← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:8 Hidden Price of Empire - Endless War Is Changing Who We Are
01:33:37
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- [00:30]
A
All right, well, welcome to the show. I'm Scott. Scott Horton. That is scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org etc, and he is Daryl Cooper, Martyr made podcast@martyrmaid.com and@substack.com Martinmade right subscribe.martyrmaid.com they tell me.
- [00:48]
B
That gets around Elon's, you know, throttling. I don't know if it's true, but.
- [00:52]
A
Yeah, mine is Scott hortonshow.com is my substack.
- [00:56]
B
So they tell me it's more professional that way.
- [00:58]
A
So, yes, it looks much better. That used to be my website URL before I got Scott Horton.org so now I'm using it again. Anyway. So, hey, if you are a Daryl Cooper substack subscriber then you ought to subscribe to my substack too. That's we all agree.
- [01:12]
B
Yeah, you should just kick over to Scott's, actually, because as I'm finishing up this next episode of the history podcast, I've been neglecting the hell out of you guys. And so I apologize for that. But if you want to kick over to Scott, at least until I'm done, you should do so.
- [01:24]
A
That's true. I got at least a couple interviews every week I'm putting up there now, and sometimes when I remember, interviews of me. So, you know, let's start about talking about that verse, man. What is this podcast that you're doing and how close are you to drop in that official first chapter of it?
- [01:41]
B
I'm right. I'm. I'm in the final writing phase now. So I think, you know, my goal is to get this done by. By the first week of September and.
- [01:51]
A
Okay, great.
- [01:52]
B
Whenever I set myself deadlines like that, all I'm doing is, you know, preparing myself for public embarrassment. But I'm gonna. I'm gonna say it here. I think I can get it done. You know, you were talking about some of the projects you've got on on the burners right now that it's just kind of forcing you to just push everything else aside and just buckle down and focus. And that's kind of the mode I'm in now, like, other than this podcast. Honestly, like, I barely get out of my chair with my laptop and my books. Like, it's just all I've been doing. And I'm sort of really, really just focused on that to until. And I'm going to be until it's finished. Like, I have this thing. And you're probably the same way, actually, knowing what I know about you that, like, I'm either obsessive or I'm kind of just doing other things. Like, I just, I. I really am not one of those dudes who can just sort of, like, I'll put aside, like, two hours in the morning and then like four hours in the afternoon and kind of get this done bit by bit. I just. I don't know why. I just can't. I just can't work like that. Like, I have to push everything aside and just get laser focused and kind of let it become my whole world for a while. And that's. That's the mode I'm in now.
- [02:58]
A
So, yeah, well, that is how I am. Except I don't ever turn that off. I don't have the periods of screwing around either. Very occasionally, I'll hold a gun to my own head and force myself to go skate with the boys, like every few months or something, possibly take the boat out or something. But actually not. You know, I go months at a time without ever doing anything but work because I just got too much to do. I. I take on huge projects at a time that are just. I'm completely ridiculous for doing so, but I can't help it because I keep thinking of things. So I'm almost done. Speaking of which, I'm working on the academy, the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. And that's like Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, only it's me. And it's a scothortonacademy.com to sign up. If people want to get on the email list to find out first and watch a little promo video we got there. It'll definitely be next month. It's definitely not going to be this month, but it'll definitely be next month that we're going to go ahead and launch the thing. And it's me doing gigantic courses. I forget how long, but many tens of hours on the Middle east and the Cold War with Russia, the new one. And then it's the great James Bovard on 40 years of investigative journalism, on everything in the world from stealing documents from the World bank to the Waco massacre and everything else. And the guy's just the most accomplished and most important libertarian journalist ever. Jim Bovard from the Institute and also from the New York Post, of course. And then we got William Bupert on how America lost every war since 1945, and C.J. kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson was the worst person who ever lived. And then we've got this preacher. I forgot his name. He's not a preacher. He's a scholar. A Lutheran, a religious scholar is going to be debunking Christian Zionism and dispensationalist, pre millennialist.
- [04:49]
B
Hold on, I have to jump in real quick, man.
- [04:52]
A
Yes, sir.
- [04:52]
B
Everybody knows that Winston Churchill is the worst person that ever lived. Come on.
- [04:58]
A
You're in so much trouble, dude. Oh my God. You know, I. He was, he helped sink the Lusitania. It's true. Colin Simpson wrote that book.
- [05:10]
B
I'm stoked about this project because, you know, I, I've always actually going back years, even before you and I were like, like really buds. Like, you know, I would listen to your work and, and something like this is going to be just, just 10 times better for it when, you know, like something jumps off. Like, you know, I'm like a lot of people who are like educated layman on given issues, like around the world, right? Where I read a few books, I read all the Shah's Men, I read, you know, a handful of books, the Twilight wars, et cetera, about Iran, right? So when the Iran thing jumps off, you think I have all this sort of knowledge just sitting there about everything that's going on, but really what it is, is like I read those books and unless I'm doing a podcast on it or something, like I come away with it where I remember the vibe of the book and I remember like sort of the general themes and lessons that I took from it, but then the details just kind of fade out of my memory or over time, you know, and so later on, like, I'll have this general. I'll have the same feeling about the situation that I gained from that book or those books, but the details are all gone. And so when something jumps off, I would always go back and just revisit some of your interviews and your stuff just to kind of get myself back up to speed. It's super useful for that. And if you're doing like 10 hour courses and stuff, it's going to be great.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah. You know, I guess I'm reminded of something from junior college. I took a speech class and I wouldn't be able to tell you the percentages, but he showed on the board where you remember this per, you know, on average, whatever, through the studies, you remember this percentage of what you hear. You remember this percentage of what you see. Remember this percentage of what like somebody explains to you, Remember this percentage of what you read. You remember this percentage of what you teach somebody else, right? And that's of course the highest score. And that's of course my job is I read Gareth Porter And I go, oh my God, did you guys see Gareth Porter today? Well, here's what he figured out. Knew it all along, didn't you? And we go through it and so I get, you know, the. Reinforce my own head. And then of course, my job is interviewing everybody who writes all of the stuff that I like to read. So then I get to ask them all the follow up questions that I want and all those things. So when I read one of those books, I then spend an hour with the guy that wrote it and I get to go, so at that one part where you wrote about this, well, what about the other thing? There's. And then, so I'm like getting a chance to develop. First I learned this, but now I want to learn a little bit more based from that. And so that gives me a better chance to really like, you know, retain something or another from each little thing, you know.
- [07:38]
B
It's so true. And it actually doesn't, it doesn't even just increase retention, actually helps you develop your own and refine your own thinking, you know, like, like I noticed in my jiu jitsu classes, for example, like, you know, I'm just a middle belt, but every once I'm high enough that if the coach is sick or something and he can't come in that day, I can teach the white belts, their arm bars and their basic stuff. And you would think that that's just kind of going through the motions for somebody who's been doing it for many years, like I am, but that's not the case. Like, even having to show them even the most basic stuff makes you realize like, oh, you know what, I'm actually kind of sloppy about this. So I, you know, but I can't be now because I'm teaching it. So I have to clean that up. And it helps a lot. I mean, and you know, the, like, the version of that in like daily life is, you know, my wife will ask me a question about something going on in the world that's in the news. And from, you know, five minutes or so, I get possessed by the ghost of Scott Horton. I just sort of like speak words that I've heard you say before, but then eventually, like after doing that enough times, like, those become my words and I can sort of say them, you know, in my own vernacular and with my own added, added parts to it. So, yeah.
- [08:47]
A
Yeah, fun.
- [08:49]
B
So what else are you working on? You're working on a book stuff, you know.
- [08:55]
A
Yeah. So now once the academy's done, I will finish the audiobook I had to put that on hold because essentially, Tom woods has brought this new opportunity to me on a silver platter to do and so. And, you know, help to make it happen. So I have to do this. I have all these other guys as part of the academy with me and everything. And so this has got to be my top priority. And then as soon as I got that in the bag and out there, I of course, got to do everything I can to promote it. And then I gotta knock out the end of the audiobook. I'm still not done with the audiobook of Provoked. I've finished all of Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, which is three sections on my sub stack there. Scott hortonshow.com and it's like, I forgot if it's nine or 12 hours, it's longer than the audiobook of Enough Already is just the first two chapters of the audiobook of Provoked. So I still have quite a lot to do there. Except, man, once I'm done with this academy thing, I'm just so determined to knock the audiobook out that I'm just. I will. I am going to. If I just got to get myself a drug habit and stay up for 72 hours, I'm going to finish that damn thing. I mean, because after that.
- [10:04]
B
Because after that, your schedule's clear, you're all done, right? You just get to hang out, enjoy the sunset.
- [10:10]
A
No, then I gotta relaunch more again. The Scott Horton show interview show, which I have been back to doing at least two interviews a week lately, including some real good ones. I talked with Matt Taibi last week.
- [10:23]
B
Yeah, I listened to that. It was good.
- [10:24]
A
Who else? Somebody good whose name was escaping me off my memory. But so I've been. I've been doing a bunch of that and. But I gotta make that a YouTube show. Like this is once I can finally get my act together and get that going. And then it looks like I'm gonna write another book. My idea originally was, oh, I know what I'll do. And I kind of got like, excited and out ahead of myself, I guess, a little bit. And so I texted Tucker Carlson and I was like, hey, man, you and me should write a book together. And we'll just outline it and then I'll do the hard part. I'll write the thing and then we just put your name on it with Scott Horton at the bottom. I don't care, you know, and like put that thing out. And then he, like, kind of didn't answer. And then he was like, ah, I'm real busy. You Know, okay, what the hell, I'm, I'm way out over my skis here. Okay, never mind me. But then I thought, you know what, I already outlined the thing and I already know exactly what I want the book to be.
