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On Today’s Episode –
The guys dive headfirst into the latest updates from the war in Iran with special guest Dr. Bonner Cohen. We’re going beyond the surface level today as Bonner and Mark provide a masterclass on the region’s history to explain how we got here. Plus, whatever happened to Greenland? We discuss why this massive territory has completely fallen off the news map lately.
Tune in for all the Fun
Bonner R. Cohen is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, where he concentrates on energy, natural resources, and international relations. He also serves as a senior policy adviser with the Heartland Institute, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, and as adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, New York Post, Washington Times, National Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. He has been interviewed on Fox News, CNN, Fox Business Channel, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, NBC, NPR, N 24 (German language news channel), Voice of Russia, and scores of radio stations in the U.S. Dr. Cohen has testified before the U.S. Senate committees on Energy & Natural Resources and Environment & Public Works as well as the U.S. House committees on Natural Resources and Judiciary. He has spoken at conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. Dr. Cohen is the author of two books, The Green Wave: Environmentalism and its Consequences (Washington: Capital Research Center, 2006) and Marshall, Mao und Chiang: Die amerikanischen Vermittlungsbemuehungen im chinesischen Buergerkrieg (Marshall, Mao and Chiang: The American Mediations Effort in the Chinese Civil War) (Munich: Tuduv Verlag, 1984). Dr. Cohen received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Hi, this is Chris Howard, host of Plugner with Chris Howard.
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Made in America, heard around the world. You're listening to Blood Forrest truth. I'm your
host, Mark Young, co-host engineer, Matt Umbarger. Matt, you're on your way down the Florida to join us
at the Florida office here today. Yeah, I'm going to come see you. I have that airport
square glass. Springtime. It's a horrible. Yeah, it's horrible here. It's 87 and sunny. It's just
torture. Folks, our guest today is our dear friend to the podcast, Dr. Bonner Cohen.
And we're going to spend some time here really digging into Greenland. And why this needs to happen,
what's important about it, why is it strategically important? But I want to cover a couple of things
first. Two items. First item is there was an attempted bombing in New York this weekend.
And here's the story. These were what are called TATP bombs or what the Iranians call
Mother of Satan bombs. They were packed full of improvised explosive surrounded by nuts and bolts
and shrapnel to cause maximum damage. They were launched by an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old
of, I believe, Afghanistan background who grew up, by the way, in a $2.5 million house in
Pennsylvania. I didn't know that. Oh, no, no, no, no. These kids grew up in wealthy families in
Pennsylvania. Oh my goodness. But they were going to strike a mighty blow for Iran.
So at any rate, the bombs didn't go off. Now, here's where I'm going with this.
And Bonner, I really want to hear your input in you two, Matt. It has been my contention for a while now
that there is something wrong in the actual brains of part of Americans.
And what I mean by that is, we have a part of the country who is now living in what they believe
to be a risk-free, consequence-free world. And here's why. When the bombs were thrown,
this was a dueling protest. Pro-Aran and anti-Iranian protesters on the same site.
The bomb was thrown into the anti-Iranian crowd, okay? They did not go off.
When the bombs were thrown, the anti-Iranian conservative-leaning people ran.
They all fled from the device. The pro-Aranian people approached the device, stood next to it,
pulled out their cameras to take video of the device, and sat there laughing at the people who ran
away from it. New York police bomb squad came out, and found it was a real live bomb that would
have caused massive destruction, except they were able to detonate it, and for some reason it did
not go off. And my question, the bombs you're talking about, what did you call them, T-A-T-P.
T-A-T-P. They're real unstable. It's not a nice thing. So accidental detonate, like the fact
that it didn't go off is darn near-miraculous. Yes, because just throwing it could make it
at home. So my question here is, what is wrong with people when you decide to make fun of the
people who ran from danger, and instead you approach the danger, stood next to it, and pulled out
your phone to shoot selfie videos. Bonner, what do you think? Yeah, that's amazing because, as you
pointed out, that bomb could just as easily have gone off, while those people were taking photos
of it, as it did when they threw it, because these are very volatile things, usually they're pretty
reliable. The anti-mulla demonstration, those people were simply lucky. It was, if you will,
the luck of the draw, and that's what it was. But your question goes to something deeper, namely,
they saw something humorous, albeit in a perverse way, about people running away from what they
rightly feared could be certain death for them had those bombs gone off. Among other things, this
tells you just how dedicated these people are, not just the two guys who were through the bombs,
ages 18 and 19, who, as you pointed out, grew up in very comfortable circumstances in Pennsylvania,
not in some refugee camp, in some godforsaken village somewhere, and we don't know the backgrounds
of the other people there. My guess is that they also grew up relatively comfortable, but they grew
up having been poisoned by an ideology. In this case, extreme Islam or Islam period for that matter.
And for them, for these people, the people ran away, weren't necessarily infadels, but they were,
they were seen, I think, by the bomb floors and their cohorts, as turncoats, as people who
turned against Allah, and they were, if anything, more contemptible than the infadels who had never
been exposed to Islam and in their own way had their own reasons for not joining it. So this is,
this is really quite amazing because it raises the question, how many more people
like this are there in the country, not just more people such as the two bomb throes, but their
companions who, under certain circumstances, were just as willing to do something like that. How
many of those people do we have in the country as the war drags on, and even after the war ends,
we have to realize that we have a certain segment of the population that takes great pleasure in
this. You will recall that when the two suspects were interviewed, one of them said that
because this whole thing reminded people of the Boston Marathon bombing, he said the real
problem there was only three people were killed. Right, they were hoping for a bigger event.
