Chris Helali, co-founder of DD Geopolitics and former Army chaplain candidate, warns that Donald Trump's threats to destroy Persian civilization could trigger global collapse via supply chain disruptions in fertilizers and helium. Halali critiques the "Epstein class" of unelected bureaucrats driving imperialist wars and an "Israelification" of foreign policy that creates enemies to consolidate elite power. The discussion highlights the shift from an industrial economy to a debt-driven consumer model, concluding that weaponized sanctions and endless conflicts threaten ordinary citizens worldwide with mass famine and civil war. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ruling Class vs Original Vision00:09:10
It's not the American people.
It's this ruling class that's dominating us, that's filled with all of these unelected bureaucrats and ghoulish type figures that are driving this country and making it poorer, making it more violent, and then enacting that violence abroad.
So when we overthrow countries, where do people go?
They end up leaving and coming to Europe.
They come to the US.
And then we have a crisis of migration because we destroyed their countries or we sanctioned them into oblivion.
This is the cycle, and we want to break this cycle.
Welcome to today's interview here on brightvideos.com.
As we are standing on the edge of the abyss as beings on planet Earth, with Trump issuing these insane, deranged threats to destroy an entire civilization, in this case, the Persian civilization, that is far older than the United States of America, by the way, that needs to be pointed out.
And I'm joined today by a first time guest, someone who I think can bring a lot of common sense to this and excellent analysis, but a voice that I mean, I've never spoken to our guest until just now.
And it's Chris Halali, and he's the co-founder, the co-editor of DD Geopolitics, which is a very popular channel on X.
And also, he's got his own show on YouTube.
Welcome, Mr. Halali.
Thank you for taking the time to join us today.
Thank you very much for having me, sir.
It's a pleasure to be on.
It's great to have you on.
And I'm so glad that we can have this important conversation.
Let me just set a little bit of context and I'll ask you to introduce yourself to our audience.
Now, the urgency of what's happening in our world right now brings together people who.
Might come from different political persuasions or backgrounds or leanings, and that's totally fine.
What we have in common, I think, and pardon my language, is that we all don't want to fucking die in a global nuclear.
Again, pardon my language, I don't normally do that, but this is where we are.
So give us a little bit of your background and your channel for our audience, and then we'll go from there.
Sure.
So I'm, of course, I'm an Iranian American.
My father's from Iran, and my mom's from Greece.
And I was born in the USA.
I graduated from US universities, did my graduate work in the US as well as in China and Greece.
I was a commissioned US Army officer, commissioned as 11 Alpha as an infantry officer, and resigned my commission as a chaplain candidate, disagreeing heavily with the US foreign policy under the Obama administration.
Left in 2015.
In 2016, I ended up working with refugees coming out of Syria.
And in 2017, I fought in Syria against the Islamic State.
Alongside Kurdish forces, as well as I coordinated with the Russian forces, with Wagner and the Syrian Arab Army, which is Bashar al Assad's military.
So I fought in Syria, I came back to the US.
Did more graduate work.
And then since that time, I became, I was elected high bailiff.
I ran for Congress.
I didn't get into Congress, but I was one of the first communists to run in two plus decades, three decades or so.
I was elected just this past election as a high bailiff of Orange County, Vermont.
And now I'm doing journalism and war correspondent work.
I'm here in Moscow now.
I've spent a lot of time on the front of the special military operation against Ukraine.
I went and traveled to Yemen, to Sana'a, and was there when the Americans were bombing there.
Lebanon, all throughout Iraq.
So I've traveled, I've been to over 100 countries, did a lot of work abroad.
So my primary work now is journalism.
I also do diplomatic and legal consulting, as well as, you know, really pushing for some common sense in my political activism, trying to push for some common sense foreign policy for the United States and to really bring us back from the edge of the abyss here, as you rightfully pointed out.
Well, that is an extraordinary background, sir.
I have to say.
You've done a lot.
You've traveled a lot.
You are clearly multilingual as well.
And I think you have a very important view of what's happening with the world.
Again, even though we come from different political backgrounds, you mentioned communists.
You know, my audience is mostly, well, they used to be, many of them were conservative, I think, but most of them despise Trump at this point.
So they're more sort of Ron Paul libertarian kind of people and a lot of independent thinkers.
That's really, my audience is not, they're not tribal.
They don't worship men, they have principles.
So that's where they come from.
