All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 29, 2026 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
21:58
US Military's MINERAL SUPPLY CHAINS Have Collapsed
|

Time Text
The Debt Empire's Rare Earth Dilemma 00:14:59
Well, we are in the desperate final chapter collapse of the U.S. Empire and the U.S. dollar.
Maybe you could call it the debt empire.
That's really what it's become.
Welcome to the special report.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
And I'm not here to rub your nose in doom and gloom, actually.
I'm here to help you navigate this situation.
But in order to do so, we need to know where we are in history.
It's good.
It's like you ever go to a giant mall and you're lost?
Like, where am I?
You know, and you look at the map and it says you are here.
That's what this is.
In terms of history, you are here.
And where is here?
Well, that's what I'm attempting to describe, is where here is, because here is a very dangerous place in terms of history.
So I like to listen to a lot of different special analysts and podcasters.
I learn a lot from other experts.
One of the things that makes me so well-informed is that I realize that I don't know everything and I need to turn to other experts to help me understand and interpret the world.
And in doing this, there are several really well-informed people that I like to listen to, like Alex Kraner is one of them.
But also in terms of finances, as you know, I interview Andy Sheckman on a regular basis.
He's extremely well-informed.
There's also Luke Groman, who I have not yet interviewed.
I hope to in the future.
But Luke Groman was on a podcast recently and he was explaining something that was really intriguing.
And I think he nailed it.
And I'm paraphrasing my understanding of what he said.
But essentially, Luke Groman is saying that one way to look at what Trump is doing with this seemingly desperate grab for minerals and for oil resources is to understand that we are now in the last desperate stage of empire.
And that if you don't grab all these minerals, that the United States of America will not be able to manufacture any military weapons after about a year or less from now because we don't have the supply chains of these rare earth minerals that are necessary to make the weapons.
And, you know, what are we talking about?
You've heard them called rare earths, but they are elements like terbium or neodymium, which is used in magnets or dysprosium or even titanium.
I mean, there's a long list of them.
And silver is one of them now becoming more rare as the physical is vanishing from the marketplace.
But in order to make the F-35 fighter jet, the stealth fighter, whatever that thing is, in order to make it, you got to have all these minerals.
In order to make cruise missiles, in order to make ICBMs, you know, it goes on and on.
In order to make modern naval vessels, you have to have these rare earths.
And the United States of America does not have a supply chain of these rare earths.
For decades, we depended on China to sell them to us.
And so China dominates rare earth manufacturing or refining is the correct term and exporting, and they have for decades.
And there are a number of reasons for that.
One is that it's technically very difficult.
But secondly, it's also incredibly toxic.
And so China has been willing to, number one, invest in the R ⁇ D to have the technology to extract these rare earths out of basically dirt, you know, dirt and rock.
So they take in barges filled with dirt and rock.
And then out of that, they will extract, you know, grams or kilograms of various rare earths.
I mean, and that's why they're called rare, by the way.
It's not that they're actually only located in China.
No, they're everywhere.
They're all over the planet.
But they're only present in very minuscule concentrations compared to the rest of the soil, dirt, or rock.
So, for example, I'm just taking a guess, but let's take neodymium.
Even in neodymium-rich mining areas, the neodymium itself may only be present at small single-digit milligrams per kilogram of material.
Or maybe it's even micrograms.
It just depends on the mineral.
But China has developed the technology to extract these.
And also, China is willing to use the toxic methods, toxic chemicals, toxic runoff, because China really doesn't care about its environment at all.
And so the whole world said, well, let's let China pollute its country with the refining of these metals, and then we'll just buy from China.
And that worked until recently, when Trump got into power and started running the trade wars and punishing China and saying to China, well, you can't buy energy from Russia or we're going to tariff you and demanding to India, you're not allowed to buy oil from Russia.
So Trump decided to go full gangsta.
And he's trying to run the world like a gangster boss and to dictate to every country who they're allowed to sell to.
As a result, China has at times said, well, we're cutting off rare earths to the United States.
And that's gone back and forth.
At one point, this was last year, I think April, maybe it was the April or May timeline.
Did you know that Ford had to shut down its automobile manufacturing in America for several, a few days because of China's export restrictions on neodymium material that's used in magnets that's used in Ford vehicles?
So China proved that it can shut down the entire U.S. automobile manufacturing industry just like that.
So then Trump caved to China.
A lot of people don't know this.
Trump caved in to China while the White House announced, oh, we dominated them.
They caved to us.
Nope.
Trump caved to China and said, we're going to back off the tariffs because China agreed to reallow the exporting of neodymium.
That's actually what happened.
You'll never hear that from Trump, by the way, because Trump is always, you know, I won.
I got the deal of the century.
Not really.
He actually got owned by China, but that's not the way the White House describes it.
Nevertheless, here we are in a situation right now where what Luke Groman is describing is, I believe, accurate.
The United States of America, its military, regardless of how much money you print, because you can't print minerals, okay?
