Nov. 20, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
48:45
Sunday Special: Globalist American Empire, FTX Operations and the CCP Cold War w/Darren Beattie
On this week’s Sunday Special Edition of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Darren Beattie of Revolver News to breakdown and discuss the Globalist American Empire. From FTX and Crypto to the Cartel’s fortune being laundered by the CCP, Poso and Beattie cut through all the static with answers and high level commentary. Their perspective on Elon Musk and Twitter is a must listen. Whether it’s the BCCI and the intelligence community or China’s influence over Hollywood, no topic is of...
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's special Sunday edition of Human Events Daily.
I'm joined today by Darren Beattie, editor of Revolver News, for a discussion on where we are, what is the state of things, and specifically the state of what Darren has taken to use, but you see this term everywhere.
You started, I believe you coined the phrase, but I've seen it all across the internet.
I've seen people mentioning this even in forums that Well, first of all, it is one of my prouder, I would say the proudest coinages that I've made.
the globalist American empire.
So Darren, what is the globalist American empire and what is the state of it as you see things today?
Well, first of all, it is one of my prouder, I would say the proudest coinages that I made, the globalist American empire, which...
lends itself to a very convenient acronym and appropriate one.
And so what is this?
Indeed.
So what is the state of the globalist American empire?
Well, I think we've seen a number of blows, according to which a lot of the possible alternatives to the power and preeminence of the the global American empire had been neutralized.
And, you know, I guess we're all looking to Mar-a-Lago today to see what Trump does and how he does it.
I would say it's fair to say that at least to some degree the Trump movement has been, if not neutralized, then diminished or crippled by the collective action of the regime.
And how Trump responds to that remains to be seen.
And so that's one aspect.
There was, you know, even though kind of ironically Trump was very explicitly opposed to Cryptocurrencies and calls it a scam.
And he may end up very well being vindicated by this.
I remember specifically when he tweeted that out, I guess it was a couple of years ago now.
It was in 2020 when Bitcoin was on its way to the top of the charts.
Everybody was talking about it.
It became the hottest thing.
Because you know what happened was everybody had had those stimulus checks.
During the lockdown, so Bitcoin and just crypto and the whole what they call the DeFi community was really taking off.
And then out of nowhere, here comes that, you know, they were calling him Boomer Trump with his boomer take about crypto and Bitcoin and the old dog just doesn't get it.
And now here we are two years later and we're seeing the collapse of crypto and then also seeing that these this FTX group, which to me looks like an intelligence operation slash money laundering operation.
It is completely falling apart.
All of these customers left holding the bag.
And then that tweet has resurfaced and said, well, maybe he was on to something there.
No, and look, I think he would be the first to admit that he doesn't understand it, and that's probably why he was rightly skeptical.
And, you know, despite all of the sort of caterwauling by the crypto enthusiasts about, oh, it's not used properly, it's a decentralized protocol and such and such, you need to understand how it uses, you know, if you don't have your keys, you don't have your coins, like, All those things are probably, you know, valid as far as I've been able to check.
But you have to look at sort of the reality of Bitcoin as a kind of semi mass adopted product and its use cases in that context beyond, you know, what people have called like nerd money or beyond the sort of more limited use cases that are confined to its more kind of Secure use.
And yeah, the FTX may just be the tip of the iceberg.
And, you know, we can look at it and say this is a big scam, which it obviously is.
It's a big kind of money laundering operation that gets closer to the truth.
And so can it be a scam and a money laundering operation at the same time?
You really have to look at some of these things and why they're allowed to continue for as long as they are.
And you kind of you get to you get to the root of the scam.
And I think things like FTX and perhaps other other crypto coins might be even worse, especially the stable coins.
We might have just seen the very beginning of the whole kind of crypto scam unraveling insofar as crypto has been used.
But what's interesting is that to your point, though, that it seems as though the regime was propping up this specific FTX and this coin exchange, which has always been a rival to Binance.
Binance was the one that I was familiar with, this large one.
But they were using this one and then giving the guy the celebrity treatment, the Elizabeth Holmes treatment.
And it wasn't that he was just given this celebrity status, but also there were exorbitant funds that were banked with him and deposited with him that were given to pass through.
