Friends & Enemies (02/16/25) Rug pull

Nyquist: The Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President Vance have gone to Europe. There’s been meetings. The Chinese are saying, Alex, that Trump is going to betray Ukraine to get Russia to be his ally against China.

Benesch: What I’m seeing is a very sophisticated strategy to confuse international powers such as China and the Russians; to confuse them about who is a friend to them and who is an enemy to them. I think this is masterfully done. It’s supposed to look unpredictable, and a lot of it is between the lines. A lot of it is historical context, and you either know or you don’t know.

There was, of course, the Munich Security Conference and Vance creating this big splash. He was saying that Europe needs to become more conservative, and he was telling about his sympathies for right-wing parties, and there shouldn’t be any big issue with voting for these right-wing parties in Europe. That was on the surface. The other part of the message was this.

Vice President Vance, Second Lady Usha Vance, visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial site outside Munich on Thursday, and he said this:

“I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust in books, but being here and seeing it up close in person really drives home what unspeakable evil was committed and why we should be committed to ensuring that it never happens again.”

Now, this is not just standard political talk. No, no, no, no. What actually, after World War II, after 1945, really protected Europe from fascism? It was the US. It was the Americans. It was the intelligence community that not only fought the communists in Europe, they also fought fascists over here.

So, after the war, the Americans created the security infrastructure here, and there’s so many documented cases of true fascist groups being broken up and exposed and destroyed one after the other. But this was never advertised that much. And this going after true fascists, this happened a lot under Republican administrations. And I’m sure more sophisticated left-wing media and left-wing people know that, but they don’t want to say it, especially not now.

Nyquist: You have to remember, Eisenhower was the commander in chief of the Allied forces that occupied Germany, that formed West Germany, and Eisenhower was a big part of that.

Benesch: Yeah. And it’s like there’s so many individual cases, but also back home. I mean, who went after the KKK groups hard? Who went after these neo-Nazi groups in the US hard? It was the conservative FBI. And they had the whole COINTELPRO thing, bending rules, sometimes breaking rules, to smash these fascists domestically in the US. And Americans did the same in Europe, and they also taught various security agencies over here how to do that in a more or less civilized manner, in a smart manner. They fought fascism after 1945 a lot.

Nyquist: And even before, people forget the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, which was excoriated by the left for decades as being some kind ofanti-communist bunch of nuts. You know that it started out hunting Nazis? Martin Dies, a Democrat, started the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1930s. And he was going after not just communists, but Nazis in the US and communists in the US in the 1930s. But when he went after the communists, after going after the Nazis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would call him into the White House. I think he called him in twice. And he said, “Martin, don’t go after the communists. They’re my friends.”

And of course, when Pearl Harbor happened, he had to stop going after the communists because the Soviet Union was our ally.

And later on, when Senator Joseph McCarthy wanted to do in the Senate what Martin Dies had done in the House, he sat down. He had a meeting with Martin Dies. There’s a Democrat, Martin Dies, from Texas, and a Republican, Senator McCarthy from Wisconsin. They sat down and Martin Dies says: “Senator McCarthy, I would tell you not to do it. But if you’re going to do it, you better be prepared because they’re going to come after you.”

Benesch: And the Russians now, especially in recent years, are claiming to be the next big thing in fascism. They don’t say it explicitly, but when they talk about being the third Rome, and when they act that way domestically and internationally, they invade other countries, they treat their own people like dirt. There’s this kleptocracy, all these people that know Putin from way back, they stole everything. So they parade around as the new big thing in fascism, and Putin is the leader. And the European fascists, they see Putin as the leader because the Europeans don’t have one. There is not one person here who has that aura about him.

Nyquist: Charisma.

Benesch: Yeah, nobody has that war background and the sheer stage performance, and that craziness about him, and that drive, and all that stuff. Nobody has that. So they’re all looking at Putin as the new Führer, right? So he’s the guy, and maybe we can have some little sub-Führers under Russian dominance over Europe. That’s kind of where fascism is at now, in Europe anyways. And so now, JD Vance sends out this multi-level message, and people misunderstand him on purpose.

There was this horrible article here in the New York Times, the headline is, “Vance tells Europeans to stop shunning parties deemed extreme.