So he wanted more vying for his buck here with this. He didn't get it for reasons we can be
thankful for, but he didn't get it, and that was the disappointment. So this is a serious problem
because I don't think this was an isolated incident at all. In fact, we know it wasn't because of
the Boston bombing because of the gentleman from Senegal who opened fire from his SUV on the
students outside a bar in Austin, Texas, just a few days earlier. So we know these people are around
and we're going to have to be ever vigilant because you can't reach these people with any kind
of rational argumentation at all. They are beyond that. You're not going, some will be more radicalized
and others, some will be more willing to engage in open acts of violence than others, but they're
all playing on the same team. So by the way, and we're doing this while we have cut off funding for
homeland security. Yes, oh, yes, exactly, right. So here's my question. So this is a biology,
kind of a neuroscience question. We have a part of our brain, which is called the amygdala,
and that amygdala is the oldest part of our brain, and it's the part of our brain that identifies
danger. And it's the part of the brain that can tell the difference, as I always tell people,
the difference between a stick and a snake, and that part of the brain is there to keep us safe,
and that part of the brain has overriding capabilities. Well, you jump at the movies, right?
It's the reason you jump at the movies because that part of your brain doesn't know that the
slasher's fake. So that part of the brain is the oldest part of the brain, and it was important
because you really needed to know if there was a saber-toothed tiger behind you. That's right,
yes, that things could happen. And even though knowing where there was a peach tree where you could
pick some fresh fruit, the saber-toothed tiger needed to have priority because you don't need
the fruit of your debt. Are the amygdala's have how have they overcome millennia of evolution,
which has developed that part of our brain over thousands of years, and yet they have overcome
evolution. And before you answer that, let me add to this. This is the same thinking that takes
people with 20 different violent crimes and puts them back on the street, or the same crime that
makes you think that trying to drive over an ice agent is an acceptable behavior,
or going to a protest wearing a gun shouldn't have a consequence. What's happening here?
I do think it's fascinating that you brought up the whole biological element here because what it
tells us is that although we're wired to do certain things, and we normally do those things,
there are people and there are circumstances, and when those people and those circumstances
come together, the biology takes a backseat to something else, something else that was not there
originally as we human beings came along. But things that we picked up shall we say along the way,
that enable us to lose our fear of the things that we should fear. And there are all sorts of
different ways of this when a think of war when the commander says, attack that hill,
and if you're an 18-year-old kid and you've got a rifle in your hand, you see that hill is
very well-defendant, and attacking that hill just may not be a good idea. So there are times
when... But rationally, even though you attack the hill, you're afraid. Yes, yeah, you better be,
yeah, because... These people stood around laughing in the ground. So the way up in your brain tells you,
this might not end well, right? Right. But you attack the hill anyway, and that has enabled armies,
and maybes and air forces and whatever it is, to function over the ages. So we have seen this
mode of behavior actually integrated into, well, at the very least, and to the military sphere,
because if armies are... Well, you know, this D-Day landing here, I can jump out of the boat,
I can storm the beach, but there are guys up there with machine guns, and they can do very
night... You know, I think I'll skip this. So what are the things we do when we're going through
basic training, putting people through basic training, is to get them to overcome exactly what you
refer to, the natural biological fear of bad things happening, fear of death. So we do use it. Well,
we do that with police officers too. They're wearing a gun for a reason. They're going to encounters
in very bad actors out there, and they, though, too, when they go down that professional path,
that there is an element of danger in this, and we assure them, and usually, we're right,
that if you take certain precautions, it will not happen, but you have to be aware that it will
happen. So the phenomenon you refer to, at a certain level, it's been with us for a long,
long time, otherwise there wouldn't have been any wars. You know, we're the of mentioning.
What we're talking about in New York, and what I fear we're going to, we're going to see elsewhere,
no, we saw it on 9-11. When those guys drove the, I got flew the planes into the Twin Towers,
and into the Pentagon, they knew that they were flying into death, but they also knew that they
were taking these other people into death with them. And I think it's safe to say that they had
completely overcome their fear. Then you were exactly what they were going to do that day.
It went very well for them. They weren't caught, nobody suspected anything. And when the plane flew
into Tower One and Tower Two, and it exploded, and they died, for them, it was as successful
undertaking. How you deal with that kind of mentality, when you know at a certain level,
it's out there. This is, this is very, very tricky. And unfortunately, we don't have the best
defenses against this. You try to limit that behavior to the extent that you can. By, for instance,
keeping people whom we know are bad actors off the street. Their past behavior, not one time,
not two times, not three times, not four times, tells us what they're capable of doing. This is
everything from child molesters to violent criminals, white beaters, and what have you.
So judges or other officials who allow these people to go back out on the street with no bail
and what have you, they should be held responsible, generally, by the way, they're not,
but they should be held responsible for the mayhem that they are enabling the very predictable mayhem.
And of course, the other thing relating specifically to what happened in New York,
and the whole problem we have with radical Islam is, of course, we had open borders for four years.
It wasn't in competence. It was by design. How many bad actors? In addition to drug cartel people,
common criminals, what have you that came across, a certain percentage of those people
were terrorist, and they are perfectly willing and able to carry out acts of terrorism. So we have
done, I think, a very poor job, at least certain elements of our society. In charge of those institutions
that are supposed to keep bad things from happening, they have actually encouraged bad things from
happening because everybody knew that the borders were open. People trying to escape poverty,
coming here for quote unquote good reasons, albeit illegally, but relatively benign actors
intermingle with people who came here with a completely different agenda in mind.