But Tell us in your view now, again, DD Geopolitics is a channel that's really blowing up in terms of popularity all over X. What is the aim of DD Geopolitics and what is the main thrust of your work and your posts right now?
Well, speaking of the Ron Paul sort of like libertarian audience, I mean, I had Ron Paul on my show.
I have a very good relationship with him, with many others in that realm Scott Horton, you name it, McAdams.
We have a whole crew of people.
And actually, I find myself agreeing on most things.
We might not agree about economic issues, but we can certainly agree, for example, on foreign policy, anti imperialism, and a lot of these issues that are dominating our time.
We're against wars.
We're against, you know, a thousand plus foreign military bases.
We're against regime change.
We really are in many ways.
I can agree with probably most of your audience on most of the issues.
I also believe that states should have strong borders, it's necessary.
I believe that there should be processes for people to travel from country to country.
These are all normal things.
China has it, Russia has it, every country has it that I travel to.
So that's nothing outside of the bounds.
But what we are focused on, what DD Geopolitics is committed to, is bringing an anti imperialist and resistance voice to, especially, the global majority, the global south.
About the US crimes, US regime change wars, and endless wars.
And really, what we end up calling it is it's the Epstein class.
It's not American people.
And a lot of people that I interact with, they know that.
It's not the American people.
It's this ruling class that's dominating us, that's filled with all of these unelected bureaucrats and ghoulish type figures that are driving this country and making it poorer, making it more violent, and then enacting that violence abroad.
So when we overthrow countries, where do people go?
They end up leaving and coming to Europe, they come to the US, and then we have.
A crisis of migration because we destroyed their countries or we sanctioned them into oblivion.
This is the cycle, and we want to break this cycle.
We want to have an America that is part of a multipolar world that is a partner for peace and prosperity, not a partner for violence and endless chaos.
Well, we absolutely agree with you.
And I've said many times that I want to trade with the world.
I want to trade knowledge and goods and services and technology.
I don't want to coerce the world or bomb people into compliance with our demands as the American empire.
And let me just share with you.
A little bit of my background.
I mean, I was given a Freedom Award by the United States Congress.
I've been invited to meet Trump twice now, and I've turned it down both times because I don't agree with his ethics and values.
I am pro America, but the original vision of America, which was not imperialistic, we weren't into colonizing and bombing and coercing and punishing other nations, and certainly not into genocide, supporting genocide, and ending entire civilizations, which is what Trump is promising right now.
That's why I've openly called.
Repeatedly all day today, impeach Trump.
I texted my congressman, impeach Trump, 25th Amendment.
And I'm not alone, right?
I'm not alone.
There are what, 24 or 25 members of Congress calling for that today?
Have you kept track of that?
There are, there are, there's a, I saw Roh Khanna, I saw many others who've come out and spoken about this as well, both congressmen as well as some senators who've also spoken out.
I don't know the exact number because it's changing.
I think minute by minute, we're getting new information.
People are coming out, but certainly I agree with you.
Trump is a different man than he was before.
And I, I actually had some common points of, of agreement with Trump.
He had come into office saying, no more endless wars, no regime change wars.
We're going to stop the war in Ukraine.
We're going to stop this.
We're going to stop that.
I was very supportive of that.
I want peace.
I want a prosperous America.
But this that we're getting right now, we are now in the eighth conflict that the Trump administration has unleashed in less than two years.
What are we doing?
What good does this do?
I just don't understand it.
So I'm with you.
I'm with you.
At this point, it's clear the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked and Trump needs to be removed.
And there needs to be some sanity because right now we're getting mixed messages minute by minute.
It seems to go with the stock market, it goes with the price of oil.
Nobody knows what's going on.
Is Netanyahu dictating American foreign policy?
Who knows what's going on?
And I think it's very concerning for American voters and taxpayers.
Well, absolutely.
And I'd like to get your reaction to this because I did a special podcast on the destruction of the industrial city of Al Jubail, which is being bombed in retaliation.
Oil Prices and Foreign Policy00:15:39
Of course, that's in Saudi Arabia.
It's being bombed in retaliation for the aggression against Iran's energy infrastructure by Israel and the United States.
But this Al Jubail.
Facility, which is a thousand square kilometers, it produces something like six or seven percent of the hydrocarbon based feedstock products, including for lubricants and plastics and so on, that affect the entire world.
And yet, here I am in Texas and I'm surrounded by people in America who think that this war will just stay over there, that it won't impact us.
