← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:13 - Is #FreeSpeech in America Hanging by a Thread??
01:32:14
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- [00:00]
A
I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt and this is my personal best.
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B
YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co.
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A
Design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in store, online and in the app because your personal best is greater than any. Lowes knows how to get you ready for holiday hosting with up to 35% off select home decor and get up to 35% off select major appliances. Plus members get free delivery hallway, basic installation parts and a 2 year Lowe's protection plan. When you spend $2500 or more on select LG major appliances valid through 10. One member offer excludes Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Florida. Installed by independent contractors. Exclusions apply. See Lowes.com for more details. It's sat you guys. Welcome to show it's provoked. I'm Scott Horton from the Libertarian institute. Oh, there's Mr. Daryl Cooper, martyr maid. I got my Homer Simpson glasses on. I realize that these aren't funny because they're Homer Simpson glasses. They just make me look especially old.
- [02:38]
B
Why?
- [02:39]
A
Bookkeeper of some kind.
- [02:41]
B
They make you look wise, Scott.
- [02:43]
A
Oh, thank you. Yes, I'm sure that's what, that's how it comes out. Definitely what I was going for there. Hey man, how are you?
- [02:51]
B
I'm good. I'm a little frazzled. I. I hate any city over, you know, 20,000 people these days. And I just flew into LA, so I've been in airports and on airplanes all day and my reward for not crashing into the ground from 30,000ft is that I get to be in beautiful Los Angeles. So.
- [03:12]
A
You know, I love la, but the last time I was there I thought, oh my God, it's like that movie Escape from la, which was a knockoff of Escape from New York, which.
- [03:22]
B
Was like when you fly in and it's different than it was when I was, when I even 20 years ago. Like you, you fly in and the city just stretches off to Tijuana now and it stretches like all the way up into Ventura County. There's just city non stop up to San Bernardino. It's insane. Yeah.
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A
And all the. There's no gap between the Inland Empire either. It's just one big city out to upland.
- [03:45]
B
There used to be, but there's not any more. You want to hear something crazy though? That's just completely unrelated to anything that we are going to talk about when I was in Kauai, I worked for the government. There's a Navy missile range out there. So I was assigned out there for. For six months. And I was on a helicopter and we flew over this piece of the island that was 175,000 acres. And it was owned by the guy who founded AOL and built Time Warner for like $150 billion or whatever they sold AOL for right before. Nobody cared about it anymore. And I was like, how big is that? And so I was curious. And so I'm flying into LA and I looked it up. How big is the San Fernando Valley? It's smaller than that. It's like 160,000 acres or something. It's just like crazy. One dude owns all that. But anyway, little trivia for you. By the way, everybody. I'm on my laptop. I'm not at home, obviously, I'm on my laptop with a laptop. Came microphone. So if my audio sucks, blame that. I will not cool.
- [04:50]
A
You sound okay. Hey, I was flying today too, because I was in Chicago because I won a big award.
- [04:57]
B
Look at me R. Hold it up to the camera.
- [04:59]
A
It's the Integrity Media Excellence in journalism award for 2025. And I won that from Integrity Media. And then also who was there and who won it was the great Matt Taibi and also the great Jimmy Dore and the great Julian Assange, who was represented by his brother Gabriel Shipton, who's also a great guy, and Robert Shear, who. It was really great to meet him. I. I met him one time actually in LA at an event at a church with a skateboard ramp in the back. But it was really cool meeting him. And I learned that he was actually the guy that broke the story about the Iran coup of 53. And how he broke the story was he looked up Kermit Roosevelt in the phone book and called him and said, hey, why don't you tell me a story, buddy? Anyway, he was really great. He's like 89 years old or something like that. And he was. Didn't seem a day over 75, dude. He was all pissing vinegar and going on and having fun. And then there was this lady named Dorothy Leavel who had been the editor of this independent black newspaper in Chicago since 1969, which. Or 68 even, I think was. So that was. She gave a. Gave good little talk about that. And then Ali Abunima from Electronic Intifada was supposed to have won. Well, he did win, but he wasn't there because he had a death in the Family. But he was represented by this lady named Moren Murphy, who she gave her talk about all the journalists killed in the world this year, and especially, of course, in Gaza, which is hundreds and hundreds of. And hundreds killed by the Israelis there. So it was really cool. And then. But I also got to hang out with Ray McGovern was there and John Kaku was there and. And Aaron Mate was the emcee, the great and lovely Kim Iverson. And Ford Fisher, who is that journalist that does all the coverage of the riots and the protests and. And all those kinds of things and publishes through Taibbi's Racket News was there. So. And then I got to meet a bunch of really nice people and all that. And then it was Len Goodman and Patrick Sullivan who. Who run and host the thing and who I'm very grateful for. And so that was really cool. So nice.
- [07:06]
B
I'm not laughing at you or your award ceremony.
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A
I'm laughing at the Homer Simpson glasses.
- [07:10]
B
Right? Max CC limit. No, I am not high. I just got off an airplane and I wish I was. Why am I dressed so sexy? If you mean why is the shirt open, it's because I'm in Southern California now and it's hot. I am looking a little wild. And Kyle, I love you, too. So let's go.
- [07:28]
A
There you go. Kyle Smith is so high. He's got to look down to see this guy. Okay, More things to say. Charles Goyette, you know him, he used to be a radio show host in Phoenix, Arizona, for a long time, and he got kicked off the radio for being good on Iraq War two. And, hell, I thought the guy retired, but it turns out he's just been writing really great stuff for private investment, newsletters that hardly anybody gets to read. But guess what? He wrote a book called the Empire of Lies. And guess what? I'm gonna publish it. It'll be the 18th book published by the Libertarian Institute, coming up here real soon. And you know what's really cool about it, man, not to spoil it or anything, is I can just tell, and believe me, I don't take it personally at all that he has not been reading me this whole time. So even though he's talking about much of the same stuff as me, it's totally different examples and totally different kind of directions of coming at the same kind of subject and whatever. You know, I always complain that, like, I'm not that good of a writer. So provoked is just like this chronology. But if I was a good writer, I would have had it all mixed up. And told the story in an interesting way. Well, that's what he did. And in less than 300 pages. And it's just great. It's called Empire Lies and that'll be coming out. I'm really excited about that. So I gotta announce that and. And then I'm back to work on the audiobook and I'm doing the last of the editing on the Academy courses. So that's coming up. And then I wanted to ask you about your part one, because I know your people are very interested.
- [08:52]
B
Yeah, I do know.
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A
What's your status?
- [08:54]
B
So, yeah, I've been grooving on that before I forget, we got mnet. Who said, what's up? From Ethiopia.
- [09:01]
A
Cool.
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B
I love Ethiopia. Whenever I would go through there in the airport, I would stop in for a few days. Finest women on the planet anywhere. Except for Armenia, which is where my wife's people are from. But love Ethiopia anyway, so. Enemy. So I've been, I've been grooving on this thing lately, dude. Finally, like, I cleared my plate and was able to just sit down for the last several weeks and really bear down on it and, and man, like the way I had envisioned the thing. After I started getting it mapped out, I realized this is 10. This is like 10 hours if I do it like this. And I know some people out there wouldn't mind that, but I got to cut it down a little bit. So I'm squeezing it down and pushing some stuff off until the next episode. But it's going to be a good six, seven hour episode and it'll be done here in a few weeks, Like a couple weeks even. Like, you know, I'm going through just like a little, little spoiler this episode. I mean, you know me like I'm Vladimir Putin in this, in, in this, you know, where you asked me a question about the Ukraine war and I start talking about Prince Vladimir. So I'm not quite that bad. But it's, you know, it's about the Germans in World War II, and you can't talk about the Germans in World War II without starting. Without starting with World War I, at least. @ the very least. Right. And so, you know, I wanted to convey to people in a very visceral way and it's a difficult episode to write and it'll be a difficult one to listen to just what the guys in that war went through, you know, really just, I mean, the conditions that they endured for years, if they, if they were in the war the entire time, managed to survive. I mean, just like when you think about the environment alone. You know, one of the things that I told my wife, I was like, you know, I think of the other day when I was writing, there was some rain in the forecast where I live. It's like, oh, it's nice, warm summer rain. I think I might put on my raincoat and go walk in it some galoshes and, like, enjoy the weather and the nice smell. Okay, cool. Like, go in your backyard, dig a big hole and make it high enough you can't see over the top. And now go get all your clothes, all your food, all the stuff you need to live and just stack it up in there. And now you just forget about your house. You live in here now. This is your. This is now your home, and you live here. And now it's going to rain, and this is where you live. And this is just it. This is like the. That's where things start when you start getting into the complete lack of sleep because of the firing and the artillery. The almost daily, at least minor traumatic brain injuries that people were getting, like, on the daily. Just from the concussive blasts of the artillery. Overwhelming stress, you know, the grotesquery of being in a place that smells like rotting corpses all the time, to the point where it soaks into your bread, the smell soaks into your clothes, and you just can't. You know, a lot of soldiers who went through it said that of all the things that decades and decades later, they carried with them, like, as a memory about that war, it was the smell, you know, and big battles like the Battle of Verdun and Battle of Assam, people would talk about how when they were coming up from the reserve lines to reinforce the front, you could smell it miles and miles away, just rotting corpses as you were walking up into this inferno, you know, and like, these are all the. The rats. You know, a single couple of rats, like two, a male and a female, can have 880 babies in one year if they're well fed. And all of the rats on the Western Front were really, really well fed, you know, because there's a lot of human flesh lying around.
- [12:39]
A
Wilson flu, right? Spanish flu. It was the Kentucky flu that Woodrow Wilson exported to Europe and caused extra. Millions of deaths on top of the war.
- [12:49]
B
Little, little reverse Colombian exchange there. And then, like, you know, I mean, just the little things, like the fact that you're in. You're ankle deep in mud pretty much like 10 months a year, most of the time in your trench. You're like ankle to knee to thigh or waist or Sometimes armpit deep in water for hours, sometimes days at a time. Just constantly bailing water just to keep it below your knees. Because you're up in Flanders in Northern France or Belgium, and pretty much the entire place, the water table is like a foot or two below the surface. And so you start digging down and you're in a pool of water before you even know it. So it's a full time job just to bail water out, to keep it below your knees, your feet.
- [13:33]
A
You're saying you're making great progress on the episode then.
- [13:35]
B
Okay, yeah, yeah. So anyway, I'm here like, yeah, six hours later. So that was Enemy, episode one, everybody.
- [13:44]
A
Daryl pitched this show to me. You know what we'll do, Scott, is you go off and I'll keep you reined in. And I was like, all right, that sounds pretty good. No. All right, hey listen, we gotta do some super chats. We got a bunch of them here. We're doing this live and we got a bunch of people watching. So here's where we start. The first one is, what can we do to help particularly with Defend the Guard? Well, the answer to that is you go to Defend the Guard, us, especially you veterans, but everybody else too go there. They definitely need money and they definitely need volunteers, particularly veterans, to go and represent at the state congressional hearings. That can be really effective. And then the easiest thing of all for people to do is to phone bank when it's at issue and everybody's bum rushing the phones in Arizona to the House of Representatives that week and everybody do it all at the same time. It can be really effective. We've seen it over and over again. So I mean, there's nothing more important to the anti war movement in America right now than the Defend the Guard thing. And it's defendtheguard us and bring our troops home us and then other than that, I don't know, man. Leave an Amazon review, send it to your, to your buddies, you know.
- [15:03]
B
Yeah, it's such a great project, man. Like sometimes it can get really despairing when you think of, like, what can we do to fight this machine? And like rein it in. It just seems impossible. But then like, there are these levers you can pull that you know, are real force multipliers. And like, this is a way that if we manage to get this through, man, they're gonna have to work a hell of a lot harder to sell wars to us. You know, if governors all of a sudden and state legislatures are, their asses are on the line, you know, if the Guard gets Sent. That's. I just. I love the idea. I love the project.
- [15:38]
A
Yeah. And I'll tell you just real fast, Diego Rivera is the guy with his boots on the ground running the thing most of all. And he said to me explicitly, oh, he is so over trying to convince anyone this is war. Either for this, or I'm going to destroy your career. That's it. Black and white. We're not playing games anymore. And I'm not trying to be nice, because you could convince a guy and they'll change their mind and vote against you anyway. It's got to be. They're convinced that this is their only choice, and they have no choice. And so they're playing hardball. They're doing a really great job. So that's great. And that's Cruz. He asked that question. Thank you, Cruzy. And then. Oh, he asked another one.
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B
And.
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A
And you know what, man? I agree with this. And I think I might have mentioned this to you. I know times are busy and. And tough, but William Buford, you should talk with William.
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B
I know, I know. I've been meaning.
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A
You listen to his show.
- [16:31]
B
No, but I followed him on Twitter for a while, and I really like his account there. I haven't. I have. You know what? I've listened to a couple episodes of his show, actually, but not enough to get real familiar. But I really want to talk to that guy. I just haven't gotten to it yet.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah, he's great. He was army officer, and I think. I'm not sure exactly if he was still in the army or he is like, a contractor training Afghan soldiers in the war. But his speciality is debunking counterinsurgency doctrine. But he's also just a master military historian on all counts, and he's done one of the courses for the new Scott Horton Academy and everything. And I just know you get a real kick out of them, dude.
- [17:11]
B
Yeah, definitely.
- [17:13]
A
And then that was also Cruisy. Thank you, dude. And then Philip Taylor says, daryl, are you familiar with Zoomer Historians Channel?
- [17:23]
B
If.
- [17:24]
A
So, do you have any thoughts or the accuracy of his portrayal of Germany in World War II? I think that says.
- [17:30]
B
Yeah, I am not familiar with that channel, but I will check it out. All right.
- [17:36]
A
And then Cody Folsom, Jimmy Kimmel was the last American patriot who spoke truth to power. Truly, around that, I'm not sure who he's quoting. That's a pretty funny one. Well, you want to address the Kimmel thing? I love the devil horns in your cowlicks you got going on There, by the way.
- [17:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's probably good. You know, look, man, it's a tough thing, right, because we can look at this from an abstract, principled position, like Ron Paul was doing in that video that was being passed around today and saying, we don't like it when the left does it, and we don't like it not just because they're doing it to people we might agree with that we like, but because it's wrong in principle. And that is 100% true. The question that you have to answer for yourself if you're going to be against that, like, if you're going to say that we should never do that, you know, the question you have to answer for yourself is how can you establish any kind of deterrence from the other if they don't ever think there's going to be blowback for. You know, it's a thing like when.
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A
Who doing what, though? Because I think was Ron, and I didn't see Ron's video, actually, but was he addressing the FCC commissioner saying we're going to go after him for this, or was he addressing the positions that.
- [18:53]
B
Were going to drop? It was more just. It was the. The clip I saw was just more general. You know, it was like, we don't like it when the left does it and we shouldn't be doing it either kind of thing. Right.
- [19:03]
A
And it's just on the, on the overall cancel culture thing.
- [19:07]
B
Yeah. And I can't argue with that. Like, that's a. I mean, that's. Those are my principles, too. You know what I mean? But at the same time, it's like, you can only bring a knife to a gunfight so many times before you get tired of getting shot, you know, And. But, you know, you bring a gun to a gunfight now, everybody gets shot. So maybe that's where we're at now. What do you think?
- [19:29]
A
Yeah, No, I mean, I think, and this is just the tragedy of American politics my whole life long is whatever horrible abuses the last guy does.
- [19:39]
B
Yeah.
- [19:39]
A
The. Sometimes the new guy runs on those things, and then they almost never turn it back. You know, this is what Robert Higgs calls the ratchet effect in crisis on Leviathan, where every time there's a crisis, which is always the government gets more and more and more power. And then sometimes, you know, each crisis abates, as the emperor would say, and then the ratchet goes click, click, click back. But the actual. What you call. Jeez, this is the third time the word has escaped my. My tongue. The God dang. The part that goes on the ratchet and wraps around the nut. The. I know it. I'm just stupid. Yes, the socket. Exactly. The socket stays in the exact same place and the ratchet goes click, click, click back. But it's just an illusion, you know, you lose more and more freedom. So like if the, the Democrats are abusing the IRS under Bill Clinton, then they'll do the same thing under George W. Bush. And if George W. Bush is illegally spying and torturing, then Barack Obama will also illegally spy and torture and you know, this and, and oftentimes expand the thing. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. So yeah, instead of the Republicans saying what we're going to do is privatize the airwaves and we'll see how long abc, CBS and NBC last without a federal license in the first place and a federal granted monopoly control over these airwaves in the first place. Start with that. You know, this is actually Ayn Rand.
- [21:09]
B
The chat over here. It keeps making me laugh. Okay, go ahead.
- [21:12]
A
Is right. The only Irand I ever read, because I never read any of her stupid novels or any of that, but the only thing I ever read by her was Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal. And she has a great essay in there about the absolute Bolshevism of the national government nationalizing the airwaves. Back under, I believe it was William Howard Taft. And all they had to do was just homestead in which radio stations controlled which frequencies in which towns and all that. They could have figured all of that out through local state legislation and through court cases and, and whatever would have been fine, just like homesteading any other property. And instead they nationalize the airwaves in order to force all the big companies to serve the national government. And so that's of course the first problem in the line here is that ABC exists as a creature of the federal government in the first place, always has. But anyway, I, I'm all for revenge against Jimmy Kimmel.
- [22:04]
B
I hate him.
- [22:05]
A
And I, and I'm, I'm okay with market pressure coming to bear against people for things like that. And in fact, what I read, I think in the Journal, what the, what the people at the company said was that he refused to apologize. They said, you go out there and say that you were wrong about that and that he offered what he was going to say and that that wasn't good enough. It wasn't like a full retraction. He was going to like try to half stand by what he said or something like that, I guess.
- [22:30]
B
You know, I kind of wonder if they gave him, like a poison pill ultimatum, you know, like the, like, like the Austrian list of demands to Serbia, you know, right before the first World War. Yeah. Just because, like, I have seen people, and including people who I know are like kind of insiders, mid level insiders in Hollywood say that that show was losing insane amounts of money for the network for a long time, but they had a contract and they were happy for the excuse to cut him loose. And so maybe that's true. And now they get to come away looking like, oh, we're the victims of the federal government. And, you know, the. The FCC might have done him a favor. I don't know. I mean, I agree with you. Like, market pressures, I mean, I don't think anybody can complain about that. You know, if I live, If I have a deli in a Jewish neighborhood and, you know, one of my employees, one of my. One of my, like, guys at the checkout counter walks in with a swastika tattoo on his. On his arm showing, then he's going to get fired, you know, because I'm trying to sell some sandwiches to some Jews, man. But, like. And so I get all that. Like, that's fine. Um, it is a little bit of a, you know, people want to make it like it's a new step that the federal government stepped in, though, but it's not. That's the problem is, like, this stuff, I mean, for sure, over the last several years has been going on, but it's. I mean, it's been going on for a long time in different ways. It's just, you know, we're kind of in this weird holding pattern. I feel like a lot of us where we're looking back on this thing that we don't want to give up on, and this thing that we hope we can kind of pull back to the present and restore, you know, but then at the same time, looking forward and just sort of wondering if, like, maybe things have just changed in this. Like, we're not going back to how things were and like this golden age that we like to think of, 1776, like, we have to deal with the world as it is now. And these are the tools and the, the way power is exercised and the way it'll be exercised against us if we don't exercise it ourselves. I mean, I feel like, especially our generation, you know, Gen X, like the Zoomers, they don't have as much trouble with that. You know, the Zoomers have been born into this chaos. It's one of the things I think about A lot, actually, is how, you know, I mean, shoot, you're like, people voted in the election last year who were not born when 9, 11 happened. You know, they were little kids when the financial crisis happened. They don't remember that there were people who voted in the last election. They're 18 years old, who were 10 years old when Trump ran for office the first time. They're 10 years old. And so it's just been chaos that they've been thrust into, like, from the very beginning. And this is just the world to them. And they don't have, like, you know, and they were also born into a world where a lot of these sort of sacred symbols, you know, of the. Of the national community and just a lot of our historical things where a lot of these things had already kind of been disenchanted and been cast aside and they're thrown out into a world where these things are already kind of, you know, looked at as silly and delegitimized. Whereas, you know, those of us who have sort of straddled the birth of the Internet, you know, I was a go before I started really using the.
- [25:35]
A
Internet, using, hey, there are adults today that were born in 2007.
- [25:39]
B
Word. Yes. And that's thing to think about turning 18 this year. Yeah. And so. And so I feel like our generation, like, we have a little bit more trouble. Like, we have to. I heard somebody say this the other day, and it really kind of hit me hard is like, before we can move forward, there's certain things that we almost have to allow ourselves to grieve the loss of.
- [26:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
You know. You know what, though?
- [26:03]
A
Here's the thing. I. I mean, I don't know, like, what all the ramifications of the death of Charlie Kirk are going to be. You know what I mean? There's going to be a lot of them. The fact that he was the I'm willing to sit right here in front of everybody and argue with anybody guy, you know, that's obviously highly symbolic. Right. He. He wasn't shot just because of the views he represented, but how he represented them. And so there's going to be a chilling effect from that where people are going to be, you know, less interested in trying to mimic that same behavior. On the other hand, they might have just made a thousand more of them because honestly, like, things like this are terrible, but they're very rare in America. Right. Like, thing all the campuses Charlie Kirk has done the same event on before that this never happened before. Out of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of appearances I'm sure so. And it's a very unique case. So I hope people won't let it, you know, won't react too bad and let it change how we operate around here. You know, we've had assassinations before. We're not getting rid of our First Amendment. We have to keep it.
- [27:09]
B
We have to, yeah, it's.
- [27:10]
A
What are we going to do without it? Because then it's just going to be an absolute war of censorship each time the other guys are in power.
- [27:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's unique in terms of how extreme it was with somebody actually getting killed. But I mean, the problem is people been watching it maybe hasn't been in the news as much lately, but for years of just, you know, anybody remotely conservative, I mean, remotely conservative, shows up to a college campus to give a speech. Charles Murray, you know, it's the sweetest old man like Charles Murray, very traditional, kind of like just conservative guy goes, and it's a riot on campus. And like the woman he's with, like, to who, who's opening for him, gets assaulted. And people have been watching this happen for a long time. And it's not assassination, you know, but it's this sort of, you know, people feel and have felt for some time, with good reason, that a lot of the leftist radicals, just like in the late 60s and early 70s, like you, you let them get to a point where they felt a sense of impunity. And when you get there, once you're at that point, it's really hard to re. Establish deterrence without, without overreacting, you know, because they don't think you're going to do anything. They just don't think there's any consequences to their actions. I mean, you know, there's certain things like when you go back to the 2016 election, I don't know if you remember, I mean, for a while there it was like every Trump rally, the, when the people were leaving, they were getting attacked by like mobs of people, their cars were getting destroyed and they were getting chased around and beaten up. Like, that kind of thing is not something that we just have every election cycle in America. That's a, that's a different kind of thing that came out. And you know, I like, here's where I'm really torn on the state response to the Charlie Kirk thing is I feel like the, the idea that the government is going to now step in and do something about this is the only thing that is keeping some right wing dude with the rifle from loading it up and going out like, he has to know that, you know what? I'm not going to do that because the, the state is going to do something, at least something, you know, and if they felt like the state's not going to do anything and the media is not gonna mourn him, they're gonna mock him and all this, then, dude, you're getting the right wing guy with a rifle out there somewhere and I don't want to see that. And so, you know, that, that's like where I'm, that's, that's where I'm torn, I guess is, is between those two things.
- [29:40]
A
Well, I mean, look, I've been seeing people say, because Emil, I have been looking at Twitter a little bit that, you know, well, lies are not protected speech. Well, yeah, they are. Unless it's fraud. Right? Or what was this one? I wrote it down. The guy was saying, this is reckless endangerment. Jimmy Kimmel saying that it was a right winger that shot Charlie Kirk. That's reckless endangerment. Because right, nothing. In America what's illegal is a direct incitement to violence. And that's it. We've been through this already. And in fact the defining case was a Klansman who threatened a politician and said, we're gonna get our revengeance against you. And the Supreme Court said he had the right to say that. What he didn't have the right to say was let's get him right. That's the distinction. Because this isn't England, this is America. So that's it. So all this hate speech stuff is barking up the wrong tree. And you know, I, I'd like to, to give good credit to Matt Walsh and Orin McIntyre who, you know, I watch both of their shows pretty regularly and both of them just absolutely slam Pam Bondi and said this should be the end of her career for saying, oh no, there's speech and then there's hate speech. No, there's not. And just, you know, it takes one crisis. And it's not just that they abandon any principles, they just become Democrats and sound exactly like their enemies and invoke the exact same standards. But, but you know, these, these two right wing influencers that I've seen immediately came out and said, no, wrong lady. And I believe Oren said, hey, if you can't do this job, go home. That's it. This is, we're not putting up with this at all. And I think Tucker Carlson said the same thing. He went off on his show about this, that this is, they're denying your Barry humanity when they're trying to deny your freedom of speech. Like, yeah, he killed it on this. So I think she was forced to kind of retract and back down on that. But like, we gotta hold firm to that dude, because we saw, remember, I mean, they were breaking the law and, and they got away with it for a time, but they lost at the, at the polling booth finally over it. Um, anyway, but just remember the tyranny of the censorship on Twitter just a few years ago before Elon Musk bought it. It was just horrific, dude, the way they treated people and, and the way they helped to rig the election of 2020 by what they do by Shadow banning Charlie Kirk and all of his buddies, all of the new right wing influencers, Mike Cernovich and, and Jack Posabic and all of those popular MAGA guys all got Shadow banned down to oblivion in order to try to. And, and I think with great success, to rig that election against Trump last time. Anyway, I should shut up and read more of these things because we got super chats. This dude says, oh, do we think that Trump is capable or interested in actually ending the war in Ukraine as we stand right now? My short answer is I think he is interested, but not capable. As I've said before, the Russians are winning, but they're winning slowly and they're still far from their goal. And the Ukrainians don't want to turn around and quit the field where they're still standing. And so it ain't quite a stalemate, but it's a slow motion war of attrition favoring Russia. And I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's already lasted way too long. It's far too dangerous. But I don't know what the hell anybody can do about it, quite frankly. It's terrible.
- [33:11]
B
I mean, look, I think that we, whatever reservoir of trust we still had remaining with Russia in 2022 is just gone now, you know, and they just, they don't feel like we are capable of sincere and lasting agreements, you know, And I mean, we reinforce that like every day when we're holding negotiations with the Iranians and you know, the Israelis are secretly plotting a sneak attack against them at the same time, like when you do stuff like that, the rest of the world takes notice, you know, and we. Especially when you have the hubris to brag about it like, like we did with that and like, you know, some people, some European officials did about the Minsk Accords all being sort of one big gag to kind of string the Russians, like, the Russians didn't see it as a gag. The Russians thought it was a way to, like, stop this war from. From coming to fruition. And like to hear officials that you've been negotiating with their people this whole time just sort of laugh at you and say, ha. You believe that? You know, at this point, it's like Putin might believe Trump wants to do it, but he also knows that there's limits to the power the president can wield and that he's only going to be in there for a couple years, and who knows what happens after that. And so, you know, it's. It. It's hard to make an agreement that you can really trust with the United States right now. And that's one of the things that, you know, I wish that our leaders would take more seriously, right? Is that something like our national honor, like, our word is our bond as a country. Like, we have to do this thing that we said we were going to do, even though it's actually going to cost us now. And it's not a. It's not going to be good for us. But we said we would do it. We committed to it, and so we're going to do it. You got to. You got to maintain those things. Like, those are the kind of things that forget the next administration. Those are the things that are going to matter. 10 administrations from now, you know, 15, 20 administrations from now. Does America keep its word? Does America do what it says it's going to do? If they say they want us to sit down across a table from them, are they holding a. Holding a knife behind their back and waiting for us to, you know, turn around to go get lunch? I mean, these are the kind of like, just as a. As a human, you know, like human beings, right? One of the things they say about psychopaths is that they tend to move around a lot, if not geographically, at least from one social circle to another, because they just. Inevitably, people kind of catch on to what these people are about, and they just burn bridges everywhere they go. And so they have to move on. Move on. But you can't move on in the global arena. America's here, and our word and our national honor and how we're perceived, that's going to stick with us, you know, And I feel like the damage we've done just over the last 15, 20 years, but. Or really, you know what? Since. I would say since the end of the Cold War for sure, when. When we were in this unprecedented position, right. With the world at our feet. I mean, we could have set up the American world order anyway we wanted that could have lasted, you know, a thousand years. And instead we just kind of stuck with the petty, you know, just politics. Yeah. And, and it's really unfortunate and I think, you know, at this point, the rest of the world's just not buying it anymore, you know, and, and that's. Yeah, that's sad. I mean, you don't want the rest of the world not trusting the most powerful country in the world. It's a recipe for, you know, for, for bad things. So.
- [36:46]
A
All right, man, I gotta cut a spot here for the show. So, first of all, this show Provoked is brought to you by the book Provoked by Me, published last year. It's about 477, 000 words on how the Cold War with Russia, the new Cold War with Russia is all America's fault, and the causes of the war in Ukraine. Before that, I wrote Fool's Errand Time. Then the war in Afghanistan, which looks like that might be relevant again because Donald Trump says he wants to go back to the Bagram Air Base and get this idiot argument. I already addressed this in the book, you know, eight years ago that, oh, well, China makes nuclear weapons somewhere near Afghanistan, like in western China. So. Oh, so we're going to station B2 bombers at Bagram Air Base for when we have to do a sneak attack against China's nuclear weapons facilities? What? No, they're never going to station any major air power at Bagram. Enough to bomb Afghanistan. B1s for bombing Afghanistan with. Yeah, but B2s and nukes for potentially holding over the head of the Russians or the Chinese stationed in Afghanistan? No, they're never going to do that. So what advantage does that give them to go back to Afghanistan? Nothing. These people are crazy. Sorry, I had to say that. And then this one is called Enough already. And it's about all of the terror wars and there's a review of it today and all weekend@antiwar.com by Michael Holmes, who interviewed me a couple times. He's a German guy who interviewed me a couple times. Dirty wars and Endless Lies, Scott Horton's shattering history of America's war on terror. And that's it running@antiwar.com this weekend. So I had to say that. And then I also have to talk about the Expat Money Summit. This is where, say you had some money and you were trying to save it from annihilation by Uncle Sam. What you do is, what you could do is you could find other places in the world where you can get citizenship, indoor residency, buy property and protect your assets. This is not some scam where like they teach you how to cheat on your taxes and go to prison or something at all. Nothing like that. This is all about staying exactly within the rules of the United States and the other countries in the world and how to do it exactly right so that you can protect your assets. And it's taught by this great guy. His name is Mikhail Thorpe. I would say Mickel or something. Mikhail Thorpe. He's a really good dude and he's expert at this. He's been doing this a long time. And the whole thing is free. It's expatmoneysummit.com and Chris, is there like a slash provoked at the end of that or something? Yeah, slash provoked. Expat. Moneysummit.com provoked is. I haven't been saying that the last few weeks. Go there. The whole thing is free. They'll have some upsells or whatever, I guess during the conference. But it's from October 10th through 12th and they'll teach you. And they're focusing on Latin America this time. I'll teach you how to protect your assets, buy up property in Latin America and, and save your money and all of these things and the right way. And it's not like just some. Only an upsell where. You know what I mean, like they just string you along and make you buy things. Like. No, they actually will teach you the basics. Absolutely. What you need to know for free throughout the whole summit. And then the various upsells are just do a little better than that. So that's business. If you have any money, protect it by. By looking at that. And then drink my coffee. If you like waking up in the morning or if you just need to drive drunk home from the bar, get some coffee in you. All right, listen, this guy asked a question. It was.
- [40:25]
B
Fear.
- [40:25]
A
The old blonde fear. The old blood asks. Oh, that was the Ukraine question. I just, I just did this guy. Same chatter. Do you two think that the shit live types are going to treat Jimmy Kimmel as their free speech martyr in the same way the right is treating Charlie? I mean, kind of maybe, but I don't know. He didn't get shot and he ain't got charisma.
- [40:52]
B
Not really.
- [40:53]
A
Jimmy Kimmel, he's so washed up and old. I think this will be the last one on the phone here. Oh. What do you consider to be the biggest distraction for right wingers of our time? I'll leave that one to you.
- [41:06]
B
I mean right now it's hard to think of anything else other than just the. The obsession. And I get it. I'm. I'm one of these people to a degree, and I have to fight it off in myself. The impulse a lot, but just the obsession with conspiracy theories, it's the most natural thing in the world. The government lies to us about everything. Like, even when there's no reason to lie, they still lie, you know, and. And so that, you know, those are the. Just. Those are. Those are the conditions that are, you know, just perfect soil for conspiracy theories to sprout up and grow in. And so I get it, and I'm one of those people. I have to remind myself of this. But, man, like, I've been. I. I've been just at war on Twitter the last couple days over this Israel killed Charlie Kirk thing, and it's just like, look, man, I'm of all people on the planet, the last person who puts anything past, like, from a moral standpoint, anything past the government of Israel. There's. I mean, we've watched for two years that there are no moral limits that they consider applicable to their own. To the. To their own behavior. I'm. I put nothing past them. But, man, you've got to start with, like, start with, okay, we don't know anything. We don't know who did this. We don't know. So now what evidence do we actually have? And you got to work out from there. You cannot start with a conclusion and work your way back fitting every little square peg into a round hole and trying to cram it in there to make it work. And people are so stuck on it, man. Like, they really, really, really want to believe it. And it's easy to believe. Like, they kill a bunch of kids in Gaza. They kill a bunch of journalists. They would do, you know, I mean, you know, their deeper history that, like, again, there's no real limits. It's not a matter of whether they would or wouldn't do it from that standpoint, but you got to be able to, you know, present an argument to people and present information to people that they can't debunk in five seconds when they go look it up. It just makes us look stupid. And more than that, it really. It distracts from real issues that are going on. You know, like the other day I said that Charlie, you know, Israel killed Charlie Kirk is why we can't have. Israel has too much influence in U.S. foreign policy. You know, it just gets subsumed into these. Into these sinkholes of conspiracy theory theories and you know, and you know what it reminds me of is when I would go to the Middle east for work all the time when I was with the DoD, I would talk to a lot of the Arabs in the different places that I would be working. And man, like, and these are English speaking Arabs, so they're more urbane and, like, educated than like your average dude in the slum. And, man, their head. Their heads. And I don't even say this as an insult or whatever, these are. A lot of them are great people, but their heads are just so full of conspiracy theories that they cannot think straight about just regional politics or anything like that. Like, they believe them all and there's just. They assume that the. That the craziest conspiracy theory version of something is probably what's true. And then they start there and it makes it so that, you know, that conspiracy theorizing and obsessing over that stuff is what they do instead of actual politics, you know, instead of, like, type of organized politics that would actually get anything done at all. They're just, like, caught in these rabbit holes they can't claw themselves out of. And I see that happening, like, in corners of the right these days. I mean, you had, like, I know you're, like, not paying as much attention to Twitter, but you had like Nick Fuentes over the last couple of days, known Zionist shilling, you know, Nick Fuentes, who's been on saying, you know, what's the evidence exactly, for the Israel angle? Like, just what is going on? Like, what? Like, and you got tons of people on the right saying, oh, they got to him. You know, he got. He must have, like, it's like, dude, I don't know. It drives me insane, man. Like, we have to, like, no matter. No matter which angle you're coming at this from, even if you are somebody who hates Israel, even if you're somebody who hates Jews and they're your enemy or what, Whatever, it doesn't matter. Whatever approach you're coming from, you cannot abandon reason and you cannot abandon, like, the. The requirement to think and speak and act with a sense of justice. It's important. Like, if you. Yeah, it doesn't matter where you're coming from. Like, you know, reason and justice are not negotiable things that you can cast off when you feel like it. Like, you have to always have your. Your feet planted on those two things. And so look, if Israel killed Charlie Kirk, if that comes out, I will literally, on a live stream of provoked, get a live crow and I will eat it in front of you. So, yeah, you'll have a full mea culpa. You get to watch me eat a live diseased bird that I'll catch on my own, you know, on a power line in nearby. But yeah, man, just that like, we gotta focus on real problems. And in the conspiracy theorizing again, I understand it. And a lot of times it's more true than not. But you can't let it distract us from like hard political problems that we're actually trying to solve.
- [46:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, my approach to this stuff is just be patient. I don't feel the need to be first on all these things. You know, if Justin was here, that would be his job to write, you know, everything we know so far as of Wednesday night or whatever. But for me, I don't really have that. I don't feel that pressure to pronounce what must be the final result conclusion thing now. So I know there are a lot of theories going around, a lot of people taking it upon themselves to investigate, which I think is great. I was, you know, I was looking at Twitter a little bit. I was watching a little Candace Owens and I was just thinking, man, if we had had YouTube and Twitter back in the days of the Oklahoma City bombing, they wouldn't have gotten away with that. There is no John Doe to crap for a day, dude. They would have just been nailed. We know all these Nazis names, we know which cases they testified for the prosecution, rest you give me a break.
- [47:38]
B
Maybe, but as a, as a still.
- [47:41]
A
Oklahoma bombing truther for the last 30 years straight, you know, I think it is important that people investigate these things independently and don't wait around for the government to tell you what the truth is. But like you're saying too, that doesn't mean you have to just jump to conclusions. You can just compile a bunch of things to wonder about and, and wait as long as you can to make your conclusion. Try your best to debunk these facts that you're compiling, see if you can falsify them. Because you can't build a house out of straw anyway, dude. So if you're going to really make your case, you're going to have to have only the best pieces. So.
- [48:17]
B
Yeah, and you know, I, I see a question from Cyber Chud 2077. Why would you say that as the information is still coming out and it's so early? I'm not. We have to separate these things, right? To say that there, there's no like hard evidence that I, that I've seen that, that I think Anybody's seen that Israel carried out this assassination is not the same thing as saying the story the government is telling us is true or that they're, like, on the ball and figuring this out in the right way or conveying the information. It's not the same thing, you know, to say that. Like, when we say, be careful and take your time, that just means at least. Well, it's what you said. Just don't jump to this conclusion. But you have to really ask yourself, like, you have to think about the claim itself and how extraordinary it is. Israel, this foreign country, ordered an assassination of, like, an American political commentator and figure, now, would they do that? Yes. There's no doubt in my mind Benjamin Netanyahu would sleep like a baby tonight if he did something. There's no doubt about it. They've done. They've done way worse, you know, and they. They've been doing it on a daily basis now for years. So it's. It's not that. But you have to say, okay, that's. Step one is that this foreign country ordered a hit on this American citizen in broad daylight, with thousands of people around, cameras everywhere. And they've got apparently the president, the vice president, the FBI director, the DOJ head, just everybody in the American government covering for them as they've done this. So you have this vast, sprawling, global conspiracy at this point that's like. And now, okay, maybe it's all true, but if you're going to go down that road, you know, you've got to. You better have some good points to make, you know, and not just some innuendo that, you know, that. Well, I don't want to name any names, but, like, just. You can't just have innuendo and, like, holes in the official story. And, you know, therefore, maybe this other thing, this insane, sprawling conspiracy theory is true. Maybe it is, but you got to have some solid building blocks to, like, put that together on, you know, and people are just not waiting for that.
- [50:37]
A
Yeah.
- [50:38]
B
And I feel like it sucks so much, and, like, people have been coming at me so hard for saying this stuff on. On Twitter, but it's like, dude, we're on. Like, we're almost certainly on the same side of most of these issues. You know, this is. I mean, the reality of it is, like, whatever you think about it, if you're right and they've got the president, the vice president, the FBI director, just everybody, then guess what? It's going to be like JFK. In 70 years from now, people are still going to be arguing about it. And so, like, I just, it sucks all the air out of the room when this stuff becomes the focus. And anyway, I don't want to dog on people, man, like, because like I said, I get it. Like, I 100% get it. There's no reason to believe anything that these people say. And there's nothing morally that you could put past the Israeli government. I'm with you on that.
- [51:27]
A
Yeah, I know that.
- [51:29]
B
But. But we just have to remember, like, to stay, we got to keep our eye on the ball and make sure we maintain some sense of credibility among people out there who like, are not already on the train, you know what I mean?
- [51:41]
A
Well, look, yeah, hold your horses. Shouldn't be that controversial of a statement, you know what I mean? And that doesn't mean hold your horses on looking into things, Just hold your horses on concluding things until you can be more careful and be more right. I also wanted to mention real quick, dude, that speaking of Israeli murderousness, that I interviewed an American Palestinian, Dr. Palestinian.
- [52:07]
B
I didn't get a chance to listen.
- [52:08]
A
Yeah, Anas Ahmed is his name and he spent a month over there in May operating on people, you know, getting bombed to death and shot to death over there. And I got a real good interview out of him the other day, which just posted. So if people want to take a look at that, it's, you know, under my Scott Horton show handles, there are 3,000 people watching live right now on our various things, which is great. Everybody go over to the YouTube channel, YouTube.comprovoked I think you need that at in there. Or if you type slash anti war radio. It's my old anti war radio channel, so that'll work too. It'll forward you over there and then. Yeah, this is great. I'm having fun. I missed live calls on pirate radio. We're gonna get to that someday here, but for now, let me run through these chats real quick. We have Reed, Hoppa and Rothbard, of course that's true. Left and right, the prospects for liberty, anatomy of a state war, peace in the state and, you know, other great ones. The case against the Fed, what has government done to our money and our anti imperialist heritage? And okay, DC Trump wants to retake bam. Yeah, I already cussed about that. Non interventionist should support tariffs. Well, I'm not exactly sure about that, but I know that we do have a, a very rigged and crooked, not exactly free trade system that basically says you can keep your tariffs on us and we'll drop our tariffs on you as long as you Let us have military bases in your country and dictate your foreign policy. Right. That's our deal with the Europeans, the Koreans, the Japanese and whoever else. And so it definitely should not be that way. And so if the trade off from bringing our troops home is we have to renegotiate, you know, some level of protection just, you know, with other countries. I'm listening anyway.
- [54:01]
B
And you know what?
- [54:02]
A
I know that there are really smart libertarian arguments where no matter what their tariffs are on us, we should, we still shouldn't have tariffs anyway. But I'm not that good of an economist. I'd have to ask Mark Thornton to explain all that crap. So I'll pass. But I know that I don't support this rigged game that we have now, which is really a giant pretense to maintain military dominance throughout the planet.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah, and I mean, I'm like you, I, I'm not a good enough economist to, to pronounce on, on the effects of that necessarily. But I, I would say from the non interventionist standpoint, and maybe this is what he was getting at. But you know what tariffs do, like, forget the economics of it. What they do is they give you foreign policy tools short of force to use in your, in your dealings with other countries. You know, you can go to another country and say, you know, we're gonna stop allowing you to sell your main products into the American market, or we're going to incentivize Americans to buy, you know, by lowering tariffs and like, opening it up for you. It's just, it's a lever you can pull that's something short of, you know, hey, we're gonna invade your country or bomb you if you do something we don't like. You were dead on, though. I mean, it's, you know, it's this Cold War system that we established, which maybe made sense, you know, during the Cold War. This idea that we're in this, in this global war against, you know, another empire and all the countries whose loyalty we're competing for, we go to them and we say, look, here's the deal. Like, you get to develop at a breakneck pace because you're going to be able to just sell into our market and we're not going to sell into yours. And as you said, you know, but you're going to be on our side of the Cold War, you know, foreign policy wise, like, we get to call the shots there. And maybe that made sense in the Cold War, but then by the time we got past the Cold War, you had all these Countries like, forget about like the non aligned countries that we were doing this with to kind of bring them into the fold. We got like Canada, European countries that we were doing this with that they're completely rebuilt from World War II. They have better public transportation, better infrastructure, everything than we've got over here. And when, when Trump comes along and says, you know, maybe we need to rework this system that we put in place to fight the Cold War, they act like some sacred tenet of American democracy and the global system is being violated. And it's like, no, it's not. You know, these are, these are just, these are negotiations that have needed to take place for 35 years and they haven't yet. And, and it's good that they. But, but yeah, I mean, tariffs are foreign policy tools in addition to just being economic, you know, incentive machines. So that's important to keep in mind.
- [56:52]
A
Yeah. All right, so well, here, let's just run through some chats here. This guy says possible movement on Illinois weapons ban next week. Praying. Do you know about that? They're gonna.
- [57:04]
B
I guess I saw the chat about it. I don't know anything about that.
- [57:08]
A
Sounds like there's a chance it's going to get less worse is the implication I'm picking up on that, that they might be rolling something back. So that sounds like maybe.
- [57:19]
B
So I will have to. Maybe we'll talk about that next week because I am not, I'm not really aware of that.
- [57:26]
A
Here's another one. Kimball taken down. Fine by me. I hate the bastard. But FCC pressure, Not a fan of that at all. I think that is absolutely the correct take. I used to like Jimmy Kimmel when he did the man show a long time ago. Oh, look, reminder. Dave DeCamp is at the tail end of the fundraiser over@antiwar.com. help him fight the good fight and donate now says Adam Parker. You got that right. And I'm editorial director there. So I mean that when I say that I was actually got to hang out with Dave last night. He, he went out to the awards ceremony thing in Chicago. We got to go hang out. Great, dude. He's our news editor there. Read him every day. I'm concerned with the administration using this to crack down on anti Israel sentiment. I mean, ain't that the way. And that was part of what Pam Bondi said was like, oh, we gotta crack down on antisemitism. Or McIntyre was like, oh God, listen lady, you know what I mean? And look, he is no hippie leftist, pro Palestine activist and he's Not a strict non interventionist Ron Pauline either, but he's just saying, come on now, you're getting on my nerves with this stuff. You know what I mean? Charlie? Kirk's assassination was not about anti Semitism. And no, it doesn't mean that we need more bans on speech for Americans who want to criticize this foreign nation of Israel. It's in the news now that this guy, Mahmoud Khalil, you're gonna now deport him to. Especially now, especially after what happened, Charlie. In our society or Al Jazeera, Algeria. You want to play the clip, Chris? Go ahead. More law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people. So we show them that some action.
- [59:13]
B
Is better than no action.
- [59:15]
A
We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything. And that's across the aisle. Kook. So, yeah, and this is the thing is, as we were talking about last week, can't we just defund all the liberal arts departments? There's a big controversy at Texas A M this, this week, I believe it's brand new, where a student kind of secretly recorded the teacher preaching some trans ideology type stuff. And the student says, well, the president changed the law on this. I guess their interpretation of title nine is what she's referring to. Or I'm not exactly sure, but I haven't kept up with it that close. But. So this became a big controversy between the president, university and whoever else. All the chairmans and provosts and whatever. And I believe the headline that I saw was several professors were fired from Texas A M for pushing this stuff after they'd already been told not to and that kind of thing. Which, man, why, why even have these liberal arts departments at all? You want to read the classics? They're all on Kindle, dude. Like, we don't need the national government especially, or even the state governments to subsidize these giant colleges to teach a bunch of gay communism to everybody's son and daughter that they send off to get a higher education. You know what I mean? You're supposed to be reading Chaucer and whatever, and now, you know, I mean.
- [60:47]
B
And even beyond all that, like, these departments are just scams, dude. It's like, it's like if you're going to art school at like Cal State Northridge, it's like you're not going to like get a show at the Met from that. They're just. They're completely taking your money and selling you a dream that is completely false. And so you Think about it. You're an English literature major or a gender studies major. Like, what are you, what jobs are you competing for? Well, all 50 of you in your class are all competing for your professor's job when he retires. And so it's just this huge bottleneck. And just by default, 49 of you are not. Are going to be disappointed. You know, and they're so. They're just a scam. They scam people out of money. You know, these kids who were told. I mean, it's really sad that we've sort of. We've created this culture around the university system that makes it so that people who do something else, you know, people who. I can't remember if I told this story on this show or not, but, you know, I, I used to do somebody I was, I was dating at the time. I used to have to go to these universities, grad, graduate school, art shows, right, for these students. And it was absolute hell on earth. Like, contemporary art is just so, you know, or maybe I'm a philistine, I don't know, but I hated it. And so I would be there and there's a bunch of these art hoes and like homosexual men who have created things that they're calling art and they're being shown and commented on. And I'm just sitting in the back chilling, like, waiting for this whole thing to be over. And was this other dude who I would always commiserate with, he was the husband of one of the girls in the art program. And this, this was here in la, and this dude, he owned a landscaping company, employed like 60 people. He had people all over the city, you know, doing work for, for businesses, homes. Like, he had like 30 trucks. Like, this is established. He was like 29 years old, right? Just a, like a legit dude. And I'll never forget because we were in a little gaggle one time and there's a bunch of these art girls standing around and then me and this guy and maybe one other dude, and they asked him at one point where he went to college and he just said, oh, yeah, no, I, you know, I did a lot of landscaping when I was in high school and stuff. My dad did landscaping. And so as soon as I got out of high school, like, I just jumped straight into that and started building my business. This is a dude who's like, again, a hyper successful dude. You know, 60 people, he's like paying their salaries and all of these, these art students who are like 34 years old in graduate school because they can't think of what else to do with themselves at the time. They're, they all, you know, they work at Starbucks despite the fact that they've got a bachelor's degree. And they all look at him like, oh, like they felt bad, like, oh, he didn't go to college. And you know, the worst part about it is it bothered him. He should have been like, right, I don't care about your opinion, but it did bother him. And because that's the culture that we've created where like, you're, you're a lesser person if that's, if that's who you are, no matter what you've done. And it's, and it's really destructive. Like, because, I mean, like in terms like it's socially destructive. Like we have, you can't find a freaking electrician, you know, to do to, to wire up your house for you to fix something within the next like three weeks, because they're all booked out. But you've got a bunch of kids with graduate degrees who are working at Starbucks and living with five roommates in their 30s. You know, it's just, it's just a terrible perverse incentive we've created.
- [64:27]
A
And then they blame free market capitalism for the whole riot. Hey, this is our, this is late stage capitalism. When I take a giant loan from the national government to go to college, get some worthless degree.
- [64:40]
B
Keep talking.
- [64:41]
A
Sounds like freedom's fault. All right. Hey, so this guy says, he says, marley Analytics. I haven't been calling out these names. I'm sorry, guys. I should be. Does Kirk's assassination anyway remind you of the transpose of mlk? Could this be the start of a counter revolution? And I would point out that Hunter Durantis, who's our editor at the Libertarian Institute, he ran a piece at tac, which I think it was not his title. They called it the Hero We Needed. Charlie Kirk was the Hero we need or something. He makes a comparison there with mlk, obviously citing the best parts of MLK and his non violent approach and all of that. And then. So I don't know exactly what kind of counter revolution, but are we getting a hell of a reaction out of this? Yes. I mean, I don't know where it's headed. Well, go ahead.
- [65:38]
B
Yeah, I don't know exactly what the. I'm not exactly sure what the questioner is getting at, but I will say this, and this is something I worry about. If you go back to 68, right, you had two sort of currents, main currents of the protest movement. You had the white College kids who were mostly anti war protesters because they didn't want to go to Vietnam. And then you had the civil rights, black rights protesters, right? And they had gotten increasingly wild over the course of the decade, increasingly sort of, you could say anti social and just separated from like the main current of like politics in the country. They were kind of beginning to branch off. And you had, in 1968 or actually so in 66, that's when Stokely Carmichael coined the term black power. And you started to get the youth in the civil rights movement who started to get really riled up. You had some of this on the anti war movement on the campuses too. But there was still enough built in faith in sort of the established channels of protest, you know, that most of that energy was flowing into those things. And so in 1968, when Eugene McCarthy was running on an anti war ticket, you know, you had all these hippies and all these anti war radicals on campus who, you know, they cut their long hair off and they clean for gene movement so they could go door to door with these middle class normies and talk to them about this Senator Eugene McCarthy and why they should vote for him. And you also, at the same time, even as like a lot of the youth in the civil rights side was getting really dissatisfied with the non violent approach and you know, all of the things that Martin Luther King would talk about, he still had enough weight in the movement, enough moral authority in the movement that he was able to keep a lid on all that, you know, on things just veering off totally into black power and black separatism. And in one year, you know, you get, RFK is murdered and Eugene McCarthy gets just totally robbed at the Democrat primary. You think like 2020 was bad. I mean, 1968 was at least. I mean, you had a guy who didn't even, he never, you know, Hubert Humphrey didn't even win a primary. I don't even think he was in any but two of the primaries and he didn't win a single one. He had like 0.2% of the vote or something. They just installed him, you know, and this was at a time when these kids, this wasn't like, are we or are we not going to raise the age of, you know, Social Security qualification or something? This was like, when I get out of college, am I or am I not going to go die in the jungle? So this was serious shit to these kids. And then you just steal the election, I mean outright. And when they protested in 1968 at the Chicago convention, the cops Come out and just beat the shit out of him, you know, and, like, so that happens. And then, of course, Martin Luther King gets killed. And, you know, in this sense, like, I've seen people say, like, you know, the left says, we want to, you know, we have to bring down the temperature. It's like you just killed the guy who wanted to bring down the temperature, and so now you get the next thing. And that's how people felt in 1968. And that's very cathartic. And honestly, in a lot of ways, like a reasonable way to react to a situation like that. But as we saw back then, nothing. Nothing good comes from it, man. Like, when people start freelancing because they lose faith in the established channels of. Of. Of. Of getting their grievances across and dealt with. When they start freelancing, man, people. People can. Chaos ensues very quickly, as it did back then. And, you know, by the time it was 19, everybody thinks of, like, the 60s, like, when they think of the weatherman or all of these other things as things that were, like, part of the 60s. All that stuff started in 1969. You know, this was like the end of the 60s when, you know, you already a couple years removed from Haight Ashbury, and all this kind of. This was, like, the end of it. And all the dissatisfied people who were pissed off about, you know, that they had put their faith into these established channels of protest only to get stomped on when they actually started to win the argument. You know, they. They were. They were righteously pissed off about it. And. But as you see in the 1970s, I mean, it just spun off into complete craziness, because if, you know, you're not going into those sort of established channels that everybody sort of, you know, that a large number of people have a sort of hand in shaping it and sort of shaping the rules that govern it, then people splinter off into, like, a million different cults and movements and just little groups. And you get Jonestown, you get the Symbionese Liberation army, you get the Black Liberation army, all these crazy little groups that are just committing violence for no real reason. It's just sort of nihilistic violence. But that's where you can end up. And that is where we. That's something we have to worry about right now. I mean, people are on the edge in terms of, like, they're. They're. They're. Their faith in the system right now is hanging by the last thinnest thread in the tapestry. I mean, it is like, you know, and. And we, you, you gotta hope that the people who are making decisions are aware of that and that their decisions are going to be shaped by that. Because if you let large, large, large numbers of people cut that last thread, then you could lose control of events very quickly. I mean, really.
- [71:26]
A
Yeah, well, I don't know how anyone could have faith in this system whatsoever, I think, but the, the question has got to be what to do about it. And it sounds naive now and this kind of goes towards our next question. But you know, in a sense it, you know, the way I used to argue with the, in with the libertarians is, look, the Constitution is about 95 of the way to pure anarcho capitalism from where we are now. And it's supposed to be the rule of law, it is the charter that created this national government. And so it's supposed to be bound by it and not going back to it, but going forward to it and implementing the constitution, repealing the 21st and the 20th, even centuries as much as we can, and having something like a limited republic and with more and more decentralization of power, that's the way to fix this, right? Because we don't have levers of power over Washington. If we could form a broad consensus against centralization, then we can make some progress with that. But as far as like on any one law, we, the people of this country have no power compared to the moneyed interest. And this goes. And I'll be quiet in just one sec, but the E. Rutger asked. It sounds like Daryl's deterrence idea aims at the idea of accepting the changes of the society. This is refers, this comment is an hour old or whatever. We're behind the ball here. But when you were talking about that and he's, he asks, does this conflict with Scott and Justin Raimondo's ideas on reclaiming the right? It seems like there's already this push for a new right. And so this my kind of take on that is that, yeah, I mean there's, we're stuck going forward in time, the best any of us can perceive. So there's no going back to anything, right? It's the future. Right now we're having this conversation halfway through 2025, by God. So reclaiming the right is, you know, bringing up the legacy of people like Garrett, Garrett and H.L. menken and Albert J. Knock and even John T. Flynn and some of the other people who were, you know, made up the kind of opposition to Roosevelt and World War II back then and you know, at the, the very first days after World War II and, and invoking that legacy of, of, you know, call it Paleo conservatism or Paleo libertarianism as a sound basis for a future non interventionist foreign policy. Iran, Pauline. Foreign policy that's based on the, you know, quite strict recommendations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and others of that generation that you're going to destroy your republic if you go create a world empire. So don't. Which, you know, they explained that quite, quite clearly. So we can do that, I mean, as best as we can and try to. I think the right already agrees, as I love to quote Doug McGregor, it's the greatest thing anybody ever said. Time wins more arguments than reason. In other words, it don't matter. You spouting off your mouth, boy. Me, not that he was talking to me, but that's how I take it. It's like you sit here and complain, complain, complain, but guess what? By the time ISIS Sacks Fallujah in 2014, everyone's going to agree with you whether they ever heard you say that or not. They're like, ah, geez, I guess this was all for nothing after all. And so the right more and more is with us. We don't have the power in the White House obviously, but I think the narrative more and more belongs to Tucker Carlson and likes of this show in, in setting the, the tone for what conservative American foreign policy should be going forward. But what do you think about all that stuff?
- [75:13]
B
Yeah, and I would add to it that decentralization, it has the added benefit of a, it's something you can sell to people on the other side. You know, you can tell like a liberal New Yorker dude. Do you really want a dude in Alabama, a Baptist in Alabama having a say and whether or not you're girlfriend can get an abortion. Do you really want that? You don't, right? Well, yeah, so let's just separate these things out. You know, decentralized go. You can sell that to them. They might not hold to it once they're in power again, but you can at least sell the idea to them. And then also like it's a, you know, talk about bringing down the temperature, like concrete ways you can do it. Decentralization is like the biggest way you could do it. If all of a sudden like it doesn't matter quite as much who gets elected president because it's not going to completely change your life. You know, I think we, we mentioned an episode or two ago, you think about how Ukraine was. It was just this disaster of a country because you really had two countries that were stuck together that didn't want to be together. And this side, you know, the east would elect a pro Russian guy, and the west would have, you know, elect somebody who hated Russians. And they go back and forth, and neither side felt represented whenever they were out of power, like, at all. So there was no loyal opposition. And you just, you know, got what. What we have now. And of course, you know, they. They had a little help with all that. But, you know, that that's what happens when you have an immensely powerful federal government, is it really matters like who gets elected president. It really matters like who he appoints to the Supreme Court. Because, I mean, you know, if you got the wrong guy in there and a Supreme Court justice kicks the bucket, your life might change, like, in ways that matter. And if that was not the case, you know, if the Supreme Court was ruling on trade disputes, you know, between states and like, shit like that. But social issues, cultural issues, a lot of these things were handled at the lowest level that they could reasonably be handled at, which I would argue is like, the township probably in most of these things, you know, people. People wouldn't have to invest so much energy into questions that people didn't used to do that. You know, you didn't have, like, your average dude who was turning a wrench all day, just pissed off at night because, you know, Herbert Hoover appointed such and such as a federal judge. I didn't give a shit. Had nothing to do with their lives for the most part, or if it did, it was in, like, minuscule ways that, you know, that they were never going to notice. And that's just not the case anymore because we have this. We have this machine, this federal government now that, you know, if you go back to 1933, when Roosevelt was first coming into office, before the New Deal, before the Second World War and the Cold War, the federal government, in terms of revenues, in terms of personnel who work for it, in terms of just the activity and the aspects of society and the economy and everything else that it had, that it had a hand in, is 5% the size of the federal government now in every way. And so what that means is that, like, 95% of the government grew up in the context of the Depression and global war. And that's what the government grew to deal with, you know, to be proactive in the economy during a depression, because that's when all these agencies and these departments were all created. And once you get them rolling and get them moving and have somebody's job depending on them, Finding something to do. I mean, we all know that story. Like it's just going to keep on going. And so we've got this giant thing that's built to fight an economic depression in a stupid way, but that's what it thought it was doing. And to fight global war against the fascists or the communists. And that's what the government is built to do. And even things that we don't think of as being, as having anything to do with that. You know, when Eisenhower was sending troops down to Alabama to, to point guns at American citizens to integrate those colleges down there, he wasn't some bleeding heart, like civil rights guy who just like was, you know, unable to sleep at night because this, you know, this black woman wasn't able to get like, maybe he believed that stuff, but it wasn't like something he was super like dialed in on. He just knew that the Soviet Union is sending their agents all over Africa right now to these non aligned countries and saying, look at the United States, look at Jim Crow, look what they're doing to black people. Are you really going to follow them? Are you going to follow us? Like, come with us. Propaganda rights itself. And that's what Eisenhower was thinking of. And so even things like that have like a, you know, a warfare state sort of tinge to them, you know, and that's what the whole government almost really is. And the way that you deal with that is not to just like break it down or be. You have to, you have to devolve it down to lower level subsidiaries. The only way you're ever going to do that.
- [80:16]
A
There's a great George Carlin bit about that. How we just declare war on everything. Got a war on poverty, got a war on education, got a war on this and a war on that. And our only concept for dealing with anything, we don't really do anything about it. We just declare war on it and send a bunch of DEA ages a kick in people's doors or whatever.
- [80:33]
B
There's. There's a joke in 30 Rock where Alec Baldwin says something like, he says something, he's like, oh, it's war on drugs, the war on the poor. And then Tina Fey is like, I think you mean the war on poverty. And he's like, yeah, let's go with that.
- [80:47]
A
Yeah, same difference. And he's being redundant with the war on drugs. Anyway, all right, this guy says, tell Daryl I spent countless hours fighting with people over his Churchill was the chief villain of World War II comment. I'm holding the line, brother.
- [81:03]
B
So glad to Know, I mean, I've talked a lot about that. I don't know if there's anything else everybody wants to hear me say about it.
- [81:09]
A
You know, I got a tangent there. I forgot to mention that I got a chance to meet. I'm going to say his name wrong. I have no idea how to say it right. Alexander Mercoys, the guy from the Duran that does that. Great podcast. It talks all about Russia issues all the time. And I was surprised that he knew me. And he had been at that conference in Georgia where I'd been invited to give that short statement. And he said that I had made a great impression with my. My little talk that I'd given in Tbilisi there over Zoom. I was supposed to go there, but I decided not to. But so that was cool. I'm gonna send him a book. But he's a. He's a really great dude. And I forgot why that was relevant.
- [81:50]
B
We're going where. Something about Churchill. Oh.
- [81:53]
A
Because he said, there's a book called Churchill by some commie and I forgot the commie's name, but he says, this is a very popular revisionist book about Churchill in England that everybody kind of reads. And then they pretend that they didn't because the guy that wrote it is such a Stalinist or whatever it was. I forgot. And I said, well, I just read AJP Taylor. And he's like, ah, well, there, you know, he knows what that means. Same difference. But so I don't know if you've read that book or not. I could recommend he's not the commie one.
- [82:22]
B
I probably should, though. It sounds like.
- [82:23]
A
Yeah, I asked him what it was called, and I think he said it was just called Churchill. But I'm gonna email him anyway because I need his mailing address. So I will try to hunt that down for you because I know you need it. Senator Brundle Fly says, I like liberty.
- [82:39]
B
That was not a fart I rubbed against the wall.
- [82:44]
A
I didn't hear you. I like libertarianism. It's a game we can play only in an ordered society with shared premises, if culturally Balkanized. I don't know how to play that game. Well, that's the whole point. You've got to teach libertarianism to as many people as possible and practice it as much as can. You know, freedom is the parent of order, and if you just try to impose it, it ain't gonna work anyway. So degenerate society says they didn't dig up the nuns in Spain, but they had a lot to do with the Spaniards. Were digging up their nuns. Scott, you see the new K O T H? Knights of the Hoth. I don't know. Koth. I don't know what that stands for. I was trying to guess a Star wars name. The nuns in Spain. I don't know what we're talking about. You're the historian.
- [83:34]
B
Yeah. Spanish Civil War stuff. I don't see the question. So I don't know the context. But he's talking about, you know, they would. They would exhume the graves of. Of priests and nuns and defile their corpses and do all these terrible things. There's pictures you can find online. Really awful stuff.
- [83:50]
A
Yeah. All right. Derek Wheeler asks, speaking of conspiracy, Scott, have you done any digging on William.
- [83:56]
B
Band, King of the Hill? Well, of course. Huh? King of the Hill.
- [84:00]
A
Oh, I missed it.
- [84:02]
B
K O T H. Oh, of course.
- [84:06]
A
Did I see the new King? You know, I watched a couple of them, and then it was all kind of woke and it just. Man, they missed it. Like, this was all clearly produced before the election of last year, and it just seems so out of date. They're like, oh, it's Hank Hill dealing with woke times. But it's. It's just feels. I don't know.
- [84:26]
B
They got boys that been whacking off in my tool shed.
- [84:30]
A
Yeah. They could have made it more universal. You know, it was too like. You know, it's like watching a new Star wars movie was like, wait a minute, is this long ago in a galaxy far, far away?
- [84:38]
B
Or.
- [84:38]
A
This movie was filmed in 2019. I get it. Anyway, Derek says, hey, what about William Van Wagonen says that the Arab springs beginnings in Tunisia were not as organic as they appeared. Have I done any digging? Yes, I did. I interviewed him about it. I did two interviews with William Van Wagenen recently. Do I have the book right here to show you? No, but you can see in the. Oh, I do have it. This is the book. It's the 17th book I've published. Admittedly, five of them were mine, but this is Creative Chaos, published by the Libertarian Institute by the absolutely great and even heroic William Van Wagenen. He paid the price in time in Al Qaeda captivity over there, spent a lot of time in Iraq and in Syria, and really knows his stuff. And it's funny because I have been interviewing him supposedly about this book, but we just keep talking about the background. So we did, like, a whole show. We're just talking about Iraq War two the whole damn time. And then we did another one where we end up just talking about Tunisia and Egypt that's the second one, Derek. It's there we talk all about Tunisia and Egypt and this and that. And I, I was actually thinking about this, I guess on my flight. I was kind of spacing out and thinking about like how much I need to really reevaluate my take on the Arab Spring from back then. And even in Enough Already where he really makes it seem like they were just as color coded revolution as anything that happened in Georgia or Ukraine in the Bush years and that from the beginning. And that it wasn't just that America exploited the ones that were in their favor and crushed the ones that were not, but that they really were behind it all. So, you know, I'm really not sure, man. I think because part of his thing was it kind of depended on WikiLeaks releasing those State Department cables at an opportune time. But that's getting the cause and effect backwards, right? Like everything happens for a reason. Well, you mean effects had causes? I mean, because in this case what happened was WikiLeaks released this stuff and there was a bunch of State Department cables in there detailing the corruption of the dictator of Tunisia and his wife's family especially. But then as he pointed out, but who trumpeted all that up on the radio for the last couple of months before the riots broke out. And I don't know this for a fact, but I guess his implication was these are all USAID backed up groups in Tunisia that, that ended up picking up the thing, digging the pro, picking up the protest movement. See at least seeds of the same thing in Egypt at that time. Clearly they absolutely just hijacked the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria in a way that was the polar opposite of how they treated it in Yemen or in Bahrain, Kuwait or Saudi where they just absolutely crushed all opposition ruthlessly.
- [87:30]
B
So yeah, I was actually in Bahrain when that was going down. Are you kidding me? Yeah, no, I, I, and I didn't see much, but I was in a taxi cab going from my hotel back to the American base and I was a civilian and on my way there, like we went through a zone where, you know, there were people hanging on the windows of the taxi at me and you know, there was some tear gas coming through the vents in the car and stuff. And not, it wasn't anything crazy like the, the real action was several blocks away. But yeah, it was, it was wild, dude. And it was funny too because you know, the countries we don't like, boy, you heard all about everything that their governments did to put down those protests. You didn't hear anything about what the Saudis and the Bahrainis were doing over there. And they were going hard, man. They went ham on those people. And it never even made the news here.
- [88:27]
A
Right. All right, well, look, man, we should wrap. We're at like an hour and a half here. I saw one guy said he didn't think the Israelis killed Charlie Kirk because they would have blamed it on a Palestinian.
- [88:40]
B
More on me.
- [88:41]
A
Makes sense.
- [88:42]
B
Yeah.
- [88:43]
A
Or on Daryl. All right, so listen, I think this has been a lot of fun. We covered a lot of ground in no particular order. Let me check my notes real quick. Oh, Trump says October 7th was genocide.
- [88:56]
B
So.
- [88:58]
A
Okay, but then that means that definitely what Israel's doing is genocide. Iran signed a new deal with the IAEA to restart sanctions, although the European powers are still threatening to do the snapback sanctions which could destroy that. But there's going to be a new inspections regime there. You can't say there's been an unbroken chain though since the war. So I don't really suspect that they've broken out toward a nuke. But I, I would not completely discount it. And then there's a bunch of random stuff on here, but. Oh, you know what, let me just say this one thing real quick and maybe I'll skip it. Yeah, I'll just skip it. Oh, you know what, I'll say this instead real quick. They forced down the interest rates. The so called independent Federal Reserve, bowing to pressure from the President, cut interest rates by a quarter of a point, trying to just juice the bubble like he's George W. Bush just sowing the seeds of future catastrophe. And of course we need just free market interest rates instead of having the thing rigged. But we got inflation above their so called 2% target and they're cutting it anyway. And so buy whatever commodities you can now buy gold, because they're. And I'm not selling it. I'm just telling you all your prices are going to keep going up already again more. And so I guess we'll leave that at that. Unless you got something else for us, bud?
- [90:21]
B
Yeah, because he's asked it a couple times. Matt. Hm. 73. You said earlier this week I said there was a podcast coming out that I'm super stoked about. I cannot tell you what it is. It's not my podcast. When it gets announced or comes out, it gets rescheduled. Then, then you know you'll know what it is probably without me having to tell you. But it's not mine, so I can't announce it it to you. But it's going to be good when it comes.
- [90:45]
A
There you go. All right, Cool. Well, thank you, everybody, for watching. It's been fun. And thank you, Daryl. And get.
- [90:51]
B
So, yeah. Sorry for the setting and my. My beautiful clothing and the laptop quality sound and. And video and. And my. And the fact that my forehead is just gleaming with sweat this entire time because it's freaking hot.
- [91:05]
A
Now you can turn the ceiling fan on. Thank you, everybody, for participating. It's been a lot of fun. See you next week.
- [91:11]
B
See you next time. It.