Transcript of Catherine Austin Fitts Interview on Tucker Carlson Show

But their fundamental pitch is an economic pitch, and the pitch itself is not crazy. Their solutions may not work, but the pitch they make to voters is very straightforward, and anybody can understand it. You don’t have to be a socialist to agree. I’m certainly not a socialist.

A Chicken in Every Pot

But why wouldn’t I want leaders who care what Skippy peanut butter costs? Well, of course, I would. And this has been recognized forever. “A chicken in every pot” — I mean, that was the promise of the Herbert Hoover for president campaign in 1928.

His supporters said, “Elect Herbert Hoover, and there’ll be a chicken in every pot.” In other words, we’ll lower the price of Doritos — it’s going to be peanut butter. Now he made that claim one year before the Great Depression, made it a lot harder to put a chicken in every pot. But even before the Depression, Hoover supporters knew just like any awake person would know that economic concerns are the core concerns of voters and ignore them at your peril. And by the way, there was a socialist candidate that year in 1928, Norman Thomas, who by modern standards was totally moderate.

By the way, he was a Presbyterian minister. He was kind of a wet liberal. He was hardly a transgender activist or an anti-white hater or anything like that. He didn’t want to ban Thanksgiving, but he wanted to make sure that people’s material needs were met. And that’s not a crazy goal.

So to keep him from getting into power, or people like him, the Hoover campaign promised that they would pay attention to food prices. Doesn’t mean that they were tools of socialism. Actually, it meant they were opponents of socialism because they knew that if they didn’t pay attention, you could conceivably get a socialist. Norman Thomas didn’t do very well that year, probably because Herbert Hoover took the threat seriously. So this is not a new idea at all.

It’s the oldest idea because it’s the most obvious idea. If you don’t attend to people’s actual concerns, they will go elsewhere. And in a purportedly democratic system, they have a whole range of options, by the way, most of which we haven’t been presented with in recent history, but it could get pretty radical here. Why wouldn’t it? And so you probably shouldn’t ignore those concerns.

The Backlash Against Matt Walsh

That’s all Matt Walsh was trying to say. He works at the Daily Wire. He’s not a wild-eyed radical. But you would have thought he was reading the Communist Manifesto on air and burning an American flag given the response from his fellow conservatives, other elements of the MAGA coalition. Rather than just ignoring him — if you disagree with someone, you always have the option to just ignore him.

“I didn’t hear what you said. Sorry.” Rather than just ignoring them, or maybe even smarter, paying lip service to agreement. Yeah. No.

Matt Walsh makes a smart point. People care what their groceries cost. Normal people care. Maybe you even find out what groceries cost and then play a more elaborate role. “Oh, I was at the grocery yesterday and, boy, prices are high.”

“We’re going to do something about that.” You would think they would do that, but that’s the opposite of what they did. And by “they,” I mean the neocons, the people who are in charge of the Trump administration now — not the people who came in with Trump, but the people who somehow took control of the Trump administration and turned it in a totally different direction from the one most of us voted for. Those people attacked Matt Walsh, and not just Matt Walsh, but the idea that it is legitimate, that it’s allowed, that’s within bounds to complain about food prices. “What’s wrong with you?”

Ben Shapiro’s Message

Complaining about food prices? We’re going to play you a clip from someone from whom we try to play a lot of clips. It’s Ben Shapiro. We’re going to play it in just a sec. But before we do, just a caveat: we’re not playing this to suggest that Ben Shapiro was like a shaper of history, a mover in American politics.

He’s not. He’s an employee like most everybody else. He’s doing what he’s told. He represents larger interests, obviously. So why bother to replay and then rebut something that Ben Shapiro said?

Well, in an effort to speak to the people who put him up to it. So the whole point of Ben Shapiro — and there is a point to Ben Shapiro. This is not some organic phenomenon. Like, Shapiro was just so charming and brilliant that he somehow got into Harvard Law School and then, eyebrows and all, emerged as a social media titan. No.

Of course not. Ben Shapiro had a deal with Facebook, you know, a deal no one else got. And so the point of Ben Shapiro was: here’s a way to send a very specific message, to outline and sell a very specific worldview to young people. Ben Shapiro is an old person’s idea of a young person. He is a spokesman for a group of older people aimed at younger people.

“I have an idea. Let’s get Ben Shapiro. This guy, Ben Shapiro, he’s brilliant. He’s a really promising young kid, and we’ll get him to sell free market economics in a robust Reaganite foreign policy to the young folks.” And by the way, it kind of worked for a while, thanks to the trans movement, which you suspect they also kind of concocted — same group, but whatever, wherever that came from.

For a while, Ben Shapiro seemed like he was on the side of common sense, and he’s for free speech, and he’s against the trans lunacy, etcetera, etcetera. But always, from day one, the point was Ben Shapiro is going to sell this very specific version of economics — not capitalism, bears no resemblance to anything Adam Smith advocated for, but the kind of modern American monopoly arrangement where six companies can behave like countries, have sovereignty unlike our own nation, and control every part of your life through debt — which is kind of broad, but a fairly accurate definition of our current economic system.

So sell that, and then sell the even-harder-to-pitch idea that it’s unpatriotic to oppose wars for Israel. First of all, it’s obviously antisemitic. It’s just an expression of hate if you don’t want to regime-change some country you can’t find on a map. Obviously, you’re a bigot. You’re basically a Nazi.

In fact, you must be for Hitler. You probably are opposed to the Second World War too. You probably have problems with Churchill. It’s literally immoral to oppose Ben Shapiro’s employer’s foreign policy, but it’s also un-American. Like this country was founded to fight wars for Israel.

“That’s why we’re here. I mean, our founders said explicitly, America exists as a Judeo-Christian country to support Israel. Okay? So whatever the prime minister of that country wants, we’re doing. That’s why we’re here.”

So if you’re against it, you don’t believe in America. You’re against America. “Why don’t you just leave? Maybe we’ll revoke your green card. Oh, don’t I have a green card? We’ll strip you of your citizenship.” And that’s what ICE exists to do now. In any case, you should know watching this that these are not just Ben Shapiro’s opinions — to the extent he actually has opinions, who knows.

But these are the opinions of the people who prop up Ben Shapiro, who created Ben Shapiro. And this is what they think. This is the argument they sincerely believe, apparently, is going to appeal to young people who are worried about the price of burritos. Watch this.

Unfortunately, this has become the mode for a lot of young people.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

BEN SHAPIRO: “Why can’t I afford what my parents could afford when they were my age?” Spoiler alert: when it comes to groceries, you can. And in areas, by the way, for housing where deregulation has been the rule, you still can. In fact, you have today more restaurant options, your food costs less of your disposable income, and it is probably significantly better.

