Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Tucker Carlson's Russian propaganda is so thick, Russian TV stations have started featuring him on their channels. Plus, will China ultimately intervene to stop Russia from invading Ukraine?
To access the bonus Weekender episodes on Friday, and participate in live shows and Q&A sessions, become a patron at https://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Jared Yates Saxton here, as always, with my loyal co-host Nick Halsman.
how the Ukrainians will fight and die in the street wars.
What a stupid type of thing.
These people are burning the war.
Not to protect the Ukrainian democracy, but in Ukraine, there is no democracy.
Hey everybody, welcome to the "McReight Podcast".
I'm Jared Yates Sexton here as always with my loyal co-host Nick Housman.
We are of course following what's going on in Ukraine.
We're going to get deeper and deeper into the state of that war.
The next few days and few weeks are obviously going to be crucial, and we'll jump into that more and more as we go along in the show.
But we have to start, Nick, with our one, our only, our good Russian boy, Tucker Carlson.
Ah, da, excuse me.
Can you Okay, so for people who don't know about this, and we've been following Tucker Carlson's descent into straight-up right-wing reactionary authoritarianism for a while now, it has come out now.
It has been leaked from state-sponsored media and the state itself that Russia is very proud of our favorite frozen fish stick air, and has more or less mandated that Tucker's sound bites and clips need to be aired around the clock on state-sponsored propaganda.
I wish I could say surprising, but I guess I would start with this, Nick.
How would you feel, personally, if Russia, in the middle of absolutely destroying a culture, was like, yeah, we want some more of that Nick Haussmann.
We need it.
We've got a fever and it's the only prescription.
I would be concerned that maybe something that I was saying was problematic, right?
That would be a big red flag to tell you.
But wait, it's the same thing with having a whole bunch of white nationalist groups, like the Proud Boys, looking at Trump as this hero of theirs.
It should have caused Trump to say, hmm, what am I doing?
What am I saying?
They would have a group like that want me to be their hero.
Well, it's the same thing here, and we have the receipts.
It's not hard to figure out why.
We questioned this last week, what motivation Tucker Carlson could have beyond liking to appear on Russian TV, right?
Which is, you know, could be ego, I don't know, but I'm a cynic, and I do feel like you never know if there's more of a direct connection than even, you know, what we're seeing so far.
Well, first of all, Donald Trump was, and we know this, we watched enough of Trump over the years to know that Donald Trump just loved anybody who liked him.
It was the easiest way into anything.
Like, it doesn't go deeper than that.
It's a very, very childish, shallow, I mean, interiority, I don't know how else to say it.
I mean, this is an absolutely paper-thin man.
When it comes to Tucker Carlson, I mean, this is part of a larger project that Tucker wants.
He wants an illiberal regime in the United States of America, and let's make it very clear.
We keep getting new listeners to the show.
Let's make it clear for everybody.
Let's put it on the record.
This is a transnational authoritarian movement.
That's what Tucker Carlson is for.
At this point, he is not just ideologically adjacent to the Russian ideological state of mind.
an evangelical, patriarchal, classist, hierarchical society.
The same thing that Russia has, the same thing that Hungary has.
That's what Tucker Carlson is for.
At this point, he is not just ideologically adjacent to the Russian ideological state of mind.
He's within it.
He is speaking directly to his own intellectual peers at this point.
And there's a reason why he's trafficking in the conspiracy theories that he is.
He He is reading from the same text.
He's reading the same people.
He's consuming the exact same bits of knowledge that people in the Kremlin are consuming, that Putin is consuming, that all these people are living within.
There's no distance between him.
It's not even a Venn diagram anymore.
It's a circle.
Right.
And it's all just like political justification for things, right?
It's like, whether they can somehow fold in other American political stuff to sort of justify what's happening really helps them.
So, you know, if they want to try and bring up things like COVID, for instance, we talked about this last week, too, where, you know, there's these, you know, these, you know, secret weapons labs, and that's why, you know, Putin has to go in there and get rid of them.
Or now it's like, well, you know what?
As soon as the masks mandate started going away and the COVID started going away, well, then they have to create this.
This is something that the Democrats created out of this, that Biden created this to give him more, you know, to be a war president or something that will give him a chance in the midterms of which he's not even running in.
It's transparent.
I'll give him credit for that.
I mean, they're not like trying to hide what the motivation is, but man, and I guess it works.
Is it working?
Do people listen to this shit?
It's both working and not working because one of the things that's happening here is that Tucker is... Tucker is preparing his audience, which, you know, numbers in the millions at this point.
Um, he is preparing them for authoritarianism, right?
It's like, the people who are listening to this podcast, undoubtedly some of them, their moms, their dads, their uncles, their aunts, whatever, are watching Tucker Carlson every night.
As this propaganda is washing over them, it's not like they're sitting there thinking about Julius Evola.
They're not sitting there thinking about Alexander Dugin in Russia.
What they're doing is they're getting just these fragments of ideas, right?
They're getting suggestions for narratives.
They're getting legitimizing ideas, right?
So, meanwhile, they can go out into the world and they can say, hey, I know you're saying Putin's awful, but there are bio labs in Ukraine, and I think they cause COVID, and don't you think somebody should do something?
And look at how Christians are treated.
And it's this big, well, there's no other way to put it.
It's a flood of shit, is what it is.
And I want to go ahead and I want to give people a little bit of a sneak peek into what is happening here.
Alex Jones.
Who Tucker Carlson has not only cribbed stories from, he's used the same sources, he's used people who have appeared on Jones' shows.
