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A
Tonight, me and Daryl will do a.
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Show again, All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break.
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Humans 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. This is Provoked. All right, you guys, welcome back to the show. You know, from last week. I'm Scott East, Daryl the great martyr maid, historian and podcaster. And I do a lot of things. I run the Scott Horton Academy and Libertarian Institute and associated with Antiwar.com and I wrote some books. Oh, and I do a show, the Scott Horton Show. Tonight we're going to talk about the threat of war with Iran again, more, which we've already talked about, but it remains a real possibility here. And all the latest news is that more and more Navy ships are arriving in the region all the time. And Trump is threatening war and issuing ultimatums. So why don't you take it from there, Darrell, Tell us what the hell is the latest here?
- [01:25]
B
So if we're not going to war with Iran, then there's a whole lot of wasted fuel and other military resources going into piling up, you know, a stockpile of weapons to make it look like we are. There is a lot of, a lot of equipment, a lot of ships that are either there now or headed over there. Last I heard, there were, there were six destroyers in the region, if you count the two in the East Med off of Israel, which, you know, their capabilities to participate are a little bit limited. They could fire Tomahawks, you know, they would go far enough, but that's a very limited, even with the Tomahawks. But otherwise there's, there's four destroyers there with a carrier strike group. So, you know, it's got three of those, three of those destroyers and probably two submarines. We're not really sure. You're never really sure with subs. And I think, like, you know, a lot of people aren't really sure, like, necessarily what that means. They go online and you hear that, you know, there's however many, you know, 600 VLS cells, vertical launch system cells on that many destroyers or something, you think, wow, that's a lot of missiles. But, you know, when you send a destroyer out to sea, it's primarily an air defense platform. And Most of those VLS cells is 128 on a, on a destroyer. Those are, those are just your vertical launch cells. They're on the deck and back aft. There's, you know, these things that are flat on the ground and you have these lids that pop open, you've probably seen the videos and the missiles go up and out. They're not these box launchers that are like up on top deck and out of the 128 VLS cells, you know, you gotta put all your air defense missiles, which means your SM2s, SM3s, depending on what the mission of the ship is, your ESSMs for short range stuff, your vertical launch torpedo systems. Usually there's only about eight of those, but in general, when we send a destroyer out to sea, it's got 32 tomahawks on it, which sounds like a lot, but you know, I ask everybody to remember back when, during the first Trump administration when he hit that Syrian airfield after they allegedly used chemical weapons, we hit that airfield with 80 something Tomahawk missiles and it was operational again like a week and a half later. So these are not like gigantic devastating weapons. They're, you know, Tomahawks are subsonic, they're very slow, they're very big in terms of radar cross section. You don't need like a super advanced air defense radar to track them and shoot them down if that's what you want to do. What's great about them is that they're long range. You know, if we were to fire a whole bunch of Tomahawks like at Russia or China, they'd probably shoot them all down. You can shoot infinite number of Tomahawks at Iraq or Syria though, and not have that problem. So they're, they're great weapons for that. And the fact that that's where our focus has been, you know, not on great power conflict, but on fighting these brush fire wars and these, these wars of choice against opponents that really can't fight back in a lot of ways. It's only been in the last few years that we've even begun to really develop offensive weapons that compare with a lot of other countries out there. Like you know, our anti ship missiles for example, like we've got some decent ones that are being rolled out now, but for a long time, you know, our anti ship missile was a harpoon. Most, most of our, put it this way, like most of our, if you have a, a destroyer, a cruiser out to sea and you want to blow up a ship up until recently, like they've, they've got the, the Navy strike missile now on some of the ships, but you'd have to get within range of your 5 inch gun and blow it up with your gun because they just didn't have any anti ship missiles and the ones that we did have on some platforms, they're harpoons, you know, very big, slow moving, decent sized warhead on it but you know, not an advanced missile, not like some of these French and, and Chinese and Russian ones that you see. And so we've suffered for that reason because you know our primary, our primary strike weapon out to sea has been the F18s on the carrier. You know the destroyers defend the carrier. They don't need anti ship missiles or anything because we send F18s out 200 miles to pick it and anything that they decide is a threat, you know, they, they can hit. So, so you figure if you've got, let's, you know, I saw somewhere else that there's two more destroyers headed to the region. We don't know if they're going to be in the East Med off Israel support helping with air defense, you know, specifically or if they're going to join the others in the Gulf of Oman and that whole region over there and actually participate, you know, in, in, in striking a larger area of Iran. But you know, let's say they do get up to eight and all eight are involved at that point you're talking about two hundred and forty Tomahawk missiles. When a ship runs out of missiles, like if it doesn't have any more Tomahawks, that ship doesn't just you know, go get like a, you know, there's no like at sea resupply thing where they come over and give you new missiles. You got to go into a port. I think we got a magazine in Greece but I don't know how much they actually carry there because we haven't had ships going out and just you know, multiple ships just completely unloading all of their, their Tomahawk missiles or anything. And so I don't know how many are even there. I imagine some are pre staged if we're really going to attack but you know they have to go back there. It's a multi day operation with cranes like an industrial operations, cranes and hard hats. These are huge missiles that you got to lower. I mean and so it's a big operation. It's not as if like it's something you can turn around real quickly. You fire those off, it's going to be a week before you get your ships back on station. And that's if they have all the missiles that you need to replenish those ships there in Greece, which they probably don't because it just, if they do it's a, it's a thing in preparation for this conflict because we wouldn't normally on the carrier, you know, a carrier, I don't know what the one that's over there now has, it may be mission specific, but in general they go out with 48, with four squadrons of, of 12F A18s or Super, or either Hornets or Super Hornets each. And so you got 48 F18 strike aircraft on a carrier. Now each of those F18s is capable of carrying up to four AGM 84 standoff land attack missiles, which is just basically a modified Harpoon, the one I just described as an anti ship missile. You know, this is another cruise missile that's big, huge radar cross section, very easy to shoot down for even a relative primitive air defense system, assuming it's not getting, you know, jammed to hell by effective electronic warfare and stuff. And you know, after at least what they're, what they're saying publicly about our success in that area with Venezuela, you know, who knows, like, you know, we, we've never really, we've never really tested in the field and seen like, you know, like, like the kind of VW that's really necessary to overcome, you know, the, the, the abilities of say an S300 or something, which is Iran's, you know, sort of, they have the most of the, like of their advanced air defense systems. The S300 I think is the one they have the most of. Supposedly Russia delivered them some S400 systems after the 12 Day War. And so they've got some of those now those are very advanced systems for shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles. And so you know, each of those F18s again, which typically is 48 of them on, 48 of them on a carrier, can carry up to four of those modified harpoons, AGM84s, but they're never going to do that. You're not going to send a pilot out there with four strike missiles and nothing to defend himself with if another interceptor fighter comes up and you know, is in the air. So, and they wouldn't, the carrier wouldn't carry that many. They wouldn't carry enough for all 48 of those to, you know, to go out with just a full loadout of, of the strike missiles. And so, you know, it's pretty limited in terms of like even a big art model like that, like it can do a lot of damage, no doubt. And if we're intent on doing things like you know, hitting central Tehran and taking out defense buildings and taking out their leadership and then, you know, that's a, that's a lot of weapons but if you're actually talking about degrading their military capability, you just need a lot more than that. I mean, you need a lot more. And I know we've got B52s, we've got things coming out of Diego Garcia and things like that, but again, all of those things, including, by the way, if we're going to use the F18s, I think the, I think the standoff land attack missiles, last I checked there, the standard variant has a max range of 155 nautical