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Feb. 3, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

02:10:41

BBN, Feb 3, 2025 – Trump resets America to thrive in a MULTI-POLAR WORLD

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	Welcome to Brighteon Broadcast News with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
	Well, these are extraordinary times.
	Welcome to Brighteon Broadcast News from Monday, February 3rd, 2025. I'm Mike Adams.
	Thank you for joining me today.
	I'm the publisher of naturalnews.com, the founder of brighteon.com, and we are now less than one month away from the launch of our new AI engine called Enoch.
	Which is free, open source, downloadable from brighteon.ai on March 1st.
	So, yeah, about four weeks away.
	That's going to be something.
	Events are unfolding right now that are absolutely astonishing.
	We've got the Trump administration has essentially shut down USAID funding.
	And USAID was or is a giant global CIA front slush fund where they would say...
	Oh, we're funding birth control in Africa, but they're actually funding CIA assassins in the Middle East or whatever.
	Everything was a cover story.
	I mean, still is, but this was the slush fund, hundreds of billions of dollars a year that were sent out to these various groups to carry out coups and protests and political assassinations, bribery.
	Basically, this was the...
	Projection of deep state power across the world.
	And Trump just shut it down, which is absolutely shocking the world.
	And then on top of that, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said over the weekend that we are now in a multipolar world and that the United States being the one global power, like that concept is obsolete.
	Wow!
	Because I've been, of course, seeing that for quite some time.
	Many of us have.
	We're like, hey, you know, the last chapter of the U.S. Empire's global dominance is here.
	This is it.
	Well, apparently Trump sees that, and Trump is reconfiguring the world in a controlled reform.
	In other words, Trump's not just going to let the American Empire collapse.
	He's actually reconfiguring...
	Everything.
	The geography, which is what Greenland is all about, the economics, the military, you know, the tariffs, everything.
	Trump is actually going to position America to be, I believe, a strong competitor in a multipolar world where China is strong and Russia is strong and ultimately even Iran is strong.
	You know, Saudi Arabia is very strong.
	The Middle East.
	But the United States is no longer going to be able to operate as the world bully to just run around and coerce everybody.
	That's the way it has been done under Obama and even under Trump's first administration and then under Biden.
	But that changes now, and Trump realizes this.
	So Trump is, in essence, he is making a conscious decision to end U.S. hegemony in a way That he sees fit as allowing America to compete internationally.
	So all of a sudden, when you understand that, then everything that Trump is doing right now makes sense.
	And this is the perfect day to roll out my interview with John Perkins, the economic hitman.
	He's the author of that book.
	He's a lecturer.
	I interviewed John Perkins maybe 15 years ago.
	It was a long time.
	And then just last week, And we talked about this very issue.
	And John Perkins used to work for a financial firm that was really basically a World Bank CIA front.
	He didn't realize it at the time.
	When he did realize it, he blew the whistle, wrote the book Economic Hitman, or Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
	And he tried to educate the world on how the U.S. was actually running around the world using debt in order to control regimes.
	And then, by the way, he wrote a follow-up book about how China does the same thing now.
	China's doing the exact same playbook right now.
	But the U.S. sort of, I think, pioneered it, at least in the modern era.
	I guess, in reality, it's as old as time, probably.
	But the U.S. has been running this since the end of World War II. Now, I want to read for you what Marco Rubio said during a shocking recent interview.
	This was with Megyn Kelly, and this was just a couple of days ago.
	He said the following, well, I think we spend a lot of time, now, remember, Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State now, right?
	I think we spend a lot of time in American politics debating tactics like what we're going to do, who we're going to sanction, what letter we're going to send, or whatever.
	I think it really has to start with strategy.
	What is the strategic objective?
	What's the purpose, the mission?
	And I think the mission of American foreign policy, and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it's been lost, the interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right?
	And Megyn Kelly says, America first.
	And then Rubio responds, and he says, well, and that's the way the world has always worked.
	The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what's in the best interest of China.
	The Russians will do what's in the best interest of Russia.
	The Chileans are going to do what's in the best interest of Chile.
	And the United States needs to do what's in the best interest of the United States.
	Now, let's stop there because Biden and Victoria Nuland and Obama, none of these people would admit this.
	They all thought that the world had to bow down and do what America thought was best for everybody else to do.
	But here's Rubio saying, really admitting for the first time in decades that Russia has its own interests.
	And essentially admitting that Russia has a right to have its own interests which are different from the interests of NATO or different from the interests of the United States.
	Because the position of the State Department, through the Biden years especially, has been that Russia has no right to exist.
	That no nation that opposes America has any right to exist whatsoever.
	Clearly, Secretary Rubio is now blowing that out of the water and saying, well, we're going to be living in a multipolar world.
	All of these nations have their own interests and they have the right to have their own interests.
	That's what he's saying.
	See, this is a watershed moment right here.
	He continues, quote, where our interests align, that's where you have partnerships and alliances.
	Where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they're going to further theirs.
	And that's been lost, he says.
	Exactly.
	That's what I was just saying.
	That has been lost.
	And it's crazy that that was lost because that's common sense.
	But again, under the Biden regime, there was no widespread belief in the State Department that Russia had any right to have its own interests.
	Rubio continues, this is really important.
	He says, quote, and I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War because we were the only power in the world.
	And so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases.
	Trying to solve every problem.
	And there are terrible things happening in the world.
	There are.
	And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again.
	So it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.
	Again, this is historic that he's saying this.
	It's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power, which is the United States.
	He says that was not.
	That was an anomaly.
	It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
	We face that now with China, and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
	So this is an extraordinary admission, and it's combined with the actions that Trump is taking.
	On Greenland and Canada and Panama, and I've got news on all of those, this is a fundamental reshaping of America's role in the world, and actually I think it's a healthy reshaping.
	This is, in my view, absolutely necessary.
	This is showing that the United States, under Trump and under Secretary Rubio here, is no longer living in a delusional fantasy land.
	Which is why the government has ended all the woke DEI LGBT programs as well, because that's all fantasy land, and transgenderism is all make-believe, imagination, or mental illness, depending on how you look at it.
	But this idea that only the United States ruled the world, that was also delusional.
	That was kind of like geopolitical transgenderism.
	It was like believing that men can have babies, thinking that only America could police the world.
	So those days are over, and that's a very healthy thing.
	But what it means is that the United States is going to have to compete based on merit, and the U.S. is very far behind.
	We've talked about this in recent podcasts.
	The U.S. is lacking in technology.
	China dominates now 38 out of 44 key technologies in the world, including robotics and advanced materials, science, and also exotic minerals extraction, telecommunications, all kinds of things, right?
	38 out of 44. It was 37, but then when they released DeepSeek, now it's 38 because natural language processing, China dominates that area as well.
	The United States also doesn't have a good functioning education system.
	It doesn't churn out students, or not very many, who are capable of doing anything other than being, you know, woke-tards.
	So that's going to change.
	That's why Trump is getting rid of the Department of Education.
	We don't want centralized control of education.
	We want to put that power back into the hands of the states and the teachers and administrators there and let states and schools compete based on merit instead of having the federal government dictate some kind of indoctrination schedule.
	Like, you have to teach so many hours of climate change, and you have to teach this many hours of transgenderism and lesbian rights or whatever.
	Like, that's what the Department of Education has been all about recently.
	So that's got to end.
	But also geographically.
	Now, over the weekend, the president of Panama announced that after meeting with Marco Rubio, or Secretary Rubio, it's going to take me some time to get used to using that title for him, but he is the Secretary of State, so Secretary Rubio, and can I just say that we should arrest and indict Alejandro Mayorkas, you know, before we forget?
	Who he was with Homeland Security and Secretary of State.
	There's a bunch of officials, State Department officials.
	Antony Blinken, right, needs to be arrested in my view.
	But Alejandro Mayorkas at Homeland, DHS, needs to be arrested.
	But Secretary Rubio, so far, appears to be doing a really good job.
	And he visited Panama.
	Over the weekend, then, the president of Panama announced that Panama was going to stop doing construction projects with China, and it's going to shift over to American companies, and that Panama may even cancel early some of the contracts with Chinese companies that are building things related to the canal.
	Or maybe it's ports, or just canal infrastructure, I think, is the answer.
	So that's a very big deal, and it shows that Panama really wants to cooperate with America, and the only reason, really, that China was awarded those contracts is because America wasn't interested in those contracts.
	Because, of course, under Biden and under Obama, America was not interested in being leaders at all, just letting everything, you know, go to pot, so to speak.
	But with one visit, Marco Rubio turned that around in Panama.
	That's going to further establish America's presence and some level of exertion of control over the Panama Canal.
	It doesn't mean that America will totally control it.
	The Panama Canal should be a neutral territory, in my view, as it is right now.
	It's run by the government of Panama, and there's an international oversight body, and they charge the same rates to every country, no matter what.
	You know, that's the way it should be.
	But America doesn't want to lose control to China in Panama, and now things are starting to turn around.
	Now, also over the weekend, Trump reinforced the idea that he wants Canada to join the United States as the 51st state.
	Whoa!
	Now, on top of that, Trump said he's serious about acquiring Greenland.
	Greenland.
	Now, you may recall, I showed you...
	An image, a map, a couple weeks ago, looking down onto the North Pole from space, you can see that Greenland is kind of right there in the middle, really close to the North Pole.
	It's right in the middle between Russia and North America.
	So Greenland is key territory for a defensive stance against Russia's missile launches.
	And then we also learn that Trump is announcing a plan to build an Iron Dome.
	An Iron Dome for America.
	This is an infrastructure to block any incoming advanced weapons.
	It's an executive order, and it's on whitehouse.gov, to build an Iron Dome for America aiming to defend the homeland against ballistic hypersonic advanced cruise missiles and other next-generation aerial attacks.
	it's also going to include space-based monitoring and interception systems that will have directed energy weapons basically this is ronald reagan's star wars but this time it's real so why is this important let me tie all this together okay so greenland again that's the geography where the united states wants to put part of the iron dome radar systems early warning systems
	you know over the horizon systems and interdiction systems to block russia's incoming missiles and remember russia has the new oreshnik system which is so far unstoppable by anything the united states possesses And then Trump renews call for Canada to join the U.S. This is a headline out of RT over the weekend.
	And Trump says that he will remove the tariffs if Canada joins the United States.
	Which tariffs?
	The tariffs Trump just inflicted on Canada, by the way, it's like, I'm going to hit you in the face with a baseball bat, and if you join me, I'll stop hitting you, you know?
	Yeah, there's a little bit of a gangster vibe going on here with this, but there is a geopolitical strategy to this.
