EP:56 - Wars & Rumors of Wars

Summary

Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton

Episode 56: "Wars & Rumors of Wars" (July 31, 2026)

Theme: Exploring the psychology of collective hysteria and conflict—from COVID-19 policies to cycles of violence and media manipulation.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dissects how mass fear and official narratives drive ordinary people into cycles of compliance, aggression, or despair during times of crisis. Cooper and Horton weave together the fallout of COVID-19 policies, psychological impact on individuals and society, and parallels with past eras of paranoia and violence (e.g., post-9/11 terror wars, Waco, Ruby Ridge). They argue that unaccountable bureaucracies, media complicity, and political opportunism provoke collective breakdowns that can have lasting, traumatic consequences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Tech Issues, Audience Loyalty, and the Nature of Live Media

• [00:39–03:36]
  • The hosts banter about technical problems, referencing a recent show where Scott was inadvertently muted (“the dog ate my homework, and then a gorilla threw my dog in the river”—Daryl [02:50]).
  • Both express appreciation for the dedication and humor of their audience during these mishaps.
  • Tone: Candid, self-deprecating, warm toward their community.

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2. COVID-19 Policy Catastrophe and Bureaucratic Corruption

• [04:00–12:56]
  • Scott highlights Tom Woods’ book, "Diary of a Psychosis," which chronicles government missteps and harmful mandates (masks, lockdowns, vaccines) debunked in real time.
  • The hosts express outrage at the isolation and suffering caused by policies, particularly for people dying alone; Daryl gives a visceral reaction:

    "If I was one of those people whose wife was dying... I'd be a freaking world famous terrorist right now." ([06:00], Daryl)

  • They emphasize the hypocrisy of elites flouting their own mandates (Pelosi getting her hair done, Newsom’s dinners, etc.).
  • Scott ties lockdowns to a political effort to destabilize Trump’s America, accusing Democrats of a “color revolution.”
  • Fauci accused of dishonesty and evasion ("pleads the fucking Fifth Amendment, Cooper. He pleads the Fifth Amendment, this guy." [12:56], Scott), knowing the origins of the virus and the limits of interventions.
  • Notable Quote:

    "Every last bit of it, all of it was debunked and disproven by the end of June [2020] at the latest … If you're reading Tom Woods every day, you know the score." ([04:23], Scott)

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3. The System’s Profound Loss of Credibility and Mass Disillusionment

• [12:57–22:26]
  • Daryl reflects on how bureaucratic power has decoupled from democratic process, behaving as its own political actor:

    "We just allow them to behave according to the same standards that we've come to accept from politicians ... they're allowed to lie to you. Like, blatantly." ([12:57], Daryl)

  • The aftermath of COVID is positioned as a breaking point where masses lost faith—not just because of failed public health, but a wider sense of betrayed trust dating back to Trump’s co-option by the establishment.
  • Daryl admits to initially following advice optimistically, then entering a “process of disillusionment”—a journey many Americans shared.
  • The broad convergence of media, tech, political, and intelligence institutions to manage narratives and suppress dissent during this period is described as unprecedented.
  • Both hosts discuss how, in retrospect, efforts by dissenters (Atlas, Bhattacharya) were systematically shut out of official circles and public consciousness.

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4. Psychological Fallout: Mental Health, Isolation, and Paranoia

• [22:26–28:13]
  • The hosts highlight the explosion of anxiety, loneliness, and mental health crises stemming from lockdowns and enforced isolation—especially among vulnerable, non-digitally-native populations.
  • Daryl shares personal anecdotes of friends who "completely lost their minds" due to COVID pressures, suggesting that the broader impacts will "ripple out for like probably the rest of our lives at this point." ([23:09], Daryl)
  • Scott draws parallels to post-9/11 panic, arguing top-down induced fear (terror, germs) can push ordinary people over the edge, with government and media complicit in amplifying anxiety instead of reassuring the public.

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5. Case Studies: Waco, Ruby Ridge, Montana Freemen, & Government Demonization

• [29:55–42:14]
  • Both recall past government sieges and how media and authorities dehumanized those involved (“he drives a Trans Am, he's got a mullet”—[31:02], Scott), preparing the public for state violence by painting victims as cultural enemies.
  • Daryl recounts Montana Freemen standoff, knowing participants personally:

    “The guys there are being described ... I know these guys ... not by any stretch some terrorist. So to watch that all unfold ... was extremely radicalizing.” ([36:12], Daryl)

  • These events are described as foundational political awakenings, breaking faith in official narratives and exposing the manufactured quality of moral outrage.

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6. Cultural Shifts and the 1990s as a Turning Point

• [40:03–42:21]
  • The 90s are identified as a moment when public discourse became uglier, more cynical, and faith in institutions eroded—all echoed and amplified through pop culture (e.g., pro-wrestling’s “Attitude Era” discussed as reflection of the times).
  • Daryl previews an upcoming conversation on Tucker Carlson about cultural change in the 1990s, suggesting these decades laid the groundwork for today’s crises of legitimacy and trust.

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7. War, Escalation, & Strategic Drift in the Middle East

• [44:57–53:05]
  • The hosts shift to current wars: the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, conflict in Iraq, and the Red Sea crisis.
  • They argue the US (now under Trump again) is hitting Shiite militias and trading tit-for-tat attacks without a coherent strategy—“no plan,” only escalation to kick the can down the road until after the US elections.
  • Daryl doubts the US or allies have the resources for a full-scale war, believing strategic goals keep shrinking (“every single goal he listed is not even discussed anymore… the only question is whether Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz” [45:02], Daryl).
  • Analogies to Afghanistan, Iraq surge, Syria’s civil war are dismissed as misleading; Iran’s domestic support, geography, and regional alliances are very different (“Don’t be stupid…I hated the way people are so willfully ridiculous about stuff like this.” [53:21], Scott).
  • The implication is that current interventions are doomed to repeat the failures of previous ones, with equally severe consequences.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Scott Horton ([04:23]):

  "Every last bit of it, all of it was debunked and disproven by the end of June at the latest..."

• Daryl Cooper ([06:00]):

  "If I was one of those people whose wife was dying of cancer...I'd be a freaking world famous terrorist right now."

• Scott Horton ([12:56]):

  "He pleads the fucking Fifth Amendment, Cooper. He pleads the Fifth Amendment, this guy."

• Daryl Cooper ([12:57]):

  "We just allow them to behave according to the same standards that we've come to accept from politicians…they're allowed to lie to you."

• Scott Horton ([31:02]):

  "He drives a Trans Am, he's got a mullet. Just to let all those, you know, sort of liberal ladies in, in, you know, Southern California or whatever know—this is just some crazy redneck, you know, douchebag.”

• Daryl Cooper ([36:12]):

  "They would move him around to different high security prisons and stuff. His family didn't know where he was for years at a time. And this is just some dude that's like, yeah, he's like kind of crazy and needs to pay his taxes… but not by any stretch some terrorist.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Banter & Live Show Tech Issues: 00:39–03:36
• COVID Dissection Begins; Critique of Fauci: 04:00–12:56
• Bureaucratic Power, Systemic Corruption: 12:57–22:26
• Mass Mental Health and Societal Fallout: 22:26–28:13
• Sieges and State Demonization: 29:55–42:14
• The 90s, Cultural Explanation: 40:03–42:21
• Middle East Wars and Strategic Drift: 44:57–53:05

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Flow & Tone

The episode moves from personal stories and cultural critique to systemic analysis and sharp, sometimes darkly comedic outrage. The tone is conversational but urgent, blending skepticism, empathy for ordinary people, and condemnation for manipulative elites.

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Conclusion

Provoked #56 is a sweeping conversation about how fear-driven policies, both past and present, grind down public trust and provoke cycles of trauma, violence, and mass delusion. In mapping the psychological and political costs of COVID, the terrorism era, and ongoing wars, Cooper and Horton frame these crises as symptoms of a deeper pattern: the fusion of unaccountable bureaucracy, manufactured hysteria, and media manipulation, with devastating results for ordinary people. The show closes with warnings that current foreign interventions are destined to fail like their predecessors, caught in repeating loops of denial, propaganda, and strategic confusion.

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For anyone seeking to understand how mass crises warp societies—and why so many feel traumatized, angry, and suspicious of power today—this episode cuts to the core, sparing no punches.

Transcript

[Daryl Cooper]

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

[Scott Horton]

Negotiate. Now end this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is Provoked. Oh, my God.

[Daryl Cooper]

It's the show.

[Scott Horton]

What's up, Daryl? How you doing, man?

[Daryl Cooper]

I can't hear you. You're. You're what?

[Scott Horton]

All right, well, here's the thing I have to say about that, okay? First of all, I've been doing this for 30 years. Well, 28. And I've had dead air before, and I'm gonna have dead air again. So I don't care. That's the way it goes. Even happens to KBJ sometimes. Also, it's two thirds your fault because I saw you texted me at 20 minutes after and said, they're saying that you're muted. But you didn't just pop in here and tell me where I could.

[Daryl Cooper]

You did not want me in here. Everybody would have bailed immediately if I popped in here. I was throwing up all over the place. I thought I had that explosive diarrhea stuff that's going around, like, for real, but I was like, all of my produce comes from my place here, so I don't think it's that unless it's airborne or something. Dude, I was. I had to cancel with Jim Webb the next morning, too. Like, I was miserable, dude. I was. And then, thankfully, it was like. It was. I was food poisoning. I think I ate some bad salsa.

[Scott Horton]

Listen, my other excuse is that I'm old and I can't see. I used to be. That was my best talent is seeing things. And now I can't see. And so I can't. I could see the chat room running, but I couldn't see anything. And the only thing I remember seeing in there was, like, complete nonsense. Like, do you believe in the Afghan Giant or some.

[Daryl Cooper]

Whatever, dude, I'm not. Yo, how long did they. How long did the. The chat guys, how long did they stick around?

[Scott Horton]

Oh, it was the full hour.

[Daryl Cooper]

You guys are the best, man.

[Scott Horton]

And. And I didn't go back and reread it, but somebody said it was the funniest and funnest chat ever. Whatever. So I'm glad everybody had a good time. I.

[Daryl Cooper]

You were just like.

[Scott Horton]

And I was like, no, screw you. I am not muted because I can see. I'm all lit up on my board right here. But I'll tell you what happened. You know what happened. And this is a good goddamn excuse, by the way. Screw you guys. Windows Update said that the driver for the speakers for this monitor is the default input audio driver. And so even though I was all lit up. Oh, and this is the other thing. The power went out. So it was only at the very last second before the show that I got my board fired back up. So I'm like, okay, the board can hear me, so I know my audio's good.

[Daryl Cooper]

And this is like, the dog ate my homework, and then a gorilla threw my dog in the river. And then, yeah, man, who the hell

[Scott Horton]

ever heard of that?

[Daryl Cooper]

I hope you were, like, really up and just ranting like a Nuremberg rally. Just nobody knew what you were saying.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, no, well, that was the other thing is what I should have said at the end was, hot jokes on you guys. You didn't get to hear all the brilliant stuff I just said.

[Daryl Cooper]

Really good.

[Scott Horton]

The best shows I've ever done. So at least I got to hear it. I don't care about it. And the thing is, too, is I've been trying to remind myself to keep

[Daryl Cooper]

a backup recorder going.

[Scott Horton]

And so that would have worked, right? I'd have had the video and then the backup recorder audio, and I just had to adjust the thing, but I forgot to do that, just like I did tonight. So better hopes.

[Daryl Cooper]

I just love that so many people stuck around for the entire time. You guys are awesome. That's. That's great.

[Scott Horton]

They're all entertaining each other. And in fact, like, it probably was pretty funny, right? Because I was pissed off for part of that. I don't know what I was talking about. Inflation or something. I hate inflation.

[Daryl Cooper]

Right.

[Scott Horton]

Listen, tonight on the show, we're going to talk about things. Let's talk about the germ first instead of the war. You want it?

[Daryl Cooper]

Something other than the war first would be nice. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, so here's this Fauci guy.

[Daryl Cooper]

Hero.

[Scott Horton]

Now, tomorrow on. On the Scott Wharton Academy Q and A show, our special guest is going to be the great Tom woods. And he's the author of this here book, Diary of a Psychosis.

[Daryl Cooper]

You see this?

[Scott Horton]

And let me tell you about this book. Okay, so the book is, as you know, Tom woods has his daily email that he writes. Okay, so all this is. Is chronological out of Tom's daily emails. It's not every single one of them. You know, it's a selective reading of the thing, but it's all just in chronological order. And here's the punchline. Darrell Cooper, are you ready? That every single thing that the government did, every mandate that they had, every, you know, false truth that they claimed was holy writ. Every last bit of it, all of it was debunked and disproven by the end of June at the latest. We're talking every last bit of it. From the masks to the six feet to the whatever. Obviously the inefficacy of the vaccine comes later and all of that, but. And the dangers of it, whatever comes later in the fact with the vaccines. But everything about the germ that they said, including, you know, the death rate and every other thing, all of it, all of it is completely straightened away. If you're reading Tom woods every day, you know the score by almost really, you know, in March, April, May too. But by the end of June, it's every single thing. I'm sorry, I wish I could rattle off every, every little attribute, every last bit of it. And then you have to sit there and read the book for another year and a half worth of totalitarianism in the name of this. Keeping the kids out of school, keeping people away from their families while they're dying in the old folks home and in the hospice and you know, closing down all those business, closing down the university, you know, destroying so many lives. I mean, just bro, some of those

[Daryl Cooper]

stories, like if, if I was one of those people whose wife was dying of cancer and like she spent the last month of her life alone in the hospital and they wouldn't let me in, bro, I'd be a freaking world famous terrorist right now. Like I would, I, like the death count would be higher than covet itself. I mean, I would lose my mind. And I'm surprised more people didn't. I know a lot of religious leaders now, pastors and priests and stuff, who look back on that and you know, sort of had the experience of, you know, like if somebody hasn't really been in a lot of physical confrontations, sometimes like, you know, one will come up, they'll be at a bar or something, like a fight will break out. And by the time they even like sort of orient themselves and figure out what's going, even going on and what they should do, like it's all over, right? And they sort of look back on it. I'm like, man, I should have been more prepared, prepared for that. That happened to like churches for sure. Like they look back now and they're like, man, I can't believe that. Like we let us close them, like close ourselves down like that. Like there were people dying who didn't get, you know, to take the Eucharist for the last time and things like, hey, and they really regret it. But it's like, well, I mean, you guys had your shot. You know, hopefully you don't get another one.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, the strip club was open and the liquor store was open. And, you know, Gavin. Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

Weed stores were open.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. Fauci himself got to go to the ball game. Nancy Pelosi got to go get her hair done. And Gavin Newsom got to have dinner with all of his friends and all that. Remember, like, every single one of these guys was breaking all of their own rules. Gretchen Whitmer, her husband was caught out at the boat dock going out, having a nice weekend when she had the most totalitarian lockdowns in the entire country. And by the way, nobody ever really talks about this because I don't know how in writing this is and how proven this is. It's only obvious that this was all part of a color revolution against Donald Trump. That whether they deliberately, and I'm not saying they did, I doubt that they did. I'm sure it was. I presume it was an accidental leak from the lab. But once the thing got out and they knew that they could do lockdowns and disrupt the society that bad over this, it was the Democratic governors that did it the worst, because it was like a suicide bombing. Even if they were destroying their own political career, they were helping destroy America under Donald Trump. And so that was worth it to help destabilize the country. And of course, Whitmer was reelected anyway. Newsom was reelected anyway. Democrats love that stuff, so it's fine anyway. But they did that to drive the country to chaos. So all that tension, all the deaths were blamed on Trump. Remember the CNN death counters? Like every single person who died somehow is a personal responsibility of the president and all this stuff. And then. But here's the thing is what's new is the Fauci diary, where we know now, and some of this was already out, that he knew that it came from the lab. He was one of the ones on the big conference call with the other super majority of the scientists on the conference call who thought, oh, yeah, no, the way they had the cleavage site latch on to this particular lung cell, that's something they've been trying to achieve there. He said he knew that they were trying to achieve that. So all likelihood was that it came from the lab. But the problem is that leads directly back to him and to his defiance of Obama's order. And look, I'm not trying to say anything nice about Obama, but Obama said stop. And he said, no, it's an Emergency and went ahead and did the and maybe Obama knew about that, I don't know. But they called it an emergency and they went ahead and kept the contract going through this eco health alliance to keep pushing this gain of function research. So there's every reason to believe that this is at least like the executive producer of the germ itself. And then he's the guy in charge of all the lockdowns and he totally lies about it. There he goes. Oh, I didn't say lock down anyone. I didn't, I didn't say close any schools or. No, no. See what he does, he says, I didn't close any schools. No, he was just on the phone to the governor of New York and the governor of California demanding that they do. And then here, you know, in this one, let me show you, this one here is from, from Public News Shellenberger's thing they have he has here where see, this lady is Rochelle Walensky, and she's the head of the center for Disease Control and Prevention. And here her committee was saying that you don't need to do beast booster shots for the frontline workers. And he was overruling her and putting all this pressure on her to demand that they do the booster shots and all that. But then you just had the whole thing about, you know, trying to force the whole thing on children, the vaccines and all that. And really, just in essence, this was not in all 50 states, 100%, but in essence, overall the policy was the lockdown stay, the two weeks to flatten the curve, the lockdown stay for a year and a half until everybody's got their shot, then you can go back out again. When they knew that it was all bs they knew that and even they knew it's in the, it's in his diaries, they that they knew that the shot didn't work, that it didn't prevent infection and it didn't prevent spread and that even their claim that, well, but it'll keep you out of the hospital though, that that claim began to, you know, very quickly prove to not be true. And they buried all that too. And then here's the most important part of it maybe is this one by Taibi. The Fauci legend will not die. I saw Rand Paul tweeted about this yesterday coup. He says abcb, SMB, cb, whatever, all of them censored this story about Fauci's diary. They either didn't cover it at all. Ms. Now they call it MSNBC. They either didn't cover it at all or they Go. Yeah, Fauci's thing came out, but it doesn't prove anything. There's no smoking gun in there. The New York Times, the rest of these. What smoking gun? There's no smoking gun. The whole thing's full of smoking guns for one. This was one I read about yesterday. I'm sorry, I don't have this one in front of me. I don't think this was in either of these articles, but one of the major ones was the death rate. It's either 3% die of it or it's.03. Right. And he was sticking with the 3% for long enough to get all of the emergency edicts in place, which is completely crazy. And Dr. Paul called this out right away, too, conflating the case fatality rate with the infection fatality rate and all those things, B, switching those numbers around so it can make it look way more deadly than it was and the rest of that. So, yeah, it. Yes, he was in charge of recommending and. But his recommendations were treated as basically holy writ, especially by the Democrat governors recommending the lockdowns, the distancing, the closing of the schools and all of those restrictions came from the guy who looks like he was the one who invented the damn germ in the first place. Seven million dead. No accountability whatsoever. Just this smug son of a bitch sitting up there SM going, oh, you. You're the crazy one. I plead the Fifth because you're out to get me. And then he doesn't have to answer for any of this because he pleads the fucking Fifth Amendment, Cooper. He pleads the Fifth Amendment, this guy. Did you see that? The clips of this thing?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I saw it. I saw it. I mean, you know, like, the thing is, there's a. There's a lot. A lot to say about this. Like, on one hand, what it makes me, like, think about is how, you know, now that the bureaucracy has detached itself from the article two powers of the President and the Constitution and has become like a political actor of its own. We sort of. We just allow them to behave according to the same standards that we've come to accept from politicians. Like, we just sort of take it as, like, politicians, they're allowed to lie to you. Like, blatantly. They're allowed to. It's normal. It's fine. If we catch them, you can vote them out of office. But it really. And now, like, these guys, I mean, they look at themselves as political actors. Like, my job is to make sure this vaccine. Vaccine happens. These lockdowns go down, and if I have to lie if I have to do this or that. I'm totally entitled to do that, just like a congressman would do something like that. And. And we sort of just accept that. You know, the. The other thing it makes me really think of, like, in a broader sense is how, you know, when people look at the Trump administration now, the people who feel betrayed by it, you know, the people who are disappointed over the whole thing, yes, it's the Iran war, you know, yes, it's lack of deportations, all the things that, you know, he promised he would do and he's not doing. But it really is like this broader context of, like, you go through the 2016-2020 process where just really like unprecedented coalescence of mass media, big tech companies, the Democratic Party and just larger Democrat machine, the security services, intelligence services, all of these. All of these, like, really, really powerful institutions coming together to interfere political system in a way that we really hadn't at least seen out, you know, in public before. Having the 2020, having Covid happen and having it proceed, you know, in such a way that, like, all of these things, they were so obvious, like, at the time, you know, when they were like, well, yeah, it emerged in Wuhan, where there happens to be a bio lab where they're doing gain of function research on Covid viruses. But it was probably this wet market. I mean, don't worry. It's like you're, you know, I found a murder weapon where, you know, on the side of it, it wrote, scott Horton did this. This is my favorite gun. Here's my registration number for it. And, like, trying to come up with other excuses. So obvious. And when, like, when the Floyd riots kicked off and everybody is stuck at home, if you're not a rioter and so you're. The entire country is watching, as, you know, the Centers for Disease Control, all these public health authorities come out and saying, well, it's actually okay for them to do this because, yes, Covid's a risk, but, you know, racism is a real public health risk. So this is actually like, we have to, you know, prioritize here and to have that happen, and then for them to tell us right afterward, all right, everybody get held back in your houses. Like, all of this kind of stuff goes on, and then the 2020 election happens with all of the shenanigans and whatever actually happened behind the scenes. There's. There was no transparency, and there were a lot of questions that people had that were completely legitimate that were never answered. And people were censored. People were thrown off of social media for even asking questions. People were having their. Their private messages censored by the big tech companies. And these are just obviously like the broad highlights. And then the 2020 election happens. You have the January 6 thing, the military response to, to that whole thing, and then Trump WINS Again in 2024. And it was like, okay, in the, in the context of the last eight years, yes, they, they did all these things. Yes, they censored, yes, they lied. Yes, they use police power and intelligence services against people. They didn't like all this stuff, but in the end, they, they lost. And now it's time to set things back on a course that we can live with. And for him to just be like, psych and totally side with those people, I mean, because that's really what it is. It's not just like, man, you know, I don't really under. I'm an outsider, you know, I'm a guy from Queens. I don't understand the levers of government and stuff. And, you know, you make compromises here and there, and people take advantage of you because they're seasoned bureaucrats and politicians, and it just turns out I can't actually get done. It wasn't that he's, like, on their side. He's fully on their side. And it's just people see that and they're like, yeah, I don't know, man. Like, what, am I supposed to vote for JD Vance in 2028? Or am I supposed to, like, what. What am I even supposed to do here? People are. I feel like that's where a huge number of people who aren't just your, you know, your, your types who are, you know, who, who. Whose entire political identity and sort of any clout that they have. A lot of times their income is, like, based on their support for Trump. So it just doesn't matter. They're, you know, on board other than those people and, you know, neocons, during the periods where they're not afraid that Trump is gonna taco and leave Iran, pretty much everybody else, I think, is like, is that exasperating? And this is coming from somebody who, like, you know, you probably didn't have this problem because you're naturally more skeptical than I am. I'm, like, hopelessly naive optimist all the time. My wife, you know, makes fun of me for it, but she's probably right. Like, when this, when CO started, like, I was. I remember, like, you know, like it was yesterday. I just gotten back from a work trip in Hawaii and I come home and over the weekend, the Fed, I think they dropped rates like a percent and a half or something like that on a Sunday. And I was paying attention during the financial crisis. I was like, oh, wow, they're taking this extremely seriously. Like, there's something really, that they're afraid of here, because that's a dramatic, you know, action for them to take. And then, and so, and so, you know, I was one of those people. I get a package in the mail, I wiped it down for the first month or whatever with, like, alcohol, cloth, because I was like, well, they say to do this, so I'm going to do it. Not going to go outside into, you know, into crowds. I'm going to obey the, obey the rules, basically. And so I was. It's not as if I started out from day one, like, really skeptical and just. It was like I tried to, to play by the rules. The system, somehow, after, I don't know, a lifetime of, of living in it, system somehow still had enough credibility with me where I would think, like, yeah, okay, they do this, this and this, but they wouldn't do that. I mean, come on, ask me. And then to just go through this process of disillusionment, having them all just stripped away one by one by one and realizing that there's, like, there's absolutely no bottom and you will keep falling until you're in the deepest pit of hell if you, if you, if you don't, like, grab onto something outside the system, because these people are. Yeah, it's, it's been very disillusioning for many, many people. And, and I was probably like, you know, somebody who was skeptical of, of all of this compared to the normal person. You know what I mean? Like, your normal person, like, who just gets their basic news from television and whatever. Like, I was probably a skeptic going in compared to them, and even, like, hopelessly naive and optimistic about it. And so, you know, I, I think it just makes the, the betrayal of the Trump presidency and, and, and, and not just, again, not just a failure, but the abject 180 betrayal of it. It really just twists the knife that much more.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, and the thing is, too, it's not like he was fighting the good fight in 2020. He was endorsing all of the lockdown stuff and ridiculing anybody who tried to stand against it and all of that. He was his own and all of our worst enemy that year as Dave Smith, honest in our lifetimes. And he did his best to own every bit of it. He could have got Rid of Fouchy. He was the one who said, no, see, I'm great because I'm keeping Fouchy.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, I'll be honest, I gave him a pass at the time just because I was like, this guy doesn't know anything about any of this stuff. And he's got the heads of these agencies, all of these people around him who are saying, look, boss, this is what you have to do. This is what's going on. He doesn't know anything. Anybody who has a. Has a different view from the one that all the people around him were putting out. They don't have access to him. They don't have access to television, so they can't get it out. They don't even have. I mean, just there's. They're completely censored. And so probably like, he was just lost and didn't know what was going on and was listening to the people who were supposed to know. I gave him that pass. And now I look back on it and I don't even know if I should have done that. I mean, not that it's an excuse. He's the leader. He's the president. He's responsible for all this stuff.

[Scott Horton]

He did have access to people like Scott Atlas was giving him, you know, dissenting information on some things at least. And Jay Bhattacharya and the guys from Stanford came out with their Barrington declaration pretty soon into the thing.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, but he's not reading that like, he's getting his information from his advisors. You know what I mean? And again, this isn't an excuse. It's his job to, like, keep abreast of all that stuff, especially in a public health emergency like that. It's all. It's on him. But, you know, it's. It was. It was a. You know, there are so many. Like, there are so many storylines here. Right. Like, I really think that a lot of the complete insanity since 2020 in our politics, part of it was because of COVID because of this mask off moment.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, let me say real quick here. I'm sorry to interrupt, but, yeah, crucial thing to me, a friend of mine, his relation is a psychotherapist, and said, do you think that it's a coincidence that during the George Floyd riot that they're all chanting, I can't breathe. Like that's supposed to be a reference to Eric Garner and to Floyd, but it's also a reference to them being locked in their houses and with masks on their faces.

[Daryl Cooper]

They're outside.

[Scott Horton]

They're still having to wear Masks and they're saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. So, you know, that was the same police state that they were protesting against only because they were left wing partisans that got all muddled in the thing that they were the pro mask people chanting their discomfort, you know.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, one of the, one of the things I think that's really driven our politics completely off the rails since 2020. I mean, part of it is just, you know, that again, all the stuff I just listed, people watching that go on. But I think a lot of it too was, you know, you had tens of millions of boomers and not quite boomers, but like older people who like, yeah, they used Facebook to look at their grandkids pictures or you know, they send emails and stuff at work using Outlook and stuff. But they're not like on the Internet, you know what I mean? They're not like immersed in that culture. And then we locked them in their houses for like a year and a half and everybody is just plugged in 247 and they don't know. They're not. They haven't been around since like the late 90s watching, you know, doing use net boards and stuff. They don't understand the culture. They come in, they're seeing stuff from Q. They're seeing all this stuff and they're like, oh wow. They don't know like what to take seriously and whatnot. And people just spun off into a million different directions. And also, I mean, this is something to think about. Like I, I know. I mean a handful of people, at least three or four people at least, who I known them for for years and years and years. I'm talking 20 years or more. Who, you know, maybe they were always like, they had some anxiety issues, maybe they were a little weird, you know, socially awkward or something, but fine, you know, they were totally fine. Like they, they were just kind of weird who completely lost their minds, like wandering the streets at night, just babbling to strangers. Lost their mind during COVID and. Yeah, exactly. And when you think of like, okay, those are like extreme cases. For every extreme case, there are a hundred invisible, like less extreme cases of like damaged mental health. Like just destabilization of personalities and that, that is rippling out. It's going to ripple out for like probably the rest of our lives at this point, you know.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, look, it was the same thing in the terror wars, man. I knew somebody in the terror wars who, you know, instead of Bush saying, listen, it's okay. I mean what happened was terrible, but the Guys, the real enemies in the country, they died in the thing. And we're wrapping up. Our heroes in the FBI are wrapping up the last six of their friends or whatever it is. But you in your hometown, in your suburb where you live in America, you're safe. Nobody's knocking down your Safeway. You're okay. So don't worry. We're handling it. It's cool. He did not say that. He goes, be afraid. Stay afraid. Be very afraid. It's going to take me a year and a half to build up the forces in Kuwait to invade Iraq.

[Daryl Cooper]

Okay?

[Scott Horton]

Stay afraid. The Arabs, they're gonna get you. The terrorists. The terrorists, they're everywhere. And there I know at least one person who was on the edge of sanity who. Bush pushed her, boom, right off the cliff and went full schizophrenic because of the anxiety of the fear. The, the top down, you know, pushed fear down her throat that just, you know, going outside every black car with, with black tinted windows is some CIA thing. Every Arab is at the Quickie Mart is some terrorist plotting against. And like, and just that kind of fear and paranoia just run wild again. Like you're saying we're talking about regular people here, man. This is just like some guy's auntie, she doesn't know. These people don't know. They don't have a foundation to stand on what's true. All they know is the President says we're in danger. And like. And apparently, like, for the indefinite future. Oh, my God. And, and there's some people who, they just can't take that. And it's the same thing here with this germ. And, and especially people like you're talking about here. How many of these people weren't driven to insanity by the fear of the germ at all, but simply because they were locked in solitary by their government for no good reason at all? And when they're, when the government employees in charge of the policy knew better all along anyway, tried to have to look consistent and push their agenda the way they did. It's sick, man. There are people who, you know, the worst ones are the people who, their loved ones died alone. I, you know, there's just. I. This is just like a random one. But you can multiply this by hundreds of thousands of times or thousands at least. Where I think this was, an English lady said that her, her grandfather or her uncle or something is lifelong fear. For whatever reason, this was like his lifelong fear was that he was going to die alone, cold, afraid and alone. His family would Abandon him. They only wanted him for his money or whatever it was. Nobody even really loved him, dude. And he would know. He would see at the end of his life that they would all abandon him. And now here he is, he's dying, so he's, like, half out of his mind and whatever. He's old. He. You can't explain to him that there's this new virus going around and so the rules have changed. He can't understand that. All he knows is that his family is nowhere to be seen. And here he is dying alone. He knew all his life they were going to betray him and steal everything and leave him to die. And, like, dude, you can't take that back.

[Daryl Cooper]

And you can't take back, like, surveillance videos of Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done and Gavin Newsom going to French Laundry while people's, like, are not allowed to have a funeral for their grandfather. I mean, it's. It's crazy to look back on, like. And, you know, these are, like, obviously, like, the broader. Like, more. Just more. More like, acute things that happen that are really, like, shocking and are going to be shocking for her, but there's certain little things that you had to be there that are going to be impossible to explain to people in future generations. I mean, assuming that this doesn't just become our lived reality for forever from now on. But, you know, I lived in this little tiny apartment on the beach in, you know, when I was working for the DoD Navy base, obviously. So I was there, and I lived in this little tiny apartment on the beach. And I was. It was maybe like June or July or something of 2020, and I go outside on the beach, which we're sort of. I was. It was in that stage of, like, whether you were allowed to be outside at all or not. Was sort of up in the air, but went out there and. Because I heard, like a. Like a megaphone kind of thing. And I go out there and the police had set up, like, one of those canopy things and down at each side of the beach, and they had drones with videos and microphones on them. And if anybody was on the beach. You were allowed to walk on the beach by yourself, not with anybody else. You could walk on the beach. You were not allowed to stop walking. If you stopped walking to take a look at the ocean or something. Sir, Keep moving. Keep moving. And I was like, this is like, out of a book or something. Like, what the hell is going on here? This is so crazy.

[Scott Horton]

It sounds like science fiction. Totally. All right, here's all you need to know about government, okay? That's government. Well, see, we have to protect the people because of the crime. Okay, that, yeah, there's a bad, There's a germ. So what we're going to do is we're going to kill you and we're going to, we're going to destroy your business. We're going to drive you to suicide and then you won't get the short term upper, upper respiratory infection thing. So there's, there's the thing and, and the lie about anything. They call this a suicide. They go, well, see, what happened was all these mommies and daddies, they poured gasoline all over their babies and lit them on fire. See, it was like the Jim Jones thing. Daryl, you've heard of Jim Jones? This was just like that, okay? It was a suicide. See?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

Delta Force combat applications group Team B was there pulling triggers in their own words, killing these people. But, you know, anyway, good old government, you know, they're going to protect you from this, that and the other thing.

[Daryl Cooper]

Dude, you know, the thing that as

[Scott Horton]

I get older, party wins and you can keep the other guys out, then it's all good, bro.

[Daryl Cooper]

As I get older and I look back on that situation, like, a lot of it doesn't really shock me anymore. It seems like sort of almost built into the structure of how the state relates to its people that when they get into a confrontation like that, like that is something that, you know, there's a very high likelihood of something like that happening if the people don't capitulate immediately. And it's not as shocking as it was back in the day when it was going on. The thing that absolutely still shocks me now though, is to go back and look at the media reporting of the whole thing where they were demonizing these people and basically preparing the public for their eventual mass murder. I mean, that is a hundred percent what was going down. And you've like pointed out before, like, and this is such a, you know, it's such a great detail to kind of seize on how they would report on, like, he drives a Trans Am, he's got a mullet. Just to let all those, you know, sort of liberal ladies in, in, you know, Southern California or whatever. No, this is just some crazy redneck, you know, douchebag, like, whatever happens to him and all the people with him, by extension, like, don't worry about it. And you know, because this is your sort of culture enemy that we've set up for you, that part still, I look back and it's like man, not shocking in the sense that like, how could this happen? Because I mean it's, it happened in 2016-2020 with like a lot of MAGA people and stuff, you know, to a certain degree. But like, it's still like that's the part of it to me that is, I mean, almost the most egregious. Obviously shooting and burning people is, you know, is worse. But yeah, it's, it's harder for me to sort of. Yeah, I don't know, it's just, it's hard, hard to explain, I guess.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. I forget if I was rambling about this on the show or not. Maybe I just said this to somebody. But like that whole thing, I was raised that like, you gotta remember when you're studying history and you're casting aspersions and things that everybody's just a man of their own time. And that doesn't mean that they're innocent of the guilty things that they do. But it does mean that you gotta understand their different point of view and they really might not think of something as wrong the way that you do

[Daryl Cooper]

now and whatever kind of thing.

[Scott Horton]

Then it finally sunk into my head too, that I'm a man of my own time too. And in my own time was basically the, you know, Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton years. Right. And where this is your security force. Right. I finally remembered, you know, what it was. I finally remember the anecdote the other day of the first time I ever met a cop in the wild. And I would have thought that it was just skateboarding with my friends, but I remembered what it was because I saw it in my garage is my street sign. Some guy had been throwing away a street sign and it was of my street. And so I was like, oh, hell yeah, I'll get that. It was like in the trash. So I got it and an off duty cop pulled over and gave us the absolute full gestapo drill sergeant treatment over this thing. And I told him, you can drive around our street. All of the signs are there. This thing is old. And a guy gave it to me and so I didn't steal it. And you got no right to treat me this way. The guy, he treated me like the way people complain that cops do. And I guess I'm lucky he didn't put his hands on me.

[Daryl Cooper]

The Scott Horton origin story. He created a monster.

[Scott Horton]

That was one. And I see I still have the street sign. I saw it in my garage and I was like, oh yeah, I remember that. No, I've had the sign for a while, but it's usually buried deeply somewhere. But. But yeah, I mean, that's the first time I ever met government in practice. It was completely irrational and unjustified in its aggress against me. Right. Like, screw that guy and everyone who loves him. Like, why should I have to put up with that crap? This is my security force. And I was from not the nicest, but a pretty nice neighborhood where chances are my dad's got a good job and whatever. And if that cop thinks his job is protecting anyone, I would might think it would be the likes of me. But no, I'm an Other to him. You know, Even as a 12 year old, I'm on the outside of who's protected, you know, from their point of view. So that's the time that I was raised in, and this is the time where, where I was raised in this. And. And as you said that the media wasn't just for the liberal ladies out in California, it was for everyone and they bought it. And I was sacking groceries in northwest Austin, Texas, where the housewives leaned Republican and they wanted David Koresh and all of his family murdered too. And everyone else there, they're interrupting her soaps. Oh, that's right. He said he was Jesus. And I remember saying to this one, oh, he said he's Jesus, go get him. And I go, yeah, get him and nail him to a tree. How dare he. Like, you know, what are you, When a guy says he's Jesus, you kill that guy. That's what you're supposed to do to a guy like that. And like everybody knows that. And. But every housewife in Northwest Austin knew that these people have to pay. And yes, because it was interrupting their stories. Yes, because it was interrupting their game shows. And who is this guy to take over daytime TV when I'm trying to watch my Oprah Winfrey and my Sally Jesse Raphael and whatever and you know, American people who wrote that death warrant. It truly was.

[Daryl Cooper]

I had a very close connection. I lived in Montana when you remember the Montana Freeman incident. Yep. Yeah. So I lived in Montana and knew, I mean, I was like directly connected via my best friend's father to those guys. And you know, like the, the Waco thing was sort of my, that's kind of my political origin story. It was the first like, political story that I really remember sitting down and being kind of consumed with and watching it unfold. And thankfully my grandpa was like at the time, back in the day, like a black helicopters, new World order type dude. And so he was there to kind of school Me like, you know, at least to let me know that this is all like, this is all bs and not to buy the narrative. But then when the Freeman thing happened, you got a thousand FBI agents surround this compound that I had been to before, right? That is just some house. It's nothing. And the guys there are being described. I know these guys and they're. They're normal old crazy dudes who like, you know, have weird interpretations of the Constitution, English, common law and blah. All this kind of stuff. Fine, whatever. Like, they were absolutely not dangerous people by any stretch of the imagination. And so I'm watching the media coverage of this and the way they're talking about these guys that I know, and I was just. It was like, wow. I mean, I'm. You know, in a way it was like they had Bo Gritz go in there. I mean, I don't know if they told him to go say this, but when, you know, they. Because they ended up surrendering and a bunch of them were held without charges for years. Took them years to finally write them up for like, writing bad checks or something. And they did years and years for it. The guy was their leader, Leroy Schweitzer. He was actually a cousin of the Governor Schweitzer in Montana, who was governor there for a while. Like, they would move him around to different high security prisons and stuff. His family didn't know where he was for years at a time. And this is just some dude that's like, yeah, he's like kind of crazy and needs to pay. Pay his taxes and he thinks he doesn't have to because the Constitution says some whatever, but like, not by any stretch some terrorist. And so to watch that all unfold when, you know, it's something some people that. That I knew directly was extremely radicalizing. And just, you know, recognizing it makes you realize that you can't believe anything that these people say, especially when it comes to something like that. And what I was going to say about Grits was he went in there and he. He just. The way he got them out of there because they were in there with their wives and kids and stuff. Like they. Or I don't know if their kids were there, but like, they had their wives, they're like their families. And he went in there and he said, you guys gotta surrender. Like, I don't know what your cause is or what your deal is, but they're gonna come in here and kill all of you, just like they did in Waco. You gotta surrender. And that's why they surrendered. And he was probably right, you know, and the 90s, you know, it's actually interesting. So I'm going to be back on Tucker next week. On Monday we're going to be recording. I don't know when he'll release it, probably later in the week. And he wants to talk about just sort of, you know, the history of the second half of the 20th century, like American history, you know, really focusing on the changes that took place first in the 60s. But we're really going to zero in and dial in on the 90s when those 60s generation kind of took power and like the things that happened because we have, you know, a lot of people have a view of the 90s, that it was sort of this golden age, which in certain ways, like, it was like, it was nice to be a kid in the 90s, but when

[Scott Horton]

you look back, missionary bubble at the time.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, exactly. When you look back though, I mean, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Atlanta Olympic bombing, the Freeman incident, all of these kind of things were going on. It's like, wow. And if you watch, you know, I watched this, I watched this like six part Netflix documentary series a while back last year because it was recommended to me on. It's called Mr. McMahon. It's about Vince McMahon.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah. It's so good.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, it's so good. And yeah, and one of the things that was so interesting about it is that, you know, it's sort of a history of pro wrestling, but it's overlaid over like the cultural history of that same period and how pro wrestling would like reflect it, like at each stage.

[Scott Horton]

It's.

[Daryl Cooper]

I did that essay on the Iron Chic and how his changes of character, like from heel to, you know, he changed from an Arab to a person.

[Scott Horton]

I, I have to interject here, YouTube algorithm just pulled up for me. The Iron Shake and the Soviet guy, whatever his name is, singing the Soviet national anthem and everybody booing them.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. And like, you know, and so they, they do that very interestingly in that series. And when they got up to like the late 90s, when they switched over from like the gimmick era to the attitude era, you know, the stone Cold, you know, half naked women making out in the ring, it's just like you realize that like, wow, like things really, really, really change like in a, in a sort of like, like, like vulgar and crass and sort of confrontational direction in the late 90s. And, and then because I had just watched that, I, immediately after I was done, I watched the two part series on. Or the. Yeah, two Part documentary series they did on Jer. And you really realize like dude, something broke in the culture in the 90s. Like people got really crazy and like I don't know if it has to do with like, you know this probably has something to do with it. The fact that just the whole Monica Lewinsky thing, people turning on their TVs every day and hearing about blow jobs in the oval office and stuff, it just sort of maybe you know, dragged down like the level of discourse and made certain things. Because you remember back in like I think it was like I want to say I was in third grade. So this would have been like 92, 93 when Tipper Gore was doing that like anti profanity campaign. And the big thing was the, the rap group 2 Live Crew had that song me so horny. Dude, you listen to that now you could play the entire thing on the radio without bleeping anything out. Like it's totally just anodyne these days. And back then it was like you had a Democrat out there running a campaign against this stuff.

[Scott Horton]

In fairness to separate Gore, the rest of that record was not so clink.

[Daryl Cooper]

But

[Scott Horton]

no, this is man, we used to love listening to that stuff. Man, I forgot about two Life Crew. That's funny. Hey listen, this show is sponsored by expatmoney.com provoked they pay us money to say that and, and it's a cool thing man. This guy Mikel Thorpe, he's an expat, he can teach you how to do it. Get residency and or even citizenship and other places. Figure out how to buy property, open up bank accounts, protect your neck. Get yourself a plan B for worst case scenario. Xpatmoney.com provoked and our friend Matt C. He's a tax lawyer. If you make a lot of money or you own a small business, kind of a professional type with a good salary, one of those and you need to protect yourself from the revenuers. Get yourself a good tax lawyer. So he's not just an accountant, he's a lawyer. So you can tell them all your deep dark secrets and he will help you get through and protect every penny he possibly can from the blood soaked clutches of the national government. And then his show, my show Scott Horton.org Coffee libertystickers.com and and the academy everybody sign up to the academy because if you do you will learn a lot of stuff. And our promo code is summertime. You save 20% and we just added a course on the real secret history of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee APAC everything about him going back to the founding by Isaiah Kennan and all this by the great Grant F. Smith. And this is absolutely crucial American history for you here. Learn all about it@scott hortonacademy.com and with that, I got a ton more news, but I know you gotta go. So let me just say that the war seems like it could very well be spreading with America and Saudi hitting Shiite militias in Iraq, Iran, and then Iran responding by hitting American bases in Jordan and the Houthis hitting an airport, or first the Saudis hit an airport in Yemen and now the Yemenis have hit an airport in Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea is threatened. Trump escalated bombing over, he chickened out over the weekend, thank goodness. But he did escalate overnight last night. And just, I don't know what to make of this. They say here that it was the head of Central Command talked him out of advising, pardon me, talked him out of escalating the war last weekend and then. But the Wall Street Journal says he's the one who's saying, yeah, let's bring him to it right now from his Central Command headquarters. Daryl Cooper in Tampa, Florida. Not the Al, you did air base in Qatar, because that's kind of closed for some reason. So he's hiding safely in Tampa, Tampa, Florida and saying that we need to escalate this thing for another couple of weeks. So it's not looking good at all, sir.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, the only solace I take in it is that you can't get around the material reality that we simply do not have the stock of ammunition that would be needed to, to, to drive this to a full scale war for any extended period of time. We just don't. And you know, it seemed, I, I really, I was, you know, a lot of people are trying to figure out like, what is, like what's the strategy being employed here. There was a news story that came out that answered that question perfectly. There absolutely is not one. We're like 100 days or however, 150 days into this war. There is no strategy. You know, everybody in Trump's direct orbit told him, don't do this, it's a bad idea. He did it anyway because Benjamin Netanyahu said it would only take a couple of days. He came out and promised it was only going to take a couple of days and it didn't. And that's it, that's the plan. Nobody's got a plan. They're trying to figure it out like, you know, months and months in, like what the actual plan is and at this point what the Goals even are. I went back, somebody had posted it. So I watched the part of the initial speech that Trump gave to announce the, you know, the launching of the strikes, and he's talking about what it's going to be, regime change, we're destroying all of their missile capability and drone capability, blah, blah, blah, all these things. Literally every single goal he listed is not even discussed anymore as, like, that's clearly not even on the table. The question now is just whether or not Iran's going to control the straight of Hormuz. And, I mean, if you ask me, that's not much of a question either. I mean, it's just, you know, the. The only goal that we have left is one that is just patently unachievable, probably even by. Even if we were to go in there with a million troops and occupy Tehran and put, you know, a government of our own choosing in there, the idea that that government is going to be friendly to Israel and friendly, that's just not going to happen. Like, whoever is. Is ruling Iran is going. They might not be Islamic radicals, they might be nationalists or something, but they're going to have very, very similar geopolitical alignment to what they have now. And they're gonna. They're gonna run the straight of Hormuz. They're just going to. And, you know, it seems that Trump is. Is completely caught in the same trap that every democratically elected leader gets into when they're losing a war, which is just don't lose it on my watch. Just keep it, you know? You know, and that's why he has to do a couple strikes every now and then. You know, he has to do a couple every now and then, just be like, the war's still on. We haven't lost or anything. We haven't run away, like, this isn't over, but just push it along far enough down so that it's J.D. vance's problem or Gavin Newsom's problem or whoever.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, I used to think that it was impossible that the Biden government could push the Ukraine war past the election of 24, and they would say openly in Politico, well, our strategy is we got to just keep the war going, at least through the election. Biden can't look like he lost the war before the election. And they're saying that in, like, late 22, early 23. And I'm going, oh, come on, you guys are going to keep the war going through?

