Daniel McAdams on Downfall and Chaos in Syria
32:19 Share

Well, we're excited to have our guest today. He is the co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. He's also the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace. Daniel McAdams joins me. How you doing, sir? David, hi. Thanks for having me on your program. Great having you back on. And, you know, wow. I mean, every day it feels like another country. It's changing governments. It's like a

They would say spring cleaning, but here we are in the winter months. Everybody's trying to rearrange all the power before Trump comes in. This is a weird period of time in between presidents, right? Yeah, it is, and it's kind of unprecedented because usually, and Dr. Paul had a column I think a week or so ago about this, usually these are quiet times where the incoming administration ramps up and all this sort of stuff, but for whatever reason, we don't know why,

This transition has been incredible. I mean, we can go down the line, but it's just the cherry on top is what's happening in the Middle East right now.

Yeah, I know Trump always says, I want my administration to count on the day I got elected because that's when the market rallies, that's when these things rally. He doesn't want Obama or Biden or anybody to get credit for any of the things that he thinks are positive that comes along with his win. But man, this is really not just a stock market rally, but a lot of change.

changing of the guard i mean most particularly in striking with syria i mean it just crept up on a lot of people while they're busy during the weekend now and everybody gets weird during the holiday season anyways and then to look over there and see my goodness now assad is now in russia and i was always wondering myself i covered that syria thing so much and then it got so quiet and i it's always when it's quiet that there's something up up to something you know so yeah

I mean, I know you kind of follow it a little bit more acutely because your institute, Ron Paul Institute, is dedicated to foreign policy. So has this surprised you at the rate of change and what's happened here with Assad leaving? Absolutely. Totally shocked. And I think anyone who says that they weren't shocked is lying. You know, even people that I read that I count as following it a lot closer than I do.

Syria and the Middle East, they're all shocked. And there are so many competing stories. I think anyone who claims they know what happened is also wrong. There probably are a few people who know that happened, but they're not talking to you. They're not talking to me. So there's a lot of speculation. Whenever something big like this happens,

There's kind of a, there's a rush to get out there and put your theory out there to be the first one. And I always kind of, I look for what people say, but I really don't like doing that because I, you know, I don't know what happened. I don't know how to understand it. I've spent hours and hours over the past couple of days reading very competing narratives about what happened and speculation about what happening. I don't think anybody knows. The only thing we do know is that the Middle East literally in the flash of

24 hours has radically changed for good. It will never be the same as it was before about a week ago.

And when you say for good, you don't necessarily mean in a positive direction. You just mean permanent, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. I used the wrong word. Yes. Has changed permanently. That's a much better word. You're starting to sound like Nikki Haley there for a second. I didn't catch that. I know. Thank you. Yeah, I don't want that to go misquote me on that. No, it has changed permanently. The world has changed permanently. The...

The sort of the correlation of forces, as the Soviets would say, has changed very, very significantly. And we don't know how this will play out. I mean, you know, as as as we speak now and a couple of days after, I'm just watching Israel bombing Damascus, carpet bombing Damascus, which is incredible. Is that happening as we speak? That's wow.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. As of this past hour, I've seen some video of it. But they've also taken out all of the air defense systems and basically all of the military equipment Israel's taken out from Syria.

And I've seen a couple of tweets from people associated with the HTS, the new government, saying, why are you guys bombing us? We want to be friends. So it's very, very liquid right now. Understandable if Israel felt threatened.

that, yeah, you take out this is your opportunity. You may not get again to take out literally. I mean, they're going to be it's going to take 100 years to build up defensive weaponry like this. The Russians aren't going to come back with with S300s anymore. So you're taking out the ability of your adversary to do you any harm. So from that from that perspective, it makes logical sense that Israel would do this.

And, you know, they're not known to be shy when it comes to asserting themselves militarily in these situations. Well, the guy that's supposed to be in charge is former al-Qaeda guy. Is that right? Yeah, Jolani. In fact, the Syrian embassy in 2017 put out a $10 million bounty on the guy's head. It said, stop this terrorist was the headline. That made the rounds. You may have seen it on X over the weekend. And now he's the guy who...

