All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 30, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
29:41
The Cheerleader Who Got In The Game

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn this typically epic Thursday-night group podcast, the gang discusses the Nord Stream attack, the polarized and de-politicized society, and much, much more. Preview audio includes Spencer’s discussion of Nord Stream, the assassination of Darya Dugina, and polarization vs. depoliticization.  

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Gets us, I guess, to Nord Stream in the sense that the first one came up around 2011, and then Nord Stream 2 was going to come online imminently, but obviously will never go online.
And these were multi-billion dollar projects, and it is actually a huge feat of engineering.
So they were privately built.
They were done with Gazprom.
So I guess whether you consider that to be a private organization or not, I guess it's up to you.
It was the former oil and gas monopoly that was privatized, quote unquote.
And so there was a tremendous amount of European and Russian money that went into it.
North Stream 2 never went online.
North Stream 2 was basically cancelled immediately after the invasion.
And you have these issues that, you know, I saw a Tucker Carlson piece that I would like to talk more about.
They play these, you know, clips from Joe Biden saying, you know, if Putin invades Ukraine, you know, North Stream 2 is out, we're going to do something, you know, one way or the other, it will not go online.
And yeah, I think some things like that were kind of threatening, almost said, like a mob boss, you know, one way or another, you know, it won't happen.
I get that, but the fact is it didn't happen, and it didn't take much of any cross-Atlantic diplomatic pressure for that to be cut off almost immediately.
The Germans decided that, and they made a fateful decision to do that.
I actually saw an interview that Deutsche Welle is actually a really good kind of CNN alternative, if you will, and most of their, or I don't know, half of their stuff is in English.
But they were interviewing a German green politician and some German engineers.
And yeah, there does not seem to be this alt-left that is promoting reopening the Nord Stream.
And I would imagine there is a sort of alt-right that wants to work with Russia.
But I think a lot of those people are direct Russian assets.
To be frank.
But so this happened.
It happened right in the middle.
There was a bombing of both Nord Stream pipelines, as you know, I'm sure.
And it actually news of it was occurring just as we went live on Tuesday.
So I didn't quite know what to make of it.
And I had to look into it.
And the first.
The thing you would say, of course, is what I saw a lot on Twitter early on, which is that this must have been a CIA operation.
And because NATO, if not Washington, and maybe even some forces within Europe as well, I saw someone throwing out the idea that France might have done it because they have submarine capabilities.
A very good submarine capabilities.
Who knows?
Maybe that's true.
Maybe that's not.
It's just a, you know, evidence-free speculation just simply operating on cui bono.
But you can understand the cui bono rationale for this benefit to the United States or NATO or the West in the sense that it cuts off Russia permanently from or, well, If not permanently, about as close as permanent as you can get.
That, you know, methane plume coming out from the water, that's going to be bad optics, first off, forever generating again.
It was, yeah, it does seem to be rather decisive in that sense.
From what I understand, and I have read into this, Boris, Mentioned this as well on a couple of our calls.
And I've looked at some other sources that more or less confirm this, that energy prices will be absolutely terrible.
I have heard someone who's paying 400 euros a month and it's at 1400 euros a month.
That was just a little tidbit that I heard somewhere.
So if anything, if that is true, that energies have doubled, tripled or quadrupled, that is a huge...
Bitch.
I mean, that's going to...
First off, not even cut down on discretionary spending or whatever.
I mean, some people just simply cannot pay that.
And so that is terrible and could cause unrest even.
Your vacation is out the window.
You've sold your other car and you're selling your grandma's jewelry to put food on the table.
I totally get that.
But it just is what it is.
I mean, they...
Russia is playing this game where it wanted to use natural resources as leverage and as a weapon.
And I do think that there's a strategy of external destabilization.
And I don't mean that in the sense that there are going to be coups throughout Western Europe.
You know, blood in the streets.
I doubt that.
There might very well be, you know, something resembling that in some way.
I mean, you know, if people are getting...
I don't know.
There are laws in the United States about shutting off heat in the winter, at least.
You know, if Germans, average Germans, are getting their heat shut off and people are freezing or something, that...
Obviously, that's a disaster, but I don't think that is going to happen.
And I don't think the German government is going to allow such a catastrophe to occur.
I mean, something like that happened in Texas, and it was like a 48-hour deal in Texas, and it was talked about forever.
And there actually were some deaths that were directly as a result of that.