And they don't understand supply chains, they don't understand industry, they don't understand chemistry or where the role of naphtha, for example, the role of sulfuric acid, the role of helium.
Can you please explain the importance of what I'm talking about here?
The destruction of the infrastructure that powers modern human civilization.
You're absolutely right.
In fact, it's not even, for example, on the petrochemical side, it's not only industrial products in the sense of heavy industries, capital goods.
We're talking about agriculture, fertilizers.
There's already a decrease of fertilizers on the market now, and we're getting into spring and growing season now.
Farmers across the world are basically trying to rush for supplies.
Russia has put a ban on exports of those things.
China is also trying to control.
Their fertilizers and to make sure that their farmers are protected.
I mean, we really are about to have a man made famine in some parts of the world because of this.
So, you have exactly as you said, helium, which is necessary for industrial goods, for scientific exploration, for technological advancements.
We're seeing a variety of byproducts of petroleum.
It's not only the gas and the diesel and the aviation fuel, for example, it's many more things that come from those hydrocarbons that are extracted.
Especially in the Arabian Peninsula or in the Persian Gulf region.
So, when you add that together, you take away 10, 20% of that.
You take away even 5% or 10%, even a smaller amount.
You're going to affect supply chains.
You're going to affect people in different parts of the world.
And what does that mean?
Let's translate this.
Farmers don't have enough.
There's not enough food.
Then there's riots and protests and coup d'etats and civil wars.
And what ends up happening?
You drive conflict.
People end up fleeing countries.
Then they go into other countries that then destabilize those countries.
And it becomes this domino effect until you have a mass militarization across some regions.
And we've seen that, by the way.
We've seen that over the past decade plus.
So this is a very destructive path that we're on, not only for there.
Okay.
You're exactly right.
People in the US are saying, oh, We don't have to worry about it.
It's over there.
When it starts to affect supply chains and it starts to affect what you get at Walmart and what you get at the big lots and things like that, that's where it becomes an impact.
It's not only at the gas pump, it's in all of the supply chain, including food at your local supermarket when you're going to go.
A lot of that comes from Latin America or from abroad.
How do you think they get their fertilizers?
How do you think that they are able to transport it?
All of that, all those costs are included in this war that's happening in the Middle East.
That will have a knock on effect.
And I think that we're going to see.
The possibility of a global recession.
If what happens in the next 24 to 48 hours is as catastrophic as I'm thinking it might be, if they end up crossing that Rubicon, we could see a mass global recession.
We could see significant damage to many countries.
And just imagine that domino series coming down.
I'm really worried.
I'm really worried.
I have kids.
I don't know if you have kids, but I'm really worried for their future.
They're dragging everybody down, they're pulling the temple down upon everybody's heads.
And we didn't ask for this.
In fact, we asked for the opposite of this.
Yes, yes.
Well, and you use the term global recession, and I know you're choosing your words carefully, but I would argue that that's a very mild interpretation of what could be unleashed.
And we already have early indications.
For example, in South Korea, many companies have already declared force majeure on their chemical output because of a lack of natural gas.
We've seen with Qatar Energy, two of the 14 LNG trains have already been destroyed with a three to five year repair time, according to Qatar Energy's official announcement.
If the other 12 trains are destroyed, then The world as we know it does not function for 10 to 15 years, and that's assuming they can even rebuild it.
Because if Iran hammers the desalination plants and hammers the energy infrastructure in retaliation, then nobody can live in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, UAE.
I mean, the area becomes uninhabitable, and then that leads to what you just said mass human migration to Turkey, to Europe, to India, to wherever, so they don't die.
I mean, this is a disruption that we've never seen in our lifetimes or in history.
You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
And think about the political consequences of that.
Think about the consequences in a whole variety of countries that are already experiencing their own issues domestically.
When we saw, for example, millions of Syrians leaving Syria, they went to Turkey and then they crossed over into Europe.
Think about all of the knock on effects that had for Europe as well.
That's still reeling from that today.
We have the election this weekend of Viktor Orban in Hungary, the re election.
All of these things factor into all of these political campaigns.
To all of these domestic policies within some of these European countries.
And this tension that's created is creating the conditions for, I think, even further eruptions of violence.
I'm really at a loss of words here as to why we have embarked on this path.
I mean, I think that you and I clearly understand some of the background as to what got us here.
But this is really very, very dangerous.
If we don't stop this from escalating even further, we could see.
