 We're back here at CNLives Election Central and we're joined by the once-globetrotting journalist Pepe Escobar. It was now marooned because of the pandemic in Bangkok, Thailand. Pepe, thanks for coming on CNLive. How are you doing? Hi everybody. Hi Joe. Hi Elizabeth. Hi CNLives. Look, it's completely, it's for me, like Joe said, it never happened in my life for the past 40 years. Being stranded in the same country for eight months in a row. It's, maybe you start climbing those walls pretty soon, but yeah, I'm going to the mountains as soon as I have a break, you know, because it's still the rainy season. I'm going to the Golden Triangle for a few days just to relax because it's been completely demented, especially the past four or five weeks. How is the virus going in Thailand right now? It's totally under control. 59 deaths. Yeah. It's one of the best records in the world. I think the best one is Vietnam and Thailand is probably second best. But the problem is the country is hermetically sealed and they destroyed the economy. That's it. And the real unemployment rate is over 40% at the moment. Obviously you never get this from the Thai authorities of course, but talking to Thai people around Bangkok, you get a feeling of how bad it is. And if you don't have jobs here, people have to go back to their provinces where obviously there are no jobs as well. So it's official circle, you know, there's no foreign investment coming apart from the Chinese. No business because a businessman cannot come here to strike deals. What about assistance? There's no government assistance to people who are out of work? Well, they ran out of cash. It was. It was the equivalent of 160 US dollars a month, roughly. But they ran out of cash and now there's nothing. So it's a dire situation really. And we are in the middle of a color revolution as well. Well, that's right. Which is a mix of color revolution and those grievances about the fact that this is a military dictatorship that only listens to itself and a monarchy that unlike the previous monarchy, King Bumibol is completely remote and detached from Thai people. The king spends most of his time in Baviera in a five-star hotel. He's concubines, his horses, his dogs, and all that. And he comes here for a Buddhist ceremony or two. He's been here for the past two weeks or so. And then he flies back to... He can get in and out. He's not hermetically shielding. Unlike you. Exactly. He can get in and out anytime he wants. And he has a Schengen visa. Schengen diplomatic visa, of course. So he can go back and forth. And the woke generation here, they are really fired up. They have been protests for the past few weeks. There is a constitutional crisis because the protests, they want the constitution to be rewritten because the previous version favored the current military dictatorship disguised as a civilian leadership. It's an extremely complex situation. And obviously, Thailand is in the middle of the US-China overall larger-than-life dispute. Right. As one of the branches of the Chinese New Silk Road. But with lots of American investments here for decades. You know, speaking of the constitutional crisis, you may have heard that there's an election going on in the United States. Which is responsible for me not sleeping this week, Joe. Just like you, Elizabeth, and everybody else watching us. That's right. So first, I want to ask you your personal view of what's going on. And now you know the latest that Biden, the verge of maybe winning Pennsylvania, if he does, he'll get the 270 votes. But Trump made those remarks today from the White House. And then I'd like you to later speak, if you can, about what China's views are of this election. How do you make out of this, if you can? What's going on in Washington, the US? For the moment, Joe, the Chinese reaction is extremely discreet. Like you don't see editorials in the Global Times, for instance, or in the People's Daily. It's a wait-and-see situation. According to our think tank sources and the people that we know in Beijing or in Chenzhen, obviously they would rather go for President Kamala. Because, all right, maybe the trade war would be softened a little bit. Sanctions, they have no illusions that sanctions will continue to be in place, but it would be more, let's say, less turbulent to deal with a democratic presidency. But this is very informal. You don't see, for instance, higher ups in the Politburo or people from the finance ministry going on the record in Tsinghua or in one of the major dailies, saying anything about it for now. Same with the Russians. It's wait-and-see. On tasks, discussions at the Valdai Club. The Valdai Club, they had another great discussion this week about Russia-China Eurasian integration on top of their meetings two weeks ago, which were amazing. They were not covered in the US, by the way, but they never are. This particular Valdai, which was a virtual Valdai, I was very frustrated because I was supposed to go normally and meet all of them and interview a lot of really, really heavy hitters in the Russian economy and geopolitics and all that, but it had to be virtual. But what Lavrov said especially, and then Putin's intervention plus the Q&A afterwards was quite subs in terms of the role of the state, the Russian economy, in terms of their drive towards a multipolar world, the Russia-China strategic partnership and all that. So this was extremely important. I talked about it in one of my columns, but I suggest all of you to go to the Valdai Club website. You can actually see most of the discussions, most of the panels on video with English voiceovers, not subtitles with voiceovers in fact, and it's a major contrast with what's going on in the US. Same in China when they had the approval of the five-year plan last week, the 2021-2025 five-year plan. And then when you put this all together, you see to another world is possible mechanisms flowing in parallel and intersecting in many areas as well in contrast with the absolutely crazy western neoliberal obsession in fact, which includes the US, not only Europe, but the US as well. But coming back to our larger-than-life saga, right, today I did a gaming exercise in fact. I wrote the column that I sent one hour ago, it's centered on a gaming exercise, which I call it the blue gaming exercise. It's a color revolution exercise, but applied to the United States, the land that conceptually invented the concept of color revolution. Of course, I used what's going on from the blue and the red side, the accusations of fraud, the legal battle that it's in front of us I had for the next few weeks. And I built a narrative that you can read as if it was one of those scenarios in the transition integrity project, the TIP. In fact, the scenario that I put in my exercise is very similar to one of their scenarios, but incorporating what happened since Tuesday night, especially that famous vertical jump in Biden votes in Wisconsin and Michigan, I incorporated that as well. Trump just told us a while ago about fraud again, but without providing any smoking gun. They can't because the Republican lawyers and investigators and whatever is going to take them days. They have to go through recounts. They have to compare what really went on in many of these polling places compared to registered voters. It's going to be hell, of course. But I incorporated all that in my column and it's a very, very cynical satire. In fact, you can read it as satire and you can read it as a documentary of what happened this past three, four days as well. So I'm very curious to what the response is going to be in the U.S. for this column. I know that the response in the Global South would be largely positive because most people in the Global South, they are convinced that these elections are fraudulent in many levels on both sides. But I'm curious to see the American reaction, especially now where there's censorship all over. You know that our friend Phil Giraldi writes for Strategic Culture. You cannot link to his columns on Facebook, for instance. Our friend Andrew Korribko, who's based in America but based in Moscow, he's being de-platformed everywhere because he goes against the mainstream narrative. So many of us are being censored right and left and in the middle as well. So this is very, very scary. And the fact that if you point out, like many of us did, and I also did, starting from last week, that what we're going to have with a damn presidency is the return of the blob. And not only the blob that was attached to the Trump administration, but the blob as we know it from Obama-Biden 1 and Obama-Biden 2. So we're going to have basically Obama-Biden 3. And last year I gave names, Tony Blinken, you know, Michelle Froh-Noi, you know about them more than I do, in fact. But a lot of people in the Global South have no idea about these people and these are the people who will be behind American foreign policy in a damn presidency. So it's very, very scary. And Fugir Auden in his columns, he says the same thing, quoting Paul Kennedy's Imperial Overstretched. He writes that basically forget about a reversal of the Imperial Overstretched on the contrary. So expect, you know, incursions in Syria or in Ukraine, for instance, for 2021 is practically inevitable. And that's why a lot of people in the Global South are extremely worried about it, if they find the correct information about how this is going to morph into an Obama-Biden 3.0 administration. Do you think, Pepe, that just a question on the census? I didn't know that about Phil or Andrew. You didn't know about Phil? Or Andrew. No, I didn't know that. But you think that this is a small question, but if Biden wins, will that continue? I mean, or has this been an anti-Trump phenomenon that we're seeing? And if Trump's gone, will that end? It's a very good question, Joe, because it depends. There is a big tech censorship, in effect, against any journalist or