EP:48 - A BIG Discussion of Current Events

Summary

Provoked EP:48 - A BIG Discussion of Current Events
Podcast Hosts: Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton
Date: May 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper in a wide-ranging, unscripted discussion on current geopolitical conflicts, the psychology of state violence, and the tangled web of U.S. foreign policy. They break down the cycles of violence in places like Iran, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, and examine the structures that perpetuate conflict. The tone is blunt, open, and critical of dominant political and media narratives, with both hosts applying historical reference, policy analysis, and personal experience throughout.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Frustration of Repeated Narratives in Foreign Policy

• Scott Horton expresses the challenge of keeping analysis fresh when situations (like Iran negotiations) remain static and news coverage is contradictory.
  • "It's really hard to like, kind of figure out how to talk about it, you know. And, you know, I like, I find myself like wanting to just kind of say things that I was probably saying a month ago..." (05:41)

2. Iran, Ceasefires, and U.S. Political Calculations

• Discussion of the ongoing “low level” ceasefire with Iran, convoluted U.S. communication, and Israel’s role in escalating or undermining agreements.
• Darryl Cooper: "We all have this fatigue from the President saying this and that and the other thing all day, every day, changing his mind, flip flopping around, declaring victory..." (05:59)
• Trump's political motivations and the impact of Israeli actions on the negotiation process are critiqued, highlighting short-term political needs trumping long-term stability.
• Scott Horton: "He was on his way to like real humiliation and military breakdown ... and probably a serious loss of like long term loss of a lot of our alliances..." (08:32)

3. Cycles of Empowering Adversaries

• The argument that American and Israeli interventionism has repeatedly (and often inadvertently) increased the power of Iran and its regional allies.
• Darryl Cooper: "You can make the case that Netanyahu has been an Iranian spy this whole time. All he does is bark about it, but all he does is ... grant them power..." (15:47)
• Linkage between Iraq War, U.S. support of extremist groups in Syria, and the strengthening of Iran/Hezbollah.

4. Limits of American Power and the "Empire Problem"

• Both hosts repeatedly point out that U.S. efforts to create an unnatural regional order inevitably backfire, leading to more chaos and requiring ever-greater interference.
• Scott Horton: "We've done all these things to make Iran like, you know, one of the most powerful players in the region. ... That's the natural order." (34:18)
• Analogy to domino structures—if the U.S. leaves, the region collapses because the order it built is inherently unsustainable and dependent on outside power.

5. Genocide, Gaza, and Moral Language

• In-depth exchange on the ongoing destruction in Gaza, the reality of mass civilian casualties, and the obligations of language in labeling it as “genocide.”
• Scott Horton: "It's insane that people are, like, cowed out of using that term. Like, what's the good of it? Then we got to wait till all 6 million Palestinians are dead, and then we get to call it a genocide?" (47:08)
• They reference the direct targeting of civilians, systematic destruction, and the intent to erase a people, drawing comparisons to historical atrocities.

6. Media Complicity and Language Games

• Critique of media’s use of euphemisms, avoidance of direct attributions, and softening the reality of state-perpetrated violence.
• Reference to the practice of “marking up” news headlines to reveal misleading language.
• Darryl Cooper: "It's just all euphemisms and misdirection all the way down or just refusal to use proper nouns where they belong." (58:29)

7. Ukraine-Russia War: Tactical and Strategic Miscalculations

• Analysis of Russia’s initial misjudgments, the missed diplomatic alternatives, and how Western and Russian actions boxed themselves into prolonged war.
• Darryl Cooper: "He kept being coy about it ... when what he should have said was, you're damned right, I'm building up my forces because I'm ready to attack. You sign the damn treaty or ... negotiate seriously..." (75:34)
• They debate the legitimacy and limits of claims to protect ethnic nationals versus the legal and moral hazards of intervention.

8. Perpetuation of Empire at Home—Domestic Consequences

• Assertion that global empire precludes domestic reform and freedom.
• Darryl Cooper: "We can never take a week off to get our shit together as long as we're constantly in a state of international emergency here. ... We cannot have a constitutional government and a free society ... when we have a world empire." (69:04)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Scott Horton: "All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans." (00:49)
• Darryl Cooper: "Ron Paul is the hero that we needed, but Donald Trump is the hero that we deserved." (09:00)
• Scott Horton: "If I was trying to steel, man, the war party's argument in the Middle east ... the best way I could frame it..." (steel manning the establishment rationale for continued intervention) (13:36)
• Darryl Cooper: "Netanyahu sounds like he's just, you know, David Worms are on Ahmed Chalabi's crack pipe, only without the last 25 years of experience to show how naive all this stuff is." (17:49)
• Scott Horton: "Politics is a part of warfare, you know ... the fact that we don't really, really, really want to [fight a total war] is part of the equation." (19:39)
• Darryl Cooper: "Artificial prosperity, very real bust. Central banking and war. War and central banking." (42:00)
• Darryl Cooper: "It's an intent to make a mass, you know, group of people, a nation, maybe lowercase N type. A nation of people no longer a thing. And that's what they're doing." (50:33)
• Scott Horton: "That country has lost its right to exist. ... This state ... there's no coming back from this." (49:00)
• Scott Horton: "Could you imagine if the Russians were on camera doing the stuff we've seen the Israelis doing for three years? Oh my gosh, we would be at nuclear war." (61:15)

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Important Timestamps

• 05:00–10:30: Frustrations with repeated talking points in coverage of Iran negotiations; critique of U.S./Israeli policies.
• 11:45–15:40: Media narratives about the Iran nuclear threat; steel manning hawkish approaches; how U.S. power structures traps itself.
• 15:47–18:41: The argument that Israel’s actions empowered Iran.
• 25:31–29:42: The nuclear issue as a pretext for escalation and symbolic power.
• 34:18–40:11: Empire logic, unnatural order in the Middle East; analogy to economic "moral hazard."
• 45:27–51:16: Gaza, genocide terminology, the reality of civilian suffering and destruction.
• 58:29–61:42: Media complicity, euphemisms, Lebanon escalation, and wider regional destabilization.
• 66:05–81:00: Listener questions on tactical nukes, protest movements, the obsession with foreign policy in U.S. politics, and the closure on Ukraine war alternatives.
• 69:04: Candid summary of why foreign policy dominates American political life.

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Episode Summary/Takeaways

Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper deliver a candid, at times scathing, analysis of the cycles of violence generated by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They situate current crises (Iran, Gaza, Ukraine) not as aberrations but as logical products of imperial overstretch, moral hazard, bureaucratic inertia, and media complicity. The episode echoes with calls for realism, honesty, and willingness to break with propagandistic habits—whether in recognizing genocide, accepting the limits of “heroic” intervention, or acknowledging that the empire stifles possibility for domestic repair.

For listeners or readers seeking to understand current events beyond headlines, this episode provides a dense, highly opinionated, and historically grounded alternative perspective, laced with both personal anecdotes and policy dissection.

Transcript

[Daryl Cooper]

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[Scott Horton]

All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans.

[Daryl Cooper]

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, this is the show.

[Scott Horton]

Welcome.

[Daryl Cooper]

Marta Maid. How are you, sir?

[Scott Horton]

Good, man. How are you?

[Daryl Cooper]

I'm doing okay, man.

[Scott Horton]

I heard you were in Nice, enjoying the nice, cool weather in Tampa recently.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, it was a bit muggy for May, I would say. But yeah, I went there and I was doing the Danny Jones podcast and it was good, man. He's a very nice guy. And it turns out he had a mini ramp at his studio warehouse thing there. So I didn't bring my skateboard. He goes, oh, you didn't bring your skateboard? I says, what, you got a mini ramp here? He goes, yeah, right in there. And then, okay, I know nobody cares, but this is the story. It's a three foot, which is great for a little kid to learn on or whatever, but it's the kind of ramp that I get hurt on. I would rather skate a 10 foot or an 11 foot than a 3 foot. I'm like, oh, man. And then I don't have my board. I'm skating a stranger's board. But it was actually, I got used to the. The skate that he had, the extra board that he had real quick. And we had a great old session before and after the interview. In fact, after the interview, we had a real good old session and I had a lot of fun and I did not slam at all. So it was rad.

[Scott Horton]

And they scare me, man. Like, I used to snowboard all the time. Like, oh, right. I didn't know that for like five or like, for. For probably four or five years, I would go, like, I lived right by. I would lived in Bozeman, and I would go four or five times a week and sometimes for like half days, you know, after lunch or something. But, like I would go all the time. I got pretty damn good. I never got to the point where I felt comfortable in a half pipe. It just was always weird to me.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, yeah, I have no experience on a snowboard, so I couldn't speak to that. But just looking at them on tv, they, the snowboard half pipes are huge, right? They're like 15 foot transitions.

[Scott Horton]

That's definitely walls.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, like the, the new guys are going 10ft out, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know how I can see how a snowboarder becomes a really good skateboarder. I don't know how a skateboarder could ever get in a snowboard half pipe after riding a regular skateboard ramp.