He's suddenly given out of nowhere, this guy who comes in, he's the son of two Stanford professors, and suddenly he's signing deals with the Ukrainian government in the midst of You know, these massive payments that are going through.
I said, boy, it looks like they found their new Hunter Biden.
Yeah.
And I think it's, it's very interesting that you mentioned that.
And again, I think the appropriate framework for this, there's an initial temptation to compare it to, you know, Theranos with Holmes, but I would say Theranos and Holmes, that's just a straight up scam.
That's just sort of, Playing off of these old, dumb, and decrepit sort of political figures.
But she was scamming them.
Exactly.
Who are drunk off the prospect of quote-unquote, you know, women in tech.
And she very cleverly sort of engaged those kinds of delusional erogenous zones, so to speak, and effectively scammed people who are stupid.
And it's really, you know, in some ways, we have to give her credit for scamming fools, like, Mad Dog Mattis.
Yeah, the dog, the litter box general.
Mattis.
But that was a straight up scam, as you said.
She just scammed them and that's it.
There was really kind of nothing more to it.
And so I don't think Theranos is really the right kind of framework for FTX.
I think the appropriate framework for FTX is closer to something like the BCCI bank.
And for those who don't know what this is, the BCCI Bank was a bank set up in the 70s and it had tons of scams going on through it was set up by allegedly set up by a Pakistani.
But basically Newsweek, believe it of all places, Newsweek was actually doing real reporting then.
And they basically said, OK, every single hand that this is passed through has been intelligence connected.
And so long story short, there was this bank that was engaging a lot of scams, but whether it was set up by intelligence from the beginning or whether intelligence just exploited it, it was used as a conduit for Iran-Contra and to fund various other groups and
Became very useful and therefore the scam was allowed to go on for a lot longer than ordinarily it would have because it was useful to various elements of the power structure to take advantage of that kind of vehicle.
And I think that BCCI is probably the more accurate framework to understand not only FTX but a number of other major things that have gone on In the crypto world.
And the thing that you know about the regime and they don't reinvent their playbook that much.
And if something existed before and now it doesn't exist, you can pretty much bet it does exist in some slightly modified form.
Well, my favorite sort of take on this is that the mainstream position on just say, Let's just take the CIA, right?
And it's more than just that, but let's say that.
So we can say, well, the CIA was lying to the American people and spreading propaganda and conducting false operations in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s.
Nobody was ever fired.
Nobody was ever held accountable, but they're perfectly fine now.
And if you suggest that they might be currently up to something bad, then you're a crazy person with tinfoil on your head.
Right.
Right.
No, absolutely.
And so you can just look to history for these antecedents.
And, you know, the BCCI, especially after all of the hearings sort of aired out the dirty laundry of the intelligence community and the FBI and so forth, they needed trickier ways.
They couldn't just straight up fund a lot of things because they were worried about another hearing.
So they needed to set up and infrastructure that would sort of take a lot of their activities off the book and could serve as kind of a money laundering conduit for various rebel groups and other projects that the intel world was engaged in.
Well, the most famous one for, you know, I think a lot of our listeners, I think the most famous one of these would be Benghazi and Operation Zero Footprint that was being run through there, this MANPAD operation going from the Libyan rebels to the Syrian rebels and this guy, the ambassador, gets caught up in all of this.
They, you know, and then the terrorists decide, well, we don't want you to be running this operation.
And so they attack.
But I always point out that the one thing nobody, of all the questions in Benghazi and the movies and the hearings, but the question that nobody ever seems to get to is why was a U.S. ambassador at a CIA black site in the first place?
Right.
Yeah, it's you run into these kinds of strange coincidences.
And yeah, so to my take on the FTX thing is it's it's I.
I wouldn't say it's so much intelligence in this specific case of FTX, but it serves that BCCI function for major elements of that sort of Clinton-DNC type infrastructure.
It became appropriated as a major sort of money moving vehicle for certain nodes of the Clinton-DNC Well, I couldn't agree more.
And there are probably other crypto coins and institutions that serve similar purpose for other elements of the regime as well.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
And you see this apparatus building and rebuilding and remaking itself, moving from time to time, from place to place.
And once the Clintons go away, there's going to be a new node that that essentially takes over it.
