Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein critique US government overreach, arguing that a new China-Russia-Brazil-Saudi economic pact threatens the petrodollar while ignored NATO expansion risks direct war with Russia. They condemn liberals' political prosecution of Donald Trump over Stormy Daniels as a rule-of-law violation likely to backfire, predicting his arrest optics will galvanize supporters rather than defeat him. Ultimately, the hosts assert that American hubris and short-sighted legal tactics are accelerating global instability and undermining democratic institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Petro Dollar Origins00:10:53
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith and back with us.
Long-awaited return of the great Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, brother?
How are you?
I'm doing swell.
How about you, Davey Smith?
Doing very good.
Doing very good.
I'm headed out tomorrow.
I am headed down to do Tim Poole's show.
So I'm looking forward for that.
Looks like it might be a big news day, a fun day to do that show.
And then me and you got a bunch of stuff coming up.
Albany, Funnybone, Albany, I believe is the next weekend we got.
And then Zaney's in Chicago.
A lot of stuff coming up in the future.
ComicDaveSmith.com for all our live shows and ticket links and all that stuff.
What else you got, Rob?
Well, I got Albany with you.
I got Zaney's with you.
And then I got a date in Florida, in Orlando, a little meatcock convention type ordeal thing.
So that's about it at the moment.
Hit me up.
Summer porch tour.
Dates coming soon.
Rob's newsroom at gmail.com.
You only got 14 days to apply with your porch.
That's it.
You got to get those porch applications in quick.
This isn't like it used to be where any old porch would just land you a date on Rob's porch tour.
Nope, porches are exclusive.
Rob's got to come over.
He's got to kick the bottom of that porch a little bit.
You're like, I don't know, how much can this porch really do?
Okay, so we've had a little bit of a weird schedule over this last week.
And so there's been a lot of things going on in the news that me and you haven't talked about yet.
So I want to talk about them.
I think what we should start with is what is the biggest, most important story to me that does not exist if you watch the corporate press.
It is really unbelievable.
If you turn on CNN over the last few days, CNN's whose ratings I think have collapsed by something like 60% since Donald Trump left office, they're just badly bleeding.
But they are following Donald Trump with their cameras all day.
This is Donald Trump taking off from Mar-a-Lago.
This is him landing in New York.
This is him going to Trump Tower, waiting for him to be indicted.
Like this is the big story.
And certainly it is a very big deal.
However, you wouldn't even know this had happened.
Your average American probably has no idea.
But over the last couple weeks, there's been some major geopolitical developments in the world.
And this feels like the beginning of something very big.
This feels like the beginning of one of the most important developments in my life.
It started when President Xi from China went over to Russia, met with Vladimir Putin, worked out a deal with Vladimir Putin, an economic agreement.
This also seems to now include Brazil.
It looks like it also includes Pakistan.
It looks like Saudi Arabia is also siding with this new kind of conglomerate.
It seems to be, in my opinion, the beginning of the end of the unipolar moment.
Maybe not the end of the dollar as the global reserve currency, but certainly a big blow to it.
What are your thoughts on all this stuff, Rob?
How big of a deal do you think this is?
Man, you just dropped a nuclear bomb up in my lap.
So I find this to be the world's most interesting topic.
And what's nice about doing as much podcasting as you and I do is you get to touch upon everything and then at some point in time, be right.
So I know that at the beginning of the Ukraine war, I said, oh, this might be a nightmare for the dollar if China doesn't side with us.
And they didn't.
And it's very interesting what's going on because Saudi Arabia is also brokering ideas deals with Iran now.
Under the Chinese tutelage or whatever, right?
But the big story was just at the outset of the war, China, both China and India didn't get our back in terms of basically going, hey, we're going to war against Russia.
And so they continue to trade with them.
Now, as to whether or not this is actually the end of the dollar, well, it's fascinating because, you know, some of our biggest allies are moving away from us.
The dollar thing gets very complicated because I look at this and I panic and I go, well, it's the petrodollar and certainly this is the end.
We've been king shit.
We've been getting away with this forever.
We're spending more than we possibly can.
We've been sending our inflation to all these people.
They're all suckers for using our currency and they're no longer afraid of us.
They're going to move away.
And that's kind of where my logic is and what makes sense to me.
But from talks with Gene Epstein, from what I've seen from this guy, Mitch Talk, from Keith Weiner and others, it seems like, or also even like that guy, Jeff Snyder with the Euro dollar, that there's just so much usage of the dollar.
There's so much debt in the dollar.
It's still the benchmark that everything's priced against.
So I find this to be the most fascinating topic.
And I lean towards this seems like a big moment and that the world is moving away from the dollar.
But I'll openly say that this is a big topic and I don't have a full comprehension or opinion.
I think I tend to agree with you.
So I was talking to Gene Epstein about this a little bit the other day when we saw him at that Mises Caucus event in New York City.
By the way, great to see Gene.
I got to get him back on the show soon.
And he was saying that he was like, look, the question still comes down to what are people going to bet on?
The dollar or China?
And he goes, for as much as we've mismanaged everything, China has mismanaged it a lot more than we have.
And so this is kind of his thinking on it.
And I get that.
I just think that even if you don't buy into like the, this is going to collapse the petrodollar view, this is still a major blow to the PAX Americana, to America kind of controlling all of these countries.