[Daryl Cooper]

No.

[Scott Horton]

And so I want to object that to you now, Coop, that, like, nah. But then that's two and a half years from now, they're going to keep up this sort of tit for tat, low level bomb, this bomb that hit a ship, hit a city, back and forth for another two and a half years.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, especially, I would say especially since it's pretty clear at this point that the Iranians are not playing that game anymore. Like, they're not going to let us get away with that. They're not going to do a thing where, I mean, the whole, the whole breakdown of the Memorandum of Understanding where, you know, we go in and before we did any of that, didn't you

[Scott Horton]

have an airport run?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I do. I, I can go another like five or 10 minutes and I'll just drive really fast with a child in the car. I lost my train of thought.

[Scott Horton]

I'm sorry, man. I screwed you up.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's okay. It was probably, it was probably not going to be that interesting, but.

[Scott Horton]

No, I'm sure. At least moderately interesting.

[Daryl Cooper]

All right, take over, you guys.

[Scott Horton]

Remember, he's gonna say someone in the chat room. Remind him what he was gonna say. Someone in there has the short term memory chunks necessary to get us back on track.

[Daryl Cooper]

Darrell, When I was in the military, they gave me, they made me go take like a add, adhd, whatever, I don't know. I talked to a counselor and they went through a bunch of stuff and they put me through this testing and they were asking me a bunch of questions where I was supposed. Like it was testing my short term memory and I was just knocking it out of the park. Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then in like the hallway, down the hall, a child like shouted. And I like looked over and just gone. I had just. Whatever was in my head is completely gone. I don't, I don't have that capability, I guess, in my world. Yeah, I used to. Oh, yeah. The breakdown of the Memorandum of Understanding. So like I, like somebody said the breakdown of the mcu, but before we had done like any of the preconditions, just that were sort of set up, we decided, and I had thought, I think maybe Trita is the one who explained this. Not to me, but I was listening to something where I think he explained it where it was pretty clear that when they set up that alternative corridor to get around Article 5 regarding the control of the Strait of Hormuz, that what they were trying to do was basically, at first there were two paths on the plan. One was Iran really wants this money. And so if they want this money, they're not going to restart the war. So what we're going to do is we're going to create this other corridor here and they'll let us get away with it. And if they don't, well, they started the war. Oh, and bro, like, how awesome was it when Iran launched those missiles at Jordan the other day? And they're like, Iran launches surprise attack, dastardly sneak attack. Is there a ceasefire in effect that I'm not aware of?

[Scott Horton]

Right. I mean, that was, and this is what I was saying was this is the attack that was fired in direct retaliation for America and Saudi hitting the Iraqi Shiite militias that, you know, George Bush and David Petraeus made into the Iraqi army and all of their allies. And then, yes, this is the way the Wall Street Journal framed it. Iran hit this base in Jordan for no reason. And then this is where Trump, you know, was cussing and saying, I'm gonna beat the FNs out of them for that and all of that, as though just the same thing with the way they report the running of the blockade. They go, yeah, Iran restarted the war in the Gulf when. Yeah, because you were running the blockade in direct violation.

[Daryl Cooper]

I saw when Trump was being interviewed by somebody, I think it was a Fox News guy in the last few days, and they asked him about, you know, is the straight, is the straight open? He said, oh, we control the strait. Like, it's us. We, we have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. And the guy like pushed back one time, you know, wasn't enough. But like, he pushed back. He's like, well, they say that, like, you know, only a few ships are getting through compared to how it used to be. It's like X number of ships. He's like, don't worry about it. We control the strait. It's all us. Like Iran controls nothing. And the next follow up question should have been, okay, why are you blockading Saudi and UAE and Qatari ships? Because they're not getting through. And if you control, like, it's just a, it's just a ridiculous situation, we're eventually going to lose the war. I, I guess we could, like, theoretically, and maybe this is the plan at this point. They want to do a Syria like thing, you know, where they think that if they just drag this, Maybe it'll take 10 years, but eventually this government will economically collapse. And, but I mean, as long as the Strait of Hormuz is closed and they can control the other access points in the Red Sea and everything, and, and Iran still has the option to escalate on their own, Terms it's going to be. It's really hard to see how they can keep this going for the length of timing. They can't, you know, to do a Syria. Like Syria couldn't project power at Israel, you know what I mean? Like, they had no power projection capability whatsoever. So.

[Scott Horton]

And look, and all these people deal in these idiot analogies where, you know, for example, they would say the surge worked in Iraq, that's why we got to do it in Afghanistan. But the surge worked at what in Iraq? They helped the Shiites complete their victory in the civil war against the Sunni Arabs is what happened there. They helped the super majority defeat the 20% minority. Okay, well does that translate over to Afghanistan?

[Daryl Cooper]

No.

[Scott Horton]

And same thing here for Syria. Oh, let's turn Iran into Syria. Well, in Syria you had a minority ruled dictatorship by the Alawites and it was a coalition with the Christians and the Druze and the Shiites and the. And many Sunnis. But it's still a minority dictatorship sitting on a super majority Sunni country. And one with a huge part of the east of the country is sort of desolate badlands out there that the government can't really control. Desert land out there was perfect for America and its NATO and GCC allies in Israel to jump in there and support a Sunni based insurgency against the minority ruled regime there. The Alawite ruled regime there. Is that what we have in Iran where a tiny minority is suppressing the super majority of the population of the country? No, it's not. And you know, I was on Pierce Morgan. Everybody watch this after the show. Go watch me on Pierce Morgan. And the guy was saying that. Yeah, no, we just. They have no popular support at all. And the proof of that is that they're hanging and executing protesters from January. Okay, but what about the millions of people who came out for the funeral of the Ayatollah Common E? That doesn't count for anything. I mean, they're, they're hanging people by the what? The ones, the tens. And I'm supposed to believe that that means. Because that's the only way that they can hold on to power in the country. Don't be stupid. I hated the way people are so willfully ridiculous about stuff like this. Oh, well, you know what it is, is I just refused to read the news for a week and a half while they were transporting the Ayatollah's dead body in his casket all over the country. Yeah, where he's collecting. Yeah, it was like the biggest funeral in the history of mankind. But whatever, dude. You know, I don't have that.

[Daryl Cooper]

Totally true.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. So, anyway, man, I don't know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I got.

[Scott Horton]

I gotta.

[Daryl Cooper]

I gotta break out, bro. I gotta take my niece to the airport. So. Sorry, everybody, that we had to cut this a little bit short and we got started a little bit early, but I'm already gonna be driving really fast to get her there on time, so,

[Scott Horton]

yeah, everybody, go buy my books. See you, Daryl.

[Daryl Cooper]

This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton.

[Scott Horton]

Be sure to like and subscribe to

[Daryl Cooper]

help us beat the propaganda algorithm.

[Scott Horton]

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