- [11:18]
B
So hell, what is it?
- [11:20]
A
So it's going to be America first, the rights turn to peace. And it's going to be about how screwed up everything is and why it's all the worst fault and the empire's fault and how that's step one in setting America right again is giving up on the neocon dream of global hegemony and being a normal country in a normal time. Like even Gene Kirkpatrick said we could be back in 1990. And so that's going to be the thrust of the thing. And it already writes itself. I just, you know, I jotted down the outline and five minutes, which is sort of like the other books too. Like they're already basically fully conceived in my brain. I just got to do this log. But I got myself a good co author. Hunter Durantis from the Institute is going to write it with me. And he's a great expert and historian on the old right too and knows all about the old anti war right before the neocons came and ruined everything. And so he's going to be a good podna to have on this one. And I think he's already like raring to go and, and pretty excited about it too. So what do you think you had.
- [12:26]
B
To sort of like if you had to sort of elevator pitch like the right wing critique of, of the empire and like the right wing anti war position. And I, and I asked that just because, I mean it's kind of crazy since anti war position was really like a, it was, it was the conservative right wing position for a long, long, long time. But it's been sort of, you know, it's been, it's been out of the Republican party and out of the right for so long that I think a lot of people have trouble even articulating the right wing anti war position. So I mean, what is it you see?
- [12:59]
A
Developing Republic, not empire. It's as simple as that. You cannot have George Washington's Constitution and a world empire. And just look at us, you know, imagine somehow having a global empire Centralized in Washington D.C. but not having a domestic empire centralized in Washington D.C. it's impossible. Right? And you know, a huge part of it is just having a government powerful enough to force us to pay to fund the thing. And so we just, and, and you look at the debt they just officially crossed $37 trillion. It's a. I think it was Brian McGlinchey. I just wrote this great piece at Stark realities about 37 trillion. That's nothing compared to all the other unfunded liabilities of the national government. And all this is like over $100 trillion. Just some. Whatever it was. I'm sorry, don't quote me on that part. But it was at least very high tens of trillions. And just. This country's completely bankrupt. Are the stewards of American power. Have run this country into the ground. The empire costs as much or more as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid every year. And all three of those are now outpaced by spending on interest on the national debt.
- [14:18]
B
I mean, that's kind of a Rubicon, isn't it?
- [14:20]
A
I mean it is absolutely just insane. You look at that line chart and it's it. Somebody's gotta call a halt to the thing. And then even worse than this, and this is. It's kind of invisible until you are shown it once and then you'll always see it for the rest of your life. That boom bust cycle in the economy that you've always lived with. Every 10 years, all of a sudden everybody stops spending money and everything sucks. And the average guy doesn't know why. Right? We've all lived through that over and over again. Our whole lifetime's long. And the. The reason why there's only one answer for this. And there's only one group of people who know the answer and are right about this and everybody else is stupid and wrong. I'm sorry. It's just true, okay? It's the Austrian school economists, Ludwig von Mises, particularly back a hundred years ago, wrote the theory of money and credit. And what it's about is how what they call the business cycle where we have this boom and bust is not caused by business. It's not caused by free markets. It's not caused by mistakes and bad investments. Because freedom is stupid and messy and unworkable. It's because the government communist commissars control the currency. One half of every transaction is the government money. And of course, the government has essentially, I mean this very loosely, a conspiracy of interest with the banks who are members of the Federal Reserve System, with the government, where the banks promise to always buy government debt. And then the government licenses the banks to print money out of nothing and to make new loans of new credit and bank credit expansion into the economy. And so you always have in the boom times, the government and the banks working Together to create way more new money than there is new wealth to be represented by it. Which leads. Just think of it this way. The government is holding down interest rates by pouring in new money or by just literally holding them down. Then if you are an entrepreneur, that interest rate signals to you that there are X amount of resources, of capital investments saved up for you to borrow and invest in your business, right? But in a free market, that interest rate would fluctuate freely and you would know it would be an accurate signal of just how much whether maybe now you should be saving because you'll be collecting on that high interest rate rather than maybe you should be borrowing. But when they hold the interest rate artificially low, now you, the businessman, take out loans that you otherwise would not because you are being misled into thinking that there are more available resources for investment than there actually are. And so this is what Mises called the cluster of errors. You can have a bad businessman make a bad bet. You could have a thunderstorm destroy the orange crop. You could have all kinds of things happen. But what causes a whole nation of businessmen to all make a bunch of stupid bad bets in the same direction at the same time? Government intervention in the monetary system. That's the answer. Artificial bank credit expansion. Read, what has government Done to Our money? In the Case against the Fed by Murray and Rothbard. It's also. It's chapter 14. No, no, it's chapter 11 of for a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard. Just explains this so perfectly. And so this is why you think about what they call the good times. Think about all the times in your life, Darrell, that you watched on TV and they were going, man, it's great economic times now. Stock market's roaring, everybody's happy, and you're going, oh, my God, are you kidding? Prices of everything are up. Cost of living is up, price of rent is up, price of groceries is up, price of fuel is up. Think of the Bush years, for example, where you didn't have widespread price inflation on everything, but on your basic cost of living, energy, food and housing, right? And they go, oh, this is the good times, this is the boom times, and you're getting completely screwed. Unless you're the guy who is, you know, selling these things that are being artificially boosted, right? Otherwise it's at the expense of everybody else. And then what happens? The correction, which is what? The absolute catastrophe, right? The Great Recession, the massive correction, where all the bad loans are either called in or marked off, and all of the marginal businesses that never should have been invested in but and only were invested in because of the artificially low interest rates, sending those false economic signals to entrepreneurs, all those businesses wiped out. I saw a line chart today where the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population of the country went from one and a half trillion to like 275 billion in the crash of 08 and 09, right? That's the correction from the artificial fake prosperity of the inflationary boom times. And then they again and again and last sentence here, and all of this is to make big government seem cheap, right? If they just raise your taxes, you'd call a halt or at some point revolt. So they tax what they can and then they borrow more and then they print the rest. And so then when you're sitting in the unemployment line, staring at your shoes, wasting time, unable to provide for your people, that's your cost of killing all those Yemenis. That's you later paying the price in your wasted life for the sins that the government previously committed on your credit card. Does that make sense?
- [20:07]
B
Yeah, totally. And you know, I try to, man, I try to get like left wing people interested in the Federal Reserve and it's really hard to do. But when one of the, one of the hooks that I have that works occasionally is to point out to them that this boom bust cycle you're talking about, it just leads to like more and more consolidation of capital, which is like the left wing boogeyman, right? Because who can ride out the busts? It's, you know, the same companies that wrote out Covid, like the companies that, you know, all of your mom and pop restaurants got closed and now there's more Applebee's on every corner than there ever were before. And that's the whole economy. And then you just think about how, you know, the, the interest rates being artificially low. It just, it just, how do I put it? It like skews the risk profile of the whole country in like a very bad direction. Because you know, if you think of like something like CalPERS, the California Pension system for the public employees, it's something, it's like $2 trillion some insane like, you know, fund. And just to meet, you know, the California pension, state employee pensions, it's not as if like the current employees pay in, and that's the fund for that year that pays out the current people or anything. It's a, it's a big sovereign wealth fund that has to meet a certain mark every year in order to meet its obligations to all the people. It's got to pay. It's got to make something like 7 or 8% every year. Well, you know, when you can get 5 or 6% on a government bond or something else, it's like really safe. Then you know, you can, you can dabble in other things to make up that other 2 or 3% that you've got to make to meet your obligations. When they slam interest rates down to 2%, 1 1/2, 1 0%, they look around and they're like, we gotta make 7 or 8% or 7 to 8% or we cannot pay out the pensions we owe to these people. So what's paying 7 to 8%? Well, not government bonds, not AAA rated corporate bonds, not really anything. We gotta go all the way down to like, you know, whatever Greek sovereign debt and mortgage backed securities. And obviously the big one is just you have all these huge funds that used to be primarily bond funds that are just piled into the stock market. It. Because it's just the only place that you can actually make the returns you require, you know? Yep. And that is for everybody.
- [22:26]
A
Right. That goes for grandma. She can't save money in a just savings account or a CD down there where inflation is going to whoop her interest rate and just destroy her money. She's got to make a bet somewhere and goes for everybody. Forces regular joes who have no business whatsoever betting on the stock market into the stock market.