Here in the United States of America, we are fatter, richer, have nicer houses, nicer cars, and the food we eat is much, much better than it was for our parents in general. Our parents probably would have considered a $4.50 burrito at Del Taco a gourmet meal. Your parents would have considered a $4.50 taco at Del Taco a deal because your parents were proles. They were pathetic. They were disgusting people, and anything was enough for them.

You don’t want to use the term “goyslop,” but it does seem kind of appropriate in this specific instance. They would be grateful for a Del Taco. What are you complaining about?

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

“Eat Your Burrito and Be Happy”

But it’s the first line that really does catch your attention. He says it is fashionable, this mode among young people, to complain that life is more expensive than it was for their parents.

So here you have this whole new generation — this entitled, fat, lazy, tattooed, drug-addicted, screen-mesmerized generation that has no idea what’s good for itself, but is all about entitlement, whining, and entitlement. And the main thing they think they’re entitled to is a life as good as the life their parents led. Who gave them that idea? Of course, that used to be, I think, referred to euphemistically as the American dream. And the American dream was the idea that your children might have a better life than you had.

And, yes, not just spiritually, but materially. They might have the things that you wanted but couldn’t have. That’s why you work hard to give them opportunities. But Ben Shapiro was telling you, what? “We never said that.”

“Who told you that was a real promise? How dare you want what your parents had? Who do you think you are? Eat your Del Taco and be happy. $4.50 for a Del Taco? What a deal.”

And you know how we know it’s a good deal? You know how you know America’s thriving? Because it’s fatter. By the way, if you lived in China during one of the recent famines during the Cultural Revolution, obesity was a sign of affluence.

But of course, we don’t live in China during a famine. We live in late-stage empire in the United States, where obesity is not a sign of affluence, but instead a sign of discouragement and poverty. That’s the truth. It’s a sign, most of the time, of sadness — not of a thyroid condition, but of depression. So people who are depressed get fat.

So if you want to know how your population is doing, measure their BMI. So it’s a little weird for Ben Shapiro to say, “We’re doing great. We’re fat.” But what is actually going on here is what is happening across our society on so many different issues, which is a rewriting of history in real time. You just saw something happen.

Let’s just pick an example. Israel pushed Donald Trump into a war that hurts the United States, that we cannot possibly win. That’s all downside for us, but potentially upside for Israel. That would be the war with Iran.

The regime-change war that no one in America supported. And you watched that happen at the end of February of this year. But within days, they were telling you, what? “Are you an antisemite? Didn’t that happen?”

“Israel didn’t push Trump to war with Iran. Were you saying Trump has no agency? Are you saying Trump’s weak?” Well, obviously, Trump is weak. That’s why he allowed the Israelis to push him to war.

I mean, who doesn’t know that? Of course he’s weak. But it doesn’t matter, weak or strong. That’s what happened. And they admitted it happened, and we saw it happen.

And anyone who paid any attention at all had no doubt at all, because it was true — that’s what happened. Israel pushed Trump to war with Iran. It’s not like there were critical American interests at stake. There weren’t. There are now.

But what’s interesting is that almost immediately after, every big news organization in the United States started telling you what you just saw is not what you just saw. And if you thought you just saw that, the problem is you. There’s something wrong with your brain and with your heart. “You’re a hater. You must hate Jews.”

Well, no. We don’t hate Jews at all. But that just happened. “Shut up.” And by the way, we haven’t seen polling on it, but it’s probably been pretty successful.

If you scream at people long enough and persistently enough and tell them lies consistently enough, after a while, they kind of give up and believe those lies. You can change the collective memory about an event pretty quickly after that event occurred. And then you can encode it forever in what we used to call the history books, and we now refer to as AI, which is our collective consciousness. And forever after, something that didn’t happen will be recorded as historical truth. That can happen.

We’re watching it right now. So one of the things that Ben Shapiro’s employers are trying to tell you is that actually your life is way better than previous generations. “You’ve got it so good. You don’t know how good you’ve got it.” And if you can’t see that, the problem is you.

“So stop complaining, bitch. You little whiner. Get to work. Retirement? What? That’s for ungrateful people. Get back to work. Eat your Del Taco. They’re only $4.50. Your parents would have been grateful for a $4.50 Del Taco.”

What Life Actually Looked Like

Getting out after eighteen hours in the spinning mill. They were only nine years old. They didn’t have Del Taco then. That’s what they’re trying to tell you your parents’ generation lived through. But did it?

We could make a detailed case based on the statistics, which are still publicly available from, say, two generations ago. Let’s just pick the biggest generation in American history, the Baby Boom. And we could tell you everything about their lives. Do you know the average age at which people had babies? Let’s just pick a year.

I’ll pick the year I was born, 1969. Women had babies in the United States on average at the age of 20. Twenty years old. How’d they do that? How could you afford a baby at 20?

You can’t afford a baby at 20. Childcare is so expensive. Do you know how much it costs to hire someone from Central America to watch your child while you work as a bank teller? It doesn’t make any sense. That couldn’t have happened.

Oh, but it did. It did happen, and it’s provable. But maybe a more telling picture of what life was like in, let’s just pick that same year, 1969, is an actual picture from 1969. Let’s pick the biggest event that year in the United States. Certainly the most celebrated and lovingly cataloged event, not simply of that year, the summer of 1969, the same year as the moon landing, but of that entire generation, the Baby Boom — the famous Baby Boom that everyone loves to despise, and for good reason.

People born between 1946 and 1964. Right smack in the middle, 1969 was the year of the Woodstock Music Festival in Woodstock, New York. And numbers kind of vary about how many people went — 400,000, 600,000, hundreds of thousands of Americans went to that event. And there are a lot of pictures of it, and they’re all on the internet.

We’ve got a couple of pictures of it, but take ten minutes tonight and look at the pictures. Not of the performers — Sly and the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead and Richie Havens and all the rest, most of them long dead — but take a look at the crowd. There it is right there. That’s the crowd at Woodstock. That’s a faraway shot.

So you kind of get a sense of the scale of it, but you kind of get a sense of the demographic composition of it. So in 1969, this country was about 90% white, 88 to 89% white, about 10 or 11% black. And interestingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the crowd at this mass event is probably a little more than 90% white, maybe 95% white, but then at least 5% black. So it was on some basic level representative of the American population. 90% white, 10% black.

But zoom in a little bit. What do you notice? Those are shirtless people, and if you look carefully, they’re leaned over.

The first thing you notice — what’s the first thing you notice? Well, the complexion of the skin, again, 90% white. But after that, the first thing you notice is you can see the ribs on almost every single person at that event. These are thin, fit people with muscle definition and not a single hint of what we call now a love handle. These are people like triathletes, and this is a broad cross section.

In fact, it’s probably not even the healthiest cross section of American society in 1969. These were the drug users of 1969. These were the party people. They’re sleeping outside for three days in a field in upstate New York. These are not probably the captain of every track team on the Eastern Seaboard.

These are like the stoners. And yet even the stoners in 1969 looked, well, fit, trim, and happy. Of course, they were dippy and they had stupid ideas and they were running around naked in the field, and that doesn’t sound entirely bad, but they were misguided and dumb and probably had opinions that were maybe even malicious. But they certainly looked happy. They looked cheerful.

They looked like they thought the future was going to be great, better than today. They had not been lectured by their leaders to be grateful for a Del Taco. In fact, they weren’t eating Del Tacos, and you can tell by the way they look. And so you can’t look at those pictures, and thousands more like them on the internet, of this country before this era that we’re living in now, and say the people are better off. They’re gravely worse off.

And you can see it in their faces and in their tattoos and in their piercings and their demeanor. And they’re not all failing, of course. There are amazing young people who are bright-eyed and hopeful, optimistic, on it, so impressive. But you can’t say they’re more confident about their future than their parents were, because they’re not, and they’re right not to be.

So if you cared about them, you would consider that a tragedy. As a matter of public policy, you’d consider it a disaster. It’s exactly the opposite of what you’re charged with doing. Your job, if you run the American government or if you seek to influence the running of the American government, your job is really simple. Help the people thrive.

That’s it. And by the way, once again, if you don’t do it, someone else will. Maybe someone with an economic program that doesn’t work. Maybe someone with deep racial animus that’s going to split the country along racial lines. Maybe someone who hates white people or thinks that men can become women or something crazy.

That person’s going to win anyway. Why? One reason: because he at least pretends to care about the people who live here. And not just their material well-being, but their spiritual well-being.

Can you imagine four or 500,000 American 18-year-olds plucked at random from cities across the country in a field this summer, this month, August, fifty-seven years after Woodstock — can you imagine what they would look like with their shirts off? Which is not to make fun of their lumpy physiques; that happens to a lot of us over time. But can you imagine what their faces would look like?

Would they look as cheerful as the kids you see in the pictures of Woodstock? You hope so. Probably not. So maybe the last thing they need is to be lectured by people who are clearly the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, like Ben Shapiro, who somehow got into Harvard Law School despite a middling IQ. How did that happen?

Never asked. People like that have no standing at all to lecture the rest of America’s young people about whether or not they complain about their clearly declining standard of living and their future prospects. They have no standing at all, but they do it anyway. Now why do they do it? Well, there are two reasons they do it.

The Contempt Behind the Message

First, because they feel it. Now, the second Matt Walsh sent that tweet out, there was a chorus of people making exactly the same noises Ben Shapiro made. “Shut up. Burritos are enough for you. A $20 burrito is a good deal.”

“Eat your burrito and be quiet. Eat your burrito and be happy. No chalupas for you.” So there was that. So it’s clearly coordinated.

But it’s not just coordination that gets us to a talking point like that. There was deep feeling behind it, and that feeling was contempt. That was loathing of the people complaining. That was loathing of the population, and that is part and parcel of this whole program. And this ultimately is the reason that the neocon worldview is a cancerous worldview — not simply because it’s wrong about which countries we ought to invade, which leaders we ought to topple, which democracies we ought to erect in countries whose languages we don’t speak.

Okay, that’s obviously all wrong. But that’s not the worst thing about it. The worst thing about it is not just its inattention to the fortunes of actual Americans. It’s its hostility.

It’s hatred of Americans, because there’s no other way to describe the kind of feelings that could get you to give a lecture like the one Ben Shapiro gave. If someone you loved turned to you and said, “You know, man, I’m overwhelmed by the cost of food,” if you love that person, you might ultimately explain, “Well, maybe you’re buying the wrong food, and I have a solution for you.” But would your first impulse be to tell a person to shut up and be grateful for a burrito from Del Taco? Probably not.

That’s the way you speak to people you hate, who you resent, whose degradation pleases you. That was the most revealing moment because it showed you the true motive of Ben Shapiro and people like Ben Shapiro. They don’t like you. And if they did, they wouldn’t talk like that to you. They would show compassion, but they don’t ever.

It shouldn’t surprise you, by the way. Anyone pushing for a war like the war with Iran clearly hates you, clearly, no matter what they say. And keep in mind that every attack on your interest always comes, guys, as a liberation movement. “We’re going to liberate you.” Liberate you from the fear you doubtless feel from Islamic Jihad.

“You’ve probably been worrying about Hezbollah a lot.” What? No. Who? “Hezbollah — what?”

“You worry a lot about Hezbollah, but we’re going to save you from that. You know, the Iran nuclear program is a massive threat.” Oh, where’s Iran? “It is. Trust me. They’ve killed thousands of Americans.” What? Who? “Shut up. They have.”

And so they tell you, of course, that whatever they’re doing is to save you from something you probably didn’t feel a threat from before — like, I don’t know, marriage or cheap food. Think of all the liberation movements: decent schools, safe neighborhoods. “We’re going to liberate you from that in the name of civil rights.” Oh, yeah. “We’re going to liberate you from marriage.”

“It’s really a prison. A big prison.” Mhmm. “We’re going to set you alone in an apartment by yourself with your cat, order your food online.”

“We got $4.50 burritos. You’re going to feel a lot better. You’re going to be free finally.” Okay. So of course you say that, because that’s kind of what liars tell you.

Whatever they’re doing to hurt you is actually in your interest. “No, it’s medicine. Just take it. You won’t get COVID.” But behind the lie is what?

Why would you lie to someone like that? Why would you tell them that? Why would you tell them what’s killing them is saving them? Because you hate them, obviously. Now the question of food prices — something so fundamental, something every single human being deals with because everybody has to eat — it’s out in the open.

It’s all revealed. You can lecture me about the Iranian nuclear program or the threat of Hezbollah, but if you’re lecturing about food prices at my grocery store, you clearly hate me. And they clearly do. You should know that. And as if we need more evidence, well, here’s Mark Levin.

Mark Levin’s Response

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

MARK LEVIN: On the internet, something very weird happened last week, and I was watching this — the price of a burrito. Now, I’m not really into burritos. Every now and then I’ll go to Taco Bell and I’ll have one or two. Pretty cheap, if you ask me. That is the price.

