#2500 - Scott Horton

Thank you. Right now. Yeah. The Joe Rogan experience. My day's your rogue. Sound okay. Check, check, check. This is my normal complaint volume. One of those one ear on, one year off guys? Yeah, my right ear hurts a lot from years of this. And so I usually just leave it off. There's a volume adjuster. You sound good. But no, it's just I have a pain in my right ear so I try not to antagonize it. And thank you very much for the gift. And uh like I was saying media. uses a pipe now because of you.

I love that guy. Best. He's so funny, dude. He comes into the room, he just blows the room away. And he's a giant dude, so he like l hovers over you like, Oh, you didn't know? You don't know about this? And then he just hits you with fifteen conspiracies in a row, rapid fire with So good. Yeah, with no breaks in between them. So uh thanks for doing this, man. Um Yeah, thanks for. We have uh great mutual friend and Dave Smith. He recommends you highly. So I'm glad we could finally do this.

I wish there was more going on in the world right now we could talk about though. Just have to go back over to Vietnam or something, you know? Yeah, some the old stuff back when we didn't know any better. Yeah. It's uh kind of a mess. Yeah. Um I've seen you argue on television like a thousand times. Do you enjoy the like that Pierce Morgan type chaos? No. Yeah.

In fact I just got back from England. I got invited to do the Oxford debate, which I lost on Ukraine. Um but then I invited myself on Pierce Morgan Live as long as I was in town. When you say you lost a debate, is that because the people voted that were in the audience? Yeah. All those people with Ukraine flags?

Well, they didn't have Ukraine flags that time. I think someone showed a old picture or something. But yeah, same crowd. So what happened was yeah, when they leave they either leave through the yes door or the no door. And the yeses had it, which was unbelievable to me, but uh not that I did my very best job.

Well, but on on Pierce Morgan, I was trying to get myself just a interview so I could just talk to him about some things and instead they just prefer that format where you gotta mix it up with a guy, which I can do that too, you know. Yeah, the interview thing is way better. The the thing that he does though is really good for engagement.

He's very smart. Yeah. Like Pierce has done he's mastered it. He's taken like the Jerry Springer type format and thrown it into the world of politics and and any other social issue that's going on. Yeah. But it is too like um years ago the guy from antiwar dot com can't be on T V. Mm-hmm. But we can be on his show, he doesn't care, he's cool with it. I mean I guess same thing here.

That's is a big change from how things used to be. We just had this whole separate conversation going on below the higher one where he has reach, you know, up and down the chain I Is he on T V T V or is it just He just has massive. Yeah, massive. So it counts, I guess. T V T V is actually a hindrance now'cause the only p way people watch T V T V is clips that someone takes and puts on X or YouTube. That's it.

Or they just see it accidentally, it's just on, it happens to be on when they're in the room or whatever. What a fucking dying market. Like imagine if you're in broadcast television right now and you're just thinking, like, where am I what am I doing? Yeah. Like this is a bad format. You have to break for commercials every seven minutes. No conversation could ever get in a depth.

There's executives in your ear telling you what to say and what not to say. They'll edit out anything that they think is like controversial that's gonna mu fuck with their sponsors or fuck with the government or fuck with whatever their narrative is. It's just everything's changed. When I first started doing podcasting, it was the archives of the interviews for my radio show and it was so important to me that I'm on the radio'cause that's real legitimacy. That means

Somebody hired you, somebody thought you were good enough to be there, whereas podcasting any jerk can do from his basement and it just doesn't count. And then that just became not true and I kinda clung on to my radio show actually gave up my last radio show on KPF K in Los Angeles last year after I mean, where it didn't matter anymore anyway and podcasting has completely changed the entire market. Do you know how many people were listening to you actually on the radio before you quit?

I think it's like probably high thousands but not ten thousand, you know, KPF K in LA. Doesn't that crazy It's the most powerful F M transmitter west of the Mississippi River. It's grandfathered in at one hundred fifteen thousand watts, but it's but the thing is about it too, and it's always been like this, the

the programming on there is so inconsistent that you're listening to Latina Lesbians one hour and then you're listening to Crystal Worship and then you're listening to hard hitting news and then you're listening to like leftist union organizing or then just whatever you know what I mean? But it's just There's no like real rhyme or reason to it, so it's hard to follow, you know. What kind of a channel is it? Um left of the dial um at ninety point seven FM.

You know, comparable to like K U T type. It's not actual public radio, but it's no commercials, all donations. Wow. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, it's like um I don't know if co-op still exists here in Austin. Um uh cooperation. You must have made a lot of money from that. You must be so rich from doing that. Yeah. A leftist radio with no no ads at all, just donations. Boy, you must be raking it in.

No, they never did pay me. But I looked at it like they let me be on there for fourteen, fifteen years or something and um You know, like even when I was uh writing my book about the Russia Ukraine stuff, I would do my radio show once a week and I was able to still cover what was going on in Palestine and in a way that I felt like

You know, in a you know, something meaningful that I can do even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere. I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and antiwar dot com and I can interview them once a week and and then When I left KPFK I got some response. They're like, Oh no, where are you going? kind of thing. So I mean some people were caring for it at the time. Did you d let them know, Hey, I have a podcast, you could see'em all all these episodes would be archived.

Yeah, I kinda always let them know that. You know I've done six thousand two hundred something interviews since two thousand three on my various shows. So I always try to remind people to go check the archives if they want for the full dose of that stuff. Before we get into any of these subjects, like how did you get into this? Um

Well, you know, in the nineties I was you know, when I was younger I was much more of like a New World Order uh true through type. And um but then I basically dropped all that I grew out of How do you how do you define new world order truth or type?

Okay, well, I mean the New World Order conspiracy was that American foreign policy ultimately is about building a one world federal government under the United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States. The John Birch Society sort of idea of how and and I Uh I really liked those guys. Um and I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton and even to the into the beginning of W. Bush.

But then I could I finally realize with the way that the Iraq war was prosecuted that this is not about building up the UN Security Council. We got the National Security Council and Cheney and his neocons and they have their own separate policy that just disproves the that sort of new world order theory. And the American and and in fact so what H. W. Bush meant by that was just the era of the American Empire with no one to stop.

this time was all it was never to build up the UN as the world government. It was to build up Washington DC. And of course they've been failing and failing at trying to establish that ever since. Yeah. Um So... The th conspiracy was that the United Nations would would be the government of the entire earth and that all other governments would somehow or another give up their power to the United Nations for what reason?

'Cause they're all in on it together in secret, whatever. That's the point, is it ain't right. It's not true. many people would have to exactly too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have exact to somebody else then when they don't have to. Money Yeah. wealth. Yeah. So we don't want you know obviously it's the ultimate nightmare would be that you would have some kind of one world government and then

Some kind of totalitarian regime take power with a monopoly on nukes and a monopoly on police power. And you know, but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now. I mean that's just not gonna happen anytime soon at all. That's not what it's. You don't think there's any push towards centralizing things in that regard? Like wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?

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So yes, there there's always you know, the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can. At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America. But there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things. It's all about coercing and cajoling governments to go along. And which goes to show, I mean, this is the whole thing about when they talk about

You know what what H. W. Bush meant when he talked about the New World Order is the same thing that Joe Biden meant when he would say the liberal, rules-based, international order of just doing what America says. Right? That's what it is. You know, it's a pseudo empire. It's not exactly the ex the same kind of empires and, you know, colonialism that we've had in the past, but it's sort of a neocolonialism where if we can overthrow your government

with some money, then we'll do that. A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that. And if we have to if we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we think so. Yeah. And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz doctrine, you know, of various degrees, but this is A reference to right after the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz at that time was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.

And him and a couple other neocons, Skuder Libby and Zalme Khalilzad, they wrote up this document called the Defense Planning Guidance. And it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the post Cold War era and the post First Iraq War, Gulf War era. Um And what it said was we're going to be the most dominant power on every continent, anywhere in the world, and we're not even going to tolerate any other

nation or alliance or a group of nations anywhere to try to join together to balance against us. We will be dominant everywhere and we'll never let anyone get that far ahead or at least we're gonna try to construct an order where our power is essentially permanent and they don't even try it. And so that's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in the Middle East, expanding our footprint into Eastern Europe and of course, you know And it's

You know, it under the theory that if it's not us it'll be somebody else and it'll be so much worse, so we have to stay and dominate everything forever. But of course you can look at the debt and just see, Well, we can't afford it, so I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep doing Right. And if you look at Wolfowitz, if you see pulpa image of Paul Wolf. He looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the Wolf Witz Doctrine.

Right. And by the way, they did rewrite it because it was a scandal. It was leaked to the New York Times, and so they went back and rewrote it and they just said, Well, we'll bring our friends, you know, from the international institutions along to the case. There where your cursor is right below, right there. No, to the right of that. That one. Yeah, there you go. Look at that. That looks like that completely looks like the type of guy that would do something.

So listen, there's a there's a book about the neoconservatives by Jacob Hillbrun called They Knew They Were Right. Which is of course right? Like yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing, really, you know. That's hilarious. Try this. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob. And turn it. So um this was a the this one of the things that uh when Coleman Hughes and um our buddy Dave Smith got into it with was about whether you remember when

Um they brought up this seven countries thing that you know, and he was saying that there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it. He was told that we were gonna go into seven countries. But You know, I was talking to Dave about this the other day. He's like I y if you just look uh at the fact that we did everything on that list except Iran.

Every single one of'em took place, except Iran. Like he's like, I really want to go and do that debate again and I can't get Coleman to sit down with me. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. For people who are interested in the subject, you know, long term.

uh there's no mystery about the connection between the neoconservatives doctrines and then the activities that the W administration engaged in. Yeah. You know, subsequent I mean what happened was You have you know Andrew Coburn, the great journalist Andrew Coburn, says that the neoconservatives are a cross between the Israel lobby and the military industry.

The fighter bomber salesmen needed eggheads to justify their policies. And the neoconservatives wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony, and so took all the military industrial complex money to build their think tanks, to create their consensus, to build their policy.

You know, their own kind of thousand little council law on foreign relations is to get what they want. And then when, you know, the seven countries thing is So what we're talking about just to clarify is Wesley Clark was given well was He was on some television show. I forget what the show was. Do you remember? There's two different statements. One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now. That's right. Democracy now. And basically what he's talking about is um

You know, he says that a general or I'm sorry, a military officer of some rank told then retired but still with access, former general Wesley Clark, who had been the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe under Bill Clinton, did the Kosovo War. So very prominent four-star. And he said, The way he told the story was he told him, Hey, you know, we're g they're planning for a war with Iraq and he said, Iraq, why? And the guy said, I don't know. And then

The second part of the story was he came back a week later or something and the same guy said there's this memo that has the seven countries and they say they want to take'em all in five years. So they meaning the office of the Secretary of Defense. So that's Donald Rumsfeld, who is not a neoconservative. He's his own separate thing here, but he's the Secretary of Defense.

But all of his guys, all of his most important guys are neoconservatives. So the deputy secretary of defense is Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense for intelligence is Stephen Kimball. The deputy secretary of defense for policy is Douglas Feith. And then under him is Abram Scholsky and Bill Loody and all of these guys, uh Michael Rubin and others who were all working on this project to get us into Iraq. And this is the

Neoconservative network of power. You got Scooter Libby and um David Wormser would travel around from state to defense to the Vice President's office. Scooter Libby and John Hanna in the vice president's office. You got Zalme Khalil Zad and Elliot Abrams on the National Security Council, Robert Joseph and and uh Stephen Hadley and and uh Eric Edelman. All of these guys were already the network

Of guys who agreed with this policy going back through the 1990s. It was what they had founded the Project for a New American Century on. And so what they're saying is we should not tolerate any and remember the time in in the d they this was the stated doctrine. We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports terrorism. And supports terrorism can mean anything, right? Like Abu Nidal

died in Iraq before the war even started and was a washed up old terrorist from a previous day. But like that's good enough. Got Mujahideen call community've worked for us ever since, but at that time was a good enough excuse to invade Iraq. They would invoke that And so They made up that doctrine. The Mojahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan?

Well this is a particular sect of Mujahideen coups th who were Iranian communist cultists who were had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein and then were You know, he supported them. They had nothing to do with anti American terrorism at that time except, you know committing it when they had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution. By I mean, by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them. Yeah.

But they w in other words though, this wasn't Al Qaeda. This was not any real excuse. They would just invoke the ad doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off this list.

of all of these governments that they didn't like. And coincidentally and incidentally and very importantly, of course, is this was really, in many cases, Israel's list of where if it was say Colin Powell, which is what people thought they were voting for in the year two thousand by the way, well I don't know about this W Bush, but at least Colin Powell will be up there, we can trust him, they all said

If it had been up to him, we would have done a two-state solution in Palestine and solved that issue, and then we would have had probably the most limited of wars against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. And that would have been it. The rest of it would have been police uh and or special forces action. There would have been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war and he's responsible

But that was not his policy. That was the policy that came out of the Vice President's office and this neoconservative said. And it's really as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the clean break doctrine which David Wormser and Richard Pearl oh I I neglected to mention Richard Pearl and his friends on the Defence Policy Board. But um

Pearl and David Wormser had written up this policy paper called A Clean Break in nineteen ninety six, and they wrote it for Netanyahu when he was first prime minister the first time back then. And what it said was instead of going along with the Oslo peace process, and making a deal with the Palestinians. We should just forget all that and just h we'll have peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors. And so

But the problem of course is we and and of course meaning continue to devour Palestine, what's left the twenty two percent of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. But the problem is We have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is backed by Iran by way of Syria. So if you just picture the Middle East, you know, um if you want you can throw up a map uh and just kinda show there's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran.

through Syria and to Hezbollah, this Shiite militia in southern Lebanon. Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power. But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives. Uh they're as stupid as they are, arrogant y and certain in their policy. And they believed in this harebrained scheme assembly.

that the Jordanians and the Turks would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein less Iraq, and that even though it's a supermajority Shiite Arab country, Those Shiites, they just love being told what to do by either their original plan was the Hashemite king, the cousin of the king of Jordan, and then they threw that out and it was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first place.

An Iraqi exile you might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress. They said well we'll just make him the guy instead, which ended up not happening. But that was their plan and they said the new Shiite dominated Iraq

Will then the religious leaders in Iraq will then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel instead. And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil pipeline to Haifa Israel.

And they were sold this bill of goods and they really believed it. And so and you can find this on my website, Scott Horton.org. I have a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm, and then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States, a balance of power strategy for the Levant. They're both by David Wormsor, signed off on by Richard Pearl. And then they wrote a book where Wormsor wrote the book and Richard Pearl wrote the foreword. It's called Tyranny's Ally.

America's failure to remove Saddam, you say get that America's the ally of Saddam just because we won't launch a war to regime change there right in the top. And then based on the same harebrain scheme. And what's funny about this is this guy David Wormsor now tries to defend himself and he did a interview on a podcast not too long ago with this uh born again Christian about September eleventh.

And but he talked about this and he's like, Yeah, no, that's still right. They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell'em to do, those Shiites. They just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet. But if that was true as Dave Smith pointed out. Well, then how come you can't just call the King of Jordan right now and ask him to ask the Ayatollah to knock it off? Call him and ask

Have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time? Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad? before you can make this magic wish come true. And the whole thing is completely stupid. And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad

And but one, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them. And two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites, who are Sunnis in a whole separate line and are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan who used to rule Iraq back seventy years ago or something, but have no purchase there whatsoever. And of course what happened just real quick, what happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran. They didn't

Empowered Jordan and Turkey and America and Israel over the Iraqis, they just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before. When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the American. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's good to be passionate about something. Exploring what interests you adds more color to your life. It makes it more fulfilling in a way.

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That's ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Do you think that that is because of total incompetence and stupidity? Or do you think that it was a scam? And that they were they kind of knew this was gonna happen in the first place, but what they really wanted to do was sell a lot of weapons, sell a lot of war, make a ton of money. I mean the amount of money that was generated How much money did we spend on the Iraq war?

Oh I mean on Iraq alone at least five or seven trillion. I think it was probably ten trillion for the whole military war. Let's stop and think about that. Yeah. Five or ten trillion. Let's just say five. Let's be nice. Yeah. Where's that money going? How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that? How many defense contractors are involved in

you know, lobbyists, policy influencing change, influencing certain actions. And why would they do that? Why would they do that? Why would they push a hair brain screen? Is it because of stupidity or is it because th they don't give a fuck? what the excuse is let's get the party started. Let's get some missiles. Let's get some new planes. Yeah, okay, so... Boom. But okay, so we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced Trump this would be easy.

And then it wasn't. I think that's the same thing here. Iraq was supposed to be easy. And it was easy after all, right? You send the Marines to take Baghdad, they could take it. The the the third infantry division and the Marines were done regime changing the place in what, five weeks? But then it was a matter of occupying the place and the whole thing devolving into civil war and all that and I think

Well, I'll put it to you like this. In the clean break, we might be in coping with crumbling states, but it might even yeah, I think it's in coping with crumbling states, which is the same thing. Are we back? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Sorry about that. We had that stupid glitch again. Yeah, this is my right. Did we did we get a new computer? Birmingh. Yeah. Sorry. Can I can I ask you this?

On the stupidity or the plan. I think look, plan A is it be fine and then plan B is, well, at least we can make some money and and push this thing on and let both sides fight and weaken each other and these kinds of attitudes for sure. That's the point. Like did they genuinely think that this plan would work or was this plan just a feasible excuse to talk them into getting the party started? I I have one good uh argument in your favor there for sure, which would be Senator Joe Biden.

at the time insisted that we break Iraq into three Great space. Yeah, or right there with the worst. That that That we draw these lines and essentially enforce ethnic cleansing or sectarian cleansing and create three sort of mini states within Iraq. And, you know, Anthony Blinken was his right hand man then and I mean that's who these guys are. Is you know, very

very much Amer I mean uh Israel first, Israel instead types. Mhm. Um there is something before the clean break called the Oded Yanon plan. Uh from I believe nineteen eighty one, which is a real riot to read. It's a this Israeli strategist. And

The premise of the thing is that the Soviet Union is certain to conquer the entire planet. Talk about one world government, we're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow, and poor little Israel's gonna be all alone out here, so we have no choice. But to smash every near Arab state into as many warring tribal pieces as we possibly can, to weaken all of them relative to us as this desperate strategy. And of course the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the

But that was the premise for the thing. And this oh and here's what I was gonna say before the glitch was There is a statement in I think it's in coping with crumbling states. where he kinda says, Yeah, you know, these states are pretty artificial and without, you know, the Bothist construct in Iraq and Syria you would have these smaller tribal based type units so then You know, in other words, if you can't have a completely compliant Sock puppet there.

Might as well make'em fight and and destroy their countries. And that certainly happened in the case of Iraq, certainly happened in the case of Syria under Obama as well, where they just said, look, if we can't get the Al Qaeda guys to sack Damascus and get rid of Assad, at least we can just destroy the place.

Do you think there's a parallel in um when we first went into Iraq like Desert Storm, it was very easy, right? Relatively minimum loss of American lives and I think everybody got a little cocked. Oh yeah, that absolutely was part of that. Just like what we just saw with Venezuela. It was so easy and people asked me right after Venezuela, so what do you think this means for Iran? And I was like, bad news. Right? Like nobody thinks we're gonna go in there and kidnap the Ayatollah.

But if you can put eyeballs on them, you can put a bomb on sale. That's all you gotta do. And that didn't even help. Of course. That's like and is it true that whenever they've been negotiating with someone, Israel kills them? I think that happened at least a couple of times early in the war, yeah. I mean that was what they said. In fact was I forget if it was Vance or Trump who said, Well we we can't say I think it was Trump said we can't say who we're negotiating with'cause they'll get killed.

And like you're supposed to think that what like hardliners in Iran will kill them for trying to negotiate, but no, is this the Israelis will kill'em, you know. That is wild. Mm-hmm. One of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran i mean rarely talk about it. i is Ukraine. It's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness.

It's like they now just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing. And the uh Ukraine thing is fascinating too, because it was one of the few wars that I saw leftist support. It was very interesting. It was like kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from their profiles, then it was Ukraine flag. Right. Metzger had a joke about that. Invading Ukraine is bad. Can't we all agree on that? Like he really gives him like he like leans on. Can't can't we all agree that it's bad?

But it wasn't cure for COVID, you gotta admit, you know. Um and it was. They just switched from night to day on that and then yeah, the other thing and uh look a big part of that is Putin. is a great stand in for Trump. If you're a angry liberal something, you gotta be angry at something, then he represents now we're the right common turn and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force.

And so like if not that Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean, and they're anti right everything, that the Russians are the right. Not the the Ukrainians are the left, but whatever and Russia is obviously the uh much larger country and the one that invaded that crossed the border first here and and and they are the aggressor in the war so it as far as the narrative goes, it's easy to justify sticking up for those, you know, plucky defenders, which is, you know, I was actually surprised

But I shouldn't have been, right, when I went to Oxford and lost that debate. Was that was who was it wasn't th not that they were leftists, but they're liberals, you know, or progressive type, you know, college kids. And they're just totally on the side of Ukraine. And in fact the question of the debate was this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world. That's not even debatable. They've got H bombs.

Seven thousand of'em. We're not having a war with Russia. I don't even know what you're talking about. This and then I should have made my case better because they did not like me or my case at all. They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that. that they think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbass.

Which is just absurd, but I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough. I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place I would barely have to make my case. I just thought I'll just make a H bomb joke and that'll be the end of that. You know, I said, Haven't you ever seen threads? Have you ever seen threads?

It's like the British version of the day after, where Margaret Thatcher gets them nuked in a movie? Yeah, remember the day after from nineteen three with Steve Gutenberg? So this is the Russians' version from the same time frame. Oh. And um And I was like, haven't y'all seen threads? Which of course they haven't. There are a bunch of little cats. Well they probably think it's that social media app. Yeah, right.

The Instagram one? Yeah, exactly. Um we should talk about like how this whole thing got started in Ukraine.'Cause most Americans don't even realize that the United States kind of overthrew the government. Yeah, absolutely. Twice in ten years. Yeah. And in fact, you know, George Soros bragged that he had really influenced the vote toward the pro Russian candidate in nineteen ninety four.

Um th you know, back ten years before that. Uh he's he bragged about that in an interview with um the New Yorker, Connie Brook in the New Yorker magazine. Uh, he said, like real estate investment trusts, I make it happen with my investments, you know. Um and yeah. And Look, I mean Russia and Ukraine have a long and difficult history, but the long and the short of it for our purposes is that they wanted out at the end of the Soviet Union and in fact even embarrassingly for the Republicans

George Bush, senior and his government even intended the USSR to stay together. They wanted Not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to Belarus and Ukraine and at least some of the stands. And but what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet Union. The most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it. And it was actually in the aftermath of a hardline commic coup in August of nineteen ninety one which failed.

And so it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day, but then ended up doing his own coup basically and just destroying what was left of the USSR and and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out. So so why did the United States um get involved in Ukraine and why did they stage a coup?

Yeah. Well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right? And so back to the Wolfowitz Doctrine. The and and they talked about this in Rebuilding America's Defenses, the uh PNAC strategy document from the nineteen nineties, nineteen ninety-eight, I guess.

Um and I believe in in the defense plan and guidance of that he wrote in nineteen ninety two, uh, Wolfowitz, um, that we gotta expand NATO into Eastern Europe. And this is The debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not, but n but and in fact in the nineties there were some people who expo who opposed expansion altogether.

But then there was another school of thought that just said, Well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in but then they never did. And so they ended up expanding the military alliance up to Russia's border in a threatening manner and in a way that did not include them at all. And they had alternatives. like the Partnership for Peace and before that what we still have the OSCE, the Organization for Security or Yeah, Security and Cooperation in Europe, where

those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO, where NATO would be more political. This is what James Baker and uh under H. Shovey Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russia. So that we're gonna make NATO a political organization and we're gonna have as a security organization, it'll be the OSCE or the PFP, which will include you guys.

And which was not true. They're basically, you know, never really meant to live up to those promises. So, um It's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America had lost the Cold War from all the spending in the nineteen eighties, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe, and then they started moving into the Caribbean. And then they started overthrowing the government in Canada when they voted wrong.

Ukraine is Russia's Canada, right? Kazakhstan's their Mexico. Ukraine's their Canada. It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but it's same difference here. And so That narrative gets lost. Yes, it does. It's weird because it's so obvious. When you lay it out like that, and when you look at the agreement that was made at the fall of the Soviet Union that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of Russia. And yet they consistently did that.

Absolutely. And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second because people dispute that and say it's not true. And in fact, H. W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in in Malta in December of nineteen eighty-nine that if you let the Eastern European Warsaw pass.

states go, not the Soviet republics, but the Warsaw Pact states. If you let them go, we promise not to take advantage. Like full stop. That's it. A hundred percent. And then from there and and I cover all this in my book provoke. Um

And I I it's even overkill on the research'cause I wasn't sure where to stop. So it's all there for you. Where it wasn't just on February the ninth. It was all of these meetings over the course of months where the Americans, the British and especially the Germans, but with the Americans standing right there in many cases too.

affirmed to the Russians, the Soviets and then the Russians over and over again that we are not coming, we are not going to integrate Poland, we're not going to integrate Hungary, uh then Czechoslovakia, which hadn't split apart yet. Um And we have no intention of doing that. And that was, you know, came from Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmut Cole, the Chancellor, uh Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the prime ministers of England, and um

Douglas Heard, their foreign minister, and um even Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, and along with George Bush's government over and over again promised them that we're not going to do this. And then They just went ahead anyway. And the Clintons uh you know, went along with it too. And in fact In the in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it.

And by the way, so when all of the anybody in that era, whenever they on on on America's side or on the West side, whenever they oppose It was always for one reason. There was no like variety of reasons. It was always one reason. This is a unnecessary provocation against the Russians. These are our friends who just overthrew the communists for us.

So why would we pick a fight with them? Why would we disrespect them? We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the West, into Europe, into everything. And this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic. That was the one and only reason And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who had coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the nineteen forties.

and, you know, uh was a had been ambassador to Moscow. And he was the one who said, We gotta contain communism Well now he's saying, We should not be trying to contain Russia When they didn't do anything. And he said, in fact, in a interview in the New York Times in nineteen ninety eight, Kennan said, and he was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so-called foreign policy grave beers.

And he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he goes, I'll tell you exactly what's gonna happen here, okay? We're gonna expand NATO right up close to Russia and we're gonna get a negative reaction from the Russia. And then as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us that'll never happen, don't worry about it, will then say, Aha, see, that's how the Russians are. That's why we have to do this.

Which is exactly what they say now. See, the Russians are coming, that's why we need NATO more than ever before. When it was n building up NATO more than ever before was what created this antagonistic relationship in the first place. And then

You know, and I should specify I am from Austin, Texas. I don't have any connection to Russia whatsoever. I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever. This has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever. This is like whatever. I what can I say? I reluctantly admit That, and I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for war, but I'm saying that this is true, essentially, that in his declaration of war, when Putin said that

Basically we tried independence. We tried letting Ukraine be an independent country. But it turns out that no, it just became a colony of the United States of America. It's totally controlled by America. So we'll but we're just not going to stand for that. You know, so we're gonna intervene, we're gonna do what we have to do at least to mitigate that. If America's still gonna control Kiev, then at the very least we're gonna control the Donbass.

And the south uh southeastern coast here. And so I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm saying that was essentially true, that America had You know, almost like it was a a British colony just had total sock puppets in charge of that country. In fact there's a a clip that I quote extensively. It's one of the only block quotes of my book,'cause I got rid of almost all them for space.

But I I I think I have the block quote of Victoria Newland testifying. That's Robert Kagan's wife, um, very important neoconservative, worked in Dick Cheney's office in the W Bush years and everything, um, helped, you know, cause all of this problem. And she goes on and on describing The level of What can you call the infiltration essentially of the Ukrainian government by the United States?

working at every level of the Ukrainian government, throughout their police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch, throughout, you know, and and out in the provinces and everywhere.

We're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country. And you know, the the WikiLeaks are very uh beneficial on this story because they show where the Americans understand clearly by the Americans, I mean Washington, the State Department, whatever, these guys. They know good and well that Ukraine is deeply divided, p especially politically, on questions like whether they should join the NATO alliance or whether they'd rather be closer to Russia. Try to cut.

split the difference and stay out of it or anything like that. And so they say, Well so we just have to push then, we'll just have to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda campaigns and we'll just have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes and essentially

It's America, you know, the the book is called, sorry I keep mentioning the book, but it's how Washington provoked how Washington started the new cold war with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. I'm not blaming on Kiev, I'm blaming it on essentially Bush Sr. through Joe Biden. that they all of them had such a ham handed Russia policy that it led to this. It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed.

Or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day. When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible. Of course. But no one gave any background. No w no one really talked about and make made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet Union or Russia rather took over Canada. Right. You know, or was proxying Canada.

Yeah, exactly. Or if they went back at all, they would go, Well, you know, this all started when Russia seized Crimea. But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government and the so called revolution of dignity in february twenty fourteen. Uh so then It's a complicated mess. But Crimea happened after that, but they just wanna start history at places where it's the most convenient for them. Also

The control of Ukraine is also connected to resources, right? I mean there's immense amounts of minerals, natural gas, there's trillions of dollars of that stuff there. that and this also connects barisma to the Biden administration, right? Yes. Like I would not by anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people, for our betterment or anything like that. Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interest.

Right, Chevron wants that oil, and Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have investments in those grains. And so this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us.

You look at you know, whatever benefit they have to our GNP or GDP is negligible, certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that. These are all the free riders. These are, you know, the excuse makers for this kind of policy. But Essentially, I think what it really is is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible. You know, like there's this um

Uh really important Rand Corporation study that was published in twenty nineteen. So the Rand Corporation is a Pentagon sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara. They put it in California so it would be somehow a little bit less political, a little insulated from East Coast stuff and be able to come up with their thing. But that's that's basically who they are. So of all the think tanks they're like the most directly connected.

And they came up with this thing it's called extending Russia. And by extending Russia, they mean overextending them. Mean in other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves. Like during the Cold War. Right, exactly. So w what cause

Small trouble for them in as many places as we can, just to bog them down with expenses and commitments. So we wanna at that time the the pipeline wasn't complete yet, so we wanna intervene with sanctions, whatever we can to disrupt the Nord Stream pipeline. They said maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again, which they actually did in two thousand twenty. Um they had done it before in two thousand five and two thousand one, failed all three times. Um

Which if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right there. Man, you don't wanna succeed in a uh especially a bloody if it turned bloody a coup in Belarus. My God. Um but anyway, uh then they said we could increase uh weapons to the jihadists in Syria. We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan. we could increase support for the uh Ukrainian military.

And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying, do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off balance, to keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend, right? But then all throughout it They have all these disclaimers where they say, don't listen to us. If you do this, it'd be terrible. Like if you overthrow the government of Belarus. The Russians might just invade it immediately.

and station nuclear weapons there, to make the point, right? If we support the jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the Idlib province and sack Damascus and then we'd have an Al Qaeda government in Damascus, which is of course exactly what happened at the end of twenty four. They said we could increase support for the what was then the ongoing civil war that had broken out after the revolution in two thousand fourteen.

And we could increase support for the Ukrainian side of that or the Kiev side of that war. But then that could provoke the Russians into a full scale invasion of the country, which would of course be terrible for Belarus I mean for Ukraine and terrible for the United States. At a massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international standing and prestige, and of course. Untold chaos.

for the people of Ukraine. And so we better be real careful about pursuing these policies. And then I swear you look at how Biden ran things and it was like he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers. And they just went ahead and did all of these things. And in fact they were doing they were messing around. It it was actually the last year of Trump that they uh tried to overthrow Belarus.

Uh so that was independent of of Biden's wishes. That was already going on. And then they were messing around in Kazakhstan in January of twenty two, right on the eve of war, right when you might a hoped that the entire you know, pressure in Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from breaking out. What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin to try to prevent him from invading Ukraine as they're threatening to do?

and had were building up their forces in preparation for it. And then what do they do? They support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is that's the big one. Right on Russia's southern border there, out of all the stands. It's the most important one. Which is just madness. But and it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to when it comes to that is just

You know, if we can't overthrow Putin, we're gonna still weaken him, hem him in, surround him, agitate him and force him to make commitments. And of course, this is what this is why the war's been going on for four years. America could tell Kiev, under Biden or under Trump, that look you guys are just gonna have to compromise here, obviously. You've lost, you know, all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk and

you know, for at least half of Zaprosia and Kherson and so just make a deal, figure it out and and we're not supporting you anymore. Instead, what'd they say? Remember they said over and over again, we want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Russia might win the war. Or but no, we promise they won't. But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good. And in fact I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits and all these people would say

Uh and maybe they still say this. We're getting such a good bang for our buck in Ukraine. Cause just think about it. Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not. So all we gotta do is we just give'em money and then they go fight. And then sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian soldiers at all. Hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed, hundreds of thousands who of whom have been horri uh you know, horrifically maimed.

uh the a major part of this country completely destroyed. Huge segments of their population fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again, right? The total destabilization of their culture and society in every way.

And then but you can tune into Fox News or hell the Democrats too, talking about or maybe worse, that oh, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck because we're killing Russians. We're sending them home in body bags, we're sending them home in coffins, we're even killing their generals.

in the field, but none of our guys are dying. Heh heh heh. As though the Ukrainians don't matter at all. And that's the way they think of it. This is inflicting costs on the Russians. Joe Biden would say that over and over again. It's almost like the underpants gnomes thing with the first you steal the underpants, then question mark, question mark, question mark, and then profit. Not really sure.

Oh, in South Park, the poor I think it's butters, the underpants, gnomes are stealing's underwear, and they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work. And they don't really have it worked out what they're gonna do with the underpants, but they're sure they're gonna make a lot of money in the end. And that's the same kind of thing here where they skip the step about Uh well is this really weakening R uh Vladimir Putin's regime or maybe it's strengthening his regime? Is it

you know, increasing American power and influence in the region, or in fact we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves and we've done more than you know you could have imagined to push Russia towards China and toward the rest of Eurasia. Um You know, Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization to and to emphasize their turn to the East.

That seems to me to be a terrible mistake. You know, and I think part of it is part of the longer term Cold War with China too. And and there you you hear them talk about this, Joe, they'll say

You know, essentially Russia's friends with China. So there's two things we can do there. And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do would be just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China. Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that or he doesn't know how. Um And then the other side was no, lure Russia into Eastern Europe, bog them down so they're no use to China.

um you know, weaken their power, give inflict them uh on them this strategic defeat in Ukraine so that then they won't be as useful to China in our Cold War with them or worse. And which I think is stupid and didn't work. I think that was the the choice that Joe Biden made and I think it was totally wrong'cause it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China. And the Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened well, not that new, about twelve years ago.

that they open to China and they keep adding to it. So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want and the Chinese'll burn every hydrocarbon you got, so You know, they really don't need Europe. Uh you know, Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe. Uh totally unnecessarily, but in a way that's not a little bit more than a little Didn't really Hurt Russia.

And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this? This was the di to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe? Yeah, in fact more specifically, right, it was To to make this break between to solidify the break between Germany and Russia.

American and Russian interests in Europe and then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff, all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff. They closed down all their nuclear in Germany and then the idea was don't worry, we're gonna import all this clean burning uh C H four from the uh Russians. And then but to the Americans

This is the worst thing that could happen would be an alliance or this strengthening any any part of a any strengthening relationship or or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians. Because with um uh you know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials and both of their at least potential military strength, that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep everybody else out.

And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there. And you know, there's um Here in Austin there's that sort of uh corporate CIA strat run by this guy George Friedman. What is it? Stratfor it stands for strategic forecasting. They do dirty tricks. Yeah, it's here in Austin. Oh no. They they do some dirty tricks, but I think they mostly like uh do like

You know, pseudo CIA briefings for corporations and stuff, let them know what's going on in the world, that kind of thing. Mostly. Their emails got leaked on uh wikiLeaks.org. uh years ago and you know, they're involved they're they're close with some of these color coded revolutionaries. And anyway, I don't know them or anything but

their leader is a guy named George Friedman. And I'll give him credit, I know he opposed Iraq War II in two thousand three'cause I heard him on the radio back then. But um I mean I'm not vouching for the guy as like uh a good guy or whatever, but just to say he's sort of like a realist

school foreign policy analyst type. Mm-hmm. Um, not too ideological or anything like that. And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words, primordial fear. This is the primordial fear of American You know, imperial policy planners is that you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russian

And so anything that we can do to prevent that we'll do. Now I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at least the support of the United States. Seymour Hirsch has it that it was American military guys.

Um, which I think I don't know. And then there's a whole cover story about this yacht and then there's six different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it was used and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever and it's all meant to confuse and But this episode is brought to you by Visible.

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He said that it was Um minors based out of Pensacola, Florida, meaning not pickaxe minors or children, but meaning divers that go down and disable sea mines. That that was their expertise. Those were the guys that they sent to do it. And that was in I think he did that in the London Review of Books or something like that. Is is that disputed? Yeah, and and including by people who blame the Ukrainians and people who blame

I don't know, like Polish or I guess Polish uh groups or whatever. They had all these different investigations that all led different directions. I know Jeremy I think Jeremy Skahill had one version of it. And then James Bamford, who I really respect. He's the guy that wrote all the books about the National Security Agency over the years. Um

And he had it that it was the Ukrainians and they used robots to do it. And he's, you know, sussed that out through documents and stuff and decided that that must have been what it I don't know. There's there's six different versions of it and I have I'm not choosing which is the favorite here but I think it's

Clearly was in America's interest. And and of course, Joe Biden and Victoria Newland have both sort of cheekily said, We're not going to let this proceed. And if they do, we'll we will do whatever it takes to stop it. And so evident And you could see how they would have to do that. consider that to be you know what they would be trying to prevent would be this Strengthened relationship between Germany and

ocean. Well eventually they capped it, but it I think it was the biggest release of methane into the atmosphere ever. It was a huge thing. It was a massive if you were a liberal, progressive, democrat, environmentalist type That oughta be like the most offensive thing you ever heard of. Yeah, it's way worse than cow burps. Worried about cow burp. Yeah, that's centuries worth of cowbursts man. Centuries worth.

Jesus. So the Kazakhstan Kazakhstan thing I'd never heard of. I'd I I hadn't heard a peep about that. I had no idea that we were meddling in Kazakh. Yeah, it was one of those where Much like what just happened in Iran in January where there's uh protest over some economic policy. I think in that case they had cut the gas ration or something like that. And

And it's you know, it's a country that's divided by ethnicity. Those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever. So you have sort of the ruling caste and the people on the outs and whatever. So you had a big protest movement and then all of a sudden there's armed gangs of guys Killing cops, seizing police stations, trying to seize airports and and this kind of thing. And um and then what happened was the Russians invaded. They sent regular troops.

across they were asked by the government there to come and intervene. And they sent troops, they crushed the insurrection. And then it was funny'cause Anthony Blinken said, Oh, there's a lesson. When the Russians come, they don't ever want to leave and then the next day they turn around and left. And then they invaded Ukraine. They haven't left there since. But um So who were these insurrections? I don't know.

I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or something, you know? I don't know. Yeah, them too. Yeah. And so this whole thing was just what you were saying earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible, spend as much money as possible, cause as many problems in as many places. In fact, the same George Friedman from Stratford, I think it's in that same speech or maybe a different uh one where he says

Yeah, when when Iran is doing a little bit better, you hit them. When Russia's doing better, you hit them. When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them. You do whatever you can to always be effing with everybody all the time.

in order to, you know, that's how to press your advantage. Which I think is totally just short sighted. It's high time preference, you know, sort of government thinking, right? That like, well if if we can get away with this now, we should, without really thinking about the long term consequence. In fact,

That was one of the um the things that failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up that I thought was crucial that is in my book, is uh Strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton's guy who a g originally opposed NATO expansion and then later championed it. In twenty eighteen, when it was the middle of the war, uh the the civil war, so called, with America supporting Kiev and the Russians supporting the so called rebels on the other side.

Um a New York Times reporter named Keith Gesson went and interviewed Strobe Talbot. And It just kinda went without saying that like clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO expansion has sorta blown up and caused all these problems, you know, what are we gonna do? And and what do you think now, pal? I forgot exactly where you phrase it, but it's sort of, you know, what do you have to say for yourself, stroke?

And so Strobe Talbot says, Well listen, he goes, when you're in power, you have one job, and that is to pursue your nation's national interest. And if you don't do that, well then you won't be in power very long. So that was what we had to do. But then he says Now, maybe should we have had a higher, wiser conception of our national interests?

Maybe. In other words, at the time what they were thinking is we want Lockheed dollars and we want Polish votes for nineteen ninety-six. Illinois crucial swing state, right? So or was, I don't know. Uh That's why we gotta do this,'cause it's in America's national interest that Bill Clinton get reelected and we all get to keep our jobs.

So we're gonna we're gonna make these promises to these people and pursue this policy for our narrow interests as rulers of the empire. But then If he had had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interests, he might have thought, Wow, are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century? And maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important than America continuing to get along with the Russians.

And again, when the communists are long gone. So whatever problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't evangelical Marxism at the point of a rifle, right? I mean, this is just whatever it is, we can deal with it. And um And so no, they chose the lower, dumber conception of America's national interest instead of the higher, wiser one. And they blew it, you know.

Is there uh anyone that's ever made the argument to you l like where you've had these debates where you have a utopian perspective on international relations and that this libertarian ideology of like staying out of people's business, staying out of the th what what you'll do if you don't fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them stretched out, they'll just amass more and more power and then they'll start to try to take over

what was traditionally the Soviet Union. What was originally the Soviet Union? Yeah, you know... It it just so happens, right, that America never leaves anybody alone, so we just don't have a controlled experiment. Right. We're constantly provoking and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction. And it's just like when we talk about terrorism.

Uh again, I'm not in any way justifying it, but I'm just saying we have so much intervention preceding the terrorism, you have to be able to attribute that. Yes. But now so how would things be otherwise, for example, if H. W. Bush had just said, Okay, well We won the Cold War, Pat Buchanan's right, let's just come home.

and had brought the Empire home from Europe. Then what would happen is the Germans would have reunified and then they would have joined into a new European Union army with the British and the French and probably the Poles and then it would have been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller countries in their region, and hopefully strike a long term security partnership with the new red, white and blue Republican Russians. And

You know, if people wanna say but and in fact the other side in that debate at Oxford, Daniel Fried said, Yeah, but it was Poland wanted to join our alliance. It's not like we made them, they wanted to. But the thing is, yes. They might have reason to fear Russia based on old things. But the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence? It's it's too far from here and it's something that we're no good at. We only cause problems.

And something that's not a good thing. the other European states who are all Western Christian capitalist democracies and friends of ours that they can all work together and solve on their own. I mean when Germany reunified, it's not like the Commies were taken over. It was the West that was dominant in the new Germany, right? These are our pals. There's no reason in the world that m that America should ha had to have well, for example, like a a big park.

part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power between America and Germany over who's gonna be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. We should just let the Germans have it. I mean not have it and kill everybody or whatever, but god it could hardly have been worse than what America helped to cause there by trying to compete with the Germans for dominance in a land that's quite literally six thousand miles from here.

But is the fear uh from the American side that if you let other countries consolidate power, if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keeping them spread out like we're doing with Russia? Yeah. That they'll eventually get stronger and then they'll become a real problem. And then you keep'em weak, keep them distracted, keep them engaged in this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up. Yeah. And that keeps them down.

When it was the Cold War against the Commie Soviet Union, I was a kid and it's I'm not a expert on all of that history. I think there were real questions about the dangers of world communism at that time where at least I'd be willing to hear you out. But since the end of the Cold War No, there's just no justification for it because as Bill Hicks would say, right? Like just spin the globe, man. There's no countries out there, right? Every power in Europe is our friend.

And no threat to us and mean us no harm whatsoever. There are no powers in in Egypt I mean pardon me in Africa that count at all except for Egypt, which is our friend. India will be a power in a hundred years from now. Uh China is a rising power, but we've been their friends for fifty years. Even when they were still communists, Nixon went and made friends with them in the early nineteen seventies. And then the Soviet Union. Yeah.

But aren't they constantly infiltrating our d different b universities and I ain't endorsing that. You can keep'em out, but But Chinese infiltration is kind of crazy, like what they're what they're doing in America. It's like if you're saying they're our friends, you know, the mayor of Arcadia just cut I saw that. Yeah, she was a communist spy. She's a fucking mayor of a city in California.

I'm putting that on the FBI counterintelligence division. That should have never been allowed to happen in the first place. Um and no, I don't mean that they're totally benign, but Look, I worst case scenario, China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates Taiwan.

That doesn't mean they're gonna invade Korea. It doesn't mean they're gonna invade Japan or Australia or or have the appetite to want to do that. I think China's already a pretty overextended empire and it's very poor in many parts of it. And they have Something is it fourteen or fifteen neighbors that they gotta deal with already. You know, their their greatest ambition is to build this um

uh you know what uh highway and and and fiber optics and whatever from Shanghai to Lisbon. Right? This what do they call it the why am I forgetting the name of the damn thing? The the great uh the the great new highway they're trying to build all the way across Eurasia. Um

They can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. They gotta cut through Tajikistan. You know, these are wild lands. They gotta make deals the whole way across if they're gonna do that. If you know, they They're and and if you look at the way they're building their empire so far, it's all just briefcases.

you know right. Government backed businesses making deals and buying up resources and stuff. But I I I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden going, Yeah, that's what I want to do for my country, is blow my own brains out, trying to take over the whole rest of the planet Earth. Well and you know you know, just to point to what you're saying is like China's not They're not. They're not doing what we're doing.

I'm not saying they're nice guys or whatever, but they don't rule us and they're no threat to North America. They have no need to pick up. People say, Oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan. Well then move'em to Austin. We've had advanced micro devices here for thirty years or whatever, thirty five years. Maybe more than that. They can build that stuff here.

They can but they've tried, it's very difficult. The thing about what they've got going on in Taiwan, the reason why Taiwan is the head of it is that they're far more advanced than anybody else in the world at doing it. Bring them. Yeah, you would have to you d it that's a lot. I thought you were gonna say it was something special about the salt water over there or something.

No, no, no, no. They're just way ahead of everybody else. I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a a chip manufacturing plant in Texas? And I think their yields were so poor. I I don't know what the actual story with that is. So I'm speaking way over my pay scale here. But I think what it is is you have to have like certain tolerances when you're creating these chips and they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve.

w despite spending an enormous amount of money. So it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you just crank out chips. Like apparently these chips are super complicated to make. Sure. Not worth having a war over. No, not worth har I'm not saying it's worth hearting on but I'm just saying that this idea just move him to Austin. I don't think it's that easy. I think chip manufacturing is one of the most t complex technological challenges in twenty twenty six.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean we've had um Yeah, AMD does here, but I'm pretty sure that that um them and Samsung and others have, you know, all the facilities they need here to I don't know. Or they should be able to. They sh they maybe could with enough resources and time and maybe stole all the fucking eggheads from Taiwan and bring them over here, all the geniuses that have figured out how to make these chips.

Maybe. Maybe they wouldn't let'em. But what i what happened with the Samsung chip factory? It's never been fully open and it's not done yet. Oh, okay. But what was there was Used to be a rent a cop at some pretty fancy factories here, you know, back twenty five years ago. Oh yeah? What kind of factories? I think it would have been AMD or And or Samsung. Some pretty fancy like uh chip fabrication and stuff like that.

And I did have a job being a rent a cop'cause these skate parking garages at work and do my homework at work. It was great. Yeah, easy job for the most part, right? Just free time. Um let's ask perplexity, why are all the why are so many chip manufacturers in Taiwan? 'Cause I'm pretty sure there's something about the advancements that they've made in chip manufacturing that no one's been able to replicate.

Otherwise it doesn't make sense that China wouldn't just make their own. Yeah. Like they're right there. I read this thing not long ago about how like with the China's AI stuff They figured out how to write their program where they need much less computing power to do the same kind of effort in the way that they did it. So they just found their own work around. You know what I mean?

Well they also there's a lot of espionage going on too. Yeah, probably. Um a lot of the world's chip manufacturers is in Taiwan because the island deliberately built a specialized ecosystem around content. contract chip fabrication foundries then compounded that early lead with huge investment, dense clustering of suppro suppliers and talent, and strong government support over several decades.

So early strategic bet on manufacturing. Starting in the nineteen eighties, Taiwan chose to focus on precision manufacturing, fabricating chips for others instead of trying to build its own big consumer tech brand. And then their dominance and scale. Yeah. Founded in eighty seven, now the world's leading contract, T S M C the leading contract chip manufacturer, produces over half of the world's advanced semiconductors and more than ninety percent of the most cutting edge nodes.

Because of advanced fabs, uh because advanced fabs cost tens of billions of dollars and must run near full capacity to be profitable, only a few players can keep up, and Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out. See, that's what I'm talking about. Like the uh I don't think it's easy. I mean the thing is at the same time. Well why not? I don't know. Huh. Yeah, I mean when it comes to capital

So we got Samsung and Dell and AMD and IBM here. I mean seems like they can invest their own money and build their own whatever they need to, right? Just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved in keeping it running. Like I think there's so I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of expertise. Not that I have any, but that they're so far ahead.

that this process that they bet on early on, that they've got their manufacturing to this point where they've already invested this enormous amount of money and the money it then they have to keep them running constantly. I don't I don't I don't think it's simple. I don't think it's like car menu. And then by no customers you mean that essentially everybody who needs these chips is already getting them from Taiwan. There's not much more demand than that.

Well not necessarily. It could just mean that they already have contracts, that they don't need them because they've already, you know, made commitments to Taiwan shipment. On the other hand if if Beijing is a military threat to Taiwan And these people would rather not be under the rule of Beijing and the Communist Party, then there's a pretty big incentive for them to move to Texas.

There is but again what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step. I think I don't think it's just like move here. I think it's an enormous investment in cap. Like beyond normal things and then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment and it's very difficult. And again, if Samsung doesn't have any If right now they don't have any customers. Didn't they have an issue with yields though? Wasn't there an issue with uh chips being made to standard?

I think there was something else on top of that. They're trying to get to two nanometer production. Rumor. Hm. Well the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year. Let's just cut all that. Then we'll have plenty of capital freed up to close your microchips. Yeah. Yeah. Hey look, uh one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire's good for nothing anyway.

Right. We have H bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us, but America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt, right? That whole thing was a hollow bluff and the Iranians just called it. And we lost. I mean, our bases have been evacuated. They keep coming out. How they were covering up. the satellite photos. They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos and you could get'em online or whatever other countries had'em.

And then you've had the New York Times and I hate to cite CNN, but it was a well sourced story where they got all these great satellite photos and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched eighteen bases. From Irbal in northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman and and took out all radar stations and pitted our runways, hit refueling tankers and AWAX radar planes and took out the entire not the entire, but a huge percentage of the

uh overlapping radars for the missile defense systems over there. Left our allies in Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain wide open. Uh you know, our our naval uh fifth fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline. I read this thing said the Qataris our our main airbase in the Middle East, the headquarters of Central Command and our main air base at Qatar.

The Qataris made a deal with Iran. Please stop hitting us. And they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of Qatar, our main airbase during that war. And so as Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said, well what good is a military base that you can't fight a war from?

You know, it's just like that um I know you've seen this, right? That um that old meme that says, Well if Iran doesn't want trouble with us, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases and it has all the the map of all our bases in the region? But the thing is What Donald Trump I guess didn't understand was that Those were a tripwire that were essentially we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war. Those bases were preventing war.

Because it should have been out of the question that we would attack Iran'cause all those bases would be up for grabs against them. So how do how were they so poorly defended? That's what I don't understand. Like how is it so easy for Iran to attack these bases? And did they have any foreknowledge of this? Did they understand

Yeah, so why they were so poorly defended, that's gotta be political decision making among the brass, right? About like, well, we don't wanna admit that we need these fortifications in the first place, maybe, or just The other general said don't so we don't want to fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what No, sorry. It's not a gross underestimate. It can't be because listen, I'll tell you, man, um, in January of two thousand and seven.

The Chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon and they told him, Look, we'll do your rock surge where we increase the war in Iraq. But we really don't want to go to Iraq.

And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance or at least we won't have it. That I I shouldn't have said that. I was overstating it. We will not have escalation dominance there. And that means that, you know, is a Pentagon term for if we're gonna get into a fight

We don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage of that conflict. And in the case of say invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right? As Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable. In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all, A short and medium range missile force. that we cannot defend.

Now we can defend from it some. We have our Patriot missiles and our other type of interceptors, but they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can protect from. And we had at that time A h more than a hundred thousand guys in Iraq, fifty thousand in Afghanistan, and then plus still, as we still do. Um tens of thousands. Air Force and Army in Kuwait, Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain, uh, I guess.

Air Force and Army in in UAE and I didn't know in Oman, but yeah, of course in Oman they had, you know, some naval presence there as well. So And they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs, and then the Strait of Hormoose will also be at risk. And in fact, It's true. Um at antiwar dot com you can find in the archives there, I wrote an article in August of two thousand and five. called Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran? And I say in there, they can close the strait.

And they can inflict economic damage, drive the cost of a barrel of oil up t above two hundred dollars a barrel and all of that. So there were people a lot smarter than me who were writing about that at the time that I was interviewing on my show at the time who were just saying, Look We can start a war with Iran, but we don't really have a good way to finish one. And so and we talk all about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in a sec too, but point being that

You want to do a regime change? As you just said, you kill the Ayatollah, it doesn't do any good. They have a new Ayatollah. You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the Ayatollah, but then they'll just appoint a new ruling council. So then you can dump in the 82nd Airborne Division, but they can't occupy and control Tehran. There's no good land route to invade the country. They have two massive mountain ranges.

And one of the most preposterous narratives was like getting the people to ride. Oh yeah. We're gonna arm up some Kurds. Yeah. Well not just the Kurds. They were trying to get d just the Iranian civilians. Yeah. With no arms.

Yep, and they'll talk about, you know, arming the Kurds and arming the Balukies when it I don't know if there are other factions, but that seems to be a direct reference to groups like Jundala, who the Obama and the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed about fifteen years ago, who were bin Ladenite head chopper, suicide bomber guys.

They're, you know, no different from Al Qaeda or ISIS. And they you know, John Bolton on Pierce Morgan uh that the same show that I was on was saying, Yeah, we could arm up the balukis and stuff is crazy. I I actually wrote in that article at that time, the neocons daydream that if we just start the war

then the people will rise up and create a new pro American government there. But that's crazy to bet on that. There's no reason to believe that. And so and there's video of me in 2010 warning the same thing and I'm not claiming any great insight. I didn't go to college, man. I just

you know, I'm interested in this stuff and I I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about it at the time and it was just complete consensus. Everybody knew they can reach out and and boy, over twenty years I must have said this a thousand times. They can not only hit all of our uh military stuff in Iraq and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar et cetera, Saudi et cetera, but a trillion dollars of economic targets all up and down that

Which is exactly what they did. They hit refineries, they hit chemical plants, they hit not just at the Strait of Hormuz, they hit American oil tankers up near Kuwait just to show that like we pwned this entire thing now. So back to my original point when I got on this tangent was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt. The Donald Trump just blew his big bluff. that we're the big player in the region. We're actually not in the region. We're here.

the region is over there and the entire, you know, threat of our dominance over there is basically coal. I mean, obviously we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even nukes and all that, but Can the leaders in Bahrain in Qatar and UAE and Saudi rely on America to defend them? Right. Or they gonna come up with their own different policy now? Haven't we also used up like two thirds of our Patriot missiles?

supply. Oh yes. I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot. And they they're admitting now that the Iranians still have 70, 75 percent of all their missiles and launchers. All that stuff about we decimated everything they had was all just burst. Who's admitting that? Government officials talking to the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last three days. Yeah. Oh, I hadn't...

Seventy, seventy five percent. They got all their launchers, all their missiles. They they dug out missiles that had been buried. They refurbished some and finished some that it were on the assembly line. That was what they told the post. They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went ahead and restarted up again. And don't they have some crazy like missile elevator system where they're they're buried deep underground and

I don't know how it works exactly, but yeah, they and and even they have apparently like the factories are buried deep underground as well and just dispersed throughout the country. And so They've been preparing for something like this for a long time. And so these bases that we had, are all of them non functional? All the ones that have been hit? I don't think so.

Um I don't know the exact extent of that, but as far as their usefulness over the long term, they might as well have just been abandoned at this point. Let's uh see like what the conventional news says. New York Times and CNN have two big profiles on this. I don't know off the top of my head better stuff than that. The CNN w one oh and NBC also had had one within the the CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks. The New York Times is about six weeks old.

One of the things that disturbed me to no end, we talked about this a couple of times in the podcast, was um there was uh one of the guys who was over there who uh attended a uh a briefing. And they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon and that Trump was anointed by Jesus Christ and that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return. And that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debrief.

The whoever this officer was that was tell us talking about this said that the guy had a giant smile on his face when he was telling this, which made it all the more creepy. Oh good, the end of the world. Nobody wants to die alone, right, Joe? But they were saying that that there's a faction in the military that is these religious fundamentalists that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus' return.

So look there's a guy named um Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify Iran's strike. So there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein. This is but look look at that. Let's just go over this real quick because this is so crazy. Cause this go up to the top, please. Right there. So no with the top. So it's where it says who it was. So it's a military commander.

uh told a group of non commissioned officers that President Donald Trump, anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth. And then that's that's Mikey Weinstein right there, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He was I believe he was an Air Force officer, maybe he was an army officer.

And then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military. And I it's been a long time since I spoke to him, but he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of the Air Force. The highest ranks of the Air Force.

They really believe this stuff. It is time to bring on the apocalypse, and it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nukes so that they can use them according to the divine plan and this kind of thing. It is scary stuff. need to know this. Uh go back to that please'cause there's one quote that that's below that. This is uh

This is so fascinating. He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan, and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of Revelation. Referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Can you imagine if you're over there you already think the war is sketchy? Like why the fuck are we doing this? And then this guy comes down, you're like, oh my god, we're cooked.

This is a big part of how they justified Iraq. I mean there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible. Get it? Middle East, year two thousand sorta ish. such a massive crash in evangelical support for Israel and these kind of foreign policies now is because people just don't believe that anymore because

That's what the Left Behind series at Walmart said twenty five years ago and then it never happened. It didn't come true. Speaking of the one world government and all this stuff. Where's Satan? Where's the deal? Instead it's just Obama and Trump, you know. So how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing?'Cause J.D. Vance very against it, uh a lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it. I think that's a good thing. Netanyahu essentially, you know, let's talk about

four dimensional chess and whatever. I think what it is is it's just checkers, right? Is Netanyahu goes, listen. For Iran for Iran to have a civilian nuclear program. Come on, that's just cover for really a weapons program. It's just a stage in a weapons program. We know eventually they're gonna make nukes and then they're gonna attack Israel with'em. And we also know that um

And and you already said that you're not gonna let'em have nukes. Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes. Same difference. And you already agreed to that, right? Right. Okay. Well, and they won't give up enrichment. So what do we do? We gotta attack. It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapons scare in Syria there that once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone and now like we got you on this technicality. Double jump.

Ye you already agreed with the stupid things I said, and so now you have to do the thing that I said. And then Trump goes, Okay. And then plus on top of that, just the flattery. And like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing. Back when he was on Twitter in his first term, I used to tweet at him and I would say Wealth, strength, gold. Get out of Afghanistan.

Height, power and what like just tell him like things that he likes, right? With get out of Afghanistan in the middle. And so this is what Netanyahu does is he goes, listen You're greater than Abraham Lincoln. You're greater than George Washington. You're a world historical figure. You're sure to go to heaven now.

You're like if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in nineteen thirty five and prevented that whole thing from ever happening. Well you're just Guessing that this is how he talked to her. Kinda but Wouldn't it be awesome? Oh, it would. It would be great. But he repeats so much of it back that I think that like, yeah, you could pretty much tell. This is what they're saying to him. And then this is what he's responding is. Obama wasn't man enough to do it.

George Bush wasn't man enough to do it. He knows what has to be done, he's willing to do it, and he's ill informed enough to believe. That it makes any sense that if you just bomb their nuclear program that somehow it'll go away. If you just hit'em hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say. It doesn't work like that. It oftentimes does not work like that. And with these guys, they've made it clear.

that we're not making bombs, but we absolutely reserve our right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and we will suffer your airstrikes. We will not give up. That right, and so that's it. And and they've been completely clear about the that this entire time. But Netanyahu convinced them. Right. This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormuz was not at risk.

Because Netanyahu convinced him once we hit him, once he killed Ayatollah, the whole thing's gonna fall apart. There'll be no one too close to Strait of Horror Moose, because we'll have already won by then. What do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons? probably um the other States in the region will. You know, Darryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show provoked, and I know a good uh friend of yours. Love Daryl. He he is so great. That guy gets boy, does he get fucking misreaded?

Oh he does it. Oh my god. Heroic guy, man. Um Very fucking smart and if you Listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. Anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's anti Semitic is fucking crazy. Yeah, no. You're crazy. All that stuff is just a little bit more. Balance. Out of context. It's so balanced and so objective and you know, his perspective on it. And just people take that one thing that he said uh about um uh

a Churchill. The thing that he said about Churchill being the real villain. He's being provocative. Right. And what he's trying to say is that Churchill, by imposing those embargoes, essentially was starving and was was keeping resources from getting to Germany and he forced Hitler's hand to do what he did.

It's not excusing him. It's not like saying Hitler wasn't a fucking evil cunt. It's not it is not like saying he e Hitler's a good guy, but Winston Churchill's the bad guy. Somebody was saying it all. But he was saying Winston Churchill Also a bad guy. Right. Also wanted to attack Soviet Union right after they were done with the war. And he was actually he even introduced the subject by saying to Tucker that, you know, I like to pick on my friend Jocko, who's very waspy.

And I like to yeah pick on him and joke with him that, you know, Churchill was the real bad guy.'Cause he wouldn't accept you know, peace for an answer. He had to finish the regime change no matter what, even if it took America doing it for him and whatever. And then his point about he never even finished the point about the people starving in the camp. He was totally taken out of context to mean that the only people who died in the Holocaust

All that happened was the Germans didn't care enough to feed them well enough or something. But that was not what he was saying at all. He was essentially arguing that even if you were some kind of German apologist, Even you would have to admit that every single soul they took possession of, they took responsibility for. And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody could deny that.

Right. And then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Hawkause. His point had nothing to do with like trying to diminish the rest of it or discount the rest of it or anything like that. He was just saying You know, arguing even the devil's advocate would have to admit so much of the case on the face of it. And then there he was seguing right into a point about Gaza.

and how the Israelis Gaza's not a country. Gaza is an Indian reservation. They were already whooped and conquered and besieged. And so you take control of people like that, then you're responsible to make sure that they're fed and that they're not starving to death in this you know, under your captivity, which was the point that he was making. So it ended up being You know. Half half of a thing in jest uh and and and half explained about Churchill and then a point about

the war in the East that was totally and I think in some cases honestly misinterpreted. But But what's dishonest is people pretending like he didn't explain himself on the record over and over and over, clarifying what he meant by all that. stuff. And that's the problem with video clips. Yeah, yeah. Clips are a real problem. Yeah. Because you lose the context of the entire conversation. You get one person's point where they might be

steel manning something else or they might be like trying to be provocative or or whatever it is. But to me it Always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate. Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not be true. I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history

where we have gotten a completely objective, one hundred percent accurate representation of why the war started, what were the factors, what were the motivations. We could go all the way back to Smedley Butler. And Smedley Butler's war is a racket, which I always point up because here's a guy in nineteen thirty three that was realizing he was a major general, realizing at the end of his tenure, like, holy shit, what did I do?

I thought that I was doing this to s to make the world safer and really I was making it better for bankers, better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever the fuck they were actually doing. And You can talk about that, but if you get into discussions about World War Two and anything involving the Nazis, anything involving the Holocaust, anything all of a sudden anti Semitic gets thrown around. All of a sudden you're a you're a bad person.

As he says, it's, you know, a huge part of our civic religion basically, um You know, where like George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln and all that stuff is too long ago where it's really Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are the founding fathers of the American Empire and their great project, the greatest generation and all of those things.

That's how we know that that's who we are. I mean, my grandfather was in that war and my great uncle was, you know, death marched by the Japanese in that war and stuff like that. A lot of people have uh connections to that. It's uh As Bill Kristol and his friends would say, this is how you build national greatness. You need big projects that we can all do together. And World War Two is the biggest project of all. So it's the kind of thing that that people don't really want to question.

Also, we should point out that they were bankrolling Smedley Butler, trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government. He refused to do it. Yeah. Yeah. They marked up Capitol Hill with the documents and and showed'em. They were trying to get him to uh throw a military coup on the United States government and take it over. I mean you thought FDR was bad. These guys wanted to overthrow him. He wasn't you know the wrong faction, I guess. Um

But um look I'm not a expert on and I I've only read a few books about the Second World War and you'd have to read hundreds to really know what you're talking about on that one. But I can tell you that Pat Buchanan's great book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. that Pat knew that everybody was gonna try to smear him and everyone was gonna attack him and nobody wanted to hear his

uh version of how this all happened. So he only quotes the highest level, most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford. And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever. He's quoting only these English historians saying, Here's how the idiot Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill

essentially fumbled into this war, screwed up and got us into this war that was way worse than we ever could have hoped. And they ended up turning Poland over to the commies at the end anyway and all of that. And is really honestly is

what I think it is is a decent take on World War Two without all that religiosity that you're referring to there. And just take a cold look at it. You know, like they say that W. Bush, he's the Winston Churchill of the twenty first century. And I'm like, you know what? Maybe that's right. And maybe Winston Churchill was really just the George W. Bush of the twentieth century. It's just you're supposed to never admit that or twice. Churchill's Dick Cheney. Oh yeah, that's a good question.

That was boy, that guy He had no pulse for a while. Yeah. You know, ca is that not in the Bible or something? Like guy who wants war, who uh is giving no bid contracts contracts to the company that he was the fucking CEO of. Yeah. Where they're going over there and fixing for billions of dollars shit that we blew up. And this guy doesn't even have a pulse. I know. He lives so long too. Like only the good die young kind of thing.

I mean how many people dropped dead after COVID of heart attacks that were young and healthy and this fucking guy keep on trucking. Remember when he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized? Yep. He fucking they were they were doing which is uh one of the most uh very I I'd say it's one of the hardest to uh argue in support of type of hunts. It's uh called a canned hunt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what it is that they just released.

Very similar. They just well this is, you know, birds. They just release these birds from a cage, literally. And they fly and then they shoot'em out of the sky. And even then he blasts his friend. And then he Drinking and hunting. Well allegedly. So he wouldn't do any interviews or anything, he wouldn't talk to anybody for like twenty four hours.

And so he had to sober up or you know, allegedly or whatever. And then his friend was like, Oh my minor minor misunderstanding. You got a few pellets in my face, what the f Fuck. I'm very sorry if this reflected negatively on the Vice President. That's how gangster. My fault for putting my face there. Amazing. No lawsuit, no nothing. Your friend shoots you in the face. No worries. What angle exactly did he get shot that he was okay after that? Well you c the thing about it is it's birthday.

It's just a bird shot, yeah. And um if you Burchot spreads, right, and uh depending upon the distance and how far he was away from him, yeah he could've just got clipped. Most likely that's what tapped'cause I think he was seventy.

You know, if you're seventy you get shot in the face with a shotgun, usually that's a wrap. Yeah. So I I think he just got clipped with a couple of pellets and the you know. He probably should have just shut the fuck up and not reported it. Right. I don't know how it even got out. He must have had to go to the hospital. Yeah, you say y I fucked up. I dropped my gun and it went off. Oh yeah. Yeah, you don't have to do that. Vice president. I mean...

Until the newspaper I said that If that was my friend, you know, I would probably say Yeah. Come on, bro. Stammered. Killed and wounded a lot of people, that's for sure. Mostly vicariously, but not always. Well, I mean there's a special place in hell. It's just there already. It's just w it was so weird that that worked. You know, just all of it. The no bid contracts, the the fact that he was essentially running and he remember when he was in a bunker and Bush was running around?

He's in a bunker somewhere. Like why is he in a bunker? Like what the fuck that whole war was so weird. It was to pretend that there's a threat. That there's an ongoing threat when there wasn't. I had a bit about into my act is like the the elites really have no idea how dumb people are. And the only way to find out how dumb people are is make a dumb guy president.

And that that's what they did. And then when we went into a war uh with Iran or with Iraq rather, like how did how did we how did we justify that? And they bought that? What the fuck? And then the bit was like, he won again? Right. And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going I think we can go dumber. Ha ha ha. That was that was the idea of the bit, is uh this is the only way to find out how dumb we are.

Yeah. Like that um Kurt Vonnegut story uh Harrison Bergeron where there's like the ruling elite but the president I think is the president in the movie of it is Tim Curry or something. He's just a total like buffoon and it they just The the real power's all behind the throne run of things. Well my the fourth my favorite movie about that is Doctor Strange.

'Cause it's like'cause it's kind of humorous and you know, it's but the whole thing is like oh my god, I think when you see this Pete Hexess thing where these guys are talking about this and this Commander is saying that it's all to bring about Armageddon. It's this is right out of Doctor Strange Love. Yeah. Oh you can tell and this is one of the most dispiriting things, right, is when you can tell

A lot of times when these people are talking that wow they're he's really not lying. He really thinks that that stupid lie is true and he's telling us what he thinks is true. Like this you know, depending on their tone and the way they explain it. He is sometimes uh like even with Donald Trump, like

It's possible he's even talked himself or allowed himself to be talked into believing that they really were making nuclear weapons and that then they were gonna use them on us. I mean that might just be this dumbest lie and he knows. Right, but if they did have not your weapons, it would be a giant problem.'Cause the Iranian government, just what could they have done to their people? The executed protesters, they they've done some wild shit.

Nah, I don't You don't think that's a big deal, what they've done to their protesters? In fact that's why we got off on uh on uh Martyr Maid there a minute ago was because on our show he was saying right now Through their conventional power and especially because W Bush gave their best friends Baghdad, Iran is by far the dominant power in the region, conventionally speaking, other than us. if they rush to an atom bomb. Say to somehow deter us.

Which I don't think that would work. I think we'd just attack'em. If they really did it, we'd just attack'em again. Um But if they did somehow get an atomic bomb, well then that would then incentivize all of the other powers, I mean or other states on the G C C there Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain and UAE to get their own new. And at that point, Iran's entire strategic advantage is cancelled'cause now they got nukes too, and so now nobody has a strategic advantage.

But no one can do to them what happened to them now if they had nukes. Like this was the argument for Ukraine Not that we're not going to be able to do that. That would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as well. And I think see, it's like this. Here's how it worked, okay? The Iranians.

They're members of the nonproliferation treaty going way back, and they had a safeguarded civilian nuclear program where the IAEA could verify they're not diverting their nuclear material. How could they verify this? Oh, underground I mean. No, no, no, because all that stuff was open and declared and and safeguarded by the IAEA. So they're enriching at two major facilities at Fordo and Natance, and then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb, from the mine through the conversion process.

I mean how how much of it could be done in secrecy? was very robust uh up until you know last June. Essentially they were pro proving the negative. Can I pause you there? Because they didn't know that the Iranians had the capacity to fli to they they sent one four thousand kilometers, right? The Diego Garcia. Yeah, the missile. Well those missiles had a far greater range than anything that they had declared.

Actually not quite because well first of all that's the missile stuff is totally separate from their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They have nothing to do with that. But as far as the missiles, The only limit on their missile range previously was a political limit. Oh it wasn't uh capability. That's right. It wasn't that they stated that all we have is this?

I'm pretty sure it was last October in the aftermath of the June war. In so then in October of twenty five, the Ayatollah announced we're lifting our limit on the range of our missiles. And they said that publicly, that they were doing that. And so and that was as a result again of this provocation of the war last June. So that's still separate from the nuclear stuff though, but go ahead. It was I'm sorry. So it wasn't capability.

Although they don't have the capability to launch a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile to the United States of America. They can hit Israel, but they can do that with the intermediate. But if they're cooperating with China and China has that capability. Because Bill Clinton gave it to him, yeah. Yikes. Jesus, why did you do that? I love this story. For the money.

Um, if if you remember the scandal of ninety six and all the Chinese money in his campaign in ninety six, they spent all their money hyping or all all the media attention hyping up Charlie Tree and Johnny Chung, who were like low level fundraisers who didn't have anything to do with anything, and then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist named Wen Ho Li.

and the evil FBI persecuted poor Wen Ho Lee. And it was this huge distraction from what really happened, which was this Chinese Indonesian um billionaire named Riyadi, who was directly tied to Chinese intelligence. He got his guy, John Wong, appointed to the Commerce Department where he was put in charge of licensing missile technology transfers to China. And they took that authority away from state and defense and gave it to the commerce and then John Wong was the guy

who got to rubber stamp those missile tran uh technology transfers. So then Hughes Aircraft and Lorale Corporation then sent their very best three stage rocket technology to China. Oh jeez.'Cause it's cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know.

So th they were not, I don't think, able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United States before that. And they were able to'cause I mean, and for a few hundred thousand dollars or maybe a couple of million dollars or whatever, they were able to buy this from Bill Clinton. Jesus Christ. I know, crazy. But no, you're right. That look, could China could could Iran with Chinese help or whatever someday be able to deliver a war here here? Yes. However.

Much better solution to that certainly would have been we I know we can't go back, but certainly would have been just normalizing relations with Iran and just dealing with them. The reality was Iran's position was not that they were racing to a new.

Their position was they had this safeguarded program where again the IAE is essentially proving the negative. We know where all their uranium is, it's right where it's supposed to be, and they haven't taken it and diverted it yet. And we know how much they're enriching and we know where it all goes. And so They're so then Israel would say

America, they're making nukes. If they have a nuclear program at all, this is the same during W Bush, during Obama. This is true under Olmert as well as under Netanyahu, um, who's been in charge almost the entire time since Obama. Um And the policy was from the Israelis. America, bomb them. They got a civilian program and you know that's just cover for they're gonna make nukes someday and they're gonna use them on us, so just go ahead and let's get'em now.

then America would say, No, we're not doing that. This is under W Bush, again under Obama. um under Trump one and under Biden. No, we're not gonna just start a war. But we will warn the Iranians, don't you break out and try to make a nuke now. Because if you do, then we will attack you and we'll bomb your Manhattan project before you can complete it and before you can get an atom bomb. We'll see you then. But here's And then the Iranians would say, We're not making new.

So don't attack us. And then the heavy implication was, if you attack us, then we might make nukes. So they had a latent deterrent, right? A half-assed nuclear weapons deterrent. They proved that they had mastered the fuel cycle, that they could enrich uranium if they wanted to up to weapons grade. They never did.

But they said they were essentially saying we have a revolver in one pocket and bullets in the other. Let's not escalate this. And that could have and should have stood. Except this is what

This was the answer to your question about how do they get us into this?'Cause Netanyahu convinced Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli line. That for them to have a civilian nuclear program at all is equivalent to the exact same thing as them making nuclear weapons and we're just not gonna allow that. So how much

understanding do we have of their capabilities and how do we have that understanding? Like how much do we know about their enrichment program? How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon? 'Cause haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear weapon? Well, That was not a threat.

In fact, if I if I know the statement that you're talking about, they were saying, look, we're not making nukes and the proof that we're not is the fact that we know how to, we could, and we're still not, and you can see all this time. They mastered the fuel cycle back in two thousand six. Once you Okay, so it's like this. And and they have been set back on this. They got their facility uh blown up last June. But

Essentially you have remember yellow cake, don't drop that shit. Um you have that refined yellow cake is refined uranium ore. Then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas. And that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges. Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges, a whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes.

And then you spin the the uranium hexafluoride gas in the centrifuges and you spin the U two thirty eight, which is heavier, out and away from the two hundred thirty five, which is the sweet stuff. And the more you enrich it, then um, the more capable it is of being used for nukes. Well is one way to put it, but so they would they need like three point six percent U two thirty five for their electricity program.

They need twenty percent U two thirty five for targets for their medical isotope reactors for like cancer treatment radiation or like that radioactive dye that they put in people for to see your circulatory system and stuff. But then to make weapons grade uranium, you need typically above 90% pure uranium-235. In any case, once you spin it through the centrifuges to whatever stage of purity, then you gotta convert it back into a metal again.

Whether you're gonna make fuel rods or whether you're gonna try to make a bomb warhead.

So under the Obama deal of two thousand and fifteen, the JCPOA, it was really just a extra layer on top of the nonproliferation treaty and on top of the safeguards agreement that we already had. But the way that was worked out was A big part of it was that they would scale back their capability to enrich by shutting down, I think it was two thirds of their centrifuges at Natan's and then at Fordo they would change it from a f a production facility to just a research facility.

And then whatever stockpile of uranium they came up with would be transferred out of the country to Russia and they would turn it into fuel rods and send it back. That way they have no stockpile that they could just quickly reintroduce into the centrifuges and enrich to a higher grade. They'd have to basically start at nothing again.

And so under the theory and the way the scientists worked it out, that if they withdrew from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country and said, We are now making atom bombs, it would take them a year to enrich enough uranium. At weapons grade to make one bomb out of it. Then on top of that, you have to have the actual experts who know how to machine it into the exact

uh specifications as and how to detonate it and everything else. And the the simpler the nuke, the harder it is to deliver. So typically like the Hiroshima bomb was a gun type nuke where you just shoot a one uranium pit into the other one and which they didn't even test. The Trinity test was the Nagasaki bomb basically. They knew it would work, but it was essentially a very heavy bomb and very difficult to deliver.

And virtually all miniaturized um implosion bombs in the world that can ever be married to a missile, they're virtually all made out of plutonium. And they don't have a plutonium route to the bomb because under the Obama deal they poured concrete into the Iraq that's ARAK.

which was supposed to be a heavy water reactor, which can produce weapons gray plutonium as waste. But they poured concrete into that thing and shut it down completely before it was even open. Their reactor that they do have operating is at Boucher and it's a light water reactor.

Which means that it is possible for it to produce weapons. Great plutonium is waste, but it's much more difficult. They would have to shut it off all the time to harvest the stuff out of there and all of that. Under inspections, they can't do So this is all monitored.

This is all monitored. It's like if you had a gun shop and you have a ATF cop sitting at the bar stool. Well, unless he was fast and furious smuggling your guns to cartels. But assuming not that, but like assuming he was just a regular cop. Like you can't accuse me of selling illegal laser rifles from my gun shop when I've got a cop sitting right here. And that's the deal here is they got inspectors throughout the place. And then what happened was

So we had that perfect Mexican standoff, right? Where is Israel saying bomb them, they're making nukes. We say no, we won't bomb'em, but we will if they do and them saying don't bomb us'cause we're not. Then Trump called their bluff last June. Really Netanyahu did, and then Trump jumped in the thing and they really did set their nuclear program back quite a bit. Now

I don't think there's any proof that they destroyed the centrifuges at Natance and Fordau. They're deep underground, under granite, and very hard to get at. But they got the elevator shafts and they got the air shafts. And they if anybody was working down there they were buried alive. The Iranians were incentivized to move giant boulders in front of the doors to protect them from missiles and attack and stuff like that. But so

Um all the reporting is that the Natan Fordo facilities are essentially just frozen right now. There's nothing going on there. There's open source reporting from last November and then there was a report of a in the newspapers just two weeks ago or maybe three. Um based on classified information that there is nothing going on there. They um You know what my deep concern is? Okay. No one said what you said to the president. Yeah. See? That's right. Not only that.

That the people these elected officials and these appointed officials that get into positions around him, they don't know this. Right. Which is a Easy. Dude, I'll tell you what, that New York Times article, did you read that one where Netanyahu came and they sat across from each other at the table like this instead of Trump sitting at the head of the table and Netanyahu gave him the whole presentation about how easy the war would be? Um so as soon as he left then they said,

at the table said, Don't listen to him, boss. He's he's blowing smoke, man, that this is gonna be so easy. Now they didn't really t tell him, Don't do it, but they told him don't trust Netanyahu and that'll be a snap the way that he promises and all that. But then And look, it's Maggie Haberman and them at the New York Times. I mean, it seemed like a very well-reported story from you know the principals are talking to her about this stuff. This is what Joe Cannon said as well.

Yeah. So they they go around the table and Rubio has his say, the vice president has his say, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and whoever, but none as you just said, none of'em say what I just said. Right. And it really is It's like a it's like f four or five dudes in a room who may or may not know very much about this really. And and and talking about it and none of them man enough to say, like, Mr President, permission to speak freely here, sir, don't make this mistake, buddy.

You know what I mean? I think they probably don't. Which is why I've been at this for a long time. Wild. That is really crazy that you'd be in a position of making these decisions without having this understanding of the fact that they're not even really capable right now of making nuclear weapons. If any of them were capable of really knowing about it.

Like this, it would be Rubio or Vance. Or hell, Kane too, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He all of these guys should have been able to say to the president, this is an illusory threat, sir. What's the Vance really not Wasn't Vance not there while the He was not there for the Netanyahu part, but then he came in later, which were what he was in Azerbaijan prepared for the war, right, was where he was as well.

Wasn't Azerbaijan didn't they have some sort of a peace agreement with Armenia? Um At the time? don't know, I had missed that then. You're right then. I think I didn't know that. He visited both of them and that's one of the reasons why he couldn't come back. Okay. If you visit Azerbaijan you also have to visit Armenia, otherwise it would cause some sort of an international conflict.

Yeah, because we support the hereditary dictatorship in Azerbaijan because they help us run the oil pipelines west instead of north through Russia. But it was also because they had made some sort of a peace agreement, correct? I don't know. I mean, they're... Possibly. They're fighting over or the the the contest was over whether Armenia is going to open this corridor across Armenia to an Azerbaijani or an Azeri enclave on the Turkish border.

Okay, Prance, uh Matt and Baku, J D Vance and uh how do you say his name? Aliav? uh met in Baku to disc discuss the implementation of historic August eighth White House Peace Summit and reaffirmed their shared commitment to regional peace, security and prosperity. Leaders signed the US Azerbaijan strategic partnership charter

which will strengthen bilateral relations between our countries. The United States remains committed to working with Azerbaijan to unlock the great potential of the South Caucasus region. So it was a peace summit. And so he met with Azerbaijan and he also had to meet with Armenia as well. This was February tenth, so this is right before the war. Okay. I thought he was like just tipping them off. No

I'm pretty sure that the reason for this was that he had to meet with both of them. See, he could not be there. So if I was J. D. Vance and I knew or rather if I was Netanyahu and I knew that J. D. Vance was really not into this war and didn't want to be a part of it at all, I would probably try to Time it for them. Yeah. What a good time. You can't even come back. Yeah, that makes sense. What does it say?

Ah, the gathering had been deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea th it was happening. Also absent was Vice President J. D. Vance.

who was in Azerbaijan and the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time. Now, if I was Netanyahu and I knew that J. D. Vance is gonna be in Azerbaijan I don't really you know, try to spend too much time on the symbolism of things, you know, leave that to the symbol minded, right? Simple minded? But like

Isn't it meaningful that this is the situation room? The president's supposed to sit at the head of the table. Instead Netanyahu sat there and Trump sat here opposite him and let him run the thing as an equal instead of I don't know. Implement. I really don't know. I mean, they've been friends for a very long time. All the speculation about him being compromised, I mean, is very possible but unknowable really, right? Netanyahu would do that. I mean he he brought up Monica Lewinsky to

to Bill Clinton. Did he? Oh yeah. You know we're tapping your phone, homeboy. We got you on tape. You better let Jonathan Pollard out of prison. And then Bill Clinton refused to do it because George Tennant and the whole top tier of the CIA w we're gonna resign over it if he did it, so he didn't do it. It was Trump that let Pollard out. And now Pollard is running to the right of Netanyahu. He's now announced that he's running for the Knesset over there.

So the reason why the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public No,'cause no no no, I don't think so. Nan Yahoo's said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard. Oh they had tapes? What do you mean they had the like recordings? What are you wearing? It may have been after the scandal had broken, but they had him on tape with her'cause the only tapes were her on the phone with Linda Tripp that Linda Tripp had recorded. Right. But they had him on the phone with her. I forgot her name.

You know, the story is um the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in nineteen ninety six. They were in the room for half an hour or something, and when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated and says, Who the F does this guy think he is? Who's the superpower and who's the client state?

Because Netanyahu had just told him like, Look here, Butler, here's your orders for half an hour, just barked commands at Bill Clinton in a way that he was just like, I can't believe this guy. Wow. It's hard to feel sorry for him. In fact here's one too. Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic. This is the only time I've ever been sympathetic with Barack Obama. He's caught on a hot mic talking to the president of France. And he goes, Oh man, you think you hate him. I gotta deal with him every day.

And that was about nine years. about Netanyahu. Well wasn't there an issue with JFK and Israel over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons? Yes. So he was demanding inspections of Demona, their nuclear facility there. Correct. And the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give aid to a nuclear weapons state that refuses to sign the nonproliferation.

And so and they don't want to do that. In fact they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before the change after apartheid. Um but If they're If they openly possess nuclear weapons. Then I mean hell, it should already be illegal'cause everybody already knows. But the Glen Symington law says that you can't give aid military aid.

to a nuclear weapon state that won't sign the NPT. That's America's treaty that we forced the whole world to accept. And which by the way is in terrible jeopardy now, right? Because, you know, um Saddam Hussein goes, look, my hands are up, I got nothing. They invaded him anyway. The North Koreans armed up with newts. The Libyans said, Well look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no operational program, but you can have our junk. They killed him.

And then the Iranians said, Look, we can make nukes, but we're not making nukes, so leave us alone already and then we kill them. So America is the great destroyer of America's nonproliferation treaty that we foisted on the world, by which the non-nuclear weapon state promise the non-nuclear weapon states promise never to get them, and the nuclear weapon states promise never to share them. So

And that's all in jeopardy now. That may not even exist anymore. The polls are talking about getting their own nukes now because of Trump's pivot away from Europe in the middle of a war that America helped cause over there. Israel officially doesn't have nukes.

Officially they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least two hundred. And in fact I have that personally from Mordecai Venunu, who is the Israeli whistleblower who went to prison. They kidnapped him in a honey trap plot, I think in in England or in Italy. With checks?

With chicks, yeah, yeah, yeah. They went to get him laid and they kidnapped him and they held him in solitary confinement for like twenty five years or something. But he gave the whole story to the Sunday Times, the London Times, and they published it back in I'm gonna say eighty six. And then um what happened was he was on Twitter. He may still be on Twitter. Um, but um

I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great uh whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers and who was a friend of mine for a long time. He died a couple of years ago now, but um He had an anecdote about Venunu that turned out was incorrect, but I asked Venunu, is this correct? And then he said no. It's just like I told the Sunday Times back then and that was that they had two hundred atom bombs by the time

He squealed on'em. And we know from Grant F. Smith's research, he got this through some FOIA documents. Um he's from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, really great researcher on this. And he showed that they had at least been researching hydrogen policy. The big ones. Although there's no proof that they ever actually made H bombs. And I don't think it's been reported that they've made them, but they at least were looking into how.

And this was part of the conflict that J F K had with Israel. Yes. And trying to register what was then I think the American Jewish Council, I believe is what it was called, the the predecessor to APAC as a foreign as foreign aid. And then they dissolved it and created APAC instead, I guess, is the long and the short of that, how they got around that. And there are people You know, and it was You know, I don't know, man, honestly.

Like I told you, I was more of a conspiracy theorist in the nineties, but I never did all read into JFK because there's just a hundred books about it and a hundred different theories, and I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French hitmen to do it, or if the Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Alan Dulles

Got some Cubans to do it or what the hell, right? Like I don't know. And so it's um I really get you know, I'm um I don't I don't think I ever really could figure it out, so Well no one. I just kind of leave that one alone. But Oliver Stone is a lot of people. Yeah. You know what's funny about that? And I think he even admitted this at one point, man. You watch the whole movie, JFK. Oh. You watch the whole movie JFK. And Sorry, man.

No worries. It's just Dr. Pepper. I like a little stains on this table. There you go. Makes it live. In the edit later we'll just click on the Clip. To Joe and No, we'll just show the Dr. Pepper. Why Dr. Pepper? Why are you so into Dr. Pepper? Okay. I have Doctor Pepper man from a Um no the um the uh you watch the whole movie JFK, right? It's got every theory under the sun in there. And then as soon as it's over it says produced by Arnan Milchan.

Who was an Israeli spy and who helped Benjamin Netanyahu steal Kritrons, which are an essential part of these nuclear triggers, that's who produced the movie. And so then someone asked Oliver Stone, like, Hey man, an Israeli spy produced your movie where you point the finger at everyone except maybe the Israelis. What's about that? And he's like

Wow, you're right. I I forgot exactly how he says it, but he acknowledges that, you know what? Like, it could have been even that my own film was part of a put on there. Well, especially when you consider the fact that his own film was made in what, the nineties? Yeah. Right. ninety, ninety. Yeah, probably never even heard the angle that it would have been the Israelis.

Uh LBJ was very close to the Zionists and even had a Massad agent for a girlfriend. I'm sorry I forget her name, but one of his mistresses was a Mossad agent and then he he completely reversed all those policies as soon as he was in power. But of course same thing with Vietnam, he reversed

Well, or at least released any skepticism about Vietnam and said let's go ahead and escalate there and all that. So like I say, that one's it's too muddy for me to try to wade through and and figure out exactly who pulled the trigger on Crazy. The not so secret life of uh Matilda. Is that how you say her name? Matilda Krim? That was his Israeli spy girlfriend. Yeah, I believe that's right.

Good old Phil Weiss. I love that guy. He's a great guy. That's uh MondoWeiss dot net is a great website for anti Zionist The no daylight policy, the US alignment with the Israeli government. So obviously today and uh Trump's deference to Netanyahu was born under Matilda Krim's dear friend Lyndon Johnson.

In the feverish weeks surrounding the nineteen sixty seven war, Krim, who had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side and advised him on what to say publicly. I mean you got it. give it up to a country the size of Rhode Island that has that kind of fucking pull. They got their priority straight, that's for sure. Yep.

I mean I mean they threatened Harry Truman. They bribed him and they also threatened him. They sent his his daughter's memoir says the Zionists sent letter bombs to the White House. And they'd stop at nothing to get their state. Truman. Yeah. Wow. And and they paid for his reelection too. In fact, um there's a great scholar named um John B. Judas.

uh J U D I S and he wrote a book about this. Uh yeah, kinda if you mispronounce it, you know. He actually also wrote uh as long as I'm talking about him, he wrote a great article for foreign affairs in nineteen ninety five. about the neoconservatives called From Trotskyism to Anachronism and it was about how now that the Cold War's over, who needs these crazy hawks anymore? Right? And then these are the guys who took us who launched the Iraq War.

you know, a few years later, uh seven years later or whatever, he was he was saying they're a spent force and they should be by now'cause they had been Trotskyite communists and then had moved to the right for the militarism and stuff. But he wrote a book about how Truman

did this and and I think that was part of it was this intimidation campaign. And it was his own daughter that in her book in her memoir said that they sent uh letter bombs to the White House to intimidate and they also paid for his elections. It was, you know, a carrot and stick kind of a thing. And then yeah, look if you ran the Israeli foreign ministry, you only have one priority in the world that outranks every other priority by a million billion. And that is

Your relationship with the United States of America. How friendly is the president? How friendly is the Senate? What do we gotta do to make sure that everything stays in line? It's everything to them. So let me ask you this. How what do you think happens with Iran now? Like how does this play out? If you had to speculate.

Well I'll tell you that first of all, they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now than ever before. Although I'm not necessarily predicting that. You know, Trump has proven by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent, he has proven he's willing to bomb them. And if they really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing.

And then this president and I think the next one too would be willing to go back to war over it. As Barack Obama promised he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb. And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic called As President, I Don't Bluff, where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to tell Netanyahu and them, I really, really mean it.

If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but just let me try to solve this another way. So I think that promise stands. This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden, and I think that will continue to last into the next presidency. And if the Iranians are smart, what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is we're not giving up enrichment.

And we're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day, but we're never gonna call it that. And just don't do this to us anymore and try to bet on the fact that Trump's only got three years left and the next presidents won't be so belligerent.

And they won't call the bluff or and and go ahead and launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke. And as Daryl was saying, They're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally, they really have no need to make a nuclear bomb. And they can I think successfully deter Israel even with their conventional missile force. And we saw them just absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv. Yeah. So Very under reported, right? And I think

You know, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatollah, right? And they kill him and apparently like the the new Ayatollah, his son, they killed his mother and sister and or mother and wife and baby. I mean that's the new Ayatollah over there is you know, he's got to be more radical than his father. He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was. And So what is the pathway to resolution? Well, I think that's a good thing.

It's so unfortunate because honestly, um, you know, whatever, maybe some genius at some think tank has a better idea, but I really think that the thing to do is just quit. The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say what the I'm not sure. One. Yeah. But we don't really need these bases over there. The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East. We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore. So forget the Carter doctrine.

Let's just come home. And I think if we do that, we s we bring all of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our bases, close them all up and come home. Then that shifts the entire burden onto Iran that they still have to deal with the rest of Eurasia. We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. Everybody else is.

So are they going to now levy a tax to get through the Strait of Hormuz? Absolutely. But too bad shouldn't have started this war then. Nothing we could do about that now, Willie Nelson said, you know, so like the way going forward is and by the way, like in in Panama they tax um ships going through the Isthmus there, through the Panama Canal. The Indonesians, I believe it is, attacks people going through some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. And so it's not entirely unheard of that

You know, the the dominant power there is going to uh levy a fee on people coming in and out of there. But Again, too late, too bad. I mean America already we had the exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now, we had on February the twenty-seventh. And then they launched this war on the twenty eighth, which by the way was the anniversary of the Waco Raid. This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war. And in fact, as long as I'm on that.

And I know you know this, but it's really worth dwelling on that they killed not just one, but two girls' school. in their initial assault. They killed in one building they killed a hundred and I think seventy-three or seventy-four, uh almost all little girls.

And then in the other one was twenty more. And with and with that was an experimental new Lockheed missile that fires tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates, uh or as it detonates uh in a creative new way to cut people to shreds. And the thing is about that is as um there's this great media critic um named Adam Johnson who pointed out, this is equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing. Which, you know, for young people, uh

Oklahoma was nine eleven before nine eleven, right? It was massive. And never mind there was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it. That's another interview, Joe, but but it was a hundred. Yeah. Yeah, it is and just the I'm here for you, buddy. But yeah. But but they kill a hundred and sixty seven people were killed in that thing. And it was just the ugliest damn thing. And it included like twenty kids in the daycare there.

Right, that was the cover of Newsweek was a firefire hold holding a dead baby. So worst thing, z the most traumatic thing for this country, and in the heartland of Oklahoma City and all that. Well that's what America did to Iran. Only the entire building full of kids. All hundred and sixty seven of them uh a few teachers, but virtually all of them little girls. And another school down the street too or relatively nearby where they at the volleyball game, where they killed even more.

So now think about the Pearl Harbor attack with Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl Harbor, out of context, but still it was a sneak surprise attack in the middle of negotiations, on behalf of a foreign country over a lie. And then they killed a bunch of kids. It's like imagine if at Pearl Harbor, if our story of Pearl Harbor was that they sank all our heroes and drown'em down in their ships, in the hulls stuck in their hulls down there.

But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little kids. Gurk. The children of those sailors who drown at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day too. Oh, and also is a Catholic country and he's also the Pope. Imagine how we would react to that. Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what our story of of the World War II would be. It would be that we kept nuking'em till they were all dead.

is what our story of World War Two would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor. somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should. If that had happened to us Again, just like we you know, uh we did a little on Ukraine there and the way America just absolutely pushes their luck. If Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in ten years'cause they kept voting wrong, we would invade Canada and nuke Moscow.

And in fact when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd. Right, how ridiculous is it that the Russians would dare try to overthrow the regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our bases in Alaska or any of these kinds of things, that they would go to war with the people of Vancouver who refused to accept the new coup junta. Is comic book crazy? They wouldn't dare. But we do that to them. You know, and we act like as as Dr. Paul said.

If we go around the world killing people like this, bombing people like this, and we think that we can just get away with it and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at our own peril. And he was speaking for the government as a member of Congress at the time that we're putting the American people in danger.

by acting this way. It's completely crazy. You know, the remember the the f um the Shiite fatwa that the old Ayatollah, the Ayatollah before last last uh Khomeini put on Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verse? Where people and people have tried to kill him numerous times, including got his eyeball in one case. Um we've had a real problem with bin Ladenite jihadi terrorism over the time. We have not had the Shiite.

We have not had the Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq or the Ayatollah Khamenei declare that all good believers should attack the West now. They could do that. And that's the kind of fire that we're playing with. It's extremely dangerous. I mean bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank. He was just a rich guy who he had earned respect'cause he was wounded in battle and stuff. He had money and and influence.

If the Ayatollah Sistani put out a full jihad, which I'm not saying he would do that. I don't I don't have any real reason to believe that he would go that far, but he's been willing to stand up to the United States numerous times, especially during the war. um in you know the last couple of wars over there. And so and remember what happened. The night that they started this war, on the February the twenty eighth, the next day on Saturday the twenty ninth.

Or was it I think it was Friday was the twenty eighth and it was like late in the night they started the war. And then Saturday, I believe, was the twenty ninth and A uh an American uh immigrant from Sierra Leone, here in Austin, took an AR fifteen, put on a shirt with the Ayatollah and an Iranian flag on it. I didn't even know they had Shiites in Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do.

And he went down to sixth street and and he shot eighteen people, killed three and wounded fifteen people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack. Call it backdraft. I I coined the phrase in my book that in If blowback means long term consequences from secret foreign policies that the American people then don't understand and are left up to false explanations or left susceptible to false ex explanations.

Well then back draft terrorism is when the consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your face. And, you know, frankly, like those three people were crucified for Israel for their sins. For for and fifteen more wounded, and I don't know how terribly wounded, for all I know, people are still in the hospital or that thing. And that was a immediate blowback terrorist attack.

from this war just right away. And and it's the kind of danger that our government is continues to put us in through these interventions over there. At some point, you know, all those sort of um Hypotheticals about yeah, but what if Russia took over the world or what if China did if it wasn't us or whatever? Those have got to just kind of fall away, you know, by the wayside. There's no real reason to fear that in the first place. But also who in the hell are we to stop it at this point?

Right? Another South Park reference when Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics ceremony, he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us. So he recruits Butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese away. And then over and over again throughout the episode

Butters keeps like closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick just over and over again. And then by the end of the episode, Cartman says, You know what, just forget it. Okay? If that's the best you can do, Butters, let's just stop. We're just going around we're this is not working, our intervention. It's just not. What do you predict is gonna happen with Iran?

No, I don't know. I'm really worried. I mean I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's you know, or too literally when he's being hyperbolic, but he has threatened to nuke them over and over again, including just the other day, he said the country's gonna have a glow. around it. Most of that. I mean I no, no I don't. I'm not predicting that, but I think it's a s it's symbolic right of his frustration. He absolutely just should not have done this. And now he has no good way out of it.

Right. He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me. In fact there was this story in the Jerusalem Post Mm. the end of April, I think, I think it was like April twenty eighth, about how Trump ordered the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just walked away. Right? And then they're looking into it. Well, just how bad will Iran exploit the new vacuum that we've created and the power and influence that we're handing to them? How bad will it really be?

because he has no options to fix it. He just doesn't. You want a regime change in Tehran, you can drop a hydrogen bomb on the capital city and kill ten million people and then claim the desolation is peace. Or you can just forget it. And like, man, you know what? We're all tough and badass enough to kill all these people. Well, we should be tough enough to admit when we screwed up then.

Look at Afghanistan. We stayed for twenty years because Washington couldn't admit that we can't win this war. There's only one way to tame the Pashtuns, and that is kill them all. And we're not willing to do that. So what are we doing? We're just losing slowly and then what they do they finally admitted it. They finally just said, Fine, I guess we lost and left. That's what we gotta do here, but sooner is better.

Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of his regime and then whoever comes into power in twenty twenty eight then gets out? God, I hope not. I I can't imagine what's gonna happen if this thing keeps on for three years, you know.

This is a real flaw in our system, quite frankly, is like if we had a parliament, we could just vote no confidence in this guy and put a new guy in there whose fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it. Instead, all we can do is wait three years Wait for him to f kill over of a heart attack or wait for his own cabinet to overthrow him in the name of him being, you know, too demented to continue, which is not going to happen.

Um, you know, that twenty fifth amendment, they always invoked that like they could do a coup against him for being a Russian agent or whatever back in his first term. Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden, he would have to be completely off his rocker and and to to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow him, which I just think is virtually impossible. So

The good news is, right, is that he's he he could just flip flop on anything, right? He'd just change his mind about anything. In fact when he announced the ceasefire, he said, We're gonna we're going to negotiate based on Iran's eleven point proposal.

Like, okay, man, fine. Right? Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally. Like call it whatever you want. And and he is good at that. You could call that a gift if you want to politically. He can just pretend like, Yeah, no, I meant to do that So what is the hold up? Like what uh what are they disagreeing on?

Well he's gotta deal with Netanyahu, right? The master blaster thing, you know, from Thunderdome on his back shouting in his ear what he's gotta do and what he's gotta not do in the sixty minutes interview. Uh he tells the uh um Major Garrett that, you know, uh we're not done. The war's not over until we get that uranium. And Garrett says, Well, how are we gonna get it? He says, Trump promised me he wants to get it, he's going to get it. And

And of course they have this e ever since they announced the ceasefire. The Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire. This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has clearly been somehow enslaved. by Netanyahu that he's willing to put up with that. As Bill Clinton said again.

Who's the superpower and who's the client state? How is that we have a ceasefire deal and then you can come and veto it like this and then not be chastised and not told to get back in your corner. We're handling this and and I really just don't know the answer to that. You know, he wants to be great. He wants to have a legacy. This is a good thing. I really should study more about this, but this is a part of libertarian economic theory called public choice theory.

The public choices are still made by private individuals, and they're acting based on what's good for them rather than what's good for the country. Like Strobe Talbot. We need those Lockheed dollars. We need those Polish votes. So we do a policy that ultimately is bad for the country, even though it's good for the Democrats at the time. And same thing here.

What's good for the country is to just come home. But and you can hear this just built in. People don't even question it. It's just built in, of course, to every single discussion about this. How are we gonna do this in a way that it looks good enough for Trump that he's willing to accept his defeat here, right? How can we spin it for him? How big of a gold medal do we have to give him? How big of a tip ticker tape parade?

Do we have to give him how firm of a pat on the back and a congratulations do we have to give him for him to decide that it's okay to come home? Otherwise and without looking like too much of a jerk himself for what he's done here. And then and having to live with it for three years, the aftermath of however it works out with Iran newly dominant.

And so again, Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Obama put'em up two pegs by building the caliphate and then helping them destroy it again. Um and then of course Al Qaeda rules Damascus now, so that's a big hit against them.

But uh what what Donald Trump has done with this war is about uh at least equivalent to what W Bush did in terms of enhancing Iranian power in the region. It's like The guy in the football gring in the football game grabs the ball and then runs the wrong direction and scores the goal for the other team. You really think it's that bad? Oh it's absolutely I mean America look before Absolutely. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because

I mean it's it's just as simple as this, right? On February the twenty seventh, the Gulf was open for business. And the illusion of American conventional air and naval power kept it that way and nobody questioned it. It's America's dominated order. Yes, Iran has Iraq. And they have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, but hell we even got Sunnis ruling in Damascus now. And so the GCC and including Jordan and Turkey and Israel, this is America's empire in the Middle East.

On February twenty ninth, thirtieth, I mean, well, nope, sorry, there is no uh one leap here. On March first, second, third this year, all that was over. I mean Darryl Cooper again is you know, we do this show provoked every Friday night, and he said, Listen, I'm hearing from my friends in the Pentagon. This was one week into the war.

He goes, I'm here for my friends. This war is not going well. They're hitting all our bases. They've killed a couple of our guys and they're pitting our runways and hitting our radars and hitting our planes and We knew it then, right then. Just and I'm sorry, man, it's just true. Told just so for 20 years. All of our assets in the Gulf are up for grabs. They can reach out and touch us there and there ain't a damn thing that we can do about it. You know, and it just absolutely is true.

Scott, you're a real bummer. But thank you. It's a lot of fun, isn't it? Talking to me. Than it is. It's uh it's good to get your perspective and I really wish someone had had your perspective before this all got started, at least an understanding of the uh ability to enrich the uranium and turn it into an actual weapon. But thank you very much. Um tell everybody about your shows, where people could find'em, where people could find you.

Absolutely. So I do the Scott Horton show, which is my interview show, and provoked with Daryl Cooper. And um Where can people get those? uh on here on the YouTubes and on Spotify and all those things. And then um I have uh I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute. That's libertarianinstitute.org.

And for the deep, deep dive and the deep background on all this stuff, I have the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at Scott Horton Academy.com. And oh, you know what? Yeah. If I can find the zipper on this thing. Fool's air in Afghanistan. Enough already on the war on terrorism and provoked on Russia and Ukraine. Boy, those are some fat ass books, dude. You do a lot of work.

I do. I have a lot of jobs and I work real hard on this stuff. Um and these have been very well received. You know, uh I'm uh Uh basically my job is uh I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this. When I was a young kid there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on Raw Time, which was the heavy metal show on the Access Channel here in town. And Probably not too long before he died. And this is of course the days before the internet and everything.

Um Where he talks about the importance of seeing people get up there and tell the truth and not be afraid to tell the truth and set the example for other people. And, you know, at that time it was like to have a guy like him, a comedian, able to tell the truth on a platform where other people could hear it, was just so exciting to even it was like just breaking through this

this, you know, impenetrable force field. And then he was just saying he says, Well, well if that guy can do it, well then maybe I can do it and I'll get up there and I'll say what I think is true too and then that kind of deal. And so I've been more or less following that same path since then.

Well, thank you for all this because the amount of work that's involved in putting together these books and all the interviews and all the podcasts you've done for most people to occupy their mind with the kind of information that's in yours it's gotta be very troubling. It's probably not so much fun and uh it's also very important for people like me who haven't done that work to to have access to it and get an understanding of it. So thank you. Well thank you very much for having us.

We'll do it again.