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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well the thumbnail might not provide a lot of insight so let's get into that real quick. That actually is from a man that was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson - I'll get into that in a moment - but the reason for the title and the thumbnail is that a viewer sent me a link to some video by one of these new YouTuber types. By the way folks, yes, I have talked to some of the guys that are out there on YouTube, but I've never considered myself one of these so-called “Thailand YouTubers”. I started putting this stuff up in 2016. It was basically promotional material, and legal and educational information; legal, educational information is probably the best way to put it. It comes from the perspective of the expat community, let's put it that way. Now I do understand I'm kind of anomalous expat or immigrant however you want to look at it, being yeah, I'm a naturalized Thai, I am an American Attorney blah, blah, blah but again, I'm not doing this to be a YouTuber if you can't tell, I mean we haven't changed the set, we haven't changed anything about the way I do this and notwithstanding a million people have  told me, “Oh the algorithm would treat you better if you did this, that, the other thing", I don't care. Okay? I'm not doing it for that. So this person s not, and tip of the hat to the person that sent me this, but they sent me a link to one of these people. I'm not going to link it up because frankly I don't want to add any more fuel to this particular fire, but it's one of these, "the real reason all of this Crackdown stuff is happening in Thailand", and the conclusion drawn in that is, it's all a smoke screen from the “Thai ruling class” to distract from things that they want distracted from, most notably that economically Thailand is in dire straits and blah, blah, blah. So the reason for the person in the thumbnail is to directly refute all of that, and I'll get into how we refute all of that in a sort of - this going to be a long video - because I started off from the standpoint of the citation I'm about to do from the Pattaya Mail, but there's more going on here and I think by the time you've watched it all, I will have given you the waterfront if you will, the totality of what is “really” going on here. And no, it's not the Thai ruling class, political class whatever you want to call it, Thai establishment trying to distract from anything, it's history playing out in real time. Thailand has constantly been the subject of what I can only describe as undue foreign influence for I don't know how long - unfortunately most of the modern history of Thailand is Thailand having to deal with all these folks from outside, coming in trying to tell Thailand what it needs to be doing - and this is yet another one of these things, it almost looks like propaganda by some foreigners saying, "oh everything Thailand is doing, the weapons caches that they found, it's really", no, it is what it appears to be, okay. Occam’s razor oftentimes applies. If you see hoof footprints, you don't immediately jump to the conclusion it's a zebra; it's probably just a regular old horse. That said let's jump in here. 

Really quickly before we do that, as I have discussed in other videos, folks have talked to me, sent me emails and said, "look, I don't always need to avail myself of a lawyer; we appreciate what you do; we know you're not monetized or anything, is there anything we can do to support you otherwise?" Yeah, as I've discussed in other videos, my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok. The name of the place is Pancake Palace, as the name implies breakfast anytime. We also have American diner style food: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, buffalo wings. We've got grilled cheese sandwiches; we've got hot dogs, chilli dogs, if you're interested, please feel free to check out the links in the description below and come on by we'd love to see you. Now let's jump in. 

First here from this recent article in the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Foreigners living in fear as Thailand's legal system becomes a weapon. Well first off let's be clear, and I will probably have another video on this coming that I may not make contemporaneously with this one, but I'm probably going to make it but I'll go ahead and give sort of a brief synopsis here. In that article, and I urge those who are watching this video go check out that whole article, he kind of runs the waterfront - the author does in that - but there's one aspect of it where they are talking about slap lawsuits. These are like defamation lawsuits - which I've had them brought against me - and it's an attempt, it's currently being spun as "oh, there are Thais doing this; now in my case it's a foreigner, it's foreigners doing this to me as a Thai and I find it truly disconcerting that foreign nationals can come into Thailand, completely flout Thai Law, completely flout the restricted occupations, act as literal fake lawyers, and then when someone calls them out on it, they turn around and sue them. Now I don't think this is all going to play out the way that these folks think it's going to play out, but we're going to leave that to the Courts; I'm not going to go into that any further. But that said, this idea of weaponization of the Court System, well it's not just the Thai community doing that, and in fact it's not a standard operating procedure of Thais to use litigation that way. In fact Thais are the least litigious people I think I've ever found on the face of the Earth. It's probably why I live here because I like that about them. But that said, this idea of foreigners living in fear, you don't need to live in fear in Thailand if you're not, and I have never liked "well if you're not doing anything wrong!" yeah, on surveillance and stuff that's a nonsense argument. But if you come to someone's country and you think it's cool to set up a weapons cache and just hang out trying to be some kind of quasi gangster or something, don't expect that the locals aren't going to have a response for that. That's ridiculous to the point of absurdity. 

Meanwhile, these foreigners that are sitting around saying, "oh, all of this is just a big smoke screen because of something the Thai political class is doing, or the Thai establishment is doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what I think we are seeing is yet another attempt at foreign undue influence that we haven't seen the likes of since '97. I talked about this past summer too. That said let's jump into this. Quoting directly, same article, Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, Foreigners living in fear as Thailand's legal system becomes a weapon. Quoting directly: "At the same time, Thailand is tightening Immigration controls and increasing scrutiny of foreign activities in tourist regions. Officials have openly linked stricter visa measures to concerns about illegal businesses, overstays and criminal activity involving foreign nationals." - which there is pretty ample evidence of. Quoting further: "This combination of aggressive enforcement, legal uncertainty and growing political sensitivity has created a climate of anxiety among many foreigners living in Thailand." Well if you're the type of foreigner that you know, I have dealt with for years that when I'll say to them in a professional capacity oftentimes, "well legally this is the situation" and they'll just sort of say, "well there has got to be some way to get beyond that. Can't we pay somebody? If that has been your attitude, then yeah there's a reckoning on that attitude right now. But if you're just here to live your life and be retired, no, there's no reason to be, I don't know, hiding under your mattress over all of this. That said, quoting further: "Importantly, this does not mean all foreign businesses are illegal." - yeah - "nor does it mean Thailand is hostile toward foreign investment. In reality, Thailand still depends heavily on international tourism and foreign spending. Phuket alone reportedly welcomed around 13 million visitors in 2024, while tourism revenue across the southern provinces continues to grow rapidly." So basically, what Thailand really would like to see is foreign tourism and foreign investment; they would just like those foreign nationals to abide by their laws. That's the only thing that Thais are looking for here. And I find it to be incredibly arrogant and of an entitlement mentality that - this is the only country by the way I've ever been, ever in the world, where the foreign community if you will, the expat community, whatever you want to call it, has these outsized expectations from the country that they are a guest in, about what that country needs to be doing for them. I put up a post on Twitter, I didn't put up a post, but I was responding to a post, where someone was saying, "oh you can live in Thailand for X amount of time, and what do you get out of it?" What do you mean, what do you get out of it? You got to live in a foreign country for X amount of time. If you come to Thailand expecting to get something - that this is like some kind of slot machine or something - that if you put in enough time, you're going to get something out of it, that's a bad attitude to have. And people will say, "Well you naturalized, you did.." Yeah. I did not come in with that attitude to begin with. As time went on, my situation became such that I could avail myself of certain benefits, yeah. To borrow a phrase from George Washington Plunkitt, "I have seen my opportunities, and I took them." That's not the same as coming in from the outset with the attitude that Thailand owes you something; very, very different. And again, this whole "oh, everything is a smoke screen for the political class" and then the prevailing argument seems to be "the economy is tanking" and the political class is using all this crackdown stuff as a smoke screen. First of all, no. They don't send in the 4th Army division down to the islands because they are trying to do a smoke screen, okay? They use the Thai Army when they seriously consider there to be an issue that calls for using that tool, so let's start there. 

Then meanwhile, let's go over here to Twitter and under: Furkan Gozukara @FurkanGozukara over on X. Absolute bombshell. Prominent economist Richard Werner confirms the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was completely engineered. He revealed the IMF deliberately bankrupted Thailand to force them into selling off their national industries to foreign elites for pennies! And let me quote a couple of excerpts just from that; I'll put the link to the Twitter post in the description below which has a less than 1 minute clip up of this person, again this person's name being Richard Werner, who apparently was contracted by the Government here to come in and ascertain what happened in the Asian Financial Crisis and he, well let me just quote what he says. Quote: "I concluded it was a plot by the local Central Bank in Thailand against the country, together with the IMF. It was a situation to create a boom bust cycle" - and let's be real honest. Central Banks, for example the FED in the United States, it's neither Federal nor a reserve. It's a Monetary Authority that has monopoly power granted by Congress which is in clear and direct and stark contrast to the plain language of the US Constitution, but let's leave that aside for the moment, but yes, the Federal Reserve Act 1913 created it but it is a consortium of foreign bankers praying on the United States. You think it's one thing, but it's not. They say, "oh it's the Central Banks, the Bank of this, the Bank of that, the Federal Reserve." Well yeah, in actuality it's a consortium that has effectively co-opted a legislature, whatever - and different jurisdictions are going to have this in different ways - I really like Thailand because frankly, the Central Banks don't have near the influence that they do as other jurisdictions, and that's a fact. You can compare the BoT for example to the FED; it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, let's just put it that way. 

But long story short, at the end of the day, when this person is saying it was the Bank of Thailand and the IMF, that doesn't mean it was Thais, let's keep that well in mind. That said, quoting further: quote: "Thailand was doing well until then and then it was "asked" to sell its Banks and its industry to foreigners, very cheaply." When I heard this smoke screen stuff about "oh it's a smoke screen for the political establishment, political elite, whatever", I said to myself that sounds off, and then the sort of subtext of all of it was, "well there are all these economic problems in Thailand." Where have we heard that before? Like Fitch chiming in this past summer, basically implying that there were structural problems with the Thai Banking System, and then in the final paragraph of that same article - which I cited at length a couple of times, in a couple of videos - they went on to say, "well actually they had done stress tests, and the banking system is fine". And as I brought up at the time, there was all kinds of political stuff going on in the background and then on top of that, they rolled out the same old playbook that we now know was imposed due to undue foreign influence upon Thailand by outsiders. It was not an organically occurring economic event, it was imposed upon this place. And yet again I hear the same murmurs from the same corners of the world where, "oh, no it's not the problem with these foreigners that are gathering weapons caches - not just one but two instances of it - all within the same week long period, it's not the foreigners who are getting drunk and getting into fights with the locals all over the place. No, no, no, no, no, that's all just a smoke screen because Thailand has economic problems that are causing it to go under.” No, I can see your play right now, and I'm going to be right here all the way down the line to make sure that this nonsense narrative never happens again. Thailand is fine economically. And in fact, what we're seeing right now is the rest of the world is sort of bifurcating or even trifurcating into different - I'll call it supply chain sectors economically - Thailand is able to in a certain way navigate this per her own national interest as best she can by doing the best deals she can with different counterparties. And you know what? The unipolar moment clearly no longer the situation; not that I am particularly a fan of that as an American myself having been born there and everything, but it is just a reality of it, and I can see that there are those especially out of the West, and by the West I particularly mean Europe, that seem to want to, I don't know, it looks like colonization to me, and I've got some real qualms too at this point. The Prime Minister has been over in France. I think overall has probably been beneficial, but they are talking about these EU-Thai free trade agreement. This in the foreground of a background where we have got people talking about how Thailand needs to worry about herself economically. If I can say anything to the Thais, "know thyself. Thailand is going to be fine." It's not the Thais that need to worry about changing, it's the rest of the world that should be taking a page out of this book. And yes, there's heightened scrutiny on foreigners because the fact of it is, we've seen a large influx of foreigners who have acted completely differently to the foreign nationals that we have seen in the past. And on top of that, a highly globalistic former government that we saw before here in Thailand, try to go ahead and impose a bunch of visas on us that resulted in foreigners who were here that don't really seem to have much of a purpose. So yeah, there is a real problem and no, I don't think it's a smoke screen for anything economically. That being said, it remains to be seen how all of this will play out, so we'll certainly be keeping you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.