[Scott Horton]

You know, it was interesting. The last few years I've taken up skiing just because like I'm old and rickety and so it, it, you know, it's just something you can do. You don't see a lot of like 70 year old snowboarders. You see plenty of 70 year old skaters, you know, or skiers rather. And so I switched over just for longevity purposes and it was actually cool because I used to play hockey, ice hockey a lot and like especially hockey blades, like, as opposed to figure skates. Like it actually transfers over to skiing really well. If you can ice skate on hockey skates, you can probably ski. It'll, you'll, you'll be a fast learner for sure.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's interesting. Yeah, man. I've always said Austin needs a mountain. We just replace Georgetown and just put a big.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, if you want. What's the population now?

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, I don't know, probably three quarters of a million.

[Scott Horton]

If you add a mountain. If you want it to jump up to like 3 million and crowd you even.

[Daryl Cooper]

No, no, I don't want that. I want a mountain. Only no one else is invited as me and my friends, as long as we're picking up stuff anyway, so. Yeah, that was cool, man. And I'd like to go back to Tampa because there's a legendary skate park there. I just rightly assumed that I would not have time to go. So I didn't even bring my board. But it was cool, man. I had a good time hanging out. It's, you know, the same interview with him is more or less what you hear me say on the other interviews when they ask about Iran stuff and whatever, only in a slightly different order. And you know, with his questions the way that he came at it, you know, I tried to address him and stuff. So it went pretty well and we made friends and seems like a good guy.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting challenge I've been finding where, you know, like, if somebody asked me on to do an interview and if I've never been on or if maybe the last time I was on was six months ago or a year ago or something and they want to talk about Iran, I go on there and like, I give them my Iran spiel, right? They kind of ask similar questions to everybody else. I give the similar answers that I give everybody else because that's what I think about those questions, etc. But like, when we're doing this show, I keep finding myself in this at this point where it's like, man, like, we got to talk about like what's going on in Iran. But what's really going on in Iran is the administration here is just kind of bullshitting the public nonstop and you don't exactly really know what's going on. And you kind of get conflicting news every day. It's really hard to like, kind of figure out how to talk about it, you know. And, you know, I like, I find myself like wanting to just kind of say things that I was probably saying a month ago or six weeks ago. And that's not a very interesting show, though.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, well, you're right though, that, I mean, what we have now is a kind of low level, you know, ceasefire with somewhat violations and ongoing negotiations. But, you know, what's happened really more than anything is, you know, we all have this fatigue from the President saying this and that and the other thing all day, every day, changing his mind, flip flopping around, declaring victory, declaring at one point, remember, the President, the new President of Iran is on his knees begging to sign the deal. When they don't have a new president, it's the same old guy. And you know, just things like that where it's just he's so all over the place. Nobody knows, you know, how seriously to take him on any given day. Even just it was the other day. So we have a major agreement on the straight of horror moves. And the New York Times printed it like, well, it seems like this is a. They don't always, right? They were like, seems like this is maybe a more real one. And I think that's right. Didn't it seem like this was a more serious one? And then what happened was the Israelis escalated in Lebanon and you know, made their demands at the, you know, made their phone calls to Washington and Trump, you know, ruined his own deal. It's like he's Barack Obama up there. It's completely ridiculous to help. And Brazil was like, we'll help. And then he was like, no, it's

[Scott Horton]

really weird because, like going into any negotiation with Iran, you know what the Israelis are going to do. And so it's like, why even, why even come to that, you know, to that point in the negotiations with them where it's being reported in the papers and stuff when, you know, the, Unless you have sort of a, yeah, the Israelis are going to do this, but this is how we're going to respond. And it's like every single time, it doesn't matter what they do, it, you know, they just have a reset button, a magic reset button they can hit. And you know, like, I think TR really, really got it right. We, we, we talked about this point he made a while back. But, you know, right after the ceasefire he said that, you know, Iran had, by accepting the ceasefire, had actually, you know, lost some negotiating power for the simple reason that the chief thing Trump needed politically at that point and militarily for that matter, was for the war to stop. That's what he needed. And once that happened and now it's sort of, you know, is Iran going to start it up? Are they not? You know, they never really have before, so they're probably not going to. That Trump basically has what he wants at this point is, you know, something at least at a level that he can control. You know, he can, he can deal with these tit for tat, you know, we strike you here, you strike us back kind of things for the rest of his term. He doesn't care about that. But he was on his way to like real humiliation and military breakdown and, and probably a serious loss of like long term loss of a lot of our alliances over there in the Arab countries. And so he needed it to stop. Now it stopped. And it almost seems like he's comfortable just sort of dragging this current state out for. It's so messed up too, man. Because, you know, like this is, he chose to like his entire four year term is now because he's gonna, the Republicans are gonna lose in November and he's gonna be a lame duck president for two years. Like he decided to use the two years that he was gonna have to actually do things on this and it just sucks, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, it is. It's completely crazy. And you know, this is why the John Bircher's always said that, you know, the only way to destroy America is to try to claim the power and the ability to rule the whole world. And of course we can't do that. It's so obvious that, you know, we're destroying our own country because, well, so many people have pointed out, right, that the president has much less power on domestic policy, but he can do things in foreign policy and no one can really stop him. So presidents just end up doing that. You know what I mean? But it's always something horrible and destructive when they could, you know, make an effort to, at the very least, undo some of the very worst policies that we have in the country here and then. So, yeah, to be a bit redundant about it, Ron Paul is the hero that we needed, but Donald Trump is the hero that we deserved. And so we got it, you know, right in the face.

[Scott Horton]

But there's a, there was a quote.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's what he is, dude. He's just Rudy Giuliani. If Rudy Giuliani was the president, then you wouldn't be surprised by any of this shit. And that's all he is. He was never Dr. Paul. He was always, you know, the federal prosecutor from New York.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, that's true.

[Daryl Cooper]

Nine, eleven. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

What else going on in the world? I've been distracted.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, I was on the Matt Gaetz show today. That was fun. We're talking about this stuff. But I like that guy. And he's also, I like that he is a big fan of the great Dave DeCamp, our news [e-mail] and interviews him all the time. So it was cool. And then also today, in today's episode on the Joe Rogan show, he debated Harlan. Is it Reynolds or Wilson? I'm sorry, Harlan, the phony as hell comedian who I really like. But they got into it about Iran a little bit and Rogan says, nah, that's not really true because Scott Horton was on here and explained why that ain't really true. Talking about the Iranian nuclear program, which is, after all, you know, the bottom line excuse of the war. Trump just repeated either today or yesterday, made these wild claims. No, they were on the verge of a nuclear weapon. They were going to have one in two weeks and then they were going to use it against everybody in the Middle East. You know the one that they were going to have, which was going to be what, a uranium gun type, you know, Hiroshima bomb, 10 kilotons max, that they're going to deliver, what, in a civilian airliner?

[Scott Horton]

Dude, there was a, there was a clip going around, I'm pretty sure it was super recent of Victoria Newland and she was talking about Iran and nuclear weapons and she said something, I can't remember the exact Quote, but, like, it was like, you know, if Iran gets them, then other countries in the region might get them, Saudi Arabia might get them, Turkey might get them, Israel might get them. And she said it in a way of, like, she doesn't. It doesn't seem like she's making this up. Like, what the hell's going on here?

[Daryl Cooper]

That's exactly what I said in my 22 days ago. She didn't seem to be lying when she said it. Could she really be that ignorant? Dude? My God. So did you watch the debate of her and Pompeo versus Mir Shimer and Walt?

[Scott Horton]

No. I saw a couple clips from it. Was it from that? Yeah, maybe it was. Yeah, it was from that. Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, yeah, we talked about it last week. You know, maybe I just put up a screenshot and talked about one or two aspects.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

[Daryl Cooper]

But whatever. Bottom line is not that you would be shocked or surprised, but it. Whatever, your bias would be confirmed that Newland and Pompeo are real lightweights. I mean, both of them probably bring, you know, as sound of arguments as you could get for a hawkish foreign policy. Although, in fact, she was against the Iran war, as is her husband, Robert Kagan, and she was. You know, I saw Mearsheimer explain on breaking points that she even opposed leaving the jcpoa. She said, no, we should improve it because she was at least realistic about the situation instead of just a propagandist about it. Like, actually, this is not that bad of a damn deal. We should just try to lift these sunsets and things like that. Pompeo was taken. The more, you know, the harder stance against, you know, for the war and against Iran. But anyway, you would not be impressed. It's just the same old crap. If you, like, saw them on Fox News just blathering their thing about, well, they're bad guys, and you got to stop bad guys before the bad guys get to be worse guys. And everybody's Hitler and everybody else is Chamberlain and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Scott Horton]