And one of the things that's very interesting about it is that you have these countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, India and Pakistan, traditionally incredibly hostile rivals who are seemingly under China's leadership, kind of all throwing their chips in on this end of what seems to be like more of a bipolar world order now than a unipolar world order.
That's a very big deal.
What exactly that means is not clear.
And of course, to be clear, it's not as if America doesn't still have major powerful countries under their influence.
We have Germany and we have like these big economies, but Brazil is the biggest economy in South America.
And that's now, you know, they're now in with Russia and China.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest powerhouse in the Middle East.
They are now in, you know what I mean?
Like this is no small deal.
It's no small deal that Saudi Arabia, for I believe really the first time, is they just announced, I don't know if you saw this, Rob.
They just announced, it was either yesterday or the day before, that they're going to be cutting the supply of oil, which is like a direct middle finger to the U.S. and support for Russia.
Well, we got windmills.
What do we need their oil for?
Yeah.
We've been reinvesting, so we're cool.
But so the Biden administration is pressuring Saudi Arabia to sell more oil, to flood more oil into the market, because of course Putin is an exporter of energy.
This hurts him.
The higher the supply is, the lower, you know, the higher the supply is, the lower the price is going to be.
They went the opposite direction.
This is just, this is a major change in world events.
For people who don't know the kind of broad strokes history of the dollar dominance really started at the very end of World War II with the Bretton Woods Agreement.
And what happened after World War II was that basically America was essentially the only industrialized economy whose homeland hadn't been destroyed.
We paid a price in World War II.
We certainly lost some soldiers.
We spent a lot of money on it.
We had Pearl Harbor bombed at the very beginning, for us at least.
But it wasn't like what England went through or what Germany went through or what Eastern Europe or what Russia or what Japan or what China, what any of them went through.
Their actual countries were like just decimated.
And so at the end of World War II, the dollar, we entered the Bretton Woods agreement, which basically pegged the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce.
So the dollar was convertible to gold.
Although there was some fishiness with all of it.
But then the deal was that these other countries would peg their currency to the dollar, which was essentially, at least the idea, the way it was sold, was basically putting them on a gold standard because you're pegging your currency to dollars and the dollars are redeemable for gold.
They're as good as gold, as they used to say.
It wasn't until basically America then started cheating a lot and printing a lot more dollars than we actually had gold to back it up.
The French called our bluff in the early 70s after they had seen what we did in the 60s, fighting the war in Vietnam, all the crazy NASA budgets.
We created Medicare and Medicaid and the great society, all this welfare spending.
And they were like, you guys are printing a lot of money.
I think we'll take our gold.
And that's when Richard Nixon, in his words, quote, temporarily suspended the convertibility window, took us off the gold standard, essentially.
He said, we're not giving gold for money.
But at that point, it didn't crush the dollar reserve currency.
People kept buying the dollar.
Now, the petro dollar view is that really what happens there is that in the 70s, we go and we make this deal with Saudi Arabia.
They'll only sell dollars.
Excuse me.
They'll only sell oil in dollars.
Therefore, now we create rather than a gold standard, a petro standard.
It does, however much you buy into the petrodollar idea, it is true that that happened.
It is true that we insist that all of these countries sell oil in dollars.
And it is certainly true that this led to an error of us really meddling in the Middle East and oil-rich countries in general and trying to get them to keep selling their oil in dollars.
Elites Running the Show00:14:36
It certainly seems like these powerful people view that as a very important thing.
So that's where I'm a little skeptical of Gene and some other people who kind of like don't think of it as that big of a deal.
To me, it seems like, well, these guys seem to really think it's a very big deal.
And so it makes you wonder what the response to all of these countries moving away from that will be.
A lot of questions up in the air, but one way or the other, this is a huge story.
And it's really something to see it not getting covered at all in the traditional in the traditional corporate press outlets.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I think part of it is also because, you know, like for us to talk about this on our show, we've at least kind of been prepping our audience for this, or at least our audience, they've heard us talk about this stuff a lot.
If they're interested in this show, they're probably somewhat interested in this topic or at least willing to hear about it.
Whereas like, could you imagine CNN even trying to tell their audience about this?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, they'd be like, well, what are you talking about?
You've never mentioned this before ever.
We never even knew this was a thing.
What do you mean we're that?
Like, honestly, they'd be like, what do you mean we're the world reserve currency?
What is that?
What does that mean?
We're not on a gold standard.
I wasn't even aware we weren't on a gold standard.
So it's like, it's almost like, how do you deal with this when you've never told the story to begin with?
And also they don't know what to make of it, I think.
And also they'd like to, in a way, pretend it doesn't exist.
You mean there isn't endless demand for the US dollar?
And you mean we have to do evil things to make sure that we can continue to support our socialism here?
And the inflation would be worse if other countries weren't forced to use our currency.
Yeah, there's a lot to untangle.
Well, and that, and just, I'm sorry, I don't want to let you go ahead, but just the fact that essentially the way this deal has been set up is that other, you know, countries export their products and we export our dollar.
We export our digital pieces of paper.
And like, this is a big part of what props up the wealth of this country.
So I'm sorry, keep going.
Just to add another possibility with the petrodollar, I had a Gary Richide on my show.