You can't print weapons.
You can't print artillery, etc.
So regardless of how much money or currency you print, you can't create dysprosium out of nothing.
It doesn't actually work, it turns out.
You can try, but the universe laughs at you.
The table of elements mocks you.
So Trump is in a mad dash to try to find minerals to replace China's exporting of rare earths.
Because if we don't find those, then once a war with China begins, which seems like we're on that path, or maybe a larger war with Russia or a war with Iran, once the next world war gets going, the U.S. will run out of ammunition.
That means running out of missiles, running out of artillery, running out of fighter jets, whatever.
Now, the U.S. talks a good game in terms of bluffing.
Oh, we can hit you hard.
And they can.
They can.
The U.S. can hit anybody hard for about two weeks.
And then they're out of missiles.
The destroyers and the aircraft carriers or whatever, all the frigates, all the naval vessels, they can launch, they can kick ass, do a lot of damage at first, and then they have to go home and reload all the missiles.
Well, where did those missiles come from?
They come out of storage, and there's not much left in storage because the U.S. shipped everything already to Ukraine, or almost everything.
So the U.S. is not sitting on any real stockpiles of weapons, not anti-tank weapons.
Oh, and the U.S. also shipped everything to Israel to try to defend Israel last summer against Iran's incoming missiles during the so-called 12-day war, which isn't over, by the way.
So there are no spare Patriot missile interceptor rounds, you know, or whatever they're called, interceptors.
There are no spares anywhere.
There's no spare high Mars missiles or rockets or whatever terminology people are using these days.
Whatever you want to call them, there's nothing left.
And so the U.S. can't fight a sustained war with anybody.
The U.S. can kick ass for a couple of weeks, and that's it.
And the only way for the U.S. to be able to have a sustained war is to crank up manufacturing, which means you have to crank up the extraction and the refining of rare earths.
Now, in order to do that, oh, also I should mention, the U.S. gets most of its enriched uranium from Russia.
So the U.S. also doesn't have any kind of real domestic refining of uranium, not at scale.
There's one, maybe two companies that do that in the United States.
They are in no way poised to keep up with the capacity that would be needed during a global conflict.
So we buy uranium from Russia, and then we do further processing to turn it into weapons-grade uranium.
Some of that happens domestically, but again, not at sufficient scale.
So I did a special report on this a couple of months ago.
Turns out it would take us 20 to 25 years of infrastructure investment in order to get the United States to a level where it could be self-reliant with uranium just for nuclear weapons.
That's 20 to 25 years out.
It turns out that it's a similar number for building up the infrastructure of refining rare earths.
So if you want to refine rare earths in America and become self-reliant on rare earth minerals, all the ones I mentioned that are used in military applications, that's going to take you 20 to 25 years.
And that's assuming there's even a state that will let you do it within their borders because none of the states want this to happen in their state because it's so toxic.
It's so environmentally hazardous.
And that's also assuming you can find people that want to work at the toxic refineries.
And that's assuming that, you know, OSHA will even allow it to take place or the EPA or, you know, you're going to have to go through mountains of paperwork to try to do this anywhere in the United States.
And I don't even think it's possible, actually.
I don't think it's possible.
Now, there's a coal mine in Wyoming that announced a few months ago that they're going to start doing some rare earths extraction as a byproduct of coal processing.
That's great.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That will give you milligrams per month, maybe.
Milligrams.
I mean, it's not even going to be 1% of the need of the U.S. military.
It's a joke.
It's basically a publicity stunt to announce that.
Yeah, we're doing our own rare earths now.
Yeah.
The amount of rare earths that you extract, you know, could fit in a coffee cup every month.
That's not going to carry the military.
It's not going to carry industry.
Okay.
So you're just running a pilot program up there is what you're running.
And that's not at scale.
And it's never going to be at scale.
So since the U.S. is so far behind, Trump is desperate to find other sources of these minerals before the whole world breaks down into a complete cutoff of international sources of these minerals.
That's what's happening.
Trump's trying to grab the mines, even though it's actually not going to work because we don't have the refining capabilities, but he's trying to grab the mines in Venezuela.
He's trying to grab control of mines everywhere, including in Africa, trying to do deals.
Greenland is part of this as well to control the routes and also control some of the mining.
This is about minerals extraction, but it's too late.
It's too late.
I mean, I don't know, give Trump kudos if you want.
He's trying.
He's giving it the old college try, as they say.
But it's too little too late.
It's kind of like with the power grid.
China is 20 years ahead of the United States in building out its power grid infrastructure.
That's too late for us.
We can't compete with China in the race to superintelligence because we're 20 years too late.
You know, you can't just create a power grid overnight.
You can't print money and build kilowatt hours or gigawatt hours.
It doesn't work.
Same thing with rare earths extraction.
You know, you can say, oh, we're going to start extracting now.
Okay, great.
Anybody can say it, but you're not going to be able to replace what you used to get out of China without about a 20-year investment in infrastructure and knowledge and science and environmental paperwork and all this.