So one of the failings of our society, or at least segments of our society has been the failure
to recognize the immense amount of harm that they are enabling. So here's, and I get all that,
but here's what's hitting me. It is rational to run away from a bomb. And as my friend Dan Sullivan
says, Dan always said that fear is wetting your pants and bravery is doing what you need to do with
wet pants. Very good. So the fear isn't gone. You're overcoming the fear. These people
didn't have any rational fear. They took selfies of themselves with a bomb and posted on social media
what cowards the conservatives were for being so chicken to run away from a live bomb.
Now where I'm going with this is the amygdala, that portion of the brain, some people refer to
it as a lizard brain. It is my understanding. And again, this is what I have an education in.
I believe the only thing that can overcome the amygdala at this level, because it's not,
I'm afraid, but I'm doing what's right. It's, I do not recognize danger. I think the only thing
that can overcome the amygdala at that point is the form of mental illness.
Yeah. Right. And mental illness, of course, is a broad spectrum. But we all come people in
our lives who were a little off some of them way off. Yeah, this is the crazy homeless guy that
jumps out in front of traffic. Yes, that's right. Right. And if you have these people politically or
religiously motivated, people who are a little off anyway for whatever reason, bad genes are
whatever, if they're, if they're a bit off anyway, then there's probably no way to reach them
at all. I think these are people who would have been in an asylum 50 years ago. Oh, yes, they would
have. Yes. We all remember, I grew up in in Georgia and our state mental hospital was in a
town called Millageville. And I can distinctly remember not being the best behaved eighth grader,
a teacher telling me, Blonder, if you don't clean up your act, you're going to end up in Millageville.
Well, that was kind of a joke because everybody knew what he meant. I was going to wind up in a
little hospital. And that is where we kept people, kept people who were not necessarily dangerous,
but they were certainly dangerous to themselves. They couldn't possibly function in society. Here,
however, they could be kept in relatively humane conditions. They would be thread. There was some
medical care and what have you. We deinstitutionalized these people across the board around the country.
Beginning in the 1960s, actually, it started under under the Kennedy administration.
It has been a complete disaster. That is the origin of the vast homelessness that we see.
Tell me something, both of you guys, do we need to bring back, do we need to make
a silence great again? Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes, we do need to bring back the mental hospitals.
We have to understand the word hospitals here. We can't really cure these people.
This is the new mega map. Make a silence. That's right.
From didn't talk about that too, having to read. Right. But actually, there is serious
discussion. If we read through medical journals and what have you, you will see voices being raised.
We need to bring this back because doing away with these mental hospitals or at least limiting
the number, the vastly limiting the number, has had absolutely terrible consequences.
So yes, yes, I would certainly advocate for bringing them back. Putting them simply in jail,
if they're violent, that's only going to take you so far. Upon having served their
sentence in jail, it provided they haven't killed anybody. They released, don't release them to
society. No, release them to the mental hospitals. Yeah, and it needs to be humane and needs to be
being decent treatment. But these people are a danger to themselves and a danger to society.
When you're taking selfies with a bomb, oh, believe me, yes, yes.
And cracking jokes, you're sitting there with your camera smiling of a picture of yourself with
an active bomb. You're nuts. That's insanity. That is insanity. Oh, it is. It is.
So my second topic, forget the Greenland. Right now,
now, polls are showing the between 83 and 89 percent of Americans, including 70 percent
plus of Democrats, want voter ID. But Chuck Schumer and many of the other Democrats continue
to go on and say, voter ID is Jim Crow 2.0. They're now saying not only is a Jim Crow 2.0,
but it is the return of wiping out the woman's right to vote.
Now, my question is, in Washington, we had this group of people, which is called
the House of Representatives. Is not the purpose of the House of Representatives
to represent the will of the people at that time in Washington?
Yes, it is. And what we see is that's a nice title, House of Representatives. And these people
call themselves Representative X, Y, or Z. But they're not representing the people. They are
representing for the most part their party or a certain faction of their party. And as Trump
has correctly pointed out, the only people who don't want a photo ID are people who want to cheat
because otherwise, why wouldn't you want it? So here, the loyalty of the members of the House
of Representatives is not to the people they are supposed to serve because, regardless of party
affiliation, heavy majorities, both of Republicans and Democrats, favor voter ID.
But you do see people who are going along with the human line, which is, of course,
there's nothing but a sound bike. There's no analysis there at all. Simply because
they are catering to forces within their party, forces who see lack of voter ID and other games
that can be played in the voting process. Not just early voting, but mail-in ballots and
these sorts of things. If you want to read an election in your favor, there are several avenues
at your disposal, one of the most promising of which is the voter ID. It didn't receive the
attention it should have at the time. But the first step we took in this direction was during the
Clinton administration, when a bill was passed, when the Democrats had majorities in both houses,
the voter voter. I think it dates to 1993. Sounds right.
The voter voter loss, as well, if you had a driver's license, all you had to do
to be eligible to vote was to show a driver's license. So many pricing people figured out,
well, voter driver's license, there's invariably a photo. They're a mugshot. We've all been to
the DMV and we've had those flattering pictures taken of ourselves. So you show that.
That means you are eligible to vote. If you have a driver's license, you're eligible to vote.
So then these people tell themselves, and they told us, even though I doubt if they believed
themselves because they knew what game they were playing, they said, okay, well, he's already shown
an ID. So we don't need for this voter to show an ID while voting. That's the road. That's the
slippery slope we started going down over 30 years ago. And the purpose of the exercise was
getting as many people to the polls legally or otherwise as possible as a way to jack up your vote
and keep yourself in office or get elected in the first place. That's what's going on here.
And anybody who raises a question about this, well, you saw it with Schumer. Jim Crow 2.0.
Of course, it's a lie. Schumer is no stupid man at all. He knows that.
But he also knows what certain elements of his party expect of him and he delivers accordingly.
Yeah. He personally campaigned for voter ID in years past.
Oh, that's right. And that video footage exists. Yes.
I mean, there's only one reason to not want voter ID and it's because you want to cheat.
But you need two forms of ID to help shovel snow in the city of New York.
That's right. Yes.
But you don't need to vote. The thing that's amazing is they're calling it Jim Crow 2.0 and 80%
of black Americans want voter ID. Favorite, favorite, the photo ID because you know what? A lot
of them have figured something out. They're being insulted.
Actually, the biggest victims of the cheating themselves because they keep people in power who
ultimately keep them down. Because remember, the left in this country has no interest whatsoever
in social mobility, particularly of black people becoming middle class. Well, if they become
middle class, establish nuclear families, enter the workforce as opposed to taking various forms
of, well, we used to use the word welfare today. It's called assistance on this assistance for
energy or for your rent or what because their goal is to keep as many people dependent on the state
for their existence as possible. And there it's vitally important that that not be too comfortable.
There's not enough money for that. But you, you keep a large segment of the population dependent
on government handouts. You do so in the name of combating racism when you're actually practicing
racism yourself because you are denying blacks and other minorities a stairway to the middle class
because if you are a member of the American left, the middle class is your enemy. And by the way,
no one angles noted recognize this in the mid 19th century when he pointed out what a terrible
institution not only the middle class was, but also the conventional family. Again, the man may have
been evil, but stupid he was not. He figured out that if we are going to stay in power,
there are certain institutions that we need to destroy the family in the middle class being
two of the most prominent. Yeah, there, people need to understand there is a huge difference
between crazy and stupid or evil and stupid. An example would be like the Colorado
theater shooter who drove past four other theaters to get to a theater that had a no,
it had a gun free zone requirement on the theater. Yep. He wasn't stupid. I'm going to go to
I'm going to go and do my shooting at the theater that does not allow guns where people can shoot
back at me. Now, he was still crazy, still evil, but not stupid, but my point on this is
the party, the people that are saying essentially, yes, America, yes, Democrats, yes, Black people,
we know you want voter ID, but you're not smart enough to make this decision. Yeah, we know what's
best for you, which means we are no longer representatives. We are elite rulers.
I mean, is that not the definition of elitism and dictatorships?
Now, let's get into Greenland. So folks, you've heard people talk about Greenland thing.
You heard President Trump say he wants to turn Greenland into a state. He wants to acquire
Greenland. And you have to understand, first of all, understand that President Trump is
President Trump is a art of the deal negotiator who likes to do something which is called in
negotiation. We call it conditioning or price conditioning. So I give you an example. Price
conditioning is you come in and you want to buy a baby grand piano and you have the number
$10,000 in your mind. You walk into the piano store and all of a sudden you see a price tag that
says $25,000. You're now price shocked. Okay. Now, the piano salesman comes up and tells you
it is so lucky that you showed up this week because we're having a sale on baby grand pianos
and this $25,000 grand piano is this week only $19,999. You just went from you walked in the door
with a $10,000 vision. You got in the building. Your reality was altered to $25,000. Now all of a sudden
$20,000 sounds like a value even though five minutes ago your number was $10,000. This is President
Trump. I'm going to throw these bombs out there and I'm going to ask for so much that when I
agreed to take less everybody's going to say, we got a good deal. So, bono, I'm assuming that you
see that and is that some of what the president's doing? Yes. Trump's first move in almost any
negotiation whether it's foreign policy or domestic policy or what have you. The first move is
go with a bluster bombast. And ask for everything plus. Is it absolutely everything? Remember
he was going to build a wall on the Mexican border and the Mexicans were going to pay for.
Right. Now, part of the wall has been built. It's back under construction again. The Mexicans are not
paying for it. But that was that and they got off like he's not making a pay for it. So, they got a
good deal, right? So, the whole notion for instance that Greenland was going to become the
51st state or maybe the 52nd state after Canada, which by the way was the same thing.
Not just climatologically but politically. That's actually not even in our interest to make
it to make Greenland a state. Actually, it's in the populations too small to be a
never support itself. And the two leading parties in Greenland are very left of center parties.
So, assuming just for the sake of argument that Trump is already effective,
close a business tomorrow afternoon, Greenland is a state congressman, of course, obviously
after approval that assuming it did, then he would have effectively have created two democratic
Senate seats and given the low population just one congressional seat. Right. Which he's never
going to do. No, he's never going to do. Exactly. So, that was all bluster. So, I think the
ultimate thing that's going to happen here is that the status of Greenland is in fact going to
change. There may be a kind of condominium involved wherein Greenland formally retains its ties
with Denmark under which, however, the defense angle of that and no small, in no small way,
the economic angle of that is primarily going to be driven by the United States. In those
words, the status is going to change. It's going to be kind of a jointly administered territory
between the United States and Denmark. It's imperative that a message be sent here that
if you are the people's Republic of China or Vladimir Putin's Russia and you cover Greenland,
and we know for a fact that both of them do and for them. Yeah, they both want Greenland, right?
