EP:2 Murder by Policy: Empire of Violence : The Complicity of American Power

Summary

Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Episode 2: Murder by Policy: Empire of Violence: The Complicity of American Power
Release Date: July 5, 2025

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Introduction and Context

In the second episode of Provoked, hosts Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton delve deep into the intricate web of American foreign policy, examining how it perpetuates cycles of violence globally. The conversation spans historical analogies, contemporary conflicts, and the psychological underpinnings that drive nations into perpetual war.

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Scott Horton's Appearance on Tucker Carlson

Scott Horton begins by sharing his recent experience appearing on The Tucker Carlson Show. He remarks on the extensive three-hour interview, highlighting that while most discussions centered around Somalia and Yemen, he also ventured into historical comparisons.

"I think that's going to make it, you know, controversial, but I think I got it right."
(03:00)

He defends his critique of Winston Churchill, suggesting that Churchill's wartime policies bear unsettling similarities to modern American leadership, particularly in their complicity in violence.

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Churchill vs. George W. Bush: Historical Parallels

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around Churchill's wartime strategies, especially the implementation of a starvation blockade during World War II. Scott critiques the narrative that equates Churchill to a modern-day George W. Bush, arguing that Churchill's policies facilitated mass starvation and made the rationalization of atrocities easier for soldiers.

"Any army officer wants to do their job right and understand America's relationship with Russia has to read Provoked."
(01:36)

Darryl adds to this by emphasizing Churchill's role in escalating the war beyond Britain's capacity to win without American or Soviet intervention.

"Churchill's policy of having a starvation blockade, you know, it at least made it easier for men like that SS officer to rationalize what they were doing."
(05:17)

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Propaganda, Historical Narratives, and Public Perception

Scott and Darryl discuss how historical narratives are shaped from a young age, citing the screening of Schindler's List in schools as a tool to instill emotional triggers that influence public perception of conflicts. They argue that these narratives simplify complex issues, leading to polarized views where criticizing figures like Churchill is misconstrued as sympathizing with Nazis.

"They're being inculcated, inculcating it into our children, generation after generation that you can watch their children be killed by the thousands and not only feel nothing, but actually cheer it on and support it."
(21:07)

Darryl further explains that idiomatic expressions like "death to America" are often misinterpreted outside their cultural context, exacerbating tensions and misunderstandings.

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US Military Actions and Complicity in Global Violence

The hosts critique America's prolonged engagement in foreign conflicts, using Somalia as a primary example. Scott outlines the history of US involvement, highlighting how continuous bombing and support for warlords have destabilized the region without achieving the purported objectives.

"We've been bombing Somalia 44 times this year so far, and which is a higher rate than even the worst of the Obama years."
(46:55)

Darryl draws parallels between US actions in Somalia and historical atrocities, emphasizing the cyclical nature of violence fueled by policy decisions.

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The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Case Study in Complicity

A substantial segment is dedicated to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The hosts argue that Israel's military actions against Palestinians, including the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, mirror genocidal behaviors historically observed in other conflicts. They assert that American support for Israel exacerbates the violence and prolongs the suffering of Palestinians.

"Israeli forces kill 139 Palestinians in Gaza over 24 hours."
(34:08)

Scott criticizes the moral compass of American policymakers who support such actions, suggesting that these decisions tarnish America's legacy in history books.

"And so that's why we're always at war. It's not because the world's always messing with us. It's because we're messing with them."
(58:22)

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Broader Implications for American Foreign Policy

The discussion broadens to address America's role as a global superpower perpetuating violence. Both hosts argue for a multipolar world where power is distributed among various nations, reducing the need for American interventionism. They lament the erosion of the Constitution and the shift towards a permanent state of emergency and war.

"America is the world empire. And even though the American people want to just mind our own business, this is the new world."
(58:22)

Darryl underscores the importance of national honor and historical memory, advocating for a foreign policy that does not sully America's reputation through unnecessary violence.

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Closing Thoughts

In wrapping up, Scott and Darryl reflect on the future trajectory of American foreign policy and its global repercussions. They express concern over the normalization of violence and the diminishing public scrutiny of military actions. The episode concludes with a call to recognize and challenge the perpetuation of violence as a cornerstone of American power dynamics.

"You can't just hold to that old, to the old idea that, you know, this isn't something that we can possibly rethink or change in the way we approach."
(64:25)

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "Any army officer wants to do their job right and understand America's relationship with Russia has to read Provoked."
  (01:36)

• "Churchill's policy of having a starvation blockade, you know, it at least made it easier for men like that SS officer to rationalize what they were doing."
  (05:17)

• "They're being inculcated, inculcating it into our children, generation after generation that you can watch their children be killed by the thousands and not only feel nothing, but actually cheer it on and support it."
  (21:07)

• "We've been bombing Somalia 44 times this year so far, and which is a higher rate than even the worst of the Obama years."
  (46:55)

• "Israeli forces kill 139 Palestinians in Gaza over 24 hours."
  (34:08)

• "America is the world empire. And even though the American people want to just mind our own business, this is the new world."
  (58:22)

• "You can't just hold to that old, to the old idea that, you know, this isn't something that we can possibly rethink or change in the way we approach."
  (64:25)

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Conclusion

Episode 2 of Provoked serves as a critical examination of American foreign policy's role in perpetuating global violence. Through historical parallels and contemporary analysis, Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton challenge listeners to reconsider entrenched narratives and advocate for a more conscientious and less interventionist approach to international relations.

Transcript

[Daryl Cooper]

Sa.

[Scott Horton]

All right, you guys, welcome to the show. It's Provoked, episode two of Provoked with me, Scott Horton and my good buddy and podna, Daryl Cooper, Martyr made podcast. And of course I also host the Scott Horton show and run the institute and editorial director of Antiwar.com and wrote some books and some things. Hey, how are you doing, Daryl?

[Daryl Cooper]

Doing great, man. Haven't been as busy as you. What's going on in my world, dude.

[Scott Horton]

So the big news is that Yesterday was my 14th wedding anniversary, which is pretty good. Probably more than anyone could expect, you know, longer than anyone could expect someone to be married to me, but it works. And, and then also get this man the spotlight today on Anti War.com. let me get the guy's name right, otherwise that would suck. Provoked is a must read for Military Professionals by Lt. Col. Josh Van Buskirk in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. army War College.

[Daryl Cooper]

All right, you.

[Scott Horton]

Of my last book that this show is sort of named after. So. And it's really good too. And he says, you know, any army officer wants to do their job right and understand America's relationship with Russia has to read Provoked. So. Hell yeah, I was happy to see that it's. Anything else has been going on.

[Daryl Cooper]

I. I heard your wife lost her phone. I mean, has that crisis been resolved?

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. What happened was she picked up her phone and called it so it would ring and she could find it. And I'm not sure if she got a busy signal, if it rang in her hand or exactly how it was.

[Daryl Cooper]

I can't talk. I've looked for my sunglasses for a half hour before leaving the house and they were on my half the whole time. That's a regular occurrence. So the next time I leave the house and get in my car and don't have to come back in for something I forgot will be the first time.

[Scott Horton]

That'll be awesome. I can relate, I'm afraid. You know what it is with me? It's the left hand. Anything in my left hand, I don't know it's there. I'll leave the house with the TV remote control in my hand or anything. And I don't know it's there until I look at it. Reminds me of that documentary I saw about the kids getting the split brain procedure when they had real bad. Yeah, their brains were all screwed up. That's me. Only with my corpus callosum still intact there.