You know, if I was not too impressive, dude, if I was trying to steel, man, the war party's argument in the Middle east from an American perspective, like, the best way I could frame it, like, if I was trying to sell it to me, is. And, you know, this comes down to the fact that, you know, you can't trust this promise when it's made. But is that, look, we have our presence, our overwhelming presence, like it or not, in the region for the last several decades has created a regional order that if we just pull out is going to just lead to mass chaos and death. Like, because there are parties that are sort of throwing their weight around that they don't have because we're their ally. There's countries with. That should have armies that have no functional arm. Like, all. It's just. It's. It's an unnatural order. And so what we need to do is we've got an alliance structure over there. We've got countries that more or less can kind of work together, get along, even if not officially, from Egypt, Saudi, Israel, that sort of action, Jordan. And we're familiar with them. We can call them on the phone and they pick up. You know, we need to make sure that these countries can work together well and that they are militarily strong and that their enemies, like, know it. And then we can. That'll give us the ability to pull out. Obviously, like, you know, if a president came and made that argument, they. It would just be a cover for, you know, a longer war. But that, like, that's one. That's one way that, like, it could be sold in a way that we have to do this in order for us to get out. But, you know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I agree with that. That you. Yeah, you could say, look, we set the table very poorly and especially recently. So it's. It would be a bad time for American power and influence to leave now. But. Yeah, but that's why you should have left before.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

If you left before, it would not have been in a way where all this power defaults into Iran's hands. I mean, I really think. Sorry if I'm being redundant from this show. I did say this one time somewhere that, you know, if you were joshing around, you can make the case that Netanyahu has been an Iranian spy this whole time. You know, all he does is bark about it, but all he does is help, you know, grant them power, kick them up in power over and over again. Remember, you know, even on Iraq War two, Sharon and his government did support it, but it was Netanyahu and his men who were, you know, the neoconservatives in America. They were the ones who had really bought into this Clean break doctrine and wanted to get it done and worked so hard to get it done. Netanyahu, too, even believed in the pipeline to Haifa and the whole, you know, Chalabi sales job there. And so that was what resulted in Iran becoming so much more empowered in Iraq War ii. And then, of course, it was his policy, like, well, to reverse that. He supported and participated in the backing of the Bin Ladenites in Syria, which ended up leading to the rise of the ISIS caliphate, which then, you know, Obama fought, you know, he did, but then also fought Iraq War III to destroy them, which again put America directly on the side of the Shiite Iraqi government. And in direct alliance with Iran and Iranian supported militias of various stripes all across the, you know, Shiite south for war against isis. And so that's two big ones. And then now convince Trump to do this. It's funny, man. You think about Netanyahu, he's almost like gambling and going crazy here a little bit. Like, think of how certain he must have had to be Darrell, in his own head to decide that. Like, man, at all costs, I have got to convince Trump to attack Iran. And I just know, like, somehow by the end of it, man, it'll work out. I just know that, like, whatever happens, somehow, I don't know, but it'll be great. And then Israel will be the dominant power and Iran won't be our regional rival anymore. We'll just put the monarch in there.

[Scott Horton]

What?

[Daryl Cooper]

Like, he's daydreaming, right? He sounds like he's just, you know, David Worms are on Ahmed Chalabi's crack pipe, only without the last 25 years of experience to show how naive all this stuff is. And then now look what he's done. Now he's cost America's entire regional order, which was their greatest, you know, guarantor of their security. And now just completely shown as you showed, as you will you revealed one week after the war on this show, they're like, oh, our bases are getting hit. Our bluff is being called in the biggest way since the fall of the Soviet Union. Right now. This in, like, losing to the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency. This is, you know, going up against a lower tier state and losing. Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Horton]

It's one that all of the actual rival powers that we have, you know, like, they watched us lose in Afghanistan and China didn't look at that and say, well, this tells us a lot about how they would fare in a naval war around Taiwan. It had nothing to do with that, you know, but this, I mean, you know, this has really, like, removed the veil and, and sort of exposed us in a way that really, I mean, honestly, nothing else has. Even if you go back to like, Vietnam or something, none of those really showed, like, the limits of our military's ability to kick any other military's ass. Like, they just showed that there are certain things that military is not very good at, you know, What I mean, and if you try to make them do those things, then it's gonna be really bloody and really ugly and messy and probably not work. But this, you know, this is different. I mean, this shows that we, I mean, look, I have no doubt that like that, that if we went full World War II and had Chevy and Ford start churning out tanks and, you know, plane parts and you know, drafting 16 million men into the army, we could overrun Iran. Fine, whatever. But like politics is a part of warfare, you know, and the fact that's just the fact that that's completely impossible and not on the table. I mean, you know, I, because I, I say that because I've seen people kind of trying to cope by saying like, well, we could if we really, really wanted to. It's like, well, yeah, but the political situation, the fact that we don't really, really, really want to is part of the equation, you know, which means we can't. And like that's like saying, I, you know, I could beat this guy in a fight if I was super motivated to go train like Rocky and, you know, whatever. It's like, yeah, but you're not. So he'll kick your ass, right? Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

And which, you know, at the date that we're doing this show, the end of May here, it's already proven that for all that tough talk about pouring all the Marines and the 82nd Airborne and the Special Operations Command in there to seize these islands and to try to seize the uranium and all that, they weren't able to do that. And I know that there are theories, possibly credible ones. I'm not an expert on this topic at all. But we have discussed in part the theories that that was the mission that ended up being framed later as a rescue mission from a shoot down, that they were trying to get some uranium there. But if that is true, then, well, they still weren't able to get it. And it was a very limited attempt with, you know, less than 50 guys or less than a hundred guys certainly. So not much of an effort, not like the, the absolute catastrophic, you know, Hollywood movie situation that you would have had to attempt to really finish the job and get that job done. Which as we discussed at the time, it'd be, you know, it's a self licking defeat there in the sense of trying to bring in enough force protection for the force required to get the job done. Now you're just bringing on a much bigger battle against, you know, Iranian forces. Now you're not sneaking in, now you're invading in a way that all of your guys, including your new force protection, are open now. They need force protection and what? And on down the line, right? So somebody talked Trump out of that. The Secretary of the army or somebody told him, well, sir, you know, the problem with that is a lot of guys will get shot. A lot of guys will get, you know, a mortar blow up in their face, and then you're going to have to deal with that.

[Scott Horton]

And he decided very well might not work.

[Daryl Cooper]

Thank goodness. He. He wanted to call it at 13. He was afraid to lose any more than that.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's right, isn't it, Daryl? 13. Or was it 14?

[Scott Horton]

I think it's 13. Still.

[Daryl Cooper]

I think it's 13. Forgive me, everybody, if I screwed that up.

[Scott Horton]

I don't think, you know, I. I always thought that retrieving the uranium, I mean, even leaving aside the fact that I don't think we know for sure exactly where all of it is, but say we do know that it's all in one place, you know, in Isfahan or something, in one of those collapsed mountains. I mean, I don't think there's any way to get in there and retrieve that, really, without taking and actually holding that territory, because it would take time, man, like, to dig out those collapse tunnel entrances. I mean, we'd have to bring in heavy equipment. Like, it would be, like a serious job. It wouldn't just be a bunch of Delta and Seals in there. You'd have, like a bunch of CBS doing construction work and stuff and excavation work and, like, you know, to do that while you're under drone and artillery and whatever else kind of fire. Like, at the time, it's just, you know, very possibly in an area where there's a lot of hostile civilians and stuff, you know, like, it's just speculation

[Daryl Cooper]

of Isfahan and all their pitchforks and torches, for that matter.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, and the same. I didn't. I was surprised, actually. I didn't. I don't know why. Probably I guess I was just surprised because I didn't know. But I. I think I remember that the. The island that they kept fussing over and pretending like they were going to take. There's like 50,000 people that live on that island. It's like, okay, well, you're gonna drop, like, what, a couple hundred special forces onto this island, and there's 50,000 people who are probably angry that you're there. Like, what are you gonna do when they come at you with a machete? You're just gonna gun them all down, like now, it's a very, very tough situation unless you, like when you, when, when you're clearly from the beginning, like, like reluctant to, in the extreme to get into an actual war, you know, and, and so all those things, like, I think were probably illusions from the jump and, you know, it was just purely the job of the Joint Chiefs. And, and the secret that to Trump and because, you know, the thing is, I'll bet you the same, you know, like his reasoning, I, I think, you know, is a lot of people have their various explanations for why he would listen to Netanyahu over his own advisors, his highest level advisors. And there's probably a lot of personal reasons for it and other things. But I mean, one of the ones that is not personal and you know, from some standpoint, I guess makes some sense, is, well, that's great, but, you know, Israel is more embedded in the region than we are. They have better information than we do. And so I'm going to go with what Netanyahu says. That's a bad thing to do to your advisors. But like, you can at least understand that. And you know that like with Isfahan, like seizing the uranium, any of this stuff, you know, Netanyahu's in his ear saying, do it, boss. This is going to be, you know, this is, that you can do this. Don't worry about it. Like, we've, we've gained this out. Here's how it's going to work. Because Netanyahu knows that who cares if it works? The point is you want to get a bunch of force Recon guys in there getting chopped up by the Iranians. So now Trump has to send the rangers in to back them up. And now they're getting attacked. And now you have to say like, that's what, that's what Netanyahu wants. He just wants to escalate by any means necessary. So if a bunch of Americans get wiped out now Trump feels like he has to go in and avenge them to like, save his ego, then that's a huge victory for Netanyahu. You know, it's like, well, calculus.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, well, as we were just discussing, we're kind of switched our two things out of order in our discussion here. They're in a very difficult position now. I don't know that they're really going to make nukes, but it's symbolic of the same damn thing Anyway. Remember that time story where after last June, Netanyahu said, oh, well, you know, now they're definitely going to make nukes now that we attack them. So guess you better definitely attack them. Then you got to finish the job and get all the way through. Otherwise, you know, you can't just stop short of Baghdad, so to speak, in this case, Tehran. And then he said the same thing. After the failure of this war, after the first few days or first week or two of this war, when their goals were not accomplished and the regime did not fall, Netanyahu again told Trump, well, man, but now we've really put their back against the wall, so now they're starting to make nukes. So now we definitely have to finish the job. We have to continue to escalate. So whether or not nukes. Same point from our discussion before. Iranian power has been vastly increased by this. Just like the last few interventions that Netanyahu was in on here, as I was delineating, as I am so often want to do, that he has empowered Iran and their Shiite allies over and over. Of course, they did get rid of Assad in Damascus and put Al Qaeda in there. So that's a big win for the American and Israeli column against the Iranians. But that was only at the end of 2024. For most of this time, they had empowered Iran in Syria as well, made Syria and Hezbollah more dependent on Iran than ever before for 15 year extra years there. But anyway, so. But then if you're in Netanyahu's position, you're not you, but you're him. I mean, if, you know, what do you do now? Because I don't, you know, a mission to get the uranium, and then now we got a sunk cost fallacy and we have to keep escalating to regime change from there. Doesn't look to me like that script's playing out. I think that ship already sailed. You know, I mean, I guess they could try it. I know Netanyahu is still pushing that narrative, and Trump is, too. You know, it seems like all his leaks and statements about the negotiations, you know, center oftentimes on the fate of the uranium and who's going to get it and what it means. I have this thing here. Let me share it. God, I'd hate to read the whole thing to you here. But he does say, which will now be lifted, the naval blockade, which will now be lifted, and we'll start the process of heading home. And. But then he says, the nuclear dust, that means the partially enriched uranium there will be unearthed by the United States, which it is agreed is the only country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so. So that's not clear whether saying China's Going to help us dig it up. It doesn't sound like it sounds like he's just saying only they or we could. I guess. I don't know. He just wanted. He just took a side. An aside to flatter Chairman Xi maybe there in close coordination in conjunction with Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, he deigns to deem it that work plus the IAEA and destroyed. It won't be diluted down and turned into fuel rods. It'll be destroyed, he says. And then blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he says things like this all the time. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if you know what to make of it. But it seems like, you know, I don't know, like a simple interpretation would just be, come on, he's nothing but jerk in our chain. This guy had a ground dog day meme there. I'm like, come on. He says this every day. And then we're trying to be criminologists and figure out, like, is there any part of this that's really meaningful? They both have so many stipulations to their demands, as we've discussed in the past here. It'd be very difficult for them to climb down, as you said earlier, you know, the tree to Parsi solution and just walk away is really the best one. But of course, that does leave a run in a, you know, very enhanced position over there, which, as we've discussed, it's sort of too late to do anything about. But from the President's point of view, geez, he still has all this power. He really can't do anything about it. You know what I mean? Entirely. He can't see it that way. Right.

[Scott Horton]

It leaves the, you know, if we did that, it leaves the open question of, as far as I know, Iran's terms are still that we get out of the region and so are we really going to abandon our base in Bahrain? Are we going to abandon our base in like, that is hard to imagine the DOD or the pre. Anybody swallowing. And yet Iran, every time a deal gets talked about, that is one of their firm demands. And if they're like really harsh on that, I mean, this is probably going to go on a while, maybe even at a low level. But just, just simply because, you know, it's not even that we can't live without those things. It's that nobody can stand being the guy on watch when we admit we lost him. I mean, nobody wants that.

[Daryl Cooper]

And so just like Vietnam or Afghanistan, we're like, no, you get out there and do it.

[Scott Horton]

And this one's more even, like it's even more sustainable in a way just because, you know, the, look, here's a, here's a dirty secret about the Navy. You know, we would have like $2 billion destroyers doing a full six month deployment running around off the coast of the Horn of Africa, like chasing around daos with Somali suspected pirates in them. Okay. Like a two billion dollar warship that we have doing that. Why? Because they didn't really have another mission. You know what I mean? Like you just didn't really have another mission. And so like right now, like, you know, we've got enough cruisers and destroyers that are usually putting around the Middle east anyway, but doing freedom of navigation stuff or whatever that they can like maintain a blockade or half blockade or on off blockade like pretty much like as long as they want because they're not doing anything else really anyway. But you know, I, it just, at this point I, it really does seem like, you know, the, the like with Iraq, for example, right when you got up to the time of the surge, say what you want about, you know, the surge and the Bush Doctrine, all that kind of stuff. I know from people who sat in the meetings with the President, with the Secretary of Defense, somebody working as an aide for one of the heads of one of the. Anyway that Bush thought it was going to work. He wanted to go in. He thought it was going to change things, it was going to win the war and it was going to actually turn things around. Get all that stuff in Afghanistan. They probably, like some people at least probably believe something like that too. With the surge there and like that if, if we just, you know, hang on long enough, we can, you know, institutionalize the, the army enough. There's some people probably believe that with this. It's like nobody can possibly believe that any of the goals set out at the beginning of this war are achievable. They're just, there's no road to that. And you know the interesting thing to circle back on what we're talking about a minute ago, like the pro. One of the problems with empire, and this is not just the US empire, although we've scaled it up to, to a new level. If you look at like the old colonial empires, right, all the countries that France and Britain used to run, you notice like in the 20th century all went completely to. And people just started killing each other and like civil wars everywhere, Pakistan, India, you know, all the. And the reason is because an empire does not want the most powerful player in a region to be their proxy because that most powerful player in the region doesn't really need them. And so they can't really be controlled. What they need is preferably a disliked minority like, you know, the Alawites in Syria, the sunnis in Iraq, etc. And you want them in charge because they're not going to do. They're going to be loyal to you all day long because if they're not, the people around them are probably going to throw them out of power. You worse. And so what that means is when you do leave, you have this whole political order set up that is just completely dependent on outside power to exist. And we've done that on like a, a larger geopolitical level, not just ahead of state in a country and he's from a minority that, you know, we can control over the majority. We've done it where countries now are throwing their weight around regions that they simply don't have the weight of their own to do. And we've done that all over the world where you know, like, like we talk about Iran like we've, we've done all these things to make Iran like, you know, one of the most powerful players in the region. Iran should be one of the most powerful players in the region. You know, it's got 95 million people. They churn out something like 10,000 engineering graduates every, it should be, you know, it's a, like that's the natural order. Turkey and Iran should be calling most of the shots in that region. Egypt, if they ever got their act together, maybe. But like, you know, that would be nature taking its course and things kind of correcting back to the natural state of things. And everywhere around the world though, there's an unnatural state of things that is completely dependent on, you know, our outside power keeping it that way. And if that just continually justifies our presence everywhere and it evokes these realistic, sometimes horror stories of what will happen if we leave and it just become this self, the self licking ice cream cone like, you know, by definition.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yep. We can't, we can't leave now. We built a house of cards. It'll fall.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, exactly.

[Daryl Cooper]

And yeah, look, I mean with Afghanistan, it did take 20 years before a combination of Trump and Biden agreed that we really need to just go ahead and leave that war. Not that we came home from there, just pivoted to Ukraine and wherever else,

[Scott Horton]

but

[Daryl Cooper]

hard to admit it in this case, I guess. And even then they didn't admit it. Even then they claim that we're leaving because we won and everything's great. So now we can leave. Was there excuse to leave. It's going to be pretty difficult under these circumstances to say that, you know,

[Scott Horton]

the Ukraine and just the general situation with Russia is you know, kind of another example of this, like Ukraine by itself or if it was Ukraine and like a unified, like stronger sort of more independent actor Europe counterbalancing Russia and the borderlands between them kind of being like a competing sphere of influence. Ukraine would have had to accept that reality and could not have gone off the rails into this like extremist anti Russian position that they've been in. They would have just had to accommodate the fact that there's this gigantic country here and we have to kind of deal with them. And it's, you know, the outside influence primarily ours. You know, obviously like a lot of the Europeans provide a lot of the, you know, the sort of emotional, like the motivation for it and some of the money. But it's our power that really like matters. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of same thing we've done with Israel. It's just caused them, you know, it's allowed the most extreme people in their political environment to say with, you know, some amount of convincing success that we can do this, we can actually do this because the US has our back as Europe has our back. And so it's, you know, actually it's this, you know, this everything kind of been getting trouble going back to this. It's not too dissimilar from like Poland before the Second World War where, you know, Germany, their position to, you know, France and Britain and the rest of the world was Poland's way over here. Like what does it have to do with you? This is between us and the Soviet Union. What happens here? We're going to decide. We're not telling you what you can do in Singapore, Britain, like, you know, so you're not going to tell us what we in the Soviet Union are going to do here on our borderlands. That was their position and you know, because. And the polls would have had to accommodate that. The col. The Poles, like if they did not have the guarantee of war from the Western states would have had to just accept the reality of their situation and cut a deal with Germany that, you know, that that could have been made, that would not have been, you know, so damaging to the Polish state that it wouldn't have continued in an independent way and, but they just, they couldn't do it. The fact that they had all that outside influence allowed the ego, you know, to really, like, kind of drive things like, no, we're not doing that. We're not compromising, period. We don't have to. And, you know, it's just. It's a. It's a bad influence all the way. Because eventually, you know, what always happens is you run up on that point where, you know, one side decides that just like in World War II, that, like, yeah, they're saying that they'll intervene for this, but they won't. And then they do, and now you're at war. And, you know, it's just. I just think that it would be best if the world order, just like in. In politics, even in a. Domestically, in a country like, it should reflect sort of the natural hierarchy and the natural advantages of the people and countries, like, in question, right. Like the fact that Turkey is where it is, that it controls the Dardanelles and access to the Black Sea, that it straddles Europe and the Middle east, that it has the population, it has. Turkey is a great power. Like, you know, in. Maybe not in global terms, but like, they just are. And any, like in Iran's the same way. In any sort of geopolitical plan that you have to make that not be the case is like, you're fighting against gravity. And that's not to say that, like, you can't win for a while, but really the only way to do it is just to create so much chaos. I mean, again, go back to that. The same example, same thing with Germany and Europe. You know, Germany gets super powerful, World War I happens, gets decimated. They get, you know, the Versailles Treaty takes them down 10 notches. Within 15 years, they're the most powerful country in Europe again. They go in there, flatten every single one of their cities, kill all their men, you know, take over the country. And by like the mid-50s, it's the biggest economy in Europe. And now Germany pretty much is the EU and like, is Europe. It's just because that's the natural order. It's the biggest country. It's a very sophisticated kind, all those kind of things. And you can. You can keep trying to fight that, you know, using violence, but, you know, the tide generally tends to come back in.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, look, I mean, what you're talking about in economic terms is just a simple moral hazard. You know, in 1990, I'm bluffing. I think it was 94, Alan Greenspan bailed out this investment firm in. On Wall street and it was called. Everybody called it. Somebody coined the phrase, I don't know, the Greenspan put. Yeah, and that meant essentially, if you made a bunch of bad loans, but you've got powerful friends, then don't worry about it, the central bank will create new money and bail your sorry ass out. And so that's just a huge incentive to banks to go ahead and make bad loans because the Fed's got your back. And then that also translates in the macro sense, to the overall economy in an inflationary economy. This is really what causes what they call the business cycle, which is really the government inflationary currency cycle, where all the new money makes it seem like there's all this new wealth that has been saved up as investment capital to go into new projects. But that's not really true because it ain't real wealth. It's just a bunch. Well, not just, but it includes a bunch of just new money far beyond representing whatever new wealth has been created. So then that leads people to begin projects that ultimately are unsustainable, but then that transfers to government programs across the board, including the Pentagon, where those inflationary dollars, for example, prop up the military of Ukraine, the military of Afghanistan before that, to, you know, fight with power and authority that they otherwise would not have. And then when the interest rates go up, their power and influence crashes, just like everything else. And it's all part of the same system. It's not, you know, the crash doesn't always come in a direct correlation there. But, you know, certainly the. It's more than a metaphor. Right. That is, in fact, you know, those, those, you know, the Afghan national army and, and the Ukrainian army are essentially, you know, these big firms that are being propped up by American inflation. Without that, they, as you're saying, they would have to make entirely different business decisions about how to move forward and what strength they have to carry on with, et cetera. So same principle at work and always ends up leading to a terrible correction in the end. So artificial prosperity, very real bust. Happens all the time. Central banking and war. War and central banking.

[Scott Horton]

And in both cases, and in both cases, the economic and the geopolitical, it's. It's almost never the people at the top paying the price.

[Daryl Cooper]

No, of course not. All right, so listen, I want to talk about Ukraine and European stuff for a minute here before we go to

[Scott Horton]

questions, but I saw Russia was hammering Kiev a couple days ago.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, but hold that thought real quick, because as long as we're still, you know, somewhat near in proximity to our discussion of the war in Iran, I want to throw in a little bit about Gaza and how they're still killing about A hundred people a week, I guess it is, compared to a hundred a day before the so called ceasefire of last October. And you know, I don't know if it's even 100 a week, but it's certainly, you know, tens and tens every week at the Minima and including I saw some really bad footage of, and still pictures of dead kids, you know, out of Gaza, just what day before yesterday. And I guess because of the ceasefire it's really been, and because of the war in Iran, it's really been moved to the back burner what's happening to those people. But Netanyahu gave a speech where he said, listen, we're going ahead and we're closing in. We are now we're already, we said 50, now we're at 60, but we're moving to control 70%. We're taking 70% of the Gaza Strip. So whatever that yellow line was is way behind them. Now we're going to take 70% of the Strip and geez, I'm sorry, I guess I should have had this clip queued up for you there, Darryl. But anyway, the crowd says no, a hundred. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that, but we're going to just go to 70 for now. Everybody fine. As they continue their project of what is absolutely a genocide. I would like to stipulate, because I don't want to be misunderstood, and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating, you know, when you see the absolute desolation of the Gaza Strip, much of that was done after the people had been forced to leave. So it's not like they killed, you know, 500,000 or you know, more people in the air raids, in a full Dresden, you know, firebombing campaign that didn't happen in that short of amount of time. And in many cases they bombed them and bombed them and bombed them until they fled, they ordered them to leave and then they would come in with dynamite and, or just airstrikes and destroy everything and level their towns. So, you know, I don't want people to think that I'm being misleading and overstating. You know, they, they say the violent deaths in there, in there are officially in like 80,000, not much higher than that. Now if you take the excess death rate and whatever, I don't think anybody's been able to really measure that for sure yet. But when we take the overall number of people who died, who otherwise would not have, it's going to be quite a bit higher than that.

[Scott Horton]

Every other war I Mean, that is how we measure it in war. Usually you can. You can look up anywhere, it'll tell you combat casualties, but then the number that everybody knows for a given war is usually all cause excess death, right?

[Daryl Cooper]

And so anyway, on my train of thought, there was though that. But it's still a genocide. Okay, let's say forget all the excess deaths and say it's still only just 80,000. Is somehow the magic cap on as high as the number can be, still the complete destruction of their towns in that way that counts. The point of it is that it's not just a quantity of people massacred. The point is, is how Israel's going about it and hell, their stated intentions and how they're going about it, which is to destroy a people. And I always hated that word, even when I was a little kid in public school. I remember saying, a people I don't like. But I get what you mean. If you're talking about the Pueblo or whatever, in this case, you're talking about the Palestinians, and they're trying to completely raise this, you know, ancient society there and destroy everything that they have, all their homes, all their businesses, all of their government buildings. So therefore all their public records of all their family histories and their land ownership and their. All of their mosques and their churches and everything, just completely decimating it. And as the. I'm sorry, I forget if it was the finance minister or the national security minister again said the other day to complete, or was it Netanyahu himself said to complete the plan of the voluntary immigration of the Palestinian people. In other words, just to unrelentingly torture these people until they finally either just lay down and die or give up and flee to, I don't know where, the Sinai or go drown themselves in the ocean or what, but that's what they're doing. And they say it over and over again, and that's genocide, and we should absolutely not be a part of this. It's insane that this is still going on, and it's insane that people are, like, cowed out of using that term. Like, what's the good of it? Then we got to wait till all 6 million Palestinians are dead, and then we get to call it a genocide? Because, like, then the magic terminology kicks in after it's all too late to stop it. And this whole thing is insane.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, dude, we count Holocaust victims. You know, like, we. We literally count if, like, Jewish partisan casualties in battle, like, because, you know, this was going on. So these people were forced to go out into the forest and join one of these partisan groups to survive, and they got killed as a result. We count them. I mean, that's like. If we're going to count anything like that, then yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially when, man, like, you know, we've never had this much evidence of just brazen, needless mass killing, like, ever in any war, like, ever. Forget eyewitnesses or anything like that. Digging up mass graves and having to figure out, like, how exactly these people died and the circumstances. I mean, we've just got video after video after video of things that, you know, I mean, just. Just snuff films. You know, Soldier made snuff films from, like, hundreds, thousands of them. And it's gotten to the point where people are so inundated by it that they're numb to it.

[Daryl Cooper]

And it's back in April.

[Scott Horton]

Ah, sorry. And look, the way I look at the genocide question is, like, you know, are we having a legal argument? Because if we are, then, I mean, it's hard to take seriously because international law doesn't really seem to exist anymore. If we're having a definitional argument, like, just sort of how we should use the term in order to like, maintain its, Its legitimacy and its force, then that's fine. That's an English major argument. I guess for me, it's just. Just look at what. Just look at the pictures of that city. Watch the videos. Hear the testimony of these people using food bank food aid trucks to, like, draw in starving women and children and, and, and open up on them with tanks. Like, you call that whatever the hell you want. That country. That country is like, it's. Look, I'll be, I'll. I'll try to be careful here. That country has, has lost its right to exist. And that does not mean that I advocate somebody going in there and nuking it. That's not what I'm saying. But in terms of, like, the question, does Israel have a right to exist? If it did, it doesn't anymore. It just doesn't. I mean, there's. There's just. There's no way you can have it.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, it's.

[Scott Horton]

It's so. And that doesn't even mean necessarily that, like, the people who live there can't live there, but, like, this state. That's what I mean by when I say Israel, I'm talking about the state that's there. There's no coming back from this. There's no, like, reform from this kind of thing. You can reform from things that you denied and hid from your public and got caught doing. Or whatever. You can't come back from like a total public and. And gov. A whole of government, like embrace of this kind of madness and atrocity.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, I don't sense though, as far as using the term genocide, the reason that there's such a word is because it's a thing. And it's different than wide scale massacres. It's different from war casualties. It's different from totalitarianism. It's different from, you know, it's its own. It's an intent to make a mass, you know, group of people, a nation, maybe lowercase N type. A nation of people no longer a thing. And that's what they're doing. And along with every cruelty that you describe. But I think it's, you know, if

[Scott Horton]

Milosevic was still alive, he'd be looking around like, oh man, the red check

[Daryl Cooper]

massacre where 35 fighters were dumped in a ditch and yeah, that was good enough to start a war then, you know. Okay, so I want to show you this. Speaking of. Of old excuses for war. So this is Tucker's great interview with this guy, Dr. Nick Maynard of Oxford University. Have you had a chance to see this?

[Scott Horton]

Ah, is this a new one?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, it came out the other night. Just last night, I think. So the night before last, maybe. Yeah, it was the night before last. And what it is, man, is it's really good. Tucker has a fantastic monologue at the beginning, as he always does, no teleprompter required. And then he interviewed. It's really worth watching. And then on top of that is this interview with this guy. He's a doctor, He's a abdominal surgeon, specialty doctor. And he's been to Gaza there, operating on the casualties of the war there. And he just talks about all what he's seen and what he knows from like the firsthand friends of his who told him no hearsay, but just their direct experience, you know, eyewitness testimony to him. And he's very careful. He's obviously, he's a surgeon and he just tells the utmost cruelties, many of which you and I already know about and have talked about, such as the targeting of specific body parts of even children by the Israeli snipers. So one day it's the abdomen, the next day it's the neck, and the next day it's the genitals and whatever. They're clearly having a contest for, you know, contests for, you know, who they kill with their sniper rifles and whatever and how or how they wound them, signature, you know, type wounds and whatever and. And people being Tortured. People being forced, you know, on their knees with, you know, shackled and blindfolded for, as he says, 60 days at a time. Mercilessly beaten around the clock. The worst torture state in the world for the Palestinian captives of the Israelis. There's just nothing like it. I mean, they make the ChiComs look like angels here, and not because they are, but simply because of the abject sadism and cruelty of these people. It's just sick what they do. And I really highly encourage people to watch that. And then, man, I had a segue there from there to what you just said, but now kind of got high and forgot. Do you remember what your point was right there before I. I brought up this interview?

[Scott Horton]

No, not. Well, it wasn't. I was just talking, you know, I'm going back on Tucker in July.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, great.

[Scott Horton]

I think we're gonna do. I think we're just gonna do a long episode and it's gonna be like, like a long, deep dive, short version of the Fear and Loathing series. So just give everybody sort of the, you know, the story up to 1948 and the founding of the state, like in as much detail as I can cram into three hours or so.

[Daryl Cooper]

So.

[Scott Horton]

And I'm prepping for that one and like, really kind of, you know, trying to tighten it up and make sure that I just stay on, stay on message and hit the right points to carry it through because I don't want to get through that and then realize there's big, important things I left out. So I'm pretty, pretty excited about that. Excited to see Tucker again. I always. I always go out in the summer. I don't like going out in the winter because I like going to Maine more than I like going to Florida.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I've only been on there the one time, but yeah, the spot in Maine is very nice, by the way. And this is, I think, crucial. There's a new pull out. People can find it on Max Blumenthal's Twitter feed. I forget the name of the group, but they did a wide survey of American Jews and they found that, I think it was a bare majority, or maybe it was just just short of a majority of American Jews under the age of 35 aren't even Zionists. They are, as they put it, functionally anti Zionist. They want a binational state with full citizenship and equal rights for everybody. Forget this Jewish state business is virtually half of American Jews under 35, never mind the rest of all American liberals and whatever on that side. But, you know, for all These people, the. The pro Israelis and the anti Semites who love to conflate all these issues. I saw, you know, I posted a thing trash and Bernie Sanders today because he said he's against that. Equal rights. Well, that would be anti Israel. So, no, I'm against that. And someone said, yeah, see, because he's a Jew. But no, it's because he's a Zionist. That's the term you're looking for. There are plenty of Jews who completely disagree with him on that and have for a very long time. And he's too poor of a person.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, that reminds me to even get

[Daryl Cooper]

out in front of that parade at this point. I'm sorry, what did you see?

[Scott Horton]

I don't. I. I really haven't been on social media at all in a while, but I saw, like, a few things going around. Norman Finkelstein going after, like, Tucker and stuff. And like all the. Greenwald.

[Daryl Cooper]

Glenn Greenwell had a fantastic REM to that.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I have to watch it. That was so disappointing. I mean, as Greenwald says, he goes,

[Daryl Cooper]

listen, leftists have this thing where they have to pretend to monopolize all virtue. If anyone to the right of them seems to be expressing the same sentiment that they have about the same issue for the same moral reason, then it's almost just like an allergy. It's automatic. They have to say, well, Megyn Kelly's just realized that's where the money is now. Or Tucker Carlson really just hates Jews when they just, as Greenwell says, they just got accused of hating Jews this morning and had to say, like, hey, that's not fair. I am not. I'm a leftist. How could I possibly be a racist? I'm a civil rights type. How could you say that? And then later that day, they'll go, yeah, these right wingers, they don't mean it. They just hate Jews. And with no irony whatsoever and totally certain of themselves in a way that only leftists can be. And now just watch, somebody's gonna quote me out of context, saying I'm a leftist. There I was paraphrasing them. But anyway, so, yeah, Finkelstein, whatever, dude, he's. I, you know, I've seen him say that he's a communist. Like unrepentant, not like some kind of democratic socialist or whatever, but he's a communist. So you only take a guy like that so seriously. For Christ's sake, man.

[Scott Horton]

What not. We got questions.

[Daryl Cooper]

One more thing. Lebanon, they're going. They're past the Latani River. They're going to The Zahari river, if I'm saying it right, they're forcing an evacuation of tire. That's T Y R e this ancient city in. On the Mediterranean coast there. They're forcing an evacuation there. They're already bombed the crap out of it. And, you know, they've been bombing Beirut and what. And I don't know if anybody knows where they think they're going to stop, that they are taking full advantage right now. You know, security zone, nothing, man. And, you know, if you follow the Twitter feeds closely, you'll see the way the media just completely bends over backwards to soften the language and, you know, the way they do for the cops. The cops firearm discharged and the bullet made its way into the car where it found the little girl's heart. Yeah, the cop killed the kid. Yeah, thanks. Same thing here. We're like Israel empties city or like city demanded to be emptied as Lebanon is embroiled in conflict or whatever. And they don't mention Israel, they don't mention who's ordering who to flee, who's blowing up, whatever. You know what I mean? It's just all euphemisms and misdirection all the way down or just refusal to use proper nouns where they belong. There's a lady on Twitter named Assad Rawl, I think it is, or something like that.

[Scott Horton]

And.

[Daryl Cooper]

And she just, you know, marks up the New York Times and Reuters and AP headlines, BBC headlines. So just what you're really trying to say in English is this and just showing the absolute tortured semantics that they use in order to avoid saying what is happening right in front of everybody. They're completely destroying, you know, at least half of Palestine or, you know, a solid third of Palestine. And they're taken so far like a third of Lebanon. And with. And they've already seized, you know, what a good little sixth or something of southwestern Syria there and which Al Qaeda has let them go ahead and have from Mount Hernan all the way down. So everything's coming up Netanyahu over there with American support for the medium term anyway, short term anyway. Although, as we discussed, he ain't getting his regime change yet. And then before we go to questions, let me just say, I know we're already at an hour, but what the hell. I just want to say real quick that I'm no sectarian. I've been getting along great with the Cato guys lately. And that doesn't mean everyone I know, Tom Palmer is probably still associated with it somehow. And he's a bad dude up to no good. But the main foreign policy department there is my good buddy Doug Bandow, Justin Logan, John Hoffman and Brandon Buck. And I think John Glazer's over there somewhere, but I never see him. But anyway, I like John Glazer too. Me and him go way back and all those guys are just so good on all of this stuff, man, and hardcore on Israel. You might think that at Cato they'd pull their punches on the Israel lobby and their influence in America, their role in pushing this war.

[Scott Horton]

Not so.

[Daryl Cooper]

Cato has been absolutely fantastic in which for a, a child, a survivor of the libertarian civil wars, like this is huge and very important to me to be able to brag about that, that how great they are right now.

