← Doug Casey's Take
Doug Casey's Take
America on the Precipice: Charlie Kirk, Cultural Fracture, and Economic Collapse
00:32:42
In today's episode, Doug and Matt delve into the controversial assassination of Charlie Kirk and its broader societal and economic implications. The discussion covers a wide range of topics including the potential economic instability facing the US,...
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- [00:00]
A
Good morning, Doug. Everybody's talking about Charlie Kirk, and it's understandable, but I think it's worth discussing maybe putting it all in a larger context. And we sit on the precipice potentially of economic issues. Certainly it seems like the dollar is losing its status. Central banks have more gold than they do dollar reserves, for instance. Right now, Trump's trying to make radical changes to things. The social climate is tense. Can you put this all in context, the whole thing with Charlie in some context, maybe historically or just considering all these other details.
- [00:40]
B
Okay, everybody's got an opinion on this type of thing, but it is hard to establish a big context. Here's what I think of it's that this is turning into a major event. It's, I'd say it's comparable to what happened to Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1963, because that kind of was a watershed in American history, that assassination. It's when the 1950s ended like four years too late and the 1960s began with the drugs and the college revolutions and all this type of thing that really set things off, number one. And people also forget that at the, and I think I mentioned this in the past podcast, but everybody still forgets it that in between 1968 and 1972, there were 4,000 bombings in the U.S. outfits like the SDS and the Weather Underground and all kinds of other fringe group. 4,000 bombings. That's a lot. Well, we're not having that today yet. So things changed. And all that stuff really started happening when the stock market started coming on glued in 1966 and not in 1968. So is that tied into what's happening today? Because the stock market hasn't come unglued yet, but I think it's going to.
- [02:29]
A
Well, and of course that was leading up to that led up to 1971, where we abandoned, you know, we closed the gold window.
- [02:37]
B
Right.
- [02:37]
A
Like that was. So they were the same economic forces seem to be present where there's, where a reset occurred then.
- [02:46]
B
Yeah. And the, and the problems that we had in the late 60s and the early 70s, it was mostly with kids, college age kids. There were riots everywhere in France and the, the Red army in Germany, so called and you know, riots on campuses in the US and so forth. But you know, college, as we've been talking about in the preparation our book, a lot was a different animal than it is today. The kids weren't, I mean, the kids who were making trouble were all leftists, but all the professors weren't leftists. Now they Are all leftists. Everybody goes to college today. Only a relatively small proportion of kids went to college back then. So how's this all going to pan out? Something's going to happen, I think, because the country is very unstable. Much, much more financially and economically unstable now than it was then. Of course, you have the Vietnam War then, but we got lots of wars now. Nothing the size of Vietnam. It's this. It's like a kid's kaleidoscope changing. And anything can happen when somebody turns it just a little bit. But my guess is that when the financial markets come unglued because they're floating on air like Wile E. Coyote in a cartoon after he walks off a cliff, then everything else is going to fall apart. So I think that's going to be the catalyst is the financial markets. But this thing with Charlie Kirk, I mean, and it's real because unlike George Floyd, I mean, there you have a degraded criminal that swallowed drugs to hide them from the cops and dies for that reason. And it became a national movement with this total scumbag. But now we got a counter movement with Charlie Kirk. Totally different individual. It's so.
- [05:07]
A
And this is more, this is much more activating the youth, I think, on either side than that event did, you know, like this, this does seem, I think, to have engaged young people in a way I haven't seen them engaged and. Well, and I don't think in my lifetime. But most of the time they have other things to do. They don't even care about what's happening in the world.
- [05:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. So we haven't heard the end of this yet. Not by any means. And who's going to pick up the mantle of Charlie Kirk? And the other thing is, exactly what is the government going to do about it? Because Trump is apparently, on a personal as well as a political level, mightily pissed off and has decided to crap crank down on all these leftist type organizations. And, you know, since he doesn't have any philosophical center and Pam Bondi comes out and says, we have to, we can't have hate speech. I mean, hate speech is bad. We have to, we have to clamp down on people saying things. But wait a minute. This whole idea of hate speech is a leftist idea. The what? One of the things that makes America different and better than any other country in the world, at least what's left of America, is that hate speech wasn't a special definition of anything. You know, in fact, I'm, I'm not going to say I'm all for hate Speech. But I don't mind hate speech because when somebody says certain things, they're telling you who they are. I don't want to suppress that because then you don't know what the person's really thinking. So this is why you should be able to say anything you want, even if that's what they say is unseemly or disreputable or whatever. So, you know, I don't trust the Trump administration to do the right thing from a personal freedom point of view in any way.
- [07:12]
A
No. And I mean, you got to just, the people that are on the right, they just have to remember it was just a couple of years ago that the hate speech stuff was used to target them.
- [07:25]
B
Yeah.
- [07:26]
A
You know, and they like this. So, so, like embracing it is so dangerous. I don't think that they understand. And I understand that people want like a crackdown on, like the antifa people, you know, that were engaging in lawlessness and all that. But, like, you know, you can arrest them for the lawlessness, not the hate speech.
- [07:47]
B
Yeah, precisely. But, you know, Trump has a special problem. It's that he's got, he's, I think Trump is looking at this two ways. He's looking at this from the point of view of somebody that's trying to save America because, you know, he doesn't have a good grip on the philosophy or the history of America at all. But he knows what he doesn't like and he sees these ultra leftists woke us Marxists, the rest of it, and he says, I've got to cut the head off the snake or the snake is going to eat the country. Okay, good argument can be made for that. I mean, it's, it's, it's like the Russian Revolution in 1917. If the czar cut the head off of the communist snake, well, then the snake wouldn't have devoured Russia. Same thing in hit in, in Germany in the 1930s. You cut the head off the snake and at least you have a few more years of stability. So I can see why Trump wants to get rid of these people, but he's creating a precedent. And when the Republicans leave office in 28, and I expect they will, the Democrats are going to redouble their efforts to woke eyes the country, number one. Number two, Trump understands that these people want to bankrupt him and his family and put him in jail. I mean, he's had a hornet's nest and they really want to get him now. So he's got to take these people out and put them in jail. But wait A minute, then they're going to turn around. And you know, this is like third world banana republic stuff at this point because the red people hate the blue people now, which is another different thing in the 60s. Yeah. You know, the lefties didn't like the righties and Vietnam War and all this type of thing. Yeah. But it was nothing like it is today. Nothing like it. It wasn't widespread. It was just among college kids and some intellectuals. And this is, this is culture wide now in the U.S. yeah, I, I.
- [09:55]
A
Was listening to this guy Balaji on a podcast recently talk about this, and he said, you know, the, the, the red and the blue people are, you know, they don't. They have only married intermarry at 4% of marriages or either, you know, between a Republican and a Democrat today. So he said this is, he said it's. There isn't one country, there are two parties. And it's a lot more like a Sunni and Shiite tribal situation than it is like a nation that has, you know, that is, as a, that is one nation that has political differences and. Good.
- [10:38]
B
Yeah. Or, or for that matter, between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland recently, or the Catholics and the Protestants in Europe in the 16th century. I mean. Yeah. Christian brotherhood and all this type of thing. They all believe in the Bible and Jesus, but they killed each other out of wholesale. So. Same thing.
- [10:59]
A
Yeah. And it seems like he talks also about the fact that essentially they've already, these two groups have already seceded from one another in the digital world already. So like the, you know, the, like, just like all the, all the lefties. We used to be on Twitter, but now they're on something called Blue Sky. You know, it's just for liberals only. Like JD Vance joined it and they like canceled his count on day one. You know, he's not allowed in there. And Twitter, you see, is mostly like right wing oriented at this point. Definitely. And, or they're on Truth Social or Gab or something like that. So they're separated digitally that way already. The people. So their media influences, the media feeds totally different version of reality that they're experiencing. So they've seceded already. They've separated themselves completely in the digital world already. And he said that ultimately it appears first in the digital world and then eventually it comes into the physical world.
- [12:01]
B
Yeah, I think it's definitely happening anyway, the concept that 330 million people can live together under one government, it's kind of ridiculous when the government is responsible for dispensing economic benefits to the Whole country, whoever is in office, some group is going to benefit at the expense of the other groups. It's once again like a third world country. All these countries in Africa, one tribe gets control of the government and all the foreign aid and everything. And high government positions all devolve to the buddies of the president and they try to stay in office as long as they can until there's a revolution. So, yeah, we're moving that way in the U.S. it's really too bad because if the U.S. goes, there actually is no place that at least theoretically represents free speech and free markets and free thought anymore. England going down the toilet, certainly Western Europe is going down the toilet totally. In addition to being bankrupt and importing masses of, you know, migrants who live off the state and have the wrong idea from our point of view of the way things work. So it's. I think we're heading it. Listen, the inevitability of heading into tough times has been obvious for a long time, but from an economic standpoint.
- [13:44]
A
From an economic standpoint.
- [13:46]
B
You mean from an economic standpoint now. Yeah, now it's clear what's happening. From a cultural standpoint, this is, this is a relatively new evolution.