On top of that, Tucker Carlson has even come out and said, and I mean this in so many words, I'm not just generalizing, he came out and said that Alex Jones is an actual portrayer of reality more so than mainstream media.
So Alex Jones, who is I gotta tell you, Nick, not the smartest tool in the shed, has been really floundering trying to figure out how to handle this situation because he's a Putin ally, whether he likes to admit it or not.
On top of that, he's been trying all these different narratives.
Alex Jones has been talking about, one, biolabs, which created COVID and the New World Order is trying to depopulate people, but also He has been pushing this idea that isn't it coincidental that as COVID lockdowns started to go away, that all of a sudden there's this war against Russia.
And considering that, I want people to listen to this clip.
Tonight, you wonder if looking backward many years from right now, historians will notice the remarkable coincidence in timing.
Have you noticed?
Here it is.
At exactly the moment when the emergency powers they awarded to themselves to fight COVID started to wane, our leaders began pushing for conflict with Russia.
And then, on the basis of that conflict, they assumed historic war powers.
Without even pausing, the Biden administration declared total economic war on a sovereign country.
No American had been killed.
The United States had not been invaded or attacked.
And yet with no meaningful public debate or congressional authorization, the Biden administration destroyed that country's currency, then removed it from the international banking system that impoverished its population.
What do you think about that, Nick?
began seizing the property of people affiliated with that country without a trial or due process of any kind without even bothering to explain exactly what crime they had committed.
No American government had ever done anything like that before.
If there was one thing the U.S. government long stood for, it was the rule of law.
What do you think about that, Nick?
How do you feel about that?
Well, I would just say that they timed the war to after the Olympics in China.
That was the only... Oh, and we're going to get to China in just a moment.
You're exactly right.
It's weird whenever things just happen to be so coincidental that there's no denying that these things are taking place.
This is Alex Jones on Fox News.
And I have to tell you, Tucker Carlson would have Alex Jones on Fox News at his desk live if he could.
He would absolutely make that happen.
But as we've covered, These far-right paranoid fringe guys, they practice this stuff.
They throw a bunch of stuff out there, they A-B test it, they see what tests the best, and then they bring it up to the big leagues, and it ends up on Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, or you name it.
This is, it's not just a coincidence that Alex Jones has been peddling this and looking for this, and that right-wing online vectors have been pushing this type of poison conspiracy theories online and in every space.
This is intentional.
This is what they do, and this is on purpose.
He is actually, at this point, whether he's being paid or not, acting as an agent of Putin's influence.
So I'm convinced, and I tweeted this out earlier this week, that almost 100% of Putin's foreign policy motivation is to destabilize the United States.
But not even destabilize, is he wants to what happened to the Soviet Union in 89 or 91 happen here as well.
Like the destruction of democracy, whatever.
I kind of feel like, so the guy who's driving this whole thing is Putin.
So we cannot lose sight of that.
And it seems so a rational take to understand.
And yet, like, they're really trying to push it.
It's like you're like, just like Tucker had said, you're making us be fascist.
Well, you know, somehow the Democrats are making Putin go in.
But he is, Putin is driving this.
And I'm starting to picture, you know, Scenarios here where he is going to get more and more provocative with the West to engage them in a war because he thinks that that will, and he might be right, that would ultimately lead to so much unrest in the United States that it would cause the kind of collapse that he's looking for.
And the next step on that would be, well, maybe we absolutely need to call his bluff then and Trust that he won't use nuclear weapons and actually do the no-fly zone or do something that would say, listen, because if NATO gets involved, they could easily crush the Russian army.
Like the numbers are, you know, when all NATO gets involved, that would be, I think, four to one or something like that.
It would be over if he didn't launch a nuclear strike.
Right?
Well, so we're going to get into a couple of studies that have gone into this and a couple of these scenarios and an article by Elliot A. Cohen, who, by the way, got paid a lot of money to write an article for The Atlantic for saying something a lot less succinctly than you just did.
You said he gets paid a lot of money?
Yeah.
Because he probably writes, what, once a month?
Elliot Cohen got paid as sort of like a freelancer.
So basically, for anyone who doesn't know this, the Atlantic or the Atlantic Monthly or whatever we want to call it, has always been sort of, we've talked about this, but not with the Atlantic before.
We've talked about how the New York Times and Washington Post, like people will post things on there to communicate with other people in arenas, right?
The Atlantic is sort of the, how do I put this, the national security state where they talk to one another and where intelligence talks to one another.
You're more likely to go over to the Atlantic and find stuff that is from war hawks, neoconservatives, things like that.
Or more liberal sort of hawks, you name it.
But so yeah, he got paid to seed this in here.
And I got to tell you, we got to talk very quickly about where we are in this situation.
Before we get into these, these background articles and arguments.
So let's do a little bit of a reset.
Russia has nearly 100% of its military capacity in Ukraine right now.
Like, that's Insane if you actually take a look at what's happening on the ground Russia had to put all of its chips on the table and push them into the middle and said Because the original idea for this was that it was going to be over in a few days And it was going to be real fast and then you know the Western world could move on and probably get rid of sanctions They've got most their people on the ground A ton of their operations are not working right now.
So here is the question, because I have to tell you, I don't think that Vladimir Putin is doing this simply as a one-off.
I think in order to do something like this, he had to make a decision, hey, all of the stuff that I've done, interfering in Western powers, putting together these fifth columns, you know, getting people like Tucker Carlson on the same page for this illiberal movement, He had to make a decision.
I'm going to put the chips on the table if I have to.
So here's what we're looking at at this point.
So nearly all capacity is in Ukraine.