miles. Most of your Iranian air defense systems are probably, well, no, I should say about, about as far as we know or estimate that they have probably about half of their Systems can shoot 100 over. Over 155 nautical miles and half or shorter. But you got to figure like, depending on, you know, unless you're going to target something directly on the coast, you know, a port or some missile battery that's there or something, if you want to target anything inland, you've got to get that F18 probably within range of their air defense systems. And while, you know, tracking and shooting down a B2 is really tough, like, you know, the most advanced Russian systems would probably have trouble with that. Some of the best attack missiles that are out there can be difficult to track and shoot down. Ballistic missiles by themselves are hard to track and shoot down. But cruise missiles, you know, if you're, or rather, but, but aircraft like F18s, anybody can shoot those down and like, so if you really want to do anything and, and again, the caveat on this is maybe we have some Vonderven, you know, electronic warfare capabilities now that just make their air defenses all completely irrelevant. That's possible. But if it's not the case, you know, if they do start, start, you know, lighting up our planes and firing missiles at them, we're going to lose some planes, we're going to lose some pilots, you know, and I, I really hope that at the level of, you know, people who are providing Trump with information, they're, they're letting him know that, you know, that that is a serious possibility. And so especially now that, you know, we, we know that the, the Russians have delivered some S400 systems because those are highly capable systems. And so, you know, in order for your F18s, like, you got to think about it like this, like, you know, F18s, if you want them to, you're not going to send an F18, you know, to fly 500 miles off the carrier. Like it's too far. Like, you can't, you can't you know, perform a effective mission that way the carrier is going to have to get closer if you're going to fly that thing like toward their coast and into the point where its missiles could actually reach inland and hit, hit some of the inland sites. Which means moving all of those ships, you know, the carrier itself, but also its defense destroyers like moving them in closer within range of Iran's anti ship missiles. And everybody talks about, you know, hypersonics and stuff and you know, those are, those are very cool looking weapons like from what we've seen in Ukraine and everything. And the capabilities are real. We don't really know what their effectiveness is at hitting moving targets in, in the ocean, you know, at very long range. You know, one of the things, for example, that we, you know, you learn ballistic missile defense stuff, which is the, the field I used to work in for a long time at the dod, is that in a lot of ways like ballistic missiles, they're hard to shoot down even for, even for us. Like they're tough to shoot down. Like when we do tests, you know, we know that it's coming from this direction at this time of launch on this trajectory and we're placing our ship to test this miss, you know, to test the shoot down at exactly the right spot to hit it. And when it's just the per, like we don't have any of those advantages and you have to shoot down a bunch of them. Right. You know, and not just one when you're not doing a test. And so that's really, really hard to do effectively. And but you know, the trump card on it is that an aircraft carrier is super fast and it takes a long time for that ballistic missile to get out to it and it can just kind of get out of the way as long as, you know it's coming. And so we don't know necessarily about the hypersonics and anti ship ballistic missile capabilities but we know a lot about, you know, the cruise missile anti ship capabilities that they have and they're substantial because again for a long time and even to this day, like we by far do not have anywhere close to the best anti ship missiles out there. The best anti ship missiles out there have been Russian, Chinese and French for a long time and, and Iran has those missiles like these are very serious anti ship missiles that they have. And so it's very dangerous. It, you know, it, it almost seems to me, and I don't want to think this because you know, I probably know people out on those ships. I was looking at the Ships that are deployed out there right now and I've been on most of them. You know, when I was working for the DoD, I would go out to ships and train their crews and stuff. I've been on most of them that are out there and I probably know people that are on them now and it really does like, it, it looks to me like we're sort of, we're putting these ships out there. If you look at like the, the rhetoric that's coming out of like top Israeli ministry defense officials and others in the cabinet and you look at all of the moves that are being made sort of very openly, you know, it was, I, I, I don't, I can't remember what media outlet it was just a little while ago today talking about, you know, we may strike as soon as Sunday. And like really putting it out there like this is coming, this is coming, this is coming. And you know, we're doing that while we have ships within range of those Iranian anti ship missiles. I mean they could launch first. And it almost seems like we're trying to bait them into doing it, you know, because if they, look, it doesn't matter what we did to lead up to it. It might matter to you and me and whatever, but to the American people, if they hit our carrier, it's over. I mean, we're going to real deal war if that happens. You know, and, and, and as it stands right now though, I mean, you know, on one level, like Trump obviously doesn't care much what the, the, you know, he cares a lot more about what Israeli voters seem to think than Americans when it comes to this issue because Americans have been firmly against it from the beginning. A lot of people voted for him on that basis to keep us out of stuff like this. And he does not seem to care. But you know, I do think that he has just maybe from an ego standpoint, like he does have some hesitancy about engaging in anything that, that might not be a quick, easy win. You know, the other thing too is those Iranian air defense systems, like, let's say we do find, like we just, you know, through intelligence sources or whatever else, we know exactly where those S4 hundreds are and we just hit them right off the bat. We, you know, and we hit their S300 systems or, or our electronic warfare, you know, is able to shut down most of their air defense. That sounds like, okay, great, maybe it'll be easy. But the other side of that is Iran may look at it and say, okay, now we just have nothing else to do except for launch every ballistic missile we have at important targets, you know, American and Israeli targets. Because it's like our only thing, this is our only way right now to really hopefully get them to back down. And they did back down last time. And so, you know, it might not, it might escalate things even more if we are successful in shutting down their air defense. It's hard to say, you know, the, the, the, the, the thing that concerns me is just knowing how limited the firepower that we have over there actually is. And again, it's a lot, but it's not a lot in the context of a war with Iran. You have to look at it and say, well, what, what would be the goal then? Like, what is it we're actually trying to achieve if we're gonna go do this? Because having another 12 day war where Israel gets a bunch of their city blocks blown up by ballistic missiles and it all just kind of ends in a stalemate or whatever, like nobody really wants to do that. If we're going to get into this, it's going to be a purpose to it, I imagine. And the only way that that kind of firepower, that limited amount of firepower that we have on station over there is going to affect anything like regime change or Syria is if they start really taking out like the highest government officials. And at that point, man, like, you know, and if the Iranians are thinking that way and if the war starts to go that way, where, you know, they just hit the President, they just try, they just hit where they thought the Ayatollah was, you know, whatever. I mean, they're, they're not going to, there's not going to be any more of this sort of telegraph de escalatory stuff like they did at the end of the 12 day war after we hit the nuke sites, they're going to, you know, they're going to decide that the only move they have is to go down fighting. And you know, and if you, if you, if you know a little bit about the Shiite mentality, specifically the Shiite mentality, that, that means a lot, that means something to them, you know, that idea of going down fighting. And so, you know, we're all hoping it doesn't come to that. I was watching the news today because, you know, like Trump's other military escalations in various parts of the world always seem to come on Friday after the markets closed, so that it doesn't, you know, cra crater the stock market the next morning gives them a few days to work, but nothing's happened so far. I'm grateful for that and I really hope that it doesn't. I know we've got allies over there that, you know, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman that are very much trying to warn us off of that. Mainly because, not because they're buddies with Iran now, but because they mainly think that, you know, Iran's wings have been clipped to the point where they're not a massive threat to the region right now or to them. And so they, they, they just think this would be inviting the potential for chaos when it's not necessary. And hopefully they're able to, to prevail on, on Trump and, and get this thing called off because it does look like we're heading in the direction of war.
