Transcript of ‘Coffee and a Mike’

Transcripr submitted by a reader

Mike Ferris: 0:46
Gilbert, you are a man that is constantly working. I either watch you on YouTube or you’re constantly writing. It never stops for you.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
No, frankly, this fourth career was just sputtering along. It was kind of a semi-retirement. And then along came the Special Military Operation. And people with a background and expertise like mine suddenly became looked for. We were supposed to come forward with sage analysis and so forth. How sage my analysis is, I’m not going to beat the drum about that, because all of us have been put, back footed, by the changes over the last three years. Many of us, myself included, have been saying at times that the end of the war is three weeks from now.

1:42
We’ve been saying that for three years. And I make no apologies for it. I’m about to publish, I think in three months time, a collection, it will be about 600 pages, of my essays from 2022 and 2023. And I read back what I wrote back then, I was a little bit embarrassed by some of these essays, because nobody likes to be proven so wrong. But we all were proven wrong, because they were things that none of us anticipated.

And particularly I was disadvantaged because my job was to convey what the Russians are saying among themselves. And they were generally confused. The Russians, I mean the chattering classes, the well-educated people, people who are members of the Duma or very respected professors at major universities and take part regularly in the several talk shows that are quite outstanding in quality.

2:53
And they were confused. Mr. Putin played his cards very close to the chest. Even the day before the invasion, It was not clear that there would be an invasion. And it’s not because we thought he would do nothing, no. But he had many other options. And we didn’t know that he would go this way. So, as I say, looking back over several years, we have been, we who’ve been consulted to give our wise advice, have been caught by the unexpected turns in the war.

3:32
And so that is my background, but it has not caused me any pain in the sense that I still get requests for a commentary, because, as I said, I’m delivering something that virtually no one else has been delivering, what the Russians are saying among themselves, and to themselves. People watched when it was still accessible on RT, and they thought they were learning something about Russia. I don’t mean to disparage completely RT, but it was largely scripted by retired journalists from the States, from Canada, and other places, for an American audience primarily, and less so a global audience. And it was not what Russians are saying to themselves, which is a completely different issue.

4:29
If you have an opponent, you should understand his mentality and what he is talking about, not what his foreign hires are talking about. Well, that’s a long introduction and a long-winded answer to your question, but I wanted to say that I am on the air a lot, yes. And as somebody who for eight years was working for a telecoms company in the 1980s, I still am flabbergasted at the reach of alternative media like yourself, how many people tune in from around the world. Of course, though, it usually, as I find in my own, what I publish, it usually is an Anglophone world, because people can be educated and know several languages. But when they’re reading something that requires a lot of brain power, they prefer to do it in their own language.

5:25
And so that’s the way it goes. And I have more readers in New Zealand than I ever would have imagined. And it’s precisely because they’re English speakers. Nonetheless, we are, we specialists in Russia are still in demand. I would like to be not in demand. And so I’m very hopeful that Mr. Trump succeeds in what we can talk about with you in a minute or two.

Mike: 5:52
Yeah, you know, I want to get to that here in a second, but I do want to ask you, in terms of where is Putin at now with Russia-Ukraine in terms of that conflict? I mean, is he interested in that being resolved at this point with Trump being back in office?

Doctorow:
Of course he’s interested in being resolved. And of course he would be quite pleased if sanctions were lifted and if Russia could resume something like normal diplomatic, commercial, travel relations with Europe, because the real cutoff in travel and exchanges is with Europe, with the immediate neighbors. And I’m sure he’s willing to make some concessions for that. But there are basic points which they will be– cannot yield on, because he has so emphatically stated Russia’s basic requirements for security, and these have been repeated, amplified day after day on state television, that is practically speaking impossible for him to sacrifice any of those issues that had been identified as non-negotiable. And the non-negotiable issue above all is no NATO in Ukraine.