It's not working right now.
What does that mean?
It means you now have to try new methods, which could mean chemical attacks.
It could mean more war crimes.
I mean, we're seeing absolute war crimes.
We're talking about like stuff on a level that will keep people up at night.
Or, all of a sudden, you bring in an escalating type situation.
And we're going to talk about China in a second.
But also, for those who didn't pay attention this weekend, they intentionally bombed a base that was very, very near the border of Poland, where NATO forces are currently stationed.
NATO currently right now has about 30,000 troops just over the border of Poland.
They have warships all over the place right now.
They're running war games.
That's not an accident that they lobbed a bomb that close to the border of Poland.
That tells NATO, we're not fucking around.
You send in weapons, you send in vehicles, guess what?
That's going to be a provocation.
That's going to be an escalation.
More or less, this is silent, well, silent signals, right?
These are messages back and forth.
I don't know where this escalates, but I can tell you right now that we are in an absolutely crucial moment in all of this.
It's about to get, it's been hairy, but it's about to get really hairy.
Yeah, if ever there was a time to threaten to move to like New Zealand, like we've been saying, this would be the time.
But yeah, I mean, listen, what they need to do is seal off the western border of Ukraine so all these armaments can't get in.
And once that happens, that's it, you know, then then it's a matter of time before Ukrainians will, you know, they will ultimately just get slaughtered.
And then whether the Ukrainians can keep those borders open or the smuggling into it it's a huge country they maybe they can still do that but.
It is frustrating that the West or these bullies don't operate on the same rules of engagement that we do and they're always first to be able to do this stuff with impunity and we always have to react to it later in some sort of stoic mannered way.
At some point it feels like, and this is what Elliot Cohen is basically arguing for, We need to have the stomach to actually enforce something more proactive to propel these people back to Russia.
So I just want to point out, so we're talking right now about this article in The Atlantic.
It's called America's Hesitation is Heartbreaking by Eliot A. Cohen.
And Cohen, I want to point out for everybody who wrote this article, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, which is part of this, you know, national security state geopolitical sort of order, and the Arlie Burke Chair in Strategy at CIS.
His most recent book is The Big Stick, The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that this isn't a discussion that needs to be had.
But I will tell you, in a land of people who are carrying hammers and everything looks like a nail, this guy is looking for a nail.
They always are.
And I know that you've seen this.
There are a bunch of geopolitical maniacs who have just come out of their shells the past couple of weeks and they're like, World War Three.
World War Three.
And they love it and they can't get enough of it.
And I will say very quickly, and I want to put this into context, these war hawks, these geopolitical maniacs, They want something to prove their mettle.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like being an expert in something and never seeing it during your lifetime.
And they are kind of salivating at the prospect of it.
But some of these people want to make it seem like we would survive a nuclear war.
They love it.
They love it.
You're seeing articles right now that are like, nuclear winter hasn't been proven.
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
It hasn't been proven.
But we're pretty sure that if you set off a bunch of bombs, things are going to get bad.
Or hey, maybe we'll invent something soon that will eliminate the nuclear winter after that.
So we'll be okay after that.
No problem.
Let's do it.
Sure, the free market will take care of it.
And if you want to see what this is all about, go look at people like Herman Kahn, who, during the Cold War, basically made incredible livings going up in front of the military and just being like, hey, you know what?
If we destroy Russia, they will destroy the eastern seaboard.
It would probably mean, I don't know, 150 million people dead, but we could figure it out.
He was part of the inspiration, of course, for Doctor Strangelove.
Well, Eliot A. Cohen is auditioning for his own thing, and I know what you're saying, and I know where this is coming from.
He, at this point, is saying, and the big quote in this article is, we're dealing with an enemy that is vicious but weak.
I completely agree.
Menacing but deeply fearful.
Absolutely.
You don't do this unless it's based out of fear.
And that is likely to crack long before our side does, which that's a little bit where it starts to get a little weird.
You know what I mean?
Like that's that's hubristic.
Don't don't sit here and pretend like we're made of sterner stuff or something.
And he says, if only we have the stomach for doing what needs to be done.
I don't know what that is, but the article deeply, deeply, deeply points to we need to go into Ukraine, get boots on the ground.
and dare Russia to retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Right.
I'm all for it.
I'm Jared.
I'm almost at that point.
I swear to God at this point, I'm like, here's the thing.
I've somehow convinced myself that he won't use him.
I don't know why I convinced myself that.
I don't know where or how, but I convinced myself that he won't use him.
I kid you, but I'm not willing to risk how many billions of people are on the face of the earth.
What about this?
Couldn't we, Star Wars?
No.
But almost as crazy as Star Wars, the SVI program would be, somehow, you could cut out the connection between the button and the silos in Russia, or you could maybe somehow blow those up, although that would obviously cause a nuclear explosion where they are, but blow them up before they can launch them.
All of them, all 8,000 of them.
I don't want to, first of all, listen, if we're just bringing up hypotheticals, I want to jump in my time machine, go back and get rid of nuclear weapons at any given moment where we had a chance to get rid of them.
I want to go back and tell Ronald Reagan Star Wars never worked and you had an opportunity to completely dismantle.
Or, I don't know, whenever we put Putin in power and we could have gotten rid of nuclear weapons then.
And by the way, people like this, these geopolitical maniacs, they love nuclear weapons because they're chess pieces.
They're great!
It leads to a more interesting game.
But I have to tell you, there are so many different scenarios out there.
Right now, China's over here.
And we'll talk more about China in just a second because, man, the footsteps are getting louder and louder and louder that China's going to have to pick a side here in a minute.