So it's a serious thing.
The idea of, you know, I've been in Germany in the winter.
I mean, four or five months of people freezing in their homes, burning their furniture.
The government just won't allow that to happen.
They just won't.
So it's horrible.
I totally get it.
And I don't even know where you go from here because there's going to be no more Russian gas.
I mean, this is not, you know, as I've been saying, I mean, Putin has doubled, tripled down.
I mean, he is in this thing, and there is no turning this around, you know, much like, say, Georgia in 2008, or even the Crimea thing in 2014, where, granted, there was still something like a Cold War going on, but, you know...
We can still deal with Putin.
It's not a big deal.
Yeah, he's kind of rough around the edges.
No, it's over.
And so a lot of these things are just like fait en complet.
I mean, you can whine all you want, but it's not turning around.
And I think that might have been somewhat of the motivation.
Whoever did this was motivated to kind of...
Reach some kind of endpoint, like you're never turning this back on.
Now keep in mind, Putin shut off Nord Stream 1, which was operational, three or four weeks ago.
So there was no gas flowing through the tubes, but there was still obviously methane that was...
I don't know the right word, dormant or something in the tube.
So it's not like Germany was getting all of this natural gas and, you know, living the high life.
And then the CIA bombed the pipeline and they can't have money anymore.
I mean, that just did not happen.
It's a much more difficult situation.
And that's why I think...
Who exactly did this is unclear, but it is interesting to speculate on it.
Again, I already mentioned there was someone throwing out France.
They have the submarine capabilities.
The U.S. did offer a warning to Germany about this.
This has been reported.
And, you know, reputable sources.
So I don't think it's fake news.
But who knows exactly?
I mean, there's no doubt that, you know, elite play games with strategic leagues and so on.
But there was a report on it.
And so that, it does seem odd if the U.S. is engaging in these dark actions of I mean, keep in mind, if the US did this, they would be attacking something in the Eurozone,
in, I guess, in Swedish territory, in terms of waterways, 200 feet below the surface, engaging in state terrorism.
Now, that doesn't mean that the US...
Wouldn't be willing to do something like that, but that is a pretty dastardly, diabolical thing to do.
And if you were ever caught, like, if that, let's say it all went wrong.
I mean, okay, let's say it went right, and the US actually did do this, and we find out 20 years from now or something, I think people would basically...
Consider it, you know, an interesting thing, but it's water under the bridge.
And, oh, in some weird way, I'm glad they did it because NATO defeated Russia in this protracted war.
If that situation went wrong, I mean, the risk of the, like, 1% chance, I mean, when the risk of 1% chance of failure is so high, It's hard to imagine them doing this.
And it's hard to imagine that they could exert pressure on Germany to never consider the Nord Stream.
And keep in mind, Nord Stream 2 has been closed for six months.
Putin himself cut off the gas three weeks ago.
So you're so desperate to go bomb it just in case?
I see the notion that was promoted by Tucker Carlson and most of the dissident right.
I do see it.
I just kind of don't see it.
I mean, at the end of the day, their willingness to do that just strikes me as it's just too much.
What bubbled up to the surface is a drop in the bucket.
It's a co-production to the tunes of tens of billions.
I mean, it's an ecological disaster, too.
It's an environmental disaster.
Right.
And, you know, look, Putin doesn't care about that.
And even darker elements within the American security state don't care about that.
You know, it is what it is, but you're attacking mostly German property, actually.
Right.
The physical infrastructure, right?
The actual pipeline of German.
Yes, private property also.
I mean, that's why it's kind of weirdly an act of terrorism.
That being said, Russia owes money on this thing.
They aren't going to be getting any...
Likely any revenue from it, particularly since the day that it occurred, not coincidentally, presumably, this Norwegian pipeline came online.
So you can then claim, I mean, I don't think Russia really even needs an excuse.
They could just refuse to pay at this point.
But you can then claim a force majeure and no longer continue payments on this.
Massive feat of engineering.
You can also put it offline.
I mean, if you think that, you know, if you think that Germans are freezing to death and you've kind of like underestimated their capabilities or competency and then you've also probably kind of overestimated.
national outrage and civil unrest and so on, then you can say, oh, we'd love to help you.
We would love to help you, but your bastard friend, NATO allies destroyed this.
I agree.
The whole thing is very unclear.
I mean, Blinken said it's in no one's interest, which seems to be a bit of a punt.