But the players will still remain on the table.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're coming up on our first break, but stay tuned because I'm joined with Darren Beatty, Revolver News, and we're going through the state of the globalist American empire.
Be right back.
And we're back here, Darren Beatty of Revolver News.
We're talking all things globalist American empire.
Darren, You were just telling me about this bank, BCCCI, that was being used for intelligence operations, but there was more to that bank than just use inside the United States, because if I remember correctly, weren't there cartels, drug cartels, in Mexico and South America that were also using this bank, and our intelligence community was also essentially being involved with these cartels?
Nothing like that would ever happen again, right?
No, of course not.
But yeah, of course, we're, we have relationships with the cartels.
And that's one of the reasons that the war on drugs is such a, it's not a foolish prospect, it's simply an ill conceived prospect, because it's, you know, his question is, what are you going to war against?
And, you know, these cartels have become sort of
Parapolitical military entities unto themselves and kind of just the way we play in alliances with nation states We do the same with cartels and some cartels have a relationship with us and some don't and we're just talking about this great interview and maybe you can link to where the Expert journalist in Mexico is talking about how China is making inroads to the cartels but yeah, there's been this long-standing relationship and
You know, it's a delicate issue and there needs to be some way to, you know, support these cartels that the government is supporting without being noticed, ideally.
And laundering money through banks like the BCCI, that's one way to do it.
And in fact, you know, historically, that's basically what happened, even though it was taken down largely by an undercover DEA guy, as as had documented in a very entertaining movie called The Infiltrator, which you're talking about with the Breaking as as had documented in a very entertaining movie called The Infiltrator, Well, and this is something that people need to understand as well.
And I can speak to this a little bit from inside the intel community that or if you ever read the story about Barry Seal, another great movie, by the way, with Tom Cruise, that 100 percent true, by the way, that even within the intelligence community is not one entity that there are. that even within the intelligence community is not one entity
There are fiefdoms, there are compartments, there are secrets within secrets, and to put a blunt name on it, that the DEA does not always know what the CIA is up to, and the CIA does not always know what the DEA is up to, and the DEA might be trying to take down one organization, but that organization has the full backing of the Central Intelligence Agency, and then they might start fighting back against one another, or you've got a Pablo Escobar situation where
Essentially, it's United States Special Forces that take them out, but they're more than happy to let the Colombians get the credit for it.
And so I sort of just walk back into the, come on, that's an hyper shot.
I've heard it described to me that there's definitely a hierarchy within the community.
And DHS is like, my impression, that's like the ultimate low IQ.
That's just way out there in Fetterman's zone.
DHS is Fetterman's zone.
Well, certainly when it comes to Intel.
I mean, DHS has some decent HSI, their law enforcement investigative angle and customs, sure, they're fine in terms of what they do, but in terms of this level of operations, no, absolutely not.
Right.
And so it's CIA naturally kind of at the top and FBI and then DEA.
And it was once described to me that basically the function of the DEA is to go after the cartels that have fallen out of favor with the CIA.
That's actually an incredible way to put it because, uh, not to confirm or deny, but let's just say, yes, absolutely.
There are times when, when things like that have happened and essentially, and keep in mind at the same time, look, go, go back and look at the, the case of the great Whitey Bulger.
Who, uh, who was a direct informant under none other than Robert Mueller himself before he became special counsel, before he became the director of the FBI.
He was up there in Boston working for the DOJ and Whitey Bulger was a, this, this is a great way to look at it.
So if people understand that story, um, uh, Johnny Depp movie, by the way, black masses about this, where, and they get into it a little bit, but not into the full piece of it, that he was an informant.
against other gangs.
But in doing so, his gang was given free reign throughout throughout the city of Boston, United States city.
This is in the 70s and 80s to commit murders, to commit drug operations, money laundering operations, political corruption, political bribing.
His brother, by the way, was a state center.
He might still be a state center now that I checked all of this going on with the full endorsement of the FBI.
So not just under their noses, he's allowed to do this and given a free reign for all of these other crimes.
Why?
Because he's going after rivals.
And so you'll hear this phrase within the agency of, well, if we can't defeat the cartels, perhaps we can control the cartels.
Yep.
And And it's not, you know, just for the purposes of controlling them to manage the violence at the level of cartels where, you know, you have basically narco states in Mexico and Latin America.