Oh, absolutely, they do. One look at the map tells you why, that you have to deter them from doing
things there that are manifestly not in our interest much less than the interest of the people
of Greenland, all 57,000 of them. So, you have to make a statement and make it perfectly clear to
everyone that Greenland's defense is being covered by the United States. Not something amorphous
like NATO. That doesn't really get it. And most certainly not by Denmark, Denmark is a country of
just a few million people and it's the size of the state of Maryland. So Greenland is not,
Denmark is not going to deter anybody from doing anything and the Danes, or who are not stupid,
and know that. So, what Trump wants to do here is change the status quo. And I think ultimately,
he will succeed in that by cutting a deal with the Danes under which Greenland either becomes
a territory of the United States. And we have these things scattered around like Guam.
Yeah, yeah, like Guam. It's scattered around the Pacific. With some sort of nebulous, continuous ties
to Denmark, the language that is spoken there is a variation of Danes, their cultural ties there,
and what have you. But it will be guarded, it will be protected, and bad actors will be deterred
from doing bad things by the United States. Now, why would they do that? Well, Greenland is
in our hemisphere. It's in the western hemisphere. It's in the northeastern part of the western
hemisphere stretching from inside the Arctic Circle south to even a little south of Iceland.
It contains vast stores of mineral wealth, including rare earths. There's also no small amount of oil
in natural gas off the eastern coast of Greenland. And Trump rightly sees these are natural resources
that could greatly benefit the United States, which in large part have not been exploited at all.
There's practically nothing. And if China got control of this, this would give China even more
of a chokehold on rare minerals. Oh, that's exactly right. Yes. And of course, the Chinese have
recognized that the Chinese in fact have declared themselves to be a sub-artic power. I know,
which is absurd. There's no such thing as a sub-artic power. The northernmost part of China
is 900 miles south of the Arctic Circle. But by acknowledging that they are a sub-artic power,
they're also a letting us see just how interested they are in both Greenland as well as
screwing around in the bearing straits that separate Alaska from Siberia. Because once you
have established a foothold, which is perhaps here, not the best word, in the Arctic region, distances
become much smaller than they are. You digress the importance of the Arctic. Don't look at a map,
look at the globe. Look at how, in that sense, how close Russia is to the United States, or how close
that you can go from there to Scandinavia. Now, much has been made up of our Arctic change. And the
fact that the sea lanes there may be more passable in the future than they are now because of
receding ice. That is true, which can't rely on that because the history of that part of the
world tells you that the ice recedes, but it also expands. It would make shipping more efficient,
though, if it was, right? That's right. And by the way, it expands and it recedes not because of
air temperatures, but because of shifting undersea currents over which no human being has any control,
whatsoever. And when warm currents make their way into the Arctic regions, guess what? The ice
melts. When, for reasons we really don't understand, they are then replaced by cooler currents, guess
what? The ice expands again. That's a long observed pattern in the Arctic region, but there are
certainly going to be times when there is less ice in the Arctic circle. That would be a very
inviting environment for all sorts of geopolitical stuff that you could pull off in that very
important part of the world. So that's why the Chinese covet it. Remember, their goals are not
defensive. They're offensive. They want to replace the United States as the top dog in the
world. They've been actually fairly open about this. And anybody who thinks otherwise,
anybody who thinks that you can integrate the people's Republic of China into the world,
trade organization that they're going to behave like everybody else. No, no, no, that's not what
they'll do. They'll be happy to make commitments to do A, B and C. And of course, then they'll do
whatever they damn well, please. Knowing that they have relatively a little price to pay for
not adhering to their commitments. Yeah, the, it almost seems to be a given that,
that they have no concern over integrity or. Yeah, right. Yes, we're back to the middle class.
Integrity leading up to commitments and that sort of thing, that's that's not part of it.
There's even predating the Chinese Communist parties take over of mainland China in 1949.
There was never a history of law. In China, the way there was in Europe and in the United States.
So much always depended on whatever a particular emperor wanted or when the power of the emperor
receded and warlords stacked up, the local rule of law was what the warlord says was going to happen.
So you have a culture that's predisposed not to pay a lot of attention to paragraph seven
sections four of any kind of agreement. We have lawyers who take that stuff seriously,
that Chinese know how to play the game, they nod, they go along with it, but they don't adhere
to it. It's it's putting aside the communist element of this. It's alien to them. It's culturally
alien to them. Now China has sent some cutters, some, some cutting ships up into that region,
haven't they? Oh, yes, they have been. Ice cutters, ice breakers. Including ice breakers,
where, by the way, the United States needs to get with the program because we don't have nearly
as many ice breakers as we need. Russia leads the world in ice breakers. Well,
one look at the globe tells you why they're clearly an Arctic power and they need the ice breakers
for their survival. The telling part is the Chinese don't because they're not an Arctic power.
Yeah, when you talk about 900 miles difference, that's right. That's the difference between
Detroit and Fort Lauderdale, which is 87 degrees outside versus 30 degrees outside.
That's right. Exactly. And so, so the Chinese are sending ice breakers and producing more ice
breakers to be sent to the Arctic, not for, not because they have to, not because they're an
Arctic power, because they intend to establish themselves there, both militarily and commercially.
