EP:6 When Civilians Become Targets: Blood on the Path to Aid

Summary

Podcast Summary: Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton

Episode Title: When Civilians Become Targets: Blood on the Path to Aid
Release Date: August 2, 2025
Hosts: Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Description: "Provoked" explores the psychology of conflict and how ordinary people become ensnared in cycles of violence. In this episode, Darryl and Scott delve into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, examining the role of civilians, the actions of Hamas, and the broader implications of military strategies on human lives.

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1. Introduction and Hosts' Updates ([00:01] - [06:14])

The episode begins with Darryl Cooper updating listeners on his personal projects, including his new long-form history podcast. He discusses his meticulous approach to exploring deep historical topics, such as Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the history of slavery in the United States. Darryl emphasizes his commitment to thorough research and his intention to present comprehensive narratives, often spanning multiple hours per episode.

Notable Quote:
Darryl Cooper at [04:15]:
"I do a long-form history podcast where I dive really deep into a given historical topic... some of these episodes are four or five, six, seven hours long."

2. Transition to Main Topic: Slavery and Its Historical Context ([06:14] - [29:27])

Scott Horton and Darryl shift the conversation towards the history of slavery, highlighting its deep-rooted presence across various societies and epochs. Darryl provides a critical analysis of American slavery, arguing that it evolved to become more brutal over time, diverging from the general trend of increasing humanitarianism. He challenges the notion that slavery was solely a product of racism, suggesting that economic and social factors also played significant roles.

Notable Quote:
Darryl Cooper at [08:00]:
"Slavery actually got worse and more harsh over time... it's because these are the people at the bottom of the social totem pole."

3. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Civilian Impact and Military Strategies ([29:27] - [57:42])

The core of the episode delves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on the devastating impact of military actions on civilians in Gaza. Scott Horton references an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Tony Aguilar, a retired Special Forces officer, who describes unprecedented brutality and destruction in Gaza, surpassing previous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Highlights:

• Hamas's Role and Resilience:
  Darryl argues that, akin to insurgent groups like the Taliban, Hamas remains resilient despite significant losses. He emphasizes the cyclical nature of violence and retaliation, where increased military aggression only fuels further resistance.

• Israeli Military Tactics:
  The hosts critique Israeli military strategies, particularly the use of heavy artillery and indiscriminate force in densely populated areas. They discuss the psychological and physical toll on Palestinian civilians, citing specific incidents where innocent lives, including children, were lost.

• Historical Manipulation and Propaganda:
  Darryl accuses Israeli leadership, particularly figures like Netanyahu, of manipulating demographic data and supporting Hamas indirectly to justify stringent military actions. He references documents and interviews suggesting intentional policies to exacerbate Palestinian suffering as a pretext for continued aggression.

Notable Quotes:
Scott Horton at [16:48]:
"The poor Palestinians of the Gaza Strip are still being subject to absolute nightmares, starving to death every day."

Darryl Cooper at [24:52]:
"Hamas is what we call the resistance right now... they might be decimated, but the resistance to the occupation is not going to go away."

4. Public Perception and Media Influence ([57:42] - [79:01])

The discussion shifts to how media and public perception shape the narrative around the conflict. Scott critiques mainstream media outlets and figures like Tucker Carlson for either downplaying Israeli aggression or, conversely, supporting Israeli policies without addressing the underlying issues affecting Palestinian civilians.

Key Points:

• Media Representation:
  The hosts argue that media often fails to present the Palestinian perspective adequately, instead perpetuating stereotypes and justifying military actions without scrutiny.

• Influence on Public Opinion:
  Darryl and Scott discuss the role of American politics and lobby groups in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards Israel, highlighting how political alliances influence media narratives and public support.

• Documentaries and Investigative Journalism:
  They mention recent documentaries like "The BB Files" and "The Settlers," which expose corruption and violent strategies within Israeli leadership, aimed at demystifying the justifications for ongoing military actions.

Notable Quote:
Scott Horton at [69:35]:
"These people are not Israel lobby Hasbara spreaders... they are victims of this stuff who internalize it all."

5. Ethical Considerations and Moral Responsibility ([79:01] - [83:20])

In wrapping up, the hosts reflect on the ethical implications of collective punishment and the moral responsibility of nations towards occupying populations. They argue against the notion of collective guilt, emphasizing that civilians should not be held accountable for the actions of governing bodies or militant groups.

Key Points:

• Collective vs. Individual Responsibility:
  The hosts vehemently reject the idea that the entire Palestinian population should bear the responsibility for Hamas's actions, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of individual and collective rights.

• Future of the Conflict:
  Darryl and Scott express pessimism about the sustainability of current policies, predicting long-term instability and continued cycles of violence unless significant changes are made in how the conflict is approached.

Notable Quote:
Darryl Cooper at [82:04]:
"There's no reason to think he's lying just because we've seen all the things that he's talking about."

6. Conclusion and Promotions ([83:20] - End)

The episode concludes with the hosts promoting their respective projects and encouraging listeners to engage with their content for deeper insights into international conflicts and historical analyses.

Highlights:

• Darryl Cooper:
  Promotes his Substack, history podcasts, and upcoming audiobook on the history of slavery and the lead-up to the U.S. Civil War.

• Scott Horton:
  Highlights his extensive interview archive, upcoming courses through the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, and new documentaries shedding light on Israeli policies and the broader Middle Eastern conflict.

Final Remarks:
Scott thanks listeners for their support and invites them to subscribe to their platforms for more in-depth discussions and analyses.

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Overall Summary:

In this episode of "Provoked," Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton provide a comprehensive and critical examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emphasizing the tragic plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They dissect military strategies employed by Israel, the resilient yet beleaguered role of Hamas, and the broader historical and political contexts that perpetuate ongoing violence. Through detailed analysis, notable firsthand accounts, and critical media perspectives, the hosts challenge mainstream narratives and advocate for a deeper understanding of the human cost of conflict. The episode also serves as a platform for promoting their extensive body of work aimed at unraveling complex historical and geopolitical issues.

Transcript

[Daryl]

On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this.

[Scott Horton]

So whether you're sharing the streaming password.

[Daryl]

In the family chat or trading those late night voice messages, that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Scott Horton]

What's up, you guys? Welcome to the show. How you doing, Daryl?

[Daryl]

Doing great, man. How are you doing?

[Scott Horton]

Good. Good to see you.

[Daryl]

Had a productive, productive week, I hope. It's been hot as hell here, giving me an excuse to stay indoors and just try to work on this next, this next podcast of mine. So that's been nice, man.

[Scott Horton]

I'm really looking forward to that. Maybe we should start with that. With your martyr maid, huh? Who's that? And what does that mean? And, and what's this new podcast you're working on?

[Daryl]

Terrible person. If you, if you Google his name, you'll, you'll find that out very quickly. So, yeah, I think probably most of the people listening to this, most of the people listen to us probably already know. I do a long form history podcast where I dive like really deep into a given historical topic. I just sort of follow my nose and my interests at a given time. You know, I did the early history of Zionism and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I did a long series on Jonestown, so I did one on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. I got kind of all over the place, whatever's on my mind at the time. And some of these episodes are four or five, six, seven hours long. So not for everybody, obviously, but I do go deep and I try to be very careful with my research and everything. And so right now I'm working on doing a series. I put the prologue out, the first episode, real episode of the series will be out here shortly called Enemy the Germans War. And it's, it's this, you know, not a full history of the Second World War. I would need 50 episodes to do that. But it's the experience of the war from the perspective of the Germans, you know, and not just the Third Reich High Command and the geopolitical stuff I'm really interested in what's an average conscripted soldier experienced on the Eastern Front? You know, what the German civilians who were, who, whose brothers and, and sons and fathers were conscripted and sent off to fight what they were going through as the heavy bombing was coming through their cities. And you know, and then of course, just how a society of very civilized and cultured people descends to a level of, of barbarity during that war that has kind of become a byword for all of us, you know, to the point that it lasts today as like the reference point for, for where you cannot, under any circumstances, regardless of the enemy you're fighting, regardless of what the stakes are, that you, you can't, you can't go there, you can't go to those depths because there is something worse, it turns out, than losing a war. And it's having to wake up the next day and realize that, that you did that, you know, that you're those people. And so, you know, again, like, I'm interested in learning how people who, I mean, look, these are ordinary people. These aren't people who are aliens to us or anything like that. You know, they were just Europeans in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and they ended up doing what, you know, we all, we all know happened in the, in the east over there. And so I'm very interested in just how, how a country and individual people kind of bring themselves to that point and rationalize it and then process it afterwards as well.

[Scott Horton]

Man, I can't wait to listen to that. It's going to be so interesting. So cool. And then like, what sub stack might people look at if they wanted to sign up for that? Daryl?

[Daryl]

Oh, go to subscribe.myrmade.com I'm told that if you have a non. Substack. You know, substack. Something that, that Twitter doesn't throttle you. I'm sure they're smart enough to have figured out that little scheme by now, but I do it anyway. But yeah, subscribe.modermad.com you get all my podcasts as well as interviews, essays, kind of. I try to put out a lot of content. It's slowed down a little bit lately as I'm pounding out the last bit of this episode, but usually it's a piece or two a week, usually essays with audio, with an audio format that I read for people who'd rather listen, you know, and it'll 7, 10, sometimes 15 page essay a week on given topics. You know, I'm on, I think, part 17 of a series, probably 200, 250 pages at this point. I should probably turn it into a book, but on the history of slavery and the lead up to the US Civil War. Like I said, I kind of pick whatever topics I'm, I'm kind of stuck on and obsessed with at the time and just run with it.

[Scott Horton]

So, yeah, I'm behind, man. I got too many jobs. Daryl. God dang it. I want to hear all the, the whole history of slavery. I, I was like, I remember like just checking in on the progress of just the titles of the episodes and where you were at. And I think if I remember, it was like part seven and we're still not at the 1860s yet.

[Daryl]

I was like, dude, I am at part 17 and I just talked about the Haitian revolution in. Okay, so, I mean, okay, so this.

[Scott Horton]

Is the whole world history of all slavery ever, huh? Or what?

[Daryl]

Yeah, I thought I start out, the first few episodes are all, you know, I go back to ancient Babylonia and like all of. And just try to, you know, one of the interesting things about the topic is that, you know, if you go back, like, it's hard for us maybe as Americans specifically, to understand how class bound the world was until yesterday and is still in a lot of places today. You know, there's that famous scene from, from the Right Stuff, the Tom Wolf book where he talks about how one of the astronauts. It's not really a scene in the book, he's just writing about it, but he says, like how one of the astronauts, when they came around from the backside of the moon, when they were out of communication, they came on. The first thing he wanted, like, the first thing he wanted to know was who won a baseball game that he was interested in. And it's like, there's something to me, at least very romantic about the fact that, you know, America's a, a country that was built and went to the moon on the backs of, you know, I mean, he wasn't a working class dude. He was probably like a astrophysicist astronaut or something, but still, like, he's a guy who wants to know the ball game score, you know what I mean? And those are the people that took us to the moon and built this country. And I love that. And so it's hard for us to sometimes wrap our heads around, like, how firmly class bound the world was in some places is. And you go back and you find like all of these ways of talking about slaves and slavery that are familiar to us from, you know, racist screeds in the 1840s, you know, in, in the South. And it's like not just similar in tone, it's similar in theme, similar in just the way the language they use, the way they talk about it going back thousands of years. And it's because, you know, these are the people at the bottom of the social totem pole. And they're an outcast class, whether or not they. They are technically classified as that. And there's just. It doesn't even, you know, like, one of the. One of the most interesting things that you find reading about American slavery is how it actually got worse and more harsh over time. You know, over time, which is kind of the opposite of what you'd think, because in a lot of other ways, we were becoming more humanitarian and more aware of these things. And the character slavery in a lot of ways, and the racial kind of animus that behind it kind of kind of went. Got worse over time in the sense that, you know, almost as if, you know, the experience of having slaves, or put it this way, here's a better way to put it, people think that, like, that Africans were made into slaves because the Europeans who took them were racist. In a lot of ways, it's kind of a reverse causality, especially in America where it's, you know, you're around slaves, everybody has contempt for slaves. Everybody looks down on slaves. Everybody sees them, you know, exhibiting characteristics that any slaves are going to have that I would have if I was a slave. You know, they think they're lazy. They think they don't do any work unless they have to. And they're always trying to malinger and get out of things because of course I would too, you know, and, like. But they see all those things and then they attach those stereotypes to those people. And then here in the United States, all the slaves were very, very distinctly different from the majority population and, you know, black people. And a lot of the. The racial animus actually came as a result of slavery, as opposed to rationalize it, too.

[Scott Horton]

That too, people are saying it's unfair for you to do this to somebody. They go, yeah, but you got to understand, this is a different race that's so much different and lower that that makes it okay. When the real thing is they don't want to have to change their mind and stop operating in their current way, you know.

[Daryl]

Yeah. I mean, and I, you know, I go back into deep history on that too, because, you know, it's really interesting how, like, there's a lot of historical contingencies that are like, they're really just coincidences that they happened in this particular way, in this particular order. But then because they did just inform whole cascade of events that comes after it. So the fact that, you know, the first countries to go across the Atlantic and start colonizing the New World were Portugal and Spain. And, you know, these are two countries that just in 1492, they finished the Reconquista, you know, so you have a people who had been literally at constant war for 700 years to drive the Muslims out of Iberia. I mean, this was, you think of, like, we always think of, like a warlike society is like Sparta, dude, the Spanish peninsula, like, for those hundreds of years, like, that was a warlike society. They were in a constant state of war for that entire time to the point where all of their institutions, their social values, all of these things developed around this, like, martial concept, you know, and the fact that it was that. That it was them who first went over to the New World and that they just happened to have been in contact for hundreds of years with the Muslim world that ran most of the African slave trade at a time when it had, you know, there was no slavery in Europe. Kind of familiarized them with not just the slave trade networks that existed in northwest Africa, but also just sort of morally condition them to think of it as just normal. You know, it was just always around because Spain, remember Spain is a. Is a place that slavery basically existed in Spain unbroken until, I mean, you can go back to Roman times. There was slavery there. And then when the Roman Empire fell and the, you know, the Visigoths came, came in and others came in, I mean, there was still slavery. So the rest of Europe and then the Muslims came in and they brought slavery and, you know, very early on. And so the rest of Europe kind of goes into the feudal mode and slavery kind of goes by the wayside just because you can't go take your neighboring provinces, peasants as slaves unless you want a war with that guy. So, like, you know, human. Human resources were valuable and people protected their own, like property. And so it's technical. Slavery kind of disappeared, but it never disappeared in Spain, in Spanish Peninsula. And so it was much more familiar. And, you know, then you add in, like, their proximity to. There's just a constant direct interaction for centuries with the Muslims. Their idea of what slavery, how it worked and what justified all that stuff was just very heavily influenced and even to a certain extent really was just grafted over from arguments that Muslims always made regarding it. And those were largely based on, you go back all the way to Aristotle, because, remember, the Europeans had lost track of Aristotle and a lot of the Greek philosophers, and the Muslims had maintained those and studied them for a long time and. And their ideas about slavery and about how they're just, you know, this is straight from Aristotle. There are just different types of people in the world. There are different types of people who are suited for different kinds of things in different ways of life. And. And that these were, you know, you could break them down into racial groups and other type of geographic groups. And, you know, Aristotle says, you know, there's surely like, you know, a Greek out there who's fit for. Only for slavery, and there's surely an, you know, an Ethiopian out there who is. Who's fit to be a democratic citizen. But in general, this is the case. And that informed the way the Muslims thought about it and then was grafted on over into the Spanish and Portuguese when they came over to the New World. And so it just kind of seemed very natural, you know, to them. Whereas if you, you know, if it had happened to have been the English who had come over first and started the whole thing off, I mean, honestly, it probably still would have eventually gone the same way. Just because there was no way we were going to Europe. Just didn't have the manpower to colonize the New World without bringing in just slave armies to do most of. The. Most of the work. But, you know, but you do wonder. And so that this is like, this is why I'm on part 17. And I'm only at the Haitian Revolution. You know, I tried to go real deep and I even did a whole essay on, you know, this canard that you've probably seen it. I think the Nation of Islam back in the 90s, wrote a book about. Was called the Secret History between Blacks and Jews. I think it was the Nation of Islam put it out. And it's all about how Jews controlled the slave trade and, you know, all the slave ships and everything. And it's. It's total. Like, the only way that they do that is they count all of these conversos, you know, these Jews who had converted to Christianity and some of them a generation or two down the line, they were extremely prosperous and they owned a lot of shipping companies and, you know, shipping interests and things like that. That's all true, but, you know, I'm sure, like, yeah, I don't know. I'm a Christian. I'm not in the business of questioning other people's conversions without really good reason. So, as far as I'm concerned, those are Christian, you know, Christians running. Running the slave trade. But, yeah, I did a whole essay just on that. And, you know, they. It's. It's. Yeah, it's a fun one because, like, now I'm into the part that, like, I really wanted to start the series about. I started it as a. I want to talk about. Yeah, slavery. But then, like, as a lead up into the Civil War, that's really what I'm interested in. Is those 60, 60 years really, like, of the 1800s, like, before the Civil War, how did the country bring itself to, like, this point? And you know me, I mean, I. I do the Putin thing where I say, let me take you back to the kievan ruse and 10, 20, 80, you know, and start there. So, yeah, it's been fun.

[Scott Horton]

That's cool, man. Well, I gotta catch up on that. I think it's really a shame that podcast, apparently on all these apps can only be played at a maximum of double speed. I'm ready for quadruple. Dude, I can take it, man. Hit me. I got to catch up on some things and I still got some reading to do.

[Daryl]

So, like when we were kids and those Micro Machines commercials came on.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah.

[Daryl]

Like, the rest of us are, like, trying to figure out what he said, and you're just like, oh, you make some interesting points.

[Scott Horton]

Right? No problem for me, man. I was raised on that stuff. All right, so speaking of slavery and people with no rights whatsoever, the poor Palestinians of the Gaza Strip are still being subject to absolute nightmares, starving to death every day. I barely look at the front page anti war.com and I've been looking at the front page of antiwar.com for 26 years and every day, but like, man.

[Daryl]

Oh.

[Scott Horton]

It'S so ugly over there. And. But I don't want to spend all of the rest of the show on it because there we got to talk about Russiagate too, and. And potentially some other things. But there's a couple of things that we definitely need to talk about. The first, let's just resolve this question from last week, which I had noticed, but I didn't have a chance to say. And I. I did see where someone in the comments was like, well, hey, man, what gives? So we're going to have to reconcile this. My thing was insurgent Mass says, and at least the Israeli government claims. I think I tried to build in a caveat that, like, they have a conflict of interest. Maybe I only thought that and didn't say it out loud. They do have a conflict of interest in the sense that if they want to pretend that there's still a lot of Hamas left to kill, then that's a good pretext to continue to kill everybody. Right. So I could see that as, like, a conflict of interest in the Israelis. Reporting the Israelis. It didn't come out that way. Right. It was Ehud Omert was criticizing Netanyahu and saying, listen, there's just as many Hamas now as there were then. And you know, my idea was, as I've, you know, Learned from Stanley McChrystal and Sergeant Matthew Kill two, you create 20. And that's how it goes. And obviously there's a finite number of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, but it's 2 million of them. What percentage of that or the raw number of that that are fighting age males? I don't know. I guess I can presume the Israelis have AI that just targets all fighting age males and calls them all terrorists and anybody around them too, and whatever. So surely they're taking probably the brunt of the strikes. But then again, I know they have a vast tunnel network there and that in fact Gazan type, whatever you call it, resistance has had a tunnel network under there for thousands of years. That's how they've always fought is hiding in that sand. It's really good for tunnels. For whatever reason, that kind of dirt or whatever. I read a thing about that. And so you says, man, they're not even putting up a fight anymore. This is just a slaughter now. And then I says, yeah, them Hamas ain't never going to go all the way away. They're going to keep fighting and resisting and if it comes to the final cleansing of the place, they're not going to allow it. They're going to still fight and you won't be able to put men on the ground to really force them all to leave without getting shot and whatever. But it seems like there's a little cognitive dissonance here about just how whooped Hamas is where. You're right, they certainly aren't firing rockets. But maybe I'm wrong that they have enough resistance left to put up much of a resistance at all.

[Daryl]

If I don't think you're wrong and I don't think, yeah, I don't think there's actually, we really, actually disagree here. The what I was trying to get at, you know, I think because this was in the context of just all of the people being killed at aid distribution sites and things like that. The point I was trying to make is that there's no heavy combat going on.

[Scott Horton]

Right.

[Daryl]

You know what I mean, that Hamas cannot put together, I mean, a platoon level unit to go execute any kind of a.

[Scott Horton]

Tell me, tell me how that compares to one year ago or one and a half years ago.

[Daryl]

Well, I mean, you saw on October 7, you know, you had thousands of people in a concerted air, land and sea operation that had been kept under wraps for months involved a lot of machinery that they had to build and put together themselves and so forth. I mean, that's a big operation. It takes a pretty complex and sophisticated organization to do it. Everything that you see.

[Scott Horton]

Now, wait, what about one year ago after. After a year ago or 10 months before?

[Daryl]

I mean, things were starting to slow down by that point, but, you know, they were still at a point where you could say there were areas that needed to be cleared out of concentrations of fighters, you know, and so there was heavy combat going on. The Israelis were taking casualties in combat from enemy fire, you know, not just some. Some lone dude with an AK who pokes his head out a window and. And takes a potshot and then gets blown up by a tank or something. But, like, in combat, you know, that was all happening, you know, maybe 10 months into it is like, probably where it was tapering off, but you still had that to a degree. And again, the point I was trying to make is just that you could at least create a narrative to rationalize some of the. Some of the killing we're seeing now of. Of all the non combatants. If, you know, if you're like, look, man, there's firing coming from that crowd. You know, there was. We were in the. Like, it was crazy. And like, you know, bullets are flying, things are blowing up, and we're shooting, and, you know, you don't know who's who. And we killed a bunch of. That's not what's going on. I mean, there's. We see videos of this shit, you know what I mean? And it's like, there's nothing going on. It's just a bunch of people going. Trying to queue for food, and they're shooting at their feet and shooting over their heads and sometimes shooting them, and there's just. There's no way to justify it, you know, And. And that's. That's what I was. I was just trying to. I was. I was referring specifically to the heavy.

[Scott Horton]

But so on the more narrow question of Hamas's relative strength or relative obliteration or, like, you know what I mean? What's left of them to defend? What's left of the. I mean, I think probably they've killed a hundred thousand, maybe 200,000 people there, but that still leaves 2 million, right? So.

[Daryl]

Well, think about it like any other. Like any other counterinsurgency, right? Like, how many Taliban did we kill? It was a lot. We killed a lot of Taliban to the point that, like, the guys that ran us out of Kabul, they were the sons of the guys we killed back in 2001, you know what I mean? Like, and so I think that the, that the people that the Palestinians and the Gazans in particular have demonstrated that as long as, you know, they still, they still have two legs to get up and walk and two arms to carry a weapon, they're going to put up with whatever level of suffering they have to and fight back, you know. And so when we talk about Hamas, the organization, sure, they might be decimated right now, you know, they might not have a command structure and the ability to marshal resources and personnel for like scaled operations, but we just think like that's the superstructure that's built over the resistance to the occupation, which is not going to go away, you know, and I think they've proven that over the years. And when you look at like what we did with the Taliban, I mean you're talking about 20 years of just, you don't hear much about like, because there were no big set piece battles or anything. We killed so many of those young posh tuned dudes walking around the mountains out there. And 20 years later their sons came and took the place back from us and Ransada, Kabul. So I mean that's Hamas in a sense. You know, Hamas is what we call the resistance right now.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I mean this is the same thing from Iraq and Afghanistan that, yeah, they're not armored divisions where, but that's the whole point. They're just light militias. In other words, you could organize one in a week or less. You know, I mean even if you take a heavy hit, you come right back together again.

[Daryl]

Yeah. And you know, even Iraq is somewhat different than, than those, than Afghanistan and Gaza in the sense that, you know, there was a large contingent of foreign fighters in the country who were not well liked, they were feared, but they were not well liked by the majority of the population. It still took a long time to get the tribes on our side because they didn't think we'd protect them and ultimately we didn't when, when the bill came due. But, but we could at least employ a strategy of trying to win over the local population while framing as a fight against this international force that we're, that we're throwing out and you know, in the victory condition being basically breaking the back of that force, you know, and there's still going to be Shia militias and Sunni militias and you know, but we could at least like have a victory condition that we could proclaim. And even if it was illusory, Gaza and Afghanistan like, what was the victory condition in. In Afghanistan? Like, get the Pashtun majority to just accept, like, a hodgepodge of minority government people over them, for that was never going to happen, ever.

[Scott Horton]

And the same in Gaza, you know, like William Bupert, the Army expert in debunking coin, which is counterinsurgency strategy, he calls these forces anti fragile. In other words, the harder you hit them, the harder they come together, the more solidified they are. You're not breaking them. Now, of course, ultimately, you can kill every last one of them or, you know, really beat them down to such a point of. Of absolute weakness. You know, obviously, eventually, if it's. If the. The differential in actual firepower and intelligence and whatever, is that different? But in the meantime, essentially, the more you kill them, the more you recruit, the more committed they are to resist. And so it's counterproductive the whole way through, essentially. Which, by the way, one more thing about that is, you know, Mike Flynn, who is famous for being framed as part of the Russiagate hoax as Donald Trump's incoming National Security Advisor, which maybe we'll get to that part in a minute. But before that, he ran intelligence for JSOC in Iraq, and then he helped. He ran intelligence for McChrystal, running the whole war in Afghanistan at the beginning of the surge in 2009 and 10 there. And he had written this thing complaining about what he called anti insurgency, which meant when you just bomb them all the time, but you don't know what the hell you're doing, versus, you know, high IQ counterinsurgency, where you flood the place with Marines, and then somehow you'll have the magic intelligence and you'll know who to bomb instead of just bombing random people all the time where. So in his conception, COIN works, which we're rejecting that because that's stupid. But he's right about the first part, that anti insurgency is even dumber than counterinsurgency, if you want to call it that. That was the way he was framing it, that this is purely counterproductive. You cannot achieve anything when you're simply bombing from the air and you don't really know who you're killing. You do know you're enraging whoever their survivors are and giving them real motive to continue the fight. Yeah, that's built.

[Daryl]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you would think that this would be a lesson that. That we learned over the last 25 years or more, but apparently, yeah, way more. Go back to Vietnam, go back to the Philippines. I mean, but, you know, One of the, like, one of the things that I've mentioned before with regard to the strategy employed by the Palestinian resistance since the 67 war, and we may have talked about this in a previous episode, but they, you know, after the Arab, secular Arab states kind of got their asses whooped By Israel in 67, they were kind of at a loss for what to do. They had been waiting for Nasser and the rest to come save them. And that was sort of the strategy, such as there was a strategy at all. And after that failed and it became very obvious that that was never going to work, they kind of turned to the Algerian method, you know, because that's the one example they had of running a colonizer out of a Middle Eastern country was the Algerians running the French out. Not taken into account. And. And that was just through pure brutality. Street murders, bombs, just all of the things that, you know, we deplore as terrorism, but done in a genuine resistance, you know, way. In Algiers, the Palestinians employed that. One of Yasser Arafat's two closest confederates was. He's a Palestinian, but he was a veteran of the Algerian war, and he's kind of the one who helped build this out and sold the idea in the first place. But they did that without taking into account the fact that the French could go back to France. The Israelis are not going back to Poland. Like, that's just not going to happen. They don't have anywhere to retreat to. But the Israelis are making that same mistake with the Palestinians. You know what I mean? You can see it just with the absurdity of, like, the solutions being floated. I mean, they want Europe and Egypt and Jordan to take them all. They want Indonesia, Indonesia, Ethiopia. I mean, these are ridiculous ideas. I mean, just absurd, ridiculous. Hey, we're going to move hundreds of thousands of people against their will into countries that are already shaky at best in their governance and, like, social structure. Absurd ideas, just totally ridiculous. And so they don't have anywhere to retreat either. And so when they. When the Israelis go in and just use conventional military tactics to attack, like you're attacking a mass army when you're talking about a few guys amidst a civilian population of 2 million. Yeah, it's exactly what you said. All you do is harden the population against you. Every single person in Gaza right now knows somebody who is not a Hamas fighter who's been killed or wounded. I guarantee it. You know what I mean? And, like, that's the kind of thing that lasts.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, for sure. It's so ugly over there. And so let's play some clips. We have a couple of clips from Tucker Carlson's interview of a retired now Special Forces officer. I believe he was a lieutenant colonel.

[Daryl]

In, yeah, 12 deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan was one he mentions. Interesting.

[Scott Horton]

I know, I was like, okay.

[Daryl]

But.

[Scott Horton]

Against the jihadis in that one, you know, go ahead.

[Daryl]

Yeah, been there. So he's been there, done that. And yeah, I'll let him. I think he, you know, maybe the clip, he'll, he'll tell his story. He was a contractor who got brought over there.

[Scott Horton]

Aguilera.

[Daryl]

Lieutenant Colonel Tony Aguilar. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

So I'm trying to get him on the show. I don't know if I'll be able to. I'm sure he's getting a lot of calls. But he did this in depth interview on Tucker show and of course Tucker asked all the best questions and really got the best out of him. But then I, I haven't seen it yet but I know he was also on with Sagar and Crystal on Breaking Points. He did Democracy now and he, I believe his first big interview was on the BBC. So people want to look into all those things and, and take a look at the guy. I'm under the impression, as Tucker said, that there are attacks against this guy now.

[Daryl]

But of course I'll be surprised if they hold up. Yeah, of course. I mean, anyway, go ahead.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, yeah, let's run him and see. You've spent your life in combat zones. That's why I think your testimony is so compelling, because you have a frame of reference. You've seen a lot of destruction and a lot of killing in your life for 25 years. How would you compare what you saw in Gaza to what you've seen in say Afghanistan or Iraq?

[Daryl]

Nothing compares. Nothing I have seen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Baghdad, in Mosul, Sadr City, all throughout Afghanistan, Syria, the southern Philippines, some places where there's dense populations. I have never witnessed anything as brutal, destructive, violent. And I would say that steps far over our international laws of how we persecute wars and how we engage in warfare. We've long departed from that standard and America, America is a part of it.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. So. And he goes on to detail about killing a civilians over there. Essentially the story's telling. This is what the Israeli press was reporting and what we've spoken about before, where they have these very few food centers run by this strange Israeli backed NGO which they discuss its strangeness to and they've replaced these hundreds of UNWRA sites, the former UN relief agency that they ran out of there with four major sites. And he says, I think three of the four are all the way in the south, near the Egyptian border. And then one of them is in the Narazim corridor, halfway through, as they've cut the place in half. And then he's describing how again, and this is confirmed already, pre confirmed by the media reports in other places, again, especially in Haaretz, where what they're talking about is how they hold everybody back until all the food is ready, they lay it all out, and then they just kind of open the gate so that it's a stampede, right? They don't have like a. Some kind of gate system where they can bring in a few people at a time. And any kind of orderly thing, they force them to essentially fight like mad over the stuff to get this stuff. People are starving. And then. But the whole time that they're corralling them around and. And bringing the people, and they're forced, he says, to go through war zones, like where they know these are battle zones still active, where they're forcing the people to cross. And then there are no signs. He says he asked them, why don't you just put up a sign that says, go this way? And they go, no, that would cost too much. We're not doing that. So instead, how do they tell the people, the Palestinians, how do they herd this giant mass of starving people around? They heard them. By shooting at them. They shoot over their heads. They shoot at their feet. They shoot right past them, supposedly, in order that they know if you cross a line, if you start dropping dead, it's because you're crossing a magic invisible line. Go back the other way. And if you start dropping dead this way, there's a line there, too, apparently. And so you better stay in between these lines where people are getting shot. And how will you know when you cross the line? You got shot and they're doing this, and. And they're, as he puts it, oh, yeah, no, we're shooting at their feet. Yeah. Well, guess what? There's ricochets. These bullets bounce up and kill people. And you're shooting over their head, but it's dark and there's a berm, and then. But there's a trail going in, zigzagging back there. So you're shooting over these people's heads, but you're hitting those people over there. And he says, then, you know, this is like at dawn, and then daylight really breaks, and you can see there's just bodies lying on the side of the path all the way down he says they try to blame this on Hamas. Like, I'm telling you, no, this is the idf. And he even said specifically, dude, no point in embellishing any of his statements here. I got no agenda to do that. He said, listen, I don't know. And I'm not talking about all of the idf, their air forces and whoever. I'm talking about this brigade of army reservist conscripts who are clearly untrained, undisciplined, out of control. They're absolutely. And they're not just shooting them with fully automatic machine guns, including apparently like heavier ones, not just M4s, which are 556, trying to get shot with one of those. And. But they're hitting them with artillery and with tank rounds. You're going the wrong way. So they shoot him with a tank. And he's talking about men, women and children. And then he's told the same story in multiple places about this young boy comes and kisses his friend's hand, kisses his hand, says thank you to them in the most sincere like. And these guys have been around in the Middle east fighting for a long time. They know that this is like the most sincere form of respect that this 12 year old boy is showing them. After walking 12 km, he says to get there through this, you know, a deadly maze. And then the kid gets a little bit of food and he leaves. And then he hears fully automation machine gun fire. And he says he just got there. So he thought, oh no, something must have happened, I wonder what happened. So he ran to go and check it out and he could see the IDF was just machine gunning the crowd of people and including this little boy, this 12 year old boy, they killed him. And then people tried to say that was fake. And then he explained to Tucker, here's their debunking is the photo of obviously a different boy. And he says, I took that picture too. It's a different boy from a different camp. This kid, for him to get there, he'd have had to have his own helicopter because I'm telling you, he couldn't get there from here. So don't you give me that. You're debunking. Debunked. In fact, you can see the kid he's talking about has very short hair. And the kid that they say is him has, you know, one inch of hair flopping down here, clearly, you know, an inch and a half.

[Daryl]

I don't think we should even give those arguments the time of day, honestly.

[Scott Horton]

Like, you're right, you're Right.

[Daryl]

People are going to say whatever they're going to say about this guy. And who knows, maybe he left in a huff, disgruntled employee, maybe he had.

[Scott Horton]

Guys sincere to me, Daryl, I got it.

[Daryl]

But the real point is, the point is that what he's telling us is just what we've been watching on camera for months, for a year maybe. You know, he's just telling us what IDF soldiers have told Harad's, you know, newspaper, what IDF officers have come out and talked about. That's all he's doing. So it's not as if like we all thought this was like a nice clean war. And then there's this rogue dude coming out of nowhere telling stories. He's just telling his perspective on what we've all been watching this whole time. And so they can say what they want about him. There's no reason to think he's lying just because we've, we've seen all the things that he's talking about.

[Scott Horton]

Here's the thing, man. I heard, I talked to a friend today on the phone and he told me that that's what his friends say. That's all fake. That's a bunch of propaganda. That's all Hamas lies. And these are people who are not Israel lobby Hasbara spreaders. These are Israel lobby Hasbara receivers and you know, victims of this stuff who internalize it all. And you know, what are you on the side of the other guys? Like, no way. This is the side and we're on it. And anything that's going to cause us too much discomfort, like, wow, the side we back fight like barbarians and are deliberately using starvation as a weapon, are deliberately machine gunning men, women and children and shooting them with tanks. That can't be right. Or else why am I so stupid to go along with this? And so it's easier to say that you're lying. And so that's the problem, right? Is that's the, the reason I dignify it right is I'm always hung up on this man. I one time said to the other Scott Horton years ago, before he was a Russiagate kook. I really liked him. And he would say, you know about anti torture stuff and this and that and whatever. And I said something along the line of just, just dismissing propaganda. And he said I forgot the exact context anymore, I don't know, whatever. But he cited to me the Declaration of Independence, the decent respect for the opinions of mankind. So you gotta figure the average guy listening as an honest guy and he just hadn't heard your point of view yet, and you gotta give him a chance and a fair shake and, and, and maybe even it's, it's fair to assume that he's heard the other side's propaganda 100 times more than yours. So you better make a good case and then you better show them that you got a respect for someone. Just because somebody believes something wrong doesn't mean that they're so damn bad. But it oftentimes does mean the people spreading that propaganda are. You know what I mean? I think there are times where, like, especially man, like people get caught up in some lie or whatever. But like in the case everybody, right, when you're out driving around that, like, it kind of occurs to you, like maybe that wasn't true. You know what I mean? Like, when you're doing something else, kind of space out a little bit and think from a little bit different perspective that, like, man, that does kind of sound cruel now that I think about it, or dismissive or overly like, biased or whatever. I, I, again, I always say this. I know I'm redundant about it, but I, I think, I don't know if I've said this on this show, but I, I'm firmly convinced, Daryl, that most Americans don't understand who's occupying who over there. In fact, there was a poll that Grant F. Smith did that showed that a majority of Americans thought the Palestinians were occupying the Israelis because. Or else why would be we be on the side of the bullies in the whole thing? Right. Doesn't make sense. So, so that's how people rationalize it is they just don't understand, or they think like Ben Shapiro lies to them and tells them that Palestine is a sovereign nation that's next door to Israel and it attacked Israel and now Israel is defending itself from it. Right. Instead of admitting that, no, this is not a sovereign nation, it's an Indian reservation. These people are under Israeli control. All this land was de facto, whatever you want to call it, annexed, taken under the control of Israel in 1967. It's their land essentially, in terms of like, not their rightful ownership of it, but their direct exercise of control over it. It's been like this longer than I've been alive by quite a bit, so by nine years. So, so when you, when I, I'm firmly convinced, I've just seen it happen. When I explain that to people, they go, oh, well, no wonder. And I think I probably did say this before. It's called, they're called Palestinians. So it sounds like they're from a place called Palestine. And everybody's got a country. Like who doesn't have a country? So of course they're from a country called Palestine. And we even talk about the Palestinians and Palestine as a place, only it's just like a place that's indefinitely on hold, that doesn't exist right now because Israel's squatting on top of it. But otherwise it would be called historic Palestine. That's what it's been called for eons now.

[Daryl]

And the canard about how, you know, the Palestinian national identity, so called is this recent invention. It's like, dude, national identity in general is a recent invention.

[Scott Horton]

Say more about that please.

[Daryl]

I mean, you didn't have like the nationalist movements in Europe. You go back just a couple hundred years even in Europe, and nobody's talking about like the Polish people as a nation, as a political and social entity that has sort of sovereign rights of its own or anything. Like nobody, nobody thought that way. You started to get a little bit of that with England, a little bit with France under like the absolutist monarchs, but it took a while to percolate. And by the time you start getting like the nationalist revolutions in the rest of Europe, which is, you know, where, where that idea originated, you know, I mean, you're talking like the Palestinians were only behind by like a little, a little while, you know, And I mean Jewish national identity, even people have trouble understanding this part of it because they think, I mean, you have to remember like Jews are, there are Ethiopian Jews, there are Middle Eastern, like Arabic speaking Arabic looking Jews, European Jews, Sephardic Jews, like you know, people who are from different countries, all speak different languages. Some are atheists, some are reformed, some are super Orthodox, some are Zionists, some are not. And so the idea that like you have this group of people, like it's, it's an interesting exercise to like ask somebody like, what, what is a Jew? Give me something or some list of things that you can say as a descriptor that applies to this entire group of people. Because it's almost impossible unless you want to say that a Jew is somebody who practices Judaism and then an Israeli is somebody who's an Israeli citizen. But I mean, what, you know, you would have a whole lot of trouble trying to find any point of like commonality between, you know, a New York City atheist, Ashkenazi Jew and in religious Ethiopian Jew, like living in the Middle east right now. There's be very hard to like draw any. There's no genetic component, there's no religious component, there's no Cultural or linguistic component, anything like that. And so the idea that, like, there was this Jewish nation that's just persisted throughout history and they came back to claim their rightful land is that that's a myth by itself, you know, And I really know, like, I think one of the reasons that, that this gets, you know, a lot of people have the reaction that they had that you're talking about is their. Their idea. I get this from people all the time when they listen to my series on the early history of it all is like, basically their idea of it is like, you know, the book of Genesis, the Kingdom of David and Solomon. Maybe if they real, like, you know, real Bible students, the Babylonian exile, but then the Romans, Jesus comes along, you know, during Roman times, and then it's just blank until 1948. Like, that's really, like, how most people. That's. That's where their knowledge of it is. Like, from the time of Jesus until 1948, it's just one big blank. They have no idea what's going on there. And that's. That's why you get these just totally ridiculous, like, arguments about how, you know, one of the other ones that people like to use is how, you know, oh, well, yeah, a lot of the Palestinians, quote, unquote, who live there, you know, they moved in there, like, after the British came because the economy was growing and so forth. They act like people are coming from, like, all corners of the globe to move in there. When, like, the overwhelming majority of that in migration was like, I live on one side of the Jordan river, my cousin lives on the other side, and I say, come on over here, we got a job for you. Or they live in southern Lebanon or something, and they travel 20, 20 miles to, like, come into, quote, unquote, Palestine. And, like, you know, which at the time obviously was not a. Was not a sovereign country. And so, you know, these are things that are very easy to dismiss, but people don't have any of the context for it. They don't understand that. You go back to the year 1900, and Jews were maybe 2% of the population of Palestine, the whole area. And they were religious Jews who lived in Jerusalem for religious reasons. They were not Zionists. In fact, they had problems with the Zionists when the movement really got started. And so, I mean, you're talking about a place that for hundreds and hundreds of years had virtually no Jews there. And you know what it would be like? It would be like, this is especially true because if you look at the genetics, actually the Palestinians, Palestinian Muslims, especially, The Christians, but, but the Muslims as well, they share as much or more common DNA with the ancient inhabitants of that region as any Ashkenazi Jew does around, you know, from around the world. And so you want to talk about, like, this is our genetic inheritance. This is us as a people. Like both sides have as much, quote, unquote right to it, even under that rule. But, you know, it would be like if like a bunch of radicalized, revolutionary Boston Irish Americans went back to Ireland, said we're the real Irish people, and ethnically cleansed a bunch of people and put them all up in, you know, Ulster county, up on the Ulster millions.

[Scott Horton]

Going home to Sicily, going, quote, unquote, and kicking everybody out of their house, cutting their throat and moving in, saying.

[Daryl]

This isn't your land. You took our land and moved in when we were gone. And like, that's, that's what it's like, you know, and it's when people like, yeah, well, just last thing is that one of the reasons it's so important to understand how this whole thing started, you know, that, that, that, that this was not something that happened like after 1945 when, you know, you just had a bunch of sort of, you know, bedraggled, kind of suffering former inmates of the concentration camps, kind of just looking for a place to have a little bit of peace. This was a revolutionary movement in a revolutionary time, like the, the Bolshevik movement, the communist revolutionary groups around Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Europe. They were drawing from the same pool of young Jewish dudes as the Zionists. They were in direct competition. They write about this, like a lot about how they're competing with the, with the communists for these revolutionaries. After the war, when Menachem Begin came down there, you know, he was part of a migration from Poland where they had like a trained up, drilled, well equipped, 20,000 soldier fascist Jewish army in Poland that was like supporting, you know, the Polish state and was sponsored by the Polish state. Huge number of them went down to Palestine. I mean, this was a military invasion and a revolutionary movement that went down there and violently took this place. And you know, the reason that that's important to understand because, you know, one, one of the first responses to that will always be in this, from a certain context, like in a certain context, this, this makes sense, is, okay, fine, but that was a long time ago. And you know, Israelis are there now whatever their grandparents did and, you know, they just got attacked, so they have to do something about that. And fair enough to, as far as it goes, but it's still important to understand, just because, you know, I get in trouble for saying this sometimes, but, like, there's. I, I said this even right after October 7th, which is like, you know, probably in bad taste, but I still think it was true. Is there, from a certain perspective, like, a people under military occupation, under foreign military occupation, can never be the aggressor almost no matter what they do. I mean, under what circumstances do the kids in Red dawn become the aggressors against the Russians? You know what I mean? Like.

[Scott Horton]

Well, if they were killing the Russian occupiers, families in their, like, tracked homes, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. No, you're still talking about killing women and children with no guns in their hands.

[Daryl]

I'm not. I'm not for that. I'm not for that at all. I think that when you descend to a place like that, you know, you're, you're selling your soul for a. For a political cause, and that's not a good thing. But I do think that, you know, look, put it this way. It's like accepted foreign policy, like philosophy, international relations principle, that we have nuclear weapons. Part of the reason is for deterrence, but everybody kind of recognizes that, you know, if, if the United States was invaded and most of it's conquered and, you know, just some ISIS is surrounding Washington, D.C. and that's the last holdout, and we decided to launch a bunch of nukes, People kind of accept that is like, that's what they're for. They're for, they're, they're there to protect your people and your associate, you know, political association, whether it's a state or whatever, they're there to protect you from, like, the ultimate disaster, which is like, something that threatens your existence. And so, and we're willing to do that, and, and everybody kind of accepts that that's not a terrible thing to do. I mean, Israel has an open policy of, you know, the Samson option when they are in danger of getting overrun, that they have the option to launch nuclear weapons in an offensive manner against people whether they, they have nuclear weapons to threaten them with or not.

[Scott Horton]

And most people that, that. But anyway, I understand.

[Daryl]

I agree. I mean, I, I, you know, especially as I get older, like, if I was the president and, you know, Russia or China got off a lucky first strike and just the war's over, like, all we can do now is, are we gonna kill a couple hundred million of them? I probably wouldn't do it. Like, I just. This may be why I shouldn't be president, but that's How I feel about it, too.

[Scott Horton]

No, that's the job. Well, yeah, I mean, as far as the whole. Palestinians never had a state and all. It's such silly propaganda. Well, look, they were under the domination of the Turks. That wasn't their fault. They just weren't strong enough to resist it. And the British Empire, the most powerful empire in world history after that. And so. Oh, of course they didn't have a state. Lots of people didn't have a state until the British finally withdrew. So now, like, India doesn't have the right to have their own government. Israel gets to occupy India, too, because they didn't come together as a nation state until 49.

[Daryl]

Eastern Europe. They were all under Israel. Hungarian empire.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. India didn't get their act together until a year after Israel. So Israel gets to occupy it because there never was an Indian state, and they get to steal whatever they want, occupy New Delhi and move right into your house. The whole thing is silly. And. And that's why they always have to just interrupt any argument about this with, you're a Nazi and your hatred is suspect and whatever, because they can't withstand any kind of syllogism explaining the situation. You know what I mean? And what they're doing.

[Daryl]

And not to mention that, you know, all of those arguments, those. To me, those are all arguments over abstractions.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah.

[Daryl]

That go around. They go around the fact, okay, there's no nation state. These are all, like, ideological concepts and political philosophy concepts that people came up with, like, in the last few centuries. The bottom line is there were a bunch of people living there. They had their lives there. They had their families and their livelihoods in this place. And you came in, whatever your reasons or excuses, from a completely different continent and drove these people out at gunpoint.

[Scott Horton]

And in our tradition. In our tradition, it's property rights that count. John Locke. Life, liberty and property. Come mix your labor with your land. I think you probably told me a little something about that, Darrell, you know, and that which you justly acquire through voluntary means from other property owners. You know, that's so. Of course, yeah. Why do I own this land? Well, it was my grandfather's land, and then he left it to my father, and then he died, and now it's min. That's why. You know what I mean? Of course, that's. If you ask a Palestinian, that's how they know. Why do I say, that's my grandmother's house? Well, here's the deed and here's the key. So is that good enough evidence? You know, it Seems pretty convincing.

[Daryl]

Yeah. And people will say, oh, I was taken by conquest, so was the United States, so were a lot of countries. And my answer to that is, yeah, but I don't think that the Native Americans were, like, evil in 1850 for, like, taking out settlers. Like, they were fighting to protect their, you know, their. Their land and their home. Like, I like. And I don't think anybody feels that way about them. I mean, think about this. Like, this conflict is 80 years old at this point, right? Yeah, 80 years old.

[Scott Horton]

Although, wait, on that point, you'd have to admit that if the Indians had kept their targets at fighting age, males, that would have been a lot better public relations for them instead of, yeah, they kill civilians, so we're going to have to just wipe them out because they pose this absolutely insatiable, irrational threat that sees no difference. It says in the Declaration of Independence, they don't discriminate between men, women and children. So we gotta. They're the worst enemy we face, that kind of thing. So just like with Hamas, if Hamas had just driven right past that rave and driven right past those kibbutzes and gone straight to the military base, that would have been some pretty damn good public relations, actually. Not. Just not that bad ones. Instead, they set themselves up to be demonized as, as bad as the Islamic State and all of their subjects, too. And look at what it's robbed them. You know what I mean? When they could have just left those people alone. In fact, it would have been better. They driven slowly by the rave and kind of just gave them the middle finger, right? And like, made a show of how they were not targeting these people.

[Daryl]

You know, I mean, I agree that. I mean, the Palestinians and Arabs in general have suffered from just catastrophic public relations since, I mean, since the First World War, really. Like, they just. And that's why they've lost again and again and again, largely. But at the same time, I would say that, like, I think the answer most people would give to that is the march for peace. Be like, yeah, you guys told us that for years and years and years, and we tried it.

[Scott Horton]

You mean the March return of 2018?

[Daryl]

A March of return? Yeah. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

You want to talk about that?

[Daryl]

Yeah. I mean, like, people like me, idealists, naive people like me, always said that, you know, they should do. What they should do is they should do something like the. The Green March that the Moroccans pulled off against the Spanish back when they wanted that portion of Morocco back then, it was still occupied. They decided, we're just. We're not going to be armed and we're just going to walk in because we just don't think that they have the will to gun us all down. And if they do, it'll inflame public opinion badly enough back in their country that we'll win anyway. And so we're just, we're just going to, we're just going to walk toward the gates. And our bet is that they won't stop us. And if they do, you know, then that will use that propaganda. And so the march of return, I mean, they finally, after years of people like me, morons from the outside like me, saying they should try that, they tried it. And thousands of them got shot by snipers. You know, and I want to emphasize to people when you're talking about snipers, this is always important to remember. I mean, thousands of people getting shot by snipers, kids, there's videos of people in wheelchairs, people getting shot in the back, women, people with journalists, vests on, all being shot by snipers who had, at first they had a line in the sand. They were to shoot anybody that came within 300 yards of the fence. And I mean, that's a long ways. And they eventually like reduced that down a little bit when public relations got difficult. But you're talking about thousands of people being shot by snipers and snipers. That's different than spraying machine gun fire and things ricocheting around and people being in a crowd that gets hit. Snipers are executioners. You know, they look at their target, they see the expression on their face, they see what they're holding in their hands and they can tell what's in their pockets. And then they shoot that person, you know, and to have thousands of people, unarmed people of all ages, both sexes, you know, just weekend after weekend after weekend getting shot like that, it really kind of, you know, I mean, that's a. I don't exactly know how to answer people who give that reply to the idea that what they should have done is drive past that rave, you know, because they would say, we tried that. And you see where that got us. It got us nowhere. You people on the outside, yeah, there's some like usual suspect activists out there who like got our back. But it didn't, it didn't change any policy or any public officials mind in Europe, America, anywhere, that they were just sniping thousands of us, our kids, our wives, etc. It didn't change any of your behavior.

[Scott Horton]

Well, it's funny because it's just like it is, Daryl, though. This is the Same thing that they say about the Israelis is you shouldn't stoop to their level. You lose the game when you act like they do. And then. But that's the same thing for Hamas.

[Daryl]

I agree.

[Scott Horton]

What I'm saying here is I'm not talking about a great march of return and walking unarmed into a military base. I'm saying they could have driven past the rave and past the homes and gone straight to the military base and sacked the military base and taken their hostages from the military base where everybody there, they're humans and many of them are conscripts, but at least they're wearing olive green. By the rules, they're fair game. And so. And again, I get what you're saying about settlement and cowboys and Indians and all of that. And there's, I don't know, some kind of gray area ish there. But in this case especially, I think it just goes to show, you know, not just how morally wrong it is, but how. So apparently morally wrong it is that people even assume that Netanyahu set it all up to happen this way because it's so damn ugly that then he can exploit it to. Now look what he's doing. He's finishing the job. He's using the opportunity to genocide these people right out of there. This goes back to Arnon Safer and the population problem, the advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu. People look this up on my site. It's@scott horton.org Fair use. And this guy was a demographer from down at Tel Aviv University who came to Ariel Sharon and said, you got to look at these numbers, man. These Palestinians are multiplying like rabbits. And so what we need to do is this was behind the disengagement. By disengaging from Gaza, we'll just be figuratively kicking 2 million people out of the country. They'll still be controlled by Israel, they'll still be under Israeli control, but it'll be a siege, and we won't have settlers there anymore. We'll call it the end of the occupation, and we'll be able to subtract the number of Palestinians that anyone can accuse us of occupying by 2 million. So now we're not an apartheid state. Now it's still majority rules, even though cruelly so, over the west bank, that kind of thing. And so. But then the reporter, because there's an interview with the Jerusalem Post, and the reporter asks him, yeah, but I mean, what are the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip going to do in that situation under a total siege like that? They're going to completely freak out, right? And he goes, yeah, oh yeah, they're definitely going to go crazy and try to fight and resist. So we will have to just kill and kill and kill and that is what will keep them down and, and keep us, you know, on the steady course there. And again, that, that dovetails with what Dov Weisglass, another advisor to Sharon, said that this is the disengagement is to put the peace process in formaldehyde so we don't have to give them a Palestinian state because we do this ridiculous siege and we claim, oh, see, we tried it. We gave Gaza independence and they just turned over to Hamas and fired rockets at us. When meanwhile the whole scam was, they knew that it was going to lead to just exactly what they have now. They're going to create completely intolerable conditions for those people and then when they resist, will use that as excuse to kill even more of them. Yeah, in their own words. I mean, that's the Likud man. You might not want to believe that USA is allied with a government like that, but yeah, they're worse than George iii.

[Daryl]

I mean, you just have to look at the history of the Likud Party that came out of the revisionist Zionist movement, you know, to begin with in the old days. I mean, the first Likud Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who, you know, it's a fascinating life story and everything, but unrepentant, outright terrorist, I mean, led a group, the Irgun in Palestine back in the 40s that just, they were, I mean, full scale slaughter of women and children, bombs in marketplaces, all, you know, throwing break going to Palestinian neighborhoods, just throwing grenades into houses where people are sleeping to drive them out. The second Likud prime minister was Yitzhak Shamir, arguably, I mean, even worse than, than Begin. Begin was at least something of a soldier. Shamir. I mean, you know, it was, it was a coalition of the three major groups in Palestine, but largely led by his Stern gang that pulled the Dariusin massacre, which is just, I mean, it was the My Lai massacre basically. And these are the people who are the first two Likud prime ministers. You go a little bit further down the line. I always tell people to like, just imagine, just try to think of like how this looks from the other side's perspective. You have Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, the guy who really ran like a rogue war in southern Lebanon without even, I mean, it really was like him and IDF Northern Command just sort of deciding to go to war in the late 70s, early 80s with Lebanon, oversees the sovereign Shatila massacres. It's just a total humanitarian disaster. And to the point that everybody in the region knows him as the butcher of Beirut and he gets elected prime minister, you know, and so it's like, it. That looks to them the same way it looks when people in Gaza elect Hamas. You know, they're like, okay, that just proves that, like, these people are crazy. You know, it proves that they're like, they hate us. They're that brutal. That's how it really looks. And that sounds crazy to us because Ariel Sharon knows to, like, put on a suit when he gets, you know, and like, and go and speak without a, you know, too much an accent and use colloquialisms that are familiar to Americans. Like, they're very. They're all very good at. That's why Netanyahu has been in power as long as he is, because he just understands the American right better than probably most Republicans here in our country. And, and that's, you know, really, like, I mean, that's the, that's the main asset he can sell to the Israeli people is I can keep the Americans on side. Like, who are you going to put up that can do that? But, but, you know, again, so that sounds like a little bit crazy to us. Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu looking to them like they're electing Hamas, but it's not crazy.

[Scott Horton]

So, look, I'm glad we're focusing so much on Hamas at this point because it reminds me of the thing that I wanted to say to you, which was about I was on hold on to do the Pierce Morgan show yesterday. I debated Wesley Clark again about Ukraine, only with a couple of hangers on. Some kook and some Russian were, like, not helpful. But anyways, mostly me versus the general. I think I did okay. It was probably not as good as the last one, but while I was on hold, Piers Morgan was whooping the Israeli ambassador, I guess, to England, or maybe it was the ambassador of the United States. I don't know which is what his name. His name was Yitzchall. I don't know if you know the guy, but anyway, Pierce Morgan was just whooping the guy. And at one point he went contrary to the usual talking point because he was trying to make a different point. And I think I'm not really reading his mind, but sort of seemed like he realized the slip, but he was committed to it at that point. But at one point in his rant, the ambassador, the Israeli ambassador says, nobody elected Hamas right They're just this horrible, criminal, terrible gang. Right? And then Pierce Morgan says in bat, Israel backed Hamas and Netanyahu had a policy to support Hamas in that. Right. And the guy doesn't deny it. Okay, so then this might be. And I was sitting there on hold going, oh, oh, pick. I want to jump in here. If I can't, you know, I mean, which I'm. I'm on for the Ukraine debate in 10 minutes. But I wanted to jump in and say, oh, that's right, Netanyahu voted for Hamas. You want to talk about it's okay to kill anyone who lives near anyone who voted for Hamas? Well, it ain't the people of the Gaza Strip. When the majority of the people in 2005, when George W. Bush forced them to hold that election, the majority were minors and only a plurality of voters. In fact, they didn't get a majority in any single district anywhere in the west bank or the Gaza Strip. They got only a plurality until the Gaza bombshell, big, disastrous coup attempt of 06, which led to Hamas kicking Fatah out of the Gaza Strip and taking full control of the thing, which is purely, you know, blowback from American foreign policy there that forced it to be that way. And so you want to. These people, the hawks, the excuse makers, they want to pretend there's some popular sovereignty in Ukraine where by some unanimous assent and consent, the people of. Did I just say Ukraine of the Gaza Strip, whereby some unanimous assent and consent that they all chose Hamas to be their duly elected and rightful representatives, and therefore they share in the responsibility for what Hamas does. There's no way in the world when a majority of them were minors in 05 and the majority of them are minors now.

[Daryl]

They weren't born yet. They're literally not born yet.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. So the. If there was ever such a perfect, like, example. Right. Like if Lisander Spooner wanted to teach you why popular sovereignty is stupid, he might just point to the Gaza Strip. Right? Now, these people share virtually no responsibility for Israel, quite literally foisting Hamas on them. And yes, I don't want to overstate the origin. It was the Muslim Brotherhood who coined the thing in the first place. But Israel. And we have this from Richard Sale and UPI S A L E Richard Sale. Everybody read it. So good it's all based on CIA, Shin Bet, Mossad sources. Same for Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal. Same for Trita Parsi in Treacherous alliance and Robert Dreyfus in Devil's Game and. And Jeremy R. Hammond in his book Obstacle to Peace. That Israel supported the rise of Hamas in order to marginalize the nationalist pseudo commie Fatah, which is Yasser Arafat, and the plo, which is now run by Abu Me.

[Daryl]

That's something. The British were doing that back in the 20s. Dude, that's right. Like, that's a. That's a tactic that's been going back to the 20s, like, supporting radical Islam in that country first to split off the Christians from the movement, because the Christians provided up until really, like, the 1970s, like, a very large amount of the leadership structure in the pflp. And, well, they were communists, so maybe not they wouldn't call themselves Christians, but a lot of them are from Christian families. And the PLO as well. Like in 1979 or 80, when Yasser Arafat went to Iran to visit the Ayatollah after the revolution, the Ayatollah was pressing him on, you need to make this an Islamic movement, declare a jihad. And he refused. And I'm not any fan of Arafat or anything like that, but he refused for a reason. He knew that game. You know, he understood what. What that was about, and. Because it'd been going on for a long time. And, you know, I think you've said this before before. It's probably been said by. By a lot of people. But even if they did elect Hamas, that's the logic that Osama bin Laden used to justify knocking down the Twin Towers. Like, you guys are electing the presidents that are killing our people. So don't cry innocent to me. You know, change your government. If you don't like it. You guys have the vote, right? We. We barely have the vote, like, if you want to call it that at all, like, in most of these countries. So, like, I just reject the logic altogether. I mean, course, there's absolutely no. There's absolutely no level of responsibility or. Or just collective sharing of guilt or anything like that. That will. That should get anybody to agree that it's okay to go kill a bunch of women and children and to do it indiscriminately and on purpose.

[Scott Horton]

You know, Daryl, there was a episode, I guess it was on Pierce Morgan where Dave Smith was up against Dean Kane from Superman. And Dean Cain goes, oh, well, they all voted for him. And they all elected. They're all from the country that did the thing. And Dave goes, oh, yeah, well, your country did. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen. So are you saying that they have the right to kill you? And he goes. And then he didn't say another thing for 40 minutes. And that was the end of his participation in the show that day. They're like, oh, geez, wait, does Barack Obama, committing a sin, give someone the right to murder me and my family? Boy, that doesn't sound right. You might call that a non sequitur when you apply it to me and people I care about, now that I think about it, you know, sorry, Superman, you know, through.

[Daryl]

Yeah. And also, wait, on the Hamas, on.

[Scott Horton]

The Hamas thing, Netanyahu said, we control the height of the flame. And there were three different sources that said that. He said that while he was briefing Likud ministers and telling them, yes, it's true, I am backing Hamas, but listen, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas, because that's how we keep them divided. And so that we can keep telling the Americans, you don't expect us to negotiate with a bunch of terrorists, do you? But don't worry, everybody, we control the height of the flame. But they. Meaning I do. He was saying, but they lied and go. He didn't say that. Those three different, separate, on the, on the record name sources are all lying about that. Except that there's a new documentary out called the BB Files, which is all about the corruption of him and his wife extorting everybody to buy her champagne and fancy jewelry and all these things. And they show in that video, they have the tapes, Daryl of the police, the, the Shin Bet interrogations of Netanyahu sitting at the desk. And Shin Bet asks him, I mean, you got to trust the Hebrew translator of the, of the movie. But I do. There's no reason to doubt it in this thing. It's not some kind of put on. This documentary is fully serious. You know, you could have your Hebrew speaking friend check it. And the police say to him, what are you doing back in Hamas? You giving a bunch of money to Hamas? And he says, yes, I am doing that, but don't worry, we control the height of the flame. Uses the exact same term that he had used in that supposedly disputed quote. So. Right. Just like if you had Bill Clinton saying, yes, I'm backing Al Qaeda in Bosnia and Kosovo and Chechnya, but don't worry, we control the height of the flame. Right before September 11, which is actually pretty close. Right? They said they, you would say at the, at the Pentagon, they would say, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower, which is basically the same thing. We know what we're doing, but they don't know what they're doing. They're drunk as hell, getting us all in a bunch of trouble on both sides, you know.

[Daryl]

Yep. You know, I keep my, my like, naive, hopeful side, dwindling as it may be. I just keep hoping these, you know, the Israelis, the ones I know at least, and the ones that I've known in the past, like, say what you want about any group of people, one thing you can say about the Israelis, at least I thought so, is that this is like a very, very politically engaged and politically astute people, you know, and I'm surprised that they've allowed a guy like Netanyahu to take over their political system for as long as they have. Just, even, even outside of the, the way he's prosecuted things against the Palestinians, just his corruption and just his hokiness, honestly, like, it's, it's, it doesn't fit with the character of the Israelis. I know that they would tolerate a guy like that for so long. But again, you know, the fact that he knows how to play the American. Right. Like a fiddle. I mean, it's a, I mean, you see, actually right now, I mean, that is like pretty much the main strategic asset that the Israelis have is their ability to influence the Americans. And so I guess if he's, if he's good at that, then he's a good prime minister.

[Scott Horton]

Well, look, there's a crack up coming. I mean, that's the whole thing. News. No, they should not have let him drive. He's been a total disaster for Israeli security. Greater Israel is a suicide project, just like the American empire is, and it's destroying their country. I always wonder what people say about, oh, Israel's not going to make it and that kind of thing, like, what are they even talking about? And I usually, I don't know. There's only so many people whose opinion I really take seriously about large questions like that or whatever. But I believe it was John Mearsheimer who was saying on a clip that I saw the other day that, well, what's going to happen is people are just going to move away from there. It's going to not be a secure country and people are just going to leave. So it's not that anyone's ever going to invade and conquer them until, you know, the very end of the thing, but they're just going to make the country. And I always believed this, too. And maybe I believed this long enough ago that I must not have known what I was talking about, Darryl. But I've always thought that Israel could have gotten along if they just kept the labor guys in there and More or less tried to make peace with their neighbors instead of just this absolute constant bullying, constant denial of the rights of the Palestinians, constant threats against everybody else. This oded Yanon style policy of breaking up all their neighbors and keeping everybody weak so they're strong. That. That's short term thinking. That's high time preference thinking. Dude, that's stupid. It's not a way. Don't they want their country to last for the next few hundred years or something to the imaginable future? Or not. Is. The whole thing is. Is completely nuts. And, and I, and so I saw that. And this is what they're talking about. This is. Look, this is the story of Tucker Carlson right now, man. His turn against war is. It's so huge and important and, but also emblematic, right? The same things that are making Tucker Carlson say, enough of this. I'm ready to come out and oppose. This is the same as making the entire American right. No, sorry. One half of the American right turn against Israel. And in the latest polls is 50% of Republicans say that they disapprove of Israel. Like, you know, on the just basic approval disapproval thing, they disapprove half. So for the American right, that's a lot. You grade that on a curve. We're talking about huge progress. And I don't remember what the previous number was, but it was low. Man. If you go back just a few years ago, this is a major shift and there are people, you know, I saw, you may have seen the clip of Candace Owens. And of course, she's been really great on this for a While now, since October 7, you know, air at least right around there. But there's a recent clip of her where she's saying, I would rather saw off my leg than ever support Israel again in any way. Forget it. You're the chosen. Chosen by who? Satan? Like, she's mad and she speaks for a lot of people. I was like, dude, you're not reeling her back into. Dude, you guys made a mistake pushing her overboard because she can swim. She ain't afraid at all, y'. All.

[Daryl]

So like, yeah, and how are they.

[Scott Horton]

Coming back from that? How are they gonna get Tucker Carlson back on board for the war party? Dude, they ain't gonna. You know what I mean? Like, there's whole segments and again, he's emblematic. He's the leader, you know, by far. But, but he's emblematic of so many people who are just going, guess what? I actually don't give a damn about Israel. Maybe even I disfavor them. And, and it doesn't cost me anything. What does it cost me to actually not favor this horror show any longer? Maybe nothing. You know what I mean? So it's just easy for people. I think they're finally understanding we don't have to believe in this anymore. Just like Ron Paul said, we don't have to believe in this stuff. And people go, oh, I don't. Okay, great.

[Daryl]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, as far as Mearsheimer's comment about the project kind of dissolving just because people decide to leave, I mean, that, that's not far fetched at all. And it's not just a security question either. I mean, you know, it's, it's also just if Israel, and they're on their way in this direction unless something changes fast and dramatically, if they are, you know, if they're looked at around most of the civilized world as they see it, like a South Africa, like a Rhodesia, you know, this pariah state that, you know, you can't travel to foreign countries because people don't want to see you there. And all the Israelis got options, man. You know, they're not like, these are educated, literate people who can move to any city in Europe or the United States and, and assimilate just fine. And I mean, Israel was having enough trouble. Think about like, they got a conscript army and like, there's this idea that like everybody in Israel carries an M16. And like is a, you know, they're, they're down at record lows in terms of like the number of people they can get into the army to do their mandatory service. Because people leave for America for a few years, they go to England for a few, just avoid that whole period of their life, stay if they can. A lot of people. And I mean, that's why you have things like the American Jewish Committee back right after October 7th, I think it was early 2024, putting out this like public service ad or whatever that said this is the American Jewish Committee saying that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews can be safe. I'm like, not America, okay? But like, that's an asset if you need to keep people there. And if you need to drive Jews from around the world, right. To go to that place is to get them to think that way. When in reality, of course, Jews are in, never in more danger than when they're in Israel because of the way the government there's behaved, you know, and it's really sad because one of the early fears of like a lot of Jews who weren't on board with the Zionist movement yet is around a lot of countries. It was, you know, in America. It really wasn't until like the 1930s that it started to pick up. One of the arguments that they would use against it is, no, no, no, you're going to go down there, you're going to create a state. That state is going to do the kinds of things that states do. And then people are going to look and see the Jewish state that says it speaks for all of us and represents all of us going and starting wars and assassinating just all the different things that states do. And that's going to come back on us. And that's what's happening too. And that's really sad.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, it is. And by the way, there's another great new documentary that's out called the Settlers, which is, I guess a Dutch journalist or something, and he did a previous one that I haven't seen. This is, I believe, his second one where he goes back.

[Daryl]

That's a Louis Thoreau one.

[Scott Horton]

Yes, sir.

[Daryl]

Yes. And the other one's called the Ultra Zionists and it's worth watching too.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, good. So I'm gonna catch up on that. But so he's, he's with Daniela Weiss, who's one of the leaders of the settler movement since the 70s. And one of the guys he's interviewing at one of these outposts way out in the west bank tells him, yeah, I'm born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and I decided to come here and steal these guys land and whatever thing. I'm like, man, I don't know. That whole, like, they're just the lowly survivors of the Holocaust who need a refuge kind of thing is wearing thin when you're talking about people from Brooklyn, New York who like, boy, that's some pretty expensive real estate, man, in Brooklyn. And then they get to go and, and squat and steal someone else's property way out there in the name of they need a refuge. Come on, man. Well, that's just a damn lie. I'm sorry, that ain't going to work on me because that couldn't possibly be right. There ain't nobody in Brooklyn threatening any Jews at all. Give me a break.

[Daryl]

The last thing, and I know we got to wrap up because we've been running long is, you know what? Actually just cut that whole part. Let's go ahead and wrap it up there because I'd go off on a long tangent.

[Scott Horton]

All right, all right, well, so to wrap, that's our show. We're now our third week at number one on Apple. New podcasts. That's pretty good. Our first week, nothing. Our second week, eighth place ever since then, first place for new podcasts on Apple, which is nice. I don't know how long they'll count us as new, but we're doing good there. And then he's Marta Maid. Check him out on substack and martyrmade.com if they just want the audio of the podcast feeds and, and all that. Right. And they can look you up on all the podcatchers and such.

[Daryl]

Yep.

[Scott Horton]

And then I got some things to plug. First of all, check out my interview with or my new debate with General Clark today on the Piers Morgan Show. That's out there. And then I'[e-mail] that's where I got my 6,000 interviews going back to 2003. Scott hortonshow.com where I have the also interviews. But also I have the beginnings of the audiobook, the first two sections of the audiobook of Provoked, which is still like, I forget it's 9 or 12 hours just to get you through H.W. bush and Bill Clinton. So that's a lot to get you started there. That's my substack. And then I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute and I got a lot of really great guys over there and adding all the time and publishing books, great podcasts and articles every single day over there. Top quality stuff at the Libertarian Institute. I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, which is actually the most important project on the Internet since 1995, where Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzalone and Eric Garris do all the hard work getting you all the bad news every day. That's antiwar.com and then I'[e-mail] where I wrote these books that I gotta sell. And so please go and buy them at. It's Afghanistan. It's Fool's Aaron. The terror wars is enough already. And the Ukraine war is provoked. And then I also got transcripts of my interviews with Dr. Paul, if you're a Dr. Paul lover. And then.

[Daryl]

Let me say something real quick about your books for everybody out there. If you're like, not familiar with Scott and you're like, who's this dude? Why should I buy his book on this? Because, like, there's some professor at Harvard who wrote a book like that says it's on similar topic because they're not as crazy as this dude. This dude's crazy. I was, I was gonna help you Write the Russia book. And after like a couple months of me kind of like being occupied with other things, and I check in and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm on my. I'm on 350 pages. I'm like, oh, wow. Of footnotes. I was like, you know what? I think I'm out of this one. This one's all yours. That means this dude is crazy. And he does. He does research like nobody else. And he's just been on this for so long. So long. And like you said, 6,000 interviews. I mean, talking to experts about this stuff multiple times a week for what, 25 years at this point? Something like that. I mean, honestly, that is more. That's more time put in than most Harvard professors of international relations or something like that, like, into the issues, especially the nitty gritty of actually what's going on. So if you haven't gone out and bought Scott's books and read up on these things, then you shouldn't really even, like, go out and have a conversation about them yet. Go get them, go read them, go listen to them, and then you'll be the smartest person in your friend group.

[Scott Horton]

Ah, that's very nice. You say. And then. Well, there's one more thing about that too, which is that if you're familiar with the great Tom woods and the Liberty Classroom, he built me my own liberty classroom. It's called the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. See, I got the jammer on my Jammer. And. And what it is, is it's, I hope sincerely, it's going to debut in the month of August here next month, and it's going to be courses taught by me. One on the Middle east, one on the Cold War with Russia and the Ukraine War. Then I've got a bunch of other really great experts teaching courses on all kinds of great things, including Israel, Palestine, Ramsey Baroud, and why and How America Lost every war since 1945 with William Bupert and all kinds of really great stuff. So that's@scott hortonacademy.com and right now it's just sort of a splash page and a really great video that Dan Smt's made. But if you put your email address in there, then you'll be the first to know when the thing goes live and it should be real soon. So that's about all I got to say about my gigantic list of URLs that people need to type into things and then thank you for your patience. See you next week, guys.