Biden comes up and says, well, we need to start talking about sending money to rebuild Syria. So ironically, we spent 20 years in a war on terror fighting al Qaeda and probably secretly funding them when we need to. And now we're thinking about overtly funding al Qaeda, although the HTS that he's the head of now, that is an important faction, the strongest faction in Syria. But it's not the only faction. There are many competing interests in there right now. That's why it's so hard to read.

And the model there with Assad being an Alawite was he's this kind of minority group that's installed to be a kind of mediator between all the other factions. That was the idea behind his family being there, right? By the Western powers when they put him in. Is that the concept? Yeah, I think there was a lot more tolerance. There definitely was a lot more tolerance. I mean, we don't, again, we don't know how, if HDS indeed rules properly.

Syria after this. We don't know how they will rule. There was a lot of PR in the days leading up to the overthrow of Assad from the mainstream media. They probably got the talking points directly from the CIA saying that Jelani, he's changed his tune. He's a lot more inclusive now. You know, he's he's he's he's he's

He's gone woke. He's in favor of diversity. You know, maybe there'll be an LGBT branch of Al Qaeda. I don't know. But they were spending a lot of time trying to whitewash. Did they give him a new remake? His image, too? Does he have the Rachel Maddow glasses and stuff?

Well, they gave him a remake. He actually has a little bit of a Fidel Castro look. You know, he's he got rid of all the headgear and everything. And now he just kind of wears this, I guess, kind of like what I'm wearing, this military. He doesn't have the Rachel Maddow glasses like that. Not yet. That's coming. That's probably hipster glasses. Yeah, he needs a USAID. He's going to have to have a Starbucks coffee in his hand. Right. And say, I'm here. Here I am. And yeah.

Now, you know, the funny thing was, is Assad, I remember seeing photos where he looked very Western and sophisticated, having an ice meal with John Kerry and his wife. What happened with all those days? What was the problem with the deal there? What went wrong? Yeah, that was in the early 2000s when Syria genuinely believed, excuse me, genuinely believed that they can improve ties with Washington. And in fact, I was a tiny part of that myself because it was around that period when he,

the early to mid 2000s, where several staffers on Capitol Hill were invited to the Syrian ambassador's house for a dinner to discuss

the thawing, unfortunately, very brief thawing in relations between the U.S. and Syria. And so I think there are probably about 20 of us who sat around. We had dinner at the ambassador's house and we spoke with the senior officials at the embassy to talk about how this might come forward, you know, come forth. But sadly, that that that fell aside pretty quickly after that. Hmm.

Yeah. Wasn't that though, like, maybe I'm wrong here, but wasn't that like 2012 that, uh, Kerry was having dinner with him and his wife there and all that? Yeah, that, that was, that was later. Yeah. This, this initiative was early earlier on. I think that, I think there was a meeting between, uh, Assad and, uh, Colin Powell in 2003, if I'm not mistaken.

So there were a couple of attempts before they launched the Arab Spring. What was the term? Why couldn't they just work? What was the deal they couldn't work out? Do you know from your perspective? I don't know the exact details, but it had to do with the relations with, as you say, the various minority factions inside Syria. It's always a difficult thing. You know, you remember the...

the Soviet nationalities policy. That's one of the reasons why things were so difficult when the USSR broke up, because the idea was you had to have ethnic Russians in places where there was anti-Soviet or anti-Russian nationalisms. That's why you have so many Russians in Latvia, for example, and so many in the Caucasus, for example. So it's difficult balancing a multinational or multi-ethnic empire or country, for that matter.

Diversity is not necessarily strength, despite what the left may say. I'm just trying to understand the bare bones. Okay, you've got America and Israel wanting this guy out. And then Trump gets in, kind of slows that thing down. Biden gets in. It's still kind of quiet from our perspective in America. I'm not seeing it pop off much.

But all of a sudden, now that Biden's coming out and Trump's coming back in, everything just accelerates so fast. And I'm thinking, what was the deal they couldn't make? Was it stop loving, stop getting along with Russia? Was it get away from Hezbollah or something with Iran? What was the deal that just couldn't be reached to

need to switch in this new guy who's got a nice Hollywood remake. Yeah, again, who knows? But there are certain things that you have to look at. One of the components is the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire because the unrest in the Idlib region, that's where the Al-Qaeda was kind of honed up for about a decade. They were just kind of regurgitating in there and all that, cogitating in there in Syria. The ceasefire

uh that happened uh about a week or so ago uh between lebanon and israel was really the beginning this is when they broke out of idlib and they started taking over uh you know they started in the countryside they took aleppo without a fight they took hama and hams um very very quickly and the um

The Syrian army literally melted away and everyone, even people who have had a good track record on this, they expected that the army was falling back to protect the towns from house to house fighting. And they were going to reestablish a line around, ultimately, it was ultimately around Damascus, but it was supposed to be further forward.

And lo and behold, Saturday, they just melted. They just disappeared. They abandoned their posts. So the question is why?

One answer, one possible answer, and it's important, is that with this ceasefire, Israel wanted to make sure that Hezbollah could not be re-outfitted with weapons. And a lot of these weapons were making the ground journey from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon and Hezbollah. So they wanted to cut off the weapons supplies and strangle Hezbollah out, which is probably part

Of the equation. I think there's never one aha. When something big happens. There are a lot of things that happen together. In perfect unison that allow it to happen. And I think those two things certainly are a component to it.

Now, there's also the atrophy of the Syrian Arab Army, which was the army that Assad commanded. Obviously, when you see a situation where your army melts, numerically, they had a very, very large advantage over the jihadists, but they melted away. Why did that happen? That suggests a lot of things that the army hadn't been taken care of properly, hadn't been trained.

Maybe there's corruption in the ranks. So there's a big issue. And then the third big, another of the big issues is

is that, as we know, both Russia and Hezbollah, and to a degree the Iraqi militias, they're the ones that pulled Assad's chest outside of the fire last time when he was in a world of hurt back in 13, if you remember. And they came in and they took them out and reestablished. That's been 11 years ago, almost 12 years ago. And they did not come to his aid at this time. The Russians did nothing.

The Iranians did nothing. Iraq was supposedly sending in some militias. They didn't go. And so that was a key factor, I think. I talked to a Syrian immigrant a few years ago one time, and he said the real policy is just to create chaos in Syria. That's what it's about. It's not, you know, so I don't, you know, you look at, it seems like there's this weird pattern where you have these more Western-style groups

dictators like Saddam Hussein are then replaced with something more religiously oriented to the region. And Mubarak in Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Spring stuff over there. You've got Gaddafi being replaced with whatever's going on in Libya now, chaos. And now here you've got Syria,

And what's going on with Assad, this Western-style kind of guy that wears a suit, and now he's replaced with the guy who was al-Qaeda, and now he's dressing like a hipster communist. I know that's popular. If you look in the storefronts today at the mall, you'll see that little hipster jacket that they all wear. I think he got that same little communist Antifa jacket. They got him into that. But, you know, what's the overall? I mean, I'm always looking at the big picture. It seems like

It seems like, you know, there's a real realignment. Like you said, there's a real permanent realignment of power here. And it's going in the direction of American Israel, right? Kind of locking up the region here. Yeah, I mean, Israel, I mean, one of the things that you didn't mention, but it's also very important, is that Hamas was created as a counterbalance to the Palestinian Authority, which was also more of a secular movement. And Israel played a big hand in creating Hamas. That's objectively...

understandable and true. It's something that you can easily look up. They played a part because they were afraid of pan-Arabist movements. And from a perspective, that's rational. They didn't want all of these secular Arab leaders to get together and say, one of these is not like the other. And so they wanted to create more extremist religious movements. So then if they took them out, they could say, hey, we're killing some bad guys. We're killing extremists.

And so I think there's a lot of that in play. Remember, before the invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu came to the U.S. Congress and he made his case that we need to invade Iraq and it would be fantastic and wonderful and we'd get rid of a thug, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't really work out that way. So they definitely have an interest in getting rid of secular pan-Arabist leaders. Look what happened to Gaddafi.

So, you know, that's part of the pattern, too. Yeah, it seems like and it's it looks like it's going in the direction that, you know, the deep state, the permanent bureaucratic class of Washington wants. Right. It seems like they're getting what they want. Trump made a comment on Twitter, I think, or Twitter.

Truth Social, where he said, you know, this is not our fight. We need to stay out of this, you know. And I commented, I said, I appreciate that sentiment, but don't lie to the American people. Those people taking Assad's position of power were, you know, working with America and Israel for a long time. And when a Biden comes out immediately and indicates he's going to be giving a lot of aid to that new government,

rest assured they're very pleased with the results of who's getting in power when they're willing to turn on the financial spigot, I think. So, you know, and from my perspective, I kind of, and I don't know this might, I don't know what you think, but you know, Mike Huckabee said one time in the 2007 debates with Ron Paul about getting out of Iraq, he said, we broke it. We got to fix it. I typically don't like that sentiment, but,

There is a wisdom to the idea of, OK, wait a second. If Christians and other minority groups are going to be persecuted as we speak in Syria because of our government supporting groups who now have power over them, do we not have a moral obligation and does not Trump have a moral obligation to make sure that those groups and communities are not persecuted?

Yes, but there are different ways of doing it. We did break it. I don't know who had Trump's ear on this, but I think they're feeding him something the way they want him to read it. His statement almost sounded libertarian. Hey, we have no business there.

But the problem is we were already there. We already messed things up and we're already occupying part of the territory. And the CIA has already funded these jihadists for 10 or 15 years. I mean, we put all the pieces in play and then we put a quarter in the machine and it started running. And then we said, oh, my God. Yeah, it's not my fight. So and the other thing that was disturbing about what Trump said, maybe even more than that, was he called them opposition fighters.

When in fact, Jelani is literally on our terrorist list. There still is that reward on his head. In fact, my friend Max Blumenthal made a funny tweet. I don't know if you saw it. Funny post on X saying, now that we know where he is, who's going to collect the $10 million, you know, the bounty on his head. So, yeah,

In terms of what obligations we have, I think certainly our obligation is not to fund these people and not to provide them assistance. That would be a good start. I mean, the same is true with Ukraine. If we cared about the Ukrainian people, we would stop funding the war machine that's getting them all killed. So it's never too late to pull back.

I would say, though, that we are, like you said, even if there's some libertarian rhetoric, isn't that funny? Malay had a lot of libertarian rhetoric, and now things are starting to feel a little libertarian in the rhetoric around this incoming administration, but yet there's some kind of a weird...

It's a branding thing. Something's going on where, and you know, it's hard to know what is doing what and who, the tail wagging the dog, that whole deal, what's going on. Is it the zeitgeist moment we're in and everybody in DC is just trying to kind of catch up to us where the people kind of are in America? Or is it just a kind of cynical play to kind of

you know, give the good rhetoric that is still selling really a lighter footprint approach to regime change. It's kind of, oh, like you said, do this. We're staying out of it. We're non-interventionists. We're non-interventionists. It's almost like they're reading the room and they know that the message of Ron Paul and non-interventionism is winning the American hearts and minds. And they're kind of like trying to

couch that into their foreign policy words, you know? No, that's a good way of putting it, David. And I think in a way we can sort of be pleased with that because it shows that they view us as a force to be reckoned with, you know, they realize that it has a resonance. Our message has a resonance. If it was a losing, it was the neocon message. They wouldn't use it. We need to break stuff and kill people. Yeah.

So I think that's a good way of looking at it. But I've often found myself at odds with other libertarians because they often fall for the rhetoric that's very, very carefully packaged for them to eat. It's like a chocolate bar or junk food. They just slurp it down. In fact, I even gave a speech once to the Mises Institute about how not to be a CIA propagandist. Yeah.

And so they use that. They've used it several times. They tried to overthrow the Iranian government and the government in Belarus and elsewhere. They use this kind of libertarian rhetoric and a lot of libertarians at their hearts are sort of this is a deep divide. It's probably a different discussion than we're having today. But in their hearts, there are a lot of libertarians that sort of like Trotskyites.

You know, they believe that we have a universalist ideology that we must enforce and that we must enforce on the rest of the world. Whereas the other school of libertarians that I myself am in would say that the goal is simply liberty. And liberty means that you can do, as Dr. Paul says, you can do whatever you want with it. You can have an Iran as a as a confessional state.

In the world without having to overthrow it and send in the Reason Foundation to reorganize their government. You can have... And at the same time, the locals in Iran have their own, they can fight their own thing. If they want reason to come, let them fight for it. But it shouldn't be something America is getting involved with in that way.

Yeah, it's this idea of universalism that's always led to slaughter, you know, from the 1930s, from the Soviets, you know, this idea that there's a universalist

view of the inevitability of man, you know, the new Soviet man, you know, and, you know, and, you know, out of Germany came that idea as well. Anytime you see these things, they're dangerous, especially for us as libertarians, because we believe the more local, the better. We don't want to have an overarching ideology of America. Right.

That's why, to me at least, America First means a very small America where the power is devolved down not just to the states but to communities. That's where freedom really exists. Some people have said that this was kind of a deal perhaps that Putin is negotiating with Ukraine, the terms of the Ukraine deal with this new incoming administration to say, okay, I'm going to not provide support for Assad anymore in exchange for me having my interests resolved.

recognized in the Ukraine matter. Do you think that's something going on there?

I think that's probably the least likely scenario. You think that's the least likely? I've heard people float that, so you think that's the least likely. Why do you think that's the least likely? Because he's winning and you don't make compromises when you're winning. And it's objectively true that Russia's winning. I think, and this is again speculation, at first, I mean, I'm a pretty emotional guy and I was pretty emotional. I thought, man, Russia, come on, you're not protecting your friends. What's wrong with you? With friends like these, who needs enemies? Yeah.

But I've kind of cooled down and I've read some people and I've done some thinking. And, you know, why does Russia want to be bogged down there anyway? Why do they want to keep pulling Assad's chestnuts out of the fire when he's not willing to do anything himself? He's not willing to build an army that can defend the country. You know, their goodwill has lasted for 10 years. Maybe it's time to pull the plug.

And, you know, other people who know military affairs better than I do have also pointed out that's really not necessary. And I don't know if this is true or not, because I'm not a military person. Yeah.

I don't want to be cheeky, but maybe Assad was trying to be a little less militaristic himself. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. How do we know where these things, the tail, you know, it's kind of a snake eating its own tail at some point, right? Maybe. It's a good point. Yeah. You know, we have to always wonder how these ideas that we have about the world actually play out in real life, don't we? You know, because it's like, what if he was...

You're saying, I just, I'm not saying this to give you a hard time, but it's like, you know, you stand for peace and less militarism. And yet you're kind of saying, Assad, maybe you should have got a little bit more militaristic and fight for yourself. Well, let's remember that's self-defense though. Self-defense is not aggression. But, you know, Larry Johnson, who's a friend of mine, he's spoken at our conference. He's a former CIA analyst and a really great guy. And he had a good short little piece that came out, I think, yesterday.

And he made some good points. One of them was that, you know, obviously, when you take a look at it from the surface, Israel and the U.S. are the big winners here. Israel's wanted Assad gone for a long time. So has the U.S.,

And on the surface, again, Turkey is a big winner. I think he actually said Israel and Turkey are on the surface big winners. They look like winners. I mean, Erdogan engineered this. You better believe it. And the big losers would be Iran and Russia. But he said, when you think about it a little bit more,

Turkey and Israel are now next door neighbors to this boiling cauldron of hatreds and instability. They may actually end up in a worse situation that they've unleashed these demons now. Mm-hmm.

Well, that would, that would, it would, we'll have to see whether they can keep their rabid dogs on a leash and heal, right? You got to heal it.

You know, that's the problem with what happened with Hamas, right? Is they always wanted, they didn't want to, if you have to work with someone closer to Mr. Rogers versus a rabid dog, you're going to choose the right. And that's what Israel said. I mean, I quoted their, World Net Daily is a Christian Zionist website. They put my story at the top and it was a total critique of their whole ideology, but they put it at the top story where I said it was the haunting of the cross and the Holy Land and in it,

I explained how, you know, their own leaders have said Hamas is an asset. The PA is a liability. We don't want a secular, you know, government, like you said, Pan-Arab. We don't want to have, in fact, Christians used to lead a lot of the Palestinian interest and the negotiation table back in, what, the 70s or whatever? You'd know better than I. But, you know, they don't want those kind of folks in the world stage having their voices shape the conversation about Palestinians. They wanted to have Hamas.

represent them so that would be an easier villain to get public opinion against right and yeah it bites you back no it doesn't eventually yeah good but remember tariq aziz i think he was the vice president or foreign minister of iraq was a was a catholic so you won't have that in hamas you won't have that kind of that kind of diversity to them is not strength and you won't have it with this fellow jelani yeah and that reminds me that guy i saw a veteran say saddam hussein's

all his inner circle were Christians, the guys that he would... That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. What is up with that? Why are we always attacking every little tiny village of Christians around that giant region? My goodness. I mean, that is... It's disappearing from the Middle East. And this is going to be a death blow. I mean, this is literally where it started. I mean, I was reading...

The other day when these jihadists were running roughshod through the country, and I forget the name of the village. I know it's in the back of my mind, but there's a village where they still speak Aramaic, which is the language of Jesus that Jesus chose to speak when he was on earth. And that was their language. And that village is now overrun by radical Christian-hating jihadists.

So that's very, very sad. And I'm very sad that more American Christians aren't concerned about the fate of Christians in the Middle East. That's got to change. We got to do something about that and media. I really appreciate your time, Danny McAdams. I know that this is a time of the end of the year. And I know you guys at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace are

have been a bulwark in the voice of peace and non-intervention. So I want to talk about what you guys are doing, what you're planning to do in the next year, and just kind of give us your vision of what you're looking to accomplish. Well, as you know, David, we're in the fundraising season, so everything depends on whether we're able to raise money, and it's never easy. I mean, the Beltway think tanks, they raise in the millions. The downside is they waste a lot of that money, but we raise a lot less than that.

And we do a lot more than that because, you know, we're dedicated and we don't waste any money. But, you know, we put as you know, Dave, we put on a couple of very big conferences every year that bring a lot of people together. And that's really important. Our mission is bringing people together. We're not a libertarian outfit. We're not left or right. We're about bringing people together who share our values.

And so that's what we do. And we hope we hope to do that. I mean, this is the time where we need to do that. We need to hold a conference on Trump's foreign policy, the good, bad and the ugly. Take a good hard look at it. We don't play favorites on party or politician by any stretch of imagination. But we've got great programs. We've got the Ron Paul Scholar Seminar, which grows every year. And we have some of our some of our alumni are doing great things.

In fact, one of our first year alumni, T.J. Roberts, is now elected to the state legislature in Kentucky. And T.J.'s a great guy. We have a lot of hopes for him. There are a lot of others that have gone through the program who are doing really well. So this is the Ron Paul revolution continued. And so I'm very much hoping that we can continue our work. And of course, the Liberty Report keeps growing. A couple of people, maybe a gentleman named Elon has been paying attention to Dr. Paul's

uh posts on x one of them being we need to stop all foreign aid and that really went viral over the weekend so i saw that like nine million views at least yeah and the other one that that elon retweeted was 40 million wow so it's huge so you know we're we're happy for the attention but we gotta we gotta pay the bill let's be clear be clear is there anyone out there

I mean, you guys are really getting, with Elon's attention, the biggest amplification of the voice for liberty and peace than anybody else in the world right now. I think that's true. Let's be clear about that. I mean, we have the guy that's got...

almost 300 million followers. Richest man's got all the influence. Everybody's calling him the shadow vice president. And he's retweeting Ron Paul every day. I said, I think we may have given Elon the greatest political mentor he could ask for. Now, what he does with that, we'll be excited to see. But, I mean...

you guys hats off to this opportunity that you guys are taking the opportunity. I'm happy. I was able to play a little role and coaxing it along the way with all my friends, tweeting out things along the way. It's been wild to watch it happen in real time, but my goodness, I think, you know, Ron and the Institute that you guys represent is really in the driver's seat to really keep shaping the narrative. And I love, I love the way,

There's this opportunity, regardless of what happens with the administration, to be able to have a friendly connection to talk and then also stay on the outside and be honest. And that dynamic that you guys are in is very unique. Only you guys are in that position right now as it pertains to liberty and peace in that way. So that's all. Thanks very much. I hope we can continue. It depends on our friends and followers out there. So how can people donate if they want to get involved?

Well, we have matching funds available right now. Go to ronpaulinstitute.org and you will see our little thermometer. And we welcome tax-deductible donations. And also, I appreciate you, David, for allowing me to say this on your program. It's very kind of you. No problem. And you have a wonderful Christmas. We'll talk soon, okay? Take care, David. Thank you. ♪♪♪

Bye.