	Now, the first time I heard Trump saying that he wanted Canada to join the United States, I literally thought it was a joke.
	Even right now, I don't know what to make of it now, but Trump's very serious.
	He wants Canada to join the United States, and then he wants to acquire Greenland, and as you know, Greenland kind of melds into Canada with these large islands, this kind of smattering of land masses in between Greenland and kind of northeast Canada, headed towards the North Pole, very cold areas.
	Great places to put AI data centers, though, because you don't have to pay any cooling costs, and there's a lot of energy right there.
	So if you build energy infrastructure, you can build massive AI data centers economically.
	Very interesting.
	But if Trump were to acquire Greenland and Canada, and now you're starting to see the picture here and asserting a lot of control and influence over Panama to the south, you would have the United States of America being The entirety of North America almost all the way to the North Pole.
	And with Alaska on the west side of all of this, of course, practically touching Russia, or just a few miles away from Russia right there.
	And Alaska was acquired by the United States.
	Don't forget about that history.
	The U.S. bought Alaska for what today would be considered a pittance.
	Like, pennies on the dollar.
	You bought Alaska for how much?
	Like, a dollar, you know?
	Given how much it's worth in terms of energy and strategic location, that's why Trump wants to buy Greenland.
	Because Alaska protects the United States from the western front line, let's say.
	Greenland would protect the United States from the eastern front line.
	And Canada is all in the middle.
	And that's why Trump wants Canada, too.
	I don't think Canadians are generally fans of Trump, however.
	Except for, let's say, the Canadians in Alberta and sort of the more rural, the more nationalistic areas of Canada, which is a positive thing.
	I'm not using that term in a way to disparage people.
	I mean, I'm nationalistic about America.
	I love America.
	I believe in America.
	And some Canadians love Canada and believe in Canada.
	And they want to make Canada great again, right?
	So those people might not mind joining with America at some point.
	I don't know, but my understanding is that most Canadians don't want to join the United States, and I'm not even sure that most Americans would welcome Canada.
	I don't know.
	Interesting topic.
	But I will say this.
	If Canada joins America, Then we should adopt the metric system, and Canada should widen its roads to meet America's road standards.
	I don't know why all these countries have such narrow roads, but I also don't know why America is still using the imperial system of measurement that not even the United Kingdom still uses.
	So it's time to go metric.
	Maybe we could do all these changes at once, huh?
	Maybe Trump sits down with Justin Trudeau and says, hey, all right, what's it going to take for you to join America?
	And Trudeau says, lifetime of free cocaine and you have to embrace the metric system.
	Something like that.
	I'm just imagining maybe that's the answer.
	Not sure.
	But, you know, there's something else.
	If Canada were the 51st state, you know, Canada's population is, I think, somewhere right around 40 million people.
	So it's about 10% of the population of the entire United States.
	But if Canada were to join as a state, Canada would only get two senators, even though it has 10% of the population.
	But according to the apportionment of the House of Representatives, Canada would get a ton of congressional seats, House seats, because that's apportioned by population.
	So with 40 million Canadians...
	A whole slew of House seats would go to Canada, which means that California would lose House seats and so would Texas and so would Florida and all the states.
	And this would actually transition a lot of political power to Canada.
	And at least my impression is that most of Canada is quite liberal, quite leftist.
	You know, they're not pro-Second Amendment.
	They don't have a culture of being pro-Second Amendment.
	Maybe we can legalize, you know...
	AR-15s and suppressors for all Canadians.
	That would be a great goal, I think.
	Free suppressors for all Canadians!
	But it would take time for Canada to blend with U.S. culture, and some of it would never blend.
	And in the meantime, conservative Americans would be outvoted by the Canadian influence in Congress.
	Think about that.
	In the House, anyway.
	Although Canada would only get two senators.
	But in the House, they would just clean up.
	So, a lot of things to think about.
	I don't think Canada is going to join the United States.
	I don't think Canada wants to.
	And I don't think it's going to happen.
	But Greenland?
	That could happen.
	I know it sounds crazy, but Trump could make an offer.
	We'll buy Greenland.
	We'll pay every citizen $5 million.
	Or something like that, which is actually doable since the U.S. can just print money.
	It's like, we're just going to print the money and give it to you and then we'll take your land.
	You know?
	Wow.
	Let's see if that happens.
	Now, over the weekend, also Vice President J.D. Vance said that Donald Trump is committed to acquiring Greenland, saying that it has very important strategic...
	And economic consequences for the United States.
	He was on Fox News Channel's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
	And he said that, quote, so here's the thing that I think a lot of folks don't appreciate about Greenland.
	It's really important to our national security.
	There are sea lanes there that the Chinese use, that the Russians use, that frankly Denmark, which controls Greenland, is not doing its job and it's not being a good ally.
	So you have to ask yourself, how are we going to solve that problem?
	Solve our own national security?
	That's an odd quote in my view because it's like, it's not even our country, you know?
	That's far away from America.
	Why do we have to control those sea lanes there, you know?
	But this is the way America thinks, at least for the moment.
	He continues, if that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, That is what President Trump is going to do because he doesn't care what the Europeans scream at us.
	He cares about putting the interests of America's citizens first.
	And then there's the fact that Greenland has extraordinary natural resources.
	Oil, gas, you know, rare minerals, plus the sea lanes, plus the geography, you know, just the geographic location.
	And there are only 55,000 people.
	Living on Greenland.
	It's a massive landmass to have only 55,000 people on it.
	So if you, with 55,000 people, if you gave each of them $10 million, that's a lot of money, but if you did, if you gave each of them $10 million, that means you could buy Greenland for...
	About half a trillion dollars, which is the same amount that the U.S. is investing in AI data centers in Texas.
	It's, you know, $550 billion, which is, these days, you know, I mean, look, they're just printing the money anyway.
	Of course it causes monetary devaluation.
	Of course it leads to inflation.
	But if Trump could convince every person in Greenland to take $10 million, Then the U.S. could just print the money, the Federal Reserve, and then to the Treasury, print the money, wire it all to everybody in Greenland, and then say, you know, welcome to America, this is our land now, and then it's a done deal.
	The dollar's going to collapse anyway, so it really doesn't matter that they just print another half a trillion dollars.
	You see what I mean?
	At this point, it's almost like buying it for nothing.
	But can Trump convince the...
	Shall we call them Greenlanders?
	Is that the right term?
	Greenlanders?
	I don't know.
	Can we convince them to sell or join?
	I don't think that Europeans are really that...
	I don't think they're liking Trump very much right now, actually.
	So that's going to be a hard sell.
	But we'll see.
	We'll see what happens.
	Trump has proven to be very resourceful.
	And if Greenland does become part of the United States, well then.
	I'll have to visit it.
	Because that would be like, you don't even need a visa.
	You just fly over there with your driver's license.
	Drive around Greenland.
	But I do want to be very clear that I do not agree with any agenda that would forcefully occupy any of these countries.
	Greenland or Panama with the U.S. military or the U.S. CIA, etc.
	I don't think that it's right to...
	I don't think it's right for China to try to take Taiwan.
	It's also wrong for the U.S. to try to take Greenland by force.
	But if there can be a deal reached, that's different.
	So, we'll see.
	In any case, it's pretty clear that my prediction that the United States of America will...
	It's clear that we're moving in that direction very rapidly.
	You know, California's talking about secession.
	They're going to put it on the ballot.
	Trump's talking about expanding to Greenland, maybe Canada.
	Who knows what else is in the works?
	There might be states breaking off from other states.
	There might be, like, splitting off a part of California from Western California.
	Some interesting things in the works here.
	In the meantime, let's talk about this Iron Dome project for a second because of this plane crash that took place in Philadelphia, a so-called plane crash.
	I think it happened, was it Friday night?
	And I did not post over the weekend, but I collected some of the videos.
	I want you to see this, and I want to ask you what you think this is, because it was widely reported as a An air ambulance plane crash.
	And it doesn't look like that at all to me.
	But here's the ring doorbell video that was making the rounds over the weekend.
	That is, you know, the sound and the visuals and the size of the explosion do not look like a plane crash.
	Now, that video.
	See, here's the thing.
	After three years of war between Russia and Ukraine, we have all seen a lot of videos of hypersonic missiles slamming into targets on the ground.
	To me, at least at first glance, that video that you just saw there, that looked like a hypersonic missile slamming into the ground and exploding.
	Now, if a missile...
	Hits the ground and explodes, you would expect to see a crater.
	I mean, we see that all over Ukraine and Russia, wherever missiles have hit, right?
	There are craters, and we see it in the Middle East.
	We saw it in Gaza when Israel was launching missiles, etc.
	And also, you know, when Hezbollah is launching missiles at Israel, it leaves craters.
	The bigger the missile, the bigger the crater.
	The bigger the bomb, the bigger the crater.
	So is there a crater associated with this crash in Philly?
	And the answer is, of course, Yes, there is.
	Check this out.
	Alright, here's a video, aerial footage of the crater in Philadelphia.
	A circular crater formed on the ground.
	You know, it's extraordinary.
	Zooming out, kind of showing the neighborhood, showing some of the damage.
	See the buildings.
	Look at the blast damage on the buildings there.
	Does this look like an airplane crash to you?
	I mean, granted, this plane had fuel on it, as all planes normally do, obviously, unless they're gliders.
	It had some amount of fuel on it, but this just seems extensive.
	I don't see any plane parts anywhere.
	I see, look at those burned-up, exploded vehicles.
	Blown-up buildings, blown-up vehicles.
	This looks like a hypersonic missile.
	This is what it looks like to me.
	Now, there's a third video of this that I also want you to see.
	We're going to loop this video several times, many times, while I talk about it because this, to me, this can't possibly be an airplane.
	I'll give you more details about why I think that, but check out this video as we loop it.
	All right, there you go.
	Look at the speed.
	I mean, the speed at which this is coming down.
	And the way it's arcing directly into the ground, it's accelerating, and the fireball, the explosion, is bomb level, missile level.
	It's like this thing is packed with high explosives.
	That's what it looks like to me.
	This is not simply just an airplane crash.
	We've seen lots and lots of airplane crashes.
	I've never seen one that looks like this.
	Not once.
	This looks like a hypersonic missile.
	And let me see if I have something else to show you.
	Okay, this next video, which is 11 seconds, shows an F-35 plunging out of the sky in Alaska.
	Just plunging out of the sky.
	We're going to loop this and just bursting into flames.
	On the tarmac, now you can see the parachute of the pilot.
	So the pilot ejected safely, it looks like.
	The pilot's probably fine.
	But there goes a, I don't know, $50 million aircraft.
	How much are these things?
	$100 million?
	$5 billion?
	Who knows?