analyst that contradicts the mainstream narrative, which is a damn narrative, essentially, a damn-shaped narrative. So it's not a matter of defending Trump. It's a matter of asking questions. So it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask about this sudden vertical bumps in those votes in the middle of the night in Wisconsin and Michigan. We still don't have a definitive answer about it. The possibility that there was fraud in this election, which is very, very high, it's a perfectly legitimate question or a set of questions, as well. It has nothing to do, in fact, with Trump saying these elections are fraudulent and he has no smoking gun. That's one side of the story. Our role as journalists is to ask questions and to dig deeper. But nowadays, we can't. We simply can't. If we do, we are de-platformed or censored on Facebook or accounts disappear on Google, like with press TV, for instance. I was on press TV yesterday or two days ago, et cetera. They are de-platformed a little bit everywhere. Or in the case of, what's the name of that site? The American conservative or American Harrow Tribune or something like that. That's what I was reading today. Yes. Thank you, Elizabeth. Which was proscribed, blacklisted, just like that, because I know it's financed by the IRGC. This is ridiculous. I know Professor Tony Hall personally. It's his website. He, more or less, does what? 80% of what's published in the website. It's practically a one-man operation, maybe three or four people. He has nothing to do with Iran. The problem is that Professor Hall and myself, we've been to Iran a few times. In the eyes of the State Department and the Deep State, we are all Iranian agents, just like we are all Russian agents. That's our friend, Phil Giraldi, comes in. Everybody that writes for strategic culture comes in. That other website, Nail Journal, where William Engdahl publishes. Same thing. Stalker Zone, a website that is very, very good. Mostly Russian writers. And they have, for instance, the best Russian analysis of what happens in the Ukraine. Blacklisted as well. So, you know, the whole thing has to follow one format only. And, you know, it is the death of journalism by a thousand cuts. So the major cut was Julian's story, of course. And all of us are, you know, the protagonists of the death by a thousand cuts. They're going after everyone. If you deviate from the norm, from the Ministry of Truth's narrative, you know, it's very, very scary. Glenn Greenwald, with his story, with the intercept, touched upon it as well. Different pasts, but more or less the same story. So any one of us that deviates from the norm, now we are under attack everywhere. And consortium news as well. No question. Well, Elizabeth, first I want to give an update here. Two days ago, Trump had a 600,000-vote lead over Biden in Pennsylvania. It is now a 26,000-vote. With 95% of the vote counted, all the mail-in ballots. So he's hanging on by a thread, Trump. By a thread, yes. A thread. And if Biden takes Pennsylvania, that's it, electoral votes, he's declared a president. And then we'll see how Trump reacts. Elizabeth, do you have any questions for me? I just wanted to comment that I agree with you and I've been observing this censorship as well. I'm also very concerned about it. I agree that the job of journalists is to ask questions and be skeptical. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, as long as when you do, if you answer them and when you answer them, you do it factually. And I think that even consortium news got called Russian something or other by, I believe, a Canadian news outlet or a documentary that there's now like litigation around. But so you really cannot escape this type of smearing when you do seek the truth. And it happens to be truth that embarrasses power structures. I've asked this of almost every guest we've had on, but you brought up Julian Assange. What do you think will be the difference, if any difference whatsoever, and there may be none, between the Trump administration and a potential Biden administration when it comes to Julian Assange and the extradition attempt that is ongoing now to bring them from the UK to the US? That's a very good question, Liz. We don't know. Of course, the ultimate decision is the deep states. It's very entrenched and very powerful deep state factions in unison. They will decide the fate of Julian. In fact, I see a dark winter scenario for him. No matter who's in the White House, it's a deep state phenomenon. He went against a deep state in public. That's anathema. So he has to be published. Nothing's going to change this equation. So it's not a bipartisan thing or in terms of power politics or who's in the White House. No, it transcends all that. Just like what we're watching now, the way I see it, and I've been discussing this with many friends and analysts, it is a Kabuki theater, but it was more or less rehearsed and pre-programmed. Now we have, essentially, 50% of the US pitted against the other 50% of the US, maybe 52, 48, 51, 49. But the country is completely irreversibly polarized. Who profits from it? You know better than I do, right? And that's it. So the people who run the gaming, who pre-programmed everything, who concocted different levels of PsiOps, they are just observing remotely this pre-Civil War conflagration, which is after the inauguration, whatever that is in January, is going to be even worse. Like laboratory rats in a cage. Yes, Joe, absolutely, absolutely. It's an extremely sophisticated PsiOps, in fact. And of course, the best American analysts, they know this by heart and they can decode the details, but the general public, they have no idea. They are just polarized into their own formulas or mattresses or aggression, in fact. And they don't have enough critical thinking or critical tools to understand how they are being manipulated on all sides. And that's why it's terrible, because it has to do as well with this, you know, the discourse nowadays flows through social media, where you can have a super PhD debunked by an absolute idiot with one objective. And there's nothing you can do about it. I'm reminded of someone who tweeted the other day that it takes one idea to convince 1,000 scholars and 1,000 idiots. What is it? I'm screwing it up now. 1,000 details weren't convincing idiots. Yes, and 1,000, yeah, that's what it takes. One fact to convince 1,000 scholars, 1,000 facts cannot convince one idiot. Absolutely. So we are living this at 24-7 full-time. And there's nothing we can do about it, you know. So in all my conversations, we're always talking about what's the point for us to keep writing long essays with lots of links, quoting books. It's absolutely pointless. You're going to have an idiot from, you know, the typical village idiot as Humberto Eco famously. He said that before he died, a few years before he died, I think was one of the best things Eco said in public ever. He said that the internet had elevated the village idiot to the condition of an oracle. And you have village idiots as oracles all over the place. And there's nothing we can do about it. And one or the other is going to become president of the United States. Exactly. And we have exactly. Yeah, I was about to say we have everything from QAnon on fortune, which is the village idiot that you're describing in one way. But then you have the Blue Anon Russia Gate village idiot speaking in the Washington Post and the New York Times and all these other outlets. So it's really a shambles across the board. And it seems like when it comes to the thousand fact joke, you know, Julian Assange gave us those thousand facts. He cited on the public. And as Joe and I were talking about earlier, when you really do look at it, obviously the public is not represented by whoever wins this presidential election or any presidential election. And so Julian Assange by being on the side of the people, he's on this, he's against the side of both potential presidents. So either, like you said, that either way he's not going to be served very well by whoever wins. Absolutely, Elizabeth. So Julian remains the number one example for the whole planet of what all of us who try to impart information or at least decode what's going on and try to explain to other people. The fate that awaits us in short term, midterm and long term. Well, Pepe, I know why you keep writing. It's the same reason why I keep writing. It's for yourself to keep saying and to figure it out, not to be, to fight against this environment. Orwell said that writing was revenge against, what was it? Revenge against, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting this thing. It's a revenge against reality. Yes. So you have to preserve your Roman mind, keeping up with what's going on, figuring it out for yourself. And in the meantime you might as well impart it to others if they're interested, right? You're right, Joe. It's a very romantic notion, isn't it? Yeah. I'm always reminded of, I always keep in my mind the Keats, College, Byron, the Brit Romantics, in fact. We do this, it's an altruistic impulse. It's an inner drive. It's an impossible dream. And we create for ourselves the illusion that what we do matters. And what we do may change something. Well, with age, of course, you understand that it may change one or two people. You know, you may change your family somewhere and all that, but that's it. Yeah, they'll stop talking to you. Yes. Change your family. They stop talking. Yeah, when they read your column. That's how they change your family. Heather, let me ask you this. We're talking about the sentence. What happened with Greenwall as he wrote a piece about these laptop emails and photographs of Hunter Byte? And the New York Post published it. And then, as we all know, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously shut that down. And the whole New York Post, which is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, by