People Are Going To Drone Bomb Our Data Centers! Says Blackrock CEO Larry Fink

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jimmy Dore Show

Episode: “People Are Going To Drone Bomb Our Data Centers! Says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink”

Date: May 20, 2026

Host: Jimmy Dore

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Overview

In this episode, Jimmy Dore delves into the rapidly expanding world of AI data centers, highlighting an alarming warning from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink about potential domestic attacks on these centers. The discussion explores the consolidation of corporate power, environmental impacts of data centers, the political motivations behind their rapid proliferation, and the failure of democratic processes to check corporate interests. Featuring commentary from Tucker Carlson, environmental experts, and a former CIA officer, the show offers scathing criticism of both the tech oligarchy and the American political establishment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Larry Fink’s Warning: Domestic Threats to Data Centers

• Jimmy introduces Larry Fink as “the guy who runs the world,” equating him to “Dr. Evil” and the true power behind politicians.

• Fink is quoted expressing concern that ordinary Americans, not foreign adversaries, might use cheap drones to attack massive new data centers.

  Notable Quote:
  “Larry Fink is concerned that ordinary American citizens, as he just said, will use $3,000 drones to destroy these billion dollar investments.”
  —Tucker Carlson [08:10]

Timestamps:

• Fink’s warning and context [01:31–05:55]
• Host and guests riff on the implications [05:55–07:50]

2. Corporate and Political Power Structures

• Jimmy and guests draw contrasts between Chinese and US systems, arguing US billionaires are above politicians, unlike in China [01:31–02:40].

• AI data centers are framed as tools for surveillance and social control, with the state and corporate sector collaborating.

• The expansion of prison infrastructure—originally built for ICE—is depicted as preparation for suppressing domestic dissent, not immigration enforcement.

  Notable Quote:
  “They built all those ICE prisons… not for immigrants, they built them for you. If you now are ready to revolt.”
  —Jimmy Dore [02:47]

3. Tucker Carlson & The Relationship Between Citizens and Power

• Carlson argues that the focus isn’t on how AI changes power dynamics or impacts human rights, but on securing elite investments:

  Notable Quote:
  “Does this change the relationship of the powerless to the powerful? …How do we do this and bring about the prosperity that it promises, without totally eliminating human rights?”
  —Tucker Carlson [07:12]

  Segment:

  • Carlson’s remarks stitched with Jimmy’s reaction [07:12–08:32]

4. Environmental and Social Consequences of Massive Data Centers

• Tony Heller (RealClimateScience.com) outlines grave environmental risks of massive new data centers like “Project Jade” in Wyoming.

  • These centers may use as much energy as 10 nuclear power plants.
  • Lack of water will force heat dissipation into the air, creating possible catastrophic 'heat islands'.

  Notable Quote:
  “The proposed 10 gigawatt data center will match the energy footprints of an atomic bomb every 52 minutes… There’s very little or no water available to cool this massive new data center. This means the data center will have to be cooled by radiating the heat off into the air.”
  —Tony Heller [14:02–16:44]

• Concerns highlighted:

  • No proper environmental modeling conducted.
  • Potential for catastrophic local climate effects.
  • Erosion of local character as rural land is converted to housing for construction workers.
  • Water rights for data centers may undermine allocations for others, especially amid historic drought.

Timestamps:

• Tony Heller’s full explainer [14:02–19:12]
• Follow-up expert critique [19:45–21:29, 25:23–32:48]

5. Public Resistance and Oligarchic Manipulation

• Large-scale public objection to data center projects is dismissed or paywalled; local commissions often override popular opposition.

• Accusations that complaint processes are “paywalled” summarize public frustration at being locked out of decisions that impact their lives.

  Notable Quote:
  “Paywalling the complaint process to a foreign billionaire’s tax-exempt data center in your backyard is probably the best encapsulation of American democracy that I’ve ever heard.”
  —Verbo Care Announcer (satirical segment) [23:43]

• Experts warn that, unlike climate alarmism, the dangers of concentrated data centers may be severe and imminent.

  Notable Quote:
  “I’m genuinely alarmed about what these massive data centers are going to do to local climate—not to the global climate, but to Cheyenne, Wyoming and Utah and other places where they’re building.”
  —Environmental Expert [34:23]

6. Surveillance State Motivations

• A data scientist guest suggests: The primary purpose of the centers is likely 24/7 mass surveillance—not legitimate commercial need.

• Chinese models for AI are more efficient, distributed, and cost a fraction of US operations, suggesting the American model is both wasteful and possibly malicious.

  Timestamps:

  • Surveillance theory [35:35–36:57]

7. Broader Political Context & Historical Parallels

• Multiple reminders that US founding principles include the right (and history) of armed revolt against unresponsive elites.
• Critiques of Trump’s push to deregulate and rapidly build data centers, prioritize prisons, and ban state regulation of AI.
• “Operation Warp Speed” is cited as a precedent for bypassing safety and oversight for expediency and profit [37:02].

8. US Foreign Policy, Terrorism, and CIA Operations

• Ex-CIA officer guest indicts US and Israeli foreign policy as primary sources of terrorism, not Iran or other official “enemies.”

• Provides history of US support for Saddam Hussein, arming and funding terrorist groups, and manipulating the war on terror for imperial objectives.

• CIA and military actions are frequently unaccountable to elected officials—driven by the interests of financial and military elites.

  Notable Quote:
  “Unfortunately, no, [Iran is not the number one sponsor of terrorism]. It is us. We’ve been the ones funding it, we’ve been the ones enabling it…”
  —Ex-CIA Officer [44:10]

• Russiagate, election interference, and NATO expansions discussed as tools of the military-industrial complex, not the will of citizens.

9. Ultimate Power and Public Disempowerment

• Discussants conclude that corporate and intelligence agencies serve the interests of a small billionaire class and global financial elites, not the American people.

• The unchecked building of environmentally disastrous data centers is a vivid symptom of this power dynamic.

  Notable Quote:
  “We live in an oligarchy. We don’t live in a democracy.”
  —Jimmy Dore [33:13]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On power consolidation:
  “It’s amazing how capitalism and communism ended up in the exact same place…there’s only three companies that own everything.”
  —Jimmy Dore [01:31]

• On ICE/future prisons:
  “They didn’t build them for immigrants, they built them for you.”
  —Jimmy Dore [02:47]

• On environment & heat:
  “The data center will have to be cooled by radiating the heat off into the air…how are they planning on getting rid of this heat equivalent to an atomic bomb every 52 minutes?”
  —Tony Heller [16:43]

• On water and resources:
  “The fact that they may have water rights now doesn’t mean that these water rights are going to be theirs six months from now. These massive data centers do not belong in the desert.”
  —Environmental Expert [28:03]

• On surveillance:
  “The only explanation he can think of for [the data centers] is for mass 24-hour surveillance on everybody in the country.”
  —Environmental Expert, paraphrasing Data Scientist [35:35]

• On the American system:
  “Paywalling the complaint process...is probably the best encapsulation of American democracy that I've ever heard.”
  —Verbo Care Announcer (satire) [23:43]

• On political capture:
  “The CIA…works for the military-industrial complex and the Davos internationalists.”
  —Jimmy Dore [50:29]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:31 — Introduction to Larry Fink and the discussion on power structures
• 07:12 — Tucker Carlson on AI, rights, and elites’ priorities
• 14:02 — Tony Heller on environmental impacts of data centers
• 19:45 — Environmental expert discusses modeling and catastrophe potential
• 23:43 — Satirical breakdown: Paywall complaints and public disenfranchisement
• 32:48 — Rising energy/water costs, resource competition explained
• 35:35 — Data center surveillance state theory
• 37:02 — Parallels to “Operation Warp Speed” and regulatory bypasses
• 42:11 — Ex-CIA officer describes US sponsorship of terrorism
• 50:29 — The relationship between CIA, financial elites, and political puppets

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Conclusion

This episode of The Jimmy Dore Show is a fiery, deeply skeptical journey through the intersection of surveillance capitalism, environmental catastrophe, and the decaying structures of American democracy. Centering on Larry Fink’s warnings of domestic threats to billionaire investments, Dore and his guests excoriate the political system for subjugating public interests to those of a tiny, powerful elite. The environmental, social, and ethical consequences of unchecked data center expansion—and the national security state that enables it—are laid bare with humor, outrage, and a call to resist passivity in the face of engineered catastrophes.

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Transcript

[Kiana]

I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted.

[Jimmy Dore]

Start your free [e-mail] ready or not.

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[Jimmy Dore]

Wayfair Every style, every home. Hey, come see me on tour in Atlanta, Raleigh, Spokane, Tacoma, Levittown, New York, Rosemont, Illinois and Chicago, Illinois. Go to Jimmy Dore.com for a link for tickets. Establishment media sucks. August lighting. So good luck. Bullshit. We can't afford why he's fomenting this. Watch and see as his jack golf the medium speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.

[Kiana]

It's the ch Jimmy Door show.

[Jimmy Dore]

Here's Larry Fink now. If you don't know Larry Fink is. He's Dr. Evil. He's the guy who runs the world. He's the head of Black Rock. And they're the people who own everything. Right. And so the idea that communism is bad because you don't get any choice. And there's one central place that makes everything. Well, it's amazing how capitalism and communism ended up in the exact same place because you don't have to. Yeah, you get 40 different choices of cereal, but you, you have owners. So there's only three companies that own everything. It's BlackRock, it's State street, and it's Vanguard. And they're the equity people. And he's one of them. And he's more powerful than presidents. He, Donald Trump, he's his boss, this guy. So that doesn't, by the way, that doesn't happen in China. China, that the billionaire capitalists are not above the politicians in America. The billionaire capitalists are above the politicians in China. That doesn't Happen. They have capitalism, but the.

[Caller/Guest]

But they don't have mass immigration.

[Jimmy Dore]

But they have. But the politic, the government is above them. And they put their billionaire. That's not. It's the exact opposite here, okay?

[Caller/Guest]

That's why there are enemies supposedly because these billionaires can't believe.

[Jimmy Dore]

That's right.

[Caller/Guest]

That the state could come down on a billionaire.

[Jimmy Dore]

That's right, they can't believe it. But here he is and he's gonna tell you that they're building these AI data centers for surveillance so they can when step out of line. So they're going to give you a ubi, Right. So they're going to cut your jobs. Right. So your jobs are gone. You go to college, you're going to be saddled with mountains of debt, you're not able to afford a house. But plus now you're not. Your job is going to be taken away by an AI machine and an AI data center. And so that's the. That's the cherry, that's your. Hey, you graduated college, no job and so now what he's going to do. And then they built all those ICE prisons. They didn't build them for immigrants, they built them for you. If you now are ready to revolt. Right. And so now he knows people are ready to revolt, especially against AI data centers. And he's afraid they're going to start bombing them. He's afraid people are going to start bombing a data centers. Wouldn't that be.

[Caller/Guest]

Don't. Then he'll have someone do it.

[Jimmy Dore]

By the way, wouldn't that be horrible? Yeah. Go ahead, Kurt.

[Caller/Guest]

What was it the thing after New Orleans flood, the government group that was supposed that everybody said was going to put you in tents.

[Jimmy Dore]

This is the new female ICE is the new fema. And so let's listen to him now

[Grabian Speaker]

because of drone warfare we have to relook at all forms of security and the need for the multimedia marketplace, the GCC region.

[Jimmy Dore]

So this, I got this off that Grabian website and they insert their little commercial over their. Over this. Over their own thing, over this guy talking get info from him. I can see why this guy feels insecure. He can't even stop Grabian marketplace message from interrupting him. Let's listen Grabian.

[Grabian Speaker]

But now because of drone warfare, we have to relook at all forms of security and the need for the multimedia marketplace, the GCC region to rebuild it so that it's going to be in a position where it's not going to be obstructed by drone warfare. So many more things Multimedia marketplace. But even here in the United States, if we're going to be building, let's see these 1 GW data centers. How do we make sure we're not protecting those $50 billion $75 billion investments we have to multimedia everything because of the role of drone warfare. Right now we're looking at it internationally. But you know, one of my concerns is could it be a domestic terrorism using a three thousand dollar drone? So all multimedia marketplace are actually opportunities, not problems. It's going to require as we said, trillions of dollars of capital. Governments cannot build these out alone. They don't have the multimedia marketplace. Their deficits are started mounting and we spend too little time talking about the US deficits and other countries deficit. So this is going to all be the role of private sector.

[Caller/Guest]

Wow. You see him next to Michael Milken, that lizard with the bald head. The bald headed guy went to prison. Now they all still hang out with him.

[Jimmy Dore]

Here's what so, so they know that people are going to revolt. I have to remind people, I'm not encouraging people to do violence. I'm just reminding people that this country was founded on violence. The last time the ruling elite was this unresponsive to the citizens, George Washington picked up a gun and started shooting people.

[Caller/Guest]

Yeah, you could shut the whole thing down, just not participating, by the way, zero violence. That's everybody could all do that.

[Jimmy Dore]

And now, so now he knows that that spirit is in America. It's an American spirit of freedom. Don't tread on me. Why we have the second amendment. He knows this and he's afraid of it. And that's what that tells you right there. Oh my God, people are going to start droning him. Thank God Trump put $80 billion not into your life giving you high speed rail or health care you could afford or schools or parks or anything nice that's healthy or infrastructure. No, no, he put, he built 80 billion into prisons because he knows people are going to start revolting. Just like that guy who actually is Trump's boss. He knows this. Here's what Tucker Carlson has to say about it.

[Tucker Carlson]

But consider the concern. So if you're rolling out what they're telling you and clearly they believe is the single greatest technological change in the history of human life on this planet is the biggest thing that's ever happened ever, then you think one of your main concerns would be, well, does this change the relationship of the powerless to the powerful relationship of the citizen to the state? For example, one of your concerns would be how do we do this and bring about the prosperity that it promises without totally eliminating human rights. Making people slaves because we're against slavery, right? Aren't making slavery.

[Jimmy Dore]

We were.

[Tucker Carlson]

How do we do that? But that doesn't seem to be Larry Fink's main concern. His main concern is how do we protect our investment. This infrastructure, these buildings, these data centers. Someone could drone them. Someone could drone them now. Who? Foreign actors?

[Jimmy Dore]

Hezbollah? Hamas?

[Tucker Carlson]

No, no, no. Just people. Larry Fink is concerned that ordinary American citizens, as he just said, will use $3,000 drones to destroy these billion dollar investments. Why would he be worried about that? We've had electricity for over a hundred years. There are 11,000 power plants in the.

[Jimmy Dore]

In the United States. People don't. People don't bomb them. And you want to see how people really feel about data centers. False. All of this is false. Then why won't they let people talk? Why won't they let us ask questions? This is not real information. And we sit here like it's okay. It's a charade. It's a charade. It's false. So he knows it's coming. He knows it's coming.

[Caller/Guest]

They all have known for as long as they've talked about it. They all. The guy with the hair lip, Ben Goertzel, go look up his speeches. He talks about exactly what's going to happen. Lots of anger and violence. They plan for it. They have planned for it. The drone thing, though, that's like. They want extra, like, authority over the sky with that. That's all that means.

[Jimmy Dore]

I'm not telling anybody. They should bomb an AI center. That would be horrible. That would be crime. I'm saying that they think you're going to do that. In fact, they know you're going to do that, and they're preparing for it, which is why they created all those prisons in the big beautiful bill, which is why they made it illegal for local governments to regulate AI data centers. And why they created an $80 billion prison industry and a new police force, which is not there to get rid of illegal immigrants. Because they want illegal immigrants, because they want cheap labor. That's not what this is about. Which is why they're prisoners.

[Caller/Guest]

It wasn't just for black people. It's for all of you.

[Jimmy Dore]

It's not. It's not just for black people this time.

[Caller/Guest]

That was just the tested. They test. Of course they're gonna test it on black people. But ultimately the prisons are for you.

[Jimmy Dore]

Prisons are for you.

[Caller/Guest]

You might be black, so that doesn't really make sense. But you See what I'm saying?

[Jimmy Dore]

I like how Larry Fink said he's afraid of. He's not afraid of. He's scared of foreign actors. And that's not just Javier Bardem.

[Caller/Guest]

I'm afraid of him.

[Jimmy Dore]

Unfortunately, you can shout shame at. You can't shout shame at a sociopath. It's this because they were shouting shame at those people. You can't shout shame at a sociopath. It's the same thing as shouting a cat when they piss on your rug.

[Caller/Guest]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Dore]

That has no effect. And here's what they tell you. If you don't want these. Here's. Here's the three commissioners who were corrupted by the Tech Bros. And they vote at the same meeting. And they were telling people to shut up. For hell sakes, grow up. For hell sakes, grow up. He says, yeah, grow up on the.

[Caller/Guest]

Take it.

[Jimmy Dore]

Take it.

[Caller/Guest]

Yeah. That is not a local expression. That is a Freudian slip. For hell's sake, grow up. That just bubbled right out of that guy.

[Jimmy Dore]

Where for the sake of hell, be ma. Be mature.

[Caller/Guest]

Hell on earth where you live now,

[Jimmy Dore]

for the hell escape that we've created in the United States, for that sake, be mature. And it should be the kind of mature that makes some lazy, insanely lucky corporate toady happy. That's the kind of maturity he's looking for. Hey, what happens if he says, for heaven's sake, does he just get struck by lightning and burst into flames? If he says, for heaven's sake, I bet everybody would like to see that happen.

[Caller/Guest]

It's like when Bush said the Iraq. You know, Rush, the illegal invasion of Iraq by mistake. In that speech is the exact same thing.

[Jimmy Dore]

Right when he was talking about Ukraine and Putin invading Ukraine.

[Caller/Guest]

These three jerk offs know what they're doing. They knew that people would be upset. That's why they get paid the big bucks to sit there and just like dispassionately try to take it like customer service agents until the AI can replace even them.

[Jimmy Dore]

Where'd you send it, Steph? To both of your emails. Okay. Hey, you know, here's another great way you can help support the show is you become a premium member. We give you a couple of hours of premium bonus content every week. And it's a great way to help support the show. You can do it by going to jimmy dork.com, clicking on join Premium. It's the most affordable premium program in the business. And it's a great way to help put your thumb back in the eye of the bastards. Thanks for everybody who was already a premium member. And if you haven't, you're missing out. We give you lots of bonus content. Thanks for your support. A vacation rental shouldn't come with surprises.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

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[Jimmy Dore]

7 Life Support.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

If the hot tub's broken, that's a verbo care thing.

[Tony Heller]

If my teenager starts calling me Leslie,

[Jimmy Dore]

that's a family thing. Leslie.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

Verbo Care and 24.

[Jimmy Dore]

7 Life Support.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

If you know you verbo terms apply.

[Jimmy Dore]

So now I want to talk about the data centers. So you've been making some posts about the data center. Let me play your video.

[Tony Heller]

Hello, this is Tony Heller from RealClimateScience.com I live in Cheyenne, Wyoming and this story is big news around here. Wyoming county approves construction of what could become the largest data center in the United States. Project Jade could eventually use the same amount of electricity as produced by 10 nuclear power plants Cheyenne to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined, an enormous data center in Wyoming will consume five times more power than the state's people. The owner remains a mystery. This project is obviously going to make a lot of money for some people, but what about its environmental effects? The proposed 10 gigawatt data center will match the energy footprints of an atomic bomb every 52 minutes. That's a huge amount of heat. We should ask the question how do they intend to dissipate that heat without causing major environmental problems? Let's take a look at other industries which generate a lot of heat. Like steel mills. Steel mills are typically placed near large bodies of water like this one at Gary, Indiana. It is located right on the edge of Lake Michigan. The heat generated at the steel mill is carried away by the water. This keeps the air temperatures in the region from rising significantly. This photo shows another energy intensive industry. It's the Rawhide Coal Fired Power Plant located just south of the border from Wyoming in Colorado. I took this photo during the record cold of Valentine's Day 2021, the same day when Texas froze. These solar panels in the foreground were covered with snow and they weren't generating any electricity. Northern Colorado is completely dependent on this coal plant for their power. That day the plant is cooled largely by evaporating water. Water evaporating out of the smokestack directly cools the equipment and water evaporating off of this lake removes almost all of the remaining heat. Note that the water is evaporating even in very cold air. Water is incredibly efficient at removing heat. The amount of heat which water can hold is more than 3,000 times higher than an equivalent amount of air. The amount of heat which will increase the temperature of water by 2 degrees Celsius would increase an equivalent amount of air by 7,000 degrees. That would raise the temperature of the air to hotter than the temperature on the surface of the sun. The point being that water is very efficient at removing heat, but air certainly is not. The problem we've got here in Cheyenne is that we don't have much water. The western US Is experiencing the worst springtime drought on record. Cheyenne gets almost all of its water supply from snowmelt. And as of yesterday, none of the mountain locations which Cheyenne gets its water supply from had any snow. Additionally, we had the warmest start of the year on record. With temperatures nearly 10 degrees above normal. There's very little or no water available to cool this massive new data center being built. This means the data center will have to be cooled by radiating the heat off into the air. But as we've already seen, air is very inefficient at removing heat. So how are they planning on getting rid of this heat? Equivalent to one atomic bomb every 52 minutes. To put this heat flow in perspective,

[Ex-CIA Officer]

this is equivalent to all of the

[Tony Heller]

solar radiation received in Cheyenne during the winter, when the air is still during winter and summer. This is going to have a major effect on the temperatures in the Cheyenne area. The sun only warms the land up for a limited number of hours every day. But the data center never turns off. This graphic generated by Gemini shows what the temperatures on Earth would be if Earth's day length was 72 hours instead of 24. The sun provides a tremendous amount of heat to the Earth, and the only reason we can survive it is because our days don't last very long. If days lasted for 72 hours instead of 24, the middle of the day would be unbearably hot and nights would be unbearably cold. But the data center never turns off, so we never get a break from its heat. There's a similar data center being planned in Utah, where they're also having a very bad drought. Scientists are very worried that it could create a massive heat island near the Great Salt Lake. We have the largest weather and climate supercomputing center right here in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Before rushing into this project, which could have a very bad effect on our weather, wouldn't it be a good idea to do some modeling and find out exactly what the effects are going to be? They are rushing into these projects without doing a proper environmental assessment. And regardless of the weather Effects of the data center. They're having a terribly bad effect on the local community. Huge areas of land are being converted into hideous four story apartment complexes which look like prisons. Apparently these are needed to house the construction workers. The outlying areas of Cheyenne are known for their large lots and houses spaced widely apart. And this land is being replaced by high density and hideously ugly apartments. The social impact of these projects is huge. And all these people they're bringing in are using more water, which we don't have. 250 years ago the United States was founded on the principle of consent of the governed. But we were never given a vote on this. Tucker Carlson recently confronted Kevin o' Leary about this. O' Leary made the argument that his project was approved by a small commission. And Tucker Carlson responded. How hard is it for Kevin o' Leary and Amazon and Microsoft to corrupt three county commissioners? The people of Utah and Wyoming deserve to have a proper environmental assessment done. We deserve to know the facts of what's actually going on. And the Declaration of Independence gives us the right to choose our own destiny. And there's another dark side to this story. Instead of doing a real environmental assessment of the impact of this project, they are hiding behind the global warming scam. They want the public to believe that if they sequester the carbon from their generators, everything's going to be okay. But the problem isn't imaginary heat from global warming. It's the very real heat coming from their generators and from their data center. Besides what I've talked about in this video, there's another very big question as to what these giant data centers are being used for. But I'll save that for a different video.

[Jimmy Dore]

Okay, so there's been a lot of pushback recently. There's been a video going around I want to. So this doesn't seem sustainable. Tony, I want to show you. I'm going to show a video in a second. But you're right, they're not doing the modeling. They're not what this seems like they're engineering a man made engineered real not climate change, but a man made engineered catastrophe. Again, am I overstating this? And why are they doing this?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah, you may well be right. It may well be a catastrophe. And without the modeling we don't really have any way of knowing that. It might be that with the prevailing winds a lot of the heat will get carried away and it won't be a problem. But when the air is still has the potential to raise temperatures tremendously. When a study by a professor in Utah said it could raise temperatures by 16 degrees, which would be catastrophic. It melts all the snow here. We've already got a problem with not enough snow. And it's hard to say, but we definitely need that modeling. We need a proper environmental assessment. And the reason it's not happening is because the Trump administration is pushing through these data centers, limiting. There was a, I just saw a press release from the White House that they want to push them through really quickly and ignore the normal environmental impact statement process.

[Jimmy Dore]

I mean, this is the kind of thing that leads to a revolution like this really does. Like. So, you know, I try to, I don't encourage violence, but I just, I just encourage people to remember how this country was founded. When, when the, when the, when the ruling class was not. Would be. Was this unresponsive to the, to the citizens. George Washington picked up a gun and started shooting people. That's how this country was founded. When the ruling elite was unresponsive like this to the, to, to the citizenry. George Washington and a bunch of people picked up guns and started shooting people. People forget that, okay? And we do have a second amendment here. And I'm not, again, I'm not advocate, I would never advocate people do violence. I'm just trying to warn people that that is a very potential thing that could happen. Do you worry about something like that?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Well, Kevin o' Leary said the other day that he's worried that people are going to make drones that are going to come in and destroy his data center. And I think that is actually a very real possibility.

[Jimmy Dore]

So I want to show you. Here's the video. Why are so many people afraid of data centers? His quick thoughts. Let's watch this and I want to get your response.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

Kevin o' Leary asks Utah an intriguing question. What if you give me 40,000 acres of untaxed land twice the size of Manhattan for a data center that will use more power than the entirety of Utah, currently raise nighttime temperatures by 26 degrees, threaten the local ecosystem and in return all provide enough jobs to raise the total job pool in Utah by seven hundredths of 1%. What do you say, Utah?

[Data Center Advocate]

First, landowners are selling or leasing their land to the project. It's not being given. Second, it doesn't make sense to think about percentage change in employment across the whole state. The data center is not being built

[Tony Heller]

across the whole state.

[Data Center Advocate]

It's being built in Box Elder County, Utah population 65,000. If half of the population has a job, then we aren't talking about seven hundredths of one person. Percent of a change in employment. We're talking about plus 7% employment because the project is expected to bring in 2,000 permanent jobs at completion. Third, jobs aren't the only thing in terms of taxes. The project is expected to bring in $30 million annually for box Elder county in the first phase and more than $100 million annually at full build out. And that's for Box Elder county specifically. There's also money that would go to the State or the MITA program, but this is 100 million DOL annually at full build out to Box Elder County. 2026 budget summary for Box Elder county shows us that the county currently has $52 million in revenue. They have a budget deficit of $11 million, and they have a fund balance of 38 million. So the real trade being offered here is I'm going to buy some land from private landowners and build a data center on it. You get plus 7% employment in the county and three times your tax revenue, which I think sounds like a little bit better of a trade.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

After nearly 4,000 people lodged objections to the project, the complaints have suddenly gone silent. That's either because everyone has changed their mind or Utah has changed the process to where all previous complaints have been invalidated. And to lodge a new one, you have to pay $15. Paywalling the complaint process to a foreign billionaire's tax exempt data center in your backyard is probably the best encapsulation of American democracy that I've ever heard.

