The first physical salvos in this latest chapter of the globalists' war on normal human beings were fired yesterday when US stooges set fire to 3 trucks carrying 'humanitarian aid' at the Colombia-Venezuela border crossing. For good measure, a handful of 'defectors' from the Venezuelan Gendarmerie rammed border barriers with armored vehicles, seriously injuring several people. Western media outlets tried to claim that the trucks were set on fire by Venezuelan security forces firing tear gas canisters, but the culprits were undoubtedly US/Guaido agents tasked with creating the right 'optics' to support the bogus narrative that the Western media has been pushing for months. In the southeast of the country, near the border with Brazil, clashes broke out between opposing factions and 4 people were killed as 'unknown gunmen' fired on the crowds. In short, for anyone familiar with the details of the previous 68 coups carried out by US governments around the world, the situation in Venezuela is following the worn-out playbook, line for line.
Meanwhile in France, the 15th consecutive weekend of Yellow Vest protests took place with no sign of diminishing numbers. The much-hated Macron government has repeatedly tried and failed to tarnish the image of the protestors. First they were labeled 'far-right extremists', then they were denounced as 'Russian agents', but now the 'big guns' have been brought out and, according to much of the Western media, the Yellow Vest protestors are, to a man and woman, 'dirty anti-semites'. Someone should tell Macron that when you have to resort to such discredited canards, you really should cut your losses and admit defeat. There's little chance of the 'Princes of Paris' doing that, however; they (and most of the Western elite) have spent many years increasing and consolidating their power, and the very last thing they will do at this stage is relinquish even a small part of it.
On this week's NewsReal podcast, Joe & Niall discuss the 'revolutions' in Venezuela (1st hour) and France (last 20 minutes).
Running Time: 01:19:17
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript of the show:
Niall: Hello and welcome to NewsReal with Joe and Niall.
Joe: I'm Joe.
Niall: I'm Niall. It's Sunday, January 13, 2019. So in this day and age, as everyone can see and experience for themselves thanks to, among other things, the proliferation of communications and social media, it seems that just about everything is up for discussion, up for revision, up for reaffirming and it's causing incredible amounts of polemic polarization. I suppose there's a kind of eschatological element to mainstream religion and even to the more modern new-agey beliefs, that we would be going through - they prophesied - a time when all will come out in the wash, that all will be revealed. Now most of the time you've got a nice halo over that, that it will be the time of the great unveiling and everything will be revealed and it will be great. We're finding it's more like everything's coming to the surface, all the internal contradictions in society, among people and even within people, come to the fore and it's pretty fractious. Obviously the main simple division is left versus right when it comes to politics. But it's so much more than that, isn't it? Pro Islam/anti-Islam. Pro-migrant/anti-migrant. Femi-Nazis versus the Manosphere. It's like everything. Everything's up for picking a side and people are doing it.
Joe: Picking a part and picking a side, yeah. There are a couple of things. One is that a lot of people - you talk about eschatological end time stuff - I get the impression that a lot of people who aren't necessarily religious, are not practicing or religiously inclined or whatever, still talk about it in those terms when they look at some particular moment of craziness that happening on the planet. They'll make some reference to the end of the world or something like that. Obviously those ideas, especially in the west, which is mostly a Judeo-Christian culture, are in people's minds and in their heads from when they were brought up and exposed to one extent or another to religion, have this idea of the end times. Or maybe it's even deeper than that. I don't know.
But basically people have that on the tips of their tongue whenever things are going crazy on the planet, particularly in a widespread kind of way. War is one thing. People maybe have gotten used to that when that happens but I see that when people see the level of social chaos and division they tend to go to that place of saying it's almost like the end of the world is coming or something. They do it in a tongue-in-cheek way but they still say it.
The other thing is, you can look at it all in a very negative way and say it's crazy, a lot of people have lost the plot, there's so much extremism going on, so little rational thinking or nuanced thinking, some black and white thinking and it's terrible. A lot of people are afraid of - rightfully so I'd say - of what's happening in the world and to their societies depending on where they live and how bad it can get. But at the same time, like you just mentioned, it's almost like there's a lot of stuff people coming out or people are bringing up things within them, their ideas that are coming up to be dealt with, let's say. People are being forced to think about things more deeply than they usually are in human societies in the past. From one perspective that's a good thing.
If you imagine a family where there's a lot of stuff going on below the surface, old grievances and old hurts but nobody talks about it and then one day somebody says something and that just blows the whole thing wide open and everybody is then, at each other's throats, arguing, recriminations, accusations, blah, blah, blah. That's maybe a good an analogy for what's happening with the human family, particularly in the west but to some extent around the world. But it seems to be focused on the west where the big western Judeo-Christian family are having to do some soul searching and having to really sort out their issues and their differences and hopefully come to some resolution or conclusion, or at least some deeper level of understanding.
I think that is available for some people as long as they approach it in the right way. But a lot of people are probably doing it in the wrong way. They're sticking to their guns, sticking to their position, they're right, everyone else is wrong. It's not a productive way to approach the situation. But of course if you're going to have to approach it in a more positive way you would have to see that what benefits one also must benefit all. There's a community aspect to it, "We all rise or fall together" type of thing.
So it's not a good idea to say, "Well I'm just going to stick to my guns and screw you. I'm right and you're wrong." It's not helpful for you or for anybody else in the society where you're living. It's very interesting times that we live in. Like you said, there's a lot of chaos, a lot of nonsense, a lot of craziness and hopefully something good will come out of it, or we're all going to die.
Niall: {laughs} Or neither. So the neither would be something like not much good can come out of it but for some, if they don't fall into the trap, they can do what? They can thrive in fact.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: They can - to quote someone who's made this a popular term but has older meaning for us - they can ride the wave rather than being washed under it...
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: ...by the sheer strength of it.