- [22:44]
B
Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, the, you know, there's also a. And maybe, you know, I kind of think I like to talk about this like even more broadly in terms of, in the context of the book you're writing about how the empire is harming people, like directly because people can think the empire is destructive, it's bad. I don't like killing people. I don't like all these wars. But in terms of like the mechanism by which all of that rebounds back on you and now, you know, and obviously a big part of it is, is the monetary part. But then I wondered too, and, and I don't know if you're going to cover this in the book. I would love it if you did. You know, I've been thinking, because I've been thinking a lot about this lately, so this, this episode I'm working on right now, the first real episode of the World War II series. It's, it's about the end of the First World War and the revolutions in, in Eastern and Central Europe that happened right afterwards. And my starting point, and I critique it a bit, but my starting point is George Mossey's brutalization thesis. Where, you know, he, he takes this idea that, you know, you, you had, you had all these guys. You know, this was one of the first wars that, you know, you didn't have like professional armies. These weren't mercenary armies that were going out there, professional soldiers that were going and, and fighting in the trenches. These were just whole generations of men piling into those trenches. School teachers, office clerks, you know, just normal people, right? And they go into the trenches and they experience this horrific situation. Like, just horrific beyond anybody's imagining. You know, you gotta like, you know, it's all, everybody knows war is terrifying. Bullets are coming at you, you might die, maybe you do get wounded, maybe somebody, you know, dies. But you know, the trenches were like this environment where, you know, you can't put your hand up above the top because it'll get shot by a sniper. And so that means that when your buddy dies, you can't go up topside and bury him somewhere. And so you bury him in the floor of the trenches. But then after, after a while, the floor underneath you have trenches is just all bodies and there's nowhere to bury anybody anymore. And so your buddy for the last four days now is just sitting in the corner over there, dead, decomposing, with rats eating his face, you know, and this is like what these normal 19 year olds who were working in an office yesterday, like this is what they were experiencing for years, you know, and then after that you, you know, they, they get done with this experience if they managed to survive and they go back to Germany or they go back to, you know, whatever country they were from, if they were from one of the defeated countries and their countries in the midst of a revolution where artillery pieces are being rolled out on the streets of Berlin and blowing up people in buildings because there's communists in there, there's, you know, right wing militias in that one. Machine gun battles on the street, people, you know, just kids being killed. And so going through this. Like, you know, you're 18 years old in 1914, you're 22, 23 years old when the war ends. Another two or three years of just total chaos on the streets of Berlin and all the German cities, but all of central and eastern Europe really. And then 1923, of course, you have the hyperinflation in Germany and that spread a lot, like throughout central and eastern Europe as well. And so you just have these people who the first six, seven years of their adulthood is just total chaos. And like the idea that like life is something that's sacred, that we need to like, really value and take seriously and that it's not something that you just throw away in a cavalier manner. That's not the world these guys were introduced into, you know, and then these guys or the ones who were a bit younger, and sometimes they were even like, more radical than anybody else because they felt that, like, we just missed out. You know, if you were 17 years old when the war ended and, you know, you didn't participate, like, you probably got lucky. But then after it's over, still, you know, you're working in an office and there's 10 guys and eight of them were in the war and two you weren't, and you're, you know, there. There's a certain sense of. Of shame and need to compensate that comes with that. But those were all the guys who were filling up the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the. And. And the Waffen ss, you know, in the Second World War. And so that's like a really important thing to just understand. It's not like a way of making excuse for anybody. It's just like understanding, like, how this kind of world developed. That's a long way of approaching. Like, my. My question here is like, you know, obviously, like, we have these boutique specialized volunteer force armies now. Most people, you know, like. Like the military's really become like a caste system where you either know 20 people who are in the military or you or, you know, nobody who was in the military, you know, and like, it's families. It's like your dad, three, your uncles, your grandpa, et cetera, was in, or just nobody in your family is served. Like, it's really like a segregated thing. And so you have a lot of people who are totally isolated from the experience now, and even the people who aren't, who are sort of in that part of society that provides the soldiers, you know, even then, it's just our armies are so much smaller and these things are so much more contained in terms of the actual operations. There's just not that many people with direct experience. But because of the spread of media, you know, especially just the, you know, high definition, you know, 4K HD, just on your phone all the time. Uncut live footage, if you want to see that. Like, people are still seeing all these things all the time, and they're like, in addition to that, it's, you know, not just the witnessing violence and things, but, you know, there's something. I really feel like there's something corrupting to our souls, corrosive to our. To our spirits as individuals and as a society of living In a society living at a time when you're at war, you know, and it's something that, like, almost like when a war starts, you're kind of on a countdown because, like, from that point when it starts, your soul starts getting eaten away a little bit. And if it goes on for too long, then you start having real consequences to that. And this is something that we recognize even in the force. Like, we have. You know, there were a lot of disciplinary problems that were coming up in the SEAL teams, for example, you know, in the first 10 years of the Iraq war. Very, very, very few, like, very well behaved for the most part. And, you know, I mean, given the situation. But, like, we started to see more and more disciplinary things, including things in the field that were happening.
- [29:34]
A
Hey, there's a new book out real quick. There's a new book out about Delta at Fort Bragg and their litany of murders and drug dealing, crime and prostitution.
- [29:43]
B
One of the things that they. That they sort of came, like, a conclusion they came to about all that is, like, these guys have just been at war for too long. Like, you. You. You can send people out to, you know, on a few tours to do something, but then you got to take them off the line, man, and, like, get them out of that mentality and, like, bring them back into the fold of regular society. And, you know, like, I think I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, and I'll cut it over to you after this, but, you know, I feel like. I think back to when Abu Ghraib was publicized in 04 and how you had your people, just like people defended Lt. Cali. There were those people out there who tried to downplay it, but for the most part, people saw those pictures and they were like, what the hell are we doing? This is crazy. And it wasn't just, what are we doing to these people. It was, what are we doing to our people, you know, because these are just a bunch of National Guard kids from, like, Maryland or something like that who, like, now we send them over there into this environment, and this is what they're doing. What are we doing to our own people? And I worry, and I think, like, you know, that if. If something like that were to happen today, and maybe it is happening. I mean, it's happening 10 times worse in Gaza. People see it every day, and people. They feel. I just. They feel nothing, you know, compared to. I mean, not everybody, obviously, but, like, the level of outrage and horror that, you know, you should feel at the. At the. At the idea that our weapons are enforcing a blockade that's leading to that child starving that you're looking at in a picture right now, and that we're doing something to contribute to that that should horrify people. And it just doesn't. You know, eventually people get inured to.
- [31:28]
A
All that it is. It's just your basic desensitization as same as anything. I still remember the first time I saw Grand Theft Auto, which was in like, what, 06 or something, and the guy killed a hooker and then he tracks her blood across the street. And I remember going, whoa, man. Oh, my God. Now that's crossing a line in a video game that I just hadn't thought of that. You know, I don't know what the hell. It's just R rated. It ain't that bad. But I was a little shocked, you know what I mean? I guess that makes me an old fuddy duddy, right? But of course, that's nothing now. Like, whatever that was just, you know, at very first blush there kind of thing. But then, yeah, I mean, look at what it took for them to lie us into Iraq. And then by 2011, Obama was like, yeah, Libya, some lie, whatever. And then launched a war in Libya. Nobody even cared.
- [32:17]
B
Dude, that's so true. I heard somebody the other day in another podcast talking about. And I get their point, but like, they were talking about how the Iraq war, like today, like, now that the Internet is the way it is and everybody's on social media and there's some open forums for information to get out there and everything, that they couldn't pull that off today. And my response to it is they wouldn't have to pull it off today.
- [32:39]
A
Yeah, they just walk just like with, like, they.
- [32:41]
B
They don't even bother lying to us anymore, you know?
- [32:44]
A
Yeah, they called out Trump. They go, look, man, your Director of National Intelligence is not standing by your claims that Iran is making nukes. He goes, I don't care. Do whatever I want. Anyway. Okay, thanks for letting us know. Nobody considered for a moment going to Congress and getting an authorization to go to war or any of this, which, you know, so much the better for that one. Probably want to call that one as short as possible. Although that's probably still just step one of that war. I hate to. I don't want to go down that trail now if you don't want to, but that ain't over yet. And. And yeah, as far as. Yes, okay, so on Abu Ghraib, I mean, I still remember, just because this is how my brain works is like, I Know where I was at Airport Boulevard and 290, listening to 5:50am radio, driving my cab, I guess it would have been, or maybe my little pickup truck, and listening to the absolute outrage on conservative talk radio from San Antonio about these pictures. And to quote, this is not who we are. We insist that, no, we're better than this. This is George Washington's country, man. This is a Christian country. We don't go around torturing people.
- [33:56]
B
What in the world?
- [33:57]
A
Somebody's got to go to prison. What is the. What is the truth behind this? What in the hell is going on? And then Darryl, that was over by Friday. And by Friday, George Bush said, first of all, we don't torture. Second of all, yes, of course we do. And you love it. You support me, you support America. You support this war. You're a patriot. Then you must, I demand, you must back me up on this. You're damn right. We do enhanced interrogations to get what we need out of these terrorists to prevent them from nuking American cities and the American people. The audience and the hosts on 5:50am radio in San Antonio went, all right, fine. I guess we do torture people after all. That was that week, dude. Never mind all the rest, you know.
- [34:49]
B
You know, a lot of people, I find they still to this day have a. A total, Like, a big misunderstanding about what happened at Abu Ghraib. And, like, the. The real story is way worse than the one that most people think, because most people. What most people think is that you had this unit of psychopaths that, like, went off the reservation and did all this stuff that, you know, that. That we're all horrified by and embarrassed by, but we got rid of them and we dealt with that. And, like, you know, that. I mean, for everybody out there who doesn't know the whole story, like, that's not what was going on at all. Like, that National Guard unit showed up, and all that stuff was already going on. And you got to remember, these are a bunch of. These are a bunch of people never been to war. Some of them were like, you know, been in the Guard for a while. I think one of the main guys was prior service, but he'd never seen combat. Most of them were just young youngsters who. Who were in the National Guard, thought they were gonna get college money, you know, and now we're at war, and you're in Iraq, and they put you in this prison, and you get there, and the CIA is there. They got their interrogators and everything. And, you know, there's this weird thing in the military where it's embarrassing, honestly, for those of us who are veterans, but it's just, it's true. Where like, you know, you could have like, I swear to God, you could have like an admiral or a general, you know, in a room and if like a low level CIA guy walks in, they just kowtow. They're like, oh, wow, yes, sir, yes. Anything we can do. They treat them like they're above like everybody in the military. It's just a weird thing that I don't really understand. But you go there, you have these CIA guys and they, they tell you that, you know, we're going to interrogate these guys. And I know you guys are just military police who were sent here to be guards, but part of your job is going to be conditioning these people before they are sent to us to be interrogated. And what does that mean? Well, here, let us show you. And it's all the stuff that those, they went to jail for, like, that's the stuff they were told to do, you know, for the most part. I mean, you know, like that even that picture that, that famous picture of the guy in the hood standing up with his arms spread like a scarecrow and everything, you know, that picture like this is like, I mean, it's just such a crazy thing to even think about. But the, the girl who took that picture, she was, you know, part of the guard unit who got in trouble for all this. The girl who took that picture, she walked by and there was, that guy was standing on that, on that crate naked in a, in a freezing room, like, shivering, his teeth were chattering. And she went and got that, that shroud and everything to cover him, like, and then took the picture as she was kind of taking pictures of everything that was going on. And like, you know, so when you, you know, when you realize that this was not just a group of psychopaths who like, lost their minds, this was a group of regular Americans that we put into an absolutely, just an unforgivable situation. We put them into this situation where they get there and they've got their officers, their bosses, all these combat veterans who have been there, done that, that they kind of look up to CIA interrogators all telling them, this is what you're supposed to do. And what are they going to think? They're going to think that, well, I thought the military and war and everything was this way, but obviously I don't know what I'm talking about. This is how it is.
- [38:02]
A
And you're right. But then Again, Sam Provance refused to participate and blew the whistle and told the truth and handed the stuff over to military investigators because that was what his mama taught him. Was right. So, yeah, you know, finds a very dark light on everybody else there who went along with that. I don't care what your rank is. Like, you don't know that it's not okay to tie somebody up and then beat them up.
- [38:25]
B
Oh, yeah, no, I'm. I'm 100% with you. I mean, we. You know, I wish we would build statues of those people. You know, build. Build a statue of the helicopter pilot at Mei who, like, put his guns on American troops to make them stop doing what they were doing.
- [38:41]
A
But in Fool's Aaron, or in. Well, I have a better torture chapter in. In Fool's Aaron, I guess. But in. Enough already. I tried.
- [38:48]
B
Torture chapter.
- [38:50]
A
Yeah, I do write torture chapters sometimes. I did try to name all the whistleblowers. Ian Fishback and Sam Provence and all those guys. I'm sorry, I can't remember them all right now, but there were a lot of people who came forward and told the truth about Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, about Guantanamo Bay and about Abu Ghraib and what they're doing in Iraq. There's a guy named Tony Lugaranis, guy named Matthew Alexander. That was his pseudonym for Tony Camarino. He was the guy who got Zarqawi. How'd he get Zarqawi? By saying, hey, buddy, you want a cigarette? Tell you what, man, why don't you tell me where Zarqawi is instead of torturing it out of the guy. And that's how they got Zarqawi in 06. Anyway, it is. It's a. It's a really ugly story. And by the way, the CIA murdered a guy named Al Jamadi there in Abu Ghraib. And it was the CIA that strung him up. It was not the National Guard. They hung him with his arms behind his back from the ceiling till it crushed his chest and suffocated him to death. And it was John Durham who investigated the origins of Russiagate, was the same guy who let him off.
- [39:52]
B
Yeah. Anyway, you know, and it's. It's. It's like. Well, wait, before.
- [39:59]
A
Hold that thought one second. Just say, everyone knows that Daryl Cooper is beholden to no man other than his voluntary donors at his substang. But that is not true for me. My soul is owned by my coffee dealer, Phil Peppin from moondozartisancoffees.com and this is my Scott Horton show blend it is Ethiopian and Sumatran coffee all mixed together is why it tastes so dang good. And if you go to Scott Horton.org oh they're more better. You go to Scott Horton.org in the right hand margin there is a link there. Or if you just go to scotthorton.org coffee just type that in. Scotthorton.org coffee can get some of this and then I get a little bit of a kickback and also get to drink coffee in the morning and not man, I'm telling you, the amount of money I save on coffee, I told this guy, you know, you want to advertise on my show, I don't want money, just pay me and coffee, which is what he does. And I'm so very grateful and thankful and. And what? I have no choice. I'm completely addicted to this substance. So everyone type in Scott horton.org Coffee and buy some. And as long as I'm doing ads, I want to reiterate from last week. I have the real live version right here. It's the latest book from the Libertarian Institute. Creative chaos inside the CIA's covert war to Topple the Syrian Government by William Van Wagonen. This guy is just the most fantastic writer and the bravest investigative journalist. He was kidnapped by Al Qaeda over there and survived. He went camping out with the Yazidis in Afghanistan getting the true story of how the Kurdish, the Barzani clan was back in Al Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS and all this stuff. And man, he's just fantastic. And a huge part of the reason that my chapter on Syria and Iraq War 3 in enough already is so good is because I was able to borrow so heavily from this hero's work and it's such an important book. I publish it. I owe it to this guy, do everything I can to boost it again. It's brand new out on Amazon right now. The Kindle will be out very soon. I got my other guy working on it. Creative Chaos by the great William Van wagon in the 17th book by the Libertarian Institute. And so yeah, there's my shameless no need to be shameless but my extremely proud plugs of the day there. So now say the brilliant thing you were going to say.
- [42:18]
B
Well, it's just, I guess kind of my closing thought on that issue because there's other things we want to talk about is that you know, and I think this is real. This is a right wing position. Right. A conservative position that you can like a conservative can, can understand that like if we go from being a Society where we're, we're not comfortable with kids being exposed to pornography, let's say. Right? But then now they are exposed to it. You can tell a right wing person that, and they'll be cognizant of the fact that like we've, we're suffering from, from something there. Like we lost something and that that's not a, this is not a good thing for us or our society. Like, it's just, there's just something that we lost. And, and similarly like with this stuff, like a society and us as individual, we as individuals are better when we see something like Abu Ghraib, when we see something like Gaza and we are horrified by it, than if we're not. You know, it's just you, you're a different kind of person like once you're inured to that kind of thing and it's not, and it's not an improvement, you know, and, and that's to me is, you know, like, I mean, I could talk about the economic stuff and the monetary stuff all day, but the, like, to me the real, the real catastrophe of the global war on terror is just what it's done to us kind of psychologically and spiritually and how it's corrupt politics, all that.
- [43:46]
A
Daryl, look man, I mean, you're a tough guy, you're a veteran. I mean the, the obvious counter argument to what you just said is like, no, we have to go kick ass, dude. We can't let people mess with us. And them radical Islams represent a danger to us. And so your job, sir, is killing them. Dude, what are you talking about? All this wimp stuff about leaving the world alone when it's so dangerous out there. And I don't say that to be like silly, but like that is the devil's argument position. That is the George W. Bush position is all tough guys unite to go and do tough guy stuff and so all wimps and weenies, you can stay home. But the, the, the real men have to go and do the tough job that they know needs doing. So you're telling me you don't believe in that? Because I know you used to.
- [44:43]
B
Yeah, I think a lot, I think a lot of veterans don't of the war on terror don't believe in that anymore. You know, they, they look back and it's not that, I mean you can do this even with somebody like, like jocko. And don't take what I'm saying as like me telling you his position. I'm not putting words in his mouth, but just from Knowing the guy well, like, even somebody like him just, he's a GI Joe action figure, Team America dude, right? Even, even people like him, they look back and they look and they say, you know, like, I had to give a folded flag to the mothers of some of my guys. And when I look back on it, I don't know what it was for. Like, I don't know why we had to go, like, what anybody got out of that. And worse, like, they're even looking back at it and saying, you know, even if we would have won, even if we would have won, if things would have gone the way that George Bush and Donald Rumsell promised us, even then, I don't really see what we're getting out of this. You know, what did any of it do for us? Even if it all worked out, it just seems like, you know, it's this churn, it's, this is the mowing the lawn thing that, you know, the Israelis talk about where you're almost going out and doing it.
- [45:52]
A
Just.
- [45:52]
B
I actually heard somebody make this argument explicitly that keeping Afghanistan, keeping that war going was a good thing simply because it kept our military sharp. You have these guys, the Taliban types and the Pashtuns, who they, you know, they're, they're warriors, they want to fight. Great. We have a place we can cycle our, our frontline combat troops through. They can get some experience. And then, and I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. Like, it's depressing to hear like somebody that, in general, that I actually like and respect. He's a good guy, like in general, but like to hear him say that, I just like, I wanted to bang.
- [46:29]
A
My head against a wall, you know, severe rationalizations there. You know, it is, it's really sad and I agree with you that, like it, it absolutely has corrupted the spirit of the country. You've said this before. In a way, I'm like, man, it sounds schmaltian, sentimental and I don't like it. But on the other hand, like, yeah, no, it really is a real ass thing that like the long term history books from now are going to have us as such bastards. God, the Yemen war nobody even knows or cares about, but man, they killed 300,000 people minimum forever. You talk about nothing. And that war is as sinful as Iraq War two in every way. And what's going on in Gaza now, you got upset as hell about Trump bombing Iran for a minute, but he's been Joe Biden helping Netanyahu slaughter these poor Palestinians day in and day out for months now. Deliberately starving him. They asked Trump about. He goes, yeah, I think he should finish the job, dude. He's as bad as he can be on it. And it'll be a miracle if they're not carpet bombing Ramala and Janine. I mean, They've already killed 10,000 people in Janine or something, whatever. It was thousands. It'll be a miracle if they're not just carpet bombing the population centers of the west bank and ethnically cleansing them exact same way they're doing a Gaza now by the end of Trump's term.
- [47:48]
B
And it doesn't. It feel a little bit.
- [47:50]
A
And it's like, oh, well, whatever. I mean, we inherited that from Biden. It's just this thing that's going on. And you know how those, those Israelis are. And like, I don't know. I mean, people are get. I shouldn't say that people are getting more and more outraged about it, but there is, like, I know you can relate. There's a feeling of helplessness here, too, where we know that Trump doesn't care what we think about this. He's going to do whatever they say.
- [48:10]
B
It almost feels like, you know, thinking about Netanyahu recently saying that the next phase now is that the IDF is going to move in and take the remainder of Gaza and occupy the rest of it. And, you know, it almost seems like, you know, if you look at polls, right, of just Americans opinions of Israel, like, the change over the last two years has just been unbelievable. Like, I never would have predicted it. Even if you would have told me all of the terrible things that happened that were going to happen in Gaza, I wouldn't have believed it would be like this where, you know, you have. Even Republicans under 50, I mean, are a majority, like, critical of Israel now rather than favorable. That I think, you know, it almost seems like they're looking at these numbers and realizing that this, this, this, you know, American evangelical Christianity. Ted Cruz, like, you know, Jesus wants us to send bombs to Netanyahu to kill Palestinians. Like that. That's something that is like a boomer, you know, 65 and older, kind of fading out. And if you look at, like, the younger you go, the further away from that you get. And it's almost like they're seeing that and they're like, guys, we got like 10 years to finish this. We got to get rid of these people, finish this job, build our greater Israel now. And look, yeah, okay, they'll complain. They'll hate us in 10 years. We'll, you know, we'll. We'll make it up to him. You know, we'll, we'll, after Netanyahu's dead, we'll have a bunch of think pieces about how, you know, he really was kind of a tyrant. Just like they have Bill Clinton now that, now that they want to go after Trump or whatever for like, you know, any of the like sexual assault allegations. Of course now they have to be like, yeah Bill, Bill Clinton probably did rape when he right guys. And they'll have those kind of things and try to and that it really does look like they're just sort of sprinting for the finish line right now.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah. By the way, I want to mention and for the audience who maybe aren't familiar, especially like, you know, obviously my people know. But for your, your folk who may be unfamiliar, read antiwar.com every day man. And hell, the Libertarian Institute, don't let me sell my own first thing short. You know, the great Kyle Anone and all of our great writers at the Institute are doing such great work on this. We just published a great one by Jeremy Hammond the other day. But you know, Dave Decamp@antiwar.com is on top of this news and it's in the top headlines every single day how many people they kill over there. And it's, I used to say it was like Waco every day, but it's really, you know, about a Waco and a half or more every day. It's about 120 something. It seems to be about the average. I'm not keeping that close a track. But it's seems to be more than a hundred Palestinians slaughtered every single day, day in, day out. And again, this is an Indian reservation. This is a ghetto within Israel. I don't care what you call it. They annexed this territory back in 67. And so this is the equivalent of bombing an Indian reservation out in Arizona or, or bombing a black ghetto in Baltimore or in Chicago or something like that and just slaughtering people by the high tens of thousands in this way. And it's, I, I, I urge people really, if, if you're not that familiar, go and just look at X put Gaza and in your X search and just look at the images coming out of there and the video coming out of there. It, you will identify very quickly the level of cruelty that is being inflicted upon these people. It is really bad and it is on us. This is the Joe Biden Netanyahu war, the Donald Trump NETANYAHU War, the U.S. israeli war against, I mean you can't call it a war at all as Bill Hicks said, a war is when two armies are fighting. It's just a canned hunt. It's a turkey shoot, man, fish in a barrel. Just a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign, a genocidal campaign against the women and children and the civilian population of the Strip. In May, Netanyahu himself, not just his advisors, but Netanyahu himself, said in May, we're. We have destroyed all their homes, so they have no home to come back to, so that now they can choose to voluntarily immigrate. And that's it. The headlines are constantly, if we can't ship them to Somalia, we'll ship them to Libya. If we can't ship them to Libya, we'll ship them to Indonesia. We can't ship them to Indonesia. The new one this week was maybe we can send them to South Sudan, where the CIA broke South Sudan off from Sudan. That was on Wesley Clark's list after all, remember? Well, the neocons list that Clark told us about, I mean to say, but the famous Clark list. And so maybe we'll move them there. I mean, they have, they are openly declaring their genocidal intent on a regular basis. In fact, I have one right here, which is Bezel Smotrich in the Times of Israel. There's a right wing paper in Israel. Smotra says he'll okay 3,000 more homes east of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, quote, burying the idea of a Palestinian state forever. And which of course that ship sailed a hell of a long time ago. But they keep reiterating that this is the same guy smotrich, who before October 7th was the one. And I got my Israeli American friend translated the Hebrew for me. You know, custom order. As long as you, as well as you can read the subtitles. And the video is still on X of Bezel Smotrich saying, in this game of delegitimization, Hamas is an asset and the Palestinian Authority is a liability. See, because it's all about trying to paint the Palestinians as terrorists to the international community and to the liberals in Tel Aviv. And so as long as we can say, oh look, Hamas, then Hamas is an asset. That's why we want to keep them there, right? So call it Obama style treason, right, against their own people. But as Netanyahu put it repeatedly, and again, we have him on tape now, so they can't deny it anymore. We control the height of the flame. Yeah, we deliberately not. The Palestinian people have elected Hamas. Likud has foisted Hamas on the Palestinian people. And yes, you're right, they are dangerous terrorists. But don't worry. We control the height of the flame. We know what we're doing. But we need our no. 1 to talk to certificate to show the U.S. congress, to show the Europeans, to show the Tel Aviv liberals. You don't expect us to negotiate with these people, do you? It's the most cynical plan in the world and they openly admit it and brag and boast about it. It's as simple as that. You want to talk about material support for terrorism, you want to talk about who's responsible for Hamas, it's literally the Prime Minister of Israel and his men are more responsible by far for Hamas's so called rule, subcontract rule in the Gaza Strip than any Palestinian, you know, as far as choosing them to, to have power over the civilian population there. And you hear they bragged about it.
- [55:03]
B
Yeah. And you know what's interesting is like, you can go back like if you, if you go read up on, you know, go ask Grok or, or just look up on Google. What is the, like what, what are the pieces of evidence that people use to attribute the deliberate intent of genocide to the Germans during the Second World War, for example? And like you look at it and there's like a, there's a few things that are like, you know, you have to sort of, you have like this, the Wancy conference with some second and third level officials who said, you know, and it's, and it's notes of some that somebody took and then somebody else transcribed of this conference, that somebody there said, this is what Hitler wants. In other words, is not a way to try to delegitimize any of that. It's just a way to say like they have to go look, look, they really have to like dig through archives to find little things where there's inferences and you know, same thing with, with, with the Turks during the Armenian genocide. There's, there's a fair amount there. I mean there's some pretty incriminating statements. But like to go find like just these, these. There's not like the flood of government officials who are coming out and just announcing their intent to do what they're doing. They're trying to hide it and all that. And that's true for virtually all of the genocides of the 20th century, you know, and in this one, I mean, I just, I, it's hard to imagine any other scenario where you've got the finance minister, the defense minister, that's like the entire cabinet of this, of a government just openly announcing their plans and as they're doing it you know, and to have people just, I mean, still kind of just want to deny it, wanna. Wanna make excuses for it or rationalize it. It's. It's dumbfounding, honestly. Like, yeah, it's. And it's depressing. It's depressing.
- [56:52]
A
Yeah. You know, it's funny because. And I understand all the incentives that people have to think the way they think and, and how hard it is to admit you're wrong and all that kind of thing. But then we see it all around us too, where people say, nope, I'm out. I used to believe in this, but now I just can't anymore. And like, what are they going to do? They can sit there and beat themselves up over how embarrassed they are that they had to change their mind, or they could just be good on it from now on. You know, I try very hard. Maybe I'm not really good at this. I guess it'd be for others to judge. But I would way rather eat crow now and say, sorry, I screwed that up and get my facts straight for tomorrow than sit here and pretend that I didn't screw up and then keep screwing up, keep saying the same wrong thing just so I don't have to admit that I got it wrong or something like, nah, man, I can't live that way. And I just think, you know, like we talked about with the Christianity thing, we're like, okay, your minister says the Bible is why we must support this sin. But if you look at another page, it says, man, you really should not be doing things like this. So, like, I ain't asking you to change your religion. I'm just asking you, like, which part of your religion do you really think is apt here at or like applies to this situation? You know what I mean? I think you can just. It's the kind of thing where you're like, you be driving your truck down the street or taking a shower or something, and it occurs to you that, like, huh. Actually, that doesn't really sound right, does it? You know what I mean? Just get a little bit of different perspective. Smoke a joint in your garage and kind of space out and be like, huh. I remember thinking that, but I don't think I agree with that anymore. You know what I mean? Take a chance to shift your point of view for a minute and you might find like, and you know what? Who cares what your Uncle Bob thinks or what your. Your, you know, friend Jimbo thinks or whatever? You can change your mind about whatever you want. And I understand, and I'm the same way too. Everybody's concerned about what other people think about what they think and blah, blah. That's how it works. But so in a way, like, it's a race. Hurry up and get good on this.
- [58:49]
B
Yeah.
- [58:50]
A
Or you're gonna be so embarrassed to change your mind that you won't be able to. Now's your time.
- [58:55]
B
I hate when I see people like Piers Morgan when he came around, and you have all these people be like, oh, welcome to the party. It's about time. Oh, now you're doing. I'm like, would you guys just shut up and, like, take a win for once? You know, welcome. Like that.
- [59:10]
A
Yeah, give him a beer and let everybody else know. You are also welcome to change your mind. We're not going to shame you for getting it right now. Come on over.
- [59:17]
B
Because, like, you know, you're just putting them in a very difficult situation. You have to give people an out. And, you know, just think of yourself like, you know, you're not right on everything all the time. There are times where, like, you're misinformed or you have the wrong biases at the beginning, and you have to eat that. It's just. And regardless, like, the point here is to get this stopped. It's not to win the argument. It's not to, like, you know, score points on Twitter. It's to get this stopped, man. And like, anybody that wants to get on the right side of that, it's just, you got to welcome those people. You. You know, and I understand, like, you know, all the emotion that's tied up in it, and it's really. I mean, it's. I get it. It's frustrating. And, like, you know, when you see people who've been propagandists for the wrong side of something that important for them to switch sides, it does. You know, I get it. It looks like they're sort of, you know, now that it's getting to the point where it seems like maybe the general, like, social mood on the issue starting to turn now. They're trying to get in front of front. Who cares, man? Who cares? We got Piers Morgan with his giant show exposing this stuff every day now. That is all I care about. I don't care how he got there, you know, and, yeah, I think we need to. You know, you have to. You just. You got to learn to think like that, man. Take a win.
- [60:37]
A
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so a couple things. How much time we got? Ah, we're already at an hour, so let me. Let me change subjects here real quick to a couple Things before we gotta go. The first one is there's a new development in the Russiagate hoax that I wanted to talk about real quick here. This is from Racket News, of course, the great Matt Taibi, who again, I talked to him last week, if people want to listen to that, said Scott hortonshow.com But this is now an email from December 22, 2016 is after they've been tasked with Obama with coming up with this ICA to try to pretend that the Russians intervene because they wanted to help Trump win and all that, which was released then seven days before Trump was inaugurated in January of 17. So here is the email from James Clapper. That is to Michael Rogers, who is the head of the nsa, who's having trouble getting on board here and raising his estimate of how much to believe in this crap. And then it is also to John Brennan and Jim Comey, right? Head of nsa, head of CIA, head of FBI, from the Director of National Intelligence, okay? And he says, understand your concern. Oh, he's answering Mike Rogers here who's saying, ah, geez, I don't know, my guys are not really committed to this stuff here. He says, understand your concern. It is essential that we, CIA, nsa, FBI, ODNI be on the same page and are all supportive of the report in the highest tradition of. That's our story and we're sticking to it. This evening, CIA has provided to the NIC the complete draft generated by the ad hoc fusion cell. We will facilitate as much mutual transparency as possible as we complete the report. But more time is not negotiable. We may have to compromise on our normal modalities since we must do this on such a compressed schedule. This one project that has to be. Oh, sorry, pardon me. This is one project that has to be a team sport. In other words, these are orders directly from the DNI that nsa. Enough of you and your dissents. Now we are going with this thing. And of course, Mike Rogers clicked his heels like a good little national socialist and did what he was told instead of telling the truth to the people.
- [63:03]
B
People.
- [63:03]
A
And we know that Trump told him, Mike Rogers, why don't you tell everybody I'm innocent? And they pretended to believe. Aha. See, that's obstruction of justice. He was trying to get the National Security Agency director to intervene and ruin the investigation when. No, he wasn't. He knew that he was innocent and he knew that the NSA must know that. So he was saying, NSA director, can't you like chime in here and tell them this isn't true? And they all. Oh, no, they all pretended. This is the height of criminality. I'm sorry, Mr. President, we're going to have to pretend to investigate you for two and a half more years here before we let you off the hook. And it just wouldn't be proper for the National Security Agency to say anything before all that is complete. And Trump should have had all these. Never mind. Sorry, go ahead.
- [63:52]
B
Yeah, one of the. I think back on that period, you know, I was thinking the other day after we had our conversation about this last week, how if somebody's like 20 years old, they were 12 and 12, like 11, 12 years old in 2016, and all this stuff was probably maybe just background noise. The adults were talking about it.
- [64:11]
A
Hey, I got a funny.
- [64:12]
B
If you're a little younger out there, you have got to understand how insane the environment was surrounding Russia Gate. I mean, you had Rachel Maddow, you had every channel, every day, every show, 24, 7 on the cable news channels and everything coming. And she's like, very solemnly looking into the camera and saying, I never thought I'd say this. I just. I never thought that this would happen in our country. That. But I have to just admit to myself, and I think we have to admit as a. As a people, that the President of the United States is working for Vladimir Putin. I mean, it was that, like, every day, all day, and they. It was just taken seriously. And if you didn't. If you didn't take. I mean, think. Take like Matt Taibi. Matt Taibbi should be getting a Pulitzer Prize for his work on that. He is completely vindicated for everything. He was trashed. He was blacklisted, everything. A respected journalist going, I've been reading Taibi since the financial crisis, you know, and he's completely right on this thing. And he. They try to punish him for it. And if this was a few years back, you know, before there could be a sub stack, before there could be some of these other open channels, they would have shut his ass down and closed him out. And thank God they can't do that now.
- [65:37]
A
They ran him out of the Rolling Stone.
- [65:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. For being completely right. You know, and what's crazy is that, like, again, you'd think like, in a just world, he'd be getting hired back to run like the Washington bureau, the New York Times or something. But no, he's still got to just go publish his own stuff and whatever. Because. Because they're angry that he was right and they were wrong. You know, I remember back when all this was going On. So I was like obsessed with this story from 2016 all the way up to maybe, I guess, maybe the. A year after, probably like till 2019, right? So after the, the Mueller testimony disaster happened. And then I just started to realize that, like, oh, nothing is gonna not. These people are not gonna pay for this. And I just can't. I can't keep watching, so I'm gonna lose my mind. And. And so I was. But I was super obsessed with it. Reading the blogs, listen to the podcast, and you would come across these things and there's a lot of conservatives, a lot of Republicans. I mentioned last week that, like the people who were pushing all these lies, they really underestimated how engaged the MAGA people were with this story. They knew people who were. They knew who Danchenko was, they knew who Mifsud was. All these like obscure people. They knew all those people names. They knew the whole story behind it because of the podcast and the blogs they were listening to. And there was. I remember coming across, you know, when the Carter Page thing came out and they were trying to say, well, you know, just all the equivocations and excuse making and everything. And you mentioned last week how Carter Page was. He was an asset of the CIA. He would go debrief the CIA every time he met with these guys. And so he, you know, he, he gets approached by these two Russians and, you know, they try to get him to do something or whatever, and he immediately goes to the CIA, tells them all about it. Well, the guy at the FBI who was attacked, he was like the liaison on the Carter Page case. Okay. The guy who signed off in March of 2016 on like basically closing the file on Carter Page was John Carlin, who I think was the head of the counter. Not counter, counterintelligence. He was head of. Head of counterintelligence at the FBI. And then when they wanted to run a FISA warrant to track Carter Page and everybody around him, meaning the president, meaning everybody around the President. John Carlin, the guy who knew 100% that this was all above board, he signed, he was, he was the case officer for Carter Page, like working all this. He signed the FISA warrant and then he quit the FBI two weeks later. And it's like when you see stuff like that or when you see, like when, when Comey was being interviewed by Brett Baer, right? And this is like down the line a little bit. And he asked him about, you know, the Hillary Clinton having, you know, I can't remember the exact detail, but something like that. Oh, The Clinton campaign paying for the Steele dossier.
- [68:48]
A
Yeah.
- [68:49]
B
And Comey looks at him and he goes, yeah, I'm not sure that that's. I just, I don't really have any information on that. It's like. But everybody knows that now that's public information, you know, and now we know, we look back on emails and everything else. He knew that like at the very, very beginning. And so you see that and you're like, if they're lying about something like that, it's because they know they, that they're wrong, you know, and it's just, it's an incredible story. I mean, and I'm very happy that it's all come out and everything, but man, it is really hard to swallow that people are not gonna get perp walk for this.
- [69:26]
A
Yeah, well, so, I mean they may. There is a grand jury now and I'm not gonna hold my breath for seeing high level justice and defense. I mean, pardon me, justice and C to prison. But it could happen. And after all, if you come at the King, you better not miss. And they did, man, they swung and they miss. And then they tried to put him in prison again and again and again after that too. And so, you know, he owes it to us to be committed to destroying his enemies. He better and they deserve it. And they broke the law. It's not like he has to cheat and persecute them. They belong in prison, it's fine. And so all they have to do is their job and these people are cooked. So I'm not holding my breath because on that level it's not law. At that level it's politics of whether you're going to go that far or whether you're not, as we talked about before. But there ain't no question that they deserve it. And by the way, so speaking my interview with Taibi last week, See this is. I'm so just over promised on too many things. I still have not had a chance to read the newly declassified annex to the Durham report. I have had a chance to review almost all of the newly declassified House committee investigation of the origin of the ica. But the great Taibi went through and he did parse that newly declassified annex to the Durham report with a fine tooth comb. And he found where essentially is like this. They said all 17 intelligence agencies agreed. Right. Pretending that it was a national intelligence estimate from the National Intelligence Council which would have included DIA and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and all these others, which of course were not included that was not true at all. It was. And in fact they did admit this at the time, it's just the press all lied about it, but at the time they called it an ICA because it was not an nie. Right. So there's this made up kind of ad hoc intelligence report report and then I'm not sure exactly how quickly it came out that in Brennan's own words this was a hand picked group of people, but we were led to believe from the CIA, the FBI and the nsa. Well then it turns out that no, they were all from the CIA. And then it turns out that they, the CIA analysts objected to each and every single individual piece of so called evidence or innuendo that was used to support that ica. And each and every time they were overruled by Brennan. And so that report was just written by Brennan. Yeah, that was it. That was not the agreed upon conclusion of anyone except the leader of Jabbat Al Nusra, the guy that started the war in Ukraine too. That guy.
- [72:24]
B
And the guy who briefed Obama. The guy who briefed Obama the previous summer that Hillary Clinton had an active program going to try to pin all this stuff on Donald Trump. I mean it was just a total consciousness of what he was doing and.
- [72:39]
A
Who we know for a fact actually started the thing himself in December of 2015. And we know for a fact knew that Hillary Clinton was getting on board for what he was doing by March. So we had that report you're referring to is like from the summer he briefed Obama in the summer. But we know that Brennan knew, I mean it was his thing in the first place. But we know for a fact that the CIA knew all about what the Russians knew about Hillary's plan to divert attention from her missing emails by saying that Donald Trump was in league with the Kremlin. And this is before any even rumor of the hacked and leaked DNC emails that didn't come until the summertime. So this is at the beginning of the year a total frame up job. And I don't, we don't know exactly when Obama first knew about. We know he knew at least by July. But we know that John Brennan, who originated the thing, also knew the others role, particularly the, the Clinton administration's role. And we know also that the FBI knew all along too. So that means that every single scrap of crap that was brought to the FBI the entire spring and summer of 16, they all knew in advance to expect a deluge of crap from Clinton and her people trying to insinuate some kind of link between Trump and Russia. They all knew, they had all taken the inoculation and then they went ahead and pretended to be sick anyway, you know, that was the deal.
- [74:09]
B
Yeah, And Obama, I mean, you know.
- [74:11]
A
Bad analogy for this day and age, but you understand what I mean?
- [74:14]
B
Like, Obama played it fairly smart. I mean, he never, you notice he never came out and really talked about it. I don't know if he's ever talked about it really. Like, he didn't. He was not one of the guys coming out and saying, this is very serious, you know, that blah, blah, blah. Like you didn't give one of those speeches before or after he was in office. And it's almost as if he was taking his, he was doing the Pontius pilot thing, kind of washing his hands and saying, you guys go ahead and do this, you got my blessing. But don't, no, don't drag me into this. This is your thing. But you know, the thing that was so frustrating about it is that Even back in 2016, 2017, like, as all this stuff was going on, it was so obvious to anybody who would just employ like a fraction of their common sense that this whole thing was ridiculous. I remember when the, the New York Times published a story, so it's just an insane thing. You think about how stupid this is. The New York Times published a story where anonymous intelligence, high level intelligence officials said that they had a source at the Kremlin, a human source at the Kremlin who was in the room when Vladimir Putin gave the order to hack the servers and blah, blah, blah. And right then and there I'm like, wait a second, because this is not, they didn't, they didn't put this information out there in order to like, put some indictments down or anything. This is just purely to drive the news cycle for a week. So it's like, wait a second, you're telling me that you have an intelligence source that is in the room with Vladimir Putin when he's giving like the most sensitive order you can imagine, and you're burning that guy like, just to like drive the news cycle for a week. Like, it's like, it's just so stupid that it doesn't even. Or when Mueller, like, you know, when Mueller put, put those indictments out of a bunch of the Russian intelligence officials and everything. And they talked about how like they, we have been able to tell like, which Russians were at which computer typing, what, doing what, all these things. So we know exactly. And here's these indictments. It's like, okay, so you have this unbelievable intelligence source where high level Russian intelligence officials, you're tracking them on their computers as they're doing the most sensitive stuff they're doing. And you're going to burn that source for some indictments that are never going to go to court. They're in Russia, they're never going to be given up. Like, it's just, it's just so obviously bs, you know, and like, when, when you couldn't get people who were like, you know, I assume Rachel Maddow has an IQ over, you know, average. And you just, A lot of these people do, you know, that, that they just, they're not incapable of understanding these things, you know, and it's just how, you know that they were all lying. They were just, they were lying. And not only lying, but, like, lying in a way that was like, you know, they were layering emotion on top of their lies to, like, sell it. Like, it was just. It's so gross, man.
- [77:13]
A
Well, you know, and this is one of the new developments in there, too, is that now it's clear that Jim Comey, when he made that announcement that, okay, the investigation into Hillary Clinton is over and we're not recommending prosecution and all of that, that he did that because he was afraid that the FBI investigation was leading to the Clinton plan to frame Trump because they were looking into the missing emails, and that was leading right to how they were diverting from it. And when Comey realized that, oh, my own guys are going to figure out what's going on here, that was when he announced the shutdown of the thing. And then I'm trying to remember the exact, the exact anecdote that triggered Brennan to call the Russians and tell them, you better knock off whatever you were doing, which only exposed whatever intelligence asset they claimed to have had. I forgot the exact anecdote there, but you could see where it was. And this is in Taib's report, you can see where it was essentially intended to prevent the lie from being debunked. Right. They had sources coming in. That was what it was. It was. It was one of the sources that the CIA did rely on, who told them that Putin was. Didn't care who won, and he didn't trust either way. He figured it was going to be bad either way, but he figured that he could handle it and it wasn't that big of a deal. And then Brennan burned that source because he was debunking the lie.
- [78:41]
B
One of my favorites was when Glenn Simpson, the guy who ran, what is it, Fusion gps, right when he gave his closed door classified testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. And that night, Dianne Feinstein drank too much cold medicine. That was their excuse. And she leaked it. She, like, published it and sent it out. So it was in the media everywhere the next day. And it's like everybody watching that who, like, was following the case knew exactly what happened, is that he went in there and gave some, like, pretty tight detail, like in his story. And they needed this out there so that everybody else could get on the same page so they didn't come in telling different stories. Everybody knew that's what happened, but they were like, oh, she, she released this highly classified information because she drank medicine. I didn't know that. I mean, all right, you know, from the, from the. I know, I'll let us go. I'm sorry. Chris, our producer, we always keep here longer than the hour. But I remember too when they first formed the special counsel, right? And it's like, I'm not a lawyer, but I know something about, you know, I follow politics enough and have for a long time that I know how special counsels work. Basically. You know, it's when there are political considerations that you need to let the public know that this is an independent, legitimate investigation that's not going to be influenced by, by all that. And so what is the, like, number one thing you do not do when you're setting up a special council? Well, you don't take the investigators from the FBI who were already working that case and move them over to the special counsel. The whole point of the special counsel is to separate those things. And so when they start doing things like that, like, just there was just this drumbeat of things where you're like, am I, am I insane? Like, I turn on every channel and even Fox News, Republican senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, everybody is like, well, this is just, this is very serious. And, you know, we think maybe Adam Schiff is going a little far, but we have to take this very seriously. And it's like, they were all lying, dude. Like, all of them. And this is what's crazy to me too, is that these are the people now that Trump is, like, cozying up to and like, in hugging and jettisoning his base in favor of. I don't get that at all, you know, but let's wrap this up because I'll keep going. You know me. I obviously, I got my, got my dander up now, so we better shut it down.
- [81:06]
A
Dude, I'm obsessed with Russia gate. I can't help it. And just wait Until I actually finally do get to lay my own eyeballs on that Durham Report Annex. I know there's so much in there. There's new stuff coming out. Everybody read. Matt Taibi, Racket News. And Aaron Matei is also doing very great stuff on his sub stack and at the Gray Zone and whatever. But listen, before we go, there's one important thing, and maybe unimportant, maybe we just end with something funny here. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but the important thing that I want to talk about was Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which we note every August. And I have this tweet that I put out there, you know, had one of my guys tweet out for me and it's. I have a blog entry like this at the Libertarian Institute and Anti war dot com. Anybody can find it really easy. Just put my name in there in your search and then search for who opposed nuking Japan. And I've been collecting this list of names for a very long time. And I, I have this in my book Hotter Than the Sun and I have all these quotes.
- [82:12]
B
A bunch of hippies, right?