The New York Times should know all this background, but they don’t want to say it, because it hurts the Democrats. It goes against all this fear-mongering of this grand international fascist conspiracy centered around the Republicans.

The truth is not useful right now to the Democrats and to the New York Times, so they don’t say that. They don’t say what they know.

And this is where we’re at right now. So there was the destruction of fascism in 1945, and then there was a continuous history where America made sure that in Europe, fascism would not happen again. And that has not changed. That whole program, that whole outlook has not changed.

So when J.D. Vance made this big splash and said, people shouldn’t shun some of these parties, there are conditions attached to it. These right-wingers in Europe, that’s the implicit threat, need to be pro-Republic. They need to be pro-America. They need to be focused. None of that craziness. None of that conspiratorial fascist nonsense. Because the NSA knows, the CIA, all the other American agencies, that are active over here, they know. If you were an AFD member years ago and you talked trash about America, the NSA put you on the list. They know your secrets. And when the Russians got deeper and deeper into the AFD, that was also a big risk that the Russians were taking. Because God forbid, the NSA, the CIA, some of the other American agencies, they figure out that some AFD guy had been recruited by the Russians. This stuff can backfire on the Russians. And so this is kind of the multi-layered message that was sent.

Vance was basically saying, if you’re pro-America, if you’re within reason, if you’re loyal, we can work with you. But if you don’t fulfill these conditions, we will deal with you like we have dealt with these people since 1945, rebuilding Europe. There’s books on this. There’s Anton Shekhovtsov’s book, Tango Noir, where he goes into all these right-wing extremist groups, especially since 1945. And all these groups, especially German groups and all these others, these groups are always infiltrated by American intelligence. We know this.

Nyquist: And these groups, by the way, have always had certain members connected to Moscow. This is the thing, you mentioned the FBI investigating the Ku Klux Klan. One of the things they discovered was the communists were in the Klan. They were using it.

Benesch: That’s how far the communists were willing to go. The message, the sales pitch, obviously, was, man, if only the Hitler-Stalin pact had actually worked out, Hitler and Stalin could have split up the world, conquered one half the world each and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If we can only try to recreate that magic, maybe we can make it work this time. This was the sales pitch.

Nyquist: You know, after World War II, it’s reported in Stalin’s biographers that Stalin would sometimes go, oh, if only I hadn’t fallen out with Hitler, we could have taken the whole world. Yep. He would say this from time to time. Stalin would say that. And I think Hitler was, in a way, Hitler learned from the Marxists. He created his national socialism because he said, look, people will fight for their nation, but they’re not going to fight for these abstract Marxist ideas. So socialism is good, Hitler said, but we’re going to make it national socialism. And Hitler used anti-Semitism, and he realized he could control a country if he could get the far right and the far left together. So the Nazi Party was a far right and a far left party. Hitler said that some of the best Nazis were former communists, right? He would say this. And so what did he do? He appealed to the far left by being a socialist. He appealed to the far right by being a Nazi. And the anti-Semitic thing, if you read Mein Kampf, what Hitler says is he says you can’t tell the German people that they have all these enemies. Look at World War I. We’re fighting France and Britain. We’re fighting Russia. We’re fighting America. We’re fighting Romania and Italy. We’re fighting everybody. Germany is completely surrounded by enemies. And we can’t fight these people. And so he said, you got to reduce it all to one enemy. He says this in Mein Kampf. So guess what one enemy it is that they reduce all their enemies to? It’s the Jews. That’s what the whole formula of anti-Semitism is. This is a very cynical admission in Mein Kampf by Hitler. And so what he does is he says, OK, how are all these enemies of Germany one enemy? He says, well, it’s Jewish finance capital out of New York and London. The West is Jewish finance capital, capitalism. And now, I mean, that’s the enemies out there. And what is the Soviet Union? It’s Jewish Bolshevism, right? So all the people that Hitler ends up fighting, because he ends up fighting the whole world, we called it the United Nations. United Nations was the alliance that defeated Hitler and the Japanese.

That whole alliance, it’s all just the Jews. It’s crazy. But that’s what he did. He reduced it to what we just have to destroy the Jews and the whole world will just go away and stop bothering us. Just crazy.

Benesch: So here in this New York Times story, it says this. Mr. Vance punctuated the message by meeting on Friday with Alice Weidl, the AFD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election, as well as other German leaders. All together, it was an unusual intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally. Well, hold on a second. Miss Alice Weidl, I mean, we talked about this before. She’s a woman. She’s lesbian. Her partner has darker skin or has like a foreign background. We can pretty much guess that Alice Weidl, she doesn’t like the freaks in the party. She doesn’t like the actual fascists in the party. And they don’t like her either.

Because there’s some distinctive characteristics where you can separate a sort of normal AFD person from a truly fascist AFD person, because the party has shifted before and they may shift again. So there’s like your average hardline conservative, kind of like somebody who would like the Republican Party in America. And then there’s actual fascists. So you can make that distinction. And I think that the United States has a pretty good idea of who is who in the AFD. Who is what in the AFD? And so the New York Times is calling Vance’s comments meddling. Oh, this is foreign meddling. He’s manipulating an election in Germany by just saying a few things.

Even though, you know, this this this is a complete double standard, when before the Ukraine war,  political leaders here would would get praise from the Russians or they would get praise from the Chinese and nobody said a word. Right. And there was talk of new trade and all that. That’s not meddling, especially before an election. But if a Republican actually says something, then that’s called meddling. Well, as I said, the real meddling that’s been happening for for generations, the real American meddling in our elections is making sure that communists don’t win. And making sure that fascists don’t win and making sure that this thing doesn’t spin out of control.

Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial site outside Munich on Thursday. They set the line. They don’t just say where the line is. They set the line. These Americans, they enforce that line. There’s a story from the Wall Street Journal which is a couple of days old, an exclusive story. J.D. Vance wields threats of sanctions, military action to push Putin into Ukraine deal.

Vice President J.D. Vance said Thursday that the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Russian President Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kiev’s long term independence. This is the difference between a JD Vance and somebody else who wants to turn back the clock, who wants to destroy all the new things that happened after the Middle Ages.

This is how we make a useful distinction. But the New York Times doesn’t want to make that distinction. They just say JD Vance just told the crowd at the Munich Security Conference that we should work with right wing parties. So there’s proof the New York Times implies that this is all a fascist conspiracy. But guess what? I mean, every president of the United States has the insurrection act. This was there in the in the first Trump admin. Reagan had it. Bush senior had it. Bush junior had it. Nixon had it. Eisenhower had it. They all had the insurrection act, but they never started a fascist dictatorship. This never happened. Instead, they fought a lot with the intelligence community to destroy these these right wing extremist groups.

Vance and his wife visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial site outside Munich.

He says, “I am really moved by the site.” He said, “It’s very important that it’s here and it’s very important that those of us who are lucky enough to be alive and can walk around can know what happened here and commit ourselves to do everything to prevent it from happening again.”

Okay, he says “everything”. This is not negotiable. Now who’s the leading fascist now or who’s seen as the new Fuhrer, who’s seen as the new leader of international fascism? That person is Vladimir Putin. He is seen as the fascist Fuhrer.

Nyquist: I have these two Chinese papers that Mr. Wang of Luda Media gave me last night, and I had them translated yesterday, later last night. And what these papers say is stunning.

The Chinese say in their strategy papers, “We have infiltrated the three factions of Trump’s coalition.” Those factions are MAGA, the tech right, and the old Republican establishment. We’ve infiltrated all three of them. And we’re going to make them fight each other, but we have analyzed Trump’s weaknesses.

We no longer think Trump is unpredictable. We were wrong about that. Trump is very predictable. And here’s his faults. He has over weaning pride and confidence. Because of the assassination attempt, he believes that he’s God’s instrument, which makes him less able to understand, you know, to take in criticism when he’s making a mistake so he doesn’t catch himself.

Trump wants to basically give up Ukraine. He’s going to sell out Ukraine to get Putin to be his buddy against China.

Now the question for you, Alex, having watched the vice president, do the Americans know what the Chinese think, what the Russians are going to do to trick them? And are the Americans leading the Russians and Chinese on, leading them to believe that Trump is going to do this and then Trump’s going to pull the rug out from under them at the last minute?

