← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
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- [00:00]
A
Tonight is Darrell Cooper gonna drone strike my motorboat.
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B
All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans.
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A
Negotiate. Now end this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present and future.
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This is prov Voked.
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All right, you cooks, welcome to the show. I'm Scott, he's Daryl. How you doing, Daryl?
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B
Good, man. How are you?
- [00:46]
A
I'm doing good. Here's our proper layout there with our captions.
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B
We got a nice layer of snow over the landscape here. And I just got done eating a big ass mousse burger, so I'm in a good mood.
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A
A moose burger, huh? Yeah, well, I'm a bit high on a big bowl of spaghetti myself right now, so I don't know if I'm as messed up as all that. What's moose taste like?
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B
I've seen, like, very similar to beef.
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A
All right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And this was roadkill or you went out now?
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B
My buddy shot it, hunted it. Yeah. We just got 300 pounds of elk in the mail. The bull I killed in Colorado. So we had to go buy another freezer and it filled that whole thing up. And we've been trying to give that stuff away, so my wife and I aren't going to eat that in the.
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A
Next three years, so had to go buy another freezer. Man, that sounds nice. Living the good life.
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B
It's funny because up here where everybody hunts this time of year, it's like freezer season. You go to Home Depot or wherever, it's just freezers, wall to wall. And everybody knows what they're for when you buy them, so very nice.
- [01:52]
A
All right. Good times. Well, speaking of hunting things, the government's been blowing up a bunch of people lately, and you started a big fight with all us cool ass libertarians over on the X thing. So I guess we got to start with that. Some guy that I don't know said something that seemed reasonable and you got mad and he was, oh, I was not mad.
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B
I was certainly not mad.
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A
No, no.
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B
Well, you know what I mean. Yeah.
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A
In context. He says, what, the guy's just selling drugs. What's the problem being a drug businessman anyway? And then you said, well, no, but.
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B
Then what else did he say? That's why I reposted it. He said, what they're doing is a much more honorable profession than anybody working for the government. And that includes cops, military and firemen. That's why I said, Scott, Dave, Tom. Somebody. One of you libertarians got to come Pick up your boy. He's been on the sauce again, making you guys look bad.
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A
It really is immoral to be a tax parasite of any description. He is right on on that line.
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B
But no, your house is on fire.
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A
It's. Yeah, you know, the volunteer firefighters.
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B
I don't know.
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A
I missed that part. But no, of course we need to legalize drugs. And when it comes to these boats off the coast of Venezuela, the worst they're accused of by the regime. I don't know about the White House, but the permanent regime says that they smuggle cocaine out of there. Well, why? So rich people can stay up late and drink longer? And I'm supposed to go to war over cocaine? Are you kidding me? Like, of all the thinnest, most ridiculous, stupid ass pretexts for war. This is some Tom Clancy, Harrison Ford bullshit from the 1990s. We haven't got our war on terrorism going yet, so we're going to pretend that our foreign policy is based around cocaine smuggling. Get the hell. And back then, of course, it was just on the heels of the Republicans being the biggest cocaine dealers in the history of all of the universe. But anyway.
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Here. It's still just as stupid as a pretext and. But I wonder what you really think. You said something about, you know, hey, they're pirates, so go ahead and zap them the closest.
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B
That's the closest analog, I think, you know, not that they are. They're obviously not technically pirates. I'm just saying, like, you know, this isn't exactly a law enforcement operation, nor is it like a. Inactive. Isn't it though?
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A
Like, doesn't the Coast Guard just intercept these people and as Rand Paul said, like 20 of the time, they're actually innocent and are mistaken for.
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B
Look, if we kill innocent people, obviously that's a problem. If that ever happens, we need to mop that up and.
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A
Well, you're. That's why you send Coast Guard guys to arrest them and then charge them with crimes instead of killing them first and then figuring out later who it was that you killed and what they may have been doing out there.
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B
I'm okay with the Coast Guard VBSS team doing the executions in person. That's cool.
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A
Okay, if I cocaine on the boat, you just throw them overboard. But you got to make sure you got to definitely catch them right handed, though.
- [04:52]
B
No, I mean, look, I. I was kind of tongue in cheek and baiting the libertarians there. I don't know.
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A
We're fun to get in fights with.
- [04:59]
B
You know, I don't. I'm very confused about what's going on with the whole Venezuela situation. The best read that I have on it. I mean, first of all, let me just say like most Americans, for some reason just going back to like when Richard Nixon said that nobody gives a about Latin America. Most Americans know more about Russia and Israel and Palestine and a lot of places in Africa than they do about anywhere in Latin America. And I'm kind of guilty of that to some degree too. And so you know, Venezuela, like the history of it, like, I, I don't really have a lot of that context. Right. Like, as far as, you know, the, like I have a rough outline of like who Maduro's base is and, you know, why Chavez was supported by the people that he was supported by and so forth. But, but not enough to like, you know, make pronouncements on it. And so when I watch it, like the best explanation I can think of for what's going on over there. And this is again like not a good reason to kill people, but like, it's just that Rubio, being a Florida, you know, Cuban Floridian, has a bug up his ass about Cuba and of course Venezuela. And that Trump basically told him, you could be Secretary of State and do what you want down in Venezuela, short of taking us to war and back me on all my other plays, you know, and go out and defend everything else. That's the only thing I could think of that's going on because he really out of nowhere.
- [06:20]
A
Yeah, I think you're right. And so I had a theory that I don't like anymore. But look, it was just a hypothesis. I didn't ever declare. It was so fact when I, I posted a tweet about it that I got really bad reaction. I said.
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Something about my completely half assed theory based on very little data. Is this discuss? That was a tweet and people said to me, if you really believe that.
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B
Then I now hate you.
- [06:48]
A
Whatever. Like, okay, I don't know what to tell you people, seriously, but what it was was that Chevron has maintained good relations with Venezuela this whole time. And there was an article in the American Conservative by Harrison Berger or Berger, who I like very much and is right there, which is one of the most important publications on the planet, which I, you know, is all of the best people are the editors and staff of there. I put a lot of stock on what they say and they had a piece about, hey, do you really think it's a coincidence then that Exxon has really been supporting. I'm almost sure, it was the center for Science and International Security. There's so many of those damn think tanks up there. I'm pretty sure it was that one and that these guys had just put out a big study saying it's time to go and regime change Venezuela. So I said, hey, maybe this is a little bit of Exxon elbow and their competition in Chevron out of the way. And so. But a friend actually sent me a private message instead of castigating me in public as an absolute idiot and moron and said actually that's really not it because at these prices, Venezuelan oil sucks. It's, it has to be. It's very heavy, filthy, sulfur ridden crude that has to be refined in severe process, that's very expensive and oil is pretty low right now, relatively speaking.
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B
And as far as I know, our Gulf refineries are the, are the closest ones that Venezuela can use to refine that stuff as far as.
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A
Yeah, and Chevron and Citgo and Exxon all have available of resources. I looked into this a little bit. They all have the facilities capable of refining the heavy crude. Now it used to be the Kochs had their facility in Corpus Christi was the only one, but I guess they've expanded since then around the Gulf. So there is that. Then my friend also said Exxon and Chevron don't play like that. They work together on things. They mostly stay out of problems. Right. They don't. And, and, and they don't fight like this. So that's not what it is. So it says okay, fine. And then. Well, it ain't the drugs. And I know that drugs, let's agree, not the drugs. So now I want to know more about this, Daryl and I know you've heard of this, maybe you know more about it than me already is the Isaac Accords that are supposed to be the Latin American cholerary to the Abraham Accords where all of Latin America now makes new trade deals and normalizes beyond what they already have, I guess, relations with Israel. And you know, clearly the new suck up lady who got the Peace Prize, who wants to eat Machado I think is her name, who wants to be installed there, she's explicitly sucking up to the Israelis and all of that. So now whether that's just good politics like the Turks like to run around with the Israelis in Washington because it's good to, to have them around because they're helpful, they have the juice right already. So I don't know, like what, how many wheels on the car are actually based on that? You know what I Mean, but then there's what you just said. And this is interviewed Brad Pierce today, the wayward raveler who's a great writer who writes for the Institute as well and he wrote about the, the, the Florida man occupied government and how that's what it is. Dud. You just have these guys in the, the Cuban influence and especially through Marco Rubio is, it's all very right wing and anti communist and God bless them all for that. But it's all very interventionist. And I guess part of the idea is the key is if you get rid of Venezuela, then they stop subsidizing Cuba with cheap oil and, and whatever loans or whatever el other favors and that makes it easier for, you know, Cuba to eventually fall, at least in Rubio and his friend's mind, whether that's really true or not and based on the opinions of a lot of expats who we all know you're not supposed to listen to because they lie and believe lies. So I think you're right. Like that's by process of elimination. That's what it is. It's an ideological bent that now's our chance to get rid of these guys once and for all. But then one more thing is just to set you up here is you just made very explicit and important reference to just don't let it turn into a war. Right. You want to get a regime change down there, figure out a coup or something. They tried that last time. But that's the real question is whether he's going to let Rubio lead us into catastrophe here. Right.
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B
I don't think that'll happen. I mean they'd have to be crazy to try something like that, you know, that we, I, I, I hope that there are enough people around Trump who can tell him about the Bay of Pigs and how we found out after it was all over that all of the anti Castro Cubans lived in Florida now they weren't in Cuba. And I wonder if that's the case in Venezuela. You know, like we have this idea, some people have this idea that, you know, basically the entire place is a giant gulag that Maduro is keeping the people in. And if we can just, you know, push the thing over a little bit, the people will do the rest. Where we heard that one before, you know, and so I'm just not so sure about that. I mean, you know, these Latin American countries, I feel like, you know, our foreign policy has been so unfocused down there for such a long time in, to the extent that we were focused on it. You know, you had like, you have drug stuff obviously and then you had anti communist stuff during the Cold War. And you know, one of the things that if you, you know, I've read a few books about the narco wars down there and back in the day and one of the things that comes through in like all of them is how you know, the dea, all of these agencies are like single purpose built machines, you know, so you put the DEA in a country like it's there to interdict drugs or do whatever their particular mission is. And that's all these guys know is who, who are the dealers, where are the trade networks, where all that kind of stuff. And they don't know anything about the communist militias out in the, you know, jungle or anything like that. They would go and try to get help from, you know, the DoD, go talk to the ambassador, have the DoD come in and help us with X, Y or z. And the DOD's like, what are they, communists? And then no, we don't care who they are, what's going on or whatever. So in other words, just very broken up. And I feel like, you know, with, with that being our very limited focus on the region for so long, I just don't think we have a good understand of it in our government, you know, and, and the understanding that we think we have is coming from these really hardcore ideologues like Rubio and you know, the people around him. And so that, I mean that right there by itself should be like the, the, the, the biggest, you know, push to like caution, you know, just the fact that we probably don't really understand what's going on down there. Like whatever, whatever happened to that Wong Guaido dude? You remember him?
- [13:32]
A
Yeah, of course. He completely discredited himself by calling for intervention against his own country.
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B
Yeah, and then didn't the new woman, she did that like, like within a week after getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And I love too to your point earlier, and I don't think this is why we're messing with Venezuela, but you know, she said that her first act as the head of government of Venezuela would be to move the Venezuelan embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. And I said, now, hey, you know what, say what you want about this whole situation. That woman knows how to get things done in Washington.
- [14:05]
A
Yeah, exactly, right. She's playing those cards, right. There was a funny thing of her, a video of her, her lipstick is all smeared, she just looks all wild eyed and crazy. And it was, it was funny, man. It was like satirical, only not Satirical. It reminded me of like a Paul verhoeven thing, like RoboCop or something, right? Where she's going, yeah, and if you invade my country and put me in power, there's all this oil and all these minerals and you can have it all, $1.7 trillion and it'll be all yours. And all this. And she's just, wow, what a pitch. Just, man, you sure you want to just put that on YouTube or whatever? That wasn't supposed to be like a private message to somebody, just bananas. It's so over the top, you know.
- [14:54]
B
So like real quick, like, don't you think that, like, it seems like the strategy is to try to just put enough pressure on the regime that some general or whoever, you know, in with enough juice there in Venezuela just turns to the other guys and says, look, we just, we gotta arrest this guy, like take him out of power or whatever it is, send him into exile. And then we got to reach out and just reset, you know, hit the reset button with the Americans. This is not working. So just to put pressure so that somebody from down below puts a bullet behind the guy's ear, just takes him out in another way. It seems like that's the strategy. It seems like also they've called our bluff on that. Like, and the fact that over all of this time, you know, not just this year, not just this administration or even going back into the Chavez days, the fact that that has not happened yet should make us question like there, you know, the generals are clear, like I've heard and I don't know again how much. I don't have like a lot of the real hard detail on this. But from what I understand, the arrangement over there is basically that the military gets to control the oil industry. And so the generals have a stake in the current regime, like a real deep stake. If that's true. That's what I read somewhere it was a while back. So like don't take that to the bank or go post it on Twitter or anything. But if that's the case, I mean, that's how you keep those guys on side, you know, a 50 million dollar bounty is not going to change their minds if the military is controlling the oil industry and their whole operation basically is dependent on keeping, keeping the guy who's there in power, you know.
- [16:35]
A
Yeah, well, look, don't anybody forget that Donald Trump himself said that his President Trump said three, four weeks ago that Maduro offered everything, he offered everything, total surrender. So for people who are young or were bad on this, at the time the story came out in like the fall, I'm going to guess September, October of 2003 in the New York Times by James Rison. So six months after the war started, I said, hey, by the way, Saddam offered to condition to surrender unconditionally to Richard Pearl. He sent a businessman, an emissary or a diplomat to meet with Richard Pearl in London. Oh great. So of course Pearl just buried it and didn't do anything with it. He offered everything. But we only found that out six months later. Here our current day W. Bush has announced Saddam has surrendered unconditionally. We're still gonna go to war anyway. So to me, like, no, that's it. You can't do that, man. You can't say the other guy already quit, but we're still gonna attack him. You just can't. You can't. There's gotta be a limit. There's gotta be somewhere on this stuff, man. It just, I mean that makes you.
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B
Wonder like what the end game is, you know, because I saw that too he, that he basically said, look, guarantee I'm not gonna get shot or put into a supermax prison for the rest of my life and I'll go into exile. Fine, like whatever. I mean, if that's the case, we turn that down. It makes you wonder what the end game is.
- [18:13]
A
Well, you know what, maybe everything there was hyperbole because I wasn't even thinking that necessarily included stepping down. But every other thing as far as giving in to America's will on obviously resources would be a huge one, but foreign investment and whatever other rules of the game, I mean that's, you know, it's like Yanukovic saying, fine, I'll fire my prime minister and you can just hire my whole new government for me and I'll just sit here and watch, watch them work and do nothing. You know, which wasn't good enough for them then either. Remember they went ahead and overthrew him anyway. So now, and look, this isn't the most important part of this, but it really is worth discussing. And right wingers, you don't. It's okay, you won't automatically like become a libertarian and get libertarian free market cooties all over you if you accept that drug prohibition doesn't work. It's completely crazy. And in fact, I learned in Tucker Carlson's morning email that today is the anniversary of the end of prohibition. Utah law finally ratified the 21st amendment that repealed the 18th. And because prohibition was an absolute catastrophe, it did nothing but expand criminality. It made Liquors harder in every way. And it birthed a massive federal police gestapo that then turned into the drug warriors as soon as they were done with the, and, and ATF and the rest, as soon as they were done with the drugs. And it never did work. And they've had a full scale war on opiates for now, 90 years really since the Roosevelt years. And they never accomplished really anything with it. And the same for cocaine, I guess, later. But they've. No one has ever even claimed, I don't think, other than just on a newspaper headline, but like in any actual study, that the DEA ever succeeded in reducing the supply of cocaine to the United States in any measurable or meaningful way. For all their PR stunts on all their piles of cocaine, for all the people they shoot and kill and boats they sink, and the rest makes no difference whatsoever to the price or availability of cocaine to the actual cocaine market in America, which is always an elite market. You think the, the cocaine users of San Francisco or New York city or Washington D.C. ever ran out of cocaine ever in your whole lifetime? No, the whole thing is stupid and wrong. You ought to just be able to go and get it at Walgreens. And no, that's not good. And it shouldn't be encouraged. In fact, I've known a couple of cokeheads in my life and it was very bad for them and they should not have let it become their primary objective in life to become a cocaine addict. But still it was up to them. They're grown ass mentioned and it wasn't the law that ever stopped them. Even when one of them went to jail for a while, came out was still on drugs. He gave it up later when he wanted to, when he decided to, not because they made him. And so all this does is just spread criminality. It, it creates black markets and, and gangsterism and territorial violence and all of this stuff. And then meanwhile, I don't even know these kids. I'm too old. I don't know their names. But there were a couple young pro skaters in San Francisco earlier this year who both took a bump off a key. Just a little bump, not a line, a little bump of cocaine. But it was spiked with fentanyl and they died, both of them. Two young pro skateboarders dropped dead from cocaine because it had poison in it. When, if they just bought it from Walgreens, then you would say those young skaters should not be doing cocaine. Don't party so hard, young man. You might regret it when you turn 40 or something. Instead they're dead because they bought cocaine from some guy at the bar. And I actually have a friend who bought a pill he thought was Xanax from a friend at the bar, but it turned out had fentanyl in it and it killed him. They saved his life and then he ended up dying later anyway. But, but still it was because it was a black market Xanax. Why can't a grown ass man go to Walgreens and buy a Xanax? Because the national government says that you can't. And, and so you have to go to the black market and die. It's so stupid. All this is so stupid. It's beneath any intelligent human being with an IQ over 120something to think that, yeah, no, this is going to work one day. All we need is for the national government to kill more people, to crack down harder and think that we're on the path toward any progress whatsoever when. Sorry, just to wrap this up, any grown adult ought to be able to go to Walgreens, buy the drugs, and you can have all the propaganda campaigns against opiates and for treatment as you can possibly muster. Don't be a dope head. You really want to get hooked on, on heroin. You know what that does to people and you know, you could die from it. So don't call this number and we'll help you. You can just do that, right? Just like legalizing pot as they have done doesn't mean you have to glamorize it and doesn't mean you have to recommend that it's best use for everyone all the time or whatever. It's just better than locking people up over it. Better than getting in shootouts over it. So, you know, I get it and I see on Twitter, oh, libertarians sure love drugs a lot. That's what everybody says.
- [23:37]
B
You and drugs, huh? Libertarians smoke weed. Okay, yeah.
- [23:42]
A
Maybe that's why we're able to sit still and think this through a little bit better than you guys. You know, maybe.
- [23:47]
B
I mean, one of the other effects of prohibition, this was true during alcohol prohibition as well. Like, you couldn't get a beer in the US during out. I mean, unless you went to some dude's house and he like brooded himself or something. You couldn't get beer in the US because nobody was going to risk their ass getting thrown in prison to smuggle, you know, a boat full of beer across the Great Lakes into, into Detroit or something. It just wasn't worth it. So basically, as soon as prohibition happened, the only thing you had out there was high alcohol Content drinks, because it was the only thing concentrated enough to make it worth their while. And that's something that's happened actually during the drug war also is if you, you know, they've looked at like, the concentration of the active chemicals in the heroin, cocaine, these, like all of these things back then compared to now. I mean, it's just. It's astronomically stronger now. And you can't find any of the weaker stuff. It doesn't exist because again, nobody's going to risk their ass to like, bring something that's not going to fetch top dollar. So that. That also makes it more dangerous. I mean, look, I'm very, you know, me, I'm a law and order guy. I don't like the fact that places that, you know, I used to walk around, like, nice walk around neighborhoods with used bookstores and quirky cafes that you bring a date to for the, you know, on the first date or whatever that, like, you got to step over people on the sidewalk now who are just blitzed out on fentanyl or heroin or whatever. El. That lack of enforcement in the cities on that stuff, you know, there's a very visual sort of indication of how that's going. And I think that's what worries people. If we were to just open the floodgates, do people really have. I mean, alcohol is one thing. Obviously some people don't have the ability to control themselves with that. But I think people worry. And there is something to worry about is that if we just threw the gates open and said Oxycontin, fentanyl, Xanax, whatever it is, you can go down 9.99 at Walgreens, that if enough people would be able to resist that over the course of their lives, you know what I mean? Because you could resist it for 5, 10 years and then go through about a depression and decide you're going to go grab some opiates, and now you're hooked on that. I mean, it's just, you need like one stumble to like, start going down that rabbit hole. And then once you start down it, you know, you get the thing that all addicts have, which is, you know, not just, oh, like, you know, I'm, I'm. I'm loopy or I enjoy that. It's really that, like, okay, you know, all that gnawing anxiety at the core of your stomach that keeps you up at night at 2:00am like, you know what, there's actually a button you can press and that just goes away. And once you know that, you can't ever Forget that, you know, and that's what keeps people, like, going down that road. And I just wonder, like, in our society where we're already having like, record suicides, record just, you know, deaths of despair of all kinds, I do wonder what, what the.
- [26:46]
A
Yeah.
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B
What the outcome would be. Now the. On the other hand, you know, I'm answering myself right now my own, like, sort of question. I, I got into a discussion with a buddy of mine about legalization of prostitution. And, you know, I told him, look, I'm. When we were talking about this, actually it was when I was doing my series on the labor wars, so I just done the Battle of Blair Mountain, all this other kind of stuff. And I said, look, man, like the stuff I'm reading about, like, what capitalism did to minors. And like everybody else, I'm not sure I want to, like, have them involved in prostitution. You know, I don't want to like, go down to Van Nuys and there's just giant warehouses with cubicles set up and thousands of women in there that you can go bang for like 499 or something. I'm not sure I want to see that, you know, and. But he, he came back with the obvious thing to say, which is like, isn't anything better than what we're doing right now where you have just like some violent psychopathic pimp with a stable of girls that he beats the. Out of and sexually abuses and like, all that. That's the way we do it now. Like, isn't anything better than that? And I have to say, touche. You know, I mean, you make a great point about, you know, if somebody, you know, the, the dealer has no incentive to like, not cut your drugs, your coke with, with rat poison because, like, okay, he's down one customer. Whoop dee doo. How's he ever going to get rid of all that cocaine? Like, that's not a problem, you know, Whereas, you know, Procter and Gamble or whoever else, if they were manufacturing it, they have a real, you know, like a real incentive to avoid the class action lawsuit that would come if they were actually poisoning people.
- [28:27]
A
And look, bare bones too. It's a lot harder to overdose on heroin than it is fentanyl. And right now you go to the black market, it's hard to know whether your heroin has fentanyl in it or not. So you have people accidentally overdosing. So the question is, do you prefer that your brother is a junkie or a dead junkie? And that's the. Compared to what that we're talking about here. And then when it comes to people having drug problems, you know, I think we know on rare occasions there, I'm sure, are anecdotes where you lock a guy in prison and he goes ahead and kicks and gets clean in there and realizes he needs to turn his life around or whatever. But not mostly. That's not, you know, as Bill hicks said in 1989, sick people don't get healed in jail. What are you talking about? Somebody's addicted to heroin. You need to. The drug czar, if we're gonna have a drug czar, should be an addict in recovery who knows how to deal with this and can help other people. And what if you just look at it, if you, if you stop associating a view like that with liberalism. Right, but you just look at it as just your own self as a person, doesn't that make more sense that instead of beating up drug addicts and throwing them in jail, that you figure out a better way, you know?
- [29:48]
B
Yeah. And not to mention the fact that like all of the follow on social effects, you know, like the fact that when you go into. I mean, this happened back during prohibition too, you know, when, if you go back to the 1910s, it's really interesting because you had this first generation of like the Irish gangsters were kind of fading into the background by that point because they were kind of getting assimilated. They'd come long enough back and you had. But you had a lot of new Jewish and Italian immigrants and they. The organized crime network started sprouting up in like the late 18, early 1900s. But then around like the 1910s, it started to peter out. Like that first generation who was kind of involved in small time hustles and gambling in their neighborhoods, prostitution, whatever. Their kids weren't really following in their footsteps and most of them didn't want them to. And there wasn't that much of an incentive to do it anyway because it was sort of small time neighborhood stuff. Then comes Prohibition and you have, I mean, there I, I was reading that Al Capone in or. No, no, not Al Capone, the, the racketeer.
- [30:55]
Jimmy Hom, lefty book halter, like the godfather of labor, racketeering. That dude made $600 million one year in. Or no, I'm sorry, no, it came out to 600 million in today's money. So in today's money, he made $600 million. And so it's like, okay, you have like a, you created a situation now where, you know, people, can you go back and look at like the corruption on the police forces back then, for example. And these guys could go to a beat cop and tell him, look, we will pay you 10 times your annual salary. All you have to do is look the other way and give us a call if anybody's looking at X, Y and Z. That's all you got to do. You're not moving anything for us, you're not killing anybody for us. That's all you got to do. Look the other way and warn us if anything's coming. And we will pay you 10 times your annual salary or we'll kill you. Or, you know, you'll be a problem for us. And if you don't do it, by the way, somebody else will. And you know, and so like, you introduce like that level of incentive, you're going to corrupt your process. Just unbelievable, you know, make it inevitable. Absolutely. Look at it today. You go in and you look in any of the inner cities and you find that like, okay, the shops are all owned by people who live outside the neighborhood. And the only, like real serious economy, the only people who look to be really be doing well in the, in the neighborhood are the dealers. And so every kid looks up to him. Everybody kind of has to. Like, you know, when you, when you read about the, you know, the new school guys don't really do this so much because the drug war has just changed the nature of the game so much. But like, you go back to the 70s when there were still some of these like Frank Lucas types out there, and you know, these guys would, you know, people look at it as like they're buying their neighborhood's loyalty by, you know, handing out Thanksgiving turkeys and like all this other kind of stuff. And yeah, you could look at it that way. I guess it is that. But there was a reason that they did that. You know, they were the only ones in the neighborhood who really could, who had the resources to do anything like that. And so they, you know, they use that to like drive up their, their prestige in the community so that people wouldn't turn on them. I mean, this is another thing actually too. It's just the nature of the drug game now. If you go back then, you had these guys who were like godfather types, 50 year old guys, like running the heroin trade in Harlem, you know what I mean? Like you had guys who had been doing it for a long time, came up through the process and they've been running it for a long time nowadays, like, it's just, you know, now that you can get 20 years, you know, For a trafficking offense. I mean, everybody flips on each other immediately. The, the, the money is so high. They're like all of the, all of the, like, big players, those Frank Lucas types. Those guys don't exist anymore. Like, the whole thing is broken up into little like just, you know, this dealer owns a couple corners, he kind of like expands his territory, gets up to the point where law enforcement or another banger, like, takes notice of him. And it's eight months in, he's dead. And then the next kid comes up and they're all just a bunch of psychopathic 18, 19 year olds who grew up in this, you know, and so like, even that, like, you know, the drug war sort of removed what organization there was to the drug trade, which, you know, again is. It's not like these guys back in the day were like wonderful people, but they at least had some sort of like, forethought about like I have, you know, because these guys would take their money, they would go buy like apartment buildings, they go buy businesses, corner stores and stuff like that in the neighborhood, and that's what they would do with it. The kids today, like, a lot of them, they're making huge wads of cash, but they're only 16 years old. They can't go buy anything. And so they buy a 400 pair of shoes and like some rims for their car or whatever. And like, it's created that whole culture, you know, because it's gotten younger and younger and younger. And so, yeah, look, the drug war is a disaster. It's completely failed. It has made a bad situation even worse. I do understand on one level, you know, like, like I'm familiar with the argument that like the whole thing, the drug war was started up just so they'd have a reason to go after the Black Panthers and the hippies and all that. And that was probably in there somewhere. Knowing Nixon, I am sympathetic to. You know, you have these like 60 year olds, you know, in the government and just regular people back in like 1970, and they're looking around at the cities that have just completely fallen apart in the last 10 years. And you've got just, you know, junkies wandering around like, capturing and literally barbecuing people's cats around Haight Ashbury and stuff. And they're looking at this like, we gotta do something. Like, we gotta do something. This is crazy, you know, especially coming from a place where like, they weren't used to this, they never seen anything like this. And so I get it. But yeah, after 50 years, man, we should be able to look back and then, and pile the lessons on top of the lessons from prohibition and just, and just understand that, you know, the effects of building up super, super well funded black markets that the follow on effects from that are worse than anything that's going to come from legalizing drugs. 100%. Right?
- [36:09]
A
Totally right. All right, let's talk about something else. My coffee dealer, Phil Pepin, he runs a company called Moon Do Artisan Coffee. Get it? They hate Starbucks because Starbucks support Zionism in the war party and killing kids. So instead they're Moon Do's Artisan Coffees. They support peace and they support me and my show, my other show, really whatever it's called. Scott Horton show brand coffee flavored something Ethiopian and Sumatra mix. It's really dang good coffee. And it's their best selling coffee that they have at Mundos Artisan Coffees. And Phil contacts me all the time and tells me about all the four star reviews coming in and all the nice comments and all the reorders and everything. It's going really great. So all you do though is you just go to my website, Scott Horton.org Coffee and it'll take you right there and you can follow the link there, there's a link in the right hand margin and a QR code and all that, but you just type in Scott horton.org Coffee it'll take you right there and get you some good old coffee to drink. And then also I got to talk about Matt Cercy Lee, libertarian anti government tax advisor. Now Darrell, I mean this in all sincerity, not like a Sunday morning infomercial thing, but just between you and me, I don't know if it's possible, but do you hate the IRS as much as I do? Because I hate him.
- [37:29]
B
So yeah, I wouldn't presume to, to say that I hate him as much as you do, but I'm not a fan.
- [37:35]
A
Yeah, well, you're a kind gentleman. You don't really hate anyone. I do though. I hate the irs. Oh, I hate them so much. And quite frankly, I hate them on behalf of all their own other innocent victims in line in front of me. I'm back of the line. And yes, I hate them for what they've done to me, but I hate them for what they've done to everybody else first. Worse, it just ain't right. Income taxation is full communism. It's Bolshevism and it's gotta go. And anybody who supports it is scum and should be kicked out of your family anyway. I'm off on a tangent. Matt, seriously will help you stay out of the tax man's crosshairs. And he's not like, oh, here's how to cheat and get away with it, and you end up getting in trouble. No, this is how to do it, right?
- [38:18]
B
So you.
- [38:18]
A
You pay them only what you absolutely have to, but you do pay them that, and then you go about your business. And he will help you do that. Right? And his website is agorist tax advisor, agaristax advisor.com. and people have heard him advertised on the Tom woods show and all that, and he's supporting this show, my other show as well. And I'm just out from under the IRS and getting back to business myself right now after years of dealing with their absolute disgraceful lies and despicable practices. But so I know everybody else is basically in the same position. You got to do absolutely the best you can to avoid the worst of what these people can dish out. And so, Matt, seriously is who you look into their Agorist Tax advisor, is it? Oh, man. Advisor advice. Agaristax advice.com Also, buy my books and sign up for my Academy. Check it out. Scott Horton Academy shirt. Now, I don't know. I. I know you. I saw your notebook. So I know you signed up for the lifetime subscription there, Daryl, but did you realize that we've added our newest course, Adam Francisco, on debunking Christian Zionism? It's called the Christian View of Israel and Judaism by this great biblical scholar from Concordia University, a Lutheran scholar, Adam Francisco. And I don't know if you've had a chance to dig into it yet, but it is.
- [39:39]
B
No, it's on my list. I'm looking forward to it for sure.
- [39:41]
A
Oh, you're gonna love it, man. It is right up your alley, I promise. It is so good. And, you know, the reviews are coming in. I mean, my Middle east course is 30 hours long. It's taken people a little while here, but I got a great email today from a guy said he's watching. I got. I got a couple messages today.
- [39:58]
One saying that he's watching Ramsey brood, and he's just so floored with what he didn't know and, like, how dare he have ever considered himself informed until now. And now he's watching Ramsey Barood explain Palestine from the. From a Palestinian's point of view, and he's just, oh, my God. And then another guy on Twitter said the same thing, only he talked about what he was raised to believe in. Temple. In other words, he's Jewish. And this is what he was. This is so contrary to what he was taught in school. And he can tell that what they did was they lied by omission. Right? He knows that Ramsey Barood ain't bluffing about this stuff. And he just remembers a big blank space in his education where what Ramsey Barood is. Is describing actually took place. And so I knew it was going to be great. I mean, it's the same as my show I've done for 20 years. Daryl is. I'm not the greatest broadcaster, I admit that. I don't care about that. I got a great taste in guests. And same thing here with this academy. I got a bunch of really good dudes to teach these courses. So everybody's gonna Love it.
- [40:58]
B
Scott.
- [40:58]
A
Hortonacademy.com and get it for your friends for Christmas and whatever. It's rad. And I think that's all I got to say about business, at least for now. So now let's talk about. Let's talk about Afghanistan. So the new Cigar report came out. That's the special Inspector General for Afghan reconstruction. And they actually have one more year to go in their mandate. I'm not sure why, but they're still report. And this is what they're calling their final report on the absolute and abject failure of the reconstruction project in Afghanistan. Right off the bat, they say they put in, I have it here, 145 billion, which I think has got to be the lowest low ball. I don't know what. They're not counting in that, but they must not be counting. I guess that's officially what the State Department spent or something. But adjusted for inflation, it's far more than they spent on the Marshall Plan, and they have absolutely nothing to show for it. And I admit that I did not have time to dig through the report that much because I actually got caught up reading the new National Security Strategy. But I would just point out the table of contents here for you. And this is surely worth a read for people who are interested in the Afghan war. Cigar has done a really great job on this stuff.
- [42:16]
So they talk about who got the most money, what was saved, what was wasted, what was left behind.
- [42:23]
Major findings of the different audits of the money, investigating outright theft of taxpayer dollars and. And what all, including their efforts, led to the failure of the war in Afghanistan. And that's the kind of thing that Cigar has been really good on, that you don't really get a lot of, Darrell, is that this didn't all happen despite our best efforts. But Oftentimes because of our best efforts. And that what our government was doing to intervene there, not just militarily, but with the State Department weenies and through the NGOs, and all of that on the ground, is they're actually distorting power factions like crazy with all that money. And in many cases, there's a whole book by a guy named Douglas Wissing about how virtually all this aid money is going through the Taliban. They're taking, like, 70 off the top and leaving 30 for the rest, just for the window dressing of it all, or whatever the numbers were. It's called Funding an Enemy by Douglas Wissing. A whole book just on how American money was going to back the Taliban against our guys the whole time in the war. And it's just the whole war is like that. And the only reason, I mean, hell, maybe they would have gotten away with it anyway, but they got away with it, especially because it was on the other side of Iran from here, man. It was on the other side of Iran from even Iraq. It might as well have been on the far side of Mars. So it was like they could just steal what they want, get away with what they want. And they were able to stay. You know, we were forced out of Iraq by 2011. They stayed in Afghanistan 10 more years after that. You know.
- [43:57]
B
The thing that is very.
- [44:00]
One of the things I remember. Let me pull this up, actually. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. There we go. Back when the withdrawal was happening, and we were chased out of there with our tails between our legs. I was reading a lot about it because we did an unraveling episode on the whole thing. And one of my favorite things that I came across was the book that the Afghan president at the time, I can't remember his name now, but he'd written a book. There you go. Ashaf Ghana. He had written a book, how to Fix Failed States. Okay. And so I was curious, and I went and I looked for reviews of the book. I didn't have time to read the whole thing before we did the episode, but I read it now, and I went and looked for reviews. And, yeah, I found one in Publishers Weekly. And Publishers Weekly is they're pretty. Like, they do anonymous reviews. And so, like, they can be pretty harsh. Even on, like, popular books and stuff, they'll say what they really think. And they wrote, and I quote, the authors do a fine job in emphasizing the centrality of a strong, accountable state in addressing poverty and underdevelopment. Unfortunately, their analysis suffers from its heavy reliance on management theory abstractions. Such as the power of networks, flows of information and capital, webs of value creation and business school truisms. Underlying a sound management system is an effective supply chain. Supply chain management litter their turgid discussion. Fixated on new economy conceits, they say little about the crucial task of quelling violence and lawlessness. Instead, they dwell on globalization oriented development strategies drawn from Ireland, Singapore, Oregon and other regions that are not failed states. Fatuously, they even liken Sudan's travails to those of troubled conglomerate Tycho International. And so then I went and read the review in Foreign Policy magazine, in Foreign affairs magazine and all the national interest. Oh, they loved it. They thought it was amazing. And you know, that when this guy walked in to the office of whoever he was talking to at the State Department or what, you know, they just fell over themselves, their hearts beating out of their chest. Oh, he's perfect. And it's like, like a lot of times, like I'm just, I'm blown away by the inside insane incompetence of these people. Like, you know, and we almost like when you talk to one of these people, like if you take that person in the State Department office who fell out of her chair, like fainting, like it was Paul McCartney when she met this idiot. And you talk to her, you know, you get her out of her office and you talk, you're like, oh, this is a smart person. You know, she has an IQ of 115. She got whatever, 1250 on her SATs, and she's a smart girl. It's not like an idiot in the sense of like having no mental faculties, but it's more like being in a cult. You know, these people aren't even aware of other viewpoints than their own. And they get into this mode where they meet a guy that is just saying the most things you can imagine. I mean, we're talking about Afghanistan and he's talking about the power of networks and flows of information and capital and shit. Like they should have just. But the fact that they didn't, it really tells you how insular, you know, the foreign policy world is. And you know, the Afghanistan withdrawal is just, or just the whole Afghanistan adventure.
- [47:25]
In a way is almost a better illustration of all of that, of all of the failures of our foreign policy elite even, than like Iraq is. Because in Iraq you can really like, to a large degree put that down. Not entirely, but to a large degree you can put that down to like a very tight knit cabal of people who got themselves into positions to maneuver us into that War, you know, they like, Afghanistan was nothing like that. Like, this was not something where just some tiny little click really had it out for Afghanistan, wanted to get them out. This was just something we kind of got into. And then we're like, well, we're here. We can't very well leave because things are still messed up. So I guess we'll stay, but the next president. Deal with them. We just did that for 20 years, you know, and we're lucky. I'll tell you what, we're lucky we got off with only 20 years. You know, I mean, it's like, look, the withdrawal was handled absolutely horribly, like, in a million different ways. You know, we murdered that family on the way out. Obviously, a bunch of our people got killed by a suicide bomber that they had been tracking and watching for two days, and nobody would let us interdict them. And so there's a lot of obvious. Like, just the whole thing was a disaster. But on the other hand, you have to give whoever was making the decisions in the Biden administration, I assume it wasn't him, at least some credit for biting the bullet and just saying, whatever happens, we're getting out of here. And thank God for that, because, I mean, I. If he had stayed just because he didn't want to deal with the fallout, I don't think Trump's getting us out. We'd be talking about this in 2028, dude.
- [49:02]
A
Well, the irony of the thing is Trump signed the deal to get us out by May 1st.
- [49:08]
B
Yeah.
- [49:09]
A
21.
- [49:10]
B
Yeah.
- [49:10]
A
And you're right to be suspicious that he would have tried to change that deal and kick the can down the road himself if he could have. But that, we know, was Biden's major flaw, was he kicked the can down the road for four months. Well, the Taliban did not. So our guys would have left on the first day of fighting season instead of on the last day when the Taliban's walking in and taking over the whole country while our guys are skedaddling out the door. It wasn't just the suicide bomber at the Kabul airport, but it was all the last three, four weeks, five weeks of the thing, as the Taliban is still conquering the country on their own timeline, when we're supposed to have already skedaddled, and then we could have that decent interval where nobody's looking when they walk into Kabul. But Biden absolutely screwed that up. You're right, though, that it was still. And I said I got in trouble. So I said on Fox News at the time that this withdrawal from Afghanistan, as catastrophic as it was. Is still the best thing that Trump or Biden ever did in their lives. Sorry. And that just goes to show, like, what horrible guys they are and the other decisions they've made. But. But that it. It absolutely had to end. And, you know, I had a funny story about Ashraf Ghani and books, too, which is that the other Scott Horton, who is. Who is a. Is a law professor from Columbia University and writes for Harper's Magazine. Well, he was advising Ashraf Ghani. He's an international human rights lawyer. And when my book Fool's Aaron came out in 2017, he was summoned into Ghani's office, who greeted him with a copy of my book and said, what is the meaning of this? And the other Scott Horton had to say, it's not me, it's this kid, you know, with the problem always causing me problems. So I'm proud of that one. And then, of course, I was totally right. And look, what's the book? We all know about the book. The Afghanistan papers came out a year and a half after my book, and it proved that I was right about everything. And I was kind of pissed off that old Craig, what's his name from the Washington Post did not say that. Like, hey, there are others who beat me to this punch. Like, not on this specific cache of interviews that he got, but whatever. And then what were. What were the Afghanistan papers? It was interviews that the principals gave or very, you know, highly involved people gave to Cigar, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. Most of them blabbing, believing this is going to stay off the record for other forever, others more guarded, but basically all of them admitting that just like in Vietnam, they knew they could never win the war. They were just going to make it somebody else's problem. They're in country to get their ticket punch and get back out again. And the rest of that. It is.
- [51:54]
B
In some ways, it's even stupider than Vietnam because, like, it's after Vietnam for that's one reason, but also, like the idea that, you know, at least in Vietnam it was all Vietnamese people and you could at least, like, you could at least tell yourselves that you were, you know, you had come into the country at the request of the UN recognized central government and all that kind of stuff. In Afghanistan, we went in there and thought it was going to be a good idea to just completely disempower the Pashtun majority and put a coalition of various minority groups, like, in the government, every one of which knew that there's no way they're keeping the posh tunes down forever. They're coming back. And like, doesn't matter how long the Americans put it off, they're coming back. So let's steal everything we can while it's not nailed down because what's the point, you know, this isn't going anywhere. And they knew that from the beginning. Everybody that worked for us knew that from the beginning. Beginning. And it was just. Yeah, I mean, everybody in the comments and who's watching this right now, I assume has read your book on Afghanistan, so they don't need to hear me talk too much about it. But yes, they haven't. Shame, shame, shame.
- [53:02]
A
Well, look, I mean, there's new news out too about a new whistleblower on the sas talking about them taking people out and murdering them. It's the same thing. You know, we had American Green Berets and Rangers.
- [53:16]
Who committed war crimes at various times as documented in the book. We've had Australian Special Forces guys who also took prisoners, you know, away and then murdered them. Same thing here. New, new whistleblower on the sas, Special Air Services there in Great Britain for their war crimes in Afghanistan. And as we've talked about before, installing child rapists and drug dealers and throat slitting murderers to be the police chief and the mayor and the governor of the state.
- [53:50]
Having soldiers who, who can't stand the thought of going home without having killed a man. So they kill an innocent man, a captive, they line him up, put him up against a tree and shoot him so that they have, will have gotten, you know, their, their bullets wetted or whatever thing, whatever rite of passage that they need over there. I mean, it's, which is like the mujahideen or something, it's crazy. And then the idea that we're going to somehow turn those people into our loyal, friendly, obedient sock puppets after treating them in that way for so long, it's just unbelievable. I mean, imagine a foreign army in your town and then not only that, they take a child rapist and make him the police chief and protect him with their soldiers and his power. Not only do they call him police chief, they make him the police chief. Right?
- [54:42]
B
Yeah.
- [54:43]
A
Imagine how mad we would be and how violent we would be in response to that.
- [54:46]
B
Yeah. It's one of the reasons that when you talk about somebody like the, that quote unquote, opposition leader of Venezuela saying, you know, basically calling for the Americans to militarily go into her own country, I have absolute like the level of contempt I have for people like that could literally not be any Higher. Like, my answer to that is, I don't care if Stalin was in charge of the United States and my whole family was in a gulag. If a freaking Chinese soldier or anybody else like, stepped foot on America, I'm doing everything I can to kill every one of them. If that comes across like what. I don't. Just don't understand how people could think any other way. You know, it's like that, that, that part of Red dawn where he's about to execute the, the Russian, you know, Patrick Swayze is. And you know, he's like, what? How. How does this make us any different than them?
- [55:40]
A
Because we live here.
- [55:41]
B
Because we live here, dude.
- [55:43]
A
You know, my friend made me take that out of Fool's Errand. That line was in Fool's errand. And somebody said, take it out. They won't understand. And I was like, ah, all right.
- [55:52]
B
Every American should be able to understand that, man, I should have left it in. All right? And honestly, like, that, that, that instinctual understanding that most Americans, especially American conservatives have.
- [56:05]
Like, it should be. It should. You know, you would think that that would be enough to inoculate us against the impulse to go into a lot of these stupid ass wars just by invoking Red dawn and being like, just imagine it was you. Like, doesn't matter why the Russians are there. Who cares? You live here. These are guys with guns who are coming into your town. Like, how is an American gonna deal with that? That and, and just explain it to people in that way? Usually makes some kind of a dent. But, you know, it's interesting. Like, the, the, the really crappy thing about this, like, I, I was livid during the. His Israel Iran war earlier in the year, just by how I saw so many people who know. They'll tell you, they'll go on for hours how stupid Iraq was, how terrible. They lied us into that. Where? Absolutely. I can't believe we did that. Oh, Afghanistan. I can't believe they kept us there for 20 years. They knew all along. Well, the Iranians get them, get them. And I'm like, the Duro, man, you people are so easy. It's just so disheartening to see that.
- [57:09]
A
I know it is. Oh, you're on the side of the drug dealers. I can't believe it.
- [57:15]
Hey, by the way, Daryl, did I show you my new mic plate?
- [57:19]
B
This is provoked on it. Provoked. Hey, we didn't get to. We have to, because we're already coming up on an hour and we got some questions. But how about Bibi Netanyahu? Vindicating your boy.
- [57:31]
One of the cheap villains of the Second World War, baby.
- [57:35]
A
Oh, man.
- [57:37]
B
Of stupendous atrocities, I believe was his quote. So, yeah, if you want you. You have a problem with me, take it up with Mr. Netanyahu.
- [57:46]
A
Okay, so first of all, I think that there is an iron law of the universe that says when Daryl Cooper and Benjamin Netanyahu concur, there can be no daylight, there can be no disagreement with the common interest in discovering this same truth. At the same time, I have to say, man, this is far worse than if Jocko threw Churchill under the bus. I'm a Horton, I'll throw him under the bus. But Benjamin Netanyahu throwing Winston Churchill under the bus. Ah, man, really? People are watching. And.
- [58:32]
To justify killing Palestinians.
- [58:34]
B
Yeah.
- [58:37]
So far, like, the rhetoric has come so full circle that they're not even saying, how dare you compare us to the Nazis anymore. Now they're saying we're not as bad as the Allies. The Allies are way worse than us.
- [58:53]
A
Yeah, they started out going, well, if you can do Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo, then we can do Gaza, Gaza City, and Rafa.
- [59:01]
B
And.
- [59:02]
A
And now they're going, well, look, we're pretty bad, but we're not as bad as that. At least east, which, by the way, they passed all the Geneva Conventions and signed the UN charter after World War II to outlaw exactly what they themselves had done at Hamburg and Dresden, in Tokyo, and said, we're not doing that anymore.
- [59:25]
But, you know, the law don't apply to the Israelis as long as they're protected by the Americans, I guess is the bottom line there. Okay, so look, we should do some chats. Let me just say real quick that people need to subscribe to your substack, which is subscribe.myrmade.com, which is where they get your great long form podcasts, including, I don't know if you saw. I tagged you in a thing, you probably saw it, where this young lady said that she went to Israel on a trip and they tried to get her to change her citizenship and join the army and all these things was such a kind of high pressure campaign. She decided to look into it, and she looked into it and looked into it, and then she found the Martyr Maid podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. And she says, you can tell this poor guy, he tries so hard to stay neutral, but you just can't. The story in neutral, the Israelis are the aggressors, and what they're doing, it ain't right. And she, like you, really Got through to this lady and she made a video about it and I know she's one of very many. And then the new podcast series is called Enemy the Germans were World War II from Germany's perspective. Not from the Nazi party's perspective, you kooks. From Germany's perspective. And it's so good already. Episode one is so good. And I really hate World War I. And in a way that I'm very interested in it. And so I learned so much. I really need to go back and listen to that again. It's what, four hours is the first episode there.
- [60:51]
B
Yeah. Which by the way, four hour long podcast on an obscure topic like trench warfare. I just passed a million downloads on that thing.
- [61:01]
A
Wow.
- [61:02]
B
Yeah, not bad. It's like a month and a half or something. Pretty good.
- [61:06]
A
Very good.
- [61:08]
Very good, man. Okay, so. And I got a substack too. It's just Scott. HortonShow.com is my sub stack. And if you wanted to listen to the audiobook of Provoked, I'm posting the pieces of it there. I only have three parts, which is Bush Senior and Bill Clinton 1 and 2. But that's like nine or 12 hours or something worth the length of a long audiobook already. Just for the first part of the book there. So that'll get y' all started. And then I have finished recording all of W. Bush, all of Obama and most of Trump on Ukraine gate or something. So I'm really now the. Now that the academy is sort of kind of out of the way, I'm trying really hard to get back to the audiobook for you guys. So that's all at my substack. So look at that. And then I wanted to mention too, as long as we're on YouTube here, everybody sign up for the Scott Horton Show. YouTube. It's just Scott Horton Show. I did five interviews today. Brent Burleson, remember that guy that said I ran psyops on American Protestant churches for the Israeli consulate that we published at the institute? I interviewed him. Really great interview there.
- [62:14]
He's redeemed. Dave decamp on all the wars course from antiwar.com and I already mentioned Brad Pierce, the wayward raveler. We talked about Venezuela and also about Sudan and the UAE war in Sudan. And then William Van Wagenen, we got. He wrote this new thing at the Cradle. Did you see it? About the jihadis in Syria abducting the Alawi women and enslaving them under so called marriages. Right. And. And Jelani's government, just as Donald Trump is rewarding him is. Is going along and covering it up and all of that. And then I also interviewed an Afghan who had me on his show last week, and his name is Sangar Pikear. And he had a lot to say about what's going on in Afghanistan, the history of the war there and the recent fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan and their new relations with India and all that. So you got to be really nerdy like me to get into it. But that, that's there. And then importantly, and I know we wanted to talk about this, I don't know if you want to now or we won't want to put it off, but I talked with Mark Thornton, the economist from the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Austrian Economics, a master of necessian business cycle theory, which is the most important thing that everyone in the world needs to know about, which is inflationary money doesn't just cause endlessly rising prices, which it does, but it also causes this horrific boom and bust cycle that they call the business cycle, which is really the government's inflationary money cycle that leads to so many dislocations and so much grief, and the blame gets cast by the masses on capitalism, quote, unquote, when really our commie government controls half of every transaction, the value of the money. They control the interest rates, they control how much bank credit is allowed to be expanded or contracted and buy up bad debt with new money. They print out of nothing. And they just ruin economic life for people. Just when you think you're all right again, they pull the rug out from under you over and over and over again. And Mark Thornton is just the best on this. And we had a really great conversation on the show today. So that's five interviews I did today. That's my usual. I used to do sometimes even 10 interviews every Friday or something like that. So I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with the Scott Horton show, if people want to check that out. That's where I keep my 6,000 something interviews. And then we did, you know, as long as you brought up Netanyahu and, and him vindicating you.
- [64:45]
Did you want to get into the boom bus stuff at all or do you want to get into the. We. We also had the Hasbara. The collapse of the Hasbara regime was.
- [64:54]
B
Let's go down the econ route. That's. We can talk about that anytime.
- [64:58]
A
Okay, let's do it. So business cycle theory says this, that this is Mises. Figure this out. The theory of money and credit. 100 years ago, 104 or 5 and it basically says this. It says the reason that you have these booms and busts, they couldn't really figure out what was causing the booms and busts. Karl Marx blamed the excesses of capitalism and this kind of thing. And that's the way you learned it in sixth grade or seventh grade. And when they teach you the story of the Great Depression is that in the 1920s there is the wild excesses of free market capitalism got out of control and caused all these speculative bubbles in the stock market. And then the stock market crashed and that led to the Depression. And then we learned the lesson then that we needed the national government to intervene in the economy to smooth out the booms and busts, to create a central bank and to have all these regulations in order to prevent the capitalists from driving the whole economy off a cliff. And it worked great. I'd said also, it didn't work great. And that's why World War II really worked great to bring us out of the Great Depression. That's the way we all learn it in school, when the reality is, of course, the central bank was created in 1913 at the. On the eve of World War I. It was used to vastly expand the money supply in order to pay for American participation in the First World War. And then in the 1920s, they kept. It was really the New York Fed operated as what's now the Open Market Committee. They were really the bosses, the New York Fed. And they kept an inflationary policy through the 20s, right when there was a massive expansionary boom and prices should have been falling because productivity was going through the roof. And there were all new inventions and automations and all kinds of things. So prices should have been falling, falling, falling. Instead they were stable, which was a disguise, right, for actual price inflation. Then the chairman of the Fed was a guy named Benjamin Strong, and he was the protege of the head of the bank of England, a guy named Montague Norman. And he did a favor for Montague Norman basically by debasing the US Dollar in order to prop up the British pound, because the British pound had problems because they had debased it in order to fight their wars in South Africa. And so Benjamin Strong made a deal with Montague Norman and inflated the money supply here. And that was what really led to the speculative bubbles from 27 through 29. And then that was the bubble that, that popped in 29, famously, all the guys jumping out the window and the giant stock market crashed. But then, as David Stockman, also an Austrian school economist, has instructed and Shown that the whole damn depression was over before Franklin Roosevelt was ever inaugurated in March of 1933. Now, Herbert Hoover was no Ron Paul. He was a progressive and he was an interventionist. That's why it's called the Hoover Dam, not the FDR dam. And all those public work projects and price floors on wages, right? When there's massive downward pressure on wages, he's saying it's illegal to pay anyone less than this. Well, then they're all fired. We won't pay them anything then, right? Like all these idiot government interventions. That was Hoover before FDR even got there. But still all the bad debts have been cleared and the economy was ready to rebound. And then the debt damn Democrats came in and just ruined everything. And with all their tinkering and all their intervention, all their massive increases in income, taxation and what Robert Higgs coined the term, I believe, regime uncertainty. Where they made it, where anyone who did have any money was afraid to invest it in anything or move it anywhere for fear of what the government was going to do next. Because it was just one harebrained scheme after another. And it was all. There's a great book called New Deal or Raw Deal by Burton Folsom where he talks about how it was all spoils too. This had nothing to do with solving the Great Depression. It was just the Democrats printing money and going into debt to help their friends around the country and the various Democratic political machines and to stay in power. And then he declared himself essentially President for life, the Great Dictator Roosevelt stayed for four terms and got us into the giant war. And, you know, we didn't get us into the war till the end of 41, beginning of 42. And so it had been almost a full decade of Great Depression economics under, well, more than that, but under, under Roosevelt. And then, still then they give credit for the war, for bringing us out of the Depression, when what really happened was the war ended. They were all under rationing during the war, all under scarcity. It was after the war ended that then people came home and yeah, some of the factories that the government had built with all that debt during the war were then turned to productive uses. And also they forced the rest of the world to accept all our GR and all our other agricultural products and other exports and stuff for a time. So that really helped with the rebound there. But anyway, point being that your seventh grade teacher is just completely wrong. Mine was just completely wrong. Pre market capitalism caused the Great Depression. The government was necessary to fix it. And that's what everybody still believes. And that's why in 2008, when it was George W. Bush, not Ron Paul, but it was George W. Bush, who, by the way, came after Clinton, who came after Bush and whatever, going back to Eisenhower and Truman and Roosevelt, no one ever got rid of the New Deal. We had the New Deal the whole time. We had the. The biggest national government in the history of the solar system the whole time. But then when the crash of 08 happened, what'd they do? They go, oh my God. The wild excesses of laissez faire free market capitalism caused another crash. Apparently Ron Paul's been the president for eight years, not George W. Bush. And, and so now, of course, we need a bunch of bailouts and we need more inflationary money, more stimulus, more artificially lowered interest rates, and do the whole thing again in order to correct for the last thing. And so we're trapped in this cycle, and it's because we let our government control the money and they took us off of the last vestiges of the gold standard. So there's no limit on what they can do. And as I believe it was Henry Hazlett that said that when it comes to inflation and all the problems that it causes society, not One man in 10,000 can identify the root cause. Right? And so people just get mad. They blame the shop owner for raising prices, they blame the factory owner for downsizing, they blame the candy bar maker for, for adding more wrapping and putting less chocolate in the thing and whatever it is, all the shrinkflation, all the everything when everybody's just trying to cope with the central bank screwing us over, man. And, and that's it. Like, look, you don't have to agree with libertarians on nothing, but you have to agree with Mises about money.
- [71:34]
B
You just have to let me. Okay, right, so let me start there and let me throw this at you because I, you know, I had my libertarian phase. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 17 or so.
- [71:45]
A
Okay, that doesn't count.
- [71:46]
B
Yeah, well, that's. That got me started. That's the origin story, right? I share with a lot of people, I think. And so it was like, like until my mid-20s, I was really obsessed with this stuff. I read Misus, I read Rothbar, I read all that stuff. I read the entire. You ever been to that website, the Friesian? I don't know if it's still up. It's just like, it's like this, all like text, HTML, just libertarian economics website. It's a great resource. And I read literally the entire thing. It must have been like 10,000 pages worth, like if you were to put it on paper. So I was obsessed with this stuff for a while. And Mises is obviously correct. Like that's the thing that stuck with me out of like when I came out of my libertarian phase is he's obviously right about all of this stuff. The question I have is agreeing that we never should have started down this path is not the same thing necessarily as saying that like, now we're here, let's just pull that last block out of the Jenga Tower and see what happens. Happens. Like, I just worry like, you know, we have a situation where like most libertarians, most people who are, are into Austrian school stuff and everything, they talk about the business cycle 2008 comes, and the answer, one that again, intellectually on some level I agree with, but their answer is, you know, the, the, the melon answer. Let them all fall. Let it all, Let the whole, let the free market sort it out. There's bubbles blown up, up, Let them collapse. It's the only way to wash all this inefficiency out of the system. All this resource misallocation. You gotta like, get rid of it or we're never going to get out of this cycle. Which is true. That said, you know, when you look at like the, it's not just the United States, like the entire world economy is based on the US Dollar, you know, and if we were to do something that was so disruptive, like if we were just to decide, you know what, but we're gonna, we're going to give the libertarian wet dream and we're going to cut the federal budget to half a trillion dollars, you know, whatever it is, like just essential functions. I don't think anybody doubts that that would, at least in the short and intermediate term, lead to a massive contraction of the economy. That would make it much. I mean, you know, we're never going to pay back the debt that we've accumulated up to this point. Like doing what we're doing now, we're certainly not going to pay it back then. So doing something like that seems like it would be just tantamount to it to a default on our debt, which would make every bank in the world insolvent, every sovereign wealth fund in the world insolvent like this. I don't know if, like, it's really hard to calculate like the downstream chaotic effects and how that would come back on us. You know, I mean, if you look at just the, the, the, the, the, the really disruptive kind of transformations that were taking place during the Industrial Revolution, like here in the United States, we had our labor wars in the late 18, early 1900s and stuff, but for the most part we were insulated from like the worst of it because we didn't, we at least didn't have to worry about threatening neighbors on our borders. You know, we didn't have to worry about are we going to get invaded. We didn't have like, we, we had for the most part, you know, a labor shortage that kept upward prices on wages for, you know, throughout most of that period of time.
- [75:07]
Over in places where they had more pressures during that period of transition, places like Russia, a lot of other places, they did not come out of it as unscathed as we did. Like, things can go really bad if you just take your hands off the steering wheel and say, you know, we got to just let this thing play out. And so I don't know, like how we would get out of it from where we are now, you know what I'm saying? Like.
- [75:31]
A
I think the choices are, well, look, I mean, we're going to have a giant crash anyway. You have an artificial boom, you're going to have a real correction. You look at 2008, that's where we're headed. It's the same kind of thing. It'll be a little bit different. Just like 08 was different than the dot com bust and that was different than the rock War one bust or whatever. But there's always something.
- [75:51]
And so the correction is coming at that point, I think. Well, going back to what you said about 08, they absolutely should have let them fail because the thing of it is all the actual real assets that have any value, those are going to get distributed by bankruptcy court, right? It's what happens with the bailouts is they just take money from working people and give it to people who are already wealthy so that they don't have to taking responsibility for bad bets that they made. And now it is true. And I remember putting this to Australian economists in the, in the aftermath of that crash. Now look, we're all agreed that this is Alan Greenspan's fault. So like, yes, even the worst bankers on Wall street who had to know what they were doing in making some of these bad bets on these mortgages and, and cutting them up and putting them in these new derivatives and selling them off to some other schmuck and all of this stuff on the, on a game of musical chairs, like a lot of them knew what they were doing, but ultimately they were lower on the chain of events. From what Alan Greenspan was doing by holding the pedal to the floor with the artificially low interest rates, especially in the aftermath of September 11, but even before that.
- [77:00]
And so.
- [77:03]
But the thing of it was, was what was the solution by bailing them all out and keeping them whole? Because it wasn't entirely their fault. All they did was just make the problem, you know, put the problem off and make it last. Now, Mark Thornton agreed with this. I didn't actually get to ask him this in detail, but we, I've talked about this with other economists before that basically the lockdowns of 2020 took the place of a massive crash. We were due for a recession anyway. And then the lockdowns took the place essentially of artificially high interest rates. If you think of Paul Volker's term in late Carter, early Reagan, where Volcker came in and raised interest rates through the roof to force the recession to beat inflation and then start the business cycle over again, the lockdowns. And that was really what happened with the crash of 08, was Ben Bernanke started raising the federal funds rate because, oh, inflation's getting too hot now. We better cool it off. And then the bubble pops. And so we were already due for that with the lockdowns of 20. But then what they do after the lockdowns of 20, they created one third of all the money they've ever created and mostly bailed out all the most powerful corporations first at the expense of other forcing middle class businesses to close. They're keeping all the big guys whole. So you're saying, like, I don't know if we can let the national government take their hand off of our national economic policy. What might become of us then? And I'm saying it can't be worse than letting big business control big government to use it as a weapon against the rest of us the way that they do where we all got to be homeless and they all get a bailout and. Yeah, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are homeless in this country right now.
- [78:47]
B
I mean I, it would have to be, I think a long term, like controlled demolition though, you know, it's like there are coming anyway.
- [78:56]
A
So I guess the question is, what do we do after the next crash? Keep bailing them out?
- [79:01]
B
I think we know the answer to that the next crash because you said it right. Like basically what we did during the 2008 crisis was, you know, the, the, your kid ran up a million dollars in credit card debt. They can't pay it. And so the family estate took that on its books. Right. And it's getting up close to the point now where the family estate's not going to be able to meet its obligations. Like the next step up is the federal government and then just national governments around the world becoming not credit worthy. And we're very quickly approaching that, that, and when we get to that point, you know, when we reach that point, and it's not something that is sort of at least ostensibly part of a plan that we're putting in place to like, you know, a controlled demolition, it's going to be panic in the streets and it's going to be worse than anything that, that we would do if we did it on purpose. For sure, like the disorderly collapse would be worse.
- [79:56]
A
But that's why they cut the budget though. I don't think it'll cause a giant contraction. To cut the budget, you fire all those government workers, all they do is destroy wealth. They regulate people and prevent other people from creating wealth and they otherwise don't produce a damn thing. When they all have hands and minds and can be put to good use and, and their restrictions on everybody else lifted then mean all of that productivity and capital and, and human capital is available for productivity. So I think if you really just slash the empire, we might have, just from that alone, we might have a severe contraction for a moment as there's a readjustment, but not for more than a little while.
- [80:39]
B
But I mean the level of cuts, the amount of cuts that we would have to put in place to start paying down the debt. I mean, I don't know, like what's our annual budget now? Like $4 trillion or something. Like something just insane, you know. And I think if you were to look at like just tax receipts, I mean, I think you're paying for Medicare, Social Security and the military and that's about it, right?
- [81:02]
A
5 trillion is tax receipts every year. Income tax receipts is only 5 trillion. So out of seven, I think is the total that they spend.
- [81:11]
B
Jesus. Yeah. And so I mean, look, like the thing is like I agree with you that all of this creates just a horribly imbalanced, inefficient economy with resource mal allocation misallocations, like all over the place. That only hurts us and drags us down, all that kind of stuff. And that if we could get through the period of disruption that would, you know, be coming. Like if we, if we detonated that whole thing.
- [81:39]
A
Yeah.
- [81:39]
B
Then things would be better for sure. Like I think that that is true. It's similar to like when, you know, I, I actually make this argument myself, so maybe I should be making it here. But. But, you know, people talk about, like, I was talking to somebody about Japan's demographic issues, and they were saying, well, Japan's just going to have no choice but to, you know, open up the floodgates to, like, immigration from the rest of the world because they're just not having enough people to. To fund all of their pensions and all these other kind of things. There's not enough young working people. And my answer to them was like, yeah, look it. It'll probably suck, you know, like, as their pensions go bankrupt, and, like, they're going to have to figure it out. But when it's all over and the dust settles, at least Japanese people will still have Japan, you know, and the question is if you can get through that disruptive cycle without collapsing into fascism or communism or what have you, you know, because, I mean, the thing is, like. Like the issue. One of the issues we have, I think about, like, my wife's generation. She's a little younger than I am, right? Her. Her entire experience of the economy has just been that the whole thing is just like, randomly. People randomly get wiped out, lose their homes, whatever, just every few years, and there's no real predicting it. Like, she gets out of college and the 2008 crisis happens. They all go looking for her, and her classmates go looking for work. And they're not only competing with each other, they're competing with, like, guys with 20 years of experience who just got laid off, you know, during the financial crisis. They start to get back on their feet around, you know, the late 2000 and tens and covet happens. And so, like, when you. When people feel that level of vulnerability, you know, and that level of randomness in their lives as they see it. And then when you add on top of that, the fact that, you know, our. Just our family and community structures and all the different little sinews, like churches and local organizations and stuff, have really just kind of disintegrated over the past 50 or 60 years. That just adds to the feeling of, like, vulnerability that if something goes wrong here, if anything goes wrong, if I'm the one who gets laid off, I really don't know what I'm gonna do, you know, and. And I don't. And, like, when you put people in that situation, man, they're gonna vote for Bernie Sanders. They're not gonna vote for Ron Paul, you know, and that's like a really tough obstacle. And I think it's a question like, libertarians have to like really confront, you know.
- [84:05]
A
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, and yeah, and we're, we're the best to do it. Bernie Sanders ain't gonna get you in nothing but trouble. But I understand that. Look, I know real ass right wingers who voted for Bernie Sanders because somebody has to pay this bill. Now if, if this person voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, was she gonna actually somehow make healthcare affordable in the country? No, neither's Bernie Sanders. But he's gonna make the government pick up the tab overall. And hey, if you got a sick old lady, then you got to do what you got to do, right? So this is why, as Misa said, the middle of the road leads to socialism. The more they intervene, the higher prices get, the more people need them to pay their way when it's their damn.
- [84:55]
B
Fault in the first place. It makes people. It also makes the population much easier to control politically. Sure. You know, I mean, you look at something like Covid with, with them closing public schools, closing churches, and if you were to go back and try that in the 30s or 40s or 50s, you would not have been able to get away with it. Like, go, go tell the Catholics in like Hell's Kitchen that they can't go to mass on Sundays in 1932. Good luck with that. But today it's like, dude, like, I can't lose my job. Like, I cannot lose my job like I am if that happens. Whereas back then, it just wasn't like that, you know, I mean, it was like there was just, there was more opportunity, there was less competition. Prices were, were lower relative to what people need. I mean, people would work. You know, we all know the anecdote kind of story, like just working for the summer to pay your college tuition. You know, paying five, ten bucks a month for your portion of your health care and all that, you know, kind of thing. And so it was just, they were like, the stakes were just much lower for people a lot of the times, you know, Whereas like today, the stakes for people just seem total.
- [86:00]
A
I mean, there's a really good article that was going around last week. I sent it to Bob Murphy because I was hoping that Bob Murphy, who's another Austrian economist, would do a review and comment on it. And this guy was, you know, he was no Austrian or he was maybe a center left liberal or something. He was just talking about, oh, it was the poverty line. Did you see this was the article about the poverty line was measured at $20,000.
- [86:22]
B
Dude, I just read three times the.
- [86:24]
A
Cost of what it takes to feed your Family.
- [86:26]
B
Yeah.
- [86:27]
A
And he goes, yeah, but child care then, first of all, wasn't even necessary at all. Or if it was, it only cost this much, and transportation for a car cost this much and gas costs this much. So your actual ability to go to work this and that, once you go through all of that and this is. Can't really be right. I'm not feeling this. But he says, according to that same calculation, if you adjust it, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year is what it takes to really get by in a major city in America these days and to be able to pay all of these costs. And he goes and he shows and he breaks down, especially because of childcare and how, you know, people will. Their wife will get a job and make $50,000 a year and pay $36,000 a year in child care, but just because they really have to have that margin is just enough so that now they can pay their property taxes and live in a house instead of an apartment or whatever it is, is absolutely necessary. But then at the cost of all that time actually mothering their child, which is, you know, priceless, but it becomes the necessity and all that. So the. The way that this guy calculated it, you could really see, and this is why, and it's the height of irony. It just murders me to hear. Ma', am, Dami. And all of these damn Democrats talking about, oh, the affordability crisis. Oh, they're going to lick price inflation for us, huh? We're gonna. The. The socialists are going to give us hard money. No, they're just going to give us everything for free with government money. And where's the government get the money? They take it from us and keep a bunch for themselves and then give us a little bit of our own money back.
- [88:00]
B
Oh, wow.
- [88:01]
A
Thank you so much, ma'. Am.
- [88:02]
B
Danny.
- [88:02]
A
Oh, the now. And, and just Robbie Bernstein said this on the Dave. Dave Smith and Robbie Show. Part of the problem the other day about how. Damn it, a year ago, everyone was calling it inflation. Now it's, oh, the affordability crisis. And so we're not talking about what it is, inflation, which is caused by the government expanding the money supply. You bastards. But anyway, listen, let's do some super chats and get the hell out of here.
- [88:30]
Darn you, Daryl Cooper. Because Palantir was a CIA thing and you had dinner with that guy.
- [88:36]
B
I did. So what the hell are you telling me? Whoever that was. I didn't say that question. Are you telling me you would not have gone to that dinner? You're full of you would have. It was interesting. Like, you go there if, like, if. If I were in, like, the 1930s and I had a chance to go to dinner with Stalin, I'd go, like, who wouldn't want to sit in on. Be a fly. Fly on the wall, anything like that? So, yeah. And also it gave me a chance to go look Neil Ferguson directly in the eye, face to face, and give him a chance to talk the. That he talked about me online.
- [89:07]
A
Oh, he looked at his shoes and.
- [89:08]
B
Shrugged and smiled and like, wandered off like a. Like a beta chimp.
- [89:13]
A
Oh, man, I humiliated that guy's wife in front of a giant auditorium of people one time. It was so funny. He's such a punk. Dude. Hey. So William wonders, did Purdue care about opioid harm? And I'm not sure if that rhetorical type question is for you or for me. And the point being that, well, we have prohibition and this massive scheduling of doctor prescriptions for opioids now, and yet Purdue was allowed to get away with killing all these people for money with their giant OxyContin crisis, which was all under the color of legality and whatever until they re clamped back down on it. So maybe he's saying to you, well, under prohibition, the companies allowed to operate in the market are still horrible bastards. Or maybe he's saying to me that if you legalize it even more, then the companies are just going to ruthlessly exploit people and feed them as much drugs as. As they can. I wouldn't necessarily dispute that, but I would just say it would have to be up to everybody else to push back on that. Look, I've never done opiates in my life, other than when I was in the hospital because I broke my jaw on a gigantic lean detail in 1997. For just a minute, I was on some Demerol. But otherwise, I don't do that. And I'll tell you why. It ain't because they told me that drugs are immoral to use. It was that they told me, and I'm pretty sure this was seventh grade health science class, that what happens is part of your brain in your brain stem, controls your breathing and your heart rate, and opioids affect that. And so you will suffocate to death and die. Your heart will stop, your breathing will stop, and you'll no longer exist. So you can smoke pot from now until next Thursday, and that's not going to happen to you. But if you don't take opioids, if you especially shoot them into your veins, you might die. So Guess what? Don't do that. And that was a very convincing argument. And I have made that argument to others before, too, that, like, hey, that can make you stop breathing, you know, you need to breathe.
- [91:18]
B
Yeah, look what happened to George Floyd.
- [91:21]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [91:22]
B
Little bit of a boot on the neck. I think the author's name, Sam Quinones. His book Dreamland, about the opioid cris this. It's a great book. So I was listening to an interview with him one time, and he was talking about. He was like, working for the New York Times, I think it was at the time, one of the major, major papers. And so he calls up this factory in China where supposedly, like, they're making fentanyl that comes to the United States, and he has, like, this whole, like, cover story because he thinks he's going to have to, like, infiltrate and find a way to get in. And he just kind of asked, can I come? They're like, yeah, come on over. And he's like, okay. And so he gets there and he goes to the factory and it's like right there on Main street in Shanghai or wherever the hell it was. And they're like, oh, yeah. So over there is where we make the fentanyl and da da, da, da, da, da. Just laid the whole thing out for him, knowing he was in New York Times or like, that's how out in the open that is, right? And so, like that. I mean, that by itself really puts the lie to the idea that this drug boat nonsense is really about the drugs. I mean, come on, you know, if something is happening like that out in the open on a scale that dwarfs anything that's coming out of Venezuela and, you know, in service of distributing a drug that's infinitely worse for people than cocaine could ever be, you know, really kind of puts the light of that. But that just blew me away, like how out in the open it was. I mean, I. Yeah.
- [92:52]
Real quick, I want to say something about that. The last commenter also, I mean, look, my experience.
- [93:01]
Going to that Teal dinner, there was a bunch of other, like, people you've heard of who were there, and it was interesting to listen to all of them talk. All of them think we're going to war with China. Like, war, war with China. Like, all these billionaires, all these people, they're a hundred percent convinced we're going to war with China, like in the next couple years. By the way.
- [93:18]
A
The.
- [93:19]
B
You know, I was there, I guess I don't know how Teal heard about me. And he got turned on him to me somehow or another. And they were trying to get me to like come out and go to one of these dinners, like for a long time, for a few years. And I finally went to this one and, and you know, I went there and went to the dinner and confronted Neil Ferguson and didn't go anywhere. And that was it. I think I went. And was that when I, yeah, I think I, I think I went and hung out with you and Dave Smith actually after that, because I think it was on that same trip that we were there. So that was like the extent of it. And I, I talk about that in public because it's whatever to me. But you're, you got these people who are like, so Daryl, he went to a Teal dinner, huh?
- [94:01]
A
So you took $50 million in soldiers.
- [94:07]
B
Like it kind of gets under my skin when like people, they, they draw the line between Teal and JD Vance because Teal likes Vance. A lot of the tech guys, they all like Vance. That they, they, they take the fact that they get along and that they think the same on a lot of issues and automatically think that that means like they're puppeteering somebody. And it's not always that, you know, sometimes it's just, you know, a lot of these tech guys.
- [94:35]
People just don't believe me when I, when, when they, when they, I, when I say this. But you know, they, they assume that like everything, if you're a billionaire and you're getting involved in politics at all in any way whatsoever, it's because you're trying to steer the political system to favor your business and give you more money and all that. And for sure, like that happens, no doubt about it. But a lot of times these guys do it for the same reason that you or I or anybody else would do it. And a lot of these tech guys are like these half autistic dweebs who are hyper focused on like efficiency and things being done just the right way and all of that. And they're looking at, especially during the Biden administration with this guy doddering around like an old fool and they're just like, we're, this is crazy. We can't watch this anymore. And we're sort of like, and they've been around long enough now and they've been billionaires long enough. You know, if you're 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg, it's a little bit hard to like walk into the White House and tell the President what he should start doing when you're 45 or whatever. Year old Mark Zuckerberg you feel a little more comfortable doing it. You know, so a lot of these guys are just feeling their oats for the first time. And a lot of it really does have to do with just them looking and being horrified at what they're watching. You know, the people who are running the government and, and just really fearing, you know, whether. And this may have to do with their own business interests, but also like, just again, these are still Americans, most of them. You know, they look at it and they're like, China, China is going to absolutely eat our lunch. I mean they're really.
- [96:02]
A
Thing is, nobody tried to buy you out at that dinner.
- [96:06]
B
They just, you know how, you know, you know how, you know they didn't. You know how you know Daryl is not a Peter Thiel op is if I was like, I would be much better promoted. Like my promotion is so terrible. Like so amateur garbage trash almost non existent. Anybody networks, you know it immediately they're pushed you in every YouTube algorithm. They're like brought to you immediately, immediately. So. So no, unfortunately he didn't give me any of those billions.
- [96:35]
A
All right, hey, let's knock some of these out. This guy donated very nicely and said, hey, volunteer firemen are awesome. They don't count as government employees. Word to the volunteer firemen, you guys are doing great. Other than that, he's looking forward to episode two of Enemy. He says, so get on it. That's good. I'm paging down. I'm paging down, Daryl. Spotify says, I listened to 5380 minutes of martyr made this year and I switched to your sub stack at the start of Enemy. So wow, that's pretty good. But that reminds me of something important that I gotta say, which is that my web guy Harley from Expand Designs informed me that over at Spotify, they are so pissed off at us, Daryl, and they accuse us, and maybe especially explicitly me of censorship and censoring all the comments. I said, I've never logged into Spotify comments in my life. I have no control over that whatsoever. I've never seen any Spotify comments in my life. And I am assured that this is just an automatic thing. It's just that you kooks won't stop ranting about the Jews. And so of course you're on automatic censor. But I would never censor you. I would publish all of your insane ravings, of course, if it was up to me.
- [97:49]
B
So.
- [97:49]
A
But, but, but Harley said there are people on there who are like, I can't believe I supported Scott Horton for all these years and he'd betray me like this? Like. Ah, man, don't take it personal, bro. It's the computer. God. I'm not in charge of that. I'm just little old Francis E. Deck over here, babe. I'm just trying to get by something about Pat Buchanan. He was really right about everything. Almost said y antiwar.com Pat, if you really want to know how right he was. I used to be legalized drugs, but since COVID I see what big pharma is capable of, I don't think I want to make or let them sell meth and heroin, whether it's Venezuelans or Walgreens. Happy to be wrong. I mean, yeah, understandable. The. The problem is with checks and balances. And as you were saying about all the zombies on the street, the tragedy of the commons. You have the government legalized camping and vagrancy outside at the same time. They legalize being a junkie. Well, that, that's. In fact, one of the guys I really like at Reason magazine is a guy named Zack Weissmuller, and he did a really good study about why Portland was such a disaster. They legalized drugs, but they also legalized total vagrancy and all that all at the same time. And then also right as Covid hit and right is just. It was just the perfect storm of catastrophe. They really did not do it right. But he made a good argument that they might have if they had done it a bit differently.
- [99:14]
B
Kind of describing, like you're kind of describing. One of my main problems with the whole decriminalization thing in general is that, like, if you had a right wing libertarian government in charge, who was going to legalize drugs, but yoke up anybody that is, you know, lolling around on the sidewalk, high on fentanyl and throw them in the patty wagon. I think a lot of people could deal with that. But what we're. You're not going to have like a full on right wing libertarian government. And so what you end up having is what you just said. Okay, we legalized drugs. We did this libertarian thing. Oh, we're not going to arrest criminals or drug. Are you kidding? Can't do that. Like, we're not even arresting people for shoplifting at Walgreens.
- [99:55]
A
Like, come on now, you could be a junkie on the sidewalk and you can steal whatever you want from the store and. Yeah. God. All right, so this guy says, back to the green and blue on attacks from Afghanistan and one came home or two came home. We have two CIA death squad Guys who. One of whom shot a bunch of cops after getting pulled over. That video was suppressed, but it's now out. And then we have the assassination of the young lady from the National Guard in Washington and her buddy, who is still in critical condition but was able to give a thumbs up. I read. So he's living, but. So this guy asked how many were killed in these green on blue attacks during the war? That is a good question. And now that you ask it, I don't think I know the answer to that. I wrote a book about this, and I wrote a lot about the green on blue attacks. I don't remember if I ever knew a total or estimated total on those. I'm sorry. I do know that it was so pervasive. It was because they made it so clear that such a huge part of the policies. We got to build up this army, train up this army to replace us. So the Taliban said, all right, well, we'll just infiltrate guys into the army and shoot them up and just completely destroy confidence. Between the trainers.
- [101:13]
B
Stories I've heard from, from my buddies who were over there, like, they talk. They would talk about how, like, their translator that would go out with them, they would have to feed him, like, false information about where they were going and stuff because he would rat him out. He would, like. They knew he was doing it. They couldn't get rid of him, though. And they just had to operate like that all the time. Yeah, it was completely crazy. And the fact that, like, that guy even made it over 150, according to.
- [101:39]
A
Gemini AI crap here.
- [101:41]
B
One of the.
- [101:44]
I can't remember where I read it, but anyway, they were talking about the evacuation in 2021 and how.
- [101:53]
You know, basically what happened. Like, the people that got on those planes was basically like, we didn't. We. It was so chaotic that we weren't able to, like, find and get our hands on, like, the actual, like, you know, Kabul housewife who was working at a typist in our embassy or whatever. And we didn't know where to find her or like, where her family, whatever. But Biden just sort of. The Biden administration just kind of decided, well, we can't have all these planes just be empty. So just round people up like anybody wants to go. And so you have these pictures from inside these evacuation planes, and it's like nothing but dudes aged 18 to 40. I'm like, are we. Are these really the most vulnerable, the people that we need to be bringing over?
- [102:34]
A
Right?
- [102:34]
B
And so far, we found out a few times the Hard way. Apparently not.
- [102:38]
A
Yeah, well, there's 75 to 77,000 people that they brought over here. And I'm sorry, I'm not sure how many of them, but you know what? I interviewed this great. I was trying to reach him, but I couldn't find. I couldn't get a hold of them. But this great Australian journalist named Andrew Quilty, I had interviewed him repeatedly from Afghanistan back then about the CIA death squads, and I did an interview with him right after the withdrawal about the importation of these death squads to the United States. So you can go back and listen to that interview. And I joke in there that soon these people will be our police. They'll all get government jobs and that'll be who's pulling you over. Our. Our, you know, Taji death squad veterans of the Afghan war. And so I'm sorry, I. I'll see if I can get that number.
- [103:27]
For you. Roost 632 for next week. And. And I'm gonna. I'll be able to get a hold of Quilty by then, I'm pretty sure.
- [103:36]
And so. Yeah, I don't care about that stuff. What do we got here? Page down a little bit more and tell Scott and Daryl to keep rocking it and sticking it to the man. Agreed.
- [103:49]
B
I don't know. According to some of the commenters, I am the man, so.
- [103:53]
A
Okay, good.
- [103:54]
B
Myself.
- [103:55]
A
Yeah, there you go. Punch yourself in the black eye there, man. All right, that's good. We're good. It's good to talk to you, man. This was fun.
- [104:04]
B
Yeah. Everyone sticking with us for this extra long episode, Everybody.
- [104:08]
A
Yeah, it was cool. Everybody go sign up for my academy and buy my books for your loved ones for Christmas and we'll see you next week.
- [104:18]
This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked.