WATCH: Joe Lauria — Trump Defies Rational Analysis

Donald Trump is somebody very hard to define and to describe because we’ve never seen anything like him, the editor of Consortium News told Turkish journalist Tunç Akkoç’.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Tunç Akkoç’: Hello everyone. Today we have a very special guest [speaking] from Australia, Joe Lauria, a very experienced journalist and the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Welcome, Joe. Thank you for your time.

Joe Lauria: Thanks for having me on.

Tunç Akkoç’: I’d like to start with your, let’s say, first of all back in 2023, you wrote about your personal memories of Daniel Ellsberg, who risked his freedom to leak the Pentagon Papers.

And of course, we know the Assange case and, the Snowden case. And you are following these cases also very closely, as I know. And my question is, how do you view the conflict between freedom of speech and national security? I mean, judging from these cases, do you believe leaking classified documents can be justified in the public interest, etc.?

Because today, also the public is discussing these topics all over the world. 

Joe Lauria: I absolutely think it’s right to leak classified information, particularly if it’s going to end a war, an unjust war. That’s what Daniel Ellsberg was trying to do by leaking the Pentagon Papers and this idea of national security as a, very often, and particularly in the United States, has been used as a kind of a canard.

It’s not true. It’s a way to protect the interests of powerful people who have got themselves mixed up in a horrible war, like in Vietnam. And they refuse to end that war, even though they were losing the war. And they knew that. That’s what the Pentagon Papers was all about. The government study that was supposed to be secret, that Dan Ellsberg was taking part in, showed that the U.S. knew they were losing that war for years.

But politicians kept telling, and generals kept telling the American public and the world that they were going to win. They were still going to win. So many, many people were dying, mostly Vietnamese, but also American soldiers, in vain because they knew they were, eventually, they were going to have to get out of this war. But it was too difficult for them politically to back out of the war, because they would be shown to be failures, not only losers, militarily but politically to continue this war, based on lies that the war was going to be won.

And I think we see a similar thing in Ukraine right now, frankly, let alone what’s going on in Gaza, which is much, much worse and worse than just lying about, winning a war, which I also think [Benjamin] Netanyahu is doing. They’re not interested in winning and beating Hamas. Not now, anyway, because they need to get all the people out of there.

That’s their stated open aim right now. So, they don’t want to win that war. But, yes, I think that a whistleblower or someone who has possession of these documents, like Ellsberg did, like Chelsea Manning did about the war in Iraq, could find a newspaper or an online publisher, like Wikileaks, to publish these documents, to turn the public away, against the government.

Based on the truth, not on just a political argument, but on the facts that are being withheld from the public. You absolutely have a right to do that. The Assange case was particularly dangerous because they went after a publisher. Now, in the U.S., we have a First Amendment, and that allows you to publish any material, basically, under the First Amendment.

But the Espionage Act conflicts with that First Amendment because it says that any person who has unauthorized possession of defense or classified information, is in violation of the Espionage Act. Now, Assange was a publisher, so he [may have] had First Amendment protection. Right. But he also was violating, technically, the Espionage Act. So that act has to change. It’s like, that’s what he pled guilty to.

Why did he became free? Because he said, ‘Yes, I broke that law, but I don’t believe the law was just. I believed I was protected by the First Amendment. That’s why I published the documents.’

“We’re living in a time of great repression. Not just about classified information, but about any kind of information that goes against powerful interests. They’re shutting down people’s speech, particularly on social media.”

So again, a government employee who signs a non-disclosure agreement, as you do in all the intelligence agencies, they have, by law, they’re not allowed to give the information up, whether that be the U.S. Espionage Act, the British Official Secrets Act, or, I’m sure in Turkey there, they have, I know there was a big case because I’m friends with one of the journalists, Yasmin Congar, is a friend of mine who I knew in Washington, 30 years ago in the 1990s.

I know she got caught up in that, so, this is a really serious issue. And we’re living in a time of great repression. Not just about classified information, but about any kind of information that goes against powerful interests. They’re shutting down people’s speech, particularly in social media. The government is using private companies to shut down the voices of people who are critical of Israel in particular right now, and what’s going on in Gaza.

And this is a very serious, even more serious than Daniel Ellsberg, because it involves hundreds, maybe thousands of people, students on the campuses who are speaking out. That Turkish woman who was arrested in Massachusetts, a student who wrote an op-ed, an opinion article, along with four other names. She was the only one name on the article, and she… 

Tunç Akkoç’: How do you assess these things now? I mean, it’s very, moving, of course, what you are telling and we are following it. When you compare it with years ago or decades ago, did you see something similar like that? I mean, regarding the freedom of speech in the United States. 

Joe Lauria: No this is much worse. I’ll give you a quick example about, how it was better. It was never great. First amendment has always been violated. At least it’s written down. Many of the countries don’t have an amendment like that, a Bill of Rights, but it’s violated in the U.S. And we’ll give you an example of how bad it’s gotten now. 50 years ago, in the 1970s. I can’t remember the exact year. ’69 maybe. But, there was a journalist named Seymour Hersh, and he was given classified information, or he was told about this attack in My Lai, which is a village in Vietnam, where American soldiers killed dozens of innocent women and children and old men in the village. It was one of many, many massacres like that.

But the American public didn’t know about this. This was not in the newspapers. So a whistleblower went to Congress and then went to this journalist and gave the information. The information was published, became a big scandal. They actually arrested one soldier and put him on trial. But he got out, after a year or two. But something happened.

If you compare that My Lai massacre to the massacre that we see on the video that was given by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks called Collateral Murder, these U.S. war helicopters firing at civilians on a street in Baghdad and killing a number of them, that we see in this awful film. What happened in that instance? In the My Lai 1960s incident, the whistleblower was listened to by Congress and by the press, and nothing happened to that whistleblower.

Whereas in the Chelsea Manning one, she went to jail for giving up that information. In My Lai, the journalist Seymour Hersh got a job at The New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for that reporting. In the story of The Collateral Murder — we’re talking about two U.S. military massacres of civilians, one in Vietnam and one in Iraq.

And then the journalist in the Baghdad story, Julian Assange, also went to jail, and nobody was convicted of the soldiers that did the Baghdad one, where at least there was one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, who was incarcerated [in My Lai]. So look at it. The whistleblower is free in Vietnam, goes to jail in Iraq. The journalist is free and gets awards in Vietnam. And in the Baghdad instance, he goes to jail. At least one soldier goes to prison in Vietnam. Nobody’s even prosecuted [from Iraq].

So this just shows you 50 years later how the U.S. system and the culture has changed much for the worse. But as I said, the censorship that’s going on, and it is censorship because government is involved, using private companies to shut down people’s speech on Twitter and Facebook.

“Elite, powerful interests are feeling more and more under threat by the populace now, not by a good media, like that which brought down Nixon with Watergate. We’re talking about average people now having a voice they never had before.”

And we all know this for sure now. And, this is because people have more voice than they ever did because of social media. Those elite, powerful interests are feeling more and more under threat by the populace now, not by a good media, like that which brought down Nixon with Watergate. We’re talking about average people now having a voice they never had before.

So there’s an overdrive of trying to shut voices down. And we’re not talking about, you know, the Soviet Union, we’re not talking about China, we’re talking about the United States. It’s supposed to be this beacon of democracy. 

Tunç Akkoç’: Well, and my next question is a general one, of course related to these things you are telling about. Drawing from your book A Political Odyssey, how would you explain, America’s persistent interventionism since World War Two?

I mean, since decades? We speak about the military industrial complex. Since Eisenhower. Right? I mean, what forces this complex’s reliance on perpetual war. And can this cycle be broken? 

Joe Lauria: Big question. First of all, I think U.S. interventionism began with the very first day the United States existed in 1789, or rather 1787 when they beat the British.

And what what do I mean by that? One of the things that Britain did was to pass a law in the Parliament saying that the colonists in North America could not go beyond the mountains, the Appalachian Mountains, to conquer Native American land. I don’t think that a lot of American colonists liked that. That was one reason, I believe, for the revolt.

There were many. That wasn’t the main one. So once the war was won and America was a country, an independent country, it began its war of extermination against the native population. That was a war of expansion, of territorial expansion, of interventions that you just described. So this goes way back to the beginning. Of course it became a worldwide phenomenon in 1898, when the declining, decrepit Spanish Empire that was on its end, was finished by the rising American empire, when they beat the Spanish in the Philippines, in Guam, in Puerto Rico, and they even attacked in Cuba.

So this was the expansion of the U.S. globally, but even before that. I forgot to mention the Mexican War, where all the states, California and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, they were all part of Mexico. The U.S. took that from Mexico. They beat Mexico in a war. So these were all territories. This never stopped. But after the Second World War, during the World War, a phenomenal change.

And I do describe that in that book that you mentioned, that I wrote with the late Senator Mike Gravel. After every war in U.S. history, the many companies that made sewing machines, for example, and then made weapons for the war, when the war ended, they went back to making sewing machines. Our military that raised like a million soldiers — even in the American Civil War — after the war, these guys went back to the farm. So there was never a huge army in the U.S or a permanent military industry. But after the second World War ended, because of the depression in the 1930s, the economic depression was ended for the most part because of the war.

The war industry got the U.S out of the depression and became the most powerful, manufacturing force in the world. Certainly not now. Trump is trying to go back to that, but that’s probably never going to happen. And because of this great powerhouse of industry based solely on the war, when the war ended, there was fear the depression would return.

So there was an impetus to keep the military industry going. And, it coincided with U.S expansion around the world. They were left with bases in the Pacific and in Asia, all throughout the world. And this was now a global empire with the rest of the world destroyed. Only the U.S was untouched really, by this war. So this is the beginning of America’s global empire and a permanent industrial military industrial complex, as Eisenhower called it.

And we’re still living in this. And how will this end, like all empires end? Gradually? Going forward, going back but losing, collapsing. Not by its own will, but because of the inevitability of all empires ending. And we see now the BRICs nations coalescing together as a force, a counterweight to U.S. imperial might.

And this is really the beginnings of the end. And I think you could see Trump is a president who in his inauguration speech in January, just a few months ago, he talked about the “great” American, [William] McKinley. This was the president during the war against the Spanish Empire, as I was describing. So he wants to revive the Empire. He wants to save the empire with his tariffs. He wants to bring back manufacturing power that the United States had at the end of the Second World War in the 1950s. This is a very … this is not going to happen. I think it’s kind of a sick dream of Trump’s. And he’s representing those forces where the U.S. realizes that their days are numbered of their world dominance.

And like all the European empires, they have to realize they’re no longer a great power. And they better turn their attention internally to their domestic issues. We’ll see. When the European empires ended, they started a national health insurance program. They started a social democratic system. They spent their money on their own people. That is what has to happen in the United States. We don’t see any signs of that happening, but I think inevitably it will. And that’s where we’re at in a moment of history. In my view. 

“There was an impetus to keep the military industry going. And, it coincided with U.S expansion around the world.”

Tunç Akkoç’: Okay, let’s let’s come to today. I’m curious about your answer really, to the next question. Trump and the, let’s say, MAGA movement have repeatedly promised to dismantle the deep state, right? So, what do you think? Can Trump realistically break the influence of the military industrial complex? I mean, he said this, by himself. What do you think? 

Joe Lauria: Yeah. Well, you’re talking about the derin devlet. What is the Turkish word for deep state? 

Tunç Akkoç’: Yes derin devlet.

Joe Lauria: Yes, so this is of Turkish origin. This. You know, I studied a lot about that, Ergenekon, the whole thing, many years ago. I was actually – to tell your audience – I was The Wall Street Journal reporter that interviewed Fethullah Gülen, and [authored] that article that created enormous problems with Erdogan. So, look, the deep state, most people…

First of all, the Deep State denies there’s a Deep State. Okay. They have put out, you know, the propaganda that this is a joke, that there’s a deep state. Who are the people saying that? The Deep State, of course. They don’t want to be discovered. They want to stay deep. So the idea that at least in the U.S. we’re talking about the Deep State is progress, right?

Whereas other nations knew about their deep states before. Now that it’s common knowledge, as you say, MAGA has this idea, but not just MAGA, that behind the elected government are unelected bureaucrats, particularly in the intelligence agencies that have enormous power. And I think that after the Second World War ended, that moment when Truman started the national security state with the National Security Act that created the Pentagon and created the National Security Council and created the C.I.A. in ‘47 and in 1950, the National Security Agency, that wasn’t even known about for 30 years, it was that secret.

So we know that it exists. They certainly worked. And, whether you like Trump or not, and he’s certainly somebody to criticize, you cannot deny, now we look back at the Russiagate scandal, which was a complete fake story made up by the Clinton campaign against Trump. And this is very common in American politics, and in all politics I would imagine, to make up false stories about your opponent and try to get it in the newspaper.

It’s called opposition research. It happens all the time. But these false stories about Trump, the F.B.I. —  that he would not not be a good face for empire. That he would be a complete a loose cannon, a wild card, a guy who would say one thing one day and another the next. The guy is somebody who defies rational analysis. 

It’s impossible to really understand what he’s going to do next. So the F.B.I. was worried about that. But also, he could go after them. They didn’t know what they were getting with this guy. And he also stirred up the population, whereas that’s how he won, because the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, had total arrogance towards average Americans, where Trump, a billionaire, pretended in a way that he was going to help the average American.

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And that’s why he’s twice won elections. So the Deep State got involved. The F.B.I. got involved in a lie again. So he was a personal victim of the F.B.I. in particular, in that whole Russiagate scenario. So he wants to do damage to them. And he hired Kash Patel, an Indian-American, to be the F.B.I. director.

And they have released some files on the JFK assassination which is a big part of the Deep State. Was the C.I.A. involved in the assassination of John Kennedy? And he has released those. So there are signs of this. And Kash Patel says he wants to shut down the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington and just make it a field office and put that money into law enforcement around the country.

If he actually does that, that’s a sign of taking down the entrenched bureaucracy in Washington, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That would be a positive sign. So I can’t answer the question because nobody knows for sure. I just think that they will find a way to survive. And when Trump is gone, whatever damage is done, they will probably reconstitute that. Unless there’s fundamental change, I don’t see how the intelligence agencies will lose the unbelievable power that they have to determine foreign policy and even domestic policy. So, it’s a very crucial and critical moment in U.S. history in that regard. 

Tunç Akkoç’: Just let me add only one point. The opinion of other people is, yeah, Trump is struggling against these forces. But at the end of the day, Trump and his team, they will create their own Deep State. This is another theory. 

Joe Lauria: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think it will change. It’ll be one that’s controlled by Trump rather than by the Democrats. So, but even that would be different because it’s a kind of a nonpartisan force right now.

It’s always there, no matter who the president is and no matter who controls Congress. Look at this incident from about ten years ago when there was a torture report that the Senate wanted to declassify, and we found out there was torture after the invasion of Iraq, right after 9/11, the various torture sites that the U.S. set up around the world when they were sending people to be tortured, these black sites. The Senate wanted this report declassified because obviously it’s against international and U.S. law to torture people.

As Obama said, “We tortured folks,” so he admitted it. But this report, the C.I.A. spied on, went into the computers of members of the Senate, to try to stop them from doing this. And that became known as well. That’s how powerful they are. They openly spied on members of the Senate. They’re not supposed to act, the C.I.A., inside the U.S. at all. It’s against the charter of the C.I.A. They’re only supposed to act outside the U.S. So they not only acted in the U.S., but they spied on elected U.S. senators to stop them from publishing this torture report, which revealed of course their role in torture, the C.I.A. So it just shows you how powerful they are.

But you’re quite right. I think that whatever damage is done, he’s going to have, I mean, Trump is somebody very hard to define and to describe because we’ve never seen anything like Trump. So he is operating in a way where he’s destroying a good part of the bureaucracy, by firing all these people and shutting down agencies, and sort of running this thing from the seat of his pants, as we say in the U.S., by just every day, kind of ad hoc, making decisions.

So whether he needs a Deep State behind him to do that or not is not clear to me. But he has these ambitions, like to take over Greenland, so will he need intelligence, a Deep State to help him do that? He certainly would need the military, if that’s the option he wants to take. It’s a good question. Would he create his own Deep State? Very possible. 

Tunç Akkoç’: The question about the Deep State was about Trump administration’s domestic, politics. Let’s look to the foreign policy. How realistic are the evaluations that this Trump administration would actually end U.S. involvement in foreign wars? Does Trump represent a shift towards, you know, a lot of people are talking about realistic, or let’s say realist foreign policy, especially given reports that he’s distancing himself from the neocons.

Joe Lauria: Well, he’s not. That’s the problem. I mean, yeah, he doesn’t have, someone as bad as John Bolton in his administration this time, who was an arch neocon, or Mike Pompeo, another one. But he has Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, and he persists with this Keith Kellogg, this General, as his envoy, one of his envoys on Ukraine and why? He was supposed to, I thought, we heard he’d fired him and demoted him, but now he’s back again.

So Trump, makes nice noises. He says good things. He has the right instincts, it seems like, in his interventionist viewpoint. But there’s a very strong part of that in the United States, in the libertarianism that has gained influence in the last years. And Trump seems to have part of his libertarian views about nonintervention. He says he doesn’t like wars and all that.

He wants to end the Ukraine war. Okay. Does he understand the root causes of the Ukraine war? This is what Vladimir Putin told him on [May 19] in their two-hour phone conversation. War cannot end unless the root causes are addressed. Nobody in America knows what the root causes are because the mainstream media won’t talk about the root causes. They did at the beginning in 2014, the beginning of this crisis with the unconstitutional change of government in Ukraine backed by the United States.

But the role of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine — many in all the mainstream media in the U.S, in Britain, the BBC, they did big articles, video reports about the role of the neo-Nazis, how much  — they were not large and they don’t get seats in the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada – but they have extra-parliamentary influence that way outsizes the numbers that they are. They have an enormous role. And they all reported that. Now that’s gone.

You can’t mention the role of the neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion etc. And you don’t talk about the fact that the democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, certified by the OSCE, was overthrown violently in February 2014. So that is like excised away, airbrushed out of the story.

And if you want to tell that story, this is what Consortium News does. Essentially, it’s reporting what is taken out of the mainstream media, those root causes. That is we report and we have gotten ratings, we’ve gotten companies coming after us to shut us up, to try to call us Russian propagandists and all this because we’re talking about what happened, the coup, the Nazis, etc.

Now, you know, Russia presented treaties to NATO and the United States in December 2021 saying if you remove your troops, NATO troops from the former Warsaw Pact countries, take those missiles out of Romania and Poland that are like six minutes away from Moscow, they can have nuclear warheads on them, you know, and if you don’t negotiate that, we will take technical/ military [steps]. We can invade Ukraine. And that invasion by Russia was an intervention in a war that was going on for eight years, that was started by Ukraine with U.S. backing. Trump said that and everybody yelled at him.

Ukraine with the United States started the war in 2014. It’s just a fact. You can deny that fact, you can erase that fact. Does Trump understand this? I don’t know, I don’t think he does. He spent two hours with Putin. He’s talked to Putin before. [Steve] Witkoff, his envoy, has gone to see Putin several times. I’m sure the Russians are telling them these things — what I just mentioned, a few of them, there are other causes — till they’re blue in the face.

They’ve been objecting to NATO expansion for 30 years. [Boris] Yeltsin objected to it, not just Putin. Yeltsin, their puppet in Moscow, was against NATO expansion. So will Trump end the war in Ukraine? He has to understand the root causes, and he’s got to get Ukraine to realize that the only way they have a chance winning is if NATO directly gets involved fighting Russia.

And NATO leaders know that that could lead to a nuclear annihilation. So that will not happen. Therefore, Ukraine cannot win. They have lost the war, and the sooner they give up and have to give up territory, the better deal they will get. But they persist in fighting. Trump is ineffectual. He can’t force this end of war. He should be able to, because he has the power over Ukrainian government to shut off the arms, shut off the intelligence, shut off the money.

The entire Ukrainian government has been run by the U.S. taxpayer for eight years now. So he can end that war. He’s not doing it. Number two: Gaza is the worst. This man is a war criminal of the worst kind. He’s so stupid. He thinks that Gaza is a neighborhood in New York City that’s full of crime.

Because he’s from New York City — as I am — from Queens. He talks about people getting knifed, getting killed and mugged. And stabbed with knives in Gaza. Not that they have 2,000 pound bombs being dropped on their tents, that they’re being told to move here and then they are bombed there. That they’re being starved. He’s talking about there being knife fights.

And he wants to help the poor people of Gaza by moving them out and building new houses and ethnically cleansing Gaza. So you’re telling me he wants to end wars? He’s facilitating the worst crimes that we’ve seen in decades. So he’s full of it. He’s not following his non-interventionist rhetoric. Why? Because he’s out of his mind.

I don’t know if he believes it. The last person he spoke to, it seems like, is just what he repeats. He’s all over the place and he still has neocons in his administration. He needs the realists there. He needs to listen to them. He has to listen to his own instincts. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t.

Tunç Akkoç’: While at that point, my last question for you, it’s about the Middle East. You are following and covering since years very closely the region. And you, of course, you know very well the American perspective. So, do you understand Trump’s Middle East strategy? I mean, in the region, the balances are shifting. You know, it’s incredible. [Bashar al-] Assad’s fall and the genocide in Gaza and incredible things are happening, Israel’s historic aggression, etc.. Do you have a clear understanding what Trump’s strategy is in the Middle East? 

Joe Lauria: Yeah. To get a free airplane from Qatar and to get real estate deals set up when he leaves office in Gaza and elsewhere. And a tower is apparently going to be built in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or something. I mean, this is what his Middle East strategy is.

He doesn’t understand the Middle East. He only understands real estate deals. That’s what he is. He has no clue of the history of the Middle East. He doesn’t understand the Palestinian conflict at all. As I just was saying, he thinks Gaza was just a bad neighborhood in New York when people getting, you know, street crime, this is what he said.

“This man is a war criminal of the worst kind. He’s so stupid. He thinks that Gaza is a neighborhood in New York City that’s full of crime.”

This is what he says. So he doesn’t have any knowledge of what Western European and especially British and French first intervention in the Middle East meant. The end of the Ottoman Empire and the rule by Britain and France. How Lebanon, Syria came about, the Sykes-Picot accord. He doesn’t know any of this. And then how the U.S. after the 1956 Suez crisis, basically took over from Britain their empire worldwide, and in particular in the Middle East. And how the U.S. backed the state of Israel, as a proxy for them to have domination of the region.

And how all the Arab governments have sold out the Palestinians now with his Abraham accord. So he thinks this is bringing peace, but it has brought Gaza, it has brought the genocide basically. And nobody’s lifting a finger except the Yemenis to do anything, including your president, who keeps saying nice things but continues, as far as I know, to send oil to Israel. So this guy has got no clue about what’s happening.

It’s his own personal enrichment is what really motivates him. He’s going to defend Israel because he got $100 million from the Israeli lobby, and Miriam Adelson, this [wife] of a rich donor who died. And his instinct, as all American politicians, is defend Israel no matter what they do.

Now, we’re starting to see a tide turning. More and more people are speaking out against it because Israel has become totally transparent about their genocide and about their ethnic cleansing. They are not making any, they’re not hiding it anymore. They’re openly saying, I’m talking about these extremists who are in the government now, who in Israel years ago were were marginalized. The Kahane group, these people, they were not considered, you know, mainstream in Israel.

They are now running the country. So they are fulfilling [first Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s Zionist dream of Greater Israel that took place gradually and now is really a final solution in Gaza, which is the most horrific thing we’re witnessing. And what is Donald Trump doing? Dreaming about a golf course there. This is how sick it is. 

Tunç Akkoç’: Joe, thank you.  Joe Lauria was our guest today, the editor in chief of the independent media outlet based in the United States, Consortium News. And, hopefully see you next time. Joe. 

Joe Lauria: Thank you for having me on. All the best.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.

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