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Aug. 8, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:05:46

HOLY SH*T! It’s Inevitable Now | WAR is Coming - SF 426

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	so so
	so in this video you're going
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Three with Russell Brand.
	We've got an extraordinary concoction of guests today.
	Douglas MacGregor, former Trump administration insider and obviously military man.
	Mike Benz, who's done more to expose Deep State or what he would call the blob than any other pundit that I can think of.
	And Tulsi Gabbard, who with her elegance and dignity and forthright manner, give you some hope that there are politicians and lawmakers in whom You can trust.
	Let's start off with Colonel Douglas McGregor outlining how he sees the ongoing escalation of tension exacerbating existing conditions and potentially leading us to the very threshold of Armageddon itself, as well as being rather sweet and avuncular chap.
	Let's have a look at him now.
	Something happened that was really intriguing, at least to me, recently.
	The populist British leader Nigel Farage, who's about as close a thing as we have to Donald Trump, certainly he's, you know, he's Britain first, he's anti-immigration, he's openly patriotic, and in fact historically I've had a number of struggles and even contretemps with Nigel Farage. But one
	thing he said publicly while campaigning for the Reform Party in the UK, sort of like a
	British Tea Party type movement, I suppose, he said that, and indeed there is footage of him
	saying that he warned while a member of the European Parliament that the continual
	provocation of Russia and the attempt to turn Ukraine into a vassal state and make Ukraine a NATO
	member meant to be a threat meant that it would be likely that Putin would eventually
	invade. I've heard elsewhere people say that we started reporting on the Russia-Ukraine
	conflict in the third act after numerous provocations.
	Both Kirstahmer, the prime minister assumptive of our sort of centralist globalist Labour party,
	Authoritarian, I should add to that.
	And Rishi Sunak, the sort of current, former hedge fund investor and part of a hedge fund that invested 500 million dollars in Moderna.
	Both of them condemned Farage's comments, saying that it's outrageous to claim that Putin was in any way provoked.
	What is your opinion on that condemnation and on what Farage asserts?
	Well, I think brother Farage has stated a self-evident truth.
	It's something we call a tautology, for those who are interested out there.
	It's absolutely true.
	And we knew back in the 1990s, early on, But if we expanded NATO to incorporate more and more countries closer and closer to Russia, eventually there would be confrontation and conflict.
	George Kennan pointed to it.
	Virtually everyone with experience in the region and anyone with any knowledge at all of history knows that.
	I think the worst part of it is that President Bush, and I'm talking about the senior Bush, made it very clear that we would not exploit the vacuum
	created by the withdrawal of Russian military power from Central East Europe.
	And of course, we turned around, and that's exactly what we did.
	So I don't know what Starmer thinks.
	Of course, he may not be thinking at all.
	He seems to be reading from the same playbook as Sunak and the rest.
	It's all nonsense.
	If we want this crisis that could lead to a real war between us and Russia to end, it's very simple.
	You simply suspend all aid to Ukraine until further notice, although you should send humanitarian assistance, and make it clear that we're withdrawing all personnel from all NATO countries from Ukraine, and get down to some sort of negotiated outcome.
	Who wants enemies on their border?
	If the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or anybody else came into Mexico and set up missile batteries aimed at the United States, what would we do?
	Well, I can tell you what we would do.
	We'd send the Air Force in right away, and then the Army would invade.
	There would be no question of it.
	You know, so the Russians exercised extraordinary patience and put up with a lot of nonsense.
	Their cause has always been just.
	That's the truth, Russell.
	Your background is as a military advisor to a former Trump Secretary of Defense, and of course you're a combat veteran.
	I wonder how your perspective has changed on the way that the media reports on military activity, and I suppose specifically wars and hostility between nations, now that you work in this type of media.
	The reason I'm asking that question is because when you say something like Russia have been incredibly patient, I've seen people that have said comparable things, anything that's sort of sympathetic towards Russia or Putin, in the most literal sense I suppose it's true, being called Russian sympathisers, even being called appeasers.
	There's an ongoing media attempt to portray Putin as a kind of quasi-Hitler and Russia as expansionist and imperialist, but under the kind of analysis you've offered us that simply just doesn't hold up.
	Even to the common sense of the layman, it doesn't make much sense.
	So, how has your understanding of the media's role in presenting to the public forthcoming conflicts and ongoing conflicts changed From when you were within the military.
	When you were within the military, did you see it as necessary to ensure that the public were broadly supportive of a foreign campaign?
	Do you think that this problem has exacerbated, become more deceptive?
	What's changed, Colonel?
	Well, I can give you a couple of quick examples because for what it's worth, when I was in the desert in 1990 and 91, Miraculously, the BBC was the most accurate source of information and news about what was really happening in the Middle East.
	And we would routinely turn to listen to the BBC because their comments were very measured.
	There was no exaggeration, just statements of fact.
	And when they did invite people to comment, the people that came on to comment were very balanced and straightforward.
	Even then, I thought that the American media saw the whole opportunity as a time to expand and exaggerate to the point where it became entertainment.
	So we were showing people photographs of munitions landing on the enemy and celebrating the arrival of all
	these rockets and missiles and artillery rounds as though something good was happening. In other
	words, the American media, even in 1990 and 91, missed the point that it was a war and people were
	being killed.
	And when you kill people, there are consequences.
	At least at that point, I thought the BBC did a good job.
	Now, if you fast forward to 2003, as soon as we went into Iraq, the lies just began spreading and multiplying.
	A one-star brigadier general in the U.S.
	Army who was involved in the public affairs of what was happening on the ground in Iraq at the time was telling people things that were just blatantly untrue.
	We had this young woman.
	I can't remember her exact name.
	I wish I could.
	I think it was Jessica something.
	Was a about five foot four five foot five All of a hundred and ten hundred and twenty pounds and she was trying to drive a truck with some ammunition in it The truck got lost a convoy was lost in a in a sandstorm.
	She was captured Brutalized by the Iraqis had captured her then taken to a dropped off in a hospital where an Iraqi doctor Saved her life and then the Iraqi doctor actually contacted us so that we could come and get the woman and Well, all of this was turned into some sort of heroic fight where she fired her M-16 until she went down, which never happened.
	And then the special operations went in to rescue her, which never happened.
	So the lies were really taking off with great rapidity in 2003.
	And from that point forward, it became clear to me, and I was still on active duty in 2003, that anything you heard from the media Was probably not accurate, probably not true, and that you had to immediately assume it was nonsense.
	What did you feel about being involved in the Iraq war at that time, and has that opinion changed?
	Well, at the time when I was approached in 2000, actually I was approached in 2001 in October, and it was made clear to me that this opportunity to exploit 9-11 would be used to justify intervention in Iraq, I said, well, there's three things.
	First of all, I understand because we did not finish the job in 1991.
	They were trying to kill Saddam left and right, never seemed to get him.
	And then they claimed that the whole operation was exclusively for the purpose of driving out the Republican Guard.
	They didn't understand the Arab world.
	They didn't understand Iraq.
	And it would have been much easier to simply remove Saddam and replace him with a new government.
	Preferably of military men that could then call in the UN and handle elections or whatever.
	But we were fixated on this notion of occupation.
	But in October of 2001, when they approached me, they said, well, how much would it take to unseat Saddam, to remove his government?
	I said, probably not very much.
	And tried to explain that the average person in Iraq was not prepared or even remotely interested in dying in a war to defend Saddam Hussein with their last breath.
	People didn't seem to understand it.
	You know, you're British.
	You know who drew the borders and the various lines that created all these countries that were formerly just tribes living inside the Ottoman Empire.
	And they're not terribly meaningful, frankly.
	But it's amazing that they've lasted as long as they have.
	But there was no sense of the fluidity of the people.
	They didn't seem to understand that in that part of the world, You know, loyalty to your family, to your clan, to your tribe, whatever, is much more important than anything called Iraq or Jordan or anything else.
	Yes, that those concepts and constructs were convenient for us as we attempted to carve up the resources of that region but hadn't become glommed on to the consciousness of the indigenous people of that region.
	And I wonder how this expansionist and exploitative mentality has continued to affect that region.
	I want to mention to you a time that I saw a speech by Colonel Gaddafi after the execution of Saddam Hussein, where he said to some kind of Arab council, I'm sure you know what it would have been, like, hold on a minute, Saddam Hussein's been executed.
	Guys, our region's under considerable threat.
	Now, you know, Gaddafi was indeed next to go.
	There have been some pretty dubious actions inside Syria, it looks like, you know, sort of arming militia, destabilizing that nation.
	In the 1970s what went on in Iran was pretty peculiar and extraordinary and what happens in the Middle East to this day seems to require an ongoing relationships with the United States and the United States military.
	I wonder Colonel how you feel about American resources and American lives continually being deployed to sustain exploit and advance wars within that region that unless you
	have a partisan connection to it, seem pretty brutal, nihilistic and unnecessary. It's a bit
	reductive, but you know, bloody hell, it's not helping, is it? No, look, you're absolutely right.
	And it is very obvious to anyone who served for any length of time in the region that
	the social structures are very fragile.
	In other words, everything does revolve around family, clan, tribe, the local area,
	and it doesn't take very much to disrupt the lives of those people.
	And we continue to impute to the region the things which we take for granted.
	We're national political integration is a good example that we are integrated states, integrated governments with powerful bureaucracies and so forth.
	These kinds of things really didn't exist 25, 20 years ago.
	And so it was very easy to go in and disrupt these societies.
	The problem for us, Russell, and I think this is also true for Great Britain, because we are in many ways very similar to the British historically.
	We are primarily a maritime and aerospace power.
	What do I mean by that?
	Well, we too are an island.
	We have the North American continent.
	We're surrounded by water.
	Yes, we have a common border with Mexico, and we have a border with Canada, but there are very few people in both of those countries compared with us, and we have historically avoided conflict with those two groups of people as much as possible.
	So we focused on everything beyond our borders over the seas.
	The problem is with us is we sail in or fly into a particular area, and we stay for a period of time ostensibly to do good things, to build liberal democracy, to create utopias where everyone can live happily ever after, and no one is interested in being converted to this utopia.
	And we disrupt the place, we damage the place, we destroy the place, we kill large numbers of people, either deliberately or accidentally, and then when we've had enough, we simply sail away, or fly away.
	In other words, wherever we go, we are temporary.
	If you're watching us on YouTube, we're only going to be available for a couple of more seconds.
	Click the link in the description.
	Join us on Rumble, where we're free to speak about opposing global war, which you sort of feel like you should be able to discuss anywhere.
	Nevertheless, click the link in the description.
	And I think what you're seeing today with the Russians in Ukraine, you see it in the Middle East with the Arab states, the Iranians, the Turks, you see it in Asia with China, and all the countries, their attitude is, wait a minute, we live here, you don't.
	Let us decide what has to happen.
	In other words, let us tend to our own affairs.
	We don't need or want your intervention.
	And this is the problem with this constant pursuit since 1991 of what I would call American political, military, economic, financial hegemony.
	We Americans don't really need the hegemony.
	No one in the United States is interested in it.
	It's only a small group of people in Washington who have essentially gotten on board the locomotive and have taken this train down a track that nobody in the United States, if they had been asked, would have ever opted for.
	And we don't need hegemony, and the world doesn't want our hegemony.
	That's really the big message that's coming back to us.
	And unfortunately, Washington takes this and uses the media to persuade everyone that the rejection of our hegemony means instantaneous hostility to us, which in turn then justifies the use of military power all over the world to beat back anyone who doesn't want to live with our hegemony.
	It's an endless do-loop that leads to catastrophe.
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	Increasingly, words like, you know, democracy and freedom when used to fuel these campaigns seem, if not euphemistic, downright dishonest.
	And when we think of the last sort of 50 years and American PSYOP and deep state operations backed by perhaps special forces or outright military action in Central America, South America and in particular in the Middle East.
	So there are obviously examples in Africa as well.
	It seems that this ability to impose hegemony was facilitated by the fact that the projects
	were being imposed upon regions, peoples, and in particular, I suppose, military forces
	that were easy, relatively speaking, to subjugate.
	And perhaps the information sphere wasn't so recalcitrant and immediate in its ability
	to offer counter-narratives and immediate reporting, even though there's plenty of information
	available on what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua or Venezuela even, and certainly Somalia,
	Syria, the list goes on.
	And what struck me as outright absurd was that the kind of mentality that had been somewhat
	deployed in Afghanistan or Vietnam or wherever you want to say, was being imposed on a country
	Like Russia, that has its own history, that has its own sovereignty.
	I'm not suggesting those countries don't, but Russia is a military superpower and a nuclear superpower, and in spite of whatever weakening took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, they remain a significant nation.
	And the playbook didn't make sense to even a layperson like me.
	And now we're starting to see That an individual's intuitive response is closer to an accurate appraisal than the oddly newly framed bombast and jingoism that you find coming out of a neoliberal Biden administration.
	that uses similar tropes and terms and says that if you are interested in bringing about
	diplomacy and peace that you are an apologist. So how is it from a military perspective that,
	you know, that it seems like, because I've got so many questions for you, like one like,
	I wonder when the American appetite for this kind of expansionism expired? I wonder when
	manifest destiny was no longer appealing? I wonder when, you know, nation-first movements,
	like seems to be happening across Europe and certainly in your country, took a true hold on
	what isolationism means and how much it's connected to the end of the sort of American
	manifest destiny project.
	But I suppose to start us off, I wonder, Colonel, why it was assumed, and can it have been assumed, that a playbook that would work in those countries to the south of your nation or the Middle Eastern countries would in any way be effective in a country like Russia?
	Well, if you embark upon policies or policy directions without any strategic analysis, I suppose everything is possible.
	Remember that the people that you're dealing with in Washington today, in sharp contrast to the people that founded the country and governed us for most of our history, at least up until World War I, these people are ideologues.
	Ideology is a secular variant of religion.
	So you're dealing with people who are fanatics, who absolutely fervently believe that they have captured a monopoly on truth.
	They're very similar to the crazed Bolsheviks of 1918, 1919, 1920, who believed that they had the answer.
	And of course, their answer, collectivization, nationalization of everything, state ownership of everything, produced tens of millions of dead inside the Soviet Union long before World War II broke out.
	Well, we're dealing with people that have the same attitude.
	You cannot have a useful discussion or debate with them, because their position is, from the very beginning, that one size fits all.
	They have the answer.
	Liberal democracy, in their terms, has to exist everywhere, and when it does, there will be peace.
	In reality, the answer that George Washington and Hamilton and Madison and all the people that framed the Constitution and founded the country believed in was something very different.
	Their attitude was, the best thing we can do is to stay out of other people's affairs.
	And if we are successful and we build ourselves up financially, economically, defend our country certainly, but build ourselves up and we become prosperous and successful, then others will want to emulate us.
	In other words, we're not interested in exporting what we do and how we live to anyone at gunpoint.
	That's a waste of time.
	It doesn't work.
	And then we went through World War II, and you know we occupied Japan, we occupied Germany, and a great deal of mythology emerged as a result of those occupations.
	People believed that somehow or another we had rescued the poor, benighted Germans and Japanese from ignorance and squalor and stupidity and fascism.
	In reality, all we did in both countries was get these countries back on the track that historically they had followed before the war.
	So you still had the Japanese emperor, you now had a parliament, and all of these institutions in Japan worked, the same institutions in Germany sprung up and they worked, and the people themselves, culturally, were already predisposed to follow the same line that we're discussing right now.
	It wasn't exactly the way we govern ourselves, it was different, but it was quite similar.
	We thought, well, this model, what we've done in Germany and Japan, we can do the same thing in Afghanistan.
	We can do the same thing in Iraq.
	We can do the same thing in Syria.
	And we forgot that the secret of success in both Germany and Japan was our fervent admiration and respect for the cultures and the histories of the people that we occupied.
	We actually respected the Germans and the Japanese.
	We didn't impose anything on them.
	We helped them get back on their feet.
	They did the work.
	That's why we remain friends.
	We at least understood that when the war ended we wanted to be on good terms with people.
	We've thrown all of that out.
	We simply say we have the answer and everyone in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya has to become like us, which is absurd.
	Makes no sense at all.
	It appears, and certainly I've heard the discourse to the effect that Ukraine is a convenient location.
	Vassal state has certain resources, but it's strategically incredibly valuable.
	When I see Zelensky panhandling for support from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, explicit deals done with Blackrock, and I know Blackrock is enormous and in some ways a diffuse organization, but nevertheless, to make post-war, if such a thing is possible, Ukraine into a kind of a digital utopia, which I sense in a way, Colonel, might be a pilot scheme for the rest of the world.
	There seems to be a sort of a globalist agenda to use technology to maximize power and citizen management and to exploit fissures where possible to make the claim that these technologies are only being used to help people to protect people either from a pandemic or from a war or to facilitate safety or convenience.
	I wonder how that maps on to any potential post-war relationships economically with Germany or Japan and even at the risk of not complicating but certainly expanding this conversation I wonder what the significance was of American intervention in the First World War, if you consider the Second World War to be an epochal moment in America's confidence in ideological expansionism that became sort of deracinated from its original idea of protecting, or at least respecting, the heritage of the nations it was intervening on behalf of, and how that became colonialism of a more traditional hue.
	Well, you're touching on an area where there are lots of theories and lots of different explanations.
	World War I in particular, which I think is the first and greatest tragedy in the history of Western civilization, tells us a number of things about the United States and Europe.
	And one of the things that we learn is about the banking system.
	And clearly, we had extended great credits to the French and the British.
	We said we were neutral.
	And that the Germans could also come and utilize our credit markets.
	But of course, it's very difficult for the Germans to reach the United States and involve themselves in your credit markets when the British Navy is blockading the continent.
	So, we were always lopsided in the sense that we were on one side more than any other.
	And inevitably, I think it became clear that if we did not intervene in the war, that frankly, Germany and Austria-Hungary would win.
	And people did not want that to happen.
	They saw that as a potentially devastating outcome economically in terms of finance for the United States.
	And then again, you also have this undercurrent of the United States wanting to participate in this great imperial experiment.
	Remember, we had gone into the Spanish-American War quite unnecessarily, frankly.
	The Spaniards Agreed to virtually all the terms that we laid down for them, and we still invaded Cuba.
	We decided to keep Puerto Rico.
	We made the decision to stay in the Philippines, and all the Filipinos wanted was independence and freedom from the Spaniards.
	We said we were going to stay there and install liberal democracy, make them Anglo-Saxon Democrats, and so we killed a quarter of a million Filipinos to make them Anglo-Saxon Democrats.
	Of course, that's all nonsense.
	And today we can look back on that and see the stupidity and frankly the criminality in all of it.
	But today we're bound up with exactly what you're describing.
	You've got people now who are looking at what can be taken from Ukraine.
	They were looking at what could be taken from Russia.
	Russia is resource rich.
	Eastern Ukraine certainly has resources in it, but that's not what Putin was interested in, because Russia has enough resources on its own, as we've certainly discovered.
	Remember, we were told Russia is weak, it's backward, it can't stand the sanctions for more than a few months.
	All of that turned out to be wrong.
	Russia is very strong, has very strong social cohesion, has resources, has a strong economic foundation.
	They can outproduce us today in their manufacturing base.
	As regards, with regard to military equipment.
	So there was no strategic analysis that was ever performed.
	It was all ideology and the belief that we could use our military power once again to bully people into accepting a status quo that they didn't want.
	And now I think we're on the verge of losing everything.
	If you look at the BRICS, which started out being a relatively small number of countries, everyone wants to join.
	We think there are going to be 84 countries joining this BRICS organization, currently led this year by Moscow, before the end of the year.
	Everybody wants to join it because they want to get out from under our financial system, out from under the Swiss system.
	This is why people are de-dollarizing.
	In other words, everyone is walking away from us or running away from us as fast as they can because they don't want to be bullied anymore.
	There he is, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who clearly believes in liberty and freedom, and is one of those alliances that I've just been astonished by.
	Someone with whom, on the surface, I would have thought I had very little in common, but now I just enjoy and adore.
	When it comes, though, to pure education, someone who's able to demonstrate to you why you should be mistrustful of the three-letter agencies, how war leads to profit for shadowy figures like George Soros, How even public brands like Google are ultimately connected to the CIA.
	There can be no more significant or reliable voice than Mike Benz.
	This is one of my favorite conversations with Mike.
	Have a look at it.
	Pretty recently I heard that when the Clinton Foundation were over in Haiti, ostensibly helping Haiti in a way that in retrospect looks pretty clumsy.
	We're here to help you!
	Please get your help off of us!
	And like the money was spent In all sorts of weird clumsy ways and even when you see video footage of a sort of a younger sleeker Hillary Clinton leading George Soros peculiarly through the wreckage of Haiti even though that's before many of their subsequent disasters you feel like what's going on why is this guy there what's happening I mean I've heard
	For example, that George Soros benefits in some way from the conflict between Ukraine and Russia with regard to oil.
	But I don't understand that, and I wonder if you could help me to understand it, please, Mike.
	No, this is important to keep in mind because George Soros is not just like a player in this.
	The annual contributions just to the DNC.
	In the last election cycle, George Soros contributed $100 million to the DNC.
	The second biggest donor was only $40 million.
	So George Soros was two and a half times bigger than anybody else in terms of a donor.
	So he dominates the political leadership of the Democrat Party in the U.S.
	But this is a very much a global story.
	So let's sort of start with the George Soros origin story.
	In 1979, George Soros was a partner at a hedge fund in New York.
	Who primarily concentrated on doing foreign currency speculation, that is betting using New York financial firm assets under management on the direction of currencies in Eastern Europe in the middle of the Cold War.
	He creates the Open Society Foundation, in his own words, as a tax loophole for his children, for Alex Soros, in South Africa in 1979.
	But then he lucks his way into the windfall of a lifetime when Ronald Reagan becomes president in 1980, and this new doctrine of using NGO statecraft Using the National Endowment for Democracy, as I mentioned, that same thing that Hunter Biden was on the board of and that was created explicitly by the CIA director to have non-CIA fingerprints on funding of CIA assets.
	In 1982-83, the NED gets set up and Reagan expands this doctrine of working through NED cutouts and working through the web of civil society organizations and NGOs to do CIA-backed color revolutions, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, which was the main hot zone of the Cold War.
	So, Hungary, Poland, Germany.
	While the Cold War was global, these exact countries were the biggest hot zones of spy versus spy, of the CIA versus the KGB, and they were the crown jewel of, you know, the prize for winning the Cold War.
	When Hungary toppled its communist government and became part of the sort of NATO Western world, when Poland toppled its government with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Movement there, when Germany reunified.
	George Soros teamed up in the early 1980s when this collaboration was being set up so
	that the Open Society Foundations, their offices in all of those different countries would
	function as State Department and CIA vassals for the student groups and the revolutionary
	street muscle that would take to the streets in a show of force or would destabilize or
	shut down the economy or the governance functions of the ruling communist regime in order to
	to orchestrate those revolutions.
	George Soros basically took this open society model and set up basically satellites in all the different regions that the CIA and State Department were running government toppling blueprints in.
	And so his own universities, his own NGOs, his own, you know, sort of civil society organizations were being used in order to help the CIA and State Department overthrow those governments.
	Well, that's a great gig if you happen to simultaneously be running a hedge fund speculating on the direction of those currencies because you have an advanced 6-month, 12-month, 5-year head start in terms of the direction of that currency because you know that the CIA is going to overthrow that government.
	and either prop it up or crush it so you can short it and make a massive, massive windfall.
	For example, if you know that it's going to be destabilized.
	And he was tasked by the Reagan State Department to do that destabilization work and they were
	getting tens of millions of dollars to help facilitate that, again, through this money
	And so Soros became a darling of this bipartisan blob apparatus.
	He was best friends with John McCain.
	You know, you may have seen pictures of them where they're so close to each other, smiling, you think they're about to start making out.
	John McCain, by the way, was not just, you know, this very powerful senator for two decades here in the U.S.
	He was not just the man, you know, who The blob was deciding between in the 2008 presidential election when the choice was between John McCain and Barack Obama, but John McCain was also the founder and the president for 25 years of the IRI.
	Now, I mentioned Hunter Biden's NDI, the National Democratic Institute.
	When the NED was created, when the CIA created the National Endowment for Democracy, It simultaneously created two different spindles, two branches of the NED, subsidiaries that are wholly funded and controlled by the NED.
	One was for Democrat stakeholders called the NDI, which Hunter Biden sits on the board of, and Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, runs.
	It also created the RNC, the Republican branch.
	You can think of this like the CIA wing of the Democrat party and the CIA wing of the Republican party.
	The Republican branch of the NED is called the IRI, the International Republican Institute.
	Who founded and ran that for 25 years?
	It was John McCain.
	So John McCain became essentially the Republican bipartisan branch of the Soros operation.
	This is why you have sort of a kind of, even though Soros is known as a sort of left-wing figure, he is supported by half of the Republican Party.
	And he makes selective contributions and bolsters, you know, these are folks like Mitt Romney.
	Mitt Romney's on the board of the IRI.
	Mitt Romney, by the way, is who ran for president for the Republic.
	He was the Republican Party nominee for the 2012 presidential election.
	And he's also the one who led the impeachment of the populist, nationalist, sort of representative wing of the Republican Party, Trump, you know, during the impeachment over the Ukraine.
	Amazingly, remember, they impeached Trump because he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine, i.e.
	the exact financial investments of this same class that I just mentioned.
	And this also gets to the Soros story in Ukraine.
	Ukraine is in debt to the IMF and the World Bank.
	George Soros functions as a sort of financial intermediary between what the IMF, the creditors in the IMF and the World Bank need done to get their debts repaid and the political actions that countries need to take in order to pay off that debt.
	Often what that involves is privatizing industries that are held by the state, selling them, and then using the proceeds of that sale to pay off the IMF and the World Bank.
	If you know the IMF and the World Bank are going to force a fire sale of a major trillion dollar industry in that country, Well then, guess what?
	If you are a corporation or a financial firm and you know this is going to happen, you get a bargain basement discount price to be able to swoop in and take over that industry when it undergoes that privatization.
	George Soros explicitly laid out in a series of documents you can look up that were called the blue leaks or also called the hashtag DC leaks.
	These were George Soros IMF coordination documents to coordinate the sale of NAFTA gas, the privatization of NAFTA gas in an IMF deal.
	Now again, NAFTA gas is the state gas giant of Ukraine.
	It is Ukraine's entire economy, okay?
	Ukraine's entire economy is that it runs the gas transit points From Russia into Europe, which used to be 100% of gas into Europe from World War II essentially up until 2022.
	Technically, they went through a gas diversification program in the early 2000s that the State Department coerced Europe to do to buy more expensive American gas in order to diversify off of Russia when Putin started to use gas diplomacy to reassert Russia on the world stage.
	George Soros and Vladimir Putin were locked in a death battle for control over NAFTA gas, because NAFTA gas was basically split on its board between the NATO side and the Russia side, because all of Russia's economy was based on these Russian gas transits.
	And so what NATO worked to do was diversify the gas transit so that they started from the Permian Basin in Houston, They were ported in through the Baltic Sea to run through terminals in Poland to connect to NAFTA gas, and so NAFTA gas would be... Ukraine would still be getting billions of dollars of gas transit money, but the starting point would be U.S.
	companies and British companies rather than the Russian government.
	And you can argue that that's in, you know, the national interest of American citizens or British citizens, but, you know, at the end of the day it is still A dirty tricks operation and that flies in the face of a hundred years of our, you know, free trade, free trade policies, if you will.
	But George Soros was the battering ram for orchestrating that and for privatizing NAFTA gas and prying it off of Russia.
	And so George Soros funding essentially the Democrat Party and funding the political operatives who were spearheading the Ukraine situation.
	is perfect for his own financial empire because he is the one who's investing in Naftogaz and whose own portfolio companies and his own investment funds are invested in the endogenous gas industry in Ukraine.
	So he is basically bribing US and British officials to take the battering ram of their military and CIA To pull off the operation that benefits his own financial portfolio companies.
	The last thing I'll say is, you can go on my Twitter right now, at MikeBendCyber, type in, in the search bar, at MikeBendCyber, Soros Empire, and you will see a direct quote from George Soros himself, where he is bragging on tape that he created the Soros Empire by, quote, picking up the pieces The Soviet empire collapsed.
	As the empire collapsed, I moved in and picked up the pieces.
	collapsed. As the empire collapsed, I moved in and picked up the pieces. First in Hungary
	in 1984, and then Poland in 87, China in 87 as well.
	And I'm going to stop there.
	And so this is how the this what the Soros empire was replacing the Soviet empire.
	So he was you know that meme of two photographs and you look at them you say it's the same picture.
	When you see NATO and you see Soros, they're the same picture.
	When you see the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office and you see Soros, it's the same picture.
	When you see the CIA or British intelligence and then you see a picture of George Soros, It's the same picture.
	They're one blob.
	Let's tie all this together with a comment that I think came from one of the questions on your locals at the start of this, which was, who does the blob work for?
	You know, I think, I forget how you teed that up in the beginning, but I almost think of it, you know, like that Austin Powers scene where he goes, who does number two work for?
	Who does number two work for?
	That's right, buddy.
	You show that turd who's boss.
	That's a good scene, man.
	That's one of my favorite scenes.
	You show that turd who's boss.
	Right, good.
	We're on familiar territory.
	Mike Myers comedy.
	I feel at home.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Hit me, man.
	Right, because that's actually a great way to look at this, because the execution arm of This transatlantic foreign policy blob is the State Department, the CIA, and the DoD, and its swarm army of tens of thousands of paid assets in the media and in the civil society and university realm and things like this.
	But they are essentially number two, if you will, working for a class above them who they have a revolving door relationship with.
	And which is really where people in government make their money and do favors for in order to make their own careers and be able to have their own, you know, put their own kids through private school education and really join an elite class.
	And that is what I call the corporate and financial donor and drafter class.
	You might think of as a co-investor class.
	And before I delve into this, I'll start with a quick analogy from what I just mentioned with Jared Cohen, who I mentioned, you know, started at this, You know, started embedded in essentially CIA hot zones, organizing student groups, and then worked directly at the center of synchronizing CIA and State Department color revolutions on social media.
	Then went directly to Google's essentially CIA branch.
	But what did Jared Cohen just do a few short years ago?
	Moved over from Google Jigsaw to the macroeconomic asset management branch of Goldman Sachs.
	He is now one of the highest ranking officials at Goldman Sachs.
	Well, what he's essentially doing at Goldman Sachs is he's not a mystic, you know, forecasting what's going to rise and fall in terms of economies or assets to invest in around the world.
	Because he's got this State Department CIA back channel, he allows Goldman Sachs to do what's essentially insider trading at the most macro level.
	If you know that the military or the State Department or the CIA is going to overthrow a government or privatize an industry, You know, a trillion dollar industry in Venezuela or Ukraine that's owned by the state government, but now it's going to be privatized.
	So if you're an early investor in that, your investment is going to go to the moon.
	You have this corporate and financial overclass where there's a revolving door.
	Okay, so let's take a step back.
	What do I mean by donor and drafter class?
	So let's start with the term drafting.
	So in a bike race, the ideal strategy is not to be out in front.
	Even if you're the fastest racer, you don't want to be out in the lead in a bike race because you are bearing the brunt of the full force of the wind, which slows down your traction.
	You need to exert more work.
	In corporate terms, that is killing your profits if you're out in front.
	The ideal strategy in a bike race is to be right behind the person in front so that they do the work cutting the wind and you efficiently, with a much less amount of energy, get the same place and then you overtake that person at the end.
	And so what corporations do, and by proxy their financial equity and debt holders do, is they draft behind the blob, the government side of the blob.
	They draft behind the DOD, the War Department, the Pentagon.
	So, for example, when the military moves into Ukraine, they draft behind that.
	When the State Department goes in and threatens sanctions on a country so that it changes its terms of private enterprise or changes its labor laws to make it cheaper for, they draft behind the State Department.
	If the CIA is incubating a new emerging leadership class in a country who is going to be favorable to ExxonMobil there or Walmart there, Or an agriculture company there or a tech company there.
	They draft behind that.
	And they also serve as co-investors or donors into those projects.
	Because oftentimes it's not enough just to have U.S.
	funded allocations to fund a war project or a foreign assistance project.
	Like, for example, in Ukraine, there's a big issue about how much funding is enough to actually support Ukraine.
	So part of what the State Department does is they go around to get co-investors in the project in the region so that Microsoft or Google will sort of like, you know, co-fund it and provide a top-up.
	to get the amount of money needed to do this initiative.
	And actually a great example of this is something like DIA, the DIA app in Ukraine.
	This is something that I think the Gray Zone, as you mentioned, published a lot about.
	This is this digital ID system in Ukraine that Zelensky has made essentially mandatory
	for all Ukrainian people and it ties their digital identity to their bank account.
	It's basically the ultimate way to be able to manage a civilization and it was created by USAID.
	USAID is the major funding organization that straddles the line between the State Department and the CIA.
	It essentially serves as an above-board, public-facing State Department adjacency that funnels the money that is used by the CIA.
	Essentially, when something gets USAID funding, it becomes an asset for our covert diplomacy.
	And so USAID funded the creation of this app in a partnership with Google, Visa, and American Express, I believe were the two transaction companies.
	So Ukraine doesn't have its own sort of sophisticated IT architecture.
	The State Department, using its diplomacy arm, has now made mandatory the use of a system
	that Google profits from because it runs the architecture of DIA, and that Visa and American
	Express profit from because they process all the commercial transactions of now every citizen
	in Ukraine.
	So you now have a locked in, government-backed cartel over every single person in Ukraine
	for both, you know, Amex and Google.
	And so, this becomes a very powerful... Now, when you look at who actually sits on the board of these CIA interstitials.
	So, like, let's take an example.
	Something called the National Endowment for Democracy is a classic example of this.
	So in my first salvo here, I talked about how Wisner's Wurlitzer in the era of CIA control
	over media 1.0 was 1947 to 1975-1976, which is when the CIA would directly co-opt media
	organizations. And then this sort of went down in flames when it all came out in public hearings in
	the Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings in 1975-1976.
	President Jimmy Carter, when he won as a Democrat in 1976, promised to put an end to that.
	He fired 30% of the CIA's operations branch in a single night and basically kneecapped the ability for the CIA to do this work directly.
	Reagan comes into office in 1980 and wants to revive the sort of full poisonous fang power of the CIA, but doesn't have the bipartisan support to ram this through Congress.
	And so Reagan's CIA director, Bill Colby, approaches Reagan's attorney general, the head of the Justice Department, and says it was a disaster when media groups around the world were seen as funded by the CIA.
	What we can do, though, is if we set up a national endowment for democracy promotion and have that be formally firewalled off from the CIA so that it looks like it's just coming from a public endowment.
	Actually, it's not even public, a private endowment.
	Then we'll be able to have the same capacities we had from the 1940s to the 1970s, but there won't be CIA fingerprints on it.
	We'll just intermediate it.
	We'll just back channel with the heads of the National Endowment for Democracy.
	And so there was a back and forth between the CIA director, Bill Colby, and the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, where they came up with the structure that there would be a formal firewall, the National Endowment for Democracy would be a Private, non-governmental organizations, but that as long as there was Senate Intelligence Committee consent to it, the CIA would effectively direct their operations.
	And by the way, they're a private, non-governmental organization, but they're under the direct oversight of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees.
	They're a CIA cutout managed by the State Department.
	Now, the NED, if you look at who's on its board, It's the directors of all these companies.
	Their board of directors for the National Endowment for Democracy has members of the Officers and Directors of Google, Officers and Directors of Amex and Visa, Officers and Directors of Exxon and Chevron.
	A great example of this, actually, is in the run-up to the 2014 Maidan coup, the CIA State Department-sponsored overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine.
	Whether you agree with that or not, them's just the facts.
	Victoria Nuland actually gave that speech about how they successfully orchestrated this using $5 billion, $5 billion with a B, in State Department and USAID subsidies to the right-wing, right-sector groups in Ukraine who did this.
	She gave that speech bragging about that $5 billion in U.S.
	financial sponsorship of the coup right at a conference that was right in front of Sponsored by Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell.
	And by the way, those are the exact companies who had invested in the oil and gas space in Ukraine.
	Chevron had signed in 2013 a $10 billion, again with a B, $10 billion partnership with Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas giant, which accounts for an overwhelming majority of Ukraine's national economic sector.
	Shell had signed a $10 billion, again, a matching $10 billion partnership with Naftogaz in Ukraine, again, with a B. So Halliburton had signed a deal with the Ukrainian government's Naftogaz in order to do all the oil and gas refining of the oil and gas base there.
	You know who held the rights to the Black Sea shale resources that were destroyed when Russia annexed Crimea?
	All the shale rights in the Black Sea basin there?
	It was Burisma.
	You know, not only was Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma, but Hunter Biden himself was on the chairman's advisory board of the NDI, the National Democratic Institute.
	You know what the NDI is?
	That's the DNC branch of the NED, which is the CIA cutout created so that the CIA could run money without it having the formal fingerprints of the CIA during the CIA 2.0 restructuring.
	So, Hunter Biden, on the board of the CIA cutout, that CIA cutout having on its board all the oil and gas co-investors, were then marshalling the CIA and the DOD, i.e.
	U.S.
	taxpayer funding, in order to prop up their investments in the region.
	And this same blueprint is replicated everywhere.
	In virtually every multinational corporation on earth, Again, it's very difficult to make sense of this space unless you're able to talk to people that understand the military, like Colonel Douglas MacGregor, people that understand the deep state and are willing to be open about it, like Mike Benz, but also you have to talk to reliable and yet ascendant political figures who may properly wield power
	One day.
	It's quite likely that Tulsi Gabbard will end up with a position in, I would imagine, any Trump administration would likely use her.
	So it's interesting to hear what she feels about this most significant of issues about which we are often kept in the dark.
	Here's Tulsi Gabbard discussing the likelihood of current tensions exacerbating to the point of no return.
	Have a look.
	Having dedicated so much of your life to the American military and having dedicated so much of your life to the Democrat party, I mean, I suppose the title of your book gives a pretty clear indication where your alliances lie and how you have evolved, but you must love, to a degree, both of these institutions.
	And yet one of the main reasons you've left the Democrat party is because you say they are a party of warmongers now.
	Can you tell me how the establishment's foreign policy has become divorced from the interests of the American people, the interests of the world, and even from the interests of the American military?
	Well, thank you, first of all, just for the purpose of clarity.
	My love is for our country, and the reason why I serve in our military now for over 21 years, serving as an officer in the U.S.
	Army Reserve currently, is motivated by that love of country and wanting to be of service.
	My time over 20 years in the Democratic Party, I joined in 2002, I was 21 years old.
	I saw back then a party of Free speech, a big tent party that welcomed people with different backgrounds, different religions, different views, that stood up for civil liberties and free speech, even for people they disagreed with.
	And it was a party that fought for the little guy.
	You fast forward to where we are today, that party has become Holy unrecognizable.
	And so just as my being part of the Democratic Party was driven by my love of country and my desire to serve, so too was my decision to leave the party because it has become a party that stands diametrically opposed to the fundamental principles of freedom that make this country the great country that it is.
	I've spoken to a number of West Point veterans, military personnel, former and current, and it seems to me that there is a pervasive sentiment throughout the US military of powerful anti-establishment feeling, that they believe that the government is out of control, that numerous wars that your country has been involved in and remains involved in, either through aid or direct military involvement, are putting it Succinctly.
	Corrupt.
	Do you feel that there is a real danger that the military could become an anti-establishment force?
	That patriotism in America now means not the love of your government, but as you have described, a love of your nation.
	Distinct, discreet, and very definitively separate from your government.
	Yeah, I think that the prevailing sentiment is because oftentimes those who serve and wear the uniform, they understand the costs of the decisions that politicians make and have the clarity to be able to see that even as we have a civilian-led military, as we should, when you have politicians, too often from both political parties, who are putting their own self-interest first, who are putting the party's interest first, or as we see very often, the interests of the military-industrial complex first, Nothing could be more offensive and insulting to a service member willing to lay down their lives in service to our country, to have a politician who has the power to send us to war, not caring about our country at all, and not asking the most basic question is, is this decision
	Do we get involved in this war or that war?
	Do we go and wage this war or do we choose peace and diplomacy?
	Those decisions are not very often being made answering the question, does this actually serve our national security interests?
	Does this serve the interests and the well-being of the American people?
	We've seen how, and this is something that Congress has either allowed to happen or willingly executed, which is an increase of a transfer of power away from the legislative branch And into the executive branch, into the hands of the White House and the President of the United States.
	It's an unfortunate thing because our system of governance, of course, is set up with three co-equal branches of government.
	But on the issue of war and peace, for example, We have been in many wars and many conflicts, and yet Congress has not exercised its constitutional responsibility to be the body that actually declares war before that action can take place.
	They've given that over to the president and the executive branch because they don't want to be held responsible for it.
	You're obviously a pretty potent and unusual individual having served in two such extraordinary institutions so successfully and for such a long time.
	How do you feel having served in Iraq, and I know that you were honoured in Kuwait and stuff, or at least for your service in Kuwait as a part of that conflict, when the definition of terrorism seems to be becoming As vague and as applicable according to utility as many of the other vague pieces of legislature that appear to be currently passing.
	I know that you have said for example that you are anti all war except for when it involves I think you maybe said islamic terrorism I know that you'll correct me if I'm wrong but when it It seems now that the powerful are able to designate as terrorists their opponents when we are increasingly seeing in my country and in yours elite deep state units that were set up to oppose terrorism abroad deployed domestically to target the threat ultimately of free speech and the kind of unified personal power that you represent and are advocating for in your book.
	Do we have to look Yes.
	even at the categorization of terror and what we mean by that,
	as well as perhaps considering the origins even of specific forms of terrorism,
	such as that which you oppose.
	Yes. Briefly on my foreign policy views, I see the world for what it is, not the fantasy land that
	I see the world for what it is, not the fantasy land that too many of our politicians view,
	too many of our politicians view, the lens that they view the world through and how they make
	the lens that they view the world through and how they make decisions that ultimately so often
	decisions that ultimately, so often end up being counter to the interests of the
	end up being counter to the interests of the American people
	to peace and to our security.
	I'm not a pacifist or an isolationist.
	I just believe that we should exhaust all diplomatic measures, means, outreach
	before we look at the potential of war.
	It should be the last result.
	Sometimes it is necessary.
	The adversary may change in different situations, but we the people, as well as those who wear the uniform,
	must be able to trust that our elected leaders are going to do all that they possibly can to prevent war
	and know that if we are sent into harm's way, it is for a mission that is necessary, that is unavoidable,
	and that serves the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.
	To your second point about the vague use of the word terrorism and how these institutions that were created, many of which were created after the terrorist attack on 9-11 here in our country, have been turned and used against our fellow Americans.
	That abuse of power, the warrantless surveillance that in the recent legislation that was passed was just strengthened that allows these intelligence agencies to target Americans.
	There was language in the TikTok bill.
	I heard you talk about the TikTok bill earlier.
	Language in the TikTok bill that included very vague language.
	The president is allowed to designate who is a foreign adversary or who may own a business that they believe is under the influence of or directed by a foreign adversary.
	Anytime you do that, anytime you put down in legislation this vague kind of language, there should be no doubt in our minds that it's just a matter of time before it's deployed against a political opponent.
	So it's not a stretch of imagination for Elon Musk to rightly say, okay, yep, today it's TikTok, tomorrow it may be X.
	There's a huge divergence between X and Meta, Facebook, Instagram, many of the Google, big tech, all these other entities that have been doing the bidding of the Biden-Harris administration that have gone along, whether willingly or feel they've threatened or bullied or whatever the case may be.
	They have been actively censoring free speech on behalf of the Biden administration.
	Elon Musk has made clear that X won't do that, and they won't play that game.
	And so, is it really a stretch of imagination for him to believe that if he's not willing to play ball, that their targets may be set on him next?
	Well, that's all we've got time for today.
	Thank you very much for joining us.
	Tomorrow's show is mind-blowing.
	Do you ever wonder how social media power could be deployed to disrupt existing political systems?
	It seems like a crazy endeavor, yet it's already happened.
	Remember when Trump first used Twitter?
	People were like, he shouldn't be allowed to use Twitter!
	And now we have presidents just resigning on X and disappearing ethereally, never to be seen again, just to exist as a disembodied voice somewhere.
	Now we have Some, and you know I think there are a few, but perhaps the most prominent social media commentator-cum-politician is Cyprus' own Phidias, who won the popular vote to become a member of the European Parliament in his country and then promptly went about
	Revealing exactly the kind of hypocrisy and corruption we've long suspected.
	This man can call Ursula von der Leyen his boss, the woman that did private text deals with Albert Baller of Pfizer to the tune of millions, some of which may have raised questions and indeed eyebrows, particularly when you consider her husband runs a big pharma company.
	So much to explore, and I explore all of it with Phidias, who could be the future of popular politics.
	Join us tomorrow for that conversation.
	Until then, if you can, stay free.
	Switch on.

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