Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And this was the man who basically spearheaded nearly every lawfare push against Trump world for the past eight years, for everything from the Trump impeachment to the J6 impeachment, to the all of the Ukraine affairs to running a group called Crew, which sued the Trump administration hundreds of times. And, you know, he was the former U.S.
ambassador to the Czech Republic for President Obama and even wrote a playbook, basically, on how to... how to orchestrate color revolutions against populist movements that were rising in Europe while he was at the Brookings Institution just a few years ago. And he's openly calling on live television to take that same
playbook for overthrowing foreign governments and to find a way to implement it here. And the first two things that he said off the top were that this needs to be a legal fight and it needs to be a media fight. So taking it to the courts and taking it to the media for hearts and minds. But what you've seen, one of the warning signs that I'm very concerned about
is that a fundamental part of these people powered revolutions, these so-called color revolutions, is on the street action to destabilize countries, which also provides a sort of patina, a predicate to the rest of the world that this is the genuine reflection of the democratic
people being underserved by an autocratic government but it has the the benefit of shutting down the country and destabilizing the government because they're they're between a rock and a hard place they they'll shut down the highways they'll shut down though you know the union workers will all walk out and shut down industry by going on mass strike uh there'll be violent confrontations uh in
dozens of cities, attacking police, as we saw with the BLM riots, even burning down police precincts. And then the only way to really respond to that in order to stop that is through an almost kind of quasi-military scale deployment to physically remove those people from the highways they're blocking, the infrastructure that they're terrorizing.
But when you do that, you get hit by the second round of the Color Revolution playbook, which Cries of humanitarian rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns. See, now we prove they're authoritarian because they've done this. And that's where the international community comes into the picture with joint sanctions, economic pressure. Now they can hold up this crackdown as the reason to do it.
And this gets back to the fundamental question. position we're in at this unique moment in American history where the foreign policy establishment is really, for the first time in a very serious way, having to respond to the will of the people who pay for it, which is that you have this out-of-power network here in the U.S. that is grasping to try to find allies on the Republican side in Congress.
They are now being counter-pressured by folks like Elon and others who are threatening to primary them if they defect. And their strongest allies are a handful of folks on the Republican side in Congress, but most potently the in-power governments abroad that have a similar axe to grind against Trump and Trump world and Trump's foreign policy vision.
that will be happy to assist in this project any way they can.
So what I predict you're going to see is a transatlantic flank attack, where you have the out-of-power foreign policy establishment here teaming up with in-power foreign governments, like in the UK, in the UK Labour Party, like across the EU with in-power EU governments, like in places like Brazil with Lula, like in certain governments in Central Asia,
I believe right now they're in the consensus building process of this, which is very similar to what happened when Trump won the first time. I cover internet censorship. It's my primary reason that I crusade on all these other elements. But this played out in the first few months of Trump 1.0.
Internet censorship didn't really hit the American people in a very serious way until late 2017, early 2018. What were they doing in the interim time? They were having these consensus-building All the major think tanks were having these... How do we build the coalition? What exactly is going to be our civil society strategy, our legal strategy?
Who are our friends in the Chamber of Commerce who can put economic pressure on this? How do we build a predicate for this, whether it's counterintelligence through Russiagate or whether it's a democracy promotion predicate that Trump is an attack on democracy? And that process is the process of seducing people from...
different fractal coalitions into one cohesive network that can do this together, and right now they're fractured. I'm sorry if I'm taking a while for saying this, but just to complete this point, because it's going to hang over the rest of this conversation, we can't forget that the Democrats elected Joe Biden as president, and he was removed by another faction of the Democrats.
There was effectively a West Wing Democrat Party civil war, and Joe Biden put on the Trump hat while Kamala was running against Trump with a big smile. He even asked for the hat to put it on. I've never seen Joe Biden happier than the day after the election when he walked out and made the press statement that Donald Trump had won the election.
So it's difficult right now for them to form that cohesive network and unified action plan when you have folks from the Joe Biden side of the foreign policy establishment still extremely upset and feeling betrayed by the Kamala Harris side of it. But those wounds will heal, and time, I believe, does heal all wounds in that way as their economic interests are threatened further.
potentially by the drastic reforms the Trump administration is pursuing.
Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find the U.S.-funded blob NGO swarm descending on a right-wing populist party in Europe. No, of course. I mean, this is the most predictable thing of all time. I mean, Georgia's queue has been... a thorn in the side of the US and UK and NATO foreign policy establishment for a number of reasons.
The central linchpin of world geopolitics right now is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Romania occupies a critical strategic point in that war, not just because of the transport of arms from Pakistan to Romania into Ukraine, which has been a long-time route to be able to run guns and arms and munitions in, but also because Romania shares the Black Sea coast,
Showing 21–40 of 855 · page 2 of 43
← Previous
Next →