Effects that will last a century or longer.
We haven't seen this kind of warfare since the Middle Ages, really.
This kind of like bomb-tree type warfare.
Well, part of what's powering this, and I'd love your response to this, is there's a psyop of cultural hatred that's being taught to the American people to hate all Iranians, to hate all Russians.
And I'm not talking about just casual hatred.
I mean, even Trump mentioned it's okay to bomb their bridges and power plants because they're animals, he said.
This is kind of like the way Israel refers to Palestinians as the Amalek.
And it's really the Israelification of the Trump administration, which is considering everybody that they want to kill to be subhumans.
And I am highly offended by this, as not just an American, but as a member of humanity.
We cannot function with this level of intense hatred towards fellow human beings just because we want to steal their oil, which is the common thread between Iran and Russia from America's point of view.
We want to rape and pillage other countries, so we make up excuses to do it.
What are your thoughts on this intense hatred that's being taught to the American people?
I absolutely agree with you 100% that this is the Israelification of US foreign policy and even domestic policy.
I mean, a lot of this sort of hatred, not only for Iranians, for Russians, but also the culture war stuff seems to me absolutely out of the CIA playbook, the strategy of tension, the sort of creation of enemy from within.
We saw this in the years of lead in Italy.
We saw this in other parts where the CIA was deeply involved.
We see it in Ukraine from 2014 onwards and even a little bit prior to that, with the US actively supporting Azov.
And the Pravdi sector and these groups, these neo Nazi groups that went out there to try to destroy and kill Russians and destroy their heritage and their language and their Orthodox church.
I mean, when you factor all of this, this is absolutely part of that deep state playbook.
And what that ends up doing is it ends up really only supporting and buttressing the power of the elite against the common people because I have a lot in common with my neighbor, even though they might be a different religion or ethnic makeup or different language.
I have a lot more in common if they're working class than I do with anybody on Wall Street, than I do with anybody who went to an Ivy League frat and ended up getting a nice cushy job because of their last name or their tradition, whatever it might be, and they got to Wall Street or they got to Washington and they became an unelected bureaucrat.
I have a lot more in common with somebody who's an immigrant than one of those people.
And I think people have to understand that.
The American experience, and I was an American history professor, the American history, the experience in the early.
Uh, 20th century when people were coming over from Italy, from Ireland, from all parts of Europe, from Eastern Europe, and they came over and they started to organize in unions and they started to say, Look, this situation is unacceptable.
We remember the Robert Barons, you know, the progressive era, the Gilded Age.
You had the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers.
I look at that part of history and I say, Everybody got together, even they had different languages, different cultures.
Some were from Sweden, some were from France, from Italy, wherever.
And they got together and they said, Look, these guys up above.
They're stealing everything from us.
We deserve something.
And that helped to pave the way for what eventually became, especially after the post World War II era, the American dream.
Now we're living the American nightmare because everybody's being put against one another and we don't have an opportunity to advance.
You know, our kids are going to be saddled with debt, not only government debt, their personal debt.
Everybody is suffering here, economically speaking, because we're investing everything in the military industrial complex and sending it abroad.
Why do all these countries need billions of dollars of hard earned American taxpayer money?
So add all that together.
And now we have to make Russia the enemy, China the enemy, Iran the enemy.
Why do we need so many enemies?
In fact, I live now in Moscow.
People love Americans.
They say, We love America.
We wish we could be friends.
Why are we not friends?
And I keep on trying to tell them Americans have no problem with ordinary Russian people.
It's created from above, it's pushed from above.
And that kind of inculcating of this hatred is done so that these guys can run away with billions and trillions of dollars on endless war, on their military arms, on stealing.
Supplies and resources from other countries, but it doesn't help the common people.
The common people want to be together.
That's why, if we look at it in that perspective, clearly we can understand where this is coming from.
Okay, that's a really great description.
And let me dig a little bit deeper into that and ask for your answer to this.
You mentioned you were an American history professor at one point.
And so, see if this tracks with you.
And it's okay to disagree with me.
You're the guest.
You can disagree if you wish, no problem.
But I think that after the post World War II era, when America was very strongly in an abundance phase, we were, you know, our culture was one of hard work, of discipline, of innovation, and trade.
At that time, we wanted to be friends with everybody in the world because we wanted the world to buy our stuff.
We were exporters, right?
So, we wanted lots of friends.
