It was 2003 . . . the show *Friends* was still popular . . . poorly received *Star Wars* movies were in theaters . . . Beyoncé was at the top of the charts . . . and a Republican president, elected on the promises of a more humble foreign policy, was preparing for war in the Middle East. In other words, not much has really changed—and Washington seems to have forgotten everything and learned nothing. This week, Tyler Hamilton and Mimi (Partisan Girl) join me to discuss the coming Iran debacle. Taking a step back from the news, we look in depth at the nature of American Empire. Can an empire sustain itself when it promises “freedom and liberty for all” but must resort to invasions, regime changes, and hard power? What does “national interest” even mean for a borderless finance oligarchy? And is “realism” possible when Washington’s inseparable ally, Israel, seeks the destruction or subjugation of stable powers in the region? And finally, does Zionism itself have a future in an increasingly post-White-Protestant America? This and more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Monday, January 6th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group.
It was 2003.
The show Friends was still popular.
Poorly received Star Wars movies were in theaters.
Beyonce was at the top of the charts.
And a Republican president, elected on the promises of a more humble foreign policy, was preparing for war in the Middle East.
In other words, not much has really changed, and Washington seems to have forgotten everything and learned nothing.
This week, Tyler Hamilton and Mimi Partisan Girl join me to discuss the coming Iran debacle.
Taking a step back from the news, we look in-depth at the nature of American empire.
Can an empire sustain itself when it promises freedom and liberty for all, but must resort to invasions, regime changes, and hard power?
What does national interest even mean for a borderless finance oligarchy?
And is realism possible when Washington's inseparable ally, Israel, seeks the destruction or subjugation of stable powers in the region?
Does Zionism itself have a future in an increasingly post-white Protestant America?
This and more we discuss.
I guess the news cycle is no longer boring.
We have been launched into something that is potentially catastrophic.
Something that certainly reminds me of an era I would prefer to forget, and that is 2003 and the run-up to the Iraq War, although I think the potential danger for all of this is much worse.
And I also think this is a time for choosing, as the conservatives like to say.
This is where the rubber hits the road, and we can disagree about some other things, but...
To be honest, you have to get on the record on this issue.
I'm, of course, discussing what was apparently an imminent war, at the very least an imminent diplomatic disaster in Iran.
And I have two very important people on board to talk about this with me.
So first off, let me welcome Mimi, Partisan Girl, from Australia.
How are you?
I hope you're staying safe.
Australia is apparently aflame.
That's at least what we're learning in the American press.
But how are you?
Thanks so much.
Yeah, we're having fires.
I'm on the West Coast, so not the East Coast, so I'm safe where I am, very far away.
It's on the other side of the country.
But unfortunately, yes, we've been having unprecedented fires, which usually we're very good at controlling.
So it's confusing as to why that's happened.
Yes, I actually read a statistic that almost half a billion animals and birds and other wildlife have perished.
I mean, it's truly sad.
But I guess we're going to talk about another conflagration.
Also, joining me from Canada is Tyler Kent.
How are you, Tyler?
I'm doing pretty well.
I'm not smoking the signature pipe like I usually do on your streams.
Yeah, you were kind of a young fogey the last time.
Now you look like a guy at a metal show, so it's good that you have your personalities.
I have to keep people on their toes, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, the guy at the concert who's not dancing but standing with his arms crossed.
That used to be me, actually, you know, the hood on just standing.
I've seen a number of those.
All right, let's jump into it.
Jokes aside, I wanted to focus on something that just happened because I feel like it expresses the impossible nature of the American empire just in one thing.
Basically, the Iraqi parliament has recently voted to expel U.S. forces from Iraq.
Understandably, they condemned the recent assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the legendary general of Iran, a man who's been fighting ISIS, who's clearly beloved in the country.
And they've they also seem to feel duped by mafia like tactics of Donald Trump of basically they felt like they were the intermediary in bringing the general to an airport where he was drone strikes.
And so they totally understandably condemn the murder.
They want the US troops out and it but it brings up this impossibility of the American empire and sense that America, at least in terms of its rhetoric, and I think this is actually part of its deep.
And so what you have is this, you know, heady kind of...
Christian-y empire of we just love all people and want to help them.
And then the rubber hits the road and you've had Republican officials basically say, well, we might actually not respect this vote.
Screw you, we're staying, basically.
And on some level, understandably, in the sense that they've got an empire to run with military bases and they want their way.
But I think it gets at that just impossibility of the whole American project.
But Mimi, let's just go to you first.
What do you think is going to happen here?
I mean, in the sense of, if there is going to be a campaign in Iran...
Presumably, the US would want to use Iraq as a staging ground.
And Iraq, which is, again, now much more Shia-controlled, much more sympathetic towards Iran, is pushing them out.
I mean, we might have a major battle just right on this issue, right here.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think the staging ground...
Right now would be Iraq.
They've already started to attack the Iranian-backed militias that defeated ISIS, the PMF, the People's Mobilization Forces, the Hasht.
So those people were actually fighting alongside the United States and fighting alongside the Iraqi army.
But if the US thought that it had...
I think Someone like Pompeo would have thought that the U.S. has more support inside Iraq, that he could rely on certain assets, like secular Shiites that he's been pushing to attack the Iranian embassy, and he's on Twitter saying, "Oh, Iraqis, this is your chance to get rid of Iranian influence," as if that's a priority for Iraq.
These rallies on the streets are larger than we've ever seen before and it really shows how ludicrous that thought was.
It was completely delusional and Iran does have the influence in Iraq.
If Iran so wanted, they could have gotten rid of the US in Iraq probably in 2004.
I think it shows Iran's kind of own Machiavellian strategy here coming, you know, undone.
Because I think what Iran wanted to see was kind of hold the US hostage at the negotiating table with a gun held up against their head saying, well, if you don't come to the negotiating table and you don't do this and this and this, then you're going to get kicked out of Iraq.
And obviously the US Did the Iran deal and then they pulled out and now they're killing Iranian leaders.
So the deal is off and the gun, the bullet has to be fired.
And it has been, that's what's happened now.