Cartels are very major players, if not the absolute predominant players in the political process.
And so in that sense, we're, you know, again, they've become sort of political proxies for a sort of Grand strategy, almost, you know, now there are cartels that are aligned with us and there are cartels that are aligned with China.
And, you know, we want ours to predominate and so forth.
And so it's a much more kind of complicated perspective than I think a lot of people view it.
And it involves so many kind of interesting implications that, you know, there's this kind of relationship, again, with the overworld And the underworld, and there are these fascinating sort of linking figures who serve as the liaison between the overworld and the underworld.
And, you know, it's so kind of my view that the intersection of those, that's where really the interesting things happen.
That's where the magic happens.
And that's where a lot of the things that end up having a big impact on the world happen.
And that's just sort of a nice little glimpse behind the curtain.
And we don't often get those types of glimpses.
So it's always interesting to pursue the implications when we do.
No, I agree.
And I think crypto and the FTX is a big deal.
But let's let's tease out this line, though, of of China being in bed with certain cartels, because you do see the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and their influence throughout the world as a potential rival to the G.A.E.
They certainly presented themselves and are increasingly presenting themselves with Russia and BRICS as kind of a block as an alternative, right?
I think that's what they want to be seen as an alternative to the GAE, where they're saying, look, the Americans, these Westerners, they're pushing ideologies, they're pushing pride flags, they're gonna make you have pride parades in your town, in your city, in your state capital, they're gonna make you pass all these laws that are based around moral lines that they're pushing that may not go with your country.
We don't care.
We'll offer you a line of credit.
We'll offer you military supplies.
We'll offer you weapons.
We'll offer you technology and all we want in return, whether you're looking at Africa or I could say the Pacific or the Indian Ocean.
They're looking for resources, resource extraction, mineral rights.
They're looking for basing rights when it comes to a lot of these island nations in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean.
Obviously, Sri Lanka is a huge deal there with the ports at Trincomalee and Colombo that the Chinese are building.
And so, is it possible?
Do they have the ability to actually become a global rival to the GAE?
Uh, in terms of this, or is it something where they're still building it up and they're never going to be able to attain the critical mass that they would require?
That's a really great question.
It's a really complicated question.
It's really decisive question.
And you know, I can't really claim to know the answer to that.
I've given it some degree of thought.
I will say that initially I was more.
I wouldn't say optimistic, but I was, I definitely thought that I'd put more weight into sort of geopolitical multipolarity as one vector, one of the very few vectors that might be open up some opportunities politically.
And what I mean by that is that some, if you agree that wokeness is sort of inextricably intertwined with
With gays power and prestige, and then some kind of multi polarity geopolitically, some kind of counterbalance might serve as an infrastructure that could at least incubate something that might challenge the dominant ideology in order ultimately to correct America and set America on the course that it should be on.
I'm much more skeptical of that view than I was just looking at What a disaster.
Russia was never really going to be a major player.
It was always going to be a minor partner.
But it's really kind of lost a lot of global cachet.
It's just hard to see how Russia manages in the future.
Long story short is China will be a major political player, but ultimately will carve out its sphere of influence and have a defensive posture.
I don't see China having any kind of ideology or worldview that could seize the attention and admiration of the globe.
They simply don't have the charisma to compete with Well, I certainly agree with that.
I mean, there's no grandiose universalism from China.
There's no innovative reach for the stars, kind of explore the galaxy kind of charisma there.
You do see that a little bit with Elon Musk.
You see that with some of the tech futurism that comes out of, you know, I've I hesitate to say Silicon Valley, but I'll say certain areas of the promise of the global tech future.
But at the same time, I don't exactly think those guys are anyone that we should be putting our chips on.
But certainly that is something that, to your point, will always give America and the West this edge.
The real correction might actually be something along the lines of, if you look what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter right now, And essentially going through, racking and stacking every single employee there.
And if you can't hold your weight, if you can't pull your weight, then he is decisively sending you to the curb.
Darren Beattie, let's hold it right there because we'll be right back.
I want to get into more of this as we return here at Human Events Daily.
And we're back here, Human Events, Sunday special, Darren Beatty, where we left off.
We were talking about the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, for all the power that he has within China, he doesn't seem to quite have the ability to expand and eclipse the globalist American empire, at least not yet.