Now, all that said, this debate was about affordability. Now, he doesn’t have to pay $20 for a burrito. He can make it for a lot less. But I’m thinking, what the hell has happened to our society? Where is our can-do mentality?

We sit here with a war in Iran against an enemy that has killed thousands of Americans, maimed thousands of Americans. I remember a time when America would say, “Let’s go. Let’s destroy that country. Destroy that government.” You don’t get to kill thousands of our fellow citizens, military or civilians.

You don’t get to try to assassinate our president. You don’t get to threaten us with potential nuclear weapons either. Now it’s a debate. Should we take them out? Shouldn’t we?

Are you a neocon or a warmonger? Is this a war of choice? We don’t even have a draft. Would a draft even work with young people today? I wonder.

Could we even fight World War Two today? We’re whining about a dollar of gasoline. Twelve percent of the United States population served in the military during World War Two. Over 16,000,000 Americans joined the armed forces out of a total national population of about 130,000,000 people. Roughly one out of every eight Americans wore a uniform.

We don’t have that today, and people are still whining and complaining. It’s getting embarrassing, to be perfectly honest with you. It’s embarrassing. Your unwillingness, your reluctance, your hesitation in the face of fighting for Israel.

It’s just embarrassing. It’s disgusting.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Huge percentage of Americans served during World War Two. Of course, they had no choice because there was a draft. Why aren’t they serving now?

Well, that’s a question actually Mark Levin ought to ask himself — a man who didn’t serve, who could be serving now, by the way, who could be on the front lines in Kyiv, or for that matter in the Gulf, but isn’t. But why aren’t Americans serving eighty years after the great victory of World War Two? Well, I don’t know. Maybe they look around at the country that won that war, and they ask the obvious question. Is this what a victorious country looks like?

If we won, why are we living like this? If we won, why aren’t things getting better? Why are they getting worse? Why are we so in debt? Why does the federal government spend $7,000,000,000,000 a year but only takes in $5,000,000,000,000 in tax revenue?

What’s the plan there? How do we get there? This is what victory looks like? Just for fun sometime, you ought to fly from Kennedy Airport in New York to Narita Airport in Tokyo. Spend a day wandering around New York.

Do the whole city. How about just Manhattan? Just Washington Heights to Tribeca. Just walk it. You can do it.

It’s not very long. It’s a day walk. And then go to Tokyo, one of the biggest cities in the world. Now, Tokyo is the city that lost. Actually, we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan, so they really lost.

They actually vaporized them, all their kids too. No country’s ever lost like Japan lost in the summer of 1945. But walk around Tokyo after a day of walking around New York. Which city looks like it lost a war? It’s not Tokyo.

So in order to convince people to go die for a cause, probably you should convince them the cause is worth dying for. But which cause has been worth dying for? Honestly, dying — like actually dying. Or how about getting your face blown off?

How about your ears melted off your head? Losing all your fingers? How about having your genitals shredded? What cause is worth that? Well, if it’s worth it, tell me how.

Tell me how it’s worth it, because we don’t speak German? A lot of Americans don’t speak English at this point. These are tired and stupid, in fact nonsensical, talking points, but they’re also more than that. They’re deeply insulting. You are lecturing a population that you personally have taken advantage of, whose total destruction you have overseen, and you’ve done nothing to stop it.

You did nothing when the Sacklers flooded Appalachia — the part of the country that disproportionately fought the wars that you called for — and destroyed them with opioids. You said nothing. You said nothing when this country was invaded and its trillion-dollar military didn’t stop that invasion. And for you to lecture the rest of the nation about a can-do attitude — what, do you make my freaking burritos then? It’s too much.

The Assassination Claim

And then to cap it off with the lie that you and every other person in media is now repeating, that Iran is trying to assassinate President Trump. As a statement of fact, that is not true. So they’re now telling us that Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt by a guy with a MANPAD, a surface-to-air missile, inside the security perimeter in Ankara, Turkey, during the NATO summit. That’s not true. That’s factually untrue. And they’ll lie about it.

“Oh, you don’t have the intel.” Well, you know, actually, some of us have called around. Untrue. So why are they reporting that? Well, of course, like so much that you read and see on television or on the internet, it is the product of a propaganda campaign designed to change the course of events on the ground.

A propaganda campaign designed to convince Donald Trump that he has to restart major combat operations against Iran because they’re trying to kill him personally. And so they tell him, as they have been for more than a year ever since the Butler shooting, “Iran did it. You need to get in a separate aircraft. You need to be moved on the tarmac inside a drink cart because they’re going to assassinate you at any second.” And why are they telling Trump that?

Who apparently believes it. It’s not true, by the way. That is a lie. They’re telling him that because they think that if they can make it personal, that Trump will have a stake, an emotional stake, in continuing this war against Iran, which the United States, to restate, cannot win. How do we know we can’t win it?

Because we haven’t been able to open the Strait of Hormuz despite having a fleet of vessels that can’t even approach the Iranian coast. So rather than pausing and asking why are we spending $1,500,000,000,000 a year on a defense budget, or now a war budget, that is unable to beat what we were told is a second-rate or third-rate military, a third-world country run by primitives who murder gays by throwing them off the roof — and we can’t even open a piece of water so 20% of the world’s energy can flow through. How’s our military doing? “Shut up.”

Not one moment of reflection or self-awareness even. Not one moment of asking the obvious questions about our own failures, fears that the rest of us paid for, have gone into debt for. One of the reasons you can’t buy a cheap burrito unless Mark Levin makes one for you, and we hope he will. We hope he has that can-do attitude that gets him in your kitchen rolling you a burrito for free. But in the event he doesn’t do that, it’s going to cost you more than it used to to buy a burrito.

Why? Because the country’s too in debt. Why? Well, the main driver of debt: foreign wars.

The main driver of debt, foreign wars. Our discretionary budget, it all goes to war. Wars we don’t win. Wars that are being waged not because the public wants them, but because Mark Levin is calling for them on behalf of the interests of a foreign country. That’s a fact.

And to continue that, they’re now laying this lie, this head trip, on the president. “Oh, they’re trying to assassinate you on the tarmac. Better get in the drink cart and sneak onto another aircraft.” And a lot of Americans are just believing it because they’re telling him that.

“Okay. They killed thousands of Americans.” I don’t think that was the Iranians who did that when they were sending opioids into Appalachia.

Interview with Catherine Austin Fitts

In any case, it’s worth at this point taking a step back and assessing really the root problems here. So inflation is real. No one wants to admit it because the policymakers caused it. It’s not something that just naturally happens. Inflation is what happens when you mistreat the currency that you don’t own.

It belongs to the American public. You’re in charge of it, and you use it for your own benefit and not theirs. And you have shortsighted thinking that in the end destroys nations, and it’s destroying ours.

So there’s no one we can think of who’s got a clearer handle on this, or a more longitudinal view gained over many years, beginning at the Treasury Department, on this question than Catherine Austin Fitts. And she joins us now to explain why burritos are $20.

TUCKER CARLSON: Catherine Austin Fitts, thank you so much for doing this. I have a lot of questions. I’ll keep them short. Are we experiencing inflation in the United States, do you believe?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Yes. We are experiencing inflation, and there is a reasonable chance that the inflation, at least the increase in household goods, is going to get much, much worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So it is because we’ve been going through a restructuring of the economy for many decades. This has been building for many decades. One, we start off with a model where we have a debt-based currency, and that debt basing forces huge expenses that you don’t have to have.

That’s number one. But number two, we’ve run our fiscal economy in ways that I would describe as a financial coup d’état. And as we’ve pulled resources out of the economy, we have consolidated ownership and control in a way that forces expenses, or lowers the income for the general population and raises their expenses. And this has been an intentional consolidation of ownership and control, and now you’re seeing the results that result in people being squeezed in a variety of ways. So I’m describing a change in the financial model, the centralization of power and economic control, and it involves many different things throughout the economy.

But the important thing to understand is it was a plan, it’s intentional, and if you look at where we are, it’s going to take many, many things to change it because it comes with tremendous and explosive changes in technology, which can be used to create great prosperity, but can also be used to consolidate control in a way that benefits the few and destroys the many.

TUCKER CARLSON: So as I hear your big-picture description of this transition through which we’re moving, the first thought that comes to mind is, boy, that sounds a little bit like what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed in the summer of 1991, and all of a sudden Russians woke up ten years later and all state industries were owned by a small group of people.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: That’s kind of what it sounds like. Well, generally — I mean, I’m grossly oversimplifying — but if you look at the people who did the — it’s called the rape of Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: You know, it’s a similar group, and I’ll give you a story. I was in the City of London making a presentation in 2001, and I’d been asked to speak about what I call priatization in the United States, the consolidation of the real estate and housing market. So I’d been the Assistant Secretary of Housing. And I gave the presentation, and two presentations followed.

One by Anne Williamson, who had been covering Russia for The Wall Street Journal during the rape of Russia, and she got up and gave a presentation. And then John Laughland, who’s a remarkable British commentator now in Paris, stood up and did the same on what had happened in Eastern Europe. And the three of us went into shock, as did many of the investors in the room, because we realized it was the same firms, the same law firms, the same intelligence agencies, and what they were doing in Eastern Europe and in Russia and in the United States was a very similar game. We have a big presentation series called Plunder. But they were basically going in and plundering, and it was one plan.

It wasn’t three different plans or three different groups. It was a process of consolidation of the economies in all three places, and, basically, a privatization of the nation’s resources. Well, here’s the thing. Privatization, Tucker, is when I transfer an asset or involve corporations in a service at a market price.

Priatization is when I transfer an asset to a private party at ten cents on the dollar.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. So at a below-market price.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: And what we’ve been watching, by and large, around the world is priatization, not privatization, or plunder.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s alluding — and thank you for that distinction, because that seems important. So I think many of us on the right were sold on the idea that government is inefficient, which is an easy case to make because it’s true. And in order to make the system, the government, more efficient, we need to privatize things, and the public benefits, and the market rules apply, and so it’s fair and transparent, and it just works better. That’s the case, I think, that free-market economists made throughout the eighties and nineties.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So it’s so funny. I wrote a piece about this sort of priatization at the time, and it later became an online book I wrote called Dillon Read and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. And when I first sent it to — I was working with this firm in London — the head of research just started laughing, and he said, “I’ve always believed that government is inefficient, and the solution is to bring in more private capacity.” And I’m reading this, and what I realized is what is going on is the private guys are just using the government to pay themselves huge and hideous profits above market, in a way that’s destroying markets. So we have these public-private partnerships that involve huge corruption, huge grift, and aren’t productive at all.

But the spin they use is what you just described.

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, it’s a very effective argument, and it certainly fooled me. Definitely fooled me. So how does that trend that you just described cause inflation?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So for example, and there are thousands of different examples, but one of the things that drives prices up is when you have consolidation into monopolies or duopolies. And so if the Department of Justice is simply not enforcing antitrust, you’re going to get consolidation and monopoly pricing. The best example, of course, is the bailout. So according to the Levy Institute, there were $29,000,000,000,000 in the bailouts. And what did we see? We saw a group of financial institutions engage in massive mortgage fraud and financial fraud.

As a result, we had $29,000,000,000,000 of bailouts, which does run up the debt quite a certain amount. And then what happens? They get the benefit of more access to federal credit, special dispensations of all sorts. And coming out of the financial crisis, they had a much bigger market share.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Yes. So not only did they get $29,000,000,000,000 of bailouts, but suddenly they shifted their market share up dramatically in a way that gives them monopoly pricing power. And that was combined, for example, in the financial area with changing the laws in ’79/’80 to allow essentially usury.

So, for example, as I told you, I went from a process of being a multimillionaire, to having a very rich cash flow every month, to having to live on $2,000 a month and run my companies with that. And when things are really desperate, I used to always get a credit card in the mail from JPMorgan Chase for $300, with a $50 sign-up fee, and then a 30% interest rate. And you’re in the corner. According to the Department of Justice, you have to be in Washington in two days, and suddenly you magically get this credit card, which will finance your trip for a 50% interest rate when you combine in the fee.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this is when you were being assailed, prosecuted by the Department of Justice, after you left government yourself?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Yeah. So I had a company, Hamilton Securities Group, which was working as the lead financial adviser to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And we were essentially responsible for making sure portfolio strategy was done properly, as well as doing loan sales. And we were essentially stopping money from disappearing out of the back door of HUD. And so, to get rid of us, we were targeted in this process.

And interestingly enough, after they did get rid of us and the public officials we were working with, suddenly massive amounts of money started disappearing from the HUD financial systems. And, you know, it’s typical in government — you’ve got to get the honest people out if you’re going to grift in a major, major way, and that’s what happened anyway. But we had 18 audits and investigations, 12 tracks of litigation, a smear campaign, and physical harassment. And the goal, of course, was to catch us doing something, was to prove that we had done something wrong, and it got very — it went on for a long time because they could never prove anything, and they tried to falsify documentation.

We caught them, and then it turned into a very long process. So, ultimately, we won the big litigation, so we were able to win. And one of the reasons I refused to settle and insisted on going to — because they try and keep you out of court — I couldn’t get into court. It really started in ’95.

I couldn’t get into court on the main case until 2004. So they try and keep you out of court because, of course, they have no evidence of any wrongdoing. It was very funny, Tucker. I wish I had a video of it — three times they canceled on the eve of trial, so my lawyers were the most over-prepared people in the world. They were being paid by the insurance company.

And so we got to the first day of the final trial, and I wouldn’t settle, and I kept insisting. And I was poisoned many times when I wouldn’t settle, because they wanted to sort of exhaust me. Anyway, I come in on the last trial, on the first day, and essentially the other side has nothing. They have absolutely nothing. And all the lawyers on the other side are fighting.

It’s the whistleblower attorney and the Department of Justice attorney and the HUD attorney. They’re all fighting. And at the end of the day, my attorney turns to me, and he’s white as a sheet, and he says, “Oh my god, they had absolutely nothing.”

Predatory Lending and Population Control

TUCKER CARLSON: So at the depth of this, when you had no money and you’re trying to run everything, your life and business, on $2,000 a month, you’re getting credit card offers from JPMorgan Chase. And that’s kind of a metaphor for how the entire economy works, right?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Right. People profiting off desperation. So one of the first things I did is I sold my big mansion in Washington and bought a country home in Hickory Valley, Tennessee, and I moved to Hickory Valley, Tennessee. I have cousins who are cotton farmers in Hickory Valley, Tennessee, and I moved there because I knew that the cost of living was much, much lower. So the county I live in in Tennessee has a per capita income of $24,000 a year.

Very, very low income. And one of the things, as soon as I moved there, what I realized is we were targeted for predatory lending by all the big banks and lenders. And so one of the ways I used to entertain myself — you know, I was trained on Wall Street, and I was trained by some of the best lawyers on Wall Street how to negotiate — it was really fun for me because I would pick up the phone, and they would just assume I was another person with $24,000 a year income, which, you know, at $2,000 a month, there was. And so I would start to ask them about their offers and negotiate with them, and I learned all their tricks.

And what was amazing to me is the people in my county were targeted by some of the smartest legal stratagems I’ve ever dealt with in my life. But it was war. It was a financial onslaught of trying to trick people into debt. Of course, debt is one of the greatest ways you can destroy a family’s finances — addiction and debt.

And if you look at the targeting of American communities during that period, they were specifically targeted with both addiction and debt. And it was an onslaught, and I got to learn a lot about it living there.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the purpose was? Why would any American want to destroy an American community and kill people and enslave them with debt?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So if I want to change the economy, and I want to change it from a democratic republic to essentially an oligarchy, then what I need to do is I need to consolidate wealth, and I need to reduce the general population to a group of people who are much easier to control.

So let me go back. In 1995, there was an effort made by the people who I would describe as leading the financial system to try and put the country on a financially sound basis. And it failed and ended up, at the end of 1995, in a three-week shutdown of the government. I don’t know if you remember that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. It’s during the Clinton administration.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: And it was described to me by the president of the largest pension fund in the country, several years later. He said, “You don’t understand. They’ve given up. They’ve given up on the country, and they’re moving all the money out, starting in the fall.” And that was when the $21,000,000,000,000 started to go missing, compounded by the $29,000,000,000,000 that went out on the bailouts.

I think what happened was, when they failed to achieve a real, fiscally responsible approach to the federal balance sheet, they decided to do two things. One, they decided to do a financial coup, in a process where, instead of the bankers just running monetary policy, they could then run fiscal policy. And I think the second thing they decided to do is: if you can’t balance the budget with financial responsibility, you can balance the budget by lowering life expectancy. So if you can’t fund the pension and retirement system with enough money to meet your obligations, you can meet your obligations by lowering life expectancy.

And I think a conscious decision was made to do that. Literally, right after the budget deal sort of busted, two decisions were made. One was to approve OxyContin and open the pill mills. The second was all sorts of policies that permitted HUD and other predatory mortgage lending, and that happened right as they also made the decision to do the private prisons, and they kept flooding the neighborhoods with drugs. And if you look at the combination of the pill mills, the predatory lending, narcotics trafficking coming in — again, this is all covered in my online book — it dramatically started to steadily reduce life expectancy, particularly in the lower-income groups.

And I knew it was coming. One of the reasons I kept talking with everybody about the missing money is I knew that it would hit the middle-income groups. It was just a matter of time. And I remember I always tell the story of talking to Dr. Mark Skidmore, who had worked with me on the missing money. I was sitting in a car in Bolivar, Tennessee.

I was doing errands, and he kept saying to me, “Why do you keep bringing up all the money that’s going missing from the federal government? Why don’t you give up on this?” And I said, “Don’t you understand, Mark? If we don’t do something about this, they’re going to take radical steps of lowering life expectancy.” And that was in 2018, and, of course, COVID hit in 2020, and what did we get?

We got a whole series of actions that continued to lower life expectancy, but this time in the middle and upper-middle-class groups.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so obvious to me that reducing population, either through shortening their lives or preventing them from being born in the first place — I mean, that’s official U.S. policy, of course.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Abortion, euthanasia, drugs. But I’ve always sort of wondered why. Do you think it’s because that’s the only way to get the country solvent?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So I think it’s a combination of things. First of all, we have this explosive new technology, and I think you have a lot of people in the leadership who believe, first of all, it’s very difficult to manage people, particularly if they get their hands on this technology, but they also believe they’re going to live for a long, long time. Jared Kushner, when he left the first Trump administration, did a podcast and said, “I’m the first generation to live forever, the last generation to not live forever.” One of the cofounders of Facebook said, “I’m a billionaire, so I’m going to live to 145.”

If the oligarchs are going to live to 145, one of the things they know is not everybody can do that, or you’re going to have an environmental problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, right.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So part of it is that. But I also think, with robotics and automation, they think they don’t need a lot of people, and a lot of people are hard to manage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Now, if you look at what they’re doing to build a control grid, clearly they think if they can accomplish that, it’s going to make it much easier to manage a lot of people. But frankly, they don’t necessarily want them around; they don’t need them. And so I do believe that many of them feel they would be much better off with much lower populations. I think that’s obviously true.

The Risk of Global War

TUCKER CARLSON: May I ask, though, about what role a global war would play in that? On the one hand, obviously, war reduces population. And if you wanted to clear the Ukrainians out of Ukraine, leaving only the resources and Indian immigrants, you would do what they are doing. I get it. But once you start pushing up against the possibility of a nuclear exchange, a total war, a global war — don’t you, and which they are doing knowingly —

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: And I don’t know if it’s reckless or intentional or what exactly it is, but they know that we’re moving toward global war, and they’re not slowing down. The Trump administration and all the people who support it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Don’t you kind of risk your own plans by doing that? That seems very much like a dice roll.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So there are a couple of theories. I think there are some people who do want to bring on Armageddon. That’s a cultural and religious cross-section of some of the people involved. But the other thing is, if you’ve been responsible for the dollar system, and you know how dangerous an improper or a difficult unraveling of the dollar system could be for most of the countries around the world — you know how an unraveling could kill and hurt and maim — then you will go to extreme lengths and kill many, many people to avoid that.

And part of it is, if you’re used to having power, you do not want to convert to a meritocracy. I mean, the way to solve — I just told you the thing you just did on how to save America. I think it’s one of the best things you’ve ever done. And if, in theory, we all woke up tomorrow and followed your ten principles in our own lives, in our own family, in our own community, we could see an unbelievably explosive wealth creation. One of the things I want to stress is tyranny is very, very wasteful.

And the potential for wealth explosion, if we could somehow behave like we were an advanced civilization, is an extraordinary opportunity, but it’s going to result in a meritocracy. And if you look at the people running things, they have no interest in competing in a meritocracy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. Because they’re going to lose.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: And the nature of their situation is, when people in their situation lose, they get killed and their families get killed. So they are at the point where they would do — I remember one group telling me about a group during the eighties, when Iran-Contra was really getting out of hand, talking about how they had started to make plans about dropping — exploding a suitcase nuke in the middle of Chicago, just to distract. Remember, one of the goals of war is to control the domestic population, and we are now approaching a time where, whether you have a war or you get the control grid, controlling the domestic population is going to be very difficult.

TUCKER CARLSON: So won’t that control grid make it easier?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Yeah, if they can get it. If they can put it into place. So let’s look at what they’re hoping to do. What they’re hoping to do, first of all, is to use stablecoins and digital tokens to bring 4,000,000,000 people around the world — and this is the retail market — into the treasury market and into the U.S. stock and bond market, and literally take U.S. market share, for example, in the stock market, up from 70% to 90% of the global stock market. So they’re hoping to essentially tender for all the citizens in the world and bring them into our financial system.

What they’ve said is we’re going to do twenty-four-seven trading on the global stock markets using digital tokens, and we’re going to offer 20 times margin. Everybody right now is really worried that we’re in a bubble. If you look at the tools that are being amassed to bubble using crypto — arguably, if they succeed, and I’m not saying that they will, but if they do, it’ll be the biggest bubble I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived through a lot of bubbles.

So you bring another 4,000,000,000 people into the U.S. currency, the U.S. bond market, the U.S. stock market, and you do it with twenty-four-seven trading with 20 times margin — it’s going to be extraordinary, because those are networks you can also pump out more debt on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So now what’s interesting is the CLARITY Act, it appears, is not going to pass this year, which is one of the sort of legal infrastructures they wanted to do this. So I find the sort of potential crash and burn this fall of the CLARITY Act to be quite remarkable.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So they think through these mechanisms, they have tools that can consider this wave and this bubble going forward. Now, if you look at what they want to do, what they want to do is put on your currency, your bank deposits, and your stocks and bonds what I call a manual, an automatic third lock. Do you know what a third lock is?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Okay, let me describe this. If you and I do a transaction, and I want to buy a Tucker Carlson hat, and you want to sell it to me, I give you cash, I get the hat — that’s a two-lock transaction. You have a lock, I have a lock. If one of us says no, it can’t happen.

Let’s say we have money in the bank, and I want to buy the hat. I’m going to transfer money out via an ACH to you for the cost of the hat. The bank has rules from the Treasury Department. It has sanctions.

It has to know your customer rules. It has other regulations, and it has the ability to intercede and stop the transaction for those reasons. And that’s a sort of what I call a manual third lock. So the bank gets a third lock, implementing the government regulations.

And so if you look at what happened to the truckers in Canada, most of the banks exercised that manual third lock under the direction of the government. What the government wants to do, and what the Treasury and the central banks want, is they want an automatic third lock so you don’t have to go through the bank. And not only can you apply sanctions and know-your-customer and money-laundering laws, you can apply a full-blown social credit system.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So I can make up a hugely complex rule system for Tucker and his kids and his grandkids. I can customize it for each one of you, and I can give you incentives, and I can give you rules. And unless you do exactly what I say, I can turn off your money, or I can apply negative interest rates to your money or positive interest rates. I can raise your taxes without anybody having any say about it. Let me give you an example. Go back to the pandemic.

If I say you’re locked down and you and your family can’t leave your house, your money won’t work outside your house — if I have an all-digital system with an automatic third lock. And let’s say I freeze your bank account. You can’t go to your bank and talk to them. It’s above their head.

They won’t be implementing it. That gives them — that’s what the data centers are for. That’s what the AI is for, at least in North America. The goal of that — if you look at spatial control, it involves tremendous data because of the videos and the cameras, and we’ve got lots of video footage.

But then you can imagine financial transactions all over the world, if they’re going to bring 4,000,000,000 customers from around the world into the dollar markets or our stock market. That’s a huge amount of data for spatial and financial control. And with AI — what is AI great at? AI is fabulous at processing enormous amounts of mathematical information, which is most of the information, the data we’re talking about. And so if they can put a manual third lock in a social credit system for every individual, and essentially automate the whole process with AI, then they have the ability, in fact, to control many, many people.

Now here’s the question: why would 4,000,000,000 people want to come into that system? It’s very interesting. The Secretary of the Treasury, about a month or two ago, said, you know, they’d seized a billion dollars of Iranian wallets, and he was bragging about how easy it was to do it. And I thought, well, if you’re going to go out and try and persuade 4,000,000,000 people to come into our markets, you probably don’t really want them to realize that we can seize their wallets with that kind of speed and ease.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, that would be a disincentive to participation.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: There’s no doubt about it.

Commodities Markets

TUCKER CARLSON: I think so. May I ask you just, since we’re on markets — I don’t want to get sidetracked, but I think you might be able to answer this. I’m baffled by the behavior of various commodities markets. Since this war began, they’ve moved in the opposite direction from what you would expect if supply and demand was real. So let’s just start with oil prices, Brent crude, use that as a measure. They’ve gone straight up, and they’ve kind of gone up and down, but not very up, in some cases down. And I think we can say part of that is because China decided to stop its energy imports, which is bizarre behavior.

Then gold has also — I mean, since this spring — dropped a thousand dollars an ounce at exactly the moment when the U.S. dollar is clearly headed to a much weaker position. So that doesn’t make any sense at all. Is it possible —

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: No, that makes a lot of sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Tell me how.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So, yeah, let’s look at oil first. So the Chinese have done a remarkable job of just cutting their imports in half. And to me, there’s not a lot of reliable information — we know they’ve built a lot of nuclear capacity and renewable capacity. They say, last time I looked, that they’re not using their oil reserves, which are significant, my understanding is, but it’s hard to believe they haven’t. The Japanese had a fair amount of oil reserves.

They’ve run down their reserves. My understanding is our reserves are now below the amount that threatens the whole infrastructure of the strategic reserve, which is frightening, but we’ve run our reserves down tremendously. So part of what’s been happening in the oil market is I suspect the shorting and the things they do to manage the price down. But that’s combined with enormous relief of pressure on the market because of what the Chinese did and because of ours and the Japanese strategic reserve. Now, if you look at U.S. strategy, U.S. strategy is designed to replace the petrodollar with what some people call the petro-gas dollar.

And between bottlenecking the trade routes and sabotaging energy capacity all over the world, they’re trying to build a much bigger market share for U.S. LNG. Remember, we’re a net exporter now. And if you look at how much LNG, for example, we’re selling into Asia, our oil and gas industry is making a lot of money. Now, the question is, now that the war is continuing and we don’t have the Japanese and U.S. reserves to run down a lot, there’s a real expectation that the price could continue to go higher. Now, here’s the other thing, Tucker.

When you shut down what’s been done to the global economy since February, you create a lot of — inflation, deflation, because you are shutting down. I call this COVID 2.0. You’re wiping out a lot of little guys, and again, it consolidates into the big guys. But this is very depressing for the global economy, right?

And that’s deflationary. Now let me talk about gold. Ever since I started covering gold, say, in 2000 and on, whenever there’s a war-kind of situation, you see gold drop. It’s very typical. And one of the reasons is people get short and they have to sell their gold, but the other is people want liquidity.

So they go into treasuries, they go into the short-term bond market, even if the dollar’s weak. So they’re looking to go to cash, so to speak, and you’ll see them leave gold. So it doesn’t surprise me that probably a lot of people in the Gulf area and globally needed to sell gold. But gold’s in a long-term bull market, and this is just the normal volatility of gold in these kinds of situations.

TUCKER CARLSON: May I ask why would China slash its oil imports and import as much gold as it has, which is a lot? Why is China importing gold and buying gold?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Excellent question, and I don’t know why. I suspect they think they have the nuclear and renewable and other capacity to do that for some period of time. Clearly Venezuela cut them, and clearly the situation has cut them. But I think that’s a big question mark.

And one of the reasons might be — they understood that it was very important to let that steam out. They’re helping the global economy tremendously. If the price was running up to where many people thought it would go, the pain in the global economy would be absolutely enormous.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, you could easily see $7-a-gallon gasoline in the U.S. But I guess what I’m saying is it seems like the Chinese government has done the Trump administration a huge favor by keeping things kind of status quo when they wouldn’t normally be.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Yes, that is absolutely correct. And if you look at who’s purchasing what in Asia, the U.S. is clearly making a lot of money exporting LNG to Asia. So this has been very, very good for the U.S. oil and gas industry.

Contempt for the Population

TUCKER CARLSON: So my last question has to do with attitudes, and I’m confused by this, and you may have an answer. So consumer prices have risen. Inflation is real. It’s the product of long-term changes, the ones you just described, but it’s also the product of this war of choice begun at the end of February. That’s all — it’s obvious. Anybody can understand it without an economics degree. Prices of food have gone up; that’s detectable to everybody, because everybody eats. Somebody noted this the other day and said, “Gee whiz, you know, $20 burritos are a lot.” And immediately, the same people, many of them who advocated for this war of choice, attack anyone who complains about rising food prices. And what I see there is like pure contempt, if not hatred, for ordinary people.

Like, what else could explain that kind of response? But I also see a kind of crazy recklessness, because normally, in a functioning society with normal motives, the people in charge, the rich people, don’t make fun of the poor people for overpaying for food, because that’s dangerous. They could rise up and bite you if you keep mocking them. The “let them eat cake” thing doesn’t work as a long-term strategy. Why are they doing that?

Why are they showing contempt for the population?

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: So I think they think the best defense is a good offense. And they’re attacking people for being lazy, or not working, and they describe how they made it to where they are. It’s simply what psychopaths do.

I mean, here’s the thing, and I’ll just be blunt. One of the things — we had many people on our network all excited about the new administration, and they participated in MAHA groups and worked very hard to do everything they could to get Washington to change its policies. And one of the great things about watching what has happened, because it’s in most respects completely gone the other way, is it’s proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a bipartisan commitment to depopulation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: It’s extraordinary. We had a wonderful scientist on the other day who has been very instrumental in trying to stop the liability shield for pesticides, and she got to the end of the show, and you could see she was frustrated. She’s a very careful scientist, very thorough, and she said — she really wanted to get her point across — she said, “You have to understand that if this liability shield happens and they do what they say they’re going to do if they get it, I consider that, as a scientist, to be an extinction-level event, given the impact on female fertility.” It was a showstopper.

And so if you look at the policies coming through the sausage factory in Washington, these are intentional policies to depopulate. An enormous effort has been made, for almost my entire lifetime, to come up with any strategy that can obfuscate or stop people from seeing the obvious. And something marvelous is happening, Tucker. And what is marvelous, and it’s the first time in my lifetime I’ve seen it, is that people are finally saying, “Oh, you know, they really are trying to kill us.”

And that’s very freeing, because once you know it, you know to get as far away from it, from them, as possible and protect yourself. And the thing that’s very healthy about it, and one of the reasons I loved your ten principles to save America — real solutions come when we let go. When we let go of hoping that there’s some way we can go into that machinery and turn it around, it’s not going to work. So we need to leave. We need to get away from the diseased animal and go do things that can work.

And if enough of us do that, what is possible is absolutely fantastic. The little secret here is, if you look at that machinery, it is so destructive of wealth at the state and local level that if we could begin to reverse it, even 5% or 10%, you don’t need everybody — the possibilities are enormous, particularly with the blessing of new technology. So it doesn’t have to go bad here. It can be transformative. But what it requires is we’ve got to stop hoping that the people who would attack you for a $20 burrito — I mean, seriously, can anybody take Ben Shapiro seriously ever again?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: No. We need to laugh. We need to laugh. We need to just laugh and turn it off. It’s a joke. He’s not serious. He’s not relevant.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in a long time. Catherine Austin Fitts, I think you have obviously deep knowledge, but also a beautiful perspective. So thank you very much for sharing it.

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Thank you, Tucker. You have a great day.

TUCKER CARLSON: You too. Thank you.

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