Good historian.
Run your mouth, check it out.
Did a whole episode on the Petro Dollar.
It could be that at the time that Nixon took us off the gold standard, we essentially needed the Petro Dollar because if not, we would have our currency collapse.
Like in other words, at the time, you could redeem your dollar for gold.
So if we're getting rid of gold, then what are you going to redeem your dollars for?
I guess just U.S. taxes.
That's the only thing that would be, you know, guaranteed redeemability.
So we brokered the deal that oil would be priced in gold.
So now you got a new thing that you guaranteed to redeem it for.
And therefore you create some element of dollar demand because as long as I'm holding dollars, I know that I can redeem it for oil.
So that might have been something that was necessary.
I guess that's what, 50 years ago.
But since like dollar basically had that built in redeemability, it became kind of what a lot of financial debt and other contracts have been priced in.
So it could be like at this moment, 50 years later, the dollar has been so solidified in the financial like system as kind of the baseline product that you don't actually like.
In other words, let's say Saudi Arabia said tomorrow, hey, I'm only selling oil for whatever, the China, whatever the new bricks currency is.
They create a new gold currency.
Like that might not have the same immediate impact that it would have had.
In other words, like 50 years ago when we first made the change.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, in fact, I tend to think that that's right.
I think that there, you know, the fact that so many people have just gotten used to the dollar as being the go-to currency will have some type of effect in the market in the same sense that like it's, it's just become the Coca-Cola of currencies.
And that does, that type of like psychology does mean something.
And especially when all of these systems are set up around it, it's always like, it's like inertia.
Like you're just, it takes something to make you make that change, especially a pretty drastic change like this.
So again, we'll see where all of this is going.
But at the very least, you can say, at least according to the official, what the official kind of stated opinions were, a little over a year into this war in Ukraine, this is not how it was supposed to go, Rob.
This is not what we were told this was going to happen.
You know, if you remember Joe Biden, when he first announced the draconian sanctions on Russia and was bragging about how he's going to crush the Rupal and this is going to be, you know what I mean?
Like, oh, Russia's going to be brought to its knees now.
Now you look a year, just one year later and you're like, oh, wow.
You really, it does seem that, and in many ways, I think this describes America today.
It seems like the elites in America are completely removed from how much juice they've actually lost.
And they're still just like operating on this insane hubris of believing that like, well, we're the United States of America.
In many ways, it's a kind of interesting psychological phenomenon.
You know, in many ways, it's like they still think it's 1996.
Like we can do whatever the hell we want to do.
We're America.
And quite possibly that's because so many of them actually might still think it's 1996.
Like, does Joe Biden know it's 2023 and not 1996?
I'm not convinced.
You know, it is interesting that it's like a lot of these guys, you know, the Pelosis and Schumers and Bidens, they were kind of in their prime in the 90s.
And it's almost like they can't adjust to this new world where it's like, well, look, we decided Putin's not allowed to do this.
So he don't do that.
And then we'll have a conversation about whether or not China is allowed to move into Taiwan.
But we say no.
That means they can't.
And this has been a real move.
I think Vladimir Putin in this war in Ukraine, no matter what side of the war you're on, or no matter what policies you support, I think probably we can, we all should be able to agree that he has he has stood up to the American power structure in a kind of in a way that no one has since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That he's, it's like the, it's like we have galvanized the entire world order against this move.
And he is like, no, screw you.
I'm doing it.
And that in itself is kind of interesting.
Like this is, it's not like, I don't know what else you could even compare this to.
I mean, even Saddam Hussein wasn't really flaunting the American empire that much.
He was completely contained before the second war.
I mean, Saddam Hussein actually got the green light from the United States of America to invade Kuwait.
That was like a whole setup job.
Like he still thought he was being like friends with America.
was not looking to like taunt a war out of them.
There's, I really don't know what other examples you could think of.
Even Gaddafi, like he had basically completely, you know, gone along with the George W. Bush administration, started rounding up the Islamists in his country, abandoned his weapons programs.
You know, this is really the example of someone standing up to the United States of America in this way.
And look, I'm not saying it's been a cakewalk for Vladimir Putin.
It certainly hasn't, but it's at least we see now has led to a real, a real shakeup in the geopolitical realities that we live in.
Now, what exactly this means is I guess it's kind of hard to say, but it's something.
Well, maybe to put a little optimism on it, you know, our global elites haven't really taken a big L.
And I mean, they've taken L's from the stand, we've taken L's in terms of the amount of money that we've spent on war that got us nowhere.
And we've taken L's in terms of wealth expansion.
And by wealth expansion, well, it's not the right word.
I would say monetary expansion of just flooding the markets to kind of keep the people in power with wealth basically afloat.
But this loss and the creation of Bitcoin and the fact that, you know, there is an alternative currency that people potentially could move to, maybe we'll actually force, you know, our leaders to be a little bit more responsible, like the day and age where they could be, you know what I mean?
It's like world leaders will get away with whatever they can get away with.
It's one of the problems with our government is they'll spend as much money as they possibly can because that's what they're incentivized to do.
Whatever I can consume now, I better go ahead and consume it.
So we all know that that's doomed to fail.
And so maybe, you know, the fact that we're going to be forced to pull it back might actually be good.
Yeah.
This is the essence of the conundrum that we are in.
And it's a little bit of a paradox in some ways because it is true that like if the entire world were to move away from the dollar, let's just say hypothetically, it's hard to envision a scenario where that does not hurt Americans, you know?
And so you like, you don't root for that.
I'm an American.
I don't want to be hurt by this and I don't want other Americans to be hurt by this.
However, you also have the situation that you laid out, which is that the people who screw over Americans more than anyone else are not the Chinese.
They're not the Russians.
They're not, it's Washington, D.C.
And in order for this, like the constant growth of the power of Washington, D.C., they need to take a few black eyes.
It's the only way that's going to happen is that they have to have some losses.
For the American people, I think it kind of sucks because you kind of get screwed coming or going.
You know, it's like we get screwed by them expanding the power of the dollar and we get screwed by it collapsing.
But for this whole system to unwind, something is going to have to happen here.
And so I guess you kind of hope in a way that like, oh, it just becomes clear to the elites that they can't get away with a lot of this stuff anymore.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly what the immediate ramifications are going to be.
It does seem like, again, who knows exactly what's going on behind closed doors?
It does seem like there is no serious attempt by anyone in powerful positions to grapple with what this means and treat it like with some degree of seriousness and some degree of humility.
Like, oh, okay, the world is changing.
It's moving in this direction.
We are not gods.
We don't control.
We have a limited amount of ability to influence global affairs.
Where should we be using them?
There doesn't seem to be any of that.
And it seems like everybody's just dug into their position.
It seems to me like Even within the establishment, which I think is quite evil, it seems like the smart people have all lost and the dumb people are running the show.
I think that's kind of been the case from, look, like I talk about a lot, and this will kind of lead into our next topic, but in the 90s, when the first round of NATO expansion began, there were a lot of voices within the national security apparatus who warned against it.
They were clearly the wiser ones.
There were like the, there were these people like, okay, so like on the side of saying that like we should not expand NATO because it will provoke Russia.
There was at least three secretaries of defense, Robert Gates, Robert McNamar, Will Perry, George Kennan, the cold warrior, founder of the containment strategy.
He was on that side.
You know, like there were a lot of like wise people.
John Mearsheimer, the dean of the Realist School of Foreign Policy, he was the one in 2014 who said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path because we're going to convince them to be tough with Russia and Russia's going to end up squashing them.
And like, this is a disaster for Ukraine.
This is not what we should be doing for them.
And like, so there were all these really smart people who foresaw what was going to come and they lost to the Joe Bidens and the Dick Cheneys and these people who are like, nuh-uh, we're America.
We can do whatever we want, you know?
And it just seems like those types are running the show now.
Like that's, that's just it.
And so the other major news, now this is being covered in the corporate press, but it doesn't seem, it's just kind of being covered as like either, oh, this is a great thing or this is, see, this is what Putin got almost trying to.
So the story is, of course, that Finland has officially become the 31st member of NATO.
So Finland is now in NATO.
NATO Expansion Debate00:07:41
There is now one more country that borders Russia that is now in NATO.
And one of the things that's interesting about this is that the way a lot of these like idiot NATO supporters are framing this is they're saying like, well, see, look, actually Vladimir Putin's aggression is what led to expanding NATO in this case.
So look at that.
It's pretty funny that it's okay to make that connection in reverse.
You know what I'm saying?
It's okay to say like, oh, look, Finland was provoked into joining NATO by Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
But if, of course, if you go, you can't possibly say that the NATO expansion from the 90s all the way through Donald Trump's administration, like under every president from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, there were more and more countries added to NATO.
NATO expanded in every single one of those presidencies.
And you can't even say that any of that was like a response to Vladimir to Russia invading another country, right?
It's not until we get all the way to where we are now.
I mean, maybe the earliest you could say in 2008 when he had that war with Georgia or something like that.
But there's, you know, it's just interesting that you can, they can kind of put it this way that, oh, look, Vladimir Putin invading a country.
Of course, this, this led to another country joining NATO.
Even though, if we're being honest here, it's just the continuation of a trend that started way before Vladimir Putin invaded anybody.
But regardless of that, but you can accept that like in the Bucharest summit in 2008, announcing that Georgia and Ukraine are going to join NATO, that that maybe would have provoked Vladimir Putin to say fight a war in Georgia three months later.
That isn't like, you can't look at things that way.
So it's just being celebrated and nobody, again, like all of these these, there were all of these brilliant voices.
And by the way, there was when I'm talking about the people who oppose NATO expansion, there's a lot more than that.
I'm just making the point that it was even like within the national security apparatus.
It wasn't just like, oh, well, like Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan all said this.
They all did too.
But I'm just saying that like it was even like secretaries of defense and CIA directors who were saying this shit at the time too.
So now it's like, let's say that that's correct.
Just hypothetically, let's say that what I'm arguing, that NATO expansion was a major provocation towards Russia.
Okay.
Let's say that that's correct.
Now you could, I suppose, deny that.
But again, it's just like, it's not like you're the current CIA director, as I've talked about before, in that Nyet means Nyet memo.
Okay.
This was a memo that he sent to Condoleezza Rice.
And just to make this very clear, this was not a public statement that he made.
He was the ambassador to Russia at the time.