Of course, I have one of my contentions in terms of the, you know, the Great Reset or the, you know, Klaus Schwab and things we've talked about is that This is sort of their answer to the Chinese Communist Party, their sharing of best practices from Xi Jinping and their ability to impose that and impose their will on the West.
But at the same time, it's a big argument over there is this huge global system, but who's going to be ultimately the junior partner and the senior partner in terms of that.
But to your point, should China not actually be able to take over it?
And one of the elements that I think we should discuss there before we turn to Elon Musk is this idea of telecommunications, because you've really seen the United States take this overt approach towards really going to all of the partner nations that kind of fall within the United States sphere.
Right.
across Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Five Eyes Nations, to demand that they do not work, certainly not at least at a government level with Huawei or anything to do with China.
And you're absolutely seeing a falling in line of these countries in terms of that.
Right.
And, you know, very early on, I've always resisted the ultimate kind of meaning of this sort of Beijing-Biden epithet, because my basic understanding for a while has been that there's essentially a consensus across because my basic understanding for a while has been that there's essentially a consensus across all factions of the ruling elite in the globalist American empire that we're gearing up for some kind of major
We've seen it most pronounced in the telecommunications sphere, but we've seen other examples of it as well.
And, um, and that's just kind of the new reality shaping the 21st century.
And the question is what, you know, what's going to happen with the third world countries, you know, third world country is a cold war term, meaning non aligned countries, countries that are aligned with either the Soviet Union or United States.
And, you know, the Russia situation is actually, you know, illest, you know, illuminating, um, maybe mostly for just how subservient Europe actually is.
You know, Europe is basically, from geopolitical sense, a vassal state of the globalist American empire.
They have no real sovereignty of their own, at least in relation to Russia.
But China might be slightly more complicated because, again, you're going against a lot of strong economic interests.
And basically, our posture in relation to certain key elements of Chinese telecommunications is You're either with us or you're against us.
It's, you know, it's back to George W. Bush in many ways, in the economic sphere.
And, you know, China has kind of gestured toward that posture as well.
And so, you know, basically a lot of companies, a lot of countries are going to be forced to choose between China and the United States.
And that's going to be a very interesting dynamic shaping the geopolitical landscape over the next five, 10 years.
My take on part of the Huawei debate, and this started, by the way, under Trump, but it's continued under Joe Biden, to your point, was that, you know, how dare you let Huawei into your country with their 5G networks?
They're going to start spying on you.
And don't you know, that's what the NSA is for.
Only we're allowed to do that.
You can't let the Chinese come here.
No, it's funny.
And along those lines, I've said, Along those lines, I've had people say, oh, don't you know, if you do this or that, you know, the Chinese are looking at this.
I say, look, who would you rather have your data?
The Chinese government or American journalists?
Exactly right.
You know?
Yeah, that's precisely right.
I'm not, I'm not some, you know, intelligence official.
I don't work for the State Department.
I'm more worried about these, you know, New York Times journalists having my data.
Right, and one rogue employee at Apple or Google or Twitter who decides that they hate Revolver News and they hate Darren Beattie and Jack Posobiec and Human Events Daily and all the emails suddenly just plop On somebody's hard drive one day, and all the text messages, and direct messages, and everything else, and that's all it would take.
That was all it would take as one person.
In China, they probably wouldn't really care.
They don't give a damn.
No, they wouldn't care one way or the other about you.
Me, maybe a little bit more, because I have been a little more outspoken about them.
But, you know, when I look at it, though, and by the way, one of the key points to bring up in this is that you do, by the way, see people like George Soros.
Of all folks, come out and speak very aggressively towards Xi Jinping.
And I wonder if American conservatives have ever taken notice of this fact to say, well, hold on a second.
This is the guy who's supposedly our boogeyman.
He's the person who's behind open borders.
He's the person behind the war zones.
He's the person behind so many conflicts.
Yet all of a sudden he's in complete lockstep with us in terms of Xi Jinping, in terms of the rise of China.
And my contention on that is that, well, sure, but we disagree for different reasons.
For American conservatives, it's because, sure, you might stand for freedom, you stand for liberty, you stand for the expansion of that around the world, but George Soros doesn't care about that.
George Soros cares about who's going to be in charge.
