Has RFK Jr declared a war on science?

This is a Global Player original podcast. What's your reaction to people that are getting a little worried? I think that uh no, it has not caught us uh at surprise by a surprise again. I cannot comment on personnel issues, but the agency is in trouble and we need to fix it and we are fixing it and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore. The unmistakable voice

of Robert F. Kennedy, otherwise known as America's Health Secretary. What on earth is he doing to the center the heartbeat? of disease control in America by firing some of the top people there. And not only firing the top person there, a lot of others have resigned in protest. The crucial body of public health is in turmoil. Is Robert F. Kennedy curing it or making the disease worse? Welcome to the NewsAgents USA. It's John. It's Emily. And the Centres for Disease Control.

is an essential part of the health infrastructure of America. If there are immunisations, if there's a vaccine program, AIDS, public health issues, it is the centres for disease control that is absolutely essential to it. And if you think back to the kind of early days of the pandemic in Washington. It was the CDC who were there at the briefings every day with Donald Trump talking about how they were going to fight the pandemic. It brought them into the political crosshairs.

And they became part of the culture wars, a position that the C D C never wanted to be in. And with Robert F. Kennedy junior, a well known vaccine skeptic Who thinks that the CDC has massively overreached on its immunisation programs? Well, those culture wars have got a lot worse.

and came to a head at the end of last week. Yes. This was with the removal, the firing of Doctor Susan Menares. She was the C D C Director. She is the C D C Director because she's actually refusing to take herself out of the post. Why did she get fired? because she disagreed with RFK's stance on vaccines. In other words, she still believes in the power of the vaccine.

to save American lives and he felt that she was at odds with what he was trying to do. This has kicked off a massive backlash. I mean, thankfully, in many ways. We've got former leaders, nine former leaders of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, who have published an open letter. that is not unafraid to criticise his policies, including his restriction of vaccines, his funding that he's pulled for research, and the firing of thousands of healthcare workers.

Why this matters now is it is not just an intellectual discussion. about vaccination or anti-vaccination. It is a pragmatic approach he is taking to make it much, much harder for Americans to actually obtain vaccinations. In other words Maybe you could say, Well, you know, he's anti vax, he wants to explore things, he wants to open the door and ask questions that maybe were about what goes into vaccinations and a lot of people think that there's plenty of

intellectual room to to sort of look at stuff. This is not just COVID, we should say, this is childhood vaccination programs in America. But he's gone much further than that. He's restricting access. that Americans have to vaccinations for their children. In other words You might find that you would go to your doctor and your doctor would say, I'm afraid I can no longer give you that vaccination or for your children because I will be crossing a law if I do. This is a direct Absolute impact.

of somebody's crazy thinking. And the problem that you've got at the moment is that there are various untested theories that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has about the impact of vaccines and how there are alternative treatments. And what he hasn't done. Is he hasn't given these people who work at the Centres for Disease Control, who've got a lifetime of experience In immunology, in disease transmission, and all the rest of it, any of the scientific papers on which the Kennedy theories.

are based and they're saying, Well hang on, look, okay, if you say vaccines are dangerous and are bad for you and the MMR vaccine is a really terrible thing Show me the scientific papers that have been peer reviewed so that I know for a fact that this is based on science rather than prejudice. He hasn't given them that. And so these people say, this is all a load of bollocks. I'm not going to go along with something like this, which is just your prejudice.

Guiding health policy. I spoke to I was with a American kid yesterday morning who says to me his parents are now worried that will they get their flu shots this winter? It has cast a fear that across America about what is going to be happening in terms of availability

of things like flu shots of shingles, vaccines, of whatever it happens to be. Childhood immunisation. I mean the things that we all take for granted that we just assume are part and parcel of having a baby, seeing your kids start school. all the kind of natural childhood jabs that stop your kids from getting smallpox. And we and we've seen the impact of some of this. Texas has its worst measles outbreak for a decade, and partly due to the scepticism that has grown up.

around MMR vaccines as being a danger and a threat and all the rest of it. And into this atmosphere you've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not a doctor, but who's got a lot of theories and a lot of ideas about what makes America safe and what makes America healthy.

And he is implementing these things and the C D C is in turmoil and being gutted simultaneously as a result. Yeah, he's also taking out money. I mean he's taken out five hundred million dollars in grants and contracts. in work on mRNA vaccines. So in other words, it is not just somebody coming in with a few kooky ideas and saying, Oh, let's think about this and let's think about that and

You know, to be fair, I think there are a lot of Americans who wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Or A little bit of benefit of a little bit of doubt. In other words, when he talked about the stuff that was going into American foodstuffs, or when he was talking about America's obesity problem, or when he was talking about

I don't know, like food colouring and stuff. I mean, a lot of this stuff is nonsense. But there were people who said, look around, Americans are not, you know, by nature the healthiest group of people. Maybe it is time we had somebody or a conversation at least

about what we're doing, what we're eating, how we're exercising, the health of the nation. The whole m movement, as we know, is called Maha, Make America Healthy Again. And I think a lot of people would say, well it is about time to look at this. But this is not in any way, as you say, a studied, evidence-based, scientific approach.

to what we should be doing better to make Americans more healthy. It's kind of a panic. Take fluoride out of the water, take vaccines off the shelf, make measles go up tenfold in Texas. This is not rational thinking. It is not the movement of somebody who has actually taken the time to work through America's problems and their solutions. It's somebody who, as he has confessed, has a worm in his brain that's leading him to do some really odd things. And what I think is the really interesting

wrinkle in all of this is where Donald Trump stands. Because the assumption is that this is getting on with Trump's work of implementing Trump's will and that they are absolutely side by side with each other. Trump posted on Truth Social it's very important that the drug companies justify the success of their various COVID drugs. Many people think they're a miracle that saved millions of lives.

Others disagree. With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it now. I've been shown information from Pfizer and others that's extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not? They go off to the next hunt. And so it goes on. He's not defending RFK Jr. I mean No, you know, God forbid, you've never ever said about a Trump tweet oh I don't know where he stands now. He's got a lot of exclamation marks, a lot of question marks.

But without actually having a definite place to end up. And we can't work out I think it's fair to say, we can't work out if he is endorsing RFK, if he's trying to ask a completely different question of the drug companies, which stops him even addressing it, or if he's actually starting to get a little bit of a panic on because

as you've seen over recent days. He's a man who probably will come to depend on the health services of America in no small way over the coming weeks and months. And actually Quite nice to know that you've not taken all the vaccines out of the system. Yeah. There is one other group in all of this that I just think is worth considering because you talked, Emily, a moment ago about

make America healthy again. And so let's stop having such sweet drinks and let's stop having, you know, so many burgers and let's eat more healthily and let's have more authentic ingredients in food. Does anyone really say let's not have as many burgers? He has. Has he? Yeah, he's he's said that part of the you know obesity disease in America is down to the way people are you know, what they're eating and all the rest of it. Who wants Robert F. Kennedy Junior to fail?

The food industry does. Big Pharma does. All sorts of people with very, very powerful lobbies in America. If you're part of the fizzy drinks industry, if you're part of the fast food chain. You do not want to see these policies being implemented wholesale. You want to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. go and to have someone more to their liking in charge of health and human services. And at the moment, you can imagine That Donald Trump is getting it from a variety of people saying

Yeah, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yeah, I know he's got a lot of good ideas, but some of what he's suggesting is very impractical. You know, normally that's a reason to sort of say, well, you know, push a bit harder. Do stand up to big pharma, do stand up to big business, make sure that you're getting

value for money, make sure that they're not, you know, pricing things out of the reach of normal people. This is, you know, one of the big successes, I have to say, of the Biden administration, was that he took off the brand names of, for example, the insulin jabs and medicines. and he managed to make medicines much cheaper for people. So I think taking your struggle to the big companies

I think it's something that we get backing from a lot of Americans. It's a sort of Bernie Sanders position, Elizabeth Warren position. But as you've said, it all comes from this weird place of one man's brain as opposed to any empirical evidence or work along the way. Yeah.

