Red Pill Diaries – Geopolitics with Robert Vaughan – Transcript

This transcript was generated by AI. Errors may be present.

[Opening song lyrics]
Told you to walk away.
That was my first and last mistake.
I’m blue without your face.
Hey, what can I do?
I’m just lost for you.

Rasheed Muhammad: Greetings everyone and thank you for another edition of the Red Pill Diaries. I want to bring our esteemed guest right in and I’ll let him introduce himself and his qualifications. Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you please introduce yourself to the audience that will be watching you shortly?
Robert Vaughan: Of course, Rasheed. First of all, it’s good to see you. Thank you for the invitation.
We have a mutual friend and this is how we met—through Salim Mansur, who I’ve known for at least 25 years, and you had him on recently. He is a great guy and so informative.

As for myself, I am Robert Vaughan, an associate at Just Right Media—that’s justrightmedia.org, where anyone can see my body of work with my co-host Robert Metz.

Education-wise and work-wise, I have a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology, which is unusual for the field, but I pursued it because of my interest in neuroscience. I worked at the same university that Salim worked at—the University of Western Ontario—in clinical neurological science, family medicine, and physiology. That is my strength, whereas Salim’s may be history, geopolitics, and political economics. Mine is more psychology and philosophy.

Along those lines, I’ve worked behind the scenes for a number of political parties: the People’s Party of Canada (I’ve been documenting them), the Freedom Party of Ontario, and the Canadian Alliance. Both Salim and I ran for the Canadian Alliance—that must have been in 2000. I was Salim Mansur’s campaign manager in 2019 when he ran for the People’s Party of Canada.

I try not to get into politics personally upfront; I prefer working behind the scenes, although I did run for federal parliament. I have been elected to public office as a trustee for the board of education in the city of London, and then for the Thames Valley District School Board after amalgamation. I know a little about door-knocking, pamphleting, pressing the flesh, and trying to persuade people to come over to your side of the story. That, in a nutshell, is who I am.
Rasheed Muhammad: Since you deal with the psychology and the makeup of the human mind, what kind of mindset is the Western leadership in as we see them run roughshod over their own laws, regulations, rules, and the sovereignty that they claim every other nation can have as long as that sovereignty is submissive to Western domination?
Robert Vaughan: First of all, I should probably categorize this. I think you are generalizing for the United States and Europe. Western—I mean, you have South America in there as well, Caribbean countries; they more or less keep to themselves.

As far as Western leaders go, we are talking more or less with the United States preeminent, but then you have Macron and the European leaders who seem to want to embroil themselves into conflicts that really have little to do with them personally, and especially the United States and Canada.
We can talk almost as cousins in this respect because when you roll over in bed, we get crushed. That is how close we are geopolitically.

What is the mindset, the psychology of it? I have had epiphanies over the last five years, and you know what I am talking about with the COVID tyranny that happened. I am not the only one. A lot of people thought of things academically or detached. What happened in Nazi Germany is always the big thing—why did people do what they did? We can get into that.

But for me, what happened was it became personal when I saw that our own country was doing such draconian things, and I came to realize that these people do not have our best interests at heart. None of them do. None of the Western leaders in my estimation have our best interests as the people at heart. They are corrupt morally. They are gangsters. What other word can we describe them as? Thugs. With rare exception. There are always exceptions to this generalization. I would not want to smear everybody with the same brush, but they are few and far between.

I think that politics gravitates psychopaths and sociopaths. There is a bit of a distinction there. A psychopath is born without any empathy or the ability to empathize. A sociopath is bred that way through the environment—something happens so that they turn out to be really despicable people who may do harm. They may lose a little sleep over it, but they will do it anyway. That is a sociopath.
This describes, I think, the politics from the way I see it in our parliament to the House of Representatives to your Senate to the members of parliament in the UK especially. These are the parliaments and the bodies of politics that I know best—my own, of course, and yours, because everybody knows American politics. They have to. That is my estimation. They are gangsters. They are thugs. They do not care.

But the psychology of it, the philosophy of it, goes back perhaps to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He started it off by saying there is a spectre hanging over Europe—the spectre is communism. He tried to explain through his manifesto what communism was. This may take a little while. Do you have some time?
Rasheed Muhammad: Yes, sir.
Robert Vaughan: Okay. Because if we want to get into the mindset of the philosophy—and this is all about philosophy—people in general are products of their environment, of the people around them, where they were born.

If I was born in Saudi Arabia, I would be a Muslim. I would wear Saudi garb. I would have the same values as a Saudi. Even though I have free will, and people who are born in a particular culture do leave it—Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to mind. What prompted Ayaan Hirsi Ali to leave her culture was she read Nancy Drew. It was just this little one voice that came to her that made her leave her culture for better or for worse. The same is for everybody.

I was born in the province of Newfoundland. I was taught by Jesuits. I was brought up Catholic. I was an altar boy. But I have free will. There are so many myriad influences on a person that you can choose when you become an adult what you want to do, where you want to place your philosophy, how you want to act, how you want to be moral or immoral.

