transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on sign up at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com/buy. Thank you and enjoy the show.

Speaker 2:
[00:49] 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, DC., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkopf, joined this week as every week by the man who can tell us everything we need to know about why RFK Jr. cut the penis off of a raccoon, Norm Ornstein. Norm, why did you do it?

Speaker 3:
[01:37] My first question, David, was the raccoon alive at the time?

Speaker 2:
[01:42] No, I'm afraid. I'm afraid according to the story, the raccoon was dead.

Speaker 3:
[01:46] Okay, because he's fully capable of doing it with a live raccoon, I know. I wish I had a good answer for that. But there are so many things about RFK Jr. about which I do not have a good answer. My tentative answer is, he had just sniffed a ton of cocaine off the toilet and somehow thought from that addled, speed driven mind that this was a good thing to do, to study.

Speaker 2:
[02:17] Yeah. Didn't he once say that he doesn't feel like he has germs because he had sniffed, he's not susceptible to germs because he had sniffed cocaine off the toilet.

Speaker 3:
[02:26] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] In this particular case, by the way, he was driving his car reportedly, his van, full of his kids. Can you just imagine, you're driving along, you say, hey kids, there's a dead raccoon. Daddy's going to cut the penis off and then we'll keep it. What do you think? Fun?

Speaker 3:
[02:46] If only somebody had called child protective services at an earlier point.

Speaker 2:
[02:52] No kidding, way earlier. But it does make you think. Over the weekend, Donald Trump, who last week said he was going to erase a 7,000-year-old civilization from the earth. Over the weekend, he attacked the Pope and then sent around a picture of himself as Jesus. Then his vice president started to lecture the Pope and said that the Pope needs to think about theology a little more. By the way, this is his vice president who's been a Catholic for three years. And you've got RFK. Junior, and you've got Stephen Miller, who looks like he eats bugs, and you had Kristi Noem, who shot her dog. And you've got the labor secretary, who apparently is doing all sorts of weird, unspeakable shit with her labor department. And you've got, and, and, and, you know, they're all crazy, Norm. And then I turn on the news, or I read the New York Times and it's like, well, Donald Trump's strategy in Iran, and it's like, they're crazy. It doesn't have a strategy.

Speaker 3:
[04:08] It's chess. Right. As we have said many times, the way Donald Trump plays chess is he eats the pieces off the board. Well, then we have two other stories to follow up on that, David. One is that after doing this with Jesus and saying, no, I didn't know it was Jesus. I thought it was a doctor. I will say my response to that because it had the picture of him with the glowing light in his hand. I said, apparently, that's his proctoscope. But he then went ahead and put up another picture of him arm in arm with Jesus.

Speaker 2:
[04:53] I didn't say I was Jesus. I just said Jesus is my close personal friend.

Speaker 3:
[04:57] Yes, and I would have pardoned him for his sins.

Speaker 2:
[05:05] Well, he only would have pardoned him if Jesus had attacked the Capitol or been a white collar fraudster. Because he's got this whole thing now, like yesterday. They're going and the Justice Department is moving to wipe clean the records of all these people who violently attacked the Capitol.

Speaker 3:
[05:26] You know, he pardoned the largest number, 1,500 of the violent insurrectionists. But he only commuted the sentences of those, the worst who'd been convicted of seditious conspiracy, which meant they weren't going to go to prison, but they still had records. Now, Todd Blanch, who is beyond disgraceful, is trying to erase those records. Absolutely true. We have to add a couple more elements to this, though. And the one in particular is Pete Hegseth quoting the scripture.

Speaker 2:
[06:03] I forgot about Pete Hegseth.

Speaker 3:
[06:05] Quoting the scripture in front of an audience at the Department of Defense, not the Department of War. Only it wasn't from the scripture. It was from a movie, a Quentin Tarantino movie, which has a graphic scene in it of a sexual predator keeping a prisoner, a man prisoner in his basement and then raping him. And I think that is what stuck out for Pete Hegseth in the movie along with the phony quote from scripture.

Speaker 2:
[06:41] Well, I mean, Pete Hegseth, first of all, he says he wants it to be called the Department of War, and he wants to be the Secretary of War. What he really wants it to be is the Department of Free Beer, right? The guy is like such a frat boy and such an idiot. But both, I mean, Norm, you understand politics and I really think it would be useful for you to explain to people how important the Catholic vote is to the Republican Party.

Speaker 3:
[07:11] So you have a couple of tiers here of voters who have been a part of the MAGA Coalition. One certainly is the Evangelical Protestants, many of whom I am sure still harbor deep prejudice against Catholics, which goes back many, many centuries. The second is the Catholic working class vote, most of whom have reverence for the Pope. And for him, now he's, I just saw before we began to tape this, that he's backtrack a little bit. And his backtracking was, look, the Pope can say whatever he wants, but he doesn't understand. We can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. That's the most important thing. And then he went on to say, and his brother is a complete MAGA guy. So, that's how he's trying to say out out damned spot, so he can get back in the good graces of many Catholics. But I got to believe that for many of them, this is a bridge too far.

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Well, it's the combination. It's, you know, it's the president depicting himself as Jesus and attacking the Pope, and the vice president who killed the last Pope. That may be a slight overstatement, but he saw him and the next day he was dead. And draw your own conclusions. And, but then, you know, as he's writing a book about being a Catholic, he lectures the Pope. Hegseth is regularly getting lectured by the Pope because the Pope can't stand what these guys are saying or doing about the war they're playing. Meanwhile, Catholics cut, I think, the last election. I'll have the numbers slightly off, but they broke something like 55-43 for Trump. And so this is perhaps the most important swing block for MAGA that there is out there. A bunch of them are hugely alienated by his immigration policies. Of course, they're alienated by his economic policies. And now he's not only going after the Pope, but as you say, these are working class Americans. He's going after a Pope who's from the south side of Chicago, who's a White Sox fan, who's one of them. He's got to be the most sort of relatable Pope to this big American audience that there has ever been. It's crazy.

Speaker 3:
[09:43] You know, my new favored presidential candidate for 2028 is Pope Leo. There's nothing that says you can't be Pope and president at the same time.

Speaker 2:
[09:54] Great suggestion, Norm.

Speaker 1:
[09:55] Very construct.

Speaker 3:
[09:57] However, I should note that the Pope's brother, who is close to the Pope, they play wordle together every morning.

Speaker 2:
[10:07] That's a bad sign, Norm.

Speaker 3:
[10:09] Had serious death threats and they had to basically evacuate his neighborhood after all of this, which I'm sure is why Trump is now backtracking a little bit and saying that the brother's full MAGA. But let's note one other element here in the last couple of days, David, about what a psychopath this president is. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has broken with him as we know, called Trump and said, my son is getting serious death threats. Trump's response was, if he dies, it's your fault. So that's what we're dealing with here.

Speaker 2:
[10:52] Well, I can add something to that. It's a totally different thing. But Trump, who's on the one hand is maybe trying to make a little nicer with some Catholics, mega Catholic. Apparently, in the past 24 hours said, you know the $11 million we're going to give to Catholic charities in Miami to help people in need in Miami, we're canceling that. So, I mean, he's canceling money for Catholics, because he doesn't like where the Pope comes out on all this stuff.

Speaker 3:
[11:22] Yeah. And the Pope, who is, I believe, an Augustinian, which means that he is a disciple of St. Augustine, who defined the concept of just war. And we have all of these mega people saying, he obviously doesn't know what a just war is, which is as absurd as almost anything surrounding this. And that these mega Catholics are trying to defend him, is itself just a real lesson in what a cult can do. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[11:54] Well, particularly if you know anything about just war theory or St. Augustine, which when I was in college, we had to read St. Augustine as part of the contemporary civilization course we had at Columbia. Or maybe it was the humanity. I don't know. There were a couple of courses we had to read all this stuff. But just war theory goes like this. If your country is attacked, you have the right to defend yourself against the attacker. As it happens, this specific definition of just war theory underscores that in this war, we are the aggressor, we are the party that is wronging the other party. And in fact, Iran would be justified to defend itself. In other words, they have it backwards. But they're all out there spouting this nonsense because some staffer came up with it. Mike Johnson, I know one of your favorite people in Washington yesterday, was talking, you know, he was so religious, you know, that he spends all his time trying to support the rapist fraud psychopath president of the United States, you know, naturally stepped up and said, Oh, the president didn't mean this stuff about Jesus. And yeah, it's just worth it. We're allowed to do this.

Speaker 3:
[13:18] At the same time, speaking of just war, Hegseth continues to boast about blowing up fishing boats, going after the people inside without any proof that they are peddling drugs. And if they are, they're not going to America in any event. And multiple times after some had survived the initial strikes, going back a second time and killing them, which is what we defined in the Second World War as a war crime. And today Hegseth complained that if somebody, namely Iran, fires missiles at boats in the Strait of Hormuz, that's a terrorist act. So the level of hypocrisy here plus the level of cruelty and the level of willingness to commit war crimes shows no bounds.

Speaker 2:
[14:17] Yeah, and we continued to do it. We did, we did, attacked a couple more boats in the Pacific. And, you know, as we have pointed out before, but it's worth pointing out again. So those of you who are listening can go and use this at your next cocktail party, you know, or wherever you go, barbecues with warming up, maybe you're going to go to a barbecue and this is going to come up. The reality is this, if these people are guilty of drug smuggling, A, doesn't make them terrorists because being a drug smuggler is not the same as a terrorist. B, they are entitled to due process, which they're not getting. Yeah. C, if they were tried for drug smuggling, there is no death penalty for drug smuggling. So they're being given the death penalty without due process for this alleged crime for which they may or may not be guilty. On top of that, while we're going after the Pope, I'm old enough to remember the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, which is a reference to the fact that St. Peter, who started the Catholic Church, was a fisherman. So we're blowing up fishermen consistent with our whole... I mean, if you had to say, what is the guiding principle of the Trump administration? And I say this with a certain degree of Jewish humility here. But if you were had to say, what was the guiding principle of the Trump administration? You would say, take whatever Jesus taught and do the opposite.

Speaker 3:
[15:50] Somebody said, Nick Kristof today in a social media post about these strikes on fishermen said, this is not WWJD. What would Jesus do? And I said, no, it's WWMNN, excuse me, NMP. What would a malignant, narcissistic psychopath do? And that's what we're dealing with here.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] Yeah, I don't think those bracelets will sell very well. But if you want it, we could try. We don't have much Words Matter swag. We could start making it.

Speaker 3:
[16:30] Got to get some swag.

Speaker 2:
[16:32] Yeah. No, I think the bracelets might be a place to start. But the point is-

Speaker 3:
[16:38] A quarter zip. That's what has become the uniform here. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:42] No, exactly. Mr. QZ. I was called known for that. But there is a broader point I'd like to make. I'm going to probably make it in a column today or tomorrow. But the broader point is this. I just listed all these lunatics. Every day, there's some lunatic story. And you go and you go, oh my God, this is insane. Let's get the guy, literally, if Donald Trump popped out of your local cuckoo clock, he could not be cuckooer than he is with this stuff. But it's not the sign of insanity that worries me. What worries me is Donald Trump has become more and more erratic. He does things more impulsively. He has fewer filters. Even his use of obscene language when he's talking has grown because he has all the signs of dementia. This is not political. I'm not making a political assertion. The reality is the guy is losing it, and we're like entertained by it. But it's like having, I don't know, a chimpanzee flying the plane we're all on. It's kind of an entertaining story until we get to the ending.

Speaker 3:
[18:00] That's absolutely correct. And it would be troubling for any president undergoing dementia. But every previous president, including to a degree, Trump in his first term, was surrounded by people who understanding this, if it had happened, would have not obeyed crazy orders, would have tried to keep the airplane from crashing with all of us on board. And what is more frightening even than the fact that we have a president showing signs every day of dementia is that there is no one around him who would do just that, who would keep it from careening out of control. Whatever the crazy order, they're gonna carry it out. Like, you know, I went back and looked at the clip yesterday and then put it up on social media from Woody Allen's movie Bananas, 1971. And for those who remember it, even for those who don't, Woody Allen plays this nebbish, of course, who ends up on the island of San Mar... In the country of San Marcos and gets hooked up with the revolutionaries who overthrow the vicious dictator and the revolutionary leader takes over. And the first thing he says is, I am now running this country and I have some decrees. The official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. And everyone in this country shall change their underwear every 30 minutes. And they must wear them on the outside so that we can see that they're keeping up with the decree. And third, everyone under 16 is now 16. Now, Woody Allen and the lieutenant to the new dictator look at each other, and the other guy says he's lost control, it's gone to his head, and they remove him. And that's the difference. They removed him.

Speaker 2:
[20:07] Well, but this is a more serious point, and I actually wrote a book about this once. During the first term, Trump had a bunch of people around him, who, when he started doing crazy things, like I'm gonna end NATO, or I'm gonna pull troops out of Europe, or I'm gonna shoot protesters in the legs, or I'm gonna fire missiles at Mexico, which is something he brought up, et cetera, et cetera. They would say no, and it really frustrated him. And so he spent four years stewing in his own juices, and saying, if I get to be president again, I am gonna have a bunch of loyalist yes men around me, who will do whatever I say, no matter what, and could pose no threat to me personally. And so he has this bunch of absolute idiots around him, who are just, and we're seeing it, because he's doing so many things that any rational human being would say, well, no, that's illegal. He's made $5 billion of grift. And somebody should say, well, you know, Mr. President, that's illegal, or don't have your sons selling drones to our allies, or don't have your son-in-law do this, or don't start this crazy war, or don't say you're gonna invade our neighbor, or don't try to blow up NATO. There are hundreds, I don't have a heroin addict in charge of the healthcare system of the United States, who's taking away vaccines, and putting people, snake oil salespeople in charge of our healthcare system. There's some dude in this Trump orbit who keeps insisting that he was teleported into a 7-Eleven.

Speaker 3:
[21:59] Head official at FEMA.

Speaker 2:
[22:01] Right, but the point is, he has surrounded himself for precisely this reason, that unlike the wisdom of the character Woody Allen plays in Bananas, and we must stipulate Woody Allen is a disgusting human these days, but fielding Melish, which is why one can't help but say he's a Navish, because it sounds like Navish, but fielding Melish, they knew this dude was nuts, and they said, let's do something about it. There's nobody around Trump, and on Capitol Hill, there's still more weapons for Israel went through yesterday, despite Democrats really starting to say, no, we're going to stop this. They're blocking every week. Somebody's saying, well, what about the War Powers Act? Let's follow the Constitution. The Republicans block it. When he does this crazy shit and says, oh, I'm Jesus, think of, oh, he's joking. He doesn't mean that Jesus. And we're now accepting it. We just sort of go, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's just the way it is. Let's buckle in. We've got two and a half more years of it.

Speaker 3:
[23:16] You know, I will say, as you say, we just accepted so many in the press take what he says and report it as they would for any other president, when in so many instances, it's flat out lies or utterly nuts. And they don't, you know, put it into the context of he's lying or he's nuts. And that makes it worse.

Speaker 2:
[23:43] And there's a little subtle element of DC corruption at play here that I think it's useful for us to shine a light on.

Speaker 3:
[23:52] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[23:52] I'm not going to name the journalists, but a journalist goes on, you know, media today and says, the reason Donald Trump is doing this blockade is to apply pressure to China, which is dependent on Iran for the energy. And I'm like listening to this and I'm going, well, that's not true. Donald Trump's nuts. He wasn't going to do this two days ago. He has no plan. There is no strategy. And oh, by the way, the Chinese are A, supplying information to the Iranians about how to kill Americans, and we're not pushing back on it. And B, there is zero chance that the US naval blockade would stop the Chinese because it would cause a world war, a global incident, and Donald Trump wants to go to China in a few weeks and have a good time. And so this was all wrong. Now, you might say, well, okay, there's a lot of wrong analysis out there. The question is, why? Why would a good reporter say stuff that was such bullshit? The answer is he wants to get access in the White House. And so they call him up and they say, hey, you know what? I'd like you to come in, let's have a talk. And they come in, they have a talk, and they go, well, let me tell you about the president's plan, and it'll be a deep background, but if you want to write about it, you can, and the guy, oh, president's plan is this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he goes and he runs that. If he were to go and report, this is complete bullshit, they don't invite him back.

Speaker 3:
[25:23] Yeah. And of course, what we've seen is, and just again, before we started, he was doing another one of those gaggles with the press. They love the fact that he gives them enormous access. Whenever anyone asks a reasonable, responsible, tough question, he goes after the reporter. You're horrible. Who do you work for? Oh, of course. And if you had an honest press corps that cared about integrity, they would all refuse to speak to him, or at minimum, if somebody asked a reasonable question and he wouldn't answer it and moved on to the next one, have the next one ask the question until he answered it. But they do none of that. In another two weeks, less than two weeks, we will have the famous White House Correspondents Dinner, which has for a long time basically been a kind of masturbatory self-congratulation for the press corps. Trump is going this year, and you can bet that they will soft-pedal the jokes, and they will praise him and treat him like a normal president. It's one of the worst features as we slide rapidly towards a police state, that one of the safeguards we're supposed to have, the guardrails we're supposed to have, the vigorous free press, and some are out there. ProPublica is wonderful. Julie K. Brown and the Miami Herald have not given up on the Epstein story. There's an awful lot of good stuff that happens in the New York Times. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, as I've said before, a terrific regional paper that doesn't pull its punches, Philadelphia Inquirer often. But so much of the rest, the opposite. And we're seeing now as we head towards the White House Correspondents' Dinner, David Ellison and the Paramount people are going to hold all kinds of parties where they will fet Trump and his cabinet. And it's just pathetic, absolutely pathetic. So that's the good news.

Speaker 2:
[27:44] Oh, good. Good. Do you want to go to the bad news now? What's the bad news?

Speaker 3:
[27:48] You know, it's, there's one thing I would say, just to my reflections a little bit on what's happening with Iran. I was at a dinner last night with somebody very knowledgeable about the negotiations that had taken place earlier. And what we know from the Omanis, who were the interlocutors in the first round of the negotiations, is that the offer that the Iranians put on the table was shockingly good. It was better than the JCPOA, the original Obama-led nuclear deal with Iran. And apparently, one of two things happened. Either Steve Wittkopf and Jared Kushner were so ignorant or dumb that they didn't understand what the deal was. And of course, they didn't have any technical support to tell them so. Or two, they went back and said, you know, there's a pretty decent deal here. And Trump had a phone call, this is all speculation on my part, with Bibi Netanyahu. And Bibi said, you're the greatest peacemaker through strength of all time. Look what you did in Venezuela. You join us in bombing Iran and taking out their leaders. And we have all kinds of support inside the dissident community. They will rise up and overthrow this regime, and it will be the most wonderful thing. And there is the Nobel Peace Prize on a platter for you. And Trump thinking that this would be another Venezuela went ahead, and we've ended up going from an open straight O4 muse to the craziness that we have now. But I want to take it to the next level. Let's say that Trump, who wants to cut a deal badly, he sees his greatest strength as being the art of the deal, even though we know we never read the book, much less wrote it. And you can imagine cutting a deal with the Iranians, who may have the upper hand now in the region, but who are really suffering economically, from the sanctions and now, to some degree, from what's happened to their infrastructure, the demand for maybe an eight or ten year guarantee that they won't move forward with their enriched uranium is going to be lifting the sanctions. So what happens if we end up with a deal that's probably worse than the JCPOA, which Bibi railed against and mobilized everybody he could against it. And now Iran has an improved economy with money that they can give to Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. Bibi Netanyahu could end up in the worst possible place because his great friend, his best buddy Donald Trump has screwed him and everybody else completely in this process. And how he reacts to that will be one of the most interesting things that we'll see.

Speaker 2:
[31:12] Well, look, we talked about this a couple of times this week. I had a podcast on Monday with John Wolfstahl, who helped negotiate the JCPOA and Joe Sorincione, who's one of our leading arms control experts. And then I did a podcast yesterday with Ed Luce, Rosa Brooks, who've been tracking this. And Rosa, of course, also was a senior policy official in the Defense Department and Tom Nichols of the Atlantic. And, you know, I think the general consensus was that the scenario described is probably what's going to happen. Trump's going to cut a deal. And it is going to be a deal which will leave us in a worse position both to where we were on February 27th, the day before this started, and to what we got with the JCPOA in 2015 with President Obama, which then, of course, Donald Trump pulled out of in 2019. But you know, I think your scenario, first of all, I've heard the same thing. I've heard people who were in the negotiations shocked at the ignorance of Whitcoff and Jared on the core elements of the deal, on how nuclear deals work, on how you get the assurances that it's not going to go in the wrong direction. But the second part, the part where they have an offer and they go back and it falls apart, I think your scenario is in the general zip code of correct. I think it's important for everybody to remember that last year, there were negotiations going on. These are the ones you're talking about that involved Oman. What happened? Well, what happened was that the United States was close to a deal. Trump spoke to Netanyahu and they decided the deal wouldn't be good enough, and Netanyahu persuaded Trump it wouldn't be good enough for them on nukes, and so they went in, even in the middle of negotiations going well, and they bombed Iran last summer. This time again, the negotiations were going well, and Netanyahu said, no, we can't trust them. Go in and attack. Now, the question is, why would in two circumstances Netanyahu do this? And the answer briefly is, first of all, Netanyahu has advised every US president he's dealt with that they should attack Iran. Trump was the only sucker who fell for it. But secondly, Netanyahu's got an election coming up in October. And if in fact there is some kind of peace, and if in fact he can't be on the war footing, and if in fact people start recognizing that Iran's going to come out on the other side stronger, Netanyahu could lose. And if Netanyahu loses, he's likely to go and be prosecuted and go to jail. And so he is trying desperately for his own survival to torpedo anything that looks like peace. And I think we're coming for all that. I'm sorry to go into this such length, I think we're coming to a point of crisis in the Trump-Netanyahu relationship, because Trump wants out of this so desperately that he is likely to run afoul of Netanyahu who wants to make sure we stay in it. And it'll be interesting to see whether Netanyahu's last bridge, because he's burned every other bridge in the US, ends up getting burnt because one president finally followed through in his suggestion, and it was revealed to be the disaster everybody else knew it would be.

Speaker 3:
[35:04] And the other part of this is that all of our relationships in the region, in the Middle East, have been shattered because of what Trump has done. The Saudis, the Emirates, all the other countries there that were attacked and suffered significantly after we bombed Iran, having lost people, parts of their own infrastructure, some of their oil, and the inability now to, you know, take whatever would come from being able to export that oil, all because Trump did this and very likely never communicated with them in advance. They're not going to trust him very much. And of course, we also know that the Iranians, thanks to the Russians giving them assistance with satellites and a lot of the imagery that they had, some of which probably they were able to get because they were listening in to Pete Hegseth on his signal chat or tapping into Trump's phone, destroyed really important infrastructure in the huge bases we have in these countries in the Middle East, causing a lot of damage, billion-dollar radar facilities and other things. And we're going to ask these countries to rebuild our bases in that region. So the damage that Trump has done to our national security, through all of this, to our credibility, to our relationships, not just with the Europeans who were not told in advance and have no interest in losing troops or materiel or getting deeply involved in spending a lot of money to bailing him out. And of course, he continues to attack NATO. But our other allies, and you know, this is all, it all goes back to a weak minded, flailing, feeble president acting on impulse and having no understanding of the consequences of what he was doing.

Speaker 2:
[37:24] Excellent summation. And it brings us full circle, right back to the point that we wanted to deliver to everybody here with this week's edition of Words Matter. And that is that the heroin addict, raccoon penis collector in this administration is not the craziest or most dangerous person in the administration.

Speaker 3:
[37:55] I will close with this. I'm noodling around with a piece on the three parts of Trumpocracy, cacistocracy, which we've discussed before, government by the worst, most incompetent around us. And there isn't a single figure in this cabinet who doesn't fit that picture, plus a whole host of others, like the FEMA guy who swears he was teleported. And now the possibility that neo-Nazi Seb Gorka will be running the counterintelligence center. The second part is nihilocracy and we're getting more and more information about what Doge did. There is a book coming out about AID and Doge, in which we learn that the young people who blew up AID and caused the deaths of probably 750,000 people, had no clue what AID did or what they were doing. And it's all about blowing stuff up. They're blowing up government. They're getting rid of anybody with any level of expertise in almost any area. And the third, of course, as we've discussed far too many times, is kleptocracy. This is more corrupt than every other administration in history combined, starting right at the top. And it has direct implications for our well-being and our national security. And that's something we're going to have to deal with, even if we have a midterm election, and it's a reasonably fair one, and we see a change in majority in the House and we hope the Senate, because they have the confirmation power, we're going to have to endure this for another three years. And that is not going to be a pleasant experience for any of us.

Speaker 2:
[39:49] No question about it. By the way, we'll throw a fourth word that you can throw into this, and that is, which is a real word, a stultocracy, and a stultocracy is a government by fools. And so we've got that in there. It's part of cacistocracy and part of, in this case, kleptocracy because they are fools and they are the worst among us. They're also demented. And fortunately, whereas you can't rely, as we said, on the mainstream media, you can rely on independent media. You can find Norm's writing at the Contrarian, a good place to find that kind of thing. I write for the Daily Beast. I have a Substack. You can need to know Substack. You can go there. We both write for the New Republic. You can go there. There are a lot of places that you can go. But of course, the most important one is the DSR network right here. Words Matter every week. If you have not gone to YouTube and subscribed on YouTube, now is the time to do it. Because not only is that easy, not only does that allow you to see the shows, but also clips from the shows and everything else that we're doing. But if you go to YouTube and subscribe, then when you're watching the shows, it's super easy to comment. We love the comments that we get from you and we will address the questions that you raise and we will respond to most of the comments, the ones that suggest we had to dress differently or part our hair differently. We may not do that, but we'll listen. We'll listen. Just two days ago, Norm, there was a comment from one of our loyal listeners who said, I'm sorry I missed Words Matter over the weekend. I was traveling, but I tuned in because Norm and David are two of my favorite Jews. What? What? But, hey, look, if that's what you like, if you're here for that, join us, you know, be mishpacha.

Speaker 3:
[42:07] And if somebody has a suggestion about parting my hair, thank you very much. It's been a long time since I could part my hair.

Speaker 2:
[42:15] Well, I think you've parted your hair a little bit like the Red Sea was parted.

Speaker 3:
[42:19] Yeah, that's about it. A big lane down the middle.

Speaker 2:
[42:23] Yeah, you've got a mega part and it looks fantastic. All right, everybody, thanks for joining us again here this week. And join us every week here at Words Matter at the DSR Network, at all those other places we mentioned. Please subscribe. We'll be with you again soon.