Well, I guess it is the ultimate irony, and it shows a kind of naivete of American strategy that Shias began to dominate Iraqi parliament, and that was certainly not ever promised by the neoconservatives in 2003, and I'm not sure this was something you could have foreseen.
I remember they did promise it.
I think they did promise it.
As far as I remember, they said, "Oh, you know, Saddam is a Sunni and the majority of the country are Shiites and it's time for the Shiites to have their own, you know, be able to be in power of their own country and blah blah blah blah blah blah." And as a matter of fact, in my view, if they didn't want Saddam, then they wanted the Shiites.
Because the plan was that they get the Shiites in power in Iran, and then they get Al-Qaeda in power or the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Syria, and then they have the two fighting each other.
That was the plan.
But that didn't happen.
Syria still is run under a secular government.
They have no problem dealing with Iraq or Iran.
In fighting that they could create, and now there's an alliance that stretches what they call the Shiite Crescent all the way to the Israeli fake borders, and that's the fear.
Yeah, well, there's even, I'll let Tyler jump in.
I mean, I can remember this in, I think it was around 2005.
The 2007 era, where Joe Biden was actually promoting a kind of ethnostate strategy, so to speak, in Iraq, of breaking up, having a Kurdistan, a Shia-stan, a Sunni-stan.
Obviously, I mean, Saddam himself was a Sunni Muslim, but I mean, the Ba 'ath Party has Christian roots, it's secular, fascist nationalism, and it's ostensible ideology.
He was able to unite something, and that has absolutely come undone.
Yeah, I don't think Saddam was a religious man.
He's a completely secular man.
Exactly.
Yes.
I've never seen him at a mosque.
It's cool.
It's a very strong man.
Yeah, it's a strong man.
I can see if you were actually on George Orwell's 1984, Big Brother hadn't stopped.
So there's something to it.
I think Bashar al-Assad tried to draw one, but it's just a failure.
He's just too nerdy a guy to be the strong man character.
Well, now I feel inadequate with my lack of mustache.
Yes, you should.
Me too.
There you go.
But anyway, I guess to bring it back to my first question, I guess this is maybe also kind of a question of the nature of the American Empire.
It's like...
You know, Rome loved the fact that they had an empire.
It was about gaining territory.
They would do it openly.
They would talk about it publicly.
They didn't say they were spreading democracy.
They might have said they were spreading civilization or the Roman way or something like that.
But it was out in the open.
And certainly in the 19th century, Britain, Germany, France, etc.
would be open about it.
The United States empire is this empire that dare not speak its name, and it's also something that can never really be voted on by the public in elections.
You could get a Ron Paul candidate or a Tulsi Gabbard.
candidate who will talk about it but ultimately no major foreign policy decision is ever really going to be put up for a vote and it is also a different type of empire in the sense that it is based on the to a very large degree the 1944 bred and woods accords with the establishment of the dollar as the
It's to a large degree based on NATO, which is a kind of anti-Soviet force, which is now having a second life as a global force for good or something like that.
So it's a different type of empire, but it is an empire nevertheless.
And all of this, you know, Trump's complaints about trade deficits and all this kind of stuff, you know, he was just describing what you get to do as an empire.
You get to have strong money and you get to buy cheap stuff from abroad in these countries.
And your dollar is worth more just by its very political, structural standards.
I think the conservatives want to complain about globalization.
It's destroying American manufacturing.
Globalization is a political military project.
The military hegemony must come first.
So globalization is an offspring of an American world, a unipolar world.
It doesn't go the other way around.
Globalization isn't challenging our primacy.
Globalization is an expression of it.
But at some point, it doesn't...
It's not going to work.
You can't ultimately be a liberal hegemon promoting democracy and then not expect that to bite back.
I mean, in my view, they've never really promoted democracy.
It's all been a sham.
When they do say they want democracy, that means they mean they want a state that can be, the leader of that state can be changed whenever they deem it.
That's what they mean by democracy.
A leadership that's easily changed by them.
Look at what they did in South America.
When Ali Endi was elected, or even when Chavez was elected, it no longer became democratic because they didn't like the guy.
And when it comes to Saudi Arabia, it's the monarchy, and yet it's fine.
It doesn't have to be democratic.
So I think it's all sham, but they do support the idea of democracy in that it's weak.
A country that is weak, Can remain strong by having a dictatorship that is following the country's own interests.
But once you make it a democracy and the leadership can be easily changed, then outside influences can easily change the leadership.
But in defense of the Roman Empire, when Syria became Roman...
I'm not criticizing it, believe me.
Just to point out the biggest difference...
When Syria became Roman, you know, when Rome took over its territory, everybody became Roman.
So Syria became Roman.
And such that, like, Syrians actually became leaders of Rome.
I think there was two Roman emperors that were Syrian.
So we don't have that in the U.S.'s kind of empire, or even if we call it neocolonialism.
It's not even a colony per se.
It's just slavery.
Just pure slavery.
And you have no say in anything that's happening in your own country or in your own area.
When it comes to Zionism, when it comes to Israel, it's not only that, but it becomes like they're just ethnically cleansing you and taking over your land.
Pure, you know, colony-making, but taking out the...
Original inhabitants.
And that's what Israel intends to do to Syria as well, not just to Palestine.
That is their ultimate plan, everything from the Nile to the Euphrates.
The first prime minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion, said that.
So this is worse than any kind of empire we've seen in the past.
Yeah, I mean, the Romans had hegemony over Jerusalem, and they would...
At this point, Jerusalem is the center...
We can talk about bread and woods and finance and globalization, etc., but there is one thing that can absolutely not be challenged, and that is Israeli dominance and Israel's identity as a Jewish state.
And anything, you know, even if Iran isn't a...
Global nuclear power or Iraq is a bit of a tin pot dictatorship.
That kind of unified force is a threat to Israel.
It is a power in its region and it must be destroyed.
And as we've talked about on a number of podcasts that we've done, Mimi, is that I think these Zionist American powers would prefer chaos.
You know, if we were a kind of Bismarckian empire, we would look at Syrian, you know, dictatorship or whatever you want to call it and be like, ah, yeah, of course, balance of power.
Let's have good relations with them.
We'll trade with them.
We want stability here.
We don't want a bunch of maniacs, you know, jihadists going out of control.
But the American Zionist empire would much prefer chaos to any kind of established balance of power.
We're not dealing in 19th century European, you know, norms.
This is something radically different.
And I think it ultimately does derive from the unipolarity of the American empire in the sense that there is one way.
And you're either on America's side or you're a terrible person, you're chaos, we're evil.
There's no recognition of a competing power as an equal.
It is pure Judeo- Judeo-Christian liberalism, you know, just distilled.
And, yeah, that's where we are.
Sorry, I haven't been talking too much, so...
No, you're absolutely right.
I think Tyler made me get a word.
Yeah, I was just going to jump in on the American Empire.
As I was saying, so the American...
I was just going to jump in on the American Empire, the financial empire.
And the liberal empire, in a sense, I've seen the American empire described as an empire that produces pleasure in the act of rape, and that there's a moral schizophrenia involved in the American empire.
So it comes to, for example, that we're, which goes into the rhetoric of American imperial adventures, is that we're making them free, we're opening them up to democracy, we're opening up to the market.
But what's going on is this move where the American Empire has material interests that benefit a few of the state actors.
And so there is this sense where they act on incentives, for example, the Middle East to secure their value in the petrodollar to defend Israel's expansion.
And they run into, of course, opposition.
And so they have to act like any imperial power would.
They can't pitch out on that.
They're already involved.
That's been the American Empire strategy.
Going back many years now, is having bases all over the world.
And they've had this strategy where they need to maintain a presence and a dominance in all these regions.
And there's no moral language of pushback against this.
So you often have, say, in the left in America, you have the anti-imperial rhetoric.
But the rhetoric that they use is largely so within a liberal ontology.
So you look at some responses from the left going on to what's been going on in Iran right now.
They've been saying things like, oh, okay, well, hey, everyone, look at us in California.
We accept all these people.
We have diversity.
We have freedom.
They're free from American white supremacist, patriarchal, whatever.
They're operating under the same framework of liberal freedom and actualization.
So the sense that American unipolar world, whether you come from the left or right, you're still operating the same liberal ontology.
And so this empire, which we call our own, our own Anglo empire, is not our own.
It's an empire of liberal homogenization that benefits a few state actors.
And this is part of the problem that comes with describing America as a unipolar empire.
It's because it's controlled by various international finance actors.
And so it's not really our empire or an empire with a base from America, but it's international and it's homogenizing the world.
And that's what I think is the real danger is we lack the moral language to criticize it.
And you see this, for example, with also, I mentioned the leftist responses, but also the rightist responses.
So we have, for example, we need to be isolationists.
We need to be America first.
Well, if you try to pull out and you try to push this America first isolationist stance, what you end up with is this kind of naive, also liberal idea that you could have an order of sovereign nation states along the world, which won't...
fight or they won't have their own interests, they'll just get along and trade because they all recognize each other as sovereignty.
And we know how the whole idea of the liberal idea of the nation state came about.
It was from the so-called wars of religion, which were not really wars of religion because those princes changed their religion week to week depending on which would get the most support.
But there was a breakdown of empire and this carving up into liberal sovereign nation-states.
So we're at the point where you can't simply withdraw from all these ventures the American Empire has created and say, "Okay, we're withdrawn, we have these happy homelands now and that we've sold it." Well, what America?
America is a financial empire, it is always a financial empire, it is birthed as a financial I think that we lack the language to critique it properly, and I think when it comes to Deterritorializing the American Empire, re-territorializing it towards something that is a spiritual rebirth, which we could say is our own, is the true task for the dissonant right going forward.
That was extremely well put.
Let me, I'll let Mimi jump in.
Let me just kind of bring it down to Earth just a little bit.
I think we've all seen some of these Tucker Carlson clips.
I don't have cable, but I kind of watch the best of on Twitter.
And he was basically saying things that I think we all agree with on some basic level.
What are we doing in Iran?
Why are we worrying about this?
Let's put America's interests first.
Let's put America first.
And that is a nice slogan that I think maybe in a perfect world we would all agree with.
But it actually is totally detached from reality.
America has never operated as a kind of nation state that secures its borders and deals diplomatically with other countries.
I mean, at the very best, you could say 1924 to 1944, perhaps, when it was a nation state.
I mean, I would grant you that.
But all that means is that throughout its entire history, it was basically a major frontier and economic plan.
platform, resource extraction platform, and then basically had hard imperial interests, and then certainly post-1945, or 1944 really with Bretton Woods, financial imperial interests.
And so it's who's America first?
I mean, I think John Bolton actually has a better claim on America first than any paleoconservative or Tucker Carlson.
He has a claim, I hate to say this, but destroying Iran in order to create a Globo Homo shopping mall is actually...
Closer to being the reality for America's interest.
I hate to say that.
I would love if I lived in Bismarck's Germany or something, but I don't.
That actually is in America's interest.
And all of the Trumpian rhetoric of borders, ending globalization, getting out of NATO, all this stuff that he said in 2015 and 2016 would have been a kind of extreme radical withdrawal from existing commitments and also from structures that benefit I mean, they're obviously not benefiting people in West Virginia, but they are benefiting America as a global power.
And so the whole Trumpian thing, you know, the rhetoric was great, it appealed to something in us, something good, but it ultimately was bullshit.
There is no way that the deep state...
In a real sense, a military-industrial complex, financial elites, etc., would ever have let him do that, A. And B, doing that would have actually created at least an immediate catastrophe.
If you want American interest, if you want to put America first, this is what it looks like.
And we have to recognize that tragedy if we're going to move forward and not just kind of live in this nostalgia of like, oh, let's return to that time that never existed when we were a nation state.
I mean, in the 1950s, America was all around the world fighting for global dominion with the Soviet Union.
I mean, don't tell me that we were in some different, like we were a Westphalian nation 60 years ago.
That's just nonsense.
If I were to understand correctly, what you guys are saying is that these wars are in America's interest and it's acting as an empire and it's the, you know, it's the typical, like, a nation does what's in its interests.
Yeah.
I had, and, you know, leftists say that all the time.
They say, oh, well, this is the empire just doing whatever's in interest, even if it kills a bunch of people and we stand against the concept.
But...
There's two things that I would like to push back on.
It just seems sometimes that the US is doing something that isn't in its interests.
And it confuses me as to why we do these things because, you know, in real politics, you would expect it to do something completely different.
And then I've only come to understand it afterwards in the frame of, oh, it's doing something in Israel's interest.
It's not doing it in its own interest.
That's the only way it makes sense.
Let's look at a scenario where Israel didn't exist.
The US would be allied with Syria.
There would be no trade problems.
You would have US companies inside the country.
Perhaps it would look something like Dubai.
I think Dubai is like the archetypal most Americanized, sorry, when I say Dubai, I mean United Arab Emirates.
Because not only does it have all of the American companies, you know, digging up its oil and all of the fast food places, all of the fashion places, but also it's completely and totally multicultural.
I think that 70% of the population in the United Arab Emirates are not local.
They're from Europe and the US and Asia.
You know, it's 100% diverse and it's like the archetype.
But on the other hand, you know, what I seem to notice when it comes to maybe Israel, whatever the US empire touches turns to shit.
They want Iraq to go back.
They want Syria to be in the Stone Age.
They want to destroy.
It's been 16 years.
Iraq's economy could have been like UAE, but it's not.
Because they want it to be weak.
And why?
Because of a 5,000-year-old problem Israel had with Babylon and with Aramea.
You know, the Assyrians in particular, and the Sumerians.
So, yeah, it's also Israel's intent to have no opposition.
But basically, the U.S. is saying, Israel is the Jewish ISIS, and it's asking all its neighbors, its immediate neighbors, to live with that.
And it's something that we can't live with.
But something like UAE is now...
More neutral towards it because it's not directly affecting it.
You know what I mean?
So if Israel didn't exist, the US Empire would be acting completely differently.
But what is it getting just from this tiny country?
Is it getting anything?
And I don't see how much it's getting.
I mean, Israel is trading.
With China and Russia, like, no tomorrow.
It's ignoring US sanctions.
It's creating its own, like, industry.
It doesn't have US companies.
In fact, Israeli companies are inside the United States.
Like, you know, Starbucks, for example.
So, where it could benefit itself, it's kind of defecating itself.
And that is where America First It becomes anti-Semitic.
It becomes an anti-Semitic term.
And that's what we hear in the mainstream media.
That America First is an anti-Semitic term that was used before World War II.
I mean, during World War II to prevent the United States from entering that war.
And it was.
I mean, I do think that Israel is right to fear that term.
In the sense that that was a movement coming out of the 1920s when the American economy was gangbusters, when after the First World War, very much unlike the Second World War later on, the First World War was viewed as a disaster.
And there were actually armament industry people brought in front of Congress and berated and fined and all these kinds of things.
And there was a kind of splendid isolationism of America becoming rich.
They were in, you know, the top public intellectuals were eugenicists.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating here.
We were engaged in very way ahead of the game, not only engaged in eugenics and engaged in natural conservation.
And there was a kind of like alternative reality that we could have...
Yes!
become a kind of big I agree why I would love it a big Switzerland that is isolationist has tons of natural resources rich the Buffalo like show me a suffering homeless person in the empire you know you have Destitute people in the empire.
So what do people gain?
Lindbergh was an expression of that alternative reality.
He was not a Nazi at all, but I think he grasped where Europe was going.
He wanted to stay away from it.
He resonated.
With some of it, but not all of it.
I think he wanted America to take a different path.
And there was that option.
But we're beyond that.
We are so beyond that we can't go back.
And, you know, again, we could only go back after a catastrophe, basically.
But it's that other America that I think is extremely attractive and admirable.
But the other thing that I was picking up on what you were saying that I thought was very interesting.
Was this kind of archaeo-futurist quality to the American order.
So, on the one hand, you have some rich shithead living in Dubai wearing three Rolex watches and hiring prostitutes every night and living in a penthouse on the 200th floor and just sucking off money and having investments around the world, all that kind of stuff.
But then there's the other aspect to it, which is the Islamic fundamentalism that is attacking any kind of real opposition to it.
And I would say there's this kind of dual level to America, which isn't quite as stark, but is still archaeo-futurist.
There's America as the ultimate kind of modernizing...
Post-modernizing empire, forcing gay rights on the world, putting a McDonald's in the Vatican City and all this kind of stuff that is ultimately undergirded by a Christian population that votes Republican, believes in this stuff, basically confuses Jesus Christ with the United States.
And has a messianic view of the world, views America itself as the ultimate end, the ultimate end of history.
There's a religious-like quality to it.
And I don't think you can actually really have one without the other.
You can't just build a liberal utopian empire.
There has to be a kind of...
Again, fundamentally Christian animus to it that is promoting it and undergirding it and willing to die for it.
So we kind of live in an archaeofuturist presence.
Yeah, the evangelicals in the U.S. and their reaction to what's happening with the U.S. and Iran right now is the glee because they are so excited at the prospect of the apocalypse.
Because it's an apocalyptic, messianic cult.
That is very similar in his thinking to ISIS and Israeli Jewish Zionism.
So it's the Christian version of that.
And they think that by pushing forward to the apocalypse, it's going to bring back the Messiah and the world.
And so in that case, that's going to prove their beliefs.
That's why they're so excited about it.
And if you look at, you know, the Iran war in that frame.
It has a completely different meaning to America First.
Like, these people actually want the apocalypse, and they're running the unipolar world.
Well, I mean, they're an interesting case, folks.
I mean, bringing up the Christian evangelicals, it kind of goes to show how strong the influence of Zionism is, in the sense that, you know, when you're talking about the Zionists, you have the Christian evangelicals.
They don't get what they want when it comes to all the social issues, but they get everything that they want when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
So it goes to show how far...
The Zionist lobby has at stake.
And I mean, evangelicalism and the whole notion of the rapture and stuff you see in things like Left Behind is a very uniquely American phenomenon for Christianity.
That's not something you see in theology until the last 40 or 50 years in America, right?
So it's an expression, I think, of American Christianity as the way that's bound up with liberalism and the Protestant work ethic and the like.
Yeah, so the interesting thing about the...evangelicals in America is that they get everything they want in terms of when it comes to bringing about the Armageddon through Zionist wars in the Middle East, but they don't get anything when it comes to social issues like abortion or against gay marriage and the like.
So it goes to show that the Zionists...
Influences in American foreign policy is a lot stronger than the Christian evangelical focus.
But another interesting thing to consider with that is that notion, say, of rapture, books like Left Behind.
This is a phenomenon in Christianity that's actually unique to America.
This doesn't appear in theology up until recent times in American history.
And that's tied to the Protestant work ethic, to the way in which the American liberal idea of separation between church and state created this sphere.
We have the private, individual belief.
And then you have the public sphere, and you're supposed to translate your religious beliefs into the neutral sphere in a secular language, and there's this tension between the individualist nature of American faith.
So you have an example like, this might bother a few Protestants, but the idea of, you know, you're saved by the individual faith, as opposed to what we call in apocalyptic theology the faith of Christ, which is something you see in post-world theology, which we can go into it another time.
But there's plenty of other actors and interests in the Middle East.
For example, America defending the value of the petrodollar, its alliance with Saudi Arabia.
And there's certainly a point here where the Trump administration's geopolitical strategy here is deeply flawed.
And the reason for that is there's a continued escalation in a hit-for-hit fashion that could push into higher escalating measures that they have direct far-reaching consequences in the region.
So one of the things that Iran excels in...
Is asymmetrical warfare.
So it's not like a state-versus-state warfare, but rather alliance is a proxy, say, in Lebanon, Syria, and Afghanistan, and Yemen that could target Saudi Arabia as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
If the fight is escalated, it could target Israel.
But what you would have...
For example, Iran's capability for missile and cyber attacks on Gulf oil facilities, and that would greatly hurt the petrodollar and raise the price of oil, which would deeply hurt America's economic recovery.
Trump's strategy here is actually deeply deeply flawed.
Right.
But it's he almost has to on another level.
Like it We've been building up to the Iran War for at least 20 years.
This was one of the targets from the new American century.
This has been talked about.
I actually thought that Iran would be next in the 2006 era.
and so on it's just keeps building up to this and it is going to Iran is so strong compared to anything the u.s has ever faced ever before right well that's one of the things it's not going to be like Iraq or Afghanistan and i mean America failed in those but Iran is a way in a way stronger even it's even stronger than Syria and they couldn't get to sit they couldn't Deal with Syria.
They're going to deal with Iran.
That's why I thought this couldn't happen.
But it seems to be crazily enough happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But again, there's been so much pressure on this.
Over and over and over again, at some point it will.
I don't know how many stupid conservative books have been published on the Ayatollah and the apocalypse.
The Ayatollah, it's not even a real state.
It's just a terrorist organization bent on destroying humanity.
I'm not even exaggerating in terms of...
The kind of rhetoric you hear.
And it also kind of filters its way down to Fox News, where you'll hear something like that from Sean Hannity.
Iran's not even a state, it's just a bunch of religious nuts with their finger on the button and the bomb waiting to push it, and they're wildly anti-Semitic.
Hey, I see the same thing about Israel.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
There's so much pressure behind it.
It almost had to happen.
Even just the very existence of John Bolton in the administration, and I'm obviously aware that he was kicked out.
He kind of pushed Trump too far or whatever.
I mean, this is someone who was bragging before he was appointed as a national security director that, you know, within a year, we're going to be in Tehran.
And there's just this endless pressure pushing at it.
At some point, something happens.
Well, I heard, did you see the head of Mossad saying that in an interview, he's dead now, but while he was alive, it was about three years ago, that the Israelis don't want to fight around on their own.
They want the U.S. to do it for them.
Right.
Because they're afraid of retaliation.
And they think that if the US absorbs the blow, then they're going to have less of a retaliation towards them.
And you're right, like that pressure was always there by Israel.
You've got to bomb Iran, you've got to bomb Iran.
And I think that's part of the reason why they hated Obama, because he came up with the nuclear deal and they wanted to go, they wanted just to throw the US empire.
On to Iran, no matter the consequences.
In the meantime, apparently they've been shopping for a new host to Parasite, which is China.
I can't imagine that working.
Because China lacks the Christian core that this appeals to.
I mean, I guess one of the themes that I've been discussing here is that there needs to be a...
A archaic futurist or kind of religious element to these empires.
And the Chinese, like, Israel comes to China and they say, we want you to wage wars on our behalf and, you know, support Zionism and the apocalypse.
I mean, these Chinese are just going to be like, let me show you more.
It's just not going to work.
They thought about that.
That's why they've been adopting, if you've noticed, the very liberal Jewish families, a lot of them have been adopting Jewish.
Sorry, Chinese girls.
And raising them as Jews.
This is not just yellow fever.
This is strategy.
That's my suspicion.
I mean, sometimes I get forced to watching a lot of these, like...
Romantic comedies or Hollywood comedies, and sometimes they're on Netflix.
And as atrocious as they are, they have some clues in them.
Sometimes these liberal families are like either teaching their child Chinese or, you know, doing something in relation to China.
And one of them actually said China is the future.
And I wonder, you know, where is it coming from?
I mean, if you look at that Serenity, which was, I think, a Jewish producer created that movie, which is a great movie.
Just saying.
But in it, the US and China became one empire.
The Americans had Chinese culture.
And this is this big Chinese element to it.
Even if it's as crazy, it might not even work.
You're right.
To me, I don't see it working, but they obviously think that it can.
At the end of World War I, they almost went towards Russia.
Because, you know, they were having the kibbutz and Israel was supposed to be a communist haven.
The Soviet Union voted for the creation of Israel.
You had, like, Trotsky, you know, pushing all of this stuff and getting rid of the Orthodox Church.
But at the end of the day, they went with the US instead of Russia, probably because of Stalin and because of the core of Orthodoxy, the Orthodox Church inside.
Russia is always going to have some alliance with the Orthodox Church in Palestine and Syria.
So that is why they maybe thought it was easier to make the US into an evangelical thing.
Yeah, I mean, just to put a bow on this, and I hate to say this as a, I guess, nominal, confirmed Episcopalian and as a white person, but Zionism is only popular among white Protestants and white Christians larger.
We are the only group that will sustain this as an ideology and will see Israel's fate as tied up with ours.
We are literally the only people on Earth like this.
If we were able to gauge world opinion, 7 billion, I would say that the vast majority of people have no opinion on this subject or tuned out or starving or something.
And the people who are cognizant of this crisis are absolutely opposed to it and see it as terrible.
And literally the only people who support this are American Christians.
And American Christians...
I mean, it's just we have to face this fact.
Clearly, American nationalism and American Christianity are no obstacle to Zionism.
Clearly, they are actually undergirding Zionism.
And we just simply have to face that and stop talking about, like, real Americans don't support this when clearly they do.
Well, I think that...
I heard Israelis complain that they can't get the same level of support from the Chinese as they do the Americans.
Obviously, it's going to be very hard for them to change over.
But I just did want to mention that at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was an option for Israel.
And at that time, they were selling themselves as like a socialist thing, a socialist cause, not a religious cause.
And they had the kibbutz, and you had people like Senator Sanders and Chomsky.
In Israel, trying to build a socialist haven, and the Soviet Union voted for the existence of Israel.
But I think maybe they went with the US because of the Orthodox Christian Church inside Russia, the fact that the Trotskyists weren't able to wipe them out completely, and Stalin came in and kind of brought them back in a little bit.
And the Orthodox Christians are always going to be tied to the Syrian Orthodox Church.
And the Greek Orthodox Church and the existence of that in Palestine.
So that would be a major hurdle.
And so evangelical Christianity in the United States is much more easier to control in terms of that.
But yeah, some people still have this China...
Israelis still think they can make China work in case they completely deplete the United States, I suppose.
But I don't think it's going to work.
No.
I guess we should talk a little bit about what we see going forward.
I don't want to sound like a doomsayer, but I think that there's a self-fulfilling prophecy element to all this, and I don't see how Trump could back down.
There are two times in April of 2017 and 2018 where Trump launched missile strikes.
At Syria, and people like me were up in arms, but it ultimately didn't launch a full-on war and campaign, etc.
So we do have some precedence of these.
I think the level of rhetoric is so intense, and the pressure is so intense, and the unification.
I mean, Trump was, in engaging in this action, Trump was able to unify a nation.
Sure, there are major class and ideological divisions in Iran, but you didn't see them this morning when I looked on Twitter and you had millions of people in Tehran marching on behalf of a man who's a legend and a hero.
He has united a nation against the United States, and I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Real quick, in terms of the Iran deal, I hate to sound like a...
You know, centrist liberal partisan, but to be frank, John Kerry and Obama seem like statesmen in comparison with the Republicans.
I mean, the Iran nuclear deal, as whatever problems there was, it seemed to be working, and there was simply no evidence that people can point to that Iran actually was developing a nuclear weapon, and it was.
Maybe not the best way, but one way to reach detente and regularize relations.
Trump raged against the Iran deal.
I mean, we all overlooked it in 2016.
We were like, oh, it's America first.
This is great.
But he was raging against that constantly.
And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it was like, this is the worst deal in history.
We've got to get out of it.
They're building a nuclear bomb.
And then they junk the deal unilaterally.
And then what do you know?
Iran re-engages in the development of nuclear weapons.
Which is exactly what they wanted, which is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy for war.
And so I hate to say this, I don't want to sound like a doomsayer, but I don't see how any of this can be de-escalated.
I think that there is going to be a coming catastrophe.
I'm willing to say it out loud.
I certainly hope I'm proven wrong.
They forced Iran's hands.
From Iran's side, they can't de-escalate.
Maybe from the U.S. side, they can.
Yeah.
And maybe Trump will.
But it's just, we're well past the Rubicon.
You could maybe walk back across the Rubicon, but I'm not sure it can happen.
And there has to be some response by Iran.
There has to be.
And then Trump is saying, if you respond, I'm going to wipe out your historical sites.
I'm going to destroy...
I mean, I know Trump tweets a lot of bullshit, but you cannot...
You're President of the United States.
You cannot back down from these things.
So, I mean, again, call me a doomsayer or gloom and doom, whatever you want to say.
I basically think that there is no way out of this, you know, trajectory towards some kind of catastrophe.
I mean, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world.
There is going to be some kind of major conflagration in the next three to six months.
Iran also just threatened that if Trump makes good on his threat to attack Iran's homeland, they would then therefore end Haifa.
That's the most recent escalation.
And the escalation is getting out of hand.
But I do think now Iran has no choice but to get nuclear weapons.
It's the only way that they can get any kind of respect, the same way that North Korea hasn't been invaded because they have nuclear weapons.
And what you were saying about the propaganda getting way into the...
so far that you can't walk back from it.
I mean, now we're being told that Iran was responsible for 9 /11.
It's insane!
It's just 2003 all over again, yeah.
And Benghazi and all of the stuff.
It's like 2003.
As crazy as it is to think that Saddam had anything to do with 9-11 because he was a Ba 'athist and so al-Qaeda hated him.
Think about how crazy it is to suggest an Iranian general that fought alongside the U.S. against the Taliban in 2002, right after September 11, and was like...
Al-Qaeda has threatened to decimate the Shiites.
For him to be somehow connected to the Saudi Arabian hijackers of 9 /11 is ludicrous.
And I love the fact that Pence said there were 12 hijackers, not 19. It's like he can't even keep up with the propaganda.
He just can't.
Just whatever.
They were responsible.
Just take it.
Yeah, I can imagine the tit-for-tat escalating into something catastrophic.
I mean, for example, as I mentioned earlier, you have The potential for attacks on the Gulf oil facilities and cyber attacks.
But as I was saying, Iran also has this revolutionary ideology that appeals to anti-imperial forces and Shiaid proxy forces alike.
So you could have these militias in Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen that could target Saudi Arabia.
You have forces in Lebanon that could target Israel, and that would raise the conflict caused with the U.S., and Israel would respond in turn.
And so this could turn into a major catastrophe, bigger than...
Iraq or Afghanistan and what this goes to show and I think the important takeaway message is there's an ideological veneer that goes to American power and it's legitimacy in the sense that we think about it kind of in the way Zizek describes ideology when he talks about the ideology of enjoyment he said you can enjoy these things without the consequences so you could drink diet coke so you have coke without the caffeine or you could To relieve your constipation, you could take a chocolate laxative, but chocolate's what gives you the problem in the first place.
In the same way, then, that the drones and the striking and assassinations are like Trump and them and his defenders, and you see people like Paul Joseph Watson saying things like this.
It's just a strike.
It's just a tweet.
We're having war without war.
This is deterrent.
But that veneer is breaking through.
There is no way that kind of...
Ideological legitimacy of having war without work and sustain itself.
It will turn catastrophic.
The exact consequences you can't outline, but I think we've outlined what they would look like quite adequately.
I'm interested to see what Russia will do in all of this.
Because the Zionist lobbying in Russia is also strong.
And yet, if we're living in a...
A world where real politics is what governs what countries do, that it would be 100% in Russia's interest to back and run a war with the United States.
They're next on the docket.
I mean, Russia is a nuclear power, and that is the reason why the United States is ultimately only fighting these proxy battles with Russia, you know, fighting in Ukraine, fighting over Pussy Riot and Edward Snowden or whatever, but not really seriously talking about invading Russia.
It's because they have nuclear weapons.
Of course, the lesson...
To all states is get a nuke.
He won't be fucked with by the United States.
I mean, it's just simply obvious.
People who tried to play the game have gotten screwed.
Libya being an excellent example.
Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program in 2004, or thereabouts, with the first or second Iraq war.
And then, you know, within a decade, they take him out because he gave up that power.
Russia is in a different...
But I think Russia would just ideologically have to, or not ideologically exactly, but just, I don't know, emotionally have to take Iran's side, just recognizing that the rhetoric against Russia is almost as extreme as that as against Iran.
You know, I mean, the American centrist, you know, conservatives and liberals in Washington view Russia as inherently illegitimate, as evil, and so on.
The exact same language.
It's not as heated, but it's the exact same language.
And if Russia buys, you know, the Kremlin buys, you know, $100,000 in Facebook ads or whatever, it's like, oh, they're threatening our democracy or whatever.
I mean, it's just such nonsense.
but it demonstrates...
Yeah, it just demonstrates the degree to which they're on the docket.
I mean, at some point, they have to fight.
I'm not sure they could sit this out.
I think Putin could pull a magnificent diplomatic coup by, much like he did in the Obama administration with the red line and so on, by bringing people to the table and saying, all right, we're not going to go to war, I'm going to negotiate this.
Yeah, he can play good cop.
That's the best case scenario.
That's not going to happen.
I'll tell you why.
The reason why is because Iran's relationship with Russia is only existent because of Iran's relationship with Syria.
Really.
At the end of the day, it's Syria that's friends with Russia and Iran that's friends with Syria.
Iran recently sued Russia.
Because they didn't come at the international court, because they didn't deliver S-300 missiles.
So, that is the key, and that's what's brought them together, because they're both gas-based nations as well.
Russia has the influence in Syria to force them to get rid of their own deterrent, the chemical weapons, in 2014.
Which was a good cop /bad cop game because for Russia, Syria without chemical weapons is a less independent Syria and one making more reliant on Russia.
At the same time, that was really not something that Russia came up with.
It's something that Kerry came up with.
They didn't really want to go to war with a weapon of mass destruction in Syria.
they wanted to go to war with a Syria that couldn't defend itself, which is exactly what happened after they got rid of chemical weapons.
That's when we saw, um, the invasion of Syria, not before, like as soon as the last chemical weapon was destroyed, that's when the first U S soldiers occupied the Northeast of I don't see that happening in Iran's case, because Iran is far more detached from Russian influence, and in fact, that's why the US was calling Switzerland to try to get them to de-escalate, but they're not going to, they're too independent.
So I don't see that happening.
They're going for nukes.
All right.
Sorry.
Sorry to blow up the last optimistic question.
Well, it has to end.
We've all experienced the unipolar world.
We've experienced American hegemony.
And all good things have to come to an end.
This hasn't been exactly a great thing.
There has to be a point where the kind of heady bullshit gets crushed and meets with reality.
And we're going to see that perhaps in Persia.
But it just has to come to a culmination.
I mean, this period of history cannot last forever.
It's all based on...
I mean, I don't want to sound like a Ron Paul libertarian, but just...
What are we at?
$20 trillion in national debt, and then if you add up entitlements and existing derivative contracts, there's $200 trillion floating in the ether.
I mean, you know, this will end at some point.
And it just, it must, it always has.
I don't think there's anything new under the sun.
I don't think human nature has changed or the nature of political domination has changed.
But things have accelerated.
I think the American empire will go down much more quickly than, say, the kind of, you know...
250-year slow decline of the Roman Empire, the age of anxiety, and rise of Christianity, and so on.
I think something's going to happen really quick.
It might actually be a 25-year period.
It might even be a two-and-a-half-year period.
I mean, it's going to happen.
And this is how it happens throughout history.
So it's just, you know, we're watching it unfold.
We feel powerless.
We feel emotional about it.
I've been more emotional than I have on Twitter, than I have been in months, years.
I think because we feel so perilous, we're just watching this global train wreck occur.
But we can't stop it, and I don't think we really want to stop it.
This is just the end of a cycle, and it will give us opportunities that last for something new.
Well, I'm also sick of the status quo as it is, and I don't, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, you know, the best thing, the smartest thing Iran can do is not retaliate.
What does that mean?
That means, like, the smartest thing that Iran can do is be decimated without any reaction.
That's what they're saying.
Because if you're going to knock out this general, they're going to keep attacking you.
Oh, don't retaliate.
That's what Israel wants.
No, that's not what Israel wants.
The U.S., when they say we don't want a war, no, they're right.
They really don't.
When Pompeo says that, it's true.
They don't want a war.
They want the people that are in their way to die quietly.
And I'm not ready for that.
I'm not ready for that.
To me, that is a cause that's too much.
That's coming from someone, obviously, who Iran helped a lot.
Iran helped us in Syria.
They fought Al-Qaeda.
They are opposed to Israel.
So it's too much to ask of Iran not to retaliate.
It's such a stupid, stupid thing.
Because at the end of the day, there's still going to be people dying.
There's still going to be a war.
It's just going to be...
Maybe you're going to say, you know, it's like saying, oh, don't retaliate now.
Maybe the bad guy will let you live another day if you don't try to defend yourself now.
That's what they're asking.
Yeah.
That's where they were three or four years ago, which is totally reasonable, but we're well past that at this point.
It's over.
Yeah.
You know, what interests me is what the character of the something new is and the kind of work we need to do to actually think the something new and work towards it.
Because I know, for example, the solutions that you see in a dissident right don't work.
Like you have, for example, American nationalists confused as to why Yoram Hazoni would invite John Bolton to the...
We know that we have war with war.
You can't avoid war just because you're sitting in a gamer room picking off targets and thinking there's not going to be consequences.
A lot in the distant right say, okay, well, I support Russia and China because we want to overthrow this evil global home of American empire, which I understand entirely.
But the problem is, the decline of American empire is not a minuscule thing.
That's going to have consequences for American citizens, and it's not something I think is taken entirely seriously.
And so when we're trying to work on productive solutions, we have to take into account that we don't have our own home, we don't have our own empire.
Absolutely.
No, that's the kind of thing.
I actually said this on a conversation I had a few weeks ago, which is that as much as I want to rage against global homo or, you know, tranny story hour or gay rights in Tehran, I mean, and of course I don't support any of that.
I recognize that the American order is an order.
I mean, the fact is, we're having a Skype conversation right now on multi-continents.
We can travel to places around the world, and the exchange rates work.
We can order things.
I mean, you have to at least give the king his due.
You have to accept that they're not just a bunch of idiots or SJWs or whatever on top.
I mean, they have created a world system that we live in and we are ultimately, at least us right now, relatively safe and content.
So it is what it is.
And, you know, as much as, you know, I think each of us here have a certain anti-American edge to us, the end of this thing is going to be catastrophic.
And we might not survive it.
And I'm just saying that.
I mean, you know, don't be careful what you wish for in terms of the end of America.
And, you know, and just again, just all of these other, you know, Eurasianism, or, you know, China's great, or whatever, all of this stuff is...
You know, castles in the clouds.
I mean, this is not real.
And, you know, all of this stuff is going to come crumbling down with the American Empire.
Or a kind of, you know, Ron Paul, liberal world order, all these little nation states trade with each other and get along or whatever.
Or the UN's dream.
All of that stuff are in their own way castles in the cloud without a military to enforce it.
And so, again, the end of America is not going to be a good thing.
It might be necessary, you know, at some level, but I don't think we should actually wish for it because we might not survive it and our children are going to have a harder time.
It's interesting to see what you're saying and comparing it to, like, a Trump-supporting hoo-ha, we're going to get him, like, person, you know.
Only if they understood the consequences.
I wonder if they would react in that way towards this war.
Your Walmart is going to be empty.
That is basically where the rubber hits the road for your average American Yahoo supporting blowing up Iran.
If you keep pushing this, at some point, your...
Lifestyle is going to be decimated and destroyed, and it might have to happen at some point, but you should not treat this as just some game you're playing.
This will have real consequences, and I'm not joking.
You might have to sell the trailer park.
Yeah.
The trailer park won't even exist anymore.
But yeah, economically...
Gasoline is going to be...
It'll become Syria, actually, because that's what's happened now in Syria, because the U.S. is occupying Syria's gas fields.
There's cars and cars and cars, taxis can't function, waiting at gas stations trying to get fuel, you know, the shopping centers are, the economy is weaker.
I mean, Syria has got jushé, it's got the principle of self-sufficiency, so that's kind of protected it.
But you don't have that in the United States.
So it's not going to be easy.
Actually, you do have the survivalists.
They might be okay.
But it's not going to be...
They're not going to be okay when the new regime sends a tank into their survivalist camp and they're waving a constitution and a shotgun at them.
I mean, no, they're not going to be okay.
Maybe not.
They say that Iran is nothing compared to the U.S. Empire.
They can't reach the U.S. mainland.
While that may be true, economically, they can go all the way.
Especially because it's based on the petrol bill.
So that's something that the American people are not being told.
They're just not being told or even asked if they care or if they want this.
Yeah.
All right.
Should we put a bookmark in it?
This has been a great discussion.
I'm glad we actually didn't talk about a lot of the details because everyone's talking about the details on Twitter and so on.
People can get that elsewhere.
I think it's good to take not just a step back, but many steps back and really look at what is happening.
The bigger picture.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not good.
This is the biggest picture.
Yes.
This is the discussion with the biggest pictures.
Light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the American empire might be an oncoming train.
So think realistically and start getting ready for it.
My grandfather would always tell me that.
He would say the light at the end of the tunnel is probably an oncoming train.
He always says that sometimes when you think you've met a Greek god, he's actually just a goddamn Greek.
That was another...
Famous dick and horse saying.
Anyway, Mimi, go hug a koala bear because I've heard there's a koala flaming genocide occurring in Australia.
It's horrible.
Millions are dying.
Those poor things.
I can't bear it.
That's why I don't eat mammals.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I decided a few years ago, after much consideration of how much I hate veganism, that at the end of the day, I find I can't morally eat mammals anymore because they're too close.
It just feels so much like cannibalism.
Speaking as a cannibal myself, I don't eat mammals either.
Really?
Just humans.
No, that was weird.
Humans and elves.
Cut that one out.
Can you see that getting exploited?
Yeah.
I probably didn't say it's hot stuff.
Hot stuff?
Maybe that's where we're going to be at the end of the American Empire.
Who knows?
All right.
Well, everyone.
Depressing discussion, but yeah, go and appreciate the things in the here and now that are good.
And live in the present, just for a little bit, because there are some catastrophes on the horizon, but live in the present.