7:22
And let’s be more clear about it: no foreign military presence of any kind in Ukraine, because de facto, before February 2022, Ukraine was a NATO country. They had all of the NATO trainers and NATO tacticians, strategists, a lot of NATO advanced equipment. They were a NATO country in everything but name, in everything but the absence of an Article 5 requirement that it be backed up by the other NATO members. And that is utterly unacceptable to the Russians.

8:03
So the idea of, “Oh, we’ll have some peacekeepers there” that is being talked about by Mr. Macron and others in Europe, they’re out of their good minds. That is utterly unacceptable. So the question of demilitarization of Ukraine is not discussable. It will have a military force of some kind, but nothing that could ever threaten Russia, and no foreign advisors present at all. That is the most essential.

The actual borderlines– of course the Russians would like to have the boundaries of the four oblasts or regions that they have incorporated into the Russian Federation following a referendum in those regions– they would like to have the full extent of those oblasts at their disposal. At present, maybe 95 percent of Lugansk region is possessed by the Russians. In the case of Donetsk, it’s maybe 65 percent. Donetsk was a really tough point. The Ukrainians had dug in and put in heavily fortified positions 10, 15 kilometers from the capital of Donetsk region.

9:31
And for eight years, they were firing artillery and short-range missiles, these rapid-fire missiles, into the neighboring residential areas. That is what precipitated the special military operation. And because they were so dug in, and because the Russians left the fighting in these oblasts, first and foremost to the local militia relevant to its own army, that came in later, it took a long time for there to be significant progress in moving the line of separation of the fighting forces to the west, beyond artillery range, as it is now. Nonetheless, it is not beyond missile range, particularly this Torshka missile from the Soviet period that the Ukraine still have in some quantity, and which struck Donetsk city a couple of days ago.

10:36
So this question of deep militarization is the fundamental driving point. The boundaries can be negotiated. The regime in Kiev– it is perfectly clear that Mr. Putin will not sign a peace treaty or an armistice with Mr. Zelensky, whom the Russians say, with good reason, is illegitimate and his signature is worthless.

That is another way of saying they want Zelensky eliminated, replaced, and even in the very slow-moving positions of General Kellogg, he has in the last couple of days put on the agenda elections to be held at parliamentary and presidential levels in Ukraine. So it has gotten through to the Americans, to Mr. Trump’s immediate advisors and designated emissary to Ukraine and Russia, that there have to be elections and that a valid peace can only be signed by properly elected Ukrainian officials.

These are the contours, the inescapable contours of a Russian-Ukrainian settlement. However, I would like to make the point that I have been making with greatest insistence, and it’s because it is also something that my peers don’t talk about much.

12:17
The whole war in Ukraine started because the United States and NATO rejected the calls for revision of the European security architecture, a rollback of NATO to remove all of the personnel that are temporarily assigned, primarily assigned, in the countries that were added to NATO after 1997. That’s to say all of the Warsaw Pact countries and the several republics, former republics of the USSR, meaning the Baltic states. They don’t say that they can no longer be NATO members. They say that these personnel and equipment, the forward-stationing of equipment, which threatens them, has to be rolled back.

That is what Yevkoff, the deputy to Lavrov, was saying in December 2021, and that has not gone away. So the Russians in looking forward to a meeting with Donald Trump, expect they will talk not so much about Ukraine, because by the time they meet, Ukraine will be still more battered. The lines will be crumbling still more. And so what is there to discuss about Ukraine? They want to talk about a big settlement, but with the United States, not Europe. Europe doesn’t count for anything. With the United States, a wealthy security architecture in Europe will be.

Mike: 13:52
Well, and perfect segue then to go over to President Trump because, you know, in the few short weeks he’s been in office, I mean, what I’m seeing, it is incredible. I don’t know how the guy has the energy to do do what he’s doing. But you wrote, you know your recent Substack article which just came out earlier today titled “The Big Picture – Trump’s ideological program that unifies all his domestic and foreign initiatives”. And, you know, what you discussed in it, I have not seen anywhere else. So walk me through what this article was about and how you came to these conclusions.