- [18:54]
A
Well, I'll tell you, man, it, it should be noted for people who may be brand new, maybe young, maybe only just started paying attention to politics, maybe, you know, they get all their news from AM radio or Fox and they don't know. But it would be fair if people assumed, Darryl, that if America was going to war with Iran, then it must be because we have to. I mean, they must have done something. Don't tell me that no new wars. Trump is going to start a war for no reason. And yet Marco Rubio told the Senate that, well, look, if we tell them to stop having drones that can strike our allies in the region and they don't give up those drones, well, then we could attack in preemptive self defense.
- [19:43]
B
Yeah, which, Right. Which is, which just means you're not allowed to defend yourself. That's all that means. I mean, you know, and it, this is one of the things that really concerns me about how these sort of public negotiations have played out. You know, the Twitter negotiator, true social negotiations that have been going on is that they keep on moving the goalpost of what's expected of Iran. You know, first it's a nuclear weapons program, then it's just uranium enrichment in general, then it's no long range ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. Then it's no ballistic missiles, period. And now they're talking about drones. And what they're really saying after, you know, in June of last year, Israel launched a surprise attack targeting high government officials. You know, and, and a war that was really, you know, intended to topple the regime if they were able to pull it off, did that surprise attack while Iran was engaged in good faith negotiations. And now you're telling them that Israel can do that whenever it wants. And our conditions are that you are not allowed to defend yourself or else we join in too. That's, that's an Austria to Serbia 1914 kind of ultimatum. It's something that is designed for them to reject. And then we can say, oh, they rejected a deal. And you know, so what else can we do? It's not designed for them. I mean, no Iranian government, if, if the Ayatollah said, okay, we're getting rid of all our drones, all our ballistic missiles, all this stuff, but the IRGC would get rid of, I mean, there's no government leader in the world anywhere that could, that could submit to those kind of demands. They would just lose all legitimacy and fall, the regime would fall apart just like that. And so by the way, you know.
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A
I saw, I think representing the center left, you know, Obamaite, Clintonite type consensus, Michael McFaul, Obama's former ambassador to Russia, tweeted out today that a nuclear deal now would ruin our chance at regime change. So the whole idea that this is about the reason Iran is dangerous is because of their nuclear program gets turned right upside down on the eve of war. That if we could solve the question of the nuclear program with diplomacy, well, that would ruin our opportunity to have a war. Right? Just like John Bolton caught on that APAC phone call in 2007 saying we were trying to bully them out of the npt, we wanted them to withdraw from the npt, kick the IAEA inspectors out, and that would leave us in a stronger position to, to start a war.
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B
I mean, it shows you, it shows you the degree to which our regional policy is just completely dictated by Tel Aviv, you know, because just from an American standpoint, if it's true that we're just worried about them not posing a threat to us and, you know, and our allies and so forth, I mean, the nuclear deal that Obama signed was a, was a good deal for America. You know, if, if, if the idea is like removing a threat to the United States and making sure it doesn't. That was already done. And like, if you're, if your policy is being written in Tel Aviv, though, I mean, that's not a good deal. You know, this is something that leaves Iran as a strong and prosperous state that can oppose your regional goals. You know, maybe not with nuclear weapons, but, you know, Israel is probably the one country in the world I could see using nuclear weapons on a non nuclear state, you know, in a, what would have been a conventional war. If anybody would, they would. But, but there are, you know, there's still going to be some hesitancy even, even with the Israelis to escalating to that point, you know, nuking Tehran or something like that. And so, you know, in a, in a straight conventional war where it's ballistic missiles and you know, maybe aircraft, things like that, I mean, we saw what happened in June of last year. You know, the Israelis started it, they got out to a big lead right at the beginning, did a ton of damage, killed a ton of people, really like did a, did a, did a great job. You know, one of the, one of the things that I was reading an article about this, actually it was a, it was a Russian translated article. It was talking about how one of the lessons learned from, for the Iranians from the 12 Day War was the Israelis did a really good job like disrupting their intra governmental communications. And they have like a very, very top down hierarchical system where people below don't make decisions without getting the okay from the person above. It's just, you know, this is all the Middle Eastern countries with the exception of Israel. This has always been one of their biggest limiting factors is everybody below is afraid to do anything without the person above them telling them specifically to do it and covering them for it. And like, you know, the fact that we're not like, like the US is not like that at all. Like we give our on site commanders a huge amount of leeway to make decisions as, as conditions emerge and it's one of our biggest strengths. But if you don't have that and then they disrupt your command communications channels, you just sort of paralyzed. And we saw that in the 12 Day War. For the first day or two, the Iran, Iran, there was no real response, there was no nothing. It was because the government was just paralyzed and supposedly they've done a lot to try to fix that, you know, and we'll see how that plays out in real life if, if it comes to it. But even then with the Israelis basically having free reign for the first couple days and then going toe to toe, you know, after 12 days, the Israelis were tapping out, you know, and it wasn't because Israel was about to be destroyed. It was just because they realized even with the Americans and the Jordanians and you know, helping us defend these things, defend against these missiles, we're, we can't get them to stop, you know, and, and so it's a, you know, basically when they tapped out, when they called up Trump and said get us out of this, which is what that nuclear strike really was, it was just a way for us to say, okay, we did the big thing, you know, we hit their nuclear site now we can all go home happy and the Iranians even can go home happy saying that they outlasted, you know, the, the Zionist empire or whatever. You know, that was, that was a, that was clearly a means, like a sim, a symbolic strike. I mean, you see it now because they're all admitting now that it, you know, it didn't accomplish what he said.
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A
Look, the, despite all the hype, Darryl, the Ayatollah is an extremely conservative guy, maybe just as a function of how old he is. And you know, as I've often sort of paraphrased it, like if you're the Ayatollah, what are you going to do with a problem like the usa? And the answer has been it's really the same thing as Vladimir Putin, right, is exercise virtually endless amounts of patience because what else the hell are you going to do? You can't do anything. We got, we're armed to the teeth with H bombs and a conventional military at least, you know, versus other conventional militaries that can get a job done. And so, you know, he took the very conservative way out last June and said, look, Trump, I'm going to fire some missiles at an empty corner of your base, shoot them all down if you can. And here's an hour advance warning, symbolic sort of base saving thing. And now look, it's easy to say, especially like if you're an anti war guy from my point of view, to just say, well, look, if, if we really go after regime change, then they're sure to unload every last thing they got. But maybe that's not true. I mean, maybe the Ayatollah would be afraid that, hell, even if he got taken out with a conventional bomb, that that's still better than provoking an actual atomic attack from Donald Trump, which he might just do if he told the Iranian military to go ahead and unleash everything they've got at our Navy and our Air Force. I would note the New York Times says they have a huge fleet of F15s stationed in Jordan right now in the same place that they were last June in ready for this. But then, you know, I've talked about this hell for 20 years now. That's in the Wall Street Journal. I think yesterday's issue is that Iran has a lot of potential targets to hit back now. We still got American bases in Kurdistan and northern Iraq. We've got huge army bases, I think tens of thousands of troops in Kuwait. We got the fifth fleet stationed at Bahrain. We've got the Al Udid Air Base In Qatar, that hosts Central Command and the Air Force, central, whatever coordination cell thing it's called there. And the UK Air Force is also stationed there at Qatar. And then there's bases also in Saudi, I think army and Air Force bases in Saudi and Navy bases in Bahrain and in Oman. So all up and down the Persian Gulf, not to mention all those economic targets, but just American military targets there really are available. But. So anyway, I'm going to unfairly ask you to predict the future and just say, like, based on historical knowledge, obviously states, state governments like to conflate themselves with the land that they are supposedly protecting. Right. Are they really going to let themselves be destroyed and let somebody else have it, or are they going to even risk taking their whole nation down, their whole country down with their ruling regime?