Are we building more ice breakers now? We have a program to build more. It's one of the many areas
of shipbuilding where we have fallen behind. We don't build nearly as many ships as we should have
all sorts of reasons for that. And one of the types of ships that we have been neglecting for
decades are ice breakers when we are, thanks to Alaska, an Arctic power. It's been the short
sidedness of Congress and various administrations going back decades and decades that we have
allowed this situation to come about. The Trump administration does recognize this,
turning that around is going to take time. But yes, there are plans now, which are under the
early stages of implementation to start building more ice breakers because we're going to need them.
The Russians are certainly going to do them, even though theirs are actually in a poor state of
repair, which is emblematic, I think, of all of Russian society. It's infrastructure largely
falling apart. The Chinese, on the other hand, kind of bright-eyed bushy tails coming a little
later to the game, are building more state of the ice breakers, and that we cannot allow to go
unchallenged. If Russia fired rockets on mainland U.S., wouldn't those rockets likely fly over Greenland?
Oh, yes, they would. And because, simply, again, look at the globe or look at the map
depending on your choice of words. But that's where the rockets would come from.
They could theoretically launch these things from the Russian and Far East Siberia. I have the
things and go over Alaska down over Canada and what have you. But the quickest way to hit New
York or Boston or whatever it is that they wanted to take out, simply because the distances are
much shorter, is to send them over Greenland. Again, look at Northeastern Russia. Look at the
distance between that and Greenland. It's not really very much. And then from Greenland, you go
West, you go past Newfoundland down the Maritime and Bingo, you're over to England. If you
are doing that at hypersonic speed, and the Russians, along with the Chinese, are with the U.S.
beginning to catch up on this. But you're sending rockets at hypersonic speed,
then those rockets can go from Russia over Greenland to the mainland U.S. in a relatively short
period of time, which is why we need to deepen our military presence in Greenland
to intercept them before they ever get there. Or mostly really for deterrence. To say the Russian,
say to the Russians, yeah, you can launch your rockets. We have these interceptors in Greenland.
You launch the rockets. They're going to be intercepted. But you will have
entered into a military conflict with the United States, and you then have to deal with the
consequences. That's the beauty of deterrence when it actually works. You may covet something.
We'd be able to hit Russia in minutes if we had Newfoundland.
So where do we end up with this thing? Do we end up with Greenland becoming a territory?
Does it become an alliance with Denmark? Where do you think this land?
I think they'll come up with, is some sort of a joint administration of Greenland.
And I think the important bit, Greenland, have some tie, formal ties to the United States,
because that underscores the American presence there. You can't keep it 100%
affiliated with Denmark and not affiliated with the U.S., even with U.S. bases there.
I think to send a proper message to Beijing and Moscow, you have to see that's actively,
that's actually American territory. Yeah, jointly administered by the Americans and the Danish,
you can buy that matter by the Greenlanders, and make sure that they understand that. We can also
give the Greenlanders, all 57,000 of them, a stake in this, one that the Danes can't give them.
Namely, all those minerals that are there, we can get in there and exploit them.
And we can give the Greenlanders a stake in this very similar to what we do with the people of Alaska.
Right, the oil.
There, if people get a check in the mail every year, it's a percentage that's worked out,
that they get from the natural gas that is exploited in Alaska from the fossil fuels.
A similar arrangement could be worked out very easily in Denmark. Once we get in and we start
exploiting the stuff, the rare earth would have to be refined, all of that sort of thing.
But once that gets underway, the Greenlanders themselves would benefit immensely from this,
because they would get money they otherwise wouldn't get.
And it was saved Denmark of fortune, because Denmark's having the fun Greenland right now.
Oh, that's right. Yes, exactly. And like every other European country, Denmark has a declining birth
rate. This is simply going to lift a burden from future generations of Danes. Denmark has,
unlike many other European countries, has actually paid pretty close attention to its borders.
And it hasn't been overrun like Italy and Germany and France and what have you.
So they haven't been able to offset their low birth rate through immigration.
And they've done that on purpose because they recognize that allowing in people from
alien cultures from Northern Africa and the Middle East, all that's asking for trouble.
All they have to do is look next door and Sweden and see where all that leaves the Danes know what
that. So they're going to have to live with their low birth rate unless they can somehow figure out
a way to turn that around, which there are no indications. So to lift the burden from future generations
of Danes, they would no longer be writing checks keeping Greenland afloat. Greenland would be keeping
itself afloat through its new arrangement with the United States.
This would actually probably help Greenland's population because I'm assuming there would be people
that would be moving there for exploration and for mining. Yes, it would be. Yeah, right.
Additional workers moving to the area, I would think. Right. So by the way, last item on this,
President Trump's not the first president who wanted to acquire Greenland, is he? Oh,
doubt it all. So this isn't something he just pulled out of the air. That's right.
Harry Truman in the year 1946 offered Denmark a hundred million dollars in gold for Greenland
well, a hundred million dollars in 1946 was a lot of money.