And I have to tell you that all of a sudden you start tinkering around with that.
You start having NATO going to Ukraine.
There's all the talk right now about the Baltics suddenly being a part of this.
We still don't know what the hell happened with these rockets that landed near the U.S.
consulate.
We have no clue what that is.
On top of that, North Korea over here is lobbing out a few ICBMs every couple of hours.
China's over here waiting and clapping and waiting to see what happens with all of it.
These escalatory moves, it sounds so much easier to say it on paper, but we also know, look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis, man.
All the same people, their dads, their granddads, whatever, they were all saying, go into Cuba, they won't push the button.
And what do we know now?
They would have pushed the button.
They would not have hesitated.
And so I understand it sucks, this is awful, I hate it, but It's a big game to these people and to watch them play this game, I think is just repulsive.
Well, I want to go back in time.
Let's go back to 2012 in Syria when Obama had a red line that he said that they use chemical weapons, we're going to have to do something.
They use them, they don't do anything.
A year later, they supposedly negotiate this amazing deal where they get rid of all of the chemical weapons from Syria.
And then what happens in the middle of Trump's administration?
They used chemical weapons because they didn't give them all up, and they were not deterred at all by that agreement.
So there's a moral to that story somewhere as well.
I can't believe I'm actually sounding like a hawk here, but there's some sort of moral to this.
And I don't know, part of me just feels like at some point you need to, as in the entire world, NATO being the entire world I suppose, put a foot down.
I think what you're feeling at this point is the ratcheting up.
It's the hinge moment, and it feels like a hinge moment.
Because again, Russian forces are there.
It's not working for them.
Meanwhile, I don't know if you caught this, they're bringing Syrians in.
And this is one of, if you go back and you look at the world wars, this is one of the reasons why it's a world war, because all of a sudden you start having all these powers involving other countries that start swarming in.
And I got to tell you there's we talked about this the other day There are u.s.
Troops who are not u.s.
Troops quote-unquote in Ukraine all of a sudden now I've in this article we're talking about NATO Pilots, you know, we're talking about American pilots flying NATO planes in Ukraine all sudden we're talking about Syrian troops coming in God knows who else is going to come in this thing is
It's it's it's festering man, and I get you it's it's about to take some really weird bounces and I think we're probably gonna see some incredible cruelty But I I don't I don't I don't feel like playing Russian roulette.
I mean look at it this way You know, you know a hundred years war from way back, you know between France and Britain like we're in the middle of a hundred years war like like the Cold War never ended and You want to take that a step further?
I think if you want to make that case, you can make the case that World War I and World War II were the same war that just mutated and that we're still fighting that because we didn't actually take down fascism or Nazism or authoritarianism.
We just moved it around for our own purposes.
Right.
We're still fighting the same battle because, and this is important, and I think this should be the thesis statement of all of it, We're still fighting the same battles because the powerful keep kicking the can down the road about the actual battle, which is, should we have power over our own lives?
Is there such a thing as human dignity?
Or do the wealthy and the powerful and those willing to kill others deserve to have power over everything?
That's the argument that has gone from the 20th century now into the 21st century.
And I don't want to be, you know, Well, hold on.
Let's be very, very clear.
The United States of America is not a democracy.
you stand for is the right way to do this.
But when you get most-- - Well, hold on, let's be very, very clear.
The United States of America is not a democracy. - Okay. - I mean, it is an oligarchial country that basically has a facade up front that's like, hey, don't forget to vote every four years.
Like, let's be very, very clear.
And also none of this gets off the invasion of Iraq, invasion of Afghanistan, the way that we treat anybody.
You're exactly right.
We are not the model nation.
I couldn't agree more.
Right.
But, you know, some notion, a version of the way we're running our society, and the West, capital W does, seems to be Much more popular than what Russia wants to do as an oligarchy or as a kleptocracy or something like that.
And so it's like, it's hard to sort of say, well, obviously this is the best way we should do it.
That's why we need to make sure everyone in the world has this kind of, you know, runs their governments this way.
But I mean, everyone seems to have some version of this, right?
Versus what we're seeing there and what we see in China or what we see in North Korea.
No, we don't.
And so it's frustrating to think that there is a side that you have to choose.
And you could argue that this is the good side, right?
Sometimes you might be able to take a step back and say it's not clear.
But I think it does seem a little bit clearer to me, at least, that what we've seen in Russia and China and North Korea and other governments like that is bad, negative.
We don't want that spreading.
No, we don't.
And it is.
Right.
And why we don't want to spread it?
Because it leads to this shit.
It leads to the wars, right?
That's the whole point.
It absolutely does, which is why I've been screaming every single day about this corruption that needs to be addressed.
Because what happens is when you have concentrated capital, when people have a bunch of money, and all of a sudden you have all the money in the world.
In fact, you have your own space agency, right?
You're literally trying to cure death for yourself.
And you can go anywhere in the world.
You have a yacht that's as big as, I don't know, Delaware.
Okay?
Well, what do you start doing with that excess capital?
Do you, I mean, you can invest it over here.
Sure.
Well, you don't want to pay people because they get used to that.
Well, the next thing you know, you're like, I mean, I guess I'll buy a newspaper.
Okay.
I'll buy the Washington Post.
Great.
Okay.
What do you do after that?
All of a sudden you start buying politicians.
All of a sudden you start creating non-governmental bodies.
All of a sudden you start corrupting everything and you look up and suddenly you're like, You know what?
My vote kind of matters more than everybody else's, and this democracy thing is a problem.
This isn't the first time this has happened.
It's happened since the birth of capitalism.
Liberalism and capitalism were born together.
And what did capitalism do?
It swallowed it up like Pac-Man, and then it just continued to work and work and work.
We are in the middle of an existential crisis.
The problem is, in all of this, as you and I are talking about troop carriers, we're talking about, you know, F-22s.
I shared with you this thing.
Did you see this RAND report from 2018?
Okay, for anybody who doesn't know, the RAND Corporation is way up top in terms of like the groups that have been talking about nuclear warfare since there's been such a thing as nuclear warfare.
The RAND Corporation in 2018 brought out this paper called the Russia Challenge, which Nick, tell me if I'm wrong, completely predicted all of this.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, listen, the Rand Corporation, you know, plays a very vital role in the history of our war making, for good and for bad.
So there's no question that they have their finger on the pulse of what's going on here.
And by the way, for anybody who's listened to this podcast for a while, you've heard us talk about whenever someone gets elected president or senator or whatever, basically they, you know, they do the oath of office and then they're handed like a big booklet, right, from think tanks.
And basically it says, here is your owner's guide on how to be president for the next four years, or what should you do?
It's all these groups.
The Rand Corporation basically split off from the military and, well, it didn't split off from the military-industrial complex, but it basically grew as a new appendage of it.
This article, this Russia Challenge article from the Rand Corporation, not only predicted the invasion of Ukraine, but also has completely gamed out how they think that a battle between NATO and Russia would play out.
And they are not ruling out strategic nuclear weapons.
This is what's on the table, what we're actually discussing here, what serious people are talking about.
This isn't just a couple of bozos going back and forth and being like, I wonder if it's World War III.
This is literally what has been gamed out by the people who have a seat at the table.
You know, but they also, it's the threat of nuclear weapons, which tends to be highlighted as well, which is what they, you know, it depends on how you want to read this and where you're coming from.
Again, if you have someone on the right, watch a news report next to me, if I had something like that.
We could get the exact opposite out of what we saw from the same piece of content.
And it's probably similar in this as well, where, you know, it could sound like, what?
Putin just, of course, he's going to threaten that and use that as a tool, but never actually do it.
But then again, it does say explicitly here that yes, he could.
You know, if he uses nuclear weapons, it kind of ends Russia, right?
Russia ceases to exist, as does probably the United States, right?
So it's fascinating to me and maybe it's out of the notion that he's at the end of his life and he doesn't care.
But anybody looking at this would realize that you're not going to win that way.
That's the goal.
Okay, so let's go ahead and bring this down.
I want to point out that there's a couple of other things that have been going out there.
Where people are like, well, obviously Putin's lost.
I mean, he just needs an off-ramp.
We've talked about this.
There's no off-ramp for him.
It's literally life or death.
He has pushed all of his chips into the middle.
There is no way that this man can survive as the ruler of Russia under this current situation if it continues on the direction that it's at.
Which is why all this ideology that we've talked about is starting to coalesce and starting to gain heft and weight.
There's no out here.
So with someone like Putin, and this is the frightening thing, Putin believes that Russia is synonymous with Putin.
Right?
His fate is the same as Russia's fate, which, by the way, is why people like Donald Trump are so dangerous, right?
They can't imagine something outside of that.
Anybody with a conscience, anybody who has to go to sleep at night, they think about this stuff and they're like, oh, wow, this could lead to the deaths of millions or billions of people.
There are certain personality types that don't do that.
And these dictators who don't care about life or death, they can't even Project a care about it.
Like, you know, I sit here, I'll talk shit all day long about a George W. Bush, but I have to tell you, at least George W. Bush talked about decency.
You know what I mean?
Like, he was guilty of unbelievable war crimes, but at least he knew that he shouldn't say this stuff out loud.
These people don't care.
And so, at some point facing mortality for some people, that's the end of the world.
And the world won't go on without you, which I think really concerns me whether or not he actually believes he's in a world historical moment.
I mean, that is certainly a very, very real concern.
You know, you see the pictures of him sitting 100 feet away from any of his advisors now.
He's so completely isolated from anyone who wants to tell him what the reality is.
That it's frustrating.
I mean, like, it's funny, the bigger NATO gets, right, and the more powerful it gets, the idea is that the less anyone's ever going to challenge that, right?
But then again, if you are stupid enough to do that, then here is what we have.
Although, again, I'm not going to pretend that, you know, Ukraine is in NATO, that this is the whole point of this whole thing, right?
He's got to get to a point where he's almost so desperate because NATO is so powerful that he knows he'll never beat them, that this is one of his only plays left.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, though, because, you know, Here's the thing, the government itself and Russia itself could collapse out of all of this, right?
The sanctions are so crippling as it is, their economy has already been collapsing.
And as we know now, if your economy collapses for long enough, you kind of cease to be a country, right?
That's what this world is.
Well, the question here, because part of the issue is what made this worth it for him, right?
And I think that you and I agree on this, which is that he probably thought this was going to happen a lot faster.
I think that they had a hubristic idea of what this would entail and where this would go.
And I think that's something that we can agree on and we can probably say with a certainty.
But there are also contingencies.
On one hand, You know, like, do you make a decision that somehow or another there's a survival away from the world economy?
And I do think that Vladimir Putin, based on the ideology, based on the advice of people like Alexander Dugin and all these nationalistic, neo-fascistic assholes, I think he did believe that this would be maybe the mortal wound against the neoliberal economic world order.
They truly believe that it's like an apocalyptic battle that will destroy it.
They've already announced it's the end of the unipolar world, right?
