← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:43 - Is the War Over? ...or Will It Escalate?
01:19:46
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- [00:00]
Scott Horton
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- [00:29]
Daryl Cooper
rules and restrictions apply.
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Scott Horton
Oh my God.
- [00:31]
Daryl Cooper
It's the show. All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans.
- [00:43]
Scott Horton
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. Oh my God. It's Friday night.
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Daryl Cooper
We're live.
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Scott Horton
We got Daryl Cooper. We're not airing a pre recorded rerun. We will be taking your super chats. We are here with you because I'm traveling this weekend, of course, but just for one day tomorrow and so we can do our show live. Hey, Daryl Cooper. How are you this evening?
- [01:25]
Daryl Cooper
Doing all right. Keeping busy. I'm sure you're. You've been keeping busy lately. I see your bookshelves are still empty behind you, so you must be busy with that.
- [01:33]
Scott Horton
That's right. Still have not finished moving, although we're getting there. We're getting very close. Got all the new bookshelves put together and everything, which is nice. I'm just not there. I'm here. I'm going to Dallas tomorrow to be interviewed on a guy's podcast. I'm not sure why I got to be there in person for that, but I guess I'll go do that. And then the rest of the week, man, I'm focusing on getting all that done. So anyway, that's my boring stuff. Otherwise. Oh, I'm speaking next weekend in Wisconsin, the Libertarian Party state convention there in, in Wisconsin. So if anybody's interested in that, I'll be there. And then. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with you.
- [02:10]
Daryl Cooper
I mean, I've been spending the first half of my days with my chainsaw out in my forest jacking lumber like it's going out of style. And second half of the day I'm just reading books and writing stuff for the sub stack in the. In the next podcast. Except for today, I'll spend the last few hours before we start this just sort of catching up on Things, so.
- [02:31]
Scott Horton
Right on. Yeah. Well, I've been trying to stay off Twitter, but Palin mostly staying off of the mentions page, though, so that's saving me some time, mostly. So let us talk about what's going on. Maybe we should have led with this so that people would pay attention to us. There's a ceasefire and a maybe deal that Donald Trump is announcing that Iran has capitulated on everything and they're going to give up everything and all their enrichment and whatever. And I know he's lying and that can't possibly be true, so. And I even saw reports that their ships turning back, ships that were sailing like they thought they were going to get through the Strait of Hormuz and then turned out no. But I don't know why and I don't know what it all means. What do you think?
- [03:14]
Daryl Cooper
I mean, it seems like it could be one of two things, Right. The first one is that, you know, Trump is trying to frame the issue so that. Well, so actually, let me back up, like one step, right. It seems like one of two options is out there. One is that the US Security establishment has realized and has managed to convince Donald Trump that we cannot repeat what just happened. We can't do another 40 days of that. We don't have the munitions, the global economy won't tolerate it. Our domestic economy and political situation won't tolerate it. But most of all, we just don't have the resources to do it. We exhausted years and years and years of resources just to get through the last 40 days. So that can't be repeated. And maybe they prevailed upon him just to accept that we have accomplished what is possible to accomplish with military means. And, you know, that's going to mean. Or that would mean accepting a deal that is probably inferior to the one Iran was offering before all this started, and certainly inferior to the one that Trump was boasting about pursuing in the first couple of days of the war. And so he's trying to sort of prepare the information battle space. You know, that's one. That's one possibility. And the hopeful possibility, the other possibility is he's just throwing all of this stuff out there so that when they don't do it, which they never said they would, he can say, oh, they broke the agreement and that's why we had to go back to war. And, you know, that that's a, that's not meant for a, you know, the, like the heads of state of our allies or anybody who's paying attention politically or anything. It's meant for The Fox News audience and just sort of the general MAGA masses, which, you know, seems to be, at least for the last few months, all he cares about. So we'll see.
- [05:11]
Scott Horton
Yo, I always do that. It seems real crucial, man, about how he keeps citing this CNN poll that said as he's at 100%, you know, he obviously misunderstood that stupid thing in the first place. And the way that they framed it was everybody who still likes Donald Trump, still likes Donald Trump. It was a complete idiot.
- [05:31]
Daryl Cooper
Well, did you notice? Did you notice?
- [05:33]
Scott Horton
The important part is no one has told him since then. Sir, this is a real misunderstanding and you should know that actually the polls do not have you at 100. In fact, you're looking like George W. Bush right now. People hate your guts right now.
- [05:50]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. And you know, I, I noticed that when the war first began, like in the first 48 hours or so, the polls that were coming out, they said, they said Trump vote 20, 24 Trump voters, you know, what do they think of the war? That's what they were measuring. But then as the war dragged on and got a little more ambiguous and then catastrophic in its outcome, the polls all changed to self identified MAGA voters.
- [06:15]
Scott Horton
Right.
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Daryl Cooper
It's like, well, okay, it's just like you said, it's like people who like Trump, like what Trump is doing, okay, congratulations, you got 100% on CNN. Like, you know, so, yeah, I, it's just, it kind of shows you, you know, how silly it is. But you know, you really just do wonder, you know, you, you, you, you wonder like Trump is Trump is somebody. And this is something that's been commented on like going back to, into his, into his days as a real estate developer and a reality TV show host and everything that I can't remember the name of the guy, like the, the motivational kind of self help author that was like his favorite book like for a like long time. I know it's basically like the Secret or something, but it was like this older book from back in the, back in the early 20th century or something and it was positive thinking.
- [07:08]
Scott Horton
Yeah, the author, let me look it up.
- [07:11]
Daryl Cooper
Was basically, I think it was Norman something I want to say. Norman. Norman Vincent Peel. Hey, Peel. Okay, I don't feel too bad then.
- [07:19]
Scott Horton
Yeah.
- [07:20]
Daryl Cooper
And you know, the whole gist of it, as far as I understand it is really that you can speak reality into being. You know, you can think and speak reality into being. And he seems, I mean just throughout his entire career, like very taken with that idea and somebody who takes it very seriously. And you know, it's, it's especially him, you know, coming, coming up in the age of mass media and really, in a lot of ways, being a creature of mass media, you know, that, that's something that really kind of was true in the 20th century. You know, you there, there, there were the ability to put out a message and get people on board. You know, you had this, you had this interesting combination of like very, very concentrated sources of information that could be broadcast. And yet you combine that with what was still up until like the 70s, really almost complete trust in the authorities and the government and all that. Like, you know, people knew that there were venal corrupt politicians and so forth. But you know, people in general, like when the system told you something, when the establishment told you something, people more or less figured, you know, it wasn't a complete lie. At least, you know, they didn't have the cynicism we have today. And so you combine those two things. The mass consolidation or concentration of, of information broadcasting with the high trust people had in the establishment. And you know, if you, if you got control of those outlets, you really could speak reality into being. It really didn't start to, you know, run up against the rocks of reality until the late 1960s when Vietnam, it just got to a point where like, no, you can hide the fact that, you know, everybody has a friend that got sent over there and has no legs now. Like, that's just how it is.
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Scott Horton
And then water too.
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Daryl Cooper
Yeah, right, right, Watergate. Well, see, the other thing about both of those in inst incidences, because they didn't totally break people's trust in the information ecosystem, like it broke their trust in the governing regime. Vietnam and Watergategate for sure. But what it did kind of, and there's polls that actually show this, it greatly increased their trust in television and network news specifically, because the way they saw it was like it was Walter Cronkite who told us the truth about Vietnam when the government was lying. It was the network news outlets that told us about, you know, that we're covering Vietnam. We were Watergate, we were watching every night. And so they were like the truth tellers. And that sort of got us through the next couple of decades and that's only really started to completely fall apart. I, I would say it started like the cracks probably started, you know, in like the Fox News Bill O'Reilly days when, you know, once you had a right wing network, quote unquote, the partisanship of all networks sort of became very obvious. You know, like you could have like five liberal networks. And it doesn't seem partisan unless you're, you know, really into that stuff, because they're just. That's how, that's how TV is. But once you got the other side of it, then the partisanship of all sides, all the networks, was, was very clear. And so it started to deteriorate then. And then, of course, today, I mean, it's just, you know, nobody believes anything except for the people that they believe were part of their tribe. And that's really all there is to it.
