The Truth About the Inflation Crisis and the Psychopaths Lying to You About It

Ben Shapiro to America: shut up and eat your goyslop. Overpriced burritos are more than you deserve. Paid partnerships with: Cardiff: Get fast business funding without bank delays—apply in minutes with Cardiff and access up to $500,000 in same‑day funding at https://Cardiff.co/TUCKER Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Last Country Supply: No one knows what will happen next. Make sure you’re prepared at https://lastcountrysupply.com/tucker Catherine Austin Fitts began her career on Wall Street at Dillon Read & Co. and later served as Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H. W. Bush. Drawing on her experience in finance and government, she became an outspoken critic of mortgage fraud and financial misconduct, ultimately prevailing in an 11-year legal battle with the Department of Justice. Today, Catherine publishes The Solari Report, a weekly financial briefing covering money, markets, and major economic trends. She also hosts events around the country connecting subscribers focused on financial freedom and independent living. Subscribers of Tucker Carlson get a special offer here: https://solari.com/tucker-carlson-special-offer/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Some of the deepest political analysis is the most simple, the most straightforward. People who note obvious truths sometimes trigger the most profound thoughts in the rest of us. So with that in mind, it is not criticism to say that the following tweet was one of the most simple and obvious and yet meaningful in a long time. This is from last week on the Twitter app, X on your phone. And it's from Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire. And here's the totality of what he wrote. Here's the whole tweet.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  And see if you agree or disagree. Grocery prices are insane. They're still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It's one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  So we can go through line by line and assess the veracity of each one of them. But it's just obvious, looking at that, every single word of that is true. Yes, grocery prices are rising. They're insane. Who hasn't gone to the grocery store in the last year and said, woof, really? 200 bucks? I didn't fill my cart. They're higher than they were. Now, there are all kinds of measures of inflation, famously the Consumer Product Index, the CPI. And a lot of them are skewed, some intentionally skewed, designed to hide the truth rather than illuminate it. But you don't need to consult any of them to get to what's actually happening. All you got to do is buy the things that you've always bought, a tube of Crest toothpaste, a jar of Skippy peanut butter, whatever's in your cart every week is more expensive than it was a year ago,

• 2:02Speaker 01

  two years ago, certainly more than it was five years ago. There is inflation in real terms, whether or not the government admits it, whether or not our political leaders want to own up to it or claim much-reserved responsibility for it. Because yes, it's not organic. It's their fault. But it's real. You know it's real. So why is this a problem? Well, it's a problem because for a lot of people, it makes it hard to live here. The United States is suddenly an expensive country. If you've lived here your whole life, you probably have, for the most of your life, thought of it as a rich country. But an expensive country, that's the kind of place you go on vacation. That's Monaco or Barcelona. That's Tokyo. That's someplace you take your family and then get home and say, woof, I don't have to pay those prices every day. Well, suddenly, you live in that country.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  You live in an expensive country where people are worried about having enough money to pay the basic bills. Housing, food, insurance, medical, cars. It's all much more expensive than it was. Then he goes on to say, "Stop these stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue." Well, that's obvious. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Now, why would you want to do that? Well, because in a democracy, your job, if you're a leader, is to represent the people who elected you, which is to say, to take their concerns to Washington and try and do something about them, fix their problems. That's why you're there. That's the whole purpose of our government. It doesn't exist to serve itself, much less a foreign country.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  It exists to serve its population. That's literally the whole point. There is no other point.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And so if people across the country, of all parties, are saying grocery prices are insane, then you should probably think long and hard about what to do about that, if you can. And there's no poll taken in the last year that shows that people are more concerned about the Iranian nuclear program or Islamic Jihad or some Muslim group far away than they are about the price of Skippy peanut butter. There's just, there's no poll that shows that because the majority doesn't feel that way. And why would it? Who cares about Islamic Jihad? Honestly, who really cares about the Iranian nuclear program? Not compared to your ability to live here or remain solvent through an illness or send your kids to school or even go on vacation.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Those are the real concerns that people have. And why wouldn't they be? And then the final line, "The reason socialists are succeeding," and they are, says Matt Walsh, "is because the people in charge, which would be Republicans at this point, are ignoring these issues."

• 4:36Speaker 01

  He's blaming inattention by our leaders for the rise of socialism. Is that a controversial thing to say? Is that untrue? Of course, it's entirely true. And it's always been true. There has always been a movement for socialism, however defined, in the United States. Certainly since the mass migration of the turn of the last century, there has been a vibrant socialist movement, small but active. And one of the aims of both parties, and they both agree on this, is to keep it at bay. Now, how do you do that? Well, mostly not with force, by stealing the issues. So the claim that socialists make is, "We care about you. And we want to make sure you have enough money to live here without worrying unduly."

• 5:20Speaker 01

  That's the core claim. And they may be against Thanksgiving and for transgenderism or whatever insane idea they're for. And a lot of them are for those ideas. But their fundamental pitch is an economic pitch. And the pitch itself is not crazy. Their solutions may not work, but the pitch they make to voters is very straightforward. And anybody can understand it. You don't have to be a socialist to agree. I'm certainly not a socialist. But why wouldn't I want leaders who care what Skippy peanut butter costs? Well, of course, I would. And this has been recognized forever. "A chicken in every pot." That was the promise of the Herbert Hoover for President campaign in 1928. His supporters said, "Elect Herbert Hoover, and there'll be a chicken in every pot." In other words, we'll lower the price of Doritos with Skippy peanut butter.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Now, he made that claim one year before the Great Depression, made it a lot harder to put a chicken in every pot. But even before the Depression, Hoover supporters knew, just like any awake person would know, that economic concerns are the core concerns of voters and ignore them at your peril. And by the way, there was a socialist candidate that year in 1928, Norman Thomas, who by modern standards was totally moderate. By the way, he was a Presbyterian minister. He was kind of a wet liberal. He was hardly a transgender activist or an anti-white hater or anything like that. He didn't want to ban Thanksgiving, but he wanted to make sure that people's material needs were met. And that's not a crazy goal. So to keep him from getting into power, people like him,

• 6:50Speaker 01

  the Hoover campaign promised that they would pay attention to food prices. Doesn't mean that they were tools of socialism.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Actually, it meant they were opponents of socialism because they knew that if they didn't pay attention, you could conceivably get a socialist. Norman Thomas didn't do very well that year, probably because Herbert Hoover took the threat seriously. So this is not a new idea at all. It's the oldest idea because it's the most obvious idea. If you don't attend to people's actual concerns, they will go elsewhere. And in a purportedly democratic system, they have a whole range of options, by the way, most of which we haven't been presented with in recent history. But it could get pretty radical here. Why wouldn't it? And so you probably shouldn't ignore those concerns.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  That's all Matt Walsh was trying to say. He works at the Daily Wire. He's not a wild-eyed radical. But you would have thought he was reading the Communist Manifesto on air and burning an American flag, given the response from his fellow conservatives, other elements of the MAGA coalition.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Rather than just, well, ignoring him. If you disagree with someone, you always have the option to just ignore them. Didn't hear what you said, sorry.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Rather than just ignoring him or maybe even smarter, paying lip service to agreement, "Yeah, no, Matt Walsh makes a smart point." Like, people, people care what their groceries cost. Normal people care. Maybe you even find out what groceries cost and then play a more elaborate role. And, oh, I was at the grocery yesterday, and, boy, prices are high. We're going to do something about that. You would think they would do that.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  But that's the opposite of what they did. And by "they," I mean the neocons, the people who are in charge of the Trump administration. Now, not the people who came in with Trump, but the people who somehow took control of the Trump administration and turned it in a totally different direction from the one most of us voted for. Those people attacked Matt Walsh. And not just Matt Walsh, but the idea that it is legitimate, that it's allowed, that it's within bounds to complain about food prices. What's wrong with you? Complaining about food prices?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  We're gonna play you a clip from someone from whom we try not to play a lot of clips. It's Ben Shapiro. We're gonna play it in just a sec, but before we do, just a caveat. We're not playing this to suggest that Ben Shapiro was like a shaper of history, a mover in American politics. He's not. He's an employee like most everybody else. He's doing what he's told. He represents larger interests, obviously. So why bother to replay and then rebut something that Ben Shapiro said? Well, in an effort to speak to the people who put him up to it. So the whole point of Ben Shapiro, and there is a point to Ben Shapiro. This is not like some organic phenomenon. Like Ben Shapiro was just so charming and brilliant that he somehow got into Harvard

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Law School and then eyebrows and all emerged as a social media titan. No, of course not. Ben Shapiro had a deal with Facebook, a deal no one else got. And so the point of Ben Shapiro was, here's a way to send a very specific message to outline and sell a very specific worldview to young people. Ben Shapiro is an old person's idea of a young person. He is a spokesman for a group of older people aimed at younger people. I have an idea. Let's get Ben Shapiro. This guy Ben Shapiro, he's brilliant. He's a really promising young kid and we'll get him to sell free market economics and a robust Reaganite foreign policy to the young folks.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And by the way, it kind of worked for a while, thanks to the trans movement, which you suspect they also kind of concocted, this same group, but whatever, wherever that came from. For a while, Ben Shapiro seemed like he was on the side of common sense and he's for free speech and he's against the trans lunacy, et cetera, et cetera. But always, from day one, the point was Ben Shapiro is gonna sell this very specific version of economics, not capitalism. It bears no resemblance to anything Adam Smith advocated for, but the kind of modern American monopoly arrangement where six countries, companies can behave like countries, have sovereignty, unlike our own nation, and control every part of your life through debt,

• 11:12Speaker 01

  which is kind of broad, but fairly accurate definition of our current economic system. So sell that and then sell the even harder to pitch idea

• 11:24Speaker 01

  that it's unpatriotic to oppose wars for Israel. Like first of all, it's obviously antisemitic. I mean, it's just an expression of hate. If you don't want to regime change some country you can't find on a map, obviously you're a bigot. You're basically a Nazi. In fact, you must be for Hitler. You probably oppose the Second World War too. You probably have problems with Churchill.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It's literally immoral to oppose Ben Shapiro's employers' foreign policy. But it's also un-American. Like this country was founded to fight wars for Israel. That's why we're here. I mean, our founder said explicitly, "America exists as a Judeo-Christian country to support Israel." Okay? So whatever, whatever prime minister of that country wants, we're doing. I mean, that's why we're here. So if you're against it, you don't believe in America. You're against America. Why don't you just leave? Maybe we'll revoke your green card. Oh, don't have a green card? We'll strip you of your citizenship. And that's what ICE exists to do now. In any case, you should know, watching this, that these are not just Ben Shapiro's opinions,

• 12:27Speaker 01

  the extent he actually has opinions, who knows? But these are the opinions of the people who prop up Ben Shapiro, who created Ben Shapiro. And this is what they think. This is the argument they sincerely believe apparently is going to appeal to young people who are worried about the price of burritos. Watch this.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, this has become the mode for a lot of young people. Why can't I afford what my parents could afford when they were my age? Spoiler alert, when it comes to groceries, you can. And in areas, by the way, for housing, where deregulation has been the rule, you still can. In fact, you have today more restaurants options, your food costs less of your disposable income, and it is probably significantly better here in the United States of America. We are fatter, richer, have nicer houses, nicer cars, and the food we eat is much, much better than it was for our parents in general. Our parents probably would have considered a $4.50 burrito at Del Taco a gourmet meal.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Your parents would have considered a $4.50 taco at Del Taco a deal? Because your parents were Poles. They were pathetic. They were disgusting people. And anything was enough for them. You don't want to use the term "goi slot", but it does seem kind of appropriate in this specific instance. They would be grateful for a Del Taco. What are you complaining about?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  It's hilarious, but it's the first line that really does catch your attention. He says, "It is fashionable, this mode among young people, to complain that life is more expensive than it was for their parents." So here you have this whole new generation, this entitled, fat, lazy, tattooed, drug addicted, screen mesmerized generation that has no idea what's good for itself, but is all about entitlement, whining and entitlement. And the main thing they think they're entitled to is a life as good as the life their parents led. Who gave them that idea? Of course, that used to be, I think it was referred to euphemistically as the American dream. And the American dream was the idea that your children might have a better life than you had.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And yes, not just spiritually, but materially. They might have the things that you wanted, but couldn't have. That's why you work hard to give them opportunities. But Ben Shapiro was telling you, "What? We never said that. Who told you that was a real promise? How dare you want what your parents had? Who do you think you are? Eat your Del Taco and be happy. $4.50 for a Del Taco? What a deal." And you know how we know it's a good deal? You know how you know America's thriving? Because it's fatter.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  By the way, if you live in China during one of the recent famines during the Cultural Revolution, obesity was a sign of affluence. But of course, we don't live in China during a famine. We live in late-stage empire in the United States where obesity is not a sign of affluence, but instead a sign of discouragement and poverty. That's the truth. It's a sign, most of the time, of sadness. Not of a thyroid condition, but of depression. So people who are depressed get fat. So if you want to know how your population is doing, measure their BMI. So a little weird for Ben Shapiro to say, "We're doing great. We're fat." But what is actually going on here is what is happening across our society

• 15:48Speaker 01

  on so many different issues, which is a rewriting of history in real time. You just saw something happen. You saw, I don't know, let's just pick an example. Israel pushed Donald Trump into a war that hurts the United States that we cannot possibly win, that is all downside for us, but potentially upside for Israel. That would be the war with Iran. The regime change war that no one in America supported.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And you watched that happen at the end of February of this year. But within days, they were telling you, "What? Are you an antisemite? That didn't happen." Israel didn't push Trump to war with Iran. Were you saying Trump has no agency? Are you saying Trump's weak? Well, obviously, Trump is weak. That's why he allowed the Israelis to push him to war. I mean, who doesn't know that? Of course, he's weak.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  But it doesn't matter, weak or strong. That's what happened. And they admitted it happened and we saw it happen. And anyone who paid any attention at all had no doubt at all, because it was true, that that's what happened. Israel pushed Trump to war with Iran. It's not like there were critical American interests at stake. There weren't. There are now.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is that almost immediately after, every big news organization in the United States started telling you, "What you just saw is not what you just saw." And if you thought you just saw that, the problem is you. There's something wrong with your brain and with your heart. You're a hater. You must hate Jews. Well, no, we don't hate Jews at all. But that just happened. Shut up. And by the way, we haven't seen polling on it, but it's probably been pretty successful. If you scream at people long enough and persistently enough and tell them lies consistently enough, after a while, they kind of give up and believe those lies.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  You can change the collective memory about an event pretty quickly after that event occurred. And then you can encode it forever in what we used to call the history books and we now refer to as AI, which is our collective consciousness. And forever after, something that didn't happen will be recorded as historical truth. That can happen. We're watching it right now. So one of the things that Ben Shapiro's employers are trying to tell you is that actually, your life is way better than previous generations. You've got it so good, you don't know how good you've got it. And if you can't see that, the problem is you. So stop complaining, bitch, you little whiner. Get to work.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Retirement? What? That's for ungrateful people. Get back to work. Eat your Del Taco. They're only $4.50. Your parents would have been grateful for a $4.50 Del Taco. Getting out after 18 hours in the spinning mill. They were only nine years old. They didn't have Del Taco then. That's what they're trying to tell you your parents' generation lived through. But did it?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  You know, we could make a detailed case based on the statistics, which are still publicly available from, say, two generations ago. Let's just pick the biggest generation in American history, the baby boom. And we could tell you everything about their lives. Do you know the average age at which people had babies? And let's just pick a year. I'll pick the year I was born, 1969. Women had babies in the United States on average at the age of 20. 20 years old. How'd they do that? How could you afford a baby at 20? You can't afford a baby at 20. Childcare is so expensive. Do you know how much it costs to hire someone from Central America to watch your child while you work as a bank

• 19:20Speaker 01

  teller? It doesn't make any sense. That couldn't have happened. Oh, but it did. It did happen. And it's provable. But maybe a more telling picture of what life was like, and let's just pick that same year, 1969, is an actual picture from 1969. Let's pick the biggest event that year in the United States. Certainly, the most celebrated and lovingly catalogued event, not simply of that year, the summer of 1969, the same year as the moon landing, but of that entire generation, the baby boom, the famous baby boom that everyone loves to despise, and for good reason. People born between 1946 and 1964, right smack in the

• 20:02Speaker 01

  middle. 1969 was the year of the Woodstock Music Festival in Woodstock, New York. And numbers kind of vary about how many people went. 400,000, 600,000, hundreds of thousands of Americans went to that event. And there are a lot of pictures of it, and they're all on the internet. We've got a couple not great pictures of it, but take 10 minutes tonight and look at the pictures. Not of the performers, Sly and the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead and Richie Havens and all the rest, most of them long dead. But take a look at the crowd. There it is, right there. That's the crowd at Woodstock. That's a faraway shot. So you kind of get a sense of the scale of it, but you kind of get a sense of the demographic composition of it. So 1969, this country was about 90% white,

• 20:47Speaker 01

  89, 88, 89% white, about 10 or 11% black. And interestingly, and maybe not surprisingly, the crowd at this massive event is about that. It's probably a little more than 90% white, maybe 95% white, but then it was at least 5% black. So it was, on some basic level, representative of the American population. 90% white, 10% black. But zoom in a little bit. What do you notice? That's not a great shot. They're more on the internet, and you should definitely look them up. But those are shirtless people. And if you look carefully, and they're leaned over, the first thing you notice, what's the first thing you notice?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Well, the complexion of the skin, again, 90% white. But after that, the first thing you notice is you can see the ribs on almost every single person at that event. These are thin, fit people with muscle definition, and not a single hint of what we call now a love handle. These are people like triathletes. And this is a broad cross-section. In fact, it's probably not even the healthiest cross-section of American society in 1969. These were the drug users of 1969. These were the party people. They're sleeping outside for three days in a field in upstate New York. I mean, these are not probably the captain of every track team on the eastern seaboard. These are like the stoners. And yet, even the stoners

• 22:12Speaker 01

  in 1969 looked, well, fit, trim, and happy. Of course, they were dippy, and they had stupid ideas, and they were running around naked in the field, and it doesn't sound entirely bad, but they were misguided and dumb, and probably had opinions that were maybe even malicious. But they certainly looked happy. They looked cheerful. They looked like they thought the future was going to be great, better than today. They had not been lectured by their leaders to be grateful for a Del Taco. In fact, they weren't eating Del Tacos, and you can tell by the way they look. And so you can't look at those pictures, and thousands more like them on the internet, of this country before this era that we're

• 22:57Speaker 01

  living in now, and say, "The people are better off." They're gravely worse off. And you can see it in their faces, and in their tattoos, and in their piercings, and in their demeanor. And they're not all failing, of course. They're amazing young people who are bright-eyed and hopeful, optimistic, on it. So impressive. But you can't say they're more confident about their future than their parents were, because they're not, and they're right not to be. So if you cared about them, you would consider that a tragedy. As a matter of public policy, you would consider it a disaster. It's exactly the opposite of what you're charged with doing. Your job, if you run the American government, or if you seek to

• 23:40Speaker 01

  influence the running of the American government, your job is really simple. Help the people thrive. That's it. And by the way, once again, if you don't do it, someone else will. Maybe someone with an economic program that doesn't work. Maybe someone with deep racial animus that's going to split the country along racial lines. Maybe someone who hates white people, or thinks that men can become women, or something crazy. That person's going to win anyway. Why? One reason. Because he at least pretends to care about the people who live here. And not just their material well-being, but their spiritual well-being. Are they happy? Can you imagine four or 500,000 American 18-year-olds plucked at random from cities

• 24:24Speaker 01

  across the country in a field this summer, this month, August, 57 years after Woodstock? Can you imagine what they would look like with their shirts off? Which is not to make fun of their lumpy physiques. That happens to a lot of us over time. But can you imagine what their faces would look like? Would they look as cheerful as the kids you see in the pictures of Woodstock? You hope so? Probably not. So maybe the last thing they need is to be lectured by people who are clearly the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, like Ben Shapiro, who somehow got into Harvard Law School despite a middling IQ. How did

• 25:04Speaker 01

  that happen? Never asked. People like that have no standing at all to lecture the rest of America's young people about whether or not they complain about their clearly declining standard of living and their future prospects. They have no standing at all, but they do it anyway. Now, why do they do it? Well, there are two reasons they do it. First, because they feel it. Now, the second Matt Walsh sent that tweet out, there was a chorus of people making exactly the same noise as Ben Shapiro made. "Shut up. Burritos are enough for you. A $20 burrito is a good deal. Eat your burrito and be quiet. Eat your burrito

• 25:45Speaker 01

  and be happy. No chupas for you." So there was that. So it was clearly coordinated. But it's not just coordination that gets us to a talking point like that. There was deep feeling behind it. And that feeling was contempt. That was loathing of the people complaining. That was loathing of the population. And that is part and parcel of this whole program. And this ultimately is the reason that the neocon worldview is a cancerous worldview. Not simply because it's wrong about which countries we ought to invade, which leaders we ought to topple, which democracies we ought to erect in countries whose languages

• 26:28Speaker 01

  we don't speak. Okay, that's obviously all wrong. But that's not the worst thing about it. The worst thing about it is not just its inattention to the fortunes of actual Americans, it's hostility, it's hatred of Americans. Because there's no other way to describe the kind of feelings that could get you to give a lecture like the one Ben Shapiro gave. If someone you loved turned to you and said, you know, "Man, I'm overwhelmed by the cost of food." If you love that person, you know, you might ultimately explain, "Well, maybe you're buying the wrong food, and I have like a solution for you." But would your first impulse be to tell the person to shut up and be grateful for a burrito

• 27:07Speaker 01

  from Del Taco? Probably not. That's the way you speak to people you hate, who you resent, whose degradation pleases you. That was the most revealing moment, because it showed you the true motive of Ben Shapiro and people like Ben Shapiro. They don't like you. And if they did, they wouldn't talk like that to you. They would show compassion. But they don't, ever. It shouldn't surprise you, by the way. Anyone pushing for a war like the war with Iran clearly hates you. Clearly, no matter what they say. And keep in mind that every attack on your interests always comes guised as a liberation movement. "We're going to liberate you, liberates you from the fear you doubtless feel from Islamic

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Jihad." You've probably been worrying about Hezbollah a lot. What? No. Hezbollah, what? You worry a lot about Hezbollah, but we're going to save you from that. You know, the Iran nuclear program is a massive threat. "Oh, where's Iran?" It is. Trust me, they've killed thousands of Americans. What? Who? Shut up, they have. And so they tell you, of course, that whatever they're doing is to save you from something you probably didn't feel a threat from before, like, I don't know, marriage or cheap food. Think of all the liberation movements, decent schools, safe neighborhoods. "We're going to liberate you from that in the name of civil rights." "Oh, yeah. We're going to liberate you from marriage. It's really a prison." "Yeah, a big prison." "We're going to set you alone in an apartment by yourself with your cat. You can order your food online. We've got

• 28:32Speaker 01

  450 burritos. You're going to feel a lot better. You're going to be free finally." "Okay." So of course, you say that, because that's kind of what liars tell you. Whatever they're doing to hurt you is actually in your interest. "No, it's medicine. Just take it. You won't get COVID." But behind the lie is what? Why would you lie to someone like that? Why would you tell them that? Why would you tell them what's killing them is saving them? Because you hate them, obviously. Now, the question of food prices, something so fundamental, something every single human being deals with because everybody has to eat. It's out in the open. It's all revealed. You can lecture me about the Iranian nuclear program or the threat of Hezbollah, but if

• 29:14Speaker 01

  you're lecturing about food prices at my grocery store, you clearly hate me. And they clearly do. You should know that. And as if we need more evidence, well, here's Mark Levin.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  On the internet, something very weird happened last week, and I was watching this, the price of a burrito. Now, I'm not really into burritos. Every now and then, I'll go to Taco Bell, and I'll have one or two. Pretty cheap, if you ask me. That is the price. Now, all that said, this debate was about affordability. Now, he doesn't have to pay $20 for a burrito. He can make it for a lot less. But I'm thinking, what the hell has happened to our society? Where is our can-do-it mentality? We sit here with a war in Iran against an enemy that has killed thousands of Americans, many thousands of Americans. I remember a time when Americans say, "Let's go.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Let's destroy that country, destroy that government." You don't get to kill thousands of our fellow citizens, military or civilians. You don't get to try to assassinate our president. You don't get to threaten us with potential nuclear weapons either. Now, it's a debate. Should we take them out? Shouldn't we? Are you a neocon or a warmonger? Is this a war of choice? We don't even have a draft. But a draft even work with young people today? I wonder. Could we even fight World War II today? We're whining about a dollar a gasoline. 12% of the United States population served in the military during World War II.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Over 16 million Americans joined the armed forces out of a total national population of about 130 million people, roughly one out of every eight Americans wore a uniform. We don't have that today, and people are still whining and complaining. It's getting embarrassing, to be perfectly honest with you.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It's embarrassing. Your unwillingness, your reluctance, your hesitation in the face of fighting for Israel, it's just embarrassing. It's disgusting. Huge percentage of Americans served during World War II. Of course, they had no choice because there was a draft. Why aren't they serving now? Well, that's a question, actually, Mark Levin ought to ask himself, a man who didn't serve, who could be serving now, by the way, who could be on the front lines in Kiev, or for that matter, in the Gulf, but isn't. But why aren't Americans serving 80 years after the great victory of World War II? Well, I don't know. Maybe they look around at the country that won that war, and they ask the obvious question.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Is this what a victorious country looks like? If we won, why are we living like this? If we won, why aren't things getting better? Why are they getting worse? Why are we so in debt? Why does the federal government spend $7 trillion a year but only takes in $5 trillion in tax revenue? What's the plan there? How do we get there? This is what victory looks like? Just for fun sometime? You ought to fly from Kennedy Airport in New York to Narita Airport in Tokyo, spend a day wandering around New York, do the whole city. How about just Manhattan? Just Washington Heights to Tribeca. Just walk it. You can do it. It's not very long. It's a day walk. And then go to Tokyo, one of the biggest cities in the world. Now, Tokyo is the city that lost. Actually, we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan, so they really lost.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  We actually vaporized them, all their kids, too. No, no country's ever lost like Japan lost in the summer of 1945. But walk around Tokyo after a day of walking around New York. Which city looks like it lost a war? It's not Tokyo. So in order to convince people to go die for a cause, probably you should convince them the cause is worth dying for. But which cause has been worth dying for? Honestly, dying, like actually dying. Or how about getting your face blown off? How about your ears melted off your head? Losing all your fingers? How about having your genitals shredded? What cause is worth that? Well, if it's worth it, tell me how.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Tell me how it's worth it, because we don't speak German? A lot of Americans don't speak English at this point. These are tired and stupid, in fact, nonsensical talking points, but they're also more than that. They're deeply insulting. You are lecturing a population that you personally have taken advantage of, whose total destruction you have overseen, and you've done nothing to stop it. You did nothing when the Sacklers flooded Appalachia, the part of the country that disproportionately fought the wars that you called for and destroyed them with opioids. You said nothing. You said nothing when this country was invaded and its trillion-dollar military didn't stop that invasion.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  And for you to lecture the rest of the nation about a can-do attitude? What do you make my freaking burritos then? It's too much. And then to cap it off with the lie that you and every other person in the media is now repeating that Iran is trying to assassinate President Trump. As a statement of fact, that is not true. So they're now telling us that Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt by a guy with a man-pat, a surface-to-air missile, inside the security perimeter in Ankara, Turkey, during the NATO summit. That's not true. That's factually untrue. And they'll lie about it. "Oh, you don't have the intel." Well, you know, actually, some of us have called around. Untrue. So why are they reporting that?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Well, of course, like so much that you read and see on television or on the internet, it is the product of a propaganda campaign designed to change the course of events on the ground. A propaganda campaign designed to convince Donald Trump that he has to restart major combat operations against Iran because they're trying to kill him personally. And so they tell him, as they have been for more than a year, ever since the Butler shooting Iran did it. You need to get in a separate aircraft. You need to be moved on the tarmac inside a drink cart because they're going to assassinate you at any second. And why are they telling Trump that, who apparently believes it? It's not true, by the way. That is a lie.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  They're telling him that because they think that if they can make it personal, that Trump will have a stake, an emotional stake, in continuing this war against Iran, which the United States, too, restate cannot win. How do we know we can't win it? Because we haven't been able to open the Strait of Hormuz despite having a fleet of vessels that can't even approach the Iranian coast. So rather than pausing and ask, why are we spending $1.5 trillion a year on a defense budget, or now a war budget, that is unable to beat what we were told is a second-rate or third-rate military, a third-world country run by primitives who murder gays by throwing them off the roof? And we can't even open a piece of water so 20% of the world's energy can flow through? How's our military doing? Shut up.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Not one moment of reflection, or self-awareness even. Not one moment of asking the obvious questions about our own failures, failures that the rest of us paid for, have gone into debt for. One of the reasons you can't buy a cheap burrito, unless Mark Levin makes one for you, and we hope he will, we hope he has that can-do attitude that gets him in your kitchen, rolling you a burrito for free, but in the event he doesn't do that, it's going to cost you more than it used to to buy a burrito. Why? Because the country's too in debt. Why? Well, the main driver of debt? Foreign wars. That's a fact. The main driver of debt? Foreign wars. Our discretionary budget, it all goes to war. Wars we don't win.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Wars that are being waged, not because the public wants them, but because Mark Levin is calling for them on behalf of the interests of a foreign country. That's a fact. And to continue that, they're now laying this lie, this head-trip on the president. "Oh, they're trying to assassinate you on the tarmac. Better get in the drink cart and sneak on to another aircraft." And a lot of Americans are just, like, believing it because they're telling him that. "Oh, Mark Levin, yeah, assassinating the president. Okay. Killed thousands of Americans. Okay." You must have missed that part, where they were sending opioids into Appalachia. I don't think that was the Iranians who did that. In any case, it's worth at this point taking a step back and assessing really the root problems here. So inflation is real. No one wants to admit it because the policymakers

• 37:44Speaker 01

  caused it. It's not something that just naturally happens. Inflation is what happens when you mistreat the currency that you don't own. It belongs to the American public, you're in charge of it, and you use it for your own benefit and not theirs. And you have short-sighted thinking that in the end destroys nations, and it's destroying ours. So if you've got a small business, you know that cash has to keep flowing or else you go out of business. And sometimes you just need capital to buy inventory, repair equipment, hire employees, or just take advantage of an opportunity when it comes along. You're not in charge of that, it just happens, and you have to have access to cash. And that's a challenge if you need it quickly. And that's where our friends at Cardiff can help. Unlike the big banks, Cardiff's application takes three minutes. There's no hard credit pull, and you can get approved and funded within one day. Process is fast, simple, and respectful

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• 39:58Speaker 05

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• 40:59Speaker 01

  We have great news for our listeners and viewers. Hallow's Next Prayer Challenge has arrived. The 40-day St. Michael's Lent Prayer Challenge begins August 12th. In a time when pressure, ambition, the iPhone and its constant beeping are all pulling your attention in various directions, there is a way to re-center, slow down, to get your mind on God. And that way is Hallow. The journey takes you through one of the great Christian works ever written, Augustine's Confessions, written more than 1,600 years ago. It's a kind of autobiography, and it's a masterpiece, still powerful because Augustine's struggles are ones that we can relate to. He searched for meaning, success, and happiness.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  It's incredible that something written 1,600 years ago could feel like it was modern, but it does, because it answers the deepest questions. But this challenge is more than a history lesson. Through daily prayer and reflection, you will walk with Augustine and discover how God is working in your life. God offers healing, freedom, and transformation. Everybody has something that he or she is fighting. Maybe it's fear, it's probably pride. St. Michael's Lent creates space to bring those struggles to God and allow His grace to change us, to solve those problems, which are unchangeable without God. Hallow is amazing. We love it. It's a nightly dinner table conversation in my house. Download the Hallow app today to get started.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  So there's no one we can think of who's got a clearer handle on this, or a more longitudinal view gained over many years, beginning at the Treasury Department, on this question, than Catherine Austin Fitts. And she joins us now to explain why burritos are 20 bucks. Catherine Austin Fitts. Catherine Austin Fitts, thank you so much for doing this. I have a lot of questions. I'll keep them short. Are we experiencing inflation in the United States, do you believe?

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Yes, we are experiencing inflation, and it, there is a reasonable chance that the inflation, at least the increase in household goods, is going to get much, much worse.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Why?

• 43:05Speaker 06

  So it is because we've been going through a restructuring of the economy for many decades. This has been building for many decades. One, we start off with a model where we have a debt-based currency, and that debt-basing forces huge expenses that you don't have to have. That's number one. But number two, we've run our fiscal economy in ways that I would describe as a financial coup d'etat. And as we've, we've pulled resources out of the economy, we have consolidated ownership and control in a way that forces expenses, or it lowers the income for the general population, and it raises their expenses.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  And this has been a intentional consolidation of ownership and control. And now you're seeing the results that result in people being squeezed in a variety of ways. So I'm describing a change in the financial model, the centralization of power and economic control. And it involves many different things throughout the economy. But the important thing to understand is it was a plan, it's intentional. And if you look at where we are, it's going to take many, many things to change it. Because it comes, it comes with tremendous and explosive changes in technology, which can be used to create great

• 44:34Speaker 06

  prosperity, but can also be used to consolidate control in a way that benefit the few and destroy the many.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  So as I hear your big-picture description of this transition through which we're moving, the first thought that comes to mind is, boy, that sounds a little bit like what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed in the summer of 1991, and all of a sudden Russians woke up 10 years later, and all state industries were owned by a small group of people. It was, that's kind of what it sounds like.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  Well, if you generally, I mean, I'm grossly oversimplifying, but if you look at the people who did the, it's called the Rape of Russia.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  You know, it's a similar group. And I'll, I'll give you a story. I was in the City of London making a presentation in 2001, and I'd been asked to speak about what I call piratization in the United States, the consolidation of the real estate and housing market. So I'd been the Assistant Secretary of Housing. And I gave the presentation, and two presentations followed, one by Ann Williamson, who had been covering Russia for the Wall Street Journal during the Rape of Russia. And she got up and gave a presentation. And then John Lachlan, who's a remarkable British commentator now in Paris, stood up and did the same on what had happened in Eastern Europe. And the three of us went

• 45:54Speaker 06

  into shock, as did many of the investors in the room, because we realized it was the same firms, the same law firms, the same intelligence agencies. And, and what they were doing in Eastern Europe, and in Russia, and in the United States, was a very similar game. We have a big presentation, it's sort of called plunder. But they were basically going in and plundering, and it was one plan. It wasn't three different plans or three different groups. It was a process of consolidation of the economies in all three places.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And basically, a privatization of the nation's resources.

• 46:34Speaker 06

  Well, here's the thing privatization Tucker is when I transfer an asset or involve corporations in a service at a market price. Piratization is when I transfer an asset to a private party at 10 cents on the dollar.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:52Speaker 06

  So at a below market price and what we've been watching by and large around the world is piratization, not privatization or plunder.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  That's eluding and thank you for that distinction because that seems important. So it's not simply a matter. So I think many of us on the right were sold on the idea that government is inefficient, which is an easy case to make because it's true. And in order to make the system, the government more efficient, we need to privatize things and the public benefits and the market rules apply. And so it's fair and transparent and it just works better. That, that is the case, I think, that free market economists made throughout the eighties and nineties.

• 47:33Speaker 06

  So it's so funny. I wrote, I wrote a piece about this sort of piratization at the time and it later became an online book I wrote called Dylan Reed and the aristocracy of stock profits. And when I first sent it to the, I was working with this firm in London. The head of research just started laughing and he said, I've always believed that government is inefficient and the solution is to bring in more private, you know, more private capacity. And he said, I'm reading this and what I realize is, you know, what is going on and some private guys are just using the government to pay themselves huge and hideous profits above market in a way that's destroying markets.

• 48:18Speaker 06

  So, so we have these public, private partnerships that involve huge corruption, huge grift and aren't productive at all. But the spin they use is the, what you just described.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Boy, it's a very effective argument and it certainly fooled me. Definitely fooled me. So how does that trend that you just described cause inflation?

• 48:41Speaker 06

  So, so for example, and there are thousands of different examples, but one of the things that drive prices up is when you have consolidation into monopolies or duopolies. And so if the Department of Justice is simply not enforcing antitrust, you're going to get consolidation and monopoly pricing. The best example of course is the bailout. So according to the Levy Institute, there were $29 trillion on the bailouts. And what did we see? We saw a group of financial institutions engage in massive mortgage fraud and financial fraud. As a result, we had $29 trillion of bailings, which does run up the debt quite, quite a certain amount.

• 49:25Speaker 06

  And then what happens? They get the benefit of more access to the federal credit special, all sorts of special dispensations and coming out of the financial crisis, they have a major, much bigger market share. Right?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 06

  So not only did they get $29 trillion of bailouts, but suddenly they shifted their market share up dramatically in a way that gives them monopoly pricing power. Okay. And so, you know, and that was combined, for example, in the financial area with changing the laws in 79, 80 to allow essentially usury. So, so for example, when I, as I told you, I, I went from a process of being a multimillionaire to having a very rich cash flow every month, to having to live on $2,000 a month and run my, and bring down my companies and run my companies with that on the $2,000. And, and when things are really desperate, I used to always get a credit card in the

• 50:26Speaker 06

  mail from JP Morgan Chase for $300 with a $50 signup fee and then 30% interest rate. And it was, you're in the corner, you, you know, according to the Department of Justice, you have to be in Washington in two days and suddenly you magically get this credit card, which will finance your trip for 50% interest rates when you combine in the fee.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  So this is when you were being assailed, prosecuted by the Department of Justice after you left government yourself?

• 50:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. So my company, I had a company, Hamilton Securities Group, which was working as the lead financial advisor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And, and we were essentially responsible for making sure portfolio strategy was done properly as well as doing loan sales. And we were essentially stopping money from disappearing out of the back door of HUD. And so to get rid of us, we were targeted in this process. And interestingly enough, after they did get rid of us and the public officials we were working with, suddenly massive amounts of money started disappearing from the HUD financial systems. And, you know, it's, it's typical in government.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  You've got to get the honest people out if you're going to grift in a major, major way. And that's what happened anyway. But we had 18 audits and investigations, 12 tracts of litigation, a smear campaign and physical harassment. And the goal of course was to, to catch us doing something, was to prove that we had done something wrong. And, and it got very, it went on for a long time because they could never prove anything and they tried to falsify documentation. We caught them, you know, and then it, it turned into a very long process. So, and ultimately we won the big litigation. So we were able to win. And one of the reasons I refused to settle and insisted on going to, you know, because they try and keep you out of court.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  I couldn't get into court. It really started in 95. I couldn't get into court on the main case until 2004. So, you know, so they try and keep you out of court because of course they have no evidence of any wrongdoing. And it was very funny Tucker, I wish I had a video of it on the, three times they canceled on the eve of trial. So my lawyers were the most overprepared people in the world. They were being paid by the insurance company. And so we got to the final, the first day of the final trial and I wouldn't settle. And I kept, you know, insisting and they constantly, I was poisoned many times when I wouldn't settle because they wanted to sort of exhaust me.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  Anyway, I come in on, on the last trial on, on the first day and, and essentially the other side has nothing. They have absolutely nothing. And all the lawyers on the other side are fighting. It's the whistleblower attorney and the Department of Justice attorney and the HUD attorney, they're all fighting. And at the end of the day, my attorney turns to me and he's white as a sheet and he says, oh my God, they had absolutely nothing.

• 53:27Speaker 01

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• 54:12Speaker 01

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• 55:52Speaker 01

  Tucker. So, but at the depth of this, when you had no money and you're trying to run everything, your life and business on $2,000 a month, you're getting credit card offers from JP Morgan Chase. And that's kind of a metaphor for the, how the entire economy works, right? It's people profiting off desperation.

• 56:14Speaker 06

  So I live in, um, one of the first things I did is I sold my big mansion in Washington and bought a country home in Hickory Valley, Tennessee. And I moved to Hickory Valley, Tennessee. I have cousins who are cotton farmers in Hickory Valley, Tennessee. And I moved to Hickory Valley, Tennessee because I knew that the cost of living was much, much lower. And, um, so the county I live in, in Tennessee has a per capita income of $24,000 a year. Yeah, very, very low income. And one of the things when I, as soon as I moved there, what I realized is we were targeted for predatory lending by all the big banks and lenders. And so one of the ways I used to entertain myself, you know, I was trained

• 56:58Speaker 06

  on Wall Street and I was trained by the top, some of the best lawyers on Wall Street, how to negotiate. It was really fun for me because I would pick up the phone and they would just assume I was another person with $24,000 a year income, which, you know, and $2,000 a month that was. And, and, and so I would start to ask them about their offers and negotiate with them. And I learned all their tricks. And what was amazing to me is, is the people in my county were targeted by some of the smartest legal stratagems I've ever dealt with in my life. You know, but it was, it was war. It was a financial onslaught of trying to trick people into debt. Of course, debt is one of the greatest

• 57:40Speaker 06

  ways you can destroy a family's finances, addiction and debt. And if you look at the targeting of American communities during that period, they were specifically targeted with both addiction and debt. And it was an onslaught and I got to learn a lot about it, living there.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  What do you think the purpose was? Why would any American want to destroy an American community and kill people and enslave them with debt?

• 58:09Speaker 06

  So if I want to change the economy and I want to change it from a democratic republic to a, um, essentially an oligarchy, then what I need to do is I need to consolidate wealth and I need to reduce the general population to a group of people who are much easier to control. So let me go back. In, in 1995, there was an effort made by the people who I would describe as leading the financial system to try and put the country on a financially sound basis. And it failed and ended up at the end of 1995 in a three week shutdown of the government. I don't know if you remember that.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:55Speaker 06

  It's during the Clinton administration. And it was described to me by the president of the largest pension fund in the country several years later. He said, you don't understand, they've given up. They've given up on the country and they're moving all the money out, starting in the fall. And that was when the $21 trillion started to go missing, you know, compounded by the 29 trillion that went out on the bailouts. I think what happened was when they failed to, to achieve a real fiscal, a fiscally responsible, um, approach to the federal balance sheet, that they decided to do two things. One, they decided to do a financial coup, um, in a process where

• 59:39Speaker 06

  instead of the bankers just running monetary policy, they could then run fiscal policy. And I think the second thing they decided to do is if you can't balance the budget with financial responsibility, you can balance the budget by lowering life expectancy. So if you, if you can't fund the pension and retirement system with enough money to meet your obligations, you can meet your obligations by lowering life expectancy. And I think a conscious decision was made to do that. The, literally right after the budget deal sort of busted, two decisions were made. One was to approve OxyContin and open the pill

• 1:00:23Speaker 06

  mills. The second was, uh, all sorts of policies that permitted HUD and other mortgage predatory lending. And that happened right as they also made the decision to do the private prisons and they kept flooding the neighborhoods with drugs. And if you look at the combination of the pill mills, the predatory lending, narcotics trafficking coming in, again, this is all covered in my online book. You know, it dramatically started to, to steadily reduce life expectancy, particularly in the lower income groups. And I knew it was coming. One of the reasons I kept talking with everybody about the missing money is I knew that it

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

  would hit the middle income groups. It was just a matter of time. And I remember, I always tell the story of talking to Dr. Mark Skidmore, who had worked with me on the missing money. We were sitting, I was sitting in a car in Bolivar, Tennessee. I was doing errands. And he kept saying to me, why do you keep bringing up all the money that's going missing from the federal government? Why don't you give up on this? And I said, don't you understand, Mark? If we don't do something about this, they're, they're going to take radical steps of lowering life expectancy. And that was in 2018. And of course, you know, COVID hit in 2020. And what did we get? We, we got a whole series of actions that continued to lower life expectancy, but this time in the middle and upper middle class groups.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  It, it's so obvious to me that reducing population, either through shortening their lives or preventing them from being born in the first place. I mean, that's official US policy, of course.

• 1:02:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Abortion, euthanasia, drugs. Um, but I, I've always sort of wondered why? And, and you think it's because that's the only way to get the country solvent?

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  So I think it's a combination of things. First of all, you have, um, again, we have this explosive new technology. And I think you have a lot of people in the leadership who believe, first of all, it's very difficult to manage people, particularly if they get their hands on this technology. But they also believe they're going to live for a long, long time. Um, you know, Jared Kushner, when he left the first Trump administration, did a podcast and said, I'm the first generation to live forever, the last generation to, you know, not live forever. Um, Sean Parker, one of the co-founders of Facebook said, I'm a billionaire, so I'm going to live to 145. If, if the oligarchs are going to live to 145, one of the things they know is not everybody can do that or you're going to have an environmental

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  problem. Right? Right. So, so, so part of it is that. But I also think with robotics and automation, they think they don't need a lot of people. A lot of people are hard to manage.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 06

  They, uh, you know, they, if you look at what they're doing to build a control grid, clearly they think if they can accomplish that, uh, it's going to make it much easier to manage a lot of people. But frankly, they don't necessarily want them around. They don't need them. And so, uh, I do believe that, that many of them feel they would be much better off with much lower populations.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  I think that's obviously true. Let me ask though, about what role a global war would play in that. So like on the one hand, obviously war reduces population. If you wanted to clear the Ukrainians out of Ukraine, leaving only the resources and Indian immigrants, you would do what they are doing. I get it. But once you start pushing up against the possibility of a nuclear exchange, a total war, a global war, then don't you, and which they are doing knowingly, and I don't know if it's reckless or intentional or what exactly it is, but they know that we're moving toward global war and they're not slowing down. The Trump administration and all the people who support it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Don't you kind of risk your own plans by doing that? That seems very much like a dice roll.

• 1:04:23Speaker 06

  So there are a couple of theories. I, I think there's some people who, you know, do want to bring on Armageddon. That's a cultural and religious cross section of some of, some of the people involved. Um, but the other thing is if, if you've been responsible for the dollar system and you know how, um, how, how dangerous an improper or, or a difficult unraveling of the dollar system could be for most of the countries around the world, you know how an unraveling could, could, could kill and hurt and maim, then you will

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  go to extreme lengths and kill many, many people to avoid that. Um, you know, and part of it is if you're used to having power, you do not want to convert to a meritocracy. I mean, the way to solve, you know, I told you, I just told you, the thing you just did on how to save America, I think is one of the best things you've ever done. And if, in theory, we all woke up tomorrow and followed your 10 principles of, you know, in our own lives, in our own family, in our own community, we could see an unbelievably explosive wealth creation. I mean, one of the things I want to stress is tyranny is very, very wasteful. And the potential for wealth explosion, if we could somehow, you know, behave like

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  we were in advanced civilization is an extraordinary opportunity, but it's going to result in a meritocracy. And if you look at the people running things, they have no interest in competing in a meritocracy.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:01Speaker 06

  Because they're going to lose. Right?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  And, and the nature of their situation is, you know, when people in their situation lose, they get killed and their families get killed. So, so, you know, they, they are at the point where they would do control. I remember one group telling me about the, a group during the eighties, when Iran-Contra was really getting out of hand, talking about they had started to make plans about dropping a suit, you know, exploding a suitcase nuke in the middle of Chicago, you know, just to distract. Remember, one of the goals of war is to control the domestic population. And we are now approaching a time where, whether, whether you get that, you have a war, you get the control grid, controlling the domestic population is getting, is going to be very difficult.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  So won't that control grid make it easier?

• 1:06:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, if they can get it, if they can put it into place. So, I mean, let's look at what they're hoping to do. What they're hoping to do, first of all, is to use stable coins and digital tokens to bring 4 billion people around the world, and this is the retail market, into the treasury market and into the US stock and bond market. And literally take the US market share, for example, in the stock market up from 70% to 90% of the global stock market. So they're hoping to essentially tender for all the citizens in the world and bring them into our financial system.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  You know, what they've said is we're going to do 24/7 trading on the global stock markets using digital tokens, and we're going to offer 20x margin. You know, everybody right now is really worried about we're in a bubble. If you look at the tools that are being amassed to bubble using crypto, I mean, arguably, if they succeed, and I'm not saying that they will, but if they do, it'll be the biggest bubble I've ever seen, and I've lived through a lot of bubbles. So, you know, you bring another 4 billion people into the US currency, the US bond market, the US stock market, you know, and you do it with 24/7 trading with 20x margin.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  It's going to be extraordinary because those are networks you can also pump out more debt on.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  Right? So now, what's interesting is the Clarity Act, it appears is not going to pass this year, which was one of the sort of legal infrastructures they wanted to do this. So I find the sort of the potential crash and burn this fall of the Clarity Act to be quite remarkable. Okay, so they think through these mechanisms, they have tools that can consider this wave and this bubble going forward. Now, if you look at what they want to do, what they want to do is put on your currency, your bank deposits, and your stocks and bonds, what I call a manual, an automatic third lock.

• 1:09:13Speaker 06

  Do you know what a third lock is?

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  Okay, let me describe this. If you and I do a transaction, and I want to buy a Tucker Carlson hat, and you want to sell it to me, I give you cash, I get the hat. That's a two-lock transaction. You have a lock, I have a lock. If one of us says no, it can't happen, okay? Let's say we have money in the bank, and I want to buy the hat. I'm going to transfer money, I'll do an ACH to you for the cost of the hat. The bank has rules from the Treasury Department, it has sanctions, it has to know your customer rules, it has other regulations, and it has the ability to intercede and stop the transaction for those reasons. Okay? And that's a sort of what I call a manual third lock.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  So they, the bank gets a third lock implementing the government regulations.

• 1:10:06Speaker 06

  And so if you look at what happened to the truckers in Canada, they had all, not all, but most of the banks exercised that manual third lock under the direction of the government. What the government wants to do, and what the treasury and the central banks want, is they want an automatic third lock, so you don't have to go through the bank. And not only can you apply sanctions and know your customer and money laundering laws, you can apply a full-blown social credit system, right? So I can make up a hugely complex rule system for Tucker and his kids and his grandkids. I can customize it for each one of you, and I can give you incentives,

• 1:10:51Speaker 06

  and I can give you rules, and unless you do exactly what I say, I can turn off your money, or I can apply negative interest rates to your money, or positive interest rates, I can raise your taxes without anybody having any say about it. So let me give you an example. Go back to the pandemic. If I say you're locked down, and you and your family can't leave your house, your money won't work outside your house if I have an all-digital system with an automatic third lock. And let's say I freeze your bank account. You can't go to your bank and talk to them. It's above their head, they won't be implementing it, okay? That gives them, that's what the data centers are for, that's what the AI is for, at least in North America.

• 1:11:37Speaker 06

  You know, the goal of that, because if you look at spatial control, it involves tremendous data because of the videos and the cameras, and you've got lots of video footage. But then you can imagine financial transactions all over the world. If they're going to bring 4 billion customers from around the world into the dollar markets or our stock market, that's a huge amount of data for spatial and financial control. And but with AI, what is AI great at? AI is fabulous at processing enormous amounts of mathematical information, which is most of the information, the data we're talking about. And so if they can put a manual third lock in a social credit system for every individual,

• 1:12:21Speaker 06

  and essentially automate the whole process with AI, then they have the ability, in fact, to control many, many people. Now, here's the question. Why would 4 billion people want to come into that system? It's very interesting. The Secretary of the Treasury during the, I think about a month or two ago, said, you know, they'd seized a billion dollars of Iranian wallets, and he was bragging about how easy it was to do it. And I thought, well, you know, I'm not sure if you're going to go out and try and persuade 4 billion people to come into our markets that you really want to have them realize that we can seize their wallets with that kind of speed and ease.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  No, that would be a disincentive to participation, there's no doubt about it.

• 1:13:09Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  May I ask you, just since we're on markets, and I don't want to get sidetracked, but I think you might be able to answer this. I'm baffled by the behavior of various commodities markets. Since this war began, they've moved in the opposite direction from what you would expect if supply and demand was real. So let's just start with oil prices, Brent crude, use that as a measure. They've not gone straight up, and they've kind of gone up and down, but not very up, in some cases down. And I think we can say part of that is because China decided to stop its energy imports, which is bizarre behavior, and then gold has also, I mean, since the spring, has dropped $1,000 an ounce

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  at exactly the moment when the US dollar is clearly headed to a much weaker position. So that doesn't make any sense at all. Is it possible?

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  No, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  It does, tell me how.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, so let's look at oil first. So the Chinese have done a remarkable job of just cutting their imports in half. And to me, there's not a lot of reliable information about, we know they've built a lot of nuclear capacity and renewable capacity. They say, the last time I looked, they say they're not using their oil reserves, which are significant, is my understanding, but, you know, it's hard to believe they haven't. The Japanese had a fair amount of oil reserves, they've run down their reserves. My understanding is our reserves are now below the amount, you know, that threatens the whole infrastructure of the strategic reserve, which is frightening, but we've run our reserves down tremendously.

• 1:14:52Speaker 06

  So part of what's been happening in the oil market is, I suspect, that the the shorting and the things they do to manage the price have managed the price down, but that's combined with enormous relief of pressure on the market because of what the Chinese did and because of ours and the Japanese strategic reserve now. But if you look at the US strategy, the US strategy is designed to replace the petrodollar with what some people call the petro-gas dollar. And between bottlenecking the trade routes and sabotaging energy capacity all over the world, they're trying to build a much bigger market share for US LNG. Remember, we're a net exporter now.

• 1:15:37Speaker 06

  And if you look at how much LNG, for example, we're selling into Asia, you know, our oil and gas industry is making a lot of money. Now, the question is, now that the war is continuing, and we don't have the Japanese and US reserves to run down a lot, there's a real expectation that the price could continue to go higher. Now, here's the other thing, Tucker. When you shut down, when you do what's been done to the global economy since February, you create a lot of inflation, deflation, because you, you know, you are shutting down, I call this COVID 2.0. You're wiping out a lot of little guys, and again, it consolidates into the big guys.

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  But this is very depressing for the global economy, right? And that's deflationary. Now, let me talk about gold. You know, ever since I started covering gold in, say, 2000 and on, whenever there's a war kind of situation, you see gold drop. It's very typical. And one of the reasons is people get short and they have to sell their gold. But the other is people want liquidity. So they, you know, they go into treasuries, they go into the short-term bond market, even if the dollar's weak. So, so they're looking to go to cash, so to speak, and, and, and you'll see them leave gold. So it doesn't surprise me that probably a lot of people in the Gulf area

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  and globally needed to sell gold. But gold's in a long-term bull market and this is just, you know, this is the normal volatility of gold in these kinds of situations.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  May I ask, why would China slash its oil imports and, and import as much gold as it has, which is a lot? Why is China importing gold and not buying oil?

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  That is an excellent question, and I don't, I don't know why. Um, I suspect they think they have, um, they have the nuclear and renewable and other capacity to do that for some period of time. Um, I mean, clearly Venezuela, you know, cut them and clearly the situation has cut them. Um, but I think that's a big question mark. And one of the question, one of the reasons might be, you know, they understood that it was very important to, to, you know, let that Steve out. They're helping the global economy tremendously. If, if the price was running up, you know, where, where many people thought it would go,

• 1:18:11Speaker 06

  the pain in the global economy would be absolutely enormous.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you could easily see $7 a gallon gasoline in the US. And, but it, I guess what I'm saying is it seems like the Chinese government has done, the Trump administration, a huge favor by keeping things kind of status quo when they wouldn't normally be.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Yes, that is, that is absolutely correct. And if you look at the, um, if you look at who's purchasing what in Asia, um, the US is clearly making a lot of money exporting LNG to Asia. So, so, you know, this is, I mean, this has been very, very good for the US oil and gas industry.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  So my last question has to do with attitudes. And I'm confused by this and you may have an answer. So consumer prices have risen, inflation is real. It's the product of long-term changes, the ones you just described, but it's also the product of this war of choice begun at the end of February. That's all, it's obvious, anybody can understand it without an economics degree. Prices of food have gone up. That's detectable to everybody because everybody eats. Somebody notes this the other day and says, gee whiz, you know, $20 burritos are a lot. And immediately the same people, many of them who advocated for this war of choice,

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  attack anyone who complains about rising food prices. And what I see there is like pure contempt, if not hatred, for ordinary people, like what else could explain that kind of response? But I also see a kind of crazy recklessness because normally in a functioning society with, with normal motives, the people in charge, the rich people, don't make fun of the poor people for overpaying for food because that's dangerous. Like they could rise up and bite you if you keep mocking them. The let, the let them eat cake thing doesn't work as a long-term strategy. Why are they doing that? Why are they showing contempt for the population?

• 1:20:22Speaker 06

  So I think they think the best defense is a good offense.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  And, and they're attacking people for lazy, being lazy or not working. And they describe how they made it to where they are. And, you know, it, it's simply, um, it's simply what psychopaths do.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:44Speaker 06

  I mean, here's the thing, and, and I'll just be blunt. One of the, one of the things, uh, you know, we had many people in our network all excited about the new administration and they, they participated in Maha groups and worked very hard to do everything they could to get Washington to change its policies. And one of the great things about watching what has happened, because it's in, in most respects, it's completely gone the other way, is it's proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a bipartisan commitment to depopulation. It's extraordinary.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Speaker 06

  Um, we had a wonderful, uh, scientist on the other day who, uh, has been very instrumental in trying to stop the liability shield for pesticides. And she got to the end of the show and you could see she was frustrated. She's very careful scientist, very thorough. And she said, um, so she, she really wanted to get her point across. She said, you have to understand that if this liability shield happens and they do what they say they're gonna do, if they get it, I consider that as a scientist to be an extinction level event, given the impact on female fertility. You know, it was, it was a showstopper.

• 1:22:01Speaker 06

  And so if you look at the policies coming through the sausage factory in Washington, these are, these are intentional policies to depopulate. An enormous effort has been made for almost my entire lifetime to come up with any strategy that can obfuscate or stop people from seeing the obvious. And something marvelous is happening, Tucker. And what is marvelous, and it's the first time in my lifetime I've seen it, that people are finally saying, oh, you know, they really do, they really are trying to kill us. And, and that's very freeing because once you know it,

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  you know, to get as far away from them as possible and protect yourself. And the, the thing that's very healthy about it, and one of the reasons I loved your, you know, 10 principles to save America, real solutions come when we let go. When we let go of hoping that there's some way we can go into that machinery and turn it around, it's not gonna work. So we need to leave, we need to get away from the diseased animal and go do things that can work. And if enough of us do that, what is possible is absolutely fantastic. The little secret here is if you look at that machinery, it is so destructive of wealth at the state and local level

• 1:23:26Speaker 06

  that if we could begin to reverse it, even 5% or 10%, you don't need everybody. The possibilities are enormous, particularly with the blessing of new technology. So it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to go bad here. It can be transformative. But what it requires is we've got to stop hoping, you know, that the people who would, you know, attack you for a $20 burrito. I mean, seriously, can anybody take Ben Shapiro seriously ever again?

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:24:00Speaker 06

  We need to laugh. We need to laugh, we need to just laugh and turn it off. Right? It's a joke. He's not serious. He's not relevant.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  That is the most, that's, that's the most hopeful thing I've heard in a long time. Catherine Austin Fitts. No, I, I think you have obviously deep knowledge, but also a beautiful perspective. So thank you very much for sharing it.

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Thank you, Tucker. You have a great day.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  You too. Thank you.