He wasn't coming out and saying, hey, look, everybody, here's the official story.
Like this is what we're, this is the propaganda we're telling everyone.
This was a private cable that he sent to the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the time.
Now, because Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning, got these cables and gave them to Julian Assange and he put them out there.
We all have it.
But just keep in mind, this is not what they were saying in front of the cameras.
This was what he was privately saying to the Secretary of State.
Like, just so we're on the same page, this is what's actually going on.
And what he said is that Ukrainian entry to NATO is the brightest red line for all of the Russian elite.
And he specifically says, not just Vladimir Putin.
He says from the, I believe the way he put it was from the knuckle draggers in the darkest recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics.
He said, I've yet to see one person who doesn't see Ukraine joining NATO as a direct confrontation to Russia.
Like this, this is what he was letting the Secretary of State know privately.
There is no conceivable argument that to the Russians, NATO expansion is not something that they don't want.
And this goes way back before Vladimir Putin.
Every Russian leader has made this claim throughout the entire expansion from the late 90s all the way up to this week.
So if you just accept that, even accept that as a possibility, that perhaps our own CIA director, when ambassador of Russia, was telling the truth to the Secretary of State, perhaps all these secretaries of defense and directors of the CIA and cold warriors like Kennan and Pat Buchanan and all these people, that all of them weren't completely wrong about this being a provocation.
Like just accept the possibility of that.
And now take a look at the fact that we're bringing Finland in and think maybe this is the dumbest thing we could possibly do.
Kind of like after 9-11, if you accept the fact that our military presence in the Arab world was actually provoking a lot of this terrorism, well, then maybe invading Iraq would be the dumbest thing we could do.
Like maybe this is, and I thought this was kind of interesting, Rob.
So this is from CNN.com because in moments like this, sometimes I do like to go right to the belly of the beast and just be like, how are they even spinning this?
Like, what's the narrative that they're putting forward here?
And this is something I found interesting.
This was a quote from up at CNN.com.
And they say, again, they're just celebrating it and just saying it's all Putin's fault, basically.
It's like, aha, this is how bad the war is going for you.
You just got another NATO country on your border, right?
They say Finland officially became the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, doubling the military's alliance, doubling the military alliance's border with Russia in a blow to President Vladimir Putin amid his invasion of Ukraine.
And I just thought there was something interesting about that language.
You're just like, okay, so at least you can admit it's a blow to him, right?
But like, why?
Why is that a blow?
Why is it like, I thought you were trying to spin this, like NATO expansion isn't a blow to Russia.
But if you're claiming that NATO expanding up to Russia's borders is a blow to him, then maybe it was a blow to him when we did it to begin with, right?
Maybe like absorbing all of these former Soviet countries into NATO, all of these former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO was always like seen as like a blow to him.
It almost seems to me like there's somewhat of an admission there that, oh, okay, yes, this isn't just purely like, well, our defensive alliance of these voluntary nations is moving toward you.
You should have nothing to worry about.
I mean, that's, that's the narrative from all of the people who supported NATO expansion over the last 30 years.
But now this round of NATO expansion is a blow to Vladimir Putin.
They're kind of saying the quiet part out loud that like, yes, of course, this was always a hostile military alliance as far as the Russians are concerned.
And perhaps there was a little pause there before NATO started expanding.
I think there is some evidence that like when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians were somewhat cautiously optimistic that like, okay, maybe NATO's not an enemy anymore.
Z-Biotics Morning Fix00:02:25
And then they started expanding toward them and were like, okay, no, we can't see things that way.
And really, I think the war in Serbia that split off Kosovo really screwed all of that up.
But regardless of all of that, if you accept even the possibility that perhaps NATO expansion was a big part of what brought us to this moment, then this looks a lot different.
You know what I mean?
Then you're like, oh my God, we're doing more of it.
Our response to the problem is more of what led us to this point.
That doesn't look so good, if that makes sense.
So there we go.
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Risks of NATO Growth00:10:23
I guess, again, the other thing about this, probably the other one thing that I should just mention real quick is that you go, there's also just like real, if nothing else, I'd hope that Americans could see how much this just increases the danger of this thing, you know, getting out of control.
You know, if you think back to when Zelensky bombed Poland a few months back, yeah, that's a story that just went away.
I mean, like, I know he says it was an accident.
I believe him.
It was an accident.
Is it possible that it wasn't an accident?
Sure.
It's fine to have that accident.
It's not fine to yell, we have the intelligence that says that was Russia.
Now you guys have to go fight them.
So you don't get to cry accident once that wasn't an accident.
And the fact that they immediately cried that makes leads one to at least entertain whether it was an accident or not.
Or maybe you were trying to kind of get that.
But regardless of that, yes, a few months ago, Zelensky bombed Poland.
He bombed a NATO country.
No one cares about that.
But if you remember, there were immediate calls to invoke Article 5.
Not just from random people, like from powerful people saying we need to invoke.
Now, just imagine, and this is not inconceivable, that it had been Russia.
Imagine it was an accident.
Russia had bombed Poland.
What would we have done in response to that?
Because we couldn't have done nothing.
More sanctions?
Yeah, I mean, well, that becomes the question, right?
When you already go, okay, we've put on the highest possible amount of sanctions we have and we're arming Ukraine to the highest possible amount we can, maybe short of the bomber plans so far, but like, okay.
So you got to do something more if he bombs Poland.
And so what's more?
The point I'm making is that we're running out of room of what's more beyond something where it's not a proxy war anymore.
It's a, it's a straight up America-Russia war.
And then all bets are off.
So now in absorbing another country right on that border into NATO just now ups the chances of this happening.
There's just one more NATO territory where this could happen.
And then we're all of a sudden in a like saving face competition where we have to escalate in some way.
And then he feels like he has to escalate in some way.
And then we, and this is the great danger here.
This is the great danger of how bad things can go.
Man, it's just like all of this is so insane.
Like just imagine, you know, there used to be, I don't hear this term, these terms used so much before, Rob, but you remember there used to be people would say there's like try to distinguish a war of choice and versus a war of necessity.
Like there are, there are, you know, wars that you have no choice but to fight.
They used to try to claim Afghanistan was the war of necessity.
Well, we have to fight this war because they attacked us, even though like we never had to have a regime change against the Taliban because al-Qaeda attacked us.
It's like, it's ridiculous.
It'd be like, you know, if there was a murderer in an apartment building somewhere and you went in and killed the murderer, and then you were like, also, I have to take this whole building from the landlord because he rented that building to this murderer.
It's like, now that doesn't actually follow at all.
But then people would point out, like even Barack Obama and all them was like, you know, the war in Iraq was a war of choice.
So we chose to fight this war.
We didn't have to fight this war.
And that's true.
And that's true for all of the wars in the last, you know, in our lives, in both of our lives.
But so right now we're engaged in a proxy war of choice on Russia's border.
We're just choosing to be engaged in this.
There's no reason we have to be.
We're just choosing to.
And you just see, and that incident in Poland really demonstrates as much as anything else how dangerous this thing can get.
We're in a tough spot.
I mean, not you and I, but our really the best case scenario is that Biden doesn't win reelection and the next guy throws him under the bus and goes, sorry, that last guy is dementia.
We fucked up and let's get along and de-escalates.
In the current situation, there's been a lot of Ukrainian death.
I mean, a lot, like an inexcusable amount.
And if we're not walking away victorious and it becomes very clear to the American people of, oh, we didn't actually give them enough resources to win.
We just encouraged them to be in an unwinnable fight.
I think people are going to be upset about that, especially because they were propagandized to care so much about Ukraine.
And so when they realize...
The question is, how quickly will those people move on?
Yeah, but if you also have that we have significant love.
Remember how much they talked about, well, it's a soft benefit that Trump made us look bad in the world's eyes.
That's another thing.
They've been hearing about for years, how bad Trump made us look.
Well, when we end up being about what put back 50 years in terms of, and I'm not an American first person, but I'm just talking about the American people and all of our strength and the respect that we get from other countries.
I mean, where's Biden leaving us?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that is a, that is a good point.
And I think that the more I, look, from my perspective, I think if you look at this soberly, it's really hard to argue that John Mearsheimer was not completely right about this whole thing.
And look, John Mearsheimer is not like, he doesn't share my politics.
He's not like a dove.
He's not some like libertarian like America shouldn't intervene in other parts of the world or something like that.
He's just a realist.
He's just like, we should intervene in the ways that are productive and in the ways that will like help.
And I think he called this completely right.
And he called it back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit when it was announced that Ukraine would be joining NATO.
And this is what his words were, that the U.S. is leading Ukraine down the primrose path.
And that this all of this stuff where we're like, oh, okay, you're going to join NATO.
You're going to be incorporated into the European Union.
Our military is going to be training your military.
We're going to build you up to be really strong.
We'll overthrow the Yanukovych government.
We'll put in the government we want.
We're going to put you in this position where you can now stand up to Russia.
And this was clearly what we were doing.
I mean, you can go look up the videos of like our biggest war hawk senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, going in there and talking to the Ukrainians about how Russia's the enemy and you guys are going to stand up to Russia and don't worry because we got your back and we'll do this for you.
And it was years and years and years of this kind of taunting of Russia before they finally like really snapped into a full invasion, which again does not justify a full invasion, but that's just objectively what happened.
And at this, you know, it's like, what did we really do to them?
It's like we convinced these guys that they could be really harsh to their much bigger neighbor who clearly feels threatened.
I think that's another thing that people don't kind of appreciate enough.
And I'm not claiming to be any like expert in the Russian mentality, but you can try to just have a little, as this is a Mearsheimer term that he uses a lot.
He says, have some strategic empathy, which I like a lot.
He's like, you know, for your own benefit, just empathize a little bit with their situation.
And you think Russia, Russia is a country that in the 20th century collapsed twice.
Like the entire country collapsed twice.
They were invaded by the Nazis.
You know, they've like they've they've been through a lot, much, much more than really any American, I think, can appreciate.
And so when they see a threat right on their border, it's not like we kind of exist in this world where we've never, we've never seriously known a time when we thought there could be a legitimate threat that America would collapse or that America would be invaded or any of these things.
Maybe the collapse thing is starting to ring a little bit more true these days, but it hasn't happened to us.
And that has been a reality for Russia.
And this is not that long ago.
Like I remember 1990, 1991 very well.
I remember the 1990s.
I mean, I was a kid, but like I remember them very well.
For Russians in that period of time, their country collapsed and then they went through a brutal period of that kind of like crony, you know, the kind of like crony capitalism of the 1990s.
They've gone through like very, very hard things.
And if you're like a father or a grandfather, you might remember some even more horrific things, you know?
It's like Russia.
And by the way, even the things I said about the country, you know, collapsing twice, being invaded by the Nazis, isn't even covering the rule of Lenin and Stalin.
Like Russians have lived through a lot.
And so if they see something that you're like, they're telling you, they're screaming at the top of their lungs for years and years and years that they have severe security concerns, and they have a reasonable case for why they have them.
Maybe it's something we'd be wise to listen to.
Just a thought.
Okay.
With the time we got left here, let's talk about what is the big distraction story, the excuse for why the media isn't talking about any of this shit, or at least not talking about it on anything other than the most surface level.
But Donald Trump looks like he's going to get arrested today.
People are lined up in New York City.
They got a few, they got some protesters there, some Trump supporters, but I think a lot more Trump haters.
But anyway, I don't know, Rob, what do you think of this whole circus?
Well, I still find it a little bit surprising that the only thing they have on him is this Stormy Daniels payment.
And I can't imagine that that will hold.
If it does, I don't think they even think it's going to hold.
Here's the problem.
You got these left liberals.
They hate Trump so much.
They just go whatever the fucking get him on.
Trump Arrest Speculation00:11:36
And they don't.
Whatever you get him on.
They don't actually care about the rule of law.
They don't care if he's a political prisoner.
You know what I mean?
They don't care.
They honestly go, hey, if we got to play dirty to get rid of this one guy, let's just do it, which is short-sighted.
You know, any power we give over to government can get backfired on you.
So no one should be praising or looking for an unfair system as long as it's currently grabbing your enemy.
It's a failed strategy.
I would venture to guess that this doesn't stick.
I guess the best that they hope that it can do is, I'm just guessing, is that they can make it enough of a charade that they're hoping that the Republicans don't want to run Trump because he's caught up in some blowjob scandal that is constantly, it just changes the narrative to a conversation about Donald Trump, his finances, the fact that he's willing to be shady in his business dealings and pay off hookers.
So I guess in that way, it courts a little bit of attention to the downside of Trump and maybe dents his ability to run in some capacity.
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All right, let's jump back into the show so, okay.
So, Donald Trump, just this is uh, just so you guys know.
This is literally happening right as we're recording um, this episode.
Uh, Donald Trump has surrendered to authorities.
Uh, he's expected to be arraigned in about a half hour from when we're uh recording this um, and the charges are going to be made public later today.
They're saying now that there's going to be which even that.
Can I just say even this, if I was Trump it.
There's so much shady bullshit here where, like, are they gonna, is he gonna hand themselves over?
And they don't let him out that easy.
And then he actually is sitting in jail.
I mean, look at the way they did him dirty with the documents in his house, whatever happened to that whole story of nuclear materials, and now they're not making clear what the charges are like.
Just wait till he ends up with some dumb gag order or something else.
Well, that's the other thing to talk about.
There's been speculation of this, that there's going to be a gag order.
Uh again, this hasn't happened yet.
So we'll see which should be illegal.
I just want to say 100 illegal are absolutely a clear violation of the first amendment.
These gag orders like, look, you are presumed innocent, or so they say.
If you're an innocent person, you have your freedom of speech.
You should be allowed to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
And this no, it's absolutely um conceptually, if you're a court and you're dolling out justice, part of don't you know, part of that process is preventing other people from committing crimes.
So wouldn't you want to publicize the behavior of the court in order to prevent other crimes.
Yes, the only reason that you would want to keep secret what you're doing, and even if there's a criminal, you would want him to go say hey, this was so unfair to me because it would prevent other people from doing crimes.
Unless you're embarrassed about what you're doing and you know that you're basically doing things that are nefarious and evil, and you so you don't want the party that you committed it against to be able to discuss it that you know that you don't have real charges and so you give people plea deals on the basis that they don't actually say that that you were evil towards them.
Think about how many court cases on an annual basis are some guy taking some stupid plea deal and agreeing to a gag order just so he doesn't discuss what the government did to him?
Yeah yeah, no.
And there's, of course in uh, the Roger Stone case.
This was pretty uh famous that he had was under a gag order.
Even after he had already been convicted, they were still keeping him under the gag order, which to me just seemed like insane.
Like they just won't let the guy tell his story.
And it seems pretty clearly to be politically motivated for why they would do this.
By the way, Trump did say that, or Trump didn't say, but it was put out that he's planning on giving a speech tonight in Mar-a-Lago.
So he's assuming he's going home tonight.
That'll be interesting if that ends up not happening.
I also wonder how much of this is going to be about creating certain optics.
I've been wondering about this for days now.
They're saying now he's going to be fingerprinted.
Is he going to be handcuffed?
Will there be any pictures of him being handcuffed?
I think for whatever reason, I think that's a really big deal.
It would also be interesting if they do end up like sandbagging him and keeping him in jail for even just a few days.
If you end up getting like these pictures, like mug shots, like Trump just looking awful.
You know what I mean?
Like there's something.