Benesch: I think this is an area where we can draw comparisons and try to figure out if there’s a pattern of rug pulling. Because I always give these episodes of Friends and Enemies a specific title so people can kind of remember, because it’s easier than just numbering the episodes. And the title I had in mind for today’s show was rug pull.

Because there’s been such a precedent when it comes to rug pulling or blindsiding an opponent. And that was the strategic behavior in very high circles of the United States, so tech circles or right wing tech circles.

Some of the early behavior, of these Americans toward the early Nazis, right? This was when Henry Ford was publishing this crap about the elders of Zion. The Eternal Jew and the Essay Collection and the fake protocols of Zion and all that nonsense. And then of course you had some people from General Motors who were giving these awards to Nazis. It was the early Nazi days, by the way, of course.

Standard Oil, they sold some very important technology to the Germans. This was about creating better gasoline.

Then you had all these joint ventures. There was General Electric, I think they had a thing with the Algemeine Elektrizitätswerke, AEG, Germany.

So there was this kind of business stuff going on and there was public talk. Some of these American business leaders were saying positive things or encouraging things about the Nazis. But all that did was give American intelligence, which I think was bigger at the time as it’s publicly known, a bigger window into Germany. It made it possible to infiltrate Germany better, which was very important. And then America’s political world, they said for a long time America would not get involved again in Europe. I mean, after World War I, we would not get involved again. We have no interest in getting involved. The Nazis believed it and believed they had all these American friends who were saying nice things. So the Nazis leadership would not even hire experts on American matters. They thought, we know enough about these Americans, we don’t need more expertise. And then came the rug pull.

Then came the blind side. This is when all these apparent friends turned their backs on the Nazis and they started producing for the war effort, outproducing everyone and the Nazis lost. And I think the whole story has never been told because it’s always just this left wing interpretation of every capitalist is really a fascist at heart and these American corporations. They’re all fascists.

Nyquist: I think we’ve talked about Charles Lindbergh and this hasn’t really come out yet. Charles Lindbergh, who pretended to be pro Nazi, who had a German mistress, was an American spy spying on the Nazis.

And he sacrificed his own reputation to get close to the Nazis for the US government. To learn what they were doing. And there were people like Ernst Hanfstängl who were really, really important with the Nazis. But then at some point, even the Nazis suspected them of spying for the West.

Well, Ernst Hanfstängl was half American and half Bavarian. He was never a spy, although they suspected him. They were probably planning to kill him. Putzi they called him, because he was such a big guy. And he would play the piano. He was a beautiful pianist. And he would soothe Hitler by playing Wagner.

And in fact, he came up with some of the Sieg Heil stuff because he borrowed it from American football games.

He actually took some of the stuff where they played the American baseball games. You know where the organ goes “da-da-da-da”.

But Hanfstängl ended up in a British internment camp because he had fled to Great Britain.

Benesch: And you mentioned these three factions that make up the Trump current universe, right? And the Chinese have identified these groups and they have infiltrated these groups and they’re trying to use that to their advantage. But wasn’t it kind of that rug pulling the British did against the Nazis, where they had these three fake factions and one of these factions played the part of loving the Nazis and wanting to love the Nazis. But these three factions, this was a fake construct.

Nyquist: Well, it even lured Rudolf Hess to Scotland, where he jumped out of a plane with a parachute, broke his leg, ends up in captivity. This is the third highest Nazi official being in captivity. I mean, imagine the secrets in his head, right?

Benesch: Yeah. I mean, if you do that theater for long enough. British aristocrats, they made pro-fascist statements and there’s even video footage of royals making the Nazi Hitler salute and all this stuff in the newspapers. Yeah, maybe the Germans are right. Maybe they know better than we do. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Lord Rothermere. We talked about this in the last episode if people haven’t seen it yet.

Lord Rothermere with the Daily Mail, which was a really powerful newspaper at the time, the Daily Mail praising Mussolini, praising Hitler and having all this stuff going on. But this was pretty much part of that bigger ruse that was written about by a few authors like Lou Kilzer in Churchill’s “Deception.”

Nyquist: I should add here now, Mr. Wang of Luda Media was saying, “Look, this is not what I think is going on in the Trump administration. This is what the CCP strategists, the communists in Beijing, think Trump is going to do.”