So the outcome is already determined.
It's already determined.
This race has already been won by China.
Advanced Weapons Gap 00:05:36
It's over.
If there is a war, the U.S., it might make a good showing for a couple of weeks and then it's done.
And then what does the U.S. have left when it runs out of missiles?
All it has left at that point is nuclear weapons.
And that's where this is going.
So, see, the first nation to use nuclear weapons in the coming war will almost certainly be the United States.
If not Israel, which is still basically, you know, U.S. weapons.
But it'll be the United States because the U.S. has nothing else on the table, no other options.
After it runs out of conventional missiles, cruise missiles, bombers, fighter jets, whatever, then it's going to resort to nuclear weapons.
The thing is, the U.S. is also 20 years behind on nuclear weapons.
So we're still sitting on this old, you know, Minuteman technology.
Really, it's from the 1980s.
And meanwhile, Russia has, of course, had tremendous innovation in this area with hypersonic missiles and Oreshnik missiles, which currently are not nuclear, but they could be.
They could be turned nuclear.
China has advanced nuclear weapons technology and anti-ship technology also, you know, area of denial batteries for medium-range missiles all throughout the Taiwan Straits and that whole area, South Pacific.
China, Russia, and even Iran.
Iran now has a ballistic missile that can reach the United States.
Can they mount a nuclear weapon on it?
Of course they can.
It's trivial.
Of course they can.
So, and then there's North Korea, you know.
So you've got multiple countries around the world.
Pakistan has nukes also, not that they have any that can reach the United States, but they have nukes that can reach U.S. allies.
But the point is that if the U.S. takes this nuclear, then the U.S. loses big time.
The U.S. is wiped out in the retaliation strikes.
But Trump is kind of a madman.
And he's living in a fantasy land thinking that he will never lose, that the U.S. military is always the strongest and the most dominant, and we can win everything.
And we're the only superpower.
And everybody else is just third world country.
That's what Trump thinks.
And unfortunately, his assessment is factually outdated by decades.
He doesn't realize that Russia has advanced weapons or China has advanced weapons.
He doesn't know that at all.
So Trump is going to make bad decisions probably based on bad information.
And Trump could get us into a world war that he can't finish other than to use nuclear weapons.
And then that's the end of America.
So if a war even starts, if you start to see America attacking Iran with a big assault force, just understand that America is shooting off almost all its weapons inventory onto Iran while China is sitting back and basically smiling and saying, well, there goes the USA expending their entire inventory on Iran.
And then China can just say, now we're going to take Taiwan.
Or now we're going to do whatever we want because the U.S. is basically defenseless at this point, other than the nuclear weapons.
And China will be arriving at a similar conclusion as well, involving Ukraine or anything else they want to do.
So the U.S. doesn't have the depth of weapons inventory and it doesn't have the supply chains of the rare earth minerals.
It doesn't have the knowledge, even the technology of refining those minerals.
And it certainly does not have self-sufficiency of those supply chains domestically in order to churn out the number of military weapons that would be necessary to fight a world war.
In other words, the United States of America has already lost the next world war.
And it's not all Trump's fault, just to be clear.
He's just oblivious of where we are in history.
Trump didn't create this whole situation.
I mean, he contributed to it, especially in his first term, but so did a lot of other presidents.
Obama, in particular, really worked to sabotage this nation and to make it so that America could not fight a world war.
So that's where we are, folks.
And it's wise to plan accordingly.
If Trump starts a war, it could probably be, it could very easily be the last war that America ever fights.
It could be the end of America.
So be very cautious what you cheer for.
Those of you who want to cheer for, you know, bombing Iran, yeah, be careful what you ask for.
You bomb Iran today, the world nukes America sooner or later.
Major U.S. cities melted in a giant mushroom cloud.
That's where this is headed.
And Trump doesn't realize that.
So, okay, in the meantime, stay prepared.
Brown Rice Arsenic Risk 00:01:18
You want to get prepared, shop with us at healthrangerstore.com for preparedness supplies, certified organic, lab-tested foods and storable foods, nutritional supplements that can help you stay healthy during the collapse, during any war.
And also, sign up for the Brighteon University course by Marjorie Wildcraft that begins airing this Saturday.
It's called the Wartime Homefront Essential Skills Course.
And it's perfect timing for this.
It's free to watch beginning this Saturday.
Just sign up at brightu.com.
That's the word Bright followed by the letter U, brightu.com.
Free to watch with registration, or you can purchase the course optionally and you can download it and watch it anytime.
Or you can watch it early.
But take advantage of that, which teaches you food self-sufficiency.
Thank you for listening.
You can find more of my articles at naturalnews.com and more of my podcast at brighteon.com.
Take care.
Most brown rice on the market contains a surprising amount of arsenic.
The Health Ranger store ensures that all our brown rice products are lab tested for glyphosate, heavy metals, and microbiology.
only at HealthRangerStore.com.
Export Selection