[Music] We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations. A new world order. This is multi-polarity, charting the rise of the new multi-polar world order. [Music] Tanks are moving into the capital, taking out positions near key government buildings. Gorbachev remains under house arrest with his wife, Wiesa, at his summer vacation retreat. There's been no word for Mr. Gorbachev, even if specific whereabouts are not known. One of the committee's first actions was to silence Moscow's radio eco, the first news radio station independent of the Soviet state. It is assumed he is not free to do whatever he wants. [Music] At 432 on the 18th of August, the so-called state committee on the state of emergency caught the lines of communication. The Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev's Dasha. These included telephone communications and the nuclear command and control system. Eight minutes later, Lieutenant General Yuri Plakimov, head of the 9th chief directorate of the KGB, left the group into the Dasha where they demanded that Gorbachev either declare a state of emergency the Soviet Union were resigned. Because the pretext that has been given by the new ruling government of the Soviet Union for Mikhail Gorbachev not being in power right now is his poor health. ABC News has learned that Gorbachev with the help of sympathizers did attempt to leave the Crimea by air yesterday. The attempt was foiled and he was returned to his Dasha. The previous month, 12 Soviet public figures, mostly artists, but also some politicians and military officials, signed a letter entitled "A word to the people" in the anti-harastroika newspaper, Soviet sky, Russia. That confirming the sort of decision we have taken by the supreme Soviet of the USSR enables us, authorizes the state that absolutely all legal and as it were constitutional norms have been absorbed. The letter was drafted by the writer Andrew Kropanov, an enormous unforeseen calamity has taken place, it told readers. Motherland, our land, a great power given to us to ward over nature, glorious ancestors. It is parishing and breaking apart, falling into darkness and non-be. I am a communist to the depths of myself. On July 10th, 2024, the actor, director and film producer George Clooney published an essay in the New York Times entitled "I Love Joe Biden, but we need a new nominee". Where Prokonov's letter was infused with Soviet patriotism, Clooney was shot through with party loyalty. Prokonov pleaded with Soviet leaders to save the Soviet Union, Clooney pleaded with Biden to save the Democratic Party. Yet the functional outcome was the same, a coup of sorts. Less than two weeks later, on the 21st of July, President Biden issued a letter stating that he would not run for President again in 2024. Everyone knew the Biden had given this against his will. Some accepted that he had simply caved under pressure, others whispered of a background deal, or even tracks. Now it would be surprising if Biden manages to maintain the presidency until the election. Gorbachev survived his coup attempt, although afterwards he faded into the background as the new president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin came to the fore. The coup attempt definitively spat up the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, precisely the opposite of what the parties had intended. Likewise, the coup attempt against Biden will speed up the collapse of the Democratic Party in the United States. The leaders of this party told the American people that Biden was capable of doing his job, but now, after the coup, they've tacitly admitted that he's not. This is an obvious breach of trust, and one that voters will be unlikely to forgive. But what does it matter? The collapse of a political party is nothing compared to the collapse of a great power like the Soviet Union. Another political party, perhaps. But just as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was, until 1991, the party of the state, so too, is the Democratic Party of today. The Democratic Party in 2024 is the skeleton of the American ruling movement. Without it, this elite collapses into gelatinous heat. How many American state functions with each party? Can the world system survive if the American state starts to falter? These are questions that will be answered in the following 18 months. They are questions that are now being asked across America and the world in response to this very American coup. Joining us to discuss these world historical events, because that is what they are, is Malcolm Cheyune, a regular guest on the podcast. Malcolm, you've been following the insonates of the coup and the emerging cave-kay hive that is set to take advantage of the whole situation. Maybe you can give us an outline of what's happening. Yes, I mean, I have to say, I'm quite shocked at how things have turned out. I was actually pretty early saying after the debate that I thought it was not really realistic for someone like Joe Biden to stay in. If you have some sort of Parkinsonism, like the symptoms are pretty clear in his case, that's generally some sort of degenerative disease. It's just going to get worse and worse and worse, and it's also like a really tough political sell to try to actually make voters vote for someone who is clearly incapable, just going like wink wink, not naughty as good support stuff or whatever that makes the real decisions. So I was out in front, pretty early, saying that, yeah, Biden is probably going to get replaced, but the way in which this has happened is quite beyond the belief, actually. So we are recording this on a Monday. It's been 26 hours or something since the letter was published, maybe even a little less. Nobody knows whether Joe Biden is still even alive. And that's, that's, that's no joke. Like, he hasn't really been seen. There's been like a lot of growing sort of paranoia regarding the format of the letter itself. People are looking at the signature and saying like, well, I don't know. This doesn't look like his previous signature. The letter itself doesn't use the like letterhead of the White House, stuff like that. And it's also very well known that Joe Biden being an old school guy, he doesn't use social media. So someone else is obviously in control of these accounts. Moreover, it's, I think it's been confirmed in the media that the letter himself was not written by Joe Biden. It was written by someone close to him. So we're 24 hours off into this thing. And you now have people in the Congress basically saying, well, Joe Biden has like eight more hours to provide science of life. Otherwise, we're going to think he's dead. So this is quite extraordinary, actually. The fact that something like this can happen and it's so unclear who's really in charge. If there's like Joe Biden made this decision, if someone else made it for him, if he's even like conscious, could be, I don't know, like unconscious in a coma or something, he could be dead. It's very hard to tell. And at this point to understand the American system, you basically need an even worse, like an even more extreme version of so-called like Kremlin, Kremlin knowledge. Like that people used to talk about in terms of the Soviet Union. Like, you know, we have to decipher the messages coming from the party headquarters to see what's, who's really in it and who's out and so on. Well, I mean, America works the same way now. So with all that being said, just like pointing out the incredibly strange historical way in which this resignation has been handled. Just because there's a letter supposedly from Joe Biden saying that he's no longer in the running for president, that doesn't really solve the immediate problem, which is he's still the president and he no longer has any authority to keep doing the job. Because as pretty much everyone realizes, if you're not well enough, like if you're not lucid conscious to the point where you can, you know, run for president, then you can't really be president either. So we're at this point looking forward to some sort of really chaotic fight to remove Joe Biden. It could be that this is done in a very similar way to his resignation from the campaign, which is, you know, his social media account publishes a letter saying, yeah, I'm stepping down as a president. Or it could be by some sort of process in Congress attempts to invoke the 25th Amendment and so on. But either way, one gets the distinct sense that there's really no one in control of events at this point. Kamala Harris, the replacement, it's actually quite interesting in that both of these candidates are candidates that could never win a competitive primary, like a democratic primary, if their life depended on it. Joe Biden started running for president in '87, I think, '88, and he's done it half a dozen times at this point. And every attempt has been a complete disaster, more or less. He only really got the nomination in 2020 because of a backroom deal inside the Democratic Party, where Bernie Sanders was the front runner, none of the other candidates were strong enough to challenge Bernie Sanders directly. And so everyone through the coordination of Barack Obama, everyone except for Joe Biden dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. And Kamala Harris was picked as his vice president just out of some sort of basically identity politics, like taking the boxes and also to have someone who was widely seen as not competent enough politically to really invite attempts to remove Joe Biden from the office because then you'd be stuck with Kamala Harris. So this is really a quite catastrophic situation and it's not really like the bleeding hasn't stopped. It's still ongoing with fairly unpredictable effects in the short and medium term. But whatever happens in the election, it's going to be chaos all the way there from this point. I just really quickly say, because we were discussing it offline though before we started the show, why this is a coup? I mean, why we kind of have to describe it as a coup? I think we have a conception on our head that a coup is when the military busts down the door and points a gun in the face of the head of state, whether it be the president or the king or whatever. And they say, you're getting on that helicopter or you're going into the backyard and we're going to shoot you and potentially your family. And some coups are like that. There's no doubt. Some coups are like that. But I think one of the reasons that I want to emphasize this 1991 coup, which is widely recognized as a coup in the Soviet Union and the late Soviet Union, where the communist hardliners tried to overthrow a Gorbachev's government or not just overthrow it. They gave them a choice. They said you can either declare a state of emergency, in which case the Soviet Union will be forcibly held together at the time various states, especially in the Baltics were breaking away, or you can resign. Those are your two options. So it was actually an interesting kind of coup. It wasn't against Gorbachev personally, but the policies and reforms that he was out in front of. Well, none of that happened. They just went into his dacha and they said, you know, they cut off his communications and they said, "You're isolated now. We have support in Moscow. We have the support in Moscow and you're going to do what we say." And sure, if Gorbachev had tried to martyr himself or something like that, he probably would have been arrested at some point, but it's probably not going to happen. The point is, what really defines a coup at a very base level? Well, the first thing is that you're illegally telling a head of state to do something that they don't want to do. The head of state, whether it be Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the late Soviet Union, or Joe Biden in the form of the president, in the UK, it's an unusual system that the king is the head of state, not the prime minister, so we can't make a direct comparison there. But when you go to the head of state and you say, I recognize that you have the legal authority here. You have gone through the process that gives you that legal authority or you were born into that legal authority in the case of a hereditary monarchy. Nevertheless, me and my friends here are more powerful than you currently, and we are telling you what to do. And that is not actually legal, because we're not actually allowed to tell you what to do, because you're in charge, you're the boss, but we're doing it anyway. That is a coup. And the hallmark of a coup is what you alluded to, Malcolm. It's about isolating and silencing the person that's being cued. Because when you engage in a coup d'etat, you don't want the person speaking out clearly, and that's why all of this craziness is going online at the moment. Maybe Joe Biden's asleep. Maybe he's embarrassed. Okay, it doesn't really matter. The point is no one knows where he is. And that is all the hallmarks of a coup d'etat. Now, is this going to go down in history as some crazy bloody coup d'etat? No, but as you say, this is a very big moment in American history. I think it's unprecedented, not an American history scholar. I think it's unprecedented. And it looks very much so like what you said. It's going to precipitate an awful lot of chaos. Yes, because again, in theory, this is just about something that's not really covered necessarily by sort of constitutional protections or whatever, because these parties are private institutions. They can change their own internal rules. Like every delegate, for example, at the Democratic Convention could just refuse to vote for Joe Biden, vote for Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer or something. And there would be no court you could sue them in, because again, this is not covered by the parties or not constitutionally protected. There's not this structure of corporativism where their sort of internal workings are regulated through public law. However, this is also something that obviously undermines his standing as the sitting president. Once he's sort of admitted, more or less, that he's not capable of running for precedent, he's also admitted, and Mutatis Mutandis, that he's not capable of being president. And that's not really necessarily an admission, I think, that Joe Biden would ever make willingly, even if he's only admitting it indirectly. Meaning that at this point it's only a matter of time before he gets removed. And his removal is quite likely to follow in the same sort of footsteps here. Basically, you don't hear anything from Joe Biden, you get like a letter of uncertain provenance appearing in social media. And here's the thing, I should point this out. When this letter from Joe Biden appeared on his social media, on his Twitter account, that was the first time the majority of his own stuff in the White House learned that he was quitting. They literally had to go to Twitter to find out that the orders they got 20 minutes ago, which is, you know, keep your head down, we're in this for the long haul, we're staying. Those orders had been counter-mandered, presumably by Joe Biden, or maybe by someone else, it's really hard to tell. But yeah, like Joe Biden is likely to be removed from the presidency in the very same manner, because again, it's unlikely to voluntarily give up the presidency. But the point of a coup is, you know, the will of the head of state is something you can circumvent if you apply enough pressure in sort of extra legal coercive ways. Yeah, I mean, look, as people know, I know very little about American politics, and on weeks like this, I suppose I wish I knew even less, because it seems so chaotic and so unusual. And so curious, I would say, that it's very difficult to avoid and very difficult to avoid thinking about. The first thing that struck me, as I think you said earlier on, was that he resigned. I mean, just think about this. He resigned by posting a letter that somebody had typed out for him on blank paper, not kind of White House official paper, not president of the United States headed paper, just regular blank A4 paper, and signed at the bottom. There was no messaging on any other social media accounts, no messaging in the media as far as I understand. No message in even on as official president of the United States account on Twitter. It was just this one letter that had been scanned and uploaded on Twitter, and there was no press conference. This to me, I mean, maybe you can help me, Malcolm, but, you know, if a prime minister has a bad day, he's out in front of 10 Downing Street on a podium, giving a small speech and answering the questions of the press. I mean, is it not weird for a sitting president to withdraw from a presidential race that they're not just in, but so far in that they've engaged in presidential debate against the Republican candidate? Like, to me, it just sounds so completely bizarre. And as you quite rightly say, nobody's heard from him since. Nobody's seen him since. I think two hours ago, as of the time of recording, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but the only thing that we've seen or heard from Joe Biden after he published this letter was a thing on his official president of the United States account, which was like really vague, I'll just read it out here, but it was posted two hours ago, and this is the first or three hours ago now. It's the first communications. We are the United States of America. There's nothing we can do if we don't do it together. Sorry, if we do it together, we just have to remember who we are. I've dedicated my presidency to proving that, and I'll continue to do so today, tomorrow, and every day that I have the honor of being your president. I mean, this is something that is completely non-time specific. It doesn't even mention the huge news that the guy's resigned. He hasn't appeared on the media. Newspapers don't seem to be asking the question, like, where on earth is this guy? I mean, this tweet could have been something that they'd scheduled to go out and went out automatically. I mean, my mind, there's a Briton who doesn't know much about American politics. Is this how LBJ did it when he kind of ceded the ground to Bobby Kennedy? I don't know. I mean, when Nixon resigned, it wasn't like there was a huge question. Where is this guy? Is he even alive? Is he still on the planet? No, people knew where Nixon was. Like, yeah, he was sulking, but he was, you know, you could contact him, and there wasn't this huge... I mean, the elephant in the room here is just that, like, all of these channels that are being used to communicate the will of the president have never been in the full, like, in control, controlled by the president himself. This is fairly standard, but it's certainly standard for people that are as old as Joe Biden. They don't run their own social media accounts with Donald Trump being the one notable exception. And so nobody believes that, like, Joe Biden himself posted a letter. Obviously, he didn't, because he never posts on Twitter. He has better things to do, presumably. And so the question is just, okay, so the people that are doing the communication, are they doing it, you know, on behalf of Joe Biden, on behalf of what Joe Biden should really want to do if he's, you know, know what's good for him, or just on behalf of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And, you know, it's probably one of the second two, either, like, these people are motivated by, you know, Joe Biden's best interests as they see it without asking the man himself, or there's not even a pretense of, like, we care about what Joe Biden thinks at this point. And I would lean toward a ladder at this point. There's also an interesting sort of, there's an interesting episode here in interesting detail. So the first letter that was published was written by one person fairly close to Joe Biden. I can't remember his name, but it's specifically refused to endorse any candidate. And then, for whatever reason, like two hours later, there was like a supplementary statement, where it's like, oh yeah, Kamala Harris is the one everyone should rally around behind Kamala Harris. This to me also, I don't think necessarily that like the same two people, the same people wrote these two statements. And the latter one seems fairly, I think it's like fairly likely that someone saw the statement being put out and then realized that no, actually, we need a mulligan, we need a do over because, you know, unless Kamala Harris is endorsed. We're going to have like the party is going to have more problems. So someone has to pretend to be Joe Biden and make a supplementary statement. He is clearly not in control of this process whatsoever. There's been some talk with some of his family members, like his younger brother, who in an oblique way said that, you know, I'm happy to be with Joe Biden for whatever time we have left. Which, sure, I mean, he's old, but just because someone's 81, you don't necessarily use that kind of language. That's the kind of language you use when someone is actually like, fairly sick. So, does he have some sort of medical emergency, maybe? I mean, it would explain a couple of things. This entire matter has been handled in a way where it's pretty clear that there's no benefit to doing this stuff that they're doing, like not having him show up. But just a quick question here, Malcolm, you know, again, from a position of a fair degree of ignorance, as far as I understand, unlike Britain, the United States has a series of constitutional rules related to who runs the country in the event that the US President is incapacitated. For instance, as you know, there's a very firm line of succession, and there are a series of kind of rules and I guess precedents as well as, you know, who's in charge in the event that the President isn't. You know, without sounding too conspiratorial here, like, we have no idea who the hell's running the country. I mean, we assume we are left to assume that it is Joe Biden, but I don't know. It sounds to me that there's a fair chance that it's not. Right? Like, what's happening? I mean, this sounds like serious like coup territory here. It really does. The idea that it's Joe Biden is just laughable at this point. Tony Blinken went out and said, like, everyone keep their heads down, keep working like nothing is happening. This is just them playing Swan Lake on the televisions as the tanks rolled toward a Kremlin. Because again, like the guy at the top is clearly like nobody knows where he is. And his lieutenants that are supposed to be loyal say, like, don't don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. You're getting your orders from me. Don't worry about the big guy, like, just keep your nose to the grindstone. Everything will be fine. But also, the thing about all of these constitutional rules, like rules of succession, you don't need to trigger them as long as you can maintain plausible deniability. So there was this scandal in the lead up to this coup, which is what it is regarding Joe Biden's basically his health. There was this developing story where they had, they were asked a bunch of questions regarding does Joe Biden have Parkinson's? Is he receiving medication or treatment for Parkinson's or similar diseases? And the White House spokesperson categorically denied this. And then the journalist came back and said, well, we have a Parkinson's expert that's on the guest logs. So, like, is this something to do with Joe Biden? Oh, no, absolutely not. And then the journalist came back half a week later and said, actually, we double checked this. This guy has been here every month for the last, like, nine months. And he's one of the most renowned sort of experts on Parkinson's in the US. And the first meeting we've confirmed, like Joe Biden was present at that meeting. And then they said, yeah, okay, well, okay, he was present, but that doesn't necessarily mean Joe Biden has Parkinson's. And it doesn't, because you will only have Parkinson's, if someone makes the diagnosis. If nobody makes that diagnosis, you can walk around with all of the telltale signs of Parkinsonism, which Joe Biden did for a pretty long time, like, stiff gate, shuffling gate, sort of the masked face, hypophonia, low voice, no, like, very awkward turning, no swinging of arms when walking. He had all of those signs, and he met with a Parkinson's expert several times. But as long as they're, you know, you just avoid making the official diagnosis, you can keep the charade going, which is what happened. And I think that, like, all of this skull doggery at this point is because they have a problem. They're trying to figure out how to resolve, which is how do we get rid of Joe Biden in a way where, like, what are the least damaging options here. And I think that one of the options they're considering is just pretending that he's still alive somewhere. And the other option is just, like, getting the ducks in the row and seeing how they can sort of have another, like, midnight social media posts, or whatever, announcing that Joe Biden is leaving. So, at this point, if they just confirmed his state, you would have to use all of those constitutional rules and proceedings, and Republicans would gleefully jump in and get themselves involved. Like, I'm sorry, I'm sure Phillips got more questions to ask, but I'm just so baffled, like, this is so far beyond my ability to comprehend how this can be happening without more, like, like more for roaring the press, more, like, curiosity, more incredillity. You know, as you were talking, I opened up the New York Times homepage, and above the fold, the headline is, the main headline is Harris moves swiftly to clear path of a nomination. And then there's a, then other headlines, Harris wins endorsements from Pelosi and potential rivals. The first task for President Kamala, Vice President Kamala Harris is choosing a running mate. And then another headline turning to Kamala Harris has promising risks. Here's why President Obama did not immediately endorse Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential British getting a pop music rollout online. If Kamala Harris is the nominee, the race still won't be easy for Democrats, Nate Cone writes, in a surprise reversal, President Biden rewrote his legacy and made a play for history. Like, nobody's saying, where is Joe Biden? This is, like, what on earth is happening here? Like, the president just resigned with, like, you know, a letter posted on one social media account that had no, you know, like, it wasn't a quality document. It was just on a piece of paper. There was no means of identifying who wrote it, or whether Joe Biden had endorsed or anything. And then he was silent for, like, 24 hours. Like, nobody's seen him. What's happening? There's a, there's a rule in law. Like, if you're a barrister, or you're a, like, defense lawyer or whatever, the rule goes, never ask a question, you don't already know the answer to. And the reason that lawyers have that rule is pretty simple, because if you ask a question, you don't know the answer to from, like, you know, a witness or something at a criminal trial, you might get negatively surprised, right? And then suddenly your airtight case or whatever falls apart. The reason nobody's asking any questions about Joe Biden is because of the same logic. So, what if we get, like, what if we ask the question and we get an answer that's, you know, really embarrassing or depressing? So it's much better to just, you know, whistle past the graveyard here, and, you know, hail the new leader of the Supreme Soviet, who will definitely do a much better job than the other person, whoever he was, that we don't talk about anymore. I mean, this is America now. To kind of move forward a bit, I think we've kind of clarified what is going on. I think it's kind of hard to argue against. Now, I will say this podcast will go out later in the week, perhaps Joe Biden will make an appearance somewhere, but I don't think it really covers over the initial shock of what's happened that increasingly I feel of some kin with many people today. Not just with us, especially in America, but I think a key problem here as well is that the machinations that have been going on for the past few weeks, of which there have been some very strange ones. I just also know two days ago, I think, Joe Biden's Twitter account randomly tweeted, "I'm sick," and then in a second tweet said something like a sick and tired of low quality infrastructure or something like that. There was a lot of kind of prep. I know there was a lot of prep in the media as well for the kind of like, "We need to get rid of Biden," and so on. But I suppose what I'd say is, and I think Malcolm, you've been following this quite closely, is that what's happened in the past few weeks have put an X-ray on the Democratic Party. Now, the Democratic Party is a very strange entity these days. It has been since the Obama administration. I'd call it the party of the state in America, by which I mean that the Democratic Party is inherently linked with various other aspects of the American state, whether that be the media quite obviously, but also, you know, it's quite well known that most civil servants are bureaucrats. In DC or Democrat voters, you can just look at the polling on it and so on. They're seen as the serious party. I think they maintain the majority of international connections. That's just a sense. I know that there are some Republican outreach abroad, but I think the major player in diplomatic outreach, I mean, soft diplomacy, not formal diplomacy, not actual diplomacy conducted at the embassy level. But I mean kind of soft. Well, you know, who knows who. It's usually Democrats that will know, X, Y, and Z. So by the party of the state, I just kind of loosely mean this is the party that's very integral to the functioning of the American state. And I think it's always had an air of mystique about it. It's always struck me, although I've had my data about it from time to time, that it's an extremely well-oiled machine, number one, clearly its voting operations are quite good and so on. But even beyond that, it's a very well-oiled machine, and it's very disciplined. I always assumed it was very disciplined. And I guess I've probably been taking that from the fact that they contain people in the party. I don't mean that in some conspiratorial way. I just mean they're pretty good at politics. And if they have a Bernie Sanders or an AOC, they're allowed to say things on certain issues, but they're kind of tamed in other ways. And that's difficult to do in a political party. Nothing particularly nefarious about it. It just means you have a disciplined coherent party. Well, the past few weeks really have shown various cracks in the matrix, as it were, especially at the top levels. And it's revealed something about the internal rivalries, of which I have actually heard rumors prior to all this stuff taking place. I think it would be treated as rumors. Some of it makes sense, rivalry between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp and so on. Maybe we can go into it. But what's happened now has sort of placed an x-ray over the whole thing. And I think many people can actually see many of the internal workings of the Democratic Party. And I want to turn it over and get your taken a moment, because you've actually followed it closer than me, but I'll give you my overall take, that the party now is actually not really a unified structure that has a very fixed mode of command. It doesn't have a very fixed chain of command. It's not a big machine, which the Democratic Party historically was. It was a machine sitting on top of the Union structure and so on, the kind of Tammany Hall model. It was kind of a giveaways model in a lot of ways. And it maintained very precise discipline. That was the historic Democratic Party. I don't think that's what we see anymore. I think we see a mass of groups, various interest groups. Everybody knows this. The Democratic Party is this coalition of disparate interest groups that don't really have very much in common with each other. That's fine. That's not sometimes that can be okay for politics. But I think at the top level, it's not that you have a very clear chain of command. It's not really that at all. It's more so that you have a very well-oiled media machine. And it seems that they're very good at pumping out messaging into the media. You could say propaganda if you wanted to be unfair, but let's say messaging to be very nice. It's very good at pumping down content or messaging into the media. And they have various kind of newspapers, intellectual journals, TV channels, CNN. None of this is a secret. Everybody knows what I mean when I say the liberal media in the United States. But increasingly, I wonder if that is the main element of control in the party. Because if it is, it's not as coherent a structure as we're led to believe. And I think that accounts for an awful lot of frankly the chaos that we've seen in the past three weeks. Yes, that is quite correct. And one should realize that this is a problem that goes back a pretty long way. So I was actually listening to one of the long-form sort of podcast from the New York Times, I'm pretty sure. And the run-up to this, incredibly like two weeks ago, feels like two decades ago in terms of just a political situation. But things were pretty hectic two weeks ago even. And so people were discussing like maybe Biden will be forced to drop out. I don't think anyone imagined it would go like this though. But people were discussing, is he going to drop out? What are we going to do at the convention? Someone pointed out a pretty obvious fact, which is pretty much nobody except the real old god. People like Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn and so on who are over 80. But apart from those, maybe a spring chicken like Chuck Schumer who's like 74 or something also remembers this. But in general, the old democratic party machine, the one with like a lot of smoke filled rooms and so on, where you basically didn't really have to campaign a primary to win the nomination as president, you only had to impress enough power brokers at the convention. But this party was basically, it started being dismantled after the very chaotic convention of '68. Someone like Nancy Pelosi was there probably like in person. But if you're like 40 years old today or something, you have no conception of actual like the dickering, the horse trading, the deal making, but went into running like that really old like sometimes corrupt, but like well functioning party machine, what like party grandis being able to, you know, take a person like Joe Biden aside and say, look dude, you're not running, okay. We've talked it over, you're not running. And again, like primaries, which is the way you get nominated now, which is like this miniature like election cycle. This is kind of a format number one, we don't see it in most other countries in the West. I don't think any country really uses the primary format. But it's kind of this format that's built around, you know, like control of the media being good at working the media, being good at fundraising and so on. So we can sort of, when you say that this is the party of the state, but it's also like falling apart, we can separate two things here. Yes, the Democratic Party is the party of the state apparatus. But the way that the party works internally has always like for the last 20, 25 years, become increasingly brittle and ill suited to dealing with a crisis. But obviously, like if the Democratic Party can't get its ducks in a row here, its house in order, this has knock on effects on the stability and the sort of working order of the state apparatus itself. Even though, you know, it's a party presumably so like it's not supposed to run the state directly and it doesn't. But if the party mechanism start failing, then like the state will enter a real crisis because the Republican Party is in many ways much more amateurish, I would say. Like Republicans are far more like limited in terms of... When it comes to stuff like ballot harvesting, when it comes to stuff like organizing, when it comes to fundraising among big powerful industries, the Republican Party is kind of playing second fiddle. And people have forgotten that the electoral victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was really kind of a fluke. And I find that very curious because like since 2016, there hasn't been a lot of big victories for the Republicans. So just to sort of circle back and answer your question here, yes, the Democratic Party is falling apart, it's falling apart for the same reason that the Republican Party is falling apart, which is, you know, this is a common story in the West. These parties are no longer mass membership organizations, they are organizations run by like big donations, stuffed by like consultants and stuff like that, but there's no like ground game, ground organizing of the old kind. And also, once the Democratic Party enters this kind of crisis, like this is a crisis for the American state itself, that the American state will be deeply impacted by. Yeah, I see this sort of falling apart, not just in the US Malcolm, but in Europe as well. People will know, in fact, we covered it on the podcast, the French legislature, the French legislative elections, the elections for the National Assembly, which were recently called in a snap election by Emmanuel Macron, led to, as far as I can see, a highly dysfunctional legislature at just the wrong time for France, some kind of backroom deals between Macron's party and the French, the French left wing, front popular coalition, kept Marine Le Pen's party out of the national rally, out of government. But in doing so, it puts the front popular, which is like a far left party, every bit as populist as the. At a time when the EU is demanding that France reduces its deficit, which currently stands at 5% of GDP, 5% of GDP, probably somewhere near the peak of the economic cycle is not a good thing. It suggests that this is a structural deficit that really needs to come down. But there's no popular mandate to do that. And in fact, just given the front popular mandate to spend even more. It just seems a highly dysfunctional situation within France at the moment, especially as they have a president who's unlikely to be able to work with anybody who might be reasonably elected prime minister and elected to the cabinet. At the same time, in Germany, you have what looks like an increasingly worrying situation for the German establishment parties, because it looks as though the populist parties in Germany, AFD alternative for Dogeland, and Bundus, Sara Vegenknecht, a populist left-wing party, are really going to break through the cordon sanitaire that the centrist establishment parties had created to keep them out. There's going to be elections in September in three states in Eastern Europe, Saxony Brandenburg and Turingen. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'm undoubtedly not. But anyway, in each of these states, the AFD is top of the Poland. And the Bundus, Sara Vegenknecht, is either third or fourth, despite the fact it's basically one woman party at the moment, and extremely new, I think it's less than the year old, or not much more than the year old. And that means that in all of those regions, the AFD will be the largest party by seats. In Germany, at the moment, you have really bad industrial numbers. The purchasing managers index for manufacturing and industry was below the 50-point watermark. And again, Germany is going through slow-motion de-industrialization. Populists are breaking through the firewall that's been set. Europe is looking increasingly dysfunctional itself. This isn't something that's restricted to the US. You sense political dysfunction and social unrest across the spectrum. It always just means my misunderstanding that across every country, almost in the West, there are these problems. No, it's not just you. And again, it's very hard to see how this situation improves, even in the medium term, because if we think about the American example for a moment here, like the big problem that the US has is just the impending bankruptcy. It's running these insanely huge deficits. Neither side of the political system has any sort of plan. It's not even talked about anymore, trying to grapple with the deficit. Everyone I talk to inside a Washington has straight up just given up. They know they're on the Titanic. They know they're headed toward the iceberg. They know nobody has the wherewithal to turn around or, you know, try to avoid it. They know they're going to crash, and it's just a matter of time. And once they do crash, the system is going to implode on itself. And in fact, like this coup that we spent time discussing here, I think this is just like one of the early symptoms of a much more generalized political collapse, like a complete paralysis of the political system in the manner that you see in France in the mid to late 1780s, for example, which, you know, the States general, which is called by King Louis the 16th, is supposed to solve. Like they have this complete paralysis of the state apparatus, the political class is completely at odds with itself. No decision can be made. And they try to call the States general in order to like break the deadlock. Of course, this is what sort of turbo charges the revolution. But it was actually called as a solution to exactly the same problems that America is facing right now. The only difference here is that America's problems in terms of like the deficit, for example, is worse than in pre-revolutionary France. But here in Europe, yeah, you're quite right that our own systems are also sort of breaking apart under the strain. And as Europe is sort of tightly integrated like a collection of vassal states essentially for the great American Empire here. The idea that like European political systems can continue functioning if the American system sees this up, like I think that's just fanciful. The systems will not be able to function in such a scenario at all. Yeah, I think that kind of touches on what I was saying that as the party of the state, the Democrat party maintains a lot of the self diplomatic power, whether that be media influence or like think tank influence in Europe or so on. If you've ever bopped around these kind of scenes, which I've been doing for a few years now, you'll see it's disproportionately Democrat and you kind of keep your opinions to yourself if you don't agree with them. Beyond that on the international scene, I mean, I think we're kind of only awakening to it, but if for us it's becoming increasingly obvious that we have an extreme crisis of who's in charge, sovereign to you, whatever you want to call it. Here, it's much more obvious to other countries, because remember other countries see these sorts of machinations in their own countries all the time, or if they don't see them in their own countries like China, which is quite stable and has been quite stable for a long time. It will see it on the, you know, rival powers or the other countries that has to deal with in the region on a close knit basis, their version of America and Europe as it were. So I'd imagine that most of the world right now is just wondering who's in charge. I mean, really what we've been saying, waiting for everything to settle, which we'll talk about in a moment, whether things will settle or not, but waiting for things to settle somewhat to try and figure out what's going on. I think there's also a really interesting phenomenon at work here, which is going to grind on at least until there's a new president next year in January. Which is questioning, I suppose you could analogize it to what are called ex post facto laws. Ex post facto laws are unusual, but they do exist. It's when you impose a law and it retroactively takes force. So if I ban X and you did X in the past, I can still prosecute you for doing X despite the fact that X wasn't legal. As I say, these are usually unusual laws and they're only used in extreme circumstances, but they do exist. And it feels like something might retroactively happen here. Because the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden in the past few years has made an awful lot of very key decisions. I mean, we started this show because the world started to change so fast, started with the Ukraine war, sure, but we've had other events since then. Trade wars with China, chaos in the Middle East, the Red Sea remains closed, which I know Malcolm U liked to point out from time to time. And the media doesn't really want to recognize, we want to forget about all these things. But all these things have been undertaken, and at the end of the day, if you go to the average European politician, or even if you go to an adversarial politician in China and you say, how do you explain this? You know, the decision to arm Ukraine to the teeth and the hope that it would achieve what Napoleon and Hitler never did and take Moscow. How do you explain this? Everybody, adversarial or friend would have said, well, the Americans made a determination to do this because that was what they saw as a good plan. Maybe it wasn't a good plan, but they thought it was. Well, we've seen a lot of mistakes since Joe Biden started making, started, became president. And look, I'm totally on board with the interpretation of this as a, as a soft coup d'etat, but, you know, I'm not disagreeing in a sense with the motives because Joe Biden clearly is a sick man. He has seen all, he's, he's not complimented as far as I can tell. So I think people in the world are going to start asking themselves retroactively or retrospectively rather. Were these decisions actually being made in a competent manner? And I think once you kind of pull out that string, that thread, the whole tapestry starts to unwind because you start to question four years of previous history. Now, we've been very critical of what's been going on in the show, but the most people, I'm sure our listeners are pretty well informed. But I'm sure our listeners have also encountered the fact that most people seem to think that there's some ground overarching plan and there doesn't seem to be. I just note one other thing, if you're sitting somewhere like Beijing or Moscow or Tehran or anywhere that's far away, that has their own media ecosystems that sees the West and the way that we see these places as a foreign entity that we kind of see through a glass darkly as it were. They've just seen an assassination attempt on an opposition candidate and then an effective soft coup d'etat within two weeks. And these two events are not logically related to one another. The only thing, the only general thread that runs through the two of them is to general political chaos in America right now. And I just ask our listeners to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a moment. If you were sitting here in the West and you saw those two events take place in China or Russia, what would you think? I think that's worth thinking about. I won't speculate too much, but if you're in that position you'd probably think something very particular. Yeah, and this redounds into one of the problems, like the cope, if I can use that term, that's still very prevalent inside the people in the West who want to try to keep pretending like the parrot isn't dead. It's just resting, the parrot is pining for the fjords, it's just a little bit tired, it's absolutely not that. I mean, you see all of these just-so stories in the Middle East in particular, like, you know, Brett McGurk has got this special plan together with Tony Blinken to isolate Iran and get sort of Saudi Arabia to go into total war footing or whatever, team up with Israel and then really isolate Iran. It's like, you know, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he presumably watches the news too, and he can see this chaos play out inside the U.S. And he can talk with everyone else, you know, like all of these BRIC countries that are his allies, and he can just retire to this chamber and think to himself, am I really going to take the plunge on behalf of- I don't even know who in America, like, who am I even speaking with? Will they remember sort of the deals we make in two weeks or even two hours from us making them? Like, all of these ideas that people have of some Deaf American hand, moving chess pieces, ten turns ahead on some ground strategic chessboard, it's just a miserable joke at this point. And everyone else in the rest of the world knows it's a joke. Okay, so time to dust off the old crystal ball, Malcolm, you are the resident expert on chaos, I believe you like to say that you are the conveyor of Yuri thought, which only people that are very on Twitter will understand. I think a lot of people right now that are not in the orbit of multi-polarity that maybe don't follow us on Twitter, let's just say, we could call them normies, but we're very inclusive people of multi-polarity, so we will not call them normies. I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that something weird is going on, something very weird is going on, and that chaos is erupting everywhere, seemingly at once, it started out there in the great old world, and it's starting to come back now to where we live. And I think people's first instinct is to say, well, this is just one crisis, this is just a strange thing going on in the White House, and once Kamala Harris is on the ticket or Trump is in as president or whatever, that this is all going to be fine, it's going to settle on a new equilibrium. But I think you think being a little bit of a student of history, and even anyone, as I was preparing the intro for this, I was just reading up on the early history of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, you certainly see it there too. This chaos doesn't tend to go away very quickly, so what are your kind of crystal-ballish thoughts on what's playing out, and how long do you think this chaos is going to be with us? Approximately, obviously, we're not looking for a date, we're not that bad. I think that at this point, if I'm being brutally honest here, this is a ratchet that the Americans are locked into, and they're only going to be on this ratchet until the system breaks. And that might seem really numerous, but there is historical precedent, like the US is facing a much worse situation than the French monarchy in 1786. The French monarchy in 1786 was bankrupt functionally, well the American state is also bankrupt, it's just more bankrupt, and the French had like a political crisis, well the Americans have a political crisis too. But the French did not have this soft coup or whatever, stuff like that did not happen in ancient regime France, their problems weren't quite that bad. And they had a military crisis, the Prussians for example had invaded the Netherlands, which was part of the French sphere of influence. But I mean the French hadn't really lost a fight against Yemen or a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, and the French did not have 800 military bases all over the world and a huge military that was basically collapsing due to no recruitment. So like the American problems are way worse, and the ability like the goodwill inside the American system is, if anything, even more non-existent than the goodwill inside the French system as it barreled toward collapse. And so consider this election. First of all, the Joe Biden crisis is not yet solved, and there are very few incentives to actually solve it in an amicable manner. The Republicans will be doing their darn best to try to sabotage the White House. Basically, if they can, they will hold up any sort of transition into an actual, you know, a changing of power. They're basically hinting that they will try to make sure that Kamala Harris can't even get on the ballot or at the top of the ballot. I don't think that will work, but there's obviously like no love lost here. But also, no matter who wins this election, both sides are now basically gearing up to declare the other side illegitimate in a way that wasn't really done, like in a premeditated manner in any previous election. So consider 2016 Trump won, and there was all of this sort of Russia gate paranoia from people after the fact, but they more, but like nobody actually had this like democracy is on the ballot. If this will be the last election America ever has, unless Hillary Clinton wins, like people weren't talking in that kind of manner. Well, they are now. And if Kamala Harris wins, I am very confident that many Republicans, maybe even a majority will just basically take the like they will a priori assume that this was the result of cheating. I don't think they will be able, you won't be able to talk them out of it. So, like, what's the situation in America? You have an incredibly contentious election already, where the political system is literally cracking under the strain. Nobody knows who's even in charge. Nobody knows like what the final ticket is going to be for the Democrats yet. And once this election is over, there's actually no real basis for reconciliation. Moreover, all of the fundamental problems, the recruitment crisis, the sort of international diplomatic crisis and also the economic crisis, which is incredibly serious, neither party even pretends to have a solution to that. It's not even talked about. Like the plan for the American political class is to ride this train straight into the brick wall of sovereign insolvency and/or hyperinflation. Like hyperinflation or insolvency is baked into the cake and nobody pretends otherwise anymore. So, what do you get? I think you get more and more chaos. Like, what we are sitting here going, "Oh my God, like, what's happening to the Americans? Like, this is so crazy. We've never seen anything like this." We will look back upon this. I bet you quite a lot of money, even, I feel it. We can look back on this episode in a year and go, "Wow, those were the days, huh?" When almost nothing happened. And things were still stable. That's my production. If presidential couple is being detained, it does sound like a coup. It feels not a coup. It does sound like a coup, but it is not a coup. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to blunt any signal the president is even talking about an exit and rejected a report from the New York Times, not confirmed by NBC News, that the president told an ally he is weighing whether to continue. He is the president telling people he's evaluating the assault. That is absolutely false. U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton told reporters Tuesday the situation in Venezuela is clearly not a coup after opposition leader Juan Guaido called on his supporters to hit the streets and take back their freedom. Mr. President, thank you for calling in today. Over to you. Joining me if I didn't have COVID, I'd be sitting there with you, standing there with you. I'm so proud of what you've all done. President Alibongo under house arrest, where he issued a plea to his friends for help. I don't know what's going on, so I'm calling you to make the noise, to make noise, to make noise, ready. I'm thanking you. And it is my great honor to have Joe Biden's endorsement in this race. We are only targeting criminals around him, who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the country in order to bring them to justice. As soon as we have accomplished our mission, we expect that the situation will return to democracy. So, Wisconsin, I am told as of this morning that we have earned the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic House. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]