[Scott Horton]

They were one of the few and I, I obviously have my issues with, you know, that side of the libertarian movement, but they were one of the few publications that reported on back during the second intifada is the Israelis taking control of the Palestinian police stations to stream pornography into all the Palestinians houses. And you know that it got reported a few other places later, but they were one of the first and one of the only ones for a while.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. So Ted Carpenter got pushed out of there and I think part of it was because of politics over Ukraine. But that's all right because now he writes for [e-mail] and the libertarian Institute. So that's.

[Scott Horton]

Could you imagine if the Russians were on camera doing the stuff we've seen the Israelis doing for three years? Oh my gosh, we would be at nuclear war.

[Daryl Cooper]

I don't even know about a little. There has been some pretty brutal torture and, and horrible, you know, summary executions and bad things, but nothing like on the scale of what's happened in Gaza

[Scott Horton]

especially and not of civilians. You don't see the kind of mass killing of civilians that you see in Gaza. I mean it's like, it's just different.

[Daryl Cooper]

And you know, overall it is still thousands, so. But still not in the same. Not in the same way. You're right. And now. So speaking of which. And then we'll go to the questions but it's worth pointing out here about the alleged change of fortunes. I think the map shows the same. The Russians are still moving forward slowly in most places. The Ukrainians have made some small gains, but whatever that they're claiming they had this whole pop, you know, propaganda campaign that they have really figured out the drones and they're really getting the best of the Russians and including even with attacks that include no troops to even die, only robots fighting against the Russians and kicking their asses and whatever. So this narrative is kind of taken off that they now have this renewed momentum, which is sure to and there may be some truth to it, at least in some places.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

But that would seem to be a counter incentive to their wanting to seek a deal. But then also they've been hitting more and more refineries and things inside Russia. And they hit a school in Luhansk, which is some kind of nursing school, I believe it was, and killed some young female students. I don't know if they were teenagers or exactly their ages, but maybe 20 somethings who were studying there. And this caused a massive, you know, political reaction inside Russia. And they have been pummeling Kiev, as you referenced a minute ago. They've been hitting them with their hypersonic missiles and at least proclaiming and I'm not sure on all the very latest of the details, but they at least proclaimed that they were widening their target set. They were going to go ahead and hit things that they had refrained from hitting previously or at least for a long time. And then there have been, I mean, not so veiled threats. I mean, there have been hyperbolic threats out of the Russian government previously during this war too, Daryl, where they have said things that they did not end up backing up, thank goodness. But I read a quote and it wasn't from Medvedev, it was from Sergey Lavrov. It was somewhat veiled. He didn't say specifically, but he was pretty heavily implying that he was willing to hit European cities in NATO member states as punishment for their support for Ukraine.

[Scott Horton]

Hasn't, hasn't Ukraine been they've been hitting Russian targets at least a couple times by overflying the Baltic states with their missiles.

[Daryl Cooper]

I think that's the complaint, right, is the the NATO states are cooperating to a degree now that they're going to have to be made to pay, you know, supposedly. So I don't know if they're going to follow through on that or what kind of signals they're getting from Washington about that or what is really going on there. Man, I'm going to try to catch up. I've been very busy traveling and everything, but I'm going to try to catch up on all my reading and see what I can find out about that. But when I read that, you know, Lagrav typically is the more diplomatic diplomat and they let me at Vedev do all the junkyard dog barking, you know what I mean? That's oversimplifying it, but whatever. If it was him, I wouldn't mind as much, you know, but coming from Sergey Lavrov, I'm like, ah, geez. I don't know. That means that he and Putin had a discussion and agreed that he should go out there and say that whatever exactly they meant by it, that's too much for me, man, right there. I want. Man, I can't. It's really hard to believe this war has gone on this long and there's just nobody in the world with the wherewithal to stop it, to figure out how to negotiate an exit or what. Let these people save face in whatever way they have to. Really sucks. Yeah. Okay, so we got comments. Let me see if I can remember how to detach the comment thingy. I don't know. You've got them on your end too, right? Can you read them?

[Scott Horton]

No. Oh, let me get out of full screen here. Hold on.

[Daryl Cooper]

All right.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, let's see. I got from the Nixter 1212 for Daryl. Would you ever do a show with Scott Ritter to discuss weapon systems? I don't know. I guess I would talk to most people that wanted to talk to me. I don't know much about Ritter, but, you know, we. Yeah, probably, I guess. And that's all I see.

[Daryl Cooper]

This guy says, lately Mearsheimer has been warning of Russian official openly calling for the use of a tactical nuke. What do we make of the recent escalations and how Euros might react to it? Okay, so we kind of just covered that as far as the nuke thing. I mean, there have been various threatening statements by the Russian officials, you know, since the start of this war, about, you know, that it's a sliding scale. They're on it, and they're being pushed toward feeling like they got no choice but to do that, which I think is obviously crazy. I mean, they could just quit instead or, you know, declare victory where they are instead. But I think it is a real danger. I don't think it's a high probability that it'll happen. But then that's an extremely high amount of damage if it does break out.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

And if they. If anybody starts using nukes at all, we'd be really lucky if they stay down at 10 or 15 kilotons and don't go up into much higher ranges of. Of, you know, strategic nukes. So I don't know. So this. Go ahead.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, no, let's go ahead and do this one. Go ahead.

[Daryl Cooper]

What do you think of a Covid style Canada trucker shut down in D.C. with 200,000American Patriots who all want to bring the Epstein class to justice. I say you and him fight. I don't know. What do you think?

[Scott Horton]

I think that. Yeah, I don't know, man. Like, I. Like, on one hand, I say, I look at sort of physical confrontations like that as, you know, attacking their strongest point, you know, their strongest defense. Like that's their ground. Like, they want there to be a physical confrontation because they're really good at that and they know how to handle it from a propaganda perspective, from just a. The. The confrontation itself. On the other hand, I'm kind of at the point now where it's like, you know, what else besides, you know, just physically confronting these people is really going to bring about any change? And it's hard to imagine anything happening organically. I mean. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, if it happens, I'll wish you well, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't necessarily expect the best. Ron, the actuary, or here, I got another one says America. This is. This is a good question, actually. Or it's not really a question, exactly. I guess there is one. But he says American tech companies want to make sure your children never have jobs. At what point does the country stop talking about Israel? I kind of get that. Like, yeah, I get it, man. Like, I would like to stop talking about this, but, you know, we're in a shooting war with a fairly large country right now that we have basically lost conventionally because of Israel. It's really hard to stop talking about them, you know, but I. But I feel you like, I. You know, I would love to just be doing provoked shows occasionally about stuff like this when it flares up and be talking about changes in the tech economy and whatnot. But, you know, this is where we're at right now.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, look, I mean, that's the whole point. That's the bottom line of this whole thing, man, is in an empire, Foreign policy dominates. We can never take a week off to get our shit together as long as we're constantly in a state of international emergency here. Don't you know there's a war on? You want to roll back the FBI counterintelligence division now? You want to roll back the CIA and the NSA and all their capabilities now you want to let the ChiComs get ahead of us on AI when we're in the middle of imploding? Our empire is falling and we're desperately clamoring to hold it together. No way your town is going to have to give in to this new data center. Because it's an international conflict with stakes higher than you can understand. Right. There's a NSC memo that says so. That's the whole point, man, is we can't be a limited republic. We cannot have a constitutional government and a free society of any kind, a free economy of any kind, when we have a world empire. I mean, that's what Anduril is, right? That's what Palantir is. It's

[Scott Horton]

moving, his moving to Argentina.

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, yeah, I did see that. Yeah. And Oren McIntyre had a great point that how can these elites just run our country in the ground and not give a damn? Well, because they don't have to give a damn. They can just get up, pack up and go wherever they want. They don't have to move one box, man. They go wherever they want. Escape the consequences of all their terrible policies. No problem. You know. Hey, so this guy asked if, if I think Rogan texted Trump about what I told him. He's told him things before that he listened to. I guess I kind of doubt that. But he did cite me, as I said, he did cite me on the show today. So I did make an impression there with Joe. I don't know if it carried over or not, but, you know, I don't know.

[Scott Horton]

Yo, read that Canadian's question, man. He just dropped 500 Canadian dollars, which I think is like 47 cents, but that's okay. It's. It's a lot of money to him.

[Daryl Cooper]

That sounds like a lot. Wait, put that one up there. What is it? You see it? Yeah. Let me see here.

[Scott Horton]

It says, if nobody can stop the war, Ukraine war he's talking about, did Putin really have to start it? And what were Putin's other options if he wanted to avoid starting the war in the first place? I'll just say something real quick and then I'll let Scott take over on this one. But, like, you know, I do, I really do think that Putin had bad intelligence and had, you know, almost, almost Trump, like, expectations of what was going to happen when he sent that little piddly ass force into Ukraine back in February 22nd. Because, way to put it, isn't it, you know, and like it. Because it's one of the things that, like, made people like me think that a war was not on the brink of happening at that moment. Because I was the forces that were amassed on the border. I'm like, you can't invade Ukraine with that. That's ridiculous. Like, it's not anywhere close to enough forces. And it wasn't it wasn't meant for that. Now, you know, to give Putin his due on that. You know, he, he did meet his expectation in the sense that by April, Kiev was ready to make a deal with him, that it was acceptable to Russia. But he didn't bank on Boris, you know, Boris Johnson showing up and, and torpedoing it and the Ukrainians going along with it. I guess so. But as far as other options, I'd like to hear you on that.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, look, yeah, I say in the book that just, you know, really, as you just said, you could compare it to the Iran war here, where whether the February 27 or February 21, they're just sitting there, they didn't have to go, and then the next day they went anyway.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, let me ask you one, let me ask you about this, because, like, this is.