When Marx came out with the Communist Manifesto—this was about 50 pages long, imagine a little booklet 50 pages long by some, by all accounts, a slob, an unemployed slob—changed the world. Through that work, other people followed along, of the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School—people may have recognized that school of thought that started in the 1920s when these intelligentsia in Germany could not understand why the world was not turning to Marxism. They started the Frankfurt School to look at the economics. Maybe it is the economics. Of course, that is a failure. Then later on, they turned to the social aspects of it, the cultural aspects, and started studying that.

That school gave rise to other schools of thought: the post-structuralists from the 1960s and 1980s, the deconstructionists. I will throw some names out there—people may recognize Michel Foucault, perhaps the most cited scholar ever in history, over a million citations; people go to this man and take his work; Jacques Derrida.

From the post-structuralists, you got postmodernist identity-based critiques, and then to wokeism—what we are experiencing today for the last 15 years or so: identity politics, power structures, cultural critiques. But all of them have one thing in common—they are subjectivists.

Marx was a subjectivist in that he did not understand human nature. He thought of us as cogs in a wheel, as deterministic mechanisms that he could control or that at least should have been controlled by the powers that be to come to his agenda—the workers of the world unite type of thing, overthrow the bourgeoisie. He did not understand that human beings do not work like that. The same with the postmodernists, the deconstructionists, the woke people. They are all subjectivists. The world is what I want it to be.

You and I, Rasheed—I have watched a little of your stuff—I think that you would agree, and please tell me if I am wrong, that we believe that the world has an objective truth to it.
Rasheed Muhammad: Yes.
Robert Vaughan: Yes. Okay, good. We are on the same page. That is always good. There is an objective truth to the world. The universe, reality is what it is, whether we like it or not. And if we want to command it, we have to obey it.

Not so for all of the people who think that because you are a man, you feel like a woman, that you can just change, or vice versa, or any of those kinds of things. Just the other day, I saw somebody saying that mathematics was racist because 2 plus 2 may or may not equal 4. That is a rather dictatorial attitude to have—it could be 5. This is what we are dealing with.

This is the psychology, which is a function of the philosophy, the prevailing philosophy of the world, which is subjectivist. Now this is the people, the newspapers, the media, Hollywood.

As far as the politicians go—to get directly to your question about their psychology—they rule who represent society the best. People in the West at least gravitate to those politicians who are going to best represent their philosophy, their culture. That is why you see in your Congress or in our parliament people who exemplify what I am talking about—subjectivists backing things like gender fluidity and things of that nature tacitly, never even questioning it.

If an authoritarian figure says something, they immediately go to it and obey it. This is subjectivism as well. It is not critical—even though the Frankfurt School and the deconstructionists and the wokeists were all apparently critical critiques of institutions. They do not critique their own systems of thought. For them, it is authoritarian. What they say goes. If you dare to question it, you are canceled. You are killed. You at least cannot have any career advancements if, for example, you are in the media or academia or anything like that.

I have seen it firsthand. Personal friends destroyed like this because they would dare even question what is going on. Some have spent time in jail—like yourself. You get to meet some really interesting people. I have looked at some of your guests—Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson—all of these are great people with a lot of knowledge.

Like yourself, I too have started to assimilate everything that we take in from these great guests, and it changes our ways of thinking. That is why we can think critically about ourselves. These other people—I think you may notice—they could never ever criticize themselves. Can you imagine a Joe Biden admitting that he is wrong, or a Barack Obama, or somebody like that, or Nancy Pelosi: “Oh, I was wrong.” Never criticize yourself.

But people on our side of the story are always criticizing ourselves. That is probably sometimes why people on our side of the aisle are always at each other’s throats—because they are always critiquing each other and critiquing themselves. I changed my views over the last 25 years, but mostly in the last 5 years.

I have seen professors and people whose job it was to tell people the way it was in the world become despondent over the fact that what they have been teaching over the years is wrong, and they are trying to reconcile what they now know from firsthand experience during the COVID years with what they have taught in the past 20, 30, 40 years in university, and it is tearing them apart.

Rasheed Muhammad:
Same here.

Robert Vaughan:
I could go back to some of the shows on our radio show—we broadcast on shortwave; we used to broadcast on FM, but we were canceled because of our views—944 episodes to date.

I would like to go back and touch on a few of the episodes that I did. Three or four come to mind: 9/11, entering the war in Iraq—which Canada stayed out of, but the United States went in with the coalition of the willing—and things of that nature. I would like to go back and just say I was wrong about some of these things because I have got new information which has changed my worldview.
You will never see that as part of the psychology of the people in power today—again, with rare exception. These people who are the rare exception usually end up getting the boot.

Robert Vaughan: That, in a nutshell, I think may give you an understanding of what I think the philosophy, the psychology is of our leaders today and why they are doing what they are doing. They are doing it because they are thugs and gangsters and criminals, and they do not care.

Rasheed Muhammad: Yeah. I have experienced the censorship, the shadow ban, everything. I think I may have been the only show ever to be suspended off the air while I was doing an interview. They suspended me live on the air while I was doing an interview.

Larry Johnson himself said that my show should have at least a hundred thousand subscribers, and they keep my view counts artificially low. I will go one day and it will say 3,000 views in my analytics, and I will go back and it will say 247 views and stuff like that. So I understand that the price of truth is that.
My thoughts are to put it like this: as long as I can reach a few people, that is what matters. It does not matter about the large view count or the large subscriber base or anything like this, because truth is ultimately the only thing that will help people navigate this matrix that we are now in.

When we look at the leadership—as you say, these people are thugs and they have no self-awareness, no self-correction button in them—they will double down on failure. They will double down on bad policies. They will double down on policies that will become more detrimental to people only to prove a point that they are the powerful or they are the influential.

For an example, when we look at American politics and American policies, instead of Trump backing down when he knew he was wrong with the sneak attack on Iran, they doubled down. They doubled down and tripled down, and now they are planning for another attack. To me, this shows that they are not learning. They are just acting impulsively, and this could even be at the cost of their own security and the well-being of their own people. They are doing it over and over again.

We can see that with the sanctions on Russia—how the European Union is putting up a 20th sanction package, and it is not in the least affecting Russia as they thought it would, but it is bringing Europe to de-industrialization. It is also hammering American workers at home.

Why do you think that they are so hellbent on trying to present themselves as powerful and that they can bring people to their knees, even while the reality is stating that the policies that they are putting in place are actually a detriment to their own political and economic survival and system?

Robert Vaughan:
There may be a couple of answers to that, or probably a myriad of answers, but a couple stand out—because people are looking at what they are doing: Starmer, Macron, Trump, Carney here in Canada—and wondering why they are doing what they are doing when the obvious effect is detrimental or could have earth-shattering consequences like a nuclear war.

Some conspiracy theories out there—and I think there is a lot of truth to it—is that they have been blackmailed, and whether or not that is true, you will never find the evidence for that because criminals do not usually keep records of their crimes. Which is why when you look—people were anticipating the JFK files being released: you are not going to see anything because this happened behind closed doors. They did not take minutes. There was no agenda. It is ludicrous to think that.

Even with Epstein now—there may be something with Epstein because in order to hold something over somebody’s head, they have to have some physical evidence, so there may be something there; I do not know. So there is this possible blackmail issue, but I also think that there is what I have already talked about: they actually think that they are doing what the people want them to do.

A recent polling in Canada showed a majority of people here would like Carney and the Liberal Party to continue to give money to Ukraine and Zelenskyy, even though they know it is just going to go down the toilet or it is going to go to the military-industrial complex in the States or it is going to go into Zelenskyy’s own pocket. But they do not know these things, though. They are not taught that.
That brings up another point: the media is in the pay of the politicians, at least here in Canada—to a smaller degree in the United States and other countries. But I do not know if people in the United States realize that of course we have a state broadcaster, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and they are supposed to be at arm’s length, but everybody knows they push the Liberal party line; they are always deferential to liberalism and always critical of conservatism.

But under Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, he started to fund the other media except for outliers like Rebel News. They would not fund Rebel News or True North. But they will fund CBC, CTV, Global, all the big ones, Bell Media. They actually pay them $260 million over three years, I think it is, for them to push the Liberal line. They do not say that, but they say we have a committee which will evaluate how trustworthy you are, and we will give you this quarter billion dollars over three years, and then that has been recurring and more is promised. So the media have been bought and paid for quite literally.
People out there who do not tune into shows like the Red Pill Diaries or Just Right Media or you name them—a Joe Rogan or whoever—they are not getting the other side of the story.

From my own personal perspective, I would ask family members or friends or whatever, risking friendships by doing so: what do you think of Ukraine or Gaza or Carney or Trudeau or gender fluidity, and what are your thoughts on these things? They have never heard of anybody that I would mention. Jordan Peterson, followed by millions—never heard of him. That is how bad it is out there. All they do is watch the local news or the CBC, CTV, Global—in your neck of the woods, MSNBC, Fox, CNN—and they are inundated with the official party line.

So the politicians know this. The pollsters tell them what the people want based on what they have been fed by the media that has been bought and paid for by the politicians. That is why they are doing what they are doing.

I think that is the biggest part: they want to retain power like any thug and gangster wants to. They want to maintain their position of corruption and the salaries and the perks that go along with it—flying the jets all around the world, meeting and glad-handing actual people of merit like an Elon Musk or some of the movers and shakers of the world—because they have nothing to offer and they live vicariously by the people that they meet as leaders, as long as they can keep control and keep getting elected.

So they pay the media to tell the narrative that they then exemplify as politicians. That is why we are in Ukraine. That is why we have the views that we do. That is why the United States has a neoconservative foreign policy detrimental to keeping America first.

Those are just a couple of things—probably the media influenced by corruption and blackmail. They grow up in cliques. Here in Canada, we call them the Laurentian elite—of course, the St. Lawrence River, basically from Toronto all the way down to Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston. People are born in this strip in this huge country, the second largest in the world. They grow up on this strip. They go to the best schools. They know all of the people who are the players in this elite, the Laurentian elite as we call them. With rare exception, they become the leaders. So there are cliques, blackmail, the media. Have I missed anything?

Rasheed Muhammad:
Well, that is a double-edged sword also—for the policies that they put in play to keep power and to maintain wealth. They also dumb down the population.

While dumbing down the population, it is like setting a time bomb to the base of your republic or your country because these are the people—the people that you are dumbing down are your future scholars, doctors, lawyers, politicians, everybody.

When you give them this false narrative and then expect them to compete with the rest of the world that is getting a better and bigger picture over the years and over the decades, you will see that they start lagging behind.

I think this is where the Western world is right now. They are starting to lash out because the policies of their politics are now catching up with them, and they are losing their edge technologically, militarily, economically, industrially.

I think this is all a part of the push in Ukraine, the war with Iran, the destabilization of the Sahel, the embargo on Cuba through Venezuela. I think this is a lashing out because of the blowback effect—everything that you do has a reaction, and the policies that they have implemented are now—there is a blowback effect on those policies that they have enacted over the years. What have you to say on that?

Robert Vaughan: I agree with what you have just said, and there is a little blowback. We are living in an interesting time.
Gad Saad—I do not know if you are familiar with Gad Saad, Canadian pundit, university professor now in America, I believe—but he was on our program as well, and he wrote a book, The Parasitic Mind. He was talking about how when Elon Musk bought X, it was the most important thing he ever did or will ever do. I would have to agree with him because while Elon may have Starlink—which by the way I am using—he may be putting man on Mars, which will be fantastic; he may have Tesla, which again is a great product—but the best thing that anybody could ever do was make speech free and open, because it is from that that ideas happen.

So you are right—the pushback is coming because of people like Elon opening up speech again.
You started off by saying something about education, and this is another area that I have some familiarity with—not just personally, because as I mentioned before I was taught by Jesuits and Christian brothers (by the way, Salim was as well, taught by Jesuits in East Pakistan). If Jesuits know anything, it is a love of knowledge and a love of education. I think that was instilled in me at an earlier age.

When I read a book—it was more or less a pamphlet, Why Johnny Can’t Read—I had just had a couple of children, and they were going to go into school, and I was livid at what I was going to be putting them into. Luckily, I put them into Montessori at the beginning so that they could at least learn how to read and write and cipher, which they did quite well. But when they got into public school, I was aghast at the level of education and the degradation of the educational methods over the years.
Things like—we all learned, I do not know, you are probably the same age as me or thereabouts, give or take 10—but we learned phonetically. We learned the sounds of the alphabet and how they go to make up words. But then they went to look-say, and then they went to child-centered learning, which was a broader envelope for nobody fails.

Even when I was a trustee, I asked the chief administrator of the board for London—and by the way this is a billion-dollar budget, 5,000 employees—how many students has the system failed last year? He said, “None.” My response: “Then what value is an education if anybody can pass through it without any blowback to use your words for doing wrong, for failing? Then what is the value of a diploma? What is the value of a grade 12 education anymore when the stupidest person gets it just as much as the brightest person?”

To that point, we are bringing up a population of24 people who do not know how to put two sentences together, who cannot write cursively. Okay, that is going to be a secret code for us in the future—just want to write a note cursively and hand it to another person of our age, and a young person will not be able to read it.

But this is part of—you see some of the man-on-the-street interviews; PragerU sometimes does them. You go out there and you say on July 4th, what are we celebrating? “Oh, July 4th—oh yeah, what is that about?” Not a clue.
So this is part of the other part of the equation: the populace itself has become—through no fault of their own—really stupid by design, intentionally dumbed down so that they will take tacitly anything that an authoritarian says. The World Health Organization says do this—yes sir, we will go do that—and everybody jumps. How dare you go against a Dr. Fauci? How dare you go against a Bill Gates or a Joe Biden for God’s sake?

So you brought up this point of education—I hope I did not digress too much—but education is a huge part of why we are in the situation we are today.

Rasheed Muhammad: I always say that because I think the wise of the wise should understand that when you defund education and you dumb down the educational system, you are dumbing down the thing that educates and civilizes the very masses of the people that are supposed to be the base of society.

When you do that—as I said—you lay a nuclear bomb at the base of your republic or your society. I think more scholars and more scientists and more politicians should look at that because if they do not, what we are watching is the fall of America, the fall of Canada, the fall of the Western world.
They dismiss that because they have become so pompous, so arrogant in their power and in their wealth that they just say that we can keep this—what we have going on—in perpetuity, not realizing that everything comes to an end.

Robert Vaughan: As a public school trustee, I would say publicly: do not put your kids in the public education system. Of course, everybody is aghast that here I am as a trustee saying that this system is absolutely detrimental to education.

I would rather see a child not get formally educated than to be miseducated in a public school system. I do not know the school system in the United States.

Rasheed Muhammad: It sucks.
Robert Vaughan: You have down there things like charter schools and a lot of private schools—some up here as well, not so many charter schools, but private schools and Christian schools that people can circumvent the public education system, which teaches no values at all. It is amoral.
At least with a religious education, you have morals, right? If the child later on decides that “I do not want to follow the religion,” then it has been inculcated into them that there is such a thing as morality.
While in the public education system, everything is amoral. There is no objective truth. There is no standard by which you should judge your behavior when you go out into society. You are your own moral compass.

That is what we are seeing, I think, when we see people turn to drugs, people supposedly change their gender, things of that nature, or just simply coast along living in their parents’ basement playing video games and not worrying about going out and earning a living. Why should I? There is no objective truth. There is no objective values. There is no worth to my life. This has been instilled in them in the public education system.

So I think that yeah—not even putting them in school, just letting them pick it up from their parents or priests or neighbors—is better than being taught something that is fundamentally wrong and fundamentally can destroy not only their chances of survival academically or career-wise, but fundamentally destroy their own self-worth.

Rasheed Muhammad: I also think that it is a reflection of the political system because if you look at the disregard for property, life, differences of opinion, critical thinking skills—all we have to do is look at the political system in the United States or in the Western world, and we will see that the school system is a reflection of that and vice versa.
Just like if we look at the foreign policy of America, we see it as a microcosm of the domestic politics. This is the catch-22 of the Western world. They have now been caught in that cycle of that catch-22, and they are pointing the finger at China. They are pointing the finger at Russia. They are pointing the finger at nations that are striving to decolonize. They are pointing the finger at everybody except the people who are most at fault—and those are those who rule them and who continue to hold an iron grip over the educational system of these Western nations.
Robert Vaughan: There is so much to unpack there. You are absolutely right. It is a vicious circle, is it not?

The catch-22—if people remember, we throw that phrase around, but it is from Joseph Heller, who wrote the book. He was saying that the person in the book was trying to get out of being in the military by saying that he was insane. The catch was that no insane person would say that they are insane—they all think that they are sane. So there is your catch: the minute you say you are insane, you cannot be insane.

This is what we see with our politicians, is it not? None of them are saying that they are insane. All the emperors are wearing no clothes. Everybody—nobody wants to point it out, especially in the media. You and I will, and our minority will, but everybody is just looking at the emperors out there naked: everything is fine.

Rasheed Muhammad: I am sorry, my alarm on the thing is going off a little bit. I always try to keep track of time or whatever because I do not like to push anyone’s time, but we still have a little time going.
What do you think is going through the minds of the Western world as they see the global south rise? Since you deal with psychology—because when you have ruled so dominantly for so long and then you see that everything that you once have been able to control or interdict or reshape, when you see that is now out of your grip or grasp—what do you think is going on in the mind of the leadership of the Western world, specifically America, then Europe, then the other people that follow along with the United States?
Robert Vaughan: Hard to say what goes on in their minds other than “How can I feather my nest?” Again, they are a bunch of thugs and criminals and gangsters. So what goes through their mind is themselves.

But if we want to talk maybe the intelligentsia, the scholars out there who are looking at culture change so rapidly—I was born in the early 60s. If you have ever seen the movie A Christmas Story—

Rasheed Muhammad: Yeah, I was just watching it a few days ago.

Robert Vaughan: A wonderful Christmas story. That is the kind of Christmas I remember, even though that took place in the 50s. Again, I was in Newfoundland, so they are always 10 years behind anyway, culturally. But that is the kind of society I remembered. That is gone. It can never come back. I think we have to understand that that can never come back.

What gets me is the rapidity with which cultural norms have changed from those idyllic, if somewhat naive, times—because that was the time of the JFK assassination, and so we know things were going on behind the scenes that the media were not covering. There was no X. There was no social media. There were no shows like yours or mine to point out the inconsistencies of what we see and what the media tells us.

To go from those times to today with the complete destruction—and I mean complete destruction—of our society—it just boggles my mind. I am only 64 years old. So in that time period, one lifetime, we have seen a destruction, a massive destruction.

Salim once used a phrase: Götterdämmerung. It is from an opera where the gods—if something cannot belong to them, they will destroy it. That is what I think is happening with people like—I think it is exemplified with Nancy Pelosi when she tore up Trump’s speech, which by the way is a crime and she should be indicted for. That right there was a defining moment.

Here is Trump giving accolades to people and veterans and kids and saying the good things that he wants to keep within the United States and have them endure, and she rips it up. That was a defining moment, at least visually.
Now, do not get me wrong—I think that Trump for me has been a great disappointment, as much as I did support him in the past. There are so many things right now that disappoint that I have to be very careful when I say anything about Trump. It is like this: I support this; I do not. When is he going to visit Fort Knox, for example? When is he going to get rid of the Department of Education? Or when is he going to pull out of Ukraine, stop giving them billions of dollars and missiles? So yeah, I am not as big a fan as I used to be.

By the way, Salim on our show predicted Trump would win at the same time that pundits like Ann Coulter did—by the way, Ann was on our show as well—and they were predicting this, and everybody just laughed at them quite visibly, and Salim said nope—here are the stats, here are the figures; this is why Trump will win. That is when he came down the escalator—Trump, Salim called it.

Rasheed Muhammad: So he was a big fan, but since then, not so much—especially since Trump seems to have been driven by the neoconservative agenda more so than we thought that he might have been. We thought that he had at least a bit of independence when it came to things like that, but apparently not.

Anyway, I think I have digressed from what you were originally asking, but I am glad that you did because we have to understand Trump’s beginning—because he made his money in the casinos also. So he had connections with gangsters and stuff. A lot of people do not know his—like I think I call it from Obama to all of them and their interconnection with crime and the Clinton family, all of this.
I want to play something for you since you got on that subject. This is—I played this before on the show, but I have to play this again, and maybe this will give you an understanding of why Trump is doing what Trump is doing. This is from Jeffrey Sachs. He is quoting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[Plays clip] There is a wonderful—I do not know, wonderful; my wife does not like me to use that word when I refer to President Putin’s statements—I will say just very accurate. That is in an interview that President Putin gave to Le Figaro in 2017. He has an observation which I found very astute or very accurate. He said, you know, I have dealt with three presidents now. He says they come to office with ideas, but then soon enough the men in dark suits and blue ties show up and tell them the way the world really is. That is why things continue as they are essentially no matter who is in office.
I think that there is a great—so the deep state has to me—the deep state will not allow you into a position unless they have something on you, and they will also—for you to ascend to that, you have had to have connections. Because if we look at the whole situation and we go back to the Epstein thing, we look at all—Obama, Clinton—we see Trump, and these people rubbed elbows with Epstein constantly. Before Epstein, they rubbed elbows with each other.

So to me, they play on the desires of the people: “I will change this.” Look at what Obama did: change, change. He comes into office, and what change did he provide? More change out of the people’s pockets that are poor into the richer people’s pockets.

We look at Trump: no more wars. Look at him starting wars with Venezuela and starting wars with Iran and all of this stuff. I think that they do this to keep—they have to play upon their base. The deep state looks and says okay, these people are disgruntled; we will offer them something of what they want, and this candidate will allow this candidate to ascend, and then they will speak to the issues of those people.

But when you really look at the policies, they never actually hit the issues really of what the people wanted. If you say that because you can look at the MAGA base and how they are splitting off and how they are getting fed up with Trump promises—it goes to show you that President Putin had it right when he said that people come into office with good ideas sometimes, but then soon those people in black suits pull up and say, “Hey, this is how it works. This is how it is going to happen.” And if you do not, you will end up like JFK.

Robert Vaughan: I think it is quite true. It is unfortunate, but it is also part of the system.
I do not necessarily want to suggest that Trump—because of the people he has pictures with—is like those people. You do not get to be in his position or even to be a president of the United States or a great businessman without hobnobbing with the rich and famous. That is part of the networking apparatus that you have to do. It is how often do you do it after you find out that the guy is a reprobate, that the guy is bad, like a Clinton—he knew all about Epstein; of course he was part of the whole thing. Trump, not so much. There have been people who are saying that Trump—no, Trump was no problem with him. That remains to be seen. I am not an expert on the Epstein file, so I do not know. But you cannot be a mover and shaker unless you hobnob with the movers and shakers. So I do not want to say guilt by association. Oh, here is a picture of FDR with Stalin—of course, they were negotiating the end of the war.

On the second point, yes—the people in the dark suits and the blue ties. Absolutely. The bureaucracy is a huge juggernaut that no one person can really change, especially in the United States with your checks and balances.

Trump is great at dropping executive orders, but executive orders can be overturned by the next president. They are not law. You have the checks and balances of the House and the Senate and the Judiciary and the Executive—which by the way is a great system, and I wish we had it in Canada, but we do not.

In Canada, the prime minister is basically king, and he can do almost anything as long as he has the approval of his cabinet. That is it. He can do anything because he has appointed the judges, he has appointed the governor general who represents the sovereign in this country, he has appointed all of the cabinet positions—everybody. They are all his. When he says jump, they all jump. Not so in the United States. You have got the two-party system—uni-party if you want to call it that—but you have got all of those checks and balances which I envy as a Canadian.

So yeah, the deep state—I think it was Trump who actually first used during a press conference the term deep state. The term had been bandied about before, but here you have the president of the United States talking about the deep state in those terms, which I found amusing. So yeah, he is being pushed in directions he probably does not want to go in.

I think when he gave a press conference—one when he was talking about lowering the cost of drugs, pharmaceuticals—he says, “I am going to be a little quiet for the next few days because I am going to upset a lot of people, and I have to take care of myself.” I cannot find that clip. So Rasheed, if you can ever find that clip—I remember it distinctly, him saying basically alluding to the fact that I better lay low here as the president of the United States surrounded by Secret Service because I am going to upset some really powerful people by doing this, trying to lower the cost of drugs.

So what can you expect from a chief administrator—which is really all the man is, except for being commander-in-chief?

Not only that—think of what Obama said. You brought up Obama. If Obama said he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, never did—could not close it. Why not? If he is president, if he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he can do that. He did not.

You Americans have 750-plus—depending on how you calculate them—750-plus with a quarter of a million men and women in uniform throughout the world, outside of the United States: 750 bases or stations throughout the world. How many does Russia have? Two—Belarus, they got one, a couple in Syria, right? Russia does not want to take over the world.

On the other hand, your country—I do not know. They seem to be—this was part of PNAC policy for the Project for the New American Century, one of the founding documents of the so-called modern neoconservatism—said that the United States has to have the ability to wage war on two fronts—not mentioned, but they meant Russia and China—and we should be, meaning the United States should be, the constabulary of the world.

Well, I am sorry—you were a great country, and I certainly admire the United States from 1776 till maybe 1913 with the 16th and 17th amendments, income tax, and getting rid of the legislators appointing senators, which is the way it should be instead of the population at whole—because you got your lower house for that—or maybe 1898 Spanish-American War. Why did you go to war with Cuba and Spain? Why? Because the Hearst papers may have lied about the USS Maine in Havana Harbor: “Oh, it was blown up by the Spanish.” Do you have any evidence to that? Does not matter—”We will provide you with the war” was his phrase, right?

So from that—1776 to about 1913 or so, maybe up to 1945—it waxes and wanes. The United States was a country that I loved as a Canadian. I looked up to the United States, to the ideal, to the founding ideas of that great country. I have seen it in my lifetime devolve—get its tentacles entwined all over the world for the military-industrial complex. There is no other reason for it because nobody in their right mind is going to invade the United States. There is no existential threat against your great nation. Nobody could take you on. That does not mean that you have to have bases all over the world, all over the world getting involved in everything.

I think there has been 83—somebody said 83—regime changes instituted by the United States throughout the world. My God—that is not something to look up to. Yeah, sure, a lot of those regimes were probably despotic tyrants, but that is for the local population and their neighbors to resolve.
Much like with Ukraine—Ukraine is a fascinating study. You have got the Donbass. Kyiv was bombing the Donbass long before Russia decided to enter into the fray. People forget that it was covered on the main news. Do you remember the novel 1984?

Rasheed Muhammad: Yes.

Robert Vaughan: During hate week, what was said all the time—that they were against the war, they were against the Eurasians—Oceania is against Eurasia—then you had hate week, and all of a sudden Oceania is against East Asia. Nobody questioned it. Nobody dared question it in 1984.
Well, this is exactly what is happening now. Everybody: “Oh, look at Kyiv bombing the people, the separatists in the Donbass, in Luhansk and Donetsk—14,000 killed, I think, Ukrainians killing Ukrainians.” And so when Russia comes in: “Oh, forget about that—that was Eurasia; let us go to war with East Asia. Let us take on Russia.” This is a mad clown world we are living in—1984.

Rasheed Muhammad: Do you think the West will survive in this position because the world is catching up technologically? As a matter of fact, the Chinese have surpassed the United States in a whole plethora of things that the United States once dominated, and they are now the economic engine of the world. They are the manufacturing hub of the world. They have the largest currency reserves in the world. They have some of the largest gold and silver reserves.

They have opened up institutions that counter what was once dominated by the United States and the West. They have countered the IMF. They have countered the World Bank. They have countered the London and the New York gold exchange and stock exchanges. They have their own trading forces.
They are now doing—I think 97%—trade with Russia in the yuan and the ruble. They have now started doing more trade with the largest trading block in the world, which is Asian, using the yuan. They are also using the yuan in one of the largest trading blocks in the world, which is in Africa, and they say that Africa is now being positioned as the manufacturing hub for China—the same way the United States moved industry to China, China is doing some of that across Africa.
How do you think that this will fare with Europe, which has little to no resources, and the United States, which is now in a debt spiral the likes of which we have never seen before—and even though it is rich in minerals, to tap those minerals costs an exorbitant amount of money which the United States no longer has?

Robert Vaughan: A whole lot of questions there in an area that I am not that great on—which is economics or global economics at least—except in the geopolitical sense.

You asked whether or not the West will survive this political shift from a unipolar hegemony of the United States being on top—mainly because of 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union. It took time for them to get their act together. China back when I was born was a peasant society, and now it is thriving, has a GDP to rival that of the United States—I think they may have surpassed it by now.

So will it survive this unipolar hegemony? No, it is already lost that. This is not a unipolar hegemony world anymore. It has different centers of influence and economics. Whether that is good or bad, I do not know. I think it is probably for the best.

We cannot discount the global south—you referred to the global south and its rise. These are people. Everything comes down to people. I almost dislike talking about things in geopolitical terms—is that when it comes down to it, we are all people.

If you travel throughout the world and you meet the people, all they want—does not matter where they are—all they really want is to have their family brought up in peace, to be able to thrive and flourish. Unfortunately, a lot of them are embroiled in the machinations of their gangster thugs in power.
So I think it is a good thing basically that we no longer have a unipolar hegemony—even though we in the United States and we in Canada and the West benefited from being on top. I do not know that we have to be on top. Why cannot we just get along with our friends in the global south?

Now, I will give you a personal example—not for me personally, but for a friend of mine here. I live in New Brunswick, the province of New Brunswick in Canada. When the COVID happened and the tyranny happened, he and his wife just up and left—they got on the last plane out of here before they had to have that. I am mindful of some of the things I have to say because I know where you post your stuff.

They went to Ecuador. It is one of the three easiest countries for a Canadian to get in and get permanent residency or even citizenship later on—Panama being the easiest, then Costa Rica and then Ecuador, I think—but I do not have that mixed up. They love it there. They are free from all of the nonsense that is going on in this country—this is a godforsaken country, it really is.

If anybody wants to read my real thoughts on this, you can go to my Substack—Robert Vaughan at Substack—where I posted about a lot of what we have been talking about, Rasheed, a lot about how we are products of the milieu that we grow up in and the culture that we grow up in.

But he went down to Ecuador, him and his wife, and I talk to them frequently. As a matter of fact, I just did an interview with them—if people can see that on justrightmedia.org—where they talk about the health care down there being far superior than what they left behind in this country; where he just posted the other day a Christmas parade, and it was friendly, right? There was no violence going on, no bollards in the street to stop trucks going in blowing up the place. A helicopter came overhead and dropped confetti on everybody as they had the floats of the nativity going down the street. He said, “This is wonderful. I can participate or not—it does not matter. But I am not out there trying to destroy it or denigrate the culture that has stood the test of time in this country, a country long older than Canada.”

So will the West as a collective survive? Yeah, I think we will survive. We do not have to be on top. We just have to think of ourselves as individuals, as people—as Chinese, as Japanese, as Ecuadorians, as Americans, Canadians, British, German, Russians, Ukrainians—and that we all want the same thing, which is peace and to flourish as individuals. At least that is what the majority of us want.

I think we have to understand through shows like yours and social media that we are being really sold a bill of goods by our politicians. We have to be critical and really hold their feet to the fire and throw the bums out if they are not following an objective reality where there are objective truths and an objective morality.

So yeah, we will survive people. I have great sense of hope for people because we survive. Look at what happened in World War II—the devastation. Japan survived, Tokyo survived, Dresden survived—well, except for those who were killed—they all rebounded as a nation, as a people, and recovered. So yeah, we will survive.

Rasheed Muhammad: In closing, as we talk about this—why, and you brought the question up, why does the United States or the West have to dominate, and why cannot we just live amongst as equals amongst others?

Well, the United States’ stated policy—it is stated national policy—is to prevent any nation or combination of nations from becoming a near-peer or peer power at all costs. So if this is the stated policy and the stated goal of the United States, how can they accept—without war—how can they accept a multipolar world?

Because we see they are burning down the world trying to prevent Russia from reemerging. They are positioning 65% of their warships and weapons to Asia to try to keep China hemmed in in the two island chains, and they are trying to position ships and submarines on the Malacca Strait to cut off China’s water access for trade or whatever.

How—with the mindset of we can exist as equals or one in a world of many poles—how is that possible when the policy and the policymakers have it in their mind that America must dominate at all cost or else let us just burn the whole thing down?

Robert Vaughan: I think you are probably referring to a neoconservative type of policy because that kind of policy flies in the face of the foundation of the United States of America.

I think Salim even mentioned it when you had him on as your guest. He quoted John Adams—I do not think he was president at the time; I think it was an ambassador or another official capacity. He said that the United States does not go out to seek monsters to destroy. It was not a nation of hegemony or of conquest or of empire. It was a place where people could come and assimilate into a nation where individual rights reign supreme—not collectivism, not collective rights, not nationalism and patriotism perhaps, but not nationalism.

So when you say this policy of not allowing any nation or group of nations to become a threat either militarily or economically against the United States—that is a shame. I think that policy has to change because it is un-American. It flies in the face of your founding fathers.

Rasheed Muhammad: Thank you so much for joining me on the Red Pill Diaries. We are going to have to get you back on the platform. I really, really appreciate it. I want you to have a blessed and safe day. Thank you so much.

Robert Vaughan: Thank you, Rasheed. It has been a pleasure. Thank you for all you do.

Rasheed Muhammad: Thank you so much, sir. Be blessed.

Robert Vaughan: Thank you. You too.
Rasheed Muhammad: For everybody who will be watching us later as this airs, I want to take the time out to say—as I often say before we leave—do right by others, not because there is some material gain or some accolades or some praise or applause to be had. Do right by others because it is the right, the humane, and the godly thing to do.

Because even when no one else is watching you, remember that God Almighty is watching you. As my late great and most beautiful mother would always say, “God sits high on the throne of power, but he looks low at the actions of men.”

Know that I love each and every one of you who loves truth, but know that the love that I have for you will always pale in comparison to the love that God has for you.

Until we next speak again, stay strong, stay true, but above all things, remember to stay righteous because righteousness is the only thing that is going to get you out of here. Hey mama, your baby boy loves you more than life. Deuces everybody. Thank you all for joining me. We are out of here. Peace.
[Closing song lyrics]
Told you to walk away.
That was my first and last mistake.
I’m blue without your face.
But what can I do?
Cause I’m just singing and you’re just lost for you.