the way, it's a tabloid and a lot of problems would have put. And then Greenwall wanted to write a piece for the Insta, which he co-founded, and they wouldn't let him write. So he quit, gave up a lot of money for that. So I'm curious about whether anybody in China knew anything about the Chinese Biden family connection. How does China see that? Look, you don't see this in Chinese media or even in commentary. And I asked some of our friends in Hong Kong and in China, is this being discussed in the Chinese way, both, for instance, in Chinese social media or that? No. The Greenwall story for them is very remote and very few Chinese have details about the intercept, about who Greenwall is, why he quit, something that he co-founded, the involvement of Pierre Omidyar, you know, visually. I'm talking about the Hunter Biden story. They're very familiar with Hunter Biden. He's been in China. Yes, exactly. You can see the public opinion in China is, and this is something that you read in editorials in Xinhua or People's Daily or China Daily, etc. It's interesting. The way most Chinese see it, it's a corroboration for them of the rot in American politics, which is something that is, for them, is already an established notion. So for them, this is an extra example, but with a different political party. Of course, for the past four years, they have been absolutely driven, absolutely mad by everything that the Trump administration throws at China. But now they see that the other party as well is internally completely corrupted as well. So that's why I think even on a public opinion level in China, mass public opinion as well as the leadership, there are no illusions about them presidents at all. They expect the sanctions to continue, essentially. They expect at least a measure of dialogue compared to what we have, especially the past two years, all right? But nobody's thinking, for instance, that the sanctions against Huawei are going to disappear because this is being explained by Chinese media that it's an American national policy, independent of partisan politics. It's part of the national security strategy. China is the top competitor, much more than Russia. They understand the notion that China now is not only the top economic power in the world, the Chinese already see it. In fact, they are analyzing terms of PPP, not gross GDP. So under PPP terms, China is already the number one economic power in the world, the number one trade power in the world. They're going to clinch a mega trade deal around here in Asia, the RCEP deal, regional comprehensive economic partnership, which is what TPP, Obama's TPP, wanted to be. But in fact, we're going to have RCEP with China included and all the major players here, the ASEAN 10, the 10 Southeast Asians plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. And the Indians in another fabulous example of stabbing yourself in the back, they are out. So India is going to be increasingly irrelevant in trade terms across Asia. And next year, they're going to clinch the famous, which is being discussed for years now, China-European Union trade deal. Why is India staying up? Because of pressure from the US? Yes, for two main reasons. One, that they think that RCEP is basically a China deal, which is not because this has, this has been discussed for at least for the past two or three years, extensively among everybody, including India. But they say, no, we're going to be invaded again by Chinese products. You have to modernize your industry, your manufacturing capabilities. India doesn't export anything like China, good manufacturer products. They are all made in India, stays in India. It's not exported. You don't even find it in Bangladesh, for instance. You find maybe what textiles, but much more textiles from Bangladesh than India, but you find Indian textiles in parts of Asia. That's it. Not much. And the other reason is that the Indian elites under Modi, in fact, those Hindutva, Hindu nationalist supremacists, they actually believe in the Indo-Pacific concept. It's completely nuts. They think that they're going to be treated by Washington as same-level players in the Indo-Pacific structure with Japan and Australia as well. Completely absurd, a mirage. Completely. But this is what they believe at the moment. So add one and two and they pulled out of the RCEP discussions and they said, okay, maybe we come in later. But then the train already left the station. They're going to sign this. They were supposed to sign this before the end of 2020. Okay, maybe beginning of next year, but already left the station. Big trade deal with all the major East Asia players. And India will be out. You know, at least Australians are aware that they are a colony basically of the United States. Exactly. But they go along with it anyway. At least they're unlike the Indian you're describing. Exactly. They know the score. Let me ask you now, a Biden administration would not in any way change or maybe make more aggressive a containment strategy and to try to disrupt Russian-Chinese integration if you were discussing Kondalda. Is that how they see it? Absolutely correct, Joe. Because, okay, this is 90% of what I have been writing for the past five years at least. I think practically each and every column that I write is linked to this ongoing process of Eurasian integration in myriad levels, geopolitical, geo-economic trade, investment connectivity and all that. And the three major polls are Russia, China and Iran, which little by little, they are integrating slowly but surely. We have many examples. The Russia-China strategic partnership in so many levels. And now, like Putin said a few days ago and everybody in the West was like, military, direct military collaboration at the highest level in terms of even exchanging military secrets. It's a military alliance in the making. I would say medium to long term, but Putin himself on the record already said it's possible. We have the famous 25-year, 400-billion-dollar Iran-China deal, which is basically trade, investment connectivity, Chinese investment in the Iranian energy industry, which is essential. They don't have that kind of money. Modernization of Iran in terms of building metro lines like they were building in Tehran, high speed rail, fiber optics, all that. The integration of the different corridors of the New Silk Road, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Chinese, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which as part of this corridor, they inaugurated a few days ago the first metro in Lahore in Pakistan. It's something huge. Lahore is an enormous city. Circulation is an absolute mess. And now they have their first metro line. Can you imagine? So this is something we're going to see soon in Islamabad, in Karachi, in major Pakistani cities. Chinese technology, and it's part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is the link to Guadr especially and the Arabian Sea, which is an extra outlet for the Chinese. So all this is proceeding in tandem. And then Russia, the same thing, lots of Chinese investment in eastern Siberia. And something that has been discussed at the highest level as well, the integration of the both Koreas with eastern Siberia. So this means South Korea will have a direct land-based access to the Eurasian continent. And this is something that they don't have at the moment because North Korea is in the middle. So what do we have? We have Putin, Moon, and King Jong-un sitting down together and say, okay, how are we going to unite the Korean Peninsula and then unite us with eastern Siberia, you Russians. Ongoing process, they have been discussing this for at least the past two years, irrespective of the Trump-King-Jong-un meetings. So this is all proceeding in parallel, in tandem, in different levels. And you have other important players in Central Asia or Pakistan or Turkey. They are slowly but surely being integrated as well. So if you look at what may happen in the next 15 years, which is a horizon that the Chinese themselves included in the five-year plan, they have something called Vision 2035. 2035 for the Chinese is very important because it's the midterm between where we are now and 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. And in 2035, they had already planned, in fact, these three five-year plans in one that they discussed last week. Not only this one until 2035 where they planned to be one of the top technological powers in the world, but they planned all the major steps to arriving 2035 as the top in virtually everything. And that includes, of course, the expansion of all these new Silk Road corridors, six of them plus the maritime Silk Road, everywhere in Asia. So uniting East Asia all the way to Turkey and Eastern Europe and arriving in those major destinations in Western Europe, in Germany, especially in Venice, in Madrid by train, in London by train as well. So you've never seen anything like this in history. It's an enormous trade investment connectivity process uniting the whole of Eurasia. And they are starting. If you look at the official timetable, next year, 2021 starts the implementation phase. So we're not even implementing according to the Chinese. What happened this past seven years, since they announced the new Silk Road seven years ago, it's the pre-planning, setting up projects, starting projects and all that. The real thing starts next year, ends, and then we have one of those beautiful cosmic coincidences when the Chinese economy will start to pick up again, like, you know, like there's no tomorrow, because they are already over COVID. So next year, I expect the Chinese economy to boom like crazy. And obviously, they'll have enough extra funds to invest in all these connectivity projects outside of China as well. So this is what they discussed in the five-year plan. The official denomination is double development dynamic translated from Mandarin. So invest a lot in the domestic economy. And at the same time, invest in all these projects. China goes west, right? Goes west, arriving in Europe. And, you know, I follow what is discussed in the US about that. The only thing that I see is Belt and Road is a debt trap. Belt and Road is a Chinese domination in the rest of the world. Belt and Road is a communist subversion, et cetera. They don't analyze the facts. They don't analyze how this is being developed. Let me interrupt you a second. As you were describing all those things, these incredible things with Putin and the South Koreans and linking Russia with the United Korean Peninsula, I'm thinking people in the corridors of the Pentagon, CIA, the state, they can't do anything. What can they do about it? They drive them crazy. What could they do about it? You're right, what they can do about it apart from launching examples of hybrid war here and there. So, okay, let's try to destabilize Xinjiang, you know. Let's send some special forces to connect with the Xinjiang separatists over there. The Chinese already know about this shit for decades, you know. Let's try some sort of provocation in Ukraine. The people in Donbass, they have been fighting this for six years now, in fact. Let's try something in Taiwan. The Chinese know the whole thing and they know that any provocation, in fact, now they are, if you talk to Chinese analysts, now they tell you right away, if there is an American provocation against Taiwan, China can invade Taiwan in 24 hours, if it's a serious provocation. The U.S. would not start a nuclear war against China. The U.S. is not going to start a nuclear war about Taiwan, obviously not, you know. And South China Sea, we already know what it is. South China Sea is a Chinese lake period. And this is being discussed between China and the other nations in the South China Sea. They are establishing what they call a code of conduct in the South China Sea, something they have been discussing for the past two years or so. Of course, there will have to be concessions towards Vietnam, Malaysia, Grunai, etc. It will happen. And for instance, in the case of Indonesia, the Chinese are not trying to encroach into Indonesian islands, very close to Indonesian territory, very far away from China. They understood. So they're starting to be more diplomatic the way they deal with the other countries that surround the South China Sea. But all of them more or less agree that this is something that has to be so solved and discussed by South China Sea nations, no foreign interference. So what the Americans can do about it? More snopps, freedom of navigation operations. So what? They're like fleas around a dog basically. It attempts by the U.S. to stop this process that's inexorable. It's inevitable. Under the Biden administration, would the ramp up attempts to disrupt, ramp up these hybrid war activities? What do you think? Definitely, Joe, because once again, the blob will be in charge now 100%. So this is official deep state policy. And it's against the alliance of peer competitors. Something that Brzezinski in his grave shouts about every day, right? So this is not going to change. I think in fact it's going to pick up steam. And that's why the Chinese and the Russians especially are very guarded and they know what can happen starting next year without them presidency. They have absolutely no illusions about it. There will be provocations. And probably the first one on the list would be something in Syria, which we don't know exactly what would be. But it would be in areas that the U.S. already is in the northeast where they are basically exploiting the oil, stealing Syrian oil, right? Or it could be a reinforcement of those American bases near the Syria Iraqi border, for instance, anything. So the Iranians also have no illusions. They expect and this is something not necessarily Ayatollah Khamenei and the revolutionary gods, but the minister of foreign relations, Zarif's people, they expect that the U.S. will be back to JCPOA next year. In fact, almost everyone around this area, Southeast Asia, expects the Americans to be back. But we don't know exactly how they will be back. But there will be at least some sort of convergence into, okay, let's revive the JCPOA. So maybe this is the only positive news in all this mess. Elizabeth, anything you want to jump in with? Sure. I hope that our audio is back. I've been alerted by chat that we lost audio for a while there. So hopefully we're back. I'm just glancing at you. It doesn't look like we are yet. But I'll take it. No, there's nobody else. Yeah. Let's take a couple of seconds. It's fixed. Okay. All right. If you have a question, I have seven more. Go ahead. I have a few questions from chat here, and they may be relatively short to answer, but I thought I'd throw them at you anyway. So one of them is whether China and Iran and their connection will prevent the U.S. bombing Iran or I suppose increasing tension with Iran? Definitely. Because now it's not acknowledged in public, but China has made a commitment in the background to the Iranian leadership that if you are in dire straits in terms of an American operation, we got your back. And this is something that the Russians also have made, very discreetly. It's part of these talks between Zarif and Wang Yi. Zarif was with Wang Yi in Beijing what, two weeks ago or so. And Lavrov and Zarif will get along very, very well. So this, we know this is in the cards, and we know that the Americans know about it. And obviously they won't try anything against it, especially because whatever they try, the level of made-in-Iran weaponry now is very, very serious. And the Pentagon knows it. Not only they gained it, and everything that they gained was a disaster from an American point of view. They know that if they try anything and the person go, for instance, Iranians can do anything they want. Their coastline is lined up with missiles. They can shut down the Strait of Hormuz in one evening if they want it. They can mine the Strait of Hormuz, for instance. This will provoke a collapse of the global economy, among other things. So this obviously the environment knows about it. So once again, going back to the possible only good news and all that, this would imply that a damn presidency would start some sort of rapprochement with Iran starting next year. But let's have no illusions once again. Right. Yeah. And so one of the things we were talking about earlier on the stream was the potential for Kamala Harris to be a relatively strong warlock. And given the fact that Biden isn't all there at this point and that his presidency probably will be, if not in not fully taken over by Kamala Harris, at least in principle, he won't be the person really at the helm of the ship. What does that look like for foreign policy? How dangerous is that in terms of a World War III type scenario? I mean, if in the absolute worst case scenario, what do you think would develop under Kamala Harris presidency? Well, Kamala Harris in terms of foreign policy is a cipher, isn't it? I'm not sure anyone in the West knows about Kamala Harris foreign policy views. So we don't it's a cipher. This means you'll be under total control of the deep state machinery. And that's that's why it's so dangerous. Of course, Biden, the same thing, assuming he survives a few months into the presidency. Don't forget that technically, he is on stage two dementia. I talked to some professionals, they told me it's stage two dementia. They can keep him up with meds, with drugs, but the rot of in the mind is irreversible. It takes a while. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes one year or two. And all of us who had a similar experience on a family level, which is my case with my mom, for instance, you can tell right away. You cannot if we dealt with a similar situation, you just look at his pattern of behavior, his eyes, and you immediately know, detect it, you know. And so it's not going to last long. And then we're going to have a cipher as commander in chief. Wow. Absolutely. I'm not really fancy his decline. I mean, it just in the last week or so, we saw him seem to confuse Trump's name with George Bush's name and his wife Jill was next to a mouthing Trump, you know, and he's had a few sentences that were absolute gibberish. It's really becoming very clear. And but the question also does from the chat arises that who will decide America's foreign policy? And that does relate a little bit to what is Kamala Harris going to be like, but also forgetting her for a second, what behind the scene really controls American foreign policy. Some people think that it's, you know, Israel, some people have different opinions, whether it's defense contractors, what's your take on that? It's a mix of all that. It's a mix of Israel, of course, the extremely powerful defense contractors and the revolving door around the defense contractors. And some very specific characters that will be very powerful in the next administration like Tony Blinken, probably the National Security Advisor, and Michelle Flournoy, probably head of the Pentagon. So you just look at the background of these people. In fact, we're talking about imperial functionaries. If you look at what they did before, you have a pretty good idea what they're going to do afterwards. So it's a concourse of circumstance and the solidified machine of the deep state, which is no wonder. A lot of people around the Global South are very, very worried about it. For instance, to give a South American example, I talked to some good friends in Argentina, for instance, an analyst. They say that essentially, well, next year they're going to come not only against Bolivia and Venezuela, but against us in Argentina. And that's absolutely no question. Brazil is a different case because Brazil at the moment is a colony. It's one of the most pathetic geopolitical developments of the past 100 years or so. How they managed to turn Brazil into a neo-colony in a matter of three or four years, in fact, even before the coup against Dilma, which was four years ago. Argentina is complicated because Argentina has very close relations with China. And Argentina can be the spark for another pink tide in South America. So the deep state is going to come out all guns blazing, destabilizing Argentina. So it's going to be a hybrid war all over the place. And Bolivia, they're not going to let Bolivia to be relatively independent. Forget it. That's a very good point you made about those of us who've had parents and my father had dementia. And it's just the other day I was telling someone when I see Biden, I see my father. I thought that was my father. Of course, Joe. The vacant look in the face. The vacant look. The first thing that struck me months ago already. The vacant look. And that's it. You cannot disguise that. You can take tons of meds, but it just slows down an irreversible process. Can my grandfather say the same thing? So all of us who had a familiar experience with it, we can detect it right away, right? I'm going to talk to you about Ukraine now because as we all know from the famous leaked conversation between Victoria. I forgot what you mean you had for Victoria, but Victoria knew Lynn. I call her maidun cookie distributor. Okay, maidun cookie. Yeah. And with Jeffrey Piotr, the then American ambassador, they were discussing who was going to lead Ukraine weeks before Yanukovych was overthrown. They decided on Yatsenok and Yatsenok. So they were talking about a coup. I mean, there's no way you could deny that. And they didn't deny it. And the American press and you only talked about, oh, she said, fuck the EU. Like that was the whole story. That was basically, it was nothing that you said, but they distracted it. But the key thing there, she says, Joe Biden and the U.M. Joe Biden is going to kind of glue this all together. That Joe is going to have a key role. And guess what? The coup took place. Joe had became basically the vice-roy of the United States to run Ukraine, where he was bullying ministries, including the justice ministry, to get rid of that prosecutor who under testimony in a court case in Austria said, he fired me because I was going to investigate his son's company. And by the way, how did his son get on the company? I don't know. There's no proof Biden put his son there. But this is like 19th century colonialism. You take over a country. You install your people. You install your people. The Treasury Secretary, the former State Department U.S. official, became the finance minister of Ukraine the day after she got Ukrainian citizenship. And Jeffrey Archer is a family friend of the Kerrys. And he was a partner with Hunter Biden. In Burisma, we were writing about this. I'm sure you were too at the time it was happening. And then Monsanto got contracts, although it was a complete takeover because they were afraid once Yanukovych said he wasn't going to go with the EU, he was going to go to the Russian deal. That was it. The coup was started. So now Biden is going to become president, looks like. We're still watching to see what happens in Pennsylvania. If he's president, he might remember a thing or two about Ukraine. And there's this scandal, this scandal erupted that almost may have hurt him because it's not a landslide that many people predicted against Trump. So maybe the scandal that the Twitter tried to suppress at the New York Post published that Greenwald had a quid over. Maybe that had hurt him. You said at the beginning of our conversation, you thought Biden was going to start ramping up maybe a hardcore military aid to Ukraine, to heart to heat up the civil war in the Dumbass. I want you to tell me more about that. Now, Trump, Obama didn't want to give military hardware. Trump did, but yet there was never really a reemergence of that war. Now, tell us about what Biden would do and about whether the Minsk plan is even on life support or not. Yes, it's what the deep state would do, Joe, in fact. They simply cannot get over the fact that there was a military defeat in the Dumbass in 2014. When I went to Donetsk in 2015, early in the spring of 2015, and they took me to the battlefield, was an absolutely amazing site, was a relatively circumscribed battlefield of what, 20 square kilometers or so. This was the key battle between the Donetsk-Luhang forces and the Kiev forces, and it was a rout. And I'm sure our friends in the Pentagon who gave wars and all that, they were stunned because it was that classic cauldron Russian tactic. You surround your enemy, and your enemy inside is in a cauldron, and then you devastate your enemy from all angles. This is exactly what happened. It's about three hours away from Donetsk. So they want revenge, but how? Kiev's military forces are a joke. The only thing that they know, the only thing that they do, in fact, is to shell suburbs of Donetsk, for instance, or the airport, for that matter. They don't have a cohesive military capable of staging an advance and taking over Luhansk, Donetsk, and at least parts of Dumbass. So what could they do? Send special forces and, you know, subvert. They already did this years ago. They killed the governor of Donetsk. Do you remember that? Send special forces to Donetsk and Luhansk. You're not going to conquer any territory with that. And what remains of the industry in Dumbass is linked to Russia already. It was and remains linked to Russia anyway, again. Right? So even if they create, let's say, a more militarized front trying to draw Russian forces in, the Russians won't take the bait. First of all, because the people in Dumbass are very well organized, and they have enough military forces, including Cossack militias. You know, I visited one of them, talked to one of their commanders. They're very, very well organized on a village level. You can even draw a parallel with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, you know, villages in southern Lebanon. Very organized, very well-opinized, connectivity, word of mouth. So it's important to conquer a territory like that, unless you have a blitzkrieg, you know, a chug or not, which is not going to happen. What about Zelensky? Would he go along with an escalation of the U.S.? Was he strong enough to resist that? We don't know. That's a good question, Joe. We don't know. We really don't know. He's been trying to make an hour right to vote. Sorry. Who was that? Was he an end? Yes. No news for the moment. No fresh news, just a few minutes at least. No, Biden closing in on the presidency. Closing in on both Georgia and Pennsylvania, right? We thought we might have an answer by now. That's why we went on the air, but I'm enjoying this conversation immensely with you, Petty. It's more interesting than you know. Thank you. My pleasure. But I like that you asked me questions that I need to try to find. For instance, I'm not following Ukraine for the past few weeks, for obvious reasons, you know. But I assume there are no new facts on the ground. And I recommend seriously for all of you watching us, go to Stalker's Zone and read a guy called Rostislav Ichenko. His articles are translated into English. I met Rostislav in Moscow. The guy knows everything about Ukraine. He's absolutely brilliant. And they translate most of his top columns into English and they publish at Stalker's Zone. So if you read this, Ichenko, you're going to have a pretty good idea of what's really going on on the ground in Ukraine. I'm going to read it before they shut it down, before they take it off the Internet. Before they shut it down, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But if you go through, for instance, if you share what they published on VK, the Russian Facebook, let's put it this way, no problem. But if you try to link to them on Facebook, forget it. No way. Or tweet it. Forget it. We've got a number of different questions in chat. They're ranging on a lot of different subjects. The latest one was, what are the chances for a revival of the TPP, in your opinion? Absolutely zero. Because, you know, really, absolutely zero because the successor of the TPP, which at the time was the competitor, is the RCEP, which is going to be signed if not in December. Well, they're postponing this forever. If not in December, early next year. And like we discussed, everybody's on board except India. So they don't need a TPP. We've got another question. What about, please tell us about the ongoing de-dolarization of efforts in Eurasia. We need hours for this. Yeah, not to ask you to speak for an hour on that one question. Wow. All the major players, which means Russia, China and Iran, they are increasingly trying to bypass the US dollar. And some of them are actually bypassing the US dollar. This thing is how they're going to coordinate. This would be the next step. So there are discussions already on how they're going to coordinate their payment systems. The Chinese payment system, the Russian payment system, and later they could bring Iran as well. So then you have a sort of alternative swift bypassing US dollar. All of this, once again, it's long term, but already started and it's ongoing. In bilateral trade, for instance, China and Iran, as far as we know, they are completely bypassing the US dollar. China, Russia, they are getting close to 50% of their trade in respective currencies, Robo and Yuan. So as you can see, this thing is progressing very, very fast. This thing is to bring other major Eurasian players on board. India is going to be impossible, at least for short, medium term. Pakistan, Turkey, the Central Asians. So this is something that is being discussed at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization level. Of course, between the People's Bank of China and the Russian Central Bank and all that, but it's ongoing. They know and this is something they started discussing at the BRICS sessions already in the late 2000s to give an idea of how long this is way back. When Lula was still the Brazilian president, Lula was a big, big, big driver of we need to do the trade amongst us by passing the dollar. And at the time was Medvedev and Hu Jintao, obviously they loved it. So they started discussing this around 2009, 2010. So now, 10 years later, when you compare to what was happening 10 years earlier, wow, wow, big territory. I would say realistically, we can have a great deal of Eurasia by passing US dollar and trading their own currencies or in a basket of currencies in 10 years time by 2030. And certainly, according to the Chinese, officially, certainly by 2035, because they see 2035 as China with a convertible yuan and a yuan as an international currency. So this means they're going to do all their trade in yuan. And everybody will have to adapt, including that famous, the famous day, the fateful day when the Chinese are going to disembark and re-add and tell the House of South from now on, it's yuan only, guys. I cannot imagine what the US economy is going to look like on that day. It will not be pretty. Wow. It's from a Washington point of view, it's enough grounds to launch a nuclear attack against Saudi Arabia. Exactly. I mean, it doesn't look good in terms of the economy. It would look very bad in terms of war. No question. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Bleak outlook. So another question was, do you think the withdrawal from the Middle East will continue? And I don't know that that's predicated on, I don't know that we've truly withdrawn, but yeah, that's the question. Yes. It requires a very complex answer because if you ask the deciding instances of the deep state, they will say never. So this means maintaining that ridiculously massive embassy in Baghdad with lots of contractors inside and in the vicinity, maintaining lily pads here and there, including Syria, yeah, maintaining all the big bases in Qatar, in the Emirates. So, no. Realistically, they won't back down. This thing is, for instance, if you see it in terms of the greater Middle East, to come back to Condoleezza Rice's terminology, Afghanistan, sooner or later they will have the only thing practically that is going to be left in Afghanistan is going to be Bagram, which is a huge base as well. But you have the Taliban talking to the Afghan government, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians all within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, trying to find a solution for Afghanistan only with Asians. And that obviously will imply no foreign bases in Afghan territory. So this should be the big, big deal in the next two, three, four years. And I'm sure the deep state that they're going to do every dirty trick in the book to try to convince the government in Kabul that they need American protection, which is, is that a cat? Yes, it is a cat. Yes. Well, I'm a big cat person. So whoa, he's beautiful. Yeah, he's very pretty. So the cat interfered with our Afghan talk. Well, the last question was going to return to Trump. And it was, it was someone asking, I want to know Pepe's comments on media censorship of Trump's announcements. And we have talked a little bit about media censorship today, but that was the question. Yes. Wow. Before talking to you guys, I saw that the three networks cut off when Trump started talking about the possibility of fraud in the elections. Well, and he's being obviously directly censored by Twitter, which each of his tweets now is censored, the fact of censor. So that tells you everything, right? What do you mean? What networks, Pepe? Because I saw it on CNN. Look, I, before I talk to you, there was a huge headline saying that ABC, NBC and CBS cut off Trump's talk when he was talking about fraud. Goodness, really? I didn't know that. I have to check this out when we finish. Yeah. But this is what a huge headline in the garden effect. I think I still have it here. Give me one second. Yeah. Well, you do that. I did. I just want to say that if I can find it. You saw that a little bit. Yeah, I saw a reference to it. People were referencing, were discussing why they thought it had happened. And some people said it was out of spite, but that was just, you know, a random hot take. So it's news. Whatever he says, whatever craziness it is, we got to hear what he has to say. Yeah, it was one of their, it disappeared as a headline, guys. It was their main headline a few what, 40 minutes ago. Now it's not here anymore. Maybe it's in their live results blog. No, I cannot see it anywhere. Ah, I found it. Networks cut Trump's speech as some Republicans just ties president over election life. Networks cut Trump's speech. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what happened. I mean, as he was speaking when he started saying as he was exactly as he was speaking. Huh. That's quite something, isn't it? It is. CNN credit, they showed the whole thing. Showed the whole thing. Well, at least, yeah. That's what we got to know what he's saying. I mean, I wrote my article and considered a news based on seeing him speak on CNN. So we got to say we got to know what he has to say. Well, apparently no smoking gun again. But he was reiterating that, you know, there's fraud everywhere. There are lawsuits. We are investigating etc. I used to happen at the UN and the General Assembly when the Syrian ambassador began speaking. Suddenly it was a technical difficulty. A technical difficulty, right? Yes. Over a couple of months, every time you want to speak, they lost sound somehow. So they're not saying they're not giving a reason that ABC or NBC, whatever the networks were, they're not giving a reason. They haven't responded. At least not yet, Joe. Maybe at least not yet. I hope we have the guts to say we did a made editorial decision. We thought it was false. Just like Twitter has been hiding his tweets. This is probably what they're going to say. It's an editorial decision. Wow. False information. Just like Twitter, it's an excuse to say he's the victim and the outsider. Well, exactly. And the editorial decision is let him say something. And then you pick it apart afterward in your analysis of what he says. Exactly. Then you have analysis. You have news analysis immediately after the fact. But that disappears completely from many outlets, right? That's scary. Well, maybe they're afraid of one thing, which I understand. It could be that he's riling up his people on the ground, which leads me to my what I wanted to ask you next, Pepe. You lived in the US, right? You live in LA. You've been all over the country. And in Washington as well. Washington. So you know the American culture and population and even if you haven't been living there now, you can understand how it's escalated to this kind of unbelievable. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have many good friends in the US who are always in contact. Absolutely. What is going to happen here in terms of a lot may depend on what Trump says and does. Yes. But people are talking about real violence here. I mean, serious violence breaking out over this election. Like in Kenya, about 10 years ago, if you remember, there was huge riots after an election in Kenya. Absolutely. What's your take on that? Wow. There's a strong possibility, depending on the language Trump employs when he's not going to recognize what would be the final result. In fact, we're not going to have a final result for weeks, right? I think the final result is only by December, right? The final vote tell the Electoral College has to go. The Electoral College, the first Electoral College meeting is in December, right? Exactly. So, depending on how he's going to spend this next few weeks, which obviously he won't concede, that's for sure, and how he's going to frame the legal battle, which as far as I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, they're going to try to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden, right? Is that a possibility? I think that's a strong possibility. Well, they will talk about that before the election, but if he wins, they could still do it. Yeah, they investigate Trump, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And how one or two investigations of the laptop from hell are going to proceed from now, or if they have a definitive smoking gun linking Joe Biden directly to everything that was uncovered in the laptop from hell. So, this could be a and he obviously with the dog whistle is very easy. It takes one adjective or one expression to rally millions of people. So, yeah, and these people are already fired up. I think they are preparing. I read a lot of blogs of, you know, right, I have to know what the right right wing is thinking, right? And the impression that I have is that people are getting ready for it, like that famous call to the proud boys. Yeah, stand by. And you can say that millions of people are standing by at the moment. And in obviously, they will agree with Trump's analysis of a fraudulent election. It's not as if things were common in the US. We've had incredible uprisings in the last few months, and right left wing fighting each other. And there have been murders and shootings. So this is the cauldron into which this now the selection is thrown into. And in the middle of the pandemic, after the George Floyd murder, the years of frustration, the police, I want to point this out, it just occurred to me that ABC, NBC and CBS are free over the air television. So people want to watch CNN have to pay for that. They have to put Trump's lot of Trump supporters are not very well off. Let's face it, they are unemployed, they're badly employed. So they may not have cable. So ABC, CBS and NBC thinking a bigger audience of ours are Trump supporters than CNN. So we're going to cut it off. I wonder if that was the thinking that's a very good point, Joe, very, very good point, in fact. And I was looking at the breakdown of age. I found a table that is, let me see if I can find it here, voting by age. Most of the votes for Biden were between 18 and 29. So the woke generation voted by and people over 65, you know, the vote for Trump was, you know, negligible. Practically nothing. They didn't even vote. They didn't even care to vote. Yeah, so we got so you have a cleavage between the woke generation and over 65s on one side and rural and urban on the other side, and they intersect these two cleavages. By the way, that Senate investigation would have to take place before maybe before January, because right now that's 48 to 48. We still don't have the Senate elections in yet. Exactly. There are two seats and these two seats are in Georgia, right? If I'm not mistaken. Is it in Georgia? Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to click on this and find out. I'll tell you in a second. 48 Democrats, 48 Republicans. One flipped seat, two flipped by the Democrats. Georgia, yeah, Georgia has only counted 98%. That's correct. And North Carolina is not in yet either. Okay. But the projections are basically saying that they're going to keep the Senate. Well, the Republicans are leading in both North Carolina, very, very razor thin, and in Georgia, and in Alaska, by the way. And in Alaska. Exactly. They're going to win. But that, I think, was already Republican. Yes, it was already Republican. Yeah. So it looks like the Republicans could gain control of the Senate here if they win Georgia and North Carolina. But if it's a 50-50 tie, as you know, then it depends who's in the White House, because the vice president was in the White House. Exactly. But so far, most of the projections are giving the Senate to the Republicans. And in the House, the Democrats, they lost a lot of seats in the House. It's completely crazy. Yeah, the Republicans will keep the Senate most likely. Yes, most likely. But by a hair. And the House, let's look at the House. Yeah, they down five seats. Down five seats, which is a lot. 33 remain to be decided. So, Republicans have a chance even. Now it's net six gain of the Republicans. They have an outside chance. They only trail 209 to 193. That's 16 seats. It's not much. Yes. Amazing. This is supposed to have been a blue wave. This supposed to have been Biden. The only blue wave is Manchester City playing in England. You know, that's a blue wave. Give me just a quick take on the primary. What happened with Sanders? And what's, and Sanders reaction to that, how he said, I'm going to go for Biden, but without using the leverage he had to get any commitments. Joe, he folded. He folded immediately afterwards. He didn't fight internally. And then he immediately collapsed, folded completely, and joined the Biden camp. Wow. People who admire Sanders everywhere, like, you know, in Brazil, for instance, or in Europe, in Spain or France, where he's very popular, by the way, they were like, how come, you know, he didn't even put up a fight. Yeah, he had all he had the his huge base behind him. Huge base. Central Democrats need that base to win. They needed that. He could hold it over a barrel. So I want this. I want that. I want that. You better, if you don't come through, there's going to be trouble. But he didn't do anything. At least Corbyn, they had to kick Corbyn out of the labor party. This guy, they had to kick Corbyn, exactly. And with those bogus anti-Semitism accusations, completely absurd, totally absurd. I guess they didn't do it to Bernie because he's Jewish. So that would be hard. No, you can't do it to Bernie, exactly. But Bernie, if Bernie was the candidate, he would probably be elected by 9 p.m. This would be the second election day. If they'd allowed him to run last time, this would be a second term, probably. Exactly. It'll be his second term. Absolutely. It's a disgrace. Well, but you cannot, but the damn environment, wow, it's worse than the blob itself. It's part of the blob, of course, but it's worse than the blob itself. It's in a class by itself, in terms of internal corruption. And if these investigations are over the laptop from hell, the problem is, can you trust this Republican team, you know, Giuliani, you cannot trust these people. You know, you have to be an independent investigation. What's the real story about the laptop from hell? But an independent investigative commission, you know, which is not going to happen. No, Pepe, the way I understood it, and I didn't delve very deeply into this story, but Biden did make these deals, but right after he left office, like two months into 2017, right after he left office, so that it was legal then in a way, but he may have set it all up while he was still vice president and use clearly his influence in that office to get what he wanted. That's the allegation, but that he closed the deal when he was no longer in government. So there's nothing illegal about what he did. Absolutely. And that's the problem with they don't have a smoking gun. I'm not sure they're going to find one. My problem is the coup d'etat that the U.S. directed in Ukraine that overthrew a corrupt but democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. That never gets mentioned by the republic. No, it never gets mentioned. That's the backdrop to this whole story about Ukraine. Yes, it never gets mentioned, Joe, and it will never be investigated in the U.S., never, never, never. You know, at least in Britain, they had the chupad inquiry about Iraq. Yes. Never investigate their major international crimes, basically. And that will never be known. That's excise. None of it was investigated by government, by the press. They completely buried this role that U.S. played in the overthrow of that government, allowing Biden and others to go in there. To go in there, yeah. Running the country as the vice-roy. And if you don't put that into the background of the story, there's only this laptop here, or, you know, the whole thing about the prosecutor, it's isolated, it's part of Biden's role in Ukraine. And he got away with it. That really annoyed me, I have to say. He got away with it. He's going to become president now. But, you know, the deep state and the U.S. establishment can get, you know, different parts of the global south, you can get away with virtually everything. They got away with everything that they set up for the coup in Brazil against Dilma, which started back in 2010 with the NSA. They got away scot-free. They can get away with all the bribing that went on in Hong Kong last year. You know that the former U.S. ambassador in Hong Kong is here now in Bangkok? No. Aha, nice, isn't it? Color revolution now is 2002 hours, 45 minutes. You know, it took a plane in Hong Kong and landed here in Bangkok. It got to work when he landed. Exactly. I have a very fast question for you from chat. We've been repeatedly asked if you have a Twitter handle. And if so, what is it? No, I don't have Twitter because you know why I don't have Twitter? Because I thought I would become a slave and tweet 50 times a day like most people I know do, you know. And never read another article again. Yes, but maybe next year, I think I'm going to start next year with a Twitter account and transfer everything that I publish on my Facebook to Twitter because sooner or later I'm going to be expelled from Facebook. Well, exactly. They'll do the job for you. You won't be a slave. They'll just kick you off, right? Exactly. So I was suspended two or three weeks ago. It was very funny. I sent them a very professional letter, which I assume was read by a human. I said, look, you can blacklist a journalist from Asia Times. Why don't you do the same when a journalist from the New York Times or the Financial Times? So I'm sure that's stung a little bit, you know. So a few hours later, my account was back. Not on Twitter, though. You're talking about Facebook? Yes, I'm on Facebook, Instagram and VK. The problem is I try to bring a lot of people from Facebook to VK, but they don't migrate. It's very complicated to convince people to change social networks. Another question from chat was what your thoughts are on Epstein and the Maxwell's takes us a little bit off the election topic. Well, I read everything that Whitney Web published and I think she got to the heart of it. It's the best stuff that I read about Epstein or was what Whitney did. Very, very good. Really, very good. I think the whole mechanism is there. The same is, obviously, it's impossible for us to get to the masterminds of the whole story. We have a pretty good idea who they are. But once again, no smoking guns. And I'm very curious to what this lane has that nobody knows yet. And what she has, the FBI has. And what they're going to do about it. Maybe she has something that they don't have and that's a get out of jail card. Well, this is what she implied, right? Yeah. But for the moment, nothing. She could leak it if she wanted. But you know damn well that even if she had absolute video evidence of Clinton in bed with a 12-year-old and Trump, that we never hear about those people, that class of people never get prosecuted. Of course not. Exactly. Of course not. And Joe Biden, we could add Joe Biden to it. It depends on the professionalism involved in these investigations in the Senate or through a special counsel from now on. I don't trust these Republican lawyers. I don't know about you, Joe and Liz, but I'm not sure these guys are up to it. Yeah. But with the evidence has to be made public and some of it has, the emails have, and the real smoking gun guy, if he is one, is the business partner who- The business Bobulinski, right? Yeah, you're not record. That's significant, I think. But the Democratic media totally buried that purposely. Just like they did the Burisma story, which was it was debunked. He kept saying it's been debunked by, by whom? By whom, exactly. The President investigated, government agencies didn't investigate it. Ukraine didn't investigate it because you fired the guy who was, you put the guy in there, wasn't going to investigate it. Who investigated? How could you say it was debunked? That was it. Okay, it was debunked. Oh, I see. You know, like you were saying before, especially outside the U.S., they can get away with everything, a coup, and an invasion, a major invasion of a sovereign nation in the Middle East, namely Iraq, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and you don't even have an investigation in the U.S. Get away with everything. The CIA operates in a jungle. There is no international law that the U.S. respects. So they can commit any crime they want, from assassination to drug dealing to bribing politicians. And that's what they've been doing since they were created. And where and what form will they ever be investigated or tried? Never. So having that impunity, that money, and that power, I mean, it's never because it's the essence of the system. If you don't, if there is not a systemic earthquake, nothing is going to happen. And we know it's not going to happen. Right. Right. Unfortunately. But and the rest of us across the global south, just suffered the consequences. Yeah, you don't even get to vote. But whoever this president is is going to affect almost every nation on earth. But even in the U.S., they just drag us along every four years. And then they kick us down the stairs once we vote. It's an inter ruling class dispute. It's a battle between elites has nothing to do with even the American people. Absolutely correct. And and now one of the things that I was the column that I just wrote before talking to you guys, basically, it's a mix of psyops and world resting federation special set up as this huge circus pitting a mob against another mob with 50% of the country polarized against the other 50%. And you have the guys who run the show in the Tribune, just observing from above, you know, it's it's fascinating because this is this is supposed to be post modernity, post everything post ideology, absolute modernity, you know, that liquid modernity as Balmond used to say. And this is what we have something that the Roman Empire was doing 2000 years ago, you know, it hasn't changed. Yeah, and you got the media like CNN say this is democracy in action. This is democracy in action. Well, you know what? That's the only part of it that they want to preserve to make it look like a democracy that you can vote. That's a very small part, even if it was a more equitable system in terms of who the candidates are, even in a parliamentary system, where and this proportional representation, where small party can get a couple of seats in parliament, that's just one part of democracy having elections, right? Pepe, there's so many more things having a free press, not having monopolies of businesses to control things having a really independent judiciary. There's a host of things. No corruption in the system built in the system in all instances of power. Yes, and this is democracy economic, more or less more equality economic than we have in the US. That's part of democracy. People have power because of what they can spend money on. And when you have such a disparity in wealth as we have in the US now, so they can go and vote. I mean, and we know these two candidates we're going to pursue pretty much the same foreign policies, although you're saying Biden might be even a little bit more on the side of the blob, as Obama called it. Yeah, because it's not about him. People tend to personalize everything. It's the system behind him. He's a representative, a flawed representative of a systemic rot. Yeah, and Trump tried to disrupt a little bit in his very chaotic way. Exactly. He tried to disrupt a little bit. And this is something I always discuss with my very well informed American friends. He didn't go deep enough because he could not. In fact, he tried to disrupt it in his shambolic, narcissistic, demented way. But he did try to tweak a little bit. But it was just him. He couldn't even pick a decent team to be behind him. Or there are two interpretations, right? He was forced to have deep state people surrounding him and policing him. And there was nothing he could do about it. First of all, because he doesn't know how the Washington system works. When he got there, he didn't know anything about it, right? So you see somebody who tries to tweak 1% of the system. I'll give you one example. The House Committee on Assassinations decreed that in 50 years, all the CIA documents related to the Kennedy assassination had to be released. And those 50 years happened to end in the first year of Trump's presidency. So he started tweeting. He was going to have them released next day, I think he says, can't do it. CIA told me it's not a good idea, something. There you go. There you go. There you go. Went against what the House representatives decreed because he was told in no uncertain terms. And you remember, of course, Chuck Schumer, Senator Schumer saying on TV that Trump's smart guy, I thought he was a smart guy, you can't go against the intelligence agencies. They have seven ways to Sundays to get back at you. That's an extraordinary statement by you. It's on national television. Exactly. And it passes as normality, right? Yeah, it's accepted. It's accepted, yeah. But he who knows what happened, why he go deeper into the deep state, as you say, and they've tried to get back at him from the very beginning. From the very beginning. Yes. And he was surrounded, even inside the White House was surrounded. Police surrounded again, by the way. Interesting discussion to be having while we lose sound, but yes, this is this is a discussion. Yeah, the panel of top US analysts, I would love to hear their different takes on the did he could could not he go far enough, or he tried and he was, you know, nipped in the butt. And the ramifications, you know, it was an interesting time, Elizabeth, for us to lose our sound. Kathy Bogan, our producer, says that she didn't touch it. It went off by itself, and she put it back on again. Isn't that fascinating. Didn't touch. Yeah. Now I'm again, I'm, I don't like to think about this kind of thing at all. I think it's sometimes self aggrandizing to think the agencies are shutting us down. Most of us aren't all that important to them. Tell them we're recording at our end. No. Yeah. And I'll tell chat that everything will be, everything will be restored when we repost it and that Kathy's got that handled. That's what I didn't want to say, because now they know we got it. Now they know we got the tape. Go to your computer. But you know what's funny though, as per terms of coincidences, I mean, my internet will cut out today in a way that left my provider absolutely stumped. They didn't, they can't figure out what's wrong with it. So I'm not being conspiratorial. I just thought I'd throw that in there too. Yeah. But it is funny that we're talking about them and maybe they shut up to sound off. We were talking about them in unflattering ways. Joe and Liz, this happens a lot. I'll give an example. I do podcasts with an independent Brazilian site that is very, very forceful unmasking the Brazilian deep state and its connections with the American deep state as well. These guys were hacked every week and then one day, maybe a month ago, it was so blatant that they identified the IPs and they were coming straight from the US. They didn't even disguise the IPs. So they were being attacked directly from the matrix. So it happens all the time. Yeah. And obviously, they keep an eye on consortium news, obviously, obviously, you know. Well, I don't know if that's for certain, but they might be doing the right thing. So this is a bad, it's a bad, I think it is a badge of honor, in fact. Yeah. Maybe they'll learn something. Yes. Maybe they'll learn something. Pampy, we don't want to keep you any longer. We've gone through a lot of things. So. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much, guys. It was a pleasure talking to you, really. Yeah, Pampy. I loved it. We'll do it. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you, Liz. And let's do it again whenever you want. No problem. We will, Pampy. Hopefully someday you'll be able to get on an airplane again and I come visit you again in Bangkok. Well, I'm so frustrated. I cannot even see my wife. It's ridiculous. She's stuck in Paris. Oh my goodness. Yes, she's stuck in Paris. Now she's under curfew stuck in Paris. It's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. Yeah. All right, Pampy. Thank you. Okay, guys. Thank you. All the best. Best of luck. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye. Well, that was Pampy Eskibar of Asia Times and if you don't know who he was before that, you know who he is now. So we appreciate Pampy coming on. Again, they haven't called Pennsylvania. They're being, I guess, extraordinarily cautious. It's still 5% to go. Trump is ahead by what? Here's what I'd like to do. I would like to take a, he's up by 22,576 votes with 95% reporting. That's Trump in Pennsylvania. There's 55% still to count of these mail-in ballots for Biden to make up 32,000 votes. So the way they've been talking about it, it looks like he should be able to do that because he's getting about 60, 70% of all these ballots, these mail-in ballots, and it's in the Philadelphia county where there's been a strong Biden support. Elizabeth, what do you think about us taking a bit of a musical break and we'll come back in if you can? And then we'll see if there's an update on Philadelphia because we've been going strong for actually, believe it or not, we've been on the air for three hours now without taking a breath or having a sip of water. We'll see everyone back in about 20 minutes or so and we can break in if there's a big news like if Joe Biden becomes president or something like that. Okay, see you later. Bye.