Joe: The other aspect is that you can say, "Well don't get worked up about it. Why are people getting so worked up? It's not such a big thing", people who are observing it, let's say, might think that would suggest it's not such a big deal, that this has happened before in human history, societies have been divided, there have been serious polemics that have come up and that have divided populations and specific countries or more than one country. There's even some level of social strife or conflict. It's just what happens in human society. "'Twas ever so" sort of thing. Just no big deal really.
But I don't think that's the case really because we live in a very unique time where in previous societies literally before the last 20-25 years, people did not have the access to information that they have today and the ability to interact with each other, with millions of other people potentially, instantaneously or immediately as something unfolds. Think about social issues, 100 or 200 years ago. They were relatively small. No, a lot of people in the country would have known about it, even fewer would have been directly involved in it and for that reason it would peter out. Those kinds of things never went on for too long. I'm leaving out wars here. I'm talking about social conflict or social dividing of the population on one side of the aisle or the other. Sometimes it actually led directly to a war but civil wars in the west were quite short-lived as well. Again, not everybody was involved in it.
But today with the internet, we did a show last year on why the internet should be 9/11'd, the internet should be destroyed. It was just my take. It was the devil's advocate kind of approach. I thought that the internet overall was a force for ...
Niall: Negative.
Joe: ...was a negative force rather than a positive force, overall. But then you can't really separate those two because if you decide that the internet should go then you lose some of the positive aspects of it. Certainly we have benefited from it.
Niall: You lose its potential at least.
Joe: Yeah. So it's not really something you can take a hard line approach on.
Niall: Just in case anyone misunderstands us, between the lines are we saying something like 'don't take a hard stand on anything and be quiet?' You see how it could be misconstrued...?
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: ...as just stay back and stay quiet and don't raise your head above the parapet, lest you be shot, metaphorically and possible even literally. But that's not what we mean, is it? You can take a strong stance and stand your ground on whatever principles you have come to accept at that time but without having to do or say anything precipitous that is potentially dangerous, something like that.
Joe: Again, it's not simple, it's not black and white and that's a good example of the truth of what we're saying, of how things, when they go black and white, that they're wrong. The answer to that question as to what people should or shouldn't do is not black and white. It's nuanced and it can be specific to the person and to the particular situation in their lives and what's going on in their community.
So for example, stories that are relevant today where countries in Europe have been and even are today - there was a story today from Germany where an Afghan refugee I think, went into a hospital and stabbed a pregnant Polish woman and she lost her baby as a result. There have been many examples of this kind of thing in the past few years in European countries and to some extent in the US as well. That's the kind of thing that would seriously inflame tensions and get someone really worked up and you can understand why it would put them on an anti-immigrant stance. But that's a specific situation. Do you want to get in the streets and protest that if there's a protest going on in Germany tomorrow, for example, to protest immigration? Do you want to go on the basis of that story? As a German, let's say, do you want to defend German society and to stop this kind of thing happening and obviously the answer in theory would be to stop immigration or to campaign for the cancellation of the German government's immigration policy.
Nobody's going to argue with you. Nobody's going to say that's the wrong thing to do. They could argue and say it's only one case, blah, blah, blah, there's lots of good immigrants, blah, blah, blah. So extrapolate that out to any issue that you get worked up at, that head-sure, your moral foundations or what you feel strongly and pushes those buttons. You should also, while constating that to yourself and recognizing that that's the way you feel, it's important to understand or bring in some understanding about human nature and about how the world works and how that there may well be in the world today in positions of power who have an interest in dividing society, particularly western society, but any society. There's a long track record - particularly against western powers but not only - but western powers going around the world using divide and rule policies or strategies within countries to set local people against each other so that they can more easily control them and rule them. It's not a big stretch to suggest that that may be at work in western society.
Niall: It's so abstract though to go from there to a guy going into a hospital and stabbing a pregnant woman.
Joe: Right. But I wouldn't say it's a much abstract but rather it posits a very, very complex and you would probably say, monstrous scheme or plot if that's one of the end results of it, i.e., someone is deliberately planning to bring in as many refugees or migrants into European countries, knowing that they haven't been integrated or it would be difficult to integrate them and they come from a different culture and background and many of them come from conflict zones. They've been traumatized themselves so they're a bit unhinged and a bit destabilized.
So out of every 10,000 migrants you know there's going to be a few who will act in this way, in some way or another. You're not going to define or plan it right down to that guy going into the hospital, but in general you know that some of them are going to act up and inflame tensions in western societies and cause that kind of division among the people because obviously there are different types of people and one of the fundamental things that people need to understand is that there are deep psychological differences between human beings. There's a lot of psychological literature on the studies done on this to show this. One of the books that we keep referencing is Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
But the fact of the matter is that people do have foundational differences, let's say and they can be broken down. That's why they have been broken down into conservative and left-learning or liberal or whatever. The conservatives tend to, among other things, value loyalty to their group and sanctity...
Niall: Of the nation...
Joe: Of the nation or...
Niall: Higher power.
Joe: ...or a higher power basically. Whereas more left-leaning people foundationally, as a part of their makeup, they were born with, let's say, they were wired, tend to have more of a care foundation, that they're triggered more by care and consideration for others, for the oppressed, for poor people or people marginalized in whatever way, etc. People suffering and they want to care for them.
That's why they're called bleeding heart liberals whereas conservatives tend to be more focused on conservatism, their group tradition, loyalty to that and, like you mentioned, sanctity and the idea of a higher power authority.
So they're very foundational differences that make people respond quite differently in different situations. The idea would be that someone knows that. That idea has been understood for a long time by social scientists and by rulers of countries who use scientific information to help govern the country, their understanding of the psychology of human beings seems to be quite developed. So this conspiracy that I'm positing here is to keep in mind, the possible conspiracy that someone is deliberately trying to divide western society for a specific purpose.
It's not a very complex purpose. It's as old as time in a certain sense. I mentioned before that it's divide and rule and it's a clique or a group of leaders or an establishment that has been in power for a very long time and they are corrupt and increasingly corrupt and increasingly self-centered, increasingly don't care about the people. The people then respond to that with the yellow vest protests in France and in other places of late and their response to that is "We need to divide these people. We need to have them fighting each other rather than fighting us because we like our positions of power and authority and we don't want to lose it but we're the type of people who can't just stop serving ourselves primarily over serving the people."
So they can't do that because they're constitutionally driven to serve themselves so they're going to provoke a reaction among the population and they understand. Again, this isn't new. This has been around throughout human history, the strategy of controlling the population, of dividing them against each other. I'm just saying since that strategy has been around for a long time of a group of elite people in power trying to divide in times when the people are rising up against and angry at the authorities, the authorities then use tactics to divide those people. I'm saying that that's what we see today.
You can't remove some conscious input from the authorities or from some powers, in implementing that strategy. A strategy doesn't just develop by itself. It's just doesn't all happen by accident. There are people in power who are corrupt and do want to, at all costs, hold onto their power and do see that the people are angry with them and do implement strategies.
So you look and say, well what's playing out in the world today? And you see that western countries again, in particular, are being divided, have been over the past several years increasingly divided against each other along these fundamental ideological lines. So when you find yourself being polarized to one end because of some event in the news, that by definition would put you potentially at odds with your neighbour, the guy living next door to you, all I'm saying is, before you get out in the streets and start marching and screaming at people and maybe at your neighbour, you should keep in mind that you may be playing into a deliberate strategy to get you to do exactly what you're doing and it's not in your best interests.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: But at the same time, like I said, I can fully understand people's responses based on my understanding from the work of other people, of those differences in human beings and what makes them tick and that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the leftist 'care' foundation, consideration for other people. There's nothing wrong with the right's conservative more moral, loyalty and sanctity and authority foundation. Both of them are necessary for a properly functioning society and there is a middle ground that can be found between the two but it's very easily split or divided or provoked. Those differences are very easily exacerbated. What I'm saying is that I see those differences being exacerbated, of being provoked and I can also track it back obviously, in the case of immigration to conscious decisions by western powers to bomb and destroy Middle Eastern countries and African countries, where the immigrants are coming from that are causing this social divisiveness.
So are you going to be a coincidence theorist then? That that was all just by accident? Fair enough if you want to do that. It still doesn't change the fact that it's happening. But I suppose the key ingredient is if it's conscious or not then you can assume I suppose, if you fall on the side of "I think it's mostly likely to be conscious," then you can assume that it doesn't have a good end result for you. If it's just accidental then maybe you're more free to just go with it because that's just the way these things happen and they have to be sorted out one way or another and may the best man win type of thing.
But if there's a controlling hand in it that is specifically trying to create a negative situation for everybody on both sides of the conflict or the debate, then I would, at the very least - I'm not saying people shouldn't get out and protest and express what they think, stand up for their rights and stuff, but just pay attention to what's going on, at the very least and be careful.
Niall: There were two other incidents in Germany last week which were pretty horrific as well and it's interesting in the way they contrast with the story just cited of the Afghan. I presume he was a refugee. I presume that was his partner who he went into the hospital and stabbed.
Joe: Maybe.
Niall: Two incidents happened three days apart. I think it was the same city in eastern Germany. On the first occasion someone set of some kind of bomb explosive outside the offices of the AfD, Alternative for Deutschland, the so-called new far right party, anti-migrant party in Germany. Just two or three days later, somebody I think from the same city, an elected AfD official MP was so brutally attacked he almost died. You might have seen the photos.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: ...of damage to his face. It was probably an attempted assassination. I think it's actually lucky that he was not killed. But there's no information that I know of about who did that, but I just found the confluence of those two things coming so close together, I think in the same city, really weird.
Now alright, conspiracy aside, imagine that you're not thinking, you're not going to bother, you're just taking it at face value when you hear that news. If you were a supporter, loosely, or maybe really ardently of AfD in Germany, what would your impressions of that double hit be?
Joe: You'd be further enraged at the immigration policies of the German government and you would resolve that you're going to do whatever's necessary to make sure that those policies are changed or, if that's not possible, you're going to take direct action against immigrants.
Niall: Yeah. My side is under attack.
Joe: Right.
Niall: I have concrete evidence. It's in my face, my side is under attack.
Joe: That's the conservative loyalty foundation that won't be overcome. They'll always go with that whereas the liberals could very easily switch. They may feel that they'll have some sense of concern for their society and bad things happening in their society but they'll very easily switch because of their nature. When it comes down to it, they'll care more about the immigrants because they can easily be provoked by images and stories about immigrants coming with their children and no food, no shelter, and they'll end up going down to help the immigrants rather than take a stand against them.
My problem is that, on the one hand there's more hope in the conspiracy theory angle because it suggests that someone is deliberately trying to invoke a class of ideologies in society and create a bad situation in western societies that they have to actually consciously involve themselves in. For example, they could have put someone up to beating up that AfD politician to deliberately inflame tensions and if that's the case, that suggests that if these people weren't consciously trying to inflame the situation, it wouldn't be so bad and human beings could resolve to work it out on their own, that ultimately people would see sense and realize that they're the ones who are going to lose in any kind of social conflicts and are not going to go there. So people would not go to the extremes of provoking the other side and creating violence in their own society from which everybody is going to lose.
So the concept of conspiracy suggests that it's hopeful in a certain sense, even though it's bad. It posits that somebody's trying to deliberately make things worse because otherwise they would be okay.
Niall: Otherwise they would naturally resolve.
Joe: Naturally resolve but if it's just coincidence and it's just the way human beings are, well then you have less hope because the blame falls on ordinary human beings and you get the feeling that's just the way human beings are. They're always going to be at each other's throats eventually.
Niall: So I just throw my hands up. They're all going to tear each other apart.