[Daryl Cooper]

They didn't have to. You know what I mean?

[Scott Horton]

Go ahead. Let me ask you about this, because this is, you know, people will look and they'll say like that the Russians who were in Eastern Ukraine, the ethnic Russians who were there who were being killed, being excluded, like, systematically, you know, ever since the, the Maidan coup and were in a state of, you know, civil war and under military attack by Kiev, the Russians, you know, they look at those people and they have always, since the fall of the Soviet Union, have said that, like, these people are our concerns. The Russians in the Eastern Baltic states, like, those are, we're, we're, we're going to back out our troops and everything, and we're going to allow these countries to break away. But just to be on the record, we have concerns about what the fate of these people is going to be. And so they've always looked at them as, you know, somebody they were obligated to sort of look after. Other people would be like, well, there's an invisible line in the sand right there between Russia and Ukraine. Those are totally different people. They have no right to intervene to protect them. I don't really buy that. Like, you know, if the Russians really felt. And whether Putin and, like, you know, his government felt this way, I know a lot of Russian people, you know, felt that we have an obligation to step in and, like, protect our, our people here, you know, and just because they're on the other side of an imaginary border, clearly Kiev doesn't consider them real Ukrainians. And so what are they? Well, they're Russians. I sympathize with that. You know, like, it would be hard for if the US Government, if there was a big coup and, you know, the new Government was just radically, radically anti Mexican and started attacking the Mexicans in the Southwest militarily and stuff. And the Mexican government intervened to protect them. I wouldn't say that like, you know, they had invaded America unprovoked, just whatever. Like, I sympathize with that. And so I don't know how they would have stopped the mistreatment and the killing of, you know, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, short of military interventions. But maybe you have a theory on that.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I wrote about it in the book that, I mean, there are obvious options that they didn't even try right up front, like, for example, use and swear to use their veto on the UN Security Council to obstruct all business until they get their way. Right. There would be a major card to play. Another one was forget the west blowing it up. He could have. In fact, he did turn off Nord Stream 1 himself. Putin did, when he was, you know, angry in, I guess, October of 21. Well, he could have shut off Nord Stream 2 then himself too, and said, listen, you guys are just going to freeze in the dark, man. I mean it this time. Instead, I guess his finance people told him, no, we need that revenue this winter in the lead up to the war, or what the calculation there was. But if he wanted to play hardball, he could have just shut off the gas. He could have declared, the UN Security Council is closed for business until I get my way. And then his way was something that he had already demanded back in 2018, which was give me UN peacekeepers from a third disinterested country to stand on the gray zone and enforce the peace. They had a peace deal, the Minsk 2 peace deal, since February of 2015. It was signed by our allies, the French and the Germans, and rubber stamped then by Obama and by the UN Security Council as the official peace deal to end the war. They're, you know, America and is and pardon me, America and Ukraine. The Poroshenko and then later the Zelensky government worked to sabotage the implementation of the deal. But that essentially was Putin's main demand was implement the Minsk 2 deal. Now, you could say he just had given up on that already because he just thought that wasn't going to work. But he could have played harder hardball to make it happen. And in fact, he could have taken a country that's much closer to his own, like say Kazakhstan or something. I'm making that up on the fly. But somebody that he could get to agree, even without a UN Security Council resolution, dress him up in green helmets, then fine and march him in there to stand on the line. He could have, as David Swanson is a left wing anthropist, and this does sound naive at first, but he said, just send in unarmed Russian peacekeepers, just send in tens of thousands of troops just with no guns, but just to stand there and just to separate the two in a way that entirely shifts the burden onto Kiev. And you can even send civilians in there. And you know, he said, yeah, this sounds like silly hippie, but look, this is how they force the Soviet troops out of the Baltics. The ultimately Russian Soviet troops out of the Baltics was, I'm almost certain it was in Lithuania where they had this massive mob of 100,000 people or something singing songs as they unarmed and peacefully finally forced the Soviets out. And the Soviets had massacred some Lithuanians, what like a year before that. But when it came down to, you know, the end of the, the end of their rope, they were forced out peacefully by people singing songs and marching them to the border and telling them, don't come back. So if Putin was trying to, and I think he was trying to end the ongoing so called civil war, which we know now for a fact was run by the CIA from the day it began, you know, Zach Dorfman was the great reporter who covered this for Yahoo News, but then the New York Times pretended to get the scoop a year later and did that in depth piece about the 14 CIA bases. They say 12, but then they say, oh yeah, and also there were two more. So that's 14 CIA bases in the country from the time that war began and all that. If that was his concern, that and the expansion of NATO, the, the essential de facto integration of NATO. Playing harder hardball, I think he could have gotten his way. And I think, and I say this in the book too, that one of the things that he really did to screw himself if he was trying to get, you know, Joe Biden to just give in to him, was that he kept being coy about it and saying that, like, no, I'm not going to invade. You know, I sure want to have my way. But it's silly to say that I'm preparing to attack and all that, when what he should have said was, you're damned right, I'm building up my forces because I'm ready to attack you sign the damn treaty or at least meet me in Geneva and negotiate seriously about this. And Biden wasn't serious. Biden said, look, we're not going to put these missiles in Ukraine. You don't have to worry about that. And he says, well, let's put that in writing. And Biden says, okay, you know, we can reach an agreement about that. And then he sent like the third or fourth stringer to like go and promise to set up a meeting and then never follow through and never even do it. You know what I mean? So, you know, it was absolutely horrific diplomacy on the American side. I think, you know, probably 49 to 51, they, they probably didn't prefer war, but they were like almost just as happy to go ahead and have a war and inflict what they saw as a costly strategic defeat on Russia if they had one. So they were not being very good negotiating partners here. But Russia had a lot of cards to play besides simply invading the country the way they did. And then their plan sucked. I mean, as Daniel Davis said at the time, they invaded in from three directions and with not enough troops in any one column to get what they wanted. If they had all marched on Kiev, they would have been able to have their way. And instead, you know, they blew it. Now look at them. Four years of this, hundreds of thousands of killed. And I know that. Well, I, whatever, I don't know, I always prefer the most conservative estimates from all sides. I know both sides play down their own numbers and play up the other sides. I prefer more conservative estimates when it comes to that thing. But at the minimum, hundreds of thousands of guys have been killed on both sides of this thing. The entire east of the country's been completely destroyed. The, you know, population of Ukraine has been, you know, severely, you know, weakened in terms of, you know, people being forced to flee and all that. But the Russians have, you know, all of their own social consequences from this thing too. And then of course, as I also say in the book, it's going to be a Pyrrhic victory eventually, whether they go all the way to the river or whether they stop at the Donbass and the, you know, Zaprozia and Kherson are exactly where they end up drawing the line. They will have simply removed everyone in the country, whoever liked them out of the country by drawing a new line around them and calling them Russians. So now they're going to be dealing with a much more right wing, much more anti Russian and nationalistic Ukraine on their border for the indefinite future, which only in self licking ice cream cone terms means that they've just bought themselves decades more conflict here by doing this is an absolute idiot thing to do and they should not have done and they did not have to do it. And I'm not saying that your concerns aren't valid. The war had been going on for a long time. But I'm saying if he wanted to be creative, he could have figured out a way to force that issue. And instead, apparently, he decided earlier in 2021 that, screw it, we're going for it. And then he didn't want to change his mind. Right. Like, he's George W. Bush building up in Kuwait. He doesn't want to just say screw it, you know?

[Scott Horton]

You know, it's actually to close up because I got to get going. But, like, it's an example of what I was talking about earlier, where you have, you know, empires that create these artificial power structures. As you know, the Ukraine, Russia relationship has been because of US And European backing. And that goes until the other side, Russia, in this case, looks at the board and says, nah, they don't want any of this. They won't do it. And then they go do something stupid, and we do do it. Now you're four years in, you know. Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

All right, so listen, just real quick, one guy here says Alexander Mercouris from the Duran has my book on his shelf. I've noticed that he's a very nice guy. I met him at an awards thing in Chicago one time, and he was very nice to me and said he really liked the book and got a lot out of it, which was very flattering considering that he's, you know, really one of the foremost experts on this stuff, and I have a lot of respect for him. So thanks for pointing that out, and thanks to Alex Mercouris for that. And then I guess that's it, everybody. There's one or two more in here. Sorry, guys. We better go with it. Keep your eyes peeled for the Danny Jones podcast. I'm on there. And then if you're a regular consumer of the Matt Gaetz show, you find me on there as well, and then otherwise, I'll be around. And thank you very much for your time. Marta, mate. It's been great, dude.

[Scott Horton]

Peace, guys.

[Daryl Cooper]

This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horse. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked Underscore show on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked.