Ramble On: Putin's Rasputin & Trump's Chump (video)

Morning thoughts on Alexander Dugin, "The Geopolitical Future of Russia," Elon Musk achieving the Kremlin's aims, and "Walk Like an Egyptian."

Here is today’s ramble:

The transcript, which has been edited for shits & giggles clarity:

Hey, good morning. I’m recording this at six o’clock at night on Thursday, the 27th. So when you’re seeing this, it will be Friday morning. (I assume that Friday will follow Thursday. I don’t know how many assumptions we can continue to make here.)

I have a way of thinking about the whole Elon Musk thing. And as you can see, I’m dressed up in my black hat and my t-shirt. I’m dressed up like I’m going to a Cabinet meeting in Trump’s White House. Right? So I’m trying to figure out how to fit this guy in and where he fits in and how to think about him. And I think I landed on something.

There is a philosopher of geopolitics. I guess you can call him a political scientist. He’s kind of a mystic. He’s only 10 years older than me, even though he looks like he’s from the 19th century. His name is Alexander Dugin and they call him Putin’s Rasputin. Putin, Ras-Putin, Putin Rasputin.

This guy, Alexander Dugin, wrote a book called The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia in, I think it was 1997. And Putin’s very big into this guy, okay? And he’s very influential. He’s sort of like the Curtis Yarvin—you know, Yarvin is to Trump in this neo-reactionary White House as Dugan is to Putin. Kind of the philosophical grandfather, if you will.

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Now in this book, Dugin talks about Russia being this Eurasian landmass and how that needs to be strengthened and that the enemy is the West, the “Atlanticist West.” And I’m going to quote just something, just one paragraph out of this book.

He writes:

America is Russia’s total geopolitical adversary, the pole of the direct opposite trend to Eurasia, the headquarters and centre of Atlanticism. Positional geopolitical warfare with America has constituted the essence of all Eurasian geopolitics since the mid-twentieth century, when the role of the United States became obvious. In this regard, the position is clear: it is necessary to counteract US Atlanticist geopolitics at all levels and in all regions of the world, trying to weaken, demoralise, deceive and, ultimately, defeat the enemy as much as possible. It is especially important to bring geopolitical turmoil into the US domestic reality by encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements of extremist, racist and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the USA. At the same time, it makes sense to support isolationist tendencies in US politics, the theses of those (often right-wing Republican) circles that believe that the US should confine itself to its domestic problems. This state of affairs is highly advantageous to Russia, …All levels of geopolitical pressure on the US must be engaged simultaneously…All of this is central to Russia’s “foreign geopolitics” vis-à-vis the US.

What does that mean?

That means that aside from all the other stuff, aside from what he’s doing in Ukraine and elsewhere, what it means for the United States is that Putin sees us as the enemy and wants us destroyed—and wants us destroyed in such a way that we participate in our own destruction. And how will he achieve that? By any means necessary.

What Putin wants isn’t a gain of territory or anything like that. He just wants us gone. He wants us so weak and so fighting with each other and so, you know, fatally wounded that we don’t bother their ambitions anymore. He wants us sick. He wants us broke. He wants us stupid. He wants us fighting with each other. He wants us firing guns at each other. And he wants us isolated from the rest of the world and the rest of our allies. That’s what he wants. He’s said as much. In Dugan’s book, you extrapolate what he means, okay? Those are the things that they want. That’s what they’re trying to do.

Now, I wrote in Tuesday’s piece about all this evidence that we have that Trump is an asset of the Kremlin. I don’t know, whatever fucking word you wanna use. Okay, some people don’t like the word “asset.” He’s working for the Kremlin. He’s carrying water for the Kremlin. He’s doing what Putin wants.

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But for a minute, just forget about who these people are. Just pretend it’s just random characters you’re reading in a book or something, okay? You have a guy that gets elected, a demagogue who gets elected with help from the Kremlin, okay, as president. Now, the skillset that you need to do that, to get elected, to win the hearts and minds of all these MAGA, to trick people into believing that you’re actually a successful businessman and you’re alpha and tough and all this other stuff—that’s a very specific skill set. And obviously Trump possesses that skill set. The skill set he does not possess is how to run anything, right? Who does possess that? The person who possesses the skill set to do that, to actually implement the destruction that Russia wants is Elon Musk. And that’s why he’s there.

Elon Musk talks to Putin all the time on the phone. We know this. What are they talking about? What are they talking about? Episodes of Severance? You know, “Did you watch Downton Abbey? Vlad, what did you think of the episode?” No, they’re not talking about that shit. They’re talking about how to fuck with us, okay? Musk isn’t from here. He’s from South Africa via Canada. He came here and is sucking all of our money out of our—you know, that’s how he made his wealth, by government contracts. We’re paying him, right? And what’s he doing? He’s in the Cabinet, at a Cabinet meeting, I think it’s the first one or one of the first Cabinet meetings where everybody’s gathered. Trump is sitting there like a cuckold, which is a word that they like to use. So we’re gonna use it back. Just sitting there while Elon stands up wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt and just says whatever he’s saying. Everyone’s just there staring at him, not doing anything, okay? Why is that? Why is this guy allowed to disrespect the Oval Office, the Presidency, the Cabinet, all of this stuff? Why would he show such egregious disrespect? Why? Because that’s what the Russians want.

And look, you can say whatever you want about the people and who voted for this and what the policy is. Everything they’re doing is designed to make us weaker. Period. I wrote this in a thread on Twitter in 2018. And the only thing that’s changed is that Musk is in there now, and he knows how to do this better than the people that were there before. That’s it. That’s the only thing that’s changed, right?

But that’s what they’re doing. Look at all the stuff they’ve done. Every single thing they’ve done serves no legitimate purpose. There’s no efficiency. If this were in a novel, how would you make this work, right? This guy can’t do it? Well, I’m just gonna bring in a dude that, you know, didn’t get elected, wasn’t really part of the campaign at all, didn’t get approved by the Senate. And I’m just gonna kind of give him absolute power to do whatever he wants. And the Supreme Court is going to agree, and we’re just gonna do whatever this guy says. I mean: Elon Musk has captured the federal government, and Elon Musk is working for Putin. Whatever their exact relationship is, it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. The point is what he’s trying to do is what Putin wants. They want the same thing, which is us destroyed.

I don’t know why Musk wants it that way. Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe it’s too much ketamine. I don’t fucking know. But he’s doing the same thing. USAID—cutting that. What does that do? That just helps Russia. Makes the United States weak. It destroys, in one swoop of the pen, decades of work that we’ve done overseas to promote democracy, to end starvation in these countries and to make it seem like the United States is a good place and that we care. That’s gone.

He’s weakening NATO. Putin really doesn’t like NATO because Alexander Dugin really doesn’t like NATO. So Trump has been trying actively to destroy NATO or at least to get the United States out of it, okay, to weaken that Western Alliance, that “Atlanticist” alliance, which is how Dugin says it. That’s what he’s doing, okay?

RFK Jr., the anti-vaccines. We have people dying of measles now in West Texas. Measles! This is a disease that’s been eradicated. But you know, people watch this Kremlin shit. They say, “I don’t know, it’s scary. They’re going to chip me in 5G,” whatever the hell it is. And they believe it. And then these epidemics happen and people die. Children die because of RFK and what he’s doing. He’s trying to get rid of pandemic response stuff. He’s trying to get rid of cancer research. He’s trying to get rid of SSRIs, which would be such a mental health crisis. When I saw that, I couldn’t even say anything about it because it’s so insanely upsetting. There’s no reason to do that other than to make everybody mad—you know, mad, meaning insane mad, and cause havoc.

Then you have Tulsi Gabbard giving away the state secrets, getting rid of all these NSA people. They’re just finding ways to fire the efficient people in all of these departments. The NSA is what keeps us safe. And they’re just getting rid of these people because they are in a chat room that’s— You know what the chat room was they were in? It was a support group for LGBTQ members of that group. That’s what it was. And Tulsi, who’s in that cult, which hates gay people, her cult leader, Chris Butler, hates gay people. So does her dad, you know, a virulent homophobe. Now she’s in there and that’s just an excuse. Just makes us weaker. That’s all that it does. It makes us weaker.

And all of these things, laying off all these people under the guise of efficiency, right? And the budget, the austerity budget that these Republicans wanna pass that’s gonna cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut all of these things while giving tax breaks to the rich—all that’s gonna do is fuck up the economy. It’s gonna tank the economy. That’s what they want. They want the United States economy to collapse.

Why do they want the United States economy to collapse? Because they see us as their enemy, and we are their enemy. Because they’re our enemy, they’re the enemy of democracy. They’re war criminals. They’re going into Ukraine and blowing up buildings, destroying stuff, blowing up hospitals, like all of the whole thing. Everything that everybody was protesting for the last year that Israel was doing in Gaza, Putin has been doing in Ukraine for three years now. That’s the reality. And we don’t want to abet that. We don’t want to do that. What we need to be doing is to support Ukraine. Because Ukraine is fighting our fight, which is the fight for democracy. You know, that’s what they’re doing. And all we have to do is support them.

And now we’re not going to. Trump went on the world stage and basically, you know, in the United Nations vote, voted with Russia so that—you know, he didn’t want to say anything bad about the invasion. He tweeted out on Truth Social, this weird paragraph where he just took the Russian party line about the war. Why would he do that? Why would he insist that the CIA email him on regular email the names of all of their new recruits for the last two years? Why? Because he wants to out them to make us weaker. And that’s it.

And all of this America First bullshit is just isolationist. And you heard it from Dugin. They want us to be isolationist, because they know if we are united with Europe, we will kick their stupid Russian ass. That’s it.

They’re afraid of us—and they should be afraid of us. But right now, we’re in a position of weakness because we have this Kremlin asset in his baseball cap and his t-shirt in a meeting room with the President of the United States and the Cabinet of the United States all sitting there looking at him in some sort of weird awe. Why is that? These people are all assets. Whether they’re direct assets or not, they’re all doing the work of Putin, because they’re doing the work of Elon Musk. And that’s what Elon Musk is doing.

So I don’t know where we go from here, but that’s the way to frame it. That’s the way to think about it. If a hostile government installs our president, a guy to be the president, and that guy didn’t really know what he was doing to implement the stuff that they wanna do—the sabotage that they wanted to do—what would they do? They’d find a guy who did know how to sabotage everything and they’d put them in there and they’d give them as much power as they possibly could.

And that’s what’s happening. And that’s what’s happened.

So that’s what I got for you here upfront. A couple of quick announcements. Thank you to everybody who came out to see me on Monday night at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City. I interviewed Alexander Vindman about his new book, The Folly of Realism. That was fantastic. There is a video of that which I’m gonna post here—

—that you can go check out if you’re so inclined. It’s a nice video. They did a really good job with it.

This Sunday, I am going up to Saranac Lake, New York, where LB and I will be doing a special Five 8 event at the Adirondack Voters for Change annual meeting in Saranac Lake. I think it’s at four o’clock in the afternoon and I’ll put a link to that down there below. Hopefully you can come and, you know check us out—if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. We will be on at 8pm ET tonight, as usual:

Last thing: I just read, you know, it’s funny because one of my favorite songs from the 80s, really one of my favorite songs period is “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which I know is kind of like almost a gimmick song in a way, right? But I love it. I love everything about it. I love the words, I love the music. And I like to just listen to it and walk around because it makes me happy and it kind of pumps me up. And for whatever reason, I’ve been listening to that song a lot this week. And it turns out that they’ve now found—they found a tomb, a new tomb of a pharaoh that they didn’t know about before. And I think this is super exciting. Cause I don’t know, maybe we’re going to unleash some sort of spirit here that’s going to help us, you know, walk like an Egyptian.

Anyway, thanks for listening. Have a great week. We shall prevail.

This screenshot is necessary so the thumbnail doesn’t get wonky.