And by the way, my grandparents lived in a tent, getting a job with a manufacturing company, and you were provided a tent on a plot and you were given a salary.
And they lived through the Great Depression, lived in a tent, but they were hard workers and they were able to pick themselves up from that and become very successful.
So, my ancestry has lived that American dream.
But now, something has happened that's very toxic to our culture, which has become a culture of complacency.
And one where we expect to be given everything for free, where we can just print money anytime we want and we can trade that debt for other countries' products and services.
And then, after we offshored so much of the manufacturing, then it became an issue of well, we don't make stuff in America.
Now we have to take it from someone else.
Then we have to declare everybody else to be an enemy so we can take their oil, Venezuela or Iran, or we can take their goods, or we can tariff them, we can economically sanction them as Trump has done in a weaponized fashion.
Since almost day one.
Does that make sense to you?
Is that what I just described?
Is that tracking or would you disagree with that?
No, no, certainly.
I think parts of that are correct.
I would go a little bit deeper and try to go to the root of that.
For example, the offshoring, the destruction of America's industrial base was done with the pure sort of free market capitalist and monopolistic tendencies of the big manufacturers.
For example, why pay an American worker a great union wage?
For example, I think of You know, Bethlehem Steel.
And I had, you know, family members, you know, from my ex wife's family who were there, who were workers, steel workers, and people who were very much involved in that process.
And, you know, they were very close with political leaders.
You know, that was one of the big, you know, the steel making, especially in that whole corridor, was a huge, huge part of America's, you know, strength.
And then slowly, why do you need that?
If you can liquidate it, you can offshore it, you can pay somebody a fraction of that amount, then you can get it cheaper and you end up selling it.
And that whole process, that whole supply chain, then you knock out the American worker, you send it abroad to East Asia, for example, you're able to get it cheaper.
Then you're able to really push a consumer economy on the Americans.
So that way they then sort of transition from industrial production, an industrial economy, to a consumer economy.
And then you need to continue to have cheaper and cheaper products because people's wages are not growing as fast as they should be.
And so you end up eventually having this Walmartification, or McDonaldization, as people would call it in the academic sphere, of the society to where products get cheaper and more inferior.
And I want people to think about this because I had a farm in the US for eight years.
Farming products back in the day, old John Deere's, old Massive Ferguson, you name it, all the old tractors, those things are still running from the 1930s, 1940s.
I own some of those, by the way.
I have John Deere's from the 1970s.
So, you know that the quality of the production was amazing.
Why?
Because it wasn't planned obsolescence.
They really wanted to invest in good products that lasted because the end goal okay, yes, it's good to make a profit, but there's also a social good and a social element that comes with that.
Now, for example, farmers are persecuted for fixing and repairing their John Deere's, which are much more plastic and electronic based now.
And now people are actually getting arrested and getting fined for doing that kind of stuff.
So, I just want to say that we've lost a lot of that heritage.
Yes, sure, part of the American spirit was pick yourself up by the bootstrap, work hard, you'll succeed, kind of that frontier mentality.
But all of that has gone by the wayside when you create an economy that's consumer based and you want everyone to consume faster and quicker and spend more money and go into more debt by taking out debt.
Whereas before, our grandparents, when they came to this country, they needed only a little bit.
They had the best products that they could buy and they didn't have to replace them every year.
Now you replace products yearly or biannually, and it's just horrible.
Vitamin D for Optimal Health00:04:24
And the waste, but that's how the entire system has adjusted that way.
And that system adjustment has also had an impact on our lives as well, on our personal lives.
You see the quality of housing going down, the quality of insulation going down, the quality of building materials going down, because that race to the bottom, which is a tendency of the free market, but in the most extreme sense, that race to the bottom has led us to this point where.
Everything is inferior.
Everything breaks.
And if you want to buy something really good, it's very niche and very, very expensive.
And I'm sure your listeners understand what I'm trying to say here.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely correct.
I just want to remind our audience that you have a channel on YouTube called The Chris Halali Show.
I'm showing the screen right here, in addition to your work with DD Geopolitics, which is very popular on X.
And please stand by, Chris, because we're going to do this interview in two parts.
This is the end of part one.
I just want to encourage our audience to check out part two at brightvideos.com.
And be sure to visit Chris's channel and website and follow him or his organization on X at DD Geopolitics for a lot more of this.
So, thank you for watching part one here today.
I'm Mike Adams with brightvideos.com.
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