Israel’s History with the U.S. Empire, Times Up for TikTok, Cuba Off “Terror” List w/ Dr. Aaron Good (Putin is one of Schwab Fellows?)

4:29

“Very curious, like what sides you sketch out here—what sides of the mobs that actually control American decision-making have decided that this instability in the Middle East is not actually good for us, and which ones are still hanging on to it?

Well, this is a question that we could answer with greater or lesser complexity. I think at the core of this is the issue of why the US and Israel have become so intertwined in recent decades, especially in the 21st century. I believe that it takes us into the realm of deep politics—the politics of the very top of the political system that isn’t really about elections. It’s really about extremely wealthy oligarchs. This is an oligarchy of private wealth, and the real factions are organized groups of oligarchs commanding huge amounts of money and large organizations like corporations, think tanks, and everything else they control. These are the people who were able to move the US to decide to push for global empire after World War II. They’ve had different conflicts among themselves, while the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and elected officials operate at the pleasure of these oligarchs.

We all kind of understand that the wealthy control everything, but we might disagree on the mechanisms. If you look at the state of Israel, it was controversial at the time to recognize it in 1948. Harry Truman does so and also receives a big campaign contribution from Zionist backers that helps him win in 1948. He becomes beholden to what we think of now as the Israel Lobby, like AIPAC. Back then, the Democrats were the party more favorable to Israel. Meanwhile, old oil players like the Rockefellers weren’t necessarily in favor of recognizing Israel; they thought it might complicate their control over Middle Eastern oil.

When Eisenhower came to office, he did so on a wave of oil money. In 1956, you have the Suez Crisis—essentially a land grab attempt by Israel backed by the British and French. But the US put a stop to it, saying it would make us look like another white imperial power to the rest of the world, at a time when we were trying to win hearts and minds in the Cold War against communism. So, 1956 doesn’t go Israel’s way. But in 1967, with Lyndon Johnson in the White House, it’s a repeat—a Zionist scheme to start a war and grab more land. This time, they succeed. LBJ, being more corruptible or serving different interests than Eisenhower, enables this.

Eisenhower served the old guard—corporate titans like Standard Oil and Sullivan & Cromwell types of the Eastern Anglo establishment. Truman and LBJ, on the other hand, had more Zionist backers, which I think tied into labor and labor corruption. People don’t like to talk about this, but organized crime in the US has deeper roots than the Hollywood version we think of. It wasn’t just an Italian thing—Meyer Lansky, the mob’s accountant, ran rackets involving gambling, Teamster pensions, and money laundering. This tied into legitimate economies and eventually connected to Israel.

Over time, this corrupt, warlike faction gained more power and shifted the composition of the oligarchy. The old guard that stopped the Suez Crisis in 1956 lost influence, and the US became more aligned with Zionist and neoconservative interests. Nixon, Reagan, and George HW Bush occasionally pushed back against this. Nixon had some different ideas; Reagan recognized the PLO toward the end of his presidency; HW Bush even forced Israel into negotiations for a Palestinian state. But HW’s pushback on Zionist policies likely contributed to his 1992 election loss.

He ended the Cold War and won the Gulf War, which should have guaranteed his reelection. But I believe the Israel Lobby worked against him. Ross Perot’s third-party run further fractured the electorate, and it’s worth noting that Perot’s ties to Israel and the broader hawkish, militaristic coalition raise questions. Years later, Perot Jr.’s company was deeply involved in oil deals that benefited Israel.

The neoconservatives—championed by figures like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney—wrote radical doctrines in the early 1990s about preemptively destroying potential threats to US dominance. HW Bush dismissed them as “the crazies.” But by the time George W. Bush ran in 2000, the lessons of HW’s loss weren’t forgotten. W’s administration fully embraced the Israel-aligned neoconservative agenda. According to some insiders, HW himself believed his loss in ‘92 was due to crossing the Israel Lobby.

Middle Eastern leaders saw HW differently. The king of Bahrain publicly said that HW Bush was the only president since Eisenhower to give Arabs a fair shake. He stood up to the Israelis and paid the price. Even today, there are moments where US officials push back on the Zionist-neocon consensus—Obama not invading Syria, for instance.

Occasionally, internal US factions aligned with rational national interests resist the more extreme neocon policies. For example, in 2005, Vanity Fair exposed Dennis Hastert’s corruption tied to the Turkish and Israeli lobbies. In 2007, Zbigniew Brzezinski warned the Senate about the dangers of a staged attack being used as a pretext for war with Iran. These rare moments of dissent suggest there are still some in the US establishment wary of the self-destructive trajectory we’ve been on.

Trump’s foreign policy, for all its chaos, sometimes hinted at a recognition of these dynamics. It’s possible his administration sought to recalibrate the US-Israel relationship, though the results were mixed. My hope is that the current administration understands how precarious the US position has become after decades of overreach and that cooler heads prevail.

Ultimately, Zionism at its highest levels—the deep politics of Zionism—is aggressively expansionist and imperialistic. At its core, it shares disturbing similarities with regimes that are infamous for their oppressive ideologies and actions.”

30:24

“Is that the Empire needs to retrench and that there may be people around him who are sober enough to recognize that it has to happen, that they can’t really, the more they try to go forward and fix the problem with military force in the Middle East or in Ukraine, it will only be more disastrous. And so you notice that Trump is really being aggressive and patriotically waving the flag like it’s 1898 or something, and they’re trying to fight the Spanish-American War. I mean, it’s like he’s talking about Greenland and the Panama Canal, and maybe, you know, people are talking about invading Mexico. Brett Stevens just wrote an op-ed saying it’s time to invade Venezuela, which would get him jailed if we had the rule of law prevailing in this country, because that’s brazenly illegal. You can’t incite people to murder one person, much less attack a whole country illegally. But of course, it doesn’t matter here in the US; those laws only apply to other people.

But my point is, this is like a return to the era of the Monroe Doctrine, wherein the US was going to be the hegemonic power over the Western Hemisphere, and perhaps this is kind of bowing to reality now. And what that means for Israel and so on down the road, I don’t know. But you really can’t have war with China, you can’t have war with Iran; it’d be a disaster, and you can’t have war with Russia. So how do they possibly extricate themselves from this? How do they save the European economy? The Europeans are getting kicked out of, especially the French, who are getting kicked out of West Africa. That’s the only reason France has been as wealthy as it has been over the last many decades—because they have a neocolonial relationship with West Africa that is ending. I mean, the world is tired of white power running everything and the dollar.

So in a sense, I don’t know that they’re so worried about American public opinion, except for a couple of things: they cannot field an army. I don’t think they could fight a ground war because who would be stupid enough to go and join the army and fight in whatever war Donald Trump is going to fight or whatever Democratic president? Because nobody’s going to attack the US. Everyone knows these are wars for imperialism and for a class. More and more people are aware that this is just for a class of billionaires. I’m not going to go and become an amputee or get PTSD and commit suicide for some flag-waving idiocy—that’s not for me. Nobody feels that way anymore.

And the other aspect is that we are so backward now in all of our institutions. I think that the writing on the wall, in 20 years, China is going to be far ahead of us in every area of human progress. Well, they’ve already surpassed us in life expectancy. I mean, if you look at the condition of China at the end of the time that the Communists took over in 1949, what they’ve been through—the Taiping Uprising, which stemmed from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, and then Japanese imperialism during World War II, but it was decades really. And then the Civil War itself, they’ve been through hell, largely because of Western imperialism. And yet their civilization has cohered, and they surpassed us in life expectancy. That’s astounding. And the US has nothing really to offer people, except for lies and PR.”

47:38

“I would be remiss if I didn’t quickly slide in a promo for my next piece for the Wall Street Journal, which is about how OpenAI has unpersoned me. If you go to ChatGPT and ask, “Who is Ted Rall?” it will not answer. If you ask, “Who wrote The Revenge of the Latchy Kids?” my most famous book, New York Times bestseller, it gives the credit to someone else.

If you ask, “Who were the finalists for the 1996 P-Sur Prize?” I was one of three. It gives the credit to someone else. They have unpersoned me. About a year ago, I wrote a piece critical of OpenAI for the Wall Street Journal, and they have unpersoned me. That’s unbelievable.

I’ve even tried to retro-engineer, like, how can I get it to admit that I exist? There is no way to get it to. Like, are there any cartoonists whose last name rhymes with Maul? No. Are there any cartoonists whose first name is Ted P’s five? Not me. You know, it’s actually really remarkable. It’s a reminder that tech is not neutral.

And now, OpenAI— I mean, ChatGPT—is being embedded in search engines. It’s being used by the Pentagon. It’s being used by the IRS. I’m thinking, well, maybe it’ll tell the IRS that I don’t exist so I don’t have to pay taxes! But, you know, it’s going to be everywhere. We’ve achieved what we have in 1984, with Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth. We are there.”

59:29

“You know, the people running it keep in mind that the party knows their voters don’t like them and what they have to offer. That’s why there was no primary this year. This was remarkable. They foisted a candidate on us that nobody voted for, at all. Even when she ran for president before, she didn’t get a single delegate, right? Oh, she dropped out before Iowa. Yeah, before Iowa, she never even made it to the top three. Rigged primaries in a row, really. They know they’re not even popular with their own voters. That’s why they can’t even let them vote, or they rig it so much that it’s comical. It’s more than three. I mean, in 2012, Obama ran unopposed. In 2008, they shived John Edwards. In 2004, they shived Howard Dean. The whole Dean scream thing—it’s kind of a lie. It never happened. Really? Yeah, that’s true. You know? But it’s gotten more… I guess what I mean is, the last three were more over the top, clearly, like blatantly rigged. But yeah, they’ve… I mean, I think it was after the McGovern loss that they rigged the primaries to make it much more conservative-friendly. That was around the time of Rockefeller. The next Democrat candidate for president was handpicked by David Rockefeller. And that’s what happens: Watergate shifts politics to the right. They drop Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket in 1976. He’s not on there as the VP, but it doesn’t matter because the Democrats are now the Rockefellers. There’s no more Rockefeller Republicans. The Democrats are neoliberal Republicans. What’s that? I thought Nelson Rockefeller died. He didn’t? No, he was dropped from the ticket before he died. He did die, but he was dropped during the Halloween Massacre, the same time they basically moved the whole cabinet to the right. They moved Dick Cheney into Chief of Staff, made Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense, fired William Colby at the CIA, and replaced him with George HW Bush. It was like Watergate was really a right-wing coup, and both parties shifted to the right after that. The Democrats are now Rockefeller Republicans, and the Republicans are further to the right of that.”

1:08:46

“Unanswerable case against this regime; it’s totally lawless, it’s not democratic. Even political science, which is methodologically gimped to a huge degree—even Gillan and Paige, I think that’s the study you were referencing earlier—they say that the median American voter has no say on policy whatsoever, and that’s obvious to more people. I didn’t even vote last time. My mom worked for a congressman, I worked on political campaigns since I was like 10 years old. I worked on presidential campaigns in ’04 and ’08. I didn’t vote because I feel like if I’m voting, even if I’m voting for one of the three hapless leftist candidates or whatever, because they can’t even unite under one candidate, even doing that is legitimating the idea that this is a democracy in the first place. I’m now, and I’m not saying that not voting is going to be any more effective than voting. I think it’ll be exactly as effective, which is this is a top-down regime, and I don’t want to endorse it in any way until things change, because otherwise, if I do, I feel like I’m almost implicated even just by voting. I’m going to be implicated in whatever crimes they commit because this is not a democracy. This is a covert fascist system built on global domination, and the lawless pursuit of it. That’s pretty straightforward, but it’s true, and that sucks.”

“When you brought the Young Global Leaders program here for executive education and the Schwab Fellows, there are now two countries in the world where young global media leaders have emerged. Can you tell us a bit about that?

In terms of governance.

Yes, actually, this notion of integrating young leaders has been part of the World Economic Forum for many years. I have to say, when I mention names like Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.”

So, Merkel and Putin are Schwab Fellows, which makes sense based on what I wrote earlier. Klaus Schwab was behind the German neo-colonial project of the EU, whose main component was the German-Russian relationship and gas trade. I remember seeing Klaus Schwab complain about the war in Ukraine. He didn’t want this war because Davos and Klaus Schwab were focused on COVID, using it as a means to control people through policies and narratives related to the pandemic.

Davos and Klaus Schwab are aligned with the Yankees and oppose the more hawkish neocons in the US who push for wars. Klaus Schwab didn’t oppose the war because he’s a good person or cared about preventing suffering. He simply knew that this war would undermine the COVID narrative, which was central to his agenda. As I wrote earlier, the first bomb that fell on Ukraine essentially “killed COVID,” because once the war started, no one talked about COVID anymore.

What’s strange to me is that Davos—meaning Klaus Schwab, Sikorski, Merkel, etc.—didn’t want this war initially, but now they seem to be pushing it. Sikorski, who once said, “Polish Foreign Minister: We gave the US a ‘blowjob,’ got nothing,” is now actively supporting the war. I’m guessing they realized they’ve been cornered by the narrative and feel compelled to follow it, even though they initially opposed the war.

I knew Sikorski and Merkel were Schwab Fellows, but I didn’t know that Putin was one as well, which is very interesting. It makes sense, though, when you consider what Whitney Webb has been writing, which I shared earlier:

“An exercise hosted by the World Economic Forum in coordination with Russia’s state-owned bank, Sberbank, one of the largest financial institutions in Russia, and with the participation of the Russian Prime Minister.”

…

“I also find it quite astounding when you consider that the entities involved in Cyber Polygon—the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Secret Service—are all part of the initiative, yet at the same time, it’s being co-hosted by a Russian government state-owned entity.”