- [28:51]
B
I mean, the fact that it's Donald Trump in the White House probably does give them a little bit more pause as far as the nuclear option than they would with a typical American president. You know, I would like to hope that if Trump ordered a nuclear strike on Iran that some general would arrest him or something and, you know, just not do it. But there are, there are, you know, from what I, from what I understand, like, one of the first things that happened is like all of the top levels at the Pentagon were all replaced with straight up yes men when he came in. And they. Nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna stand up to him if it comes to that. But, you know, look, I, I think that Iran is very concerned with maintaining its relationships with Russia and China. Those are very, very important to its security in general. And so they're probably going to take their advice to up to a certain point, you know, maybe where they get back into a desperate corner, then maybe they, they would disregard it. And those two are almost certainly going to urge restraint, you know, maybe. Well, you know, almost certain I say that. But like, who knows, man, they might want to see the US Tied up in the Middle east like that again. I mean, it's, it worked out well for them last time, so who knows? But, yeah, I can't. I. It's really hard to predict the future for the simple reason that, you know, Trump tends to have these wild swings, you know, these art of the deal swings where he's demanding that, you know, you take all your tariffs off and send your, you know, Greenland's Prime Minister or whatever over to the US to be put in the docks or something. And then, ah, well, we'll just kind of backs that off completely and like, change it up. So who Knows what I can tell you, though, is it's very expensive and very disruptive to the rest of the overall mission of the US Military to stage this much equipment at forward bases around Iran like we're doing right now. This is not something, I mean, you know, it feels like, and this is why I'm really wary about predictions, is it feels like February of 2022, when Russia is showing all the signs, you know, that something's about to happen in Ukraine. But people, including myself, I was like, yeah, but they wouldn't do that. Right? Like, what. What is the. Just. I just. Because you're used to them not doing it, you know, and so, like, you know, just. Even though all the signs were there, you know, I still really didn't believe it was going to happen until it happened. And here, I mean, all the signs are there, dude. And the only thing that, you know, we can kind of hang our hat on hope and hope for is that our other regional allies are important to us. You know, Saudi Arabia is important to us. Jordan is important to us. They don't, you know, they. They don't have Epstein blackmail info on Trump like Israel does. But. But they're still. Those relationships are important, you know, and the people who are, you know, just sort of the deep state, GS15, SES employees, like, you know, the relationships are important to them. And Turkey, for that matter. Turkey is kind of a wild card. I mean, we've already got Saudi Arabia saying that we can't use their airspace to do any of this. Turkey said you can't launch anything or do anything over our. Over our airspace. So already, like, your options are fairly limited. And if you get to the point where missiles aren't working and you feel like you need. I mean, I don't even want to think about troops on the ground because, like, that's like a. That's like a Institute the draft kind of war, you know. Yeah, that's like. That's like a half a million men, like, going in. I don't even want to think about that. That's a different. We're in a whole different world if that happens.
- [32:21]
A
Well, you know what they're talking about. I mean, whether the tr. Balloon kind of thing is that, well, what we do is we would bomb their regime so badly that the protests would start again and the people would then rise up and take the opportunity of the regime's weakness to overthrow them, which total.
- [32:37]
B
That is a complete and total misreading of what those protests were about. You know, the protests started in Iran. They were not regime change protests. You know, these were, they were, they were a lot of like the middle class who was really upset that the, that the Iranian currency had completely collapsed and they were out like protesting the IRGC's mismanagement of the water situation. Things that are, you know, that are real grievances that people have against their governments. But they weren't regime change protests. It was once they started and Israel activated all of the networks that had been building up, the Kurds and the, you know, the networks in Baluchistan and everywhere else. Then you saw the people coming in with heavy weapons and machine guns and all of the killings started up. You know, that was a regular organic government, you know, protest against the policies of the government and just the failures of a government that had an insurgency, a foreign funded, foreign established insurgency made up by the way of a ton of non Persians that sort of wrote on the back of that and came in and like took advantage of the chaos. And so the idea that, you know, just all those people who were doing that, who Iran rounded up and killed, like the, you know, a lot of the, the real insurgent types that all those people who were there to begin with, you know, protesting the water shortage and stuff, that they're going to go out in the streets and demand that the Ayatollah be beheaded again because Israel and America are attacked, that is not going to happen. It's just there's a total misreading of what, you know, the political situation is over.
- [34:14]
A
Well, look, and as long as we're on that, we got to talk about the absolutely, completely preposterous numbers of dead coming out of the monarchist factions and, you know, the neocons and whoever trying to lie us into this war. There's a great bit of Max Blumenthal destroying the Israeli IDF spokesman on the Piers Morgan show where, you know, he, he knows the name of the guy who's the monarchist activist out of Germany who's coming up with this number. 30,000 people killed. I mean, man, you're talking about the Ayatollah would have had to carpet bomb West Tehran. I'm talking about some massive battlefield like the Somme, full of casualties or something like 30,000 people. How in the world could they have possibly killed 30,000 people? They couldn't have is the answer to that. Yeah, they're, they're obviously lying. The numbers are low, thousands at the highest. And I'm not even sure it's proven that they rounded up and shot it anyone, as far as I know, all those people died in fighting. I never saw yet proof of a single massacre of protesters anywhere. Yeah, and so the whole idea that.
- [35:21]
B
They were, that they were like massacring unarmed protesters, just, you know, just the actual information that we have publicly available just does not support that at all. You know, this was the, the, the, the, the, the normal protest, the, the protest against the water situation and the, and the currency collapse and everything. Those went on for a while. There was no killing. You know, there were people out in the streets. There were. It's like one of the things you see, like some of the pictures and videos, they'll be like, oh, look, this high government official is out with the protesters. This is a big deal. This means they're turning on each other. It's like that's not an anti go. I mean, some of them, they did that, they said that and it was a pro government, like, you know, pro regime demonstration, but some of them weren't. But like, yeah, like Oak did that. Yeah, that guy's something else. Yeah.
- [36:11]
A
Yeah.
- [36:11]
B
But other ones where they were actual protests, you know, they were protests against the economic situation, stuff like that, they weren't anti regime, just like tear down the regime protests. And so I'm highly skeptical that the Iranian regime can be brought down with standoff weapons, you know, with, with, with Tom. I, I just, you know, look at, look at Ukraine. Look how much damage Ukraine has absorbed over the last few years and they're still hanging in there. It sucks to be in Kiev right now in the middle of winter and everything, but they're still going. And it would be a mistake, I think, to underestimate the resolve of the IRGC and just the regime in general to, you know, to maintain itself over what it very rightly at this point, you know, considers an existential threat. I mean, the fact that the 12 day war happens. And I was asking somebody who was kind of, you know, I wouldn't say he's like pro, pro war, like warhawk type, but he was kind of like trying to sell me on like what the benefits to a regime change could be or whatever. And you know, one of the things that, that I asked him was just tell me, like, what, what has happened since the end of the 12 day war that has caused us to decide we have to go back in there? Like what, what Casas Bella has Iran provided us since the end of the 12 Day War? What have they done to provoke what's now being built up? And of course, there's nothing. He couldn't give me an answer. And this is A smart guy who did want to defend that position, but he couldn't because they haven't done anything. And so if you're in that position, right, like if you and I get in a fight and it's sort of a stalemate, but you didn't want the fight to begin with and I did, but it ended in a stalemate. And then I just show up again. You haven't done anything to me since then or anything like that, but I just show up to your house again ready to fight. You're going to come to the conclusion that this dude's never going to stop. There's nothing I can do to placate these people. And so at a certain point, like, we've got to put our back against the wall and just, just swing as hard as we can. And you know, if they think that, if they think that the, the Iranian leadership, the IRGC leadership, the, the religious leadership, if they think, if you think that they are afraid of dying in a war against what they see as the Great Satan, you know, nothing about Shiite Islam, like at all. Like it is the last people that are worried about dying in a war, in what they would consider a holy war. I mean, from the inside of their worldview, it 100% is that, I mean, it's the, it's the global enemy, the world enemy that is, you know, mounting all its forces, surrounding you and coming after you. Why? To take out the Islamic regime, you know, and so to them, you know, it is a holy war. And, and these people aren't going to just back down and fall apart. You know, again, like we may have capabilities on station that we're not aware of that, you know, and intelligence on certain government officials and stuff that allows us to just paralyze their command structure and just create enough chaos that, you know, things kind of fall apart. But I wouldn't count on that, man. I just, I just would not count on that. So if there was going to be some kind of a Venezuela style coup, you know, where we changed the regime, but really we just sort of like reset relations with the same regime by getting rid of the guy at top, at the top or whatever, if that was going to happen, it would have happened during the 12 Day War. You know, we talked about during or after that war how the Israelis did this really nasty, nasty, dishonorable tactic where, you know, they had been killing all these government officials and generals in the initial sneak attack. And at the same time, while the Iranian command and control infrastructure, the communications infrastructure was all shut down, Nobody knew what was going on. They had Mossad agents calling up Iranian generals and telling them, hey, you know, all these people are dead. Your family's next unless you go on TV and denounce. And you know what? Nobody did it. Not a single one did it. And that should tell you something, you know, that, you know, people should understand. The, in, in the most recent Iranian elections, the far right party, the one that didn't win, like it's to the right of the one that did win, got like 19% of the vote. That's almost 20 million people. You know, there, there is a hardcore in that country that is not going to bend and, and you're going to have to contend with them even if you do have a regime change. You know that at the time, you know, like I thought, like all this, all this talk that the Shah.
- [40:54]
A
Yeah. I mean, the country is not called Persian Shia, Stan, it's called Iran. And there are all different factions who are whatever degrees of patriots and nationalists about Iran, whether they agree with the religion of the Supreme Leader whatsoever or not. You got Balukis and Sunni Arabs and Aziris and Kurds. They're not all just what we're supposed to pretend and assume that they're all chomping at the bit to rise up, overthrow the regime or tear the country into 10 pieces or whatever. Why would you think that? I remember. I'm sorry, am I repeating myself? SEYMOUR Hersh, back 10 years, 20 years ago, had a piece on this about, you know, where he's quoting, you know, consultants and advisors to the Pentagon about this, saying that, look, man, this would be like if Iranians came and tried to bribe a bunch of Southern Confederate flag waving rednecks to turn against Washington D.C. well, I'll have you know that ever since they lost the Civil War, they're the most patriotic Americans of all. And you're not going to turn, they're not going to make traitors out of them. You know, you get them to fight on behalf of some foreign regime, dropping some guns in and you know, turn even against the Democrats, you know what I mean?
- [42:08]
B
No way. And so especially when they have lots of examples, you know, like right now in my, I'm just wrapping up the research phase for my next World War II episode. And you know, a lot of it's going to be about the German revolution and the revolutions in Eastern Europe right after the First World War. And one of the things you notice going through all the German newspapers at the time and everything in Austria as well is all of them Talking about Russian conditions, the Russian situation, Russian conditions are going to come here. They knew what was going on over in Russia after they had their revolution, and they were terrified of what, of that coming to their country. And a lot of like, you know, the really brutal violence that the socialist government unleashed against the far left socialists, the Spartacists in Germany, was because they were afraid of that coming here and here. I mean, Iran, even if you don't like the regime, you know, you can look at Syria, you can look at Libya, you can look at Iraq and be like, I don't want that, you know, and that's clearly what Israel and America want for us. And so, you know, taking. I, I can take their side, that's not going to save me from the chaos of a civil war and a famine and like a, you know, a complete and total. And so, yeah, I mean, the only people who ever, who are going to do that are, Are. Are real, just sort of mercenary militant types, you know, because there is no group that is like, so oppressed in Iran. Like, they have their. Look, every country's got their issues, you know what I mean? And some more than others, and Iran, maybe more than Vermont, fine. But it's not one of these countries where, like, you know, for example, like, you have an entire population of people locked up with, you know, behind a wall with remote control robot machine guns facing inward to keep them away. And if they try to do an UN armed protest at the border fence, your snipers shoot a few thousand. They don't have anything like that, for example. And so, you know, there's not this, like, big population of people in there who, if you can just get them organized and armed and activated, they'll be the ones to. It just doesn't exist, you know, and this isn't Syria where you have an Alawite minority government that was put in there a long time ago, ruling over a Sunni majority or something. You know, you. You would really need to convince a lot of just ordinary Iranians that it's better to side with a con. You know, a couple countries that, whether you like the Ayatollah or not, want to see your country destroyed. And most people are just not going to do that. And Americans of all people should understand that, you know, of course.
- [44:36]
A
All right, let's do a little bit of business, and then we're going to change the subject to another important subject. All right, first of all, everybody should go sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. Don't you know that tomorrow we're going to do as we do at the end of every month. We do a live Q and A with all of the Lifetime subscribers to the Academy. So that could even be. Daryl could ask me questions if he wanted to since he's a lifetime subscriber. You guys are going to want to check that out. It's me on the terror wars and the Cold War and a lot of other great experts on a lot of other great stuff. And then I'm also sponsored by moondo's Artisan coffee, which tastes very good. And I get emails like this. People email me and go, man, that's some really good coffee. And it really is. It's the best selling coffee at Moon Dose Artisan Coffee.
- [45:20]
B
Get it?
- [45:20]
A
Starbucks supports the war party and particularly in Israel. And, so Moondoz does not. They support peace. They support this show and they support my other show too. And so get a picture of that there QR code or just go to scotthorton.org coffee and it will forward you right on to Scott Horton flavored coffee, which is really good stuff. And then most importantly here, I have to tell you about Matt Culli. He is the agorist tax advice agaristax. Advice.com is the website. And what it is, is, is say you run a business and you're trying to make money and not have the government take it all away from you. Well, he knows all the actual legal loopholes not to get you in trouble, but to keep you out of trouble. But to keep you from having to spend one dime more on taxes, then you absolutely have to. So find out all the very legal tricks of the trade. How to depreciate your assets and whatever the hell you have to so that you can pay as absolutely little tax to the machine as possible, which is of course a wonderful virtue to starve the government of revenue if you can. And plus to spend that money on yourself and your family instead. So that's agris tax advice. And he's not just an accountant, he's a lawyer. So you can tell him all your dirty secrets too, that you did. And, and he'll help figure out how to keep you out of jail. Okay, so thanks for that. Now let's talk about some other things, man. The Epstein files, they. They release millions of them. Here's all I want to say about that. I think we should do a big show next week on that.
- [46:58]
B
Yeah. What I noticed. Time to get into it too much. Yeah.
- [47:02]
A
And I looked at some of the screenshots of some of the most, you know, Salacious accusations against Trump, for example. And they're all just kind of in this spreadsheet and they all kind of have no verification whatsoever on any of them. Somebody said that somebody else said that this happened to them 17 years ago or whatever. And Trump's name comes up in there a few different times, but in some of them they even call him President Trump, meaning these tips didn't even come in until after he was sworn in in 2017. And this kind of thing. So these are not contemporary claims from back in 1993. This is, you know, whatever a lot of it is, or it's emails where.
- [47:39]
B
You don't really know what it means.
- [47:41]
A
Like for example, Epstein writing to Bill Gates about that time that you wanted me to get you some antibiotics for your wife, buddy. Like we, that's not exactly confirmation. Although writing that two Gates, I think, anyway, but here's, here's what I think.
- [47:56]
B
I will tell you real quick that somebody I know who is a VC in Silicon Valley has been for a long time very connected. When we were talking about that story in a group chat, he didn't confirm it or anything, but he said that kind of tracks.
- [48:11]
A
Yeah, the guy was the richest guy in the world for a long time. And he's such a nerd. I mean, obviously he's got an Israeli pimp to furnish young Slavic women or whatever.
- [48:22]
B
You know, that's.
- [48:23]
A
How is he not doing that? He's Bill Gates, for Christ's sake. All right. Goodness. So, but I, I don't have any particular need to be first, I want to, I want to see what comes out with that. And we're short on time, so I want to let you talk about Minneapolis for 10 minutes here. I'm very interested in your take on what all is going on there. I want to say, as we often have talked about, you know, everybody likes to cherry pick parts of the story this and that way. We discussed this a little bit when we were talking about the lady in the Honda Pilot getting shot. And like the people who supported her shooting never seemed to notice that she was trying to back up and do like a three point turnaround type deal and get away, you know, back up left to. So to get between the guy and the other truck, you know. Well, I would like to point out that there's a couple of things that are really wrong with police training in America. Poorly or highly trained. And you see this over and over again, that if a cop sees a gun on a guy, they train him to say gun, gun, gun in a panic. As loud as he can, the implication being that it is being used or something. When the guy could have just as easily have said he has a gun in the small of his back. I'm going for it now, right? Hold his hands, Jimmy. I'm going for the gun in his waistband, right? He could have said that. Instead he goes, gun, gun, gun. So everybody panics. Then it just so happens. And you're a gun guy a lot more than me. Daryl, you explain the gun is a sig. The P320 is. Is that what it is that misfires all the damn time and it misfired. And what do cops do when they hear a gunshot and they know it wasn't one of theirs? They assume. And instead of assuming that it was a misfire, they assumed that it was a shot at them. There's no reason to think that they thought, oh goody, now I get to pretend that I think I'm in danger or whatever. Right? They overreacted, but they overreacted based on really bad training that if you see a gun, you're supposed to panic and you're supposed to induce panic in all of your fellow officers immediately. And then if you hear a shot, you're never supposed to consider that it was one of your fellow officers who accidentally misfired. And I've seen these before. There was, I can't remember which case it was. Where's a stack of SWAT cops come in the house and the one cop shoots the other cop in the back in front of them and then they all open fire and wax the innocent guy in his home kind of thing. It happens from time to time, but I just notice how everybody seemed to notice the misfire at first. But then they really leave that out a lot and make it where it's purely a cold blooded execution, which it wasn't. I, I'm still, I still think it was completely wrong and, and their stupid fault and they're completely responsible. But maybe it's manslaughter, not first degree murder or something, I don't know. But what do you think about that? And, and, and, and on top of that, all the reactions and all the points of view and everything, because that's what really counts, right? Is as Saul Alinsky, the Commie, put it in Rules for Radicals, page 74. And I learned this from the Birchers, by the way, thank you very much. The action is in the reaction of the opposition. And so that's the purpose of this kind of leftist street theater is to provoke crises and counter reactions and counter reactions and that kind of deal. So now you say a bunch of wise things, Mr.
- [51:50]
B
Historian. Well, I'll try not to make this too much of an I told you so because I've been arguing with all my right wing buddies who have been on the same page as me on the immigration issue for years. You know, I've been talk, I've been an immigration restrictionist very publicly for a long time, way before it was cool. And you know, my credentials on that are unassailable as far as I'm concerned. My concern from the beginning, when this Minneapolis stuff started to happen, even before the Renee good shooting. So I'm watching these videos and I think it's probably I was, it didn't really occur to me until a little bit later. I think it's because I did time and I spent 10 years in the military and another 10 with the Dodge. When I see guys in uniform representing the US Government who are just not behaving in a way that reflects the dignity of the uniform, that these guys were not, they were going around the streets very clearly looking for a fight. A lot of the times, you know, looking around like expecting to get hassled and not looking to de, escalate when it happened. And my concern with it from the very beginning is that this is going to kill any chance we have of actually accomplishing any real immigration reform or deportations that are going to change our trajectory at all. And look what happened. All the people out there who were saying Darrell's a cuck because he's defense, you know, saying that the, that the ICE guys or the border patrol guys shouldn't have shot the woman or this guy or whatever, like he's, he's gone soft on immigration. Well, look what happened. Trump is now saying anybody with a college degree, any, any illegal immigrant who, who has held a job and can show it, they can stay. They can stay. So congratulations to all the people out there who got their rocks off seeing a couple libtards get shot. You know, you guys had your fun being Israelis for, for a couple days posting, you know, FAFO after a picture of, you know, one of these people getting shot. Congratulations. I hope the emotional satisfaction was worth it to all you guys because now they're pulling back, they're restricting, you know, and, and, and, and narrowing the mission of immigration enforcement right now. Because, you know, look, the fact is like those things, whatever you think about the, you know, the, the moment of the shooting, you know, whether that cop was at, you know, maybe not maybe was he like legally at fault you know, can he be charged with a crime based on the discharge of his weapon into this per. Whatever you think about that, the American people have spoken on it. They are not down with what is going on in Minneapolis. And when you go to the American people, because you didn't poll them even now, you poll them and they want all the illegal immigrants deported. But you know, like something, there was a poll, like even CNN put it, I was like 55%, this was after the most recent shooting, still want all illegal immigrants deported. But that's really just American. That's just saying 55% of people think that the law should be respected. If you go to those people and say, okay, your options are deport people and to have these, you know, groups of uniform thugs going around the street just harassing people that they come across and creating these incidents and having a couple people get shot every month or so until the job's done or no immigration or lighter immigration enforcement. There's a lot of people, they just want order on their streets, man. They don't. They want stability. They do not. And ICE came into this city, into Minneapolis, and they did not bring order. They did not. And look, I'm not saying I understand that there were organized protest movements that were probably organized at very high levels, fun at high levels that were, that were provoking all this stuff. That the things that have happened were exactly the plan for some of these high level protest groups. I get that. But that's why you don't give them what they want. And ICE came in and gave them exactly what they wanted. And not by design, by the way. I don't think I was talking to a friend of mine, 15 year Border Patrol guy, who I actually, I've heard this from a couple, a couple of guys that I know that I've known for a long time in Border Patrol. One in, in New Mexico, another in San Diego. They both told me the same stories, dude, like. And these are both guys who, by the way, defended the officer who shot Renee. Good. You know, based on the circumstances of that, after the intervening, you know, the events after that and then the most recent shooting and even after that, that more recent video came out showing that the guy who got shot was a douchebag protester, you know, is a problem. They all said the same thing that like these, this, these guys are very, just going in there, very unprofessional, you know, going. One of the things they said too. Well, two things they said. One is they said, we knew this was going to happen as soon as The Trump administration came out crowing that they doubled ICE in Border Patrol in the last year. Because how do you do that? You do that by taking any asshole off the street who, you know, can pass a drug test today and, and can, you know, in a background check that shows that he doesn't have any felonies or something. You just pull them in and send them in there. You're not getting, like, you, you just, you can't do the quality control if you're ramping up that fast. Scaling up that fast. If you look, Trump lowered the training requirements to be a border patrol officer from five months, which it's always been down to 47, and then 45 or 42 days. And so when you start seeing stuff like that, you watch these videos and you realize this is what we're looking at. We're looking at guys who got just over a month of training, were given a gun. You watch some of those videos, dude, this blew me away. And it didn't occur to me until my border patrol friend like, pointed it out. Why it was is you watch one of these videos and it's not exactly that the guys are in civilian clothes, but you'll see some in like, he has, like, his border patrol pants and hat, but not a jacket or shirt. It's because they don't have enough uniforms for all these guys to go out and do this stuff. So that's. This is like, you know, 2003, Iraq war thing where we're sending guys out. We didn't even have the equipment to give them yet. And so you have a bunch of these guys who do not have the training or the experience because the veteran officers don't want to go do this shit. You know, this is a lot of young guys that are being sent out there because the veteran officers are pulling rank and they don't want to be involved in it. A lot of them aren't trained for it, period. You know, the idea that you're going to take like border patrol guy like the commander Bavino, you know, this dude was, he was the commander down in El Centro, California. Very, very hot border zone. I mean, cartels, you got helicopters in the air with crew served weapons looking for cartels coming through, right? You bring that guy in and you say, go police the suburbs of Minneapolis. You know, this is a guy who, when we have a problem with American law enforcement having a military mindset anyway, you take a guy from a place where that's probably appropriate, you know, he's got like, heavily armed cartel members that they're dealing with out there and you send that guy in, you're gonna just, you're asking for trouble, you know. And let me, let me ask you.
- [58:40]
A
This because I think we talked about this before, darl, but it's worth raising the possibility that this is sabotage. Now on one hand, this is the perennial question always is stupidity or the plan, right? So on one hand, you know, it'll be fun. Go out there and crack some skulls and drive them immigrants out and this and that on this idiot high time preference, right? But then there's like the slightest bit of wisdom whatsoever about approaching this issue, which is we have tens of millions of people to deport. If we're going to do that, it's going to be a massive widespread thing. We need to be, all of us. The watchword is always use the minimum amount of force necessary. It's a civil infraction. You know, these people are, they're supposed to be even arrested and deported still. You don't have to go around with ski masks on and cracking people over the head. And you know, I did read a thing that said, you know, these guys had been in Chicago, I think, and in LA and then. But Minneapolis is a much smaller city. So they gave sort of the whole city an opportunity to interact with them. They're kind of everywhere. And then I don't know if you saw the press conference, whereas all the different police chiefs, the sheriffs and the police chiefs all held a big press conference denouncing these guys. This was, I think a couple of days before the guy was shot, denouncing these cops for pulling even cops after hours are getting pulled over by ICE and they're busy just, just going door too, or pulling people over at random, like anybody who looks brown, pulling them over and checking their papers. So they're not looking for illegal immigrants that they know who they're looking for at all. They think that they're in this apartment complex or another. They're just randomly screwing around with Minneapolis. And like, what do you think is going to happen? And, and, and of course, Trina. And it's funny because this is my very first interaction with a police officer out in the wild when I was 11 years old was absolutely screaming in my face, you know, drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. Absolute and total disrespect from government employee to his better. And I've hated them all ever since then. And I've seen very few cops give me reason to respect them any more than that first one I ever met. And it's funny to See, these people go, well, gee, our cops on the way home from work are being treated like that by ice and they can't stand it. They're ready to revolt.
- [61:11]
B
You know what I mean?
- [61:11]
A
It's like, yeah, welcome to.
- [61:13]
B
That's what it's like to be a.
- [61:14]
A
Civilian in this country and have to deal with a cop, too. But apparently, like, they're that far out of line that they're not getting any leeway from the local police around there whatsoever either.
- [61:25]
B
Yeah.
- [61:28]
A
SJWs there. Go ahead.
- [61:30]
B
Yeah, I want to answer one of the commenters who. He's, he's, he's repeating the lines that I've been arguing with my right wing buddies in group chats for the last several weeks now, say, we have three years to accomplish this. We don't have the luxury of time. And he said this, you know, there's no way to accomplish this and have it be pretty. It's going to be ugly and we just need to be prepared to, to accept that that's how it's going to be. Wake up, dude. Trump is on. Trump is on course right now. If he does, if he just maintains the pace he's on now, he's on course to deport about 1.2 million people over the course of his entire term. 1.2. That is a drop in the freaking bucket. Biden was bringing 750,000 people in every three months for four years. It took us decades to dig this hole. It is going to take a long time for us to dig ourselves out of it, which means we need to focus on maintaining consistent public support over the long term. You know, we had won the immigration debate. You know, like when Trump got reelected, after everything that had happened, when he, when he got put back into office, the immigration debate was over, dude, like, in terms of like just the public debate, it was over, or the illegal immigration debate, at least that debate was won. It was. Minneapolis over the last month has hit the reset button on that and we might be like in the hole again on the immigration debate because of this, because of this stuff. And like, you can't think like that. You're not going to accomplish this in three years. You could put the entire US army on it. You're not going to accomplish it in three years. It's going to take a long time. It's going to have to probably go through some Democratic administrations, which means that you need to win the debate thoroughly enough with the American people that even a Democrat president is a little bit hesitant to, not to be, to be Looked at as soft on immigration and that was within our reach. And the behavior of these ICE guys in Minneapolis and the border patrol guys who are up there, who I give a little bit more leeway, they're not, they're just not trained for this kind of thing, you know. But the behavior of them, not just the shootings, that's only one thing that people are upset about. It's. They're watching the videos where there is no shooting and they're like, why are they talking to those people like that? Why are they cursing at them and threatening them? Why are they putting their guns in their face when they're not? Just to sort of control them and get them to do, to get them to back down and like show who's boss. Like law enfor local law enforcement doesn't do that. You lose your freaking job if you just put a gun in a guy's face on camera just because they were giving you, like, just. You see that, like, people see that stuff and they, they think that, you know what it looks like to people, and rightly so. It looks like chaos. It does not look like order. It does not look like stability. And the people who want, you know, there's like a small hardcore on Twitter who, they want immigration reform because they want subhumans deported back to the countries they came from or whatever, those people exist. Do not overestimate your numbers. If you're one of those people, you need the support of people who just want stability and order and respect for the law in the country. And you were not going to maintain support from those people with ICE behaving this way like you're just not going to. And we've already seen that, you know, independents, even Republicans, like, they're, you know, still heavily, heavily support Trump. Obviously it's a very partisan, polarized country, but it's declined. And independents support for his immigration policies completely collapsed. And it's not because they think he's not going hard enough, you know, and so you have to think long term. This is a long term project and we're not going to win it in three years. You have to, like, you just. It drives me freaking nuts because, you know, it's almost. You know what it reminds me of? A lot of right wingers on this issue over the last month or so remind me of like you have like a military unit in the field and you have an entrenched bunkered machine gun nest right in front of you, and they think that anything other than charging right at it is, that's, that's cuck shit, you know, that's for pussies, you know. Oh yeah, there might be a way to go around and flank them from the other side, but no, I'm a man, I'm not doing that. We're charging that machine gun nest. Don't be stupid, man. Like, this is a long term project and public support matters. And, and we see that now. All the people who were saying, who are, who are arguing with me, who, and some of you were in the comments, you know, in the last couple weeks, look at what's happening now. Trump is backing down his rhetoric. Administration officials are throwing each other under the bus. Republican senators are coming out and attacking ice. I mean, you've got police associations coming out and coming out against ice. Like, this stuff matters, man. This is not going to be accomplished in Trump's next three years. Okay? This is going to be accomplished if it's accomplished in 20 years. And you got to accept that and start thinking in those terms. And I know a lot of the younger people, they don't have that kind of patience. And I don't blame them because politics to them, like, you know, if you came of age and voting age in like 2015, a lot of people now, all you've ever known is just complete chaotic politics where things go all the way this way and all the way that way, and you can just do things. I think those of us who are just like, maybe a little bit older, like, we're, we're really amazed that things have even come as far as they have on a lot of these issues. We're kind of blown away by that. But you have to understand that, like, this is something that's going to take a long time. And in order for it to work, you have to maintain public support. And that doesn't mean being soft. It doesn't mean letting the left giving them a heckler's veto to just set up a protest and like, well, they showed up. I guess we have to back down. It's not about that. People need to be able to watch these videos, though, and see the guys wearing the uniform of the US Government and say, well, you know, yeah, a guy got shot or guy got like beat up or taken down or whatever, but they were acting professionally. You know, he came at them and they did what they had to do. People are not watching these videos and coming away with that conclusion. Right? And so that, that is my gripe about this is that it's going to harm our hope of actually accomplishing, you know, what we've all Been talking about wanting to do with immigration and. And it's already doing that.
- [67:44]
A
Yep. You know, this is one reason why. And I have moved to the right. The. The left has pushed us all to the right on a lot of things over the last little while here. And the Biden people especially, it's not immigration, it's mass migration from other civilizations in the global south who are not part of the west at all, who are coming here by the tens of millions. We just can't assimilate people that quickly. And especially when Americans don't even believe in liberty at all anymore. How in the hell are they going to inculcate libertarian ideas into the. Or even just basic American Declaration of Independence type ideas into the minds of all the immigrants when they're all a bunch of communists in the first place?
- [68:22]
B
So.
- [68:23]
A
And I mean all you right wingers, too. So, yeah, I'm with you that, like, yeah, somebody's got to call a break on that. But you can't. As Justin Ramondo would have said, you can't have a country without a border, man. But. But yeah, you can't. You obviously cannot reverse all this by creating the kind of, you know, merciless and lawless totalitarian type police state that people are only going to rebel against. Which is why I go. Maybe it's just a rhetorical question. Maybe the answer is no, it's just stupidity, not the plan. But I think, you know, there's an argument for, look, man, big business wants these immigrants and they want to sabotage this thing. So that's why whoever told, even chose Bovino or whispered in his ear, tell your guys to go out there and be as rough as they can. We're trying to get this thing completely delegitimized by February. If that was the conspiracy, then they would have accomplished it. And after all, mass migration isn't just the Democrats. It is. Big business wants all that because it relieves upward pressure on labor costs, especially in agribusiness and in, you know, hospitality and whatever. And so it's bad enough that it might as well be sabotaged, Darrell. It looks like to me.
- [69:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, illegal immigration is just outsourcing for industries that are location dependent. You know, you can't ship an agricultural field overseas. You can't. A hotel has to be where it is, A nanny, childcare has to happen where the children are. It's just. But it's just outsourcing or offshoring for. For things that can't move. Real quick. Somebody on there said, let Scott get a word In Scott had to get a molar out today, so I'm trying to carry the load here. Okay. So cut me some slack on that. Sorry.
- [70:06]
A
Daryl's doing great.
- [70:07]
B
But yeah, I guess we should. We're. We're running a little late, so let's get to the Epstein stuff next week. Yeah, that's. That's too much. And we'll have more time to look into it then. Yeah, whoever the guy was, kj, KGIV or whatever who I was answering if you're on Twitter or shoot me a direct message if you want to continue talking about this because I, I like we want the same thing and I think that the, the tack we're taking on this or that we were taking up to this point has been destructive to our shared goal. And so let's talk about that some more or shoot me an email and we can email about it. Martyrmade mail.com and I will answer you.
- [70:45]
A
And I just remember what I was going to say, which was I sort of avoided this issue for so long just because it's so divisive and I really only care not even about making all Americans libertarians. I want all Americans to be anti war and so I want to get along with everyone. I want to be anti sectarian. And this is one of those issues that just divides left and right so severely that I've kind of stayed away from it for that reason. But then again, like you said, it's super majorities of the population were won over to the right wing point of view on this. That no not amnesty deport. That was 64% super majority said deport them last summer or summer before last. Sorry in the, in the summer of, of 24. And so hell, that's the centrist moderate position at this point anyway where liberal Democrats agree as well. But then so more to the point about behavior like this on camera, like.
- [71:38]
B
You know, the way that they do.
- [71:39]
A
It for their own public relations, for their own base is just, you know.
- [71:44]
B
Oh yeah, you know what, let me respond to one thing you said I forgot to respond to as far as like the sabotage question. If they were trying to. Yeah, it probably would look like this. But you don't have to because red blooded American, especially the type who would want to join ICE or border patrol probably cares about the issue, you know, is a conservative minded person probably. You go out in the street and you have some dude like the, like the what his name. Pretty, the pretty guy like the way he was behaving in that. In the video that came out later. It was a couple weeks before the shooting. The natural response you're confronted with somebody like that is you want to beat their ass. And it takes. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline, good leadership, and extensive training to keep that from happening. It's not like these guys aren't going to be saints. If I was. If I was one of those guys and I went in there, I probably would do the same thing. I'd be acting the same way because I'm not trained to deal with somebody who gets in my face like that. You know, I'm going to respond the way I normally respond. When that happens, it. It takes training and discipline and leadership. That is what we need. We need people who. When they see the people who are coming into your city to enforce America's immigration laws, they know that the law is coming, order is coming. Not that, you know, just a bunch of dudes who are going to come in and kick some ass. Like, people do not want that on their streets, regardless of their position on the immigration issue.
- [73:06]
A
Yep. All right. His substack is subscribe.myrmain.com mine is scotthortonshow.com see us there and see you next week. 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 ProvokedShow on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked SA.