In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary podcaster and podcaster joins me to talk about how he got his start on the radio airwaves, his time on Piers Morgan Live, and much, much more.
00:02:52.000That is a big change from how things used to be.
00:02:54.000We 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.
00:04:38.000It'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?
00:04:58.000But it's just, there's no like real rhyme or reason to it.
00:05:42.000No, they never did pay me, but I looked at it like they let me be on there for 14, 15 years or something.
00:05:49.000And, 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.
00:06:09.000I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com, and I can interview them once a week.
00:06:14.000And then when I left KPFK, I got some response.
00:06:17.000They're like, oh, no, where are you going?
00:06:58.000How do you define New World Order truther type?
00:07:01.000Okay, 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.
00:07:11.000The John Birch Society sort of idea of how.
00:07:18.000And I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton and even into the beginning of W. Bush.
00:07:23.000But then I finally realized with the way that the Iraq War was prosecuted that this is not about building up the UN Security Council.
00:07:31.000We 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.
00:07:42.000And 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.
00:07:49.000It was never to build up the UN as the world government.
00:07:52.000It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government.
00:07:55.000And of course, they've been failing and flailing at trying to establish that ever since.
00:08:37.000So 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.
00:08:51.000And, you know, but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now.
00:08:54.000I mean, that's just not going to happen anytime soon at all.
00:09:01.000Like, wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?
00:09:11.000Well, look, so yes, there's always the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can.
00:09:18.000At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America.
00:09:24.000But there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things.
00:09:34.000And 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?
00:09:51.000It'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.
00:10:03.000A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that.
00:10:06.000And if we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we think so.
00:10:11.000And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, you know, of various degrees.
00:10:15.000But this is a reference to right after the first Gulf War.
00:10:19.000Paul Wolfowitz, at that time, was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
00:10:23.000And him and a couple other neocons, Skuda Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, they wrote up this document called the Defense Planning Guidance.
00:10:30.000And it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the.
00:10:33.000Post Cold War era and the post First Iraq War, Gulf War era.
00:10:39.000And 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.
00:10:54.000We 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.
00:11:04.000And 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.
00:11:19.000And 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.
00:11:27.000But 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.
00:12:22.000Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up and down.0.96
00:12:27.000So, 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
00:12:50.000He was told that we were going to go into seven countries.
00:13:15.000For 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.
00:13:29.000I 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.
00:13:39.000The fighter bomber salesmen needed eggheads to justify their policies.
00:13:44.000And 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.
00:13:56.000You know, their own kind of thousand little council on foreign relations is to.
00:14:02.000And 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.
00:14:18.000And 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.
00:14:45.000And 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.
00:14:55.000So, 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.
00:15:05.000But all of his guys, all of his most important guys, are neoconservatives.
00:15:08.000So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz.
00:15:11.000The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is Stephen Cambone.
00:15:15.000The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is Douglas Fyfe.
00:15:18.000And 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.
00:15:28.000And this is the neoconservative network of power.
00:15:30.000You got Scooter Libby and David Wormser would travel around from state to defense to the Vice President's office.
00:15:37.000But you see Scooter Libby and John Hanna in the Vice President's office.
00:16:33.000The Mujahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.0.64
00:16:36.000Well, 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
00:16:48.000They 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
00:16:59.000But by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them, and they've worked for American Israel ever since then.
00:17:12.000They 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.
00:17:20.000Coincidentally and incidentally, and very importantly, of course, is this was really in many cases Israel's list of enemies.
00:17:28.000Where 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.
00:17:59.000That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative set.
00:18:04.000And 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
00:18:26.000And 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
00:18:39.000And 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
00:18:50.000But the problem is we have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is backed by Iran by way of Syria.0.54
00:18:59.000So, 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
00:19:15.000Now, Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power.1.00
00:19:20.000But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives.1.00
00:19:24.000They're as stupid as they are, arrogant and certain in their policy.1.00
00:19:28.000And they believed in this harebrained scheme, essentially, that the Jordanians and the Turks.1.00
00:19:32.000Would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein less Iraq.0.75
00:19:36.000And 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
00:19:48.000And 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
00:19:55.000You might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.
00:20:00.000They said, well, we'll just make him the guy instead, which ended up not happening.
00:20:05.000And they said, the new Shiite dominated Iraq.0.91
00:20:10.000Will 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
00:20:18.000And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil pipeline to Haifa, Israel.0.58
00:20:24.000And they were sold this bill of goods and they really believed it.
00:20:26.000And so, and you can find this on my website, scotthorton.org.
00:20:29.000I have a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
00:20:32.000And then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States, a balance of power strategy for the Levant.
00:20:37.000They're both by David Wormser, signed off on by Richard Pearl.
00:20:40.000And then they wrote a book where Wormser wrote the book and Richard Pearl wrote the foreword.
00:20:44.000It's called Tyranny's Ally America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein.
00:20:55.000And then based on the same harebrained scheme.
00:20:57.000And what's funny about this is this guy, David Wormser, now tries to defend himself.
00:21:01.000And he did an interview on a podcast not too long ago with this born again Christian about September 11th and stuff.0.55
00:21:08.000But he talked about this and he's like, yeah, no, that's still right.1.00
00:21:11.000They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do, those Shiites.0.84
00:21:14.000They just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the Prophet.0.99
00:21:19.000But 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
00:21:30.000Call him and have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.0.76
00:21:35.000Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time?0.89
00:21:37.000Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad before you can make this magic wish come true?1.00
00:21:43.000And the whole thing is completely stupid.1.00
00:21:45.000And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad, but.1.00
00:21:51.000One, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them.0.61
00:21:55.000And 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
00:22:09.000And of course, what happened, just real quick, what happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran.0.75
00:22:14.000They 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
00:22:24.000When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the Americans' face.0.76
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00:23:34.000Do 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
00:23:53.000I mean, the amount of money that was generated how much money did we spend on the Iraq war?0.99
00:23:58.000Oh, I mean, on Iraq alone, at least 5 or 7 trillion.
00:24:04.000I think it was probably 10 trillion for the whole terror war.0.50
00:25:34.000So, 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
00:25:43.000And push this thing on and let both sides fight and weaken each other and these kinds of attitudes for sure.0.95
00:25:49.000Like, 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?
00:26:00.000I 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
00:26:52.000We're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow.0.64
00:26:55.000And poor little Israel is going to be all alone out here.0.97
00:26:58.000So 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
00:27:09.000And of course, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the end of the decade.0.97
00:27:13.000But that was the premise for the thing.
00:27:14.000And 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.
00:27:26.000And without, you know, the Baathist construct in Iraq and Syria, you would have these smaller tribal based type units.0.71
00:27:33.000So 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
00:27:44.000And 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
00:27:55.000Do you think there's a parallel in when we first went into Iraq, like Desert Storm?0.74
00:28:43.000In 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
00:28:51.000And 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
00:30:00.000They just switched from night to day on that.
00:30:02.000And then, yeah, the other thing, and look, a big part of that is Putin is a great stand in for Trump.
00:30:07.000If you're an angry liberal, something, you got to be angry at something.0.80
00:30:11.000He represents now we're the right common turn, and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force.0.74
00:30:18.000And 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
00:30:28.000And 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.
00:30:38.000So, it's as far as the narrative goes.
00:30:42.000It'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.
00:30:53.000Was that who was, it wasn't, not that they were leftists, but they're liberals, you know, or progressive type, you know, college kids.
00:30:59.000And they're just totally on the side of Ukraine.
00:31:02.000And in fact, the question of the debate was this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine.0.80
00:31:10.000And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world.
00:32:57.000And 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.
00:33:08.000And in fact, Even embarrassingly for the Republicans, George Bush Sr. and his government even intended the USSR to stay together.
00:33:17.000They wanted not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to Belarus and Ukraine and at least some of the stands.
00:33:25.000But what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet Union.
00:33:30.000The most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it.
00:33:34.000And it was actually in the aftermath of a hard line commie coup in August of 1991, which failed.0.74
00:33:40.000And so it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day.
00:33:42.000But then ended up doing his own coup basically and just destroying what was left of the USSR and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out.
00:33:51.000So, why did the United States get involved in Ukraine and why did they stage a coup?
00:33:57.000Yeah, well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right?
00:34:01.000And 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.
00:34:12.000And I believe in In the defense plan and guidance that he wrote in 1992, Wolfowitz, that we got to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
00:34:21.000And this is the debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not.
00:34:27.000And in fact, in the 90s, there were some people who opposed expansion altogether.
00:34:31.000But then there was another school of thought that just said, well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in.
00:34:37.000And 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.
00:34:46.000Like 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.
00:35:00.000This is what James Baker and under H.W. Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians.
00:35:07.000So 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.
00:35:21.000Really meant to live up to those promises.
00:35:23.000So, 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
00:35:40.000And this is Ukraine, Russia's Canada, right?
00:35:43.000Kazakhstan's their Mexico, Ukraine's their Canada.
00:35:46.000It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but same difference here.
00:35:55.000But 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.
00:36:05.000Russia 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.
00:36:12.000In 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.
00:36:27.000If you let them go, we promise not to take advantage.
00:36:43.000Where 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.
00:36:57.000The 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.
00:37:08.000Um, and we have no intention of doing that.0.88
00:37:11.000And 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.
00:37:27.000Even 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.
00:37:38.000And the Clintons, you know, went along with it too.
00:37:41.000And in fact, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it.
00:37:49.000And 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.
00:38:24.000And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who had.
00:38:30.000Coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s and had been ambassador to Moscow.
00:38:38.000And he was the one who said, We got to contain communism.
00:38:40.000Well, now he's saying we should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't do anything.
00:38:45.000And 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
00:38:54.000And he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he goes, I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen here, okay?
00:39:00.000NATO right up close to Russia, and we're going to get a negative reaction from the Russians.0.91
00:39:05.000And 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
00:39:14.000That's why we have to do this, which is exactly what they say now.0.95
00:39:42.000I 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
00:40:08.000We're going to do what we have to do, at least to mitigate that.
00:40:11.000If America is still going to control Kiev, then at the very least, we're going to control the Donbass and the southeastern coast here.
00:40:18.000And 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
00:40:25.000You know, almost like it was a British colony, just had total sock puppets in charge of that country.0.61
00:40:30.000In fact, there's a clip that I quote extensively.
00:40:32.000It's one of the only block quotes in my book because I got rid of almost all of them for space.
00:40:36.000But I think I have the block quote of Victoria Nuland testifying.0.72
00:40:39.000That'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.
00:40:48.000And she goes on and on describing the level of what can you call the infiltration, essentially, of the Ukrainian government by the United States.
00:40:57.000She 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.
00:41:13.000We're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country.
00:41:17.000And, you know, the WikiLeaks are very beneficial on this story because they show where the Americans understand clearly.
00:41:24.000By the Americans, I mean Washington, the State Department, whatever, these guys, that.
00:41:30.000They 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.
00:41:44.000And so they say, well, so we just have to push then.
00:41:46.000We'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.
00:41:55.000You 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.
00:42:05.000I'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.
00:42:14.000It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day.
00:42:21.000When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible.
00:42:42.000Or if they went back at all, they would go, well, you know, this all started when Russia seized Crimea.
00:42:47.000But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government and the so called Revolution of Dignity in February 2014.
00:43:27.000So, 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.
00:43:41.000Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interests, right?
00:43:48.000And Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have investments in those grains.
00:43:54.000And so this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us.
00:43:58.000You look at whatever benefit they have to our GNP or GDP is negligible, certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that.
00:44:06.000These are all the free riders, these are the excuse makers for this kind of policy.0.65
00:44:10.000But essentially, I think what it really is is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible.0.72
00:44:18.000You know, like there's this really important Rand Corporation study that was published in 2019.0.63
00:44:25.000So, the Rand Corporation is a Pentagon sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara.
00:44:30.000They 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.
00:45:30.000But anyway, then they said we could increase weapons to the jihadists in Syria.
00:45:37.000We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan.
00:45:40.000We could increase support for the Ukrainian military.
00:45:46.000And 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.
00:45:53.000To keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend, right?
00:45:57.000But then all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers where they say, Don't listen to us.
00:46:05.000Like if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just invade it immediately and station nuclear weapons there to make the point, right?
00:46:16.000If 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.
00:46:26.000They said we could increase support for what was then the ongoing civil war that had broken out after the revolution in 2014.
00:46:36.000We 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.
00:46:52.000A 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.
00:47:02.000And so we better be real careful about pursuing these policies.
00:47:07.000And then I swear, you look at how Biden ran things, and it was like he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers.
00:47:13.000And they just went ahead and did all of these things.
00:47:27.000And 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.
00:47:42.000What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin?
00:47:45.000To try to prevent him from invading Ukraine as they're threatening to do.
00:47:48.000And we're building up their forces in preparation for it.
00:47:51.000And 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
00:48:00.000It's the most important one, which is just madness.
00:48:03.000And 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.
00:48:15.000And of course, This is why the war's been going on for four years.
00:48:19.000America could tell Kiev under Biden or under Trump that, look, you guys are just going to have to compromise here, obviously.
00:48:25.000You've lost all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk and at least half of Zaprosia and Kherson.
00:48:33.000And so just make a deal, figure it out.
00:48:35.000And we're not supporting you anymore.0.54
00:48:37.000Remember, they said over and over again we want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
00:48:45.000But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good.
00:48:48.000And 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.
00:49:03.000Because just think about it Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not.
00:49:10.000So all we got to do is we just give them money and then they go fight.
00:49:13.000And 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.
00:49:25.000A major part of this country completely destroyed.
00:49:28.000Huge segments of their population fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again.1.00
00:49:36.000Total destabilization of their culture and society in every way.1.00
00:49:41.000But 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
00:49:49.000We're sending them home in body bags.0.99
00:49:50.000We're sending them home in coffins.1.00
00:49:52.000We're even killing their generals in the field.0.99
00:50:14.000Oh, 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.
00:50:21.000And 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.
00:50:26.000And 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?
00:50:36.000Is 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?
00:50:52.000Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization and to emphasize their turn to the East.
00:51:02.000That seems to me to be a terrible mistake.
00:51:05.000And I think part of it is part of the longer term Cold War with China, too.
00:51:10.000And you hear them talk about this, Joe.
00:51:13.000They'll say, you know, essentially Russia's friends with China.
00:51:17.000So there's two things we can do there.
00:51:18.000And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China.
00:51:24.000Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that or he doesn't know how.0.56
00:51:28.000And 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
00:51:42.000they 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
00:51:48.000I think that was the choice that Joe Biden made.0.98
00:51:52.000And I think it was totally wrong because it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China.
00:51:57.000The 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
00:52:05.000So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want and the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got.
00:52:11.000So, you know, they really don't need Europe.0.96
00:52:14.000Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.
00:52:25.000And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this?
00:52:28.000This was to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe?
00:52:33.000In fact, more specifically, right, it was to make this break between, to solidify the break between Germany and Russia.
00:52:42.000It's the previous German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
00:52:45.000She had this project she called Eurasian Home.
00:52:48.000And, And what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in Europe.
00:52:54.000And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff, all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff.
00:52:59.000They closed down all their nuclear in Germany.
00:53:01.000And then the idea was don't worry, we're going to import all this clean burning CH4 from the Russians.0.64
00:53:08.000And 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
00:53:23.000You 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
00:53:35.000And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there.
00:53:38.000And, you know, there's here in Austin, there's that sort of corporate CIA, Stratfor, run by this guy, George Friedman.
00:54:18.000I know he opposed Iraq War II in 2003 because I heard him on the radio back then.
00:54:22.000But, 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.
00:55:04.000And 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.
00:57:49.000And 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.
00:58:48.000By ethnicity, those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever.
00:58:51.000So, you have sort of the ruling caste and the people on the outs and whatever.
00:58:54.000So, 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.
00:59:05.000And then what happened was the Russians invaded.
00:59:41.000And 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
00:59:53.000In 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.
01:00:05.000When Russia's doing better, you hit them.
01:00:07.000When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them.
01:00:10.000You 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.
01:00:19.000It's high time preference, you know, sort of government thinking, right?
01:00:22.000That like, well, if we can get away with this now, we should without really thinking about the long term consequence.
01:00:28.000In 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.
01:00:55.000A New York Times reporter named Keith Gessen went and interviewed Strobe Talbot.
01:01:01.000And 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.
01:01:13.000I forgot exactly what you phrase it, but it's sort of, you know, what do you have to say for yourself, Strobe?
01:01:17.000And 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.
01:01:28.000And if you don't do that, well, then you won't be in power very long.
01:01:45.000In 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?
01:01:53.000So, or was, I don't know if it still is.
01:01:56.000So, 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.
01:02:03.000So, we're going to make these promises to these people and pursue this policy.
01:02:08.000For our narrow interests as rulers of the empire.
01:02:13.000But 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?
01:02:55.000Is 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
01:03:18.000They'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
01:03:27.000Yeah, 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
01:03:35.000We're constantly provoking, and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction.
01:03:41.000And 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.
01:03:52.000So, how would things be otherwise?0.75
01:03:53.000For 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.
01:04:12.000And 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
01:04:23.000With the new red, white, and blue Republican Russians.
01:04:27.000And, 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
01:04:35.000It's not like we made them, they wanted to.
01:04:37.000But the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia based on old things.
01:04:42.000But the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence?
01:04:54.000And 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
01:05:04.000I mean, when Germany reunified, it's not like the commies were taken over.0.63
01:05:08.000It was the West that was dominant in the new Germany, right?
01:05:13.000There'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
01:05:28.000We should just let the Germans have it.0.81
01:05:30.000I 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
01:05:41.000But 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
01:05:56.000And 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
01:08:29.000They got to make deals the whole way across if they're going to do that.
01:08:34.000And 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.
01:08:47.000But I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at.
01:08:53.000George 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.
01:09:04.000Well, you know, just to point to what you're saying, it's like China's not invading anybody.
01:09:33.000The 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
01:09:49.000They're just way ahead of everybody else.
01:09:51.000I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a chip manufacturing plant in Texas?
01:09:57.000And I think their yields were so poor.
01:09:59.000I don't know what the actual story with that is.
01:10:02.000So, 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.
01:10:20.000So, it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you just crank out chips.
01:10:26.000Like, apparently, these chips are super complicated to make.
01:10:50.000I 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.
01:12:21.000I 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.
01:12:33.000So they just found their own workaround.
01:12:35.000Well, they also, there's a lot of espionage going on, too.
01:12:39.000A 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.
01:12:58.000So, early strategic bet on manufacturing.
01:13:02.000Starting 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.
01:13:15.000In other words, leading contract, TSMC.
01:13:18.000The leading contract chip manufacturer produces over half of the world's advanced semiconductors and more than 90% of the most cutting edge nodes.
01:13:29.000Because advanced fabs cost tens of billions of dollars and must run near full capacity to be profitable, only a few players can keep up.
01:13:37.000And Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out.
01:14:11.000But just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved in keeping it running.
01:14:18.000I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of expertise.
01:14:22.000Not 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.
01:14:50.000It could just mean that they already have contracts, that they don't need them because they've already made commitments to Taiwan chip manufacturing.
01:14:58.000On 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.
01:15:10.000There's a pretty big incentive for them to move to Texas.
01:15:13.000There is, but again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step.
01:15:17.000I don't think it's just like move here.
01:15:19.000I think it's an enormous investment in capital, like beyond normal things.
01:15:24.000And then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment.
01:15:47.000I didn't see anything, but they're trying to get to two nanometer production.
01:15:50.000They 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.
01:16:02.000Well, the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year.
01:16:14.000Hey, look, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire is good for nothing anyway.
01:16:19.000We 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
01:16:26.000That whole thing was a hollow bluff, and the Iranians just called it, and we lost.0.96
01:16:35.000I think you talked about this on your show, right?
01:16:37.000How they were covering up the satellite photos.
01:16:39.000They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos when you could get them online, whatever other countries had them.
01:16:46.000You'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,
01:17:05.000hit 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
01:17:23.000Our naval's Fifth Fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline.
01:17:28.000I 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.
01:17:57.000That 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?
01:18:03.000And it has all the map of all our bases in the region.
01:18:06.000But 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.
01:18:16.000Those 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.
01:18:37.000So, why they were so poorly defended, that's got to be political decision making among the brass, right?
01:18:43.000About, 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.
01:18:58.000It 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.
01:19:11.000Where we increase the war in Iraq.0.91
01:19:14.000But we really don't want to go to Iran.0.97
01:19:17.000And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance, or at least we won't have it.0.66
01:19:26.000We will not have escalation dominance there.
01:19:28.000And 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
01:19:38.000And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right?0.84
01:19:43.000As Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable.0.94
01:19:46.000In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all, a short and medium range missile force that we cannot defend from.1.00
01:19:58.000We 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.
01:20:09.000And 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.
01:20:36.000And 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
01:20:47.000At antiwar.com, you can find in the archives there, I wrote an article in August of.
01:20:52.0002005, called Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran?
01:20:57.000And 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
01:21:06.000So 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
01:21:18.000And so, and we talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in a sec, too.0.77
01:21:57.000And 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.
01:22:15.000They were, you know, no different from Al Qaeda or ISIS.
01:22:18.000And 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
01:22:25.000I 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.
01:22:56.000And boy, over 20 years, I must have said this a thousand times.
01:22:59.000They 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.
01:23:11.000They 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.
01:23:22.000So, back to my original point when I got on this tangent, was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt.
01:23:29.000Donald Trump just blew his big bluff that we're the big player in the region.
01:23:34.000We're actually not in the region, we're here.
01:24:35.000They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went ahead and restarted up again.
01:24:40.000And don't they have some crazy like missile elevator system where they're They're buried deep underground.
01:24:45.000I 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.
01:24:53.000And so they've been preparing for something like this for a long time.
01:25:04.000I 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.
01:25:12.000Let's see like what the conventional news says.
01:25:22.000Oh, and NBC also had one within the CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks.
01:25:27.000The New York Times is about six weeks old, maybe.
01:25:28.000One 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.
01:25:51.000And that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return.
01:25:57.000And that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing.
01:26:04.000And 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.
01:26:50.000Told 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.
01:27:03.000And then that's Mikey Weinstein right there at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
01:27:07.000He was, I believe, an Air Force officer, maybe as an Army officer.
01:27:11.000And then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military.
01:27:16.000And 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.
01:27:27.000It is time to bring on the apocalypse.0.51
01:27:29.000And 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.
01:27:43.000He 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.
01:27:56.000Can you imagine if you're over there, you already think the war is sketchy?0.97
01:27:59.000Like, why the fuck are we doing this?0.98
01:28:01.000And then this guy comes down, you're like, oh my God, we're cooked.0.99
01:28:04.000This is a big part of how they justified Iraq.0.97
01:28:06.000I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible.0.90
01:28:11.000Middle East, year 2000, sort of ish.0.97
01:28:14.000This is how you're going to get raptured up to heaven in your body.0.94
01:28:18.000And all you have to do is support this aggressive war.
01:28:20.000And all this magic stuff is going to come true.
01:28:22.000And 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.
01:29:41.000It'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.
01:29:49.000And now, like, we got you on this technicality double jump.0.99
01:29:52.000You already agreed with the stupid things I said.0.98
01:29:55.000And so now you have to do the thing that I said.1.00
01:29:58.000And then plus, on top of that, just the flattery.
01:30:00.000And, like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing.
01:30:03.000Back 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.
01:30:16.000And just tell him things that he likes, right?0.95
01:30:18.000With get out of Afghanistan in the middle.
01:30:20.000And so this is what Netanyahu does he goes, listen, you're greater than Abraham Lincoln.
01:30:26.000You're greater than George Washington.
01:31:16.000It oftentimes does not work like that.
01:31:19.000And 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.
01:31:33.000And they've been completely clear about that.
01:31:35.000That this entire time, but Netanyahu convinced him, right?0.55
01:31:39.000This 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
01:31:47.000There will be no one too close to the Strait of Hormuz because we'll have already won by then.0.81
01:31:50.000But what do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons?0.85
01:31:56.000Probably the other states in the region will.
01:32:01.000You know, Daryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show, Provoked, and I know a good friend of yours.
01:32:18.000And 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
01:32:49.000And 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
01:33:19.000Also wanted to attack the Soviet Union right after they were done with the war.0.84
01:33:24.000And 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
01:33:34.000And I like to pick on him and joke with him that, you know, Churchill was the real bad guy, whatever.0.93
01:33:39.000Because he wouldn't accept, you know, peace for an answer.
01:33:43.000He had to finish the regime change no matter what, even if it took America doing it for him and whatever.
01:33:47.000And 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.
01:34:02.000But that was not what he was saying at all.
01:34:04.000He 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.
01:34:16.000And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody could deny that.0.69
01:34:24.000And then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Holocaust.0.71
01:34:26.000His 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
01:34:33.000He 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
01:34:40.000And 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.
01:34:49.000They were already whooped and conquered and besieged.0.71
01:34:52.000And so you take control of people like that, then you're responsible.
01:34:57.000To 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.
01:35:03.000So it ended up being, you know, half of a thing in jest and half explained about Churchill.
01:35:13.000And then a point about the war in the East that was totally, and I think in some cases, honestly misinterpreted.
01:35:22.000But 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.
01:35:30.000And that's the problem with video clips.
01:35:32.000Clips are a real problem because you lose the context of the entire conversation.
01:35:36.000You 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.
01:35:44.000But to me, it's always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate.
01:35:50.000Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not be true.0.86
01:35:57.000I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history.
01:36:02.000Where we have gotten a completely objective, 100% accurate representation of why the war started, what were the factors, what were the motivations.0.98
01:36:11.000We 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?
01:36:27.000I thought that I was doing this to make the world safer, and really I was making it better for bankers.0.98
01:36:34.000Better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever the fuck they were actually doing.
01:36:40.000And 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
01:36:54.000Yeah, as he says, it's a huge part of our civic religion, basically.
01:37:00.000We'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.
01:37:08.000Of the American Empire and their great project, the greatest generation, and all of those things.
01:37:14.000That was, you know, that's how we know that that's who we are.
01:37:19.000I 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.
01:37:25.000A lot of people have connections to that.
01:37:29.000As Bill Crystal and his friends would say, this is how you build national greatness.
01:37:33.000You need big projects that we can all do together.
01:37:36.000And World War II is the biggest project of all.
01:37:38.000So it's, The kind of thing that people don't really want to question.0.98
01:37:41.000It's also, we should point out that they were bankrolling Smedley Butler, trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government.0.99
01:38:09.000I'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.
01:38:14.000But 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.
01:38:28.000So he only quotes the highest level, most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford.
01:38:35.000And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever.0.99
01:38:39.000He's quoting only these English historians, saying, here's how the idiot Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.0.99
01:38:48.000Essentially, fumbled into this war, screwed up, and got us into this war that was way worse than we ever could have hoped.0.99
01:38:55.000They ended up turning Poland over to the commies at the end, anyway, and all of that.0.77
01:38:58.000And 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.
01:39:27.000That was boy, that guy he had no pulse for a while, yeah.
01:39:32.000You know, is that not in the Bible or something?
01:39:34.000Like, 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.
01:39:49.000And this guy doesn't even have a pulse, I know, it's really weird.
01:41:32.000So 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
01:43:01.000And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going, I think we can go dumber.0.99
01:43:08.000That was the idea of the bit, is that this is the only way to find out how dumb we are.0.94
01:43:12.000Like 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
01:43:24.000And they just, the real power is all behind the throne running things.0.94
01:43:29.000Well, my favorite movie about that is Dr. Strangelove.
01:43:34.000Because 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.
01:43:51.000Oh, you can tell, and this is one of the most dispiriting things, right?
01:43:54.000Is when you can tell a lot of times when these people are talking that, wow, he's really not lying.1.00
01:43:59.000He really thinks that that stupid lie is true.1.00
01:44:01.000And he's telling us what he thinks is true.1.00
01:44:03.000Like, 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
01:44:18.000I mean, that might just be the dumbest lie and he knows it.0.63
01:44:20.000But if they did have nuclear weapons, it would be a giant problem.0.99
01:44:31.000You don't think that's a big deal, what they've done to their protesters?0.79
01:44:33.000In 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
01:44:53.000If they rush to an atom bomb, Say to somehow deter us, which I don't think that would work.0.92
01:45:00.000I think we just attack them if they really did it, we just attack them again.0.65
01:45:04.000But 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
01:45:16.000And at that point, Iran's entire strategic advantage is canceled because now they got nukes too.0.70
01:45:20.000And so now nobody has a strategic advantage.0.84
01:45:22.000But no one can do to them what happened to them now if they had nukes.0.86
01:45:26.000This was the argument for Ukraine not disarming.0.74
01:45:29.000But that would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as well.
01:45:50.000Because all that stuff was open and declared and safeguarded by the IAEA.
01:45:54.000Two major facilities at Fordow and Natance, and then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb, from the mine through the conversion process.
01:46:03.000But how much oversight do they have of this?
01:46:06.000I mean, how much of it could be done in secrecy?
01:47:21.000So, it wasn't a capability thing, it was just an agreement.
01:47:25.000Although 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
01:47:34.000But if they're cooperating with China and China has that capability because Bill Clinton gave it to them, yeah.0.54
01:47:47.000If 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
01:48:03.000And then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist named Wen Ho Li, and the evil FBI persecuted poor Wen Ho Li.0.86
01:48:11.000And it was this huge distraction from what really happened, which was this Chinese.
01:48:16.000Indonesian 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.
01:48:30.000And they took that authority away from state and defense and gave it to the Commerce.
01:48:34.000And then John Wong was the guy who got to rubber stamp those missile technology transfers.
01:48:39.000So then Hughes Aircraft and Laurel Corporation then sent their very best three stage rocket technology to China.
01:48:46.000Because it's cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know.
01:48:50.000So, they were not, I don't think, able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United States before that.
01:48:55.000And 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.
01:49:11.000However, 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
01:49:23.000The reality was, Iran's position was not that they were racing to a nuke.0.85
01:49:27.000Their position was they had this safeguarded program where, again, the IAEA is essentially proving the negative.
01:49:33.000We 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.
01:49:39.000We know how much they're enriching, and we know where it all goes.0.66
01:49:42.000And so then Israel would say, America, they're making nukes.0.50
01:49:48.000If 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.
01:49:56.000Who's been in charge almost the entire time since Obama?0.69
01:50:00.000And the policy was from the Israelis America bombed them.0.94
01:50:04.000They 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
01:50:12.000Then America would say, no, we're not doing that.
01:50:14.000This is under W. Bush, again, under Obama, under Trump won, and under Biden.
01:50:19.000No, we're not going to just start a war.0.85
01:50:22.000But 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
01:51:07.000And that could have and should have stood, except this is what.
01:51:11.000This is the answer to your question about how did they get us into this?
01:51:14.000Because Netanyahu convinced Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli line.
01:51:19.000That 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.
01:51:28.000So, how much understanding do we have of their capabilities, and how do we have that understanding?
01:51:36.000Like, how much do we know about their enrichment program?
01:51:40.000How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon?
01:51:43.000Because haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear weapon?
01:52:19.000You have that refined yellow cake, which is refined uranium ore.1.00
01:52:22.000Then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas.
01:52:26.000And that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges.
01:52:29.000Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges, a whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes.
01:52:34.000And 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.
01:52:52.000So they need like 3.6% U 235 for their electricity program.
01:52:58.000They 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.
01:53:09.000But then to make weapons grade uranium, you need typically above 90% pure uranium 235.
01:53:15.000In 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.
01:53:22.000Whether you're going to make fuel rods or whether you're going to try to make a bomb warhead out of it.
01:53:26.000So, 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.
01:53:37.000But 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.
01:53:49.000And then at Fordow, they would change it from a production facility to just a research facility.
01:53:55.000And 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.
01:54:04.000That way, they had no stockpile that they could just quickly reintroduce into the centrifuges and enrich to a higher grade.
01:54:09.000They'd have to basically start at nothing again.
01:54:12.000And 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.
01:54:26.000At weapons grade to make one bomb out of it.
01:54:29.000Then, 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.
01:54:40.000And the simpler the nuke, the harder it is to deliver.
01:54:45.000So, 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
01:54:52.000The Trinity test was the Nagasaki bomb, basically.0.87
01:54:56.000Is essentially a very heavy bomb and very difficult to deliver.
01:55:00.000And virtually all miniaturized implosion bombs in the world that can ever be married to a missile, they're virtually all made out of plutonium.
01:55:09.000And 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.
01:55:21.000But they poured concrete into that thing and shut it down completely before it was even open.0.72
01:55:27.000Operating 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.
01:55:37.000They would have to shut it off all the time to harvest the stuff out of there and all of that.
01:55:41.000Under inspections, they can't do that.
01:55:45.000It'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.
01:55:52.000But 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.
01:56:02.000And that's the deal here, they've got inspectors throughout the place.
01:56:06.000And then what happened was so we had that perfect Mexican standoff, right?0.84
01:56:11.000Where Israel saying, bomb them, they're making nukes.0.97
01:56:13.000We say, no, we won't bomb them, but we will if they do.
01:56:16.000And them saying, don't bomb us because we're not.
01:56:19.000Then Trump called their bluff last June.0.70
01:56:55.000There's open source reporting from last November.
01:56:57.000And 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.
01:57:26.000That 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?
01:57:37.000So as soon as he left, then they said, everyone else.
01:57:41.000At the table, said, Don't listen to him, boss.
01:57:45.000He's blowing smoke, man, that this is going to be so easy.
01:57:47.000Now, 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.
01:57:55.000But then, and look, it's Maggie Haberman and them at the New York Times.
01:57:58.000I mean, it seemed like a very well reported story from, you know, the principals are talking to her about this stuff.
01:58:04.000Well, this is what Joe Kennedy said as well, right?
02:00:01.000I 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.
02:01:05.000We're on your southern border in a week or two.
02:01:06.000I'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
02:01:13.000So 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
02:01:35.000Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening.
02:01:39.000Also 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.
02:01:49.000Now, if I was Netanyahu and I knew that JD Vance was going to be in Azerbaijan.
02:01:55.000You 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?
02:03:12.000What do you mean they had the recordings?
02:03:13.000So 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.
02:03:27.000You know, the story is the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in 1996, they were in the room for half an hour or something.
02:03:35.000And when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated and says, Who the F does this guy think he is?
02:03:41.000Who's the superpower and who's the client stake?
02:03:45.000Because 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.
02:04:23.000So he was demanding inspections of Dimona, their nuclear facility there.
02:04:27.000To this day, they don't officially have nuclear weapons.
02:04:31.000And 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
02:05:40.000So 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
02:05:53.000And the nuclear weapon states promise never to share them.0.72
02:07:37.000And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel.
02:07:42.000And 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.
02:08:00.000You know, and it was, you know, I don't know, man.
02:08:04.000Honestly, 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.
02:08:13.000And I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French hitmen to do it or if.
02:08:16.000The Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Alan Dulles got some Cubans to do it, or what the hell, right?
02:09:08.000No, you watch the whole movie JFK, right?
02:09:11.000It's got every theory under the sun in there.
02:09:13.000And 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
02:09:23.000Which are an essential part of these nuclear triggers for their weapons.0.68
02:09:29.000And 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.
02:10:51.000That's MondoWeiss.net, a great website for anti Zionist.0.82
02:10:55.000The no daylight policy, the U.S. alignment with the Israeli government.
02:10:58.000So obviously today, Trump's deference to Netanyahu was born under Matilda Krim's dear friend, Lyndon Johnson.
02:11:07.000In 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
02:11:20.000I mean, you got to give it up to a country the size of Rhode Island that has that kind of fucking pull.0.84
02:11:26.000They got their priorities straight, that's for sure.0.98
02:11:28.000Kind of amazing that they've been doing this since the 60s and before.
02:11:33.000I mean, they threatened Harry Truman, they bribed him, and they also threatened him.
02:12:03.000He 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.
02:12:47.000It was, you know, carrot and stick kind of a thing.
02:12:50.000And 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.
02:12:59.000And that is your relationship with the United States of America.
02:13:15.000If 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.
02:13:23.000Although I'm not necessarily predicting that.
02:13:25.000I think, you know, Trump has proven by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent, he has proven he's willing to bomb them.
02:13:33.000And if they really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing.
02:13:39.000And then this president, and I think the next one too, would be willing to go back to war over it.0.92
02:13:44.000As Barack Obama promised, he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb.
02:13:52.000And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.0.96
02:13:55.000Called 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
02:14:04.000If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but just let me try to solve this another way.0.79
02:14:10.000This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden.
02:14:13.000And I think that will continue to last into the next presidency.0.84
02:14:17.000And 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
02:14:28.000And 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
02:14:43.000And 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.
02:14:52.000And they can, I think, successfully deter Israel even with their conventional missile force.0.56
02:14:57.000And we saw them just absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv.0.60
02:15:04.000And I think, you know, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatollah, right?
02:15:10.000And 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
02:15:18.000I mean, that's the new Ayatollah over there.0.69
02:15:22.000Is, you know, he's got to be more radical than his father.0.84
02:15:26.000He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was.
02:15:30.000So, what is the pathway to resolution?
02:15:33.000Well, 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.
02:15:44.000The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say, I won.
02:15:48.000Yeah, but we don't really need these bases over there.
02:15:51.000The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East.
02:15:54.000We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore.
02:16:56.000I mean, America already, we had exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now, we had on February the 27th.
02:17:05.000And then they launched this war on the 28th, which, by the way, was the anniversary of the Waco raid.
02:17:10.000This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war.
02:17:12.000And 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.
02:17:24.000They killed in one building, they killed 173 or 74, almost all little girls.
02:17:31.000And then in the other one was 20 more.
02:17:34.000And 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.
02:17:47.000And 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.
02:17:57.000Which, you know, for young people, Oklahoma was 9 11 before 9 11, right?
02:19:08.000It'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.
02:19:19.000But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls, the children of those sailors.
02:19:40.000Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be.
02:19:43.000I'll tell you what our story of World War II would be.0.89
02:19:46.000It 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
02:19:56.000It's just somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should.0.93
02:20:02.000If 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.
02:20:19.000And in fact, when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd, right?
02:20:23.000How 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?
02:20:41.000You 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.
02:20:55.000And 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.
02:21:03.000You 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
02:21:23.000We've had a real problem with bin Ladenite jihadi terrorism over the time.0.97
02:21:53.000But 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.
02:22:14.000The 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.
02:22:26.000And then Saturday, I believe, was the 29th.
02:22:28.000And 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.
02:22:41.000I didn't even know they had Shiites in Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do.0.91
02:22:45.000And 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
02:22:57.000And 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.
02:23:13.000Consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your face.
02:23:17.000And, you know, frankly, like those three people were crucified for Israel, for their sins, and 15 more wounded.
02:23:25.000And I don't know how terribly wounded for all I know, people are still in the hospital of that thing.
02:23:28.000And that was an immediate blowback terrorist attack from this war, just right away.
02:23:34.000And it's the kind of danger that our government continues to put us in through these interventions over there.
02:23:39.000At some point, you know, all those sort of.
02:23:43.000Hypotheticals about, yeah, but what if Russia took over the world or what if China did if it wasn't us or whatever?
02:23:49.000Those have got to just kind of fall away, you know, by the wayside.
02:23:52.000There'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
02:23:58.000Another 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
02:24:06.000So he recruits Butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese away.0.99
02:24:10.000And then over and over again throughout the episode, Butters keeps like closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick.0.99
02:24:36.000I 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.
02:24:47.000He said, The country's going to have a glow.
02:24:50.000Around it, you know, when I'm done with them or whatever.
02:24:52.000You really think you're close to that?
02:24:57.000I'm not predicting that, but I think it's symbolic, right, of his frustration.
02:25:02.000He absolutely just should not have done this.
02:25:04.000And now he has no good way out of it, right?
02:25:07.000He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me.
02:25:10.000In fact, there was a story in the Jerusalem Post the end of April, I think.
02:25:17.000I 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?
02:25:39.000You 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
02:26:33.000I can't imagine what's going to happen if this thing keeps on for three years.
02:26:37.000You 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.
02:26:48.000Instead, 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.
02:27:01.000That 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.
02:27:09.000Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden, he would have to be.
02:27:12.000Completely 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.
02:27:21.000So the good news is, right, is that he's he just flip flop on anything, right?
02:27:26.000He just changed his mind about anything.0.66
02:27:28.000In fact, when he announced the ceasefire, he said, We're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11 point proposal.0.63
02:28:19.000And of course, they have this ever since they announced the ceasefire.
02:28:23.000The Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire.
02:28:27.000This 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.
02:28:35.000As Bill Clinton said again, who's the superpower and who's the client state?
02:28:39.000How 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?
02:29:02.000This 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.
02:29:20.000Like Strobe Talbot, we need those Lockheed dollars.
02:29:58.000And 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
02:30:15.000And 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
02:30:25.000And then, of course, Al Qaeda rules Damascus now, so that's a big hit against them.0.65
02:30:30.000But 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.
02:30:39.000It'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.
02:32:21.000It'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.
02:33:02.000And 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.
02:33:40.000And these have been very well received.
02:33:43.000You know, I'm basically, my job is, I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this.
02:33:50.000When 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.
02:34:01.000And 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.
02:34:13.000And, 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.
02:34:27.000And 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.
02:34:35.000And so I've been more or less following that same path since then.
02:34:39.000Well, 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.