	We could look it up, but it doesn't matter.
	They're just printing the money anyway.
	But why are F-35s falling out of the sky?
	So think about this.
	We had the Black Hawk helicopter collision with the civilian jet over the weekend, or what was that, Friday?
	Right over Arlington, Virginia, near D.C. That happened.
	Then we have this F-35 falling out of the sky.
	Then we have what looks like a missile attack in Philadelphia.
	So I have a theory that explains all of this.
	Now, this is just a theory.
	But, you know, hear me out, see what you think.
	My theory is that we are at war right now, and these are forms of attacks.
	What hit the ground in Philly was not an air ambulance.
	And I think the air traffic data was faked.
	And I think all the news was faked.
	Everything was faked to put out a narrative so that the American people don't panic over the fact that either Russia or China launched a missile that hit Philadelphia.
	And it was a warning shot.
	It was a warning shot to President Trump, probably from Russia is my guess, as part of a negotiation.
	See, Trump is negotiating with Russia right now, or Trump's people, over how to end the war with Ukraine.
	And Trump doesn't have a lot of leverage there.
	Russia's got advanced weapons systems.
	Russia has Oreshnik missile systems.
	Russia has hyperglide vehicles.
	So what you just saw there in Philly, to me, that looked a lot like a hyperglide vehicle entry.
	I mean, it almost looked like Oreshnik, but not quite as fast, and it wasn't traveling on exactly a straight line, but it did look like a hyperglide vehicle.
	I'm supposing that Russia launched an intercontinental ballistic missile with a payload in the nose cone and probably alerted Trump that it was going to do this and that it was non-nuclear and it was just a kinetic weapon and that Russia is demonstrating to Trump that Russia can hit any target at any time anywhere in the United States at will.
	And there's nothing the United States can do about it.
	See, now you know why Trump is signing executive orders.
	That executive order about the Iron Dome was signed on January 27th, so just a couple of days before, saying we have to be able to stop these things coming out of the sky.
	Ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and next-generation aerial attacks.
	I don't think this is a coincidence, folks.
	I think that what happened in Philly was a next-generation aerial attack.
	I'm not buying the air ambulance story at all.
	These hypersonic missiles from Russia and China, they use scramjet engines, which enable them to achieve speeds of up to Mach 10, Mach 8 to 10, something like that, in flight, in powered, maneuverable flight.
	And I found a two-minute video I want to play for you here called What is a Hypersonic Missile?
	This is from BFBS Forces News from three years ago.
	But it shows one of the Kinzhal missiles and it shows some of the hypersonic missiles and it kind of explains them quite well.
	So let me play this video for you just to bring you up to speed on hypersonic missiles because I actually think this is the best explanation for what hit Philly over the weekend.
	I don't think it was an air ambulance.
	Looks like a hypersonic missile to me.
	Check this out.
	Here's a question for you.
	What weapons can fly at more than five times the speed of sound and are virtually undetectable?
	Welcome to the world of hypersonic missiles.
	There's two types of hypersonic weapons being developed.
	A cruise missile that uses a super-fast scramjet to fly at hypersonic speed.
	And a boost glide vehicle, a warhead that's launched aboard a rocket, then released, falling to Earth at more than Mach 5, around a mile a second.
	The Tomahawk cruise missile flies at a speed of Mark 0.8, so close to the speed of sound.
	Now, by comparison, the Russian Zircon, the hypersonic cruise missile, flies at anywhere between Mark 8 and 10. So we're talking about a nearly tenfold increase in the speed of the missile.
	For boost glide vehicles, The Chinese DF-17 is alleged to have speeds of Mach 10+.
	Traditional ballistic missiles follow a parabolic trajectory, a predictable arc that goes up and down like a ball.
	It means they can be detected early in flight.
	Hypersonic glide vehicles work differently.
	They exploit physics using drag and friction so they can fly in all directions like an aircraft, but at super-fast speeds, making them very difficult to detect until it's too late.
	"They fly below the radar horizons, meaning that the warning times they provide are quite short.
	And because they are maneuverable, actually figuring out where they're headed, what their target is, is an exceedingly difficult computing task." Most missiles rely mainly on their warhead for their destructive power, but hypersonic weapons also have huge kinetic energy.
	It can hit a target at more than a thousand miles an hour.
	Literally packing a punch equivalent to over three tons of TNT. The combination of accuracy and really high kinetic energy makes it possible to break through targets with a hypersonic missile that previously you would have needed a nuclear level payload or at least something approaching it to really sort of threaten credibly.
	Okay, I've got one more little video snippet to play for you.
	This is extraordinary.
	Now that the Biden crime family has left Ukraine, Zelensky is now saying that something like $100 billion of what the U.S. was supposed to have sent to Ukraine is missing.
	And he doesn't know where all the money went.
	Well, let me fill in the blanks.
	I can tell you where the money went.
	Ukraine was a massive money laundering operation for U.S. leaders.
	People in the Biden regime, people in the State Department, people in the military industrial complex, senators, State Department officials, you name it, they all got kickbacks to the tune of, it looks like, about $100 billion.
	That's a lot of kickbacks.
	But watch this video.
	I'll have to narrate it in English because Zelensky is not speaking English.
	It's about a minute or so, but check this out.
	This is extraordinary.
	Look, when I hear and I heard before today we hear from the United States of America, he says, Zelensky, that America gave Ukraine hundreds of billions, 177 to be more precise.
	He says, that's what the exact figure sounded like, which was supported or voted by the Congress, etc., Look, as the president of a warring country, I tell you, we received just over 75. Billion is what he means.
	That is 100 billion of these 177. Some people even say we have never received.
	And this is important because we're talking about specific things.
	Yeah, counting.
	Because we got it not with money, but with weapons.
	We got 70-something billion worth of it.
	There is training.
	There is additional transport.
	There are not only prices for weapons, he says.
	This is Zelensky talking.
	He says there were humanitarian programs, social, etc.
	But when they say that Ukraine during the war received $200 billion to support the army, etc.
	That is not true, he says.
	I don't know where all the money is.
	Okay, well neither do we!
	Well, actually we do, but...
	This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
	I just find the timing really interesting that as Trump has moved into power, Zelensky is starting to blow the whistle on the corruption of the Biden regime.
	Wouldn't that be interesting?
	If maybe part of the deal?
	Because Trump's always making deals, right?
	He is the deal master.
	Maybe Trump's deal to Zelensky is, hey, you blow the whistle on the corruption of the Biden regime and we'll make sure that you don't die.
	Or, you know, we'll make sure you can retire.
	And Trump is calling for new elections in Ukraine now.
	Zelensky is very unlikely to win those elections.
	Probably a very unpopular person at this point.
	And the elections then would give the United States a justification to say goodbye to Zelensky.
	And also, right now, there's nobody who has been elected into power.
	in Ukraine who can sign any kind of a peace agreement with Russia or the United States being involved.
	Because Zelensky, his term expired last year.
	He's no longer president.
	He is technically a military dictator right now until there are new elections held.
	So the United States is calling for new elections and once there's a new president elected, which won't be Zelensky, Then Ukraine will be able to sign some kind of agreement, you know, call it what you will, a peace accord, a surrender, an end of fighting, whatever.
	There's going to be some kind of a deal.
	Trump's going to insist on it.
	And probably Ukraine will not get back any of the land that it has already lost.
	In fact, I would say Ukraine will be lucky to keep Odessa.
	That would be a good deal if Ukraine, Could keep Odessa.
	But I think Russia's going to insist on Odessa, and frankly, Trump doesn't have a lot of leverage against Russia right now.
	What are you going to do?
	Put 5,000 more sanctions on top of the 20,000 sanctions you already have?
	Russia's like, we don't care about sanctions.
	Russia's like, we sell missiles to other countries.
	We sell oil and energy.
	We don't care nothing about your sanctions.
	And it's true.
	Who cares?
	Who cares about more sanctions on Russia?
	Russia's not part of the Western financial system any longer anyway.
	Doesn't even really matter.
	But wouldn't it be funny if Zelensky became a state witness against the Biden crooks so that Trump's DOJ was able to prosecute the fraud and corruption in the Biden regime and in the State Department, etc., where Zelensky is a witness?
	For the Trump administration?
	That would be so awesome, right?
	That would make Zelensky, you know, more of a hero, actually, at least partial redemption for the shenanigans that he's pulled over the last few years.
	But if he becomes a witness for truth, hey, we would applaud that for sure.
	All right, here's what we've got coming up now.
	I've got two special reports for you here.
	Trump's tariff wars have begun.
	And then another special report called Democrats Still Don't Realize They Are the Cruel Authoritarians.
	Two reports for you, and after that we'll have the interview with the economic hitman, John Perkins.
	A very timely interview.
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	All right.
	Here comes the first report.
	Trump's tariff wars have begun, followed by Democrats still don't realize they are the cruel authoritarians, followed by the full interview with John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
	Enjoy.
	Well, the tariff wars have begun.
	Trump has already put a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, a 10% tariff on China.
	And Canada is retaliating with tariffs targeting red states in the United States.
	Yeah, just the red states.
	So, oh, it's getting political.
	But then again, that's based on the information I have, and maybe Trump has additional information, probably, that we don't have.
	How close we are to some kind of a global war with China, and that control over the Panama Canal needs to be achieved on an emergency basis before that war breaks out.
	Possibly.
	I'm just wondering if that might be the case.
	But clearly, something has lit a fire under Trump.
	To take Greenland and to take Panama, and that's the reshaping of the United States of America in a significant way.
	And it all seems to be positioning the pieces for an upcoming global conflict of sorts.
	Conflict with Russia and China, which I hope we can avoid.
	Now, along these lines, what's really interesting is that Senator Marco Rubio just completed an interview.
	Now, he's the Secretary of State.
	And in this interview, he said some shocking things.
	I mean, shocking for the Secretary of State to say.
	Over and over here for many years.
	He said that we live in a multipolar world, and it's not normal for one country like the United States to dominate the entire world.
	It's more normal, and the way the world has been configured in the past is that there were multiple world powers who figured out how to trade with each other or figured out how to coexist.
	Of course, not always.
	Sometimes they attacked and killed each other and destroyed each other.
	As, you know, World War II, etc.
	But to hear Secretary Rubio say that the State Department recognizes that the U.S. can't be the only dominant world power any longer, that we have to get along with China and Russia.
	Although I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say it exactly that way.
	But it seems like that's what he was saying, that the U.S. can't be the world's police.
	Like, that is astonishing to hear.
	It's a positive thing to hear.
	I'm glad he's saying this.
	I'm just surprised.
	I'm really surprised.
	I thought Marco Rubio was more of a globalist, but this is really the opposite of globalism to say these things.
	So this may also explain why Trump is in such a hurry to try to acquire Greenland and also control over Panama.
	Let's talk about the Suez Canal, because that's the other key channel in terms of global trade routes and also naval ships being able to move quickly from the Mediterranean into the, well, the Arabian Sea, I mean, the Red Sea first, and then into the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf area.
	But the United States pays Egypt.
	My memory is that it's about $5 billion a year.
	I don't know the exact number, but it's billions.
	Egypt just collects money basically to be friendly to America, to continue to make sure that America has access to the Suez Canal.
	Now, right now, Egypt is amassing tanks on its border with Gaza slash Israel.
	And nobody's sure exactly what this is all about, but it seems to be that Egypt is preparing for some kind of a conflict.
	Or Egypt is maybe making a statement that says, hey, don't push all the refugees into the Sinai Desert or Egypt proper.
	We're not sure yet.
	But when Trump cut off foreign aid temporarily, he froze all foreign aid, he gave exemptions to two countries that will still receive aid.
	Those two countries are Israel and Egypt.
	And if you're wondering why Egypt, that's why.
	It's the Suez Canal.
	So, looking at the big picture here, what is Trump doing with Greenland, with Panama, and with Egypt?
	Trump is making sure that the United States maintains a dominant military control position over key waterways and passageways.
	And in the case of Greenland, being able to potentially install things like Over the horizon radar there and watching for, let's say, ICBM launches from Russia that might be flying over the North Pole.
	So Trump is trying to acquire or assert control over key areas that give the United States a strong strategic advantage if there were to be any kind of a conflict with China or Russia or anybody else.
	So, from a nationalism point of view, just looking at America's interests, Trump appears to be doing things that are most definitely in America's interests.
	Now, the people of Greenland aren't too happy about this, and the people of Panama are not happy, and the people of Canada are also not happy about the tariffs in particular.
	There was a hockey game between a U.S. team and a Canadian team, and this took place somewhere in Canada.
	The Canadian hockey crowd booed the U.S. national anthem, which is kind of funny.
	Not that we should consider Canada's hockey fans to be representative of the entire country or anything.
	I mean, hockey fans, generally speaking, are kind of a rambunctious group, which is fine because of the nature of hockey.
	But anyway, they're booing the national anthem in Canada now, which is an indication that...
	There's a sour mood because Trump is putting tariffs on U.S. goods going to Canada.
	So the bottom line in all of this, and the reason I wanted to record this, is to tell you there's a method to this madness, a seeming madness by Trump.
	You know, sometimes Trump's actions look a little crazy from the outside.
	Like, why is he wanting Greenland?
	Why is he causing problems in Panama?
	What's going on here?
	Why is he also trying to end the war with Russia and he's also trying to end the conflict in the Middle East?
	Well, I think it's very simple.
	Trump is trying to expand U.S. military control territory, especially Greenland, but also trying to consolidate U.S. military control over the key waterways and canals, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and of course the northern sea routes.
	That go near Greenland.
	That's really critical as well.
	But Trump is doing this in order to give the United States as much advantage as it can have if there is a conflict with any country anywhere in the world.
	And Trump and his Secretary of State, Rubio, they recognize that the U.S. can no longer just flat out dominate the world by running around and demanding everybody obey.
	That's not going to work any longer.
	Trump no doubt recognizes that the U.S. naval fleet, just the very structure of it in our modern age, is mostly obsolete.
	Aircraft carriers can be taken out by hypersonic missiles, for example.
	Aircraft carriers and other ships can be taken out by Russia's Oreshnik missile system.
	The future of warfare is very likely drone warfare, in terms of kinetic warfare, but there's a much stronger information warfare component to this.
	That's likely to determine the outcome of the next conflict, whatever that may be.
	When you're looking at AI and the rise of superintelligence and cyber hacking capabilities, etc., it really points in the direction of information warfare or cyber warfare as being the determining factor rather than simply kinetic warfare.
	But there's no question that from America's point of view, having control over these key territories is really key.
	Now, one more question on all of this, though, is...
	How many enemies is America making around the world or turning allies into enemies?
	I should say, maybe not enemies, but allies that are not happy with America and are less likely to cooperate with the things that Trump wants to do.
	So, you know, Trump is angering Panama.
	Trump is angering Greenland, probably angering Denmark.
	No doubt he's angering Canada, although that's not difficult.
	To do with the hockey crowd there.
	I'm kidding.
	I'm kidding.
	Trump is running around, you know, sort of causing turmoil, political turmoil in many areas.
	And then on top of that, he says that he's going to slap tariffs on any country that is moving in the direction of BRICS currency.
	I think Trump said he'll put 100% tariff on all the goods.
	Coming out of any country that is thinking of joining BRICS. Right.
	Well, that's going to ruffle some feathers for sure.
	And it's also going to establish, I think once and for all, it's going to answer the key question.
	Is the United States still strong enough to make such demands credibly and for other countries to fall into line?
	We're about to find out the answer to that question.
	I'm not sure the answer is yes.
	It may be that we are at a real breakpoint, a turning point, with the world saying that, hey, we're no longer going to just bow down and do whatever the U.S. wants us to do.
	We're going to have options now.
	We're going to trade in BRICS currency, energy with Russia, manufactured goods with China, etc.
	We're going to trade with whoever we want, and we're not going to care if the U.S. sanctions us.
	Because we have options, you know, BRICS options.
	So we're about to find out what the rest of the world really thinks on this issue.
	And I imagine there will be some very loyal countries that will never deviate from the U.S. agenda.
	That'll be the U.K., probably Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, you know, Canada, etc.
	But there will be a lot of allies, probably in Central and South America, in the Middle East, and European countries that move away.
	From a hegemonic U.S. dominant position and start to explore their options.
	There are many options in the world today because, as Secretary Rubio said, it's no longer a unipolar world.
	It's a multipolar world.
	And if all the other nations don't figure out how to operate in that multipolar world, well, they're going to find themselves tied to just the United States.
	And if the dollar collapses, then, well...
	A lot of ships start sinking at that point, you know, metaphorically speaking.
	So interesting times in which we live for sure.
	Stay tuned by hearing more of my podcasts and interviews at brighteon.com.
	I'll be interviewing Michael Jan again coming up soon with details about Panama.
	And you can also follow our news at naturalnews.com.
	We are publishing now, I think, five times a day.
	More stories than we've ever published before.
	More breaking news stories.
	So check it out, naturalnews.com and brighteon.com.
	Thank you for listening.
	God bless America.
	Take care.
	So here we are a few weeks after Trump is sworn in and Trump is taking tremendous action to enforce the law, to remove the illegals who cross the border illegally, to stop the DEI woke-ism that has discriminated against Asians and white people and qualified candidates of every color and ethnicity.
	And there are many more things that Trump is doing.
	And the left is, of course, going completely bonkers, losing their minds.
	You already know that, but what I want to point out in this podcast is that the left, they don't yet realize where they were wrong.
	They have no self-awareness.
	You hear this in the way they talk about Trump right now, how they're very scared of Trump being an authoritarian.
	I'm like, what?
	So leftists don't realize that they have been acting as authoritarians for at least eight years, actually even longer, through extreme censorship, viewpoint discrimination, debanking people for having conservative views, blacklisting people, smearing people, denying people employment because of their conservative views, blocking them from YouTube and...
	Eliminating their websites from Google, etc.
	All of this is authoritarian.
	And this is what the left has carried out for all these years.
	Yet they have no awareness whatsoever that they are the authoritarians.
	And isn't that just classic authoritarianism?
	To think that when you're silencing everybody that that's just completely normal and acceptable.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	That's the way Democrats and leftists think.
	They think that their authoritarianism is not authoritarian.
	They think that's just normal to silence all conservatives.
	But when Trump tries to enforce the law, oh, now that's authoritarian.
	Now, they also use the word cruel when talking about Trump enforcing immigration law.
	So immigration law has been on the books for decades.
	It is illegal to walk across the border.
	And enter the United States without having gone through the process of proper legal immigration.
	And just for the record, I support legal immigration.
	I wholeheartedly support legal immigration.
	I'm not opposed to immigration.
	But walking across the border is not immigration.
	That's violating the law.
	And it's not legal.
	And it subjects our country.
	To, of course, being essentially invaded by the worst of the worst, the criminals, the MS-13 gang members, the traffickers, you know, the violent people, some of whom have been let loose from prisons in places like Venezuela, and they head to America because they know they're going to get free stuff.
	And so when we don't control our border, we obviously don't have an opportunity.
	To have a merit-based, sane immigration policy.
	And like I said, I support sane immigration where we get to choose who comes in.
	We want to invite people that want to share in the American dream, that want to help build a better America, people with extraordinary skills, people with high intellect, people who can help us compete in the world, and people who bring capital and start Companies and businesses that hire Americans.
	You know, those are the kinds of people that we want to attract.
	But when you have a wide-open, lawless border, that's not who you get.
	You get the scum.
	You get the criminals.
	You get the traffickers.
	The Democrats welcome those people.
	Let's be clear, they welcome them because they can turn them into voters.
	So the Democrats do not care if your cities become unsafe.
	As long as they get the voters, they get the bodies, they get the census count that gives them more seats in the House of Representatives.
	Did you know that?
	That illegals count towards the census that determines how many seats places like California get in the House?
	So that's why Democrats have really advanced this invasion of America.
	And for them now to say that it's cruel for Trump to remove those who entered the country illegally, well, that's hypocrisy.
	What's cruel is subjecting the American people to the lawlessness, the violence, the crime, the carjackings, the rapes, the lootings, the robberies carried out by these illegals against innocent American people.
	That's cruelty.
	Isn't it interesting that the Democrats care nothing about the American people, but they think we have to do everything to save the illegals, many of whom are violent criminals?
	Teachers who are talking about arming up to stop ICE raids in schools.
	These are the same Democrats that refuse to arm up to stop school shootings.
	They said, no guns in our schools.
	It's a gun-free zone.
	We have no guns.
	We can't have guns in our schools, you know, until Trump became president.
	And then all of a sudden, these same Democrats are like, all of a sudden, we need guns.
	Why?
	To protect the illegals.
	What does that tell you?
	Tells you who they They favor illegals over Americans, which is very un-American.
	It's traitorous, actually.
	If you're not willing to defend your own country, to defend your borders, defend your culture, defend your people, you should leave.
	You should leave the country.
	You should burn your passport, get out, move to Cuba or somewhere, or move to South America or something.
	Get out of America if you're not willing to defend this nation.
	And the American people agree with me.
	The American people agree with that statement.
	That's why the American people just elected Trump.