Had the Danes turned him down. In retrospect, I wish that he was, well, no,
we don't, you know, we wouldn't make you an offer you can't refuse because Greenland was
every bit as important then as it is now albeit minus the Chinese connection because China was
not a little player back then. Who was the first president there went after it? It was back in
the 1800s. Oh, well, that's right. Stuart, the gentleman who was responsible for the purchase of
Stuart's ice box from Tsarist Russia also recognized the importance of Greenland and we covered
it back then. So we had been interested in Greenland for a long, long time. So this isn't some
hair-brained scheme that the ever volatile Trump dreamed up. It's deeply rooted actually in American
history going back to the mid 19th century. So this gets back to something that I've noticed about
Trump. Trump seems to be a person who looks back at history, sees things that should not happen
anymore or things that should have happened and just tries to go implement it. It's kind of like
how many presidents went by claiming they would move the embassy to Jerusalem but kept kicking the
can. And Trump's like, well, why do we keep promising to do this and we don't do it? Let's just
go do it. Right. Right. Or there were periodic complaints about, well, the nature of our lives
are not paying their fair share. Right. But make a bet. People who sit down conferences would be
held commitments made. Commitments, of course, were never kept. So Trump comes in and says,
no, effective immediately. There's a new sheriff in town and you're going to pay your fair share
or you're going to risk the NATO alliance. And actually for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth
that this cost in Europe where he is thoroughly despised by ruling elites as he is, of course,
here in the United States. What are the Europeans doing? They are actually stepping up their
defense commitments to NATO, aided in no small part by Vladimir Putin's miscalculation
by invading Ukraine and actually solidifying NATO. And Trump by forcing the NATO alliance to do
what they otherwise would never have done on their own has now accomplished what earlier presidents
simply by being nice about it would never have done. Also an interesting consequence of this,
I was speaking with a friend of mine, a Ukrainian friend of mine, yesterday. He's also by denying
the Ukrainians the weapons that personally I think they should have and a lot of your
Europeans should have. He forced the Ukrainians to develop their own weapons industry and that's
coming along really quite well. They're doing a great job in the drone business. The drones
and drone interceptors. In fact, we're having to use them now. Use their expertise to intercept
the drone. The United States is caught up in drones. We're producing these things around 35,000
dollars a pop, which is really cheap. Think of a missile. You know, pick your missile for
$5 million. What economy is there and launching a $4 million missile when it can be brought down
by a $35,000 drone? But Ukrainians also know how to develop counter drones. Sometimes, by the way,
counter drones are nothing but truck-mounted machine guns. Drones are slow. They fly low because that's
the way they elude radar, but they also make noise. They sound like lawnmowers. Ukrainians have
learned in Eastern Ukraine where they're fighting for the very survival that you can hear these
things coming. You can have some guys with machine guns shoot them down on the cheap and bingo
end of drones. And Ukrainians, by the way, are also developing their own cruise missiles and
their own long-term missiles, which sooner or later are going to be able to hit Russian factories
that manufacture drones. Of course. I don't think people will understand which, by the way,
they got from the Iranians. I don't think people understand the long-term consequences
of the deals that Trump made in Ukraine for rare earth minerals and the deals he's trying to
make with Greenland for rare earth minerals because those alliances or those contracts could have
a technological impact on us for generations going forward, trying to break the Chinese hold on
rare earth minerals. People are appreciating the long game that he is playing here. We're out of
time, but I want to ask you one more question. Has Donald Trump figured out that Brenton Woods
is useless now at this point? He probably has. And Trump is one who undertakes not one initiative
at a time, 12 or 15 at a time. But there's even an upper limit for him. But yes, I think ultimately
the Brenton Woods arrangement. Look, the man is completely restructuring the global geopolitical
architecture. Not just in the middle of the East, but every place else through his reintroduction
of the Mundo doctorate in the Western hemisphere, which is aimed primarily at China,
but also to a lesser extent, to a declining Russia. And so if he is willing to do that,
we know for a fact there he is. That's where Greenland figures into all of this. That's where
Venezuela figures within all of this that had less to do with Maduro than it did with ZGP.
That's just thinking outside the box that he does. The man is geopolitically far more
sophisticated than people realize. And put aside the bluster, the bombast, all of that,
because that's just part of his personality and part of the game key plays. But oh, I think
Britain Woods and just there are no sacred cows with him. If the sacred cow is no longer worthy
of being worshipped, then the sacred cow goes. Now the Democrats are now all over social media,
claiming that the Epstein files have video footage of Trump raping 13-year-olds.
They know it's there. If that footage exists, why did Joe Biden not release it and just
killed the presidency? That's right. If it really existed along with the other things.
Because you wouldn't own it on your body. That's right. They had the just that they had the
whole shooting match at the time. They had the files they could have done it. It weren't released
because they don't exist. One of the ironies of the Epstein files is the so-called fumbling that
attorney general Bondi and her people did and letting them out. Just wedded the appetite
of the Democrats and the left in general to say, aha, they're covering up things.
What the Epstein files have actually revealed is something we should have figured out from the very
beginning, in which arena did Jeffrey Epstein play? Well, the answer was Manhattan.
And who are the political elites and economic elites that he dealt with there? What were their
political persuasions? Would these have been red-state mega people who we are told with a straight
face or were in bed with Epstein? No. They were predominantly representatives of the liberal
elites of New York City as well as, shall we say, their foreign friends, the so-called House of
Windsor being most prominent among them. The Epstein files, Epstein himself, this was all really
much more about the elite left than it ever was about Donald Trump. How are they getting away with
this? It was some queens. He knew Epstein. They had a falling out. Trump even reported
Epstein to the cops in West Palm Beach after he heard that Epstein had teenage girls on his
property. Trump banned him from our logo. There's no there there, but there's no lie these people
aren't willing to tell if they think they will serve their interests and make Trump look like a
monster. How are they getting away with this? Ted Lew is all over social media saying,
I've seen the proof. There's video evidence of Trump rapes 13-year-olds. How's he getting away
with this without being sued into the next century? At some point he may well find himself,
to the next century. Right now, he knows he's going to be largely protected by
his left of the mainstream media. He's going to be protected by Democrats in Congress,
and he figures, well, if I am sued, I'll have, I'll get myself some good lawyers find a judge
who will be cooperative and they're plenty of Biden and Obama-appointed judges who will dismiss
the case out of hand. They're gambling and by the way, even if they are sued, they figure this
really not going to cost them anything because there are plenty of left-wing funded foundations
who come in and pick up the tab. So that isn't likely to come out of his pocket.