- [13:57]
A
Yeah, we were talking before we started during the, before the financial crisis. You know, I, you know, you anticipated that. I mean, I moved down to Argentina in advance of that, you know, was expecting it to happen, the stock markets to crash and it was going to wash out. It was going to be a big problem. And while that didn't work out the way that, you know, they ended up bailing out the system and keeping it kicking the can down the road. But at that time, the consequences for America were much lower stakes because it was just economic. You know, I mean, there were still ties that bound the people at that stage, whereas now I feel like that's all gone. You know, all these culture war stuff didn't exist in 2007 in any real way, you know, that didn't show up until later. So, like, it's a different powder keg now. It's much worse in every way.
- [14:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a social powder keg in addition to a financial and possibly economic powder keg and a racial powder keg. I mean, it looked like, you know, when basically white people elected Obama, you know, you could have made the case that, well, okay, people are treating each other racially pretty much the same. Look at, there's a black president. But that didn't work out too well either, as it turns out.
- [15:23]
A
No, that's when the culture war started.
- [15:25]
B
Yeah.
- [15:27]
A
With him.
- [15:27]
B
And I don't know how it's going to end. And the problem is, is that if the economy, you know, of course Trump wants to control the Federal Reserve. Of course the Federal Reserve should be abolished, but forget about that. But the fact is, is that he's going to be able to change the chairmanship and Fed governors, and he wants. He's a low interest rate guy, so he's going to take interest, have them take interest rates way down, and that's going to discourage savers. At the same time, he's going to pump up the money supply because he believes that's. So inflation is going to go through the roof, which is going to destroy the rest of the middle class, because how can you save? If you're going to save, you got to save in dollars. And, and if the dollar is losing value. So I think it's going to all come unglued here while Trump's in office. And since he's for some reason associated with capitalism and the free market, there's going to be a counter reaction, which is why I think that the Democrats are going to win in 28, 2028, although who wins or loses is basically a question of who cheats best, among other things.
- [16:47]
A
Yeah, I'm just concerned about the confluence of things here. When you're Talking about the 60s and with Kennedy's assassination, you start to see the stock market go down and then knowing what came from that, a real economic reset that came out of that, which launched crazy inflation in the 70s. But it seems like this all could happen in a much more compressed time window at this stage. And, you know, the, the situation dynamics are so much worse because the US doesn't have any manufacturing anymore. You know, the US doesn't have any cohesive sense of identity anymore. You know, it's like, it's just. And then, you see, we're willing to get into direct political violence at this stage.
- [17:35]
B
No. And manufacturing at this point is unlikely to come back to the US On a large scale simply because regulations, which are very, very expensive and inconvenient are much worse here than they are in Southeast Asia. So why, why would you come here and step into that? And the tax regime is much worse. And they can look and see that the social situation is coming unglued. So I don't think we're going to get a resurgence, a real resurgence of manufacturing in the US it's too bad. But remember, you remember when the broad, the wise guys were saying, yeah, they should Work, we should think. And it turns out that we didn't think so good or. That's very funny.
- [18:34]
A
It's a. Yeah, but it's, it's a disaster now. Yeah. And even if, even if you need to get resurgent manufacturing, I mean, this is like a decade, decades maybe long project. It's not something that can just happen.
- [18:47]
B
Right.
- [18:48]
A
I mean, we don't, you know, we don't have many engineers anymore compared to, you know, the. We haven't been training up people who can actually build stuff. Like lost all of that.
- [18:59]
B
And the engineers that do graduate from MIT and Caltech and places like that, most of them are Chinese. And other countries that come to the US because the courses are worthwhile taking at those places. They're not Americans that are going to stay in America.
- [19:17]
A
Exactly, exactly. So that's a huge problem. So.
- [19:21]
B
Well, you know, listen, we have a bubbly stock market where the rich guys are making incredible amounts of money. So who needs to make stuff as long as you're getting rich, at least on paper.
- [19:35]
A
Yeah. The problem with that is, is when basically the, you know, the dollar as reserve currency is kind of a, like it's a, it's a, it's artificially inflated the standard of living of Americans in general. And that seems like it's at a tipping point where it could be lost and then we could. And it's a bind. Like, it's not like you go down a peg because of it. You lose the benefit of it. It's either have it or you don't. And you don't have it. Like the standard of living could be just devastating. We could like falling off a cliff kind of change.
- [20:13]
B
Yeah. It's like what Hemingway said, how you go bankrupt slowly and then all of a sudden. And the thing is that even the government statistics, which are increasingly unreliable, show that since 1971, the average standard of living has been for the average middle class and lower guy has been dropping slowly, slowly as the currencies depreciated. But that's. But it's been maintained in other ways. Both because technologies kept increasing, which is good, but also because all the debt in the world, it's borrowing capital that others have saved for generations in the past. But debt's at a level that, well, maybe it can go higher, but maybe we've borrowed about all we can or. And none. The other thing is forget about borrowing from the past. You mortgage your own future. That's the other thing. So maybe both of those games are coming to an end.
- [21:21]
A
Yeah, I think they Are. I think they are. I don't have much, much longer, but I wanted to just bring up, you know, get your take on what is the story, the official story around Charlie Kirk's fascination. Because there's a lot of weird things about it all that, you know, and there's, there's a lot of noise in the system, you know, people saying he wasn't really killed or, you know, it was like, you know, crazy stuff like that. And then, and then, but then there are, there are real holes in the official story that seem awfully weird too.
- [21:56]
B
It is odd. You'd think that an assassination in broad daylight where there's no motion, a guy who's sitting down in front of a crowd of 3,000 people, you think this would be pretty cut and dried and they could find out who did it, whicho pronto.
- [22:15]
A
Yeah.
- [22:15]
B
But they can't.
- [22:16]
A
Well, they say that they have, they think they, they release the text messages where the guy incriminates himself.
- [22:22]
B
Totally and completely strange text messages, I've got to say. Like, like read, read some of the things that. Is this the way a 22 year old tranny adjacent person.
- [22:39]
A
Yeah. So the roommate says, I thought they caught the person. And the alleged shooter says no, they grabbed some crazy old dude, then interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after, but most of that side of town got locked down. It's quiet, almost enough to get out, but there's one vehicle lingering.
- [23:06]
B
This doesn't sound like normal texting stuff and the use of the term drop point.
- [23:13]
A
Interrogated.
- [23:14]
B
Yeah, interrogator. What's going on here? And, and, and, and you know, people of that age are well aware that if it's an electronic message, it's there forever. Do they really want to hang themselves that badly? Whether they're going to do it or not do it, it's still not going to look good for their futures. I mean, that's suspicious, you know, look, you think about it, we don't know, I don't know what the rifle is. I mean, we've been shown the rifle. Where's the opponent from the rifle?
- [23:53]
A
They showed a picture of the rifle that was supposedly wrapped in a towel, but it was actually in a box on a lawn, not in a wooded area. So they didn't take the picture they showed us was not like where it was discovered. It was, it had to have been moved because it was like on a lawn, you know, and they said it was left in a wooded area and there was no Towel in that picture, which supposedly was wrapped in a towel. And it's like in a, you know, maybe in an evidence box, essentially for the rifle.
- [24:20]
B
Well, I think if they went looking for that rifle there, it's a crime scene, you wouldn't think they'd contaminate. You think they take some pictures along the way to help in the investigation instead of contaminating the crime scene? That doesn't make any sense.
- [24:40]
A
Well, they contaminated the entire crime scene right away.
- [24:44]
B
Yeah. The whole thing. Yeah.
- [24:46]
A
Stage down, everything.
- [24:49]
B
Yeah. Who the, who the hell knows? And the, the thing is, if that was a.30 06, I mean, it's hard to believe anything at this point when you. I'd like to find the bullet that took out Charlie because it exists. It's someplace. You think they would really try to find it? Because if it was a hollow point bullet, it wouldn't have just been a tiny little hole on one side of his neck. Where's the exit wound? Even if, even, even if it was a solid non hollow point bullet, I've got to believe it would have.
- [25:29]
A
They claim it was this.
- [25:32]
B
Yeah.
- [25:33]
A
Put that in perspective. Here's a 12 gauge shotgun shell.
- [25:36]
B
Yeah. And. And from 200 yards away, that.30 06, which leaves the muzzle at 3000ft per second. It's still going like 2200ft a second and the sound is like 1150 or something like feet per second.
- [25:54]
A
So it's meant for large game, you.
- [25:57]
B
Know, it would have done a lot of damage. And I don't. I mean, wait a minute. And this is a crowd of 3,000 kids. Everybody's got a cell phone that they're generally taking pictures of, so why do we only have one picture?
- [26:14]
A
They have CCTV everywhere, all over campus.
- [26:17]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So I'd like to know what happened to the rest of the pictures that might have been taken in. Around. In and around there. I mean, I guess we're just being shown. What? I don't. I don't believe it. Of course, there's some people say, well, Charlie's not dead. The dead, the death was faked. Well, I don't believe that, but I'd like some reasonable answers. Why don't they send in the CSI guys from Las Vegas? They could figure this out, I'm sure.
- [26:47]
A
Yeah, I. I think they would do a better job. There's no doubt about it.
- [26:51]
B
Oh, but I forgot that Las Vegas Shooting were 500 people. 500 people were wounded. Where was the CSI guys, Grissom and those guys for the television show? They're right In Las Vegas. You think they would have been all over it.
- [27:07]
A
Yeah, well, we're supposed to forget about that event. It's not. It didn't happen. And this is when we're supposed to, we're supposed to accept. I'm just looking for evidence that this guy did what he's accused of. And there's not any, there's not any pictures of him with the rifle anywhere that they published at least. And you know, there's no. You think there'd be an exit wound of some kind, you know, coming up through here behind him on the white, on the back of the white thing? Either something. And then, and then this, this, this text message thing is the most ridiculous thing to me ever because it totally looks like it's cop talk. And somebody, you know, you ran it through AI asking if it was. Thought it was legitimate. This is what they. This is what chat GTP said about it. Verdict. Could it be real? Possible, but very unlikely because of how detailed, staged and incriminating it is. More likely it's fabricated, either by human writing a mock transcript for dramatic effect or by prompted or AI prompted to generate a fake chat log about a violent event.
- [28:15]
B
Well, that sounds authoritative, but opinion chat, GPT. And you know, of course, the other element of this that was being widely talked about in the blogosphere is that really the Israelis and the Zionists were in back of all this and because Charlie, who was extremely pro Israel in the past, was. Was kind of getting cold feet. But I don't know, they say that he personally didn't like Netanyahu, that he was scared by the way these people were intimidating him. And, and Zionist billionaires in the US were basically throwing all this money at him because he was so pro Israel, but he was changing his opinion. In fact, maybe, you know, who knows.
- [29:13]
A
The thing is, I would say there's as much evidence, there's basically no evidence of that in the same way there's no evidence that this alleged shooter did it. I mean, I have, I'm not. I haven't seen anything that's convincing on either side on neither one of those points of view at all. So it's. At least with that one, there's the motive.
- [29:36]
B
You know, anyway, if I was. Let's suppose they're right about the Israelis. I mean, if nothing else, the Israelis are pretty smart and it's a really high risk thing to kill somebody just because they're kind of not as friendly towards you as they used to be.
- [29:57]
A
Especially in, in that public manner. Right.
- [30:01]
B
I mean, that's taking a really big risk to head. Head off is leaving the. Leaving the herd for it. Doesn't. The cost benefit of killing Charlie doesn't make any sense from their point of view.
- [30:18]
A
Yeah, it really doesn't. But at the same time, none of this makes any sense to me, actually. The stories we hear from it. And all of a sudden, you know, just because it's not the old FBI, it's not James Comey, doesn't make me have faith in their. What they're telling us any more than I did before.
- [30:35]
B
Well, especially since all the data about Epstein has not been released. Even though they are obviously lying, saying that it has been released.
- [30:46]
A
Well, they actually say that there isn't anything to release. There really weren't any victims other. There really weren't any perpetrators other than Epstein himself. That's what Cash said.
- [30:54]
B
That's right. Nothing to see here. But if that's the case, what's Julian Maxwell doing in jail if there was nothing going on like he says?
- [31:01]
A
I think that's her point.
- [31:05]
B
Yeah.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah, It's a disaster. But anyway, I think that. I think this is a bigger thing than just this terrible public assassination. I think it's like that's a huge thing, but I think it's more a symptom.
- [31:20]
B
Yeah.
- [31:21]
A
What's all going on beneath the surface starting to bubble up.
- [31:25]
B
And if this is the type of thing that's going to crystallize all the problems that are inchoate, and it's going to make it easier now for people to decide which side of the barricades they're on and be more suspicious and.
- [31:45]
A
No, it's more government to help.
- [31:49]
B
Well, especially after the markets collapse, people are going to look for the government to do something. Government's supposed to do something. And they will.
- [31:59]
A
They will. No doubt about that. All right, well, we'll leave it there for today, Doug, and we'll be back on Friday. So thank you very much.
- [32:05]
B
And one other thing. Listen, I like to end these conversations on an optimistic note. And the bright side is that Kamala wasn't elected. If that was the case, who knows what would be happening already?
- [32:20]
A
That's true. We have no idea. But the thing is, we don't know. It could be. It might not be as bad. I don't know.
- [32:30]
B
Maybe this is all just an AI simulation that we're living in. I don't know either.
- [32:35]
A
I don't know. It's getting weird, though. All right, Doug, Thanks a lot. We'll see you on Friday.
- [32:39]
B
Thanks, Matt.