	And Trump promised on the campaign trail that he was going to deport the illegals starting on day one.
	So it's not a surprise.
	Nobody should be surprised.
	It's not like, oh, Trump pulled a fast one on us.
	He never said he was going to do this.
	Oh, yes, he did.
	He promised to do this, and that's one of the reasons he was elected.
	He's making good on his promise.
	And I fully support him making good on this promise.
	And he has set a deportation quota or a goal for ICE, which is to deport 1,800 illegals per day.
	And I did the math on that.
	I think that's over 600,000 a year.
	So that's a start.
	That's a good start.
	That number needs to increase, obviously.
	Why?
	Because there are millions, by some estimates, 11 million illegals in the United States.
	And again, they're here illegally, and there's a strong criminal element.
	There's drug trafficking, human trafficking, weapons trafficking, robbing homes, etc.
	And like I said, I'm not opposed to legal immigration, but these illegals have got to be shown the exit.
	And that's exactly what Trump is doing.
	It's not cruel.
	What grown-ups do.
	This is actually a pro-humanity move.
	You could even call it humanitarian.
	Trump is having air tickets purchased to fly these people back home.
	He's not making them walk back home through the trail that they walked to get into America.
	He's not just taking them to the border and dumping them and saying, good luck.
	For many of these people, he's buying them, you know, Air tickets on military transport planes at a cost of over $5,000 per person to fly them right to their home country.
	I mean, it's very polite, actually.
	It's very polite.
	They should be thanking him because most other countries will just take you to the border and dump you across the border.
	That's not what Trump is doing.
	Now, those who are from Mexico, yeah, they're going to be taken to the border and say, You know, go back to Mexico.
	But for many of these people from Colombia or Venezuela or other countries, they're actually being offered flights back to their country.
	And that is Trump and his administration going above and beyond to do what's right and to treat these people with a sense of dignity, even though the Democrats don't treat them with any dignity at all.
	So look, here's the bottom line.
	If we want America to prosper, we do need...
	Some migration of highly qualified people, people who bring capital, people who will start businesses, people who will invest in America, create jobs, create manufacturing infrastructure.
	We need some of the brightest scientists and the brightest chemists and the brightest physicists and the brightest AI developers, etc.
	Yes, we need some reasonable level of immigration to attract talent.
	And on that point, I agree with Elon Musk.
	I agree with what Alex Jones said about that.
	We have to attract top talent.
	That is the pathway to sustainable growth.
	But that process has to be a legal process where we get to decide.
	We, the United States.
	It should be a competition.
	The best of the best should want to come to America.
	And the worst of the worst are shown the door.
	Get out.
	We don't want the worst of the worst.
	This is not daycare for criminals.
	This is not a free-for-all.
	You just walk in and steal whatever you want.
	Nope.
	Those days are over.
	And, you know, the Democrats, though, they just want to keep that going forever and keep allowing the American people to be assaulted by these illegals because Democrats support lawlessness.
	And they think that lawlessness is kind and that enforcing the law is cruel.
	And all of this explains why when you have Selena Gomez and other celebrities, you know, crying On camera over the illegals, but they shed no tears for the Americans whose lives have been lost because they were murdered by illegals in some cases.
	And this is why Gomez got ratioed on social media, and she actually had to delete that video because she thought it was going to make everybody feel sorry for illegals.
	No, those days are over.
	We are telling illegals, get out, go home.
	You want to come into the country?
	You apply.
	You go through an immigration process, you know, like many of the rest of us did, like, you know, my wife included.
	We went through the process.
	We followed the rules.
	And when this is all said and done, when we get the millions of illegals out of this country, do you realize the financial benefits for the states?
	Because the states, especially border states like Texas and Arizona, are spending fortunes, you know, The lawlessness and the damage and the crime caused by illegals.
	So yeah, Democrats want the votes, but there's a cost shift onto states that have to foot the bill for all the things that these illegals carry out in their states.
	And so when the illegals are taken out of Texas, or the vast majority of them, let's say, then Texas can redirect that money into more important infrastructure projects.
	It could be better roads.
	It could be better schools.
	It could be, you know, investment.
	It could be grants and businesses or who knows what.
	And it could even be some grant money is for some of the legal migrants who come in and want to start businesses.
	I know states, if they have extra money, they would love to support innovators.
	But forcing states to pay all this money to support.
	You know, the cost of illegals, that is a huge mistake.
	And the Democrats don't care.
	They don't care at all.
	All right, one more thought on this is that there are some Democrats that are saying that they're going to attempt to block ICE and they're going to try to harbor illegals.
	Others have been more careful in their words and they've said, well, they're not going to harbor illegals, but they will not cooperate with federal law enforcement.
	I say for any officials, mayors, governors, city council members, whatever, even local law enforcement in liberal towns, if they interfere with the Trump administration and its legal obligation to arrest and deport these illegals,
	then those officials who interfere should themselves be arrested and they should be charged with aiding and abetting You know, foreign criminals who have invaded these United States.
	There is no excuse for harboring illegals.
	And if it takes a few arrests of some mayors, of some governors even, then so be it.
	That's exactly what needs to happen.
	Look, daddy's home, so to speak.
	You know, the adults are now in the room.
	And as mature adults, we enforce the law.
	Invasion of our country that results in election fraud and cost shifting onto states.
	Instead, we find them and we take them out.
	And, you know, look, we do so with dignity.
	We make sure that they have food and water and, in many cases, they have, you know, airplane tickets to go back home.
	But we don't just sit there and let them do whatever they want.
	This is not a free-for-all.
	Those days are over.
	And it would be wise for Democrats to learn from their mistakes and realize that America is never going back to the insanity that they subjected us to.
	Their authoritarianism, their censorship, the unlimited illegal invasion, all the LGBT woke DEI nonsense.
	Those days are over.
	We're never going back to that.
	And for the Democrats who still don't understand it, their world is about to get wrecked.
	Because all their delusions are coming tumbling down.
	And it's going to be a psychic shock for them when they realize that they've been living in an artificial construct that has no ties to reality.
	Men cannot have babies.
	Illegals who walk across the border are not immigrants.
	You can't print endless money without causing inflation and currency devaluation.
	And freedom of speech is the right of every American.
	Not just those who are on the left.
	Maybe in time, some leftists will learn to embrace these simple truths.
	But those who don't are in for a very difficult number of years ahead and feel sorry for them.
	Because, you know, being mentally ill and believing all these false things is just a form of self-cruelty.
	It would be much better if they woke up to reality, joined the future of America, enforced a law, Began to act with reason and rationality, supported humanitarian principles of freedom and the rule of law.
	Freedom doesn't mean you can just freely cross every border you want, but enforcing the rule of law means that you have a country where crime is low enough that people can actually function.
	If Trump is successful, a lot of the Democrat cities will actually be restored instead of being the crap holes that they've become today.
	It's the Democrats and the liberals that have destroyed their own cities, destroyed their own states, and they were on track to destroy America if not for Trump being elected.
	So thank God Trump is in the White House.
	And let's support all these efforts to reassert the rule of law and also be optimistic about the future of this nation and optimistic about legal migrants.
	You know, don't hold anything against anybody because of their ethnicity.
	Just because they look, let's say, Mexican or Central or South American, it doesn't mean that they're here illegally.
	Treat everybody with dignity and respect, but also demand that people follow the rule of law.
	And that's how we get to a civil society, a high-trust society where we can walk around the streets without being attacked and carjacked all the time.
	That's how we get there.
	If you want to have a peaceful country, peaceful cities, Trump.
	Provides the answers to that, believe it or not.
	So thank you for listening.
	I'm Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
	Naturalnews.com is where you can find our stories.
	And also, you can hear my podcast at brighteon.com.
	Thank you for supporting us.
	God bless America.
	And everybody take care.
	All right, welcome everybody to today's featured interview.
	I'm Mike Adams, the founder of brighteon.com, and I've got a really special guest for you.
	Just an extraordinary man and author.
	A man I interviewed over 10 years ago, but so much has changed in the world since then.
	And I refer to his book, one of his books, he's got many, with great frequency.
	It's John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
	And wow, does he have some things to share with us today about the U.S. empire and its role in the world.
	Welcome, John.
	It's an honor to have you back, sir.
	It's great to be with you, Mike.
	Thanks for having me on the show again.
	I appreciate it.
	Well, it has been so many years.
	I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
	I'm going to ask you about your background just for our audience here in a second, but let me just lead off by saying you and I have some similar concerns about the role that is being assumed by the leaders of the United States.
	In the administration, the outgoing administration, and perhaps in the incoming administration.
	And the way the U.S. interacts with the world has been very disturbing.
	And your background speaks to this.
	So can you give us just sort of how you came to author this book and who you are and the things that you did that showed you some of the horrors of...
	Sure.
	Before I say that, I'd just like to say, you know, it's not about the past, exactly, because I spent a lot of time...
	I just came back from Latin America.
	I hid there again in March.
	About a month ago, I was in Doha, Qatar, in the Middle East.
	I've been speaking at places around the world.
	So, you know, I think what's really important is what's currently happening.
	You know, we're at an incredibly interesting time in human history.
	True.
	But my background, so I was chief economist at a major U.S. consulting firm.
	And really what I was was an economic hitman.
	My job, and I apologize for my...
	My throat.
	I'm just recovering from COVID. I came back from Ecuador, from South America, and caught COVID here.
	So I'm just recovering, so I apologize if I'm a little rusty-sounding.
	No worries.
	It's understandable.
	We hope you get well quickly.
	Yeah, well, I'm fine.
	I tested negative yesterday morning, and it's my first time.
	I guess everybody has to experience it at least once.
	In any case.
	I was chief economist at this consulting firm.
	My real job was to identify countries that had resources that corporations want, like oil, or today maybe lithium, cobalt, the minerals that are necessary for high tech, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations.
	But the money never actually went to the country.
	It went to our own corporations.
	Mainly engineering construction corporations like Bechdel, Halliburton, Brown and Root, Sona Webster, to build big infrastructure projects in that country.
	Things that served the wealthy people, because they were the ones who benefited from electricity, you know, from highways and ports and airports.
	But then it indebted the local people of the target nation.
	Right.
	So it was what we call the debt trap and, you know, basically put the country deep into debt.
	And so the majority of the people suffered because money was diverted from social services, from education, health care and other such things to pay the interest on the loans.
	And of course, the corporations that built these projects, the U.S. corporations, made huge profits and the wealthy people in the country benefited, but everybody else suffered.
	That's not what I was taught in business school.
	So for a long time, I believed I was doing the right thing because we're taught that if you want to help a poor country, you invest heavily in infrastructure and it increases the GDP, the gross domestic product, which it does.
	And so business school, World Bank, all of these places, you know, foster this idea that this is the right approach.
	But what they don't tell you and what it took me about seven years to figure out.
	Was that GDP really measures how well the wealthiest are doing.
	Good point.
	Yes.
	And then there's the statistic of how it increases GDP per capita, which makes it sound per capita like everybody's getting this.
	But GDP per capita is just GDP, which measures the wealthy people divided by the population.
	So it really tells you nothing about how well the average people are doing.
	And as you said, this is also happening today.
	So, I mean, you write in your book how you visited all these different countries and you were, in effect, working to sign them up for these kinds of programs, which indebted these nations and in some cases led to, you know, like a currency collapse or a regime collapse, ultimately, in some of those nations.
	But even today, like all the money that the U.S. sent or said that it was sending to Ukraine, let's say.
	Wasn't most of that just sent to U.S. weapons corporations?
	Yes, and we don't know.
	Actually, it's very hard to find out how much of that is debt that's put Ukraine into deep debt, certainly a lot of it.
	And a great deal of that money, as you said, was used to purchase weapons from U.S. corporations.
	So we get a double whammy out of this.
	We've got Ukraine deeply indebted to us, and we've helped our own.
	And of course, the rebuilding of Ukraine, whenever that happens, will also make huge profits for corporations.
	It's a terrible game that we're playing.
	And now China's entered into it.
	My most recent book is about the economic hitmen of China.
	It's the third in the Confessions trilogy.
	And China's doing a much more efficient job than we did.
	Their economic hitmen are...
	Very, very good at what they do.
	Now, China's building ports, for example, in many countries, right?
	Infrastructure for international shipping and commerce.
	Yes.
	And China, you know, it's got a great story.
	It can tell the leaders of countries in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, look what happened in China.
	We averaged 10% economic growth for 30 years.
	No one else has ever done that.
	And we brought 900 million people out of poverty.
	That's more than twice the population of the United States.
	And incidentally, you know, we're not going to do a most favored nation like the United States does between your country and our country.
	That gives good trade between these two.
	But we're going to build ports that will help you become part of the new Silk Road, which means you'll be a trading partner with everybody in the world.
	You know, it's a great story.
	I wish I'd thought of that.
	I wish I had that story.
	But it's, you know, and a lot of it's based on fact.
	They have had a miraculous economic growth.
	Of course, it's come at a terrible price socially and environmentally.
	Yes.
	It's a really good story, and their economic hitmen are extremely good at spinning it and convincing other countries to take on this debt and hire Chinese companies to go in and build the infrastructure.
	Yeah, good point.
	And they are very efficient at construction.
	Let me ask you about the weaponization of the U.S. dollar, because this is something that we've all observed over these last few years, back to Ukraine and Russia, where Russia was cut off from the SWIFT system.
	But doesn't the U.S. have a long history through the State Department of weaponizing dollar trade through economic sanctions?
	And these sanctions, don't they typically...
	Actually end up hurting not the leaders of these nations, but the people instead.
	Well, they hurt the nations, the people of the nations, and often they hurt the people of the United States too, indirectly.
	But yeah, this weaponization, as you put it, of the U.S. dollar, and of course China recognizes this, and they recognize that the only reason we can impose these sanctions the way we do is because The world, the main world trading currency is the dollar.
	And so there have been many attempts to replace the dollar.
	Qaddafi did it in Libya.
	He promised to replace the dollar.
	Saddam Hussein did it.
	Yeah, look what happened to all of them, right?
	Exactly.
	You know, we don't want that to happen.
	We get a sort of a different issue now because we've got China that is using the UN to buy oil from several countries.
	It's using its own currency.
	So it's in the process of undercutting the dollar.
	And at the same time, we've also got Bitcoin, which puts a whole new slide on everything.
	True.
	Well, what do you think about the BRICS currency proposals or, let's say, non-dollar international settlement between trading partners?
	Well, BRICS is fascinating.
	and that stands for Brazil.
	Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
	But there's many, many other countries that have bought into this.
	It's sort of their equivalent to our World Bank.
	But it, again, is much more efficient around the world than the World Bank.
	It's doing a bang-up job, if you look at it from the standpoint of wanting to create their own empire.
	the United States empire decreases, which definitely is, the Chinese empire increases, which it definitely is.
	And one really good statistic is in the year 2000, the US was the number one trading partner with about 80% of the world's countries.
	Today, China is.
	They've replaced the United States.
	And that's a fact.
	And most Americans are really blind to that. - Well, absolutely.
	I'm so glad you pointed this out.
	Sometimes I take heat for pointing this out as well, but as you say, it's just a fact.
	For example, Russia and China, I think 90% of their trade between each other is carried out in non-dollar-denominated currencies.
	A similar thing between Russia and India, or India and China, sometimes Turkey and Russia, etc.
	There are many examples of this.
	And the number of countries using non-dollar-denominated currencies for trade or settlement continues to increase.
	Functioning as an economic hitman, as you say, the US was really a lot more dominant in that time.
	Like, it could set the rules and make good on threats and roll an aircraft carrier or sail an aircraft carrier into a region and credibly threaten somebody.
	It seems to me like that capability is eroding rapidly.
	Like, look at Yemen and the Red Sea, for example.
	What are your thoughts?
	Well, you know, I think...
	When I became an economic hitman, one of the reasons that the United States was moving away from the military invasion idea, the military control idea, into the debt trap was because Vietnam had basically proven that the military reaction doesn't work.
	So for many, many years after that, after the mid-70s, the emphasis was totally on economic control.
	But of course, what we call the military-industrial complex here in the United States didn't like that.
	And we're always putting pressure on presidents and congressmen to change that.
	And 9-11 offered the perfect opportunity.
	So after 9-11, we developed a military presence.
	We went hard into Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and many other countries, as you said.
	So today we have both things going.
	We've got the military.
	And we've got the economic hitman.
	And I will say that this military involvement of ours in Iraq and Afghanistan has really helped China.
	Because we've devoted so much energy and so many resources to those parts of the world.
	China hasn't.
	And China instead has devoted its energies to bringing around Africa and Latin America and controlling the trade in these countries.
	So, you know, the unintended consequences of America's involvement in these wars is extremely significant and yet very little is talked about in the United States.
	I'm glad you pointed that out because, you know, China is the world's strongest industry.
	More industrial output than, I believe, any other nation in the world.
	And, of course, Russia.
	Arguably has the most energy resources.
	The United States used to dominate in both of those areas, but no longer.
	You know, the industrial base isn't what it used to be.
	And it seems to me that the U.S. cannot compete on its merits any longer with producing goods and services and exports that just on a level playing field would be sufficient to be the dominant trading partner.
	It's like the U.S. has to run around and threaten everybody, obey us or else.
	Do you see it that way too or do you disagree with that assessment?
	What's your take?
	Yeah, it depends on what we want to accomplish, of course.
	I think to realistically understand that China is winning the economic game, we need to focus more on how we approach that game, if you want to call it that.
	And also to recognize that China has another certain advantage, and that is it does not have a history of invading other countries other than those that it considers to be part of its sphere, you know, like Taiwan and Tibet and places like that.
	And I taught it, of course, in Shanghai to Chinese MBA students.
	Fairly recently.
	And one of the things they said is, you know, you took half of Mexico.
	You got Puerto Rico.
	You did kind of the same thing.
	And this talk on the part of President Trump of taking Iceland and Panama and maybe Canada really feeds into the hands of the Chinese, quite frankly, whether he's serious or not.
	It doesn't really matter.
	The rhetoric itself, they're using.
	They're going around the world saying, hey, the United States is back at it.
	The Monroe Doctrine is being reinstituted in the United States.
	This is a little concerning, or more than a little concerning to myself as well.
	When Trump said that we want to buy Greenland, I thought it was a joke at first.
	Excuse me.
	It should be.
	I mean, because my first thought was, well, what about the people that are already there?
	I mean, you know, it's not like it's an empty place.
	And then I heard Trump say, well, we're going to take Panama back because China controls it.
	And of course, I know people in Panama and they say, no, what Trump says about Panama is just factually not the case.
	Panama charges all the countries the same based on the cargo.
	Panama runs the place, not China.
	I mean, I don't know what to say.
	I mean, there are some things that Trump has done that I'm really happy about, but I don't want to be part of a country that runs around the world just conquering lands again.
	I mean, come on.
	Well, yes, and as I mentioned, every person in Latin America, as far as I know and I suspect, Almost all of them take great exception to that.
	That sends a shiver of fear from Mexico to Argentina and Chile, all the way across through the hemisphere.
	Like, what?
	The Panama Canal has been run extremely efficiently by the Panamanians.
	And yes, the Chinese have a couple of Container ports on each end of the canal, but so do we.
	And we have the 4th Fleet, which is standing right off there.
	So militarily, we have all the power there.
	Even if we don't own the canal, we could completely stop all shipping in the canal if we wanted to.
	So what's the point of owning it?
	What's the point of pissing off the rest of the world by even talking about owning it?
	There's no reason for us to own it.
	This is just my guess, John, but I think that Trump wants to cut off China from being able to use it.
	That's my guess.
	Yeah, but owning it won't do that, and he can already do that.
	But right now, wouldn't...
	I mean, the Panamanian controllers of the canal, I don't think they would go along.
	Are you suggesting that if Trump wanted to block China, that he could...
	Just do so militarily with the military vessels there?
	Yeah.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Just like Kennedy did with the Cuban blockade.
	It's like a blockade.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I mean, even if we owned it, he'd still have to do that probably because what else do you do there?
	You just don't operate the locks for ships under Chinese flags, but a lot of the Chinese...
	Goods don't even come in on Chinese flags.
	They're from Liberia, from many other flags.
	So, you know, this is not an easy thing to do, whether you own the canal or not.
	But I think it's just as easy if you don't own the canal.
	And let me offer this opinion and get your reaction, but I want to trade with China.
	I want trade.
	I mean, I don't want countries...
	To exchange bombs and missiles when we can exchange goods and services, right?
	That's my take on it.
	I don't mind buying stuff from China, but we should also sell things to China.
	But if you just start cutting off trading partners, everybody suffers.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	It makes very little economic sense.
	And I think if it actually happens, we're going to suffer pretty severely economically in the United States.
	What would that look like, do you think?
	Well, I think we'd have a higher inflation.
	Everything would cost, well, not everything, but almost everything would cost more.
	And our own industries, many of them would have a very difficult time getting the products that they need to build the things that they need to build, because they use Chinese components.
	Totally cut off trade with China.
	Even if we cut off a fairly small percentage of trade with China or impose such heavy tariffs or sanctions that China decided to just pull things out, I think we'd be in perhaps more trouble than China, certainly as much trouble as China.
	That's a really good point because China has many, many trading partners beyond the United States.
	The U.S. is, of course, a large market for China, but it's not the only market, not by any stretch.
	And also U.S. consumer spending or discretionary spending has really plummeted recently because of the dire economic situation of people in the country.
	I mean, Americans are just buying less right now compared to a few years ago.
	And let's not forget that China also controls a lot of the world's lithium, cobalt, and other rare minerals that are required in the high-tech industry.
	They control most of Africa.
	I would encourage your listeners, if they're interested, to Google maps of China's growing trade takeover of the world, however you want to state it.
	There's a number of fascinating maps that show how right now.
	China controls most all of Africa and a lot of Latin America and a lot of Europe and a lot of Asia.
	And we need those things.
	So if we can't develop this trade with China, if we cut off that trade, what's the next step?
	War with China?
	Yeah.
	It's, you know, these war hawks, some of whom have just joined in the Trump administration, some were in the Biden administration.
	These war hawks, that seems like that's what they want, John, is they keep trying to amp up like China is our greatest threat.
	We need to we need to fight China.
	We need to I've heard them say things like, well, we need to we need to defeat China before they get stronger.
	And, you know, things like this.
	I just shake my head.
	You can't defeat China now.
	You know what I mean?
	War is not a solution to this, right?
	And what's the end goal?
	And, you know, the other aspect of this is we just pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, the WHO, and very likely some other organizations, which weakens the dollar, actually, and encourages those countries to...
	Side more and more with China.
	Whatever you think of how much money, and it is unfair, the United States spends an inordinate amount of money supporting these organizations.
	But that doesn't require you to pull out.
	And by pulling out, we've sent a message to so many other countries that we don't want to be in partnership with them.
	So they'll turn increasingly to China.
	That's my fear.
	In the old days, it might have made sense.
	Before China was so, so powerful economically.
	But today, it just puts us in a very weakened position, quite frankly.
	I just want to remind our audience, we're talking with John Perkins here, and your website is johnperkins.org.
	And John is the author of several books, but the most notable, in my view, is Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is now in its third edition.
	It's available at booksellers everywhere.
	And John, your book, when I first read it, and I forgot how many years ago it was, when did the first book come out?
	Late 2004. Okay.
	Wow.
	Well, when I first read it, I was absolutely shocked.
	Honestly, I was in a state of disbelief.
	Right.
	I thought this couldn't possibly be true, what you're saying.
	I was really skeptical.
	Over the time since then, I've learned that what you state is absolutely true, and I've watched.
	I mean, I love my country.
	I love America.
	I love the Constitution, etc.
	But I also don't want us to be the bullies around the world.
	I want us to get along and trade with people and not coerce everybody into doing what we say.
	You know, I would state it even better.
	A little bit differently.
	Incidentally, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution.
	I consider myself to be an extremely loyal American.
	To be loyal to a democracy means you've got to criticize.
	We've got to be open to looking at our mistakes so we can correct them.
	That's my goal.
	It's not so much to me about bullying.
	Yeah, that's a terrible...
	That's a terrible shingle to have hung out on your office.
	I'm the world's bully.
	But it's also just about our own economic situation here at home.
	And by bullying these other countries at a time when China is so potent and on the rise and we drive countries to China, it ultimately hurts us and it weakens us and it helps China.
	So, you know, yeah, ethically, morally, we don't want to be bullies.
	But being much even more practical, we don't want to be bullies at this time in history.
	Well, yeah, and I think...
	We here in America, the policies of our government are shooting ourselves in the foot.
	For example, cutting off Russia from SWIFT, but then seizing reportedly about $300 billion in Russian assets that I think were mostly held in the euro in European banks, and just saying, well, we're going to freeze those assets now, so Russia, you no longer own them.
	We, the West, control $300 billion.
	That sent a message to the world, which is...
	Never deposit money in Western banks because they can just take it.
	And that seems like a really bad decision if you want to sway the world to do banking with you, doesn't it?
	Well, that's one of the reasons that the BRICS bank that you mentioned and several other Chinese-dominated banks, international banks, are taking over the Asian infrastructure.
	Investment Bank is another one.
	You know, because, yeah, people are afraid of us.
	And there's an alternative.
	You know, it's one thing to be a bully.
	We keep using that word, and I don't really like it.
	You can pick a better word.
	That was my word.
	I don't know.
	It's one thing to sort of try to dominate a situation, a global situation, when you're the big boy on the block.
	And during my time, It was the Cold War, and we were up against the Soviet Union.
	But the Soviet Union had nowhere near the power that China has.
	It was a small economy by comparison.
	There were very few countries in the world that were turning to Soviet banking or anything like it.
	True, right.
	It wasn't creating a new Silk Road.
	Or international banks that people were looking at.
	It was a very different adversary.
	We were afraid of its nuclear power.
	And it was a reasonable thing to be afraid of, that there could be a nuclear war and they were behaving very aggressively.
	But today what we've got to understand is that China is very, very different from the old Soviet Union.
	And actually Russia is different too.
	But China particularly, they've already got the power.
	We essentially...
	Closed our eyes and rolled over and played dead while we were fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places.
	And China moved right in.
	And so they're there now.
	And you can't be a bully if there's a...
	Bigger bully on the block.
	That kind of neutralizes you.
	Or, you know, you can't push people around if there's someone else who's bigger and stronger than you who pushes you around.
	And I don't mean to imply that the United States doesn't have still a lot of power.
	It does.
	And our military is very, very powerful.
	But to think of the idea of fighting a war with China, that's just unthinkable.
	It really is.
	What does the military really do?
	So today...
	Unless we're looking at a total apocalypse through war, the real battle is fought by technology, by AI, if you will, and by economics.
	Well, let's talk about that because the U.S. In a bully-like fashion, attempts to sabotage China's ability to manufacture microchips that are used to build data centers for AI. So you're probably familiar with the U.S. sanctions on exports of microchip fabrication or lithography equipment out of European countries to China.
	And I remember last year when China rolled out...
	A new mobile phone using its own microchip that it had developed in-country.
	It shocked the world because the Western world thought that they had blockaded China's microchip design and fabrication capabilities, and China proved that, no, it didn't work, that they could still create microchips.
	And a follow-up on the question, sorry to take so long, John, but just two days ago.
	A Chinese company called DeepSeek released a bombshell reasoning AI model as an open-source free model that does actual human, better than human, better than PhD reasoning.
	And it's equivalent to the open AI model, but it's 1 60th the price, or you can just download it for free and use it yourself.
	So China is beating the U.S. on AI. Stunning.
	Well, should it really surprise us?
	You know, China's got some incredibly good universities.
	It's got a much larger population to draw from than we do.
	Very, very bright people.
	And, yeah, we can just expect this to increase that way.
	What do you do in a case like that?
	You try to work with them.
	You understand maybe that there's competition in the world.
	But the last thing you want to do is drive a wedge that does not allow our companies to benefit from the technology that's developed in China.
	And vice versa.
	A relationship gets worked out.
	Yes.
	Well, it's interesting.
	You know, Russia and China...
	Had recently announced an AI technology sharing agreement.
	So they, you know, Russia recognizes what you just described, that they benefit from that cooperation.
	Whereas the U.S., I mean, this actually, this was leaked a couple of weeks ago that there was a conversation.
	Oh, I forgot who, no, it was, who's the founder of Netscape?
	Andreessen, yeah.
	Andreessen came out and said that he was told in a government briefing in the U.S. that the U.S. government was going to outlaw areas of math in order to control AI in the U.S. and limit it to just three powerful corporations.
	I'm like, really?
	You're going to outlaw math?
	Okay.
	That sounds a bit extreme, doesn't it?
	Yeah, because it's linear algebra.
	What are you going to do, ban algebra in the schools?
	I can't imagine that happening.
	But you know, I would add one more thing, and that is that the first two books in the Economic Hitman trilogy were published in China by a very prestigious, one of the largest publishing houses in China, and sold a lot of copies.
	And I was asked to teach at this MBA program there.
	This third book in the trilogy is quite critical of China.
	It's the same publisher in the United States as the other two.
	And in conversations with that publisher and their hierarchy, as we're bringing out this third book, one of the things we had to deal with is because of the way we criticized China, it probably won't be published in China.
	Maybe it'll be published in Taiwan and people can get it in the Chinese language.
	Well, surprise, surprise, surprise.
	About a month ago, I received this.
	And we knew it was coming because we signed a contract.
	But the same publishing house in China has published.
	This is the third edition.
	This is the third in the trilogy.
	Wow.
	It's very critical of China.
	Wow.
	You know, it paints the patriarchy of China's economic growth and the good things that China has accomplished.
	But it also really, really comes down hard on Chinese engineering and some of the construction projects they've built.
	And places that I've visited, like dams they built in Ecuador that are failing and so on and so forth.
	And it's all in there.
	I have a friend who's...
	I have a couple of friends who are from China, and they're now visiting professors at universities in the United States.
	They've read the Chinese version, and they say, nothing's been omitted.
	Wow.
	Yeah, well, that's a very different impression than what we tend to get in the United States, isn't it?
	Well, it's fascinating you say that because I've been assessing the AI language models from the US versus China, and I'm always told by US engineers that the Chinese models are heavily censored.
	I found exactly the opposite to be the case.
	I found the US models are heavily censored.
	On topics like vaccines or climate change or culture, etc.
	The Chinese models are not censored except on just a very narrow sliver of topics like Tiananmen Square, for example, or certain things on Taiwan.
	But I find that I can use Chinese models such as DeepSeek.
	To do reasoning about pharmaceutical regulation policy in the United States, whereas U.S. models such as Anthropic refuse to process the questions.
	That's very interesting.
	Fascinating.
	Isn't it, though?
	Yeah.
	Because I was wanting to send some policy ideas over to RFK Jr. for HHS, and I had to use a Chinese model to get the best ideas for America's health care.
	Wow.
	Imagine.
	The world has changed.
	Well, we're in a fascinating time, Mike.
	The next couple of years, and particularly the next couple of years, are going to be very, very interesting, I think, to see where we go next.
	Well, what would you like to see America do in terms of its relationships with other nations in the years ahead?
	I mean, regardless of what Trump has said or is doing, If Trump wasn't even there, and you could dictate policy, or I don't mean dictate, but suggest policy, how would you shape U.S. policy?
	Well, you know, it would depend on the region we're talking about, but let's use as one example the immigration problem.
	I spent a lot of time in Central America, and the free trade agreements we have in Latin America, in Central America particularly, Are a major cause for our immigration problem.
	So let me give you an example.
	According to these agreements, the United States is allowed to subsidize agriculture in this country, but nobody's allowed to put tariffs on agriculture.
	And so if you take a farmer in Guatemala, and I'm going to just make up some numbers here, but let's say it costs him $5 a bushel to To produce corn.
	In the agribusiness in the United States, it costs $10 a bushel to produce corn.
	But the agribusiness gets a $6 subsidy from the US government.
	So it can produce the corn basically for $4.
	And it can sell at a profit at $5.
	Whereas the Guatemalan Campesino needs to sell something more than $5 in order to make any kind of a profit at all.
	You know, Guatemala doesn't have the money to subsidize its farmers, and it can impose tariffs on things imported by, and we're talking about big agribusiness.
	And so big agribusiness has basically taken over Central America.
	The farmers who used to make a decent living off the land there no longer can do that.
	And so they have a couple of choices.
	They can go to work for sweatshops.
	They're primarily owned by American-affiliated businesses and pay terrible wages, but they pay something.
	Or they can go begging in the streets, or a family member can try to migrate to the United States and send money home.
	Wow.
	It's all interrelated.
	Yeah.
	If we really wanted to solve the—this gets us back to policy—if we really wanted to solve the immigration problem, We would be investing something like the Marshall Plan that we did in Europe after World War II into Latin America, helping these countries develop their economies and at the same time helping ourselves.
	And we can ask for things in exchange, certainly, but that would be a rational approach.
	So if I'm dictating policy or suggesting policy, I would suggest a very different approach.
	To dealing with the immigration problem rather than trying to stop poor starving people at the border or wherever, you know, help them to stay in their country.
	I speak Spanish fluently.
	Where I live, there's a lot of Guatemalans and Mexicans working here.
	They're mowing lawns and they're cooking our food in the restaurants and so on.
	I talk to them a lot.
	They don't want to be here.
	They don't have good lives here.
	They work hard, and then they send as much money as they possibly can back to their families.
	Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
	They want to be there.
	That's one example of policy, and it depends on what part of the world we're dealing with.
	But there's so many things we could do to be good citizens of the world.
	This harkens back to the centralized corporate control over agriculture.
	To help support what you just said, I've seen many cases of U.S. corporate imperialism when it comes to things like pushing GMOs to other nations.
	And what we see is the destruction of the seed diversity of the agricultural sectors, right?
	And I completely agree with you.
	When I lived in Ecuador, everybody knew how to grow food around where I was in rural Ecuador, and they enjoyed...
	The diversity of the seed supply, the diversity of the foods.
	But the U.S. corporations want to come in and say, no, you only grow Monsanto GM corn or whatever, because then you have to pay us a licensing fee.
	I've seen that too, John.
	I've seen the economic destruction of Central and South America from U.S. corporations.
	I'm really glad you pointed that out.
	And the people that you were with in the Vilcabamba area of Ecuador, it's a very special region, as you well know.
	Yeah.
	Much, perhaps, a large percentage of the agriculture in Ecuador does use GMOs, and they rely completely on imported insecticides and fertilizers.
	It was every time I went to the open-air markets, there...
	I was always talking to people, you know, say, la comida sin pesticido, you know, no pesticides.
	And, you know, some would grow without pesticides, but most would say, no, we grow with pesticides.
	It was very common.
	It was hard for me to find organic food, even in the markets there.
	Yeah, and once they've bought into that whole, what's called the Monsanto approach, they can't get out.
	That's true.
	It's almost impossible to convert back.
	I also saw, though, John, this is really interesting that we're having this discussion because I saw what I call processed food imperialism.
	So you would see all the processed food and the Procter& Gamble companies and pushing personal care, cosmetics, laundry detergents into the grocery stores in Central and South America.
	And then that would lead to the same...
	First world diseases that we have in America.
	And then you start to have, like, we would have people constantly coming to us begging for money because their family member has a cancer tumor.
	All the time, right?
	And was this happening here two generations, three generations ago?
	They said, no, we didn't have this.
	This is all new.
	It's because they're eating the U.S. processed food.
	That's why.
	When I first lived in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968 to 71, Time, I believe it was Time Magazine, which we got about three months late, but we did get it, had an article on the blue regions of the world where people live longer.
	I think there were four or five at the time.
	And one of them was the Vilcabamba area where you were.
	And one of the reasons was because they ate such great organic food.
	There were a number of other factors involved, but that was one of them.
	And so, yeah, in that period of time, the Green Revolution happened, which meant that you had these miracle seeds that require heavy amounts of chemicals and are very, very much controlled by a few agribusiness corporations.
	True.
	And this is really consistent with the theme that we've talked about here today, John, and we're about to wrap this up, but think about it.
	The dollar, like the imperialistic currency, and then pesticides or GMOs as imperialistic agriculture, the military-industrial complex as imperialism force projection, it all comes back to the same themes.
	The money goes into the hands of a few powerful people while the world suffers.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's the same, you know, that's why we do these interviews, John, because we want people to understand the control system so we can decentralize, get out of this trap as much as possible.
	You know, Mike, I just had an interesting experience, a newsletter that came out, my newsletter yesterday, and people can get it by going to johnperkins.org and just going to blog up in the corner there.
	And the title of it is A.I., Musk, and the Oligarchy, A Conversation with Thomas Paine.
	Oh, interesting.
	Okay.
	I grew up on Thomas Paine.
	I grew up in New Hampshire.
	As I mentioned, my family was very cognizant of their heritage to the American Revolution and all the world wars that we fought in.
	I grew up on Paine and other writings by people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson and so on.
	So I felt I could really have a conversation with Thomas Paine, assuming that he's been able to look down from where he is and see what's going on today.
	And once I get started, the way I write, it's kind of like this flow, you know, it's what I call inspiration, being in spirit, just letting the voice come in.
	And I really felt I was having this conversation with this very brilliant, you know, A guy who wrote these articles that were instrumental in convincing Americans to fight the British back in the Revolution.
	Yeah, wasn't Common Sense one of them?
	Yeah, Common Sense and The Crisis.
	Yeah, and these were the best-selling books of the time, and they were read throughout the colonies and taverns and churches and so on and were extremely influential.
	And, you know, it's interesting to look at what would Thomas Paine think about where we are today?
	What would he say about it?
	And in going through that process, it was, for me, very, very interesting to see how, in recent years, we've really stepped back from what people like Thomas Paine and the other revolutionaries, the founding fathers, foresaw.
	Trying to create.
	And they were not perfect by any means.
	But the fact of the matter is our whole attitude seems to be changing.
	And I think at this point we're extremely vulnerable to a few of the oligarchs who control communications, transportation, and much of technology.
	I completely agree with you, and that's why I'm a strong advocate of decentralization of food, medicine, technology, and knowledge.
	Knowledge has been controlled by far too few people.
	The big tech platforms, I've been censored for over 10 years for saying things that certain parties did not want to hear.
	But that's actually changing now with AI and open source models.
	But I think you and I may not agree on everything policy-wise or political, but...
	We agree on the idea that we want human beings to live with joy, with prosperity, with a sense of self-determination.
	And all the things that you have described today and what you cover in your book are actually forces of power and coercion that are detrimental to the advancement of those human outcomes I just mentioned, which include joy.
	Yeah.
	I'm glad you said that, Mike, because we are the country that...
	It talks about happiness for its people, prosperity and happiness and freedom.
	The world for a couple of centuries now has looked to us as the leader in creating democracy and creating a good world.
	And that's been severely threatened in my lifetime, particularly in the last quarter part of my lifetime.
	I'm turning 80 next week, so I've been around a long time.
	I'm still in great health.
	I just was tromping through the Amazon rainforest two weeks ago, and then I recovered very quickly.
	So, you know, we've seen this whittling away, and I think one of the great appeals of Trump is to talk about making America great again.
	I'm concerned that a lot of his policies are going to do the opposite, but I totally agree with the philosophy that we need to make America great again.
	And that doesn't mean bullying the world, as you put it, and having military support.
	It means setting an example, and it means helping the world achieve for every country and every person in the world a better life.
	I completely agree with you, and I think that...
	To make America great again, we have to look inward.
	We have to ask the questions, how do we become better people?
	How do we enhance our education?
	How do we adopt a philosophy that is more universally beneficial to the world?
	We can't just run around the world with our ships and our bombs and our dollars and just threaten everybody and make America great.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	And I don't know what people will call this.
	Like, are my beliefs progressive, liberal, conservative, libertarian?
	I don't care.
	Any label you want.
	They're reasonable.
	They're rational.
	Yes, that's right.
	We need to take a rational approach to what it means to being a world leader.
	I completely agree.
	And I would just say it's pro-humanity.
	It's humanitarian.
	If we can't recognize the value of each other, what are we doing?
	You know?
	I agree.
	John, it's an honor to be able to speak with you today.
	Thank you for taking the time.
	Any final thoughts you want to share with us?
	Well, I think we need to look at that we live in very blessed times.
	Listen to this.
	I would encourage you to realize that we're living in an amazing time in human history.
	You may like what just happened yesterday at the inauguration, or you may not.
	But either way, we're living in a time that's historical.
	And the evolution of human beings is occurring right now right in our noses.
	And, you know, to recognize that we do have control over it.
	We can, you know, set the course.
	And particularly, America is in a position still where we can set the course for the world.
	But we really must understand the awesomeness of that power and also understand what it is we really want to do for the world.
	What world do we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren?
	But we're there.
	We're at this blessed time in history, the evolution of human beings.
	Very well said.
	And the only way that I want to make America great again is if we uplift the condition of all the other people in the world.
	I don't want to be a wealthy nation in a world surrounded by impoverished.
	Just like you said earlier, that's part of the immigration problem.
	The infliction of poverty upon these developing nations.
	And we can change that.
	So I thank you for taking the time here.
	We'll publish this transcript and video.
	Let me remind people of your book again, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and your website, johnperkins.org.
	And one last question, John.
	Are there speaking engagements coming up that people may be able to attend of yours?
	Yeah, and if they subscribe to my newsletter by putting their email in the little box on my website, it only comes out once a month, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.
	Yay!
	It's short, and at the end, it tells events that are evolving for me, and some of them come up very, very quickly.
	You know, I get invitations to speak at things or on podcasts or whatever, and it happens fairly quickly sometimes.
	Stay tuned.
	Okay.
	Well, thank you so much, John.
	Have a blessed day.
	Thank you for sharing your time with us.
	And for all of you listening, thank you for listening and sharing this interview everywhere.
	I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
	And God willing, we shall all help uplift our fellow human beings from this day forward.
	Thank you for listening.
	Take care.
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