Latest / John’s Newsletter / Foreign Affairs Fifteen: Episode 22

Transcript

Foreign Affairs Fifteen: Episode 22 · John’s Newsletter

0:03
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the foreign affairs 15,
0:05
SPEAKER_00: a quick taste of this week's foreign news and what it means for Americans.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: The podcast is free for Substack subscribers to John's newsletter
0:12
SPEAKER_00: for based perspectives and later released on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: Good morning, John.
0:19
SPEAKER_02: Good morning, Simon.
0:21
SPEAKER_02: And welcome to episode 22 of the Foreign Affairs 15, starting with the irrelevant minute.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Shane Gillis, John, mean anything to you?
0:29
SPEAKER_01: He's a comedian who went on Saturday Night Live and offended every lefty.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: How's that, Simon?
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Pretty good.
0:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in a nutshell, I mean, I grew up with Richard Pryor and George Carlin.
0:40
SPEAKER_02: Me too.
0:41
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, Greg Giraldo, one of my all-time favorites who unfortunately died years ago.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: And they were funny because they said funny things.
0:48
SPEAKER_02: And if it was offensive, it probably would.
0:50
SPEAKER_02: Every comedian in history who's any good has been offensive to somebody.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: You have to be edgy.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you have to be edgy.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: But the reaction to this one is just absolutely hilarious.
0:59
SPEAKER_02: Almost funnier than the skit itself, which was still pretty funny.
1:04
SPEAKER_02: All right.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: No, it's Cat Lady's Gone Crazy over nothing.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, France is on fire.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
1:13
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:13
SPEAKER_02: You know,
1:14
SPEAKER_02: I have a face tattoo,
1:15
SPEAKER_02: but how dare you look at my face tattoo, as Ben Shapiro always says.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: Seven continents, 14 minutes, starting with Antarctica, where...
1:22
SPEAKER_02: They confirmed the first case of bird flu, H5N1,
1:27
SPEAKER_02: on an island,
1:27
SPEAKER_02: Macquarie Island,
1:28
SPEAKER_02: which is part of the sub-Antarctic region owned or controlled by Australia.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: And I had absolutely no idea.
1:34
SPEAKER_02: We've talked about penguins.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: We've talked about krill.
1:36
SPEAKER_02: We've talked about whales.
1:37
SPEAKER_02: So we're talking about seals today,
1:39
SPEAKER_02: where about 13,000 baby seals,
1:42
SPEAKER_02: almost 90% of that year's population were killed by this bird flu virus, which,
1:47
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:47
SPEAKER_02: you wouldn't think that a seal weighing about 8,000 pounds would be susceptible to
1:53
SPEAKER_02: a bird virus, but apparently they are.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: No, and that's where again,
1:58
SPEAKER_01: this biology,
1:59
SPEAKER_01: I remember when I did like nuclear things at St.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: Andrews, and we had a tutor, and I won't name his full name, named Miles.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: And he used to laugh bitterly at me.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you're laughing.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: He slept bitterly at me and say,
2:09
SPEAKER_01: nuclear,
2:10
SPEAKER_01: worry about the biology, john,
2:12
SPEAKER_01: it's much more pervasive,
2:13
SPEAKER_01: it can bring down elephants with about a nano drop of anything.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: And this is an example of why we need to worry about stuff like this,
2:21
SPEAKER_01: because it can spread through.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: And the danger now is after COVID, where the elite let everyone down.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: People aren't going to believe anything.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: It's the boy who cried wolf.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's going to believe there's a problem next time.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: And that's the fault of Dr. Fauci.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: And that whole cabal, I entirely agree.
2:37
SPEAKER_02: And you know,
2:37
SPEAKER_02: I was like all of us in the beginning,
2:39
SPEAKER_02: you think, Oh, God, this is a disaster, shut everything down.
2:42
SPEAKER_02: And then it only takes a few weeks to get a bit of data
2:45
SPEAKER_02: to get some smart scientists weighing in to have a better perspective to say,
2:49
SPEAKER_02: hang on,
2:49
SPEAKER_02: this is more like,
2:50
SPEAKER_02: you know,
2:50
SPEAKER_02: the worst flu rather than some novel Ebola type thing that's going
2:54
SPEAKER_02: to kill everybody.
2:55
SPEAKER_02: But the experiments keep going on.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: The Russians just had a leak where they were someone died in Siberia.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: No, we have to keep our eye on the ball here without,
3:06
SPEAKER_01: as Fauci was hoping, giving up our civil liberties.
3:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and maybe have a mandatory retirement age, but that's a different question.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: That would be a good idea.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: Let's move on to Africa, South Africa.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: Again, we talked about last week, Navi Pillai.
3:19
SPEAKER_02: This week,
3:20
SPEAKER_02: I was interested to see that a court has forced the government
3:24
SPEAKER_02: to open its asylum application system.
3:26
SPEAKER_02: We talked some episodes back about how Lots of Africans are going to South Africa
3:32
SPEAKER_02: because it's the strongest among the weak in terms of economies.
3:35
SPEAKER_02: And so working there for chump change is still better than being in Mozambique
3:40
SPEAKER_02: or wherever they're coming from,
3:41
SPEAKER_02: even Nigeria, Ghana, if you're at the bottom of the ladder.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: But locals, funnily enough, don't like having competition.
3:48
SPEAKER_02: They don't care about the fact that it's other Africans.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: It's just their jobs that are in question.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: And so they're out there protesting.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: There have been protests outside of the home affairs offices.
3:58
SPEAKER_02: It reminds me, John,
3:58
SPEAKER_02: that really across the Western world we see the same phenomenon,
4:02
SPEAKER_02: which is that governments are elected because they say
4:05
SPEAKER_02: that they will stop mass migration,
4:07
SPEAKER_02: illegal migration in particular,
4:09
SPEAKER_02: and then the courts say,
4:10
SPEAKER_02: well, you can't because of the European Convention on Human Rights.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: This person's son likes chicken nuggets and they can only get them in England,
4:18
SPEAKER_02: not Albania, or in the United States.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: You have the district courts weighing in on things that are literally not
4:24
SPEAKER_02: in their purview according to the INA.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: No, what we've done,
4:29
SPEAKER_01: and there's a battle going between globalists
4:31
SPEAKER_01: who are unelected technocratic Wilsonians.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: I remember hating Wilson in school because he was straight up about saying,
4:38
SPEAKER_01: look, I don't care what elected people say.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: We have to leave this to the experts.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: And this is a whole left leaning globalist view that's been around for 100 years.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: This is the latest iteration.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: We know better than you knuckle dragging peasants who vote versus people who care
4:53
SPEAKER_01: for good reason about their job security.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: And jobs for people in their own country.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: It's internationalists,
4:58
SPEAKER_01: globalists versus nationalists who care about their own people and their own tribe
5:03
SPEAKER_01: and their own people internally.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: This is the eternal battle.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: This is since Woodrow Wilson's going on.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: It was my greatest hate object for this reason.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: This is just the latest iteration.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: And I'm with the South Africans protesting.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: God bless them.
5:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean,
5:17
SPEAKER_02: I think on that giant scale,
5:19
SPEAKER_02: you and I are both on the nationalist side and not the socialist.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, globalist side.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: Freudian slip there, son.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: Freudian slip.
5:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for Asia.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is heading to Uzbekistan and then on to India.
5:33
SPEAKER_02: And some critics,
5:34
SPEAKER_02: of course,
5:35
SPEAKER_02: on the left are always saying,
5:36
SPEAKER_02: or on the right for that matter, well,
5:38
SPEAKER_02: Rubio is just not interested in anything that really matters like Iran or Ukraine.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: Or, you know, Gaza, something that's like at the center of our foreign policy.
5:48
SPEAKER_02: And he says he's about there doing the business.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: You can't just concentrate on the fires.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: You've got to also concentrate on managing the forest.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: So he's out there maintaining our relationships.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: But I thought I'd ask you, Ivo Dalder.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: Ego.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love Ego Dalder.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: Counterpart at the Brookings Institute when I was at Heritage.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: Simon, you can imagine my deep regard for his arrogant Wilsonian, always wrong views.
6:14
SPEAKER_02: So I will read you his view of the Rubio trip, and then maybe you can give me a counterpoint.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: He said,
6:20
SPEAKER_02: you know,
6:20
SPEAKER_02: the sector of state is supposed to be out there taking care of things
6:23
SPEAKER_02: that are central.
6:24
SPEAKER_02: This is not a direct quote.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: And he said,
6:26
SPEAKER_02: Rubio has calculated that his future is best served by keeping clear
6:30
SPEAKER_02: of policies likely to end badly.
6:31
SPEAKER_02: Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, and China are all candidates.
6:35
SPEAKER_02: And under, sorry, Deputy Secretary of State, Chris Lando, You could have written that, John.
6:39
SPEAKER_02: I was going to say, when I heard Chris Lando, I said to Sarah, I think he's channeling
7:08
SPEAKER_01: That sounded like me.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: And Chris Lando is a much more sanguine figure than perhaps I am.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm more on the Patrick Henry Thomas Jefferson end of the thing.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: I love that he was provoked to say it.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: What he's saying is that Rubio is doing what the what the NSS is about now.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: We've changed the focus of American policy.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: He snarkily said he's just being an assistant secretary for Latin America,
7:30
SPEAKER_01: an area we have shamefully neglected for a century.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: Now it is central to where we're going.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: We're the only power in a multipolar world that has our own sphere of influence.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: That is geostrategically something that Mackinder,
7:43
SPEAKER_01: Speakman and all the greats would agree with us about,
7:46
SPEAKER_01: and not Ego Dalder, who's never gotten a thing right in his life.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: And so to do that,
7:50
SPEAKER_01: to go to India,
7:51
SPEAKER_01: which is the key rising great power out there,
7:54
SPEAKER_01: the only great power with catch-up growth,
7:56
SPEAKER_01: to worry more about the Indo-Pacific,
7:58
SPEAKER_01: our own hemisphere in India,
8:00
SPEAKER_01: God bless Rubio for acknowledging the world has changed over the last 35 years,
8:04
SPEAKER_01: whereas Landau said Ego still wants to have seminars and write articles
8:08
SPEAKER_01: that literally his 12 friends at the council read and no one else.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: I have staffers read the stuff they write.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not interesting.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: I just need to know anthropologically what the left-wing Wilsonians think.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to waste my time with a bunch of slogans.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: The world has changed.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: The snark needs to end.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: And God bless, again, Landau.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: I think I'm very positive today.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: When I read that, I'm like, bravo.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: Let's fight for the new world we live in.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: And Rubio's on the right track.
8:36
SPEAKER_02: I will leave it there.
8:36
SPEAKER_02: I knew I could just kind of wind you up a little bit and let you stand.
8:39
SPEAKER_02: Fastball, Simon.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Fastball down the middle.
8:42
SPEAKER_02: Speaking of which,
8:43
SPEAKER_02: of winding up and spinning,
8:45
SPEAKER_02: I have spent a lot of time on air,
8:46
SPEAKER_02: I think I did 30 media hits last week and I've got several more today about France.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: I lived there eight years of my life.
8:54
SPEAKER_02: About five in Paris and three in Marseille where I was Consul General.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: So I know the area pretty well.
8:58
SPEAKER_02: I speak the language.
8:59
SPEAKER_02: And it breaks my heart to see this is the worst I've seen.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: I've been there for the Gilets Jaunes,
9:05
SPEAKER_02: which was a sort of retirees protesting against cost of living.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: And the French are stuck in this trap that,
9:12
SPEAKER_02: let's face it, we are too, but we have some advantages.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: They don't.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: We've got economic growth.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: They don't.
9:16
SPEAKER_02: It's under 1%.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: They've got 120% debt to GDP, but they can't print the world's reserve currency the way we can.
9:23
SPEAKER_02: They have wages that are lower than ours, not by much, but like 25% lower average.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: They've got much higher taxes, second most taxed country in Europe.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: Diesel is $10 a gallon there as opposed to six here, which is still a hell of a lot of money.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: And now I saw streets in Marseille that I had walked down,
9:41
SPEAKER_02: stores that I had been in, trashed, looted.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: Supposedly,
9:44
SPEAKER_02: this is all about classroom sizes and we want more chairs and you want to fix
9:48
SPEAKER_02: the parkour soup so we can get into college.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: So kids, kids who care about education are burning schools down.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, that doesn't pass the lab test.
9:56
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's what I used to say about the Rodney King riots,
9:59
SPEAKER_02: where it was black people looting Asians because white people shot Hispanic,
10:04
SPEAKER_02: you know, I mean, it was the most complicated.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: No, it's the other way around.
10:07
SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Hispanics looting Asians because A white cop shot a black guy.
10:11
SPEAKER_02: That's LA in the 1980s in a nutshell.
10:13
SPEAKER_02: You just change the demographics around.
10:16
SPEAKER_02: That's what's happening in France.
10:18
SPEAKER_02: It's a toxic combination of far left politics,
10:21
SPEAKER_02: which they've always had,
10:22
SPEAKER_02: trying to squeeze blood from the French welfare stone,
10:25
SPEAKER_02: plus a lot of very unhappy,
10:27
SPEAKER_02: unassimilated migrants from Middle East and North Africa in
10:31
SPEAKER_02: the banlieue surrounding all the big cities and a state that's basically run out
10:36
SPEAKER_02: of money and the lamest of lame ducks in Macron.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: No, while he's going to Celine Dion concerts,
10:43
SPEAKER_01: and this Marie Antoinette moment is actually real.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Rather than deal with the fighting,
10:46
SPEAKER_01: he boogied down to Celine Dion on the weekend when he was hiding under his desk
10:51
SPEAKER_01: the rest of the time.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: De Gaulle would be appalled at this.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: What we have here is a country running out of road across the board.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: But remember what we said about the big three in Europe getting in the way,
11:01
SPEAKER_01: leading to structural decline.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: No growth for 80 quarters, 80 quarters of sub 2% growth.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: This is a this is a continent that's on the Titanic, not even talking about that iceberg.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: It hasn't even come up at meeting after meeting that I've gone to like you.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: Nothing.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: OK, unassimilated, unfettered immigration and unrealistic energy costs.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: You add all this together in the toxic brew and you have the far left in Melenchon,
11:26
SPEAKER_01: about 15 to 20 percent, a minority, but a sizable one.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: You have the unassimilated immigrants, another 20 percent.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: You add them together.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: And they may disagree about everything, but they agree about two things.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: One, they want the French state to somehow pay more, even though it's broke.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: And two, they hate Western civilization, both the far left and the Muslim immigrants.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: And let's call this out.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: This is what it is.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: It's Muslim, unassimilated immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're talking about.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: We have no desire to assimilate whatsoever.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: And leftists who say it's like being on a plane.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Where the leftists are in first class and they say,
12:00
SPEAKER_01: yelling at the stewardess,
12:01
SPEAKER_01: why don't you give champagne to the guys in cattle as the plane goes down?
12:04
SPEAKER_02: Right.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're dealing with here.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: And it is an absolute catastrophe.
12:11
SPEAKER_02: And to extend your analogy,
12:14
SPEAKER_02: the first class cabin is only equipped with enough champagne for first class.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: So when you try to spread it among the rest of the cabin, that's what's happening in France.
12:21
SPEAKER_02: They have no more money.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: You can't build the military up as they promised to do and also have retirees retire
12:28
SPEAKER_02: at 57 if they're railroad workers because back in 1850, it was a tiring job.
12:31
SPEAKER_02: It could blow up.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: And the thing is, you don't get to retire when you're a fetus, which is the French number.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: They want to lower it.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: Both the main presidential candidates want to retire when they're fetuses.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: OK, the bond markets won't accept this anymore.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: And German taxpayers aren't going to pay when they're retiring now at 67 and not
12:51
SPEAKER_01: when they're toddlers.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: All right, John, we got to rock because we're a little behind.
12:56
SPEAKER_02: So North America, no kings rallies.
12:59
SPEAKER_02: I'm just going to ask you to sum up what the Democrat Socialists
13:01
SPEAKER_02: of America are offering when they run for office.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: I think it's similar to the French left.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, in fact, I think that's a very good comparison.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: Open door immigration to get people in to nationalize them so they can vote for them
13:14
SPEAKER_01: as fast as they can.
13:15
SPEAKER_01: The magic money train back will pay for everything, even though we have all kinds of deficits.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: State control of everything and immense regulation.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're going to get.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: We're going to get La France Insoumise.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: We're going to get Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the off-Broadway people in Les Miserables.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: I can't put it better than that.
13:33
SPEAKER_02: I'm just trying to think who the American Melenchon would be because all
13:36
SPEAKER_02: of ours are pretty young.
13:38
SPEAKER_02: Maybe Bernie Sanders.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say he and Melenchon could probably go and scream at waitresses somewhere.
13:45
SPEAKER_02: They love each other.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: Oceania.
13:48
SPEAKER_02: This is just a little story that caught my eye.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: A guy named Lorenzo Lamalu was gunned down in a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City,
13:54
SPEAKER_02: Vietnam by allegedly Steve Tafia and V'a Soloa V'a.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: All of those people, I believe, are Samoans.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: I think this is a case of a Samoan gang operating in Australia.
14:07
SPEAKER_02: And it reminded me that,
14:08
SPEAKER_02: you know, MS-13,
14:09
SPEAKER_02: the Trinitarios lately in the press because of the guy who was shot by ICE,
14:13
SPEAKER_02: who had a long track record released at the border,
14:15
SPEAKER_02: Trendy Aragua, we could go on the list of gangs.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: They're all now transnational criminal organizations that are a lot more effective
14:24
SPEAKER_02: and scary than the old days when it was the Crips and the Bloods all,
14:28
SPEAKER_02: you know, conveniently...
14:30
SPEAKER_02: In the hood, which you could avoid by not going there.
14:33
SPEAKER_02: These guys are now multinational mafia all over the world.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: No, it's a multinational corporation and that takes a very different skill set to catch them.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: It takes a lot of coordination between Interpol and the FBI.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: Because it is transnational,
14:48
SPEAKER_01: and they move the money,
14:49
SPEAKER_01: and they move the illicit behavior,
14:50
SPEAKER_01: and they move their leadership from place to place to place.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take a whole new way of doing it.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: Similar to what we did with Al Qaeda,
14:57
SPEAKER_01: you realize it's a franchise, and you have to look at franchising.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: Actually, we looked for Al Qaeda the way McDonald's was set up.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: You get the name,
15:05
SPEAKER_01: but you have to do these things in common and then you can call yourself this
15:08
SPEAKER_01: and be part of it.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: But it's decentralized,
15:11
SPEAKER_01: transnational and ever so much harder than just whacking people within
15:14
SPEAKER_01: a three block radius in L.A.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: It's not like that anymore.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take another level.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: We have to move up the FBI and the rest to deal with this.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: It's a much harder world to deal with.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, it involves migration of young, vulnerable, oppressed people.
15:31
SPEAKER_02: So left-wing governments aren't going to want to take it on.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: They're just going to release everybody into the country and then release them
15:36
SPEAKER_02: on bail until they kill someone, unfortunately.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Sadly, yes.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: South America, Brazil.
15:43
SPEAKER_02: Lula, we know they're having a rerun of the election,
15:46
SPEAKER_02: I think, because the latest Bolsonaro candidate, Flavio, am I correct?
15:51
SPEAKER_02: Flavio's
15:51
SPEAKER_01: the guy.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: He came close, but he didn't get the cigar.
15:55
SPEAKER_02: But it looks like with the combination of another 5% right of center parties,
15:58
SPEAKER_02: he might get over the line.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: So Lula is now saying it's the Russian bots and it's met at Facebook.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: And he's launched a complaint and he owns the judiciary in Brazil, I think.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: So may have some success.
16:10
SPEAKER_02: But I just want to ask you generally for your take on this thing that's happening now.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: Every time there's It's sore
16:23
SPEAKER_01: losers who are not a legitimate opposition in the case
16:26
SPEAKER_01: of Lula, where, as you say, the odds are very clear.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: The far right,
16:30
SPEAKER_01: the other five or six percent that kept Flavio and Lula from getting to 50 are on
16:34
SPEAKER_01: the right.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: So these are logical voters for Bolsonaro.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: They're not going to vote for a socialist.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: They may not vote, but they're not going to vote for So he's going to lose.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: So he immediately starts complaining about how unfair it is.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: First, you have to prove to me that people around the world are swayed by bots.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm not certain that they are.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, I think it's tuned out in many ways.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: But secondly, it ruins the idea of a loyal opposition.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: And if every election we have that's close, 55,
16:58
SPEAKER_01: 45 or closer,
17:00
SPEAKER_01: meaning most elections in the United States right now where we have
17:03
SPEAKER_01: a very narrow dividing line.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: We can't always be sore losers and complain.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: And frankly, the first person who admits they're wrong and loses, I would vote for next time.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Because what this does is corrode democracy.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: And in Brazil,
17:15
SPEAKER_01: where both sides see the other as not the loyal opposition,
17:18
SPEAKER_01: but as traitorous, this is a very bad idea indeed.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: And Lula, I would hope, nearing the end of his career, might grow up just a tad.
17:26
SPEAKER_02: Fat chance, John.
17:27
SPEAKER_02: I'll just say that.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: And we'll continue this conversation.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: I live in hope, Simon.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: You know me.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: I live in hope.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: No, I think if you're a communist at 80,
17:34
SPEAKER_02: it's pretty unlikely you're going to have a come to Jesus moment at that point.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: But he could join Melenchon and Bernie Sanders yelling at waitresses,
17:41
SPEAKER_01: the three of them together.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: That would be, I would pay to watch that show.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it'd be like the movie The Expendables,
17:46
SPEAKER_02: except without the action or anything else to watch.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: All right, we're going to end it up because we're out of time.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: Stump, John.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: John, how many Zacharias does it take to make a Scaramucci?
17:59
SPEAKER_01: She did two Scaramuccis.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: You know, john, you score 100% there.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: I am.
18:06
SPEAKER_02: I'm not shocked.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: But yes, the White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci lasted 11 days.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: And the White House spokesperson to forget her first name Zachariah,
18:16
SPEAKER_02: I never got a chance to see an interaction,
18:18
SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry to say, had five days in the seat.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: So 100% john,
18:23
SPEAKER_02: you win this week,
18:24
SPEAKER_02: my red herring john, where would you go to buy $15,000 mechanical bird?
18:30
SPEAKER_01: I would say France, but I'm just guessing.
18:32
SPEAKER_02: All right.
18:33
SPEAKER_02: I should have made that a stump, John.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: That's my red herring.
18:36
SPEAKER_02: Everybody's been talking about Kelly Clarkson, late of American Idol, I want to say.
18:41
SPEAKER_02: Right.
18:41
SPEAKER_02: Being upset in a magic shop in Brooklyn because some hipster wouldn't sell her
18:45
SPEAKER_02: a bird for 15 grand.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I can see why this story is captivating everybody because we've all been,
18:51
SPEAKER_02: or at least I've been on the other side of the counter dealing
18:53
SPEAKER_02: with horrible customers.
18:55
SPEAKER_02: And I've also had horrible customer service.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: So I'm pretty much with Kelly on this one, but I'm not sure.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say it's just a break that we don't talk
19:03
SPEAKER_01: about French students burning down their schools, which is a nice change.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: Seriously.
19:08
SPEAKER_02: And my landmine,
19:08
SPEAKER_02: which we'll obviously talk about later,
19:11
SPEAKER_02: is the riots, not just in France, but spreading across Milan.
19:16
SPEAKER_02: Milan.
19:17
SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about Milan because that's where you are.
19:18
SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about those three chickens coming home to roost of low economic growth,
19:22
SPEAKER_02: bad energy policy and mass migration and how much it is a warning for
19:26
SPEAKER_02: the United States.
19:27
SPEAKER_02: So, John, last word on that.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: This is going to be the future of what we have to deal with either
19:32
SPEAKER_01: the elite master it or they're mastered by it.
19:35
SPEAKER_02: And on that note, I'll see you next time.
19:38
SPEAKER_02: You take care of yourself, Simon.
19:40
[music]