He cares about his power, he cares about his money, he cares about his bottom line.
So what you're seeing there is, as you were using the phrase, the overstate and the overworld and the underworld, that's an overworld fight that you're looking at Um, it's more of a squabble between elites rather than, you know, who's going to be in charge, who's senior partner, who's junior partner versus anything else in terms of it.
But another one of those very interesting situations.
Yeah, go ahead.
I have a minute on Soros.
So this, this is not new for Soros.
In fact, the, in the New York times, there were accusations that appeared as far back as the Tiananmen issue.
1989.
That's correct.
Blaming George Soros for essentially fomenting a color revolution type scenario in China.
China's been actually used the term color revolution in diplomatic communications in its public diplomacy very recently.
They're very aware of the what the quote unquote open society as the vector for color revolution type operations.
And that's why China has been very smart I say that there's only 2.5 sovereign nations on the planet.
There's the United States, Globalist American Empire, there's China, and Russia is a 0.5, but maybe now they're demoted to a 0.2.
But one thing that really enables China to maintain its sovereignty is its complete emphatic rejection of the open society.
And it goes down to a very deep level.
First of all, they reject American big tech.
You don't have Google.
You don't have YouTube.
You don't have all of these vectors of sort of epistemological subversion that the US uses in order-- or you don't have NGOs, which are sort of the more obvious vectors of these things.
But arguably, at an even deeper level, you don't even have English.
The English language itself is such a natural vector for the woke poison that can only be Truly communicated in English.
It probably doesn't even translate into Chinese.
And so they have that linguistic firewall as well.
And I've never actually thought of that.
But, you know, having lived in China for two years, being a Mandarin linguist, I wouldn't even know where to begin to try to train because I always usually think of translating Chinese into English.
It's how do you translate candy or First of all, in China, everyone's pronouns are the same.
It's ta, right?
So your pronouns are, for a man it's ta, and for a female it's ta.
Now the written characters would include an element of gender.
The male ta would have a male Uh, sort of, uh, they call it a side character.
And then, uh, the female would have a female side character, but in, in the spoken language, there is no difference whatsoever.
This is why if you're, if you're ever talking to someone from China that has English as a second language or Asia in general, you'll notice they sometimes might mix those up a little bit because they're not used to that in spoken language.
They're not used to these, this idea of gendered pronouns.
Um, in terms of speech.
And so even as something as basic as that, no, it's, it's completely not able to be translated.
Right.
And it ties into an earlier point I made about their lack of charisma and universal appeal, the very same linguistic and epistemological firewall that at least up until now protects them from the open society and American subversion.
Is the same thing that makes them so clumsy and ridiculous at propaganda appealing to a global audience.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
One of the most obvious vectors of this is through Hollywood.
And you may have seen there's been a slew of Hollywood movies where at the end, China is the victor because they've gone in and financed some movie.
And it's always ridiculous.
It's always completely ridiculous.
It's way over the top.
And interestingly enough, and I should probably do more reporting on this, but the amount of money from the Chinese Communist Party that they've been putting in to finance Hollywood movies has actually been going down.
And it's actually something where I believe that the party has looked at that as a potential failed vector.
They were thinking they could change hearts and minds when it comes to China.
They were trying to act as though China, or you'll see these movies where it's set in the future and China and the CCP is just some global partner that's directly working in concert with the United States through the auspices of the UN.
And it's ridiculous.
The whole thing is always completely ridiculous.
If I were advising them, I would say actually there is a lot of upside to that, but they basically need to farm that out to...
Westerners.
They need the Hollywood equivalent of those British pilots who were training the Chinese that they were hiring.
They need to get Westerners to do it because- Oh yeah, the trainers, right.
... of that.
I thought whoever did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that had some cultural cachet in the United States.
If they kept doing stuff like that, maybe they could make some inroads.
But yeah, for the most their Hollywood type, you know, Bruckheimer blockbusters really don't have much appeal.
But I will just want to conclude with a joke and make because people talk about the pressures of China.
And that's why we have, you know, Hollywood kowtow to China.
But if it weren't for the leverage of the Chinese market, we would have a transsexual James Bond by now.
Absolutely, 100%.
They're probably keeping Idris Elba out of the role as well, unfortunately, because I think Idris Elba would be perfectly fine as James Bond.