I mean, that's already been leaked.
That's already in state documents.
And I don't think that they're completely wrong on that.
I do think that this is proof that the order isn't permanent.
But the question that we have to ask And I'd love to hear what you have to say about this, because I've got thoughts.
How much of this was done with assurances from China?
How much of this involved these conversations, these secret meetings, of course, that we had?
How much of this was done with either a handshake, a nod, a wink, an under-the-table sort of a handoff?
What's your thought on this?
Because I've got thoughts.
Oh, I mean, you know, we had mentioned this, I think last week, whatever it was that the idea that like the only country that could probably have enough influence over Russia to say, hey, man, you should you should end this thing would be China.
Now, China, I think, has an interest in having Russia.
status quo, meaning maintaining its position in the world as another front against the West.
Right.
Like that, that would seem to be in their best interest.
And they would also recognize that if this goes south in a way that they have to pull out.
Listen, we already saw what happened to the Soviet Union when they had to pull out of Afghanistan, kind of a direct line between that and then the fall of the Soviet Union.
I don't see why this wouldn't be similar if that happens that way.
And I feel like that's against China's interests.
They don't want to see that happen either.
So it's weird.
China almost needs to have it go back to status quo.
They cannot afford to have them lose the capital L on this thing.
And they've certainly gone about as much as they can to stay out of this whole thing and not be part of this.
But at some point, there's no way they can maintain that position.
Well, I think that they've been involved in it in a quiet way.
Like, they've made assurances that they're going to buy more Russian, you know, oil and gas.
Yeah, that they're going to give them financial assistance, which almost, you know, it's almost like if you and I were like, you know what, Nick, I'm tired of the U.S.
dollar.
We now live with crypto.
You know what I mean?
And so you get off of the system that rejects you, you know, you go out and I don't know, you get a cabin in Montana or something.
It does feel like that has become a separate system that has been decided.
On top of that, I mean, we know now that China knew that they were going to invade Ukraine and asked them to wait until after the Olympics, which is just a mind-blowing question.
That cannot be the only thing they agreed on in that summit.
And we now know, and this has come out, that Russia has now requested additional war equipment from China.
Now, China has already said, oh, we hadn't even heard about this.
This is made up by the West.
I think that's horseshit.
I think that's bullshit.
I don't think you ask someone for economic and war aid unless you know that they are really on your side.
I can't remember if I said it on this podcast or if it was on a live stream.
Who knows?
I do feel like a lot of this has been China telling Russia, almost like, go out ahead, see what's happening, see what occurs, we've got your back, don't worry, we're over here.
I gotta tell you, I don't know where this is going to go, but I do not think it's a foregone conclusion.
Like, Francis Fukuyama put out an article this weekend that was embarrassing.
For anyone who doesn't know, Francis Fukuyama was a guy who declared with the fall of the Soviet Union.
History's over!
Nothing could ever happen.
Liberal democracy.
Last bastion of government ever.
Wait, what's that?
Were those planes going into the World Trade Center?
Oh, my bad.
He basically said that this was a lesson for China and that China would figure out that it wasn't worth challenging the US order.
I'm going to read that real fast.
Fukuyama says in this terrible article in the American Purpose called Preparing for Defeat, and he's basically already said Putin's lost the war, Russia's lost the war, here's what will happen.
He says, the war to this point has been a good lesson for China.
Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade.
And he says, we may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities.
Well, okay, that's all great from a Western perspective.
But guess what?
The world doesn't work based on Western perspectives.
And they don't want us to keep having a unipolar world.
They don't want American dominance to continue.
At some point, it's not going to be just Putin putting his chips into the table.
At some point, other people join when they think that we're weak.
And guess what?
We're pretty damn weak right now.
We have been depleted.
We have lost power in the eyes of the world.
I do not think that all of these people who are Sure.
But if they're being observed by this system and propping it up and propagandizing on its behalf, I don't think that they are looking at the entire picture here.
Sure.
I mean, by the way, you can look at this like China might not mind if Russia kind of falls off as a power because then they can fill that vacuum themselves.
That's an interesting take, too.
They love giving debt out.
I'll tell you that much.
Oh, that's terrible that that happened.
Don't worry, we'll help you rebuild.
Yeah, exactly.
Neoliberals love that too.
It'll basically be if Russia falls, it'll be a battle to see who can help Russia get back.
I mean, that's how this whole thing works.
Right and then that's the other thing it's like so Russia falls but like it doesn't just disappear it doesn't just you know it's not like a void that the map doesn't register anything anymore people still live there it's still a land place just like when World War II like ended quote-unquote like I guess it kind of ended, but everyone was still mad and angry and all the issues were still there, not resolved.
Certainly World War I was that way, even more so.
So, it's an interesting... I feel like we are at a crossroads.
We probably say this every decade or every whatever number of years, but this one really is it, where this is going to decide a lot of different things going forward for the next hundred, couple hundred years probably on the planet, if we're still around.
Well, I mean, you know, here's the thing, and I've been...
Have patience with me, Nick, and the audience, because this is something that I've been trying to put into words, and it's hard to do, right?
It's a difficult thing because we've reached not just a crossroads, We're about to enter a new world.
We're looking at moving off of fossil fuel at some point, because I gotta tell you, it's gonna run out at some point.
There's a point where there's no more.
Like, you gotta do something else.
We are not just watching climate catastrophe take shape, we're living in it.
We're literally watching territory destroyed.
We're watching economic... My God, I think it was last year there were like 10 billion dollar disasters Alone, you know just from climate disaster all of a sudden.
We're gonna watch territory resources depleted This system is not going to continue America is in decline These are all things that are occurring on top of that.
There is a technological oligarchy that literally and I'm not exaggerating wants to shove us into a virtual reality where we will live and by the way automation is completely taken over like the world is changing and And when the world changes, the deck gets shuffled.
It's like you and I getting done playing a game of cards.
Like, we're done!
Now you gotta reshuffle and figure out what's going on.
If this isn't the moment of reshuffling, it's the end of the game before the reshuffling.
And I don't think that people think this party's going to go on forever because of Western hubris, but it's just, it's not.
There's no possibility of that happening.
Well, we also have to talk a little bit about just, you know, you mentioned capitalism and we're talking about war and it's like, I almost feel like capitalism has incentivized war.
I mean, it has.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so, like, even when we see the reactions now, as soon as the hint of war in Ukraine from a few weeks ago, prices just spike, right?
For no reason.
No supply chain issue that had changed overnight.
And yet the prices spike.
And then they will stay that way.
And they never really go back down.
Oil is the same way here.
We talked about this last week as well.
Where, you know, any devastation to an oil refinery, you know, that doesn't, isn't felt for months until, you know, that anything that would have been made there doesn't get to our pump and for months and months.
And yet they will overnight raise the prices there.
So it's very, very strange to me that, you know, that that is literally the incentive.
And if you are on a board of some massive company, you know, publicly traded company, You know, war is must be treated with champagne.
They must be very excited because they know the bottom line will go up for that quarter or that or that year.
And that's that's the biggest issue of this because there's no stopping that.
Right.
You can't if we're going to live in a society the way it's been built and it's you know, it's the majority of countries across the world are focused on this.
Then how do we ever avoid having wars?
I am so glad that you got into this because whenever we talk about war, what we do and I've talked about how ideology sort of hides the reality of situations.
Right.
It's the story.
The story that we always tell in war is there is a maniacal, evil individual, which by the way, Vladimir Putin is a maniacal, evil individual.
Absolutely he is, but that's not the end of it, right?
Whenever we're talking about war, we're talking about socioeconomic issues.
We're talking about oil.
We're talking about resources.
We're talking about how much money there is to be had, not just in the production of weapons, but the money that there is to be had from cleaning up after the weapons have been dropped.
It's an incredible business.
It works incredibly well.
On top of that, that's what financial capital needs.
And in capitalism, it continually does this because as it concentrates, the people who are outside of the concentration or who are on the edges of it, Russia is doing this because it's not in control of the situation.
So what?
It incentivizes them striking back against the giant, powerful center of accumulated capital.
Part of this is the fact that Russia economically sucks.
It just does.
They're a petrol state.
That's what they've got.
That's what they can give you.
On top of that, they're basically put over here and Putin is invited every now and then to a G8 because he'll keep people in line and keep money going through the system.
It's a secondary state within the neoliberal global order.
People within the neoliberal global order don't dream about destroying it.
Right?
So capitalism incentivizes that.
Because capital's always trying to get free.
It's always trying to move towards more and more concentrated places.
So even if Russia collapses tomorrow, this thing doesn't end.
Right?
As long as we keep going down this game, more wars are not just likely, but guaranteed.
Right.
And so it's almost like the solution needs to be a more humanitarian approach where this money doesn't get so concentrated in so few people's hands.
You know, again, and you've argued this a lot about we don't really need billionaires, right?
Or whatever.
Let them have $2 billion, but don't let them have anything more than $2 billion.
Whatever that is.
Man, that would piss me off so much if like we finally did something about that, but they still got like $2 billion.
Right.
I mean, I don't know the math, but I have to imagine if you cap it at two billion, there's enough people out there that actually do have more than that, that you're talking about ending every dilemma we could ever have, right?
Well, so I think if you, okay, so in all of this, right, Tucker Carlson isn't able to do what we talked about in the beginning of this show if we don't have austerity in this country, if we don't have, you know, globalism that goes in and just absolutely eradicates these communities.
Like, Tucker's talking to a lot of people at country clubs who think that they're millionaires who should be billionaires.
But he's also talking to a bunch of people that they're like, immigrants are coming for my jobs and I've been told that the new world order is trying to destroy me.
Like, you don't have that stuff if you have a more functional society.
It's that austerity, it's that exploitation that makes that happen.
So yes, if all of a sudden we took some of the pressure out, if all of a sudden we had Something like you said, humanitarian.
And we're not bringing in murderous thugs like Vladimir Putin because they help the system work.
Yeah.
Nick, we haven't even talked about this.
We're going into Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and Iran, who just fired rockets at us.
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why we probably haven't heard completely what happened there, because we need oil from them.
Like, we're going around to murderous regimes.
Saudi Arabia, I think, just executed 80-some people the other day, in like one of their biggest mass executions in decades.
And meanwhile, they're basically flipping us the bird, and they're like, nah, we're gonna help out Russia, go pound sand, right?
Like, we are having to compromise so many morals and so many ethics simply because the system makes it absolutely required.
So if we had a more humanitarian system, we could actually start living something nearer to a life at this point.
Yeah, and unfortunately when you're describing the country club that he's hanging out with all the other millionaires or whoever they are, It's the racism that I think we haven't really mentioned either That is also what drives the other and the and the hatred and then the non-humanity of the situation is because there are makers and takers Nick Mm-hmm.
There are makers and takers.
And by the way, what do they all believe they all believe that?
Technically these people are lesser And, you know, wanting equal outcomes is all about reverse racism.
I mean, that's that's literally what's in their head.
You're exactly right.
Right.
And so that's why, you know, when we get to drill deeper into what they're doing with like, you know, education and kids, because again, we've We talked about this.
Most kids in a vacuum are not racist.
They don't necessarily see color that way.
They are taught that.
I think that's pretty clear now after enough studies that it's taught.
And obviously the parents are the ones who end up teaching this and propagating this throughout generations.
And so that is another reason why the front on CRT and all those things is so triggering to that to the right and also so nefarious in what they're trying to do, because it kind of drives all of this.
It also drives the notion of ignoring climate change because they don't want the kids to learn about it earlier.
So it's kind of fascinating how that's where we've gotten to.
We can trace a lot of this back to this one area, ground zero.
Well, it's white supremacy.
I mean, the whole point of all of this is that these conspiracy theories and these lies are about taking what white supremacy has done, the murdering, the enslavement, the genocide, the violence, the anti-democratic actions, and projecting them on others and saying, if we're not careful, and projecting them on others and saying, if we're not careful, they'll do that to Right.
We're Well, denying the history of it.
They don't want to sit with this because they know climate change is real.
It just so happens that as climate change takes over, there's going to be less land, less resources.
Who should get the land?
Who should get the resources?
Right?
And all of a sudden then, guess what?
It's going to need more violence.
It's going to need more authoritarianism.
It's not a coincidence that all of these things are happening at the exact same time.
It is an international movement of white people.
They are talking constantly about this white evangelical men, particularly wealthy white evangelical men who want to rule the world and they want to control their power and keep it and keep everyone away from it.
And that is the defining purpose at the heart of this.
It's the reason why they're on the same page as Vladimir Putin.
They want exactly what he has.
Do you think that racism existed during the Cro-Magnon man times?
Well, it was the fear of the other.
It was always like those people over there, right?
Racism was invented.
Racism was basically something that came along to basically explain, like before that it was barbarians.
Right?
It was like, oh, we're civilization.
They're barbarians, which means that we have food.
We have housing.
We have these things.
They don't deserve them.
Then all of a sudden it was like, man, you know, we're going all around the world and we're really subjecting people and raping them and killing them.
Why are we doing it?
Oh, they're lesser than us.
Right?
They were born different from us.
And by the way, you want to go ahead and make this thing go all the way around.
Why?
How did they explain it?
Because they used the Bible.
Because they used religion.
They said, oh, people have different skin color because they were cursed by God.
You know, it was because Noah's son Ham saw him naked after he got shit drunk in a vineyard and he put a curse on him and that's why people have different colors is because they've been cursed by God.
It's all ideology.
It's all a story.
It was invented so that they could exploit people.
What?
You know, listen, I think that they're aliens.
I think, you know, angels had come down to Earth at some point back in the day.
I think dragons must have been flying around in the Middle Ages, too.
It must have been wild.
That must have been a wild time, I tell you.
But I love those movies, though.
There's that movie where they find a dragon, and it's got Christian Bale in it.
I don't know.
Rain of Fire.
You know what's funny about that?
I just watched the trailer for that a couple of days ago, and I was like, man, that is a wild movie.
Yeah, I love that stuff where like anything you could find that proves those myths actually really were real.
I mean, you know, that would be, I love that stuff.
And so... And by the way, doesn't that feel, and before we finish this up, doesn't that feel different now?
Like, not just looking back in like the 90s, but like looking at popular culture and everything, everything feels so heavy right now.
And to really think about anything besides sort of what's going on, it just feels so foreign and alien at this point, besides just keeping an eye on this.
I wonder if it's a function of our age as much, but you're right.
I mean, let's say like euphoria, maybe you're watching that too much, I don't know.
But yeah, you know, here's the thing, I bet you every generation complains of this.
Everything's getting dark, it's getting too, you know, whatever, where's the love of life and all this celebration of that?
So it might not necessarily be that much different but when you put the weight of what's going on that we just talked about like in Ukraine and then across the world it does it does color everything now and it has a different feeling now to it.
Yeah, and on that note, I hope everybody is taking care of themselves.
I just want to remind you, take care of your mental health.
Take care of your well-being.
I said this on a podcast a couple of weeks ago, which is, you know, this is a really, really frightening time, but use that terror.
Use it and think about life.
Think about yourself.
Think about what matters.
We have to get busy building the future, that more humanitarian future you're talking about, Nick.
Like, we have to get started on that because this thing is...
It's getting worse and worse and we promise we're going to keep an eye on it and keep bringing you coverage that unfortunately others are unwilling to do at this point.
Yeah, well Dennis Leary said this a long, long time ago.
He's like, you know, no one's really happy.
Happiness is like in the tiniest little doses.
It's like the cigarette after sex or it's the hit and the home run and I saw whatever.
To me, what I did the other day was I had a tennis ball and I was throwing it down the driveway and the dog would run and get it and then bring it back.
I gotta tell you, for that moment, I was happy.
It was a moment that I want to celebrate and I will cling to right now.
Be present because so much of this is about how life gets away from us and we stop appreciating things and stop appreciating people.
This is a moment to remember stuff like that.
That's joy.
Joy is remembering that you're alive and there are things that you can care about and love whether it's a person or a dog or a family or a community.
Just keep that in mind.
Take care of yourselves.
We're going to be back on Friday with The Weekender.
A reminder, if you want to listen to that, just go over to patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
We are an ad-free show.
We are independent media.
We're not out there telling people what they want to hear and what the corporations want to hear.
So again, that's patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
We depend on you and we are so grateful for you.
Until next time, everybody, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
