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April 13, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

02:06:04

Sidebar with Pedro Gonzalez - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	We're going to be seeing more of this universal base income.
	The people on that bus are going to be people who are actually going to be working.
	As opposed to Americans, we're having a serious problem hiring even here.
	Everywhere we go, people are having a hard time finding people that will take a job.
	When are you going to talk about the delivery guys, the dishwashers, the babysitters, the lawnmowers?
	Let them in legally.
	If they come here, they get the papers, you let them in.
	They can't just walk in and say, yeah, I'm here now.
	Each of them had some kind of NGO, some kind of, you know, organization.
	All right.
	Coming up, Biden's up.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Good evening, people.
	Sorry, I was late and I screwed up.
	I don't know if the audio on that was way too low.
	But I tweeted out that this was going to...
	This is Geraldo Rivera's Kelly Osbourne.
	Mr. Trump, who's going to clean your toilets?
	Take on immigration.
	I don't understand.
	I'm starting off with a rant for no good reason.
	I see this while I'm jogging.
	I have to get off the treadmill and record it before I lose it.
	I don't understand.
	I mean, I do understand.
	I do not fathom how people can think this is their view on immigration.
	Who's your delivery guys, your landscapers, your babysitters?
	Donald Trump.
	If you close immigration, who's going to clean your toilets?
	And then you see everyone on The View, if you haven't seen that clip, Kelly Osbourne saying out loud what everyone on that show is thinking in their heads, go look it up.
	It is...
	Cringe is not the word.
	It's devastatingly honest, and it's only when it's said out loud that people realize how ridiculously offensive a view this is of immigration.
	You need to support this type of immigration, because if you don't, Who's going to mow your lawns?
	Who's going to babysit your kids?
	Who's going to deliver your Uber Eats when you sit at home at night?
	Like the fat cat that you are.
	Thank goodness you have people to exploit for what you perceive to be, in a way, subhuman jobs.
	You need immigration for this because no American would take these jobs.
	My labor professor in university said these jobs are not intended.
	To be life jobs.
	They're not intended to be careers.
	They're intended to be, by and large, training jobs through which you learn and then you move up in experience and therefore income.
	Whereas now they're treated as these are supposed to be life jobs that you can make a living off of.
	And if you can't support a family off of these things, then somehow the problem is you're not getting paid enough for certain...
	Entry-level jobs that are supposed to be training by nature.
	But now, in order to ensure that you have a free labor force of people who you can freely exploit for these jobs to keep the wages low because, hey, it's better than nothing, that's how Geraldo Rivera and the like view immigration.
	All right, random rant, and I'm not going to keep it for much longer than this because I see Pedro Gonzalez is in the background.
	Barnes is in the background.
	Who do we bring in first?
	Oh, hold on.
	Yeah, let's see.
	Are we demonetized?
	Let's see.
	Let's see.
	I think, are we?
	It doesn't matter if we are people.
	We're still green.
	Good.
	But if we're going to get warned, we are talking about politics tonight and stuff.
	I've been watching a lot of Pedro's interviews, a lot of his podcast appearances.
	I need to know where he gets his information because he's a very, very smart person.
	Pedro, I'll go to battle, sir.
	Hi.
	You set the bar higher than I would like by introducing me as a very smart person.
	But thanks for having me.
	Thank you for being here.
	This is going to be amazing.
	I'm going to bring in Robert.
	I think I'm going to go like this, so that if I bring up a chat, it'll cover only my face, which I think might be, you know, some people might like.
	Pedro, elevator pitch.
	We're going to get into some childhood stuff and how you got to where you are, but elevator pitch for anybody watching who may not know who you are.
	It hurts me to say this, but I am in fact a journalist, and I write for Chronicles Magazine, and that's really it.
	There's not a whole lot of credentials behind me.
	I just have a pen that seems to be effective, and that's it.
	We can talk more about the background stuff like you said later, but I mean, I think this is why my case is kind of unusual for people because, I mean, I really...
	I don't have any kind of institutional incubation behind me.
	I didn't spend time in the Heritage Foundation or anything like that.
	Growing up in the conservative movement, I really kind of broke into this probably in 2016, 2017.
	So yeah, I'm a writer for Chronicles Magazine.
	And I guess first question, if I may ask, how old are you?
	Where are you from, born and raised, parents, childhood stuff?
	So I'm 31. And I was born and raised in San Diego, California, but I've lived in Ohio since 2019.
	I don't miss California.
	It's a nice place to grow up, but it's just impossible to, I think, start a family and really thrive there.
	It's hard everywhere, it seems like, but it's much harder in California.
	So, yeah, I came out here to buy a house, settle down, start a family.
	I actually...
	Part of the move was to finish my degree at Ashland University, which has a really good political science program.
	But I had to drop out because I got so busy with work.
	And the irony is that part of the reason I went back to school was actually to be taken seriously.
	Because I kept hitting this wall where I was being told by people, like, well, you know, your arguments are good.
	Your writing is effective.
	But why should anybody take you seriously?
	You don't have any credentials.
	But then over time, that just kind of stopped being a problem.
	So I was very lucky.
	What did your parents do?
	Any siblings?
	Yeah.
	So my father passed away a few years ago.
	And my mom is still in California.
	And I've got one sister that's in California as well.
	And my mom, she's retired now.
	And my dad...
	Kind of just worked until the day that he died.
	So a long life, long productive life.
	He worked a lot of different jobs.
	The name for the union job, for people that carry the loads for stonemasons, I think Hawk something, I don't remember what it's called.
	Do you know what I'm talking about, Barnes?
	Yes, but I don't remember the name.
	Yeah, so he was that for a while.
	But by the end, he was basically just retired as well.
	Like I said, I don't have a remarkable background, or at least an institutional background.
	Now, name Pedro Gonzales.
	What's the ancestry of your family?
	Both my parents are from Mexico.
	Whereabouts in Mexico?
	My dad is from...
	And my mom is from Donatiko, but she grew up between Donatiko and Ixtlapa.
	And my dad came over in the 50s, I think.
	So he had been here for quite a while.
	Well, at least in my short time frame of things.
	But yeah, I don't really know how I ended up the way that I am.
	If I may, so if your dad came over in the 50s, he was an older man?
	I mean, how old was he when he passed away?
	Yeah, he was...
	Man, we're getting all into my family life now.
	Yeah, he had me later in life.
	We'll just leave it at that.
	Which I guess is good because it shows that I've got good genes in the family.
	I don't know.
	And so you're born and raised in America.
	Both parents?
	Yeah, they're both...
	We're in America.
	I was born in San Diego, California.
	My dad came over legally, and then he helped my mom come over as well, I think in the 70s.
	And yeah, I mean, it was very strange looking back on this stuff because people have asked, how did you get the way that you are and the views that you are?
	Was it your upbringing or something?
	Was your dad a diehard Republican?
	The answer is no.
	My dad, his favorite president, he told me, was Ike.
	He thought Ike was, not for any particular political reasons, he just thought Ike was a hard man.
	And he liked Reagan, I think, for the same reasons.
	He liked the kind of machismo of these Republican presidents.
	But I did not grow up in a political household at all.
	My parents were just a typical socially conservative, first-generation Hispanic immigrants.
	And religious growing up?
	Catholic.
	That was a huge part of the social conservatism.
	Isn't that obligatory?
	It seems like it, yeah.
	It always reminds me of the...
	Oh, I'm blanking.
	Who was it that wrote the book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?
	It sounds so familiar.
	My Angelou.
	When they were commemorating the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, she had a big presentation and she asked for all the black atheists to stand up.
	Joke, obviously, because there were none.
	But similar for the Mexican-American tradition.
	So what did lead to your interest in political science and politics?
	It came super late.
	I mean, the thing that was just always part of my life was just reading and writing, but it was always kind of just nothing serious or published.
	I just enjoyed reading old books and writing down my thoughts.
	I wrote kind of like...
	I'm sure that there's somewhere, but I wrote kind of accounts of some of the stuff that my family went through.
	And I just realized that I liked writing.
	But again, it was all kind of like personal things.
	I didn't keep a diary or anything like that.
	But every now and again, if I felt like I was really frustrated with something, I would sometimes just kind of sit down and put my thoughts on paper.
	And I always thought it was really therapeutic.
	But anyways, the political side of things, that didn't come until much later.
	It was really the 2016 election that kind of brought that to the fore.
	And initially, I was, you know, your typical California liberal.
	I was for abortion.
	I was just really irreverent, you know, because that's what everyone thinks is like the cool thing to be.
	When you're a California lib, it's just to be really irreverent.
	But then looking back on it, you realize that you actually had all the same opinions that like the major corporations, the major medium organizations have.
	So it's actually not that counterculture.
	But that was me.
	And I've described myself as a Bernie bro.
	I think people read way too much into that.
	But by Bernie bro, I just meant that I liked the way, I liked the belligerence with which Bernie Sanders spoke about the ruling class.
	And that was really it.
	I wasn't an activist or an organizer or anything like that.
	People have tried to find pictures of me at rallies or stuff like that.
	But there's literally nothing.
	I was not politically active at all.
	I just thought, yeah, this guy is saying the right things about the elites, right?
	And then after Trump won, I started to realize that actually they sound very similar.
	And at least initially, Bernie had a kind of similar immigration platform.
	Remember that he called Open Borders a Koch proposal, or a Koch policy, in a discussion with Ezra Klein, who got kind of angry about it, because Bernie just kind of shut him down and said, "No, no, no.
	Open Borders is a right-wing Koch position." And then it just kind of clicked.
	Like, Trump and Bernie sound really the same in this kind of populism.
	I had no idea really what populism was, but, you know, I think that is a big aspect of this.
	And then over time, just like through questioning things and realizing that my friends on the left were not really open for questions, I just kind of clicked like, oh, you know, I've been kind of like living in a bubble my whole life.
	And then I started to basically just defend and support Trump, writing for places like the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller.
	And my first like...
	My actual writing gig was with American Greatness.
	So you said you dropped out of university.
	Did you complete a degree in university or did you go straight into freelance acquiring your knowledge?
	I was writing and then like I said, I kind of hit a wall where I had an editor, actually Eric, I'll just say his name, Eric Owens at the Daily Caller.
	He's no longer there.
	He kind of went insane.
	And he I remember that he replied to me once when I sent him a pitch, and he said, "This article is..." I probably still have the email.
	He basically just said, "It's a good article.
	It's a good argument.
	It's well-written, but you don't have any credentials, so why should anybody take you seriously?" And then I got published by the Washington Examiner after that, and then I went back to Owens, and I just kind of showed it to him, like, "Is his credentials enough for you?" Because the Examiner is mainstream.
	And then the caller published me, but because of that experience, Someone who was kind of helping me, you know, understand the industry said, well, you should, you know, you should study political science because that, unfortunately, that piece of paper does help.
	But like I said, when I went back to school, I was still writing full-time and working full-time.
	And at a certain point, I actually was getting so much work, like doing so much writing and so much other stuff that I actually didn't have time to finish the political science program.
	I'd like to go back.
	I mean, It was one of the rare, nice experiences that I had with an educational institution because the program is basically just a kind of book club where you just read Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon.
	You read the Federalist Papers.
	That's really it.
	Most of it is actually writing.
	The standardized testing, at least with this department at the university.
	It doesn't really exist.
	Most of the exams were actually essays.
	So we would study texts and then have to write essays on them for time, as opposed to answering, you know, like on a Scantron.
	So it was a good experience.
	And I wish I could go back and finish it, actually.
	But, you know, I've got two kids and I'm writing more than full time now.
	In terms of any other careers or work paths other than writing?
	No.
	I mean, again, this is...
	What makes me, I think, kind of an outlier is before writing, I was anything but whatever you would call me now in terms of speaking and talking and being seen as a public person.
	Before I wanted to do this, the thing that I wanted to do was actually, man, this is like a whole other story.
	The thing that I wanted to do was enlist in the military.
	And specifically, I wanted to go into special operations.
	That was always what I wanted to do as a kid.
	But I was born with a disease that is totally benign, like it hasn't slowed me down, but it's permanently disqualifying from, I think, pretty much every branch.
	And I tried.
	I tried with the Marines.
	I tried with the Navy.
	I tried with the Army.
	And in every case, I was told, like, sorry.
	You would need to get a waiver and it would be like the tallest of tall orders because just the bureaucracy and I don't know.
	It's bizarre, right?
	Because it seems like the military needs people and they have a hard time fighting them.
	But I was basically being told the opposite, kind of like, well, we have so many candidates.
	Maybe that was just what recruiters were saying.
	I have no idea.
	But I spent several years actually talking to congressmen, getting letters of recommendation from members of the community.
	Nothing.
	I mean, I spent the better part of like seven years trying over and over to get in because that was the only thing I wanted to do.
	And I couldn't because I just couldn't defeat the Med Bureau, right?
	And that was around...
	After the final door was kind of shut, I just realized I need to do something else.
	But in that almost decade and seven years...
	What I did for work to support myself was basically just like, I mean, I did everything from like armed security to working, you know, kind of in a similar construction capacity that my dad did, just carrying heavy stuff on job sites.
	I mean, I just worked, I don't know, just these regular normal jobs.
	And so coming into writing, it just, I think.
	It seemed like a disadvantage at first, but I think it's actually been kind of a blessing because it's like I have the perspective of normal people behind me.
	Now I'm dying to know what the condition is, but I don't think I should try quite that.
	No, it's fine.
	Colorblindness.
	What's that?
	Is it colorblindness?
	No, no, no.
	It's really rare.
	I won the wrong lottery.
	It's got different names.
	Multiple hereditary cystosis or synovial osteocardomitosis.
	And basically, it's a genetic bone disorder where you just grow extra bones.
	They're called osteolites.
	They're basically just extra bones.
	Doctors will refer to them as tumors, osteolites, spurs.
	There's different names people use for them.
	But the issue is that they tend to grow new joints, which is why I think the military, they look at you as an investment, right?
	The average seal is probably valued around two, it's several million dollars basically.
	The military looks at it like, well, are we going to get our money out of you?
	Or is your body going to break down sooner than later?
	And I think that's part of the reason why it was just so difficult for someone like me to get in.
	And there's also no way to hide it.
	It's not like I could just lie like people with asthma or colorblindness do.
	You know, it's like I have 15 surgical incisions, some of which are like seven or eight inches long on my legs.
	They physically saw them off the spurs?
	I think one of my friends, I believe, had a similar issue where you would see it and they would saw it off and they would grow elsewhere and you saw them off as they come up.
	There's no treatment.
	They just literally have to saw them off.
	That's it.
	There's no medicine that they can give you to slow them down.
	They stop growing when you stop growing.
	It kind of solves itself at a point.
	Until that time, the only way to remove them, if they're bothering you, is to just go in there and hack them off.
	I had a pound of bone removed from my right femur in my last operation.
	My doctor told me I had the worst case he'd ever seen of it, but I was always really active.
	Saying this, again, it sounds almost unbelievable, especially if you only know me from journalism and writing.
	But, like, I had letters of recommendation from people in the community that knew, like, what I was doing in terms of, like, you know, the physical fitness stuff.
	And they were vouching for me, saying, like, look, he can do this.
	Like, just give him a chance.
	But I just couldn't get past it.
	But, yeah, I mean, even that is, like, so strange to look back on because if you follow my writing, then you know how I feel about the Pentagon and how I feel about our foreign policy.
	So it's almost like, you know, everything happens for a reason, which I don't think is a cope to say that.
	I mean, Really, seriously.
	If you follow my writing, you know how I feel about this stuff now.
	You're quite prominent and you have a substantial following and are well-respected, I'll say despite a lack of formal credentials.
	There may be other ways to get this, but typically it's either through insight, accuracy, and or predictive capabilities.
	What was the piece?
	What was the work that you did that thrust you into the respected limelight of the social media's, the journalist world?
	Interestingly, the time that I got onto Tucker, which is the biggest show in America, that actually kind of corresponded with me becoming more critical of not just the Republican Party, but also of the Trump administration.
	The people that only know me from the last part of the Trump administration think that I'm a never-Trumper or something.
	But if you go back to the archives of American Greatness, it's just like a full-throated defense of Donald Trump basically until late 2019 is when I started to realize I don't know what Trump is thinking, but I know that his personnel suck and that the people in his administration are undermining him.
	And basically enabling his worst tendencies, whereas I think he has good instincts, but he also has kind of bad, he has vices, like his ego, you know?
	And it can be easy to manipulate someone like that.
	And when you look who's around him, like, you see the problem here.
	And so that was after I started to, you know, go after people like Jared Kushner and stuff like that, that is actually what kind of...
	After that point is when I got on Tucker and then I started to do a lot more media hits.
	Because before that, it was like the odd podcast, you know, and just a ton of writing.
	But that was really, I think, the turning point.
	I think part of it was that a lot of people were feeling what I was writing.
	And, like, I wrote a piece called, I think it's just called America Has a Jared Kushner Problem.
	And it was kind of a deep dive into how Jared Kushner had kind of hijacked policy in the White House and how he was kind of part of this oppositional camp in the administration that did not represent the MAGA agenda.
	And I remember that Ann Coulter tweeted that article like 10 times.
	She made at least 10 tweets quoting from my article.
	And that was also a huge thing for me.
	And I think Michelle Malkin also did, too.
	Like, a bunch of high-profile people were sharing it.
	And from that point on, I noticed that Ann Coulter started following me and kind of, like, keeping track of my work on the people in the administration who were, you know, obviously kind of hijacking the agenda.
	So that seemed to be the turning point for me.
	Somebody in our live chat at vivabarneslaw.locals.com asks whether or not you're bilingual.
	And in that same capacity, What were some of your intellectual influences, whether American, foreign, historic, current?
	Because that kind of blends into the question.
	Yeah, so my Spanish is really deteriorated.
	I pretty much only speak it when I'm talking to my mom now.
	It's pretty shameful.
	But on the other hand, I think about this study that Pepperdine did in the 90s, and they found that...
	By, I think, like the mid-70s, most Latinos in California, especially specifically, I think, Southern California, had fully, what they wrote, assimilated into Protestant culture and only spoke English.
	So I guess, in a way, I'm kind of a throwback to that.
	But to answer your question, I mean, I speak English and shameful Spanish at this point.
	And in terms of intellectual I'm not one of these people that will tell you I'm an Aristotelian or I'm a Platonist or something.
	All of these different people have influence on me.
	That's certainly true.
	But the most influential people on me are actually very modern, like James Burnham and paleo-conservatives like Sam Francis.
	And I think...
	What struck me about them was actually their openness to their abandonment of ideology.
	I think that's probably what Burnham would say.
	Burnham, if you don't know who he is, he was a former Trotskyite.
	He was very influential at National Review, at least on the anti-communist side of things.
	But he was a former Trotskyite.
	Debated with, I think, Trotsky himself about basically the nature of the Soviet Union.
	And then he became like a leading right-wing figure.
	But Burnham's thing was that he has this, I think I would call it a famous passage from the introduction to his book, The Machiavellians, which is a hugely influential book on me, where he says that only by abandoning all ideology can we begin to see the world in man.
	And what he meant was, we have to take the blinders off of conservative, liberal, Marxist, capitalist, whatever.
	And we have to look at things actually as they are, as opposed to how we would like to imagine they are.
	And Francis was the leading disciple of Burnham.
	He passed away in 2005, I think.
	And yeah, I think those two in particular have been really influential.
	And Francis was the same way.
	I mean, Francis would quote from Marx.
	He included one of his best columns with a quote from Marx, saying something like, "Another freedom fighter said that all we have to lose is our chains." It's an obvious reference to Marx, and here you have a guy who's considered a leading right-wing thinker.
	Apart from them, probably Machiavelli as another modern, just because it's consistent with the whole Burnhamism and paleoconservatism.
	Let me ask you this, because I went through a lot of your interviews or your podcasts earlier today.
	We might be in the same spheres of information.
	So what you say, I sort of have already heard, but it's a next level of insight.
	It's a next level of understanding of situations.
	What are your sources of information?
	How much do you read in a week in order to draft and write what you write?
	Because you have...
	It's not to flatter you and it's not to kiss your butt at all.
	And there's no butt.
	You can tell when someone just has another level of understanding that's not prevalent among the blue checkmark community.
	So where do you get your information from?
	Honestly, a lot of stuff I will see on Twitter first.
	And I think it's just that speaks to the quality of the accounts that I follow.
	But I read a lot of different sources.
	I read the Wall Street Journal.
	I read the Washington Post.
	I hate all these publications, but I read them and I use them for my own work.
	But as far as how to understand things, I think that goes back to the Burnhamism that I'm talking about, about basically trying to look beneath the surface of things and Trying to understand people and events as they really are,
	even if that makes me uncomfortable, and kind of come into grips with that, whatever the conclusion might be.
	I think saying that out loud doesn't sound very revolutionary.
	It doesn't sound like a radical idea.
	But I think a lot of people in this industry, at least, don't actually do that.
	They kind of proceed.
	They start somewhere, but they already know where they want to go.
	They already have a kind of bias that blinds them.
	They don't even realize they have it, right?
	And I will talk about that in my writing.
	I don't accuse people of having a secret agenda and an ulterior motive.
	I think self-deception is a real thing.
	I was actually thinking about this today.
	Walter Durante famously denied the crimes of Stalin.
	Did he do that because he was evil?
	I mean, you could say the act in itself was evil, or did Durante really not?
	Did he really believe the things that he was writing about what the Soviet Union was doing, about what Stalin was doing?
	I think these are important questions that people don't ask themselves.
	Like I said, they proceed with a bias, they already have a conclusion for their story, and they don't really actually want to engage with things as they are because it's scary, because you might find that your world gets turned upside down.
	So I like to think that I'm not afraid of that.
	I guess the evidence that I have is the fact that I, you know, ended up criticizing Trump, but as someone who actually believed in the agenda, you know, someone who does believe in America First, like, sincerely.
	And I wasn't afraid of attacking his administration, knowing that I was going to get tons of hate for it from other conservatives.
	And I did.
	But I also, like I said, people would, you know, tell me, like, thank you for writing this.
	Thank you for not being afraid of...
	Confronting reality, basically.
	Yeah, because what you're describing is sometimes I call political realism or realpolitik, Mearsheimer being a principal advocate of that school of thought in the international studies.
	So in particular, in the context of Ukraine, you've been one of the independent voices advocating a...
	Realpolitik perspective of what's taking place rather than the kind of mythology of our media-made candidate like something out of a Marvel movie with Zelensky.
	I guess I can't use the word Z anymore depending on where I'm at.
	We're broadcasting in Germany.
	I've got to change his name apparently.
	That's how effective the Russian propaganda was on just using some letters to get people terrified of letters.
	What would you attribute beyond Looking at things from a realpolitik perspective and trying to get beneath the surface, what else would you attribute your ability to have an independent perspective on Ukraine when everybody except Tucker at Fox News is singing from the Rupert Murdoch warmongering script?
	When most people were surprised that a lot of their conservative talk radio people, they shouldn't have been.
	Mark Levin is still defending the Iraq war, both of them.
	You know, so on and so forth.
	But they thought of these people as independent voices and independent speakers.
	And a lot of them are kind of shocked to discover they're all singing from the same hymn book.
	Laura Ingraham's kind of singing from that hymn book.
	No surprise Sean Hannity is.
	There's a reason he wears that little CIA pin and the rest.
	And we can get into some of that aspects of John Bolton and Trump and how Hannity took them for a ride.
	But to what do you ascribe your ability to go beyond?
	The institutional narrative, the official narrative, the media narrative about a conflict like Ukraine, when you know by doing so, you'll be ruthlessly attacked as a Putin apologist.
	You sing the Russian national anthem in secret at home and all that jazz.
	It's the right thing to do.
	Again, it's funny because you say these things out loud and they don't ever sound groundbreaking, but that's really it.
	It's the right thing to do.
	And I don't care.
	Obviously, you have to be smart about it, which I try to always be tactical and wise about how I approach these things, especially, you know, I wrote about the Marupo theater bombing and kind of looked at the evidence that suggests that maybe this isn't what the media says it is, like so many of the other claims that come out of Ukraine.
	Like, that stuff comes at a high risk to me, but it's the right thing to do, and somebody has to do it.
	You know, if no one does it, who else?
	Imagine if Tucker wasn't around.
	In a lot of ways, he's kind of like the spearhead of this stuff because someone with a platform as big as him, I'm not just saying this because I think he's a great guy and I go on a show, but seriously, try to imagine what would we do without someone like that with a massive platform that kind of makes it okay or encourages other people to ask the same questions, right?
	And that, obviously, on a much, much, much, much smaller level, that's how I see what I'm doing.
	It's the right thing to do.
	And by doing it, I will encourage other people to ask these questions and go against the grain.
	And the stakes demand that I take the risk.
	And obviously the stakes are another disastrous war.
	And whatever you think is happening in Ukraine now, it's all bad.
	It can only get worse if this turns into a shooting war between US-led NATO and Russia.
	There's just no question that the amount of bloodshed that you're seeing now will seem...
	Much, you know, much nicer by comparison.
	I don't mean like literally nicer, but you'll, I mean, it's like Bill Buckley, right?
	I actually just published an article in the Washington Times about this.
	In 2003, the National Review wrote a cover article by David Frum called Unpatriotic Conservatives, infamous 6,500-word screed.
	Where he denounced all the anti-interventionist people on the left and right as basically racist, anti-Semites, and above all, unpatriotic.
	And in a subsequent issue of National Review, the magazine had to qualify Fromm's allegations because it was just so insane.
	It's funny that they even published it if they had to qualify it later, right?
	It's like, didn't someone see what was wrong with this?
	Just denouncing everyone who's calling for restraint?
	You know, un-American.
	And a year after that cover story, National Review, Buckley flat out said, if I had known now, if I knew what would happen after the invasion, I would not have supported the war.
	One year after National Review denounces all of the anti-interventionists as unpatriotic, Buckley comes out as an anti-interventionist and says, it was a mistake.
	I wish I didn't support it.
	Oh, sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	Go ahead.
	No, no, no.
	I was going to bring up one clip because it's something I saw.
	It came out of a few...
	I think it spurned from a spurt.
	It was born out of a tweet that you put out today, I think.
	I just want to share this clip from Madeleine Albright talking about the cost of war.
	We have heard half a million children have died.
	I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
	And, you know, is the price worth it?
	I think this is a very hard choice.
	We think the price is worth it.
	It is a moral question, but the moral question is even a larger one.
	that we owe to the American people and to the American military and to the other countries in the region that this man not be a threat.
	That's like, I was, oh, I hope I didn't just kick myself out of the stream.
	I'm still here.
	Good.
	I'm I don't know where that came up today, but it's like, apply it mutandus mutandus to what's going on in Russia and Ukraine.
	In terms of when you say, Pedro, that it can only get worse.
	And people in the chat, people out there can say, okay, you have no credentials, so take your opinion for what it's worth.
	But if people want to expand their horizons and actually hear another voice, digest the information as you want to afterwards.
	But when you talk about it only getting worse, and I saw an interview with you, yes, Ukrainians are dying.
	Innocent civilians are being killed.
	And your position, your analysis, understanding is it's the result of failed foreign policy.
	Explain that for people out there who might say you can say everyone is bad in here without being a Putin puppet and to truly understand why things are happening.
	Just elaborate on that for people who might still be.
	I think a good place to actually go is Kosovo.
	Because it actually ties into what's happening in Ukraine, and it ties into Iraq, actually.
	And I think, by the way, what's remarkable about that Albright interview is that she didn't even question the number.
	She didn't even push back on the number of children that allegedly died, right?
	Because that's actually up for dispute.
	Some people think it's lower, some people think it's higher.
	She didn't even flinch.
	It's like, yeah, no, it was the right thing to do.
	I think that's incredible.
	It just shows...
	You know, what lack of conscience these people have.
	And Albright was also the architect or one of the chief architects of the intervention in former Yugoslavia under the Clinton administration.
	So very similar to now, the United States intervened on the basis of humanitarianism, right?
	We had to stop this Kosovo war.
	And so the United States led a NATO bombing campaign that actually ended up killing 500 civilians.
	It bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which is why the Chinese actually scoffed at NATO recently when NATO said that China has to join the West in denouncing Russia's violation of international law by invading Ukraine.
	China explicitly said, we remember who bombed our embassy.
	We remember who violated international law when, against even the UN Security Council, the United States led NATO into this bombing of a sovereign country.
	China has a long memory.
	The embassy got hit by five GPS-guided bombs.
	So that's why the Chinese think it was for some reason on purpose.
	And it killed three civilians.
	But I mean, this is why people laughed when Hillary Clinton tweeted that if Putin doesn't want to be called a war criminal, he shouldn't bomb hospitals.
	The Clinton administration bombed a hospital and killed at least three patients in Belgrade.
	This is also why Serbians hate NATO and are rallying to the Russians right now.
	But importantly...
	In 2014, Putin actually said that for him, the thing that turned him against the West, because it's not like he was born, you know, branded, like prophesized to bring about this war and was just born with a grudge against the West.
	Like he said, like the thing that impressed upon me that a crisis would someday come was actually the bombing of Yugoslavia because it was traumatic for them.
	And it was traumatic for China and Serbians as well.
	So Kosovo, under the watch of Washington, actually becomes a breeding ground for Islamic extremism.
	There's actually a very good article in the New York Times that talks about this.
	There's a statue of Bill Clinton in Kosovo next to a mosque, and basically while Washington is watching this democracy grow in Kosovo, The Saudi Arabian money and influence turns Kosovo into a hotbed of jihadism.
	And when the United States invades Iraq, you know, topples the Saddam, liquidates the Saddam regime, and then creates this power vacuum that ISIS and other groups eventually fill, the country in Europe that sends the most jihadists to fight for these Islamic extremists in the Middle East, it's Kosovo.
	It's incredible, right?
	Just running from one failure to another.
	And the people that are responsible for it, they're remembered as heroes.
	Like Albright is, you know, a hero of American foreign policy.
	Like the Bush people, like the neoconservatives are back and forth, like they never did anything wrong.
	But it's actually incredible to think about it like that.
	That our intervention in Kosovo, you know, turned that place into an incubation chamber for Islamic extremism.
	And then our intervention in Iraq.
	The extremists there benefited by recruiting from Kosovo.
	It actually makes you crazy if you think about it enough because, again, no one is held responsible for this stuff.
	And you can go back even further to the Iran-Iraq war when the US intelligence knew that Saddam Hussein was using weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons.
	He was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops.
	But the Reagan administration...
	Became aware of an imminent mass attack by the Iranians and decided that the Iranians cannot win.
	So what did the CIA do?
	The CIA made a decision that the United States was going to, well, not the CIA, but the US government made a decision that our top officials decided that we were going to start sharing military intelligence with the Iraqis.
	Knowing what was going to happen, we knew that the Iraqis were going to use sarin gas on the Iranians.
	And at the same time this was happening, the Iranians are trying to build a case to prove that the Iraqis are using weapons of mass destruction against them.
	They're banned before the UN.
	And the United States, the CIA, our intelligence organizations are sitting on the evidence, staying quiet while we're enabling the Iraqis to do this.
	And I think at least four instances, the Iraqis used sarin on Iranian troops, killing, in every case, hundreds or thousands of people.
	And at the same time that U.S. intelligence was flowing into the Iraqi military, they started gassing civilians, Kurds.
	No one has been held accountable for this.
	And these are all the same type of person that is now demanding that we cannot question U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine.
	I mean, it really does.
	To go back to the beginning where you asked me, why do you do what you do?
	That's why.
	Moral indignation.
	I mean it when I say I hate these people.
	I think they're evil.
	And someone has to do something, even if that's just like writing and talking about it.
	Because everything I just said, by the way, there's an article in Foreign Policy about how the United States enabled the United States government, to be clear.
	Obviously, your average American would not want to have anything to do with this.
	And incredibly, U.S. intelligence actually knew.
	This is all in the Foreign Policy article.
	They looked at declassified CIA documents and did interviews with former intel people.
	The US intelligence knew that if Iran found out we were enabling the Iraqis to use chemical weapons against them, that it would make Iran hate the United States.
	In other words, our government knew that it was making us more hated and less safe, but they did it anyways.
	It's really maddening when you really think about this stuff long enough.
	You just dropped a ton of information that most people who are not remotely aware, it's so much they're going to say, I can't accept it.
	I can only go six months in the past, Putin bad, American government good, and you can trust the media.
	How frustrating is it to try to have this discourse with people?
	Or, I mean, I guess in what you do, you don't actually have the individual one-on-one.
	You put out an article and you just hope people read it.
	I just keep saying it.
	I mean, I think I repeat myself a lot.
	I usually will write about the same subject from different angles because I really think that you just need to hammer this stuff.
	I refuse to shut up.
	So, I mean, if you follow me on Twitter, you know that.
	But I really think that repetition with this stuff is key.
	And it's also important because we're not just doing this to collect a paycheck or to get followers on Twitter.
	I think this stuff is genuinely important.
	I have a sense of tragedy.
	I do actually feel deeply sad that this stuff happened, precisely because I love this country.
	I am actually very patriotic.
	And I don't like the idea of people patrioteering, that is, using fake patriotism or a really messed up, bizarro version of what they call patriotism to do this kind of stuff.
	To use the American flag to commit these crimes against civilians and then to hide the evidence of that, that makes me really angry.
	And so that's why I will just repeat myself and attack the same issue from different positions.
	I obviously prefer to focus on domestic stuff, but right now it's like the Ukraine will not allow us to focus on domestic stuff.
	We're looking at a crime wave, we're looking at surging costs of food and fuel, we're looking at a crisis on the southern border.
	There was a shooting in Brooklyn that looks a lot like another kind of Kenosha incident.
	None of that really seems to matter.
	The only thing that matters is our unwavering loyalty to this campaign in Ukraine.
	It's just insane.
	And unfortunately, if you're kind of in my shoes, it's just almost inescapable at this point.
	Yeah, no doubt.
	I mean, I think that I've been a little bit surprised.
	Knowing the history of fake propaganda and fake news and the tendency of people to rally and do stupid stuff in war, I knew enough of that to anticipate that.
	I mean, we locked people up because their granddaddy came from Japan.
	We took away their businesses, their religion, their church, their families, everyone else in the Supreme Court said, yay.
	We had red palmer raids of locking up the wrong people for supposedly being communist when they weren't even the right people we were locking up.
	We locked up a congressman because he opposed World War I. We locked up a presidential candidate because he opposed World War I. So while cognizant of that history, there's something about social media that has really amplified this propagandistic effect and impact.
	Social media was designed for emotional manipulation in the way their algorithms work.
	It was designed to addict people and intensify responses and almost have topics like this.
	It's reinforced woke culture and all of the insanity of it.
	But it's been fascinating to watch how it can propagate war propaganda.
	And people believe the dumbest stuff.
	People that follow Scott Adams have the dumbest set of beliefs on the planet about the war.
	They think Ukraine is winning.
	Whereas it's fascinating, the independent voices that are percolating up, independent of...
	You and some others are some like random military analysts.
	They're people that aren't even ideological that are just saying, okay, this story doesn't make sense.
	This story doesn't make sense.
	This institutional propaganda is not.
	It's like all the data nerds that showed up during the COVID pandemic.
	They were like, hold on a second.
	Something's just totally AWOL here.
	And to what extent has from what you, I mean, I have been surprised in part.
	I'm not surprised that Fox has never seen a war they didn't like institutionally.
	Rupert Murdoch has the New York Post spreading fake news on a daily basis now.
	Ironic because their real news of Hunter Biden's laptop was disguised and misrepresented as fake news.
	Now they're actually spreading real fake news.
	And some of it's obvious fake news.
	It's pitiful.
	But you have New York Post reporters taking something from a bombing that everybody knows was a Ukrainian bombing in Donetsk and pretending it's a Russian bombing.
	Taking someone that was a Ukrainian victim of Ukrainian Assoff battalion units documented three weeks before by Patrick on the ground.
	And they re-reported as a Russian atrocity.
	The CIA is no longer as good at deep state fakes as they used to be.
	And Zelensky looks like what he's...
	But have you been surprised that...
	I mean, every day we get a false flag, every day we get fake propaganda, and it gets just ramped up beyond insanity on social media.
	Yeah, no, I think it's unprecedented.
	I wrote an article for my substack called World War Reddit about this, about just the scale.
	And just immensity of the fake news.
	I think you can call it propaganda and obviously there is a lot of that, this kind of deliberate attempts to mislead Americans and especially to act as a kind of tripwire, getting us involved somehow.
	But I think the really incredible thing is that a lot of it actually seems like organic misinformation in the sense that people are sharing things that are not true because they want them to believe.
	They want to believe it's true.
	People want to believe the ghost of Kiev.
	I think Kiev is actually the Russian pronunciation.
	It's the historic one.
	The Ukrainian government...
	I mean, we kind of helped build that.
	The CIA came up with the idea.
	Well, the Germans started it.
	The Nazis started it.
	So much of what is Ukrainian nationalism...
	You'll see somebody say, I'm Ukrainian and I can tell you the true story.
	That's like asking a German who is pro-Nazi to tell you the true story of the Aryan race and the German history and that garbage.
	Most of their history is...
	What they think of as history has been narrative created in large part.
	I mean, it started out with the Nazis and the Polish Empire, and you can get to stuff like that.
	But large parts of it come, like where the Russians say that aspects of current Ukrainian anti-Russian sentiment is a product of foreign entangling governments and societies.
	Actually has a lot of historical merit.
	It doesn't explain all of it by any stretch, but there's a lot of it there, going back to the Polish Empire and then after that.
	The Nazis were the ones who redefined the Soviet famine as a Ukrainian genocide.
	Stalin just hated you because he was Ukrainian, not because he was starving people because he's both incompetent and hates Kulaks and Gossaks.
	Then created this whole narrative in the late 80s by Harvard and other institutions that reinforced that narrative.
	Because the theory was, we'll use Ukrainian nationalism to undermine Soviet control.
	And that's why we went into bed with a bunch of neo-Nazis, actual Nazis after the war.
	I mean, people like Stepan and Bandera and the rest were on Western payrolls.
	We're on German payrolls, U.S. payrolls, etc.
	So we've had a long-standing, unfortunate relationship with those kind of elements.
	Just as we went into bed, I mean, like, you look at, you're right, a lot of Yugoslavia was the script for this.
	Make fake allegations or exaggerated allegations of genocide against one particular group that's the dissident group.
	Align yourself with the group that actually aligned themselves with Nazis during World War II.
	A good number of the Bosnian Muslim units were actually joined with the Palestinian leader in Nazi units.
	They actually created their own division of the SS, just like far western Ukrainian groups did.
	They were some of the nastiest, vicious, most vile people on the planet, frankly.
	Even Nazis were...
	I'm embarrassed by the degree of grotesque violence that the Ukrainian SS units committed.
	But we did the same thing.
	Croatia, of course, had its own Nazi regime during the colluded.
	But we sided with those groups against the Serbs, who mostly fought against the Nazis, created stories and narratives that blamed the Serbs for actually what a lot of...
	Croats and Bosnians did, in the sense that they were the first group to kick out Serbs, not the other way around.
	Then told a story, a script of all the only war crimes being committed are by the Serbs, justified our intervention, and much of the unraveling of the policy impact, much of the unraveling of the actual facts wouldn't be discovered until a decade or two later, and there's still myths in large parts of, are unknown to much of the West in terms of what really happened.
	And so that is a good analogous example.
	And the same with, you know, the promotion of terrorism.
	And that goes all the way back to 1979.
	Couldn't stand the fact that our little CIA Shah project didn't work in Iran.
	Horrified by it, we go into bed with the Saudis, start to experience their own Wahhabi terrorism in 1979.
	And so we go to the Saudis and say, you know what?
	The best way to do this is to create a sectarian split within the radical Islamic terrorist movement.
	and you, the Saudis, are now going to fund Wahhabi terrorist nationalism all around the globe, including in Pakistan and Afghanistan and places like Kosovo, places like other places.
	And, of course, Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So there's all the fake news that comes out on a daily basis about the war.
	There's the complete missing context by the West.
	There's the total duplicity and hypocrisy of the people pretending to be rules enforcers.
	But the other aspect of all of this is the degree of denialism about what a, as you've articulated, no matter which side you're on, further military involvement by us only guarantees more Ukrainian deaths.
	Only guarantees more civilian deaths and could tripwire us into World War III.
	And you have serious media personalities, blue checkmark personalities, saying things like George C. Scott from Dr. Strangelove.
	Well, I'm not saying we won't get our hair must a little bit, 10 million, 20 million tops.
	You know, that kind of logic.
	Saying we could survive a nuclear war against a country like Russia that has...
	That has the kind of underwater submarines, little mini submarines, nuclear-powered submarines, without people, that can actually induce things like tsunamis.
	That's the kind of weapons Russia has been developing to protect itself over the past decade.
	Can you talk about the insanity of escalating conflict in Ukraine, just from a policy perspective, no matter which side you're on politically?
	Yeah, I think that's...
	There's a lot there.
	But basically, yes.
	I think that one thing I'll say about the nationalism side of things is that in some ways, it's a paradox, right?
	Because Ukrainian nationalism is only allowed to the extent that it actually serves anti-nationalist ends.
	As Ukraine becomes more integrated with the European Union and all that, if that's Ukraine's destiny...
	There's a transfer of sovereignty that happens out of the actual Ukrainian nation and into these bureaucratic bodies of the EU.
	And a great example of this is the fact that Hungary has been basically neutral or trying to kind of stay out of this, which is great.
	Hungary first.
	Poland, on the other hand, has been extremely aggressive towards Russia.
	And it seems like we've even had to kind of pull them back sometimes and tell them to calm down.
	But both of these countries recently got sanctioned by the EU.
	Or I should say that the European Parliament recently sided with the European Court of Justice's decision to dismiss legal challenges by Poland and Hungary asserting on one hand their sovereignty and on the other hand the supremacy of their constitutions over EU law.
	The EU said no, your laws are subordinate to the EU's and recommended sanctions against both Poland and Hungary, although Poland and Hungary are both taking in Droves of refugees.
	I think Hungary actually has taken in the most Ukrainian refugees per capita for any country in Europe.
	And they have just been condemned by the EU as they're doing.
	This is the paradox of Ukrainian nationalism.
	You know, forget to set aside the obvious, you know, problematic stuff about the extremist ideology that some of these guys have.
	It's like, do they not...
	I mean, obviously you could say, well, their immediate problem is, you know, the Russian troops.
	Okay.
	But all this time...
	Haven't they seen the writing on the wall?
	What awaits Ukraine as it surrenders its sovereignty to Davos?
	But I guess to your point, historically, this has actually been pretty common.
	This is why the British and the French encouraged the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
	The British and French promised them land independence and guidance and backed their revolting against the Ottomans.
	But before World War I was even over...
	The British and French betrayed the Arabs and secretly convened to discuss carving up the carcass of the Ottoman Empire for themselves.
	So this is another example of basically nationalism being used for imperial ends, which is in many ways, that's what's happening in Ukraine right now.
	But of course, we don't see that because we're all just, you know, focused on Putin bad.
	And that's not to say that Putin isn't a bad guy, but it's very silly to think of foreign policy like that.
	You know, oh, he's bad.
	Gaddafi was bad.
	But Libya was better off with him.
	Saddam Hussein was bad.
	But Iraq was better off with him.
	We actually made the world less safe by getting rid of bad guys, supposedly on the basis that they're bad.
	I mean, that's not really...
	So long as the deaths occur somewhere else and on foreign soil, you know, we can...
	Manuel Nalbright is willing to sacrifice 500,000 dead Iraqi children for their own good, because so long as it's there...
	Don't we owe it to American civilians?
	One story, which is in the news now, big time, is the bombing of the train station in Ukraine.
	And Robert, I know what you think of it.
	I saw your tweet earlier today.
	And Pedro, sorry, I'm choking my own tongue here.
	I think you're going to think the same way, but this is one of those situations where you have to digest, I call it fake news, or you have to digest news, or you have to have a memory span that's longer than...
	A certain timeframe.
	It was in March.
	And I'm just pulling it up if we can see this here.
	It was in March where you had...
	Wayan is apparently an Indian news network.
	It's reasonably not biased if you go by those ratings.
	And the other side is the Associated Press.
	In March, the media was saying Ukraine has Toshka U missiles.
	It's in their inventory.
	Wayan is saying it's a good missile, ideal for destroying Russian armament and personnel.
	In the Associated Press article, they're saying it's a Soviet-era weapon, short-range ballistic missiles.
	They're powerful warhead, but poor precision compared to the latest Russian weapons.
	This was the twofold reason for why the media was covering it a month and a half ago, before the incident.
	On the one hand, useful tool for destroying Russia.
	On the other hand, outdated, inaccurate, and subpar to what Russia's got.
	So sucking and blowing at the same time.
	A few weeks later, you have the bombing of the train station in Ukraine, and then you have the media saying Russia did it.
	Then you have the, let's call it, free thinkers, you and Robert, saying this smells like false flag, this smells like potential issue.
	How is anyone supposed to digest any of this in order to come to their own determinations of what is accurately happening, what is realistically happening, and what is...
	Real versus what is media spin?
	How do you digest it and what is your take on this particular incident?
	I think you just have to approach everything with an extreme degree of suspicion, which is not what most people in media, like most blue checks, they don't do that.
	They just assume that Russia did this because they want to believe that.
	They don't care.
	Like I said, they're already approaching these things with a...
	With a notion of how the world works, right?
	And so I think that the best advice that I can give the average person is just be deeply skeptical of literally everything that you see about this conflict.
	And if you feel worked up about it, then put it down and read something else.
	Because I think that's another huge part of it is the fact that the impulse to do something.
	I need to express my outrage about this.
	I need to, you know, share this story about this atrocity or something like that.
	I think a lot of people feel the urge to do that, and that kind of contributes to the concretization of these stories that ultimately end up being half true or totally false.
	And I get the feeling that this is probably one of those, because there's just a lot of evidence that points in that direction that it looks like this was somehow like a blunder on the Ukrainian military's part.
	From the type of rocket that it was, I've seen comparisons of serial numbers.
	There's just a lot of indicators, like flight trajectory and things like that.
	There's just a lot of indicators.
	It also wouldn't make any sense.
	It's such a horrible PR disaster for Russia to deliberately do something like that, especially in light of all the other things that they're supposedly doing.
	It doesn't smell right.
	And I think that's what...
	I think everyone who's following this should just understand.
	It's like, look, bottom line is Ukrainians have an incentive to goad other people, to lure other people to intervening in this war on their behalf.
	I think that is actually how you need to understand all of these cases.
	Because there wasn't even a pause between the time the bomb went off and the time that Ukraine was saying, we know, we've confirmed this as another Russian atrocity.
	It was like that.
	And it's funny because, like, Twitter, like, live updates will be like, Ukrainian officials verify that, you know, the Russians bombed a train station.
	It's like, oh, okay, well, if the Ukrainian government said it, it must be true.
	And, you know, and that's, there's a lot of problems with that.
	And I think that's, I mean, I've heard some people almost defend Ukraine.
	And to an extent, it makes sense kind of saying, like, well, look, you understand their perspective.
	Like, despite what the media is saying about, like, them just...
	Decimating the Russian military.
	The Russian military is bigger.
	It seems like they can last longer.
	And there's a lot of indicators that Ukraine's, you know, like their armor and their aircraft is depleted.
	It does look like they've actually suffered pretty significant casualties.
	In other words, the war is not going as well for them as people think it is, like the average person thinks it is.
	And so Ukraine does have a real incentive to triggering a NATO intervention.
	And that makes me angry because they're basically trying to trick Americans into fighting their war.
	But that's the bottom line.
	There's an incentive for this stuff.
	And we've created that incentive.
	The next one is the red line at chemical weapons.
	And in the last 24 hours or so, 24, 48 hours, there's been a supposed Chemical weapon attack in Marupul, which is about to fall.
	I mean, I don't like to say it's about to fall because it's been under siege for a while.
	There are reports of, like, mass surrenders.
	There are videos, actually, of Azov commanders kind of saying, like, you know, things are bad.
	Kiev isn't talking to us anymore.
	We're out of food, ammunition, and water.
	Guys are surrendering.
	We're going to hold out until the end.
	Like, it looks really bad for them.
	And so with, like, 80% of the city under Russian control...
	With tons of regular Ukrainian troops surrendering in the hundreds, it's verified now.
	It was dismissed initially, but there's just a lot of evidence that a lot of the regular troops are surrendering.
	Russia uses chemical weapons to trigger...
	The one thing they were told, if you use this, NATO's coming.
	Was it chemical weapons like the nitrous or whatever, that container that they blew up a while back?
	Or is this, I would say legit, is this alleged to be actual?
	Well, the claim came from Azov.
	As far as anyone can figure, the original claim came from Azov, which is like the extreme nationalist group, right?
	And they claimed that a UAV dropped a canister of some kind of mysterious...
	Someone might have said it's Saren, I'm not sure, but basically they said a UAV, a drone, dropped a canister of some kind of weapon and gasped people.
	Look, it's entirely possible That like some rogue, you know, like Russian, like the people's militia from Donetsk.
	It's possible that like maybe like, because you have to remember, the war for the people, for the pro-Russian people in eastern Ukraine, this war didn't start in February.
	It's been going since 2014.
	There has been a civil war raging in Ukraine between Russian, basically pro-Russian Ukrainians and Kiev that has so far to date claimed more than 14,000 lives.
	Both sides have been shelling each other back and forth for almost a decade.
	So what I'm saying is that it's totally possible that someone kind of went rogue and did this.
	But it would have to be the dumbest thing to do for Russia.
	I'm talking about actual Kremlin command.
	It would be the dumbest thing to do at the most convenient time possible for the people in Marupal.
	And what's interesting about it...
	Is that the, again, the claim came from Azov.
	It was promoted heavily by Ukrainian journalists and Ukrainian government officials.
	But it's like, this is like the one thing Western media kind of like chickened out.
	And it kind of got, it almost disappeared.
	There are reports about how, you know, we're investigating, but it wasn't like other incidents where it was just, you know, 24 hours nonstop, you're hearing about it.
	It just, it kind of actually faded because I think people realize like, whoa, this is, okay.
	This is the one that could cross the line and actually trigger something.
	But that also tells you that there's this kind of acknowledgement that there's a lot of fake news coming out of Ukraine.
	I think before we started the stream, there was another one.
	I think it was Forbes.
	The headline was, "Ukraine claims to have damaged a Russian vessel.
	Be skeptical." Forbes, you know?
	It's pretty remarkable.
	It turned out the geniuses stole an explosion of an Iranian tanker from two years ago, three years ago.
	And it goes back to what you're saying.
	A lot of this is crowdsourced.
	Crowdsourced fake news, crowdsourced propaganda.
	Because if you've been in Ukraine, you've seen this work.
	If you're on that side of the aisle, you've seen the media just report things without...
	You're seeing the New York Post take a known actions of Ukrainians against their own citizens in some cases and recreate it and say, no, the Russians did it.
	I mean, the way I describe it is there's two useful filters in this kind of context to utilize.
	To spot a probable false flag, look for something that provokes an emotional response.
	That's not factual, not contextual, not historical, not empirical.
	It's triggered to just get you enraged, like the propaganda of old.
	So it's women and children in a horrific event.
	It's going to be something over the top.
	The second is it's something that asks you to caricature the adversary, something that makes them look comically evil.
	It's something that's just not, again, realistic.
	And then third, look to means and motive, what Pedro is talking about.
	So do they have the means to actually do this?
	And would they have the motive to do this?
	And the point is the Russians need everybody to stay out of this war.
	The Ukrainians need everybody to get involved in this war.
	So they have no interest in doing anything that could make them look bad on terms of a war crime scale.
	Ukraine has every incentive to do something that they could blame on the Russians as a war crime.
	And Ukraine, in some of these cases, has the means more so than Russia, in terms of media influence, and has all the motive, and Russia has none.
	The other aspect I like is, and this is actually relevant to this one, confession to projection has been wildly predictive.
	In other words, whenever I hear the Ukrainians say something, or I hear the West say something, say, okay, just change the terms.
	So, if your Azov Battalion says chemical weapons being used through drones, like, okay, I bet that means there's going to be Ukrainian drones with chemical weapons attached somewhere.
	In fact, what happened tonight?
	Russians claimed that they found and captured drones, Ukrainian drones, with chemical weapons loaded on those drones.
	We're sending them.
	Kamikaze drones, suicide drones, as we speak, that have a wide range of nefarious effects and impacts, if they even get there.
	But so I think those two, it's amazingly how predictive those filters are.
	Because if you use that...
	False flag filter.
	You would have spot everyone.
	The bombing of the Marpol Theater.
	They're mining the humanitarian corridors.
	They're executing civilians for kicks and giggles.
	I mean, it's just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	The CIA is not as good as they used to be at this stuff.
	This isn't Remember the Maine to Hell with Spain.
	This isn't the Gulf of Tonkin.
	The incubator baby story was kind of ludicrous from the inception, but at least it was sold better on Capitol Hill.
	Mass destruction.
	I mean, yeah, Colin Powell selling that.
	Satellite images, remember?
	Yeah, yeah, satellite images.
	Just like we had satellite images here.
	The company that's selling those satellite images, biggest contractor is the defense industry.
	And they suddenly, when somebody said they wanted to see all the satellite photos that they had of that region for the month of March, suddenly they're not selling.
	Oh, no, they're not unavailable for sale.
	Unavailable for sale.
	For a whole bunch of the key dates in question.
	So, I mean, there are always problems with these.
	The Russians are on top of this and anticipating it, but it's a live education.
	Whatever people think of the war, even if you have no interest in the war, if you want to understand how false flags work, how propaganda works, how fake news works, how emotive influence, manipulation, we're seeing the recreation of what they did during the pandemic.
	Using emotive-driven appeals based on things that aren't empirically rooted.
	That aren't contextually sourced.
	That aren't historically understood.
	And we're just going to see it on a whole broad scale.
	Speaking of which...
	Go ahead, sir.
	No, I was going to say one thing.
	Before we move off of the train station bombing.
	There was an article.
	People were talking about the serial number on the shell of the...
	What do they call it?
	The device.
	There were two things.
	Spray paint on it, which said, for the children.
	Which sounds a lot like what you just said.
	But the serial number, which would have been otherwise determinate, you know, evidence, I haven't been able to find any source that confirms that, and it looks like it might just be one of the other side fake news stories.
	Oh yeah, we confirmed a serial number, and it confirms it was a Ukrainian Tushka, whatever, Tushka U versus whatever.
	Have you found anything independent that confirms or otherwise overrides, what's the word, what's the opposite of confirm?
	Contradicts.
	The serial number on the shrapnel story.
	No, I just cited it as an example of, like, I've seen several different things, like I said, from the fact that this is the type of missile that Ukraine uses.
	Everyone from the Associated Press has pointed this out.
	Russia's type, I think it's called Iskander.
	I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but that's what they use.
	It's a newer type of ballistic system.
	And I've seen people do, like I said, comparisons of the flight path of this thing, that it wouldn't make sense that it came from the Russian side.
	And I'd also seen claims, but it's difficult to verify this stuff, that people had compared serial numbers.
	And there's just one thing in a bunch that suggests, among all the other things that Barnes laid out, that suggests that this is not what the media claims it is.
	I mean, really think about the driving point of this is that Russia bombed a train station filled with civilians who are trying to evacuate.
	Russia has been trying...
	I mean, again, this is not taking the side of Russia.
	It's such a dumb thing to say, but it's irrefutable that Russia has, where it can, has gone to great lengths to evacuate civilians from places where it's fighting, like Marupol.
	And of course, the media will...
	They'll begrudgingly report this, but they'll basically frame it as like it's a mass abduction.
	Like Russia has abducted 30,000 people by evacuating them to the east instead of the west.
	But, I mean, you can, like, I think, is it Wion?
	How do you pronounce it?
	W-I-O-N.
	I'm not sure, actually.
	They actually did a really good report on that city, and they had aerial footage that showed bumper-to-bumper traffic of civilians evacuating.
	And all along the road, as far as the eye could see, You had Russians, you could tell by the armbands they're wearing, Russians and members of the militia groups walking up and down the cars, just kind of, you know, like basically patrolling the area.
	And each car had a white placard on it, which indicates that it has civilians inside of it and there are no troops inside.
	So what I'm saying is, you know, if Russia wanted to just like, if it was the Kremlin's policy to just murder civilians, they could have just bombed bumper to bumper traffic.
	In the cities that they're evacuating.
	Or they wouldn't bother evacuating them all.
	There's so many things about it that don't make sense, right?
	And I think, going back to the chemical weapons thing, another aspect of this is that the claim came from Azov.
	And it was reported by a guy named Ilya...
	One of the first people to report it was a guy named Ilya Ponomarenko, who works for the Kiev Independent.
	But Ilya is also, like, he calls himself brothers in arms with Azov.
	Like, you can just search the term Azov on his Twitter, and you'll find tons of pictures of him with Azov guys, you know, backpatting with them, referring to them as his brothers, and, like, he said he was consecrated as an artilleryman for them.
	I think he means, like, he's, like, an honorary artillery guy.
	Not, like, I doubt he's ever, like, fired around in war, but it's, like, so you have a guy whose bio says defense reporter for the Kiev Independent, and he's friends with the people that made this, Seemingly bogus claim, and it reports it as true.
	And then, you know, his pinned tweet is like a thing from Pearl Harbor.
	It's like, it's very clear, you know, the problems with this, the information coming out of Ukraine.
	I'm going to bring it up one more time, just to highlight the Associated Press aspect of this, where, and Pedro, going back to what you're saying, why would Russia do it?
	And again, I'm not taking one position or the other.
	I'm just saying, they came out and said it was Russia.
	Because Russia has these in their arsenal.
	The reason why the Associated Press was bringing this up back in March, that this was a Ukrainian arsenal weapon, was to show how under-equipped, ill-equipped they are to stave off the Russians.
	And they said, yeah, they have these Soviet-era Toshka U's.
	They're powerful, but poor precision.
	Whereas Russia has the latest Russian weapon.
	So then it comes a month later.
	Where there's a Toshka U shrapnel casing found after this horrible bombing.
	And then it goes from Ukraine has these to Russia did it.
	So Russia did it.
	An antiquated, lacking precision weapon when they have better stuff to commit this atrocity versus whatever.
	And someone in response to this tweet said, they both have them.
	Okay, they both have them.
	They're inaccurate.
	But Russia did it.
	They both have them, but Russia did it.
	Yeah, but they both have them.
	So then...
	What's this?
	And some people are saying, well, it came from Ukrainian-controlled soil, as if to say it was Ukrainians.
	Now, flip side to that is Russia's invading.
	They might be, I don't know how you would launch these things from Ukrainian-controlled soil if you're invading, but the whole point is it's being categorically passed off as undeniable Russian when both had them in their inventory, and a month earlier they were saying Ukraine has them, but they're old, antiquated, and imprecise weapons to fight Russia.
	They need better weapons.
	That's a great way to put it.
	And that's really it.
	I mean, with all of these things, I think, again, I actually don't even bother doing this.
	Maybe I should do it more to protect myself, but I don't think too much about this.
	But with all of these things, as an American questioning, you know, the stories of atrocities and red lines being crossed, the reason that I'm doing it is not to take the side of Russia and the invasion, but to keep Americans out of it.
	And also to prevent a bad war from becoming worse, right?
	Because again, Like, if you think what's happening is bad now, just wait until NATO starts bombing things.
	Just, like, someone didn't, I think it was the New York Times, I'm sorry, I'm stammering because I'm trying to remember this story, but I think it was the New York Times or the Washington Post in late March, and they did a comparison of the Iraq War and Russia's war in Ukraine.
	And by that time in late March, the United States had dropped more missiles, more bombs, I think, in a single day than Russia did since the start of the war in February.
	I think this is the first invasion.
	I don't want to get too specific because I want to say anything that's not true, but this article is out there.
	I'll share it with you afterwards.
	But it's just remarkable because it's like You know, we're framing this as like a genocidal war.
	Russia's just waging unrestricted combat on civilians.
	But the U.S.-led coalition literally dropped more bombs in a single day than Russia did in a month.
	And, you know, you can quibble about why that is.
	Well, like, well, the Russians are incompetent or they know they can't do that, whatever.
	It doesn't change the fact that what I'm saying is true.
	If you think what's happening now is bad.
	Wait until more people get involved in this and then see what happens to civilians then.
	And that is ultimately why I question everything that comes out of this because I'm trying to avoid that.
	Yeah, I mean, in fact, American efforts in the Iraqi war, the second Iraqi war, killed 100 times more civilians at this point than have died, according to the UN and Ukraine, during this conflict.
	During this period of the conflict, not including the 14,000 civilians that Ukrainians had killed leading up to.
	Russia getting directly involved.
	The 14,000, it's like the total casualties on both sides.
	But either case, that's 14,000 dead Europeans already before the war began, right?
	Which, again, no one talks about that.
	Almost all in the Donbass.
	Almost all in the Donbass.
	I mean, they have their own rows of children.
	They have a special angel's rows dedicated to the little kids that got killed.
	But to sort of transition into some broader topics, This war, in my view, wouldn't have happened if Trump would have done what he promised to do during his first term.
	He talked about making Russia an ally, pulling out of NATO.
	U.S. shouldn't be in NATO, withdrawing from NATO.
	That's what he talked about during the campaign in 2016.
	He walked that back once he got in, but he still said he wanted to limit the degree and scale and scope of American influence, not get involved in these conflicts.
	Instead, when he tried to clean up the corruption in Ukraine, tried to withhold...
	Providing lots of military support for a grifter regime in Ukraine.
	He gets impeached.
	And so I understand why he wasn't able to deliver.
	But the reality is, everybody running Ukrainian policy came from the Obama administration during the Trump administration.
	He had Vindman right there in his National Security Council.
	This was a repeated mistake of Trump.
	And it wasn't like he wasn't made aware of it.
	There were plenty of us complaining all the way back to 2017.
	With whatever people thought about Flynn, the way he jettisoned him, told the deep state they could put in anyone they want and take out anyone they wanted.
	In fact, they let Flynn come in and make the mistake of putting on a list.
	And he said, here's all the people I want to promote.
	They waited for him to do that list before they took him out because they wanted him to identify all of their problems.
	And by the way, Mueller put every single one of those people, including people with impeccable military careers, under criminal investigation just to intimidate them.
	And as long as they stopped their ambitions and aspirations or decided to suddenly retire, no further criminal investigation would take place.
	But Trump's personnel problem was a big problem throughout his...
	He said he would hire the best people.
	Reality, he hired the worst people, at least from a Trump-promoting perspective would be.
	Mike Pompeo, as is recorded in Bill Barr's book, talked about how easy it was to jerk Trump around.
	That any time he walked in and Trump said he wanted to confront Pompeo on one of his latest dumb ideas, let's maybe get a war over Taiwan, let's maybe get into war in Iran, let's extradite Assange, whatever other dumb idea Pompeo had.
	All Pompeo had to do is say, man, it's so wrong what Russiagate was.
	And they would laugh about how easy it was to distract Trump.
	I mean, these things have to be given to Trump because otherwise Trump won't fix.
	His decision to anoint Dr. Oz has not gone over well in certain circles.
	That's right, yeah.
	Because it turns out, you know, having a guy that promoted transgenderism over and over again and, you know, sexual change surgeries for seven-year-olds isn't popular in Trump's own base.
	But yet, here he is endorsing.
	The last three years, right, Barnes?
	Say that again?
	It was recent, too, that Oz thing.
	Yes, oh yes, oh yes.
	I mean, he was promoting the Chinese lockdown model from the time it happened.
	He only changed his position very late when he decided to get politically ambitious.
	And he was friends with Trump, and I get Trump's personal relationship with him.
	And Trump thinks being on TV is the equal to winning an election, because that's Trump, God bless his soul.
	But can you talk about how the one of the Achilles heel of Trump's administration was terrible personnel choices?
	Because I think for all the Trump supporters out there, if you want Trumpism to ever succeed, he's got to get the message that he needs a radical change in how he hires people in the future.
	I'm sorry.
	Can you repeat that succinctly one more time?
	Oh, sure.
	So, can you explain how the personnel problem was the Achilles heel of the Trump administration?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, because I'm sorry, my mind was like racing through all these different things that I've written about it because it's actually been a while.
	I kind of put it down because, you know, Trump lost and he wasn't around anymore.
	And I didn't want to be the guy that's just like holding a grudge.
	You know, because I mean, I wouldn't be honest if I said I was not actually really angry at how the policy got hijacked and stuff.
	But I also didn't want to just, you know, beat a dead horse.
	And obviously, you know.
	Biden is in the White House right now.
	Therefore, Biden is the guy that I should be writing about.
	So it's been a while, but I mean, I don't know.
	How do you get through to him?
	You think that he would learn, right?
	And this is the thing that's really another maddening aspect of politics is there are all of these anecdotes, and I've heard these from people in the White House, or when Trump was in the White House, I was hearing it from people, from the horse's mouth.
	That Trump would say that he was sick of Jared Kushner's agenda.
	He would ask advisors, do you think that the First Step Act is going to get me tons of votes?
	And people would be like, no, it's futile to basically subordinate your actual tough-on-crime stuff to this and think it's going to pay off.
	And he would agree with people, be like, yeah, you're right, I'm sick of this stuff.
	Literally the next day, he's on TV calling Jared Kushner a star at a rally.
	And I'm hearing that the second term, people have totally forgotten.
	I mean, this stuff has been, I don't want to say memory hold because that sounds like it's deliberate, but people have forgotten, I think, because of how horrible the Biden administration has been.
	It's been just easy to forget about that stuff.
	But going into the second term, it was going to be the Jared Kushner show.
	Remember that the Republican National Convention had a prayer for Jacob Blake, the guy that broke into, I think, his girlfriend's house and then put the kids in a car that she had rented.
	It wasn't even her car.
	And he ended up getting shot several times because he fought with police, which set off the Kenosha riots.
	The RNC opened with a prayer for him, I think on day two.
	And Jared Kushner was in charge of the convention.
	He personally arranged that weird immigration ceremony on stage.
	That was him.
	That was like a telegraph of what is coming in the second administration.
	It was there in the slogan, keep America great.
	In other words, we've already made America great.
	It's done.
	Now we're moving on.
	It's like phase two of the agenda, which is the Jared Kushner show.
	Again, it seems silly to...
	I worry about this stuff now, but it's not because, I mean, it looks like he's going to run again, and nothing has changed.
	I don't care what the media says.
	I don't care what conservative media says.
	I don't care what conservative political operatives say.
	Jared Kushner is still involved.
	Jovanka is still involved in Trump's world.
	Like, the America First Policy Institute.
	It's Trump's official think tank, right?
	It's run by Brooke Rawlings, who was one of the worst people.
	My skin crawls when I think about this woman.
	She's one of the worst people in the Trump administration.
	I've written extensively about her.
	I wrote an article for American Greatness called "While Rome Burns." I wrote another article for the Spectator, not the American Spectator, the Spectator.
	I think the headline is "How America First is the America First Policy Institute." Read those two articles and you'll learn all about Brooke Rollins.
	So she's one of the worst people, right?
	She's just like a coke show.
	I think her uncle is actually James Burnham, and she's never mentioned that before.
	It's kind of curious that she's a relative of James Burnham, but it's like she's almost ashamed of it.
	I mean, I would be telling people, I wouldn't like riding his coattails, but that's really cool, but interesting that she doesn't talk about that.
	But anyways, she's pro-amnesty, pro-jailbreak policies, and now she's running Trump's Think Tank, which kind of looks a lot like an administration in waiting.
	Like all of, or I should say, a lot of the worst people from the Trump world are there.
	And they've recruited new people that are even worse than them.
	And it really looks like they're kind of just waiting to fill the personnel need for a second administration.
	And going back to Jared.
	People will tell you he's not in Trump world anymore.
	I get pictures from the AFPI headquarters.
	I don't think I'm going to give away my source, but Jared Kushner is involved.
	I'm talking about pictures of him inside the AFPI headquarters.
	He's the resident saint of the operation and private dinners with him for donors.
	He's still involved.
	He's just kind of...
	He did this in the White House, too.
	Like, he always has degrees of separation between himself and whatever he's doing.
	So then you can, you know, the middleman gets in trouble instead of him or something like that.
	Or Lindsey Graham.
	This is an anecdote, but I had a really good source in the White House that told me that Lindsey Graham and Jared Kushner worked together on stuff.
	And Lindsey Graham actually played on the fact that everyone kind of makes fun of him.
	And so when they would do stuff, and, you know, the point would be brought up, well, like, you know, isn't the base going to hate this?
	Lindsey Graham would tell Kushner and his friends, well, just let me take the heat.
	Basically, I'll absorb all the criticism.
	No one will know that you guys were involved.
	They deliberately do this stuff.
	And again, I don't really see a whole lot of indicators that much has changed.
	Sorry, to answer your question, I don't know what it takes to get through to Trump.
	Yeah, I mean, it's lots of criticism from his base that somehow reaches him.
	That's about it.
	Tucker Carlson actually gets through to him.
	I mean, there's a good article in BuzzFeed that actually talked about how when Trump was kind of getting egged on by the crypto neocons in his administration to escalate with Iran, it was like Tucker who excoriated him on more than one occasion on his show, blasting him for kind of escalating tensions.
	That actually factored into his policymaking, which really means de-escalation, kind of like, okay, Tucker seems to be the voice of my base.
	He's blowing me up every night for pushing us towards war.
	I'm going to back off because I assume he knows the base.
	So you're right.
	Trump does actually care a whole lot about criticism from certain people.
	The same is not true for Ann Coulter.
	It seems like he doesn't care what people like her think.
	It annoys him, but it won't change his actions.
	I mean, the problem was when he got rid of Bannon, he got rid of all, like from 2012 to 2016, the real reason Trump was able to succeed, because he's really just a marketer with good instincts.
	He has no deep policy understanding, no deep history understanding.
	That's just reality.
	God bless the man, but he's one of the greatest salesmen in the history of politics.
	And I believe he has...
	Excellent instincts on foreign policy.
	But he almost never translated those instincts into policy, sadly.
	And that's because of his very poor personnel choices, which were cognizant.
	It wasn't like he was fooled and tricked.
	Most of the time he was told, don't hire that person.
	And then he went and hired him.
	There were plenty of people.
	Now, one guy who took him for a ride, the opposite side of Fox, is Sean Hannity.
	And you have a guy like Sean Hannity.
	Originally, when Roger Ailes picked Hannity, because he liked to tell people, look at how dumb this guy is.
	I'm going to make him look like a star.
	I mean, I can make even an idiot like Sean Hannity tens of millions of dollars in a star because I, Roger Ailes, am that good.
	Yeah, Hannity may or may not.
	Well, he does know those stories.
	Ailes bragged about that all the time.
	But Hannity's always been a warmonger.
	Hannity was on the opposite side kind of of the Fox spectrum.
	He pushed John Bolton, as he's now publicly admitted, pushed John Bolton to be hired by Trump as National Security Advisor.
	And he was the one constantly telling him, John Durham's right about to take action, Bill Barr's right about to take action, tick-tock, tick-tock, the clock's almost out on the Spygate crowd, on the Deep State crowd, on all the Biden-related corruption, and those aspects.
	And I think that's always been a counter-pressure that has been Trump's relationship to all of that, he became more dependent on Fox when he turned away from independent sources.
	And I think it's a place, and this is a good transition to social media censorship, the other place you could get to Trump was through his Twitter followers.
	He would pay enough attention to what people were saying on his base that it was actually truly a direct, it was fascinating, it was a direct way to access the President of the United States.
	Because I don't like Barack Obama, who never really read his own Twitter feed, nor does Joe Biden.
	He has nothing to do with his Twitter.
	He has no idea what it is still.
	But you have with...
	He's just randomly throwing the word prostitute into a random sentence.
	That shows you where Joe Biden's mind is.
	But you look at that.
	But once they stripped him of it, it stripped him of access to his audience.
	Of listening to his audience.
	Not just what he could speak.
	Have you...
	For four years, the conservative institutional hierarchy did nothing about what was clearly coming, which was social media censorship, social media manipulation, social media interference in an election, social media creation and curation of an institutional narrative that suppressed dissident, independent voices.
	We've seen it really bad in the Ukraine context.
	I mean, anybody that's a...
	If you're Scott Ritter, if you're Russians with attitude, who's just kind of relatively as apolitical as you can get within being on the Russian-aligned side, very critical and skeptical of aspects of it, but being a pretty good, reliable source so far throughout the program.
	Now, they got back reinstated, but not before there wasn't a lot of protest.
	What do you think the conservative cause needs to do?
	To deal with the problem of these big tech, big monopoly powers that can manipulate elections, that can manipulate information, that can provoke us into war, that can justify a lockdown with pandemics, and all of the other problems they're creating in the court of public opinion.
	Man, you just asked me the biggest question of our time.
	I think about this a lot because Twitter does actually promote a lot of these hack journalists and experts who are Feeding this frenzy, the warmongering, right?
	You'll look like, I don't follow these Ukrainian journalists, but their tweets are recommended to me.
	I don't follow the Kiev Independent, but I can't escape it on my timeline.
	I'd have to block them.
	So no, I mean, it's a huge problem.
	A few, I want to say one or two years ago, a bunch of accounts got banned on Twitter, supposedly, but they were like Russian propaganda accounts.
	The really interesting thing was they got banned for...
	The line was "undermining faith in NATO." I think that's actually somewhere on Twitter's website where they explain...
	They did a series of purges and they kind of explained why we did them, and it's actually on there.
	It's "undermining faith in NATO." So yeah, this is a huge...
	We're talking about dealing with Goliath here.
	Who or what is David?
	I don't know.
	The simplest answer is winning elections and then basically creating more Ron DeSantis' who are willing to confront woke capital.
	Because we're talking about tech, but it's not just tech.
	It's basically these huge corporations that use their tremendous amounts of money and influence to force things on Americans.
	And I think that's...
	I don't know if it's a cop-out, but I think it's kind of a long game that we have to play here, is to find or create more guys like DeSantis, get them in office, and then push policies that protect us from these corporations, which I don't think it is a cop-out because DeSantis is doing this in Florida.
	You know, he's taking on Disney.
	It's actually really remarkable.
	Now, what would that look like taking on big tech?
	I'm not sure.
	I'm kind of...
	I'm curious to see what happens with the whole Elon Musk thing and Twitter.
	Some people think there's like an imminent hostile takeover.
	I don't know.
	That'd be pretty funny.
	But even Twitter, right?
	I wrote an article on this for Chronicles Magazine.
	So I have to be very careful here because Paul Singer is not a forgiving person.
	So I wrote an article about the relationship between Paul Singer and the new CEO of Twitter, Pyrog Agrawal.
	And this is actually the result of a two-year-long campaign to get rid of Jack Dorsey that was spearheaded by Elliott Management, which is Paul Singer's hedge fund.
	And basically, Paul Singer's hedge fund took more and more control, put people on the board of Twitter, took more and more control of Twitter, and their key thing was getting rid of Dorsey.
	I think that for Elliott Management, I mean, we're talking about vulture capitalism here.
	But I think that the argument from their perspective was he was just not a good CEO, like an absentee CEO, which is probably true.
	Actually, no, that is true.
	He has so many other things going on that he was never really around running the company.
	But ironically, that is actually what kind of made Twitter a little bit more free.
	Apart from kicking guys like Trump off, you had an absentee CEO who was not really around to micromanage it the way that the new Twitter is.
	But, um, so anyways, as a result of Paul Singer, who's like one of the biggest GOP donors, you get this new Twitter CEO and this new Twitter censorship regime.
	And I think that shows like, this is what I mean, like, it's such a big problem because it's not so easy as like, well, you know, we're up against Democrats and big tech.
	It's like, well, you look behind you and it's like, oh, major GOP donors are actually responsible for this like crappy new CEO.
	So it's just a huge problem.
	And I think we're really talking about a long game here.
	I don't want to use the term march through the institutions because it gets overused, but really we are talking about playing the long game.
	Finding more DeSantis or more Huey Longs.
	And then, you know, protecting ourselves with their help.
	I'm going to bring this up because someone in the chat said Dr. Oz was WEF.
	And I hadn't heard it before.
	And you just Google it.
	Robert.
	Pedro, do either of you understand how this works?
	Why is it that so many people are just randomly on the WEF website?
	This is Mehmet C. Oz, Professor.
	I seem to be missing something.
	1982 undergrad.
	Why are so many people just randomly on the WEF website?
	And if it's not random, do either of you two know what the heck is going on that they just appear on the website?
	I should figure out how I can get on there.
	Be careful what you joke about.
	Don't let anybody into this WEF thing nowadays.
	I have no idea.
	I think the WEF is really just a symbol of globalism.
	It's just the symbol of the great evil, which is this post-national depraved order.
	Interestingly, Zelensky, in the last two years, asked WEF to be...
	He said that he wanted to turn Ukraine into the biggest haven for the World Economic Forum for their money.
	We moved on from Ukraine in this discussion, but I think that's something that actually was one of the big initial red flags for me.
	Like, hold on, this guy is being sold to me as a nationalist leader?
	And here he is begging the World Economic Forum to turn Ukraine into a haven for their money.
	Something's wrong with this.
	But I don't know what the requirements are to become...
	To get a profile.
	Yeah, for the most part, I think it varies.
	Sometimes they like to promote themselves by promoting anyone they've ever invited to an event, and then you have people that are truly part of their agenda and the rest.
	Oz has made statements on the cultural side that seem to be in favor of their kind of woke.
	Because that's the other factor that's fascinating was, in listening to Putin's speech about why going into Ukraine, it was fascinating how often he brought up cultural issues.
	And I was like, well, how often do you hear a war conflict in Europe?
	And really, from the Russian perspective, from the Putin perspective, Ukraine was just a proxy for fighting what they consider, what they've now called, a global empire and a globalist agenda that's anti-Russian in particular, but they think is really anti the idea of true nationalism.
	In that capacity, in terms of woke capital.
	It's been striking watching the hegemonic influence of Western culture.
	You had people on social media who were shocked that Russians weren't in the streets because they can't get Disney.
	These people actually said these things.
	I remember that.
	If taking away Disney, McDonald's, and sugar...
	Won't make the Russians revolt.
	Well, I don't know what will.
	I think this has to be satire, but I don't think it was.
	No, it wasn't.
	It was a blue checkmark guy.
	He was absolutely serious.
	And there's a bunch of them that believe this.
	They believe the hegemonic cultural influence reflects that they have the true and the best culture.
	They're the coolest people in class, and they're on the right side.
	Now, you look at Disney.
	They managed to completely wreck Star Wars, which really took extraordinary and exceptional effort.
	They took one of the most beloved franchises in history and lost billions of dollars in how they failed to develop it because they had to make it all about a woke woman hero and a fake woman hero.
	It was not a real hero narrative.
	They didn't even understand a hero narrative.
	You can watch David Mamet to understand that.
	But, you know, for them to go, and they're doing the same with Marvel, and they're doing the same with a lot of their shows.
	And they've been pushing this agenda.
	But I think a lot of families were still not clued in because they still had the old image of Beauty and the Beast Disney, Little Mickey Mouse Disney, until this conflict in Florida.
	When they actually jumped on the bandwagon of, we want teachers to teach your four-year-old sex education.
	All of a sudden, a whole bunch of families that had been asleep woke up when Disney intervened on behalf of...
	We want to have, you know, trainee reading time in your five-year-old school.
	And so can you discuss some of the, like, what's been a white pill moment has been the degree to which Disney stock is finally paying a price.
	Disney is finally paying a price in subscribers.
	Because the people at the top there are still clueless that their agenda is hated by most of their actual content users.
	Yeah.
	Most normal people.
	Do not want their kids to be sexualized and be pumped full of hormones, correct?
	Disney overplayed their hand.
	But I remember that the CEO, I don't remember his name, of Disney denounced...
	What was the order of...
	It was like in a two-week period, the CEO of Disney denounced the legislation, the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill.
	Which is hilarious because there are people that think you, you know, saying gay is illegal in Florida.
	That's just a ridiculous thing that people came up with.
	But anyways, the CEO of Disney denounced that piece of legislation, right?
	And around this time, I think he also, or the company also announced that it was going to be like cutting services in Russia to protest Russia's assault on Ukraine.
	Like, again, it was in the span of a few days, a week or two or so.
	It all happened in really close proximity.
	So denounce the Don't Say Gay bill, denounce Russia.
	And then there is a massive Florida sting operation that swept up more than 100 people in a human trafficking ring that specifically preyed on children.
	We're talking about child prostitution here.
	And four of them were Disney employees.
	And this took place...
	Just south of Disney Orlando, and one of them was a lifeguard at Disney Orlando, and he had bragged, because apparently they had surveilled these people for a while, but they had caught this guy bragging about how he used his position as a lifeguard at Disney to lure children.
	So I actually kind of wrote about this, like, as an intro to my newsletter, and just, you know, I concluded with, like, if only Disney would stop its assault on, you know, if only they would stop their aggression against our children.
	Because this is, like, a quintessential example of woke capital virtue signaling, right?
	You know, we're against the oppression of trans people.
	We're against Russia's oppression of Ukraine.
	Also, they have, you know, Disney has a serious predator problem.
	We'll just call it that.
	And that's just, like, a few examples.
	Like, they're...
	Apparently, there are a lot of examples of Disney employees getting caught up in this stuff.
	I want to say that there was actually some kind of senior official, some senior executive in Disney that after the Orlando thing also got caught with something involving child pornography.
	I wanted to write about it, but again, the Ukraine thing sucked me back into it.
	But I just was thinking to myself, like, man, Disney has a serious groomer problem.
	I'm going to bring one up.
	Your tweet from earlier today.
	It was this one.
	Okay, I saw this.
	I know you're being hyperbolic.
	I tried to get to the original underlying tweet.
	I will say, I don't think I am, honestly.
	To be clear, we're talking about a legal procedure here.
	We're not talking about summary executions.
	We're talking about a legal process, not vigilating justice.
	So in other words, it's not a call for violence.
	But I mean, look, man, I don't know.
	Do you have kids?
	Oh, yeah.
	I got three.
	Here's my question on this.
	I tried to look up the account afterwards, and there's a little froggy with one underscore.
	This one seems to have two.
	Who is this person?
	Like, was it anyone prominent?
	I see things like this, and I see attention grabbers.
	These are stupid tweets that idiots put out on Twitter just to try to say something outrageous, see if it gets traction, and it does, and then they delete their account because they got what they wanted.
	Was this person prominent?
	I don't know who Bork, Bork, Little Frog is.
	It's not, but I mean, this is just part of...
	I guess you have to...
	Do you follow libs of TikTok?
	I do.
	At least I see their tweets from time to time.
	This is like just one other Libs of Tech Talk moment, where you have these people that are out there, you know, that's really, if you don't know what the account is, you should follow it to your audience, although I'm sure, I mean, they have a much bigger platform.
	But really, it's just these people that are just being so candid about what they're doing, like teachers talking about literally grooming kids.
	Talking about, you know, having pizza parties where they, like, will introduce kids to, like, these, like, hyper-sexualized concepts.
	Like, there are, like, all these actual news reports about this stuff happening.
	The New York Post did a story about these two parents, not these two parents, these two faculty members at a school that were basically stalking kids' online activity in order to recruit them into an LGBTQ club.
	There are examples of teachers actually promoting transition therapy in their students behind the backs of parents.
	So this stuff is not unbelievable.
	Apparently, unfortunately, for the human race, it's also not uncommon.
	I actually did a story about this for Intellectual Takeout, which is the sister publication of Chronicles, with a A Spanish teacher.
	It's weird.
	He's a white Spanish tutor at a school in California, Oakland, California, that's mostly Hispanic.
	And he made a video on his social media, on his Instagram.
	He changed it afterwards, but his bio had all these references to LGBTQ stuff, and apparently his handle is a reference to an old porn from the '50s.
	This is a tutor at a public high school in California.
	So I just hit my mic.
	And he made a video where he was talking about a project that he was introducing to the school called the Transition Closet.
	And he explained it like really, you know, he was very frank.
	He said, "When the parents drop the kids off, we take them and we give them the clothes that correspond with their true gender." And it's a lot like Superman.
	It's a lot like Clark Kent changing into Superman.
	And what he's describing is how they're helping kids transition behind the backs.
	Like you drop your kid off to school and you go to work.
	You think they're learning math and stuff.
	They're being encouraged to gender bend.
	And I actually called the school and asked about the video and stuff like that.
	The school didn't want to talk to me.
	The second time I called, I got kind of an angry hang-up.
	The superintendent called me and then sent me a long dumb email about how he stands with trans rights, and I asked him, "Okay, that's great, but answer my question, do parents know what you're doing?" Never responded to me.
	And I wrote a story about it, and the transition closet, the initiative that this tutor was partnering with at this school in California is actually based in a different state.
	I'm drawing a blank right now.
	But it's based in a different state in the South.
	And the transition closet is actually based in a Lutheran church called the Good Shepherd.
	And I called them and I asked them, like, this is very, you know, I was just saying, like, I'm doing research on non-profits.
	And I called them and I asked them, when I go to donate to the transition closet, the address is to the Good Shepherd Church.
	And they explained to me, like, yeah, we kind of sponsored them and their physical space where they have all the clothes is in the church.
	And, you know, I just was like, okay, well, thank you for the information.
	Then I looked more into it.
	And this church has a queer camp for kids.
	That's literally what it's called.
	Queer camp.
	It's like a youth camp for kids.
	Again, like, when you look at the tweets, it's like, okay, come on.
	Like, that's obviously fake.
	No.
	Like, this stuff is extreme.
	Like I said, unfortunately, it is extremely common.
	And the thing that I think is remarkable about Libs of TikTok is that in so many of these videos, the people that are doing this stuff, on the one hand, they're proud about it.
	They're proud that they're doing this, pushing it on kids.
	And on the other hand, they have a kind of contempt for people like me.
	Like, F you.
	I'm going to help your kids transition.
	And I think it's hilarious that you don't know about it, that I'm doing it behind your backs.
	So, I mean, so, I mean, yeah, I mean, I have to, Refrain from Fed posting here, but I think that people that do this to kids absolutely deserve the maximum punishment that the justice system can afford.
	What's Fed posting?
	Fed posting is where you actually call for violence or something like that and say something that can get you deplatformed or fired.
	I'm just kidding.
	I don't actually have that kind of a rational...
	Impulse.
	Like federal, federal, Fed posting, like attracting the attention of the federal government by saying something.
	Okay.
	Oh, I see what you're saying.
	Okay, fine.
	I thought it was tagging the Fed to go after what I've seen people do.
	No, no, no.
	No, it's like...
	Speaking of libs of TikTok, I know I saw this one on libs of TikTok.
	And I had to go see it on TikTok because I couldn't believe it.
	I just, I wasn't sure if it was real satire or not.
	Let me just make sure we're all seeing the same thing.
	We are.
	Listen to this.
	Because this...
	At the same time that people are saying the bill is called Don't Say Gay Bill, you've got someone saying this.
	How do I play this?
	The Don't Say Gay Bill is actually also the Don't Say Straight Bill.
	Most people agree with that.
	Because of Florida's choice to keep things vague, so there's a big umbrella of which to discriminate.
	They also included straight people.
	So these are the straight things that you won't be able to talk about in Florida schools when this is enacted.
	Gender signs need to be taken off all of the bathroom doors.
	You cannot line up kids in girl rows and boy rows.
	You cannot talk about traditional families or a family with a man and a woman.
	I think we can stop it here.
	I think we got the idea.
	My goodness.
	This is the ultimate irony.
	At the same time people are saying it's the don't say gay bill.
	You have this individual on TikTok.
	It looks like a serious account, not satire, saying it's also the don't say heterosexual bill, which is what people agree with.
	Yes, do not talk about sex or sexuality with kindergartners through grade three, gay or straight.
	Incredible, right?
	We have age of consent laws for a reason, and public schools are not the place for sexuality.
	It's guys like that that I want nowhere near any kids, period.
	Sorry.
	You can have whatever.
	You're just like, I don't want you talking about sex with my kids.
	And they're like, how dare you take away my rights?
	Speaking of schooling in general, one's biographical.
	How'd you meet your wife?
	But separately, how are you going to educate your own kids?
	In other words, someone asked me the other day what I would do if I had young kids.
	I tell them...
	What I've always been in favor of, really, is homeschooling and private tutoring.
	I mean, it's how William F. Buckley was educated.
	It's how we actually used to educate people we wanted to groom for positions of power, not positions of sexual deviancy, was private tutor education.
	But given, I mean, the school systems have become, always were designed, really, since Rockefeller co-opted them, to be incubators and acculturators of whatever agenda.
	The sort of cultural, political elite at the time had.
	And it was never intended to truly educate us in the old American founding style.
	Like, I mean, we used to teach it the classics.
	And this goes back to the 1820s, 1830s.
	We had a very high education rate in the United States.
	We taught with the classics.
	We taught with great materials.
	We taught with great history.
	We taught math and we taught science.
	It was not fundamentally about...
	Whatever weird cultural values some institution has at the time.
	So how are you going to handle all of that with your kids?
	And yeah, and how'd you meet your wife?
	Barnes asking the big questions.
	I don't know.
	Homeschooling is tough, man.
	My mom, my wife is a stay-at-home mom.
	And it's incredibly difficult.
	I think that that's something that people don't appreciate enough.
	I mean, you think it's like this.
	You know, cushy job, if you've never done it before, where you just play with kids all day.
	It's a full-time job of feeding and taking care and actually raising them.
	Something that my wife actually tries to do is actually instill knowledge and values in our kids while I'm working also out of our home office, which kind of makes it easier because I can step away from the desk and help with stuff.
	Homeschooling would be great if we could do it, but I think this actually gets at something that I've written about a few times, and that's the loss of the extended family.
	The nuclear family is great, obviously, like your kids, wife, all that, but not having an extended family, like basically living either with or near the kids' grandparents, actually makes it harder to do stuff like that.
	Part of the reason why we're so dependent on things like daycare is the deterioration of extended families and these bigger households, which would make it much easier to do stuff like homeschooling.
	My wife was born and raised in Germany.
	She did not come to the United States until she met me.
	To answer your question, we met online.
	It was kind of an accident because I was living in San Diego, she was living in Hamburg, Germany, and the radius we had both set was like 15 miles within San Diego, 15 miles within Hamburg.
	It's more than 15 miles between, you know, here in Germany.
	And it just connected us and we just started chatting and like six months later she came here and then I went there and then she came.
	It was just like a back and forth for a little over a year and then I proposed.
	So my wife is a legal immigrant from Germany.
	I don't know if I'll get in trouble for this little story, but this actually has had an impact on me, specifically with foreign policy.
	My wife's great-grandfather, I think on our mother's side, was in the German army in World War II.
	He was, I think, with the Air Force.
	But he was on the ground on the day Keele got bombed.
	It's a port city.
	And he actually died because he was rushing civilians into a bomb shelter.
	And he basically slammed the door shut.
	It almost sounds unreal, but he got all the civilians into a shelter, closed the doors, and the bomb started falling, and he died.
	But because of what he did, among those survivors was my wife's, I think it was her grandmother that survived in this bomb shelter.
	One thing leads to another and then my wife is eventually born over the course of time.
	I think about that a lot because it shows that war is more complicated than these black and white narratives.
	Where, like, the entire civilian population is just up for being murdered.
	Like, I think about this because it's the way we talk about Russians now, right?
	We're talking about, like, you know, just nuking Russia or, like, you know, what are we going to do with the Russians?
	We're basically, like, touching, like, the worst kinds of Morgenthauism.
	You know, like, there are blue checks on Twitter having, like, revenge porn fantasies of the entire Russian civilian population that is, and, like...
	I'm almost at a loss of words for it.
	It's psychotic.
	It's like you're everything that you accuse other people of being.
	I'd be lying if I said that my wife's family history did not actually make me see things differently, which I think is good.
	It's a more grown-up way of looking at the world, right?
	But yeah, so she's German.
	And until the pandemic, we were going at least once a year to visit family.
	Her family is actually going to visit my in-laws, who I love, actually.
	They're great.
	They're the nicest, warmest, most welcoming people I've ever met.
	I'm super lucky to have them visit.
	I'm very lucky in that I love my in-laws.
	And they'll be here in a few months.
	Yeah, that's the story of how I met my wife, the internet.
	So, as a last question, where can people find you on the interwebs, as Viva says, and elsewhere?
	Yeah, so you can find me on every, almost every social media platform under the same handle, Emeriticus, E-M-E-R-I-T-I-C-U-S, and I've got a newsletter at contra.substack.com, like I ran Contra, and my...
	My home is chroniclesmagazine.org.
	That's where I've got my column, Theory of a Partisan.
	And yeah, you should get a subscription.
	You can get an old-fashioned print magazine.
	And just so everybody knows, I had a typo in Emeriticus.
	What does Emeriticus mean for the non-Latin speakers out there?
	Play on the word Aramite, which is like a Christian recluse or just a hermit.
	And I don't know.
	I have a...
	This is another backstory.
	I have a single tattoo.
	It's covering up a surgical scar.
	I had this goofy idea that maybe I can get my scars covered.
	I could enlist in the military many years ago.
	And so I got one before everything kind of fell apart.
	But it's a tattoo of a hermit.
	And it's on my left forearm and it covers up a scar.
	When I needed to, because I really started using like Twitter super late in the game.
	I think I created an account in like 2015, 2017, or I don't know, but I didn't really start using it until like the last four years or so.
	And I needed to like come up with a handle.
	So I was like, all right, Hermit and Meriticus.
	Sounds somehow like Spartacus or something, I don't know.
	I was just about to say, I am Emeriticus, as you said.
	And by the way, your tattoo, does it incorporate the scar or does it work over the scar?
	Like, does it use the scar as like the torso of a butterfly kind of thing?
	I can't really see it.
	But it's just a, it's just a, the actual hermit goes over the scar.
	I mean, it was really good.
	You can't see it.
	Like, people don't realize I have like a gnarly.
	Surgical scar on that forearm anymore.
	So it worked.
	So props to the tattoo artist.
	It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted because I took it seriously.
	I wasn't just going to get a tramp stamp on my forearm.
	I don't know.
	So I actually thought about it in the significance of the recluse and basically someone who's just doing things the hard way.
	Pedro, you know what?
	First of all, everyone out there, I'm going to post all of the links in the pinned comment.
	Pedro, people have been making the joke all night long.
	How did the movie Napoleon Dynamite alter your life trajectory?
	As of that movie came out, did everyone start making the joke left, right, and center?
	Yes.
	Yes, to this day.
	It's actually worse now that I'm a public person because now people are like, well, where are you going to run for office?
	Pedro, we've already got the merchandise.
	Well, and now, serious joke about this.
	Do you have any aspirations of running for office?
	This will be the last one.
	Do you have any aspirations of running for politics?
	If I did, no, because if I did, I would immediately turn into like a Huey Long demagogue and start talking about, you know, liquidating Wall Street and stuff, which I don't think would be a viable candidate seat.
	All right.
	This was amazing.
	I mean, everyone, they're marathons.
	These streams are marathons.
	They start with childhood.
	People, if you think I'm nosy.
	Get used to it.
	You need to know the things.
	You need to get into tragedy.
	You need to get into the personal life.
	And you need to know who the individual is, who you are undoubtedly going to go follow now because, Pedro, you have good takes.
	It's a little saucy, but the world needs sauciness because without spice, it's bland noodle soup.
	And it's great.
	When people ask for credentials, it's because they appreciate what you're saying, and they want to understand how it is you have these takes, this insight, notwithstanding official whatever it is.
	And I think it's overrated, and I think having a functional brain and a critical mind, and Robert has done a great job in instilling that in me, what you're writing about is value-added, and it's fantastic, and people should follow you.
	Substack, we're going to have the link in the pinned comment, Twitter.
	And the Chronicles, is it your journal, the Chronicles, or are you affiliated with it?
	No, yeah, that's actually my full-time job is Chronicles, a magazine of American culture.
	I'm an associate editor and senior writer there.
	But because it's a monthly magazine, it affords me the time to do a lot of other stuff, like, well, a lot of writing for outside publications and also interviews like this, right?
	Because our volume for publishing is a little bit lower.
	It's a nice gig.
	We're out of time.
	Chronicles is great.
	It's a 45-year-old institution.
	It was the ideological flagship of the Buchanan movement.
	It was right about everything then, including the Iraq war.
	It's still right now.
	When Trump ran for office, National Review did that infamous against Trump article with all the names of these conservatives signing their names against Trump.
	Chronicles mocked National Review.
	And did their own cover story called Against Ideology.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the magazine has an incredible story.
	I obviously work there.
	But part of the reason I work there is precisely because I love the magazine.
	I love the institution.
	I love what it stands for.
	So, yeah, go to chroniclesmagazine.org.
	Phenomenal.
	Pedro, stick around.
	We will say our proper goodbyes privately afterwards.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you, as always, for everything.
	Clip, snip, share on social media.
	Get the word out.
	Pedro's links will be in the pinned comment.
	Everyone, see you Sunday night but see you earlier than that.
	Pedro, thank you very much.

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