And they’re really convinced that Trump is this blundering fool now who is going to sell out Ukraine and is going to try to get Russia to align with him.

I got a chance to meet a friend of Elon Musk’s. I fell into having breakfast with him and then I had afternoon conversations with him and I had dinner with him.

And I’m asking him, “Well, doesn’t Elon Musk have a factory in Shanghai? And doesn’t that compromise him?” And he just dismissed all that. “Oh, no, no, it’s not. Don’t worry.” Why?

According to Mr. Wang, in this paper, the Chinese say, “Oh, we can control, we can put pressure on Elon Musk because he’s got this factory in Shanghai.”

Is it like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and these other people being pro-Nazi or seeming to be in the 1930s? Is this the same kind of thing and all of a sudden, they’re really not what they seemed to be?

You look at Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec and it’s interesting. The thing about Steve Bannon is that he has this relationship with Miles Guo. According to Mr. Wang, Miles Guo was a high level CCP agent. So you have this accusation of Mr. Wang against Miles Guo. And the book “The War for Eternity” claims that Steve Bannon has taken more than a million dollars from Miles Guo.

And then you have Steve Bannon’s secret meeting in November of 2018 with Alexander Dugin in Rome, just around the corner from Julius Evola, the Italian fascist.

So but what’s really interesting about Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec is that they were naval intelligence guys. Isn’t this kind of funny? These two guys are intelligence guys. And then they’re working with people who are accused of things. Dugin is a former KGB agent, according to his biographer, he was recruited by the KGB, he works for Russian intelligence. He’s part of the Russian information warfare game. Is Steve Bannon a dupe of Chinese? Is he a MAGA controlled agent of China, as the Chinese seem to imply in their paper? They’re talking about we’ve infiltrated MAGA. Who are their infiltrators? Are those infiltrators rug pullers? Have they just tricked the Chinese into believing that they’re doing this? And at the last minute, the Chinese are going, oh, wait a minute, these guys aren’t really on our side. We pay them all this money and they’re cheating us, right? Who’s cheating who in this wilderness of mirror?

Benesch: I’ve done original research on some very sophisticated rug pulling in the 1800s. Britain was its own thing, a global empire, getting into the Enlightenment and all that. But Europe couldn’t quite decide what to do in these these new times. France couldn’t decide, are we still an empire? Do we really try this Republic thing?

The Germans were a mess anyway, and in other countries, they couldn’t figure it out.

So in the 1800s, this is when we saw the emergence of these ideologies, such as socialism. You also saw the new right wing, the modern fascism, this counter-movement to the Enlightenment, people that said the enlightenment is terrible, everything about it is terrible, we need to just restore everything to what it was in the past, and it all needs to be so purely Roman and not a new single thought can enter this this mindset. And we will squash anybody who thinks differently. So this is when this anti anti enlightenment counter movement really took off in the 1800s. And you saw these organizations creep up. And it’s pretty much the same as you would think of today. Viral memes, right? Anti Jewish memes or cultural memes. It was like an internet meme. You find the right graphic and the right slogan, and it just takes off and people copy it and copy it and it becomes a thing. What we think of as an internet meme, that actually, that was kind of common in the 1800s, you know, with printing presses. Pamphlets. You saw these groups springing up everywhere, these super right wingers. They had more and more members and they had viral successes with their propaganda. And they were spreading the message just like you saw today. And when you look really closely, you can see sort of the infiltration of that new right wing movement. And in the 1800s, especially in Germany and Austria, you can sort of tell that British intelligence was in there a lot.

And so this is sort of a deception that was done for a few decades. And then it fully paid off. I mean, it paid off even in the 1800s, because this extreme right wing stuff, this slowed down Germany’s development. Germany was a competitor to England. So it had an effect of slowing down Germany, slowing down Austria, confusing Germany, confusing Austria. And then this deception really paid off.

When the Nazis became a thing, and you had to sell this theater to the Nazis and the Nazis would actually believe the British theater because of all that backstory going a few decades back. So the Nazis thought the British have been thinking like us or a section of Britain, they’ve been thinking like us for many decades. So obviously, they’re our friends. I mean, that’s how they’ve been for half a century.