Paul Jay: How 80 Years of Lies and Profiteering Built the Doomsday Machine

Unknown Speaker
The nuclear policy of the U.S.A. was built on big secrets and lies. It was a policy that risked the end of the world. Today, we have a special guest, Paul Jay, journalist and director of the documentary, How to Stop a Nuclear War. He will show us how these old stories still shape public opinion and control our politics. So, How to Stop a Nuclear War?

Paul Jay
That was like the walk-on music for a wrestling show, which is where Donald Trump learned his politics. I don’t know how many people here ever followed the World Wrestling Federation. Well, it was a big thing. It used to be that more than a billion people would watch it every week, and it’s still pretty big around the world. There was an actual storyline in the wrestling where Trump played a billionaire against Vince McMahon, who owned the Wrestling Federation, and the story was Battle of the Billionaires. They each got to pick a wrestler who would represent them, and whoever won got to shave the hair off the other guy. So, of course, Trump won, and he got to shave Vince McMahon’s hair off and so on.

But the point is, Trump learned how to play a character, and he learned how to get the crowd to pop. So when he goes and he campaigns, he plays a character. He’s learnt that in maybe half of America, that character plays well. They like this narcissistic, ego-maniac, almost buffoon. It plays well. It’s not who he is. He’s actually fairly savvy and clever, but the politics is a politics of theater, and the media covers the theater as if it’s real, as if you would cover wrestling as if it’s real. They cover the theater of American politics- I’m sure it’s not only the U.S.- as if it’s real. But something real is going on, and it’s very dangerous.

Behind the sort of buffoon character, there’s a cabal around Trump that wants the United States to have its own Mussolini. Mussolini is the model, and this isn’t something new. A section of the American elite has wanted a Mussolini since the early 1930s. In 1934, there was something called the Bankers’ Coup. The most famous soldier in the United States was a guy named Smedley Butler, who was a Marine. They went to him and they asked him to be a front for a coup to overthrow Roosevelt. And behind this coup were the Rockefellers, the Du Ponts, and the Morgans, particularly.

They didn’t want the New Deal. The New Deal, for people who don’t know, I’m not sure, it was a kind of European social democracy as an answer to the crisis of the 1930s, because the other alternative was fascism. There was a section of the American elite that wanted fascism in the United States. It was amongst the biggest bankers and the corporations, and by 1935 to 1940, they were all doing business with Hitler’s Germany. They were selling arms, they were selling petrochemicals, they were selling the gas that they wound up using in the ovens. It was no secret, open, significant trade.

You might ask, “Well, how was Nazi Germany going to pay for all this?” Millions and millions of dollars of goods went to Germany between ’35 and 1940. These American companies actually fronted the money. They loaned the money to Germany to buy American products. They were so sure Hitler would win. They were quite okay with a Europe controlled by Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, they wanted that, and they wanted to turn that against the Soviet Union, but they would live with a fascist Europe, and they were hoping to have the same thing in the United States.

Back up one more step. I’ll try to do this quickly because I’m supposed to do this in 20 minutes. The United States was founded on slavery and the genocide of Indigenous people. That means from day one, there had to be a very strong military. So the militarization of the United States begins pretty much at the very beginning. The plantations created cotton on such a scale that it drove the textile manufacturing of England and the Northern United States. In fact, Marx said, “Without American cotton, there would have been no industrial revolution in England.” I mean, it would have happened eventually, but not then.

So baked into the very core of American culture is militarization for suppressing the slaves, militarization for opening up land, stealing it from the Indigenous people, and expanding, eventually, northern capitalism west. At the nexus of all this, both the plantation culture and the expansion west were the big banks. The banks, first of all, were the middlemen in the cotton trade. The banks helped manage the trade of cotton from the United States to England. They even made money insuring the slaves, life insurance. Of course, the money didn’t go to the families of the slaves. It went to the owners of the slaves. To get the scale of this, by the mid-1800s, if you assign a value to the assets of slaves, they were worth three times more than every piece of railroad, every factory, and every farm. That’s how big slavery was to the United States.

So this culture of the elites of slavery and genocide, militarization, and then the banks, meaning financialization, it’s right in the DNA of the United States. There’s so much one could say, but I’ll jump to… The banks discovered something important in the American Civil War. There’s a lot of money to be made out of war. J. P. Morgan, who was the big banker, was sort of the leader of the whole financial sector. He had a company during the U.S. Civil War that bought old rifles from the army at $2 a rifle, bought a company that refurbished the rifle by just revarnishing the wood a little bit, and sold them back to the Union army at $22 a rifle. This war profiteering and the big banks right from the beginning, right from the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1934, there was a committee called the Nye Committee. A Senate Committee, because it was such a scandal, the war profiteering in the First World War, that people were demanding to know why the United States entered the First World War. It was a war between European and colonial powers to redivide the world. Why did the U.S. even go? So the Nye Committee tried to answer that question.

You know what their answer was? The lobbying of the arms manufacturers, but even more, J. P. Morgan had loaned millions and millions of dollars to the British and French governments, and he was afraid that if they lost the war, he wouldn’t get repaid. So he got President Wilson to join the war. This is the finding of a Senate committee, a bipartisan Senate committee called the Nye Committee. You’ve never heard of it, and most Americans have never heard of it, because they buried it, because you know what their recommendation was? Take profit out of war, nationalize the arms industry, the actual recommendation of a Senate Congressional Committee, and they buried it.

So, why am I telling this history? Because the American elites, in the 1930s, there was a split. There was a section led by the Du Pont family, which began as a gunpowder company and then became quite a diversified petrochemical company, and went on to become the main company in the Manhattan Project. They were the ones who developed plutonium, but they were for an America First. They didn’t want to get involved in foreign wars. They wanted a very repressive American political-economic system, and they hated the New Deal. They didn’t want unemployment insurance. They didn’t want Social Security. They didn’t want a government employment program. They wanted to get as close to slavery as you could get.

Then there was another section of American capital led by the Rockefellers. They saw the world as their oyster. They wanted to create a world with open markets, freedom for American capital, American investment, and capture raw materials, and so on, labor and markets. They were at odds with each other because the Rockefeller vision, they didn’t love the New Deal, but they were okay with it, and they got along with Roosevelt.

So as we head towards World War II, the Rockefellers create a secret committee in 1939, 1940. A hundred bankers, lawyers, and corporate leaders were working with the U.S. State Department throughout World War II to plan what the world was going to look like at the end of the war. By ’42, they knew the Americans, the West, the Allies were going to win, and they wanted a real plan. The short, the nub of the plan was the bomb. They would have the nuclear bomb. They knew that in ’42. They knew it was going to work.

You know, the Manhattan Project involved more than 600,000 people. The invention of the bomb. When they show it in the film, it’s like one little village in New Mexico. 600,000 people. The biggest industrial project in the history of the world, the history of the United States. Nothing came close to the size of the Manhattan Project.

They did it not because they were principally worried about Germany having a bomb, which is the way it’s usually told. It was one reason they thought it was possible. But by 1943, they knew there was no German bomb. Even in the Oppenheimer film, they say that. So why do you keep building a bomb if you know Germany doesn’t have one? Because right from the early days, this vision is, we are going to rule the world, and the bomb is going to be the thing that gives us that power. This secret committee they create is a vision based on the two Bs, the bomb and Bretton Woods.

Bretton Woods would be the financial architecture of these supposedly open markets. They would use the labeling freedom and democracy, but it was all about creating a global capitalist system in the non-Soviet world that the Americans could dominate. And as all of you know, or you wouldn’t be sitting here, it was never about freedom and democracy. They supported dictatorship after dictatorship in order to have this freedom and democracy.

I can go more into this, but I’m trying to get back to today. So the architecture of what they call rules-based order, they don’t want to say international law, because if you say international law, most of these people in Washington should go to jail. But a rules-based order means our rules, our order. It means these open markets. Elections, as long as the results of the elections don’t challenge the global system. If the elections challenge the global system, then you organize a coup.

The argument all through the Cold War, up until 1990, was all about the threat of Soviet expansionism. They knew that was bullshit. The CIA was producing a report every year saying there’s no threat from the Soviet Union, no military threat. They didn’t like it politically, they didn’t like it ideologically. But the CIA was telling every presidential administration that there was no threat of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe or the United States.

NATO was based on a complete lie. Dan Ellsberg, whom I’m making the film partly about, called it a protection racket. “You pay the empire through your military purchases and your militarization, and we’ll protect you.” But protect you from what? They knew there was no Soviet threat, military threat, so what were they going to protect Europe from? Socialism. NATO was there to stop socialism from coming to power anywhere in Europe.

The proof of this is that one of the first things they did was interfere in the Italian elections, throwing millions and millions of dollars to defeat the communists. They nurtured a conspiracy in Italy called the, it was under this crazy NATO thing called Gladio. In various European countries, in the name of protecting against the Soviet Union, they created secret militarized groups to organize the far-right to try to attack the Socialists and Communists, including countries like Norway and Belgium.

Here, they developed something called P2, which Berlusconi was a part of. The whole rise of Berlusconi, of course, the Italian elites have their own agenda, but the Americans were there financing and manipulating. The CIA was very involved. I’ll jump ahead. They told me I have 20 minutes, but I’m going to hang around as long as you want to, if you want to have questions and talk, whatever.

So the architecture of global finance with American dominance, European elites under the protection of NATO, but really NATO as their guardian against the Left. That really was NATO’s role. But that architecture meant that the U.S. would dominate, and something happened that they didn’t expect. That’s the rise of China. In this architecture, where Asia, Africa, and Latin America are supposed to be cheap labor, resources, and markets, there was never supposed to be, in this architecture, a rise of what they call a peer competitor. So this is a big change.

What’s happening in the United States now is that they’re facing, we’re facing, all of us, but in the U.S., an existential crisis for American capitalism. They have no idea what to do about China. They want the market. It’s too big a market to give up on. On the other hand, it’s already, if you’re talking about war in the South China Sea in the area, it’s essentially a pure competitor already militarily. Every war game they do, and the Americans do, over Taiwan ends up in nuclear war.

Larry Wilkerson, whom I know, used to work for Colin Powell in the White House. He said they did seven war games about what would happen if there were a fight over Taiwan. Every single one of them ends up in nuclear war. They had to stop the war game. But this administration, this is what’s new about Trump. This is the coming to power of a section of the elites that want to break down the model that was developed during the Cold War, meaning this.

They no longer care about this system of alliances. They no longer care about even the norms of a democratic society. They don’t know what to do about the climate crisis except deny it’s happening, but they know it’s happening. It’s not like they don’t know. I mean, one of the reasons they’re building this wall is not because of cheap labor, immigrants, and migrants coming up for work. Within 10 to 15 years, maybe less, we’re going to be crossing the two, and even some people say three degrees increase in average global warming. Millions of people who live south of the equator are coming north because it’s going to be unlivable. They’re building that wall because they’re going to put machine guns on those walls to stop people who are desperately trying to escape the climate crisis. They know it’s coming.

They know that the financial architecture, the crash of ’07, ’08, was just a symptom of a disease. The disease is finance capital has become so parasitical. Speculation is so dominant. They don’t understand it themselves what the hell is going on. They can’t even predict when the next big crisis is coming. A lot of this has to do with the digital revolution.

I knew a guy who was a broker in the 1960s, and he said, “Could you imagine doing subprime mortgage-” Everybody knows what that was? Where they gave all these phony loans to people who couldn’t pay. “Imagine doing that with a pencil and paper.” Computerization put banking on steroids. So the trigger that triggered ’07, ’08, these fracture lines in finance, they’re all still there. Literally any day, you could have another collapse. I can give you a very concrete example, but you have to ask me afterwards if you want. So, [inaudible 00:23:10]?

Unknown Speaker
Yes.

Paul Jay
Oh, you want it now? I’ll do it fast if you want, if I can. The Bank for International Settlements, which is like the central bank of the central banks. They issued a report about a year ago. They said there is somewhere between 60 and 90 trillion dollars off the books in the global financial system. And what it is, is they have this thing where, let’s say a Japanese company wants, I don’t know, a hundred million euros. They go find a European bank company that wants yen. So they do a swap, and they say, in six months or a year, we’re going to swap back again. So whatever amount of money that is, it doesn’t go on their books because it’s all supposedly going to swap back. So the BIS said there’s somewhere between 60 and 90 trillion in these swaps off the books.

So the BIS said, “What happens if one side of the swap is in trouble and can’t do their end of the swap, and what if that swap is for hundreds of millions?” In the BIS document, I can show you how to find it afterwards; it says it will make the ’07, ’08 crisis look like a tea party. It said there’s not enough money in the Fed to plug that hole.

This is just one example of how fragile the economic system is. You have climate, of course, you have new pandemics. I’m sorry to be scaring the shit out of you, especially the younger people, but I’m going to get to an optimistic note, I promise. It’s coming.

So the way they’re dealing with this in the U.S. is instead of… As terrible as Biden’s foreign policy was, especially on Gaza and Ukraine, but as terrible as it was, domestically, Biden was trying to go back a bit to the 1930s New Deal. Big investments in infrastructure, at least taking climate somewhat seriously, putting some money into climate projects, and so on. Banking regulation, environmental regulation, domestically, it was better than we’d seen, even from the Obama administration. I’m not talking foreign policy here.

Well, the elites hated it. They didn’t like the infrastructure spending because it was being done too much through the government. They didn’t like the regulation. And here comes the Trumpian campaign offering authoritarianism, deregulation, and most importantly, lower taxes. Biden was going to raise taxes just a fraction. That was enough. So what the Trump administration represents is this recognition by a section of the banks, Silicon Valley, and traditional arms manufacturers, that this authoritarian Mussolini-style regime is the way out. Their agenda in terms of foreign policy is almost war with China, and maybe it’s even war with China.

I ran into a guy from a big arms contractor at an airport. He told me the war is coming in 2027. This is a guy who’s a vice president of one of the largest military contractors. They are planning a crisis in 2027. They want to bring it to a boil. There are people within the Trump administration, and now within the Pentagon, who are Trumpists, who believe you can have a war with China without it going nuclear, and they want it.

Their thinking is that time is on China’s side. They are leading in so many technological areas now. Even in AI, it looks like China is a peer competitor in AI. They used to think the U.S. was ahead two, three years. Now it looks like China is at the very least a peer. In hypersonic weaponry, China actually has a lead. They’re building more ships. But what they don’t tell you, the ships they’re building are all defensive. They’re not building aircraft carriers to speak of. I think they have one now.

Everything China is doing is mostly defensive. I’m not trying to suggest China’s such a benign power, but it’s not the military threat. Because what is the fundamental lesson of the Cold War? They kept lying to us about the threats. They exaggerated the Soviet threat. Now they’re exaggerating China. In fact, there was no military threat from China. Now, they’re exaggerating the Chinese threat. “The Chinese want to take over the world.”

This guy I met at the airport. I said, “Why a war with China?” He said, “Because they want to rule the world, take over the world.” I said, “Well, commercially, they kind of already have, haven’t they?” He says, “No, no, militarily, and the war is coming in ’27,” he said. And I said, “Why ’27? Why not ’28? ’26? ’29? Why ’27?” He says, “Oh, that fits with our procurement schedule.” In other words, before the Trump presidency is over, they want to make sure they get all their contracts locked in. And what’s the great prize? The Golden Dome.

I cracked a joke last night, and nobody seemed to laugh, so I’ll do it again. My line is the Golden Dome. It’s not about the Dome, it’s about the gold. It’s a con, a complete out-and-out con. It always has been because there’s no such thing as an anti-ballistic missile system that can stop ICBMs coming in from space. I think, what is it? Five, six times the speed of sound. They’ve described it like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Well, let’s say AI, as part of this system, actually can hit a bullet with a bullet, but they can’t distinguish between the bullet and the bullshit.

Because no missile comes in without being surrounded by decoys. One missile can have a thousand decoys. It’s impossible. It can never work. They know it can’t work because it’s not about the defense. It’s about the money that can be made because what does an ABM system cost is how long is a piece of string, whatever the hell you can get away with. It’s a boondoggle, but it’s such a dangerous boondoggle because if it works even a little bit, it means the Russians and the Chinese have to, one, build even more weapons to evade it because the more you can overwhelm the system, the more success you have. Number two, they may have to try to build their own. It all merges into an AI arms race, which is where we’re at.

So, people like Eric Schmidt from Google are warning us that AI is an existential threat all on its own because it’s going to become autonomous, and it may decide the best solution is not to have humans. This is coming from the guy who ran Google for years. He’s an investor in the militarization of AI, and that’s the main place these AI companies are making money right now, it was with the Pentagon.

Last week, I think it was, the Pentagon just recruited four leaders of the AI companies and made them lieutenant colonels in the armed forces. I guess, I think it was the Air Force. These are one step down from general. These are just corporate tech guys. This is so they can merge Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence, and fully integrate them into militarization.

All right, so what can we do? Well, to be honest, I call myself a clinical optimist. My great-grandfather had a great line. My uncle, when he was a kid, asked my great-grandfather, “Do you believe in miracles?” And he said, “No, but I rely on them.” So I’m kind of like that. But it also means we have to consciously try to bring about such a miracle. We don’t have a choice. The choice is the end of human civilization. That’s the choice. Because these elites are so in a drug, sex, money-induced semi-coma of yachts and living a ridiculous life.

I mean, there’s never been a class in the history of the world that has so much wealth. They think they can survive anything. They think they’re immune. They can build $50, $100 million silos. They’re buying old missile silos and building these ridiculous bunkers. I’ve been saying, “Just one thing, make sure you take to your bunker a coffin because you’ll be dead in that silo before there’s a world you can live in.”

Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers and so on, called it institutional madness. It’s built right into the system. It’s so irrational. You would think for the sake of their own system to save capitalism, they would deal at least with the climate crisis, but they won’t because the fossil fuel companies have too much at stake, the whole militarization.

The other thing that’s happened, which is a good thing and a bad thing in some ways, Wall Street has become even more concentrated. In the ’07, ’08 crisis, the Lehman Brothers went down the bank and lots of people lost money. The only things that didn’t get completely tanked were Vanguard, which is an asset management company that manages the funds for pensions, and this and that. They took a hit, too, but what they do is they buy an entire stock index.

Well, he’s telling me my time’s over, but they also told me if I want to keep going. So it’s up to you. If anybody wants to go, you go. I don’t follow rules very well. So when they tell me I’m done, I’m done. See?

Anyway, the point is, four companies, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and what’s the other one? Okay, it was four of them, but BlackRock by itself now manages $10 trillion more than the GDP of China. One company, then Vanguard, then State Street. They own, between the three, four of them and a few other ones, controlling interest in pretty well every major company in the world if it’s traded on a stock exchange, including the banks.

This is potentially a good thing. I mean, it’s a bad thing because they exercise such enormous power. The good thing is, if you’ve ever had a government that actually represented the people, you could nationalize four companies. You have the whole economy.

What can we do? We need to learn how to talk to people who don’t agree with us. We’re pretty good at talking to people who kind of agree with us. Honestly, we’re even better at arguing with people who kind of agree with us. But we’re not very good at talking to people who really don’t agree with us.

So I once had a chat with a guy who was the fire chief at 9/11 at the buildings when they came down. His son was a fireman who was in one of the buildings when it came down. He’d been a Democrat his whole life. After he lost his son, he was so furious at the terrorists, he started an organization called Democrats for Bush.

Anyway, I told him I was doing a film I was researching called Why Do They Hate Us? I wanted to take a group of 9/11 families to Pakistan and Afghanistan and ask them to go around asking, “Why do you hate us?” Anyway, I started just telling them how the CIA brought Bin Laden to Afghanistan. Do you guys all know this? Some do. Because Arabs who speak Arabic had a mythological profile in Afghanistan, where they spoke Farsi or Pashto, and they thought that meant they were closer to Allah. So they wanted a figurehead for the anti-Soviet resistance. So they bring Bin Laden to Afghanistan. I started telling him some basic stuff about the history, and it blew his brain open. He’d never heard any of it.

Something in the United States, I said this last night, 30% of Americans are functionally illiterate. They can’t read enough to read labels. 30%. They barely operate at a grade five level. 48% barely operate at a grade six level, 48% of the population. Now, it’s not that much better in Italy, by the way. These people’s identity is formed by a school system where history is taught right out of the pages of the Cold War.

The only identity you grew up with in much of America, especially white, rural America, is that your great achievement in life is two things. You’re an American, which makes you number one, and you’re white. “At least I’m not black. I may be poor, I may not have a job, I may hate my life, but at least I’m white.” That’s the identity. It’s paper-thin. People are suffering. Which is why they’re susceptible to this Trumpian psychosis. But their real-life experience is already showing them that the promises of Trump are false. Prices aren’t coming down. Life isn’t getting any better. Trump’s already promising new wars. The fabric of lies is starting to tear. I wouldn’t say the Emperor has no clothes, but he’s getting close to a T-shirt and a jockstrap, and the clothes are coming off.

But what’s going to take its place? Unless we, and I mean people who are progressive, consider themselves on the Left, even if not on the Left, at least rational, if we don’t learn how to talk to people who don’t agree with us, then what’s going to take its place is another version of Trump. It will be Trumpism without Trump. They’ll come up with Vance, or they’ll come up with somebody else. It could be Rubio.

This section of the elites has bamboozled enough of the population that, so far, they can win elections, but if you remember, I don’t know if you know, Trump actually promised not to have elections in 2028. There was a meeting of Christians. It’s on video. I’ve got it on my website. He says, “My dear Christians, you won’t have to vote again. Just vote this time.” And they’re serious.

So around Trump is a cabal of Christian Nationalists’ absolute fanatics, led by a guy named Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is one of these PayPal billionaires. He owns a big investment in Palantir and Anduril. These are the leading AI-militarized companies now working with the Pentagon who are now front and center to get the contracts for Golden Dome.

My point is this. When we talk to people who really don’t agree with us, whether they support the far-right in Italy or the far-right in the United States, it’s become their identity because they don’t have much of an identity outside of it. So when we talk, and I’m not saying I know how to do this yet. I’m trying to figure this out. We have to find how to talk about these things without challenging their very identity. When I talked to that fire chief captain guy, as neutrally as I could, I told him some facts he had just never heard. I’m sure a lot of it is stuff that all of you know, or you wouldn’t be here.

People, on the whole, I believe, and this is where I believe in miracles, there’s a book, a woman named Karen Armstrong. She was a nun, but she wrote the biographies of Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha. She had a great line in one of her books. She says, “At the time of the decline of empires, people lose their ideological moorings.” They don’t know what to believe in anymore. This is at a time when the great religions emerged because they offered a new belief system that, especially with Christianity, was very revolutionary. The early Christians were an anti-Roman revolutionary movement.

I think we’re at a time where, as dark as it looks, this Trumpian far-right, and the same as it exists in Europe and elsewhere, is going to get so discredited so quickly because they can’t and won’t solve any of the problems. Hitler was able to solve some of the problems, as was Mussolini, because in those days, militarization was enough to solve the economic crisis in the short term, but it’s not now. None of these places can become so militarized that it’s going to really alleviate the economic crisis.

So we need to get ready. We need to prepare ourselves to learn how to talk to people about what the real history is. People don’t have any sense because their identity is wrapped up in a phony version of how we got here. But if we can explain how we got here in a way that doesn’t challenge the person’s identity, doesn’t insult them, respects them, because, I guess, it’s Jesus, but if we had to walk in the shoes they walked in, we would be the same as them. We’d have the same beliefs they do.

For one reason or another, we don’t. I was lucky. I grew up in a left-wing family. I didn’t grow up with a lot of the Cold War beliefs. But if I hadn’t- Daniel Ellsberg, who finally broke from being a cold warrior when he started to see the lies after lies of the nuclear era, but he believed in it to begin with.

I mean, concretely, in terms of nuclear war, really fast. Italians should fight to get out of NATO. Italians should at least advocate for no first use as a policy of NATO. Italians should believe and get into their heads that all Europeans have to believe there is no nuclear threat to Europe. Even if there was, do you really think the Americans are going to trade New York for Rome? It’s ridiculous.

In fact, Kissinger told NATO in 1979, “If you think we’re coming with nuclear weapons to protect you, you’re out of your minds.” There is no nuclear umbrella. It’s all bullshit. It was there as a mechanism to control Europe, scare Europe. They even directly lied in 1948 about a Soviet invasion they knew wasn’t coming. The CIA said it wasn’t coming. And they told the European… Anyway, I can go on about this.

But the demands in terms of Italy I think should be at least advocate no first strike within NATO, and even more so, get the hell out of NATO. Get nuclear weapons off Italian soil. They make Italy a target. They’re militarily useless, as if in a nuclear war, you’re going to put something on an airplane, go fly it, and drop it. It’s ridiculous. The Russians would have taken them out in minutes.

In the U.S., we’re advocating for getting rid of ICBMs completely and getting rid of launch on warning. There has to be a new treaty. At the very least, Russia, China, and the United States have to be negotiating the limits of artificial intelligence in command and control. We have to get back to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Get rid of this. Like, Italians should demand. “We don’t want anything to do with this Golden Dome.” By the way, did you see where the Golden Dome is also going to cover Europe? Well, it ain’t. They don’t give a shit what happens in Europe, and they never did.

So, very specifically, help me get the film out when it comes, because the film is going to deal with all of this in a way that I think will engage an ordinary audience. It’s coming out in the spring of 2027. If you want to help, send me an email. Educate yourself about some of the most important historical points, and then test them. Go talk to neighbors, people you work with who don’t agree with you. We have to learn how to have these conversations. Then, you don’t vote for any candidate that doesn’t have a plan for climate, a plan to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and if they don’t have those things, and a plan to deal with inequality, we have to connect these issues. Anyway, I’m getting all kinds of waves and everything. Technically speaking, we’re done, but I’m going to sit here until somebody pulls me off or everybody leaves. Thank you.