The TRUTH Behind America's Role in the Ukraine War

Summary

Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels
Episode: The TRUTH Behind America's Role in the Ukraine War
Release Date: December 3, 2024

Hosts: Jillian Michaels & Scott Horton
Guests: Scott Horton, Author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of "Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels," host Jillian Michaels engages in a profound and critical conversation with Scott Horton, the author of Provoked. The episode delves deep into America's foreign policy decisions and their pivotal role in igniting the current conflict in Ukraine. Horton provides a meticulous analysis of historical events, policy missteps, and the intricate web of interests that have shaped the geopolitical landscape leading to this devastating war.

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America's Provocative Foreign Policy

[03:00] Jillian Michaels introduces Scott Horton and sets the stage for the discussion by highlighting the contentious nature of America's involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Horton asserts, “The CIA, the National Intelligence Council, and the National Security Council all agreed this is a terrible mistake” ([03:00]).

Horton argues that decades of American foreign policy—particularly the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe—have been instrumental in provoking Russia. He contends that policies implemented since the collapse of the Soviet Union laid the groundwork for the current conflict, emphasizing the relentless push into regions traditionally within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Notable Quote:
“Could this war have been avoided? What lessons must be learned to prevent future catastrophe?” – Jillian Michaels ([04:11])

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Neoconservatism and the Military-Industrial Complex

The discussion progresses to the influence of neoconservatives and the military-industrial complex in shaping U.S. foreign policy. Horton defines neoconservatism as a faction initially comprised of former communists who shifted right during the Cold War, driven by a fervent belief in American imperialism.

[60:44] Horton explains, “Neoconservatives are ideologues of American empire. They believe that by dominating regions like the Middle East and Eastern Europe, they can maintain global stability and protect American interests.”

He further elaborates on how neoconservatives have infiltrated various think tanks and governmental bodies, pushing for policies that favor military intervention and expansionist agendas. This alliance between ideological proponents and the arms industry perpetuates a cycle of conflict for profit.

Notable Quote:
“The neoconservatives are the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex.” – Scott Horton ([66:09])

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NATO Expansion and Broken Promises

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on NATO’s expansion post-Cold War. Horton criticizes the U.S. for breaking promises not to extend NATO’s reach, arguing that this betrayal has directly contributed to heightened tensions with Russia.

[28:18] Horton recalls a memo titled “Nyet means nyet,” leaked via WikiLeaks, where then-CIA Director William Burns warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against offering NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Despite these warnings, the U.S. proceeded with expansion, igniting Russian ire.

Notable Quote:
“Everyone is agreed about this. You better not offer NATO membership or a membership action plan.” – Scott Horton referencing the leaked memo ([77:07])

This policy shift not only disregarded expert advice but also fueled Russian aggression, as seen in the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

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Color-Coded Revolutions and Regime Changes

Horton discusses the role of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other organizations in orchestrating “color-coded” revolutions across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. These covert operations aimed to install pro-Western governments, often leading to instability and conflict.

[84:35] He cites examples like the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, highlighting how these interventions undermined legitimate governance and sowed discord, ultimately contributing to Russia’s decision to invade.

Notable Quote:
“These are all the ones where we went in and we overthrew the government and we put in our guy.” – Scott Horton ([86:36])

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The Escalation to Full-Scale War

The conversation culminates in examining how these historical policies and interventions have escalated into the full-scale war in Ukraine. Horton asserts that America’s unwavering support for Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, coupled with continuous arms supplies, directly provoked Russia into action.

[55:30] Horton explains, “Pouring in all those weapons calibrated the amount did not deter Russia from attacking; it provoked him to launch the attack.”

He emphasizes that without addressing the root causes and recalibrating foreign policy, the cycle of provocation and retaliation is likely to continue, posing existential threats not just to Ukraine but to global stability.

Notable Quote:
“We can stick with you until then. Okay. Okay. So in 14, the bottom line is it was essentially an association agreement with the European Union that was at issue.” – Scott Horton ([81:08])

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Conclusion and Future Outlook

As the episode wraps up, Horton and Michaels reflect on the dire consequences of America's continued interventionist policies. They advocate for a reassessment of foreign policy strategies to prevent further conflicts and stabilize international relations.

Horton encourages listeners to engage critically with the information and seek comprehensive understanding through his book, Provoked, which offers an in-depth exploration of these complex issues.

Final Thoughts:
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” – Excerpt inspired by Eisenhower ([36:18])

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Additional Resources

For a deeper dive into the topics discussed, listeners are encouraged to read Scott Horton's Provoked and explore his website ScottHorton.org for more insights.

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Note: This summary focuses exclusively on the substantive content of the episode, omitting advertisements, introductions, and outros to provide a clear and concise overview of the critical discussions between Jillian Michaels and Scott Horton.

Transcript

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Scott Horton]

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[Scott Horton]

In the CIA, on the National Intelligence Council, and on the National Security Council, they all agreed this is a terrible mistake.

[Jillian Michaels]

Today we're tackling one of the most critical and controversial topics in modern geopolitics, the Russia, Ukraine war. And joining me is Scott Horton.

[Scott Horton]

Is this the most dangerous thing that's happened since the end of the Second World War? Yeah, it is.

[Jillian Michaels]

The author of Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, Scott Horton pulls back the curtain, offering a meticulous and provocative account of how decades of US Foreign policy have set the stage for this devastating conflict. From NATO's relentless expansion into Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Balkan and Chechen wars, new missile defense systems, and so much more.

[Scott Horton]

They take the welfare out of your paycheck, then they make a bomb out of it and then they explode some property. But the guy who made the bomb, he got his dividend check. That's the racket.

[Jillian Michaels]

Scott pieces together a narrative that shows how this war didn't just happen, it was provoked.

[Scott Horton]

And these guys are gangsters. Like, I'm not making any specific accusations against any specific people.

[Jillian Michaels]

But today we'll explore the policies, decisions, and missed opportunities that brought us here and ask the critical question, could this war have been avoided? What lessons must be learned to prevent future catastrophe? This is a conversation packed with history, context, and hard truths. So let's get into it. Keeping it real with Jillian Michaels. Scott, is there a man with dementia dragging us into World War Three?

[Scott Horton]

Sure seems possible. I, I lately have been trying to calm people down about this a little bit, if only because I have had some people contact me on Twitter who are seemingly, like, legitimately terrified that we're going to have a nuclear war very soon. And I think probably that's not going to happen. And whatever, if I am wrong, then I'll be dead in the thing and it won't matter anyway. I guess.

[Jillian Michaels]

Good way of looking at it.

[Scott Horton]

Yes. And listen, everything I'm about to say to you is basically just made up speculation, but I think you'll see where I'm going with it. I am betting that the White House discussion was that since they lost the election to a guy who said he wants to negotiate a peace deal as soon as possible and that they are betting that Putin will sit on his hands and not do anything too crazy if they go ahead and escalate with these longer range missile strikes into Russia, that he'll essentially take it on a chin and turn the other cheek until and buy it is time until Trump comes. Now, he's already deployed new hypersonic missiles that we have not seen before in a demonstration which, you know, he didn't hit Poland with them, he didn't hit London with them. Right. But he did hit Ukraine with them in a demonstration that, you know, he can also escalate this thing and ramp it up as well. So, you know, it's not like he was going to do nothing. But I guess, look, if I was there, I would have definitely recommended against it. But I think that the Biden people are probably right that he is not going to say, well, fine and start bombing Warsaw and Paris and Berlin and London and dare us to stop them with nuclear weapons. I don't think that's going to happen in the lame duck presidency of this demented old coot, as you correctly described in there. And I should add, and this is just an outrage, this is unbelievable. This is equal to any scandal in all of American political history that could possibly think of other than just the war itself. And participating in this thing the way they have is that this announcement, they said in the New York Times that this decision was a split decision in the White House, that Jake Sullivan, who was Hillary Clinton's man and is the national security advisor and is no dove, that he was against it and tried to argue against it and that Biden went ahead and listened to Anthony Blinken, his secretary of State instead. And thing is, it just seems to me, never mind how much we're going to disagree with it anyway, but to think that they would make such a step based on a split decision when Biden's really most trusted right hand foreign policy advisor is saying that he thought that we should not, or at least he told the Times that that is really something else. And quite frankly, all other things being equal, Joe Biden should be impeached and removed from office for daring to escalate this war inside Russia. And by the way, for people who don't know, these ATACMs, by all reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere say that it takes American special operations forces or CIA officers to fire these weapons. Ukrainians do not have the sophisticated training required to fire these ATACMs. So these are Western forces, Western combat forces, boots on the ground in Ukraine, participating in Firing these missiles into Russia. And now they've added British Storm Shadows. I'm sorry, I don't, I'm a little bit behind on the very, very latest news. I know they've given permission to fire British Storm Shadows and French long range missiles as well. I don't know whether that has commenced yet. Very well may have. And so, yes, this is extremely dangerous. And they have, you know, as you may know, they, the Ukrainians with British support, launched an invasion of Kursk inside Russia in September. And the Russians have not made the greatest effort. I mean, they've been fighting them, but they did not turn around, drive them right back out again. They're still there. They've retaken. The Russians have only taken about re. Well, the last time I checked was about a week ago, I guess they had retaken about half of Kursk, but half of it is still under the control of Ukrainian forces on the Russian side of the border. So. Yes. Is this the most dangerous thing that's happened since the end of the Second World War? Yeah, it is. This is as bad as the worst crisis in Berlin. This is as bad as, you know, worse than the invasion of Afghanistan and the heightening, heightening of tensions there. The early Reagan years, 1983, when they thought there really might be a nuclear war. This is at least equivalent to that Cuban missile crisis levels of danger.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, will you answer that question for me, Scott? I've done my best here to try to learn about the opposite argument. So I wanna try to hit you with that right now. And then of course, I wanna get to the bottom of how did we get here? Because it's my understanding that there were numerous off ramps along the way. And not only did we not take those off ramps, we, as your book so aptly puts it, we provoked this entire thing. So my first question, right, is here we are. Well, he's got North Korean troops in there. We have to do something. Well, he's a despot. He's like Hitler. What if we don't do something? He's invaded all of these other countries, Georgia, the Chechens, Ukraine, and we didn't do something. Now we have to do something. So that's what I'm hearing from the counter argument of this is he's created all, he's all of these atrocities. He's backed. Right. He's invaded sovereign nations, he's escalating things by bringing in North Korean troops and we need to do something. What would your answer be to that then? Because it sort of makes sense when you hear it you're like, oh, well, okay, I guess we need to do something.

[Scott Horton]

Well, there's a lot of different responses to that. The first one would be why would the people you want to do something be the people who invaded and destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Syria? The Americans who killed 4 million people in the first generation of this century, who drove 37 million people out of their homes. The greatest refugee crisis since World War II. And as we saw in Europe with millions of Muslims coming to Europe and you know, creating a massive destabilization throughout that entire continent. The, the Obama's dirty war in Syria where he backed bin Ladenite head chopping suicide bombers until they built the caliphate and then he had to launch Iraq War 3 to destroy it again. And the Americans are the Most dangerous. Washington D.C. our foreign policy establishment and military establishment, they are the aggressors. They are the world empire. They're not defending anybody from anything. They're the bad guys. Just because we're from here doesn't change that. Look at who's been in charge. It's been Bill Clinton and George Bush and Barack Obama in charge. That's not attacking my country. That's attacking the individual men and women in charge of policy in this country. They have been an absolute disaster. It's no different, Gillian, honestly, than if Joe Biden had gone ahead and won the election of 88 and we had had President Biden this whole time. Okay, like if I told you Joe Biden has been making bad decisions this whole time, you wouldn't say, hey, don't attack my country. You would say, yeah, like that guy is bad on everything. Of course he is. But Joe Biden represents the consensus. He's been in power. He, he was first elected to con to the Senate in 72, took office in 73. He was involved in every bit of this the whole time. He was for it all. So that ought to be your first clue. It was wrong. It was what the clintons, the Bushes, McCain and Biden agreed about what to do. So just the fact that we're from here doesn't mean that the benefit of the doubt goes to Washington D.C. it just doesn't. That's first. Why are you going to hire Lex Luthor to stop the bad guy? Are you mistaking him for Superman? Because he's not. That's first. Okay. Secondly, all of this stuff about oh, he did this and he did that, all of that of course, is out of context. The Georgia war, that's all America's fault. The Ukraine war, that's All America's fault. The Syria war, that's all America's fault. Now Chechnya, that's on the Russians. But then again, look at the situation they were in at the time. You know, Bill Clinton and Al Gore took their side in the Chechen war. Now they backed the terrorists against him too. But certainly rhetorically they said, listen, this is like Abraham Lincoln holding his country together. Clinton and Al Gore both said that because the Russian Federation, when all of these provinces were breaking away from the Soviet Union, not just the Warsaw Pact, but even the so called Soviet Republic states were breaking away and all that was left was the Russian Federation. Of course, Moscow had to draw the line somewhere. And they drew it in Chechnya. And as I show in the book, even though Bill Clinton was helping them kill the Chechens, he was also helping the Chechens kill them. And the reason why is because of a bunch of dirty pipeline politics preventing the Russians from being able to pump Caspian oil and gas up through the Caucasus Mountains into Russia and through to Europe. Instead, they wanted to go through Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean and to cut the Iranians and the Russians out. So they were willing to back Osama Bin Ladenite murderous terrorists in the Chechen wars. That was Bill Clinton and W. Bush. So yes, the way the Russians fought the wars in Chechnya are absolutely horrifyingly evil, equivalent to what George W. Bush did in Fallujah. When it comes to Georgia and Ukraine, that's like 95% on the USA, 5% on Russia for finally ceasing, appeasing the enemy. You know, America always says that our enemies are Hitler and we're always the poor hapless British and French trying to appease them. But just look at it from the other point of view. They're the ones appeasing us constantly and then sometimes finally drawing the line and pushing back.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, I love the distinction because people tend to think like, oh, you're. Tulsi has espoused a part of your position and it's trying to understand the role that we've played. And then she's immediately labeled a Russian asset anti American, an apologist for Putin. And I like the clarification that this isn't about what America stands for. This isn't about the American people. It's about the people in power in our country and what they're doing. And I really want to understand why. So, so before, before we get to.

[Scott Horton]

That, you know what, can I just, can I just address the Chelsea gabby thing for A second here. Go ahead. Because it's such a great example. Right. I saw this debate the other day. Dave Smith got an argument with. On Piers Morgan with Joe Walsh. And Joe Walsh says. Well, she says things that Russia would like her to say or something.

[Jillian Michaels]

Russia propaganda. Yes.

[Scott Horton]

You know what? She. She also was just promoted from major to lieutenant colonel when she changed from the National Guard to the Army Reserve. She is a serving officer in the US army right now. So either her commanding officers keep promoting a traitor or there's nothing to this at all. It's one or the other. It's completely binary. Okay. And the answer, of course, is that Tulsi Gabbard is an American patriot. She's no Russian partisan whatsoever in any sense at all. They are just lying about her period. When she went to, in their words, side with Bashar al Assad in the Barack Obama years, what she was really doing was she was siding against Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. America and its allies had switched sides after fighting for the Shiites in Iraq War two. They said we got to make up for that by switching sides and essentially backing the same Sunni insurgency we'd fought in Iraq War two, backing them on the Syrian side of the line, calling them the Free Syrian army, calling them Javad Al Nusra and Tulsi Gabbard. Remember, she fought in Iraq War ii, or was. She was stationed at a medical base, but she gets, like, a combat badge. She was shot at. She didn't pull triggers. But she got shelled at that Balad air base. She saw violence in that war. She was at a medical base. So she saw young guys dying, crying for their mama in that war. And now, just two, three years later, she's being told, your enemy in the last war are now the moderate rebels. And that's whose side we're on, because their enemies are friends with Iran.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Scott Horton]

And so now America prefers Al Qaeda because at least they hate the Shiites. And Tulsi Gabbard said no, absolutely not, simply because she could tell the difference between the shirts and the skins. Okay? And so, in other words, and I know this sounds crazy for people who don't quite understand, I wrote a previous book called Enough Already that explains it very well that essentially what happened was Barack Obama's Syria policy was so absolutely insane and upside down and treasonous that when she spoke simple truth about it, she was essentially accusing them of outright Benedict Arnold level behavior. And so they absolutely freaked out and panicked and threw all of this mud at her. Remember also she endorsed Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton. So bad on Syria. And so they then they just lied. They just smeared her. And Hillary Clinton said she was a Russian asset. Remember what she said? She said she's a Russian asset and she's going to run as a third party candidate to split the vote against Biden to help the Russian agent, Trump. That's what Hillary Clinton said. Is that what Tulsi Gabbard did? No. Hillary Clinton's just a liar. And then the fraud, Robert Windrom at NBC News wrote this absolutely ridiculous article saying that Russian bots on Twitter liked her, which meant nothing. I mean, the article was just absolutely absolute trash. But it took up 700 words and so people could pretend that there was some substance to it and tried to use it against her. It was just absolutely nothing but a fraud. And I have to say, by the way, that I strongly disagree with her about the war against the Sunnis. I mean, she says things like Hamas wants to take over the world and stuff. So her war, if she's in charge, her war against the bin Ladenites, I do not endorse. She is not a Hortonian on foreign policy, but she is no Putinite either in any way. She is no kind of partisan for Russia, for Syria. None of these accusations, none of them have any weight whatsoever. Okay, she was just promoted to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. army. That should be the end of that. Okay, I think it is.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Scott Horton]

So I'll say to my old.

[Jillian Michaels]

Slow down, slow down. Okay, so. Holy shit, dude. All right, let's go back to. Oh, my God, you gave me so much there that I'm gonna have to figure out how to disseminate it real quick.

[Scott Horton]

So this is fun.

[Jillian Michaels]

So the first thing I want to understand, okay, because you've. You've mentioned so many different things that I'm grabbing onto as you're talking, like, Hillary Clinton or Obama's policy towards Syria was treasonous. And, you know, we started this back when Bush was in office. And. Okay, let's begin with. Before I can even combat you, I need to understand it. And I'm. I'm combating you to play devil's advocate. So my first question is, obviously, this has been our foreign policy. Then, as you're suggesting, four decades.

[Scott Horton]

How.

[Jillian Michaels]

Long has this been our foreign policy? Can you put it to me in a nutshell? Because it seems like we're over here in our. We're in Syria, then we're over there, we're in Iraq, and it. What is the United States foreign policy? This interventionist foreign policy.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, well.

[Jillian Michaels]

And why is that our policy? Let's start with that.

[Scott Horton]

Because.

[Jillian Michaels]

Holy. Forgive me. I feel like I. I'm gonna get a.

[Scott Horton]

It's okay. Again, I apologize. I apologize for bringing up, like, too many details, but I should maybe use some broader strokes in some cases. Look, the way to understand it, frankly, is this. Okay. At the end of the Second World War, America inherited all of the world empires. Got it. We inherited the British, the French, and whatever other Western. The German. They didn't have too much of a foreign empire, but they had a bit of one. But we inherited essentially all of Western Europe's control over the global south and the East. The exceptions to that was the communists in the Soviet Union and then in China after the revolution of 49. And then, of course, both sides there then helped the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese and, you know, later the Cambodians and whatever other communist movements around the world. So essentially. And remember, in the Second World War, every industrial power was destroyed except the USA was standing right. We're untouchable over here in North America. So America was like. I forget the exact number. Forgive me, but it was like 60 or 70% of global GDP. Was US the middle part of North America. Right? So they just. They had all the power in the world to just do whatever they want and essentially extend Everywhere they wanted, except where the Reds were keeping us out.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, that was my question. Because the USSR was also simultaneously growing as a world power. Right. And that's when the Cold War began.

[Scott Horton]

That's the Cold War. Right, Got it.

[Jillian Michaels]

All right, I'm with you.

[Scott Horton]

Right. So in the Second World War, on the Eastern Front, it was the Soviets fighting the Germans. And when they defeated the Germans, remember, they got to Berlin before the Yanks did. When. When they defeated the Germans, Joseph Stalin ended up keeping all of that land between Russia and West Germany. Got it. So his troops and forcibly, you know, made those people accept communist puppet governments and force them to join the Warsaw Pact military alliance with the Soviet Union. So they didn't really call them Soviet republics, but they were Eastern Europe. All of Eastern Europe was essentially enslaved to Soviet Communism. And so that was then. The basis of the Cold War was we have to use all of our power to keep that from getting any further out of control, which seems like.

[Jillian Michaels]

A good thing in Scott.

[Scott Horton]

And that's what a lot of people thought. And you know what? Let's leave that part of it aside, because there was a lot of horrible wars like Korea and Vietnam and other horrible things that happened during the Cold War. But let's fast forward a bit to just the end of the last Cold War in 1989, say right around there. 89, 90, 91. As the Soviet Union is falling apart, they're letting Eastern Europe go. And there were a lot of Americans who had been Cold War hawks. People like, say, for example, Pat Buchanan or Jude Wanisky, Chalmers Johnson, and a lot of these guys who were hardcore anti Communist, pro containment, pro Cold War guys, Reaganites. But then when the Soviet Union collapsed, they said, all right, great, now we can come home. We saved the republic from the evils of global Communism, so now we can be a constitutional republic again. And including even the book begins with. The new book Provoked begins with Ronald Reagan's former UN Ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick saying, great, now we can be a normal country in a normal time. Right. So that was on the table as a choice, meaning for Russia can be.

[Jillian Michaels]

A normal country in a normal time, or we can say we can stop fighting this Cold War. You think about companies with healthy sales like Chubby's or Alo Gymshark, Magic Spoon Skims. Sure, you think about a great product, an attractive brand, and marketing that lifts a heavy load. But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business. Making, selling, and for shoppers, buying. Simple. For millions of businesses, that business is shopify Nobody does selling better than Shopify, period. Home of the number one checkout on the planet. And the not so secret secret with Shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Chubby's uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Jillian all lowercase. Just go to shopify.com Jillian to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com Jillian.

[C]

Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being.

[Jillian Michaels]

Scooped into the carton and time just stands still? Got it.

[Scott Horton]

That's right.

[Jillian Michaels]

We can stop escalating, stop growing missiles. Perfect. And we simultaneously promise that. Forgive my rudimentary understanding here were. Here's another one that I wanted to ask you is didn't NATO exist to fight the USSR's expansion? And we subsequently promised, as the USSR fell, we won't expand NATO.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, so what is that NATO piece?

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. So this is exactly what we're talking about, Right?

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

So at the end of the Cold War, people like Pat Buchanan and these others said, now we can give up our empire. After all, the only reason that we were exercising so much control over Europe, over the Middle east, over even Africa and Latin America, was to keep the communists out. But if communism is dead, then we can bring our troops home. We can save that money. We can end all of our various states of emergency. We can readopt George Washington's Constitution that's been essentially suspended since the end of the Second World War. And then. But what did the end empire do? The empire told Pat Buchanan and Jude Wanisky and Chalmers Johnson, forget it. We're not cashing our peace dividend. We are staying at war. And we, America, will have military dominance in the Middle east, in Europe, all of Europe and East Asia forever.

[Jillian Michaels]

And they announced the policy?

[Scott Horton]

Well, there are a lot of different reasons. It's certainly at the expense of most of the economy to benefit certain arms manufacturers and certain connected interests. The rest of us are paying. I mean, you think about it. They take the wealth right. Of your paycheck, then they make a bomb out of it, and then they explode some property with that bond. This is all net negative, Right? The guy who made the bomb, he got his dividend check, right? So the money, as Garrett Garrett said In empire, in American Empire, all the money is made. When the money goes out, we don't like say for example, loot the capital city and just take all the gold. Actually they did steal Iraq's gold, but mostly they don't just loot the place. The looting is of the American people in paying for the weapons systems, especially to enforce the empire. That's the racket. And remember. I know you already know this. Your whole audience already knows this. Sometimes we forget it was Dwight David Eisenhower who had been the general who won the war in Europe for the west in World War II. The Five Star General was then the two term Republican President of the United States. On his last day in office, he said, everybody, you gotta be careful of the military industrial complex.

[C]

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spirit, spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

[Scott Horton]

It's not a conspiracy, right? It's an economic description of a combination of arms manufacturers, the congressmen who Appropriate the money.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right.

[Scott Horton]

And the executive branch military officials who decide which manufacturers get the contract to make the weapons and that these people all have an interest in keeping their game going. And Eisenhower again, he had been a five star general and he said, God help the next president who doesn't have the influence over the army that I have, or they're just going to run right over him. And I don't know 100%, but I think most people think it was, you know, the right wing of the military that shot the next president in the head for daring to get in their way.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Scott Horton]

Yeah. And look, I have to say, like, this is actually not my thesis and when I was a kid, I really was in a lot of conspiracy stuff, but I never really got too deep into Kennedy because there's like 100 books about it and I just don't want to read them all and have to sit and decide myself, sorry. And to me, he was nothing but the Barack obama of the 1960s anyway. So I just really don't care that much. I don't know. Okay, So I do, I should say, I do know very good historians who say that, yes, after the missile crisis, he said we have to end the Cold War, right. And that he really tried to marginalize the more militaristic parts of his government and negotiate. He did negotiate the Test Ban Treaty and supposedly really wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. I don't know if that's really true. I know that, for example, Noam Chomsky absolutely rejects that thesis and said that he was nothing but Hillary Clinton his whole career until he took that bullet. I know that, you know, Gareth Porter, my. My very good friend and absolutely brilliant historian, he believes he. He's not saying who took the shot, but he's. He is saying that Kennedy was getting substantially better on foreign policy, and certainly thus then providing the motive there that he was going to get in their way of escalating Vietnam. But anyway, just point being that even if we, even if we just leave that in speculation there about Jack Kennedy. Got it, exactly what happened to him there, it's still the reason that's even plausible at all is because we all understand the beast that was created with the national security Act in 47 after the Second World War. They created the CIA, they created the Department of Defense, and these guys built a world empire. And at the end of the Cold War, they weren't willing to give it up. And so they came up with whatever doctrines that they could to justify it, including, you might even remember there was a time before they could really get the war on terrorism going where they were trying to make, like, real nation state enemies out of drug dealers in Latin America. Trying to pretend like we need. This is why we need a standing army, is to fight cocaine kingpins and this kind of stuff, because it was going to take too long to find more to do in the Middle east to get Iraq War two up and running. So part of that time in the 90s, but it was just, remember, they even made all the Harrison Ford, Tom Clancy movies about, you know, stopping the drug dealers and all this. They had to find a way to justify keeping the machine going when, as I say, even hawks like Pat Buchanan, Jean Kirkpatrick, all of these people were saying, well, we don't have to do this anymore now we could be a normal country again. And they had to find reasons to expand. And then. So one of these was we have to dominate the Middle east to prevent the likes of Saddam Hussein from dominating it. Yeah, Right. And we have to.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's the argument is that all these guys are desperate. They're all Hitlers in the making.

[Scott Horton]

That's right.

[Jillian Michaels]

And we. That's right.

[Scott Horton]

We're not there. They would be.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yes.

[Scott Horton]

So we better be there first.

[Jillian Michaels]

Is there no truth to that, though? Scott, like to.

[Scott Horton]

No, no, no, there's not. Look, I'll give you a perfect example. In the case of Ukraine, okay?

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Crimea belonged to Russia from the 1780s all the way through the 1950s. Okay. So long after the Soviet Union was created. It was after the Second World War, 10 years after the Second World War almost, that Nikita Khrushchev gave the dictator, gave Crimea to Ukraine because he needed the Ukrainian Communist Party support to come to power after Stalin died. So parochial political politics, a decree by the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Right. That was all but meanwhile, the population of Crimea was overwhelmingly Russian and identified as Russian. Now, at the end of the Cold War, Crimea voted for independence from Russia and to stay part of Crimea, I mean, to stay part of Ukraine, but just barely. And right away at the beginning, there was all kinds of controversy over whether they were going to declare independence, whether they were going to try to join Russia and Ukraine. And Russia, they had these kind of political pushing and pulling over Crimea, especially at the beginning of the 1990s, like through about 1994. And at stake is the Russians naval base at Sevestopol, which is their only naval base. That's a warm water port, unfrozen all year round. The rest of all their bases are iced over in the winter and it's their direct access to the Black Sea and therefore the Mediterranean. So it's an extremely important military base. The home of their Black Sea Fleet again since the 1780s. Right. Okay. Now that status quo held. The Russians essentially gave the Ukrainians a discount on gas if you let us keep our neighbor base, that kind of thing. And that was fine for 14 years until Barack Obama and Joe Biden overthrew the government for the second time in 10 years. Bush Jr. Did it in 2004. Obama and Biden did it again in 14. And as soon as they did, the three former presidents said, now's the time to cancel the Kharkiv pact and kick the Russians out of Sevestopol. Which is.

[Jillian Michaels]

Which is where Sevestopol is. Where the base is this.

[Scott Horton]

Yes, the base on Crimea.

[Jillian Michaels]

Gotcha. Sorry.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, no problem, no problem, no problem.

[Jillian Michaels]

It's like a fire hose of information.

[Scott Horton]

I know, I'm sorry.

[Jillian Michaels]

No, you're killing my.

[Scott Horton]

Everybody's got to read the book.

[Jillian Michaels]

Just forgive my. I know. People are. Exactly. So I'm like. Got it. Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Anyway, point being. Point being the status quo held.

[Jillian Michaels]

Got it.

[Scott Horton]

Until Barack Hussein Obama and Joseph Robinette Biden forced the issue. And then Putin reacted and said, actually no, tell you what, I'm going to keep my Naval base.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's 24.

[Scott Horton]

What happens? We tried to take San Diego away from the United States of America.

[Jillian Michaels]

Got it.

[Scott Horton]

We would kill them until they stopped trying to take San Diego away from us, period.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, hold, pause.

[Scott Horton]

Simple as that.

[Jillian Michaels]

Pause there. So right now I want to go back in time. World War II ends. Eisenhower, we formed the CIA. Military Industrial Complex is born. We establish an empire because we're policing the world. No more Hitlers can come up. And the next Hitler is going to be the ussr. There's Some conspiracy theories, maybe this is why Kennedy was shot, that he wanted to stop Vietnam. And Vietnam is just another expansion of communism that we have to extinguish. Now we're in the 70s, Jimmy Carter, we get to Reagan, everything's escalate, escalate. More nukes, more nukes, more nukes. Which never really made any sense to me because it takes like what, a handful to destroy the entire planet in a day? So I didn't, never understood that, but I guess it doesn't even matter. But Reagan focuses on resolving this. Gorbachev, take down the wall. All right, the USSR disbands. What was our reasoning for not disbanding NATO? In other words, we promised to not expand it. And it's my understanding that we added like 14 countries since then and put it right against Russia's border. How in the world has everybody forgotten that we made this promise?

[Scott Horton]

Right?

[Jillian Michaels]

What's our reasoning? Because as far as I can tell, it's stop the despots, the future Hitlers. I don't know, what is our logic for it then? What's the counter argument if it's not that it's a big part of it?

[Scott Horton]

Look, as always, it's a big conspiracy of interests involved, right? So for Lockheed, it's selling jets. And if the polls can't afford them, they'll make the US taxpayer give them to the polls, right? That's, that's all they care about. They're Lockheed Martin. That's their job, making jets, getting rid of them, right. Then for natocrats, they just don't want to have to get a job, right? They, they want to keep the bureaucracy that they already have. And if it's old reason for existing is gone, then they'll find a new one. And as I talk about in the book, at the very, from the very beginning, at the end of the Cold War, they came up with this new slogan, out of area or out of business, which just meant we have to find some busy work there is no enemy to protect Western Europe from. So if we're not protecting Western, Western Europe, what are we doing? Well, we're definitely not getting jobs. So I know we're preventing border disputes between Hungary and Slovakia. I know we're, we're guaranteeing civilian supremacy over the military in Poland. Like there was any threat of a military dictatorship in Poland, right? They come up with excuses. And as you've heard all the time from regular people in your neighborhood too, and on TV as whatever, if it wasn't us, it would be them.

[Jillian Michaels]

So if we don't stop Russia from violating Ukraine's sovereignty, then China is going to take Taiwan and all of these global aggressors will see it as a sign of weakness and run rampant. True or not true. Because it would be exceptionally bad if China took Taiwan. Right? I mean, that seems to make sense.

[Scott Horton]

Well, look, America's policy for 50 years has been that Taiwan is part of China. Nixon, you know, made that official American policy in 1973, 1974. And you know, like, it's true that they have more political freedom on Taiwan, but quite frankly, it really doesn't make much more of a difference to the United States of America any more than it matters who has sovereignty over the Donbas. When it comes to the international law, it's whatever America says it is. So in the case of Yugoslavia, America will break Yugoslavia into as many pieces as they can, encourage succession, and then recognize the new states, usher them and get them UN Security Council seats and all this as fast as possible, if that's what they want to do. And including, you know, like in the case of, of Kosovo in what's wholly a civil war. Like, you could argue that Bosnia, in a way, was a different country or republic, exactly how you define it. A different nation within Yugoslavia, fledgling democracy. But, you know, we have Kosovo. Kosovo was a county of Serbia, was a part of Serbia. And America under Bill Clinton said I could start a war based on total lies, a ridiculous hoax of a genocide that never happened, 100,000 corpses that were never killed as total make believe nonsense like Bush's weapons of mass destruction to start an aggressive war, to intervene in a civil war inside someone else's country in order to break off Kosovo from Serbia and protect them. So Vladimir Putin said, well, that's all I'm doing in Ukraine. I'm invading in the name of humanitarianism to break off the Donbass because I got to protect these people. And he's just invoking America's same violation of the law in order to justify what he's doing. This podcast is sponsored by IQ Bar.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Scott Horton]

Products, plus free shipping. Again, go to eatiqbar.com and Enter code BAR20. And yet, in the case of China and Taiwan, Taiwan is already recognized as part of China. So it's not the country next door. It's not a sovereign nation state. It's a territory that right now has like, pseudo independence. Right. But is. It's like, has de facto autonomy, but is part of China. So that's like saying, well, China insists that the United States has no right to Catalina island off the coast of California. China recognizes Catalina island as independence. We would tell them to go to hell, probably invade it tomorrow.

[Jillian Michaels]

So it's got. Why did we then change our position on Taiwan? I know there's like chips there or something. They make some sort of microchip or.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I mean, it's a. It's a money game. So going back to the. In the. In the civil war, when the Nationalists escaped to Taiwan, Harry Truman sailed the Seventh Fleet through there to prevent the Communists from chasing them across and finishing them off and protected them. So that's how Taiwan became an American protectorate.

[Jillian Michaels]

Got it.

[Scott Horton]

You know, run by pro Western right wingers. It was a military dictatorship for decades. It's a democracy now, but it was a military dictatorship under American control for decades after that. Okay. But then in the 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to exploit the differences between the Chinese and the Soviets, what was called the Sino Soviet split. So they made an alliance with China, they made friends with China, and it was an unofficial handshake deal, but they broke China away from the Soviet Union. So America's Cold War with China ended in 1974, two years before I was born and 15, 17 years before the final end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We were friends with the Chinese first. And so part of that deal was Nixon calculated that, do I really care about Taiwan? No. So, you guys, we recognize this was the deal. We recognize that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of it. However, we strongly urge you not to retake it by force. And then I guess it was the Carter administration that later added, we're not saying exactly what we would do if you try it, but we might come to Their defense. Got it. And you might have to tangle with us then. The problem is that now China has plenty of naval power to take Taiwan and to keep us away. America does not have the ability to defend Taiwan 7,000 miles from San Diego. Not a chance. They'll sink our subs, they'll sink our ships. They will splash our planes out of the sky from standoff range if we try to defend Taiwan in a hot war.

[Jillian Michaels]

So why do you think they don't just take it then? What would be stopping them? Because the argument is that this is stopping them. Fighting Putin now and making his life hell is stopping.

[Scott Horton]

That's all unfalsifiable, right? I mean, it's hard to say. Listen, there's a calculation. Nobody really knows what it is. There's a calculation that says if we gave them some certain weapon systems, the Chinese might say, whoa. Actually, that's a little much. We don't necessarily want to tangle with that. I don't know. However, on that same time scale or that same, like, you know, diagram of weapon shipments, you could also have a number of weapons systems or. Or a certain quality of weapons put in that are actually the provocation that make the Chinese decide they better launch the attack now before it gets much worse. That's what happened in Ukraine. And at the start of the war, you had CIA guys. There's this guy, his name is Zach, and it kills me. I can never remember his name off the top of my head. I just did an interview with Dave and I couldn't remember it, but Zach at Yahoo News, he did. Everybody can find it. Zach. Zach, I'm pretty sure. And he did this whole series about the CIA in Ukraine right at the dawn of the war, at the end of 21, beginning of 22. I promise, everyone can find this. If you just use your search terms, you'll find it. And this guy, Zach, and I'm so sorry, I can't remember his last name for you, but he has these great quotes from CIA officers whose job it was to coordinate the importation of American weapons into Ukraine during the Obama and Trump years and into Biden. Right. Biden's first year the war broke out, the very beginning of his second year in office. Right, right. So these CIA officers who are bringing in the weapons, they tell Yahoo. News, listen, we tried to tell them the weapons that we're bringing in are not enough to deter Russia from attacking. They are enough to provoke them into attacking. You are putting Russia in the position to say, we better do it now before it's too Late, before they're so well armed that we won't be able to fix the problem later. So pouring in all those weapons, as they said, calibrating the amount of weapons they were pouring in did not deter Russia. It provoked him into launching the attack. The same kind of thing could happen with Taiwan. We give them enough F16s that China says, that's it, we better hit them now before they get 10 more. Yep. And so, oh wow, I get it. Now, don't get me wrong, because I'm not saying that, you know, like, oh, I'm just a wimp and a pacifist. And I say what you should never do is stand up to anyone in any circumstances because that's always what causes fights. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is you can't just be naive about it and say, well, I know we'll just pour in weapons and that will deter them and not consider whether that actually might backfire and make matters much worse, as we saw in the case of Ukraine.

[Jillian Michaels]

You know, here's how I look at it personally, is that for me, if I was ever in a position, obviously this is extraordinarily hypothetical scenario, but I would try everything first, like defcons, literally. Can we de escalate, can we engage in a dialogue? Let's have a negotiation. Now if they continue to push and no peace agreement could be reached and there was aggression after aggression, well, then you have no choice but to fight. But if you're provoking the fight again.

[Scott Horton]

Taiwan is part of China. It's not part of the United States of America. So maybe Taiwan has to fight. But why are Texans bound to die in a nuclear war with China over Taiwan?

[Jillian Michaels]

Because there are allies and if we.

[Scott Horton]

No, they're not. No, they're not. We don't have a treaty of alliance with Taiwan. It's not even a nation state.

[Jillian Michaels]

What about NATO or NATO? I'm sorry, not NATO with Taiwan. But, but Ukraine now wants to join NATO. Right. So they want to have this protection against Putin who's expanding and aggressive and has been devastated ever since they broke up the ussr. So now I want to go, I want to go back to kind of the beginning of this issue with Ukraine. So USSR falls, we're not expanding NATO. And I have heard different interviews of how the neocons, and I'm wondering if you could actually define that in just a moment what a neocon is. The neocons, the Dick Cheney's of the world, all those guys you mentioned, Buchanan. We're not letting this go. We're expanding. And I've heard these plans like guys like Jeff Sachs and yourself and Mike Benz talking about how our government was like, oh, we gotta find a way into Ukraine and then we're gonna go into Iraq and then we're gonna just keep rolling and keep it moving and dominate everything. So, okay, first off, just a simple definition. What is a neocon? And who. And with dict, who is a perfect example?

[Scott Horton]

Okay, a perfect example would be Paul Wolfowitz.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Who is the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the W. Bush years. I'll do you a little better than that.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

It's a biographical definition. People often misuse it to say, like just a hawk or maybe a Republican. Nowadays, like, it sounds like that's what means neo, like new, like just modern or something. But what it really means, neo conservatives means they used to be a bunch of commies, then they became conservatives. It's a small group of people who had been mostly Trotskyites and now as Americans, they sided with America in the Cold War because they hated Stalin. They were communists, but they hated Stalin because he'd betrayed Trotsky. And plus they were Americans anyway, so.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh my God.

[Scott Horton]

After World War II, the real conservatives hated war, but they all kind of got old and died and they got replaced by the neocons. And William F. Buckley at the National Review hired just a bunch of ex Reds to be really the founders of the conservative movement after World War II. So you had James Burnham and Cindy Hook and Whitaker Chambers and all these guys who were all a bunch of trots. Then you had Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoritz and his people. Then you have Irving Kristol. And of course you're more familiar with his son Bill, the founder of the Project for New American Century and all these other think tanks. Then you had a guy named Max Shockman who had founded the Social Democrats usa, which had a whole bunch of, you know, it was a. Basically a Trotskyite group that funneled people toward the right. And then you had Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, who were professors at the University of Chicago, who were also extrots and they're students. So then when you get to the end of the 1960s, what happens is liberals became hippies, they were anti Vietnam, right? And they cited. And they cited against. And they were for civil rights for blacks, and they cited against Israel in the 67 war. So these neoconservatives then, in reaction to those things about the. What you would call like the woke left of that time of the late 60s, they started moving to the right and became militarists and really became. They joined in the government. First of all, there's a major faction of them that were advisors to a Cold War Democrat, a right wing Cold War Democrat named Scoop Jackson, who was a senator from Washington State, and they called him the Senator from Boeing. And he had hired Wolfowitz and a lot of these guys, Richard Pearl and a lot of these guys to work for him. And then in the Reagan years, they, a bunch of them, like, I don't know, 20 of them or something, got jobs as the deputy under secretary, assistant Secretary of Defense for some crazy thing you never heard of, right? Like they're just ensconcing themselves in kind of in the lower levels of the Pentagon. Then when the Clinton years came, wow, they all went to the think tanks and they created, most importantly, the Project for New American Century. And of course, as I said, they'd already always run the National Review and they created the Weekly Standard magazine. They rule the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages, and for that matter, the New York Times. And so then in the W. Bush years, now at the turn of the century, after September 11th, it's the neoconservatives who say, we know what's going on and we know what to do, because they already had this agenda. And essentially, to boil it down, what they really are, they're ideologues of American empire. That's who they are. So then when W. Bush comes to power, Dick Cheney hired the whole dang gaggle of them. And they were the guys who lied us into war with Iraq especially. They had what was called the Office of Special Plans, and they brought in Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin, and essentially Colin Powell called them the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, the Project for New American Century, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, center for Security Policy, Ginsa and some of the others. And then the rest were all Charles Krauthammer on TV and in the Washington Post saying, we absolutely have to go to war with Iraq because everybody knows they helped Osama bin Laden do 9, 11 and all of this stuff.

[Jillian Michaels]

Weapons of mass destruction.

[Scott Horton]

And that's who the neocons are.

[Jillian Michaels]

Whoa, okay, hold on, Scott. Just, just, just to put this out there, here's what I thought a neocon was. I knew it meant neoconservative. I thought it was like, Dick Cheney is a neocon because he benefits off of Halliburton. And this is why we're going in to be rock, right?

[Scott Horton]

So that's totally not right. But it's great that. Look, it's totally fair that you thought.

[Jillian Michaels]

That'S why we're doing this.

[Scott Horton]

It's not your fault everybody. Shit.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's what I thought.

[Scott Horton]

No, people terribly misuse that term. But for people who know about foreign policy studies and stuff, this is an absolute, just separate and different faction. This is not the same as just.

[Jillian Michaels]

Saying these are like ideologues is exactly what you're saying that that have this like obsession with expanding their belief system globally. Then these ideologues meet the military industrial complex and you have a match made in pure friggin hell.

[Scott Horton]

That's right, that's right. That's where all those think tanks come from. You know Alexander Cockburn? Pardon me, Andrew Coburn, his brother, the brilliant journalist and author Andrew Coburn. He says you want to truly understand the neoconservative movement. They are the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex. In other words, Gillian, the bankers and the oil men, they already had their eggheads at the Council on Foreign Relations to justify everything they wanted to do. But mostly and especially we're talking like the 70s and 80s and this kind of era that was all very Brooks Brothers WASPy white shoe territory and Jews and Catholics were not as welcome. So what the neocons did was they made an alliance with the military industrial complex. Which means, you know, like in other words, kind of the new right from out west, from California and Texas and Washington state and Colorado and places like that. They didn't have any eggheads, they had the arms industry. But they needed nerds to write studies to justify the Pentagon buying their weapons. And so they made this deal with Richard Pearl and the neocons and really created this movement and bankrolled their effort to create all of these think tanks. So you got your Council on Foreign Relations, fine, we got 20 more. And of course you do have Bill Crystal and Max Boot. And neocons ended up taking over the CFR itself.

[Jillian Michaels]

Anyway, so the military industrial complex utilize the ideologues to justify their position to engage in war around the world. Got it. Okay, great. I'm good. I got it. So it's not just Dick Cheney and Halliburton. That's helpful.

[Scott Horton]

That's right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

In fact, you want to know about Dick Cheney and Halliburton? I'll tell you a funny story about Dick Cheney. Halliburton, real quick. Dick Cheney got hired not because he's a businessman, but because he was the former Secretary of Defense. And Halliburton thought that they were going to get a bunch of free money from the taxpayer. But the problem was the Democrats were in power and Dick Cheney didn't really have that much juice in Washington at that time to guarantee Halliburton and a bunch of government welfare. So what good was he? Well, he wasn't a good businessman. And he and his right hand man, I always forget the right hand man's name, but it was his COO or cfo. They did a terrible job investigating a company called Dresser Industries. And they bought it. They made an executive decision, the board went along with it. Fine, go ahead. And they bought Dresser Industries right before, I mean, weeks before they started being held liable for literally more than a billion dollars worth of asbestos cancer claims.

[Jillian Michaels]

So bought Dresser Industries, who had all of the these claims that they didn't know about. So they inherited all the liability from the company they bought. So now he's a billion dollars in the hole and he's got to figure it out.

[Scott Horton]

And now he's got to make himself the vice president and put Halliburton on the dole. And I'm not saying they threatened him or whatever, but you see how different that is than oh, Dick Cheney's greedy and he did it for money. He did it for money for other people who he owed a lot of money. And these guys are gangsters. Like, I'm not making any specific accusations against any specific people, but if I was the CEO of Halliburton and I screw up and screw them out of a billion dollars, I would also make sure that I became vice president and put them on the dole building army bases.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay?

[Scott Horton]

You know, it's a huge motive. And by the way, I mean, he's the same guy who explained perfectly in 1994 why not to go to Baghdad. Because Iran will get the south. In the east we'll have a problem with Syria. In the west, we'll have the Kurds will want to break off. That's going to cause a problem with our friends the Turks. We'll have urban combat where our soldiers getting chewed up, hunting and fighting people in cities. It's terrible. And we decided there's no way Saddam Hussein is worth it. That's what Dick Cheney said 1994. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got The Kurds. And the Kurds. Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey. Then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the President, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was, how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many. And I think we got it right. Everybody can look it up on YouTube. It's an interview at AEI at the American Enterprise Institute. So then. And he's the same guy who turned around nine years later and caused exactly the crisis that he said would happen if he did it.

[Jillian Michaels]

Because he was the Halliburton was a.

[Scott Horton]

Billion dollars in debt and because that was what Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.

[Jillian Michaels]

My God, I don't even know anything about Benjamin Netanyahu. Table that one. Hold on. It's another show. Okay, so now we're beginning this Ukraine situation, right? And we begin with the expansion of NATO that we promise we won't do now. We're expanding NATO under the pretense of policing the world as good guys. But for all the reasons you said, to maintain our empire, to sell weapons, because our military industrial complex is selling weapons to those countries in NATO, right?

[Scott Horton]

Oh, sure. Everybody has to standardize their military to American spec, which means you gotta buy US weapons. By the way, I hope I didn't sell too short the idea that these people really do. I did mention a couple times, they really do believe that they're the good guys here. They really do believe, you know, as I was paraphrasing them, that if it wasn't us, it'd be somebody else. Worse. They really fancy themselves heroes the whole time. So if it sounds to your audience like I'm saying, oh, they just want that filthy money because of that incentive, then that's oversimplifying it. And even to a degree that it is nonsensical that people would go so far over just that it really is the ideology of American empire. And you could, even if you want, you could trace it back to the Puritans that, like, we're not just a country full of people. We got a special destiny. And it includes bossing you around because you're just not as good as we are. And it's always been that way. You know Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico to teach them to elect good men. No, that's America is Hillary Clinton. I'm sorry, but, but you know, like for in that, isn't that the perfect thing? Do you think that she questions herself and her own motivations and her own virtue ever in any way she knows she's right. No matter how wrong she is and no matter how even self interested she is, she knows that even if it's because she's mongering for power, it's because she needs that power to hold the world together so it all doesn't go wrong. She believes that about herself and about her peers. They all do. That's how they think. And so man, if we don't dominate Poland, Russia will come back for it. They just, yeah, they just believe that. They know it must be true. That is the argument just by what they're doing.

[Jillian Michaels]

Scott, I gotta be honest, that's somewhat comforting to me simply because I had started to really think this is just a money laundering scheme and we're killing all these people all around the world because the military industrial complex needs to sell jets and they need to sell guns.

[Scott Horton]

Well, that too, that too. Right, but at least, hey, look on TV they gotta sell dish soap. And it's a big deal, man, when they have a war, I mean, you remember what a big deal it was. They Covid was basically had run its course, they were ready to switch, they needed a new thing. So it was Ukraine to the 10th degree or you know, the nth degree. They, they push it as hard as they can for their own special, you know, narrow interest.

[Jillian Michaels]

Got it.

[Scott Horton]

And by the way, if you listen to most of these people, politicians in Washington talk about these things, you notice that they only speak in cliches mostly because they don't know the first thing about it either. Yeah, like do you know that they promise not to expand NATO? I would bet you that most of the 535 sitting in the House and the Senate don't even know that that's true. That they promise that we won't take advantage of the Soviets withdrawal from Eastern Europe. But that's exactly what we did. And, and I do know this is a great anecdote that came from an article by Christopher Lane. He said he was consulting with the military with, you know, high level officers, I guess, generals and admirals and things. And he would say to them, he would just ask them like in a straight way, like he's not making an analogy. He would just ask them straight, hey, guys, what would we do if China set up shop and built a military base in Mexico and started training up Mexican troops and this kind of thing created a treaty of military alliance with Mexico? And they said, well, we would immediately ramp up sanctions and threats. And if that didn't work, we would invade, of course. And then Lane would say to them, so how do you think Russia feels when we do all this in Ukraine? And Lane says, this is. People can find this in Harper's. It's L, A, Y N E in Harper's. And he says to a man, these generals and admirals all looked at him and said, huh, I guess we never really thought of it that way.

[Jillian Michaels]

Come on, Scott. Of course they would have to think.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, I don't know. I don't know. So.

[Jillian Michaels]

So hold on. All right, I want to go back again. Forgive me. I'm taking you off piece quite a bit here.

[Scott Horton]

It's my fault. Go ahead.

[Jillian Michaels]

No, it's not, actually. So now we prom. So I'm back to you. I'm still on step one if we promise not to expand NATO. And we did. Okay, so now we know that. And then I want to talk a bit about this memo that leaks. I guess Julian Assange leaked some memo through WikiLeaks that went from, like, the head of the CIA to Condoleezza Rice that says nyet means nyet. Can we talk about this for a second? And the reason I want to establish this is because I think it shows that for quite some time we had every intention of adding Ukraine to NATO. I think we've established why it's advantageous for America to have NATO expand or not America, but the military industrial complex. And we knew better. But I don't know enough about this memo. I've heard about it. Can you speak about this for a second? When did it happen? From who to who? What does it say and what begot the memo? Why was this memo created?

[Scott Horton]

Right. Okay, so I'm about 99% sure it's February 8th of 2000, or maybe it was February 30 of 2008. And it's by our current CIA director, William Burns.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right.

[Scott Horton]

And anyone can find [e-mail] it's called Nyet means nyet. It's only, you know, 700 words or something. Everybody have no problem reading it. Okay? And he was at that time the ambassador to Russia, and he's writing the memo to his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and he's Warning her that he has spoken with Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, and for that matter with all other different thought leaders inside and outside of government in Russia, and that everyone says the same thing, which is you better not offer NATO membership or a membership action plan is what it's called the next step toward bringing Ukraine or Georgia and, or Georgia into the NATO alliance. Just don't do it. He said the brightest of red lines. And he quotes Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, saying, if you do this, it could cause a civil war inside Ukraine and that would put us in a position to decide whether or not to intervene, a decision that we do not want to have to face. So for God's sake, please don't put us in this position. Then Burns is not just informing Rice that, well, that's what Lavrov said. He's telling her, madam Secretary, you need to listen to this. This is important. This is right. This is the brightest red line. He says, from the dark. I forget if this is the same memo or this is an email he sent her a few weeks later. He says, from the most enlightened liberals to the most brutish knuckle draggers in the darkest recesses of the Kremlin, everyone is agreed about this. You could cause a war is very, very. And, and, and you know, Fiona Hill warned about this and Vladimir Putin himself warned that if you try to bring Ukraine into NATO, right, I'll just wreck it. I'll just break the thing. Putin said east. He said the west of the country was a gift from the Eastern Europeans, meaning like the Austro Hungarian empire. It's part of Poland, Galicia and Volhynia. This is part of Eastern Europe separate from like core Ukraine. And then far Eastern Ukraine is really Russian territory. The Donbass, Novorossia, the four eastern and southern provinces, and then the fifth, the Crimean Peninsula there. And he's saying, well, look at this is not even a real country. So if it comes down to that, I'll just break it into pieces, man, I'm not going to let you do this. And I have the exact quote in the book. He said, this is plain as day to W. Bush, I believe in 2007. And then why did Bush go ahead? For legacy building purposes, for his own personal singular man purposes, not for the good of the United States of America or the people of Europe or the people of Ukraine, but so he could be said to have done something right after he absolutely ruined Iraq War two and everything else. That's his own people's words that they said that about him. This was a legacy building operation for him and is why he went over the dead body of Angela Merkel and Francois Holland, the Chancellor of Germany and President of France, who tried to stop him. And they said they absolutely put their foot down for only one reason. It's an unnecessary provocation against Russia. They had no other reason. Wasn't because it cost too much money. It wasn't because they didn't want to share drinks at the cocktail party. It was because you're shoving this right in the face of Vladimir Putin and he's liable to do something dangerous and terrible in reaction.

[Jillian Michaels]

And this is 2008.

[Scott Horton]

Right?

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Right, Burns.

[Jillian Michaels]

So what did we do then? Is this our first attack? So hold on, Scott, forgive me. So he tells Condoleezza, don't do it. All right, great. That's, you know, years prior to this, we don't do it. But then in 2008, we decide, yeah, now's the time. And we.

[Scott Horton]

We gave them not quite a membership action plan, but we gave them, like, an official invitation to join in 2008.

[Jillian Michaels]

How many years after the Condoleezza memo was this from? Burns?

[Scott Horton]

This is three months later.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh, my God. It's three months later.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, I was.

[Jillian Michaels]

I was. I got lost in my.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

So it simply says, don't do it. And three months later, we're like, hey, NATO, check it out. Here's. Why don't you consider. Or, I'm sorry, not, hey, NATO, hey, Ukraine, check it out. Here's a plan to join NATO in Georgia, too.

[Scott Horton]

And Georgia, too. And listen, it was the. The, the CIA, the embassy in Moscow, the National Intelligence Council, and whatever, all of them advised against it. They all said not to do it. You may be familiar with Fiona Hill, the British American, Russia expert who testified against Trump at Ukraine gate. It's funny, she looks like Marcy from Peanuts with a straight flat line for her mouth. Really weird lady. Anyway, she worked for, I believe, W. Bush, Obama and Trump. And she told the New York Times. Now, she would say, you believe Russian propaganda if you just listen to her and repeat exactly what she said, which is she bragged about this on numerous occasions, that she was so wise and knowledgeable that she warned W. Bush not to do it. Just like Burns, she told him it's an unnecessary provocation of Russia. And furthermore, she called the Times. She was speaking for the entire community of Russia, experts in the CIA, on the National Intelligence Council, and on the National Security Council. They all agreed, this is a terrible mistake. Don't do it. And Burns, in his he wrote a follow up email to Condoleezza Rice where he's trying to talk her out of it. And at one point, you can see his frustration in the thing. He quotes this in his memoir. He says, madam Secretary, if you're not with me by now, you might as well just stop reading now. I just don't know what else to tell you this. I'm saying don't do it. You are going to cause a terrible reaction. And then what happened three months later? And it's not that just Russia reacted this way. It was also America's sock puppets fault. In Georgia, the puppet president, Mikhail Saakashvili, launched a war to try to retake the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia because you can't join NATO if you don't have settled borders. So he tried to settle his borders by force so that.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, hold on, Scott, let me, let me do the, let me do the idiot recap here. So hold on.

[Scott Horton]

No problem.

[Jillian Michaels]

We go to the countries on the border of Russia, which we promised never to do. We get a hard. Don't do it. We're going to Georgia, we're going to Ukraine. We're giving them a plan, okay? We put the guy in charge of Georgia and he was a puppet. So yet another one of our kind of coups of like putting in 2003.

[Scott Horton]

The rose revolution of 03. And that's in the book too.

[Jillian Michaels]

I know that we do this like we put these bad guys in power in the Philippines. Wasn't Gaddafi another one of them? It's like we're. No, no, no, he wasn't. Okay, there was the Marco, whatever the fuck, the Philippines guy. Didn't we do that with him?

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, he was America's guy for a long time.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, so, so, so you basically you're saying we go in. Who's going in, by the way? I, I, I heard something that it's like an organization that was formed by like an NGO that was formed by the CIA and they have a name.

[Scott Horton]

You're right. That's exactly right.

[Jillian Michaels]

So tell me real, I'm sorry, Scott.

[Scott Horton]

That you're doing fine.

[Jillian Michaels]

I apologize. You know, you're like an astrophysicist. And I'm in, you know, addition and subtraction.

[Scott Horton]

But that's, no, not at all. You're, you're doing fine. It's called National Endowment for Democracy. And they, they do, the way that they say it, kind of tongue in cheek, is that we do openly what the CIA does secretly. And they say that in fact people get in so much trouble for being tied to the CIA. Openness is its own protection. They just brag that, yeah, we gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to this group and hundreds of thousands of dollars to that group, and a few million to this group. And we built this media organization. And they just claim that it's all in the name of simply little D. Democracy. We only just want a democratic, functioning system in your country. But of course, that's not what they want. They want for their guy to win. And if he doesn't win, then they hold a protest and finance and bankroll a revolution until they get their way. Or they try. These are called the color coded revolutions. The Rose Revolution. Well, first of all, the Bulldozer revolution in Serbia in 2000, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 03, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 04, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 05.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's what that means. Those are all the ones where we went in and we overthrew the government and we put in our guy.

[Scott Horton]

That's right. See, we're all looking at Iraq where George Bush is just obliterating people, but at the same time, he's waging this covert campaign to overthrow any government that's friendly to Russia on their periphery.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's what that means. That's what the color coded revolutions are. And that's what this organization created by the CIA is. And that's ultimately how we got Zelensky, isn't it? So I was under the impression almost.

[Scott Horton]

Not sort of, kind of. Yes. So he came later. He was elected in 2019, but he was elected under the form of the new coup regime. Yes. That Obama installed in 14.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, so I digress. So we put this guy in our. What's the name of that organization again, created by the city?

[Scott Horton]

National Endowment for Democracy.

[Jillian Michaels]

The National Endowment for Democracy. What a clever name. It's like gender affirming care.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Jillian Michaels]

Medical privacy, Gender affirming care.

[Scott Horton]

The National Endowment, because I'm begging the question.

[Jillian Michaels]

The National Endowment of Democracy puts this guy, overthrow guy, goes in. In Georgia. We put in our guy. Now he's gotta go start a bunch of wars because in order to join NATO, he needs secure borders. And is this what provoked Putin to go into Georgia?

[Scott Horton]

Yes, this is. This is what started the Georgia War of 2008. August 2008. Shakashvili launched the war. The first thing he did was bomb apartment complexes full of civilians, hundreds of civilians to death. And he killed Russian peacekeepers who were there under a legitimate deal, under international law brokered by the EU and rubber stamped by the UN Security Council, I believe, certainly by the European Union. It was a legitimate deal that had the Russian peacekeepers there, and Russian peacekeepers were killed right away in the attack. And so Putin responded by rolling his military forces in there. And now, look, they could have sacked Tbilisi and they could have just seized all of Georgia. They could have destroyed the BTC pipeline. They didn't. They stopped short of the pipeline. They stopped short of the capitol. They destroyed the Georgian offensive force, and then they withdrew back to South Ossetia, which they've now, you know, guaranteed independence under Russia protection. But that was, you see how. Remember at the start of the thing where you were like, okay, so what they say is, well, he did this and he did this and he did this.

[Jillian Michaels]

He invaded Chechnya and he invaded Georgia, and he went into Ukraine numerous times. And. And we did nothing. And we did nothing. And we were so patient and we tried so hard, and then finally, niet means yet. And now he's got Korean troops in there, and we got to do something. We got to do something. And if we don't do something, nobody will.

[Scott Horton]

And then talk about the current war, for example. He's saying, people in their slogan. Look at what they've done, Julian. They. They cost the Ukrainian nation state and the people of that land. They've cost them hundreds of thousands of casualties, certainly high tens of thousands killed, probably more than that killed. They have lost permanently Luhansk and Donetsk and almost certainly also Zaporozha and Kherson.

[Jillian Michaels]

These are all territories within Ukraine.

[Scott Horton]

That's right. These are, like, large. If. If Ukraine is like the size of Texas, can think of these as very large counties.

[Jillian Michaels]

What happened in 2014.

[Scott Horton]

Right. It's okay. And let me say now I apologize, and this is my fault because I'm so long winded, but I do have a heart out in seven minutes.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, I got you.

[Scott Horton]

We just stick with you until then. Okay. Okay. So in 14, the bottom line is it was essentially an association agreement with the European Union that was at issue. And they say, oh, it was the pro Russian president, but he wasn't really pro Russian. He was trying to break away from Russian influence. His name was Yanukovych, and he wanted to join the eu, but the EU drove too hard of a bargain. I'm sorry, I'm overstating it. Sign an association agreement with the eu. But they were driving way too hard of a bargain. And then Putin played his hardball, too. So if you have a deal with them, you can't have a deal with me. But while they were demanding a severe austerity regime, you know, cutting back subsidies on fuel and pension programs for old people and all these things, and barely loaning them enough to even make their interest payments on their last loans, Putin was offering them a $15 billion loan, 5 billion right up front, and a sweet deal on gas and all of this stuff. And so, and Henry Kissinger even blamed Angela Merkel. It was her fault for playing too hard a hardball on the EU side and ruining the deal. So people say, oh, Putin, Putin, Putin. But Henry Kissinger himself blamed it on Merkel for not being a good negotiator. And they blew it. But when that happened, the nationalists of western Ukraine were really pissed because this meant to them another life sentence under Russian sway, if not total dominance. But it would mean that their, you know, in the, in the fight between which major power is dominant over Ukraine, they would prefer the west than Russia. And so they reacted and they reacted with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars from the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute and every George Soros organization that you can think of, the International Renaissance foundation and a hundred more. And they poured tens of millions of dollars in to supporting this fake revolution again, another color coded revolution. This time it wasn't so much a color. It was the Maidan revolution, the Euromaidan revolution. And they made it happen. And it's a complicated mess. I describe it all in the book. Essentially they were trying to force the guy to agree to new elections in 2014, in which he did agree to new elections. He agreed to pull his police back if the protesters would pull their forces back. Well, his guys was abided by their side of the deal. But even to a degree beyond the deal and essentially just left downtown, they just left town. I think the bosses fled and then the lower down guys just skiedaddled. Well then I'm not just saying the protesters, I mean real a word, Nazi, Hitler, lovin, very far all the way to the right wing radical rightists are the ones who led the putsch and seized the capital city and forced the president to flee.

[Jillian Michaels]

And these guys, they keep saying there's neo Nazis in Ukraine and it's extremely corrupt.

[Scott Horton]

That's that they are the ones who accomplished the putsch for the United States in 2014. And that led to. How do we explain in the book? This, this goes back to World War II, of course. Ukraine was dominated by the horrible Soviet communists who starved millions in the Holodomor. So when the Nazis came, a lot of people, especially in the far west of the country, they sided with Hitler and helped him commit the Holocaust against Jews and others in Ukraine during World War II. And then the Soviets won the war. And so the CIA backed the Nazis during the Cold War for years in a covert operation until the end of the 1950s. And these are the same Nazi groups who, when the Cold War ended, the CIA.

[Jillian Michaels]

Scott.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah. Come on. As soon as the Cold War was on, America befriended all of their Nazi enemies and their Japanese enemies and immediately used them against the Reds. That's where that whole thing in Orwell comes from, about, our enemy is East Asia. No, our enemy is Eurasia. And then we just switch back and forth again because we just finished fighting the Germans and the Japanese. And then immediately, they're our best friends, and it's our Soviet allies who are our enemies.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh, my God.

[Scott Horton]

We switch around all the time.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, I'm losing you in three minutes. And I feel like I'm just starting to understand. I want to jump frigging in front of a bus. Like, I just. Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Fuck.

[Jillian Michaels]

All right, so hold on a second. So now. Okay, how do I get to Zelensky? I got two minutes to go to Zelensky.

[Scott Horton]

Okay. Zelensky was elected in 09 to make peace. He ran on peace. He's a Russian speaker from Kharkiv or right around there from the eastern half of the country, not the Far east nine. And he's Jewish, so he's not an ethnic Russian or ethnic Ukrainian. So he can kind of split the difference, hopefully, maybe, and make a deal. And I'm sorry to report to you. And as I detail in the book, the Nazis said, look, we'll just murder you and then you'll be dead. You'll be hanging from a tree on the main Dragon Kiev. You are not going to make peace, or we'll murder you to death, period. And they cited it over and over again. And the New York Times says, hey, this is a credible threat. These people have overthrown their government twice. They could do it again.

[Jillian Michaels]

You're not going to make peace with Russia.

[Scott Horton]

That's right. You will not make peace. We will fight.

[Jillian Michaels]

All right? We basically just. This is the tip of the iceberg here. We're just scratching the surface. So. So the reality is, I mean, I could keep you for 10 shows. Where do people get the book? Because, I mean, I seriously think we've maybe covered a chapter of your book right now. Where do they get it? Everywhere, I'm guessing. Tell Everybody. Where to find you, where to get the book, because there's. I mean, I didn't even have pages of notes. There's so much more to learn from you, and I've kept you for an hour and a half.

[Scott Horton]

Well, I've had a great time talking with you. It's been very nice to meet you, and I do hope you do. And I know the book is a monster, but I hope you have the opportunity maybe over the Christmas holidays to get it read and. And get back to me. Then we'll have a whole other set of conversations about all the stuff in there.

[Jillian Michaels]

Can we do that? Let's do this.

[Scott Horton]

Of course, Scott.

[Jillian Michaels]

Part one. Okay, let's come back. And because. So I'm gonna leave everybody here. This is part one. And because I forced you into this interview immediately because the world is in a state of complete chaos and disarray. I haven't even had a chance to read it yet for that reason. So if we could say this is education, part one. You've left me at the chapter where we're just meeting Zelinsky and we're gonna pick it up and I'm gonna put this up in the next couple of weeks from here, if that's okay at all. I'll make myself available when you have time.

[Scott Horton]

Time, yeah, absolutely. And your listeners will have all read it by then, too, so it'll be.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah, okay. Get the book available everywhere.

[Scott Horton]

That's right. It's at Amazon on Kindle as well as paperback. I'm working on the hardback. That'll be another couple of weeks, I guess. But the hardback's coming soon. You can just go to Amazon or provokedbook.com and don't be alarmed. It'll forward you just to my website, Scott Horton.org and you can sign up for my podcast feed there as well if you're interested. But the book is Provoked. My previous book is about the war on terrorism. It's called Enough Already. And this one, the new one, is Provoked. All about the Cold War, and I really hope everybody likes it.

[Jillian Michaels]

All right, part one. To be continued. I'll be ready for you next time we left off at meeting Zelensky. I'll go do your thing and I'll talk to you soon. Keeping it Real with Jillian Michael. Fall in love with low prices. All in the Fred Meyer app. Get juicy green, red or black seedless grapes for $1.99 a pound with your card and a digital coupon. Then find low prices on thousands of items like sparkling ice water, Kroger brand chips and more with your card. Shop these deals at your local Oregon Fred Meyer Today or click the screen now to download the Fred Meyer app to save big Today. Fred Meyer Fresh for everyone. Prices and product availability subject to change restrictions apply. See site for details.