One other thing over the weekend I read various of the resignation letters and you know, a number of them said and the guy who was in charge of the director of the National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Disease, a guy called Dmitry Dasker Lochel. wrote a letter about why he was resigning and I was with him a hundred percent all the way.

And he said, I'm unable to serve in an environment that treats C D C as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health. Okay, fine. The recent change in the adult and children's immunization schedule threatens the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people. Pregnant people. He couldn't say pregnant women.

And I just kinda thought I wonder whether with that tweet or with that resignation letter You're making R F K Junior's point that an awful lot of people will say, Oh my god, the C D C is woke. It deserves to be part of the culture wars if it can't call someone who is pregnant a woman. I read it and thought, ooh That stands out. Well this goes back I suppose, you know, to the Covid years and the Fauci stuff, right? Because Fauci who I think in sort of UK standards

would have been our Chris Whitty, our Patrick Valence, right? The people who stood either side of Boris Johnson and tried not to roll their eyes. and who said, actually, this is where the science stands, this is what the public have to know, this is what we are telling you to save your lives. That was Fauci's role, and yet somehow he became the most vilified part, the most targeted part.

of Trump's administration because whatever he said, mask wearing or closing down businesses or schools or whatever got turned into woke nonsense. Oh, he's spouting woke nonsense. And he's in the capture of big business. That was the other thing that was la labeled at him. He's been at the C D C too long. I mean Fauci was right at the heart of

countering the AIDS epidemic, actually back in the sort of, you know, nineteen nineties. He was there a long time. He knew his stuff, and yet he ended up being politicized through his need to keep sticking to the science as he understood it. The anti science movement in America to a lesser extent here.

It's just terrifying. It's this I don't want to hear from experts. Well frankly, if I've got something seriously wrong with me, I do want to hear from an expert rather than a bloke down the pub who tells me that what I need to do is to eat a certain type of mushroom because that will make me better. No, I want people who've studied.

It's nearly ten years since Michael Gove told Faisal Islam, our old colleague, people have had enough of experts. And in that one phrase, I think So much trust was lost. good work was undone. So much research was allowed to be sort of ripped up and thrown away. And he will probably tell you now, Oh, I wasn't advocating it, I was just saying what what people are are thinking now. If we've had enough of experts

then presumably we're not gonna just end up with a measles outbreak in Texas. We're gonna end up somewhere along the line with three hundred and eighty million unvaccinated Americans and whatever that means for the rest of the world. Well let's speak now to Dr. Maddie Cohen. She was the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention from july twenty twenty three until Trump's second term started, and she was one of the co-authors of

the New York Times op ed that we were just describing. Doctor Kane, thank you so much for being with us on the NewsAgence USA. I suspect it didn't come easily to write an open op ed to the New York Times

But presumably it was a mark of the concern you felt. It absolutely was that in the fact that nine former CDC directors were um moved to write this, I think is a warning, um, certainly to the United States, but I think to the world that we are very concerned with the direction we are seeing, not just at the CDC but at HHS and Um last week you likely have heard that um the administration and uh Secretary Kennedy fired their own selected director.

of the CDC after our Congress confirmed them just three weeks before. And with that we lost also four very senior leaders who also resigned when she was fired. Um so that, you know, is just showing that there is a lot of upheaval, but this has really been a pattern of attack on the institutions, on on uh expertise, on scientific integrity, and we wanted to Raise the alarm. You're talking about Doctor Susan M Monares, who is the C D C director. Have you spoken to Doctor Menares? Do you

Do you know what she's gonna do now? I have not spoken to her since everything happened uh last week. I have been in contact with the four long-term career officials who also resigned. Those were folks who had worked directly for me and I've known for quite some time. These are experts of the highest caliber, really the m some of the most. Incredible infectious disease.

experts and leaders in the world. They've led responses to Ebola, obviously to COVID. We had a lot of talent walk out the door. And they said they walked out over the fact that they were being asked to sign off. on decisions that were not based and grounded in science and data and that is incredibly concerning. How vulnerable do you think America is right now?

Look, the C D C has an important job to protect health and and make sure the communities are safe, right? Their their main job is to detect health threats. Those health threats could be infectious diseases like

bird flu, or it could be chemicals like we saw in a big exposure in the United States when we had some big wildfires um and train derailment. So we've a w wide ranging type of job that we're supposed to do at the C D C and we never know when that next outbreak or health threat is going to come.

And it could be two days from now, it could be two years from now. But the fact that we have lost talent and that I think we are headed in the wrong direction.

in terms of building trust, we're headed in the wrong direction in terms of making the investments needed to keep our country safe and healthy. I'm very concerned as well about US withdrawal from the global world. Um, as you likely know, we pulled out of many, many different relationships that we've had for decades that have allowed us to partner, but also to identify diseases and health threats before they can become a threat to any of us.

So let me ask you this, where do you think Donald Trump stands? on all of this because he posted on Truth Social um a long sort of it wasn't a rant, it was asking a lot of questions. It was as though he was slightly worried. As well by some of the stuff that R FK Jr. was doing. Yeah, I took that to say, you know, look, the president

Um, it was under his leadership that the United States invested in, you know, uh Operation Warp Speed, which is what we called our development of the COVID vaccines. Um, and it was, you know, his administration, his leadership that put that investment in place.

to allow us to get vaccines as quickly as we did. And we are very proud of that accomplishment. I think so is the president. And so what you're seeing, I think, is Secretary Kennedy being not in alignment with the President of the United States. But uh, you know, we will see if the president will further weigh in here. I will say our our Secretary Kennedy will be in front of Congress.

um and be answering some hard questions tomorrow. And I know that they'll be thinking about what has happened with the C D C um but with vaccine policy overall. And I I believe Senator Kennedy is out of step with where both parties in the United States are. On the vaccine policy, what this means for ordinary Americans now. Can you ask your doctor for childhood inoculations? Can you get your vaccinations? Can you get your flu jabs? It is Is that going to become harder?

So what we are raising the alarm about are the the signs that we're seeing that things are moving in the right direction. But the good news is right now the pediatric or the childhood vaccine schedule and access remains okay. But last week Dr. Menaras, the the handpicked CDC director from the Trump administration, resigned because she said she did not want to rubber stamp.

new vaccine recommendations that she did not feel like were grounded in science. So we haven't seen anything new, but we are anticipating that there may be some additional changes coming in the next number of weeks.

We were anticipating a meeting of our vaccine advisory committee in the United States. Secretary Kennedy fired all the members of that committee, reappointed them with folks in alignment with his idea, you know, ideology, which we have known about vaccines. And so I I think this was all about warning, but today.

you can go get your flu shot and I'm encouraging folks to do that. Get your flu shot, get your COVID shot. We did see an action by our Food and Drug Administration to to narrow and limit access to the COVID vaccine. uh going forward. So we we're already seeing some of the effects, but we are very concerned about these prelude steps that we normally would see ahead of

of a cold and flu season this winter, we see ominous signs and that's why we're raising the alarm. Could I just ask you a slightly wider question, which is about Americans' attitude towards science and kind of thinking that there is something inherently suspicious about science and scientists And the conspiracy theories that arise and the culture wars that get started over it.

Well, I think we're seeing a lack of trust in many institutions, science being one of them, but we're seeing that in a lack of trust of the media. of uh academia, um, of government. So I think we're seeing that in a lot of spaces. And I think that particularly I I'll take the criticism in public health. We were too slow to uh really communicate differently about building trust.

I happen to um run a particular state in the United States that was dominated by by Republicans during the COVID pandemic, and I'm really proud that we were able to to work across party lines and find solutions that were still grounded in science and evidence, but we were a able to have conversations about the policy left

stood on top of that. And I think that was a hard moment for the United States where folks felt like we weren't having a a transparent and trusting conversation. But I feel like in the state of North Carolina that I had the pleasure of running the COVID response pleasure may be the wrong word. The opportunity uh to run the COVID response we were able to bridge that divide and trust actually went up.

in science, in the department, in the work that we're doing. So it is possible to do, but it was not seen everywhere during the pandemic. And we had work to do to rebuild after that. I was very pleased to see during my time at the CDC, we had some hard lessons to learn. I had some major criticisms of the CDC when I took over. Um, and we worked very hard to correct those. And the good news, trust in the CDC went

from the its lower levels during the pandemic back to the levels it was before the pandemic. So we had rebuilt trust pretty quickly actually, faster than I thought. um in the C D C. Um but what I'm seeing now is actually dividing us, not bringing us together in a roading trust. Doctor Cohn, thank you so much. Appreciate your time today on the News Agency USA. Thanks. Thank you very much indeed. USA with the U.S. And Johnson.

Well we're going in. I didn't say when, we're going in. When you lose, look, I have an obligation. This isn't a political thing. Uh I have an obligation. When we lose when twenty people are killed over the last two and a half weeks. And seventy-five are shot with bullets. So let me tell you a little story about a place called DC, District of Columbia, right here where we are. It's now a safe zone. We have no crime. We have it's in such great shape. You can go and actually

Walk with your children, your wife, your husband. You can walk right down the middle of the street. You're not gonna be shot, Peter. You're safe. It's like a children's story, isn't it? Where you magic up whatever facts you want to tell your tale. Donald Trump there trying to explain that after he had issued emergency orders to get troops.

Federal troops on the streets of Washington DC to cope with what he called a crime emergency. Three weeks later, a month later, it's all done and dusted and they can go home now. Well, not home. to Chicago. Yeah, because Chicago is the next stop on Donald Trump using federal guards, the National Guard, to go in to the state to take over the policing or work alongside and look, Chicago has a crime problem. There has always been a crime problem in Chicago.

But if we are going to be science driven, to go back to the previous topic that we were just discussing. You would say which are the places that have the highest crime rates in America? Because if the National Guard are to go anywhere, surely they would go to those places. Well, so far we've had Donald Trump send in troops to LA.

To Washington DC and possibly next to Chicago. What do all three have in common? They are Democrat run cities. Where are the three states? Where are the three cities which have the highest murder rates? Oh, it's a bit inconvenient to say, but they're all Republican run states. So the highest rates are in Birmingham, Alabama, St. Louis, Missouri and Memphis, Tennessee.

They recorded more than 40 murders per hundred thousand people. And the next two cities with the highest murder rates in the US are Baltimore and Detroit. Look, you don't have to be a genius to see what's going on here. Trump is not just targeting democratic states. He's targeting governors. who he's got a real beef with because they're the people that have in recent weeks and months been standing up to him. Gavin Newsom in California, Wes Moore in Maryland, Baltimore, and in Illinois,

J B Pritzka. And I want you to listen to JB Pritzka now because he's taken the fight back to Trump in a way that Pretty convincing. It's a slam dunk. When did we become a country where it's okay for the US President to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything? Especially something we don't want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation? That we treat this as normal?

He has surrounded himself with groveling yes men who are too weak to restrain his most violent and unhinged impulses, or who share those impulses. As a governor who cares about the well-being of my people, I can't live in a fantasy land where I pretend Trump is not tearing this country apart for personal greed and power. To Chicagoans.

What you can do is look out for your communities and your neighbors. Know your rights. Film things that you see happening in your neighborhoods and your streets and share them with the news media. Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud. For America. And the line that you keep hearing, and I was listening to Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago.

in Illinois at the weekend. The line you keep hearing is there is both an immigration problem and a crime problem in many American cities. This is not how you solve it. And there is a growing sense And I don't want to overstate this, but it's hard not to come to a conclusion that looks pretty adjacent to this. That Trump is trying essentially to organise

his own police force, some kind of federal army that he can control in any of the cities where he does not have reach right now. In other words, the blue state.

If you add together what's happened in California, in Washington DC, now in Maryland, possibly, now in Chicago, what you see is not just executive overreach. But a man who genuinely looks like he's building up a force that becomes his personal army. There was a brilliant report by my former colleague when I was in Washington, Mark Stone from Sky News.

who went onto the mean streets of Columbia Heights in Washington. It's just past Adams Morgan. It's kind of a middle class area, but there is a Hispanic population. And ice was swarming the place. making random arrests, stopping people in their car, taking out garden workers and people like that who did maintenance and all sorts and just arresting them. And you look at them and they haven't got these the ICE officers, they haven't got name tags.

They're wearing a variety of bandanas, they're in paramilitaries, but they're also wearing jeans. It did look like a private army. And if you have got a huge private army that is hell bent on arresting anyone it wants to if you look a little bit brown and therefore oh you must be dodgy, you may not have the right papers, I'm arresting you. And you deploy ice on polling day around various areas where the Democrats are likely to do well. that has a chill effect on the turnout for that election

Well maybe, just maybe, the Republicans keep hold of the House and the Senate next November. And you just gotta think that this is am I being over conspiratorial to say this is where this is heading? These ICE officers Who are covered up, who are anonymous, who are masked, I mean Hilariously, you ask anyone on the right in this country. What they think if they see, you know, a woman in a burqa.

Or a young man in a hoodie and they'll be like, Well, what are they covering up? You know, if they if they're scared to show their face, then what are they getting up to? What's going on under the burqa? What's going on under the hoodie? Why doesn't that occur to people when it's ICE agents who are literally masked up to the hilt, as you say, nothing to identify them from a paramilitary force or from frankly a bunch of gangsters?

And they are now targeting any kind of communal groups. Like it might be picnics in celebration of Mexico Day. It might be anywhere where they think they can find large numbers of Hispanic people. And the aim here is to intimidate to threaten and ultimately to deport, sometimes wrecking families, sometimes picking on people who have absolutely never been the wrong side of the law in America. Well, let's listen to JP Pritzker on this as well.

They are law abiding individuals who pay taxes and contribute to the communities who feel safe going to work and attending mandatory immigration check ins. In other words, they're following the law. We have reason to believe that Stephen Miller chose the month of September to come to Chicago because of celebrations around Mexican Independence Day that happen here every year. It breaks my heart.

to report that we have been told ICE will try and disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades. Let's be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point. Not the safety of anyone living here. It's kind of chilling. I I think that it's hard to ignore. some of this stuff and just saying it's normal, it's fine, it's just a kind of minor step up from what we have seen before.

Look, what Donald Trump has done on the southern border, tick. He's succeeded in stopping the flow of illegal immigrants coming into the country. But what is happening within the country now, to those who are living there and as JB Pritzker says, are paying their taxes is terrifying. It seems the wrong side of the line. I suppose if you go back to where we were a year ago, more than a year ago, before the election at the Republican Convention in Wisconsin, where we saw people

Standing on their chairs, holding up these magazines saying mass deportation now. And I remember taking one home'cause I just thought it was like it was comedic. You don't really mean this, do you? He does. And they did. And so in a way, And a lot of Democrats supported it as well at the time. There was a lot of I don't know if they supported mass deportation. But the point is, okay, what he's doing then is he is fulfilling the democratic mandate.

So on the plus side, if you want to be really kind of calm about this, you go, Yeah, you know what? People hold held up signs saying mass deportation now. Trump took them at their word and he's now mass deporting. And you have to work out whether that is a president who is fulfilling his electoral mandate or somebody who is absolutely ransacking. The safety of America as we know it.

I think if it was being done in a proper and ordered way Where it isn't just random ICE people with their faces covered, snatching people off the streets, taking them to a detention centre where you don't know where they are, where probably their rights aren't being read. Then that is unacceptable. If there was a proper orderly process by which you were just striking making sure that people had the right papers and you were doing it in a systematic way, then fine. But as JB Pritzka said there

The intimidation and the terror is the part of it. Is the object of it. Not the by product of it. We'll be back in a moment and we'll be talking about the Trump made romance and whether it might be over.

Agents USA with Emily Maitless And John Sopor. Let's go back to the first term of Donald Trump. And his big new buddy is Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. And he invites Modi over to Texas. and they have the Howdy Modi rally where all the Indian Americans come to see Modi speak, they embrace and Trump goes to India As well, and it is the new powerhouse relationship India America. Spool forward to this year. And the outbreak of hostilities.

on the Kashmir border between India and Pakistan and Donald Trump sort of gets involved and makes a couple of calls. He doesn't bring peace, but for various reasons, Pakistan and India climbed down. What happens next is so instructive. Pakistani Prime Minister says, I'm nominating you for the Nobel Peace Prize. Narendra Modi says, No, I'm not, I don't think you did bring the peace, it was gonna happen anyway. And on a result of that

Modi and Trump have fallen out spectacularly. And the geopolitics of this really matters. Trump then imposes fifty percent tariffs on India on Indian goods. As a screw you, Modi. Pakistan gets away lighter because Pakistan are nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. And we can see the real life consequences of it this week.

With Narendra Modi alongside President Xi, alongside Vladimir Putin and Trump thinking. They're the sort of new axis, right? I won't say vivo. And yeah, if you look at them, you know, Russia, India and China if it be Brazil alongside them, we'd call them the BRICS. Now twenty years ago the BRIC countries were the up and coming economies. Now they're absolutely on top. They've come

And more importantly than just the size of their economy is the strategic alliance that they're making together. That should be a real worry for America. It is a real worry for America. And he doesn't seem to realise that he's pushed them each into each other's arms. Yeah, and Peter Navarro, who is the kind of godfather of Tariff, in America and Donald Trump's, you know, one of his close advisors on the whole tariffs policy, was absolutely raging about it on Fox News.

Twenty five percent of the fifty percent is cause India is the Maharaja of tariffs. They have the highest tariffs in the world. So they export us a bunch of stuff. They won't let us sell to them. So who gets hurt? Workers in America, taxpayers in America, Ukrainians uh uh in cities getting killed by Russian drones? Uh so I you know, I w look Modi's a great leader. I don't understand why he's getting to bed uh with with uh Putin and Xi Jinping when he's the biggest democracy in the world.

So I I would just simply say to the Indian people, please understand what's going on here. You got Brahmins profiteering at the expense uh of the Indian people. Uh we need that to to stop. So Peter Navarro doesn't understand. why India is doing what it's doing. It's doing it because it's been screwed over by America, by the fifty percent tariffs that Donald Trump is imposing on that country.

Because India won't play say you brought peace between India and Pakistan. And it's so interesting, isn't it, that Trump thought that somehow his tariff would make everyone kneel down. Yeah. Would make everyone come to him. And all that's happened is that they've gone, bye bye, we'll go and trade with each other. You know, we'll get off with each other. That's fine. And it's just shows such a total lack of Statecraft.

Total lack of understanding of history. India has always been on the non aligned side. It you know, during the Cold War it maintained close relations with Russia, not just with the US and the West. And now that you've pushed India away, they've said, Okay will just kind of warm up those relations even more with President Xi and Vladimir Putin and you've got Donald Trump going, But why? Yeah, I mean the military might on display today in Beijing, in Tiananmen Square, is the kind of thing

That Trump would look at and weep. You know, he wants to be part of that. He wants to have tanks on his streets. I mean, he's got a few of them on a few of the streets. But he looks at at she and thinks, Why can't I do that? And the truth is that the axis of power has moved to the east. It's not with America anymore in many ways. And the squandering of that relationship. It sounds funny, but it's actually really, really serious and without any proper thought given.

to what they were doing and what the consequences would be. Anyway, we will be back next week. We will see you then. Have a good week. Bye bye. Will you really be back next week? What do you mean? Will you be with me or will you be chatting to a cooker burrow? Ah. Yeah, I may well be in Australia this time next week. I hope I will be in Australia this time next week. You may hear cookaburrows in the background. Bye bye. Looking forward. Bye for now. Global Player Original Podcast