- [10:52]
Scott Horton
Yeah. So now back to the war for a second. So I had an interesting talk with Trita Parsi yesterday on the show, and he made a point about how if Trump walks away now, you know, the more he walks away, the better. And, and if he does, at least that much could be a win because he's really getting what he wants, which is to end the war. And even though he's not really achieving all of his stated goals, they were all idiot goals in the first place, he was never going to be able to achieve anyway. So it makes no difference to him. It's. It's only better to end it sooner than later before things get worse. But the Iranians are not getting all their war guarantees, all their, pardon me, their security guarantees, and all of their promises, you know, that they wanted to have in order to end the war. You know, remember, we feared that he might try to back out and they might just keep hitting Israel and keep hitting bases in the Middle east and whatever, anyway to teach him a lesson that he better not do that again kind of thing. And so the fact that they haven't taken that really gives him an extra couple of cards to play here. The only problem being is he's not willing to disengage that much. And then, of course, the other obvious wrinkle is the Great Satan, Benjamin Netanyahu and his, you know, obvious willingness to sabotage anything that Trump wants to do in America's national interest, to roll back the war to. To limit it at all. And I saw, you know, Dave DeCamp from Antiwar.com was tweeting tonight that the. There were, I believe, missile strikes and artillery strikes into southern Lebanon from the Israelis only, you know, whatever within an hour or two hours of Trump, you know, declaring. Very firm language today on his Twitter that I believe the word was, he forbids the Israelis from bombing Lebanon anymore. Enough is enough, he said. And then they just kept bombing him anyway.
- [12:52]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, sure, Netanyahu had a good laugh at that.
- [12:55]
Scott Horton
I'm sure he did. But you know, as you pointed out last week, the Iranians are in no position to abandon Hezbollah. They can't even if they wanted to. So as long as the Israelis are going to keep. And they're saying, listen, we own all the territory that we have, you know, destroyed and put our troops on, and whatever our, you know, whatever they call it their security zone or their quarantine zone or whatever in southern Lebanon, they say, we're not leaving one inch of that. Although I don't know, by the way, how far their troops have actually been able to move on foot into southern Lebanon. I've seen reports of Hezbollah putting up a hell of a resistance there, although I don't know, you know, exactly how thorough that is and, and on how many fronts or what. But that's a pretty wild card, man. Israel versus Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. And, and Netanyahu does not want to quit. And of course, this sounds so trivial that we don't give it enough credence at all. Daryl Cooper. But it is obviously crucial to all of this, that this is how Netanyahu stays out of jail, is by not just staying prime minister, but staying at war, so he can stay prime minister at war, so he can not go to jail, because he's an outright abject guilty felon. And for anyone who didn't watch the BB Files, you know, over their VPN somehow on the Pirate Bay or whatever, you can watch it on the Tucker Carlson Network now. And all it is, is Shin Bet footage. They're FBI national police interrogation footage of Netanyahu and his cronies just busting him, absolutely dead to rights on their corruption, including Miriam Adelson talking about the pressure she's under to keep Sarah Netanyahu happy with jewelry and perfume and whatever. So that's a crucial part of this, is that as long as there's a state of emergency over there, he doesn't have to go to jail.
- [14:39]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, I mean, that seems obviously part of it. You know, at a certain point, you have to wonder, and we haven't found this, this, you know, this place yet, but there is a certain point where Israelis are going to want, you know, are going to want to bail out of this. And the thing is, they have a very easy way to do it, which is just to pin everything on this one guy that everybody know, everybody except his hardcore coalition people hate anyway. You know, he's not particularly popular. He's. He's a, you know, I mean, they could, like, they could send. They could literally vote him out, send him to jail, blame him for everything and really, like, start the rehabilitation tour, like, the next day and, hey, fine with me, man.
- [15:24]
Scott Horton
You know? Yeah.
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Daryl Cooper
Yeah. It's the same way I feel about, like, with Trump saying, you know, we, like, I. I made a. I made a comment today that, you know, Biden's probably. Well, assuming that, you know, he can, you know, see outside his four walls and know what's going on. He's probably watching the Trump administration now talk about this great victory. Probably feels really stupid for not just saying that Afghanistan was this smashing success, and we once and for all defeated the Taliban when all other previous presidents failed. He should have just done that, apparently, because that's apparently a thing. And so. And Bush could have. Bush should have been like, mission accomplished. Like, oh, no, actually, no, mission accomplished. You heard me. This day. Just say it. And I mean, it's really, like. It's crazy, man. When you really look at the. I mean, there's a. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I can be, you know, that I can make comments that are based on emotion bias, false information, confirmation by just any number of things that can cause me to say something stupid or wrong. 100%. The number of people out there, though, who are. Are willing to just completely, like, latch themselves on to defending a narrative that requires them to take, like, opposing positions from day to day to day, you know, to go out there and pretend that getting the Strait of Hormuz open. I'm sorry, the Strait of Iran, as President Trump called it. Getting the Strait of Iran open is this huge. Like, Greenwald had the best tweet about it today. He was like, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the Strait of Hormuz would be open for oil transport. Like, who would have ever thought. Like, it's just so ridiculous, you know? And yet there are, like, you understand why Trump does it. You understand why his administration will say something like that. I just don't get these people, some of whom I've, like, met in person, and I know they're real and not just bots or something.
- [17:28]
Scott Horton
I know.
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Daryl Cooper
I watched them do it. I'm like, dude, you're not getting paid, nobody. Like, what are you getting out of this? I just don't.
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Scott Horton
I had a tweet like that about Wilt Chamberlain that I. It was like a quote tweet. I can verify that this is a real person. I've met him. I've seen him in real life. And so he's not a robot.
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Daryl Cooper
He's the worst offender. But, you know, he's one, he's somebody who is like, there's different types, right? There's like your, your Mark Levin watching Fox News, kind of boomer poster who. He's just, he doesn't even remember what he said yesterday. All he knows is this is what he's saying today. You know, somebody like Will Chamberlain is much, much more cynical. Like, they understand this is why you can never catch them, you can never like, get them where, you know, make them feel ashamed that they're saying the opposite thing that they did last week or whatever. It just, none of that ever works and nobody should ever try it because they understand that their job is to say whatever it takes to get you through the current news cycle, into the next phase of the conflict and into the next phase and into the next phase until we're all so enmeshed and enough of our property's been damaged and guys have been killed and stuff that now we're just in it. And when you say to them, well, but wait, you said all these opposite things. Like, they're just like, yeah, well, it worked. I mean, it was just. There's no shame there. They totally understand.
- [18:50]
Scott Horton
I mean, in fact, you know, I don't know if anyone can find this anymore because it was on that Tim Pool show that got canceled and whatever, the tenant media thing where we debated Israel, Palestine. It wasn't until the end of the thing that he finally just admitted that he wasn't looking for any solution whatsoever. His whole point was the entire British mandate belongs to the Jews and the Palestinians. They can just get effed and beat it. That's it. So at the end of the thing was like, oh, yeah, no, you didn't think I was even putting up a pretense of trying to come up with some sort of fair and equitable long term solution to the problem of these people's dispossession or anything like that. Screw them, let them all die. Oh, okay, now I get it. That's. Geez, I wish he just said that in the first place and we'd have had a lot clearer debate the whole time.
- [19:38]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, you, you, you see this, like this, this sort of process in action. Whenever I've had this conversation slash debate with several people on different areas of the spectrum, when I try to pin them down on when they say that, you know, this land is a Jewish state, that it's promised to the Jews, like, whatever, you know, you'll hear that from atheists, you'll hear it from religious United Nations. Yeah. And all. And I always ask the same series of questions to try to get a consistent answer. And I say, okay, you know, we know from genetic testing that, you know, Ashkenazi Jews have less DNA in common with ancient inhabitants of the Levant than Palestinian Christians and about the same as Palestinian Muslims do. So if, if, you know, the, the ownership of this land by the Jews is genetically inherited, well, then the Palestinians have more right to it than Ashkenazi Jews do. Certainly you can argue about Mizrahim, but like, Ashkenazis were the original Zionists, obviously, and still are the power structure largely in the country. So if it's genetic, like, explain that and then tell me how is it. Because the official position, the legal position of the state of Israel is that Ivanka Trump, by virtue of her conversion to Judaism, has more right to some Palestinian's house whose ancestors have only ever lived there going back, it could be thousands of years. Because, you know, there's this idea. One of the things that informs a lot of the sort of pop history that, that gives people their idea of what happened and, and, and why things were the way they were when the Zionists started coming back is there's this idea that during the Roman Jewish wars in the first and early second century when Jerusalem was destroyed and there were a series of, of these conflicts, there's this idea that, like, the Romans won the Barcocba revolt. That was the last and final, you know, that was the final time the Jews rose up and they just drove every Jew out of the region. Like, they're just, every single one of them. They got driven out. And that's why 2,000 years later, like, they're all in Poland and Spain, wherever else. Like, they're not, they're not over here because the Romans drove them all out. There's absolutely no contemporary evidence for anything like that happening. You know, certainly the Romans killed and enslaved a lot of the combatants in their families who were in Jerusalem itself. But what really happened was the agricultural population, the people who lived out in the countryside, which was the majority of the population in that region, you know, they stayed right where they were. You know, there's no there there. There's no like, contemporaneous records of masses of refugees that are like, going into neighboring states looking for a place to live.
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Scott Horton
There's no governed, by the way, Very well, obviously in, in your great podcast about it, but Sheldon Richmond's book Coming to Palestine. Ah. As really get a great coverage of this fact.
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Daryl Cooper
Yeah. And like, you know, and what happened was, you know, the people who the majority of the population, the people who weren't in Jerusalem, maybe, you know, in, who were involved in the revolt itself or the people kind of associated with them, they stayed where they were. And people in the other towns and cities who were urbanites, a lot of them just left, you know, when, when during the time of Christ, like, you know, in the earliest part of the first millennium A.D. there were already more Jews living in diaspora in places like Babylon, Alexandria, those two especially. But all over the, you know, the Greek and Roman world, there were more living outside of Palestine than there were living in Palestine. So they were already like a. And not like 51%, it was like 70 or 80%. So, you know, they were already a widely spread out diaspora people. And Jerusalem, it got destroyed because it was the center of, you know, the uprising and the, and the resistance afterwards. And the Romans, you know, they, they, they did what they do when you try to throw off the yoke of their power. But you know, the, the majority of the population who was, who was there, which, you know, again is not the majority of the Jewish population in the world because the majority of the Jewish population in the world lived in other parts of the empire or, or in Parthia, Parthian Empire. But the majority of the population that was there at the time of the revolt in Palestine, they stayed where they were. And then over the centuries they converted to Christianity and Islam, you know, and the ones who didn't, a lot of them, they just left because this was no longer a Jewish homeland. So they went and they had conversation
- [24:26]
Scott Horton
that Tucker had with Ambassador Huckabee was. And, and Tucker was just running circles around him, sitting still, trying to get him to explain either the religious and, or ethnic basis for these supernatural property rights. And how can you have it both ways in all of these contradictory ways where.
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Daryl Cooper
Yeah, and you can never do it. Everybody made fun of Huckabee for that, but I've never heard a better answer from people who are way smarter than him because they're, they're just had the,
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Scott Horton
the talking point for each question. Even though if you ask them all in the, in the proper order, like a lawyer, like Tucker did there, it's really. You trap him into a bunch of logical contradictions about where these, you know, mysterious.
- [25:13]
Daryl Cooper
I mean, think about how crazy it is that somebody who has absolutely no blood running through their veins, that is, you know, a descendant of like the ancient Jews, like there's absolutely just a full blooded Norwegian or something who converts to Judaism can immigrate and become a citizen of Israel, but somebody who all of their ancestors were 100% Jewish, but is Muslim or Christian because they just thought that was the right religion or whatever. That they don't have that right. Yeah.
- [25:46]
Scott Horton
And they, the reason they converted to Islam was so they wouldn't have to pay taxes. That was the deal. If you're still Jewish or Christian, you have to pay a higher tax rate and you get a break if you convert. And so simple as that. That was how they did it. They didn't put a sword to everybody's neck, they just gave him a tax cut.
- [26:01]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. I mean, and you know, it was a. Because the same thing happened a lot in a lot of Christian countries as well.
- [26:07]
Scott Horton
And which by the way, attacks is a sword at the neck, don't get me wrong. But you see what I mean? It wasn't just conquest. Yeah.
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Daryl Cooper
But you know, you know, you have to think about it though in terms of like they didn't have nation states back then. Sure. And so the way they demarcated, like who is a. What we would call a citizen today of the polity, you know, it was. Yeah. Based around religion. And so there were, you know, there were different rules governing the different groups. That's how all empires worked, you know, really up until the modern age. But yeah, you saw the same thing happen with a lot of Jews in Christian countries as well, is a lot of them just converted just because it was. Made life easier, you know, Like a lot of people like to talk about, you know, this, this is one of my favorite things to get into fights with my right wing friends about like my, my hard right friends. They, everybody loves to point to that Nation of Islam book that came out in the 1990s about Jews running the slave trade. And I always tell them it's not true. And they always argue with me and their argument. All the people that they start listing, they're all a bunch of conversos and they're like, oh, these were Jews who converted to Christianity or their kids or whatever. And I'm like, okay, far be it from me to like unless you have good, really solid evidence of it, to doubt anybody's conversion. But the thing is like a lot of these people who did it, like some of them were false conversions and that's why you got the Inquisition and stuff. Some of them were sincere conversions. And a lot of those people got caught up in a lot of the atrocities that came afterwards when they didn't deserve it. But a huge number of those people, and this just makes sense if you think about human nature. They were Just people. They weren't that serious about Judaism in the first place. And they were like, what do I got to do? Yeah, okay, I'm a Christian. Cool. And they just went about their. Their lives as business people. Like, it was never a big part of their identity or life. You know, that's what a huge number of those were. And it's like, that's just, you know, this just. You got to remember, like, not everybody out there, even in the Muslim world today, everybody thinks of, like, you know, because it's in the news. Everybody thinks of Iran as, like, just a bunch of fanatics. Or even, like, if you were to go to Afghanistan, dude, like, go to the Taliban and all of their, like, the Pashtun population out there, you think, surely, like, every one of them is just a fanatic, right? It's like, no, not really. You know, there's a lot of people who. They say the things that they have to say when, like, the guys are around, you know, who care about that stuff or whatever.
- [28:28]
Scott Horton
Focus here. Because the point being that the Zionist claim to that land is a bunch of crap. You have people who are from there who have property rights because they inherited that property from their father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father. And then you have a bunch of foreign invaders who say that plain old natural property rights as understood in the west since at least Locke, but really before that, those are null and void because they have magical, supernatural property rights which say that anyone from anywhere else has a higher claim as long as they claim to believe in the Jewish religion and the people there not, and they must be displaced. And that's what they mean when they say, does the Jewish state, Does Israel have a right to exist? I mean, do they have a right then to expel everyone else with violent force as though they are the ones trespassing? And the answer to that is absolutely not. That's stupid. What are you talking about? That's like, if I kick in your house and then I claim you're the one trespassing and kick you out, it's pretty obvious what's going on there. So, yeah, that's the bottom line here, is that none of this makes sense. I mean, you have Ethiopian Jews and you have Moroccan Jews and Lithuanian and Polish and Ukrainian and Russian and Hungari, Hungarian and Romanian and German Jews who. And Brooklyn Jews who all have the right to live in Palestine. Palestinians don't, though, right? That's. Anyone can tell you that that's stupid and wrong. You'd have to have ingested 15 ridiculous public relations slogans in a row to somehow not see right through that crap, you know?
- [30:10]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. And when you push them, when you push them far enough, they always come back to, you know, hey, the North America used to belong to the Native Americans. Now you got it. Write a conquest baby. And it's like okay, fine, I, I can't argue with that like in terms of, you know, just like the logic of it. But hold that thought. When the tables turn, that's all I ask. Just hold that thought and don't come running to anybody else for sympathy. You know, when you die by the sword that you live by, man.
- [30:42]
Scott Horton
You want to see something cool? I'm a total twin. Check it out. Actually I'm not. I'm Skater Scott. I'm me. And there's me doing a giant slob air down at the local skate park where the Total Twins met me. And it's in the new magazine of the Total Twins magazine. If you're not familiar. This is really great educational propaganda for young libertarian and right wing kids so that your kids don't have to be raised commie in America. And they have these great kind of booklet length books all about central banking and property rights and you know, the kids version of the road to Serfdom and all these great things. And then they have more serious like textbook sized books on American history. It's you know, mostly like elementary school through like junior high school and I guess in, in high school age stuff too as well on different tiers. Anyway, this is their new thing and the way that you get it is you just go to totaltwins.com free magazine. That's pretty good, right? Totaltwins.com free magazine. And then this one is all about blowback. It's called A Hundred Years of Blowback. And what happens is the tunnel twins go to the skate park and they meet me and I explain to them about how the war in Iran is all Dwight Eisenhower's fault and, and that's why we live in a domestic police state here of course. And we have. And then there's a bunch of other great little side things and whatever and it's really great stuff and you get it for free. And all you got to do is go to total twins.com free magazine and you can even see I don't know what podcast I must have talked about this on, but he even got it right. My first skateboard was a pink and white gator. And so luckily they took his name off it because he's a murderer. Spit. But really cool gator graphics. And there I am doing a big slob air. And so I think that's rad. And now I need to learn slob air. I don't even think I can do a slob air, can I? I can do a mute air. But anyway, so, man, isn't that cool? I'm a dang Tuttle twin, dude. I'm a cartoon. Who needs the Simpsons dude when you could be in the Tuttle twin. Yeah, so. And then also, I want to change the subject to this other thing, which is this really great lady named Michelle McPhee. And that name might ring a bell if you ever read my book Provoked, which this show is sort of kind of named after Provoked. How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. You can see on the shelf there behind me Maybe. Well, Michelle McPhee. I rely on her very heavily in my chapter on the Boston bombing, which happened 13 years ago, two days ago. And I did a great interview with her today. Great because of her part in it, where we just went through that whole crazy, convoluted story of Tamer Lane Tsarnaev and his idiot younger brother Jokar, who's now sitting on death row, who killed three people, two young women, and a little boy at the Boston marathon attack in 2013. And he was a Chin terrorist. And I guess the bottom line is that the FSB had their eyes on him and warned the Americans about him. And then perhaps they were working together, the FBI and the fsb, and used him as an informant, sent him there to Dagestan to help identify a couple of guys that the Russians wanted to kill and who they did kill. And then he came home, and they didn't keep their eyes on him, the Feds, and they let him get away with doing this terrible attack. And I'm not saying it was one of those sting operations that went awry. It's not one of those. But there's a lot of dirty stuff about it that I don't like, and I don't claim to understand it completely, but she wrote two great books about it, Mayhem and Maximum Harm. And so as I reread my chapter about it this morning, I thought, man, I really should have had a couple of paragraphs there about what the hell do I think is even the point? But I think at least part of it was because the Americans didn't want to pay attention to warnings from the Russians that they refused to really follow up. You know, they used the guy as an informant, apparently against some Drug dealers, and then against these terrorists, I'm not exactly sure, but apparently against these terrorists in Dagestan. But they didn't take the, the warnings of, of who he was seriously enough. And of course, then I don't know if you remember this, Daryl, but there's the Graham Fuller angle, where Graham Fuller, who is one of the architects of even post Afghanistan US support for the mujahideen in, you know, the Caucasus and I guess probably in the Balkans as well, but definitely in the Caucasus, his daughter married their uncle and, and then there was even a question of like apparently two visas for the same guy, the older brother, but with two different names. And the question is, like, how did these people even get into the country in the first place and what role the CIA may have played in allowing them into the country in the first place? And it's a big, ugly mess. And anyway, so I interviewed her today for the Scott Horton show, and that's going to be out on my substack, Scott hortonshow.com and then at, you know, on YouTube and all the other podcasters and everything the day after that. So if people are interested in that, it's still one that, you know, there's so many side stories to it, like the totalitarian lockdown, you know, Jim Bovard posted pictures of the SWAT teams pointing their rifles at citizens looking out their windows when they're looking. It's a one manhunt for one 21 year old, you know what I mean? And they're treating the whole like three towns, Boston, Cambridge and Watertown all like it's, you know, the scene of a massive Al Qaeda invasion or some kind of thing, you know, where there could be a terrorist anywhere and, and accosting anyone who went outside and, you know, shutting down all business and all events and everything. And it was pretty crazy. So anyway, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, I do a show like that.
- [36:18]
Daryl Cooper
Yes, he does. You know, Watertown. Watertown, Massachusetts. This is a just a total segue, but there, I don't know if it's. There still is, but there was a big Armenian community there back in the day. And that's actually where Operation Nemesis, which was the operation a bunch of Armenian, Armenian radicals after the First World War, put together a team of people and hunted down and killed all of the Turkish officials who were in charge during the Armenian genocide. They killed them in Berlin, they killed him in Baku, like hunted them down all over the world. That was actually hatched and run out of Watertown, Massachusetts.
- [36:58]
Scott Horton
Interesting man. You Never know what you, I don't,
- [37:01]
Daryl Cooper
I don't know a whole lot about, like, Boston bombing. It's one of those that just sort of slipped through my attention span, I guess, over the years. You know, I'd say it's those early years of the, you know, were, were very interesting, like the interaction between the Russia and United States when it came to that. Right, because, you know, you, you kind of saw on right after 9 11, like, the Russians and the Chinese were like, sort of very, very, very vocally, like, supportive of us, like, and whatever we wanted to do. And it was partly because both of them had problems with some Muslim insurgents
- [37:37]
Scott Horton
that they, they were hoping we'd call off our support for them.
- [37:40]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, well, yeah, right. That, I mean, that's one dude, that's one of the things that, like, I was talking to my wife the other day about how, you know, when you go to other countries, like, we, as a, as Americans, like, we just, most people, like, we don't understand, like, how absolutely terrifying we are to a lot of other countries. Like, the, like, we think of ourselves just this place that exists and we live here and sometimes our politicians do some things that happen, whatever. Like, I mean, we, when you really sit down and think about the fact that we have completely destroyed like, half a dozen countries in the last 25 years, several of them just kind of on a whim, like, we just sort of just decided to destroy your country completely to the point where it's still in just total chaos. And, and like, you know, the, the, I, I really can never get past the fact that, you know, that, that the best lawn school massacre in Russia was carried out by a group, you know, that. I don't know if we were still funding them at the time. I haven't seen any evidence that we are, but that just a couple years before we were like, arming, training, funding, the script, right? And like, I just, you know, I, I, I try to get people who are, you know, maybe not like, not completely in agreement with me or with us on this stuff, but who are open to it to just try to like, put themselves in the position of the Russians. Like, think, think if, like, we found out that like, Chinese intelligence was arming, funding, training the people who did 9 11, and then that happens and we, like, we're expected to just sort of move off of it. Like, it's like, okay, like, just move on. Like, that was three years ago. Like, this is like, I mean, we, we would never get over that. It would be something we'd be angry About a hundred years from now. And yet we don't have that kind of mentality. Like, it's almost because another thing my wife and I were talking about, I think it was the same conversation she was, you know, she was saying that we. We were talking about Vietnam because we'd watched documentary on it and the Vietnam War. And she said, it's amazing that, like, these people allow us to visit their country or talk to us at all or anything. And I say, you know, it really is, and I've been there a couple of times and like, the almost. It's almost as if, like the impression I get is that they're looking at us and like, they're like, these people don't even remember what they did to us.
- [40:13]
Scott Horton
Yeah. Which is mostly true, right?
- [40:15]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, it really is. Like, we don't even bear. We barely remember what we did to those people, and we kind of expect everybody else around the world to be like that, too, but they're not, you know.
- [40:26]
Scott Horton
Right. Yeah. Like, the quintessential shot from Iraq War two was a profile view of an infantry man firing his rifle at. You never get to see what. You know.
- [40:36]
Daryl Cooper
That's just, that's the point of view
- [40:38]
Scott Horton
of the whole thing. Right.
- [40:39]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah.
- [40:40]
Scott Horton
And, and, and speaking of Beslan, I mean, there are a few different points in the book where this is said and repeated. Particularly the Kosovo War of 1999 is a big one, but also is the Bezelin attack and W. Bush's response, which was, we like these terrorists and we don't want. You shouldn't go to war against them. You should take it easy. You should respect some civil processes and this and that. And I have two different sources. One of them is George Friedman from Stratford wrote about this, and I can't remember who the other one was. Oh, I bet it was Ben Aris from then from the London Telegraph, who now runs bne IntelliNews. Decent Russia reporter. I'm pretty sure he was the second source for this. And they both were at the. God dang it, man. It's going to come to me in a second. The name of the conference where they. It's an annual conference that the Russians hold every year. And Putin came into the room and it was just like a couple of days after Beslin had ended. And he's just fuming mad. He, like, can't contain his rage essentially at being lectured by George W. Bush about how you need to deal, you know, negotiate with these terrorists. And this is at a time when America is slaughtering people by the hundreds of thousands from Nigeria to the Philippines. Right. And everywhere in between in the name of a couple of Saudis hiding out in the Nangar province, sent some friends to hijack a few planes on one big day. And, and we're willing to wage unmitigated violence against populations that had absolutely nothing within even a daydream site of that attack on our country. And yet here we're talking about a massacre of school children on the first day of school and their families on the first day of school. And W. Bush is lecturing Putin and he just reacted in a rage. And then what they said at the time was this was the break. This was the end of the new friendship. Because even after all the screwing of Yeltsin that Bill Clinton did, well, what the hell? Yeltsin was gone. And you know, Putin came in in 2000, W. Bush came in in 2001. So like hell, let's have a clean break and let's see if we can get along. Fresh start and let bygones be bygones. It's a new century, new millennium, everything. Two new presidents. So, you know, screw the Kosovo war. Forget about that. Let's move forward. Let's see if we can work this out. But within five years, it was, no, no way we're gonna, you know, constantly pick fights with them over their relationship with the other countries of Eastern Europe, and we're gonna still side with the Bin Ladenites in Chechnya after September 11 and even after they've vanguard or the worst of the Sunni insurgency in our war in Iraq, which was, you know, really getting going at that time.
- [43:35]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, like, is my best recollection is that we know that we were working with some of those cheshin militias, including BS, up to like 2003 or 4. And best line I think was in 2006. Yeah, I don't know. I, I, that's just what I think we know. But it's really crazy when you think what I think.
- [43:59]
Scott Horton
What I have from Colonel what's his name that wrote the book about it was that it was after Bezeland was when America called off the support.
- [44:06]
Daryl Cooper
Really. So I think so.
- [44:08]
Scott Horton
Or maybe it might have been the earlier theater attack in Moscow.
- [44:12]
Daryl Cooper
Okay. Yeah. Like, I mean, so I was gonna
- [44:16]
Scott Horton
say, like, you can go back two chapters on this. Two separate chapters in the Clinton and Bush W. Bush sections. And provoked.
- [44:23]
Daryl Cooper
Go, go back to like the days when the Chechens were starting to rebel and there was a counterinsurgency going on in the, you know, the, the second Chin War. We shouldn't have been funding those militias. You know, these are a bunch of bin Laden knights, as you said. But at least you could like say, well, there's, this is a geopolitical move we're making. This, this thing going on. We want to encourage this uprising. And that's why we're doing X, Y and Z. What somebody could come up with a logical reason why they're doing.
- [44:53]
Scott Horton
Yeah, we're preventing a pipeline from going through there.
- [44:56]
Daryl Cooper
But then when you get past that, like the catching war is over, like it's done, like it's not coming back, it's over and we're still doing that. And then you realize, like, oh, we're just trying to create chaos. Like that's it. We're just trying to create chaos, get people killed, get things blown up and just chaos. That's it. That's the goal. And a lot of U.S. foreign policy, I think, does not make sense unless you understand that's very often the goal is just to create chaos in a place where in this instance, you know, we didn't want a pipeline getting built through that was going to compete with
- [45:31]
Scott Horton
some of our projects, especially destabilizing Russia. This is the case, right? We can never let them get ahead. I don't know if I ever told you this anecdote, sorry for repeating myself, man, but when I debated Eli Lake, which it was a tie, but if you took out all the Ukrainians in the audience, I destroyed him. But anyway, when I debated Eli Lake, it was at, I think a Princeton writer, some fancy plants pants place up there in the Northeast. I can't remember. No, it wasn't Princeton. It was at whatever, Dartmouth or something. Anyway, so after the thing, we're eating dinner at like this four star restaurant in this extremely fancy hotel where the likes of me don't belong. And it was a hilarious scene because it's Gene Epstein and Eli Lake and they're just screaming at each other. And at one point I had to say to the restaurant, like, it's okay, everybody, we just got a couple of Jews over here because they're just screaming each other at the top of their lungs or whatever, you know, it was a funny scene. But Gene Epstein of the soho Forum, my very dear friend and wonderful guy, he told this story about how Jude Waniski. Are you familiar with Jude Waniski, Darrell?
- [46:41]
Daryl Cooper
No.
- [46:41]
Scott Horton
Okay, so he was from Polyconomics. He was like a monetarist, which is like, I think is synonymous with the Chicago school. But maybe I'm oversimplifying that a little bit, but they're not exactly Austrians, but they're pretty damn fiscal conservative, libertarian, free market ish type dudes, right? Hayekians, if not, not even Hayekians, but like Friedmanites, if not Rothbardians, okay? But he had been a neoconservative. I think he'd even been a tribe and then had moved right with a lot of them and become a Reaganite and this kind of thing, had been friends with all those guys. And in fact, he even took the blame for introducing Richard Pearl to Dick Cheney. Sorry about that, guys. He said so now. But then at the end of the Cold War, Jude had sided with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell and all of the Paleo conservatives against the, the Iraq war, the first Iraq war, and against the new world order under H.W. bush and all of that stuff. And so he had become a neocon turned paleo con. And so anyway, just so you know, he was a D guy. I interviewed him once or twice. I used to be on a mailing list with him and Pat Buchanan and Gordon Prather and Paul Craig Roberts, which was fun but dang old. So Jean told the story about how. Jude had told him the story of how he had tried to convince Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for policy under H.W. bush, that, you know what we need to do, Paul Wolfowitz? We need to convince the Russians to adopt a gold standard. They can't. We're trying to give them whatever shock therapy, this and that and transplant free market economics over there, but as long as they're printing money all day, it's going to be really bad. And again, this guy's not an Austrian, but still, he's, you know, he's, he's as far as monetarism, he's for restraint in monetary policy. And he's saying, and in fact, one of the real fatal flaws in the entire shock therapy was that they still had a communist running the central bank and he would not stop printing money no matter what. All through the 90s was a huge part of the problem in the entire thing. But anyway, so Jude is telling Wolfowitz, this is what we need to do, is we need to convince them to adopt hard money so they have a sound basis for a real capitalist economy. And Wolfowitz told him, no, them, we hate them, we hate Russia. We don't want to help them. We don't want to be kind to them and help them up. They're our rivals and we are going to keep them down as long and best we can. Or at least that was his intention. And you can see, right, like we have this mythology from the Second World War that after the war we rebuilt Germany and Japan and made them our friends. And they've been our friends ever since, which proves that we know how to do this a lot better than the British and the French do and that kind of thing. But of course, we occupied and controlled West Germany and Japan and we had Joe Stalin, Soviet Union, to hold over their head and say, don't you prefer us to them? And so that's an entirely different situation having Eisenhower and MacArthur parked in your capital city versus not. And so at the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a lot of Americans said, yes, this is our chance to be their friend again. But the national security state type said, well, we don't really control Moscow. We have as much influence over their drunken president and his cronies as we can, but we don't have a military occupation there truly dictating to them. And so why would we want to be good friends to them? Why? Because that would entail empowering them, helping them to get rich, helping them to get back on their feet, at which point that just means that they're a strategic rival of ours again sooner. And so it's better to kick them while they're down. And one more point on this and then I'll shut up, I swear to God. Is that Strobe Talbot, who ran Russia policy in the 90s for Bill Clinton, had asked rhetorically in Like 2018, after the civil War broke out, but before the worst war broke out in Ukraine. And he told the New York Times, he said, listen, you have to do what's in your country's interest at the time, and if you don't, then you won't be in charge very long. But then he muses to himself and he says, but should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our national interest than the one we had at the time? Maybe. So in other words, should we have been thinking ahead that are, is this going to lead to a war in Ukraine in the 2020s and are we going to really regret getting us that close to a nuclear exchange over something idiotic like this? Or should we be thinking about Polish votes and Lockheed dollars to get Bill Clinton re elected in 1996 and they chose the latter there when obviously, in hindsight, yeah, maybe we should have been thinking about the long term interest of getting along with Russia. But you can see how in their mind at the time, they were All Paul Wolfowitz looking at it like, why would we help Russia up back onto their feet when they're Russia, we don't want them on their feet. And then to me, this is just totally idiotic and myopic and short sighted and crazy, but I understand it, you know.
- [51:48]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, it's, I always imagine, try to imagine what it's like for a country like China or Putin's Russia to, or, or Iran right now to deal with our country knowing that just so much of the way we deal with them is driven by very, very, just petty, venal domestic politics. Yeah, that was one of the more. When I, when I learned a lot about everything that happened in the 90s between us and Russia, that was one of the more, you know, shocking parts about the whole thing is how actually a lot of the old hands in the national security state, like they didn't necessarily want to be Russia's best buddy or anything like that, but they were happy the Cold War was over and we needed to, you know, welcome them back into the, I mean, you gotta think about it like, it's not as if Russia, the Russian empire before the Soviet Union came into being was, you know, this, this total outcast nation, you know, in the, in it was part of the, it was part of the concert of Europe, you know, I mean, yeah, people looked at it as if it was a little more backwards, you know, a little oriental because of, you know, the broad scope of its empire and everything. But it was part of Europe. And, you know, everybody looked at it that way. It had been for a long time. And the Soviet Union really, in the broad scope of history, you know, and that exclusion from all that was really like the blip. That was the blip. And so a lot of the old hands in the national security state were looking at it in a pretty reasonable and rational way. But it was as, as you just, I think you just said it just now, like people were, especially after the 94 election when Gingrich and the Republicans, like, swept into power, after that they were holding, you know, like the Polish vote in Chicago over, you know, Bill Clinton's head. And the, you know, just the polls are, you know, to this day, I mean, polls tend to be like pretty anti Russian and you know, the I, I, then you have the other element of it that also has to make diplomacy with this, like, very, very difficult. Right. Where I mean, just you see this again, like you look at Iran when they, when we send Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to go talk to them and they they know the Iranians are not stupid people, and they have their own intelligence services, and they just have a television they can turn on. They understand that they're talking to two Israeli agents whose cover is that they work for the US Administration, you know, and they have to sort of navigate that. It's gotta be. It's gotta be really difficult. And so. But this. This isn't something that, like, just started recently. When you go back to the Clinton years, the 1990s. I mean, so many of the people who were really ideologically driving things in the direction that they ended up going. You know, there's a lot of these people who had come from these Central and Eastern European countries to the United States and who had just a very, very negative opinion about Russia, especially back then, because there was sort of this. There was sort of this tendency to, you know, like, I made the point after, like, as the. As the Jonestown cult started to come apart, like, in its last days, you saw a lot of these people who were like, inner circle types who really built the whole thing for Jim Jones and ran it for him, and he couldn't have done any of what he did without them. But they kind of saw, like, at the last minute, this thing's heading for a cliff, and so they bailed, or things got difficult, you know, and so they bailed. And, you know, all of them, Boy, they. They just. They were all victims of Jim Jones. You know, he just. He just brainwashed us. He threatened us, whatever it was. And it's like all. Almost all of those people are full of shit. Like, almost all of those people were true believers who bailed at the very end when things, you know, changed. And you saw a version of that when the Soviet Union started to come apart where you had all these countries that they had, like, entrenched communist elites of their own. It's not as if they were administered by Russia or something like that, especially a place like Poland or something. They had their. You know, doesn't necessarily mean it was like, a majority of the population or anything like that, but these were domestic communist movements that were running these countries. But their way of sort of is kind of similar to what I said about Israel's way out of this whole mess they're in right now is just pin it all on Netanyahu. He made us do it. He's the.
- [56:10]
Scott Horton
He.
- [56:11]
Daryl Cooper
You know, it's all his fault. Let's. Let's just purge him. He's the scapegoat. They kind of did that with Russia. All of those other communist Countries like, oh, it was all the Russians just doing all of this to us. And it's like, you know, obviously the Soviet Union was dominated by Russia. It's the biggest and most powerful country in the union. But, you know, it goes way, way, way too far to say that, you know, all of these countries were just victimized by Russia, but it was their way of sort of dealing with the last, you know, 70 years and, and sort of progressing out of it.
- [56:41]
Scott Horton
Yeah, yeah, you gotta have some way of leaving the past. So oftentimes that's a line of. And get that job done. All right, so listen, we haven't done a live show in quite a few weeks here, so we need to take some super chats and all of that because obviously the people want to talk to us, especially you. But first, before that, we gotta tell them real quick about Matt Sersley, the Agorist tax advice lawyer, so that he'll give us money. And also, it's sound advice. Listen, you're just trying to get by in the world. Maybe you got an extension. It's past tax day today, but maybe you got an extension. You're trying to deal with these guys down at the IRS so you can help pay the interest on the national debt. Well, listen, there are no gimmicks. I saw Margaret Taylor Greene was promoting this guy Joe Bannister, pushing that. Oh, you don't really have to pay income tax. Look, you should know that that's all a bunch of crap. But what you should do is you should get a lawyer who will help you figure out how to depreciate your assets and pay as absolutely little as possible. Find every actual loophole. Not bogus, you know, popular right wing wives tales, loopholes. Technicalitarian loopholes, as an old friend used to call them. And. But no, instead you get you a good lawyer who's going to help you and your business get away with having to pay as absolutely little as you absolutely have to. And that is at Agorist Tax advice dot com. And he really knows his stuff and
- [58:08]
Daryl Cooper
will do great by you.
- [58:09]
Scott Horton
And then here's another thing that you really need to know about, which is Scott Orton flavored coffee? Actually, no, it's just, you know, branded. It's part Ethiopian and part Sumatran mix. It's really good. It's the best coffee. You know, I get it all the time. Phil Pepin is a great guy. He's my coffee dealer and he keeps me awake all day when I drink this stuff and it gets a ton of great reviews and tons of return customers. Everybody who buys it keeps drinking it because the Dunkin Donuts coffee from Walgreens just absolutely does not cut it. After you drink Scott Horton brand coffee, just go to Scott Horton.org Coffee, that's Scott Horton.org Coffee. And then you can drink what tastes a lot like me. And then just real quick here, let me tell you about the facts about iran.com. this is just a couple of the classes of my courses from the Scott Horton Academy here. And these are a deep background on America's relationship with Iran, in case you want to know. All for free for you there at the facts about iran.com. so now let's get at them comments. Have you been looking at them here? I have not.
- [59:14]
Daryl Cooper
I did. I've been obsessing over one that was a long time ago from Jim Bob's world. He said that I look like I'm getting ready for my first day of fourth grade in this shirt. And I it's been impossible to focus on anything else since he said it.
- [59:29]
Scott Horton
That's funny. My life. My wife loves your fountain poster, by the way. She wanted to make sure I told
- [59:36]
Daryl Cooper
you that at some point she likes that movie. It's my favorite movie, dude. And guess what? Darren Aronofsky follows me on Twitter. I don't. I can only assume it's because somewhere he saw me being interviewed with that there. I have no idea. Maybe he's a fan of the podcast
- [59:51]
Scott Horton
friend or somebody pointed out to him, right, that this guy's got your movie in his background there.
- [59:55]
Daryl Cooper
So then a buddy of mine, a good friend of mine who's a novelist, best new novelist out there right now. One I've like been. I haven't been as excited about like a new novelist as I am about him in a long time. Author of two books. And this is not an ad. I'm just bragging sort of about something. King of Dogs is one of them. And his newest book is Crowbar, which is a crazy book. He got contact. This is like, this is not, this is a self published book or I think it's his own print. Like it's not some big, you know, there's no marketing campaign, doesn't exist. There's no reason anybody who doesn't like follow one of his buddies on Twitter or something would ever have heard of it. And he got contacted by Aronofsky's people just like a couple days ago asking if the TV and movie rights to Crowbar had been bought yet. And so I don't know if it's true, but I am just fantasizing that the way that he heard about it was through my Twitter account because I push that book all the time. If anybody out there is looking for new fiction, check it out. Andrew Edwards, King of Dogs, and Crowbar. I recommend starting with King of Dogs because Crowbar is pretty heavy.
- [61:03]
Scott Horton
Wow.
- [61:03]
Daryl Cooper
Anyway, that was really cool.
- [61:05]
Scott Horton
Yeah, man. All right.
- [61:07]
Daryl Cooper
Oh, and tell your wife. Not only that, I've got the Fountain graphic novel, which Aronofsky made when he was having trouble getting the funding and the green light to make the movie, because he wanted to make it for a really long time. He said, screw it. I'll make a. I'll make the graphic novel for now. So I got that as well. I love that.
- [61:26]
Scott Horton
I wonder if I can find that for the old lady there. I bet she'd like that. I better write it down, though, or I'm gonna forget. Hey, listen, a guy asks here, or he says a comment here, speaker of the Iranian Parliament says that these are all lies from Trump. I, I, I saw a couple of different reports like that, different Foreign Ministry people, parliamentarians, whatever. And then I saw just a rando Twitter reply, Daryl, that said, you know, part of this could be the consequence of killing all the leadership, because then that would naturally, without even knowing the details, that would naturally create different factions vying for power in the, in the power vacuum from killing all the leaders. See, you could have some people maybe negotiating at least on some of these points. Trump is clearly embellishing in his claims there. But you could have some people working on a deal and other groups doing everything they can to ruin that so as to ruin that group's credibility in order to take their place and that kind of thing. So, you know, one of the drawbacks of a decapitation strategy like this is Trump said he didn't just kill the ayatollah, he killed all kinds of leadership all across and, and the Israelis, too. Massive assassination campaign across the top few levels there.
- [62:37]
Daryl Cooper
Sure. And, I mean, because you would have always had.
- [62:41]
Scott Horton
Thank you, Jer, for that comment, by the way.
- [62:43]
Daryl Cooper
You would have always had factions in terms of people with different opinions, you know, within the regime. But once you rip the lid off the leadership like that, you know, you don't have somebody with the wherewithal and the legitimacy to be the decider. And, you know, that could definitely be the case, because I got to imagine that there are people within the Iranian regime right now who, you know, they don't want any more Iranians getting killed. They want people to be able to Go back to something like regular life. And there got to be a lot of hardliners in there who are like, look, there is no regular life until we solve this problem once and for all, it just doesn't exist. And so. And this is the best chance we're ever going to get to do it. And so let's. Let's push it and, and make that happen.
- [63:27]
Scott Horton
Yeah.
- [63:27]
Daryl Cooper
I don't see how the hardliners don't win that argument under the circumstances.
- [63:31]
Scott Horton
Yeah, seriously.
- [63:33]
Daryl Cooper
And, and of course, Trump is just. You know, it's so funny that, like, when the President of the United States says X, Y and Z, and then the foreign minister or whatever, whoever it was of Iran comes out and says, no, he's lying. And. Right. We always believe the Iranian. Everybody believes the Iranian. Even, like, pro Trump people are like, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.
- [63:58]
Scott Horton
All right, so here's one. It says, do you still think it's a good idea to leave NATO if it means war between Israel and Turkey? No.
- [64:05]
Daryl Cooper
Hell yeah, dude. If it means war between Israel and Turkey. Huh? Dude, the IDF has been getting. They're getting embarrassed by Hezbollah for the second time in 20 years. I would love nothing more than to see them pick a fight with Turkey. Turkey would not. They would send their kids to go conquer Israel. That would be the shortest, easiest fight you've seen in the Middle east in a long time.
- [64:30]
Scott Horton
Please.
- [64:31]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, if we got to leave NATO to make that happen, let's go.
- [64:35]
Scott Horton
Yeah, but the Israelis, if it really came down to it, they nuke Istanbul
- [64:39]
Daryl Cooper
and Pakistan would hook Turkey up. They'd give them a deterrent. I don't think that it would come to that. And I think the Israelis, how could
- [64:49]
Scott Horton
they not know America would side with Israel against Turkey would be the problem. Right. I guess. I don't care if they fight.
- [64:55]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, good luck with that.
- [64:57]
Scott Horton
I mean, I don't want to see any of that stuff.
- [64:59]
Daryl Cooper
Dude, the Turks can fight. And I'm not, like a big fan of the Turks. I got an Armenian wife, an Armenian in laws. So, like, it's not like I'm some Turkey Stan. But, like, I have. I was in the military and the DoD long enough to work with them a bit and study them a bit. The Turks can hold up. The Turks are a real military that has, you know, like, like Western level training, pipelines, equipment, everything. Like. Yeah, no, you don't want to go straight from shooting babies in Gaza to fighting the Turkish army. That would be a terrible idea for Israel.
- [65:34]
Scott Horton
Fair enough. All right. So this guy asks and, and yes, I do agree with you that and, and disagree with and we're just talking about making bets on the future here. So who knows? I, I'm not claiming to have a real good idea, but Robert Pate, we talked about this last week. Robert Pate from the University of Chicago. To him, this is purely academic. Iran will now not only seek but will achieve a nuclear weapons capability because their latent deterrent has proven to not be good enough and their missile deterrent has proven to not be good enough. And so they need nukes. And so they're going to get nukes. And then as I believe you and I agreed last week, well, there are other reasons for them to not get nukes, including that really maybe their missile deterrent has been proven to be quite effective and that any idiot smarter than Trump would not try to do what he just tried to do after this and the absolute humiliation of America's conventional force and really the complete calling of America's bluff as the dominant power in the Gulf, that whole era is over now as a result of this. So maybe their missile deterrent is enough. And then, and then also, as you pointed out last week, if they really do race to a bomb, well, then so is Saudi and UAE and God, maybe even Kuwait and who knows who. And you don't want that. They don't want that. And they're probably smart enough to think ahead that there are other consequences at stake here. And after all, you can't do this without America, and everybody knows that.
- [67:00]
Daryl Cooper
So, and not, not just because they're afraid that, like Saudi is going to nuke them out of nowhere or something like that. They don't want it because right now those countries are, they are not at parity with Iran by a long shot, as we see right now. Once everybody gets nukes, well, now you kind of are at parity. And the fact that you can't just decide to start blowing up, you know, Kuwait's oil and gas infrastructure or whatever else, when the Americans decide to attack you again, getting that nuclear deterrent actually takes away your Strait of Hormuz deterrent and puts you in a more threatened position like it to me, it just doesn't make any sense for them to want one. You know, all the, all they would do is put themselves in a position like right now, Turkey and Iran are the most powerful countries in their region and they don't want to fight each other anyway. We, they, they have shown enough deterrent capability to just as you said, like, unless somebody is as completely owned by not just completely owned by Israel, because I don't expect that to change with presidents coming down the pipeline anytime soon, but one who is completely owned by just a fanatical Netanyahu lud government. You know, because you need the both of those things in place for something like this to happen.
- [68:19]
Scott Horton
Which, by the way, this goes back to something you brought up a couple of times about Israel after Netanyahu. And this is actually, you know, a debate, you could see both sides of it where people argue that it would be bad to get rid of Netanyahu because he's such a lightning rod and, and helps people turn against Israel altogether, you know, the silver lining to his very, you know, dark nature. And that if they got rid of him, that would be a big sigh of relief to a lot of American liberal Jewish Zionists, for example, that like, oh, we can all go back to supporting Israel again because now everything's fine, because good old Napali Bennett, the cause of September 11th is in there instead now or whatever. And I think there is some truth to that. Right? On the other hand, I don't think there's anyone in Israeli politics who is even within miles of as talented as Benjamin Netanyahu in terms of being able to press levers of power and control outcomes in Europe and the United States of America. Nali Bennett and all the king's horses and men can't do what Netanyahu is able to do through his sheer determination and chutzpah in a way, and, and just, you know, his stick to itiveness over all of this time, the networks of influence that he's been able to cultivate over all this time. I just don't think that any Prime Minister in the medium term future of Israel could have anything like the sway that he has over the west now. It could be worse. It could be Ben gvir, where it doesn't matter what America and Europe say, he's just going to kill them all or do God knows what, you know what I mean? So, like, don't get me wrong, but like, if it's a matter of a slightly less offensive prime minister coming to power, one that, you know, helps to generate new apologia in American media for the new Netanyahu, less Israel, then that would still be, I think, worth it in the loss of his, the next Prime Minister's actual ability to affect change. I mean, imagine Y lapid running around, you know, commanding American presidents to obey his will and whatever the way Netanyahu does. Not a chance. Now this guy paid 4.99 so let me say here he asked many people claim that Iran was in violation of their safeguards agreement, but I never understood that claim. Is there any truth to that? So here's what it is. Yes, there is some truth to it, but it's a misleading type thing. In the JCPOA nuclear deal of 2015, they actually agreed beforehand in the deal that if America leaves the deal, Iran is allowed to stop abiding by some aspects of the deal deal without leaving the deal itself. It says that right in it. And so that was exactly what they did after Trump tore up the deal. They said, okay, well we're going to stop abiding by stipulation A, B, C and D on the list here, but without tearing up the deal from their end and breaking their deal with the rest of the UN Security Council. That didn't happen until last June and after the war last June, that was when Russia and China and Iran finally quit the JCPOA for their side of it. And I guess the British and the French, I'm not sure when they start stopped going along. But see, it's very important to note again what a kernel of truth that is because what the JCPOA really did was it just added additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements or subsidiary agreements to the already pre existing safeguards agreement. So if they stopped going by some of the new additional stipulations they had agreed to, they stopped abiding by some of the additional protocols and subsidiary agreements, well then that really doesn't matter because they were still within the basic safeguards agreement. All of their uranium was accounted for and had been and the IAEA had continued to be able to verify the non diversion of their nuclear material to any military or other special purpose, as they put it. And so they would always say, oh well, you know, there are new allegations almost always from the Israelis about we're, we're concerned and suspicious about research here and research there and we think we found some molecules that need to be explained. And so you would have those little side quests, but they never went anywhere. It was always like, well we got from the Pakistanis and it had some isotopes stuck to it still. Or we did this bench test a long time ago and you know about it already. So this is just results from that. Or you know, they had this whole thing about a secret explosives chamber at Parch and that it turned out they were making nano diamonds for industry there and that the expert, the Russian expert that they had there to build the thing had no experience with nuclear materials whatsoever. His Entire speciality was nano diamonds. They were saying, yeah, but look at which university he went to. That's the same university where nuclear people also go, yeah, Anyway, and, and, and that's not the way with that kind of implosion chambers. Not how you would be testing an implosion system for an atom bomb, anyway. So the whole thing, you know, there's stuff like that. But by and large, the real answer is up until Israel and America started the war last June, IAEA inspections were essentially unbroken, and nuclear material was verified to not have been diverted. The negative had been proven and was being consistently disproven, or was the negative was being consistently proven. And then once they launched the war, well, that was the disruption in the IAEA inspections, and I don't believe they've been back since. So now, of course, you have the satellites watching like a hawk and probably spies in there, you know, watching very closely what's going on. And, you know, you might remember this right before the war, actually, Trump said, I'm pretty sure this wasn't a tweet. Pretty sure he said this. I, I'm, my. In my head, I got video of him talking. I'm pretty sure he said this on, on camera that we saw what they were up to. They tried to restart. I, I believe he's referring to this site called Pickaxe Mountain, which is a day adjacent to Isfahan. And he's. And he's saying, we saw that they were trying to restart work on this new facility. And then I called him and I told them, don't you do it. I'll bomb you. I can see what you're doing. And then they stopped. That was before the war. Now he says, oh, they were two weeks away. They were making nuclear bombs. I had to stop them in an emergency. But about two weeks before the war, he said that he saw them do the slightest bit of tunnel digging and he made a phone call, or had Rubio or whoever make a phone call and say, hey, we're watching you, pal. Don't even think about it. We already proved that we are willing to bomb you. We'll do it again. So just stop.
- [74:33]
Daryl Cooper
We'll.
- [74:33]
Scott Horton
You dig a tunnel, we'll drop a bomb down it. So don't. So that's the reality of their nuclear program was it was a latent nuclear deterrent. The 60% uranium was just a bargaining chip. The, the war party cries all day long, 60%, 60%, 60%. But you can't really make a bomb out of it. Theoretically you could, but not really. No one's ever made a bomb out of 60% uranium 235. Why did they stop at 60? That's the question. Why didn't they go to 90? Because they weren't making weapons fuel. What they were saying was, look, man, you don't want us making weapons fuel, right? So let's get back to the table here. We're showing you, you know, you get nervous when we enrich to 3.6%. You get upset when we enrich up to 20. Starve. R.A. stark, Raven Mad when we enrich up to 60. Don't push us to nuclear weapons. Let's just get back in the deal. That was the only purpose of enriching up to 60, and they did it in reaction to Israeli sabotage of the facility at n in April 2021. So for anyone who is actually well versed in this stuff, all the War party's claims are just laughable. You know, I interviewed a guy the other day on my. Two weeks ago or three weeks ago on my show from the American, the Federation of Nuclear Scientists. Whichever it is, I forgot the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who wrote an article where he had just interviewed all of the greatest nuclear experts on this and he said Iran wasn't anywhere close to a bomb and nobody who actually is a nuclear wonk believes that they were only liars, claim that.
- [75:59]
Daryl Cooper
Well, and I don't think the people in Israel and the United States who are like the, the War Party propagandists, I don't think they believe that Iran was trying to race to a bomb. I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu ever believed what he was saying. Just like at the beginning, like right before this war happened, when the Omani foreign minister went on American television and laid out this deal, that the Iranians were very, very close to being ready to sign on the dotted line for far in excess of the jcpoa, far in excess of anything that is going to be on offer now. And then all of a sudden we start attacking and you can't come to any other conclusion except that we didn't attack them because a deal was impossible. We attacked them because a deal was about to be made, or at least we were going to be put in a position where it was going to be very hard to say no to it. And so we had to attack now. Same with thing like with the jcpoa, like it wasn't that they thought it wasn't working and the Iranians were on the slide trying to do something. No, it said as long as the JCPO was in in force, and we had eyes on the ground actually verifying that this was not happening. Netanyahu could not drag the United States into a war with Iran. And so it had to go. That's why it had to go, not because it was insufficient.
- [77:14]
Scott Horton
Right. So.
- [77:15]
Daryl Cooper
And I got to get going, brother. I gotta feed some animals before the sun goes down.
- [77:19]
Scott Horton
Okay, cool, babe. But. But wait, we gotta take one more, which is. Hey, your torture episode in the Scott Horton Academy is very similar to the Torture Report movie. I don't think I have seen that movie, me. But if you want another factually accurate movie about torture, there's one called Taxi to the Dark side, which is about the murder of Dilawar, the taxi driver in Afghanistan. And then there's a really great one about Omar Cotter. Man, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of it. Oh, and. And you got to look up Andy Worthington and his documentary Outside the Law about Guantanamo Bay. And then, yeah, the rest of everything I'm thinking of on torture is pretty much all written reports. I don't know, but I pretty much gotta go, too. But thank you, Steven, for the question there. And, yeah, Everybody, check out scotthortonacademy.com if you want to learn about that. And. And that's it. The chats we didn't get to. But thank you everybody for tuning in and watching the show. And thank you, Daryl, for joining me, man. It's always a pleasure, and I had a good time. 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 show on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked.
- [78:47]
Daryl Cooper
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