Joe: So either walk away and give up hope or you get stuck into the battle.
Niall: Yeah. So what's going on in France then? It's not bucking the trend, so to speak, in that nine weeks in now - this weekend was more intense than last weekend - the numbers thing is weird. The French government initially said there were about 25,000 protestors across France, including Paris and many other cities this weekend. But that doesn't make any sense because they said they had at least 80,000 security forces out in the streets. You look at the videos and you're not seeing a see of blue and two yellow jackets. You're seeing a sea of yellow jackets and a few police here and there and maybe a lot at one end of the street or the city or whatever.
Anyway, the point is that they still have major support nationwide. Two months, going to three months soon. Is this hopeful? Is it in fact bucking the trend of dividing? Is it a response to it because when you hear a lot of what they have to say, individuals who have actually been on the media to speak, spokespeople of the yellow vest movement or simply when they're being interviewed impromptu on the streets, they are all about how "we're in this together" and they specifically say that the problem is upstairs. It's not the guys over there or the people coming in from over there.
Joe: Right.
Niall: It's them!
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: The rich.
Joe: Yeah. And that's why they yellow vest protests in France have been very heartening for people in other countries and made them respond in kind, essentially, in their own countries, to wear the yellow vests and engage in similar kinds of protests. It hasn't really taken off to the same extent in other countries as it has in France. But it is hopeful because if people are going to protest and complain about problems in the world or problems in this case in France, the problems clearly do stem from corruption in government and corrupt officials and their agendas that really aren't serving the interests of ordinary people.
Most people still have it fairly okay. It's all relative. They don't have that much to complain about. They're not living on a dollar a day or anything like that. They're not sorting through trash heaps for food and clothing or anything like that so it could get a lot worse. You could argue that French people are a bit too entitled, they should just suck it up. They have it pretty good compared to a lot of people in the world. But I think it's more than that. There's more than just, as has been suggested, the taxes. The people really don't like the government. They don't like Manuel Macron and what he stands for. They don't like the way he talks and what he espouses and for me it's completely understandable.
A French President that stands up on the day of the commemoration of the end of the First World War and denounces nationalism?! And we understand nationalism in its purest form which is people who are from a country who like that country and like the culture and values that that country holds, for a President to get up and denounce that publicly is unconscionable. He's an idiot basically. But he has his own ideology and I don't for a moment think it's a genuinely or honestly motivated ideology. I don't think he's just a bit deluded. I think he's working. The guy who is reportedly his lover, Benalla who's been involved in the scandals over the past six months or so where he was a confidante of Macron's, he explicitly said - and he's in a good position to know - that Macron is just simply doing the bidding, following crazy policies, that they're making him do a ridiculous amount of bullshit. Macron has his part to play in that. He's willingly doing it so he's signed up to that agenda.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Nobody's twisting his arm but he is being told what to do, like most Presidents of most countries, particularly in the west are more or less told what to do and when to do it by other people, people who are usually not elected, by career diplomats and established figures. They're the ones who decide the policies and what they should and shouldn't do. The president, the prime minister, the leader of the country is simply the person who has to get out there in front of the people and try and convince them to manipulate them into accepting or to lie to them about what's actually going on.
So I think the yellow vests don't like Macron, don't like what he stands for because he's not the person that they elected. He doesn't represent them as supposedly is the narrative. The French people elect the president. He's meant to do what they want. Well he's not doing what they want! It's pretty clear and most French people know that he's doing the bidding of someone else that does not have the interests of the French people at heart. So just that general idea is what angers the French people who want a change in the system. Forget the specifics about taxes and all this kind of stuff. I don't think that's really the issue. I think they just don't like the government.
Niall: Yeah. Andrew Breitbart said famously, 'Politics is downstream from culture.' I think of this as the French population vomiting out the whole array - but their all quite tightly connected - the whole array of new cultural norms, ideologies (in plural) but they form one overall ideology that's been shoved down their throats, so to speak. It's lies as well. It's the same in France as in the Anglosphere and many other countries where it has become a daily barrage of bullshit. Americans know this too. They complain about it as well.
So it's the same situation in France. This is nonstop. Nothing is sacred anymore. They will just lie and lie and lie and then lies upon lies and so on.
Joe: But just to follow up what you were saying earlier on, the protestors in France don't seem to be divided along that left/right pro or anti-immigrant or pro or anti conservative versus liberal, whatever way you want to describe it. They don't seem to be divided or haven't taken the bait to divide themselves along those lines. It hasn't worked in France, let's say. To the extent that the government has tried to push that division, it hasn't worked in France and it's a credit to the French people that they're a bit more clued in and they're historically suspicious, which helps.
They're just historically, by definition, suspicious of the government. When the government says something, the first thing they think is, "They're probably lying. Let's check to see if there's anything truthful about what they said at all." Then they'll look for the truth, but they assume that the government is corrupt and assume that the government is lying and they're not awestruck, for the most, by authority and by governments which is I suppose why they historically seem a bit more leftist leaning. But they're a good mix. That's what makes them kind of strange. They're a good mix.
Niall: I find it interesting watching the alternative independent commentators, let's say, online mostly, forget about the mainstream commentators. They're of course just following the overall globalist party line but even in the alternative, people are viewing it through their lens. Most of them are fundamentally getting it, in that left and right are united, but they still have their slant on it where they'll read into it what they want. So if you're of the new right, of the conservative values, pushing back against globalization, pro-nation state, you're seeing this substantially as the French people waving the tricolor therefore it's the nationalists. You can find specific evidence for it because now they have banners about the anti-mass migration or anti-terrorism.
On the flip side, if you're more left leaning you're like, "Yes! Finally! The workers' revolution is really here. This is great!" And they're all going "This is great!" but they don't understand maybe that on the streets of France today they're both there. They both know they're different when they talk to each other, but they are agreeing, explicitly I imagine in the conversations they're having, implicitly as a whole, to put aside their relatively minor differences in the interests of a much greater difference that exists - the chasm between a very small established elite, multi-generational really, and them, the great unwashed.
Joe: Well that's the problem with Macron. He has taken up a centrist position and like I said on previous shows, by taking up a centrist position he thought he would unite people but he's actually succeeded in not serving either the left or the right interests because you're in the middle. And that's actually what he does. Protestors, like you said, realize they may have differences but ultimately they can't even get to the point of resolving those differences if they don't sort this government out first.
The first step to trying to get what they want, based on their left or right leaning tendencies, they need to get rid of the government. They need to do something about the government first. You notice that Macron actually is pissing off both sides. It's bizarre but he's pissing off both sides. In other countries the government, at least in their words and most of their actions, whatever they're doing behind the scenes but most of the words and actions, if it's a conservative government, they'll take mostly conservative lines.
Niall: In the UK for example, the government's essentially following the result of the referendum and pro-Brexit.
Joe: Right. And Trump is sticking to conservative ideas. You find the same in other countries.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: But Macron, the idiot and his backers who are even more idiotic for backing him and pushing him in this direction, he's clearly seen and is serving big business interests at the expense of the French people, which really pisses off the lefties because they want socialism, right? They want nationalization of state services and you can't touch the national health service. The welfare state has to remain and you have to look after the poor and all that stuff, basically welfare.
But he's serving the interests of big business. There's basically no taxes for big corporations and he comes from a Rothschild bank. He's a big business man. So he pisses of the left for that reason and at the same time he comes out and tries to attract the left by talking pro-immigration and saying there's no such thing as nationalism which serves to piss off the right.
So who's he talking to?! You're talking to nobody in France! You're appealing to nobody! Do you realize that?! And then you wonder why you have these protests in France! United protests?! He has absolutely himself and his backers have only themselves to blame for pursuing their policy and these protests are an imminently foreseeable result of that policy, of pissing everybody off. You're thinking that you're uniting them?! Talk about delusional! It's bizarre!
Niall: Something I've been asked frequently is are these yellow vest protests going to spread. There have been some start-up smaller protests, mostly in western Europe but even as far as Australia. The US, I don't think so. Even in Taiwan apparently there was some kind of strike or something and they were all wearing the gilets jaune or whatever is their equivalent. Maybe in Belgium it's pretty hot there too but it's still substantially contained to France.
Do you think it likely that this is the thing of the year? That it'll be some kind of a European or wider spring, maybe just not yet? Or - this is the flip side of the discussion we're having - where if it's a trap to become too entrenched in one view or the other and therefore miss the real fundamental division that exists in terms of a totally disconnected oligarchy, elite, establishment or deep state versus the great mass of people who have far more in common than not? Which will win, so to speak? The phoney division or the actual one?
Joe: Well that's the battle that's going on. I don't see the protests in France as a trap. I don't see them, because of what we said, that people genuinely seem to be united against and focusing their anger in the right direction. So they haven't taken the bait. But that left/right division that we talked about and the possibility that it's being consciously implemented is more broad scale and it focuses here in one country at one point and then in another country and it pushes certain agendas. I think it's a longer scale plan, if you know what I mean. It's not something that can be implemented in a few months and then achieve it's results. It's been going on for perhaps decades, if you want to look at it in a longer term.
At the same time, those divisions have existed naturally in human beings, like we said, but it seems to have come to a point where there do seem to be people in positions of power, even behind the throne, the deep state type of thing, who know those divisions and have decided that it's a good idea in their own interests, in the interests of keeping themselves in power, to encourage divisions in different ways over a longer period of time, to encourage divisions in the population.
One interesting point as you look at France, it would almost suggest that these people that I'm positing doing what they're doing, have known that the French people are a bit more resistant to those kinds of divisive tactics because the worst and biggest terror attacks over the past number of years, perhaps throughout the whole 'war on terror' in terms of the European continent, have happened in France. Clearly, those kind of attacks by ISIS at least have the potential or should have the potential, if you don't want to assign a conscious conspiracy behind them, to inflame...
Niall: A country with such a large Muslim minority.
Joe: With 15 million Muslims and 15% of the population. You would think that France would at this point already be in serious difficulties, that that would be their response to Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan and several other terror attacks, big ones on French soil. As I've said before, these terror attacks happened in the context of media reporting repeatedly and loudly about the immigrants coming into Europe, including France, from Middle Eastern countries, Muslims, and big headlines saying that amongst the immigrants were ISIS terrorists masquerading as refugees and these are the people who carried out these atrocious terror attacks on French soil.
Right there, you'd think that any rational, thinking person who has any self-preservation instinct would say, "I don't want friggin' refugees coming into this country because you've just told me that ISIS, the ones who shoot 80 people in a concert hall, are amongst them! So no!" It's not rocket science. Do you want this mass murderer in your neighbourhood? No!
Niall: Don't worry. We have a file on them and we're watching them from afar.
Joe: Yeah. You would think that everybody, regardless of their inclinations left or right would say that's a bad idea. "I don't want any mass murderers in my town!"
Niall: They would naturally come to that conclusion among themselves.
Joe: Right. Everybody would. But at the same time as people are being propagandized or specifically the right-wingers, the ones who are more conservative, at the same time as they're being targeted with that kind of propaganda, the left-wingers were being targeted at exactly the same time on the same day maybe, as they're being told that ISIS are amongst the refugees, they're putting up pictures for the left-wingers with the bleeding hearts of refugee babies dead on a Greek seashore.
Niall: Which had been going on prior to that.
Joe: But that right there is giving you a difficult choice. Based on your inclinations you're going to say what's most important to me? Protecting our identity and our in-group from the foreigners who want to kill us or saving the poor baby? That way you split, like Moses parting the Red Sea, you can split the population along those innate moral inclinations.
Niall: It takes effort to maintain it though or to re-split it and re-split it because the sea will come back and it'll be a crashing wave and you'll get what's going on in France and the state literally crapping itself.
Joe: Well in France that happens but, like I said, that kind of strategy may have more success in other countries. It depends on the makeup of the people in the specific country. The biggest effect of the whole mass immigration to Europe and European countries has been this rise of the right that everybody keeps talking about, in Germany, the alternative for Deutschland right-wing conservative party gets a lot of votes in the last election last year or the year before and then you have a right-wing conservative party coming to power in Italy.
Niall: Well that's an interesting case. That's kind of like yellow vests in power because you've got right and left.
Joe: Yeah. It's more complex I suppose but it's a new party, let's say and they're anti-Europe and they're anti-system.
Niall: Populists, as in they're popular.
Joe: They're populist and fundamentally any party that is anti-European Union is almost by definition nationalistic because they say "We don't want to be part of your conglomerate. We're Italians. We want to control our own destiny." That's a conservative line. And you also see in Poland there's been a big swing to the right and in Hungary. Austrians seem to be going towards the more conservative...
Niall: Well they were way ahead of the curve.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: They had a "far right", "Nazi" party in the coalition back in 2000, Jörg Haider. He met and forced events. You wonder about that.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: Seeing as we mentioned it at the top of the show, we're into the hard core left/right with big political issues but do we want to say anything about the way in which divisiveness comes through everything? Between the sexes and what's the conspiracy there? The counter-narrative, the exposure of it, would say that it's something like a feminist conspiracy or at least grows out of the devouring of academia by postmodernism and hard, pseudo-leftist, neo-Marxist, whatever it is, philosophy at the root of it?
I'd love to know, really, how much this has taken root in the population because you can't trust that what you're seeing on the internet is a decent snapshot of the populations.
Joe: I think fundamentally that's another fracture point and it's between men and women. That's the simple overview of the situation. Clearly there's an attempt from somewhere. You don't have to say it's a conscious conspiracy of somebody in dark suits and dark black hats in some smoky room somewhere plotting it, but certainly there's forces at work that have been attempting to divide men and women and set them against each other. So at a social level you have an attempt to divide the population down the middle and set them at each other's throats and then you have an attempt to set at a more finite or detailed level of biological sexes you have someone trying to divide men and women against each other and have them argue and not be friends.
But the bottom line in all this obviously is that you see people in society at the level of men and women, at the level of left and right, at the level of religious levels - even at a broader level it would be Christianity versus Islam - clearly something is dividing the population, very sharply. You can reasonably posit that even if it's not a conscious conspiracy, that can only benefit the people in power if they're the ones who really need to be called to account. They're not the ones being called to account because people are too busy fighting with each other.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: But the whole feminist manosphere, red pilled male thing is another discussion that we would have to get into. I don't think we have time for it today but ultimately all of the details are just manifestations of people swallowing ideologies and swallowing hard core black and white, oversimplified beliefs about reality and the way society works and then running with it and being encouraged - again to come back to the internet - finding encouragement and validation for that black and white thinking on the internet from other people and getting together in groups, in echo chambers, tribes, "We all believe this and it's so hard core truth it's amazing. It just blew my mind."
The thing is, a lot of those things are true and they do have a lot of truth in them.
Niall: You can find a lot by, as I phrased it to you earlier, by trying it on, "trying on an ideology" or a set of ideas.
Joe: Right.
Niall: The trick though is the trap is where it actually precipitates and "That's it! I'm not letting anything else in past this wall I just put up around it."
Joe: "I've found the answer" basically and that's it. That's stupid because human development is an unending process of discovery and learning of more and more complexity effectively on any topic that you get into. So when you first get into something you say, "Wow! This is amazing information! It makes so much sense of everything!" Well don't stop there at all. You just stepped in the door and that's just one part of the puzzle.
Niall: Find out what the whole house is like before you buy it.
Joe: Right. And don't go looking to buy anything anyway. You're just collecting information and putting together a jigsaw puzzle and it's a very big one.
Niall: We'll switch gears here. We'll probably find a way that it all plays back in. I want to bring up Mike Pompeo's visit to Cairo.
Joe: The honourable representative of the Koch brothers?
Niall: Mike Pompeo's Trump's guy but he's not. I think he was may be a state representative in Kansas and Kansas is the home of the Koch Brothers Industries and now their huge political purchase/influence/lobbying in American politics, not just in D.C. I'm reading a book by Jane Mayer, Dark Money. She has a particular slant on things. She's in it to expose the dark money behind big conservative politicians, think tanks, groups, etc. It's worth reading in its own right to give you an idea of how the money flows. Of course that's not the end of the story because we know there's the Soros network and other philanthropists who donate billions to democrats and people on the other side of all of these political arguments.
But Mike Pompeo was so politically bought by the Koch Brothers that he had the moniker that he was the representative from Koch, not from Kansas. It's super interesting because here he is in government working nominally under a President who was the only one of the 15 candidates for the RNC nomination who was not a Koch Brothers recipient of campaign donations. They specifically didn't like him. They had earmarked up to a billion dollars to give to the winner of the republican nomination to then face off against Hillary. They withdrew that when Trump won it and instead invested it in concentrating on local races to get them the right stuff in and around Trump. Lo and behold, two years into the first administration of Trump, Mike Pompeo's a Koch Brothers guy, Mike Pence is a Koch Brothers guy.
So Pompeo goes to Cairo. It's 10 years since Obama did the same thing and his infamous/famous or however you saw it, speech in Cairo which would be a reversal of 10 years of Bush and "We're sorry" basically. He didn't say 'we're sorry' really but it was meant to convey contrition for American foreign policy in the Middle East after 911.
Joe: It was all horse shit obviously.
Niall: It was horse shit because it just continued under another guise. So now 10 years after that we have Mike Pompeo going to Cairo to announce the shaking ...
Joe: Oil change. We're going to stop it a little bit here and there probably.
Video: Secretary of State Pompeo on a nine city tour in the Middle East today delivering what the New York Times called "A scathing and quite personal rejection of President Barak Obama's approach to the Middle East, excoriating Mr. Obama for fundamental misunderstandings about the region that underestimated the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islamism. Take a look at the strikingly different messages in 2009 and then today.
Obama: As-salamu alaykum.
Pompeo: It was here in this city that another American stood before you. He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology.
Obama: Islam is not part of the problem in combatting violent extremism. It is an important part of promoting peace.
Niall: Pause it there. That's supposed to be two contrary statements but Pompeo isn't contradicting Obama as such. Obama never said that there was an ideological problem. He was saying that Islam is not the problem. So it's kind of semantics but on the other hand it isn't because what's implied in what Pompeo is saying is that Islam is a political ideology, period, and not a religion. He doesn't mean to but he is unconsciously making no distinction between radical Islamists and terrorism and everything that goes with it and the image of it, with Islam.
This is the worst thing you can say when you go to Cairo and speak to scholars and diplomats in the Middle East. You're trying to win them to your side but actually if you compare notes, he's trying to offset himself from Obama, but Obama's message is the one that's going to win friends and influence people in the Middle East versus his.
Joe: Right.
Niall: Okay, let's carry on.
Pompeo: I told you that 911 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East.
Obama: The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile, not only to America and western countries, but also to human rights. All this has bred more fear and more mistrust.
Pompeo: He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed "a new beginning".
Obama: I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.
Pompeo: The good news is this. The age of self-inflicted American shame is over and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering. Now comes the real new beginning.
Niall: You ain't seen nothing yet! "The age of self-inflicted shame", I think he's saying "Obama arrived here and was contrite for you and that was his fundamental mistake so we're not sorry for anything. Sorry, not sorry."
Joe: Well they had a guy in the Fox studio on after who followed up and explained for Fox News viewers what was really going on, some general or something or a colonel. One of the things he mentioned about the flaw in Obama's policy was pulling out of Iraq because that gave rise to ISIS and America was too meek essentially, going and helping the Iraqis, for example by invading and bombing their country and killing 1.5 million of them and then just leaving and giving rise to ISIS.
The problem in that guy's analysis obviously, he's not even wrong. There's so much wrong with it that I don't know where to begin, basically. But ultimately this is American exceptionalism. Obama's just trying to manipulate people with contrition. It's a manipulation. Obama was still trying to further American foreign policy but just through a nicey-nicey approach. It was freedom and democracy whereas Pompeo was saying, "No, we're going to be hard core. We're going to be straight with people and we're going to attack radical Islam and we're going to deal with this problem in the Middle East."
It never occurs to these people to shut the hell up and go home. Who the hell are you anyway? It's absolutely part of the fabric of our reality right now that America has an absolute, unspoken 100% intuited, assumed right to involve itself in everybody's business up to and including invading and bombing and threatening to do that. That's where I just have to say, "Okay, stall the digger there. Let's go back to the beginning and question your assumption that the US has any right - not even a right - but in the interests of the American people, should be involving itself in all these conflicts around the world because you know what? The world doesn't need America.
It's a typical pathological ploy for someone to insist that "I'm doing this..."
Niall: Without us, you live in hell.
Joe: Yeah, "I'm doing this for you." But have you listened to the person who said "Leave me the F alone? I don't want your help, thank you?" "No, no. You're delusional. I need to be here and it's for..." Dude, obviously you're doing it for your own interests, for your own agenda, to serve your own selfish agenda and you're presenting it as this magnanimous, altruistic, helping all these people around the world and I have to deal with these problems or nobody else will deal with them and America has done so much to help the world. No it hasn't! It objectively has not done so much to help. It has had a far more negative effect on the world, objectively, since it has been particularly influential in the world, say the last 100 years. It has had a far more pernicious effect on the world than a beneficial one. You could spend the next 10 minutes listing all of the examples of how that is absolutely true.
Niall: Mike Pompeo wouldn't agree with you. He went on to say, "America has always been and will always be, a liberating force, not an occupying power."
Joe: But that's nonsense!
Niall: "We've never dreamed of domination in the Middle East."
Joe: That's nonsense!
Niall: "Can you say the same about Iran?"
Joe: But that's complete nonsense. The guy afterwards, the colonel talked about "We need to push back against ISIS. We need to deal with ISIS because it's our responsibility to deal with radical Islamic terrorism" even though you're the ones who are actually - ISIS is our force for the past seven years in Syria, so you're full of shit?! Absolutely! And also to push back against Iran because Iran wants to take the place of Saudi Arabia. I'm like, do you have a problem with the Iranians who are not head-choppers taking the place of the baddy-boy head choppers in Saudi Arabia that you're best buddies with?! Is that not a point? Why is America concerned that Iran will displace Saudi Arabia that chops all sorts of body parts off for no good reason whatsoever and is the most restrictive and oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East that is also the fount, the source of radical Islam that you supposedly want to fight and they're your best friends?!
"Ah, but it's complicated." No! Okay it's complicated, explain it! Stop bullshitting everybody and explain exactly what your agenda is and you'll find that it's exactly the opposite of what you say. It's not about freedom and democracy. It's not about helping the world. It's not about dealing with radical Islam. It's exactly the opposite of all those things. It's about fueling radical Islam through your alliance with Saudi Arabia. It's about dominating and occupying and controlling as many strategically important, i.e., resource rich countries in the world as you can. That's what your agenda is. Just own it! Twelve step program. First step, get up and admit that you're a friggin...
Niall: You're an addict.
Joe: ...you're addicted to domination and control.
Niall: He also said, "We assembled a coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Would the Russians or Chinese come to your rescue in the same way, the way that we have?"
Joe: What? A piddly little pinprick of a country called Kuwait in the Middle East?
Niall: If that's his narrative then the counter to that is Syria. That's the thing you've been screaming about the last few years.
Joe: Right.
Niall: That Russia came a propped up the Syrian regime.
Joe: If Saddam wanted to invade Kuwait and he had his own reasons for invading Kuwait that were as legitimate as reasons go in the geopolitical sphere, what interest is it of yours America? What's your interest?
Niall: Between the lines, that's as honest as he's going to get because he's saying "I'm here. I can sell American military might. We can sell you actual equipment."
Joe: American protection racket.
Niall: American protection racket. "And we're in competition with those Russians and the Chinese for this region.
Joe: That's the real truth.
Niall: That's as honest as he's going to get in terms of a geopolitical explanation.
Joe: Right. But now that people have that they can follow it through. It's very easy once you understand that broad scale motivation of pushing back against Russia and China because America is existentially afraid of losing its position as top dog in the world and then follow that through as to what America would do...
Niall: To maintain it.
Joe: ...to maintain that and it's got bugger all to do with freedom and democracy.
Niall: Or saving people from ISIS.
Joe: Or saving people from ISIS or stopping radical Islam. In fact, radical Islam, as we've seen in Syria for the past seven years has served you very well. John Kerry, very explicitly - it's on our YouTube channel SOTT media - a recording of John Kerry stating that the American government, back in 2014 or whatever, under Obama the great liberator and the bleeding heart, 'I want everybody to live wonderful, peaceful lives together in wonderful diversity' - under Obama the US government deliberately at least allowed ISIS, at a time when they said they were bombing it and they were in Syria to bomb and attack ISIS, John Kerry said they allowed ISIS to carry on and do its thing. Evidence suggests they also included them funding, arming and sending weapons to them through various channels so that they could overthrow the Syrian government. And he's on record as saying it!
Niall: The other thing that's interesting about the timing of this is that John Bolton preceded him to the Middle East. I think they were traveling together.
Joe: There's three of them. There's Pompeo, Bolton and John Bolton's moustache. It has its own seat on the airplane.
Niall: It has its own demands. I want to see Ratheon.
Joe: Right.
Niall: You get a sense of how alone Trump is when Pompeo undercuts what Trump has been saying for the last month about drawing down...
Joe: And Bolton.
Niall: Going out of sand and death. "There's nothing in it for us."
Joe: People crap their pants. The protected zones, the ones who have signed up for the American protection racket in the Middle East, they crapped their pants when they heard Trump say that because it's all change and change is scary. Yeah, Russia is asserting itself in the Middle East but it hasn't been there long enough and those countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt to a large extent, are all American protectorates in the Middle East and they don't want to see their patron just up and leave. It scares them because they don't know what's going to happen. It's not just that Russia might not be able to provide the same protection, and it probably wouldn't want to, but they like it this way.
They don't want to have to be honest brokers with their neighbours. They want a big brother as America has been, to come in, to stay there and continue to do what it's been doing which is threaten everybody to stay in line and to operate along the guidelines that America sets. It's much easier because then you can really just be a puppet and deal with your local issues. But the broader Middle East is locked down and is stable. If America goes they think that instability will break out and who knows what could happen. Who knows what their future would hold for them in that respect.
So that's why you had Pompeo and Bolton come in and say, "Okay, hang on a minute. Trump doesn't really mean that. We're not going anywhere." And he goes on a nine day whistle stop tour, patting everybody on the head. He's handing out friggin' Xanax or Valium or something to everybody. "Chill out everybody. It's okay. We're not going anywhere. Trump doesn't know what he's talking about."
Niall: The irony is that if it had not been for either the Obama administration or the continuation in the so-called right-wing equivalent of the US government, the Middle East as a whole would be on its way to democratizing by now. A case in point is Yemen. Yemen had a coup but after years of the Arab Spring protests which were also mega in Yemen, it finally came to a head in a coup with popular backing. Then it became quite quickly a civil war in 2015 when "Saudi Arabia" - really it's a western war against Yemen to maintain the existing order in that country because, to quote an older US democrat, so a leftist from the 1960s - "If one of those little Asian countries falls to communism, they all fall like dominos." The domino theory.
Joe: Right.
Niall: It's a real fear for them. If Yemen goes then there's pressure on Saudi Arabia to reform and an actual upwelling of democracy, roughly. By that I simply mean that leadership that is broadly in line with the popular will, simply that, not any kind of ideological variance of important western democracy, literally. Although who knows what forms it would take.
Syria is a case in point. It arguably is one of the last few bastions of a reasonably secular, nationalistic, therefore in line with the will of the people, therefore democratic, countries in the Middle East thanks to Al Assad's father and of course the current President and that's why they hated him so much. If I were to tie this back to our earlier discussion, the one thing people should see in this is that there's no real difference between Obama's vision of America and the Middle East and Pompeo's version. Well what is the difference between those two? This is supposed to be a whole new government for America that's so radically different that America's tearing itself apart over this current government. But it's basically the same. The difference of course comes down to one person really - Trump. But it shows you that it was always going to take a lot more than electoral success of a maverick, a surprise and a godsend, let's say, from a perspective of the majority of Americans. "Oh thank god, Trump's there! Phew!" Well we dodged a bullet here. It will take time but we'll revert back to some normal things.
Joe: You've got the unelected power behind the throne that's been there for a very long time and now you're up against that. It's a real battle but the benefit of that has been that a lot of things have been revealed as a result of that conflict between the deep state and Trump and that's the best thing you can say about the Trump Presidency, effectively. In a broader sense, it has revealed an awful lot a lot of people, certainly those with eyes to see. So in that sense it's been a good thing.
But I think we're going to have to leave it there this week because we're getting close to the top of the hour. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you liked it click like, subscribe, all that kind of stuff. Even if you didn't like it, like and subscribe anyway. {laughter} Just because. We'll be back next week with another show so until then, thanks for watching, listening and have a good evening.
Niall: Bye. See you next week.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter