Via InternationalMan.com,
Matt Smith: All right, good morning, Doug. I think the biggest thing in the news is that Obama is a traitor. I mean, we know this officially now. Although a lot of this information had been uncovered in years past—about RussiaGate and all of that—the connections weren’t as clear as they are now, based on Tulsi’s release of information and what she’s told Trump. So much so that Trump felt quite confident recently, in an open forum at a press conference, to just outright call him a traitor. He said, “I’d like to say let’s give it time and just see, but we know he was a traitor.”
Doug Casey: I can’t wait to find out. Although I never thought of him in such an overt role. I’d only credited the fact that he was a homosexual rental boy in Chicago’s bathhouses. Too bad that’s been pretty well swept under the rug.
Matt Smith: I was always fixated on the citizenship or birth certificate thing personally. But you know, bathhouses, birth certificate, Columbia University—no one knew him when he went there. There are a lot of weird things in his past.
Doug Casey: That’s true. There are a lot of indications that he’s a genuine Manchurian Candidate. They don’t just come out of nowhere. But anybody can be elected president—or installed as president today. We almost had Kamala Harris, a total nothing-nobody who can’t even string together words into a coherent sentence.
Matt Smith: And we had Biden, who was unfit—incapable mentally.
Doug Casey: Yes, and they almost ran him instead of Kamala. This is all crazy. I guess the question is: Are they going to be able to prove that Obama was conducting a coup in the US? I’m not surprised, because coups occur—different types—all the time in all kinds of countries around the world. So why not the US? Although the US used to be unique in that it was formed to defend the average citizen against the government, that’s ancient history. That’s what the Bill of Rights is all about, which is unique, actually. But it’s a dead letter at this point.
Another question is: Will Trump pursue this thing right to the end? Can they mount evidence? Can they find a fair venue to try Obama? And even if they find that he’s criminally liable for treason, will they prosecute him right to the end? Major scandal. Much bigger than Benedict Arnold.
Matt Smith: Yeah, and it’s weird to make these declarations without—you’d assume there would be cases. Like, the declaration wouldn’t be made before there are actually cases filed.
Doug Casey: I agree. And Tulsi Gabbard impresses me as a very levelheaded person who wouldn’t just fly off the handle. Of course, she’s a hardcore leftist who believes in all kinds of standard leftist things, but they don’t have a lot to do with her current position running the so-called intelligence community. It’s funny they call it a “community.” That sounds so benign and beneficial. Everybody likes communities.
Our intelligence community is full of hardcore killers and sociopaths. I can’t wait to see how this plays out. It serves as a good distraction from the Epstein mess, that’s for sure.
Matt Smith: You’ve got to wonder—do they take this approach and really be aggressive? Because they can. Obviously, there’s a conspiracy there, which means all kinds of people could be swept up by this easily, and arrests could be made.
I mean, one of the most aggressive charges they used against the J6 people was conspiracy to overthrow the government, or something like that. Some major thing, and they went after them super hard—morning raids and everything.
If they really believe this, they could go after Comey, Clapper, Gina Haspel, and a whole bunch of people right away without even touching the president.
Of course, J6 was just little people. That was just the peasants. You can round them up. But it’s hunting big game when you go after these major-league criminals.
Doug Casey: I hope they don’t go after Hillary too hard and heavy. God forbid that Tulsi commits suicide or has an accident.
She could be added to a list of—how many here? Forty-five or fifty other possible Arkancides, as they say.
Matt Smith: So what’s your best guess on whether or not this will be something that serves as political theater that motivates the base for the next couple of years—appointing a special counsel, for instance, to investigate it—or will this actually turn into something real?
Doug Casey: I think it’s a coin flip. But it’s possible that this will make the big time. I mean, look at Watergate. Watergate was a big nothing. It was just a break-in for political reasons.
Matt Smith: One could say that was a coup.
Doug Casey: You could say that. And in that coup, it wasn’t the coup itself that was the problem. It was the cover-up that was.
Matt Smith: Well, what I mean is I think a lot of people used it against him and told Nixon—like all the Republicans in the Senate told him, “You don’t have the votes. You’ve got to get out of here,” you know, and he just walked away.
Doug Casey: There is a difference between what’s going on now and what happened in the Nixon days. Of course, nobody liked Nixon. I certainly don’t. He was a creepy guy and a disaster for the country. But the Democrats are really out-and-out communists at this point. I know that sounds inflammatory to say, but when it comes to their philosophical beliefs—yes, they’re all Marxists, ultra-hardcore leftists, socialists, statists, and what-have-you.
And we’re on the ragged edge, I still think, of a civil war in the US because the Red and Blue people hate each other. It’s not just a bunch of leftist students like in the ’60s. Nasty attitudes are widely inseminated throughout US society. Yeah, we could have a civil war. And if you do prosecute these horrible people, it’s hard to say what their supporters will do. These things can take on a life of their own.
Matt Smith: Yeah. And you’ve got to wonder, if you’re going to go after them—if you really wanted to target these people—you’d think you would spend the energy going and arresting them, collecting evidence, filing charges. Not just talking about them in the public domain.
Doug Casey: We’re not within the halls of power, and we don’t know what’s on Trump’s mind, how he might be colluding with various people, or how his enemies are colluding against him. But it’s an unstable situation. It amazes me that the stock market—and for that matter, the bond market—are so close to all-time highs.
Matt Smith: Things are good. It’s the golden age, Doug. I don’t know if you forgot.
Doug Casey: Oh, I’d pretty much forgotten. But I would not be surprised, actually. As overpriced as the stock market is, and with all the money that’s been printed, at some point it’s going to work its way through the python, and we could have really radical retail price rises.
So, you add a stock market crash to high inflation, and corporations laying off more people—I think we’re in for rough running for at least the next few years. I hope I’m wrong because I prefer good times to bad times. God forbid we live in an active war zone—especially an active civil war zone.
Matt Smith: And I think this Obama stuff adds another wrinkle to the overall objective, which I really believe Trump is attempting to pursue. As we’ve talked about months ago, it’s a global trade and monetary reset. I really believe that effort is underway, and that is going to be chaotic no matter what. And he has limited time to do it.
Doug Casey: And when we were talking before, you mentioned—who was it that came up with the ultra super-cockamamie idea of expiring currencies? Who’s doing that?
Matt Smith: It was on Sky News Australia. It says the Reserve Bank is quietly helping to build a world in which money could expire or be geographically restricted by jumping feet first into the world of programmable money.
Doug Casey: Good grief. Expiring money, which would almost force you to spend it. The way they see it is: stimulate the economy by spending and consuming. But that will destroy private capital and destroy savings. If digital currencies are bad—and they’re very, very bad—this is the ultimate expression of it. Expiring digital currencies.
It’s a criminally insane idea. And if the Australian central bank is playing with it, there are people who take it seriously.
Matt Smith: I’m sure all these things become possible with the GENIUS Act, which basically creates a structure for these stablecoins. And these stablecoins all have the possibility to do this.
I think it’s on its way no matter what. But Australia is a special case—maybe because they’re isolated and docile and unarmed, I don’t know. But they seem to be the test case. They got it really bad during COVID.
I have an Australian friend who didn’t see his wife and child for over a year because of the COVID restrictions. They were trapped in Australia, and due to their situation, they couldn’t leave, and he couldn’t enter. It was super crazy.
They also passed a law recently that says if you leave the country, you have to pay taxes as if you lived in Australia for three years. But you know that three-year limit will increase.
Doug Casey: They’re following in the footsteps of the United States from that point of view, aren’t they?
Matt Smith: They are. And then, right after they did that, they passed a law taxing unrealized gains.
Doug Casey: That was the main reason I didn’t become a Kiwi citizen after living there for years. In New Zealand, that’s already in effect for offshore assets. You’re taxed on gains at the end of the year, regardless of whether you sell or not.
The whole world, frankly, is going in the wrong direction, except for Argentina, where Milei is trying to go in the right direction. But of course, the bad guys are throwing as many roadblocks at him as they possibly can.
Matt Smith: Exactly. But in the world we’re in, you know—for the sake of it, let’s just use Klaus’ term “The Great Reset” of the economic system—every nation is overloaded with debt and obligations, and something must change. Something big must change.
It’s a fourth turning time. We just call it “The Great Reset” for the sake of it. And we have these stablecoins being part of it. We see that coming in. We see all the other economic stuff that Trump is doing. Part of it is a grab for money by the state.
You could look at these two laws I mentioned for Australia as capital controls, right?
So we’re going to see more and more capital controls.
They want to be able to sell private equity—make private equity stuff available in 401(k)s—to basically allow the billionaires to dump their shitty assets on the public.
They’re changing the banking rules so the banks can buy more treasuries.
So we have, within the scope of all this stuff, the possibility that they may actually go after a head of state as a traitor in the US. Not to say he doesn’t deserve it, but they may actually go after him.
Within the background of all of this, the most important part is what’s happening on the economic front, I think, and that is this global system reset.
Doug Casey: All the more reason why you need to activate a Plan B. In other words, get yourself a second residence in a country you like—other than your home country. Preferably a second citizenship. And foreign accounts.
Anything can happen anywhere. And getting back to what Trump will do about this treason thing with Obama… I think Trump believes, with very good reason, that unless he really cleans house of these people—which may be impossible to do for a number of reasons—once he’s out of office, they’re going to come after him with a vengeance.
Matt Smith: Especially now that he’s named names. The more rhetoric against them, the greater his risks become. He could try to become friends with them behind the scenes and smooth things over.
But when you’re coming out publicly and calling people traitors—especially the first black president—I think it’s hard to walk that back.
Gerald Celente says, “If nothing else, they take you to war.” When things go bad, they take you to war.
And we see the war stuff looking like it’s only going in one direction—which is up. They delivered US nuclear weapons to the UK for the first time in 15 years. Why would they do that?
Doug Casey: Why? That’s crazy, actually. It really is crazy. They’re looking for a real war.
Matt Smith: I think so too. And you mentioned something to me about bunkers in Germany being rebuilt?
Doug Casey: Yes. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday or the day before about how the German government has a plan to renovate all the bunkers that were built during the nuclear war scares of the 1980s—and the 1960s, for that matter. They’re renovating those. And why are they doing that? Because they’re looking at a war.
That ties in, incidentally, with one of the more insane things that Trump is proposing and pushing the European nations to do: increase their military spending up to around 5% of GDP. In most of these countries, that means doubling it. Doubling military spending.
Well, that might be good for Lockheed and General Dynamics and the rest of these Praetorian companies, but who’s the war going to be against for the Europeans? It must be Russia, because Trump is still providing weapons to the Ukrainians so they can kill each other.
Matt Smith: And he gave Russia a 50-day deadline.
Doug Casey: He’s so full of bluster… let’s hope he backs down from that. But things can get out of control when you have all this stupidity going on. Somebody could go psychotic, just as the pilot of an airliner can go psychotic. It can happen with people who are close to the red button—in Washington or Moscow or Tel Aviv or Brussels. Or London. Maybe it will just be a mistake. It doesn’t have to be a psychotic break.
Matt Smith: It’s crazy. These people are playing with fire. It’s really unbelievable. All those things are going on. Did you watch the Tucker interview with a German reporter from Bild? Did you see that by chance?
Doug Casey: No.
Matt Smith: Okay, I’m going to send it to you (link). You have to watch it. He is so insulting to the German people—how they’ve basically been broken, that they’re an occupied country, which they are.
And they have no self-respect. Their ally blew up their most important infrastructure—the largest industrial act of terrorism ever—and they don’t want to talk about it. They really believe that the Russians are their number-one threat, and yet they see all these migrants around and don’t look at their own leaders.
He was relentless about it. And he was joking, like, “You guys like this abuse I’m giving you.” It’s like they’re such a broken people now. I’ll send it to you—it’s hilarious and so accurate.
Doug Casey: I’d like to see that.
And in addition to the fact that they’re supposed to double their military spending— Germans have been programmed to be Marxists, leftists, and believe in the welfare state.
And it’s even worse than that, because a soft coup is going on in Germany. The AfD party—Alternative für Deutschland—which represents conservatism, is under serious attack. Most of the other parties are making moves to outlaw the AfD. Which is to say to outlaw anybody who’s not an overt socialist.
Whether they can pull it off or not, I don’t know. But the people running the German government—they’re just criminals.
Matt Smith: Yeah. And honestly, Germany was Europe. France too, I guess, in terms of powerhouses. But Germany especially was the powerhouse, and they’ve just destroyed themselves—or allowed themselves to be destroyed—by our blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline.
It completely destroyed their industry. And importing all these migrants… all these terrible things they’ve done. Which, of course, we’re doing a lot of in the US too.
Anyway, he addresses that point you just mentioned in that interview as well. So you’ll love it. You’ll find it very entertaining. Tucker’s on fire. This Bild guy is a major reporter—he interviews heads of state.
Tucker’s just trying to convince him—trying to change his mind. And the guy doesn’t change his mind at all, but Tucker’s doing his best. It’s hilarious how insulting he is to them.
The other thing I think is worth mentioning is that I was going through and reading the Big Beautiful Bill… I gave up on the effort because nobody cares.
But you know, one thing that stood out to me in there was the ICE budget, which was up 800%. A lot of Americans—or a lot of MAGA people—would cheer that as a positive thing. But there’s an article in Newsweek about it.
These aren’t people obviously friendly to Trump—Newsweek is mainstream press. I know they’re terrible people, I totally agree. But what they do here is highlight some of the features of this increase.
One of the particularly interesting things is that ICE now has a budget that is higher than the military expenditure of all but 15 countries.
That seems a little over the top.
Doug Casey: Are the ICE guys going to be running around in uniforms, or in plain clothes so they’re more surreptitious? Do we know what they’re going to do with the extra money?
Matt Smith: We know parts of it. For instance, they’re going to spend $45 billion to build jails for single adults and females.
Doug Casey: Wow $45 billion? That’s a lot.
Matt Smith: Yeah. I mean, I thought we were going to deport the people, not just keep them locked up, right? So what’s the point of the jails?
Doug Casey: Well, I’m fine if they’re deporting criminals, ne’er-do-wells, parasites. The US tends to draw the worst kind of people now because we offer such massive benefits. Scams attract these people.
It’s funny—there’s a group I’m part of, a bunch of rich guys. One of them is in the Hamptons, and he’s friendly with his gardener, his housekeeper, the usual entourage. He talks to them because he’s interested in these things.
And he says that among the migrant community, it’s well known exactly which benefits you can get, how you get them, how to fill out the forms, and how not to get caught. They’re picking up all these great freebies and subsidies.
They know exactly how to game the system. It’s why they came to the country. Plus, in a place like the Hamptons—or for that matter, Aspen—I’ll bet it’s higher in Aspen now. You pay $30 an hour, cash, tax-free, to these people. It’s an incredible scam.
Matt Smith: So, let’s say you’re going to house 1 million people. That’s $45,000 per person.
Doug Casey: That’s just amazing, isn’t it?
Matt Smith: Yeah. That is a lot of money on jails.
Doug Casey: And we already have more jails per capita—by far—than any other country in the world, including Russia and China.
Matt Smith: And my guess is it doesn’t cost $45,000 for a jail cell. If you’re building big, if you’re doing this Alligator Alley stuff—that swamp one—how much could that cost per holding cell?
Doug Casey: Well, in the cages they erected at Guantanamo—this was 25 or 30 years ago—when they built those cages, even back then they were $50,000 a cage. That’s like $150,000 today.
How can you spend that much money for basically a cage?
Matt Smith: And those were theoretically terrorists, at least theoretically. So I can imagine there’s a certain number of real bad actors that came through in the invasion under Biden, no doubt. If you wanted to imprison those guys, I guess I can understand that.
Doug Casey: I would understand it a little more if they’d actually given them trials. Before you put somebody in a cage for many years, there ought to be a trial. But there was never a trial for any of these people.
Matt Smith: But with these invaders, I just feel like—we’re deporting them. So I don’t understand why we would need a holding facility for 100,000—or a million—whatever that number is.
I just don’t know why we would need that, unless you’re looking toward the future and imagining a future of great disruption, where there might be dissidents of all varieties—not necessarily just illegal immigrants.
And you might want to use the 16th-largest military in the world against them.
Doug Casey: That’s right. They’ll want to round up the usual suspects and suspected enemies of the state.
Matt Smith: Well, that’s what concerns me.
Doug Casey: I’ve said for many years, I’d much rather watch this on my widescreen down here than out my front window in the US. It’s going to get serious. It’s got to get serious as the bond market blows up, interest rates go much higher, and the stock market collapses. It’s at all-time highs by all conventional measures.
Well, I can wait to see what happens. And I hope I’m dead wrong about this.
Matt Smith: But it’s all coalescing in this very limited window of time, I think, because basically Trump wants to make something happen. He’s got three years to make it happen.
Doug Casey: I read in WaPo today—Washington’s fag hag rag—which has improved greatly since Bezos fired most of the ultra-leftist staff. They just have ordinary leftists now. They had an article about how Rahm Emanuel is planning, it seems, to run for president in 2028.
Matt Smith: This was the chief of staff under Obama, right?
Doug Casey: Yes, exactly. He’s very slick and very smart. And interestingly—although of course he was born in the US—he’s also an Israeli citizen. Gee, I think that would be great, to have the president of the US be a citizen of Israel, not just a supporter of Israel.
Matt Smith: And his brother is one of the biggest Hollywood agents and is the owner of the UFC.
Doug Casey: I didn’t know that.
Matt Smith: Yeah, it was his brother who basically waged a personal jihad against Kanye for the things he noticed.
Doug Casey: And of course, Trump is a fan of the UFC. I like watching cage fighting too. But Trump really likes it.
What was it—they’re going to have a cage fight on the White House lawn sometime?
When is that?
Matt Smith: I guess it would be July 4th of next year, which is the 250th anniversary.
Doug Casey: Yeah, that’s really funny. We can’t have gladiatorial combats, but cage fighting is as close as you can get.
Matt Smith: Maybe if things deteriorate enough, we can get back to the old days where we have real gladiators out there. Maybe we’ll live long enough to see that.
You know, have migrants fight for their freedom.
It’s going to get wild, though, Doug, because I think the biggest thing people have to realize is—there’s all this chaos happening, and there’s a drive to increase wars, not decrease them. The money is being spent. Society’s attitudes are being shaped.
This Tucker interview with the Bild guy—Tucker said, “I get the impression the German people see Vladimir Putin as a much greater threat to Germany than they do their own leadership or the problems they have socially.” And the Bild guy said, “Yes, that’s true.”
Doug Casey: They’ve been totally programmed. Absolutely programmed. It’s insane.
But there’s even more that’s changing. For hundreds of years, it’s been accepted among nation-states that wars are fought by the peasants in fields, but the king or president or top people are insulated. You don’t think of killing them.
Well, the Israelis have done that on a massive scale—both with Hamas and Hezbollah, and now Iran, an actual nation-state. And the US is famous for sending out assassins in the form of drones. We don’t call them assassinations. We call them high-value targets. They’re not assassinated—they’re just high-value targets.
This is a new thing. Even during World War 2, it is said—though it’s hard to verify—that Hitler’s staff suggested assassinating Stalin and his top henchmen to perhaps overthrow the Soviet Union. Good idea. Hitler supposedly said that it would be improper and quashed it.
But the US and Israel are now doing things that even Hitler thought were a bad idea. I think it’s a good idea, frankly, because the miscreants that run governments should be afraid for their own lives and not feel insulated from the bad things they do. But like anything, these things can get out of control.
Matt Smith: That’s true. But my worry is that the success Israel has had with this—excluding Iran, which didn’t go as they hoped—has validated that strategy.
They may feel like they could take on almost anybody that way. I think that they feel that if they could do it this way, they could actually take down Russia this way.
They’ll never win a conventional war on the battlefield. They don’t want it to go nuclear. But what might they do using this strategy?
If they think they can get away with it—if they think they could pull off some super-effective, highly coordinated, Palantir-planned, AI-generated attack on multiple key places at the right time—I don’t think they’d be successful. But if you try it, you’re playing with fire.
Doug Casey: There’s a good chance Israel isn’t going to survive another decade as a nation-state. It’s true they’ve taken out all of their enemies—or supposed enemies—through all the color revolutions.
Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt—which is being bribed to be their BFF by the US. In addition to the fact that we send Israel $4 billion a year. I don’t know when that started—around the time of the USS Liberty incident.
I question whether Israel is going to last long. There’s just too much antipathy toward them at this point, given what they’re doing.
Matt Smith: Well, the internal disruption could be bad. I saw an article several days ago where the IDF was calling up 54,000 Orthodox Jewish students for conscription. Now, the Supreme Court passed a law last year saying they were no longer exempt from these conscription drives. But this is the first time there’s been an actual effort by the government to do it.
Fifty-four thousand, as a percentage of the population, is significant. If you applied that number to the US, it would be the equivalent of calling up over a million people—calling up a group that was once untouchable to participate. The internal strife that could come from that alone could take it down.
Doug Casey: It’s fun to watch. Well—not so fun to watch.
Matt Smith: The main game at the center of all this is the monetary and fiscal matters, I think they’re trying to address, which are part of this Great Reset. That’s the main show. You’ve got to keep your eye on the ball, right?
Doug Casey: There’s nothing we can do about it except be aware and insulate ourselves to the greatest degree possible. And part of that is financially.
I’m pleased to say that, finally, all these crappy little mining stocks are starting to move up. I’m just hoping—it’s quite possible—it’ll be like it was in the ’70s and part of the ’80s, when as a group, these stocks went 10-to-one, with many going 100-to-one, and actually a couple of 1,000-to-one shots—one of which I owned, actually.
Matt Smith: Yeah. You know, when you think about it, during the ’70s the dollar lost between, what, 75% and 90% of its value, right?
And I think we’re in that period again where that has to happen. The dollar must be depreciated—it’s been a stated objective of the administration. So that factor, as a driving force behind these stock moves, would make sense.
Doug Casey: Yeah. And in the meantime, the rich are getting richer, and the poor, the middle class, and even the bottom of the upper middle class are being squeezed. What a witch’s brew.
Matt Smith: Yeah, no kidding. One last thing I’ll say is, the grifting that’s happening—not just grifting, but the outright corruption—is pretty shocking.
Of course, we have the Trump Coin, which was launched near the inauguration. That was a good scam.
Doug Casey: What’s it trading at now? Do we know?
Matt Smith: I don’t know. I know Truth Social, Trump’s holding company, now owns $3 billion of Bitcoin.
But they also floated this idea of a tariff on copper. And right before that, someone front-ran that trade—maybe by a minute, maybe three minutes—and made a ton of money.
There’s so much of that going on, it’s actually incredible.
Doug Casey: It is so profitable to be well-connected with high-level government officials. It really is.
Matt Smith: It’s clearly illegal—unless you’re a congressperson. But people are doing it, and no one seems to care.
Anyway, all right. I think we’ll leave it there for today.
Doug Casey: Thanks, Matt.
* * *
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