Doctorow: 14:34
Well, I was very critical of Trump in just a day or two after he took the Oval Office, because he was making some rather stupid statements about Russia and Ukraine. He was taking the numbers, casualties, and killed-in-action from the propaganda that Ukraine puts out, which is as it has been for the last three years, is almost always inversion. That is, 10 Ukrainians are killed for one Russian, and the next day you see in Western media 10 Russians are being killed for one Ukrainian.

Aside from the question of who will be saying the truth, it doesn’t take too much intelligence to appreciate that when you have a seven to 10 time advantage in the artillery shells that you’re using daily against the enemy, then you’re going to be killing seven to ten times more of them than they are killing you. It’s an obvious thing.

15:43
So there’s no reason to be surprised that the numbers are what they are. And some of my military expert peers have been saying in the last week, and I accept their judgment, since I don’t pretend to be a military expert, that maybe 90,000 Russian army, infantry and other servicemen have been killed in the war to date. Maybe 150,000 Russians in total have died since the start of the war as taking in these militiamen from the oblasts who did a lot of the fighting and are still fighting. These people have been fighting for 10 years, from 2014. It’s quite incredible. You look at somebody’s 35, in [2015], he was starting to fight, and he has never left the front. Well, anyway, of course, they took heavy casualties. All together, it’s 150[000]. And it is a safe guess that the Ukrainians have lost 10 times, well, 1 million men.

16:56
And that the wounded and seriously incapacitated are three times that number. And that the Russians probably have 300,000 casualties taken and dead and wounded. These numbers, of course, are terrible. This is the biggest war in Europe since 1945.

Now coming back to why did I decide that Trump should not, deserves more attention than what I devoted in the first two days when he took office. It’s because he immediately sent out an amazing sequence of executive orders and other initiatives which have left Europe and the world media, in constant commentary, day by day and hour by hour.

And so I decided to look at what these are, and to consider what’s being said about them and what’s wrong with what’s being said about them, and what’s right about what’s being said about them. My point is that everyone thinks that Mr. Trump is shallow, narcissistic, mentally deranged, if you want to be extreme about this. He’s not an intellectual. He never would have thought that. It would almost be an insult in his presence to call him an intellectual. He’s not a man whom we do think of having a comprehensive plan or comprehensive agenda to implement. You would think that he strikes out in this direction and that direction to seek revenge or for reasons that are not easy to justify. This is what his critics and detractors would imagine. And it’s even what some people who are hopeful about Trump would think about.

19:04
But you can come to a lot of negatives if you take each of his major initiatives of the last two weeks separately and take them at face value. He wants to keep, he wants to impose tariffs. That’s been the big talking point the last two days. And people will tell you, good economists will tell you that the American public will pay for that. They will tell you that the cost of goods will go up, and it means that the cost of borrowing cannot go down, the Fed cannot reduce, business will suffer from this, and that in the end it will not bring manufacturing back to the United States.

19:52
All of these arguments are made, and I take nothing away from them. But they’re irrelevant. They’re missing the fact that the tariffs are part of an overarching view of what he wants to accomplish. And what he wants to accomplish is to use a wrecking ball on the liberal world order that America has assembled for the last 30 years, and that has given us a warfare state, of never-ending wars, and enormous ballooning budgetary deficits, which are unsustainable.

20:29
So, on the ideological side of it, it takes in everything. All of the remarks about transgenders and LGBT, you take them separately and you say the man is a bigot. He doesn’t, he– but you’re missing the point. The point is that the promotion of these gender minorities and other minorities at the expense of merit for the sake of an ideological vision of human rights, that has been built primarily by progressive Democrats during their time in office, and it was never deconstructed by Republicans when they came into office. This is one Republican who’s using a wrecking ball on them. And it’s not because by itself LGBT is such an issue or free abortion, unlimited abortion rights.

21:27
But these are issues that are manifestations of the overarching liberal democratic ideology that every Democratic administration has promoted and taken further and further to the point of insanity. It has complete impractical, unworkable government, and outcomes no longer count. It’s the process that you take pride in, not what comes out at the end of the process, which is usually right now quite abominable.

22:08
Trump understood that, or people around him understood it. I don’t look to Trump to have originated the comprehensive view that liberal democracy is a disaster. That is something that more clever people around him could absorb from reading some very good literature that would hardly be on the desk of Donald Trump. So I have mentioned in this article that you’re referring to the works of a French political philosopher, the man in France who has the largest private library, 200,000 volumes in his home. I don’t know where he finds room for his bed. But this, Alain de Benoist, he wrote a book, this was about five, six years ago, a collection of essays. So it’s not something that you want to take up for bedtime reading.

23:14
The consistency of your, some of it’s strictly for the highest level of political thinkers, some of it’s for the general public. And those for the general public in this book, they tell you what Donald Trump’s agenda is: to destroy what is being described by Alain de Benoit in his book. It is against liberalism. The– society is not a market. Society is not a collection of disaggregated egos, individuals.

Society is a collective existence, and man has a collective existence. And the denial of collective humanity is at the root of liberalism. Whether you attach democracy to the term “liberal democracy”, we’re talking, it comes to the same thing. Liberalism with a capital L. This is about taking to the max the rights of the individual.

24:25
Sounds good, but taken to the max it comes out frightening. It is the denial of common interests. It is the melting away of the middle class. It is the melting away of the nation-state and its replacement either by super national organizations like the European Union, which is totally bureaucratic and not answerable to any public, ruled by a virtual dictator called Ursula von der Leyen. Well, these are the necessary outcomes of liberal democracy, which is anything but democracy.

25:12
And Mr. Trump instinctively understood that, not good. And in his own way, he has brought around to people whom some say, “Ah, xxxxxxxxx”. They all have something in common. One is they’re highly intelligent. Two, they are highly loyal to him, which was not the case of anyone he surrounded himself with in his first administration.

And they are all capable of being wrecking balls. Even Rubio becomes a wrecking ball when he is taking control of USAID. That organization, which was singled out by Musk for destruction, sounds great. How could you against USAID? I mean, the word has “aid” in it, it’s pretty obvious. Unfortunately it is not US foreign assistance.

26:07
It is something very specific and nefarious. It is the agency that the CIA uses to promote its regime change in country X, Y, or Z. And the proof that Musk had hit pay dirt, we saw a day after we cut off the funding for USAID, and all of the journalists and all of the publications, media in Ukraine were “Woe is me, woe is me”, they were moaning and groaning, saying we have no money. Well, indeed, they have no money, because all of their funds came from the United States government, from the US taxpayer, to publish material that then would be retranslated into English and sold to the American public by our media as being the voice of Ukraine.

27:00
It never was the voice of Ukraine. It was a manufactured voice paid for and curated by the US government, that’s to say the CIA, acting through USAID. So Mr. Musk, he knew what he was doing. He’s now acting as the cannonball of Donald Trump.

Mike: 27:27
What were your thoughts when you saw his role, in regards to Elon Musk, his role increasing and his visibility also increasing as President Trump got reelected, and then that time in between, and now that he’s back in office? What were your thoughts initially? And I think I know where your thoughts are now, but–

Doctorow:
Well, it’s been a hollow balloon about how Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with oligarchs. And indeed it was quite exceptional that at his– it’s been called a coronation– or inauguration, he had the leading personalities. The wealthiest men in the country from Silicon Valley, were given seats in the rotunda ahead of foreign dignitaries like the deputy premier of China or senators. It’s unseemly. It’s a bit boorish. I mean, Mr. Trump never was a gentle soul.

28:33
But who has been running the show in the States for the last several generations? Poor boys? No. The– money speaks, and money has put everyone into office. How good that money was is another story. And there’s nothing new in this. There’s absolutely nothing new in wealth being the preferred influencer on politics. You take it back to the 18th century and the founding fathers. They weren’t poor boys either. The assumption was as the voting rights were extended downwards from the few white guys at the top to more white folks, males first and then finally females, and then to people of color and the rest of them. These were requirements, they were first and foremost wealth requirements.

29:35
And the logic was simple. If you give all the poor folks the vote, they’re going to strip the wealthy people of their property. You don’t want that to happen, because then after a short-term feast the country will go broke. The wealthy people got there, many of them, by talent. And you want to channel that talent, and you want to have a system of governance that ensures that they do no harm.

But to keep them out of politics, I say, it would be a mistake if I take the reasoning of the founders of the American republic. In the 18th century, there’s a lot of stuff, but wealthy people are the ones who should be the leading figures, governing figures. Whether they’re noble or not noble is a separate question. So the fact that Mr. Trump has the wealthiest man in the world at his side, he has him there partly because he made big contributions to his reelection, that’s clear, but also because of his admiration and respect for what this man has done, for how he gathered his wealth without murdering people, without doing anything really unseemly.

30:58
Of course there must have been, and certainly there were abuses, and he faced court proceedings over his position in the companies that he founded as a result of these abuses. But the man is immensely talented, and if he indeed is the one, as I suspect, who has the ideological vision that Trump has agreed to, then I say it’s wonderful. Now, I don’t have … an automatic respect for Musk as a political thinker. The only time I really heard him talk was in the interview that he gave, well, the interview that he took and then eventually gave to a vital head, the candidate for chancellor of the Alternative for Germany.

31:59
It wasn’t very impressive. He didn’t, he was not the wizard that I hoped he would be. But there are reasons for that. He had to really play softball, because their interview was being followed intensely by the EU institutions, who were hoping that he would say something that they could use to slap down X, to say that it is in violation of EU rules on fake news and disinformation and so forth. Therefore, he was speaking in terms that nobody could take exception to.

32:40
And his interviewee, Weidel, just was showing how a nice bunny rabbit she is. A gal next door working for you, working for the interests of the public and so forth, and none of the sharp edges to her thinking that found expression outside this widely watched interview with Musk. Still I think the man, I expect that the man has, is conceptual and is capable of seeing what I describe in this essay. That it all fits together. Even if any one of the many different initiatives that Trump has produced looks like a losing cause, because you’re not going to bring manufacturing back by the tariffs, because you’re not going to lower criminality in the States by deporting 11 million people. These things taken separately can look foolish and unproductive. But I say that’s a big mistake. They have to be taken all together. And the price to pay, cost, may be well worth it when you look at the total picture.

Mike: 34:07
It’s– you know, reading your article and talking to you now, it sounds to me that you are you’re optimistic of all this.

Doctorow:
If he succeeds, and that is a very big if, if he is consistent and doesn’t go off on a tangent on some of these things, then yes, he may, improbable as it sounds, he may usher in a “golden age”. It is not unthinkable, although you mentioned to me before went on air his latest remarks and latest decrees, which suggest a really toughening position on Iran, which is well timed since he’s receiving Netanyahu in his office.

Mike:
I think that’s today. I think Netanyahu is there today.

Doctorow:
Yes, exactly. So it would be interesting to time it that way, so that he could put Netanyahu at ease while softening him up for concessions that have to be made for phase two of the ceasefire to be realized. There’s a lot of showbiz in the behavior of Trump.

There’s a lot of bluff and a lot of bullying, the stage effects. But if we can look beyond that, then I would take none of these negatives to be definitive, but only to be introductory, softening-up positions with his interlocutors. And I expect he will conclude a peace agreement with Iran, regardless of what he was saying or doing today.

Mike: 36:00
How would Israel accept that?

Doctorow:
I don’t think they’ll care. The question is, this takes us back to the fundamental issue of the head and the tail, whether Israel is wagging the United States or the United States is wagging Israel. And I’ve consistently said, and I’m happy to say that I’m not alone in this view, there are people who have credentials that are vastly richer than mine, like Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who are saying exactly the same, that Israel has done what the United States didn’t want to do itself, and was very happy to let Israel do. And so it is with, well, what does Israel think about the deal that we want? I don’t think that Trump gives a damn. He does not want to enter into war with Iran.

36:53
And he wants to present himself as a peacemaker and candidate. He’s very vain. Surely, if Obama could walk away with a peace prize, having done nothing more than present himself as not being George Bush Jr., then surely Trump thinks that he can do something that will genuinely merit that designation, that award.

Mike: 37:23
What do you see as the biggest pitfalls, then, for achieving his four-year vision and beyond?

Doctorow:
Well, there are many things that can go wrong. He’s trying very hard to keep the Uniparty in Congress off balance. He says a lot of things that they like to hear, at the same time he’s doing things which they don’t like at all. I don’t think there was any euphoria in Congress over his plan to cut US troops in Europe by 20,000, I doubt it. But it gets lost in all the things that he’s doing and saying that they love. So he’s keeping them off balance, keeping them at a distance.

38:03
Will he succeed in this? Will somebody rise up against him who sees through these tricks and says, “This man is trying to destroy what we’ve achieved in the last 30 years, if not in the last 80 years”? I don’t know. Will he be, will he survive? Will he get away with purging the CIA, FBI, and so forth?

I think so, particularly if he keeps himself well apart from JD Vance, because JD Vance is his life insurance policy. Nobody in his right mind would take out Trump when you’re what you’re going to get is double Trump. You’re going to get a still more aggressive fighter for Trumpism in his vice president. Therefore, I think that he will live out his term. And I think that he has effectively surrounded himself with people who will do his bidding, which was absolutely not the case in his first term in office.

Mike: 39:16
So you see him and Putin working out some kind of ceasefire?

Doctorow:
Yes, but on the understanding that a ceasefire is only step one. The Russians do not want a ceasefire. And why would they? They have the winning hand. They’re rolling back the Ukrainian forces day after day. You look at the maps, you see they’re moving, day by day. So the Russians are on a roll. They are going to draw this out, draw and postpone their talks with Trump or any meetings as far as they can to at least reach the Dnieper River. I think that’s likely.

39:56
However, as I said at the start, their interest is in the big picture, in taking in the United States into an agreement on security in Europe. And what do we have? What are the ingredients? Well, dismantling NATO is ultimately an objective that the Russians don’t even dream, don’t even dare to dream. That’s going to happen.

But as a starter, they’d like to ensure that the United States reverses its decision to put intermediate-range missiles into Germany and elsewhere in Europe, so they do not have to proceed with their deployment of their Oreshnik and Kinzhal and other intermediate-range missiles against Germany and Central Europe. They would prefer to see that done. They would like to de facto see a return to the non-deployment, not ban, they’re not going to reach a ban on intermediate-range missiles.

41:00
They’ve invested so much money and brainpower into developing the Oreshnik precisely because the United States pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Agreement and precisely because of the experience in the 1980s, the end of the 80s, when the agreement, the treaty on banning intermediate-range missiles caused them to destroy a large stock of missiles that were manufactured, ready to go, whereas the United States, these are land-based missiles, had almost nothing that had to be destroyed. So it was such an unbalanced, unilateral disarmament, they will not under any conditions assume that today.

41:45
But non-deployment would be a good start, and that could be part of the comprehensive revision, review of security in your provisions banning, holding war games near the respective borders. There are a lot of things that can be reinstated. The most important thing in these agreements on disarmament or on setting caps on missile systems was the provisions for inspection, which meant that there were constant regular exchange visits of Russian and American personnel. And there was constant communication. All that has been cut, slashed, doesn’t exist, and the nonexistence of these lines of communication are what has made it so extremely dangerous in the last period of Biden’s stay in office, where misunderstandings, where misreadings of what the other side was actually doing could have led us without intent into a nuclear exchange.

Mike: 43:03
Well, it gave me a lot to think about today. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been very skeptical, even leading into the election, I was wrong what I thought the outcome would be, and then the transition, and the couple of weeks that President Trump has been in. But you’ve definitely given me a new perspective on how to look at these things.

Doctorow:
You will agree that his agenda is disruption. And there’s a lot to disrupt. There’s a lot of horrible structures that have been built generation after generation, over the last 30 years, which have provided for this warfare state, for this never ending war. And that Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to this, it’s all to the good. It’s not that he wants a disarmed America. On the contrary, his term that he’s used particularly in his first electoral campaign was, yes, MAGA, Make America Great, was also American First, which drew up a lot of intellectual criticism of Trump. It sounds like the 1920s.

44:22
Well, they were right. Only the 1920s looked pretty good compared to what we’ve got around us today. The point is that American political establishment has been denouncing anyone who opposed the many military interventions over the last 30 years as being an isolationist, which is about the worst thing you could say about anybody. Mr. Trump is celebrating a policy that is purely isolationist.

And well, that’s something we can examine when he rolls it out further. But he doesn’t want a weak America, no. He wants a strong America within its own borders. And that would not be that.

Mike: 45:08
Last question. How does Turkey play into all this in regards to the Middle East?

Doctorow:
Well, I am confused like many people as to what the end game for Erdogan is in his Syria gambit. We know that he wants to use his position in what is a power vacuum to exert as much pressure on the Syrian Kurds as possible. He would like to get rid of the Americans. who have been supporting Syrian Kurds, because of the implications of their existence for the Kurdish population in eastern, southeastern Turkey, which has been one of the most difficult issues in his whole time in power.

46:00
As to what does he want with Israel, it’s unforeseeable. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. Is he going to find himself in a war with Israel? Or is he really just using the strains in the relationship to get further commercial advantage by supplying oil to Israel, as he’s been doing all along? Much of it’s stolen Syrian oil. It’s very hard to read, and I’m not a Middle-East specialist, so what I just said is as much as I know.

Mike:
Where can people find you?

Doctorow:
Well, as you just indicated, I have a Substack blog, platform I like to call it, and where I publish, as you just said, almost every day now. There’s a lot of news coming by, and I try to catch it. And a lot of people are trying to catch me, and I have the good fortune that somebody who wants to remain anonymous does a transcript of each of these interviews that I’ve been giving. And so people who don’t have the time or the interest to watch videos, they can actually read what was said.

47:13
And it’s on my Substack[.]com, which has a catchy [name], I thought it was catchy, it was a little bit frightening actually, the “Armageddon Newsletter”.

Mike:
I see it come through my email. At first glance, right when I first subscribed, I’d see it and I’m like “Armageddon Newsletter”! Now it doesn’t catch me so much off guard.

Doctorow:
No, well, there’s very little Armageddon inside that newsletter, but it was to capture the spirit of the moment when I set it up, when things really looked quite alarming in international relations. The coming to power of Donald Trump, I think, should give everyone reason to sleep more calmly. They may have their own positions, whether they like his position on abortion, whatever else. There’s so many things you can object to, but I think we all would like to survive, and fundamentally that is what his presidency is giving us: a reason to hope that the United States will step back from its never-ending wars.

Mike: 48:18
Gilbert, thank you so much for doing this, and this is a conversation I think a lot of people need to hear. And I for one, am glad that I was able to to hear it, so I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you’re doing, and I look forward to more conversations ahead in ’25.

Doctorow:
Well thanks so much for the invitation, and this was enjoyable.

Mike: 48:39
Mic drop.