[Daryl Cooper]

So what else was going on yesterday, man?

[Scott Horton]

I did the Tucker Carlson show. It's going to hit any minute now. I guess. I hope yeah. Later today, by the time anyone sees this, it will already be [e-mail] the TCN thing, this is the longest interview he ever did, three hours. And he let me essentially just walk all the way through. Enough already. The whole thing, other than Somalia and Yemen.

[Daryl Cooper]

You didn't comment on Churchill, I hope.

[Scott Horton]

I did absolutely comment on Churchill.

[Daryl Cooper]

I was kind of my thing, dude. That's my thing.

[Scott Horton]

Not. Well, listen, it was in defense of our good friend Daryl Cooper, this show on his show. So we'll be getting some clicks on this one. And then I guess for most of the people watching this, then they'll have already heard the joke. So I'll go ahead and ruin it, which is, I. I've been waiting to say this, and I was just sure I was going to forget, but I did remember to say, well, you know, Tucker, remember how they said that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of the 21st century? I think that's pretty much right. And that's the case that Pat makes in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War is that Churchill was the George W. Bush of the 20th century, and that a whole lot of what he did did not have to happen. And I also did explain, particularly, like, what people, as I introduced, I said, some people obviously just deliberately misunderstood the guy, but other people honestly did. It wasn't the most perfectly phrased thing, but he wasn't saying that the Holocaust. You. You're not saying that the Holocaust was just people were starving because the Nazis weren't prepared to feed them. You were saying, at the very least, they were responsible for taking care of all the people that they had taken captive and didn't. And so people just completely took you out of context, what you're saying there, basically because he had just slammed Churchill, too. So now they're just. They don't know what they're listening to anymore, kind of.

[Daryl Cooper]

And my real point with that is.

[Scott Horton]

At the very least. But I. I made it clear that, like you were addressing, even if someone was spinning for the Germans, even they would have to admit that there are millions of people under their care. And then I said, and it wasn't even his real point. What were y' all talking about? You're talking about the Israelis responsibility for caring for the people of Gaza because it's not the country next door. It's a captive population. So Israel is responsible for caring for them while they kill them, which is, you know, how that was. That was what we're talking about at the time. So I'm sure that's going to make it, you know, controversial, but I think I got it right.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. I mean, my, you know, my two criticisms of Churchill, and this is one place, I guess, where maybe I wouldn't hold Bush quite to that level, but, you know, is that Churchill continued the war and even escalated the war past the point when Great Britain had any chance of winning it themselves. And they were only. Their only strategy was to hope that America and. Or the Soviet Union got involved, which would mean the destruction of continental Europe, basically. And, you know, that's one thing I hold him, or just the forces behind him responsible for, but then the second one is implementing and keeping on the hunger blockade. Even as relief organizations from the US from neutral countries, people in his own government were telling him this is going to cause mass starvation on the continent. It's not going to affect the Germans or their army because they're going to feed themselves first. In fact, it's going to affect the people at the very bottom of their hierarchy of peoples the worst. So the people that they care the least about taking care of, those are the people who are going to starve to death. And this is already starting to happen. It's going to happen. You know, there were relief organizations, including, you know, Herbert Hoover was. Was very involved in this, where they had arranged, you know, with local authorities in France and stuff, that neutral countries would deliver the aid and there would be neutral country sort of distributors who would make sure that it just went out to the civilian population and all that kind of stuff. Churchill just would not have it. He just would not have anything like that. And so then my point, when I brought up the fact that they weren't feeding people in the prisons, was saying, you know, there I. I cited that letter from the SS officer at Posen concentration camp, where he said in August 1941, just two months after Barbarossa was launched, that, you know, we don't have enough food to feed all these prisoners we've got. Wouldn't it be more humane is the way he put it, if we just finished them off now, quickly, rather than letting them starve to death this winter on moss. And people took that as like it was just a big logistical accident that, like, all these people died on the Eastern front. What I was saying was Churchill's policy of having a starvation blockade, you know, it at least made it easier for men like that SS officer to. To rationalize what they were doing. You know, because you might have had. I mean, surely you had some people, you know, the Himler types at the top and Some of the commanders on the ground who. They just wanted to kill as many people, as many Jews as possible. They wanted to kill Slavs, terrorized Slavs, all that kind of stuff. They're just those kind of people. But you still got to get regular soldiers to carry that shit out. And you have to be able to explain to a lot of them, like, why this is necessary, why they actually have to do this, why this is the humane thing to do. You. You know, and the starvation blockade made that a lot easier for them, you know, and. And again, like, the. They. They ignored the context of me saying, at the very least, you know, the Germans failed to provide for any plan for. For taking care of the millions of prisoners they were going to take, which is tantamount to murder. And, you know, I said that very explicitly, but people just sort of ignored that part. But, yeah, what are you gonna do?

[Scott Horton]

I did. I. I actually meant to go back and watch it, and I didn't. But the way I remembered it was that at the very least was heavily implied if somebody knows you. But I. I thought.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, no, no, no. It was. It was. You did. Very explicit. I went out of my way to say that. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I was. As I said, even if you want to give the most generous interpretation of German Germany's actions that you possibly could, if you want to take their side based on the facts as much as possible, at the very least, you have to admit that they chose to invade a country, take millions of prisoners, and had no plan to feed or care for any of those people. And so when they all died, that is murder. That is mass murder by any definition.

[Scott Horton]

You know, I saw a comment on our last show this morning that said, scott Horn, I can't believe you're platforming this pro Hitler apologist. And I wasn't sure the guy was joking or not. Like, on one hand, like, that's hilarious. You're kidding, right? And then I'm like, oh, man, you're kidding, right? And, you know, I don't know, man. People like believing things that they're told by people. I don't know. I'm not sure how to explain it. Somebody, especially on the you love Hitler thing, like, isn't that what they say about everybody all the time? We're supposed to take that at face value. Like, I don't know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, you think about it, dude.

[Scott Horton]

Like, did you.

[Daryl Cooper]

I was in, like, seventh or eighth grade. It was definitely middle school when they had us watch Schindler's List in, in class. I don't know if they had you do that, but they had us watch it. Most of the people I know, they, we all watched it. It's somewh like 12, 13 years old in school. And like, you know, that's like one example of just the, the sort of constant barrage that we're bombarded with from a very, very early age to install these emotional triggers so that when certain things trip them, you just kind of go insane. You start criticizing Churchill or whatever, it's because you love Hitler, you hate Jews, and you want. You don't think 6 million of them were killed, but you wish they were, right? Like, if you think that Churchill, like, played a role in escalating the early part of the war, then it's because you. To exterminate world Jewry or so it's just these emotional triggers are really built in. And you know, those emotional triggers serve a lot of other purposes too. And this is really like one of my main points in, in. In sort of trying to deconstruct that myth a little bit is, you know, they install those things so that when we want to go take out Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein or fight Vladimir Putin or fight the Iranians or whoever it is, well, you know, you got all these things that have been built into people's minds from a very early age that tell them when there's another Hitler, we can't allow it.

