Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
Editor’s note: this episode contains two discussions covering current affairs, one from 12th December 2025, and one from 5th January 2026. (The Editor got distracted by Christmas!) We’ve published them together as one backs up the other regarding our stance on the dollar. There is an audio interlude between the two segments on the audio version.
Comments from 12th December
We’re wrapping up some recent current affairs today. What’s been going on that people need to know about?
Well, one of our themes has been that we’re plainly at an end-of-the-empire situation with the United States. The US has been the predominant world power since the end of the Second World War. It’s been a remarkably short run as empires go, because it’s clearly in decline.
Empires do some pretty crazy things as they die as well.
Yeah, they usually do. What makes this situation unique is that we’re now literally in a position to end life on this planet. Certainly all higher life forms, or even if it didn’t go that far, the complete destruction of the human global civilisation, possibly the extinction of the human race. We’ve never been in that situation before. How we navigate this is obviously critical, and it’s obviously out of our hands. The more people who have a realistic assessment of the situation, the more likely it is that pressure will mount to navigate it safely.
I just wanted to indicate a few of the areas where it’s showing up. It’s like Groundhog Day. We keep saying it’s the situation as it has been, but it’s getting more extreme. You’ve got the Israeli government continuing its devastating destruction on the Palestinian areas of its own state, also lashing out into surrounding states like Lebanon and Syria. It’s a matter of time before there’s another attack on Iran, although you’d have thought that the decisiveness of the response last time might hold that off. Who knows?
The other ongoing conflict is, of course, Ukraine. The way that it’s developed on the ground over there in the last month or two has come as no surprise to me because I’ve been following this. It was quite obvious that despite the accounts we’ve had in the Western mainstream media trying to put the best gloss possible on it, Russia was making the running. However, this has now become so obvious and so unavoidable that it’s no longer possible to pretend otherwise.
Yet the so-called leaders of Britain, France and Germany continue to deny this. They think that somehow or other they can roll it back. They continually try to find a way to confiscate the frozen Russian assets, which are mostly held in a Belgian bank. The Belgian government is resisting that. The logic of doing that really defies common sense because the idea was that when Russia had been defeated, these could be legitimately confiscated. I don’t know whether legitimate is quite the right word.
There’s no logic whatsoever if you assume that there’s any chance that Russia might not be defeated. The chances of it being defeated look increasingly remote. Also, the unmistakable support that the Europeans are giving to the Ukrainians really amounts to the reality of their being in conflict with Russia. Of course, we’re all hoping that it remains contained. Russia doesn’t actually strike out at our own countries, which it could make a very strong case for doing.
Recent developments have been the attacks on Russian oil tankers. Most of the ones that have been attacked have been empty, as far as I can figure out, and on their way to pick up a shipment. There have now been five that have been badly damaged, probably rendered unusable. The logic behind this was supposedly that if they could strangle Russia economically by cutting off its oil exports, it wouldn’t be able to continue to maintain the war in Ukraine. There hasn’t been any sign.
So the sanctions didn’t work, so we’re going to try and sink all the ships instead.
As I say, they’ve attacked five so far. I don’t know how many tankers they have in total, but I believe it’s somewhere in the region of 1,000 or 1,500. They’d have to sink a lot more before it would have any real impact on Russia’s economy. But it’s obviously a flagrantly illegal act under any interpretation of international law, as is the sinking of half a dozen to a dozen small Venezuelan boats because they were transporting drugs destined for the USA.
Yeah, that’s a cover story for implementing the geopolitical change they want to enact.
This has been taken a step further. I don’t know whether you noticed, but one of these boats was heavily damaged and its hull was still floating in the water. It’s on video, which has gone around the world, that two passengers were seen clinging to the hull of the boat. Another attack went in there and killed them in cold blood. That is an absolutely black and white war crime under the Geneva Convention.
Even if the original attack was justified, which it clearly isn’t—assuming that there was a strong case that they were smuggling drugs, which is highly unlikely because the United States coastline is 2,000 miles away and those boats don’t have that range—but even assuming that, the right thing to do obviously would be to intercept them, search them, collect the evidence and put them on trial. Give them an appropriate punishment, which isn’t the death penalty for smuggling drugs anyway. Certainly not in international waters.
This has taken another notch up with the American commandos dropping from a helicopter onto a Venezuelan oil tanker and capturing the tanker on whatever pretext, which is simply an act of piracy. This is visible for the whole world to see. So America seems to me to be eroding its own credibility faster than it’s achieving anything useful.
Yeah, I sometimes wonder what goes through the minds of those commandos. They must just blindly follow orders.
You have very little option but to follow orders if you are in the military.
It’s not a—I don’t mean this to be patronising—it’s not a thinking man’s occupation.
That’s the way I would look at it.
If you turn the tables on any of these situations, if these things were happening to the United States boats or oil tankers, it would be the end of the world. It would trigger a chain of events that could be catastrophic.
Yeah, we’re still in the phoney war stage. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The usual way these situations work out is that the CIA have paramilitary forces in the country and they execute a coup against the leader, which could well happen. However, what would happen after that is anybody’s guess. Maduro obviously does have enemies. No leading politicians fail to do so, but he obviously enjoys enormous support from the majority of the population.
Any attempt to set up a puppet government there would be extremely troublesome, to say the least. So there we’ve got it. The other thing from the economic realm is that the stranglehold the United States has had over world finances, because there was really no alternative, has now decisively come to an end. The entire BRICS group now has sufficient trade among themselves that it no longer needs the United States or the Western world in general as a marketplace.
It no longer depends on them for supplies of anything because China’s manufacturing and technical sophistication is rapidly outstripping everybody else’s. They don’t need them for the financial arrangements because they’ve set up a parallel system that will almost certainly work better anyway. The necessity of holding dollars as the reserve currency has more or less eroded over the past year or two.
China steadily reduces its holding of US Treasury bonds of one sort or another. It’s replacing that either by gold or by holding the currencies of its trading partners. So, in a way, we’ve come full circle to the way the system of international exchange worked before America essentially monopolised it in the aftermath of World War II.
I was thinking that maybe this was the primary change that happened after World War II.
Yeah, it was. The Bretton Woods system really locked the rest of the world into subservience to the United States. At the time, that made sense. It was by far the most economically powerful nation in the world. It was by far the richest. It was owed money by most of the European countries. It had gold backing to the dollar, which rendered the dollar literally as good as gold. That lasted less than 30 years, 25 years until Nixon closed the gold window.
Now that it can no longer rely on that and no longer enforce the dollar as the purchasing mechanism for oil, it could unravel very much more rapidly than anybody expects. I don’t know at what point it would become the case that it can no longer pay all these military personnel stationed all over the world in any currency with meaningful buying power. But that would handicap its ability to exert military force.
The unknown quantity is whether it would do something utterly destructive in response. For all that, I’m still of the opinion that we’re going through some kind of birth process of a more positive era for the human race. Time will tell whether that was fruitless optimism or whether there is some hope of that.
I think it has to be, otherwise we won’t be here. There isn’t a middle way. I don’t think we can continue in this manner.
It’s not doing us any harm to be aware of what’s going on as long as we don’t let it drive us into depression, which I’m doing my best to avoid.
Yes, keep standing in the light.
Comments From 5th January 2026
I’ve noticed every January that the ‘False Matrix’ or ‘The Empire’ doesn’t waste any time kicking off the next psyop. There are always bushfires or a war. In this case, the president of Venezuela has been abducted. We don’t have a shortage of source material for 2026 so far, but we thought we’d do a bit of a roundup of goings-on last year and how they relate to events happening today.
One of the things I wrote in my journal around a year ago, either when Trump was elected or when he was inaugurated, was that I didn’t think it would take long for many of the people who were enthusiastic about his win to become disillusioned. That assessment has been vindicated in spades to a far greater degree than I could have imagined. The team he’s assembled around him seems like a mixture of raving lunatics and complete incompetents.
Trump’s team seems remarkably short of talent and somewhat demented in some of the ideas. Some of them looked pretty credible during the Senate hearings to confirm them, but have turned out to be very disappointing in reality. Bondi is an obvious example. Cash Patel, the FBI chief; his assistant, Dan Bongino, has resigned already, quite wisely.
I was also reviewing many of the promises he’d made. In general, we don’t expect politicians to honour their promises, but the pledges of openness about all sorts of things would have been really positive. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Senior and Martin Luther King… We’ve had a certain amount come out about Kennedy, which confirmed what many people had strongly suspected anyway.
I didn’t exactly fall off my chair in shock.
It seemed to create remarkably little outrage, presumably because most people who actually cared about that already knew most of it. But the fact that it’s been openly admitted is quite significant.
It feels like the year they stopped pretending to care about these things. They stopped pretending to hide. They stopped pretending they’re doing all these things in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. They’re coming out and saying openly now that it’s about the oil.
It’d be very interesting to see whether they’re impervious to the consequences of being open about these things. The big one is obviously the Epstein scandal. It’s difficult to see how Trump could have expected that to go okay, given what he obviously knew. I don’t know whether he expected the revelations to be highly selective or what. But the fact that everybody’s anticipation was raised by it, and then we’ve had a series of extremely implausible evasions and delays.
Then what comes out—did you pick up on the fact that many of the redactions in there, which were absurd anyway, didn’t actually work? Apparently, they were done by overprinting with black highlights in Microsoft Word. It didn’t take long for a number of people to figure out that by saving it as a text file, you could see what was in the text beneath the blocking. Had you picked up on that?
No, I hadn’t.
The incompetence is staggering. Of course, it’s been more embarrassing than if they’d just revealed it in the first place. It’s difficult to see how we can avoid bringing prosecutions against many of the people who, from what has come out in the limited releases so far, are now clearly revealed to be involved in flagrantly criminal activity.
Although the anti-Trump people have made a big deal about how much of him there is and embarrassing pictures and so forth, I haven’t myself come across anything which is actually incriminating to him. Although we’ve got a few extra pictures, many of the ones are the ones we’ve been seeing with remarkable regularity over the past year anyway. But these are merely embarrassing rather than anything else. Clearly, we’re dealing with somebody who’s basically immune to any feelings of embarrassment.
It’s quite interesting also that one of the more minor promises of revelations has dropped out of sight. What happened to all the stuff about the unidentified aerial phenomena? We were supposed to receive revelations about what they knew or had uncovered regarding those. It’s just been quietly dropped from the agenda, without anyone much noticing or commenting on it.
It could be wrong, but it felt like a distraction to me.
I’m surprised they didn’t make more use of it in that case!
We’ve got the Ukraine war rumbling along. The peace negotiations don’t appear to have been done in good faith.
It’s the same in Gaza.
It’s difficult to believe they were anything other than theatricals. Give the appearance of doing something without actually expecting anything different.
It’s pretty clear they lie about everything.
The other thing is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Such official explanations as we’ve had have been widely regarded as implausible, which has just fuelled further wild speculation. It has certainly done nothing to damp it down. More and more is coming out of him, plainly speaking out against the official line in all manner of ways.
It feels like he broke ranks somehow. It was definitely a professional shot that took him out. It wasn’t from the direction we’re told.
It looks very much as though it wasn’t even a bullet. It was a flechette of some sort.
The big picture has got to surely be that what we’re seeing is a classic end-of-empire situation. Every empire on the way down doubles down on things it’s done things that have worked in the past and are beginning to backfire. We’re seeing this in a massive way.
As far as the Venezuelan abduction is concerned, ‘abduction’ is the only word that will do...
I was trying to think of the right word for it. It’s a kidnapping.
Well, kidnapping is as good a word as any. A flagrant disregard of international rules by any standards and international law. A public relations disaster as far as I can see. The entire world is almost united in condemnation. Even countries like Britain are making lame attempts to distance themselves without actually criticising. It didn’t work out well with that.
It’s a mystery why the air defences didn’t take out the helicopters, whether that’s incompetence or some form of collusion. Who knows? They can hardly give him a secret trial. I’m sure he’s articulate enough to come out with lots of embarrassing proclamations in the course of whatever hearing they put him through, particularly as the alleged offences are actually totally implausible.
He might just hang himself in his cell in the five minutes that the CCTV is not working…
Well, let’s hope not. That probably won’t help America either. I don’t know what they really anticipated.The deputy who has stepped into the role as acting president was expected to roll over and cooperate, but clearly she’s started out by making a robust statement that she wasn’t going to.
The senior officers of the military have already made a clear statement that any interference will be resisted. Reports I’m hearing indicate that the population has become more united against any foreign meddling. Of course, one side effect of all this is that, overnight, many more people who were previously just going along with the standard account of events are now questioning it. They’re now taking another look at a whole succession of regime changes that the United States has orchestrated all over the world over the last 70 years—or maybe over 100 years.
They didn’t even bother with the standard CIA-backed coup this time. Or maybe they did and maybe it failed, but who knows.
Well, they certainly didn’t manage to drum up any significant apparent protests against the regime ahead of time. Then, of course, in the last week, we’ve had the drone attack from Ukraine targeting Putin’s country house, where he may or may not have been at the time. Right while Zelensky was in Miami, presumably holding peace talks with Trump. So there’s more insanity than anything rational in every direction.
Meanwhile, we’ve got the governments of Britain, France, and Germany, in particular, and several others in Europe who are plainly out of step with their populations on a number of counts. Not doing anything whatsoever to tackle the very real problems that we have in these countries. Hitching themselves to a foreign policy, particularly in relation to Ukraine and in relation to Israel, which has absolutely no support whatsoever amongst their own subjects.
On the positive note, one thing is the collapse of the hold that the elites have had over the narrative and have taken for granted. The result of their activities of the past year, and the rise of genuinely independent journalism online, has been that more and more people are questioning. There is more and more open debate about what is going on.
It looks that way to me.
Interesting times.
Good. Any predictions for this year, or just watch this space, as we usually say?
Well, my prediction for this year—my key prediction—is that there will be a dollar crisis of greater magnitude than most people could have conceived sometime in this year.
We’ve been hinting at that for quite a few episodes. My crystal ball happens to be broken, but if I were a betting man, that’s where my chips are!
How that’s going to spill over to the various, for want of a better word, Western Alliance countries, we just don’t know. It doesn’t look good.
Well, they’re certainly in a hurry to push through the digital ID infrastructure. And presumably central bank digital currencies tied to that. So the race is on.
I think they probably underestimate people’s ability to create black-market-type workarounds for anything they do in that way.
Well, you just create a parallel economy, or people find other ways of trading or exchanging value. If you find other ways to exchange value, those ways are not taxed.
That is a big one.
Good. Well, let’s leave this one here. We’ll keep an eye on how things progress over the next few weeks. Just to say, for anyone listening, if you have any questions for Derek about anything we discussed in 2025, hit us up in the comments. We’ll address it in an episode soon.
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