I mean, obviously, anything that happens is in someone's interest.
But to say that, to just like wave your hands and say that Russia didn't do it, I do believe is naive.
You know, similar, this harkens back to the Daria Dugin situation, where, you know, look, ostensibly you could say, why on earth would...
Russia conceivably tried to assassinate Alexander Dugin, or even worse, his own daughter.
Why would they do this?
These people are hyper-Russian patriots.
So it must have been done by the CIA or Ukraine.
That is, ostensibly, that is completely plausible, and that is what I thought when it immediately occurred.
But sometimes you do have to sit back and first off, ask yourself, I mean, surely Ukrainians have bigger fish to fry than knocking off the daughter of a philosopher who,
though not unconnected with the regime, is fairly marginal and kind of a mascot for You know, a bit crazy, neo-Orthodox, multi-polarity Russian imperialism.
He's a bit of a dreamer.
And he'll go on the, a bit like me in a way, in the sense that he's kind of over, his influence is overestimated due to the fact that he has been on the mainstream media.
He's been on 60 Minutes, he's been on other places.
And so...
Would they do that?
Would you engage in an assassination within enemy territory at a great risk and even at a great risk of that backfiring of that creating outrage and so on from the world or even your allies?
It just strikes me as...
It starts to get unlikely when you look at it soberly.
And then when you look at it soberly, you start to see the motivations for Russia to do that.
First off, they certainly have the willingness.
If you are well-connected and you're a billionaire, that is really nice and I hope you enjoy.
Your Lamborghini, but it's probably not going to last.
And in fact, you and your family will likely be, will end up dead in your luxury apartment pretty soon, because that is the trend.
And I don't know what actually motivated each and every one of these assassinations, but anyone who was viewed as some kind of threat or has just simply outused his usefulness.
Ends up knocked off in really brutal fashion.
So the idea that the Kremlin or some faction within it or national security faction isn't willing to do that is certainly wrong.
And I think it also kind of fits with Putin's or I'll just say the Kremlin's general predicament, which is that...
They're trying to manage a population that is mostly depoliticized.
It's not polarized.
It's depoliticized.
And you like the cheerleaders on the far right, but sometimes it's kind of like the cheerleader who's cheering a little too hard and in fact starts to step out onto the field and kind of...
You know, deflect the football and say, you know, why aren't you guys playing hard enough?
Maybe I should get out there and play hard.
Well, that kind of cheerleader can be a problem.
And, you know, she's not serving her purpose.
So I can see a kind of calculus for this from Russia.
And it just seems, particularly in the Dugina situation where she was murdered within Russian territory, not too far from Moscow, it seems to make a lot more sense in that way.
Like, is a CIA black ops situation?
I mean, of all the things to do, you're going to do that?
I mean, that just, it begins to strike me as implausible, more and more implausible as I think about it.
Now, this situation is...
A little bit different in the sense that it is in EU territory.
And both situations are completely opaque.
We're not in the know.
And these are highly professional operations.
I mean, the Jugina assassination, that was done by professionals.
That was not some random, you know, shooting your...
Ex-girlfriend or something.
That was done as a professional operation.
This even more so.
This was done with underwater drones.
Maybe it was done through an entity, state or otherwise, that had access to submarines, deep-sea divers.
This is not done with someone with a snorkel and a hand grenade or something like that.
This was a serious thing.
And so that makes it even more opaque.
I mean, we're dealing with highly trained professional killers or saboteurism in the latter instance.
And so we're not in the loop.
I'm about, let's say, 80% certain that Dario Dugina was not killed by the West.
I would say I'm more like 60, 65. That Russia did this last action.
I kind of lean that way.
But I don't really want to jump out there and throw down my cards.
It's like, call them.
Here's my hand.
When I might very well have a pair of twos or something.
I'm not certain about this.
But the remarkable alacrity with which...
The entire dissident right, and that includes Tucker and all these people around them, the fact that they just jumped out there hours after it occurred and declared it a CIA operation, I thought was very remarkable.
Do you think that for Russia as a strategy, this would be the perfect time to try to get something with a bit of nudging a yellow vests type movement again?
Yeah.
I mean, I was suggesting that.
There's another point that I just wanted to make about, like, the Russian society and then the West.
So, and again, I have visited Russia, but only as a tourist.
This was the impression I got.
This is what I hear from tourists.
This is what I have read.
And this is what I've heard as well from tourists.
Some, you know, expat Russians who have, who were talking about this stuff in English, and I think, my impression is that they're talking about it in a disinterested and genuine way, is that depoliticization.
So you have 50% of the, 50 to 60% of the population that is totally tuned out, and that just outsources all politics to Putin.
But the deal is you can't direly affect our lives with any political miscalculation, and you certainly can't demand that we fight a war for you.
So that type of situation is good in the, you know, medium to long term.
Your population doesn't hate you if there's a scandal.
They don't want to get involved.
They don't rally around some kind of idealistic reformer.
Because they don't give a shit.
And they're cynical as hell, you know, for good reason.
But that's also a danger once you start to fuck up.
And once you start, if you ever try to get them motivated.
Get them off the sidelines and in the game.
That also can be a very dire situation because the social contract you just made was with us doing nothing politically.
You've got this.
You're the politician.
We'll mutter cynical things about you under our breath.
We won't actually do anything.
We won't support any operation.
We won't engage in unrest, surely.
And we'll just kind of live our lives and shop.
There's also another dangerous part of the Russian population, which is the Z-fan right-wing extremists who think that Putin is playing with gloves on and he hasn't nuked Ukraine and or Washington yet, and thus he's a cuck.
So that is also a potentially dangerous situation.
It's kind of like the cheerleader that I was describing.
Who stops cheering and starts, you know, jumps on the field and starts punching people.
That's a really potentially dangerous situation.
But it's very different than, like, our hyper-polarized, hyper-engaged situation that we have in America and the rest of the West, where people, you know, some little...
Court filing occurs with regard to Mar-a-Lago and Trump and people start yelling and opining and talking about how we need, you know, Joe Biden isn't doing enough against Trump.
And, you know, oh, actually, the FBI planted the evidence.
We need to go protest the FBI.
I mean, we're in a hyper-polarized society and that has its own problems.
I do believe that.
Large percentage of the population on left and right.
It seems to be a little more noticeable on the right, but I do think a lot of the left as well, the liberal left, is crazy.
But yeah, we've just gone nuts.
We can't see straight because we are so polarized.
I do think there was an interesting situation 20 years ago when you definitely saw the polarization.
You know, as far back as the 90s.
But, you know, like, after the attacks of 9-11, there was a kind of weird deal that Bush made, which was that you're going to be hyper-engaged in the society.
You're going to wave flags and wear flag pins and, you know...
Watch me land on an aircraft carrier and sing the national anthem with more gusto.
But I promise that all of our wars won't actually affect you and that you won't have to do something.
And so he did, I think, quite literally say, you know, the way to fight Osama bin Laden is to go to a shopping mall or Disneyland and show him that, you know, we haven't given up.
You know, we're still...
Nihilistic, consuming assholes.
And, you know, you haven't stopped us.
We're not afraid to buy Victoria's Secret lingerie or go on Space Mountain or something.
I mean, it was a really kind of bizarre situation in a way.
And I think Putin might be in a situation kind of like that.
In the sense that, you know, Russians were kind of willing to take in the propaganda because they've just outsourced that aspect of their existence.
They're not on the field politically.
And now Putin has to deal with the fact that he needs that.
I mean, he clearly needs reserves to come in and replace the dead.
Or he's going to lose.
And he would never have done partial so-called mobilization if that were not the case.
You know, I surely believe, I certainly think that he thought this was going to be a, you know, two weeks, maybe a month.
We might even go all the way.
I mean, look, he called out Kiev as a hive of Nazis.
You know, I mean, you don't just say that without...
Planning to go in and have a few show trials or have a regime change and then create this neutered buffer state that is maybe bring back Yanukovych or something.
Who knows?
And it didn't work that way.
So he has to do something really damaging.
It would be the equivalent of George W. Bush declaring a draft in 2004 and saying, Uh-oh, we've got an insurgency here.
You guys have to go out there and die.
And keep in mind, by 2004, it was already hot.
And certainly by 2005, 2006, there wasn't civil unrest.
There was just a general cynicism.
And his approval ratings were at 20% or 30% or who knows.
And there was just a general disgust towards all this stuff.
And so that can happen really quickly when you need to, like, mobilize a kind of depoliticized society.
Even one that's patriotic, it's still depoliticized.
And so I do think this is a fascinating situation.
And it does kind of...
It's different, but it rhymes with...
▲
Export Selection