I don't think that's going to help them because for the team that plays for, yeah, look, he's a criminal, they already feel that way.
They already hate the guy.
So fine, I guess you get to give a victory to all these people you lied to about COVID for for a while.
You give them one little thing that they get to feel good about in the state is, hey, I got to watch this guy.
I didn't like sitting in jail for three days.
But you're not going to convert any Republicans to go and, oh, look, I didn't realize that that man was an evil criminal.
What you're going to get them on is actually juiced up of, and this is what Trump prays off of.
If they're getting me, it's actually an indictment of you.
That's how he got people to show up on January 6th.
It does not help the liberals in any capacity.
You're going to end up with the stronger Trump who actually motivates people to go.
Well, I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying.
I do wonder if there's something to like kind of breaking your alpha leader in front of you and seeing him like defeated and weak that can be demoralizing.
So the question would be like, how much they can make him look like that?
How much you keep him out of a tanner for four days and explain to him?
Yeah, just really look like that.
Without the hair.
Oh my God.
Without, yeah, yeah.
He's walking out like a bag over his face, doesn't want to be seen.
You know, I'm just saying, like, I don't know.
These are just ideas in my head.
I don't know if any of this is.
No makeup and no hooker.
Blowjob Trump didn't get his cheap burger game of golf in.
That might be one ugly looking man.
It might be a freak.
Like we'd be like, holy shit.
He ends up looking like John Fetterman.
Trump's just like an old Jew when he doesn't have all this stuff.
So I don't know.
I don't know what exactly is going to happen here, but it'll be very interesting to see if he does get out and is back in Mar-a-Lago, what he talks about.
If he gets a gag order and maybe even just defies it, that would be really something.
So a lot's going on literally right now as we're recording this.
I'm going to just real quickly see if I can get more updates.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, good thing no one will see this for three days.
So you guys can report back to us.
Yeah.
Look, this is just going to be fun for you guys to see how we were thinking about it right as it was happening.
Yes.
Comes out of prison, never looked better.
He gets prison jacked.
He looks great, as it turns out.
Okay.
Yeah.
He waved to the crowd as he arrived at the courthouse, it looks like.
And yeah, wasn't anything there.
Let me see if we can find, maybe we can find some live video of it that we could play real quick before we wrap up here.
Black power.
It's got to be a weird moment for Trump, right?
He said he was quoted that he described it as a surreal experience.
But it's got to be weird, man.
This guy who's been such a powerful guy, both before he ever got into government and then in government, probably not that powerful in government, but what a weird ride.
I saw a brief segment watching CNN's coverage where basically they were doing exposure of how many different lawyers he has.
And I thought it was kind of funny because they were trying to sell, like, look how evil he is that he needs a team of 24 lawyers.
But I bet every billionaire has got that many lawyers.
Yeah, I'd be surprised if you did a breakdown of most billionaires.
I'm sure Elon Musk's company has a bunch of lawyers and he's got, you know what I mean?
It's just kind of probably the cost of doing business when you've acquired that much wealth.
So I guess maybe that's their angle is just trying to go, look, this guy's always been a criminal and they finally caught him on this little thing.
But that's the political prisoner part is that I'm sure if you were to hold a microscope to the Clinton, you think the Clintons haven't puddled worse than an accounting trick to pay off a hooker?
Yeah, really.
No, Bill Clinton never even paid off his hookers.
Right.
It was just covered by Epstein and they were underage.
Do you have to pay him?
You don't have to pay him off when you're with Epstein in Thailand.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's a, look, again, this is going to be, and I think you kind of touched at this on this before, but there will be the people who hate Donald Trump will be happy about this.
Oh, here, let's see what we got here.
I guess this is him arriving at the courthouse.
I guess also the optics on a coordinated arrest that you have to work out the details with Secret Service shows up, takes some pictures and leaves is also just silly.
Well, look, the theme has been from the very beginning of Donald Trump being president, right?
And even through his campaign in 2016, was all the Trump haters being so excited because he's about to get his.
And they always, every time, get let down.
You know, it seems like there's a good chance that's going to happen here again.
But it also, you know, it seems like the calculation, which again, look, like I said, kind of the theme I was talking about with the war in Ukraine and the shifting in the geopolitical scene and expansion of NATO and all of this.
It does seem like you almost want to give more credit to the establishment than they deserve and be like, well, there's got to be some type of plan here, you know?
But maybe not.
Maybe not.
Maybe it's just, this is just as reckless and not thought through as some of these other policies.
But you go, I mean, it's just, this just looks so nakedly political to anyone who's not completely already on board with hating Donald Trump.
To everyone else, they just see this as like, oh, this is like so obviously has nothing to do with anything other than politics.
You're taking the guy who's the clear frontrunner to be the challenger to Joe Biden.
I think he's up by like 20 or 30 points in the polls right now in the Republican primaries.
You're taking the guy who's the clear frontrunner to be the challenger to Joe Biden and arresting him off this nonsense.
What is the backlash to that going to be?
Well, we're going to find out a lot of stuff later on today and then in the next few days.
So I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about on our next podcast.
Anyway, thank you guys all very much for listening.
That's it for this show.
Come check out me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein in Albany, New York at the Funnybone, in Chicago at Zaney's, and a whole bunch more stuff coming up.
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