[Scott Horton]

But, you know, I think you were saying this either on Tom woods or Kyle's show about how, you know, the major lesson of this was not just, you know, Israel first or, you know, you have to put Jewish victimhood From World War II first or, you know, that's sort of part of it. But mostly what it is is that humanity can never let these kinds of things happen to anyone ever again. Well, this is not how we. And, and because of the machines of war are so powerful now, we just cannot do business this way anymore. Where people are dying in, in such insane numbers. And then things like Schindler's List. I'm sure you probably remember there's a whole thing in that movie about how there's one little girl in a red coat. The whole movie's in black and white. There's one little girl in a red coat at the concentration camp, and you're just supposed to pick out and like, recognize, like, oh, yeah, this is. These are individual human people stuck in this situation in that kind of way, whatever. But then who can look at the Gaza Strip and not look at the IDF being in the position of the National Socialists and their helpless Palestinian captives as the little girl in the red coat. Including, like, there have been little girls in red coats murdered by the IDF in the last year and a half there. Or, you know, a little red shirt. It's not usually cold enough for coats, but you know what I mean? There. I mean, I've seen pictures of little kids just, just obliterated, you know, halves of them, plastic bags full of their mushed parts. The, the atrocities the Israelis have been committing against the Palestinians for this, you know, Since October of 2023, never mind.

[Daryl Cooper]

Before that, even.

[Scott Horton]

That. As you were saying on that other show the other day, like, we're not, we're not thinking of, like, yeah, the poor idf. We are forced to do this because otherwise they would be the little girl in the red coat getting sniped by the evil Palestinian Nazis. Like, boy, you'd have to be dumber than hell to buy into that narrative now. You know what I mean? Like, it's just the other way around, isn't it?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, of course. And, you know, the kind of, the ironic thing about it is a lot of the same people who would tell us today that we need to look away and not. And not feel sympathy for the Palestinians and in fact, even feel sympathy for the Israeli forces that are killing them. You know, I bet Steven Spielberg, he's a big Zionist booster, big, you know, funder of various organizations and stuff, made Schindler's List, obviously. And he would be probably one of those people standing up for Israel today when it's people like him who have been the ones telling us throughout our entire lives, ever since we were little kids, that it was like, you know, the greatest sin was all the killing. But second to that, right below that, was all the people who watched it happen and didn't speak up and anybody who can see what's going on in Gaza right now. You look at the pictures of that city, you hear the stories again and again, which are now coming out not just from Israeli soldiers, but from American contractors every single day.

[Scott Horton]

Let me, let me, let me stop you here for a second, ok? Israeli pilots dumped unused bombs over Gaza during Iran strikes. Israeli airstrike kills Gaza hospital director. Israeli forces kill 139 Palestinians in Gaza over 24 hours. US contractors are firing live ammo as Palestinians seek food. And this is on top of the story that came out in Haaretz the other day. And we've been covering [e-mail] in depth, you know, for weeks and weeks now for, you know many months now where. And the IDF documented in the IDF's own words how they are luring the Palestinians in with promises of food and then machine gunning them and even blasting with artillery shells and slaughtering them. This is in Haarez is the New York Times of Israel. And it's all firsthand quotes. And the officers admit it. The enlisted men say, yes, our officers gave us these explicit orders and we're like, geez, really? We have to use artillery shells on them? And they insist, yes, use artillery. And so like, this is just beyond horror. Like this is the kind of thing where if you had a novel about the Soviet Union took over the United States or something, this is, you know, something like that. Like this is just beyond belief. And they do it over and over again. They're starving the people to death. Then they promise them food, they lure them in and then machine gun them to death and blast them with artillery shells. This is going on every day. These are the headlines from Antiwar.com every day. I used to like to say, because it's just evocative, like imagine Bill Clinton doing the Waco massacre every day over and over and over, finding another church full of kids to kill and. But this is double that every day, triple that every day over there. Yeah, especially this is a ghetto region. This is like if, if Donald Trump was bombing South Chicago or bombing Rapaho Indian reservation.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. The comparison I always use is just imagine if during the Second World War we interned a bunch of Japanese and instead of being good little inmates like the Japanese did and sort of going out and just becoming Americans after that, they got really pissed off that their property was taken and their families were locked up in camps. And, and so some of them tried to break out, some of them tried to attack the guards. And so what we did is go in there with machine guns and artillery and bombs and kill a bunch of them. And it creates this cycle of conflict that by the end of the war we look at it and we say, we can't just let these people out. They're going to kill us all. We can't just have them running loose in American society. We got to keep them in there. And now 80 years later, they're still in those camps. Occasionally some of them break out and go kill some people from the near nearby town and we just bomb them again. You think about it, in those, you know, that kind of a situation, you say, who's really, who's really the aggressor here? And I mean, it's hard when you look at something as awful as October 7th, that attack was there was inhumanly brutal for sure. And you know, you don't want to downplay that or certainly not ever excuse anything like that, but there is, there's a, from a certain perspective at least, there's a way in which, like a people under military occupation can never really be the aggressor. Not really. You know what I mean? Like, everything they're doing is a response to a violent action. Military occupation, even if nobody's getting killed on that given day, is a, is, is a violent, is a violent action against, against a people. And so when they strike out against that, you know, it's really hard to, to find a situation where you could really call them the aggressor. Because people like to say, well, what if, like, you know, Native Americans started just launching rockets into our cities? What do you think we would do? It's like, well, first of all, we should at least still have some amount of like, self awareness that we helped create this situation on some level. But beyond that, it's not a comparable situation at all because native Americans, you know, for everything that was done to them, they are full citizens of the United States with every right and privilege that every other citizen has. They can take a billionaire to court and win if their case is in the right. And that is just not comparable to the apartheid system they have in the west bank and Gaza. Just not remotely, you know, comparable.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, well, and now there are so many times where they go in. This is what you said at the start of the war. And for people not familiar, Daryl's got a military background, U. S. Navy, and you know, obviously his buddies with Jocko the SEAL and knows his stuff, was a contractor.

[Daryl Cooper]

Taught him everything I know.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, exactly. Lucky him. And, and you talked about the beginning of the war. The Mossad, the Shin Bet, the idf. They can reach out and touch someone. They don't have to bomb this place like this at all. They can find they have such, you know, just through their tech intelligence, they can isolate any individual, send a team of guys or a hellfire missile and kill them one at a time. Is no cause whatsoever to fight the war in this way, isn't that right? Isn't that what you said then?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, and I mean, there is a cause though, you know, and it's. We're seeing it play out now as we, as, you know, you start to get to the unavoidable conclusion of what it is the Israelis are actually trying to do in Gaza, you know, and it's not eliminate Hamas. It's not to take out terror. I mean, it's obviously at this point, nothing like that. I mean, the Israelis, if you want to believe the IDF's numbers, have killed something like 25 to 30,000 male combatants at this point. There were, according to the, you know, best estimates, about 30,000 fighters in Hamas when the war started. So if all of them are dead and yet there's still so many fighters in there that, that you have to keep bombing the hell out of the place, then, you know, clearly like the counterinsurgency sort of self licking ice cream cone is kind of taken hold and your goal is really not to take those people out because anybody with half a brain understands that when a people are under military occupation or under siege, in the case of Gaza, there are going to be some number of those people who are not happy about it. And among those people there's going to be some core of like young dudes with no prospects in life who are going to want to go do something about it. And any American who pretends not to understand that, but then goes and enjoys watching Red dawn or something is really having like a, know a contradiction in their own brain. I think every American can understand that. You know, it wouldn't matter. You could have the worst. You know, whatever US President you think is the worst or somebody that you make up in your mind, the government is like taken over by awful people in the United States is worse than ever. They're oppressing the hell out of us. And then China invades us and occupies our country. Like Americans are going to get their rifle and they're going to go shoot some Chinese invaders. You know what I mean? Every American should understand that and to expect that the people in Gaza or the west bank, you know, that when people complain that like, oh, but they teach their children to hate Israelis, to hate Jews, it's like, dude, they've been in conflict for 80 years. Like, what do you, what do you expect them to teach their kids? Like, what do you think? Like we have more sophisticated ways of teaching people to hate Palestinians. We don't come out and go on TV and say death to the Palestinians.