It'll come, you know, the Soros organization or like-minded people are the ones who will end up
paying the legal bills. When you make these outrageous claims and you do it from the House floor,
I believe when you do it from the floor, you're exempted from-
Yeah, yeah, you are. So it's kind of like being in a deposition or being in court. You can say
anything you want when you're in this particular environment. So I think a lot of them are using,
because you notice a lot of them are giving these speeches. They're not on the House floor,
but they are in the House. Yes, that's right. Yeah. When they're doing these, they're doing press
conferences in the House. And I think they're using that as a cover to get around
federal lawsuits. It's horrible. It is, it is okay that you don't like the president.
It is horrible to be out accusing him of raping 13-year-olds and doing these type of things.
I mean, this is just hideous to do things like that. And then you compound that with,
we don't even care what our constituents want us to vote for. We're going to vote for what
we want, not for what the voters want, because the most important thing is staying in power.
This is a tragic time we live in. Are things worse today than they've ever been in history
bonner, or are we just seeing history repeat itself? In terms of the division of the country,
just about as bad will be for entirely different reasons than early 1861.
At least that was a relatively simple thing, because it was a regional conflict.
This is your next door neighbor sees things one way, and you see things another,
and there's no really reconciling the two of that. So the divisions here have nothing to do
with regions of the country, although there are enormous cultural differences between blue
jurisdictions and red jurisdictions. The divisions here will also make their way into the professional
world, the world of business, Wall Street, as well as Hollywood, now divisions have finally come up
in Silicon Valley. So here it's a more, actually it's more difficult to reign in, in part because
the major institutions of the country are still in the hands of the left. This is the lesser extent
down the corporate world, at least for the time being, next to Supreme Court decisions, dealing
with affirmative action, and the at least the temporary phase out of DEI, simply because certain
corporate elites are recognized that I'll keep them on the bad side of the Trump administration,
which may not be good for business, but don't rule out it coming back in one form or another
in the future. But remember, most of the institutions still are educational establishment,
the foundations, the professional organizations, the medical associations, and what have you
are for the control of the left. And that's going to stay that way, because that's the consequence
of something else, the long march through the institutions, something that goes back to,
well the phrase comes on Rudy Duchka, the German Marxist, believe his dates were 1940 to 1979,
and before him, Antonio Gramsey, the Italian bar, who was a brilliant, you're talking about
brilliant and evil, smart and stupid and evil. Okay, the man was evil as they come, but he was
anything, but stupid because he figured out that the Boliteria was never going to rise up
and overthrow the established order, the way to do this, was to infiltrate and transform existing
institutions, keeping the names of those institutions, but changing their content completely.
And at that, the left is succeeded spectacularly, and undoing it is going to take a long time.
Because the geography is not so clear-cut, because you have a conservative and a liberal living
next door to each other, does this prevent us from a repeat of a civil war, or does it turn into
some other weird civil war? I don't see bull run or a third day again, I don't see you that,
but I also don't see any kind of real reconciliation, because the two worlds are so far apart
that keeping things civil is going to be extremely difficult. And for that reason,
well, Thomas Sol, the British Thomas Sol, wrote a book, years ago, called Clash of Visions.
Now, he wrote that book and he was describing the differences between, in this case,
the American left and the American right, as it existed at the time. But those divisions
are actually much deeper now, and I don't see them being reconciled at all. So I think we can expect
actually more political violence, I simply think it's going to happen. Again, not on the scale
of 1861 to 1865, or breakout types of violence. That's right. But will there be
attacks? Violent attacks? Will people die as a result of this? If somebody going to open
fire on college students outside of a bar in Austin? Yes, I can absolutely see that happening.
And I think it will exist even after Trump leaves, because
hey, we don't know who is going to go into replace them. And those divisions are deep. They
are very deep, and they're not going away anytime soon. But I don't think they're going away, period.
Is Trump one of the most consequential presidents in history? Oh, without a doubt.
As I pointed out earlier, he's completely restructuring the architecture, the global
architecture, not just the Middle East, but everywhere. He's doing the same thing here in the US
by going after DEI, by walking away in Toto from the whole climate hoax at all the corruption,
the sweetheart deals, and the immense amount of harm that came from that, because the great
beneficiary of the transition to green energy was, of course, the people's Republic of China.
And Trump, Trump and the people around him, recognize that. So is this consequential
oh yes, far more than I think any of us could have imagined.
Bonner Cohen, tell our audience how they can engage with you more, because you write a lot of
articles and stuff. Tell them how they can. Okay, check us out on our website for the committee,
for a constructive tomorrow, known by its acronym CFACT, C-F-A-C-T, and check out the material
that we have on our website, which will provide you a lot of the intellectual ammunition you need
to engage in the near mortal combat that we're going to be facing in the years to come.
Check us out on our website, which is C-F-A-C-T dot O-R-G.
Thank you, Bonner. Thank you. This has been a, I think, a enlightening show today.
Great show. Oh, yeah, no, this has been fun. I've enjoyed it.
Folks, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure you go to wherever you get your podcast,
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for Matt and myself, we will see you on the next episode of Blunt Force Truth.
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