I've always said, by the way, that there's a fan theory out there that I could subscribe to where you say, well, it's easy to explain away these issues, but obviously every James Bond actor is quite different.
Well, all you need to do is just establish that the name James Bond itself is an intelligence codename.
The same way Q is, the same way M is, and now you can have an entire litany of James Bonds that'll completely go through.
But as we're ending out this segment, going to break, I'll throw out there a piece of trivia for everyone that, believe it or not, I was in a movie that had the exact same martial arts kung fu choreographer as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yuen Woo-Ping.
So I got to meet him and I got to work with him in China.
Very interesting.
Stay tuned.
Coming right back to R&B.
Okay, we're back with our last segment here, Darren Beatty.
Now, Darren, we've been talking about how Russia has essentially de-sovereignized themselves a little bit in the course of this war with Ukraine.
They've lost their leverage with Europe.
You and I have discussed that on War Room.
We've been in debates on that, where we've said that Russia's leverage is currently lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
vis-a-vis Europe.
I think that one of the last pieces of this is should, you know, and I'm just going to keep, I'm going to say it and I'm going to say it again, that if this moves, right, if we move towards a potential and people have talked about all the time, a World War III type scenario that if China and the United States, if that war ever goes from cold to a World War III type scenario that if China and the United States, if that war ever goes from cold to hot, I would much rather, I would much rather have Russia
And I think that rapprochement from the original Cold War, that kind of mindset, yes, even though it comes from Henry Kissinger, would actually serve us well in terms of thinking about this should it ever go hot.
And I'm just going to leave that there.
Since we only have a couple of minutes left with you, I have to get into one of your site's most famous readers, probably the most famous reader of Revolver News, Mr. Elon Musk.
So he was, and people were very, very upset that he was found in text messages to be very, very naughty, committing a lot of thought crimes by going and reading Revolver News, reading articles about what would happen if Elon took over Twitter.
Well, it turns out that he did take over Twitter.
And so what you had laid out before, Was this idea that Twitter itself, even beyond any midterm election or potentially even presidential election, it it really was this center of soft power.
It was the center of influence because of its power for narrative creation across the West.
And then along comes Mr. Elon Musk.
And with his power, his station, he purchases it and says, I'm going to set the bird free.
He then starts firing summarily anyone who crosses him, anyone who questions him in public.
He's going through internal message boards and sacking anyone who disagrees with him.
Now, of course, all the tech companies are going through layoffs right now.
Darren, is Elon Musk, right?
And of course, we don't know what will happen a year from now, three years from now, four years from now.
But in your estimation, is he actually returning Twitter back to that potential box for freedom of speech?
That's a great question.
The short answer is it's too early to tell, but early signs have been encouraging.
The early signs are there's a lot of activity on Twitter.
There's a massive influx of people on Twitter.
He's firing a lot of people, including a lot of the people in the content moderation.
I believe all of them, as a matter of fact.
And so he's taking out the trash.
And a lot of us on Twitter have noticed, you know, a spike in engagement.
And we can falsely infer that that has to do with some enduring and underlying change of their content moderation policy.
That's not the case.
It's just they have fewer people on the content moderation beat.
And there's a massive influx of people so the combination of those two things creates the impression that you know the content moderation policy is fundamentally changed so I think.
Those things we should be optimistic about, but we need to wait and see what he does with certain key major personnel decisions that will materialize over the next couple months and see where the sort of more permanent content moderation policy actually equilibrates, because he's sort of A-B testing a bunch of different things.
Um, so that's why I would say we need, want to be optimistic, but cautiously optimistic.
Praise him when he moves in the right direction and, um, mock and criticize him when he moves in the wrong direction.
You know, I remember it actually just occurred to me that one of his, one of his text messages, and I believe this was the Jack Dorsey was they were asking, who would you put in charge of content moderation?
And his response, very interestingly was to say, Indeed.
No, it could end up being a blessing in disguise.
It turns out that Blake Masters finds himself as a free agent right now.
So that might even be a potential role for him.
Indeed.
No, it could end up being a blessing in disguise.
I don't know if that's ultimately going to happen, but I hope that Elon is not overly sensitive to having somebody who is adjacent to the right.