[Data Center Advocate]

No, there's always been a $15 fee to lodge a complaint. And if you bother to look into this at all, you'd see the 4000ish people who originally filed the protest. They did have to pay the $15 fee too. And it's funny, I think, because getting all the details wrong while you're quoting the Guardian out of context and fear mongering and catastrophizing. Oh, no. This project is going to be like 23 atom Bob's worth of electricity. I would say that's the perfect encapsulation of the morning brew heard.

[Verbo Care Announcer]

The project will require 9 gigawatts of power, which according to this helpful webpage from the Department of Energy. Oh, wait, never mind. That was deleted within the past six days. Trying to cover context. That's about as much as the entirety of New York City uses. On a peak summer day, the project will produce the thermal load equivalent to 23 atomic bombs worth of energy being dumped into the local environment every day.

[Data Center Advocate]

23 atom bombs going off a day? No, that's way too many. That's what I mean about the catastrophizing. If it's a similar amount of electricity to New York, does that mean that New York City has 23 atom bombs a day going off right now? It's just a silly metric to convert thermal load to nuclear bombs. All you're trying to do is scare people and make it seem like that's a big amount.

[Jimmy Dore]

Let me stop it there. Is that. What is. How do you respond to that accusation?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

I think this guy got some sort of financial interest.

[Jimmy Dore]

Of course he does. Obviously this guy's been hired by, by the, the Tech Bros. To do this, but go ahead. But. So go ahead. I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

I mean, if this has a serious disruptive effect on our environment for heat, water or anything else, it. It's not. The money's not going to make any difference. If people can't live there, if it ruins their community, they're going to wish they didn't do it later on. That's why we need to have proper environmental assessment, not snarky commentary from people like this guy.

[Jimmy Dore]

Okay. He's got more to say, Tony.

[Data Center Advocate]

I'm going to stop showing clips from his video and just speed through a couple more things that bother me. He says that it's going to raise the temperature by 5 degrees or 28 degrees at night. But what he neglects is that it's going to raise the temperature in Hansel Valley in this uninhabited desert valley where the power plant is being built. Not across the state or across the county or anything. So. Oh, no, the power plant in the uninhabited desert valley might be warm. I don't think that's such a big deal.

[Jimmy Dore]

How do you respond to that, Tony?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Well, there's been studies done of existing data centers which are much smaller than this one, and they show that there's a heat island affected which affects about 1 degree Celsius at 10 kilometers and about 10 degrees Celsius at 1 kilometer. So he's understating it. In the case of Utah, I'm not certain what the situation is, but. But here in Cheyenne, it's very close to town. And if we get a, if we get a data center heat island that large, it will definitely affect us here in Cheyenne.

[Jimmy Dore]

Okay, so he's underselling this.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

He's absolutely underselling this. We need a proper environmental assessment. We need real modeling from people who actually know what they're doing and not just people are pushing their vested interest.

[Data Center Advocate]

There are concerns about water. The water for the project is not coming from the Great Salt Lake. And it's not new water. It's currently agricultural irrigation that comes from water rights of the property owners. So because they bought that 40,000 acres, they can take water from the 40,000 acres and use that to cool their data center. And there are concerns about how much.

[Jimmy Dore]

So he's. He just said that. Oh, no. Well, it's just the water is going to come from the land that they bought because those people who own that land, they have the water rights to that land. And so there's nothing to worry about because that. That water is already owned by those people. What do you say to that? Not that. That. That. That seems really ridiculous in a lot of different ways because we. We've had a myriad reports, everybody's seen them, that people's water is. Well, anyway, go. You do take it.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it goes back to the first video you showed. They made this Colorado river Compact in 1922, which was based on unrealistic amounts of water being available, and all in the upper basin states, which include Utah and Wyoming. But now they're having to deal with reality. Lake Mead's running out of water. They're draining Flaming Gorge just to prop up Lake Powell temporarily. So the water rights are going to have to be reallocated. And everyone knows this. So the fact that they may have water rights now doesn't mean that these water rights are going to be theirs six months from now. So there's a shortage of water. We have to come up with intelligent ways to allocate it. Data centers is just not one of them. These massive data centers do not belong in the desert. They should. If they're going to build them, they should build them offshore where there's seawater to cool them. Or like Elon Musk wants to do in space. Space would be a great place to do it because you have an unlimited amount of solar energy out there to tap from. But building them in Utah and Wyoming, it's crazy. And it's crazy that anyone would defend them doing this.

[Jimmy Dore]

So why don't they go do it offshore? Or why don't they do it in space like Elon Musk says? Why are they doing it in the most destructive, catastrophic way possible?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

I have no idea. It doesn't. Well, I think what I heard a couple years ago is they want to put it in places like Cheyenne because we're high altitude and the average temperature around the year is low. So they don't have to spend as much money on cooling their equipment. But it doesn't make Any sense. We don't have water and, and it could potentially devastate our climate here. So it shouldn't be done here. And but the, perhaps even more interesting is the fact that a lot of people believe these data centers are doomed to fail anyway. What the Chinese are doing is something completely different. They've, they've been building up their electricity supply in western China for a long time and they built this huge fiber optic, high speed fiber optic network around the country. What their plans are these 80% of their AI computing, data center computing and a distributed network which is spread out all over the place rather than what we're doing in the United States is concentrating them in these huge data centers. So there's a lot of talk right now these data centers are destined to fail because they're based on fundamentally flawed model from the get go.

[Jimmy Dore]

Also, China is using nuclear power, correct?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah, well, yeah, they have nuclear coal. They've built hundreds of new coal fired power plants, you know, over the past five to 10 years and they've got an excess of electricity available right now.

[Jimmy Dore]

Okay, there's more to this power it's using.

[Data Center Advocate]

The development will produce all of its power on site and it's not taking power from, from the grid. Stuff like this is just misinformation.

[Jimmy Dore]

So what about that? So they're going to build their own power plants and they're not going to take power from the grid. Even though right now there's horror stories around the country of people getting their power bills going up 30, 40, 50%, them losing power, people not having heat in the winter or cooling in the sun. That's already happening. It's been reported by mainstream news sources like cbs. And this is not made up. He's pretending like every data center is going to have its own power plant and what's there to worry about? Even though right now we're living in a hellscape because, because of it. What do you say to that?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

That's a total ruse. First of all, the fact that they're generating the power on site greatly increases the amount of heat which they're creating. So that's problem one. Second problem is they're creating pollution with the, all these on site gas turbines. But the biggest one here that he's not talking about energy isn't free. When, when they're, when they hugely increase the amount of power being used. That means they're making a lot of competition for natural gas which is going to raise everybody's energy prices not just around the power plant but across the country. So this is, this is a nationwide problem. They're hugely increasing the demand for natural gas. And the law of supply and demand means that the prices are going to go up for everyone.

[Jimmy Dore]

Yeah, so he's, yeah, he's acting like, well, they're going to build their own power plants. Yeah. But the, you, you need natural resources to power the power plants. And what you're saying is, so that's going to deplete the amount of natural resources for everybody because the natural resources which are currently going to power plants that everybody else are now going to be going to these things. So he's acting like there's some unlimited amount of, of natural resources, which there aren't. Right?

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Yeah.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

The natural gas prices are going to go up for everybody because of the, because of what they're doing with these, with their generators. That means your heating bill is going to go up, your hot water bill is going to go up. Cooking food is going to cost you more money. So this is, there's, he's trying to make like, look like it's a zero cost, zero sum thing, but that's not the case at all. Reality is that everybody pays for it.

[Jimmy Dore]

And again with the water rights thing, I just want to reemphasize that we're in the worst drought in one of the worst droughts in history in the west right now. And so this idea that, oh, well, just because somebody has water rights doesn't mean there's going to be water, as that's another thing. And then of course they're going to steal water from regular people. That's because we live in an oligarchy. We don't live in a democracy. And so get your head out of your ass. But obviously this guy's got a different view. Let's listen to what else he says.

[Data Center Advocate]

Even if you disagree with me about the data center, I think you have to admit that he's not presenting it fairly. He doesn't explain why Box Elder county might want the data center, for example. And he catastrophizes the fears. Oh, it's like 23 atom bombs a day worth of electricity. No. And I think people like this just want to scare you for attention. He gets millions of views by lying about data centers, and that's good for him, but it gives people the wrong idea. So thanks for your time.

[Jimmy Dore]

So do you think people are legitimately concerned about this? We see town hall meetings all over and people screaming and the county commissioners voting against the will of the people. Is, is, is, is, is, is what he Said true.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

You know, Jimmy, I've spent the last couple decades trying to tamp down climate alarmism. That's how I've developed my reputation is by telling people not to be alarmed about climate, but I am genuinely alarmed about what these data centers, massive data centers, are going to do to local, to the local climate, not to the global climate, but to what it's going to do to Cheyenne, Wyoming and Utah and other places where they're building.

[Jimmy Dore]

So we got a power problem that there's going to be a higher demand for natural resources, was going to drive up the price of power for people because there's, there's a finite amount of natural resources and gas and things like that. There's a finite amount of it. And so also water. We're in one of the worst droughts in history in the West. So that's that, that and also the, the, the, the amount of heat it generates. And there's, and there's been no modeling done. So there's many different problems. Video I've seen going around. And he's also giving you a oligarch view of data centers. He's not giving you an honest view of it. He's doing the exact thing he's accusing that guy of doing.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah. And what are these data centers for, Jimmy? I had lunch with a data scientist yesterday. He said the only explanation he can think of for him is for mass 24 hour surveillance on everybody in the country. He thinks that's the purpose of these massive data centers because we certainly don't need them for commercial use. We've got, you know, we've got lots of data centers available now. Chinese client, Chinese models, AI models cost about one tenth of what American models cost to operate already. And they're doing this, you know, without these mass, you know, centralized mass of data centers. So we should step back and reevaluate the whole American approach to AI because it may well be doomed to fail because people are jumping into doing very bad things like Kevin o' Leary with these gigantic data centers.

[Jimmy Dore]

But of course Trump jammed into his big beautiful bill because Trump is an enemy of the people and an enemy of the workers and he is a billionaire. So he is class loyal and he jammed into the big A beautiful bill that you cannot, states cannot regulate AI and nobody really took a look at that when he did it. But this is what it's all about, right? Because he knew this was coming.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

Yeah. Well, let's go back six years ago. Remember Operation Warp Speed?

[Jimmy Dore]

Yeah.

[Environmental Expert/Guest]

He pushed through, ignored all the normal safety testing for MRNA vaccines and claimed he saved millions of lives, when in fact he may have done the exact opposite. So this is a pattern with Donald Trump.

[Jimmy Dore]

This idea that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years, you hear, or they've been at war with. Boy, it's such a, it's such a well kept secret. Even Iran didn't know they were at war with us. What, what is your response when you hear propagandists and tools of the military industrial complex say that, that Iran has been at war with us for 47 years? What is your to that?

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Iran did an attack Iraq back in 1980. It wasn't Iran that supplied chemical weapons, it was us to them. And Iraq carried out 20 chemical weapon attacks on Iran during the course of that nine year war that started in 1980, ended in 1988. That I know the guy who hand carried the intelligence to the government of Iraq to be used to launch military plans for attacking Iran, Pat Lang. He's unfortunately deceased now. So the United States, it's the United States who's been funding and supporting a terrorist group called the MEK. MEK was put on the list of US designated foreign terrorist organizations in 1997, even though it had a 25 year track record of carrying out terrorist attacks, including attacks against Americans in Iran. But under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they took them off the list. And the CIA, my old outfit, they began working with and providing direct financial support and training to the MEK back in 2004. So we've been the ones carrying out terrorist attacks against Iran. The fact is Iran has not carried out a single terrorist attack by Iran against the United States. And we said, well, look at, look at what they've done with Hezbollah and Hamas. And again, when you look at the number of terrorist attacks against The United States, 90% of them over since 2020, 2000, have been carried out by radical Sunni groups that not only have no connection with Iran, but Iran was actually fighting those groups. So that's the other big lie, that Iran's the number one sponsor of terrorism. No, it's not.

[Jimmy Dore]

And so that's what made it extra crazy when Trump and his first administration killed General Soleimani, because he was actually on our side fighting against those people who are actually attacking us. Right?

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Yeah. Against isis. You know, he was the reason the Iranians were, they were asked to come in to help Bashar Assad, because in 2012 Barack Obama thought it was a great idea. And we were working with Turkey and the Turks wanted to get control of Syria. And so we started supplying weapons to the very Islamic radicals that attacked us on 9 11. You wrap your mind around that. You know, on the one hand we say, oh yeah, we're out here to fight this global war on terror. And at the same time we're providing the weapons, the funding and the training. You know, that's what was going on in Benghazi. Benghazi, they were collecting weapons, including surface to air missiles from what had been in the Libyan government stockpile. They're being cleaned up. The CIA operation in Benghazi was in shipping them to Turkey through Cyprus. And then it was, those were being funneled into these radical leftists that were in these radical extremists, the Sunnis that were fighting against the government of Bashar Al Assad. And that's when Iran entered to fight against ISIS, for God's sake.

[Jimmy Dore]

So Iran's fighting against ISIS, Turkey's on the side of ISIS, the United States is on the side of ISIS, Israel's on the side of ISIS. And then what? As predicted on this show in 2018, that if the CIA dirty war in Syria is successful, the people who will be running it will be isis. And that's exactly what happened. They took. There used to be a 15 million, the State Department had a $15 million bounty on Jelani's head. And now he's the head of, of Syria. He put on a blue Brooks Brothers suit and he takes off his, whatever his, his FIFA. And, and now he's, he's welcomed at Downing Street. He's welcome. He's, he's welcome at the White House. And Donald Trump says he's a good looking guy and that's because he's actually. So how can, how could you, you explain that to me in a way that makes sense that we are literally in bed with the, and we still have Guantanamo open, but we're literally welcoming the head of isis, the chief head chopper from ISIS to the White House. And, and by the way, he's in bed with Israel too. So that just goes to show me that in some ways that ISIS was just like Al Qaeda was invented by the United States essentially. So was ISIS invented by Israel and the United States. What do you, go ahead, respond to anything you want.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Well, this is like the terrorist version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. You know, you take a, take a terrorist, clean him up, put him in a Brooks Brothers suit. He knows, he knows cuisine, he's great at reading the wine list. Now, you know, yeah, he's presentable in public, but look this goes back to the 1980s, when Zbigniew Brzezinski was involved with the effort to entice, get the Soviets involved in Afghanistan. And that's where we began working with the Islamic extremists in 1980s. And then once we got the Soviets sucked in there because it did, it damaged Soviet society. And that was, that was part of his big national security strategy to weaken Russia. That's where we formed these relationships with these radical Islamists, you know, the Wahhabis, the Deobandis out of Pakistan. And that continued after, you know, after the Soviets left and the Soviet Union collapsed and it became Russia. And starting as early as 1993 was the first Chechen war in Russia, backed by the same Mujahideen that we had been supporting in Afghanistan. Then in 1999 started the second Chechen war. That's what brought Vladimir Putin to power, because the Russian elite said that this guy Yeltsin, he's too drunk all the time, he can't handle this. That was a 10, 11 year war. It ended under Medvedev in 2010. But it again, those Islamists that were brought in and working and trying to infiltrate Chechnya, they were from us. We, you know, we had bought and paid for them. So that's why I say this, this entire nonsense about, oh, Iran's the number one purveyor of terrorism in the world. Unfortunately, no, it's not. It is us. We've been the ones funding it, we've been the ones enabling it. And people say, well, you hate America. No, I don't hate America. But for God's sake, just open your eyes and look at, at what's going on.

[Jimmy Dore]

So how, just on a personal note, how does that make you feel as an ex CIA guy that discuss and it turns out that the United States is really the world's and Israel are the world's terrorists. Nobody else is doing anything. What we're doing. We have a thousand military bases around the world. We've created Al Qaeda, we funded, we're in bed with isis, we're in bed with the biggest terrorists in the Middle east, which is Israel. We're the ones who are funding them. How does this make as a person? Just take a moment and talk about how that makes you feel about your service to the CIA and about your country.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Yeah, you know, when I entered on duty in 1985 and Valerie Plain was one of my classmates, we had a, we did a career trainee program for a year. You know, I was very much involved with the notion that hey, we're, we're America, Ronald Reagan's city on the Hill, a light to the world world, a shining light of moral being moral and ethical and trying to protect the world from extremism. It's okay, I bought into that and I naively accepted a number of things back then and including when I moved from CIA down to State Department counterterrorism office and we had the invasion, the Iraqi invasion in August of 1990. And boy, at the time I had no idea then, even though I had access to classified material, no idea about our role in the previous 11 years, was Saddam Hussein. If I had known in 1990 that we had been providing money and chemical weapons and biological weapons and intelligence to Saddam Hussein, I would have looked at that invasion, the so called invasion of Kuwait in an entirely different way. And I didn't. It was only later that I began to discover this. And once you start, once you get the full facts and start looking back, you realize the American people have been consistently lied to, gaslighted and propagandized into perceiving people as enemies who are not really our enemies. And that in that, that applies to both, even Russia and China because we've got a war machine that feeds off of. And you know, I'm sure you've had some dealings with Hollywood. You know what it is, you go in to make a pitch, they want to know who is the villain. So you always got to have a villain and say, oh, give us a good villain, then we, then we can build a story around it. That's been a U.S. foreign policy.

[Jimmy Dore]

And, and so who really. So it seems like none of this stuff that they're doing at all never has anything to do with the interests of the American people, the workers. So who is pulling the strings and who does the CIA actually work for?

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Well, unfortunately, I think that the CIA is doing, it's not out on, it's not an independent contractor doing what it wants to do. I think that the tie is into the financial interests of the United States, the majority of financiers, as well as the military. You know, it sounds trite, but it's true. The military industrial complex because.

[Jimmy Dore]

And their interests are not the interests of the American people?

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Oh, heavens no. I mean, look, the interest of the American people right now is having lower prices for gas, having prices of foodstuffs coming down. And we got to, we got the exact opposite right now because of this war that we launched against Iran. I don't think the majority of Americans don't appreciate that with the shutdown of the Gulf of Hormuz. And then when Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular got involved with helping attack Iran, and then Iran shut them down. There are five key commodities, Jimmy, that drive the world economy. It's not oil everybody knows about. Liquid natural gas is another one. But urea, sulfur and helium, you know, 40, 44% of the helium of the world comes out of Qatar. And then when you look at urea and sulfur, you say, well, so who cares about that? Urea and sulfur are critical to the production of fertilizer. I didn't know that. But, you know, once this happened and started looking into, I went, oh, my God. So, so now you're looking at, if you look at plantings in the United States, like with wheat and corn, they're going down, soybeans going down. You know, farmers, they don't, they don't have the fertilizer to put on the crops. So we're going to get a delayed effect because, you know, right now, okay, the foods in the stores, six months from now, we could be looking at a completely different picture. And none of this serves the interest of the American people.

[Jimmy Dore]

And how did that happen that the CIA is it. Because our whole political system doesn't actually work for. So if the CIA, first of all, which I learned during Trump's first term, that they don't answer to the president, right? Because as Chuck Schumer famously said, that Donald Trump, for a very smart guy, is being really dumb to take on the intelligence community, because if you do that, they got some six ways a Sunday to get back at you. And so what the leader of the Democratic Party at that moment revealed was that this, the CIA, the FBI, the nsa, they don't work for the President. And my question was, well, Rachel Maddow should have followed up with, well, then who do they work for? Of course she's, she works for the same people who control the intelligence community. So she's not going to say that she's a war pig. And so how did. So is it just because of the, the way the money works in our election cycles that they control the politicians? And the politicians obviously don't work for us when they have a session of Congress. They're not in there doing a bidding of workers or students or the elderly or anybody except the billionaire class that controls them. So it's the same thing with the CIA. They work for the same billionaire class, which is the military industrial complex and the Wef Davos internationalists. Is that what I'm to understand?

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Well, I'll say Essentially, yes. But let's, let's divide the CIA into the operations side and the analytical side. What I don't know right now is whether or not the analytical side is actually giving the President unvarnished truth that he doesn't want to hear. I saw that myself. I was involved in Iran Contra back in the 1980s.

[Jimmy Dore]

Oh boy.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

And I had firsthand experience. I wrote regularly for the Presidential Daily Brief and saw that. But I would provide George H.W. bush. First it was Ronald Reagan, then It was George H.W. bush, provide him with information about what was actually happening. But he would do the opposite or he would react as if he hadn't been told that. So I don't know if it's a matter that on the analytical side, they're not telling them the truth or they're telling them the truth and the President's ignoring. So that's on the one hand. On the operations side though, they get their own, they get, it's, it's like an in house operation and there's no accountability. Remember that the, the woman, the CIA chief of station in London, Gina Haspel, she was working closely with the Bretts in the whole Russiagate affair. She was helping try to destroy the Trump candidacy before he got elected. She was directly involved in all of that. And yet who does Trump put in charge of the Directorate of Operations? Gina Haspel. You know, so the message that gets sent throughout the community basically is, hey, we can do whatever the hell we want and we're not going to, and he's not going to stop us. Which is exactly what has happened.

[Jimmy Dore]

Gina Haspel, who was also involved heavily in the torture program.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Yes.

[Jimmy Dore]

And when he appointed her the first female head of the CIA, you know, she shattered that glass ceiling and then she picked up one of those shards of glass and started torturing someone with it. So, so, so, so was, was Trump. So Trump was like Brexit in a way that the, the, the elites who actually run things, not the, not the puppet politicians, but the elites who actually, they didn't see it coming. They didn't think that was going to happen. And so then they did everything they could to blow back on him, even though he pretty much played ball with them by appointing people like Gina Haspel. And so, and you know, giving tax cuts to billionaire. He was basically like a regular Republican in his first term, except, but they did Russiagate again. So he, they did see him as a threat. Right, because, and, and, and, and go ahead.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Well, no, I just, I was just going to say that. So this actually started in 2015. And John Brennan put together, when he was then CIA director, he put together a task force at CIA. And the task force involves not just people from the CIA, but people from other agencies like the FBI, like the Department of Defense. And initially, they were focused upon collecting intelligence on all presidential candidates. They were there to support the election of Hillary Clinton, and they were even collecting intelligence on Bernie Sanders back then, once, By December of 2015, going into January 2016, it became clear that Trump had the momentum. Then the whole intelligence apparatus, not just the US Intelligence apparatus, but the British intelligence, the Australians, they all. They all coalesced. And there was a massive campaign to paint Trump as a danger. And the reason was they feared he was going to follow through on his efforts to take the United States out of NATO or to reduce NATO. And there was also concerns that he might not support Project Ukraine, which was in the works.

[Jimmy Dore]

But.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

And then that effort to destabilize his government continued. Now, you could say in retrospect, in light of what Trump has now done in this last 12 months, that maybe they had a reason to try to keep him out of there in light of his now starting a new war with Iran and destabilizing the US Economy. But there was a coordinated effort. It wasn't just domestic. CIA cooperated with the FBI, but they are also working and cooperating with British intelligence, Australian intelligence, and others.

[Jimmy Dore]

And Russiagate served a dual purpose, all right? It was to kind of delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency and get him tied up fighting that, but also to create public support for the upcoming Ukraine war, which was in the works for over a decade.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Correct? Correct. Yeah. It's important for people to understand that Russia, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia emerged from the very beginning, Yeltsin sought to said, hey, let us become part of NATO. Putin reiterated those requests in 1999 and 2001, rebuffed first by Bill Clinton and then by George W. Bush. But it was in 1995 that NATO established a de facto NATO base, Yavariv, which is in western Ukraine. That became the de facto NATO presence. And the number of exercises, military exercises that NATO began conducting with Ukraine started accelerating. And in fact, when you look at the countries, you know, because I spent 24 years scripting exercises for US military special operations forces, so I know what the patterns are and what the look for in this case, that by. By 2016, the. The country. There was one country that was not a NATO member that had carried been. Been a. The center for NATO exercises. More than 22 other members of NATO, and that was Ukraine. So we had made Ukraine a de facto member of NATO going back to, really to 1997. And that was. This plan was to use Ukraine as a battering ram to weaken and destroy Iran, Russia, break Russia up, take control of its resources. That was the plan that so as.

[Jimmy Dore]

Yes. So the idea was that they thought they were going to be able to Balkanize Russia, split it up, sell it off to blackrock Vanguard and State street and. But they were able to do that to Ukraine. They're buying up their farmland and everything. But that. That Russia is actually stronger now than they were before the war in last.

[Ex-CIA Officer]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, what. You know, the. One of the reasons they hate the hatred towards Putin was It started in 2001 when he called in all the Russian oligarchs and basically said, hey, number one, you guys are going to start stop selling off Russia to these foreign companies. That's not going to happen anymore. Two, you're going to get out of politics. I don't want your money involved with politics anymore. And three, you can then make money. But those are the two conditions, and you violate those, I'm going to put you in prison. He's very upfront about it. Most of them agreed to do it. Miguel Khodorkovsky, he was one of the ones that opposed it. He went to jail, but that was the first one. And then comes the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. The country that opposed it was Vladimir Putin. And boy, go back. I went back and looked at tracked public press. You know, the press coverage prior to 2003, press coverage of Putin was pretty positive. What a great guy. You know, he's shown up on like the Rosie o' Donnell show or something like that. And then after, after he opposed us of invading Iraq, all of a sudden he's a bad, bad man.

[Jimmy Dore]

Yeah, George W. Bush said that he saw into his eyes and his soul and he was a good man. I remember that distinctly, him saying that. And then everything flipped. I mean, they used to go out fishing together on Kenny Bunkport. That was. It was unbelievable. Hey, become a premium member. Go to jimmy door comedy.com sign up. It's the most affordable premium program in the business. All the voices performed today are by the one and only, the inimitable Mike McCray. He can be found at mikemcrae.com that's it for this week. You be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me. Freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Do not freak out.

[Kiana]

I'm not kidding. Do not. Do not.

[Jimmy Dore]

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Do not freak out.

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