The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2500 - Scott Horton

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Do I sound okay?

00:00:14.000 Check, check, check.

00:00:15.000 This is my normal complaint volume right here.

00:00:17.000 You're doing one of those one ear on, one ear off guys?

00:00:19.000 Yeah, my right ear hurts a lot from years of this.

00:00:22.000 And so I usually just leave it off.

00:00:24.000 There's a volume adjuster thing too.

00:00:25.000 So if it's too loud, you can turn it up or turn it down.

00:00:28.000 You sound good.

00:00:29.000 But no, it's just I have a pain in my right ear, so I try not to antagonize it.

00:00:32.000 And thank you very much for the gift, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:35.000 Scott Horton gave me a professorial pipe.

00:00:38.000 And like I was saying, Metzger uses a pipe now because of you.

00:00:42.000 I love that guy.

00:00:43.000 He's the best.

00:00:44.000 He's so funny, dude. 0.82

00:00:45.000 He's such a nut.

00:00:46.000 When he comes into the room, he just blows the room away. 0.99

00:00:49.000 Yeah.

00:00:50.000 He's just a force in there.

00:00:51.000 It's incredible.

00:00:52.000 And he's a giant dude.

00:00:53.000 So he hovers over you, like, oh, you didn't know?

00:00:55.000 You don't know about this?

00:00:56.000 And then he just hits you with 15 conspiracies in a row, rapid fire.

00:01:00.000 So good.

00:01:01.000 Yeah, with no breaks in between them.

00:01:04.000 So, thanks for doing this, man.

00:01:05.000 Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:01:06.000 We have a great mutual friend, Dave Smith.

00:01:09.000 He recommends you highly.

00:01:10.000 So, I'm glad we could finally do this.

00:01:12.000 I wish there was more going on in the world right now we could talk about, though.

00:01:15.000 It seems like we just have to go back over Vietnam or something.

00:01:18.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:01:19.000 The old stuff, back when we didn't know any better.

00:01:22.000 It's kind of a mess.

00:01:24.000 Yeah.

00:01:25.000 I've seen you argue on television like a thousand times.

00:01:29.000 Do you enjoy that Piers Morgan type chaos?

00:01:34.000 No.

00:01:35.000 Yeah.

00:01:36.000 In fact, I just got back from England.

00:01:38.000 I got invited to do the Oxford debate, which I lost on Ukraine.

00:01:43.000 But then I invited myself on Piers Morgan Live as long as I was in town.

00:01:48.000 When you say you lost a debate, is that because the people voted that were in the audience? 0.52

00:01:52.000 All those people with Ukraine flags?

00:01:52.000 Yeah.

00:01:55.000 Well, they didn't have Ukraine flags that time.

00:01:57.000 I think someone showed an old picture or something.

00:01:59.000 Yeah, same crowd.

00:02:00.000 So what happened was, yeah, when they leave, they either leave through the yes door or the no door.

00:02:05.000 And the yeses had it.

00:02:06.000 Which was unbelievable to me, but not that I did my very best job.

00:02:10.000 But on Piers Morgan, I was trying to get myself just an interview so I could just talk to him about some things.

00:02:16.000 And instead, they just prefer that format where you got to mix it up with a guy, which I can do that too, you know?

00:02:22.000 Yeah, the interview thing is way better.

00:02:25.000 The thing that he does, though, is really good for engagement.

00:02:29.000 He's very smart.

00:02:30.000 Like Pierce has done, he's mastered it.

00:02:30.000 Yeah.

00:02:32.000 He's taken like the Jerry Springer type format and thrown it into the world of, Politics and any other social issue that's going on.

00:02:41.000 Yeah.

00:02:41.000 But it is too, like years ago, the guy from antiwar.com can't be on TV, but we can be on his show.

00:02:48.000 He doesn't care.

00:02:49.000 He's cool with it.

00:02:49.000 I mean, I guess the same thing here.

00:02:51.000 Yeah.

00:02:52.000 That is a big change from how things used to be.

00:02:54.000 We just had this whole separate conversation going on below the higher one where he has reach, you know, up and down the chain, I guess is a way to put it.

00:03:03.000 Is he on TVTV or is it just TVTV?

00:03:04.000 No, but he just has massive viewership.

00:03:07.000 So it counts, I guess.

00:03:08.000 TVTV is actually a hindrance now because the only way people watch.

00:03:13.000 TV is clips that someone takes and puts on X or YouTube.

00:03:16.000 Or they just see it accidentally.

00:03:16.000 That's it.

00:03:18.000 It's just on, it happens to be on when they're in the room or whatever. 1.00

00:03:21.000 What a fucking dying market. 0.99

00:03:23.000 Like, imagine if you're in broadcast television right now and you're just thinking, like, where am I? 1.00

00:03:28.000 What am I doing?

00:03:30.000 Like, this is a bad format.

00:03:32.000 You have to break for commercials every seven minutes.

00:03:35.000 No conversation could ever get into depth.

00:03:37.000 There's executives in your ear telling you what to say and what not to say. 0.99

00:03:41.000 They'll edit out anything that they think is like controversial that's going to fuck with their sponsors or fuck with. 1.00

00:03:46.000 The government or fuck with whatever their narrative is. 0.98

00:03:50.000 It's just everything's changed. 0.99

00:03:51.000 When I first started doing podcasting, it was the archives of the interviews for my radio show.

00:03:56.000 And it was so important to me that I'm on the radio because that's real legitimacy.

00:03:59.000 That means somebody hired you.

00:04:01.000 Somebody thought you were good enough to be there. 0.99

00:04:03.000 Whereas podcasting, any jerk can do from his basement and it just doesn't count. 0.98

00:04:07.000 And then that just became not true. 0.98

00:04:08.000 And I kind of clung on to my radio show.

00:04:10.000 I actually gave up my last radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles last year.

00:04:16.000 I mean, where it didn't matter anymore anyway.

00:04:18.000 And podcasting has completely changed the entire market.

00:04:22.000 Do you know how many people were listening to you actually on the radio before you quit?

00:04:27.000 I think it's like probably.

00:04:30.000 High thousands, but not 10,000, you know, KPFK in LA.

00:04:34.000 It's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River.

00:04:34.000 It's crazy.

00:04:38.000 It's grandfathered in at 115,000 watts, but it's, but the thing is about it too, and it's always been like this the programming on there is so inconsistent that you're listening to Latina lesbians one hour and then you're listening to crystal worship and then you're listening to hard hitting news and then you're listening to like leftist union organizing or then just whatever, you know what I mean?

00:04:58.000 But it's just, there's no like real rhyme or reason to it.

00:05:01.000 So it's hard to follow, you know?

00:05:03.000 What kind of a channel is it?

00:05:05.000 Oh, it's, you know, left of the dial at 90.7 FM.

00:05:09.000 So it's, you know, comparable to like KUT type.

00:05:13.000 It's not actual public radio, but it's no commercials, all donations.

00:05:17.000 Oh, wow.

00:05:18.000 Yeah, I mean, they were good to go.

00:05:19.000 A regular radio show that's no commercials and it's not public?

00:05:22.000 Yeah.

00:05:23.000 That's interesting.

00:05:24.000 Yeah, it's like, I don't know if co op still exists here in Austin.

00:05:29.000 Co op radio.

00:05:30.000 You must have made a lot of money from that.

00:05:32.000 You must be so rich from doing that.

00:05:34.000 Yeah, I know.

00:05:35.000 A leftist radio with no.

00:05:39.000 Ads at all, just donations.

00:05:40.000 Boy, you must be raking it in.

00:05:42.000 No, they never did pay me, but I looked at it like they let me be on there for 14, 15 years or something.

00:05:49.000 And, you know, like even when I was writing my book about the Russia Ukraine stuff, I would do my radio show once a week and I was able to still cover what was going on in Palestine and in a way that I felt like, you know, something meaningful that I can do even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere.

00:06:09.000 I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com, and I can interview them once a week.

00:06:14.000 And then when I left KPFK, I got some response.

00:06:17.000 They're like, oh, no, where are you going?

00:06:18.000 Kind of thing.

00:06:19.000 So, I mean, some people were caring for it at the time.

00:06:22.000 Did you let them know, hey, I have a podcast?

00:06:25.000 You could see them all, all these episodes would be archived.

00:06:27.000 Yeah, I kind of always let them know that.

00:06:29.000 You know, I've done 6,200 something interviews since 2003 on my various shows.

00:06:35.000 So I always try to remind people to go check the archives if they want for the full dose of that stuff.

00:06:41.000 Before we get into any of these subjects, like how did you get into this?

00:06:46.000 Well, you know, in the 90s, I was, you know, when I was younger, I was much more of like a New World Order truther type.

00:06:53.000 And, but then I basically dropped all that.

00:06:57.000 I grew out of that.

00:06:58.000 How do you define New World Order truther type?

00:07:01.000 Okay, well, I mean, the New World Order conspiracy was that American foreign policy ultimately is about building a one world federal government under the United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States.

00:07:11.000 The John Birch Society sort of idea of how.

00:07:14.000 And I.

00:07:16.000 I really liked those guys.

00:07:18.000 And I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton and even into the beginning of W. Bush.

00:07:23.000 But then I finally realized with the way that the Iraq War was prosecuted that this is not about building up the UN Security Council.

00:07:31.000 We got the National Security Council and Cheney and his neocons, and they have their own separate policy that just disproves that sort of New World Order theory.

00:07:42.000 And in fact, so what H.W. Bush meant by that was just the era of the American empire with no one to stop us this time.

00:07:49.000 It was never to build up the UN as the world government.

00:07:52.000 It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government.

00:07:55.000 And of course, they've been failing and flailing at trying to establish that ever since.

00:08:00.000 Yeah.

00:08:02.000 So the conspiracy was that the United Nations would be the government of the entire earth.

00:08:10.000 And that all other governments would somehow or another give up their power to the United Nations.

00:08:10.000 Right.

00:08:15.000 For what reason?

00:08:18.000 Because they're all in on it together in secret, whatever.

00:08:20.000 And that's the point it ain't right.

00:08:22.000 It's not true.

00:08:23.000 Well, my question would be like Too many people would have to, exactly.

00:08:26.000 Too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have.

00:08:28.000 Exactly.

00:08:28.000 To somebody else.

00:08:30.000 And they don't have to.

00:08:31.000 Money.

00:08:32.000 That's the other thing.

00:08:32.000 Yeah.

00:08:33.000 I mean, as soon as you lose power, then you lose access to insane amounts of wealth.

00:08:37.000 Yeah.

00:08:37.000 So we don't want, you know, obviously it's the ultimate nightmare would be that you would have some kind of one world government and then some kind of totalitarian regime take power with a monopoly on nukes and a monopoly on police power.

00:08:51.000 And, you know, but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now.

00:08:54.000 I mean, that's just not going to happen anytime soon at all.

00:08:56.000 That's not what it's going to be.

00:08:57.000 You don't think there's any push towards.

00:09:00.000 Centralizing things in that regard.

00:09:01.000 Like, wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?

00:09:11.000 Well, look, so yes, there's always the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can.

00:09:18.000 At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America.

00:09:24.000 But there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things.

00:09:30.000 It's all about coercing and cajoling.

00:09:32.000 Governments to go along.

00:09:34.000 And which goes to show, I mean, this is the whole thing about when they talk about, you know, what H.W. Bush meant when he talked about the New World Order is the same thing that Joe Biden meant when he would say the liberal rules based international order of just doing what America says, right?

00:09:48.000 That's what it is.

00:09:50.000 You know, it's a pseudo empire.

00:09:51.000 It's not exactly the same kind of empires and, you know, colonialism that we've had in the past, but it's sort of a neo colonialism where if we can overthrow your government with some money, Then we'll do that.

00:10:03.000 A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that.

00:10:06.000 And if we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we think so.

00:10:11.000 And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, you know, of various degrees.

00:10:15.000 But this is a reference to right after the first Gulf War.

00:10:19.000 Paul Wolfowitz, at that time, was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.

00:10:23.000 And him and a couple other neocons, Skuda Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, they wrote up this document called the Defense Planning Guidance.

00:10:30.000 And it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the.

00:10:33.000 Post Cold War era and the post First Iraq War, Gulf War era.

00:10:39.000 And what it said was, we're going to be the most dominant power on every continent anywhere in the world, and we're not even going to tolerate any other nation or alliance or group of nations anywhere to try to join together to balance against us.

00:10:54.000 We will be dominant everywhere and we'll never let anyone get that far ahead, or at least we're going to try to construct an order where our power is essentially permanent and they don't even try it.

00:11:04.000 And so That's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in the Middle East, expanding our footprint into Eastern Europe, and of course, you know, working hard at least on building their alliances or tightening them and arming their alliances in Eastern Asia.

00:11:19.000 And it's, you know, under the theory that if it's not us, it'll be somebody else and it'll be so much worse, so we have to stay and dominate everything forever.

00:11:27.000 But of course, you can look at the debt and just see, well, we can't afford it, so I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep doing this.

00:11:33.000 Right.

00:11:34.000 And if you look at Wolfowitz, if you see, pull up an image of Paul Wolfowitz.

00:11:38.000 He looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

00:11:45.000 Right.

00:11:46.000 And by the way, they did rewrite it because it was a scandal.

00:11:49.000 It was leaked to the New York Times.

00:11:50.000 And so they went back and rewrote it.

00:11:51.000 And they just said, well, we'll bring our friends, you know, from the international institutions along to.

00:11:57.000 That picture right there where your cursor is, right below, right there.

00:11:59.000 No, to the right of that.

00:12:01.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:12:01.000 That one.

00:12:02.000 That looks like, that completely looks like the type of guy that would do something like that.

00:12:02.000 Look at that.

00:12:07.000 So listen, there's a book about the neoconservatives by Jacob Hilbrun called They Knew They Were Right, which is, of course, right?

00:12:14.000 Yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing, really, you know?

00:12:18.000 That's hilarious.

00:12:19.000 Let me try this.

00:12:20.000 It'll fit right on my little head.

00:12:20.000 Yeah.

00:12:22.000 Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up and down. 0.96

00:12:27.000 So, this was one of the things that when Coleman Hughes and our buddy Dave Smith got into it with was about whether you remember when they brought up this seven countries thing that, you know, and he was saying that there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it. 0.97

00:12:50.000 He was told that we were going to go into seven countries.

00:12:54.000 But.

00:12:55.000 You know, I was talking to Dave about this the other day.

00:12:57.000 He's like, if you just look at the fact that we did everything on that list except Iran, every single one of them took place except Iran.

00:13:09.000 Like, he's like, I really want to go and do that debate again, and I can't get Coleman to sit down with me.

00:13:13.000 Yeah.

00:13:14.000 You know, yes.

00:13:15.000 For people who are interested in this subject, you know, long term, there's no mystery about the connection between the neoconservatives' doctrines and then the activities that the W administration engaged in.

00:13:28.000 Yeah.

00:13:28.000 You know, subsequent.

00:13:29.000 I mean, what happened was you have, you know, Andrew Coburn, the great journalist Andrew Coburn, says that the neoconservatives are a cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex.

00:13:39.000 The fighter bomber salesmen needed eggheads to justify their policies.

00:13:44.000 And the neoconservatives wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony, and so took all the military industrial complex money to build their think tanks, to create their consensus, to build their policy.

00:13:56.000 You know, their own kind of thousand little council on foreign relations is to.

00:14:01.000 Get what they want.

00:14:02.000 And then when, you know, the seven countries thing is So, what we're talking about, just to clarify, is Wesley Clark was given well, he was on some television show.

00:14:12.000 I forget what the show was.

00:14:13.000 Do you remember him?

00:14:14.000 One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now.

00:14:14.000 There's two different statements.

00:14:17.000 That's right.

00:14:18.000 Democracy Now.

00:14:18.000 And basically, what he's talking about is, you know, he says that a general or I'm sorry, a military officer of some rank told then retired but still with access, former general Wesley Clark, who had been the supreme ally commander of NATO forces in Europe under Bill Clinton, did the Kosovo War.

00:14:34.000 So, very prominent four star general.

00:14:35.000 And he said, the way he told the story was, he told him, hey, you know, they're planning for a war with Iraq.

00:14:42.000 And he said, Iraq, why?

00:14:43.000 And the guy said, I don't know.

00:14:45.000 And then the second part of the story was, he came back a week later or something, and the same guy said, there's this memo that has the seven countries, and they say they want to take them all in five years.

00:14:55.000 So, they, meaning the office of the Secretary of Defense, so that's Donald Rumsfeld, who's not a neoconservative, he's his own separate thing here, he's the Secretary of Defense.

00:15:05.000 But all of his guys, all of his most important guys, are neoconservatives.

00:15:08.000 So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz.

00:15:11.000 The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is Stephen Cambone.

00:15:15.000 The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is Douglas Fyfe.

00:15:18.000 And then under him is Abram Schulzky and Bill Ludi and all of these guys, Michael Rubin and others, who are all working on this project to get us into Iraq.

00:15:28.000 And this is the neoconservative network of power.

00:15:30.000 You got Scooter Libby and David Wormser would travel around from state to defense to the Vice President's office.

00:15:37.000 But you see Scooter Libby and John Hanna in the Vice President's office.

00:15:39.000 The vice president's office.

00:15:41.000 You got Zalmia Khalilzad and Elliot Abrams on the National Security Council, Robert Joseph and Stephen Hadley and Eric Edelman.

00:15:50.000 All of these guys were already the network of guys who agreed with this policy going back through the 1990s.

00:15:57.000 It was what they had founded the Project for a New American Century on.

00:16:01.000 And so what they're saying is we should not tolerate any.

00:16:04.000 And remember the time, this was the stated doctrine.

00:16:08.000 We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports terrorism. 0.90

00:16:12.000 And supports terrorism can mean anything. 0.93

00:16:14.000 Right, like Abu Nidal died in Iraq before the war even started and was a washed up old terrorist from a previous day. 0.84

00:16:22.000 But, like, that's good enough. 0.85

00:16:23.000 Got Mujahideen-e-call commie terrorists who've worked for us ever since. 0.72

00:16:26.000 But at that time, it was a good enough excuse to invade Iraq.

00:16:29.000 They would invoke that. 0.85

00:16:30.000 And so, they made up that doctrine.

00:16:33.000 The Mujahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. 0.64

00:16:36.000 Well, this is a particular sect of Mujahideen kooks that were Iranian communist cultists who had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein and then were. 0.85

00:16:47.000 You know, he supported them. 0.87

00:16:48.000 They had nothing to do with anti American terrorism at that time, except, you know, I guess committing it when they had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution. 0.56

00:16:59.000 But by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them, and they've worked for American Israel ever since then.

00:17:06.000 They have a base in Albania now.

00:17:08.000 But they were, in other words, though, this wasn't Al Qaeda.

00:17:11.000 This was not any real excuse.

00:17:12.000 They would just invoke the doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off this list of all of these governments that they didn't like.

00:17:20.000 Coincidentally and incidentally, and very importantly, of course, is this was really in many cases Israel's list of enemies.

00:17:28.000 Where if it was, say, Colin Powell, which is what people thought they were voting for in the year 2000, by the way, well, I don't know about this W. Bush, but at least Colin Powell will be up there.

00:17:36.000 We can trust him.

00:17:37.000 They all said if it had been up to him, we would have done a two state solution in Palestine and solved that issue.

00:17:44.000 And then we would have had probably the most limited of wars against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

00:17:49.000 And that would have been it.

00:17:50.000 The rest of it would have been police andor special forces action. 0.63

00:17:53.000 There would have been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war, and he's responsible for that.

00:17:57.000 But that was not his policy.

00:17:59.000 That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative set.

00:18:04.000 And it's really, as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the Clean Break Doctrine, which David Wormser and Richard Pearl, oh, I neglected to mention Richard Pearl and his friends on the Defense Policy Board, but Pearl and David Wormser had written up this policy paper called A Clean Break in 1996, and they wrote it for Netanyahu when he was first prime minister the first time back then. 0.72

00:18:26.000 And what it said was instead of going along with the Oslo peace process and making a deal with the Palestinians, we should just forget all that and just we'll have peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors. 0.83

00:18:39.000 And so, but the problem, of course, is we, and of course, meaning continue to devour Palestine, what's left, the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. 0.82

00:18:50.000 But the problem is we have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is backed by Iran by way of Syria. 0.54

00:18:59.000 So, if you just picture the Middle East, you know, if you want, you can throw up a map and just kind of show there's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran through Syria and to Hezbollah, this Shiite militia in southern Lebanon. 0.53

00:19:15.000 Now, Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power. 1.00

00:19:20.000 But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives. 1.00

00:19:24.000 They're as stupid as they are, arrogant and certain in their policy. 1.00

00:19:28.000 And they believed in this harebrained scheme, essentially, that the Jordanians and the Turks. 1.00

00:19:32.000 Would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein less Iraq. 0.75

00:19:36.000 And that, even though it's a super majority Shiite Arab country, those Shiites, they just love being told what to do by either their original plan was the Hashemite king, the cousin of the king of Jordan. 0.95

00:19:48.000 And then they threw that out, and it was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first place, an Iraqi exile. 0.85

00:19:55.000 You might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.

00:20:00.000 They said, well, we'll just make him the guy instead, which ended up not happening.

00:20:04.000 But that was their plan. 0.92

00:20:05.000 And they said, the new Shiite dominated Iraq. 0.91

00:20:10.000 Will then, the religious leaders in Iraq will then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel instead. 0.79

00:20:18.000 And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil pipeline to Haifa, Israel. 0.58

00:20:24.000 And they were sold this bill of goods and they really believed it.

00:20:26.000 And so, and you can find this on my website, scotthorton.org.

00:20:29.000 I have a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.

00:20:32.000 And then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States, a balance of power strategy for the Levant.

00:20:37.000 They're both by David Wormser, signed off on by Richard Pearl.

00:20:40.000 And then they wrote a book where Wormser wrote the book and Richard Pearl wrote the foreword.

00:20:44.000 It's called Tyranny's Ally America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein.

00:20:48.000 Get that? 0.62

00:20:49.000 America's the ally of Saddam just because we won't launch a war to regime change. 0.80

00:20:53.000 And they're right in the title. 0.79

00:20:55.000 And then based on the same harebrained scheme.

00:20:57.000 And what's funny about this is this guy, David Wormser, now tries to defend himself.

00:21:01.000 And he did an interview on a podcast not too long ago with this born again Christian about September 11th and stuff. 0.55

00:21:08.000 But he talked about this and he's like, yeah, no, that's still right. 1.00

00:21:11.000 They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do, those Shiites. 0.84

00:21:14.000 They just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the Prophet. 0.99

00:21:19.000 But if that was true, as Dave Smith pointed out, well, then how come you can't just call the king of Jordan right now and ask him to ask the Ayatollah to knock it off? 0.88

00:21:30.000 Call him and have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. 0.76

00:21:35.000 Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time? 0.89

00:21:37.000 Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad before you can make this magic wish come true? 1.00

00:21:43.000 And the whole thing is completely stupid. 1.00

00:21:45.000 And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad, but. 1.00

00:21:51.000 One, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them. 0.61

00:21:55.000 And two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites, who are Sunnis in a whole separate line and are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan, who used to rule Iraq back 70 years ago or something, but have no purchase there whatsoever. 0.78

00:22:09.000 And of course, what happened, just real quick, what happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran. 0.75

00:22:14.000 They didn't empower Jordan and Turkey and America and Israel over the Iraqis, they just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before. 0.81

00:22:24.000 When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the Americans' face. 0.76

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00:23:33.000 Meet your match at ziprecruiter. 0.97

00:23:34.000 Do you think that that is because of total incompetence and stupidity, or do you think that it was a scam and that they were they kind of knew this was going to happen in the first place, but what they really wanted to do was sell a lot of weapons, sell a lot of war, make a ton of money? 0.97

00:23:53.000 I mean, the amount of money that was generated how much money did we spend on the Iraq war? 0.99

00:23:58.000 Oh, I mean, on Iraq alone, at least 5 or 7 trillion.

00:24:04.000 I think it was probably 10 trillion for the whole terror war. 0.50

00:24:06.000 Let's stop and think about that.

00:24:07.000 Yeah.

00:24:07.000 Five or 10 trillion.

00:24:09.000 Let's just say five.

00:24:10.000 Let's be nice.

00:24:11.000 Where's that money going?

00:24:11.000 Yeah.

00:24:13.000 How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that?

00:24:16.000 How many defense contractors are involved in lobbyists, policy, influencing change, influencing certain actions?

00:24:25.000 And why would they do that?

00:24:26.000 Why would they do that?

00:24:27.000 Why would they push a harebrained scream? 1.00

00:24:28.000 Is it because of stupidity or is it because they don't give a fuck what the excuse is? 1.00

00:24:34.000 Let's get the party started. 1.00

00:24:35.000 I think.

00:24:36.000 Let's get some missiles.

00:24:37.000 Let's get some new planes.

00:24:38.000 Yeah. 0.91

00:24:39.000 Boom.

00:24:39.000 Okay.

00:24:40.000 Boom.

00:24:41.000 But okay, so we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced Trump this would be easy, and then it wasn't.

00:24:47.000 I think that's the same thing here. 0.56

00:24:48.000 Iraq was supposed to be easy, and it was easy after all, right? 0.90

00:24:50.000 You send the Marines to take Baghdad, they could take it. 0.79

00:24:53.000 The 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines were done regime changing the place in, what, five weeks?

00:25:00.000 But then it was a matter of occupying the place and the whole thing devolving into civil war and all that.

00:25:05.000 And I think, well, I'll put it to you like this in the clean break, we might be coping with crumbling states, but it.

00:25:12.000 Might even, yeah.

00:25:13.000 I think it's in coping with crumbling states, which is the same thing.

00:25:16.000 It's, are we back?

00:25:18.000 Okay, sorry about that. 0.98

00:25:19.000 We had that stupid glitch again. 0.95

00:25:21.000 Yeah, this is my. 0.99

00:25:22.000 Did we get a new computer?

00:25:23.000 I've done everything, even, yeah, I've talked to the company, they don't know what's going on. 1.00

00:25:28.000 Motherfuckers, firmware, yeah. 0.99

00:25:31.000 Anyway, I'm sorry. 0.99

00:25:32.000 Let me, uh, can I ask you?

00:25:34.000 Yeah, sure. 0.98

00:25:34.000 So, on the stupidity or the plan, I think, look, plan A is it'll be fine, and then plan B is well, at least we can make some money. 0.98

00:25:43.000 And push this thing on and let both sides fight and weaken each other and these kinds of attitudes for sure. 0.95

00:25:49.000 Like, did they genuinely think that this plan would work or was this plan just a feasible excuse to talk them into getting the party started?

00:25:49.000 But that's the point.

00:26:00.000 I have one good argument in your favor there for sure, which would be Senator Joe Biden at the time insisted that we break Iraq into three. 0.81

00:26:09.000 Our greatest president? 0.67

00:26:10.000 Yeah.

00:26:12.000 Right there with the worst.

00:26:14.000 That.

00:26:15.000 That we draw these lines and essentially enforce ethnic cleansing or sectarian cleansing and create three sort of mini states within Iraq.

00:26:23.000 And, you know, Antony Blinken was his right hand man then. 0.62

00:26:26.000 And I mean, that's who these guys are, is, you know, very, very much Israel first, Israel instead types.

00:26:36.000 There is something before the clean break called the Oded Yanan plan from, I believe, 1981, which is a real riot to read. 0.75

00:26:44.000 It's this Israeli strategist.

00:26:47.000 And the premise of the thing is that the Soviet Union is certain to conquer the entire planet. 0.82

00:26:52.000 Talk about one world government. 0.64

00:26:52.000 We're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow. 0.64

00:26:55.000 And poor little Israel is going to be all alone out here. 0.97

00:26:58.000 So we have no choice but to smash every near Arab state into as many warring tribal pieces as we possibly can to weaken all of them relative to us as this desperate strategy. 0.98

00:27:09.000 And of course, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the end of the decade. 0.97

00:27:13.000 But that was the premise for the thing.

00:27:14.000 And there's, oh, and here's what I was going to say before the glitch was, There is a statement in, I think it's in Coping with Crumbling States, where he kind of says, Yeah, you know, these states are pretty artificial.

00:27:26.000 And without, you know, the Baathist construct in Iraq and Syria, you would have these smaller tribal based type units. 0.71

00:27:33.000 So then, you know, in other words, if you can't have a completely compliant sock puppet there, might as well make them fight and destroy their countries. 0.67

00:27:44.000 And that certainly happened in the case of Iraq, certainly happened in the case of Syria under Obama as well, where they just said, look, if we can't get the Al Qaeda guys to sack Damascus and get rid of Assad, at least we can just destroy the place. 0.58

00:27:55.000 Do you think there's a parallel in when we first went into Iraq, like Desert Storm? 0.74

00:28:02.000 It was very easy.

00:28:03.000 Right, relatively.

00:28:06.000 Minimum loss of American lives.

00:28:09.000 And I think everybody got a little cocky.

00:28:12.000 Oh, yeah.

00:28:12.000 That absolutely was part of that.

00:28:13.000 Just like what we just saw with Venezuela.

00:28:15.000 That's what I was going to say. 0.99

00:28:15.000 It was so easy. 0.99

00:28:16.000 That's exactly what I was going to say.

00:28:17.000 I mean, people asked me right after Venezuela, so what do you think this means for Iran?

00:28:20.000 And I was like, bad news.

00:28:22.000 Right?

00:28:23.000 Like, nobody thinks we're going to go in there and kidnap the Ayatollah. 0.99

00:28:26.000 But if you can put eyeballs on them, you can put a bomb on them. 0.99

00:28:28.000 Well, they killed them. 1.00

00:28:29.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:28:29.000 That's all you got to do. 0.96

00:28:30.000 And that didn't even help.

00:28:32.000 Of course not.

00:28:32.000 It's like, yeah.

00:28:33.000 Yeah.

00:28:34.000 Is it true that whenever they've been negotiating with someone, Israel kills them?

00:28:39.000 I think that happened at least a couple of times early in the war, yeah.

00:28:42.000 I mean, that was what they said.

00:28:43.000 In fact, I forget if it was Vance or Trump who said, Well, we can't say, I think it was Trump who said, We can't say who we're negotiating with because they'll get killed. 0.62

00:28:51.000 And like, you're supposed to think that what like hardliners in Iran will kill them for trying to negotiate, but no, this is the Israelis will kill them, you know? 0.90

00:29:00.000 That is wild. 0.98

00:29:01.000 Yeah.

00:29:01.000 That's wild.

00:29:03.000 It's wild that it's true.

00:29:05.000 One of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran, and we rarely talked about, is Ukraine.

00:29:14.000 It's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness.

00:29:19.000 It's like they now just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing.

00:29:24.000 And the Ukraine thing is fascinating too because it was one of the few wars that I saw leftist support.

00:29:31.000 It was very interesting.

00:29:32.000 It was like kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from their profiles.

00:29:38.000 Then it was Ukraine flags.

00:29:40.000 Metzger had a joke about that.

00:29:42.000 Did he?

00:29:43.000 He starts out like, hey, invading Ukraine is bad.

00:29:48.000 Can't we all agree on that?

00:29:50.000 He really gives them, he leans on, can't we all agree that it's bad?

00:29:53.000 And he's like, but it wasn't a cure for COVID.

00:29:57.000 You got to admit.

00:29:59.000 And it was.

00:30:00.000 They just switched from night to day on that.

00:30:02.000 And then, yeah, the other thing, and look, a big part of that is Putin is a great stand in for Trump.

00:30:07.000 If you're an angry liberal, something, you got to be angry at something. 0.80

00:30:11.000 He represents now we're the right common turn, and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force. 0.74

00:30:18.000 And so, like, if not the Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean, and they're anti right, everything that the Russians are the right, not the Ukrainians are the left, but whatever. 0.67

00:30:28.000 And Russia is obviously the much larger country and the one that invaded that crossed the border first here, and and and they are the aggressor in the war.

00:30:38.000 So, it's as far as the narrative goes.

00:30:42.000 It's easy to justify sticking up for those, you know, plucky defenders, which is, you know, I was actually surprised, but I shouldn't have been, right, when I went to Oxford and lost that debate.

00:30:53.000 Was that who was, it wasn't, not that they were leftists, but they're liberals, you know, or progressive type, you know, college kids.

00:30:59.000 And they're just totally on the side of Ukraine.

00:31:02.000 And in fact, the question of the debate was this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. 0.80

00:31:10.000 And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world.

00:31:12.000 That's not even debatable. 0.71

00:31:14.000 They've got H bombs. 0.93

00:31:15.000 7,000 of them.

00:31:17.000 We're not having a war with Russia.

00:31:19.000 I don't even know what you're talking about.

00:31:20.000 And then I should have made my case better because they did not like me or my case at all.

00:31:25.000 They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that.

00:31:30.000 That they think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbass, which is just absurd.

00:31:37.000 But I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough.

00:31:40.000 I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place, I would barely have to make my case.

00:31:43.000 I just thought I'll just make an H bomb joke and that'll be the end of that.

00:31:46.000 You know, I said, Haven't you ever seen Threads?

00:31:48.000 Have you ever seen Threads?

00:31:49.000 It's like the British version of The Day After, where Margaret Thatcher gets them nuked in a movie.

00:31:54.000 No, it's a movie.

00:31:55.000 Yeah, remember The Day After from 1933 with Steve Gutenberg?

00:31:57.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:31:58.000 So this is the Russians' version from the same time frame. 0.99

00:32:00.000 Oh. 0.63

00:32:01.000 And, um, And I was like, haven't y'all seen threads?

00:32:04.000 Which, of course, they haven't.

00:32:05.000 They're a bunch of little kids.

00:32:06.000 Well, they probably think it's that social media app.

00:32:08.000 Yeah, right.

00:32:09.000 The Instagram one?

00:32:10.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:32:12.000 We should talk about how this whole thing got started in Ukraine.

00:32:17.000 Because most Americans don't even realize that the United States kind of overthrew the government there.

00:32:23.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:32:24.000 Twice in 10 years.

00:32:25.000 Yeah. 0.82

00:32:26.000 In the Orange Revolution of 2004 and in 2014.

00:32:31.000 And in fact, George Soros bragged that he had really influenced the vote.

00:32:35.000 Toward the pro Russian candidate in 1994.

00:32:39.000 You know, back 10 years before that, he bragged about that in an interview with the New Yorker, Connie Brooke, in the New Yorker magazine.

00:32:48.000 He said, like real estate investment trusts, I make it happen with my investments, you know?

00:32:55.000 And yeah.

00:32:57.000 And look, I mean, Russia and Ukraine have a long and difficult history, but the long and the short of it for our purposes is that they wanted out at the end of the Soviet Union.

00:33:08.000 And in fact, Even embarrassingly for the Republicans, George Bush Sr. and his government even intended the USSR to stay together.

00:33:17.000 They wanted not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to Belarus and Ukraine and at least some of the stands.

00:33:25.000 But what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet Union.

00:33:30.000 The most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it.

00:33:34.000 And it was actually in the aftermath of a hard line commie coup in August of 1991, which failed. 0.74

00:33:40.000 And so it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day.

00:33:42.000 But then ended up doing his own coup basically and just destroying what was left of the USSR and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out.

00:33:51.000 So, why did the United States get involved in Ukraine and why did they stage a coup?

00:33:57.000 Yeah, well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right?

00:34:01.000 And so, back to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and they talked about this in Rebuilding America's Defenses, the PNAC strategy document from the 1990s, 1998, I guess.

00:34:12.000 And I believe in In the defense plan and guidance that he wrote in 1992, Wolfowitz, that we got to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.

00:34:21.000 And this is the debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not.

00:34:27.000 And in fact, in the 90s, there were some people who opposed expansion altogether.

00:34:31.000 But then there was another school of thought that just said, well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in.

00:34:35.000 But then they never did.

00:34:37.000 And so they ended up expanding the military alliance up to Russia's border in a threatening manner and in a way that did not include them at all.

00:34:45.000 And they had alternatives.

00:34:46.000 Like the Partnership for Peace, and before that, what we still have the OSCE, the Organization for Security or, yeah, Security and Cooperation in Europe, where those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO, where NATO would be more political.

00:35:00.000 This is what James Baker and under H.W. Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians.

00:35:07.000 So we're going to make NATO a political organization, and we're going to have, as a security organization, it'll be the OSCE or the PFP, which will include you guys, and which was not true.

00:35:19.000 They're basically, you know, never.

00:35:21.000 Really meant to live up to those promises.

00:35:23.000 So, it's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America lost the Cold War from all the spending in the 1980s, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe, and then they started moving into the Caribbean, and then they started overthrowing the government in Canada when they voted wrong. 0.56

00:35:40.000 And this is Ukraine, Russia's Canada, right?

00:35:43.000 Kazakhstan's their Mexico, Ukraine's their Canada.

00:35:46.000 It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but same difference here.

00:35:53.000 That narrative gets lost here.

00:35:55.000 Yes, it does.

00:35:55.000 But it's weird because it's so obvious when you lay it out like that and when you look at the agreement that was made at the fall of the Soviet Union that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of Russia.

00:36:05.000 Russia and yet they consistently did that And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second because people dispute that and say it's not true, but it is true.

00:36:12.000 In fact, H.W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in Malta in December of 1989 that if you let the Eastern European Warsaw Pact States go, not the Soviet republics, but the Warsaw Pact states.

00:36:27.000 If you let them go, we promise not to take advantage.

00:36:30.000 Like, full stop.

00:36:32.000 100%.

00:36:32.000 That's it.

00:36:33.000 And then from there, and I cover all this in my book, Provoked.

00:36:37.000 And it's even overkill on the research because I wasn't sure where to stop.

00:36:42.000 So it's all there for you.

00:36:43.000 Where it wasn't just on February the 9th, it was all of these meetings over the course of months where the Americans, the British, and especially the Germans, but with the Americans standing right there in many cases to affirm to the Russians.

00:36:57.000 The Soviets and then the Russians over and over again that we are not coming, we are not going to integrate Poland, we're not going to integrate Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, which hadn't split apart yet.

00:37:08.000 Um, and we have no intention of doing that. 0.88

00:37:11.000 And that was, you know, came from Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmut Kohl, the chancellor, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major, the prime ministers of England, and um, Douglas Hurd, their foreign minister, and um.

00:37:27.000 Even Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, and along with George Bush's government, over and over again promised them that we're not going to do this.

00:37:36.000 And then they just went ahead anyway.

00:37:38.000 And the Clintons, you know, went along with it too.

00:37:41.000 And in fact, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it.

00:37:49.000 And by the way, so when all of the anybody in that era, whenever they on America's side or on the West side, whenever they opposed this, It was always for one reason.

00:38:01.000 There was no variety of reasons.

00:38:03.000 There's always one reason. 0.89

00:38:04.000 This is an unnecessary provocation against the Russians.

00:38:07.000 These are our friends who just overthrew the communists for us.

00:38:11.000 So why would we pick a fight with them?

00:38:14.000 We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the West, into Europe, into everything.

00:38:14.000 Why would we disrespect them?

00:38:19.000 And this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic.

00:38:21.000 That was the one and only reason.

00:38:24.000 And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who had.

00:38:30.000 Coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s and had been ambassador to Moscow.

00:38:38.000 And he was the one who said, We got to contain communism.

00:38:40.000 Well, now he's saying we should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't do anything.

00:38:45.000 And he said, in fact, in an interview in the New York Times in 1998, Kennan said, and he was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so called foreign policy great beers. 0.79

00:38:54.000 And he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he goes, I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen here, okay?

00:38:59.000 We're going to expand.

00:39:00.000 NATO right up close to Russia, and we're going to get a negative reaction from the Russians. 0.91

00:39:05.000 And then, as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us that'll never happen, don't worry about it, will then say, Aha, see, that's how the Russians are. 0.67

00:39:14.000 That's why we have to do this, which is exactly what they say now. 0.95

00:39:18.000 See, the Russians are coming. 0.90

00:39:19.000 That's why we need NATO more than ever before. 0.89

00:39:21.000 Ever before, when it was building up NATO more than ever before, was what created this antagonistic relationship in the first place.

00:39:28.000 And then, you know, and I should specify I am from Austin, Texas.

00:39:33.000 I don't have any connection to Russia whatsoever.

00:39:35.000 I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever.

00:39:37.000 It has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever.

00:39:40.000 This is like, whatever.

00:39:42.000 What can I say? 0.64

00:39:42.000 I reluctantly admit that, and I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for war, but I'm saying that this is true, essentially, that in his declaration of war, when Putin said that. 0.64

00:39:54.000 Basically, we tried independence.

00:39:55.000 We tried letting Ukraine be an independent country.

00:39:58.000 But it turns out that, no, it just became a colony of the United States of America. 0.55

00:40:01.000 It's totally controlled by America.

00:40:04.000 But we're just not going to stand for that. 0.75

00:40:07.000 So we're going to intervene.

00:40:08.000 We're going to do what we have to do, at least to mitigate that.

00:40:11.000 If America is still going to control Kiev, then at the very least, we're going to control the Donbass and the southeastern coast here.

00:40:18.000 And so I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm saying that was essentially true that America had. 0.69

00:40:25.000 You know, almost like it was a British colony, just had total sock puppets in charge of that country. 0.61

00:40:30.000 In fact, there's a clip that I quote extensively.

00:40:32.000 It's one of the only block quotes in my book because I got rid of almost all of them for space.

00:40:36.000 But I think I have the block quote of Victoria Nuland testifying. 0.72

00:40:39.000 That's Robert Kagan's wife, very important neoconservative, worked in Dick Cheney's office in the W. Bush years and everything, helped, you know, cause all this problem.

00:40:48.000 And she goes on and on describing the level of what can you call the infiltration, essentially, of the Ukrainian government by the United States.

00:40:57.000 She says, We have our people, State Department people, and who are working at every level of the Ukrainian government, throughout their police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch, throughout, you know, and out in the provinces and everywhere.

00:41:13.000 We're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country.

00:41:17.000 And, you know, the WikiLeaks are very beneficial on this story because they show where the Americans understand clearly.

00:41:24.000 By the Americans, I mean Washington, the State Department, whatever, these guys, that.

00:41:30.000 They know good and well that Ukraine is deeply divided, especially politically, on questions like whether they should join the NATO alliance or whether they'd rather be closer to Russia or try to split the difference and stay out of it or anything like that.

00:41:44.000 And so they say, well, so we just have to push then.

00:41:46.000 We'll just have to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda campaigns and we'll just have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes.

00:41:53.000 And essentially, it's America.

00:41:55.000 You know, the book is called, sorry, I keep mentioning the book, but it's How Washington Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.

00:42:03.000 I'm not blaming it on Kiev.

00:42:05.000 I'm blaming it on essentially Bush Sr. through Joe Biden that they, all of them, had such a ham handed Russia policy that it led to this.

00:42:14.000 It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day.

00:42:21.000 When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible.

00:42:28.000 Of course.

00:42:28.000 But no one gave any background.

00:42:31.000 No one really talked about and made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet Union or Russia rather took over Canada. 0.98

00:42:38.000 Right.

00:42:39.000 You know, or was proxying Canada.

00:42:41.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:42:42.000 Or if they went back at all, they would go, well, you know, this all started when Russia seized Crimea.

00:42:47.000 But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government and the so called Revolution of Dignity in February 2014.

00:42:56.000 And so then it's a complicated mess.

00:42:59.000 But Crimea happened after that.

00:43:01.000 But they just want to start history at places where it's the most convenient for them.

00:43:06.000 And there's also the control of Ukraine is also connected to resources, right?

00:43:13.000 I mean, there's immense amounts of minerals, natural gas.

00:43:17.000 There's trillions of dollars of that stuff there.

00:43:21.000 And this also connects Burisma to the Biden administration, right?

00:43:26.000 Yes.

00:43:27.000 So, like, I would not buy anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people, for our betterment, or anything like that.

00:43:41.000 Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interests, right?

00:43:45.000 Chevron wants that oil.

00:43:48.000 And Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have investments in those grains.

00:43:54.000 And so this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us.

00:43:58.000 You look at whatever benefit they have to our GNP or GDP is negligible, certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that.

00:44:06.000 These are all the free riders, these are the excuse makers for this kind of policy. 0.65

00:44:10.000 But essentially, I think what it really is is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible. 0.72

00:44:18.000 You know, like there's this really important Rand Corporation study that was published in 2019. 0.63

00:44:25.000 So, the Rand Corporation is a Pentagon sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara.

00:44:30.000 They put it in California so it would be somehow a little bit less political, a little insulated from East Coast stuff, and be able to come up with their thing.

00:44:37.000 But that's basically who they are.

00:44:38.000 So, of all the think tanks, they're like the most directly connected to the Pentagon itself.

00:44:42.000 And they came up with this thing.

00:44:43.000 It's called Extending Russia. 0.83

00:44:45.000 And by extending Russia, they mean overextending them. 0.87

00:44:49.000 In other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves. 0.75

00:44:53.000 Like during the Cold War.

00:44:54.000 Right, exactly.

00:44:54.000 So, cause small trouble for them in as many places as we can just to bog them down with expenses and commitments.

00:45:02.000 So, we want to, at that time, the pipeline wasn't complete yet.

00:45:06.000 So, we want to intervene with sanctions, whatever we can, to disrupt the Nord Stream pipeline.

00:45:10.000 They said maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again, which they actually did in 2020.

00:45:15.000 They had done it before in 2005 and 2001, failed all three times.

00:45:20.000 Which, if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right there, man. 0.56

00:45:24.000 You don't want to succeed in, especially a bloody, if it turned bloody, a coup in Belarus.

00:45:29.000 My God.

00:45:30.000 But anyway, then they said we could increase weapons to the jihadists in Syria.

00:45:37.000 We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan.

00:45:40.000 We could increase support for the Ukrainian military.

00:45:46.000 And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off balance.

00:45:53.000 To keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend, right?

00:45:57.000 But then all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers where they say, Don't listen to us.

00:46:04.000 If you do this, it'd be terrible.

00:46:05.000 Like if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just invade it immediately and station nuclear weapons there to make the point, right?

00:46:16.000 If we support the jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the Idlib province and sack Damascus, and then we'd have an Al Qaeda government in Damascus, which is, of course, exactly what happened at the end of 24.

00:46:26.000 They said we could increase support for what was then the ongoing civil war that had broken out after the revolution in 2014.

00:46:36.000 We could increase support for the Ukrainian side of that or the Kiev side of that war, but then that could provoke the Russians into a full scale invasion of the country, which would, of course, be terrible for Ukraine and terrible for the United States.

00:46:52.000 A massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international standing and prestige, and of course, Untold chaos for the people of Ukraine.

00:47:02.000 And so we better be real careful about pursuing these policies.

00:47:07.000 And then I swear, you look at how Biden ran things, and it was like he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers.

00:47:13.000 And they just went ahead and did all of these things.

00:47:13.000 Disclaimers.

00:47:16.000 And in fact, they were doing, they were messing around. 0.88

00:47:19.000 It was actually the last year Trump that they tried to overthrow Belarus.

00:47:23.000 So that was independent of Biden's wishes.

00:47:25.000 That was already going on.

00:47:27.000 And then they were messing around in Kazakhstan in January of 22, right on the eve of war, right when you might have hoped that the entire pressure in Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from breaking out.

00:47:42.000 What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin?

00:47:45.000 To try to prevent him from invading Ukraine as they're threatening to do.

00:47:48.000 And we're building up their forces in preparation for it.

00:47:51.000 And then when they do, they support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is the big one, right on Russia's southern border there, out of all the stands. 0.94

00:48:00.000 It's the most important one, which is just madness.

00:48:03.000 And it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to when it comes to that is just, you know, if we can't overthrow Putin, we're going to still weaken him, hem him in, surround him, agitate him, and force him to make commitments.

00:48:15.000 And of course, This is why the war's been going on for four years.

00:48:19.000 America could tell Kiev under Biden or under Trump that, look, you guys are just going to have to compromise here, obviously.

00:48:25.000 You've lost all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk and at least half of Zaprosia and Kherson.

00:48:33.000 And so just make a deal, figure it out.

00:48:35.000 And we're not supporting you anymore. 0.54

00:48:37.000 Remember, they said over and over again we want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

00:48:37.000 Instead, what do they say?

00:48:42.000 Russia might win the war.

00:48:43.000 But no, we promise they won't. 0.97

00:48:45.000 But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good.

00:48:48.000 And in fact, I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits and all these people would say, and maybe they still say this, we're getting such a good bang for our buck in Ukraine.

00:49:03.000 Because just think about it Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not.

00:49:10.000 So all we got to do is we just give them money and then they go fight.

00:49:13.000 And then sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian soldiers at all, hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed, hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed.

00:49:22.000 Horrifically maimed.

00:49:25.000 A major part of this country completely destroyed.

00:49:28.000 Huge segments of their population fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again. 1.00

00:49:36.000 Total destabilization of their culture and society in every way. 1.00

00:49:41.000 But you can tune into Fox News or, hell, the Democrats too, talking about, or maybe worse, that, oh, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck because we're killing Russians. 0.99

00:49:49.000 We're sending them home in body bags. 0.99

00:49:50.000 We're sending them home in coffins. 1.00

00:49:52.000 We're even killing their generals in the field. 0.99

00:49:55.000 But None of our guys are dying. 0.86

00:49:57.000 Hey, hey, hey. 0.99

00:49:59.000 As though the Ukrainians don't matter at all.

00:50:01.000 And that's the way they think of it. 0.97

00:50:02.000 This is inflicting costs on the Russians.

00:50:05.000 Joe Biden would say that over and over again.

00:50:06.000 It's almost like the underpants gnomes thing.

00:50:08.000 First, you steal the underpants, then question mark, question mark, question mark, and then profit.

00:50:12.000 Not really sure.

00:50:13.000 I don't know what that is.

00:50:14.000 Oh, in South Park, the poor, I think it's Butters, the underpants gnomes are stealing his underwear, and they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work.

00:50:21.000 And they don't really have it worked out what they're going to do with the underpants, but they're sure they're going to make a lot of money in the end.

00:50:26.000 And that's the same kind of thing here, where they skip the step about, Well, is this really weakening Vladimir Putin's regime, or maybe it's strengthening his regime?

00:50:36.000 Is it increasing American power and influence in the region, or in fact, we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves, and we've done more than you could have imagined to push Russia towards China and toward the rest of Eurasia?

00:50:52.000 Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization and to emphasize their turn to the East.

00:51:02.000 That seems to me to be a terrible mistake.

00:51:05.000 And I think part of it is part of the longer term Cold War with China, too.

00:51:10.000 And you hear them talk about this, Joe.

00:51:13.000 They'll say, you know, essentially Russia's friends with China.

00:51:17.000 So there's two things we can do there.

00:51:18.000 And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China.

00:51:24.000 Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that or he doesn't know how. 0.56

00:51:28.000 And then the other side was no, lure Russia into Eastern Europe, bog them down so they're no use to China, you know, weaken their power, inflict on them this strategic defeat in Ukraine so that then. 0.99

00:51:42.000 they won't be as useful to China in our Cold War with them or worse, which I think is stupid and didn't work. 0.97

00:51:48.000 I think that was the choice that Joe Biden made. 0.98

00:51:52.000 And I think it was totally wrong because it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China.

00:51:57.000 The Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened, well, not that new, about 12 years ago, that they opened to China and they keep adding to it. 0.80

00:52:05.000 So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want and the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got.

00:52:11.000 So, you know, they really don't need Europe. 0.96

00:52:14.000 Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.

00:52:25.000 And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this?

00:52:28.000 This was to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe?

00:52:33.000 In fact, more specifically, right, it was to make this break between, to solidify the break between Germany and Russia.

00:52:33.000 Yeah.

00:52:42.000 It's the previous German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

00:52:45.000 She had this project she called Eurasian Home.

00:52:48.000 And, And what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in Europe.

00:52:54.000 And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff, all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff.

00:52:59.000 They closed down all their nuclear in Germany.

00:53:01.000 And then the idea was don't worry, we're going to import all this clean burning CH4 from the Russians. 0.64

00:53:08.000 And then, but to the Americans, this is the worst thing that could happen an alliance or this strengthening, any part of any strengthening relationship or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians. 0.66

00:53:21.000 Because with. 0.69

00:53:23.000 You know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, and both of their at least potential military strength, that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep everybody else out. 0.83

00:53:35.000 And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there.

00:53:38.000 And, you know, there's here in Austin, there's that sort of corporate CIA, Stratfor, run by this guy, George Friedman.

00:53:46.000 What is it?

00:53:47.000 Stratfor, it stands for strategic forecasting.

00:53:50.000 They do dirty tricks.

00:53:51.000 Yeah, it's here in Austin.

00:53:52.000 Oh, no.

00:53:53.000 They do some dirty tricks, but I think they mostly like do like.

00:53:58.000 You know, pseudo CIA briefings for corporations and stuff, let them know what's going on in the world, that kind of thing, mostly.

00:54:04.000 Their emails got leaked on WikiLeaks.org years ago.

00:54:08.000 And, you know, they're involved, they're close with some of these color coded revolutionaries.

00:54:13.000 And anyway, I don't know them or anything, but their leader is a guy named George Friedman.

00:54:17.000 And I'll give him credit.

00:54:18.000 I know he opposed Iraq War II in 2003 because I heard him on the radio back then.

00:54:22.000 But, I mean, I'm not vouching for the guy as like a good guy or whatever, but just to say he's sort of like a realist school foreign policy analyst type.

00:54:31.000 Mm hmm.

00:54:32.000 Not too ideological or anything like that.

00:54:35.000 And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words primordial fear.

00:54:39.000 This is the primordial fear of American imperial policy planners is that you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russians.

00:54:49.000 And so anything that we can do to prevent that will do. 0.59

00:54:52.000 Now, I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at least the support of the United States.

00:54:58.000 Seymour Hirsch has it that it was American military guys who did it, which I think.

00:55:03.000 I don't know.

00:55:04.000 And then there's a whole cover story about this yacht, and then there's six different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it was used and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever.

00:55:14.000 And it's all meant to confuse.

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00:56:25.000 The bottom line is nobody wants to know, right?

00:56:28.000 Seymour Hirsch, what did he say happened?

00:56:30.000 He said that it was miners based out of Pensacola, Florida, meaning not pickaxe miners or children, but meaning.

00:56:40.000 Divers that go down and disable sea mines.

00:56:44.000 That was their expertise.

00:56:45.000 Those were the guys that they sent to do it.

00:56:47.000 And that was in, I think he did that in the London Review books or something like that.

00:56:51.000 Is that disputed?

00:56:52.000 Yeah.

00:56:53.000 And including by people who blame the Ukrainians and people who blame, I don't know, like Polish or I guess Polish groups or whatever.

00:57:04.000 They had all these different investigations that all led different directions.

00:57:07.000 I know Jeremy, I think Jeremy Scahill had one version of it.

00:57:11.000 And then James Bamford, who I really respect, he's the guy that wrote all the books about the National Security Agency over the years. 0.93

00:57:18.000 And he had it that it was the Ukrainians and they used robots to do it. 0.95

00:57:22.000 And he's sussed that out through documents and stuff and decided that that must have been what had happened.

00:57:27.000 And so I don't know.

00:57:29.000 There's six different versions of it.

00:57:31.000 And I'm not choosing which is the favorite here.

00:57:34.000 But I think it clearly was in America's interest.

00:57:37.000 And of course, Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland have both sort of cheekily said, we're not going to let this proceed.

00:57:42.000 And if they do, we will do whatever it takes to stop it.

00:57:46.000 And so, evidently, they did.

00:57:49.000 And you could see how they would consider that to be, you know, what they would be trying to prevent would be this strengthened relationship between Germany and Russia.

00:57:57.000 Where's the natural gas going now?

00:57:58.000 Is it just pouring right into the ocean?

00:58:00.000 Well, eventually they capped it, but I think it was the biggest release of methane into the atmosphere ever.

00:58:05.000 It was a huge thing.

00:58:06.000 It was a massive thing.

00:58:07.000 If you were a liberal, progressive, democrat, environmentalist type, that ought to be like the most offensive thing you ever heard of.

00:58:15.000 Yeah, it's way worse than cow burps.

00:58:17.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:18.000 Remember, they were worried about cow burps?

00:58:19.000 Yeah, it's centuries worth of cow burps.

00:58:21.000 Centuries worth.

00:58:23.000 Jesus.

00:58:24.000 So, the Kazakhstan thing, I never heard of.

00:58:27.000 I hadn't heard a peep about that.

00:58:28.000 I had no idea that we were meddling in Kazakhstan.

00:58:32.000 Yeah, it was one of those where, much like what just happened in Iran in January, where there's protest over some economic policy.

00:58:40.000 I think in that case, they had cut the gas ration or something like that.

00:58:45.000 And it's a country that's divided.

00:58:48.000 By ethnicity, those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever.

00:58:51.000 So, you have sort of the ruling caste and the people on the outs and whatever.

00:58:54.000 So, you had a big protest movement, and then all of a sudden, there's armed gangs of guys killing cops, seizing police stations, trying to seize airports, and this kind of thing.

00:59:05.000 And then what happened was the Russians invaded.

00:59:08.000 They sent regular troops across.

00:59:10.000 They were asked by the government there to come and intervene.

00:59:13.000 They sent troops, they crushed the insurrection.

00:59:15.000 And then it was funny because Antony Blinken said, Oh, there's a lesson when the Russians come, they don't ever want to leave.

00:59:21.000 And then the next day, they turned around and left. 0.69

00:59:23.000 And then they invaded Ukraine. 0.68

00:59:24.000 They haven't left there since.

00:59:27.000 So, who were these insurrectionists?

00:59:30.000 I don't know.

00:59:31.000 I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or something, you know?

00:59:38.000 I don't know. 1.00

00:59:38.000 Smurks. 1.00

00:59:40.000 Yeah, them too. 0.77

00:59:41.000 And so this whole thing was just what you were saying earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible, spend as much money as possible, cause as many problems in as many places as possible. 0.74

00:59:41.000 Yeah. 0.74

00:59:53.000 In fact, the same George Friedman from Stratford, I think it's in that same speech or maybe a different one where he says, Yeah, when Iran is doing a little bit better, you hit them.

01:00:05.000 When Russia's doing better, you hit them.

01:00:07.000 When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them.

01:00:10.000 You do whatever you can to always be effing with everybody all the time in order to, you know, that's how to press your advantage, which I think is totally just short sighted.

01:00:19.000 It's high time preference, you know, sort of government thinking, right?

01:00:22.000 That like, well, if we can get away with this now, we should without really thinking about the long term consequence.

01:00:28.000 In fact, that was one of the things that. failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up that I thought was crucial that is in my book is Strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton's guy who originally opposed NATO expansion and then later championed it in 2018 when it was the middle of the war, the Civil War, so called, with America supporting Kiev and the Russians supporting the so called rebels on the other side.

01:00:55.000 A New York Times reporter named Keith Gessen went and interviewed Strobe Talbot.

01:01:01.000 And It just kind of went without saying that, like, clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO expansion has sort of blown up and caused all these problems.

01:01:10.000 You know, what are we going to do?

01:01:11.000 And what do you think now, pal?

01:01:13.000 I forgot exactly what you phrase it, but it's sort of, you know, what do you have to say for yourself, Strobe?

01:01:17.000 And so Strobe Talbot says, well, listen, he goes, when you're in power, you have one job, and that is to pursue your nation's national interests.

01:01:28.000 And if you don't do that, well, then you won't be in power very long.

01:01:31.000 So that was what we had to do.

01:01:33.000 But then he says, now.

01:01:37.000 Maybe we should have had a higher, wiser conception of our national interest?

01:01:43.000 Maybe.

01:01:45.000 In other words, at the time, what they were thinking is we want Lockheed dollars and we want Polish votes for 1996, Illinois' crucial swing state, right?

01:01:53.000 So, or was, I don't know if it still is.

01:01:56.000 So, that's why we got to do this because it's in America's national interest that Bill Clinton get reelected and we all get to keep our jobs.

01:02:03.000 So, we're going to make these promises to these people and pursue this policy.

01:02:08.000 For our narrow interests as rulers of the empire.

01:02:13.000 But then, if he had had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interests, he might have thought, wow, are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century?

01:02:23.000 Maybe we shouldn't do that. 0.69

01:02:25.000 Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important than America continuing to get along with the Russians.

01:02:33.000 And again, when the communists are long gone, so whatever problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't.

01:02:40.000 Evangelical Marxism at the point of a rifle, right?

01:02:43.000 I mean, this is just whatever it is, we can deal with it. 0.98

01:02:47.000 And so, no, they chose the lower, dumber conception of America's national interest instead of the higher, wiser one. 0.98

01:02:53.000 And they blew it, you know? 0.99

01:02:55.000 Is there anyone that's ever made the argument to you, like where you've had these debates, where you have a utopian perspective on international relations and that this libertarian ideology of like staying out of people's business, staying out of what you'll do if you don't fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them stretched out? 0.88

01:03:18.000 They'll just amass more and more power and then they'll start to try to take over what was traditionally the Soviet Union, what was originally the Soviet Union. 0.67

01:03:27.000 Yeah, you know, it just so happens, right, that America never leaves anybody alone, so we just don't have a controlled experiment, right? 0.74

01:03:35.000 We're constantly provoking, and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction.

01:03:41.000 And it's just like when we talk about terrorism, again, I'm not in any way justifying it, but I'm just saying we have so much intervention preceding the terrorism, you have to be able to attribute that.

01:03:51.000 Yes.

01:03:52.000 So, how would things be otherwise? 0.75

01:03:53.000 For example, if H.W. Bush had just said, okay, well, we won the Cold War, Pat Buchanan's right, let's just come home, and had brought the empire home from Europe, then what would happen is the Germans would have reunified, and then they would have joined into a new European Union army with the British and the French and probably the Poles.

01:04:12.000 And then it would have been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller countries in their region, and hopefully strike a long term security partnership. 0.52

01:04:23.000 With the new red, white, and blue Republican Russians.

01:04:27.000 And, you know, if people want to say, but, and in fact, the other side in that debate at Oxford, Daniel Fried said, yeah, but it was Poland wanted to join our alliance. 0.76

01:04:35.000 It's not like we made them, they wanted to.

01:04:37.000 But the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia based on old things.

01:04:42.000 But the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence?

01:04:48.000 It's too far from here.

01:04:50.000 And it's something that we're no good at.

01:04:52.000 We only cause problems.

01:04:54.000 And something that the other European states who are all Western Christian capitalist democracies and friends of ours that they can all work together and solve on their own. 0.77

01:05:04.000 I mean, when Germany reunified, it's not like the commies were taken over. 0.63

01:05:08.000 It was the West that was dominant in the new Germany, right?

01:05:11.000 These are our pals.

01:05:13.000 There's no reason in the world that America should have had to have, well, for example, like a big part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power between America and Germany over who's going to be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. 0.91

01:05:28.000 We should just let the Germans have it. 0.81

01:05:30.000 I mean, Not have it and kill everybody or whatever, but God, it could hardly have been worse than what America helped to cause there by trying to compete with the Germans for dominance in a land that's quite literally 6,000 miles from here. 0.97

01:05:41.000 But it's the fear from the American side that if you let other countries consolidate power, if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keeping them spread out like we're doing with Russia, that they'll eventually get stronger and then they'll become a real problem. 0.94

01:05:56.000 And then you keep them weak, keep them distracted, keep them engaged in this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up. 0.51

01:06:05.000 And that keeps them down. 0.81

01:06:07.000 Well, it's like this. 0.63

01:06:09.000 When it was the Cold War against the commie Soviet Union, I was a kid, and I'm not an expert on all of that history. 0.86

01:06:16.000 I think there were real questions about the dangers of world communism at that time, where at least I'd be willing to hear you out. 0.85

01:06:23.000 But since the end of the Cold War, no.

01:06:27.000 There's just no justification for it.

01:06:29.000 Because, as Bill Hicks would say, right?

01:06:31.000 Like, just spin the globe, man.

01:06:32.000 There's no countries out there, right?

01:06:33.000 Every power in Europe is our friend and no threat to us and mean us no harm whatsoever.

01:06:38.000 There are no powers in Europe. 0.82

01:06:41.000 In Africa, that count at all except for Egypt, which is our friend.

01:06:44.000 India will be a power in 100 years from now.

01:06:48.000 China is a rising power, but we've been their friends for 50 years.

01:06:51.000 Even when they were still communists, Nixon went and made friends with them in the early 1970s.

01:06:57.000 And then the Soviet Union, yeah.

01:06:58.000 But aren't they constantly infiltrating our different universities and people? 0.91

01:07:05.000 I ain't endorsing that.

01:07:06.000 You can keep them out. 1.00

01:07:08.000 But Chinese infiltration is kind of crazy. 1.00

01:07:10.000 Like what they're doing in America. 1.00

01:07:11.000 It's like if you're saying they're our friends, you know, the mayor of. 0.99

01:07:14.000 Arcadia just got fucked up. 0.99

01:07:17.000 She was a communist spy. 1.00

01:07:18.000 She's a fucking mayor of a city in California. 1.00

01:07:21.000 I'm putting that on the FBI counterintelligence division. 1.00

01:07:24.000 That should have never been allowed to happen in the first place.

01:07:27.000 And no, I don't mean that they're totally benign.

01:07:30.000 But look, worst case scenario, China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates Taiwan.

01:07:38.000 That doesn't mean they're going to invade Korea.

01:07:40.000 It doesn't mean they're going to invade Japan or Australia or have the appetite to want to do that.

01:07:46.000 I think China's already a Pretty overextended empire, and it's very poor in many parts of it.

01:07:52.000 And they have something is it 14 or 15 neighbors that they got to deal with already?

01:07:58.000 You know, their greatest ambition is to build this, you know, what highway and fiber optics and whatever from Shanghai to Lisbon, right?

01:08:11.000 This, what do they call it? 0.99

01:08:12.000 Why am I forgetting the name of the damn thing? 0.98

01:08:16.000 The great new highway they're trying to build all the way across Eurasia. 0.98

01:08:22.000 They can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. 0.99

01:08:26.000 They got to cut through Tajikistan. 0.99

01:08:28.000 You know, these are wild lands. 0.99

01:08:29.000 They got to make deals the whole way across if they're going to do that.

01:08:34.000 And if you look at the way they're building their empire so far, it's all just briefcases, you know, government backed businesses making deals and buying up resources and stuff.

01:08:47.000 But I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at.

01:08:53.000 George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden are going, Yeah, that's what I want to do for my country is blow my own brains out, trying to take over the whole rest of the planet Earth.

01:09:04.000 Well, you know, just to point to what you're saying, it's like China's not invading anybody.

01:09:09.000 They're not.

01:09:10.000 They're not doing what we're doing.

01:09:11.000 And I'm not saying they're nice guys or whatever, but they don't rule us and they're no threat to North America.

01:09:16.000 They have no need to pick a fight with us.

01:09:18.000 People say, Oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan.

01:09:21.000 Well, then move them to Austin.

01:09:22.000 We've had advanced micro devices here for 30 years or whatever, 35 years.

01:09:27.000 Maybe more than that.

01:09:28.000 They can build that stuff here.

01:09:30.000 They can, but they tried.

01:09:32.000 It's very difficult. 0.78

01:09:33.000 The thing about what they've got going on in Taiwan, the reason why Taiwan is the head of it is that they're far more advanced than anybody else in the world at doing it. 0.96

01:09:41.000 Bring them. 0.83

01:09:42.000 Yeah, you would have to.

01:09:44.000 That's a lot.

01:09:45.000 I thought you were going to say it was something special about the salt water over there or something.

01:09:48.000 No, no, no, no.

01:09:49.000 They're just way ahead of everybody else.

01:09:51.000 I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a chip manufacturing plant in Texas?

01:09:57.000 And I think their yields were so poor.

01:09:59.000 I don't know what the actual story with that is.

01:10:02.000 So, I'm speaking way over my pay scale here, but I think what it is is you have to have like certain tolerances when you're creating these chips, and they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve despite spending an enormous amount of money.

01:10:20.000 So, it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you just crank out chips.

01:10:26.000 Like, apparently, these chips are super complicated to make.

01:10:30.000 Not even a warning.

01:10:31.000 No, not worth it.

01:10:32.000 I'm not saying it's worth harding, but I'm just saying that this idea.

01:10:35.000 Just move them to Austin.

01:10:37.000 I don't think it's that easy.

01:10:39.000 That's easy.

01:10:40.000 I think chip manufacturing is one of the most complex technological challenges in 2026.

01:10:48.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:10:50.000 I mean, we've had, I don't know what all AMD does here, but I'm pretty sure that them and Samsung and others have all the facilities they need here to do it.

01:11:03.000 I don't think that's quite true.

01:11:05.000 Or they should be able to.

01:11:07.000 They maybe could with enough resources and time and maybe stole all the. 1.00

01:11:12.000 Fucking eggheads from Taiwan and bring them over here, all the geniuses that have figured out how to make chips. 1.00

01:11:17.000 Maybe. 1.00

01:11:18.000 Maybe they wouldn't let them.

01:11:19.000 But what happened with the Samsung chip factory?

01:11:25.000 It's never been fully opened and it's not done yet.

01:11:28.000 Oh, okay.

01:11:29.000 But what was there was.

01:11:30.000 I used to be a rent a cop at some pretty fancy factories here, you know, back 25 years ago.

01:11:37.000 Oh, yeah?

01:11:38.000 What kind of factories?

01:11:39.000 I think it would have been AMD or.

01:11:43.000 And/or Samsung.

01:11:45.000 Some pretty fancy chip fabrication and stuff like that.

01:11:48.000 Well, let's ask Perplexity.

01:11:50.000 Let's ask.

01:11:51.000 And I did have a job being a rent a cop because the skate parking garage is at work and do my homework at work.

01:11:57.000 It was great.

01:11:58.000 Yeah, easy job for the most part, right?

01:12:00.000 Just free time.

01:12:01.000 Let's ask Perplexity: why are so many chip manufacturers in Taiwan?

01:12:09.000 Because I'm pretty sure there's something about the advancements they've made in chip manufacturing that no one's been able to replicate.

01:12:17.000 Otherwise, it doesn't make sense that China wouldn't just make their own. 0.69

01:12:19.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:12:20.000 Like, they're right there.

01:12:21.000 I read this thing not long ago about how, like, with China's AI stuff, they figured out how to write their program where they need much less computing power to do the same kind of effort in the way that they did it.

01:12:33.000 So they just found their own workaround.

01:12:35.000 Well, they also, there's a lot of espionage going on, too.

01:12:35.000 Yeah.

01:12:38.000 Yeah, probably.

01:12:39.000 A lot of the world's chip manufacturers is in Taiwan because the island deliberately built a specialized ecosystem around contract chip fabrication, foundries, and Then compounded that early lead with huge investment, dense clustering of suppliers and talent, and strong government support over several decades.

01:12:58.000 So, early strategic bet on manufacturing.

01:13:02.000 Starting in the 1980s, Taiwan chose to focus on precision manufacturing, fabricating chips for others, instead of trying to build its own big consumer tech brands.

01:13:11.000 And then their dominance and scale.

01:13:14.000 Yeah, founded in 87.

01:13:15.000 In other words, leading contract, TSMC.

01:13:18.000 The leading contract chip manufacturer produces over half of the world's advanced semiconductors and more than 90% of the most cutting edge nodes.

01:13:29.000 Because advanced fabs cost tens of billions of dollars and must run near full capacity to be profitable, only a few players can keep up.

01:13:37.000 And Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out.

01:13:41.000 See, that's what I'm talking about.

01:13:42.000 I don't think it's easy.

01:13:44.000 The biggest thing I was seeing was that no customers is what kept popping up.

01:13:49.000 What is that?

01:13:50.000 There are no customers.

01:13:52.000 I mean, the thing is, at the same time.

01:13:53.000 Huge problem delays because there's no one to buy them.

01:13:56.000 Why not?

01:13:57.000 I don't know.

01:13:58.000 Yeah, I mean, if it comes to capacity, then it's a lot.

01:13:58.000 Huh.

01:14:02.000 We got Samsung and Dell and AMD and IBM here.

01:14:05.000 I mean, it seems like they can invest their own money and build their own whatever they need to, right?

01:14:10.000 Right.

01:14:11.000 But just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved in keeping it running.

01:14:18.000 I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of expertise.

01:14:22.000 Not that I have any, but that they're so far ahead that this process that they bet on early on, that they've got their manufacturing to this point where they've already invested this enormous amount of money and the money, and they have to keep them running constantly.

01:14:38.000 I don't think it's simple.

01:14:40.000 I don't think it's like car manufacturing.

01:14:42.000 And then by no customers, you mean that essentially everybody who needs these chips is already getting them from Taiwan.

01:14:47.000 There's not much more demand than that.

01:14:49.000 Well, not necessarily.

01:14:50.000 It could just mean that they already have contracts, that they don't need them because they've already made commitments to Taiwan chip manufacturing.

01:14:58.000 On the other hand, if Beijing is a military threat to Taiwan and these people would rather not be under the rule of Beijing and the Communist Party, then.

01:15:10.000 There's a pretty big incentive for them to move to Texas.

01:15:13.000 There is, but again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step.

01:15:17.000 I don't think it's just like move here.

01:15:19.000 I think it's an enormous investment in capital, like beyond normal things.

01:15:24.000 And then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment.

01:15:27.000 It's very difficult.

01:15:28.000 And again, if Samsung doesn't have any, if right now they don't have any customers, didn't they have an issue with yields, though?

01:15:36.000 Wasn't there an issue with chips being made to standard?

01:15:42.000 I think there was something else on top of that.

01:15:46.000 I tried typing that in and out.

01:15:47.000 I didn't see anything, but they're trying to get to two nanometer production.

01:15:50.000 They started on trials, and then there's rumors about why they have not moved into mass production, and that's all these articles are saying.

01:16:02.000 Well, the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year.

01:16:05.000 Let's just cut all that. 0.91

01:16:07.000 Then we'll have plenty of capital freed up to close your microchips. 0.58

01:16:11.000 They're not going to do that. 0.81

01:16:12.000 Who needs a world empire?

01:16:14.000 Hey, look, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire is good for nothing anyway.

01:16:19.000 We have H bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us, but America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt. 0.91

01:16:26.000 That whole thing was a hollow bluff, and the Iranians just called it, and we lost. 0.96

01:16:31.000 Our bases have been evacuated. 1.00

01:16:33.000 They keep coming out.

01:16:35.000 I think you talked about this on your show, right?

01:16:37.000 How they were covering up the satellite photos.

01:16:39.000 They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos when you could get them online, whatever other countries had them.

01:16:46.000 You've had the New York Times, and I hate to cite CNN, but it was a well sourced story where they got all these great satellite photos and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched 18 bases from Irbil in northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman and took out all radar stations and pitted our runways,

01:17:05.000 hit refueling tankers and AWACS radar planes, and took out the entire not the entire but a huge percentage of the overlapping radars for the missile defense systems over there. 0.60

01:17:17.000 Left our allies in.

01:17:19.000 Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, wide open.

01:17:23.000 Our naval's Fifth Fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline.

01:17:28.000 I read this thing said the Qataris, our main air base in the Middle East, the headquarters of Central Command and our main air base at Qatar, the Qataris made a deal with Iran.

01:17:39.000 Please stop hitting us.

01:17:40.000 And they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of Qatar, our main air base during that war.

01:17:47.000 And so, as Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said, Well, what good is a military base that you can't fight a war from?

01:17:53.000 You know, it's just like that.

01:17:55.000 I know you've seen this, right?

01:17:57.000 That old meme that says, Well, if Iran doesn't want trouble with us, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases?

01:18:03.000 And it has all the map of all our bases in the region.

01:18:06.000 But the thing is, what Donald Trump, I guess, didn't understand was that those were a tripwire that were essentially we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war.

01:18:16.000 Those bases were preventing war because it should have been out of the question that we would attack Iran because all those bases would be up for grabs against them.

01:18:25.000 So, how are they so poorly defended?

01:18:28.000 That's what I don't understand.

01:18:29.000 Like, how is it so easy for Iran to attack these bases? 0.83

01:18:33.000 And did they have any foreknowledge of this? 0.80

01:18:35.000 Did they understand?

01:18:37.000 Oh, yeah.

01:18:37.000 So, why they were so poorly defended, that's got to be political decision making among the brass, right?

01:18:43.000 About, like, well, we don't want to admit that we need these fortifications in the first place, maybe, or just the other generals said don't, so we don't want to fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what.

01:18:54.000 Like, I don't know.

01:18:55.000 It's not a gross underestimation.

01:18:56.000 It's not a gross underestimation.

01:18:58.000 It can't be because, listen, I'll tell you, man, in January of 2007, the Chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon and they told him, look, we'll do your rock surge.

01:19:11.000 Where we increase the war in Iraq. 0.91

01:19:14.000 But we really don't want to go to Iran. 0.97

01:19:17.000 And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance, or at least we won't have it. 0.66

01:19:24.000 I was overstating it.

01:19:24.000 I shouldn't have said that.

01:19:26.000 We will not have escalation dominance there.

01:19:28.000 And that means that, you know, it's a Pentagon term for if we're going to get into a fight, we don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage of that conflict. 0.76

01:19:38.000 And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right? 0.84

01:19:43.000 As Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable. 0.94

01:19:46.000 In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all, a short and medium range missile force that we cannot defend from. 1.00

01:19:57.000 Now, we can defend from it some. 1.00

01:19:58.000 We have our Patriot missiles and our other types of interceptors, but they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can protect from.

01:20:09.000 And we had at that time more than 100,000 guys in Iraq, 50,000 in Afghanistan, and then plus, as we still do, Tens of thousands, Air Force and Army in Kuwait, Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain, I guess Air Force and Army in UAE, and I didn't know in Oman, but of course in Oman they had some naval presence there as well.

01:20:36.000 And they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs, and then the Strait of Hormuz will also be at risk. 0.72

01:20:44.000 And in fact, it's true. 0.54

01:20:47.000 At antiwar.com, you can find in the archives there, I wrote an article in August of.

01:20:52.000 2005, called Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran?

01:20:57.000 And I say in there, they can close the strait and they can inflict economic damage, drive the cost of a barrel of oil up above $200 a barrel, and all of that. 0.51

01:21:06.000 So there were people a lot smarter than me who were writing about that at the time that I was interviewing on my show at the time who were just saying, Look, we can start a war with Iran, but we don't really have a good way to finish one. 0.97

01:21:18.000 And so, and we talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in a sec, too. 0.77

01:21:23.000 But point being that.

01:21:25.000 You want to do a regime change?

01:21:26.000 As you just said, you kill the Ayatollah, it doesn't do any good. 0.76

01:21:28.000 They have a new Ayatollah. 0.96

01:21:29.000 You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the Ayatollah, but then they'll just appoint a new ruling council. 0.89

01:21:34.000 So then you can dump in the 82nd Airborne Division, but they can't occupy and control Tehran. 0.74

01:21:41.000 There's no good land route to invade the country.

01:21:43.000 They have two massive mountain ranges.

01:21:45.000 And one of the most preposterous narratives was like getting the people to rise.

01:21:49.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

01:21:49.000 We're going to arm up some Kurds. 1.00

01:21:51.000 Well, not just the Kurds.

01:21:51.000 Yeah.

01:21:52.000 They were trying to get just the Iranian civilians with no arms. 0.97

01:21:57.000 Yep.

01:21:57.000 And they'll talk about, you know, arming the Kurds and arming the Balukis, which I don't know if there are other factions, but that seems to be a direct reference to groups like Jundala, who the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed about 15 years ago, who were bin Ladenite head choppers, suicide bomber guys.

01:22:15.000 They were, you know, no different from Al Qaeda or ISIS.

01:22:18.000 And they, you know, John Bolton on Piers Morgan, the same show that I was on, was saying, yeah, we could arm up the Balukis. 0.97

01:22:24.000 And stuff is crazy. 0.96

01:22:25.000 I actually wrote in that article at that time, the neocons daydream that if we just start the war, Then the people will rise up and create a new pro American government there.

01:22:34.000 But that's crazy to bet on that.

01:22:36.000 There's no reason to believe that.

01:22:37.000 And so, and there's video of me in 2010 warning the same thing.

01:22:41.000 And I'm not claiming any great insight.

01:22:43.000 I didn't go to college, man.

01:22:44.000 I just, you know, I'm interested in this stuff.

01:22:46.000 And I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about it at the time.

01:22:50.000 And it was just complete consensus.

01:22:53.000 Everybody knew they can reach out.

01:22:56.000 And boy, over 20 years, I must have said this a thousand times.

01:22:59.000 They can not only hit all of our military stuff in Iraq and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar, et cetera, Saudi, et cetera, but a trillion dollars of economic targets all up and down that Gulf.

01:23:10.000 Which is exactly what they did. 0.66

01:23:11.000 They hit refineries, they hit chemical plants, they hit not just at the Strait of Hormuz, they hit American oil tankers up near Kuwait, just to show that, like, we pwned this entire thing now.

01:23:22.000 So, back to my original point when I got on this tangent, was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt.

01:23:29.000 Donald Trump just blew his big bluff that we're the big player in the region.

01:23:34.000 We're actually not in the region, we're here.

01:23:37.000 The region is over there.

01:23:39.000 And the entire You know, the threat of our dominance over there is basically called.

01:23:44.000 I mean, obviously, we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even nukes and all that.

01:23:48.000 But can the leaders in Bahrain, in Qatar, and UAE and Saudi rely on America to defend them?

01:23:56.000 Right.

01:23:56.000 Or are they going to come up with their own different policy now?

01:24:00.000 Haven't we also used up like two thirds of our Patriot missile supply?

01:24:04.000 I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot.

01:24:04.000 Oh, yes.

01:24:07.000 And they're admitting now that the Iranians still have 70, 75% of all their missiles and launchers. 0.99

01:24:13.000 All that stuff about we decimated everything they had was all just they're admitting that. 0.99

01:24:16.000 Who's admitting that?

01:24:18.000 Government officials talking to the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last three days.

01:24:22.000 Yeah, oh, I hadn't, I hadn't, yeah, yeah, 70, 75 percent.

01:24:25.000 They got all their launchers, all their missiles.

01:24:27.000 They dug out missiles that had been buried, they refurbished some and finished some that were on the assembly line.

01:24:33.000 That was what they told the Post.

01:24:35.000 They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went ahead and restarted up again.

01:24:40.000 And don't they have some crazy like missile elevator system where they're They're buried deep underground.

01:24:45.000 I don't know how it works exactly, but yeah, they and even they have apparently like the factories are buried deep underground as well and just dispersed throughout the country.

01:24:53.000 And so they've been preparing for something like this for a long time.

01:24:57.000 Yeah.

01:24:57.000 And so these bases that we had, are all of them non functional?

01:25:01.000 All the ones that have been hit?

01:25:02.000 I don't think so.

01:25:04.000 I don't know the exact extent of that, but as far as their usefulness over the long term, they might as well have just been abandoned at this point.

01:25:12.000 Let's see like what the conventional news says.

01:25:15.000 New York Times and CNN have two big.

01:25:15.000 Yeah.

01:25:17.000 Profiles on this.

01:25:18.000 I don't know off the top of my head better stuff than that.

01:25:21.000 The CNN with one.

01:25:22.000 Oh, and NBC also had one within the CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks.

01:25:27.000 The New York Times is about six weeks old, maybe.

01:25:28.000 One of the things that disturbed me to no end, and we talked about this a couple of times in the podcast, was there was one of the guys who was over there who attended a briefing and they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon and that Trump was anointed by Jesus Christ.

01:25:51.000 And that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return.

01:25:57.000 And that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing.

01:26:03.000 Man.

01:26:04.000 And then the guy had a whoever this officer was that was talking about this said that the guy had a giant smile on his face when he was telling this, which made it all the more creepy.

01:26:15.000 Oh, good.

01:26:16.000 The end of the world.

01:26:17.000 Nobody wants to die alone, right, Joe?

01:26:18.000 But they were saying that there's a faction.

01:26:22.000 In the military.

01:26:24.000 That is these religious fundamentalists that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus' return.

01:26:30.000 So, look, there's a guy named...

01:26:31.000 Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify Iran strikes.

01:26:38.000 So, there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein.

01:26:40.000 But look at that.

01:26:40.000 This is...

01:26:41.000 Let's just go over this real quick.

01:26:42.000 This is so crazy.

01:26:43.000 Because this, go up to the top, please.

01:26:45.000 Right there.

01:26:46.000 So, no, with the top.

01:26:47.000 So it's where it says who it was.

01:26:48.000 So it's a military commander.

01:26:50.000 Told a group of non-commissioned officers that President Donald Trump, anointed by Jesus, to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.

01:27:02.000 Yeah.

01:27:03.000 And then that's Mikey Weinstein right there at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

01:27:07.000 He was, I believe, an Air Force officer, maybe as an Army officer.

01:27:11.000 And then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military.

01:27:16.000 And it's been a long time since I spoke to him, but he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of the Air Force, the highest ranks of the Air Force, they really believe this stuff.

01:27:27.000 It is time to bring on the apocalypse. 0.51

01:27:29.000 And it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nukes so that they can use them according to the divine plan and this kind of thing.

01:27:36.000 It is scary stuff.

01:27:36.000 People need to know this.

01:27:38.000 Go back to that, please, because there's one quote that's below that.

01:27:41.000 This is so fascinating.

01:27:43.000 He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan, and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of Revelations referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

01:27:56.000 Can you imagine if you're over there, you already think the war is sketchy? 0.97

01:27:59.000 Like, why the fuck are we doing this? 0.98

01:28:01.000 And then this guy comes down, you're like, oh my God, we're cooked. 0.99

01:28:04.000 This is a big part of how they justified Iraq. 0.97

01:28:06.000 I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible. 0.90

01:28:10.000 Get it?

01:28:11.000 Middle East, year 2000, sort of ish. 0.97

01:28:14.000 This is how you're going to get raptured up to heaven in your body. 0.94

01:28:18.000 And all you have to do is support this aggressive war.

01:28:20.000 And all this magic stuff is going to come true.

01:28:22.000 And in fact, this is why there's such a massive crash in evangelical support for Israel and these kind of foreign policies now, is because people just don't believe that anymore, because that's what the Left Behind series at Walmart said 25 years ago.

01:28:34.000 And then it never happened.

01:28:36.000 It didn't come true.

01:28:37.000 Speaking of the one world government and all this stuff, where's Satan?

01:28:40.000 Where's the deal?

01:28:41.000 Instead, it's just Obama and Trump, you know?

01:28:45.000 So, how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing?

01:28:50.000 Because JD Vance, very against it.

01:28:53.000 A lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it. 0.99

01:28:55.000 So, what the fuck happened? 0.98

01:28:57.000 I think that Netanyahu essentially, you know, all this talk about four dimensional chess and whatever. 0.99

01:29:05.000 I think what it is is it's just checkers, right?

01:29:07.000 Is Netanyahu goes, listen. 0.73

01:29:11.000 For Iran to have a civilian nuclear program.

01:29:15.000 Come on, that's just cover for really a weapons program. 0.77

01:29:18.000 It's just a stage in a weapons program. 0.54

01:29:21.000 We know eventually they're going to make nukes and then they're going to attack Israel with them. 0.59

01:29:24.000 And we also know that, and you already said that you're not going to let them have nukes.

01:29:30.000 Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes.

01:29:33.000 And you already agreed to that, right?

01:29:33.000 Same difference.

01:29:35.000 Okay.

01:29:35.000 Right.

01:29:36.000 Well, and they won't give up enrichment.

01:29:38.000 So what do we do?

01:29:40.000 We got to attack.

01:29:41.000 It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapons scare in Syria, there that once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone.

01:29:49.000 And now, like, we got you on this technicality double jump. 0.99

01:29:52.000 You already agreed with the stupid things I said. 0.98

01:29:55.000 And so now you have to do the thing that I said. 1.00

01:29:57.000 And then Trump goes, okay.

01:29:58.000 And then plus, on top of that, just the flattery.

01:30:00.000 And, like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing.

01:30:03.000 Back when he was on Twitter in his first term, I used to tweet at him and I would say, Wealth, strength, gold, get out of Afghanistan, height, power, wealth.

01:30:16.000 And just tell him things that he likes, right? 0.95

01:30:18.000 With get out of Afghanistan in the middle.

01:30:20.000 And so this is what Netanyahu does he goes, listen, you're greater than Abraham Lincoln.

01:30:26.000 You're greater than George Washington.

01:30:28.000 You're a world historical figure.

01:30:30.000 You're sure to go to heaven now.

01:30:32.000 You're like if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in 1935 and prevented that whole thing from ever happening.

01:30:39.000 Well, you're just guessing that this is how he talked to them, right?

01:30:41.000 Well, kind of, but.

01:30:43.000 Wouldn't it be awesome to talk to them?

01:30:44.000 Because he repeats a lot of it.

01:30:45.000 It would be great.

01:30:45.000 Oh, it would.

01:30:46.000 But he repeats so much of it back that I think that, like, yeah, you could pretty much tell this is what they're saying to him.

01:30:52.000 And then this is what he's responding is Obama wasn't man enough to do it.

01:30:57.000 George Bush wasn't man enough to do it.

01:30:59.000 He knows what has to be done, he's willing to do it.

01:31:02.000 And he's.

01:31:03.000 Ill informed enough to believe that it makes any sense that if you just bomb their nuclear program, that somehow it'll go away.

01:31:11.000 If you just hit them hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say.

01:31:15.000 It doesn't work like that.

01:31:16.000 It oftentimes does not work like that.

01:31:19.000 And with these guys, they've made it clear that we're not making bombs, but we absolutely reserve our right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

01:31:27.000 And we will suffer your airstrikes.

01:31:29.000 We will not give up that right.

01:31:32.000 And so that's it.

01:31:33.000 And they've been completely clear about that.

01:31:35.000 That this entire time, but Netanyahu convinced him, right? 0.55

01:31:39.000 This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormuz was not at risk because Netanyahu convinced him once we hit him, once he killed Ayatollah, the whole thing's going to fall apart. 0.69

01:31:47.000 There will be no one too close to the Strait of Hormuz because we'll have already won by then. 0.81

01:31:50.000 But what do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons? 0.85

01:31:56.000 Probably the other states in the region will.

01:32:01.000 You know, Daryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show, Provoked, and I know a good friend of yours.

01:32:06.000 He is so great.

01:32:06.000 I love Daryl.

01:32:07.000 He's awesome.

01:32:08.000 And he was pointing out that guy gets slapped. 0.98

01:32:10.000 Boys, he gets fucking misrepresented. 0.99

01:32:12.000 Oh, he does. 0.99

01:32:13.000 Oh, my God.

01:32:14.000 Oh, my God.

01:32:14.000 He does.

01:32:15.000 Heroic guy, man. 0.99

01:32:16.000 Very fucking smart. 1.00

01:32:18.000 And if you listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's anti Semitic is fucking crazy. 1.00

01:32:26.000 You're crazy. 1.00

01:32:26.000 Yeah, no. 1.00

01:32:28.000 All that stuff is just balanced.

01:32:29.000 Out of context.

01:32:31.000 It's so balanced and so objective and, you know, his perspective on it. 1.00

01:32:36.000 And just people take that one thing that he said about, fuck. 0.99

01:32:45.000 The thing that he said about Churchill being the real villain. 0.99

01:32:47.000 He's being provocative, right? 0.71

01:32:49.000 And what he's trying to say is that Churchill, by imposing those embargoes, essentially was starving them and was keeping resources from getting to Germany, and he forced Hitler's hand to do what he did. 0.66

01:33:04.000 It's not excusing him. 1.00

01:33:06.000 It's not like saying Hitler wasn't a fucking evil cunt. 1.00

01:33:09.000 It's not like saying Hitler's a good guy, but Winston Churchill's the bad guy. 1.00

01:33:15.000 Somebody was saying it all.

01:33:16.000 But he was saying Winston Churchill.

01:33:18.000 Also, a bad guy.

01:33:19.000 Right. 0.84

01:33:19.000 Also wanted to attack the Soviet Union right after they were done with the war. 0.84

01:33:24.000 And he was actually, he even introduced the subject by saying to Tucker that, you know, I like to pick on my friend Jocko, who's very waspy. 0.59

01:33:34.000 And I like to pick on him and joke with him that, you know, Churchill was the real bad guy, whatever. 0.93

01:33:39.000 Because he wouldn't accept, you know, peace for an answer.

01:33:43.000 He had to finish the regime change no matter what, even if it took America doing it for him and whatever.

01:33:47.000 And then his point about, he never even finished the point about, The people starving in the camps, he was totally taken out of context to mean that the only people who died in the Holocaust, all that happened was the Germans didn't care enough to feed them well enough or something.

01:34:02.000 But that was not what he was saying at all.

01:34:04.000 He was essentially arguing that even if you were some kind of German apologist, even you would have to admit that every single soul they took possession of, they took responsibility for.

01:34:16.000 And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody could deny that. 0.69

01:34:24.000 Right? 0.71

01:34:24.000 And then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Holocaust. 0.71

01:34:26.000 His point had nothing to do with like trying to diminish the rest of it or discount the rest of it or anything like that. 0.60

01:34:33.000 He was just saying, you know, arguing even the devil's advocate would have to admit so much of the case on the face of it. 0.59

01:34:40.000 And then there he was segueing right into a point about Gaza and how the Israelis, Gaza is not a country, Gaza is an Indian reservation.

01:34:49.000 They were already whooped and conquered and besieged. 0.71

01:34:52.000 And so you take control of people like that, then you're responsible.

01:34:57.000 To make sure that they're fed and that they're not starving to death in this, you know, under your captivity, which was the point that he was making.

01:35:03.000 So it ended up being, you know, half of a thing in jest and half explained about Churchill.

01:35:13.000 And then a point about the war in the East that was totally, and I think in some cases, honestly misinterpreted.

01:35:22.000 But what's dishonest is people pretending like he didn't explain himself on the record over and over and over, clarifying what he meant by all that stuff.

01:35:30.000 And that's the problem with video clips.

01:35:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:32.000 Clips are a real problem because you lose the context of the entire conversation.

01:35:36.000 You get one person's point where they might be steel manning something else or they might be like trying to be provocative or whatever it is.

01:35:44.000 But to me, it's always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate.

01:35:50.000 Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not be true. 0.86

01:35:57.000 I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history.

01:36:02.000 Where we have gotten a completely objective, 100% accurate representation of why the war started, what were the factors, what were the motivations. 0.98

01:36:11.000 We could go all the way back to Smedley Butler and Smedley Butler's War is a Racket, which I always point out because here's a guy in 1933 that was realizing, he was a major general, realizing at the end of his tenure, like, holy shit, what did I do?

01:36:27.000 I thought that I was doing this to make the world safer, and really I was making it better for bankers. 0.98

01:36:34.000 Better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever the fuck they were actually doing.

01:36:40.000 And you can talk about that, but if you get into discussions about World War II and anything involving the Nazis, anything involving the Holocaust, all of a sudden anti Semitic gets thrown around. 0.98

01:36:52.000 All of a sudden, you're a bad person.

01:36:54.000 Yeah, as he says, it's a huge part of our civic religion, basically.

01:37:00.000 We're like George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln and all that stuff is too long ago, where it's really Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are the founding fathers.

01:37:08.000 Of the American Empire and their great project, the greatest generation, and all of those things.

01:37:14.000 That was, you know, that's how we know that that's who we are.

01:37:19.000 I mean, my grandfather was in that war, and my great uncle was, you know, death marched by the Japanese in that war and stuff like that.

01:37:25.000 A lot of people have connections to that.

01:37:29.000 As Bill Crystal and his friends would say, this is how you build national greatness.

01:37:33.000 You need big projects that we can all do together.

01:37:36.000 And World War II is the biggest project of all.

01:37:38.000 So it's, The kind of thing that people don't really want to question. 0.98

01:37:41.000 It's also, we should point out that they were bankrolling Smedley Butler, trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government. 0.99

01:37:47.000 They were trying to do it. 0.99

01:37:48.000 Yeah.

01:37:49.000 They marched up Capitol Hill with the documents and showed him.

01:37:53.000 They were trying to get him to throw a military coup on the United States government and take it over.

01:37:58.000 Yep.

01:37:59.000 I mean, you thought FDR was bad.

01:38:00.000 These guys wanted to overthrow him.

01:38:02.000 He wasn't, you know.

01:38:03.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:38:03.000 Wrong faction, I guess.

01:38:06.000 But look, I'm not an expert on.

01:38:09.000 I've only read a few books about the Second World War, and you'd have to read hundreds to really know what you're talking about on that one.

01:38:14.000 But I can tell you that Pat Buchanan's great book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that Pat knew that everybody was going to try to smear him and everyone was going to attack him, and nobody wanted to hear his version of how this all happened.

01:38:28.000 So he only quotes the highest level, most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford.

01:38:35.000 And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever. 0.99

01:38:39.000 He's quoting only these English historians, saying, here's how the idiot Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. 0.99

01:38:48.000 Essentially, fumbled into this war, screwed up, and got us into this war that was way worse than we ever could have hoped. 0.99

01:38:55.000 They ended up turning Poland over to the commies at the end, anyway, and all of that. 0.77

01:38:58.000 And it's really honestly what I think it is a decent take on World War II without all that religiosity that you're referring to there.

01:39:06.000 And just take a cold look at it.

01:39:07.000 You know, like they say that W. Bush, he's the Winston Churchill of the 21st century.

01:39:12.000 And I'm like, you know what?

01:39:14.000 Maybe that's right.

01:39:16.000 And maybe Winston Churchill was really just the George W. Bush of the 20th century.

01:39:19.000 It's just you're supposed to never.

01:39:21.000 Admit that who's Winston Churchill's Dick Cheney?

01:39:24.000 Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

01:39:26.000 I don't know.

01:39:27.000 That was boy, that guy he had no pulse for a while, yeah.

01:39:32.000 You know, is that not in the Bible or something?

01:39:34.000 Like, no, yeah, it should be a guy who wants war, who uh is giving no bid contracts to the company that he was the CEO of, yeah, where they're going over there and fixing for billions of dollars that we blew up.

01:39:49.000 And this guy doesn't even have a pulse, I know, it's really weird.

01:39:52.000 He has heart.

01:39:53.000 He lived so long, too.

01:39:54.000 Like, only the good die young kind of thing.

01:39:57.000 I mean, how many people dropped dead after COVID of heart attacks that were young and healthy? 1.00

01:40:01.000 And this fucking guy, keep on trucking. 1.00

01:40:04.000 Remember when he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized? 1.00

01:40:07.000 Yeah.

01:40:09.000 Yep. 0.99

01:40:10.000 He fucking, they were doing, which is one of the most very, I'd say it's one of the hardest to argue in support of type of hunts. 0.99

01:40:23.000 It's called a canned hunt. 0.99

01:40:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:40:25.000 Do you know what it is?

01:40:26.000 Okay, so what it is that they just released.

01:40:27.000 Like in Gaza.

01:40:29.000 Ah, very similar.

01:40:31.000 They just, well, this is, you know, birds.

01:40:33.000 They just released these birds from a cage, literally, and they fly and then they shoot them out of the sky.

01:40:38.000 And even then, he blasts his friend.

01:40:40.000 And then he wouldn't do anything.

01:40:43.000 Drinking and hunting.

01:40:44.000 Well, allegedly.

01:40:45.000 So he wouldn't do any interviews or anything.

01:40:46.000 He wouldn't talk to anybody for like 24 hours.

01:40:49.000 And so he had to sober up or, you know, allegedly or whatever.

01:40:52.000 And then his friend was like, oh, it's a minor misunderstanding.

01:40:56.000 I got a few pellets in my face. 1.00

01:40:57.000 What the fuck? 0.99

01:40:58.000 I'm very sorry if this reflected negatively on the vice president. 0.99

01:41:02.000 My fault for putting my face there.

01:41:02.000 That's how gangster.

01:41:04.000 Isn't that amazing?

01:41:05.000 No lawsuit, no nothing. 1.00

01:41:07.000 Your friend shoots you in the face. 1.00

01:41:08.000 No worries.

01:41:09.000 And what angle exactly did he get shot that he was okay after that?

01:41:14.000 Well, the thing about it is it's birdshot.

01:41:16.000 It was just birdshot, yeah.

01:41:17.000 And if you birdshot spreads, right?

01:41:20.000 And depending upon the distance and how far he was away from him, he could have just got clipped.

01:41:24.000 Yeah, if you were close.

01:41:25.000 Most likely that's what's happened because I think he was 70. 0.88

01:41:28.000 You know, if you're 70, you get shot in the face with a shotgun.

01:41:31.000 Usually that's a wrap. 0.95

01:41:32.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:41:32.000 So I think he just got clipped with a couple of pellets and, you know, he probably should have just shut the fuck up and not reported it. 0.99

01:41:39.000 I don't know how it even got out. 0.99

01:41:39.000 Right. 0.99

01:41:41.000 He must have had to go to the hospital. 1.00

01:41:43.000 Yeah, you say, I fucked up. 1.00

01:41:44.000 I dropped my gun and it went off. 0.99

01:41:46.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:46.000 Yeah, you don't.

01:41:48.000 The vice president shot me.

01:41:49.000 I mean, don't tell the newspaper I said that.

01:41:51.000 If that was my friend, you know, I would probably say, let it go.

01:41:56.000 Let's figure this out. 0.99

01:41:58.000 You don't have to go to the fucking press. 1.00

01:42:00.000 Come on, bro. 1.00

01:42:00.000 There's a guy who's killed and wounded a lot of people, that's for sure. 1.00

01:42:05.000 Mostly vicariously, but not always.

01:42:07.000 Well, I mean, there's a special place in hell.

01:42:10.000 It's just there already.

01:42:12.000 It's just so weird that that worked.

01:42:15.000 You know, just all of it.

01:42:16.000 The no bid contracts, the fact that he was essentially running.

01:42:20.000 Remember when he was in a bunker and Bush was running around?

01:42:24.000 He's in a bunker somewhere.

01:42:26.000 Like, why is he in a bunker? 1.00

01:42:27.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:42:29.000 That whole war was so weird. 0.99

01:42:31.000 It was to pretend that there's a threat, that there's an ongoing threat when there wasn't. 0.99

01:42:35.000 I had a bit about it in my act is like that the elites really have no idea how dumb people are. 1.00

01:42:40.000 And the only way to find out how dumb people are is to make a dumb guy president. 1.00

01:42:44.000 And that's what they did. 0.99

01:42:45.000 And then when we went into a war with Iran, or with Iraq, rather, like, how did we justify that? 0.80

01:42:53.000 And they bought that? 0.99

01:42:54.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:42:56.000 And then the bit was like, he won again? 1.00

01:42:59.000 He won again.

01:42:59.000 He got reelected on that, yeah.

01:42:59.000 Right, yeah.

01:43:01.000 And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going, I think we can go dumber. 0.99

01:43:08.000 That was the idea of the bit, is that this is the only way to find out how dumb we are. 0.94

01:43:12.000 Like that Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron, where there's like, The ruling elite, but the president, I think, is the president in the movie of it, is Tim Curry or something. 0.99

01:43:21.000 He's just a total like buffoon. 0.78

01:43:24.000 And they just, the real power is all behind the throne running things. 0.94

01:43:29.000 Well, my favorite movie about that is Dr. Strangelove.

01:43:34.000 Because it's like, because it's kind of humorous and, you know, it's, but the whole thing is like, oh my God, I think when you see this Pete Hexes thing where these guys are talking about this and this commander is saying that it's all to bring about Armageddon, it's, this is right out of Dr. Strangelove.

01:43:50.000 Yeah.

01:43:51.000 Oh, you can tell, and this is one of the most dispiriting things, right?

01:43:54.000 Is when you can tell a lot of times when these people are talking that, wow, he's really not lying. 1.00

01:43:59.000 He really thinks that that stupid lie is true. 1.00

01:44:01.000 And he's telling us what he thinks is true. 1.00

01:44:03.000 Like, you know, depending on their tone and the way they explain it, he is sometimes, like, even with Donald Trump, like, it's possible he's even talked himself or allowed himself to be talked into believing that they really were making nuclear weapons and that then they were going to use them on us. 0.97

01:44:18.000 I mean, that might just be the dumbest lie and he knows it. 0.63

01:44:20.000 But if they did have nuclear weapons, it would be a giant problem. 0.99

01:44:20.000 Right. 0.99

01:44:24.000 Because the Iranian government, just look what they've done to their people, executed protesters. 1.00

01:44:28.000 They've done some wild shit. 1.00

01:44:30.000 Nah, I don't know. 1.00

01:44:31.000 You don't think that's a big deal, what they've done to their protesters? 0.79

01:44:33.000 In fact, that's where we got off on Martyr Made there a minute ago, was because on our show, he was saying right now, through their conventional power, and especially because W. Bush gave their best friends Baghdad, Iran is by far the dominant power in the region, conventionally speaking, other than us. 0.76

01:44:53.000 If they rush to an atom bomb, Say to somehow deter us, which I don't think that would work. 0.92

01:45:00.000 I think we just attack them if they really did it, we just attack them again. 0.65

01:45:04.000 But if they did somehow get an atomic bomb, well, then that would then incentivize all of the other powers, I mean, or other states on the GCC there, Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain and UAE, to get their own nukes. 0.89

01:45:16.000 And at that point, Iran's entire strategic advantage is canceled because now they got nukes too. 0.70

01:45:20.000 And so now nobody has a strategic advantage. 0.84

01:45:22.000 But no one can do to them what happened to them now if they had nukes. 0.86

01:45:26.000 This was the argument for Ukraine not disarming. 0.74

01:45:29.000 But that would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as well.

01:45:33.000 And I think see, it's like this.

01:45:35.000 Here's how it worked, okay?

01:45:36.000 The Iranians, they're members of the Nonproliferation Treaty going way back.

01:45:40.000 They had a safeguarded civilian nuclear program where the IAEA could verify they're not diverting their nuclear material.

01:45:46.000 How could they verify this?

01:45:47.000 Because they have their bases all underground.

01:45:49.000 No, no, no.

01:45:50.000 Because all that stuff was open and declared and safeguarded by the IAEA.

01:45:54.000 Two major facilities at Fordow and Natance, and then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb, from the mine through the conversion process.

01:46:03.000 But how much oversight do they have of this?

01:46:06.000 I mean, how much of it could be done in secrecy?

01:46:08.000 Be done in secrecy.

01:46:09.000 It was very robust up until last June.

01:46:13.000 Essentially, they're proving the negative there. 0.99

01:46:16.000 Because they didn't know that the Iranians had the capacity to. 1.00

01:46:16.000 Can I pause you there? 1.00

01:46:22.000 They sent one 4,000 kilometers, right?

01:46:25.000 The Diego Garcia attack?

01:46:27.000 Yeah, the missile.

01:46:28.000 So those missiles had a far greater range than anything that they had declared.

01:46:33.000 Actually, not quite.

01:46:34.000 Because, well, first of all, the missile stuff is totally separate from their safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

01:46:39.000 They have nothing to do with that.

01:46:41.000 But as far as the missiles, The only limit on their missile range previously was a political limit.

01:46:48.000 Oh, it wasn't a capability?

01:46:50.000 So they had.

01:46:50.000 That's right.

01:46:50.000 So it wasn't that they stated that all we have is this?

01:46:55.000 They only previously.

01:46:57.000 But then in October of.

01:46:59.000 I'm pretty sure it was last October in the aftermath of the June war.

01:47:04.000 So then in October of 25, the Ayatollah announced we're lifting our limit on the range of our missiles.

01:47:10.000 And they said that publicly that they were doing that. 0.60

01:47:13.000 And so, and that was as a result, again, of this provocation of the war last June.

01:47:18.000 So, that's still separate from the nuclear stuff, though.

01:47:20.000 But go ahead.

01:47:21.000 I'm sorry.

01:47:21.000 So, it wasn't a capability thing, it was just an agreement.

01:47:25.000 Although they don't have the capability to launch a three stage intercontinental ballistic missile to the United States of America, they can hit Israel, but they can do that with an intermediate range missile. 0.53

01:47:34.000 But if they're cooperating with China and China has that capability because Bill Clinton gave it to them, yeah. 0.54

01:47:40.000 Yikes.

01:47:42.000 Jesus, why did he do that?

01:47:43.000 I love this story.

01:47:45.000 For the money. 0.74

01:47:47.000 If you remember the scandal of 96 and all the Chinese money in his campaign in 96, they spent all their money hyping or all the media attention hyping up Charlie Tree and Johnny Chung, who were like low level fundraisers who didn't have anything to do with anything. 0.58

01:48:03.000 And then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist named Wen Ho Li, and the evil FBI persecuted poor Wen Ho Li. 0.86

01:48:11.000 And it was this huge distraction from what really happened, which was this Chinese.

01:48:16.000 Indonesian billionaire named Riyadi, who was directly tied to Chinese intelligence, he got his guy, John Wong, appointed to the Commerce Department, where he was put in charge of licensing missile technology transfers to China.

01:48:30.000 And they took that authority away from state and defense and gave it to the Commerce.

01:48:34.000 And then John Wong was the guy who got to rubber stamp those missile technology transfers.

01:48:39.000 So then Hughes Aircraft and Laurel Corporation then sent their very best three stage rocket technology to China.

01:48:46.000 Oh, geez.

01:48:46.000 Because it's cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know.

01:48:50.000 So, they were not, I don't think, able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United States before that.

01:48:55.000 And they were able to, because, I mean, for a few hundred thousand dollars or maybe a couple of million dollars or whatever, they were able to buy this from Bill Clinton.

01:49:02.000 Jesus Christ.

01:49:03.000 But no, you're right.

01:49:03.000 I know, crazy.

01:49:04.000 Look, could Iran, with Chinese help or whatever, someday be able to deliver a war here? 0.93

01:49:11.000 Yes. 0.97

01:49:11.000 However, the much better solution to that certainly would have been I know we can't go back, but certainly would have been just normalizing relations with Iran and just dealing with them. 0.97

01:49:23.000 The reality was, Iran's position was not that they were racing to a nuke. 0.85

01:49:27.000 Their position was they had this safeguarded program where, again, the IAEA is essentially proving the negative.

01:49:33.000 We know where all their uranium is, it's right where it's supposed to be, and they haven't taken it and diverted it yet.

01:49:39.000 We know how much they're enriching, and we know where it all goes. 0.66

01:49:42.000 And so then Israel would say, America, they're making nukes. 0.50

01:49:48.000 If they have a nuclear program at all, this is the same during W. Bush, during Obama, this is true under Olmert as well as under Netanyahu.

01:49:56.000 Who's been in charge almost the entire time since Obama? 0.69

01:50:00.000 And the policy was from the Israelis America bombed them. 0.94

01:50:04.000 They got a civilian program, and you know that's just cover for they're going to make nukes someday, and they're going to use them on us, so just go ahead and let's get them now. 0.94

01:50:12.000 Then America would say, no, we're not doing that.

01:50:14.000 This is under W. Bush, again, under Obama, under Trump won, and under Biden.

01:50:19.000 No, we're not going to just start a war. 0.85

01:50:22.000 But we will warn the Iranians, don't you break out and try to make a nuke now, because if you do, then we will attack you, and we'll bomb your Manhattan Project before you can complete it, and before you can get an atom bomb. 0.99

01:50:38.000 We'll see you then. 0.97

01:50:39.000 And then the Iranians would say, We're not making nukes, so don't attack us. 0.89

01:50:45.000 And then the heavy implication was, If you attack us, then we might make nukes. 0.97

01:50:50.000 So they had a latent deterrent, right? 0.50

01:50:52.000 A half ass nuclear weapons deterrent.

01:50:54.000 They proved that they had mastered the fuel cycle, that they could enrich uranium if they wanted to up to weapons grade.

01:51:00.000 They never did.

01:51:02.000 But they said, They were essentially saying, We have a revolver in one pocket and bullets in the other.

01:51:06.000 Let's not escalate this.

01:51:07.000 And that could have and should have stood, except this is what.

01:51:11.000 This is the answer to your question about how did they get us into this?

01:51:14.000 Because Netanyahu convinced Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli line.

01:51:19.000 That for them to have a civilian nuclear program at all is equivalent to the exact same thing as them making nuclear weapons, and we're just not going to allow that.

01:51:28.000 So, how much understanding do we have of their capabilities, and how do we have that understanding?

01:51:36.000 Like, how much do we know about their enrichment program?

01:51:40.000 How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon?

01:51:43.000 Because haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear weapon?

01:51:48.000 Well, do you think that's blustering?

01:51:50.000 That was not a threat.

01:51:51.000 I think what, in fact, if I know the statement that you're talking about, they were saying, look, we're not making nukes.

01:51:56.000 And the proof that we're not is the fact that we know how to, we could, and we're still not.

01:52:01.000 And you can see all this time.

01:52:02.000 They mastered the fuel cycle back in 2006.

01:52:05.000 Once you, okay, so it's like this.

01:52:08.000 And they have been set back on this.

01:52:09.000 They got their facility blown up last June.

01:52:13.000 But.

01:52:15.000 Essentially, you have, remember, yellow cake? 1.00

01:52:16.000 Don't drop that shit. 1.00

01:52:19.000 You have that refined yellow cake, which is refined uranium ore. 1.00

01:52:22.000 Then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas.

01:52:26.000 And that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges.

01:52:29.000 Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges, a whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes.

01:52:34.000 And then you spin the uranium hexafluoride gas in the centrifuges and you spin the U 238, which is heavier, out and away from the 235, which is the sweet stuff.

01:52:45.000 And the more you enrich it, then.

01:52:48.000 The more capable it is of being used for nukes.

01:52:50.000 Well, that's one way to put it.

01:52:52.000 So they need like 3.6% U 235 for their electricity program.

01:52:58.000 They need 20% U 235 for targets for their medical isotope reactors, for like cancer treatment, radiation, or like that radioactive dye that they put in people to see your circulatory system and stuff.

01:53:09.000 But then to make weapons grade uranium, you need typically above 90% pure uranium 235.

01:53:15.000 In any case, once you spin it through the centrifuges to whatever stage of purity, then you got to convert it back into a metal again.

01:53:22.000 Whether you're going to make fuel rods or whether you're going to try to make a bomb warhead out of it.

01:53:26.000 So, under the Obama deal of 2015, the JCPOA, it was really just an extra layer on top of the nonproliferation treaty and on top of the safeguards agreement that we already had.

01:53:37.000 But the way that was worked out was a big part of it was that they would scale back their capability to enrich by shutting down, I think it was two thirds of their centrifuges at Natance.

01:53:49.000 And then at Fordow, they would change it from a production facility to just a research facility.

01:53:55.000 And then, whatever stockpile of uranium they came up with would be transferred out of the country to Russia, and they would turn it into fuel rods and send it back.

01:54:04.000 That way, they had no stockpile that they could just quickly reintroduce into the centrifuges and enrich to a higher grade.

01:54:09.000 They'd have to basically start at nothing again.

01:54:12.000 And so, under the theory and the way the scientists work it out, that if they withdrew from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country, and said, We are now making atom bombs, it would take them a year to enrich enough uranium.

01:54:26.000 At weapons grade to make one bomb out of it.

01:54:29.000 Then, on top of that, you have to have the actual experts who know how to machine it into the exact specifications and how to detonate it and everything else.

01:54:40.000 And the simpler the nuke, the harder it is to deliver.

01:54:45.000 So, typically, like the Hiroshima bomb was a gun type nuke where you just shoot one uranium pit into the other one, which they didn't even test. 0.64

01:54:52.000 The Trinity test was the Nagasaki bomb, basically. 0.87

01:54:55.000 They knew it would work.

01:54:56.000 Is essentially a very heavy bomb and very difficult to deliver.

01:55:00.000 And virtually all miniaturized implosion bombs in the world that can ever be married to a missile, they're virtually all made out of plutonium.

01:55:09.000 And they don't have a plutonium route to the bomb because under the Obama deal, they poured concrete into the ARAC, that's A R A K, which was supposed to be a heavy water reactor, which can produce weapons grade plutonium as waste.

01:55:21.000 But they poured concrete into that thing and shut it down completely before it was even open. 0.72

01:55:26.000 Their reactor that they do have.

01:55:27.000 Operating is at Boucher, and it's a light water reactor, which means that it is possible for it to produce weapons grade plutonium as waste, but it's much more difficult.

01:55:37.000 They would have to shut it off all the time to harvest the stuff out of there and all of that.

01:55:41.000 Under inspections, they can't do that.

01:55:43.000 So, this is all monitored.

01:55:44.000 This is all monitored.

01:55:45.000 It's like if you had a gun shop and you have an ATF cop sitting at the barstool, well, unless he was fast and furious smuggling your guns to cartels.

01:55:52.000 But assuming not that, but like assuming he was just a regular cop, like you can't accuse me of selling illegal laser rifles from my gun shop when I've got a cop sitting right here.

01:56:02.000 And that's the deal here, they've got inspectors throughout the place.

01:56:06.000 And then what happened was so we had that perfect Mexican standoff, right? 0.84

01:56:11.000 Where Israel saying, bomb them, they're making nukes. 0.97

01:56:13.000 We say, no, we won't bomb them, but we will if they do.

01:56:16.000 And them saying, don't bomb us because we're not.

01:56:19.000 Then Trump called their bluff last June. 0.70

01:56:21.000 And really Netanyahu did.

01:56:22.000 And then Trump jumped in the thing.

01:56:23.000 And they really did set their nuclear program back quite a bit.

01:56:26.000 Now, I don't think there's any proof that they destroyed the centrifuges at Natanz and Fordo.

01:56:31.000 They're deep underground, under granite, and very hard to get at.

01:56:34.000 But they got the elevator shafts and they got the air shafts.

01:56:37.000 And if anybody was working down there, they were buried alive. 0.85

01:56:40.000 The Iranians were incentivized to move giant boulders in front of the doors to protect them from missiles and attack and stuff like that.

01:56:47.000 But so all the reporting is that the Natanson Fordo facilities are essentially just frozen right now.

01:56:54.000 There's nothing going on there.

01:56:55.000 There's open source reporting from last November.

01:56:57.000 And then there was a report in the newspapers just two weeks ago or maybe three based on classified information that there's nothing going on there.

01:57:06.000 They.

01:57:07.000 You know what my deep concern is?

01:57:09.000 No one said what you said to the president.

01:57:13.000 Yeah.

01:57:13.000 See?

01:57:14.000 That's right.

01:57:15.000 Not only that, the people, these elected officials and these appointed officials that get into positions around him, they don't know this.

01:57:23.000 Right.

01:57:24.000 Which is crazy.

01:57:25.000 Dude, I'll tell you what.

01:57:26.000 That New York Times article, did you read that one where Netanyahu came and they sat across from each other at the table like this instead of Trump sitting at the head of the table and Netanyahu gave him the whole presentation about how easy the war would be?

01:57:37.000 So as soon as he left, then they said, everyone else.

01:57:41.000 At the table, said, Don't listen to him, boss.

01:57:45.000 He's blowing smoke, man, that this is going to be so easy.

01:57:47.000 Now, they didn't really tell him don't do it, but they told him don't trust Netanyahu and that'll be a snap the way that he promises and all that.

01:57:55.000 But then, and look, it's Maggie Haberman and them at the New York Times.

01:57:58.000 I mean, it seemed like a very well reported story from, you know, the principals are talking to her about this stuff.

01:58:04.000 Well, this is what Joe Kennedy said as well, right?

01:58:06.000 Yeah.

01:58:06.000 So they go around the table and Rubio has his say, the vice president has his say, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whoever.

01:58:16.000 But none, as you just said, none of them say what I just said.

01:58:20.000 And it really is, it's like four or five dudes in a room who may or may not know very much about this, really, and talking about it.

01:58:20.000 Right.

01:58:31.000 And none of them man enough to say, like, Mr. President, permission to speak freely here, sir.

01:58:36.000 Don't make this mistake, buddy.

01:58:38.000 You know what I mean?

01:58:39.000 Is that they don't know as much as you know about it?

01:58:39.000 You know what I mean?

01:58:42.000 I think they probably don't.

01:58:44.000 Which is wild.

01:58:45.000 I've been at this for a long time.

01:58:47.000 But that is wild.

01:58:48.000 That is really crazy that you'd be in a position of making these decisions.

01:58:51.000 Without having this understanding of the fact that they're not even really capable right now of making nuclear weapons.

01:58:58.000 If any of them were capable of really knowing about it like this, it would be Rubio or Vance.

01:59:05.000 Or hell, Kane, too, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

01:59:08.000 All of these guys should have been able to say to the president, this is an illusory threat, sir.

01:59:13.000 Wasn't Vance really not there?

01:59:15.000 Wasn't Vance not there while this was going on?

01:59:17.000 He was not there for the Netanyahu part, but then he came in later, which he was in Azerbaijan prepared for the war, right?

01:59:24.000 Was where he was, his wife was late.

01:59:26.000 Wasn't Azerbaijan, didn't they have some sort of a peace agreement with Armenia?

01:59:29.000 At the time?

01:59:32.000 Oh, I don't know.

01:59:33.000 Oh, I don't know.

01:59:34.000 I had missed that then.

01:59:35.000 I think he visited both of them, and that's one of the reasons why he couldn't come back.

01:59:35.000 You're right then.

01:59:40.000 I assume he was in Azerbaijan as preparation for the war with Iran.

01:59:43.000 If you visit Azerbaijan, you also have to visit Armenia, otherwise it would cause some sort of an international conflict.

01:59:48.000 But it was also because they had made some sort of a peace agreement, correct?

01:59:59.000 Didn't Azerbaijan and Armenia make a.

02:00:01.000 Possibly.

02:00:01.000 I mean, they're fighting over, or the contest was over whether Armenia is going to open this corridor across Armenia to an Azerbaijani or an Azeri enclave on the Turkish border.

02:00:16.000 Okay.

02:00:16.000 Prance met in Baku.

02:00:18.000 JD Vance and how do you say his name?

02:00:24.000 Aliyev met in Baku to discuss the implementation of the historic August 8th White House Peace Summit.

02:00:31.000 And reaffirmed their shared commitment to regional peace, security, and prosperity.

02:00:35.000 Leaders signed the U.S. Azerbaijan Strategic Partnership Charter, which will strengthen bilateral relations between our countries.

02:00:42.000 The United States remains committed to working with Azerbaijan to unlock the great potential of the South Caucasus region.

02:00:49.000 So it was a peace summit, and so he met with Azerbaijan, and he also had to meet with Armenia as well.

02:00:56.000 This is February 10th, so this is right before the war.

02:00:59.000 So I guess I thought he was like just tipping them off.

02:00:59.000 Okay.

02:01:04.000 No.

02:01:05.000 We're on your southern border in a week or two.

02:01:06.000 I'm pretty sure that the reason for this was that he had to meet with both of them, so he could not be there. 0.76

02:01:13.000 So if I was JD Vance and I knew, or rather if I was Netanyahu and I knew that JD Vance was really not into this war and didn't want to be a part of it at all, I would probably try to Time it for them, yeah. 0.94

02:01:24.000 What a good time. 0.95

02:01:25.000 You can't even come back.

02:01:26.000 What does it say?

02:01:27.000 Ah, the gathering had been deliberately small to guard against leaks.

02:01:30.000 Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea.

02:01:33.000 It was happening.

02:01:34.000 Guard against leaks.

02:01:35.000 Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening.

02:01:39.000 Also absent was Vice President JD Vance, who was in Azerbaijan, and the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time.

02:01:49.000 Now, if I was Netanyahu and I knew that JD Vance was going to be in Azerbaijan.

02:01:55.000 You know, I don't really, you know, try to spend too much time on the symbolism of things, you know, leave that to the symbol minded, right?

02:02:03.000 As Carlin was saying.

02:02:03.000 Symbol minded?

02:02:04.000 Yeah.

02:02:05.000 But like, Isn't it meaningful that this is the situation room?

02:02:09.000 The president's supposed to sit at the head of the table.

02:02:11.000 Instead, Netanyahu sat there and Trump sat here opposite him and let him run the thing as an equal instead of.

02:02:20.000 Why do you think that is?

02:02:21.000 Why do you think they have that kind of influence?

02:02:23.000 I really don't know.

02:02:24.000 I mean, they've been friends for a very long time.

02:02:26.000 All the speculation about him being compromised, I mean, it's very possible, but unknowable, really, right? 0.72

02:02:31.000 Netanyahu would do that. 0.53

02:02:33.000 I mean, he brought up Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton.

02:02:37.000 Did he?

02:02:37.000 Oh, yeah.

02:02:38.000 You know we're tapping your phone, homeboy.

02:02:39.000 We got you on tape.

02:02:40.000 You better let Jonathan Pollard out of prison.

02:02:43.000 And then Bill Clinton refused to do it because George Tenet and the whole top tier of the CIA were going to resign over it if he did it.

02:02:49.000 So he didn't do it.

02:02:50.000 It was Trump that let Pollard out.

02:02:52.000 And now Pollard is running to the right of Netanyahu.

02:02:55.000 He's now announced that he's running for the Knesset over there.

02:02:58.000 So the reason why the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public?

02:03:02.000 No, because.

02:03:03.000 No, no, no.

02:03:04.000 I don't think so.

02:03:05.000 Netanyahu's said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard.

02:03:10.000 Oh, they had tapes?

02:03:12.000 What do you mean they had the recordings?

02:03:13.000 So it may have been after the scandal had broken, but they had him on tape with her because the only tapes were her on the phone with Linda Tripp that Linda Tripp had recorded.

02:03:22.000 Right.

02:03:23.000 But they had him on the phone with her.

02:03:26.000 I forgot her name.

02:03:27.000 You know, the story is the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in 1996, they were in the room for half an hour or something.

02:03:35.000 And when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated and says, Who the F does this guy think he is?

02:03:41.000 Who's the superpower and who's the client stake?

02:03:45.000 Because Netanyahu had just told him, like, look here, Butler, here's your orders for half an hour, just barked commands at Bill Clinton in a way that he was just like, I can't believe this guy.

02:03:56.000 Wow.

02:03:57.000 It's hard to feel sorry for him.

02:03:58.000 In fact, here's one, too.

02:03:59.000 Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic.

02:04:01.000 This is the only time I've ever been sympathetic with Barack Obama.

02:04:03.000 He was caught on a hot mic talking to the president of France.

02:04:06.000 And he goes, Oh, man, you think you hate him.

02:04:09.000 I got to deal with him every day. 0.60

02:04:13.000 And that was about Netanyahu.

02:04:14.000 Yeah, about Netanyahu.

02:04:15.000 Well, wasn't.

02:04:16.000 They're an issue with JFK and Israel over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons? 0.61

02:04:22.000 Yes.

02:04:23.000 So he was demanding inspections of Dimona, their nuclear facility there.

02:04:27.000 To this day, they don't officially have nuclear weapons.

02:04:31.000 And the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give aid to a nuclear weapons state that refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty. 0.65

02:04:31.000 Correct. 0.65

02:04:40.000 And so, and they don't want to do that.

02:04:42.000 In fact, they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before the change after apartheid.

02:04:49.000 But if If they openly possess nuclear weapons, then, I mean, hell, it should already be illegal because everybody already knows.

02:05:00.000 But the Glenn Symington law says that you can't give military aid to a nuclear weapon state that won't sign the NPT.

02:05:07.000 That's America's treaty that we forced the whole world to accept, which, by the way, is in terrible jeopardy now, right?

02:05:13.000 Because, you know, Saddam Hussein goes, look, my hands are up.

02:05:17.000 I got nothing. 0.92

02:05:18.000 They invaded him anyway. 0.90

02:05:20.000 The North Koreans armed up with nukes. 0.92

02:05:23.000 The Libyans said, Well, look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no operational program, but you can have our junk. 0.98

02:05:30.000 They killed him. 0.89

02:05:32.000 And then the Iranians said, Look, we can make nukes, but we're not making nukes. 0.92

02:05:36.000 So leave us alone already. 1.00

02:05:38.000 And then we kill them. 0.95

02:05:40.000 So America is the great destroyer of America's nonproliferation treaty that we foisted on the world, by which the non nuclear weapon states promise never to get them. 0.96

02:05:53.000 And the nuclear weapon states promise never to share them. 0.72

02:05:57.000 And that's all in jeopardy now.

02:05:58.000 That may not even exist anymore.

02:05:59.000 The polls are talking about getting their own nukes now because of Trump's pivot away from Europe.

02:06:04.000 In the middle of a war that America helped cause over there.

02:06:09.000 Jesus.

02:06:10.000 So Israel officially doesn't have nukes.

02:06:13.000 Officially they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least 200.

02:06:16.000 And in fact, I have that personally from Mordecai Venunu, who is the Israeli whistleblower who went to prison.

02:06:22.000 They kidnapped him in a honey trap plot, I think in England or in Italy.

02:06:27.000 With chicks? 0.64

02:06:28.000 With chicks, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:06:29.000 With boys and chicks.

02:06:29.000 They went to get him laid and they kidnapped him and they held him in solitary confinement for like 25 years or something.

02:06:35.000 But he gave the whole story to the Sunday Times.

02:06:38.000 The London Times, and they published it back in, I'm going to say, '86.

02:06:43.000 And then what happened was he was on Twitter.

02:06:46.000 He may still be on Twitter.

02:06:48.000 But I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers, and who was a friend of mine for a long time.

02:06:56.000 He died a couple years ago now.

02:06:57.000 But he had an anecdote about Venunu that turned out was incorrect.

02:07:04.000 But I asked Venunu, is this correct?

02:07:05.000 And then he said, no.

02:07:07.000 It's just like I told the Sunday Times back then.

02:07:10.000 And that was that they had 200 atom bombs by the time that he squealed on them.

02:07:14.000 And we know from Grant F. Smith's research, he got this through some FOIA documents.

02:07:19.000 He's from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, really great researcher on this.

02:07:23.000 And he showed that they had at least been researching hydrogen bombs, the big ones.

02:07:29.000 Although there's no proof that they ever actually made H bombs. 0.52

02:07:32.000 And I don't think it's been reported that they've made them, but they at least were looking into how to. 1.00

02:07:36.000 Jeez.

02:07:37.000 And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel.

02:07:42.000 And trying to register what was then, I think, the American Jewish Council, I believe is what it was called, the predecessor to AIPAC, as foreign agents.

02:07:42.000 Yes.

02:07:54.000 And then they dissolved it and created AIPAC instead, I guess, is the long and the short of that, how they got around that.

02:07:59.000 And there are people.

02:08:00.000 You know, and it was, you know, I don't know, man.

02:08:04.000 Honestly, like I told you, I was more of a conspiracy theorist in the 90s, but I never did all read into JFK because there's just 100 books about it and 100 different theories.

02:08:13.000 And I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French hitmen to do it or if.

02:08:16.000 The Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Alan Dulles got some Cubans to do it, or what the hell, right?

02:08:22.000 Like, I don't know. 0.76

02:08:24.000 And so, I really get, you know, I don't think I ever really could figure it out.

02:08:30.000 So, well, no one really has to leave that one alone.

02:08:34.000 But Oliver Stone is a big part of it.

02:08:35.000 There are a lot of people with Mode.

02:08:36.000 Yeah.

02:08:36.000 You know what's funny about that?

02:08:37.000 And I think he even admitted this at one point, man.

02:08:39.000 You watch the whole movie JFK.

02:08:41.000 Oh, God.

02:08:42.000 You watch the whole movie JFK.

02:08:44.000 And I'm sorry, man.

02:08:46.000 No worries.

02:08:47.000 It's just Dr. Pepper.

02:08:48.000 I like the little stains on this table.

02:08:49.000 There you go.

02:08:50.000 It makes it live.

02:08:51.000 In the edit later, we'll just clip to Joe and back.

02:08:54.000 No, we'll just show the Dr. Pepper.

02:08:56.000 Why Dr. Pepper?

02:08:57.000 Why are you so into Dr. Pepper?

02:08:59.000 I should tell everybody, he brought a whole cooler filled with Dr. Pepper.

02:09:02.000 I got to have Dr. Pepper, man, for my.

02:09:05.000 Let's get a wick here.

02:09:08.000 No, you watch the whole movie JFK, right?

02:09:11.000 It's got every theory under the sun in there.

02:09:13.000 And then as soon as it's over, it says, produced by Arnan Milchan, who was an Israeli spy and who helped Benjamin Netanyahu steal Krytron's. 0.85

02:09:23.000 Which are an essential part of these nuclear triggers for their weapons. 0.68

02:09:27.000 That's who produced the movie. 0.84

02:09:29.000 And so then someone asked Oliver Stone, like, hey, man, an Israeli spy produced your movie where you point the finger at everyone except maybe the Israelis.

02:09:38.000 What's about that? 1.00

02:09:39.000 And he's like, wow, you're right.

02:09:41.000 I forgot exactly how he says it, but he acknowledges that, you know what?

02:09:44.000 Like, it could have been even that my own film was part of the put on there.

02:09:49.000 Well, especially when you consider the fact that his own film was made in what, the 90s?

02:09:54.000 Yeah, it came out in like 91, I think.

02:09:55.000 Right.

02:09:56.000 So back then, he probably didn't know as much.

02:10:00.000 Yeah, probably never even heard the angle that would have been the Israelis.

02:10:04.000 But of course, you know, LBJ was very close to the Zionists and even had a Mossad agent for a girlfriend.

02:10:10.000 I'm sorry, I forget her name, but one of his mistresses was a Mossad agent. 0.61

02:10:13.000 And then he completely reversed all those policies as soon as he was in power.

02:10:19.000 But of course, same thing with Vietnam.

02:10:20.000 He reversed, well, or at least released any skepticism about Vietnam and said, let's go ahead and escalate there and all that.

02:10:27.000 So, like I say, that one's too muddy for me to try to wade through and figure out exactly who's the trigger on that one.

02:10:33.000 That's all crazy.

02:10:37.000 The not so secret life of Matilda, is that how you say her name?

02:10:41.000 Matilda Krim.

02:10:43.000 That was an Israeli spy girlfriend?

02:10:46.000 Yeah, I believe that's her.

02:10:48.000 Good old Phil Weiss. 1.00

02:10:48.000 She looks like a dirty girl. 1.00

02:10:50.000 I love that guy. 1.00

02:10:50.000 He's a great guy. 1.00

02:10:51.000 That's MondoWeiss.net, a great website for anti Zionist. 0.82

02:10:55.000 The no daylight policy, the U.S. alignment with the Israeli government.

02:10:58.000 So obviously today, Trump's deference to Netanyahu was born under Matilda Krim's dear friend, Lyndon Johnson.

02:11:07.000 In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side and advised him on what to say publicly. 0.98

02:11:20.000 I mean, you got to give it up to a country the size of Rhode Island that has that kind of fucking pull. 0.84

02:11:26.000 They got their priorities straight, that's for sure. 0.98

02:11:28.000 Kind of amazing that they've been doing this since the 60s and before.

02:11:33.000 I mean, they threatened Harry Truman, they bribed him, and they also threatened him.

02:11:33.000 Yep.

02:11:37.000 They sent his daughter's memoir, said the Zionists sent letter bombs to the White House. 0.83

02:11:42.000 And they'd stop at nothing to get their state. 0.64

02:11:45.000 Truman.

02:11:46.000 Yeah.

02:11:46.000 Wow.

02:11:47.000 And they paid for his reelection, too. 0.66

02:11:49.000 In fact, there's a great scholar named John B. Judas, J U D I S, and he wrote a book about this.

02:11:58.000 I'm not sure what his name is.

02:12:00.000 Yeah, kind of.

02:12:01.000 If you mispronounce it, you know.

02:12:03.000 He actually also wrote out, as long as I'm talking about him, he wrote a great article for Foreign Affairs in 1995 about the neoconservatives called From Trotskyism.

02:12:12.000 To anachronism.

02:12:14.000 And it was about how now that the Cold War is over, who needs these crazy hawks anymore, right?

02:12:18.000 And then these are the guys who took us, who launched the Iraq War, you know, a few years later, seven years later, or whatever.

02:12:25.000 He was saying, they're a spent force.

02:12:27.000 They should be by now because they had been Trotskyite communists and then had moved to the right for the militarism and stuff.

02:12:33.000 But he wrote a book about how Truman did this.

02:12:36.000 And I think that was part of it this intimidation campaign.

02:12:39.000 And it was his own daughter that, in her book, in her memoir, said that they sent, Letter bombs to the White House.

02:12:45.000 And they also paid for his elections.

02:12:47.000 It was, you know, carrot and stick kind of a thing.

02:12:50.000 And then, yeah, look, if you ran the Israeli foreign ministry, you only have one priority in the world that outranks every other priority by a million billion.

02:12:59.000 And that is your relationship with the United States of America.

02:13:02.000 How friendly is the president?

02:13:03.000 How friendly is the Senate?

02:13:04.000 What do we got to do to make sure that everything stays in line?

02:13:07.000 It's everything to them. 0.85

02:13:09.000 So let me ask you this what do you think happens with Iran now?

02:13:13.000 Like, how does this play out? 0.86

02:13:15.000 If you had to speculate, Well, I'll tell you that, first of all, they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now than ever before.

02:13:23.000 Although I'm not necessarily predicting that.

02:13:25.000 I think, you know, Trump has proven by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent, he has proven he's willing to bomb them.

02:13:33.000 And if they really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing.

02:13:39.000 And then this president, and I think the next one too, would be willing to go back to war over it. 0.92

02:13:44.000 As Barack Obama promised, he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb.

02:13:52.000 And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. 0.96

02:13:55.000 Called As President, I Don't Bluff, where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to tell Netanyahu and them, I really, really mean it. 0.68

02:14:04.000 If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but just let me try to solve this another way. 0.79

02:14:09.000 So I think that promise stands.

02:14:10.000 This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden.

02:14:13.000 And I think that will continue to last into the next presidency. 0.84

02:14:17.000 And if the Iranians are smart, what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is we're not giving up enrichment and we're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day, but we're never going to call it that. 0.83

02:14:28.000 And just don't do this to us anymore and try to bet on the fact that Trump's only got three years left and the next presidents won't be so belligerent and they won't call the bluff and go ahead and launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke. 0.65

02:14:43.000 And as Daryl was saying, they're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally, they really have no need to make a nuclear bomb.

02:14:52.000 And they can, I think, successfully deter Israel even with their conventional missile force. 0.56

02:14:57.000 And we saw them just absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv. 0.60

02:15:01.000 Yeah.

02:15:02.000 Very underreported, right?

02:15:04.000 And I think, you know, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatollah, right?

02:15:10.000 And they kill him and apparently, like, the new Ayatollah, his son, they killed his mother and sister and, or mother and wife and baby. 0.76

02:15:18.000 I mean, that's the new Ayatollah over there. 0.69

02:15:22.000 Is, you know, he's got to be more radical than his father. 0.84

02:15:26.000 He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was.

02:15:30.000 So, what is the pathway to resolution?

02:15:33.000 Well, this is so unfortunate because honestly, you know, whatever, maybe some genius at some think tank has a better idea, but I really think that the thing to do is just quit.

02:15:44.000 The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say, I won.

02:15:48.000 Yeah, but we don't really need these bases over there.

02:15:51.000 The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East.

02:15:54.000 We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore.

02:15:58.000 So forget the Carter Doctrine.

02:16:00.000 Let's just come home.

02:16:01.000 And I think if we do that, we still.

02:16:03.000 We bring all of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our base, just close them all up and come home. 0.96

02:16:08.000 Then that shifts the entire burden onto Iran that they still have to deal with the rest of Eurasia. 0.95

02:16:13.000 We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. 0.65

02:16:16.000 Everybody else is.

02:16:18.000 So are they going to now levy a tax to get through the Strait of Hormuz?

02:16:22.000 But too bad shouldn't have started this war then.

02:16:22.000 Absolutely.

02:16:25.000 Nothing we can do about that now, Willie Nelson said.

02:16:28.000 You know, so like the way going forward is, and by the way, like in Panama, they tax.

02:16:34.000 Ships going through the isthmus there, through the Panama Canal. 0.54

02:16:38.000 The Indonesians, I believe it is, tax people going through some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. 0.94

02:16:44.000 And so it's not entirely unheard of that, you know, the dominant power there is going to levy a fee on people coming in and out of there.

02:16:53.000 But again, too late, too bad.

02:16:56.000 I mean, America already, we had exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now, we had on February the 27th.

02:17:05.000 And then they launched this war on the 28th, which, by the way, was the anniversary of the Waco raid.

02:17:10.000 This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war.

02:17:12.000 And in fact, as long as I'm on that, I don't know you know this, but it's really worth dwelling on that they killed not just one, but two girls' schools in their initial assault.

02:17:24.000 They killed in one building, they killed 173 or 74, almost all little girls.

02:17:31.000 And then in the other one was 20 more.

02:17:34.000 And with that, it was an experimental new Lockheed missile that fires tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates or as it detonates in a creative new way to cut people to shreds.

02:17:47.000 And the thing is about that is, as there's this great media critic named Adam Johnson who pointed out, this is equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing.

02:17:57.000 Which, you know, for young people, Oklahoma was 9 11 before 9 11, right?

02:18:03.000 It was massive.

02:18:04.000 And never mind, it was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it.

02:18:07.000 That's another interview, Joe.

02:18:09.000 But it was 100.

02:18:10.000 That was another interview.

02:18:11.000 And that's a deep one.

02:18:12.000 Yeah, it is.

02:18:13.000 And I'm here for you, buddy.

02:18:14.000 Yeah.

02:18:15.000 But they killed 167 people, were killed in that thing. 0.99

02:18:18.000 And it was just the ugliest damn thing. 0.98

02:18:20.000 And it included like 20 kids in the daycare there, right? 0.99

02:18:23.000 That was the cover of Newsweek a firefighter holding a dead baby.

02:18:26.000 It's the worst thing.

02:18:27.000 This is the most traumatic thing for this country and in the heartland of Oklahoma City and all that. 0.91

02:18:33.000 Well, that's what America did to Iran.

02:18:35.000 Only the entire building full of kids, all 167 of them, a few teachers, but virtually all of them little girls.

02:18:44.000 And another school down the street, too, or relatively nearby, where they at the volleyball game, where they killed even more.

02:18:51.000 So now think about the Pearl Harbor attack, which Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl Harbor out of context, but still.

02:18:58.000 It was a sneak surprise attack in the middle of negotiations on behalf of a foreign country over a lie.

02:19:06.000 And then they killed a bunch of kids.

02:19:08.000 It's like, imagine if at Pearl Harbor, if our story of Pearl Harbor was that they sank all our heroes and drowned them down in their ships in the hulls, stuck in their hulls down there.

02:19:19.000 But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls, the children of those sailors.

02:19:28.000 Who drowned at Pearl Harbor?

02:19:30.000 Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day, too.

02:19:34.000 Oh, and also, it's a Catholic country and he's also the Pope.

02:19:38.000 Imagine how we would react to that.

02:19:40.000 Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be.

02:19:43.000 I'll tell you what our story of World War II would be. 0.89

02:19:46.000 It would be that we kept nuking them until they were all dead, is what our story of World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor. 0.94

02:19:56.000 It's just somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should. 0.93

02:20:02.000 If that had happened to us, again, just like we did a little on Ukraine there and the way America just absolutely pushes their luck, if Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years because they kept voting wrong, we would invade Canada and nuke Moscow.

02:20:19.000 And in fact, when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd, right?

02:20:23.000 How ridiculous is it that the Russians would dare try to overthrow the regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our bases in Alaska or any of these kinds of things, that they would go to war with the people of Vancouver who refused to accept the new coup junta?

02:20:36.000 Is comic book crazy? 0.93

02:20:38.000 They wouldn't dare.

02:20:39.000 But we do that to them.

02:20:41.000 You know, and we act like, as Dr. Paul said, if we go around the world killing people like this, bombing people like this, and we think that we can just get away with it and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at our own peril.

02:20:55.000 And he was speaking for the government as a member of Congress at the time that we're putting the American people in danger by acting this way.

02:21:02.000 It's completely crazy.

02:21:03.000 You know, remember the Shiite fatwa that the old Ayatollah, the Ayatollah before last, Khomeini, put on Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses, where people have tried to kill him numerous times, including got his eyeball in one case. 0.70

02:21:23.000 We've had a real problem with bin Ladenite jihadi terrorism over the time. 0.97

02:21:27.000 We have not had the Shiites. 0.98

02:21:29.000 We have not had the Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq or the Ayatollah Khamenei declare that all good believers are. 1.00

02:21:37.000 Should attack the West now, they could do that.

02:21:41.000 That's the kind of fire that we're playing with.

02:21:42.000 It's extremely dangerous.

02:21:44.000 I mean, bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank.

02:21:46.000 He was just a rich guy who he had earned respect because he was wounded in battle and stuff.

02:21:51.000 He had money and influence.

02:21:53.000 But if the Ayatollah Sistani put out a full jihad, which I'm not saying he would do that, I don't have any real reason to believe that he would go that far, but he's been willing to stand up to the United States numerous times, especially during the war, in the last couple of wars over there.

02:22:11.000 And so, and remember what happened.

02:22:14.000 The night that they started this war on February the 28th, the next day on Saturday the 29th, or was it, I think it was Friday was the 28th, and it was like late in the night they started the war.

02:22:26.000 And then Saturday, I believe, was the 29th.

02:22:28.000 And an American immigrant from Sierra Leone here in Austin took an AR 15, put on a shirt with the Ayatollah and an Iranian flag on it.

02:22:41.000 I didn't even know they had Shiites in Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do. 0.91

02:22:45.000 And he went down to 6th Street and he shot 18 people, killed three, and wounded 15 people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack called backdraft. 0.99

02:22:56.000 I coined the phrase in my book that.

02:22:57.000 And if blowback means long term consequences from secret foreign policies that the American people then don't understand and are left up to false explanations or left susceptible to false explanations, well, then backdraft terrorism is when the.

02:23:13.000 Consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your face.

02:23:17.000 And, you know, frankly, like those three people were crucified for Israel, for their sins, and 15 more wounded.

02:23:25.000 And I don't know how terribly wounded for all I know, people are still in the hospital of that thing.

02:23:28.000 And that was an immediate blowback terrorist attack from this war, just right away.

02:23:34.000 And it's the kind of danger that our government continues to put us in through these interventions over there.

02:23:39.000 At some point, you know, all those sort of.

02:23:43.000 Hypotheticals about, yeah, but what if Russia took over the world or what if China did if it wasn't us or whatever?

02:23:49.000 Those have got to just kind of fall away, you know, by the wayside.

02:23:52.000 There's no real reason to fear that in the first place, but also who in the hell are we to stop it at this point, right? 0.78

02:23:58.000 Another South Park reference when Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics ceremony, he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us. 0.96

02:24:06.000 So he recruits Butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese away. 0.99

02:24:10.000 And then over and over again throughout the episode, Butters keeps like closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick. 0.99

02:24:17.000 Just over and over again. 0.99

02:24:19.000 And then by the end of the episode, Cartman says, You know what?

02:24:21.000 Just forget it.

02:24:22.000 Okay.

02:24:23.000 If that's the best you can do, Butters, let's just stop.

02:24:26.000 We're just going around.

02:24:28.000 This is not working, our intervention.

02:24:30.000 It's just not.

02:24:31.000 What do you predict is going to happen with Iran?

02:24:35.000 I'm really worried.

02:24:35.000 I don't know.

02:24:36.000 I mean, I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's, you know, or too literally when he's being hyperbolic, but he has threatened to nuke them over and over again, including just the other day.

02:24:47.000 He said, The country's going to have a glow.

02:24:50.000 Around it, you know, when I'm done with them or whatever.

02:24:52.000 You really think you're close to that?

02:24:54.000 I mean, I've, no, no, I don't.

02:24:57.000 I'm not predicting that, but I think it's symbolic, right, of his frustration.

02:25:02.000 He absolutely just should not have done this.

02:25:04.000 And now he has no good way out of it, right?

02:25:07.000 He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me.

02:25:10.000 In fact, there was a story in the Jerusalem Post the end of April, I think.

02:25:17.000 I think it was like April 28th about how Trump ordered the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just walked away, right?

02:25:27.000 And then they're looking into it. 0.83

02:25:28.000 Well, just how bad will Iran exploit the new vacuum that we've created and the power and influence that we're handing to them? 0.91

02:25:34.000 How bad will it really be? 0.89

02:25:36.000 Because he has no options to fix it.

02:25:38.000 He just doesn't. 0.81

02:25:39.000 You want a regime change in Tehran, you can drop a hydrogen bomb on the capital city and kill 10 million people and then claim the desolation is peace, or you can just forget it. 0.59

02:25:51.000 And, like, man, you know what? 1.00

02:25:53.000 We're all tough and badass enough to kill all these people. 0.84

02:25:56.000 We should be tough enough to admit when we screwed up then. 0.98

02:25:59.000 Look at Afghanistan.

02:26:00.000 We stayed for 20 years because Washington couldn't admit that we can't win this war. 1.00

02:26:05.000 There's only one way to tame the Pashtuns, and that is kill them all. 1.00

02:26:10.000 And we're not willing to do that. 1.00

02:26:12.000 So, what are we doing?

02:26:13.000 We're just losing slowly.

02:26:14.000 And then, what they do, they finally admitted it.

02:26:16.000 They finally just said, fine, I guess we lost and left.

02:26:19.000 That's what we got to do here, but sooner is better.

02:26:22.000 Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of his regime and then whoever comes into power in 2028 then gets out?

02:26:31.000 God, I hope not.

02:26:33.000 I can't imagine what's going to happen if this thing keeps on for three years.

02:26:37.000 You know, this is a real flaw in our system, quite frankly, is like, If we had a parliament, we could just vote no confidence in this guy and put a new guy in there whose fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it.

02:26:48.000 Instead, all we can do is wait three years, wait for him to kill over of a heart attack, or wait for his own cabinet to overthrow him in the name of him being too demented to continue, which is not going to happen.

02:27:01.000 That 25th Amendment, they always invoked that like they could do a coup against him for being a Russian agent or whatever back in his first term.

02:27:07.000 They didn't do it with Biden.

02:27:09.000 Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden, he would have to be.

02:27:12.000 Completely off his rocker and to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow him, which I just think is virtually impossible.

02:27:21.000 So the good news is, right, is that he's he just flip flop on anything, right?

02:27:26.000 He just changed his mind about anything. 0.66

02:27:28.000 In fact, when he announced the ceasefire, he said, We're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11 point proposal. 0.63

02:27:34.000 Like, okay, man, fine, right? 0.61

02:27:36.000 Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally, like, call it whatever you want.

02:27:41.000 And he, He is good at that.

02:27:43.000 You could call that a gift if you want to politically.

02:27:45.000 He can just pretend, like, yeah, no, I meant to do that.

02:27:48.000 So, what is the holdup?

02:27:49.000 Like, what are they disagreeing on?

02:27:51.000 Well, he's got to deal with Netanyahu, right?

02:27:54.000 The Master Blaster thing, you know, from Thunderdome on his back, shouting in his ear what he's got to do and what he's got to not do.

02:28:00.000 In the 60 Minutes interview, he tells Major Garrett that, you know, we're not done.

02:28:10.000 The war's not over until we get that uranium.

02:28:13.000 And Gareth says, Well, how are we going to get it?

02:28:14.000 He says, Trump promised me he wants to get it.

02:28:16.000 He's going to get it.

02:28:19.000 And of course, they have this ever since they announced the ceasefire.

02:28:23.000 The Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire.

02:28:27.000 This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has clearly been somehow enslaved by Netanyahu, that he's willing to put up with that.

02:28:35.000 As Bill Clinton said again, who's the superpower and who's the client state?

02:28:39.000 How is that we have a ceasefire deal and then you can come and veto it like this and then not be chastised and not told to get back in your corner?

02:28:47.000 We're handling this.

02:28:49.000 And I really just don't know the answer to that.

02:28:52.000 Some people speculate that it's blackmail or it's just the bribery or he's just into it.

02:28:57.000 That he just, you know, he wants to be great.

02:29:00.000 He wants to have a legacy.

02:29:02.000 This is, I really should study more about this, but this is a part of libertarian economic theory called public choice theory, which is kind of a clunky name, but it just means that the public choices are still made by private individuals and they're acting based on what's good for them rather than what's good for the country.

02:29:20.000 Like Strobe Talbot, we need those Lockheed dollars.

02:29:23.000 We need those Polish votes. 0.91

02:29:25.000 So we do a policy that ultimately is bad for the country, even though it's good for the Democrats at the time. 0.96

02:29:32.000 And same thing here.

02:29:33.000 What's good for the country is to just come home.

02:29:36.000 And you can hear this just built in.

02:29:38.000 People don't even question it.

02:29:39.000 It's just built in, of course, to every single discussion about this.

02:29:42.000 How are we going to do this in a way that it looks good enough for Trump that he's willing to accept his defeat here, right?

02:29:49.000 How can we spin it for him?

02:29:50.000 How big of a gold medal do we have to give him?

02:29:52.000 How big of a ticker tape parade do we have to give him?

02:29:55.000 How firm of a pat on the back? 0.97

02:29:58.000 And a congratulations, do we have to give him for him to decide that it's okay to come home otherwise and without looking like too much of a jerk himself for what he's done here and then having to live with it for three years, the aftermath of however it works out with Iran newly dominant? 0.90

02:30:15.000 And so, again, Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, Obama put them up two pegs by building the caliphate and then helping them destroy it again. 0.85

02:30:25.000 And then, of course, Al Qaeda rules Damascus now, so that's a big hit against them. 0.65

02:30:30.000 But What Donald Trump has done with this war is about at least equivalent to what W. Bush did in terms of enhancing Iranian power in the region.

02:30:39.000 It's like the guy in the football game grabs the ball and then runs the wrong direction and scores the goal for the other team.

02:30:47.000 Do you really think it's that bad?

02:30:49.000 Oh, it's absolutely.

02:30:50.000 I mean, look, before.

02:30:51.000 Despite the destruction of their nuclear power.

02:30:54.000 Absolutely.

02:30:55.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:30:56.000 Because, I mean, it's just as simple as this, right?

02:30:59.000 On February the 27th, the Gulf was open for business, and the illusion of American conventional.

02:31:05.000 Air and naval power kept it that way, and nobody questioned it.

02:31:08.000 It's America's dominated order. 0.94

02:31:11.000 Yes, Iran has Iraq, and they have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, but hell, we even got Sunnis ruling in Damascus now. 0.92

02:31:19.000 And so the GCC, including Jordan and Turkey and Israel, this is America's empire in the Middle East. 0.84

02:31:26.000 On February 29th, 30th, I mean, well, nope, sorry, there is no one leap year. 0.59

02:31:31.000 On March 1st, 2nd, 3rd this year, all that was over.

02:31:35.000 I mean, Daryl Cooper, again, is, you know, we do this show provoked every Friday night.

02:31:39.000 And he said, listen, I'm hearing from my friends in the Pentagon.

02:31:42.000 This was one week into the war.

02:31:44.000 He goes, I'm hearing from my friends.

02:31:45.000 This war is not going well.

02:31:47.000 They're hitting all our bases.

02:31:49.000 They've killed a couple of our guys, and they're hitting our runways, hitting our radars, and hitting our planes.

02:31:55.000 And we knew it then, right then.

02:31:58.000 And I'm sorry, man, it's just true.

02:32:00.000 Told just so.

02:32:01.000 For 20 years, all of our assets in the Gulf are up for grabs.

02:32:05.000 They can reach out and touch us there, and there ain't a damn thing that we can do about it. 0.97

02:32:10.000 You know, and it just absolutely is true.

02:32:14.000 Scott, you're a real bummer, but thank you.

02:32:16.000 It's a lot of fun, isn't it?

02:32:18.000 Talking to me?

02:32:19.000 It is.

02:32:21.000 It's good to get your perspective, and I really wish someone had your perspective before this all got started, at least an understanding of the ability to enrich the uranium and turn it into an actual weapon.

02:32:34.000 But thank you very much.

02:32:35.000 Tell everybody about your shows, where people could find them, where people could find you.

02:32:40.000 So I do the Scott Horton Show, which is my interview show, and Provoked with Daryl Cooper.

02:32:40.000 Absolutely.

02:32:47.000 Where do people get those?

02:32:49.000 Here on the YouTubes and on Spotify and all those things.

02:32:53.000 And then I have, I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.

02:32:58.000 I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute.

02:33:00.000 That's libertarianinstitute.org.

02:33:02.000 And for the deep, deep dive and the deep background on all this stuff, I have the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com.

02:33:09.000 And oh, you know what?

02:33:10.000 I have them here if I can just show my books real quick.

02:33:14.000 If I can find the zipper on this thing.

02:33:25.000 Got Fool's Errin on Afghanistan, Enough Already on the War on Terrorism, and Provoked on Russia and Ukraine. 0.99

02:33:33.000 Boy, those are some fat ass books, dude. 0.98

02:33:35.000 You do a lot of work. 0.99

02:33:37.000 I do.

02:33:38.000 I have a lot of jobs.

02:33:39.000 I work real hard on this stuff.

02:33:40.000 And these have been very well received.

02:33:43.000 You know, I'm basically, my job is, I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this.

02:33:50.000 When I was a young kid, there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on Raw Time, which was the heavy metal show on the Access Channel here in town.

02:33:57.000 And I think there's.

02:33:59.000 Probably not too long before he died.

02:34:01.000 And this is, of course, the days before the internet and everything, where he talks about the importance of seeing people get up there and tell the truth and not be afraid to tell the truth and set the example for other people.

02:34:13.000 And, you know, at that time, it was like to have a guy like him, a comedian, able to tell the truth on a platform where other people could hear it was just so exciting to even, it was like just breaking through this, this, you know, impenetrable force field.

02:34:27.000 And then he was just saying, he says, Well, if that guy can do it, well, then maybe I can do it, and I'll get up there and I'll say what I think is true, too, and then that kind of deal.

02:34:35.000 And so I've been more or less following that same path since then.

02:34:39.000 Well, thank you for all this because the amount of work that's involved in putting together these books and all the interviews and all the podcasts you've done for most people to occupy their mind with the kind of information that's in yours, it's got to be very troubling.

02:34:54.000 It's probably not so much fun.

02:34:56.000 And it's also very important for people like me who haven't done that work.

02:35:01.000 To have access to it and to get an understanding of it.

02:35:04.000 So, thank you.

02:35:05.000 Thank you very much for having me.

02:35:05.000 Cool.

02:35:06.000 We'll do it again, Scott.

02:35:08.000 All right.

02:35:09.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 15, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2500 - Scott Horton

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