And I'm totally happy with anyone who's free speech.
But most people these days who are pro-free speech are, you know, unless there's some person who's secretly free speech who publicly seems to be a leftist, he's going to take some incoming for senior major personnel decisions.
He just has to be prepared for that and not be too squeamish about being associated with the right.
Well, and you see that with Elon, right?
You do actually see that because Elon and his, even though he's got great friends like Mr. Lex Friedman, who I know is just one of your all-time favorite podcasters, you wake up every morning and see what Lex is up to.
I hear that he's thinking about making it a condition of verification procedure that you have to watch at least five episodes of Lex.
At least five.
And with a test afterwards, yeah.
This has been, by the way, for the folks not listening, this is sort of a longstanding insight joke between me and Darren, because it seems as though the YouTube algorithm is just force-feeding Lex Friedman every time you go to try to watch something.
I think I tweeted the other day, I forget if I sent it to you, Darren, but I can't wait for the Lex Friedman interview with Sam Bankman-Free.
I'm surprised he hasn't even done one.
I bet he's done one.
I was actually surprised.
I was surprised that you would think that Because he gets the, you know, and again, this goes back to to Lex having this this penchant for bringing on these huge, controversial figures.
And sure, he'll he'll rake Kanye over the coals, but then he'll bring on the CEO of Pfizer and won't even ask him if the vaccine stops the spread and doesn't ask him any serious, hard questions.
He just sort of he does exactly what he says and what he's told to do and gets a pat on the head and goes on his way.
And I think Elon's been on a few times, so that's why I bring it up.
But, you know, when you're also looking at Elon, and you mentioned before about how the Chinese Communist Party doesn't have the charisma to sort of just capture the imaginations of the West.
Well, Elon Musk certainly does.
And I would argue that by and large he has.
And I think that there are a huge swath of people, family members I know, friends of mine from growing up even, who are not interested in politics, they're not interested in partisanship, but they do follow Elon.
And they follow sort of this Joe Rogan bit.
You know, Barstool is kind of involved in that a little bit.
And when you look at those folks, following Elon and Elon says, look, I'm getting rid of the trash because not because it is woke, but because it is getting in the way of efficiency and because this has nothing to do with running the business.
I mean, that sounds to me like a very traditional generation X sort of motif of we're just about business and the other stuff has to fall by the wayside.
Yes.
I mean, I think that that sort of technocratic approach can be helpful in terms of riding or circumnavigating, if not transcending certain political if not transcending certain political controversies.
But I think that has its limits, because ultimately, if you become a real threat to the system, the system is going to do everything it can to make you toxic.
And so it's not like this static situation where, for instance, you know, any sort of, you know, barstool type is, you know, simply, you know, has broader appeal by the nature of who they are.
And once they step outside of barstool talking points and barstool mindset, and actually challenge the regime, then they become something different and face different types of Look at me, bro.
I'm being subversive.
I've got a fantasy football team.
I'm betting on sports.
And I'm not one of those folks who's like, I'm going to attack someone for following sports.
But just understand that you are not changing anything.
You're not changing anything to do with the system by just playing along with these barstool games.
You're not.
Right, right.
And so I guess the point here is, yes, we notice that there are these groups sort of like intellectual dark web and so forth that seem to have more purchase in sort of elite sectors.
And there's something to that, like the sociology of it.
There was something sort of downscale about MAGA that a lot of the elites would scoff at.
And so branding in this respect makes a difference.
But I think people can overestimate that.
And ultimately, it's the substance that matters.
And if you're a substantive threat to the regime, no matter what kind of superficial trappings you have, you're going to face what I call the pain box.
And Elon's no exception.
And his story is not written yet.
It remains to be seen.
Just how much of a challenge and threat he is, and he's still in this kind of game of footsie, just seeing how he's going to position himself.
And from the regime side, they're probably thinking, oh, is this, you know, do we destroy him or do we try to co-opt?
And right now they're probably still in co-op mode, and that's why they're not playing hardball.
Couldn't agree more.
Darren, we are just about out of time.
I want to encourage everyone, go and follow revolver.news.
Follow Darren everywhere he is.
Listen to every word he says.
Write it down.
Read it before you go to bed.
Just make sure you're following Darren.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for being generous with our listeners and with your time.
