Jeffrey Sachs

No. No, I think that they're following a plan, clean break, 1996, and a plan, 1991, seven wars in five years, that has been deep set and that has been Netanyahu's baby all the time. Netanyahu, I regard as one of the most delusional and dangerous people on the planet. And he has engaged the United States so far in six disastrous wars, and he's aiming to engage us in yet one more.

But Netanyahu's track record is just about the worst of any person on the planet right now in terms of damage done. And we should be able to understand that. And we have a lot of rhetoric in this country standing up for Israel. We're not standing up for Israel. We are engaging in war on Israel's behalf all over the Middle East. That's a completely different thing. I believe in Israel specifically.

Israel's security alongside a state of Palestine, which I know completely to be possible and achievable and peaceful and ending this risk of World War III and could have prevented the million or so deaths that have come from Netanyahu's wars up until now. And the Arab states have been saying this repeatedly since 2002. It's called the Arab Peace Initiative. Anybody can look it up.

They repeat it basically nonstop in the last two years. The Iranians want peace. I know that as well. And so the whole game is to make claims about the other side and to say, if you talk to the other side, oh, you're a traitor. That's what they say about Tulsi Gabbard. She talked To Assad. Well, what about that?

It was almost a flip because there were nice words said about him by Hillary Clinton one year and then the next year exactly the opposite. Because these are mind games. that are played for reasons that are not said directly.

Of course not. Nothing that has happened in the Middle East has been for American national security. None of it. Not one of these wars. These have been Netanyahu's wars. Watch him cheerily.

Because they're told repeatedly the opposite. And you can be told anything can be sold. Not that people believe it, by the way, but they don't hear anything. the correct story anywhere in the mainstream. They hear things that don't quite make sense to them. And by the way, this is one of the points of Infowar. The public didn't believe the official narrative about JFK's assassination.

The public didn't believe the official narrative about RFK's assassination. The public didn't believe the official narrative about COVID. The public didn't believe the official narrative about Iraq. The public doesn't believe these things, but it doesn't hear the coherent narrative. explanation from the New York Times or MSNBC or CNN or anybody else. No one actually tries to explain.

And so what hangs out there is something completely unsatisfactory. but it doesn't have an alternative explanation. And if you don't have the clarity of the alternative, then this miserable, phony Infowar approach, it fills the space. And they're not interested in convincing us because we don't have any say in any of these issues.

They're interested in doing what they want to do without being stopped. That's the difference.

It was the day that I was on... Bloomberg and I said, the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. I remember that. And they cut you off. And they cut me off and then berated me for several minutes while I was watching on the screen, but cut off. And that was the last moment.

Pardon me? You were telling the truth. Of course. And exactly who did it when is something that would be easy to find out in five minutes. So that's not even hard to find out. But you haven't appeared on any... Not once, because that's not quite true. You know, if it has nothing to do with foreign policy issues, it's just an economics question once in a while.

But basically, the mainstream follows the security state line.

People want to hear...

I need to ask you, because the... the phrasing the official lines uh kind of the stupidities and sillinesses on almost any story of the kind that we're talking about get repeated across the mainstream space very very quickly and not only on the u.s side but generally in in the british uh media as well and so there's certainly uh some There's an official narrative, of course.

So this is part of the story that senior White House briefing Jake or somebody else briefs. And that becomes the meme. That becomes what you have to defend. You have to defend your continued access. You have to be good, loyal citizen of this. By the way, there are lots of contracts that go out with the military industrial complex. This is a trillion and a half dollar a year contract.

Business, not a small business, by the way. It's real business. It's lots of think tanks. It's lots of academic centers. It's lots of people on hire. It's lots of contracts. It's lots of that all. You don't get any. I mean, I don't want any of that, but you don't get any of that if you're Standing outside that, none of it. So people make decisions.

I think one of the best lines of modern history is the line of Sinclair Lewis that you can't convince a person to believe something when their salary depends on believing the opposite. Yes. And that's a real thing. People have jobs. They just don't want to get jobs. out of line. They don't necessarily believe, but they don't want to get out of line. And it's very worrisome.

And we thought that checks and balances of the U.S. government would be a stabilizer and especially that we would have voices in Congress that would be able to Ask real questions. And we have in the past. We had Frank Church. We had J. William Fulbright, who was not only brilliant and a critic of American foreign policy, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Who do we have now?

Well, we have Rand Paul and we had Tulsi in Congress, but basically almost nobody now. They're scared or they don't want to talk or they're paid for by, who knows, RSX or Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics or Boeing or somebody. So they don't even ask questions. This is the reality.