- [82:13]
A
Yeah, A bunch of commies like MacArthur and Nimitz and Hap Arnold and William Leahy. And, and well, so in fact, fun anecdote is Tucker Carlson got in big trouble for opposing nuking Japan on the Joe Rogan Show. He's like, nuking a city? What the hell is that? And everyone was like, oh my God, you hate America so much. And he was like, geez, I don't know. All I said was, seems weird to Nuka City. You know, I don't know, I kind of, I really like Tucker. You know, just the way he says stuff sometimes just seemed weird to me that we would do something so horrible. I don't even know if that's a direct quote, but probably. Anyway, so he got in, in such trouble for that. So when I went and did his show, I brought him a printout and I made, I got a little folder and everything for him to put on his shelf and say, for safekeeping and in case he ever needs it, like the full printout of my full collection of names here for who opposed nuking Japan. And of course, it begins with Dwight Eisenhower and then is MacArthur and Nimitz, as I said, Hap Arnold and William Leahy and even, oh, the mad bomber Curtis LeMay said it was completely unnecessary. They all agreed it was completely unnecessary to use the atom bombs on the Japanese. Even Harry Truman had written in his diary, as soon as Stalin declared war on Japan, he wrote Finny Japs, he knew that they were in the very last stages of surrendering. And it was not the atom bombs that got them to change their mind. It was the threat of occupation by the communists that got them to surrender to the Americans first. And so it was completely unnecessary. Truman lied from the beginning and claimed that he only nuked military bases when he nuked cities, and including Nagasaki, which was the center of Christianity in Japan. And in fact, like dropped a bomb right on the Catholic Church there. Fun anecdote. A bunch of the American Christian missionaries who were there, they survived just by dump, jumping in a ditch. And it kind of showed how like, these are not really that effective battlefield weapons, but you can definitely kill a city full of civilians with them. You know, they're the Democrats, you know how they are. And anyway, but the point being is this, man, I think it is really important, especially for people who, you know, are already into this and you like an important talking point or two, this is kind of thing like we're talking about before, about to really change people's mind and get them to admit that maybe things are a little different than they thought before is because just like when Tucker said that on Joe Rogan, people freak out, man. They have a real emotional exception to that because they know that true man would not have done that if he did not have to. And so as H.W. bush put it, we would have lost 1 million men invading Japan. Now they estimated we'd have lost like 30,000. And then later that got embellished to 50,000. And then in the hands of kooks nowadays, it's always a million or more than a million Americans would have definitely died invading Japan. Because we're supposed to just assume that if two nukes did it, then full scale invasion would not get a surrender until they got all the way to Kyoto and put the bayonet through the Emperor's throat. Right? Like, sure, anyway. And then also, as though by any measure it's a fair trade to nuke a city full of women and children whose men are all gone anyway. And Nuka City full of women and children or you know, people who are ill fit to fight elderly or crippled people or whatever, the only men left and kill all them in trade for GIs. I mean, they're conscripts after all. But still, like, that's not fair. And the whole thing is just crazy and wrong. And Admiral Leahy, who was the four star Admiral, who was the chief of staff to Harry Truman, tried to stop him and he said his religion that Is Christianity forbid him from doing things like that? He couldn't stand it. And it was just Truman and evil. What's his name, the Secretary of State.
- [86:12]
B
I'm sorry, I. Simpson was still.
- [86:14]
A
No, no, Simpson was the Secretary of War. The skull and bones.
- [86:17]
B
Yeah, right.
- [86:18]
A
And then the Secretary of State was that. I'm sorry, I always forget his name. But they were the only three who were for it. The rest of the entire war cabinet was against it. All the leaders in the Pacific were against it. And five star general leader of United nations forces in Europe, Dwight David Eisenhower was against it. Herbert Hoover absolutely denounced it in the bitterest terms over and over again. And the two most important founding writers of the conservative movement in the post war era, Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver both. So this is an absolute moral abomination. You talk about like what we're doing to Yemen or what we're doing to Gaza now. Same thing here. Just because some Democrat commits some horrible war crime doesn't mean we have to all rally around it and identify our own lives with it. It ain't right at all. And, and the fact that those men said so is really all you need to know. And you know what I mean? Because it could be that yes, we did have to do it, but that Eisenhower and MacArthur and Nimitz and Arnold and Leahy and Lame just didn't understand that fact. Right.
- [87:27]
B
Hey, they just, they just.
- [87:29]
A
That's impossible.
- [87:30]
B
They weren't hard enough to do the violent, difficult things that men have to do in war.
- [87:34]
A
Yeah, especially that May.
- [87:36]
B
What did he crazy thing about it too is like all of the necessity arguments are all based on the idea that it's just obvious that we had to demand an unconditional surrender. Right. It's like that's not, that's not been the European way of war for centuries. Like that's not.
- [87:52]
A
Let him keep their emperor anyway.
- [87:54]
B
Yeah, like it like that, everything starts with that. And like most of the time, like we didn't fight wars like that for, for literally for centuries. People, if you were to like, you know, we win, you lose, we're going to exchange these territories and take you know, this indemnity from you or whatever. But the idea that there will be no negotiated surrender, you will, you will, you will surrender unconditionally. Which means if we want to let our army walk into your young girl's bathrooms and do what they want, whatever it's, we're the boss, it is unconditional. You have nothing to say. And the people who are demanding this of them have Been just firebombing their civilians en masse. I mean, like 100,000 people in one night in Tokyo and doing this over and over. And they're like, we're going to unconditionally surrender to these people. Like, that's, you know, you're putting them in a, in a very difficult situation. They would have negotiated. There's a lot of evidence out there that they would have accepted a reasonable negotiated surrender that was not significantly different than the one that ended up happening in, in 1944.
- [88:58]
A
Is the best historian on that for people who want to look into that. And by the way, Daryl, a guy sent me years ago. He. He made me give him his solemn promise that I would never share it with anyone. I have it here on my local computer. There's a photograph that his grandfather took of Hiroshima with a panoramic view of the city from the middle of the city in like, super high quality. I'll show it to you if you ever come visit here. But yeah, he made me promise never to share it with anyone or post it publicly anywhere. But, man, it is something else to see, you know, the devastation there. And, and then. Wait, back to my real point was that, man, I gotten in real bitter arguments with people about this before. We didn't need to nuke Japan. Like, people will fist fight you for saying that. People are really dedicated to how absolutely important and necessary and good that was to do that. They believe that their whole life. Their dad taught them that. Their minister and their coach agree and that's it. And they're not going to hear it from you. But then you start rattling off all those names and you know what they say? They say Eisenhower said that, Leahy said that, Nimitz said that, Nitza said that. No, no, that can't be. Yes, it's true. All the Pacific theater commanders said we didn't have to do this. Hell, the head of the Army Air Corps said we don't have to do it. And then they say, oh my God, I did not know and I'm sorry, I was about to kick your ass for saying that. Like, that's. I've been in that discussion a few times. People get upset, but then it's a hard landing. Dude, welcome to the real world. Where actually I think you'd agree, I, Guisenhauer and General MacArthur, if they can agree on this, they know better than you. You actually were wrong up until now, when you've changed your mind in favor of them. Isn't that right? Welcome to reality, man. You've been Living in. In Harry Truman's world, you know? Sorry. And. But then I like things like that because, well, look, if I got that one wrong, then. Okay, you. I'm listening. Right. You know what I mean? That's all I'm asking for, man. I don't need you to go ahead and just roll right over. But time to admit that, like, maybe things aren't so cut and dry. It's just. I like flags a lot and so. Shut up, boy. You know what I mean? There's more to it. And then to close. I was just going to ask you if it's really worth bringing up or what. I. I missed it because I'm not on X anymore. I got too many other jobs. But you said that you got in a big fight with the Libertarians this week, so I kind of was interested in what that was.
- [91:33]
B
Yeah. Next week. Next week. We're already at 90 minutes.
- [91:36]
A
Just tell me after the show.
- [91:38]
B
No, well, it'll be a. Actually, it's a. It's a good conversation, I think.
- [91:41]
A
Okay.
- [91:41]
B
It'll be. It'll be an interesting thing to talk about, so.
- [91:43]
A
All right, bet. All right. Well, that's been provoked. Everybody go buy my books@Amazon.com here. This is him. Enough already. About the Middle east and provoked about the Cold War with Russia there. I need to sell them so that I can make money. And also, I wrote them so that you would know all the things inside them. And then, of course, extremely importantly, William Van Wagenen. Creative chaos. This guy has put such hard work into this. I mean, literally, he was kidnapped by Al Qaeda in Syria. And that's not made up. That's a real thing. Like, this guy is a badass. He's one of my best guys at the Institute. This book is brand new out and there is no believe me, dude, I read. I don't know, I read a lot of books about 010 or something about the Syrian war. And this is by far the best and the real story of why that whole damn thing was America and our allies fault, et cetera.
- [92:37]
B
Dude, you can't buy journalistic street cred like getting kidnapped by Al Qaeda.
- [92:41]
A
That's exactly right. And yet, oh, William Van Wagon. And he don't have to embellish. He speaks very softly. I'll go ahead and speak for him, man. He deserves the credit. He deserves the. The support in the read for his great journalist. So that's that creative chaos. And that's it for provoked. And thank you very much, Daryl, and it's good to be with you. As always. And we'll see you next week.
- [93:03]
B
Later, everybody. It.