[Scott Horton]

It's true.

[Daryl Cooper]

Somehow it's worth, somehow. Hold on, hold on. Yet somehow we're inculcate, inculcating it into our children, generation after generation that you can watch their children be killed by the thousands and not only feel nothing, but actually cheer it on and support it. And so, you know, we might not be raising up our kid and say, you need to hate Palestinians it's maybe not that explicit. It's more sophisticated, but it's done with the same intent and it accomplishes the same purpose.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. It's also true that unlike in the United States of America, where, you know, the Jews is, in most cases, like, the way a cook talks or whatever about a group of people who he can't name.

[Daryl Cooper]

Right.

[Scott Horton]

He doesn't actually know who he's talking about or whatever, that kind of thing. In this case, it's specific. It's more like if you were talking about back in history, the Jews of Spain or whatever like that, you know, in this case, the state of Israel calls themselves the state of the Jews. And when the Palestinians are saying the Jews, they're not saying all the Jews in the secret conspiracy in the world. They're talking about the ones on the other side of the wall who call themselves that. So it's not. They're not saying the Jews in, like, the kook racist sense. They're saying it in the. Identifying the people killing them. Since, you know, there's actually a funny Louis CK bit about how Americans hear Palestinians say, the Jews are killing us. And America's like, Jews, like, really, they don't seem that tough or whatever, but, like. Yeah, that's just because you're not a Palestinian living in this ghetto, you know? Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

It would be like, you know, the Mexicans being mad at gringos and then British people taking offense to that. You know, like, they're somehow talking about them. Like.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, there's a lot of different.

[Scott Horton]

Use of the same phrase. It really is worth stipulating there, I think, you know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, there are a lot of those. Like, you know, there are certain things that, you know, this was true with the Germans back in the first and second world wars, too, where, you know, there's like a cultural. There's a. There are certain cultural tendencies in the way that, like, their leaders speak about other countries and about issues that sort of make sense in their own context, but outside of that context, like, being looked at from, you know, from the outside, it just sounds like super aggressive, super, like, over the top. And so, like, somebody told me somebody, a buddy from the Middle east, from the west bank, actually was talking about the, you know, the death to America, death to Israel, whatever. And he was explaining to me that there's actually, like. That's a phrase. Like, if we say f you, we're not saying, I would like to have sex with you, you know, or you're a mother effer. I'm not saying you have Sex with your mother or something. It's just a phrase that like everybody kind of uses. And then over there, people will stub their toe and be like, O God, death to that curb. It's a, it's a phrase that people use to be, to denounce something, you know, but to American ears, like outside of that context, it's like, oh my God, they're calling for the extermination of all Americans, you know, which is.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

What you'll hear from like the Ted Cruz types is that that's their goal, you know?

[Scott Horton]

Right. And then in fact, when you say what you just said, it just sounds like, oh, you're just spinning for these crazies so hard, making excuses. But like, no, like, hey, it's an idiom, man. Like people have them, expressions, figures of speech, like ways of speaking. You might have noticed in English we have some hey, over there in Farsi too. Imagine that, you know. Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

And you know, people will object. The objection that people have will say, you know, they'll say that, well, okay, fine, it's an idiom. But look at October 7th. Clearly they mean it, you know, in this case. And yeah, man, like, look, if you go to the Balkans and talk to Serbs and Albanians back in the 1990s while the war was still going on, you poll them on how they feel about the other side, you're not going to get good answers. You know what I mean? Like, these people have been fighting and killing each other for generations. And when that's the case, to expect the losing side especially, you know, to expect them to just sort of like wake up one day and have this moment of enlightenment where they want to open their arms and embrace their captors and then we can have peace. You know, it's just, it makes no sense. It's crazy. You know, there were people in the American south who, look, they had the example of the Haitian revolution. They had various like mass murdering slave rebellions in the United States, like Nat Turner, John Brown, things like that. Where they could look at it and say, look, we, you know, even if I'm against slavery, even if I don't like any of this stuff, we've been enslaving these people for a long time. And so you're telling me, you know, you want them to enjoy the rights of given to us under the second Amendment and they get to live like down the block from me. That does not seem safe for my family. Reasonable thing to, to worry about for sure. You have been enslaving those people. They might be Real upset about it. And you might be increasing the risk to your, you know, to yourself and your society by letting them go. But you know, tough. I mean that's, that's just, you know, it's not an excuse like you report.

[Scott Horton]

About slavery where Thomas Jefferson said, we have the wolf by the ears and we can safely hold him nor let him go. It's like, yeah, well that's too bad. He's not a wolf and he ain't got no right to hold him by the ears. Jerk.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, it's just as simple as that.

[Scott Horton]

You're gonna have to figure out a way to go forward.

[Daryl Cooper]

And you know, the thing with the Israel, you know, Palestinian situation too is like, you know, there's a lot of focus on, on what the Palestinians or the Iranians or whoever, what they say. And when you listen to, you know, the accusations that are coming from the Zionist side, they're really like, really worried that they're going to do to us what we've been doing to them. Like they're, the Israelis are actually doing these things. You know, I don't know if you saw that video that came out recently of the American contractors when they were shooting at the crowd. And bro, yeah, so there's a video out now and the guy, you know, there's a group of them and they're all speaking in English and you hear about 15 shots go off as they fire into this crowd and one of them goes in a totally light hearted way, goes, oh, I think you got one of them. Hell yeah, boy. And it's like, you know, as a right winger, right, which, which I may be like kind of a Red Tory type, but I consider myself a right winger and certainly most other people, you know, in the mainstream political consensus would consider me far right probably. And I would hope and I would, I would wish that, you know, because there's this tendency on the right when, you know how they use different messaging for different groups of people, you know, because it works, you know, differently. One, the, the one that's been really prominent on the right lately, the America first kind of like maga, right, is this is just some other country. Like don't try to get me all worked up about like something that's going on some other country when I've got immigration to deal with and all these kind of things here in my own country, you don't, which is really just a way of diverting your attention so the Israelis can do whatever they want with our continued support and you know, they'll put out a token like, objection. Well, I don't think we should be supporting it, but, you know, whatever. I'm not going to focus on it. But look, if you're a right winger, if you're a man of the right or woman of the right, then you should understand things like honor, national honor. You know, as a history guy, like, I, I, I look out, I, I think about, and maybe this is silly, people who aren't as into history don't look at it this way already, probably think it is. But, you know, I think about the fact that 500 years from now, people are going to be opening up history books or a thousand years from now, and they're going to be reading about us the way we read about the Roman Empire. And it matters to me, like, how that story goes, you know, like, it matters to me that they're going to open up. It doesn't matter. We could be, like, colonizing the galaxy, you know, 10,000 years from now, assuming we're not all dead and, you know, we're still speaking languages and stuff. And people are going to pick up, you know, on Alpha Centauri Colony, they're going to pick up their history book and they're going to read about the country that sent the first person to the moon, and that was us. And they're always going to remember that. But you know what? They're going to remember stuff like this, too. And we just, you know, to not care that your nation is sullying its honor, you know, over, over such a shabby cause. I mean, this is not something where, you know, you could, at least in World War II, when we're nuking people and firebombing civilians and stuff, at the very least you could sort of make it into some Wagnerian opera where it was just this global conflagration. And yes, we were caught up in it like everybody else, and we did a bunch of terrible things or whatever, but it was this, you know, it was something bigger than us, bigger than, you know, America itself that we were caught up in. And fine, like, I don't, I don't agree with that when it comes to the fireballing stuff, but fine, you can't do that with this. I mean, we're just, we're helping like a, like a small colony in the Middle east that showed up 80 years ago, just exterminate the people who used to live there. That's what we're doing. And providing political and geopolitical cover for them while they're doing it. And that stuff's going to stick with us too. And it, in it. And it really pisses me off that people are going to open their history books and they're going to read about that. You know, and again, to go back to the, to the earlier point, we've been told our whole lives that if something like all of the training, all the Schindler's List in middle school, all that kind of stuff had one purpose. And it's so that if this ever happens again, if anything like this ever shows up, do not be the person who stayed silent. Be the person who stood up and actually said something. Even if it keeps happening, even if the bad guys win, it still matters. You have to be the one who took the right side on that issue and you know, just trust in, in the fact that eventually you'll be vindicated. But even if not, you know, it's been preparing, you know, all of that, all, all of that propaganda. Our whole lives have been preparing us for this. And I feel like this is a real, you know, it's going to be one of those things that, that 10 years from now every, it's like the Iraq War. Everybody says they were against at the time. You know, the polls say 75% were in favor of the Iraq war. Strange, because I've never met like anybody who admits that this is going to be like that too. Everybody was always against it. They always knew. And you know, that's, that's where we're at. And I, you know, this is, I mean there's, I know a lot, a lot of people out there, A lot of people will object that, you know, you're talking about national honor and stuff like, hello, have you heard about Iraq? Have you heard about Vietnam? Have you heard about any of these other things? And I get it, I get all that. But you know, that's not. Just because you're already a heroin addict is not a good excuse to like, you know, pick up the needle again.

[Scott Horton]

And look, it's the, the cruelty in which this campaign is being waged is different. I mean, the worst of the deaths in Iraq were. It was all W. Bush kicked off that civil war, but it was the Sunni and Shia militias doing the worst violence to each other and each other's families and whatever it was, you know, America's responsibility. But the, the worst of the viciousness, there was one rape. A guy named green raped a 14 year old girl and murdered her and her family. And there was the Haditha massacre where guys, there was a truck bombing and the guys killed a family, including a baby. And so There are a few of those in Iraq War two. A few, you know, Robert Bales and his massacre in Afghanistan. Israel's doing this as a matter of course, all day, every day. They have this thing called the mosquito protocol. You know, they accuse the Palestinians of using human shields. The mosquito protocol is their official policy of using Palestinian captives as human shields. And not Hamas terrorists, but men, women and children and elderly and anyone. And they force him to clear tunnels and rubble and homes if there's any booby traps, so that the Palestinian civilian gets it first. And there was a, quote, senior IDF officer told Haaretz that this is what he called a sub army of Palestinian slaves that worked for the idf clearing these buildings, acting as their human shields. You know, they talked about, you know, and this has come from the highest levels in, you know, in the government, in the military and in civilian government and current and former officials and stuff, speaking to Israeli media. They kill the Palestinians for sport when they're bored and sit around and just kill them. Their idea, their conception of Palestinian, you know, human life is essentially no different than livestock. Right. Chickens or goats.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, you don't kill livestock for sports. You don't terrorize livestock for sport, you know. Yeah, it's worse. Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Horton]

It's a canned hunt for, like, the cruelest people.

[Daryl Cooper]

And you're not even allowed to bait deer to hunt them in most US States. You can't put food out and have a deer come and then shoot it in most USA US States. And this is something, again, that's going on with human beings practically every day. They're not even denying it. Really. Yeah, he says.

[Scott Horton]

I'm like, yeah, I treat somebody like a dog. Nobody treats a dog like that.

[Daryl Cooper]

No.

[Scott Horton]

You know, I mean, it's insane. It's. It's. And, and America's culpability and it all. You're right, it is. It's a matter of, of, you know, defining who we are for history going forward. But the thing is too, man, is this is what caused September 11th. And I hate. I don't want to fight about all the truther stuff, but, like, the truther stuff is the limited hangout. The real truth is that Israel didn't do 9 11. They caused 911 by killing babies. So if Dick Cheney and Ariel Sharon did it, then I guess we don't have to worry because Dick Cheney might as well be dead. And Ariel Sharon is dead and gone, so everything's fine. But if the state of Israel, in the form of Shimon Peres, murdering with the help of Naftali Bennett murdering women and children in Lebanon and murdering of course men, women, children in Palestine as well, if that's what caused 911 and in fact the assassination of Rabbi Kahane and the first World Trade center bombing and all of Al Qaeda's war against the United States and since then as well. And of course you can add America's wars on top for the motive there and the occupation of Saudi Arabia of course is a huge one. But Israel's violence has always been at the top of the list of anti American terrorism. And I know what you're saying audience. I know, but Al Qaeda and Israel are the best of allies. I know that's true. And looks like the head of Al Qaeda in Syria, who they and the Turks helped overthrow Assad finally last December, wants to normalize relations with them and even negotiate over the Golan Heights and sign Abraham Accord and everything so. That's right. I would not anticipate that Al Qaeda in Syria is going to Kamakazi any towers in Tel Aviv soon. But ISIS might and some lone wolf kook can still grab a rifle and kill Americans easily. I, I'm just convinced I have no evidence of this whatsoever. But it just must be the case, of course that the still buried manifestos of the New Orleans attacker. Won't someone foia that or something and get that for us. The New Orleans attacker of New Year's Day, that, that was about Gaza. It was an American army veteran who converted to Islam and then did this in the name of isis. And I'm sure he was having plenty of personal problems and whatever that made him snap and do that. But he killed a bunch of innocent people. If you think he ranted for an hour or more to his family on video in his messages driving from Houston to New Orleans, which is a lot more than an hour, but they said it was, you know, however many hours worth of video there. You think he wasn't talking about what was going on in Gaza in that?

[Daryl Cooper]

Of course he was.

[Scott Horton]

And then he killed a dozen people and injured so many more. And then we had this kook went and assassinated two people in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. And then you had this other kook with you know, homemade flamethrower basically. And I, I don't know if you saw this. One of the guys that he attacked at this thing in Boulder died. It's now murder charge. They died of their injuries and which I didn't realize anyone was that severely wounded in that thing from the footage I saw, but I saw that headline yesterday so this is real blowback. Terrorism is real. And, and, you know, all this stuff about bombs and Building 7 and all this crap, which is wrong and stupid, completely distracts from the fact that it wasn't, you know, Mossad agents planting bombs in those buildings that brought them down. It was IDF officers calling in artillery strikes on little babies that motivated Egyptians to volunteer for a Saudi to kill Americans to get revenge and to provoke America into a cataclysmic war over there, which we oblige them and have done and radicalize the entire region and continue to make matters worse, as Ron Paul taught us in his great debate that he won with Rudy Giuliani in May 2007, if we think we can just go around the world doing this to people and think that it doesn't, that there can be no consequences, and we do that at our own peril. He was speaking in the first person, like the royal we, as a member of Congress and a member of the government, saying that we, they are putting us, the American people, in danger by doing this and acting like, you know, what's the worst that could happen? Well, the worst that could happen is they'd kill 3,000 of you. Or in fact, what if instead of hitting symbolic targets, those had hit nuclear power plants on September 11, which is completely doable. I mean, if you ever flown a plane around the northeast of this country, look out, you see the big cooling towers like on the Simpsons out there. We don't have those in Texas, but they have them around this country. It'd be easy as hell to steer a jumbo jet into one of those if you're sufficiently motivated. And, and yeah, they have these guys. The ISIS and al Qaeda terrors have proven that they are motivated. And yes, I know that they're very oftentimes under the control of American and allied intelligence agencies, but not always.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, you know, it's there. I think there's a way in which our relationship to Israel, the special relationship, has really corrupted their society and political system, like, to a great degree. You know, anytime you, you take similar to how, you know, if you have, if you have parents and you find out that their kid, that their philosophy with their kid is you do whatever you want, it doesn't matter, and we will have your back. It's never your fault. We will. Nothing will change in terms of how we behave toward you, do whatever you want, that kid's going to be a real nightmare, you know, And I think that without the unconditional support of the United States, just the unconditional Style backing, if even it was just support, strong support, but not unconditional support that we've been giving them that, you know, they wouldn't be as belligerent as they are, as aggressive as they are, because they don't have to care what anybody else in the region thinks. Why would you care? You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, as we just proved in Iran, even if they get themselves into a situation that they can't handle on their own and that they're looking for a way out of, we're going to ride to the rescue. And so, you know, it's like, if you have, like a big, tough guy and he has a little brother, that little brother so often is such a little bastard. You know, even if the tough guy is like a really sweet guy, his little brother is just a little nightmare. He's always, like, bullying people and hiding behind his brother while he does. It changes your personality to have that kind of impunity, that kind of license in your behavior. And, you know, it's. I mean, just think about the fact, like, try to explain this to Americans in a way that they could really, they can relate to. I mean, Benavir, the defense minister in Israel, is the leader of the Jewish Power Party. He once said that Baruch Goldstein, the mass shooter at the Al Aqsa massacre that killed dozens of people, wounded dozens more, total mass shooting. It was like just a mass murder, mass shooting, for anybody who doesn't know about it, said that Baruch Goldstein is one of his heroes, okay? And so just imagine if the US Secretary of Defense was the leader of the White Power Party, and he said Dylann Roof is one of his heroes. The. Like, that's how far down this path Israel has. Has gone, you know, how far down they've fallen. I mean, and so when you see something like that, you know, I think maybe people hear it and they say, well, you know, different cultural context, something. They try to explain it to themselves other, you know, in a way other than the one that is natural and correct, which is how we would respond to that same thing here, where it's like, this is. Okay, this society has kind of lost its mind and this political system has gone completely off the rails. If this is even possible for a guy like that to be like a core member of the leadership cabinet. And, you know, and that's Israel. I mean, that's again, and Israelis are such a contradiction, you know, as far as people just like Americans are where, you know, they're like the, the most aggressive Belligerent, least compassionate, warlike people you can imagine. And then you talk to them and like, they're raising money for tsunami victims and like, they really do care about, like, humanitarian issues, you know, but, you know, it's sort of, you know, I think what's the old saying that everybody is right wing or everybody's conservative about the things they know and care about most. And, you know, I think everybody's a genocidal maniac and an ethno nationalist for somebody, you know, I guess.

[Scott Horton]

I don't know, man. I. I talked to Max Blumenthal. I mean, I've been talking to Max Blumenthal for many years, and I believe it was in 2010 when he was over there writing Goliath, which is a fantastic book about Israel. And I remember talking to him then and he said, listen, man, let me tell you something. The political spectrum over here is from Dick Cheney to Hitler. And I'm not exaggerating, that's not hyperbole. I'm just describing it, okay? I'm a scientist and yes, Max is a leftist and, and in previous days was prone to call people further right than they are. But in this case, it seemed to be like a pretty, you know, reasonable assessment of the situation where he was just like, you know, in many circumstances, Sharon and, you know, Ehud Ulmert was Ariel Sharon's guy. Kadima was, you know, they were Sharon split off from Likud, but it's not like he turned into a dove when he did so or anything like that. It was just a split with Netanyahu over tactics.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, when you hear about something like the way Israel kicked off this war by calling up a bunch of Iranian generals and political officials and threatening to murder their families unless they cut videos saying they surrender and that they turn on the government. I don't know how an American can hear something like that and not just be like, you know, I don't think I want to be associated with these people anymore. I don't think I want my memory associated with the deeds of, of this country anymore. You know, at least not as closely and as close knit as we are. Because that's just something that, you know, people, I complained about this online. People all came up, the defenders all came out with the same line. They're like, oh, it's war is war. I'm like, wait, wait, there was no war. That's how they started the war. That was part of the initial surprise attack. That's like, it's not like they're in the middle of the Eastern front, and they're in a war of extermination between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. And, like, in the midst of the whole thing, you're just pulling at every possible string you can. This was a war that was not happening. It was a war of choice started by a sneak attack, and that was part of the initial attack. So it's like, you know, you can't even break that out. And, you know, it's funny, too, because when you. Even when you say something is apparently uncontroversial, as Israel started the war against Iran by launching a surprise attack against Iran, they'll say, well, oh, so just ignore everything that happened before that, huh? It's like, oh, okay, hold that thought. Now I want to talk about Palestinians. Okay. You know, I want to talk about the fact that when this unprovoked attack, when the peace was shut, shattered by Hamas on October 7, that Israel had killed more Palestinians in the first nine months of 2023 than they had in any year in 16 years.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

People don't know that. They don't care.

[Scott Horton]

You know, raids on the Al Aqsa Mosque as well.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. And people, you know, once you start to realize, and this is one thing that gets incredibly frustrating, but you have to just sort of learn to deal with it and, you know, use these people sometimes not trying to convince them, but use them as foils to speak to the broader audience in a way, trusting that, you know, the people out there have some common sense and some. Some, you know, ingrained compassion in. In their hearts is that, you know, the. That their arguments that they're making, such as they are, you know, they're not really designed to, like, convince you or win you over or change any mind. They're really just designed to get that person through this conversation. And as long as they can confuse the issue enough and kind of muddle things so that by the end of the conversation, everybody's just kind of like, well, it's he said, she said, and, you know, one side and the other, and just. It's to get them through that conversation. It's to get them through that week's news cycle. And then if it's all blown out of the water a week later, it's fine. Nobody cares. They'll come up with something else to get them through the next conversation in the next week, you know, but you can still use those people as valuable foils as you and Dave are so adept at doing.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. Hey, man. So one thing that I didn't get to talk about with Tucker on the show yesterday was Somalia. There are a couple things that we didn't get to cover, but we've been.

[Daryl Cooper]

Bombing the hell out of Somalia.

[Scott Horton]

We've been listen, we have bombed Somalia 44 times this year so far, and which is a higher rate than even the worst of the Obama years. And most people don't know that this is America's longest war. We've been at war in Somalia since 2001. And, you know, it's funny because I know that W. Bush sent JSOC to Somalia in December, but I actually don't know more than that if it was army or Navy or who he sent.

[Daryl Cooper]

December 01, yes, sir.

[Scott Horton]

And they started killing people then and back in warlords then. And they went, you know, for people who are familiar with Black Hawk down, that all happened in 1993 when they sent Delta and Rangers to get Muhammad Adid, who was the warlord who was hogging all the food supplies that they were trying to deliver in the Operation restore hope and UN mission thing. And then fast forward to 2001 CIA or 2002 CIA, starts paying his son who, like, had been educated in the United States, and put him in charge of hunting down and killing Islamists there. And the thing is, the Islamists in Somalia were like baby Islamists. They were nothing. They're no threat to the United States at all. And in fact, all of the warlords had essentially exhausted themselves, and there was no power strong enough to create a state in Somalia. It really was sort of a stateless anarchy. And yes, some libertarian economists had noticed that it was really good for the economy there. And they had rapid growth. And one of the greatest measures in Africa at that time of economic growth was the spread of cell phone technology. And it was they were the leaders in, at least in the rate of adoption at that time in that part of Africa. And there was no one to collect taxes at the ports of Mogadishu or Kismayo. And so they're just raking in, you know, it was the best of times for Somalia anyway. Now everybody goes, oh, libertarians, why don't you just move to Somalia? Because George Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Donald Trump again have been bombing the crap out of it this whole time, sending the CIA to torture people to death, supporting warlords to hunt down Islamist militias, creating them in the process. And in 2006, they hired Ethiopia to come in and invade to destroy what was the most rudimentary government that was coming into form just in defense against the CIA backed warlords, the Islamic Courts Union. And the smallest and weakest part of the Islamic Courts Union was the youth, Al Shabaab. In fact, I was told by one expert that's actually translates to the boys. And guess what? The uncles and the elders and the imams were in charge, not the boys. But then George Bush hired the Ethiopians to come in there and kill them all. And so guess what happened? The boys, Al Shabaab became the insurgency. And they've been fighting since 2006 in, you know, against all of America's sock puppet, you know, basically militias, but also pseudo government forces that they built up there and including African Union troops from Uganda and Kenya and Ethiopia, on and off. And they didn't declare their loyalty to Al Qaeda until they got a sack of gold coins with a dollar sign on it back in 2012. And the guy, Gadan I think was his name, that was the most Al Qaeda ish of all the Al Shabaab leaders. He was killed in a drone strike I think that same year or maybe in 2013. There have not been Ladanites in any real sense there and no real threat to the United States, although now supposedly ISIS has a beachhead there. I got the perfect solution. We'll call it the awakening. We'll hire Al Shabaab to kill ISIS and then we'll bug the hell out of there. And you know, Donald Trump tried to order us out of Somalia and was countermanded by James Mattis. And Elise Mattis told the Washington Post that he told Donald Trump, you have no choice, and in fact lied to him. We're doing this to prevent a Times Square like attack. But the Times Square attack, which luckily failed, was launched by a Pakistani American who traveled to Pakistan and saw the results firsthand of an American drone strike there. And that was what caused him to volunteer for the Pakistani Taliban, Teach me how to make a bomb. And then they sent him home to try to blow up Time Square. So James Mattis is just lying straight to Donald Trump's face, saying that that's what the mission is, is preventing terrorism rather than causing it and telling him you have no choice but to do this. It's just like they say, you know, wherever the President comes in, he gets briefed and the CIA tells him, you have no choice but to continue all these policies or else all these things will happen. And so welcome to your stewardship of the permanent government. The inter agency has already decided your policy and there it will stay. And so we've been bombing Somalia longer than any other country. Well, I guess if you want to count Iraq war, one that we're still in since 1991, other than that, Somalia is America's longest war.

[Daryl Cooper]

The really sad thing about all of it too, is that although, you know, I should be encouraged because the young people, the people who have grown up in this world are, are the most skeptical about it. So I guess I should take encouragement from that. But is that, you know, there was a time in American history and I'm not. I don't think I'm being too naive when I say this, that if we bombed a country 44 times in a year, that that would be like a big deal. That would be on every news channel, would be like in the, you know, on the headlines of the big papers, and people would be talking about it. It would be a thing, thing that's happened in like the post Cold War world is that people just take it for granted. Like, well, yeah, of course, we're bombing 20 countries at any given point. I mean, what, what else are we supposed to do? Like, that's just kind of how the world works, isn't it? And people have adapted to that idea, like, really quickly. And, you know, it's, it's done. The one thing that as a people, you never really ever, ever want to allow happen to happen is it's given the state just total license to do whatever they want violently and to adjust. I mean, when you think about things like.

[Scott Horton]

Real quick, even just since Iraq, because Bush sent the whole Marine Corps and all the Army, 3rd infantry, and everybody in there, and at one point we had 300,000 troops occupying the place. So now anything less than that is cool, right? Bill Mar said to Jeremy Scahill, come on, it's just robots. Who cares?

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, man, I didn't see that. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, one thing that's been really interesting is watching and actually there's a couple good books about this by Paul Berman. He was part of that, like, 68 leftist protest generation, and he wrote a couple books about the, the, the, the movement of that generation of, of, of leftists in Europe, in the United States, from being the anti establishment 68ers to being the establishment neoliberals and neoconservatives in, in the modern day and how that process kind of took place. And you know, it's, it's really sad because, you know, you look around for allies when you're trying to oppose a war and you realize you really do have to put together a coalition of people that in every other circumstance you Might not be particularly comfortable standing next to, but you know, you just kind of have to, you have to get comfortable doing that because all of the other, you know, the traditional anti war movements and everything else have been completely obliterated over the years. And you just, you know, it's, it's just where we're at today. And you know, again, I think that for, you know, anti war is like looked at as sort of a left wing, left libertarian, like sort of, sort of idea. But I think, you know, if you look back, I mean, shoot, you were talking about before we came on about people who opposed the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. And everybody assumes it was like the commie infiltrators or whatever who were opposing it, but no, it was the Christian conservatives. It was like the, the real hardcore America, you know, patriotic types like Eisenhower, like MacArthur who opposed dropping those bombs. And people like, you know, you were pointing out people don't know that. And I think today, you know, people who are on the right need to sort of recognize that they have, that the other side's anti war movement has really kind of fallen apart or been left to a bunch of, you know, just people who are kind of chaotic in their, in their strategy and not effective. And that we as like people on the right who call ourselves America first, have a responsibility to like take some stewardship of just our country's memory going forward. You know, we really need to start to think that way. And it's, it's, you know, it's built in right there when you start talking about America first, when you start saying things like that, you know, the anti war position is built right in there. It's not a doctrinaire anti war position where you're just an absolute pacifist and you know, practice ahimsa and you hurt no living being. It's not about that. It's just saying, look, in the best possible scenario, the best possible war, the Iraq, Iraq War two, if we killed Saddam and his sons that night and a general who is secretly a New Hampshire Democrat liberal takes over and Iraq turns into a democracy. Even if it went like that, we killed a bunch of children that night when we were bombing Baghdad, that's the best case scenario. You're still killing a bunch of women and children. And just to treat that decision to go do that with some amount of gravity, you know, like this is not just a flippant decision, like maybe we'll bomb somebody, maybe we won't. We need to like really take this seriously as a people that's all, you know, I think in that, in most people who even call themselves anti war, they're not absolutist pacifists. They just want these, these things treated with the amount of seriousness and gravity that they, they really require. Because, I mean.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, yeah, this is, this last part. I mean, when we, because it's war, people sort of split it off in their minds. It's like, yeah, there's violence, but there's violence in war and there's interpersonal violence. And these things are kind of different. Whatever. It's like, dude, at the end of the day, you strip away all of that crap, strip away all of the politics, all the religion, all the stuff behind it. And all you're talking about is grown ups killing little kids, men killing women, young people killing old people. I mean, that's all you're talking about at the end of the day. And now sometimes you can, you can, you can conclude that this was necessary, that is necessary. We were attacked or we had no choice because, you know, whatever we went into to interdict the genocide in Rwanda and while we were doing that, you know, it was chaotic and some innocent people got killed. But you can, you can make those cases to yourself. But you really need to like treat these decisions in these discussions from like, come at them from their proper starting point, which is what is that we're talking about? Should we or should we not go kill a bunch of kids? That's the question. And maybe sometimes the answer is yes, maybe sometimes something we have to risk and you know, we got to go do it, but treat it with that level of seriousness, you know, at the very least.

[Scott Horton]

And look, the other thing is too, is just if, if a conservative principle includes conserving the Constitution, you have to recognize that it's dead and gone. And it's been dead and gone since World War II. And the very last vestiges of it that are clinging on for dear life are threatened by most of all our state of permanent emergency and permanent war. The key to all of this is that America's not a normal country. America is the world empire. And even though the American people want to just mind our own business, this is the new world. What the hell are we doing trying to dominate all of Eurasia? Well, Washington D.C. has decided that that's what we're doing. And so that's why we're always at war. It's not because the world's always messing with us. It's because we're messing with them. And there is another way. And you don't need a world government, you need just to allow a multipolar world. There are powerful states, there are, you know, what they call, like seam states or middle rank powers. And we can all trade and have open and friendly relationships and America can, quote, unquote, lead in a moral and economic and technological and example setting type way if we have, you know, what we have to offer the rest of the world on a voluntary basis. But it's just wrong that America has to hold the whole world together or else it'll all fall apart. You might have noticed that our government is still the greatest purveyor of violence on the face of the earth. And you're telling me it would definitely be worse if it wasn't for this. And yet look at the last 40 years of this, just since the end of the Cold War, and everyone agrees now that every one of these things was unnecessary. Even Bill Kristol said to me in the debate the last war he could stand by was Bosnia. And that was like, based on a false flag and was completely stupid anyway.

[Daryl Cooper]

And even if it was all true is like 1% of what we've seen in Gaza over the last couple years. Yeah, exactly. There's been a Sribanita like every, you know, every month in Gaza for the, and how's that for the world order too?

[Scott Horton]

Right? This is, you know, yeah, Bill Clinton can start the Kosovo war over the Ratchak massacre, which is like 35 guys who died in a firefight and then later their bodies were dumped in a ditch and their friends said, look, they were massacred and dumped in a ditch, which wasn't even true. And Bill Clinton lost a whole war over that and launched the Clinton Doctrine that said, hey, when there's ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place, we have to intervene. Barack Obama said the same thing about a pretended threat that Gaddafi never made to murder every last man, woman and child in the city of Benghazi, which Barack Obama said, imagine the city of Charlotte being wiped off the face of the earth and launched the war. You know, Bill Clinton at least lied that 100,000 people had already been killed. Barack Obama's just making up just what might happen and launches the war in Libya. And then you look at Gaza, you go, why isn't Bill Clinton calling for airstrikes on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? I think I'm sensing a bit of a double standard here. And it's actually, this is maybe the only silver lining on the thing is no one is ever going to take America's supposed humanitarian Responsibility to protect anyone seriously, ever again, you know?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a silver lining in some ways, but, like, at the same time, I mean, look, I don't. Again, I don't want to be too overly generous or naive in my, you know, historical interpretation here, but, you know, a lot of the. A lot of the institutions that we came up with in the wake of the Second World War, from the United nations to the International Criminal Court, all these different things, they were always kind of instruments of power, you know, for the great powers. There were always double standards at play and maybe. But I. I think the fact that during the Cold War, at least, there were these two countervailing powers that were competing with each other for legitimacy in the. The unaligned world. And so they. They had to sort of. They had to honor those institutions, at least in the breach, like in some, you know, on some level, even if just verbally and, you know, being hypocritical, which I think is, you know, it's at least a sign that people know that. That. That being honest is not going to. Is not going to win people over to their side. But ever since the Cold War ended, man, all of those institutions, I mean, we have just like, completely return the world to what it was before, which is. It's a place that. Is where force reigns. Violence is how everything is decided. I mean, think about the fact that, like, Benjamin Netanyahu's under indictment by the icc. He visits countries all the time that have signed on to agreements to honor the ICC's decisions, and he just. Not only does he show up there, he's honored by them when they get there, you know, and so it's like, that's. That. That institution's just gone like that. Nobody, Nobody even is going to pretend that's not the case. The UN Is gone. Like, all of these things, you know, these. These institutions that were put in place, at least theoretically. But I think, like, you know, there was some idealism behind it, a recognition that, like, okay, after World War II, and we've seen this in every war since, you know, because. Because people love to say, well, it's war. It's part of human nature. It's just kind of what we've always done. To think that we're going to stop doing it is crazy. It's like, dude, up Until World War II, war did not involve. Did not have to involve, like, necessarily as a. As a matter of course, dropping bombs, just destroying cities, population centers. You'd have two armies meet out in the field. And they'd go fight each other. A lot of times there'd be a peasant village like off in the distance, completely unmolested by these two armies that are slaughtering each other. And things would get out of hand sometimes. And obviously terrible things, you know, happen throughout history. But now, even like any war you start, you're talking about launching missiles and bombs and artillery strikes into population centers. That's every war now. And so, you know, you can't just hold to that old, to the old idea that, you know, this isn't something that we can possibly rethink or change in the way we approach.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

And, you know, that's the way it's always going to be from now on, you know, and hopefully, you know, we'll get to a point. And maybe it's just, you know, this is the, this is the thing that nobody, you know, the, the fear that nobody really wants to entertain. But, you know, just like my one piece of per, you know, small scale optimism in the Israel Iran conflict is that both of them kind of figured out that it's probably a bad idea to tangle with the other one. They're not going to go down easy with one punch. And so unless you like getting your cities hit with missiles for a while, like, you know, you're gonna have to pack a lunch if you want to fight him. And so maybe that'll deter them a little bit. But that's kind of a sad thing too, when you think about the United States. You know, the idea that are we going to have to have the war come home here before it really sets into us, like what this means.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, no, we'll just blame it on Muhammad again and start the whole war all over again. Which, by the way, Wall Street Journal today says that the military says that Iran's not military. Their nuclear program has been set back a couple of years rather than completely obliterated. And they kicked all the IAEA inspectors out of the country. And I guess we'll see whether they even stay in the NPT and whether this is truly over or not. Looks like it's not. And what a great place to wrap because we're overtime and gotta go. I guess I shouldn't have clapped really loud right there. Thank you, man. Thank you for doing this show with me. It's so much fun. And we'll see you guys, guys next week.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yep, yep.

[Scott Horton]

Check me out on Tucker later.