The Darryl 'Martyr Made' Cooper Episodes - Complete

was nice to get a different glimpse of that. I come from a family of veterans, and so I joined the Navy after I was done with college and did ten years doing Aaron ballistic missile work defense work, and then got out and worked as a DoD civilian for ten more years doing the same thing, basically Aaron ballistic missile defense engineering stuff. In the meantime, around twenty fifteen,

I started doing a podcast just sort of on a lark. Really, you know, I was a fan of Dan Carlin's hardcore history back then, and obviously he takes six or eight months between episodes, and I would always bitch about that and pretty much all I do. You know, I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and then in the Navy, I moved around a lot, and so my continuity was always books, and so ever since i've been a little kid, I just you know, I've had my nose in a book pretty much during all of

my spare time every day. And you know, my girlfriend at the time and my friends were tired of hearing about the books that I recently read, and so they told me to go start a podcast, and so I did. I did that for a few years. You know, these are I do like long form five six seven hour long episodes, sometimes really deep dives on historical topics, and they're not for everybody, and I didn't really expect anybody to listen to it, but it's really kind of taken

off and that's been really cool. And so last year, you know, I kind of was facing a point where, you know, I'm starting a family now, and I just had to realize that. You know, when I was at my DoD job, I was literally waking up two hours early before I had to get ready for work to read and write. I was reading and writing during my lunch hour. I was spending my evenings doing that just

to get this podcast done. And that wasn't gonna fly anymore once, you know, I got a little screaming infant to deal with, plus work, and so I had to make a choice and decided to cut the strands of the safety net with a government job, and now I'm able to do the podcasting thing full time. I do a second podcast with my friend Jocko Willink, who's he's a retired nav CL commander. People may have heard of him. He's a he's an awesome dude. And we have one

called The Unraveling as well. And so, yeah, that's that's what I'm doing. And what's the name of podcast, oh martyr made. Yeah, I'm terrible at advertising.

So there was this there was this episode you did and it was about this vast conspiracy theory that you know has been put to bed and it was this thing called Pizzagate, and it was such a stupid conspiracy theory that like Ben Swan lost his job and had to go into hiding for a year after he reported on it on an Atlanta news station. I used to live in Atlanta, and uh, yeah, you know, and yeah, so why why did you look into this this silly conspiracy theory?

But it affects other people that I work with and so forth, and so it becomes a little more difficult. And it's unfortunate because, like you said, he's done all the work, and it's really impossible to talk about the issue without ripping him off a little bit, just because he did all the work, Like that's who did it, you know, and so he was credit for sure.

getting run off the rails. You know, he's another person, you know, got the full Alex Jones times ten treatment, you know, and he's not somebody you know, Ryan Dawson's not some dude who had millions and millions of people who were following him and they were like, we got to do something, but still they thought it was important enough to basically go as hard on him as they've gone on just about anybody, which is, you know, remarkable in itself.

for sure. And so I kind of approached the episode, you know, after doing the first one on Epstein and his intelligence connections, the second one where I step back and I just talked about several other cases over the last several decades where things like you know, the Finders Group,

things like the Kincora Boys Home in Northern Ireland. There are a lot of instances where there seem to be, you know, instances of childhood sexual abuse, child sexual abuse where there are just fingerprints of intelligence agencies all around it. And obviously, when you're talking about intelligence agencies, it's like talking about the mafia. Everything's deniable, everything is circumstantial evidence.

That's just the nature of the beast. But at a certain point you start to say, you know, if any one of these other cases is true, well then it's not unrealistic anymore, and it's more likely that the second one's going to be true, and it makes it more likely that the third and the rest of them could very well be true. Once you know that three or

four of these things are true. You know that British intelligence was monitoring the Kincora Boys Home because they knew that there were a bunch of powerful people coming through there having sex with children they could later blackmail and control.

Once you know that has happened, then it's not really you know, like I think when most people heard, you know, Ale's Acosta, Trump's labor secretary who was the prosecutor of Epstein back in his first case, say on the record, you know, to his interviewers when he was getting vetted for the labor secretary job, that he was told to

back off Epstein because quote, he belonged to intelligence. Like in the world where I come from, and I'm not a journalist, maybe I should go to journalism school and they correct me on this, But I would think that there would be reporters camped out on his lawn and every time he poked his head out of his house, there'd be a microphone in his face saying, excuse me, sir, what did you mean when you said that Jeffrey Epstein

was connected to intelligence? Obviously that's not what's going on, And in fact, the complete opposite is what has been going on, where there's a very obvious effort, just a full spectrum effort to suppress the story, to keep questions, just very obvious questions from being asked. And so yeah, that was the second episode, and then in the third episode, I just wanted to kind of tie it all together. And I really wasn't sure when I started it. I

didn't really plan on talking about Pizzagate exactly. But what I found was it's a good window into the into the culture in Washington, d C. And it's not just DC. It's the same in London. It's the same, and just a lot of elite circles, whether it's you know, business, you know, when you start picking through the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and think about how did this thing start, how

did it get going? You know, I kind of remember, like back in the day as I was watching on the chans and read it and everything, watching this thing as it was unfolding there at the beginning, and you know, it starts out in twenty sixteen because John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, gets his emails leaked and people are going through them and finding that, you know, normal stuff that the Clinton campaign rob Bernie Sanders and work with the DNC to like set that up, all that kind

of stuff, and people are arguing over whether this was Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump working together and so forth. But then some people came across some emails that really didn't seem to make any kind of sense if you just read them in a literal way, right, Like there were things like somebody writing John Podesta and saying like, hey, after the party from last week, we found a handkerchief with a map that looks pizza related, like do you

want it back? And he says no or whatever. There's a bunch of little weird things like that that people are like, well, that doesn't even make any sense, Like why would there be a pizza related map on a handkerchief and why would it be important enough that he would want to like you know, return it to him whatever. And so they see that, and I believe this part. I wasn't around for somebody who's who was around for it told me that this was how the pizza thing

got got started. Was it on the chans back in the day, like several years ago. I think people would come in and sometimes try to troll the board or get it in trouble by posting child porn or what looked like child porn, and so to not trip the filters, they would call it cheese pizza CP, and that that's where the pizza association came from. I'm not one hundred percent sure if that's true or not. That's what somebody

who was there kind of told me. But the point is they read they started reading these strange emails as code where pizza is porn, cheese pizza's child porn, maps and handkerchiefs mean X, Y and Z having to do

it this weird stuff. And then of course there's thousands and thousands of emails, and so if you do a search and you look for any time the word pizza shows up or map or handkerchief or whatever, it turns out that there's a bunch of emails in there that look pretty strange if you apply this cipher to it. And so that's how the whole thing kind of got started, when you know. So, yeah, that's how it got started.

And I believe the next thing that happened, well, people started doing more research once they got on the trail of it. Somebody would bring up, for example, you know Andrew Breitbart's tweet from back and I want to say, like, what was it twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen or something than that.

saying something like that is that's pretty serious. And he never backed down from it, and you know, it's almost as if he was like daring Podesta to take him into court and go do discovery or something. You know, some people found that because they're talking about John Podesta, these are his emails, and they go back years ago, go and find you know, Andrew Breitbart basically accusing him

of running an underage sex slave operation. And then after Anthony Weiner got busted for texting sexting with an underage girl, Breitbart had been out there saying that this was going on, that there was a scandal out there for a long time, and he finally got vindicated, and he was on an

episode of Red Eye. I think it was a great Gutfeld and they're talking about this and you know, he's obviously very excited, and Greg Guttfeld says something like, you know, he mentioned something about ping pong, and Andrew Breitbart interrupts him as he's like in the middle of a sentence, and he goes, huh, why would you switch the subject to the sport of ping pong? And the guy's like, Greg Gutfeld says, you know, you know how it is, and he's like, yeah, you're weird like that, like in a

very kind of knowing tone of voice, very strange. Well, the next thing, people found in those emails was stuff about this place in DC, this pizza place. It is called comet Ping Pong Pizza. And people might remember that from the news because a dude with an AR fifteen showed up there to search the place for, you know, a sex dungeon in the basement. Comet Ping Pong Pizza.

You know it was. I mean, it's something again, like the as you go through all of this stuff, it's all it all sounds so ridiculous, and maybe the whole thing is completely ridiculous, like the actual story once you tie it all together, but when you take all the little bits of it, you know, comet Ping Pong pizzas run by a guy named Jane's alaphontis. So yeah, and.

And so this guy's a pizza place owner in Washington, d C. Place called Comet Ping Pong Pizza and he is listed in GQ magazine as one of the fifty most powerful people in Washington, d C. Which is a little strange. He used to be the boyfriend of David Brock, the founder of Media Matters back in the day that was that was years ago. And so as there people start going through investigating this comic Ping Pong Pizza place.

They thought it was weird that Breitbart had had that sort of weird exchange about Ping Pong, And they start investigating this place a little and they have musical acts that will come and perform. This is a place that is advertised for children, and so as a place for kids,

bring your kids to this place. It's a fun place. Well, they have these acts, these musical acts that come through that are sort of like the best way I can describe it is that it's sort of a weird surrealist like David Lynch meets Pink Flamingos kind of aesthetic where it's sort of this trashy but like surrealistic creepy sort of vibe that you get they would. There's videos, music videos and promo videos that a couple of these bands have cut that we know we're playing there because they

were on advertisements. And one of them is called, oh gosh, what is the one called? I know one of them is called sex Stains, and then there's another one called well, the lead singer is called Majestic Ape. I can't remember the name of the band off the top of me. It's been a while since I've really looked hard into this stuff, but you know, the one there's they're they're

on stage joking about pedophilia. They're joking about pedophilia and their songs, and then this other band, sex Stains, that's performed there. They have a music video that you can go watch on YouTube, and it takes place this music video.

Most of it in like a child's nursery basically, and there's big and large toys and blocks and various things around, and there's this very prominently featured throughout the video is this large block, multicolored block, and on one side of it, the side that's always facing the camera, is this symbol that looks basically like a triangular spiral like it's a spiral but in the shape of a triangle, right, And turns out that there is a released FBI document looks

like it's maybe like a training document or something that got released that you can go find this on the internet as well. It says symbols and logos used by pedophiles to identify sexual preferences. And then it shows several examples, some of them drawn, some of them on coins or rings or amulets wear around your neck that are that exact symbol, that triangular spiral thing that apparently this is one of the ways that pedophiles expressed their proclivities to

one another, like on the downlow, I suppose. And so at the end of that music video, the lead singer of the band is kind of she's got her hands out in like this weird position. I don't know what she's doing, almost some sort of like anyway she's she's

reaching out directly toward this symbol. It's like the only thing really that's prominent in the thing in the foreground there is the lead singer and this big block with that symbol, and she's facing it and basically obviously her attention is on it and that's how the music video ends, after this thing has been prominently placed throughout the entire video,

and so people think that's very strange. People think it's strange that two doors down from Comet Ping Pong Pizza was a place called besta Pizza and that the logo of that place was a pizza slice, which is in the form of a triangle that was done up like a spiral, just like that symbol, the exact same thing. They changed the logo a few weeks after all this stuff started popping up on the Internet and the place is closed now, I think, And so that was all

very strange. The guy James alafontis the owner, you know. People found his Instagram page and the avatar that he used for his Instagram page was a statue of Antonis, who was the teenage boy lover of the emperor Roman Emperor Hadrian. On his Instagram page, there were a lot of pictures that in comments that if you just took him out of took him out of context or very strange. A child who's like taped to a table and jokes

about things that could be interpreted that way. And so people think this is all very strange, especially when they're already listening to what Andrew Breitbart said, and there you know, they're already kind of three quarters of the way down the rabbit hole. Well, then somebody discovers an email that involves this. This it's an invitation from this performance artist called Marina Abramovic, and she has an event called Spirit Cooking.

And everybody's probably heard of this, like at least in name, but for those who haven't, John and Tony Pizzet Podesta his brother were invited personally by Marina Abramovic to come to this Spirit Cooking event. And what it is is it's a dinner that takes place in a multi roomed art installation that is just it's I mean, if you were to tell somebody that this was some sort of a devil worship like ritual or something, I don't think

they would change much about it. Like there's white walls, and the walls are covered with really cryptic, weird pre be messages about drinking fresh breast milk on earthquake nights, a lot of sort of art school like edge Lord bullshit, but it's written in pigs blood up on the walls. In one of the corners, there's an effigy of an infant with a bucket of pigs blood splashed all over it. There's little dolls that are, you know, positioned like they're copulating.

And in the meal, the people who are there to participate in this thing, they drink things that are they're supposed to pretend or human blood or semen or breast milk. In another spirit cooking event that took place. You could find these pictures on the internet with like Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, a lot of other people like this. You know, they're there with like a naked body a person, a real person, lying in a tub of what's supposed to be blood, and they're pretending to be a corpse

and people are eating off of them. A lot of just very weird, strange stuff, right, And so people we'll see and Abrama Vic herself, I mean, you can go find you know, her pictures on the internet, and she's got pictures of herself all in red holding up a bloody goat's head, another one with a snake around her head and neck and in her mouth. She was apparently friends with that Brazilian cult leader John of God, who is running a sex slave operation down there you can

kind of forgive her for that. I guess Oprah and a million other people were apparently good buddies with that guy, so surprise, surprise. But you get to this and people, you know, I start asking questions, right, and so people start tying all this stuff together. They say, okay, there are you know, there's the code word emails that are telling us that there's something to do with pedophilia going.

And then they take it out and they say, okay, now there's this pizza place involved, and this guy's connected to a bunch of other people, and so now it's this sort of sprawling pedophile ring. And then they discover the spirit cooking thing and they say, okay, this is actually a ritualistic, satanic elite pedophile ring. And that's kind of where you get to at this point. It got really fun when people started looking into John Podesta's brother,

Tony Podesta. So Tony Podesta and John Podesta, you know, Podesta's both of these guys like they're those you know, there's like a whole class of these people who never run for office, they never run a government agency or anything like that, but they just always seem to be around somehow you know, they're always there whenever you like.

And in nineteen eighty eight, he and his brother Tony, right as Bill Clinton is kind of deciding he's going to run for president, John and his brother Tony Podesta to start the Podesta Group, which, up until it closed a few years ago right after Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, was certainly one of maybe the most powerful Democrat side lobbying firm in Washington, very very connected because these are people who are connected to the Clinton kind of operation

very very closely, and you know that's been running the show for a long time on the Democrat side. And so they started that up in nineteen eighty eight, and then John Podesta stepped away in nineteen ninety two to go work for Bill Clinton, and he worked for him throughout his presidency, eventually got to be his chief of staff. Gets done with the Clinton administration, and I think two thousand and three he started the Center for American progress.

And then twenty sixteen he's running Hillary Clinton's campaign, so he's just very involved in that whole circle. And this whole time, his brother Tony now is running the lobbying group by himself because you know, I think you have to do it that way for conflicts of interest reasons. But they still work closely together obviously, and you know, it's it's a everybody kind of knows what's going on, right. And so it turns out that Tony Pedesta is a

big art collector. And in twenty fourteen there was a profile of his house in a Washington society magazine called Washington Life, and they profile his house and some of his art. He's a well known art collector, I mean a very very big, like multimillion dollar, you know, pieces of art kind of thing, and they profile some of the stuff he's got in his house. The first thing that you notice is or that people noticed, was the

giant statue. It's like a golden colored like bronze statue all shined up that is a human, a headless human, basically in a full backward arch. And it's called the Arch of Hysteria and it's by an artist called Louise

Bourgeois and people. I don't know who found this. It wasn't me, but somebody pointed out that there is a picture that is a public of the aftermath of one of the serial killer in Cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer's Victims, and he took a picture of it because he would play with the corpses and do various things sometimes and take pictures of him where he had the corpse in pretty much the exact same position that this statue is depicting. And this statue she did this a year after all

the Dahmer stuff became public. Now, Louis Bourgeois, apparently there are sketches in books going back a long time ago where she was drawing this thing, so like, that's probably not where the concept came from. But when people noticed that,

obviously it continued to throw jet fuel on this fire. Well, then people started to look at some of the paintings he had on his walls, and these you can't really explain away like that, Oh I should mention, by the way, Louis Bourgeois, she's also got like there are sketches and drawings that have been made public that they show the two of them in particular where it's like a page or a canvas with a line drawn down the middle of it, and a little boy and a full grown

man with father and son written beneath them, kind of holding on to the middle line like it's a pole or reaching out toward each other something, and they both have erections. And so that's a little strange, right, Not

everybody draws stuff like that in their spare time. And so people started looking at the paintings on his walls, and these are pictures that are in the magazine profile, right, So these are things that he I mean, if I had an art collection with a bunch of pictures of what we're about to talk about, I would probably take those down before company came over. I would certainly take them down before the photographers showed up to profile my

house in a society magazine. But apparently that's not something he felt was really necessary. And so there are a couple of paintings by this artist named Bill Yanna Jorjyevik or Djerjivic, I'm not sure she's Serbian artist. And the one you see in his living room, I'm looking at it right now. He's got, you know, a big white couch a nice you know rich man in DC's living room, and in the background there's this painting and you can

make it out pretty clearly. And the full resolution version of this painting is available, you know online, you can just google it Billiyana Jerjievic. You'll find all this stuff. And it's a little girl with a sort of weird, deformed looking face and black sort of almost dead eyes, sitting on a stool with a short skirt up against like what looks like a tile bathroom wall or something like that. And that's one of them. It's like, Okay, it's a little creepy. It's creepy and weird and not

something I would have on my wall, but okay, whatever. Well, then there's another picture of another room, kind of a sitting room with an orange couch and a yellow chair in a blue chair. And there are two more of this artist paintings from this same series. One of them is this huge painting. It's about maybe looks like it's about five or six feet tall by eight or ten feet why it dominates the room. And it's another one

that you can find online. And what it depicts it's called synchronized swimming and it's got a bunch of young girls dressed in you know, different ways, laying in a circle on the bottom of a swimming of an empty swimming pool, and they've got that same sort of dead look in their eyes. They look like corpses, most of them. And that's the giant painting that he's got dominating this room, in this other walls, a bunch of young girls that

look dead lying on the bottom of a swimming pool. Well, kitty corner to that is another one of these paintings. This one's about poster size, from the same series, and this one is unmistakably two young girls dead, lying dead in a pool or a pond, rather a pond or river or something like that, and they're laying on their backs, just looking up at the camera and their their their

corpses like there's really no question about it. And so this same artist has done has done a bunch of others that weren't on Tony Pedesta's walls, and these pictures of this same series, a lot of them with the tile backgrounds. One of them, there's a little girl in a striped white and yellow shirt in her panties up against the wall and it's like picturing her from behind. There's another one with a little boy and just his underwear who's bound and tied up hanging against a tile wall.

There's another one with a with a little girl who's lying dead in a pond. Another one with a girl with some sort of a deformed face holding a dead baby. And so this is uh, you know. The the artist Billiana Jerjovic, she's been interviewed before in a in an art magazine and she said herself that things that she had read about pedophilia or inspirations for this series of artwork. And so that's certainly the association that's being made here. And it's very obvious in a lot of these things

that it's depicting abuse of children. That's really what the theme is of all of these. One of my buddies, after I put that podcast down, pointed out to me he's a guy who he worked in a slaughterhouse for many, many years, and I kind of looked at all the tile backgrounds on these things and figured there was like a shower kind of swimming pool type thing. He pointed out that that's how all slaughterhouses pretty much look on the inside, and he sent me a ton of pictures,

and sure enough, it's just tiled walls, tiled everything. And then I realized that one of the other paintings that Djerdjievik has as part of this part of this series is three or four butchers wearing hoods over their head with the butcher's long gloves and like high boots and butcher's aprons, and they're all standing around in one of those tiled rooms. And so it seems like she probably

made that connection too. And what we're looking at in some of these paintings is a bunch of kids in really you know again like creepy, abuse oriented pictures in slaughter in a slaughter hus And so it's seems like what we're probably looking at, maybe maybe not in People found an interview with Tony Podesta and he was being asked about some of his other favorite artists, and he listed a sculptor named Patricia Piccinini as one of his

very favorite artists. And I don't know, it's like a sculpture like she does, you know, the plastic arts of one kind or another. Basically, she makes these statues that look like concept art for like a surrealist horror movie. Basically most of them are the vast majority of them involved children with monsters or demons of one kind or another leering at them over like leering over them as

they sleep in their beds. There's one with this creepy monster with its long claws around standing on a bed with this what looks like maybe a four year old girl with its claws around her. You know, a lot of there's a lot of imagery of like orifices that look like vaginas or anuses or mouths with things coming out of them and kids poking at them or playing with them. There's a weird one of a deformed child

on top of like a horned goat. There's another one where there's this weird kind of pig monster with big pustules coming off of its back, with more monsters coming out of those, and it's behind this child, spooning him in bed, and so that's like, uh again, this is There's another one where there's a child trapped in a big spider's nest that with a bunch of eggs that are about to add So just creepy, weird stuff involving kids, right, And this is somebody that Tony Podesta listed is one

of his very favorite, very favorite artists. Well, then in another interview he was asked the same question, and this is where you just start to wonder kind of what's going on. Here is another one of his favorite artists that he mentioned. And I'm sure he's got a lot of favorite artists, but when he was asked the question, these are the ones he thought of, and so that's probably relevant. Is this woman named Kim Noble, who's a British woman who spent most of her life in institutions

like asylums. She's schizophrenic and has dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, and several of her multiple personalities are artists. And I'll put that in quotes because so Kim Noble was repeatedly, viciously, violently sexually abused for at least two years between the ages of one and three years old, and the damage that that did to her mind is again on display. She spent her entire life in institutions and the content of her paintings are not something that

she's innocent of. This she should not be held accountable. This is a woman who's sick, obviously, but these drawings, these paintings that she does they're sort of scratched out stick figure kind of paintings, but it's everything's very clear in all of them exactly what's going on. It all depicts extreme violent sexual abuse of children by multiple adults. In many of these things, there's kids tied to chairs with adults with whips standing over them, while another child's

on its knees covering its ears. There's another one with a little girl with adults surrounding her blindfolded, and it looks like her spirits kind of lifting up and leaving her body. There's another one with kids hanging and then standing in line in front of this adult who is sitting on a chair with a big smile on his face and he's got his hands down forcing the child to give him oral sex. You can look all these up on the internet. They're hard to look at, especially

when you know the history where they're coming from. There's another one where, i mean, there's just a bunch of adults standing around a bed and there's a child laying on it and there's an adult crouched down on top of the child having sex with the child. There's ones where there's a bunch of adults standing around with children on their knees in front of them and they're urinating in the kid's mouths. This is one of the artists that Tony Podesta listed as one of his very favorite artists.

And when you think about, Okay, all this is sick, but what we're really talking about here is a woman who had all of this stuff done to her for years when she was a small child, who's mind was shattered by that experience, and who now depicts this stuff, you know, just sort of again like she's not responsible

for the content of these things. And the idea of some guy like Tony Podesta sitting around with a bunch of his you know, art friends over a thousand dollars bottle of wine looking at you know, oh, look at the use of color in this Kim Noble piece where the man is whipping and raping the child. It's just

really sick. And it gets to the question that I that I this is the direction I took that third podcast is when you go through all this stuff and you lay it all out there, you can kind of understand why people had the response of what the hell is going on here? Whether or not you take that and tie it all together into there's this giant conspiracy involving a pizza place, and you know everything, everybody's connected and everybody's involved. You know, you don't have to do that.

Like the thing, the direction I took the podcast, and the thing that just occupies my mind is well, you know, I think about, like one of the questions that is very strange to people like me, to people like you, to people out there listening, anybody out there listening, is how somebody like Jeffrey Epstein could have operated out in the open for as long as he did in these circles.

I mean, you got to remember his private airplane was called the Lolita Express, and he didn't give it that name like other people gave it that name, you know, Lolita for everybody who hasn't read it. And I don't really recommend it, but this is what literary people consider high art. It's a nineteen fifty five novel based on an event that happened in nineteen forty eight where this man, this middle aged man, kidnapped this twelve year old girl, kept her for about two years on this cross country

trip and just raped her all the time. And that's what this book is about, and it portrays it in a way that, like, you know, maybe they're in love. It's really it's really sick. I don't want the book.

nicknamed his airplane the Lolita Express. They knew what was going on on those airplanes, and so how is it possible that this guy could just operate like that, especially in a place like Washington, where you know, people are looking for anything they can find to smear somebody and destroy their career. If there's any little thing they can

take out of context, they'll do it. But nobody seems to be interested in saying, hey, why does Tony Podesta have pictures of dead kids on his walls by artists who specialize in pedophile art. It just doesn't get mentioned. And in fact, he feels comfortable enough with all of that that he leaves it up when people come over for parties, He leaves it up when photographers show up from a magazine to profile his house, because this is

normal in this place, Like this is what's normal. And so we ask, how is it that Jeffrey Epstein could operate out in the open. It's because we're thinking like normal people, you know, we're thinking that if I walk onto a dude's private plane and there are a half dozen teenage girls that are not related to him running around the plane, and he asked me if I want to get a massage from one of them, Like I'm

certainly leaving the plane. The only question is whether I would get violent before I did that, And I think

that's how most people would respond. And so they think, how is it that he could have operated out in the open like this, Well, if you just came from a party at Tony Podesta's house where he's showing off his Kim Noble drawings, and you know, after that, you went and had dinner at a Marina Brahmovic thing with pig's blood written all over the walls and everything like that, then you show up to Jeffrey Epstein's plane and it's not that weird, you know, it's pretty just par for

the course basically among these degenerates. And so if these were people who you know, it was a guy who lived down the block, it was just somebody who, you know, he's into weird stuff. You know, some people like to listen to heavy metal music about the Devil too. Does that make him devil worshipers?

in the current setup, maybe that shouldn't be the case. Well, we're talking about people who are right at the center of the American power structure, and we are completely within our rights to demand to know. I mean, you would get kicked off of a local school board for having pictures of dead abused kids on your wall. And yet these people are at the center of the Washington power structure. And it's you know, so you ask yourself, like, what is it that's going on there that this stuff could

be could be accepted the way it is. You remember what happened. I don't know all the details on this. I don't keep up with like just day to day politics that much, but I noticed that when that guy, Madison Cawthorn came out and said that he'd been offered to you know, since he became a congressman, people had come to him and invited him to orgies and you know, cocaine parties with orgies and everything. And man, they got rid of him quick inn They that took no time at all, they got rid of him.

don't mention it at every turn? Why isn't that a major talking point?

camera videos of all the James' James O'Keeffe. You had that video that he got a hold of and that thing went crazy viral. Everybody wanted to see it, Everybody wanted to hear it. And so you would think, you know, because they say that that the media is run by you know, the rule is like if it bleeds, it leads, right, So if it's just sensational and whatever gets eyeballs, and

that's what they'll go after. If that were true, every single media organization would have an entire department devoted to Jeffrey Epstein because people all want to know about that, and they refuse to address it for probably the same reason that people just avoid and stay away from the Denny Hastard story. Denny Hasterrick, by the way, was at a a kid's summer camp with John Podesta back in sixty seven or sixty eight, I think it was in It was in Japan. It's kind of a weird thing.

I don't I don't know if that's a you know, we're bringing up but that is interesting and so yeah, I mean you you know, you start to ask what these people are, just just what it is they're doing when they're not on camera, and and who these people really are. And you know, there was a there was

a a New York Times. Well a lot of people wrote about it, but there was this there was this French novelist back in maybe twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen named Gabriel matts Neff who you wrote novels that were about pedophilia. And they were not about like a cop who's chasing down a pedophile. They were, you know, a book written by a pedophile. It turns out based on his own experiences for other people who found that kind of stuff interesting, Well, Matt's Neff was not. He was

a this is a this guy's a big deal. I mean, he had a he had a column in a major French newspaper or magazine. Rather, he was friends with, you know, Francois Holan, a lot of high up French people. Was a French high society, very very big guy over there. And finally he gets busted for being a pedophile. His entire life, you know, his first book that he ever wrote was called Under sixteen years Old and it was about pedophilia, right, So it was all out in the open,

and everybody kind of knew about this. Well, finally they arrested him, and there was this New York Times article kind of about the whole situation, and it said something very very very interesting that I think maybe shot shines

a fairmental light on a lot of this stuff. It said that, you know, in France there's always been this tension between its professed egalitarianism and the elitism of the people on top, and that the elites in France have for many years distinguished themselves from ordinary people through a different code of morality that was it was a status thing, that it was one of the ways that you know, that they mark themselves off, that they're above all of you know, a beyond good and evil, above all of

all of those provincial kind of considerations. And I think that that probably shehins a lot of light on you know, why it is that could just think about it, like, how many of these people are there that how many people out there would think it's normal, would or would want a picture of a painting of dead kids lying on the bottom of a swimming pool, prominently featured, very expensive piece of art, like prominently featured in their living room.

And the answer is very very few, right, it's it's And yet when you go to Washington, d C. When you go to a lot of these circles, there doesn't seem to be a very few of these people. They seem to be very very They seemed to be all over the place.

It was another BBC presenter that wrote an article during the Me Too stuff where he said that you know, these days he he and a lot of people that he knows lose sleep at night and have nightmares that one day the cops are going to knock on their door for a lot of the things that they were up to back in the sixties and seventies that you know, especially that that period after the Cultural Revolution in the

sixties and after the Hill, but before AIDS. You know, you hear about it, whether it's music bands, Hollywood, political circles, TV. These people were out of control in the nineteen seventies. I mean it's you hear about bands like led Zepp and a lot of a lot of bands, a lot of Hollywood parties where it was just totally normal to have teenage girls and teenage boys running around. I mean it's even like, you know, even.

need to be answered. Why did Alex Acosta say, Jeffrey Epstein belong to intelligence? We just we by any standard of national security classification. I don't care what we Everybody

wants and deserves an answer to that question. At least, you can't even get the question asked, and you know, it just, uh, it leaves room for you know, the kind of conspiracy theories that would lead to a guy grabbing a gun and going down to a pizza place and Washington, d C. Because when they're when when you see all of this stuff and you say, like, clearly there's something strange going on in all this like but and so you say, well, okay, I'll turn on the

news and they'll tell me, like you know, they'll ask the questions about it. What I mean, you find that not only is that not happening, but anybody who mentions it, you know, it's died down a little bit now. But if you mention this stuff back, you know, when Ben Swann got kicked off, you would get kicked off of like all your platforms for bringing this stuff up, for asking obvious questions that any normal person would want answered of people who are at the center of the American

power structure. And so you know that you're just you're begging for uh, you know, people to draw their own conclusions and take matters into their own hands. When that's the situation. I mean, these people, for a million different reasons, belong nowhere near power. But you know, I think this is one of the angles that you can really you

can take this to anybody. You can take this to a Democrat mom, you know, a Democrat soccer mom, and show her a lot of this stuff and she will agree with you that these people belong nowhere near the decision making process on whether or not we should be doing sex change surgeries on children. You know, like, if you have pictures of dead, tied up, abused eight year olds on your wall, you shouldn't be helping make decisions as to whether eight year olds should be able to

get gender reassignment surgeries. Most people could agree with that.

Ukraine is like the center of that. I mean, I have one of my one of my Patroon supporters said, Ukraine it almost seems like it's West World for Western elites, you know, or why why do they want to spend so much time over there?

and everything. He's got the full guy father likes set up, and he brings them all in, sits them around the table, and he just informs them, Look, you guys can stay billionaires, you can stay rich. Like I'm not going to interfere with that, but you guys are done having anything to do with the Russian state. The Russian state is back and it's going to be reasserting its prerogatives. Those of

you who can get on board with that, great. If you can't, then you and I are going to have problems, and some of them could, you know, guys like Oleg Deripaska, a lot of the Russian ethnic Russian oligarchs, they were kind of on board with that because you know, they these were guys too. It's natural to have a certain amount of love for your country. They didn't like exactly what was going on, and so they were happy to

get on board with that. You know, some of them fled to New York, London and Tel Aviv with hundreds of billions of dollars that they've since used buying off politicians and paying for media time and paying off think tanks to make sure that the Anglo sphere stays in a permanent gehat with Russia. And you know, they're very disappointed.

They thought that they were going to be able to loot that whole country forever, and they were able to do it throughout the entire nineteen nineties and Putin you know, I mean people, you don't have to be a Putin lover or whatever. I mean. You know, whether or not I would want to live in a country that's governed the way Russia's governed is really beside the point, because I'm not coming from a country that was in the

state Russia was in in the nineteen nineties. And you know, if you think that you're going to go from that to Bernie Sanders runs for office in Russia and then turns it into Vermont like from what it was in

the nineties, that's just not how it works. And I mean, you had you had oligarchs that controlled major chunks of the country, including the natural resources, and it including the local governments that refused to send taxes to the central government, who had private military forces that were better equipped and

better paid than the Russian army. And so you know, if you were to say, how is the Russian state ever going to recollect itself and just re establish itself as as a going concer, you said, well, there's going to be a massive civil war first of all, and then someone's going to come out on top of that. Didn't happen. And that's amazing that that did not happen,

given where they were coming from. And you know, I don't think again, people can like or dislike Putin for a million different reasons, but there's very few people who could have pulled that off. And I think the Russians know that, and that's why he's so popular.

high well placed sources. And I believe, I mean, he seems like the kind of guy who probably would have those sources who told him that they had gone through the fine tooth comb Anthony Wiener's laptop. And again, Anthony Wiener wasn't just a prominent congressman. He was married to Human Aberdeen, who was Hillary Clinton's good friend. I guess we'll just leave it at that. And if they had

gone through this, this is Eric Prince. This is the guy who started Blackwater, a guy who was very very connected. I mean, his sister ended up being the education secretary for Trump. Right, very connected guy. And he goes on the radio and says that he's got high place sources at one police plaza. They told him they went through the Wiener laptop and they found chaos, They found evidence of child sexual abuse, money laundering, all of this stuff,

and that they had sent it to the FBI. And when nothing happened that the NYPD was actually started threatening if you don't do something about this, then we're going to go public. But then that the Obama administration, the Department of Justice started threatening New York that we're going to prosecute a bunch of people over the Eric Garner

case if you do that. And so they didn't. And so Eric Prince was giving a was giving a presentation or having a talk with a guy, and then there were questions and answers afterwards, and you know, I had to get in there. So I got up there. I was like, I've been waiting six years to get an answer to this question. I laid it out to him and I said, you know you said, and I quoted him exactly what he said. I was like, this is in twenty sixteen. I know this a little off topic.

I don't know about anybody else in here, but I for one would love and update on this. And he didn't disavowt any of it. He said, he's stayed by all of it. He said, it's he said it was true. And so then I asked him, I said, and this goes to what you were just talking about with Russia kind of is how I'm relating this is, I said, Okay, So you were just up here though, telling us how, you know, we need to stand with the people of Iran, we need to you know, back the people like the

freedom fighters in Ukraine or whatever. It's like, you're just you're telling me in my answer here that a bunch of the most powerful people up in Washington are either complicit or actively participating in child sexual abuse and money laundering and all these things, and you want me to follow those people into a conflict with Russia or Iran or anything. Said, how do you square those two things?

And he just he kind of just avoided the question, you know, I mean he seemed like actually kind of a pretty normal, like good head on his shoulders kind of guy, but a very boomer mentality in terms of like just can't get past you know. Like he told us a story like when he was seven years old,

his family took him. They went to France on a vacation and they went to Normandy Beach, and he was already like so into World War two and everything that he was actually given his family it's seven years old, given them a tour of like Normandy Beach, right, So he's just one of those guys Team America kind of thing,

and you understand it. But I think even I think people like him are even having a little bit of trouble with the cognitive dissonance there because I'm not following those people anywhere, I mean, putting all of this moral stuff aside. I mean, it just blows me away that people don't seem to remember that these the people who are who are managing this conflict with Russia are the same people who manage the Afghanistan withdrawal, like the exact

same people, and everybody seems fine with that. I mean, it's really like it's late stage civilization like type of behavior.

will always respect. It's like the people in the Pentagon have your best interests or the people of the CIA have your the NFA, these people, you know, basically the deep state, you know, I mean these are still boomers who think that the deep state or Obama holdovers. Yeah, you know what I mean. So and then so yeah, you celebrate all these people finally realizing that the press, you know, isn't biased, it actually has an agenda and

all of a sudden military something. I Mean, here's something that pisses me off the most is it's that it's the whole like Whig theory of history thing, how could another country being how could another country invade another country?

going insane listening to these people sometimes. I mean, you know that specifically, the way I asked Prince that question was, you know, because he had said a few things he seems like sort of maybe like an evangelical, like normy Protestant type, but I'm not sure, but that's what he

kind of sounded like. You mentioned religion, Christianity a few times in his talk, and I asked him why we should follow the kind of people that he was describing in that Breitbart interview into a war against a country that is using government funds to build hundreds of Orthodox churches all over Russia? Like why should I want to go join these people to go fight them? And he

didn't have a good answer for me. I mean, I don't think there is a good answer, you know, Like, and I will say this that it is there's been a lot of progress made, Like those boomers, a lot of them kind of fell in line as far as Russia and the Ukraine story and everything, but not quite It's a little less than have been say pre Trump.

Thank God for Tucker Carlson. I mean, I can tell you Tucker Carlson is you know, he's a guy who, uh like I know him a little bit, and he's a guy who is very obviously like he's been just up here for so long that he's not quite normal, you know, like nobody could really be normal when you're that famous for that long. But I can tell you that his his politics are legit and his and his

intentions are legit, like and thank God for him. I mean, you know, the people at Fox News, and I've heard this from journalists who work with Fox News that the management at Fox News they hate Tucker's guts and they would get rid of him tomorrow if they could. And that to me just is that recommends him better than

just about anything. So but if it wasn't for him, you know, if they had been able to get rid of him, and you just had Hannity and whoever they replaced him with, then you'd have Fox News and it would be just all pro Ukraine kill the Russians. And you know, so he provides that little wedge and you know, to the extent that I have any audience or influence at all, I just decided early on. I'm not going along with this. I just I don't care how big it gets or what goes on. You know, I wasn't

going to ever get behind. I mean, you look at what happened in Syria. There's a lot of people I know that the Syrian War. Because again I came from a family of veterans. I served twenty years for the Department of Defense. It's in my nature to just be reflexively patriotic and reflexively nationalist and all that. And the Syrian War, I mean, we just have to be very

direct about what happened there. I mean, we ginned up in international jihad to go destroy a country that all of the Christians and other you know, minorities in that country were hiding behind Asad's forces. He was the only thing protecting them. They were going to get completely wiped out by these animals that we sent in there. I mean, they did wipe out everybody they could get their hands

on if they were on the outskirts of Damascus. When the Russians and the Iranians showed up, and the Russians showed up and stopped the genocide against Christians that we were perpetrating, and I know a lot of people that the Syrian War it really kind of like broke their faith, you know, it made it very hard to you know, Yeah, I just I will not support this jihad against Russia. I don't care what happens. If they want to, you know, throw me in jail, if things get bad enough, then

they can do it. But I'm not cucking on that issue. I just refuse.

off the rails with them. But still like I One of the things I've been concerned about from the very beginning is that you know that that U Zelenski is a Jewish guy in Ukraine who just learned the Ukrainian language like seven years ago. His Defense Minister is Jewish, his Prime Minister is Jewish. His campaign was funded and run by a Jewish oligarchy. Whoor Kolamoyski. And uh you know,

now I'm not I'm not like conspiracy theorizing here. What I'm what I'm worried about, and what I still worry about is like I don't like Ukraine is not a is not known as a traditionally like pro Jewish country, you know, obviously like they got a lot of these oun like neo Nazi militia types, the Asov guys, and always you think that this government under Zelenski, they don't care at all about throwing these neo Nazis into the fire forever, you know, I mean, I imagine I would

imagine that probably growing up as a Jewish kid in Ukraine probably wasn't always easy for Zelenski. I'm you know, I'm sure there were times where that wasn't easy, and so I just I worry and wonder that. You know, they've got a guy in office over there who will just throw the Ukrainians into the fire until they're all gone because he just doesn't really care, you know, because these people have been hostile to him and hostile to

his people. And I could be wrong about that. Maybe he's become a Ukrainian nationalist like all the Azov guys like over the years. But you know, it's it's something to be concerned about. I think, what do they call Ukraine the bread basket of Europe. Yeah, it's very rich land, a lot of resources, a lot more resources than a

little stretch of land in the Middle East. Yeah, it would seem like there would be some some people might be interested in taking that land over, and you know, because it's a little more rich and probably a little more stable than you know where they are. All I know, yeah, all I All I know is that it would be it would be terrible for the world, and I think it would be terrible for America and Americans if if

the regime gets its way in Ukraine. I think that that it would be a disaster for the world, actually, and I think that the best thing that could happen, including with like to America and two Americans. Is that the Russians get their way in Ukraine and that and that we have to take a step back from this global American empire. That uh, you know, we we we're I mean, if you look at places like Russia and Turkey and Israel, uh to a degree, and Saudi Arabia

to a degree, India, China. You know, basically these sort of civilization states, they all have an interest in a multipolar world order. We're we are the only ones that don't. And that and that goes for the Europeans as well. I mean, we see what's going on over there. The Europeans are the Europeans are done man like their their economy is I saw this thing the other day, point o, yeah,

there you go. I mean, and it's ah and there were and yet they're doing it's a d I Y morgent Tho plan like getting them to do it to themselves. And you know, I mean that's I don't blame the European people for being that stupid, obviously, I think their leaders are compromised. NATO is not so much a military alliance as much as it's just the euphemism we give

to the American domination of Europe. So yeah, it's I think that taking getting a bloody nose on this and getting pushed back and finding out that in fact, other major powers do have spheres of influence and you don't run the world, it would be the best thing it could happen to us and certainly to the rest of the world.

say something. They just kicked his ass and you know, really gave him a good, a pretty solid beating. These guys. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. I mean, he became a man that day. And then he just he went out and he you know, finished college. He's a teacher now, he's a very successful guy. And he really like matured about ten years in fifteen minutes during that beating. So yeah, definitely right about that.

sub Sac and sub Sac is an unbelievable platform. They've been really good to me and good to a lot of people who believe in uh, you know, you should be able to say what you want and not have to suffer the consequences of the regime and their apparatus. But this is something that with my recent reading of race War in high school, which a lot of people wouldn't maybe they would see the black white conflict in it.

But the fact that the New York City Teachers Union, the UFT at the time had sixty thousand members and forty thousand of them were Jewish. I look at that, and I'm trying to also look at the historic relationship between the black and the jew in this country. And you just started writing about it. So I want to give you a chance to do an overview. So where do you want to start.

Cannon thing happened, or when jay Z got introlled. Each time this happens, people tend to just put it in a jar and you know, put it up by itself on display somewhere as like this ignorant rapper who made this ignorant remark you know, but when you look back at how often this has happened over the years, and how often it happens specifically with black celebrities and not white celebrities. You know, it took a bottle of Jim Beam and sleep deprivation for mel Gibson to go on

his rant. You know, but that that you realize that there's a long history here and that this doesn't just come out of nowhere. It didn't erupt out of nowhere, and it's just, you know, these these ideas that Kanye is putting out about blacks being the real Hebrews, or you know, Jewish executives and business owners taking advantage of black labor or black customers, or you know, any of

these things that he says. He's not going online and you know, to some hardcore right wing website reading these things.

These are ideas that have been circulating in the black community for many decades, and you know, so I wanted to give people just a little history lesson on the background of what happened when when Kanye was having his self immolation on the steps of the A d L headquarters, But it ended up being like a much longer his history of black Jewish relations in the US, you know, kind of started back with the Great migration up through the teachers strike, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and

then all the way on up through like the Crown Heights riot and you know, attempts by various people on both sides to kind of paper over their differences and smooth things over. And yeah, it was it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot actually when I was researching it.

mid nineteenth century. It was a pretty big German migration too, and some portion of those were Jews, and they you know, mostly lived up in the northern cities, and yeah, so they were there before.

very successful members of German society. You know. The Eastern Jews in the Russian Empire were they were less certainly less assimilated, but just sort of less less sort of integrated into the value system and the habits of like Enlightenment Europe by that point, right, And so there was that, But this is something that's actually happened. You know. You see the same thing when you look at the big

Irish migration in the mid nineteenth century. There were Irish who were already here, who were well assimilated and who were because you know, the earliest Irish migrations into the United States were predominantly people with skill, are with a good trade or with wealth, and they were coming over and integrating pretty well. And then when you had the famine in in the mid nineteenth century, you started getting

just flooded. Our cities got flooded with just I mean an unbelievable like a quarter of the entire population of Ireland moved to the United States in a short period

of time. I mean, that's just unbelievable. But like you know, and they pretty much all settled in cities, at least at first, and you had the previous Irish residents of those cities who were seeing these mostly illiterate, poor rural Irish people who were coming over and they're thinking, oh my god, like these the Americans are going to hate Irish people now, and we're going to get sucked into that.

And so they set up benevolent associations in settlement houses and various things to sort of try to integrate these

people only did a pretty good job. And the same thing happened with German Jews when Eastern Jews started coming over in the eighteen eighty there was actually you know, if you wanted to participate, if you were a new Jewish immigrant, you wanted to participate or benefit from some of the like just community resources, community welfare resources, or anything that were provided by the Jewish community itself, you had to go through this process of you know, going

into these settlement houses and sort of you had to make you had to learn English, you had you had to assimilate basically, and they made damn sure you did. And you know, you even saw the same thing when you get into the twentieth century with the great migration of blacks out of the South. You know, there there were black people who lived in the northern cities, very few, but they'd lived there for a long time. These are people who would live there since before the Civil War.

And when they got up there and they started seeing their country cousins flooding into the cities. You know, they think this is this is bad news for us, and so you know, there was somewhat less of a of an attempt to help them integrate, which may have something to do with why you know, it didn't happen as well.

in that organization was. It was critical to getting that organization going and remained critical to it like throughout most of its history. You know. It's it's interesting because you know, the Jews in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. You know, the way you have to kind of think of them before, like up to right around the well about the great migration of Jews over here in the eighteen eighties really

is they were like a more advanced, more sophisticated Gypsy group. Basically, you know, they were people without a home country who lived everywhere, traveled around, and they engaged in trades that made them useful to their host populations. Right, So Gypsies are a little bit more primitive in that sense. You know, there's a lot of art, music, dance, and fortune telling, you know, things like that, as well as criminal activity.

But the Jews, you know, these were you know, they had the advantage of before this was common throughout Europe. Most Jews were literate because it was just part of their social tradition. And you know, if you were if you were literate in eighteen fifty, then you know there was going to be something for you to do. And but there were also a lot of Jewish entertainers, you know, singing, dancing, things that you know, were considered disreputable back in the day.

Like back in the day, an actor was not something that anybody wanted to associate with. Like people might go to the shows and enjoy them, but they were considered it was considered a disreputable trade because they just you know, people didn't like them. And so Jews did a lot of that, and when they come over to the United States, they did a lot of that, a lot of Jewish comedians, Jewish musicians, et cetera. And they own ended up owning

a lot of the jazz clubs. And yeah, they you know, as far as I know, I mean, race relations, you know, race relations in general in the North were not really bad before the Great Migration because there just weren't enough Black people to make anybody really feel threatened as far as their job or the changing of their neighborhood.

the South. Companies are advertised down in the South to get black workers to come up and something that's kind of it's possible now, right because there's railroads that are available for mass use. And you know, so when when those workers, when when the white workers start getting back from Europe from the First World War, they find a lot of their jobs all taken up by these people, these black people who weren't here before. And you actually

did see some some racial violence at that time. And so I think before the Great Migration, though it was not it was not so much of an issue sports.

or fifteen of them have Jewish owners. And you know, they've had a Jewish League commissioner since I think eighty three, and David Stern was pretty much understood by everybody to be running the show as the as the second man for a decade before that. So you know, we're talking what is that fifty years that they've had a Jewish commissioner basically, And yeah, I mean and that creates resentment,

you know. I mean it's something that you know, you see it in different ways, like in James Baldwin wrote this this kind of infamous article back in sixty three sixty four. I think sometimes in the sixties called negroes are anti Semitic because they're anti white. And you know, he starts it off with, I mean, this is not something you could get published today, even by a black author. You know, he says, when I was a boy growing up in Harlem, you know, the butcher was a Jew

and we hated him. The landlord was a Jew, and we hated him because he wouldn't take care of our building, et cetera. You know, the our teachers were mostly Jews and we hated them because they talked down to us. And he kind of just goes on and on like this, and this is you know, I mean, it's pretty shocking to like modern readers to read it, right, just like that.

You know, around the same time that that Norman pod hortz h article in the Commentary that I quote a lot, is really shocking to people today, you know, and I think we've probably really lost something, you know, by not allowing people to speak openly about these things. You know, when you read pod Hortz's article in Commentary, it's called

it's called My Negro Problem in ours. It's a famous article that you know, one of the fathers of neo conservatism wrote and he talks about living in He grew up in Brownsville, actually so right there in Brooklyn and in a mixed neighborhood of primarily Jews, Italians and some blacks. And when he was a boy, it was still mostly

Jews and Italians, but a growing black population. And he goes through with all these incidents when he was a kid of you know, once when he's a twelve year old boy gets attacked by a group and hitting the head with a baseball bat and just can consistently getting you know, mugged, extorted, threatened, intimidated, and beaten like a

lot by these black kids. And he talks about how that experience growing up kind of shaped his shaped certain views, some of which he you know, justifies, others that he doesn't justify and that he's ashamed of. But he says that they're really there, you know, and those are you know, that's a that's a that's an important article, an important perspective to get. You know, you have a twelve year old boy who got beat over the head with a

baseball bat. That's incredibly traumatic. It's incredibly traumatic for like for the parents, you know, for everybody involved to have something like that happen. I mean, I grew up in rough neighborhoods, in mostly black, black neighborhoods, and so I'm kind of used to this kind of thing. But I wonder sometimes how people who are who grew up in kind of middle class, stable circumstances when they read about a twelve year old boy getting attacked and beaten over

the head with a baseball bat. It's pretty shock, you know, and and and it is shocking. It was. It was really traumatic. And the feelings that that that somebody like pot Horts has that are an outgrowth of these, you know, really difficult experiences. You know, they're important to talk about, but you can't talk about them anymore, and it's unfortunate. And just like in James Baldwin's case too, you know, Baldwin, Uh,

you can call that article anti semitic. I don't really think it is, uh anymore than pot Hortz's article is anti black, but you can read it and say that this is you know, Baldwin's not somebody I have a lot of respect for as a writer or a thinker. I think he gets overplayed because of kind of who he was at a certain historical moment, but you know, he he the reality was growing up in his neighborhood, the butcher was a Jew. His teacher's word jews, his

landlord's word jews, the pawnbroker's word used. And you're going to have a difficult relationship with those people when you have an outside community that owns everything, holds all the professional jobs, et cetera. Which makes sense because they've been here for a long time and so they've moved up the social ladder and you just got here. You know, your people just got here, and so it's natural that

would be the case. But you know, at a time like the nineteen sixties, when identity was becoming so important and black militancy was on the rise, you know, the idea that kind of had held among liberals up until then that blacks would kind of travel the same path that previous immigrant groups had traveled, working their way up over the course of a few generations, you know, toward

integration to the economy and everything. That that was not a proposal that was acceptable to black people anymore in the sixties, And you know, you can sympathize with that a bit right. They've been here for four hundred years, and you have second generation immigrants telling them to get in line and do what they parents did, and you

can see why they would chafe against that. But at the same time, you know, that's the path, that is the path towards success and integration, and when it was abandoned, you know, we're still living with the consequences of that shift in identity and ideology among black people in the nineteen sixties.

kid shoots them. It's like, no, that was They're talking about something that was a prevailing theme in you know, like you said, rap songs, other black medium, this was something that was that everybody talked about in Black communities all the time is the Korean grocer, you know, So, yeah, it doesn't have to be at all. I mean, really like if you look at the La Riots, two thousand Korean businesses were burned down during the La Riots two thousand.

When you look at like the Detroit riot in nineteen sixty seven where they had to call in the eighty second Airborne in one hundred and first and I mean, it was all out war there were it was one of the nastiest riots in the country's history. There was something like four or five hundred buildings got burned down, two thousand Korean businesses got burned down. There were videos of groups of black rioters saying, you know, stay away from that block over there, that's all owned by our people.

Let's go get those fucking Koreans. And so, I mean, that's a program by any definition of the word. And

you know that happened in ninety two. In ninety one, you have the Crown Heights Riot where a bunch of dominantly like Jamaican and Kribbean Island are black residents of this neighborhood in Brooklyn, you know, went on what hesitates to call it a pugrom not a lot of damage was done and only one person was killed, but you did have like mobs of black people marching through the streets saying Hitler didn't finish the job and get the

jew and stuff and so. And both of those were very much driven by the animosity that led to them

was driven by similar circumstances. You know, it happened to be the Koreans in la who owned all the businesses in black communities in you know, in Brooklyn, it happened to be a lot of Jews, and you know it is it's a yeah, it's a problem, right because I mean, on one hand, if you look at the New York situation, it's a little different than the Koreans, because the Koreans moved into black neighborhoods and opened these businesses and took over kind of the commerce in those areas on the

East coast. In the Midwest, the Catholic and Jewish Euroethnics that had previously lived in those places owned the real estate,

owned the businesses. You know, they got driven out by the influx of black migrants from the South, and so they just owned what they had always owned, and they just continued to own it now that the population had changed, and you know, that's just something that you're you know, people can chant diversities our strength all they want, and maybe on some level and in certain ways it does

strengthen us. But there are also extreme difficulties with managing a diverse society, you know, especially when when ethnicity or race corresponds with social class in an uncomfortable way. You know, it's very difficult to manage these things, especially in a democracy quote unquote, where there's just always going to be an incentive for or demagogues to rise up and say, the reason you're down here is because you know those people up there don't like you, and it's a very

appealing message to people who are in rough circumstances. You know. I think if the I think if the Irish or the Jews when they first came and in the first generation or two, when they were down at the bottom of the social scale, if they had had, you know, sort of that same level of resentment for where they were starting out and everything that a lot of blacks kind of embraced in the twentieth century, they probably would have ended up in a similar bad situation. You know.

But it was really the opposite. I mean they were. I mean, shoot, they we all know, like people change their names to make them more familiar to Americans. You hear about like ethnics in the Eastern cities, who you know, the parents are immigrants and they won't allow their children

to speak the mother tongue at home. They're like, you speak English in this country, and you hear about that, or even even my family, like you know, on my father's side, my father's side came out to California as part of the Oki migration during the dust Bowl in the thirties. And you know that's something that is sort of romanticized for most people because of John Steinbeck and so forth. But this was, like, it was very, very similar.

It was a smaller scale, but you know, you got these people who were like rowdy, hard drinking, fighting, rural Southerners who were used to being basically sharecroppers or just above sharecroppers, who are now moving over into California, and people did not like them. You know, they thought of them as vulgar, and the tent cities that sprang up to house them were you know, considered like just dens

of vice and crime and just disorder. You know, there there was a famous incident where the LAPD actually took up positions on a freeway or a highway coming into I guess it wouldn't have been a freeway, but a road coming into Los Angeles County to prevent a caravan of OKI's from coming into La County because they didn't want them there. And so, you know, these are these are the kind of things that these are the kind

of things that happened in a country like ours. You know, there's a reason that the Russians, for example, the Russian the Russian Empire. You know, people hear about how you know, Jews were restricted to the pale offf Settlement. They could only live in the palist Settlement, which is a huge, huge piece of territory. But you know, the Russians understood that they were running an empire. The fact that they had all these different people, by definition, you're kind of

running an empire by that point. And so you know, it wasn't just the Jews who had to stay in the pale of settlement. The Tatars had to stay over there.

Everybody had to stay because they knew that once they start all everybody just move around, you're going to get conflict, and they didn't want to deal They didn't want to have to deal with that, you know, And I mean, you know, after they started to loosen those rules actually in the late nineteen hundreds, he did start to get a late eighteen hundreds, he did start to get conflict. And that conflict was I had a lot to do with the Jews starting to move over to the United States.

So you know, you read about like a lot of the pugroms that happened in the Russian Empire starting in the eighteen eighties, and you get the impression sometimes from reading them, unless you read like a deep history of it, that these are just like a bunch of Russians who hate Jews attacking the Jews, and when a lot of the times it was actually like you know, like you're in Odessa and it's the Greek community there that is in direct competition with the Jews who have now moved

in there for all of these industries that they used to dominate, so that it's the source of the conflict, and they were the ones kind of leading a pogrom there. You see that a lot. You know, these are just the difficulties again of trying to manage a diverse society. And you know when you when you're way of trying to manage that is to just not let anybody talk about it, not let anybody voice their frustrations or their fears.

You know, things build up under the surface until enough pressure builds up that they blow out.

something that you had talked about. You had talked about how the NAACP was basically started by Jews, funded by Jews, and why.

that was their religious identity. You know, there were slaves in Egypt and then they kept getting exiled and chased around, and that really was like the basis of their group

identity in a lot of ways. You get up to the twentieth century and I saw a it's like a pew or gallop pull that took place several years ago where they were asking Jews around the cunt what they thought the basis of like Jews, the primary basis of Jewish identity was it was like, you know, belief in the Torah, you know, affinity for the state of Israel, the Holocaust, remembering the Holocaust was like it got like

seventy percent. And so you have like an identity that is that is very much based on a sense of victimhood. And you can understand why they would identify with another group of people who were you know, clearly second class citizens as they were you know in certain ways in the Russian Empire, although that gets overplayed in many many ways, but you can understand where that certain sympathy would come from.

Part of it probably also has a lot to do with the fact that the Eastern Jews who were coming over, you know, they were coming at a time when when like revolutionary and socialist revolutionary politics had just consumed the

Jewish community, especially the young people. You read about another there was a letter from that same Zionist leader, High Invitzman, who's writing to another Zionist leader about how he was over in Poland trying to get people to trying to find young Jews to convince him to be Zionists, why they need to come down to Palestine and so forth. He says, I can't find any. Says every stutle I go to, every village I go to, there's a bunch of kids, there's a bunch of old people. All the

young people have left. They're all Communists now, or they're all you know, involved in some movement like this now. That's why, you know. In nineteen twenty five, Winston Churchill wrote that that article Communism versus Bolshevism versus Zionism, and it's pretty hilarious to read today.

a young person. As far as the young people went left in the Palist settlement, that's probably an exaggeration, but not much of one. They were all either going over into like communists and left wing politics, or they were becoming Zions And it really was like a battle for

the Jewish soul in a way. And you know, uh, that sense of that sense of being history as victims, I think probably did have a lot to do with the sympathy that they that they had for blacks, but it also ended up becoming the source of a lot of you know, black animosity toward Jews, because the simple fact of the matter was that you know, for everything we hear today about university quotas and some social club that you know didn't allow Jewish members or something that

Jews did find in the United States from the time they got here, you know, there were they certainly didn't face any any more obstacles to their integration and success than like the Irish or the Italians did, and they integrated.

By the time you get up into the twentieth century, when the civil rights movement really gets going, you know, it could really grate on like a black activist to hear, you know, a Jewish student who had come down to Mississippi from the summer off from Columbia, you know, or Harvard coming down and being like, yeah, you know, I'm just like you, like I totally understand what you're going through because I'm Jewish and you know, so it eventually ended up leading to a lot of the problems, you know,

that sense of like, you know, who are you kidding? Like that's that's ridiculous.

country still lived in the rural south. And the First World War comes along, and we send millions of men, white men over into the trenches in Europe and working administrative jobs for the military, and they have to leave their industrial jobs right at a time when the industrial base is expanding hugely because of the war. And so, you know, everybody hears about Rosie the Riveter during World

War Two. You know, the women moving into the workforce, and that did happen to a degree, but the black population being brought up into the north to be integrated into the industrial workforce was really the primary way that they filled it. And so starting with the First World War in nineteen seventeen, you start getting a large migration.

It kind of becomes a flood very quickly, because you know, one goes up there and he finds a job, and he sends for others, and you know, they write back about how great it is up there with no Jim Crow or whatever. Because things really hadn't started to deteriorate the way they would by the time you get to the fifties and sixties, and so it becomes a big flood. You know. You read like Isabella Patterson's book The Warmth of other Sons, which is about the Great Migration, and

it you know, it portrayed. It's a totally very like Its angle is like this was the experience of these black families and stuff as they were making this trip and this transition, right, and so that's what it is, and you get you know, one of the things she talks about is how once this got going and started building, I mean, it was just a mad rush out of the South and you had big spikes during the First World War, continued you know, lowered a little bit, but

continued until the Second World War, and then you know, I think we had something like sixteen or seventeen million men called up for the Second World War, serving in various capacities, and most of those were white men because the you know, the armed forces were still segregated, and so that created a huge hole. Part of it was filled by Rosie the Riveter. A much larger part of it was filled by a huge influx of black people

coming from the South. I mean, you read about like, you know, like that neighborhood of Brownsville, where Podhort was from and where that teacher strike took place in. I won't get the year exactly right, but it's like nineteen fifty five. As late as nineteen fifty five, it's still like seventy percent Jewish and Italian. You get up to nineteen sixty five or I think nineteen sixty seven, so like a decade later, it's ninety six percent black in

Puerto Rican. I mean, you're talking about a massive influx, you know, eight hundred thousand people moving into New York over the course of like a decade and a half. Just huge, and it obviously overwhelmed the city's ability to absorb these people. You know, they didn't have places for them to live, they didn't have you know, enough school facilities, they didn't have the infrastructure to handle all this, you know, especially since these people were coming up like the Irish

in the mid nineteenth century. You know, these are primarily like illiterate sharecroppers from the rural South, many of whom had never seen a big metropolis like New York City, you know, and let alone lived in one or participated in, you know, the complex credit economy that was developing in the cities or you know, being subject to sort of regimented industrial labor, you know, and they struggled, you know,

just like the Irish struggled. And you know, by the time you get up to the to the fifties and sixties, as white flights like really taken hold the you know, you have these neighborhoods that are again like ninety ninety five percent black and a smattering of Puerto Ricans in them. And you know, all of the businesses, primarily all of the professional jobs like teachers and civil servants and various things that are still in those places. Most of the

cops are still white. And you know, it's a if somebody were to ask me, like, could this have gone any differently? I don't know if it really could have gone any better than it did. I mean without without our political system just being completely different than it was. You know, if we had a political system that in nineteen sixty one, you know, through a hood over Malcolm X's head and dump them off in the middle of the ocean, maybe you could deal with this a little

bit differently. But in our society where it's sort of open two demagogues and people who were going to stir up anger for their own sort of for their own reasons. Very very difficult, I think too, you know, especially because like it was just it was inevitable that the black people who were coming up from the rural South, it was inevitable they were going to be at the bottom of the social scale. You know, they didn't have any

skills that were applicable to city life. Most of them couldn't read, you know, taking taking discrimination like completely out of the picture. Like they were going to be at the bottom, just like the Irish were at the bottom when they came in the eighteen fifties. And you actually see like before you get up to the era that you know, the build up toward the sixties, it started in the fifties, but before you get to that air

Have you ever seen that show Boardwalk Empire? Yes, yeah, so you know that black white right, Yeah, So the way his wife behaves with her kids and stuff. You remember that that was That's a real thing.

his displeasure. You know, he sees it as you know, selling out and bowing to the white man and everything. And it's like, you know, look, given the history of blacks in this country, like I understand where that mentality

comes from. You know, like there's there's a certain level of like inevitable historical shame that comes with the fact, you know, the simple fact that you know, your your whole, your whole, all of your ancestors were slaves of the people who you now live around in whose society you're trying to integrate into, right, and so you can understand

where that resentment comes from. But it's very it's very counterproductive and in his mentality when you get up into the fifties and sixties, you know, of resenting all that is selling out to the white man and everything became dominant by the time you get to the sixties, and so I mean you really start to see like you start to see, uh, just writings from very prominent like

black intellectuals in the nineteen sixties. Who are you know they say this stuff today, But it all started in the sixties about how, you know, things like kids disruptive behavior in schools, like well, that's you're holding them to white standards or just all of these other different things. It's like that is just an objectively like you're going down a very bad road, you know, and you're not going to make much progress with that kind of mentality. Even if it even if you can sympathize with or

understand where it came from, it definitely derailed them. I mean, if you look at pretty much any statistic you want to look at for Black Americans from the Civil from the end of the Civil War up through about like the mid fifties to the early sixties, everything you want to look at, from wealth to just everything, it's up, up, up, up,

up up up. And then you hit the sixties, when you get the Civil Rights Act, you get the Voting Rights Act, you get this sort of mass consciousness among white America that this is an issue that maybe needs to be addressed. And you know, so you would expect if it was going up before it would just skyrocket at this point. But you can look at those graphs and you start with the sixties and everything just collapses, and it's collapsed, you know really to the present day.

I mean, it's you know, things like crime rates obviously have decreased since the nineteen nineties, but you know the proportion of who's committing the crimes really is not changed. And you know that's something that like we talk about white flight. You know, people just people today really don't have any they don't have like a real understanding of

what it's like. I mean, you just have to imagine, like my wife's Armenian, right, and so over here in Glendale and Los Angeles, that's the Armenian neighbor There's buildings with Armenian writing all over them, and you know there's other people there, but that's there are more Armenians in Glendale than there are in any place in the world other than Yerevon. And you know the capital of Armenia,

it's little Armena. It's what it is. And so you know, you just imagine a place like that or a China town. You know, something that over the course of ten years is ninety five percent plaque and all the crime is being committed by this new group of people. All of the disorder, you know, is being committed by these this new group of people, and you're gonna have real issues. I mean, you know, and you know, people were people

were afraid. I mean, you know, like it doesn't matter how how liberal you are, when your when your kid comes home with, you know, having taken a baseball bat to the head at school that day, you're going to start looking for you know, for rental or real estate ads in the suburbs, you know. And that's really what happened in the sixties. Well started in the fifties, but but was completed by the sixties.

do we talk about that? I mean I've been talking about it by reading a book that takes place in the late sixties, but starts in nineteen fifty eight talking about the formation of the New York City Teachers' Union the UFT, and what happened, I mean, what happened. It was sure there were crime rates that were out of control, but there was not this the military. It's the militancy that really really did this in And where did that militancy come from?

it was a very concrete problem to fix. And the black people in the South, you know, they may have resented Jim Crow, they may have resented, you know, just the whole situation down there, but just over the years had kind of learned to live with it a little bit and learned, you know, like there was I was reading recently this story of this book about the Black Liberation Army, and in the early seventies they were running around killing cops and one of them, mentions that he's

interviewing one of them, and he talks about how he would always drive whenever they were going somewhere because him, being from the South, had manners when it came to white people because he's yes, sir, no, sir, you know how to talk like that. Whereas his buddies who were in the car with them, who grew up in you know, the Bronx, they didn't have any of that. And you kind of get an this is something that like, I don't I don't think I've ever seen anybody else really

point out, but I think it. I think it's definitely got a lot to do with it is you know, any group of immigrants, and I'm gonna call the blacks of the Great Migration immigrants just because I mean, shoot, when you're moving from Louisiana to Los Angeles or Oakland, I mean, that's a much larger migration than moving from you know, Greece to Italy or something, right in terms

of and it's probably just as culturally shocking. And you know, the when when other immigrant groups would come in, Oh gosh, I lost my train of thought. Put that aside. I was gonna say that bail me out here. I'll think of it.

crime rate than, you know, than American citizens. And it's like, okay, that's true, but what about their kids, because that's a different situation. That is when you really start to see that kind of thing. And you really saw that with the you know, because immigrants, you come into a place and you're trying to get along. You know, you're trying to find your little place and keep your head down

and you know, work and raise your family. Plus if you are an immigrant who's coming from a place, you know, as a refugee of some kind, you know, even an economic refugee or something. Whatever things are like in the new country is probably somewhat better than it was in the old country, So you don't you know, that's what

you have to compare to. And so the black migrants who came up into the North and South from the South, you know, these are people who had lived their lives and their parents had lived their lives in the South where they understood that there were you know, the bad things happened if you pissed off the white people, and there was just a certain level of deference that they may have resented but had sort of learned to just it was just a part of the way they approached the world.

But up in the up in the in the cities, your average white person is afraid of black people, and not just because they could call them, you know, a racist and get them in trouble or something. There's just a certain you know, there's a fear there that a lot of people have, you know, and I noticed it because I grew up around black people and so I have a comfort with them that is kind of bone deep.

But you know that second generations started to come of age in the late fifties, early sixties, and so now you have these young adult black kids who never lived in the South, who grew up watching their parents kind of be deferential to the white people, and you know,

didn't like seeing that. But now they're eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, and they grew up you know, again in the mix mixed race schools with white kids who were afraid of getting beaten up by them, and they didn't have any of that fear, and so there was you know, you would never have seen a I want to say never, but like it would have been very rare for a first generation black migrant from the South to you know, to talk back to or let alone get violent with

a police officer in the north, just like would be very rare because they understood, like you know, or they probably they assumed something. It probably wasn't so true that they would be real consequences for that, and you know, their kids just didn't think that way, and they were much more willing to uh to just yeah, get wild. I guess let's.

in the rise in black militancy. How great of a factor it was, I'm still trying to hash out. But an element was definitely a communist subversion, you know, like the American Communist Party in that nineteen sixty four Harlem riot. You know, there's a there's a famous black activist who you know, he told a reporter or he was given a speech maybe in a reporter heard it that if he had one hundred dedicated black militants who were black guerrillas, who were ready to die for the cause, they could

burn the whole city down. And like they were talking about that guy was one of the leaders of the New York branch of the Communist Party of America, right, And you see this a lot in a lot of these riots where the people who are primarily inciting them have not sort of indirect but direct affiliations with the CPUSA, And so that might be I have something to do with it as well when you get up to you know, a book by Rick Pearlstein Nixon Land, who you know,

I don't agree with his politics or anything, but sometimes

you still find good historical anecdotes. You know, he talks about how he talks about this period in nineteen sixty four, sixty five when burned sixty five, when Lyndon Johnson had, you know, won the presidency easily and they're about to pass the Voting Rights Act, and there's this peer you read the rhetoric from Lyndon Johnson from you know, just senators, other you know, major leaders, and they're still talking like the future that's coming is this star trek Jetson's just utopia,

you know, and they really still thought that up till like sixty five. And it's very interesting because you know, Lyndon Johnson gave like the most famous speech of his career on the eve of the passage of the Voting Rights Act and in sixty five, which was happening at the same time that the Selma marches were going on, and it's just a I mean, it's almost like a it's a sermon more than it is a speech, really, you know, I mean, it really is just this soaring

rhetoric and everything. And one week later, the Wats riot and Los Angeles broke out. And this was something that, like you know, the Harlem riot in sixty four didn't get a lot of national publicity. It was something that New Yorkers knew about, but most people outside of there didn't. The watch were right. It was so huge, and the aggression was so intense, and the level of devastation that people were seeing was so overwhelming. I mean, you had you know, because this was a uh, this was a

televised riode. It was the first major televised ride in America you had, you know, So people were glued to their screens for four or five days watching live footage of you know, firefighters trying to put out fires and getting attacked by mobs, and the mobs dancing around the burning building, you know, and you know, or watching footage from a from a TV news helicopter that suddenly has to veer away because it's taking small arms fire from

the ground, you know. And so people are watching this and they're like, you know, if you read like Christopher Colwell's book Age of Entitlement, for example, he really does a great job of showing how when Americans passed the Civil Rights Act, they looked at that almost is like

a foreign policy issue. There was this very specific problem in the South where you know, the southern institutions, the governments and stuff down there were denying black people rights that the Supreme Court had said that they have, and you've got to give the federal government certain special emergency

powers to deal with this crisis. Basically, right, That's how people saw it, and they didn't understand they were bringing in, you know, the way Caldwell puts it, is a rival constitution, you know, and just a whole new approach to politics in America. Really was was inaugurated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and you know, so that happened. You have, like, you know, the Civil Rights Act passes

in sixty four. Again, most people outside the South see that as almost a foreign policy issue for those people over there. And then you have the Voting Rights Act, same thing, that's how people are seeing it. And then you have one week after the Voting Rights Act, you have the Watch Riots and it's nationally televised and are starting to realize that like, oh, this is actually, you know, this isn't just a Southern problem, This isn't everybody problem.

And you know, the way the Wats riots were covered and the way they were sort of taken up by black militants at that point, and the fact that the older civil rights leaders, you know generation, the Martin Luther King generation, by the time you get up really after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, really was on the decline, you know, because what could be achieved in

the South had been achieved by those two laws. You know, that was the thinking, and so they shifted their focus to the North, and it was just clear immediately that you know that these guys were not prepared for they didn't have any answers for the black people in the North because these weren't problems of like you can't vote, or you're not allowed to go in to that, to

that establishment or something. I mean, these were much more complicated socio economic and social friction issues that a march was really not going to do a whole lot to fix.

was a Lithuanian Catholic parish neighborhood. And I think King probably didn't even understand that, I think, because in the South that's not how it was. You know, in the South, racial politics was the order of the day, right, I mean, because that's just how people thought based on you know, I mean the you know, because mainly because all of the Euroethnics that started to mass immigrate into the US in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they didn't move to

the south. They moved to the northern cities. And so whereas you had ethnic politics in the north, you had racial politics in the south. And so when you know, King goes up to Chicago into this Lithuanian Catholic parish and he's trying to you know, integrate the neighborhood, you know, they they see this as an attack on them specifically, and and it you know, the really interesting thing is, I'm working on a piece about this right now, is in a lot of ways it really was, you know,

the the wasp establishment in the country. You know, they really did see John Lindsay, the mayor of New York in sixty five, his first Welfare commissioner, guy named Morris, He actually uses the term battering ram. He says, We're you going to use the black migrants as a battering ram to break up these little ethnic enclaves that creates so much you know, political corruption. As they see it and all this stuff, and so they really they really did view it that way. And there's a lot there.

I got a whole list of quotes and examples and stuff that I'm going to put out in this piece about how direct and aggressive like this was an attack on primarily Catholic but ended up in New York at

least being Jewish communities as well. And you know, so what ended up happening eventually just partly because you know, the like we were talking about this before we got on the air, you go to a place like New York, which is so fascinating if you want to learn about the history of like American ethnic politics, right, it's you know, you had if you go back to the nineteen fifties and you read the liberals in New York talking about what do we do about this huge influx of black migrants.

You know, these people are struggling, there's all these things. How are we going to deal with this? And they were all very optimistic that, Okay, you had Jews, they had their neighborhoods and their interests and certain elements of you know, the social service jobs like the teachers for example, that were theirs. The Irish there got their neighbor hoods, and there's certain like parts of the government that everybody kind of understands the Irish or kind of you know,

and they were the cops and the firefighters. The Italians got the construction contracts with the city, and they ran waste management, and that the Blacks would come in and kind of take their place as one of the ethnicities

in New York City. And what happened was the influx was so big and ended up being so disruptive and so traumatic for all of the people who were affected by it that it really, you know, it like the Great Migration kind of really put an end to ethnic politics in America, which again was part of part of that was on purpose, like that's something that the WASP wanted to accomplish, you know, and it really did put

an end to it. You don't really hear anything about, you know, there's little things here and there, with the exception of Jews actually because they you know, they're the one group that didn't when they moved out to the suburbs, didn't just become kind of white people, you know, Like there's Irish American now who are going to be celebrating drinking green beer this weekend. But you know, I mean it's not there, it's not the core of their identity. And in a way that being like a like a

Jewish American is so important to their identity. And so, you know, it imported the sort of southern racial perspective into the northern cities where previously there had been like an ethnic perspective on how politics works. And you had all of these people who you know, lived in the neighborhoods where the black people were moving in. And you know, of course, you know, these are poor black people, and so they're moving into neighborhoods that they can afford to

live in. And so those are typically the neighborhoods that immigrants of the previous generation, you know, lived in. A lot of them just buying their first house after their parents. You know, you're some Italian. Your father was an Italian immigrant, worked on the docs his whole life, you know, and now you, as his son, you work in like waste management this city. And you bought a house, you know, your fall you grew up in a tenement building with

like all the other Italian immigrants. Now you bought your own house, and that's what your whole neighborhood is it's a bunch of your people, you know, Italian Catholics with an Italian Catholic church like in the center of the neighborhood that everybody goes to and it's a center of community life. And you know, all of this, and then all of a sudden, you get this massive influx of people from the South who again are just very you know,

their their habits were It's not just black people. Like again, you go back to the Okis, you know out in California, everybody saw them as disruptive and they they were. You had the big apple Achian migration up into some of the Midwestern cities like Detroit in the mid twentieth century,

and it's the same thing. They were disruptive. You know, these are rural Southerners had more of like an honor culture, you know, so if you if they you know, you insult them, you're more likely to get punched in the face than reported to the principle. And the blacks were like that too, you know, they had that mentality, and then they had some racial resentment and animosity built on

top of that. So you got all these people who lived in these neighborhoods who you know, they all scattered, they all moved out to the suburbs which were being

thrown up after the war. And now you know, you don't live in a parish community you're in you're a second generation Italian and over here is like a wasp neighbor and over there is you know, just your whole neighborhood's mixed, and your kids go to a public school that's not primarily anything, and all of those people, the exception of Jews, you know, kind of stopped being Irish or Italian or anything like that and became white people.

And you know, that's really kind of the shape that politics has kept ever since then, where you know, now there's more more more people other than blacks who are non white people in the country, whereas back then it was like pretty much ninety percent to ten percent of smattering of others. And so you have like the you know, the very phrase people of color. I mean, that's something that divides the world into two halves. You got white

people and you got everybody else. And you know, again it's it's it's a really interesting thing to read about. How you know, the the we talk about like segregation in the northern cities, and we think, like of racial segregation in the northern cities, that this was like just this profound evil that had to be eradicated and changed. The people who lived in those cities. The way they

sawt is, the city's always been segregated. You know, the Italians live over the air, the Irish live over the air, the Jews live over there in between, you know, there's mixed neighborhoods and so forth. But like that's how it

has always worked. And you know, so they they just didn't under they didn't understand like why where this push was coming from, you know, to break up their neighborhoods like this, and uh yeah, I mean, and it's you know, the consequences of the Great Migration, the problems that resulted from it, you know, et cetera, like have pretty pretty much defined domestic politics in the US since the early

twentieth century, so like since the First World War. I mean, just there's been other issues, obviously, but the overriding issue in the country domestically speaking, has been the racial question

ever since then. And it's you know, and that's a result of like people, you know, people have this idea that because like you know, New York City or something was run by by white people that they just didn't care about the black people that were in those cities, and that's you know, why they didn't get social services or why their schools were bad or whatever. That is just not true at least in most of the big cities.

I mean, when you look at the amount of attention and in local politics that was spent on how do we fix this, the amount of money that was spent, you could really get like the Great Society Programs in sixty five was really like an attempt. It was like it was almost a bailout of the cities by the federal government. They were like, we need to take some of the burden and cost that this is imposing on these cities up to the federal level, because you know,

we're better equipped to handle it. And it's really been the case for you know, one hundred years, is this, you know, is what to do about it? How to fix it? And we've gone through different permutations, right where you go through the nineteen sixties and you know, we can maybe talk about this next but you know, by you get but by the time you get up to the late sixties, you have a split between the Jewish and Black activist communities.

Harvard and Columbia and everything. Graduate students, you know, taking their summers off to go work in the Freedom Summer and they go down there and for every one of them, you know, there's thirty black activists who are down there in the South community members who were part of this part of this thing. And they come down a lot of these people, you know, they're illiterate or they're certainly

not educated, you know at all. They don't have any experience running movements or organizations like these, you know, university activists do. And they would come in and you know, like Stokely Carmichael's the big one who he you know, he says these people are just pushy, they're condescending, they're coming in like trying to I mean, like the SNICK Student Non Violent Coordinating Committe, which is the biggest black

youth movement in the country back then. You know, they when they were asking for white students to come down and participate, they he didn't want any more than one hundred to come down, and they screened the ones that came in for what SNICK called They didn't want anybody with a John Brown complex. You know, somebody who was coming in to save the Southern Negro They didn't want that.

And you know, word kind of spread what was happening, and they got way more than one hundred people, and a lot of them had the John Brown complex, and that really did kind of happen. It created that resentment and as you start to get into the mid sixties, well, I think in sixty seven is when The Crisis of

the Negro Intellectual was published. In that book, I mean, he gets pretty direct about how you know, he talks about how there's too much Jewish involvement in our movements and we're never going to get anywhere until black people

run the black rights movements. And so there's that and then also in nineteen sixty seven, that's when the Sixth Day War happened and the global left kind of you know, on Moss turned on Israel, and you know, the by that point, the the sort of integrationist Martin Luther King angle on the black rights movement had really surrendered the field to the black power movement that very much identified

with the Third World. You know, they the rhetoric back then was, you know, the French or attacking the Arabs in Algeria, were attacking the Vietnamese over in Vietnam, and you know right here in America, like we're part of all that. When they identified with the Vietnamese, the Algerians and so forth as part of the Third World, that they were this captive population in America, right And which was you know, which was not the approach of the

of like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference guys. I mean, they were very American if they were anything, you know, but you know, it's again, it's another thing that's understandable. You go, you know, if you're if you were a black person in America from the end of the Civil War on up until you know, around the fifties or sixties, in the twentieth century. You know, your history is not

really something to write home about. You know, it's something that you've been subjugated, You've been second class citizens, You've been discriminated against. And you know, now even where you're not discriminated against, you're the poorest people in the city. And like it's just and so when and then even back before slavery, like nobody had ever even heard of

like an independent black African country. You know, they've been colonized for hundreds and hundreds of years, right, and so when you started to get these post colonial nationalist movements in Africa, you know, uh, leaders like Patrice Lamumba, you know, all these were they were idolized in the black community, especially in Harlem. And you can understand why. I mean, it's like it's you know, you see it today when the Black Panther movie comes out, right, that will kind

of stuff and people laugh at it. I'm laughing a little bit now, but I sympathize with it. You know, these are a people who you know, Tyrone Jackson is not an African name. You know, Tyrone is a county in Ireland, Jackson, you know, and so these people lost everything, they lost their identity, they lost their religion, they lost you know, everything that kind of tied them together, and

so they're trying to put something back together. I mean, I think you see this white people a lot these days, because white people have been so deracinated and lost their own any sense of their own history or heritage that you see people going. I mean, you know, whether it's a neo pagan movement or just there, there's a million different varieties, and I sympathize with all of them, including you know, Wakanda forever, because people need an identity, you know.

And yeah, so you know, when anyway I was talking about Israel Six Day War happens, the global left turns on Israel and they start to be viewed as you know, not this ragtag state, like refugee state, you know, of these people who've been persecuted and carved out a homeland for themselves. The global left really started to look at them as you know, the front line of white imperialism

in the colored countries in the global South. And you know, by that point again, you know, the third world is kind of black militant view of things had really taken over in America, and so they went along with that, you know, and they absorbed that anti Zionism and that really was like the big break because back then, even like liberal Jews like today you have, you know now that Lekud has been in power for basically forty years straight.

You know, liberal Jews in America are kind of, at least when they're not in a moment of crisis, are kind of like touch and go about their relationship with Israel, right, But back then that wasn't the case. You know, other than some extreme far left Jews like the ones who you know made up the Weatherman Crew and everything, which were very small in number, all Jews in America were affectionate toward toward Israel, and you know, for obvious reasons.

And so when black people started turning very you know, very violently against Israel, that was a huge break. And that happened, you know, in sixty seven. That's when SNICK

expelled all of its white members. And at that point those white members were still seventy or eighty percent Jews, and they were really expelling their Jewish members, and you know, there was actually like at the SNICK conference in sixty seven, there was some of the Panthers who were there insisted on a vote that the organization take, you know, a

negative position towards Zionism and Israel. And of course the white students protested and stuff, and they expelled them, they just kicked them out, and so that starts to happen. And I tend to think that, and I may be over I may be kind of imposing my own view on this. But you know, by the time you get you get up to sixty eight and Nixon is elected, and you know, he turns this again, and this question that really has been the dominant domestic question of the

last hundred years in America, the racial question. He I said, we go through permutations and like variations of how it works. We had been in like a period of like how do we solve this in a way that brings these people into the fold and helps solve all these problems. Nixon came in and by that point people were so fed up with the riots, with the crime, with you know, just everything that it for From that period like on, like Nixon approached it as this is primarily a law

enforcement problem. This isn't a problem for social workers, this isn't a problem for you know, psychology. This is this is a law enforcement problem, and that's what we're going to focus on. So all the Great Society stuff, everything that all went away. The cities, of course, had become dependent on that federal money from the Great Society by that point, and all the cities just you know, they

were already in bad shape. But you know, you get up to the late sixties and they just absolutely fall apart, and you see this steady rise in crime through the seventies, eighties and up into the early nineties that I think, you know, people today, like younger people today, like I lived in South LA in nineteen ninety two. I wasn't in a riot zone or anything, but I was close enough, and I went to school with kids who were. And

you know, people don't realize that. For example, like the in the three years before the La riots, three years there were over sixty five hundred drive by shootings in Los Angeles County. They didn't all result in deaths or anything,

but that's like five a day, okay. And when you think about the fact that like ninety percent of LA had zero drive by shootings, you know, these are all taking place in a very tightly concentrated area that is as dangerous as you know, the worst part of El Salvador before you know, the current president took over, I guess, and so you know, people were looking at that and they just sort of, you know, the white people who had moved out to the suburbs to get away from

all this, you know, they just didn't want to hear about it. They just were like, keep it over there, I don't care, and unless it starts to spill out, like just have the police deal with it. And it gets to the point where again you get up to nineteen ninety one, nineteen eighty nine, ninety ninety one, and then culminating with the La riots, you know, you have like I think New York City today, or I'll use Los Angeles because I know that one. Los Angeles had

like three hundred and fifty murders last year. It had like eighteen hundred murders in nineteen ninety one. I mean, insane levels of crime and like and it was you know, if you look at like the crime statistics, I know people always talk about that. You know, you can look at it and say, well, yeah, like it's only half I mean, it's certainly disproportionate to the population. Like the

number of murders committed by blacks. Half is a lot when you're only fourteen percent of the population or whatever it is. But you know, it's it's a very different problem than the other half, which are like white or Latino murders or something, because you know, like the white murders in the country. It's like, all right, this guy over in Great Falls, Montana found out his wife was cheating on him with this guy and he killed him.

And then over here in like, you know, northern California, there was this white guy who got into a fight at a bar and killed the guy.

had enough. And then when you get up to the second kind of last straw following right on that, on the heels of that was I think people don't today don't recognize how important this was that, you know, the whole country's attention was glued to the oj Simpson trial

while that was going on. Everybody was watching that. And when it became this situation where you had this guy who obviously killed these people, who gets off because you know, one of the investigators may have made a comment or something at some point in the past unrelated to him when that happened. And then after the trial when he gets acquitted and you have the news cameras out in front of the courthouse and you have just crowds of

black people out there cheering, we won, We won. I really think that was like a major breaking point where people were like, you know what, we're We're not dealing with this anymore. And you saw a huge turn, you know. I mean, I think if you go back to like nineteen eighty five, there was something like four hundred and fifty thousand people incarcerated in the United States, and it's

like two million now. And when you count like the people who were on probation, in parole and in some level of the criminal justice system, I mean, you know, it's a uh. I mean, crime has gone down for a reason, and it's gone down because we you know, and this might be an ugly thing to say, but I mean it went down because we you know, put a good percentage of the worst people in the black underclass in prison or in some level of the criminal

justice system. I mean, that's what happened. And it's unfortunate, I guess, because there's a lot of downstream effects that you know, that that causes that are not good. But

you know, this was a response to a crisis. You know, again, you had five drive by shootings a day in la over the three years before the ninety two riots, and it kind of stayed that way, like all the way up until I guess, like Trayvon, you know, or maybe Ferguson, when everything started to change again and you start to get this nineteen sixties kind of version of how these

things are approached. And you know, I hope that we don't have to go through the same process they went through in the sixties, which is that everything just falls apart for twenty or twenty five years and gets worse and worse, and the city has become unlivable until finally, people, you know, decide to throw out John Lindsay and replace him with Ed Koch or Juliani or something. But you know, yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be interesting to see how that does develop.

the guy is he's pandering to the black community. I've seen many many we're in this together, we're in the same boat. And then you just see one comment after another. Who owned those boats? Talking about the slave ships? Who owned those boats? Who owned those boats? Why were the

slave markets closed on Saturday? And it's like, well, I mean, if a billionaire black man is asking questions, and then you have Dave Chappelle go on you know, Saturday Alive and say there's two words you can't say together, the well,

I mean, it's gonna it's interesting. It's because if those two groups start going to war with one another again, and of course this is only on social media now, which is probably a good thing because it's not in the streets yet, but it's the future is very is going to be very interesting when it comes to those two groups.

see happening. If there is like a big break, then we could maybe go back, you know, in a direction of addressing this as a law enforcement problem and kind of like more of a nineteen nineties version of addressing black crime in the cities and stuff, because they you know, the pretty much unanimous support of politically active Jews for

the black cause. I mean, it's I think that's a critical element of the support they need to keep the rest of the society from you know, fixing the problem in a very different way.

I guess said. The only word I can use is interesting, because it's very hard at this point to try to figure out exactly how that would play out, considering so much of our lives are and so much debate is online now instead of at city hall, on the steps of city hall, or in the streets in a march.

due to immigration. I mean, there's a lot of people and pretty soon enough, probably a majority of people in this country, certainly a majority of people in the cities who don't care about slavery, they don't care about Jim Crow, they don't identify any of that with themselves. You see it in Los Angeles specifically, where you know, you have black what used to be black neighborhoods, like back in the early nineties, Compton and stuff, those are all Latino

neighborhoods now. And that transition was not a peaceful one. The Latino gangs drove those people out. They firebombed apartment buildings, they were just random murders of black people trying to

drive them out. And you know, the black gangs and the black community in general doesn't have the numbers or the organization that the Latinos do, and so they got you know, when all of the Latino on black violence started to subside around like the early to mid two thousands, people looked at that as like they celebrated as a victory, but it was really just because that job of cleansing had been accomplished by that point, you know, and so

it died down. There's you know, you have situations where these things would be going on and Latino local politicians in LA would be providing cover for these Latino gangs that were driving these people out. They were you know, there was a situation in LA where there was this hospital. Actually it's a reverse situation of like the thing that you know, people were complaining about in the sixties Black people were coplaying about in the sixties, which is, you

had a neighborhood that used to be black. There was a hospital there, and most of the employees there were black because they were from the community. Over a pretty short period of time, that neighborhood became predominantly Latino. Still a bunch of black people working at the at the hospital, and the Latinos there. The Latino community successfully used affirmative action laws to say there shouldn't there, there needs to be more Latinos here, and so they used it to drive

black people out of these good jobs. And so, you know, I mean, for all the problems that you know, black people have had to face over the over the over the years in America, when you got up to the nineteen sixties, for all the trouble and all the problems, you know, white America as a whole, you know, had kind of come around to the idea that like, Okay, there needs to be some kind of a resolution of this, Like you know, these people have been enslaved, they have

been second class citizens, and you know, we got to do something here, Like something needs to be done and people like really were ready for that conversation in the nineteen sixties in the America that's coming. You know that are nobody is going to care about that. Nobody will care they can you know, talk about historical oppression or

whatever it is. And you know, I think maybe actually, like the uh, maybe the tipping point, like something you can probably look for is when you start to see a lot of Jews really start to take the side of Latinos when they come into conflict with Blacks, because that's sort of like sticking your finger in the wind and seeing which way it's blowing, you know, And so you know, I feel bad for you know, I feel bad for black people in this country right now in

a lot of ways because you know, I look at something like Wakanda Forever or Black Lives Matter, and it's

so ridiculous in so many ways. But these people are in like a pretty desperate situation and their future does not look good, and you know, I look at those things, it's like almost last gasps of a of an attempt at creating some kind of a coherent identity and you know a certain amount of political cohesion that'll help them kind of withstand and you know, just help them survive in a country that is going to be completely defined by ethnic politics again, you know, where people who are

unrelated to any of our history of race relations in this country are really running the show. And it's not going to be you know, it's not gonna be very good. I mean, talk about the Great Migration. Over the last fifteen twenty years or so, there's been a reverse Great migration. You know, the Blacks are getting driven out of the cities because of rising real estate prices and everything, and they're moving back to the South, and in some ways, I mean that's kind of a you know, it's kind

of a tragic thing, right. You have like that uh, what's that Midnight Train to Georgia? You know that old song and it's about like this black dude who went out to I think Los Angeles, Hollywood or something and just couldn't really make it and so he ended up going back to Georgia, taking the midnight train back to Georgia. And it's like kind of a sad song. And uh, that's happening like on mass now, you know. And so yeah, it'll be very interesting, it'll be very interesting to see

how it develops. But I'm not optimistic.

to land on her feet. Don't worry about that. I'm sure she'll have a nice gig at Harvard or something soon. But it may signal that the policy that she's headed up in Eastern Europe since you know, she was hired to her current position in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, when might Dan happened, that maybe we're deciding that we've got to accept defeat on that front and move on. So hopefully that's the case.

with regard to Russia. He's more pragmatic. He was always somebody though who ah. You know, when he he may have thought something was a bad idea or he was pushing for something he thought was a good idea. But when Clinton told him, no, you're going to go do this and endorse it fully and push it on everybody else, he would follow orders and go do it. So you know, he he uh all all things told, I'd rather have a pragnant, pragmatist like that in there than somebody like Newland.

But yeah, it's hard to read these things because again, like you know, new Ones not leaving the foreign policy scene. She's gonna go get hooked up at Brookings or CSIS and you know, teach classes at Georgetown about how we ought to conduct their foreign policy. So you know, it's not some giant victory. But as far as the immediate policy with regard to Russian and Ukraine. It hopefully signals, you know, an improvement in that area.

Some of them are twenty five, But they got fifty five and sixty year old guys out there.

And he was asked about our difference in approach toward Russia and the Soviet Union versus our approach to China over over the years, and this was, you know, a little this was a handful of years ago before a lot of people have started to talk about, you know,

our need to start focusing on China more. But you know, he said it was very interesting because you go back nineteen eighty nine and you have these two communist powers and one of them agrees to let their empire go voluntarily, agrees to have a bloodless democratic revolution, essentially agrees to

end the Cold War without a fight. The other side had Tianum and Square, and you know, I know there's sort of some revisionism going on about that, and I haven't really sort of through any of that yet, but there's something going on in nineteen eighty nine in China that was, you know, trying to put pressure on that regime,

and they squashed it. And from that point on, you know, we've pretty much been treating China like a good buddy and somebody we can trust and work with and so forth, and we've been just like rabid dogs when it comes to Russia, at least after they stopped taking orders from US, in the nineteen nineties, and so Gates was asked about this. He says, you know, it is interesting, he said, if you go back to like World War Two, this is hard for us to even really imagine in these days

because we're just we've grown up in the Empire. You know, when the OSS was stood up, when America came into the war, like, we had no presence overseas, we had no intelligence presence overseas, we had nothing, to the point where Dulles was actually bringing in recent immigrants from like Holland and stuff to ask them to draw diagrams of like where the port is and stuff. That's where our you know, our foreign intelligence presence was at the time.

And so you know, you start out like that, we have to stand up a Soviet Union desk at this new intelligence agency, or you know, we have to beef up the Soviet desk at the State Department. We have to build out these institutions now to deal with these

these things that are emerging. And he said, when we started doing that with China, the people that we hired to fill all the seats at the China desk, whether it's State Department or DD or the intelligence agencies mostly like overwhelmingly they were the children of missionaries who had spent a lot of time in China, and they liked China.

They like Chinese people, they like Chinese culture, and they sort of saw their role as you know, facilitating peaceful mediation between their country and this country that they had a lot of respect for with regard to the Soviet Union.

When we started doing that, and even before that, when we had like, you know, our diplomatic corps in the Russian Empire before the Soviets, small as it was, wasn't you know, ah, we filled that up almost entirely with non Russian refugees who had come over who did not like Russians, they did not like you know, and they saw their role as helping the United States, United States fight this beast, or using the United States to fight this beast, and that you know, Gates said that when

you start, you know, bureaucracies have a lot of sort of, uh, just inertia behind them, and so when you start out with a certain attitude, a certain approach, it stays that way for you know, unless you have some sort of conscious cleanup of it. It's going to stay that way because everybody there's like it. You hire somebody new, they get integrated into that culture, the old people retire, you bring in new people, and it just maintains that culture

and that approach. And you know, I think that that's something we've really seen pick up, you know, in spades since the Soviet Union fell, or really since like I guess the eighties is when we started taking in like a lot of refugees, and then in the nineties, like a whole lot where you know, if you and not only refugees, just foreign nationals and you know, recent immigrants

and stuff. If you look back at the nineteen nineties for example, like whether you're talking about Madeline Albright, whether you're talking about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the in the mid nineties under Clinton, General Salakashvili, just across the board, you see the same thing you saw during the first Trump impeachment hearing it's just one emigrat after another from Eastern Europe or from from that region going up, and you're like, you know, you kind of

realize that these people are they're bringing their priors with them when they come to the United States and join up for that, and you know, you can understand what look. I mean, if you need somebody to work intelligence or or in your diplomatic corps for uh, you know, Nigeria, the child of a Nigerian immigrant is probably a good candidate to do that. You know, they understand the culture

and can bring that to it. But there's down there's downsides to it, you know, especially when the other side really comes with a chip on its shoulder.

goes to like US hoeign policy as a whole. You know, if you go back to even the even the eighties, I'll say, up through the eighties even you know, you still had this sort of this sort of old school wasp attitude, post warlike kind of wasp attitude where you know, you had guys like James Baker. You had these people who had enough heft in gravitas, not just in Washington, but just sort of in general that they could control the fanatics and hold them back a little bit and

overrule them a bit. You know, you get up into the nineteen nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union, and you know, a lot of those people really started to fade away, to the point where you get up to the Bush administration and like, you know, our foreign policy is just totally hijacked by a bunch of second and third generation neo cons that somebody like George Kennon never would have even allowed into his office, you know, and so that that sort of consistent hand on the

steering wheel leadership at the very, very very top level has sort of evaporated. You know, it really doesn't exist anymore. There is like a there's a ruling class, but it's sort of amorphous, and people come and go, and you can come in and be cast out. And it's not this you know, it's not the Sons of Cincinnatis anymore, you know, the children of the American Revolution or something.

And so you know, there's nobody who has like a real sense of proprietorship over the country and feels like, you know, by thinking about the long term future of the country, they're looking after the long term future of their own grandkids and great grandkids in a very real sense, because this is their legacy that they're going to inherit,

you know. Now, it's there's nobody like that for the most part, and so it's just a big free for all, you know, And it's whichever interest group is the best organized and the best funded and the most ruthless and just the best at getting their way through all the various you know, levers that we provide for that they tend to get their way, you know. And it's not

a conspiracy necessarily. It's not something that you know, there's a there's this sort of you know, deep seated sort of conspiracy against Russia that keeps US in this belligerent attitude toward them. That I mean, it's that when I say there's not some conspiracy, I mean it's not something that like pervades the whole government. It's not like the regime is like this. It's that the people who feel

that way, they know how to work the system. They're extremely well organized, they're extremely well funded, you know, especially since Putin throughout all the billionaires I mean or a lot those oligarchs, those guys have been spending their money in London and New York to get you know, NATO and our countries to remain belligerent toward Potin ever since they got run out of town. So you know, there's a lot of money behind it, a lot of organization.

And then you have on top of that sort of the long term institutional approach that you know, I just that Gates described so.

not really a conspiracy. All it is is there is one group inside the government that's like, Okay, this is what we want to do. We have the power to do it, so let's trade. Let's work with this NGO whomever, and let's you know, institute a coup and put our guy into place. And you can have you know, you can have audio on YouTube with the proof where you know they're like, oh what what, what was it?

Like it was one percent of what we have now. And so it grew up in that environment and the environment of total war and global conflict with the Soviet Union, and you know, that's just not something you can necessarily

shut off. You know, I'm doing a series on my substack right now about the history of like slavery, going back a long ways and taking it up to the lead up to the American Civil War, and I was talking about the Spanish and the Portuguese and how you know, if you're gonna when you want to talk about the approach they took when they when they came over into the New World, or any of the other places that they ended up. You know, these people had been in

war for hundreds and hundreds of years. For six hundred years, they had been at continual war against the Moors, pushing them out of Iberia, and so it was built into their culture. It was built into the very way that like the incentives that led to certain people being promoted and receiving sort of you know, and you can't just

turn something like that off. And so we have a we have a government that's built to fight a war like that, and you know, it's it's I mean, look, Samuel Huntington did not have to be a genius to know that after the Soviet Union fell, we were going to go look for another enemy, and it was probably going to be Islam, you know, he called that one. Islam proved to be sort of an unworthy adversary in

a certain at least for our purposes. And so we you know, we sort of moved back to trust the old Russia.

They're not they're slav they're not most A lot of people say they're not like us, they're not like Westerners, and yeah, there is all there are all of these riches there, and yeah, it just it seems like it's the perfect the perfect country to pick on, especially when you're when you've done so much to basically defeat and demoralize the countries that surround it that you can insinuate yourselves into those countries and basically surround them much like they did what they're in.

some kind of context. I mean, you know, in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, with COVID, with record numbers of people in America committing suicide, record numbers of people dying from death to despair, alcohol and drugs and things like that, the life expectancy in America dropped. It dropped by about six months or something, six to eight months, I think. And that's a big deal. That's a very traumatic thing to happen. You look at all the death that you

know that's happening. You know, record numbers of suicides and death to despair is no joke. People feel that, and it affects the culture in a very deep way. The life expectancy in Russia, you know, from nineteen eighty nine when the Berlin Wall came down to nineteen ninety five, just six years, dropped about a decade, a little over a decade, actually, you know, And when you look at the distribution of who was affected, it wasn't that you know,

a lot more babies were dying at birth. It wasn't that a lot of women were dying that women life expectancy. Female life expectancy was not affected all that much. And the people who were already like fifty or sixty years old,

like theirs, wasn't affected too much. It was pretty much all just hyper concentrated in that group of men, like you know, fifteen to forty years old, and they weren't dying of you know, because of an increase of cancer rates, like the life expectancy dropped ten years because of malnutrition, alcoholism,

drug addiction, and violence. And so when you think about again, like what I just said about COVID and the deaths of despair over here, which are all at records, for it to drop six eight months, for it to drop a decade, I mean, you need you know, it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare for these people. You know, you when you you know, there's a there's an element to it. It's sort of like Germany after

the First World War. You know, people, even people who are sort of pro Russia and you know, against the US approach there, they don't necessarily like this analogy because you know, the end result is that they end up where the Germans are ending up. But I think it's a solid analogy in a lot of ways. You know, if you think about how, you know, the Germans fight this long, hard war, and people can, you know, historians can debate how the whole thing ended and whether they

were stabbed in the back or lied to whatever. But the fact is, like they certainly felt that way, and they weren't just being bitchy about it, Like they really felt that way, like, and they had good reason. Even if you don't agree, you have to like listen to their reasoning and admit it's consistent right that they felt that they had agreed to lay down their arms. Churchill

kept the British Navy cutting off their food. You know, tons of Germans were starving to death, and then they were basically forced knife at their throat to sign just an unbelievably punitive treaty. And so you know, you have the hyperinflation in twenty three and you go into the twenties, and you know, you have to try to put yourself in like the in this place where you're observing this happened to your own society and how it would radicalize

and affect you right where. You know, the middle class due to the inflation just got completely and totally wiped out. I mean, you know, people out there on who listened to your show know what hyperinflation is, and they know that the middle classes are the ones who get annihilated by that. You know, the poor they have nothing and there in debt, and their debts are worthless now, so

in a way they're better off. The rich people have international connections, connections to you know, international currencies, they own hard assets and other things, and they sort of ride the inflation wave up to a degree. But the middle class, who has their money in annuities and savings, you know, when all of a sudden you've got to go to the store to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash, those people just lost everything like immediately.

And you literally had like respectable middle class German women who were having to resort to turning their homes into brothels because they just had no other way to feed their children or feed themselves, and this was epidemic across the country, you know, and you have to again think about, like, how if that were going on, especially if you felt like the reason you're in this position is because you were tricked and misled and the you could have kept

fighting if you knew they were going to do this, and you would have, but that they lied to you, you know, it would be extremely radicalizing. And so you know, if you if you want to follow that an analogy further, I mean, shoot, after the First World War, we sheared off, you know what, fifteen percent or whatever it is of

the German population. And from the moment, you know, from from the moment that happened, the new German government, even the Weimar government, was expressing a lot of concern about

the fate of those people. Because you know, you have a country like Poland that hasn't been a country for a long time, and now it's a country, and so you're going to have this upsurge of nationalist feeling and you know, and all this kind of thing, and that's fine, that's totally natural, but you know, how are they going to look at the German minority over in the West and it wasn't necessarily good. Same with Czechoslovakia and other places.

And so eventually, like the Germans got to the point of like we got to we got to get these people back. And I mean that's exactly what happened with Russia. You know, even Boris Yeltsen, our total you know, just puppet throughout the nineties, Like even the very very early nighties when we were trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Russian forces from Estonia and Latvia things like that. You know, even Yeltsen, who again we controlled like a like a marionette,

was resistant. He was like, we got to wait until I can verify that the Russian people who live over there, who woke up one day and now they're foreigners in minorities in a foreign country. I got to make sure that they're okay and that they're going to be treated okay.

And from the beginning, I mean there were signs of trouble, you know, and in almost all of these countries, you know, in Estonia, for example, they started passing citizenship laws that made it very very difficult for like native Russian speakers and ethnic Russians to get citizenship, and I think to this day there's a large percent the Russian population still can't vote or anything like that. You can say that's like, you know, sort of sort of a that's maybe a

bit of a minor inconvenience. But when you look at what's happening in Ukraine and what's been going on since twenty fourteen into a certain degree since two thousand and four, you know, you can see why Yelsen would have been concerned and putin finally, now that Russia's back on its feet and able to actually do something, has has done something because they never stopped considering those Russians their responsibility and their people, you know, and rather than rather than

respect that and understand how you know, a country might feel about that, we've sort of used those people as foils to to you know, drive up the intensity of nationalist feelings in the post Soviet countries and to direct them against Russia, you know. And you read about this in like in two thousand and four during the Orange Revolution,

which obviously we had a hand in as well. Before that, you go back even two thousand and three and you look at Poles in even western Ukraine, you look at Poles about how people feel about Russia and Russians, and it's fine, it's you know, a large majorities totally approve there. Everything good. Two thousand and four comes along and you're gonna have a revolution like that, you got to have some energy to drive it. And where's that going to

come from? And you start to see all of these NGO funded and led media outlets that popped up and everything else start putting out a lot of propaganda demonizing the Russian people, calling them the problem in Ukraine and they're the reason we're having these issues and so forth, and that really started to pick up. And you know, now twenty twenty four years later, you know the kids who were who were in elementary school when that started happening,

that change in attitude and approach started happening. You know, they're the guys who joined as of battalion later on. And yeah, it's it's it's you know, it's not good. I mean, you know. And the thing is, actually, you can go ahead and redirect this because I'll keep.

of the country. That's what you understand, right.

So you know, that's probably one of the reasons they're continuing to feed their young men into the wood chipper, even past the point where it makes much sense to

any outsiders. But yeah, absolutely, and I mean, you know, you can kind of see how see it working when in this there's another here's Another parallel the Germany in the twenties is you know, people who were in Russia in Ukraine who had access to you know, like you if you had access to a foreign financial institution that was willing to back you, I mean, you know, you

could buy up the whole country. It literally got to that point where, you know, seven oligarchs in the mid nineties seven just there were a bunch of them, but seven oligarchs owned fifty eight percent of the entire Russian economy, which is an insane number, you know, and Ukraine, you know, very similar and in both of those countries, you know, we don't have to go too far down this road, but you know, in both of those countries, the vast majority of the of the big oligarchs were all Russian

and Ukrainian Jews, right, which these are people who had cousins and relatives in other countries and they were able to sort of draw on those resources at a time when there was a kind of free for all within

the country itself. And you know, when you have a situation again where you go back to Germany where the middles, respectable middle class women are having to you know, sell their bodies to put food on their table, and people with foreign connections and foreigners themselves are not just getting rich, but I mean becoming just fabulously insanely wealthy bye by looting your economy. That starts to draw up a certain

amount of resentment. You know. It's it's very fortunate in a lot of ways that you know, you haven't seen so much of that in Russia and Ukraine, specifically with regard to the Jews, because you know, it's something that you could have seen happening. You know, like in Russia, you know, those seven oligarchs who won fifty eight percent of the entire economy, six of them were Jewish. And when Putin came along and sat the oligarchs down and told them that you know, look, you guys are going

to stay billionaires. You're going to keep your businesses, you're going to do all these things, but you're not part of politics anymore. Like that's not yourusinessman, and that's it. Uh. And if you are okay with that, then we're friends and you're rich. If you're not okay with that, then you're gonna have a problem with me. And the ones who fled the country to New York. In London, in Tel Aviv were primarily those non Russian oligarchs, and you know, it's a it's it kind of goes to you think

about somebody like Bill Browder. You know, there's a guy who was working with Sergei Magnitsky, the biggest to want to talk about, like the biggest scam. Just it's mind blowing, like how well this operation is worked because that guy, that guy was a straight up criminal stealing from the Russian government and Sergai Magnitsky was his accountant who was

helping him do that. I don't you know, the conditions in Russian prisons are probably bad, and you know it's not good that Magnitsky goes in there and ends up dying of you know, sort of you say negligence, but you know, who am I to talk when you look at the condition of our prisons and you know the conditions we throw people into. So but the point is, like you know that Browder was one of these guys.

You know, people descended on that country like vultures, and they went and they found local agents that they could work with, people who were happy to exploit everyone around them and do this, and you know, whoever they could find was the most unscrupulous, you know, people around. It was the most ruthless people around. You know, there's people like these oligarch guys like Kotarkovsky, who you know is held up as sort of some type of a human

rights icon, a dissident. That guy is a gangster who if he had you know, lived the life he led in the nineties in Texas instead of Russia, they'd have put him in the gas chamber, you know, he would he would have gotten the death penalty for that. And you know, but it was a great gravy train. I mean, you have like a giant, giant country with resources galore, and every big financial institution across the West is just making huge amounts of money, you know, pulling that wealth

out of the country. And in one country, you know, a guy stepped in who put a stop to that. Ukraine is what Russia would have looked like if Putin never came along and the entire place was still I mean, you look at like the people who were appointed as governors of the different provinces in Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution. There was a whole bunch of the oligarchs, you know, often in control of the zones where a lot of their particular industries were, you know, the rest were like

US State Department assets like Sakishvili and stuff. But yeah, I mean, you know, Putin cut the gravy train off and that was his great sin, and we've not forgiven him for it. And you know, I think we had this pipe dream, people like Victorian Newland had this pipe dream that maybe we could we could we could open them back up and maybe bring them back down a notch or two so that we could we could get the gravy train flowing again. Uh. But you know, it's

a very like like the people in Russia. They remember what the nineties were like. They remember what it was like, and their parents at least remember what it was like.

And they know that whether they there's you know, whether they agree with the Ukraine War, whether they like Putin or anything like that, what they know is ever since Putin came along, the way things were in the nineties, it's not like that anymore, you know, And they can live normal lives in their country, and you know, those people are going to stick by their leader when that's

the case, you know, because they know the downside. And uh, you know, especially as time has gone on, and our belligerence toward them and really are I mean our hatred towards them, you know, And like we see things over here that sort of go in and out of the news, like when you know, some Russian tennis stars getting banned from tennis tournaments and you know, Dostevsky's getting pulled from

the curriculum of some Harvard class or something like. We see that and it's like, oh, it's so stupid and whatever. That stuff is plastered on the six o'clock news in Russia and everybody sees it and they think this is crazy. These people are crazy, like they really hate us and seek our destruction. And you know, and again I think

that most Americans don't naturally feel that way. But the people the group who do feel that way, you know, they're very well organized, very well funded, and they know what they're doing.

And given the fact that the US and NATO sort of foreign policy approach or Eastern Europe Russia approach, it's kind of already geared in that direction. Like really, they're just giving it sort of an extra push. You know, it doesn't need much more of a push, and but it's definitely a part of it. I mean, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars they got pulled out of that country. They got pulled

out of Russia. I mean, we hear about the big ones like Abramovic who left the country with forty billion dollars or whatever, but they were hundreds of these people ultimately, and you know, and that's not counting like the money that got siphoned out to Western financial institutions as all this was going on. So, I mean, you're talking about a massive chunk of the Russian economy that was just straight up looted. And you know, that's a it's a

hard thing to give up, you know. And when you have a lot of in when when you're on that gravy train and you've got a lot of influence with the United States government, you're gonna try to pull that lever to get it to act on your behalf. You know, It's always been that way.

indiscriminately targeting civilian areas and laughing about it. You know, you had Poroshenko, who you know, gave that speech, and he was bragging about how Russian children are going to be hiding in basements or down Bass children are going to be hiding in basements, you know, to avoid our artillery while our kids are going to eat breakfast and go to school. And it's just you know that we have a word for that. When you know Arabs do

it or something, it's called terrorism. And you know, if you look at the immediate aftermath of the Maidan coup, there was essentially a nationwide pugrom against Russians, you know, against Russian speakers and by you know, again a lot of the you know, I've actually read like some of

the memoirs of these hardcore as of types. You know, there's a few of them in English, and you kind of feel for these guys in a way when you read them, even if you think that you know, it's sad that they're you know, puppets of a regime that really does not care about them or their country at all, and that they're you know, they're they're they're ignorant or

whatever for allowing themselves to be used that way. But these are you know, these are hardcore like right wing patriots in their country and in the context of their lives. This is the way that it makes sense for them, you know. And so when when you know twenty fourteen happened, I mean you you know the famous ones, you know, with a few dozen people getting burned alive in the

trade building uh in Odessa. But that was something that was happening all over the place, people getting kidnapped because they were ethnic Russians who were considered, you know, politically unreliable in this new regime. And you're talking about hundreds or thousand of people getting kidnapped and abused and tortured and killed. And again we sort of, you know, we

sort of look at that. If it gets mentioned at all over here, it sort of gets mentioned as like, well, yeah, there was a violent there was a revolution, and revolutions are crazy and bad things happened, and you know in

any revolution, and that's true enough. But you know, this is if if you look at that from the Russian perspective, you know, from the perspective I was talking about earlier wherever, since the early nineties, somebody like Yeltsin was expressing concern over the fate of ethnic Russians in these countries, whether the nationalist fervor was going to get out of control and make their lives too hard, and just continually expressing concern about that over the years, and then watching that happen,

watching all of those kidnappings and murders happen, watching down Bass neighborhoods get get you know, bombarded by our artillery. It's gonna be very provocative, you know, and especially when you have larger geopolitical reasons to want to draw a line in the sand, you know, which which obviously was you know, was probably like the stuff I just talked

about the ethnic Russians. I mean that probably gave the uh, you know, the sort of emotional impulse and the it sort of drives the enthusiasm for the war effort and the cohesion in Russia maybe to a large degree. But I mean, make no mistake, They're in this war because they felt, from a geopolitical standpoint like they had no choice, and you know, and I think we knew that, and I think we put them in that position on purpose.

You know, the current CIA director was the ambassador to Russia back in two thousand and eight, and in January of two thousand and eight he wrote this, you know, kind of famous now memo back to Condoleeza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time, called neet means net and in it he, I mean, it's so it's uncanny,

like how specific he is about the whole thing. He says, Look, I'm over here talking not just forget putin, I'm talking to everybody in the upper echelons of Russian power, military people, civilians. It doesn't matter. They are unanimous that. You know, they put up with NATO expansion in the Baltics and these other places, you know, because they had no choice because

they couldn't do anything about it. But that expanding NATO into Ukraine and expanding it into Georgia are absolute red lines that they just they simply cannot tolerate and they

will be forced to act. And then he said specifically, he said they're concerned in Ukraine, is that if like like our movement to try to to try to push that idea and try to get them in there would lead to tension between the Russian ethnic Russians in the east and the Ukrainians in the west who you know, as that debate over whether they should join NATO or could they join NATO and everything heat it up, that it would lead to conflict between those two peoples and

possibly even civil war and that and this is remarkable, he said, and that Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene, which is a decision they do not want to have to face. And I mean, so the State departments kind of lesa. Rice gets that memo from her ambassador to Russia, and three months later, in March of that same year, just three months later, at the NATO summit, we come out and say, yeah, Ukraine

and Georgia are going to join NATO. And so you know, it didn't take long obviously before the president in Georgia saka's Vili, because we had the short Georgia War over there. You know, sakes Vili is a guy who you know, he's educated in the United States. Literally like was over like as part of a State Department program you know, and he's he's a Georgian. But for some reason after the Midon coup, he got put in charge of the Odessa Oblast in Ukraine as the governor there. For nobody

can really explain why, but everything everybody knows why. And so, you know, Georgia had a problem when it came to joining NATO, which is, you can't join NATO if you have an ongoing territorial dispute, because it essentially would immediately require NATO to get involved with that territorial disview. So

you have to clear that up first. And he had that problem up in Ostya and the northern region of his country that had been sort of in an uneasy but steady peace since the early nineties where they sort of governed themselves with some autonomy and there were peacekeepers in there and stuff, and it was fun. You know, it wasn't resolved, but it was fine, and he needed to clear that up, and so he moved to clear it up. And so the Russians moved in and kicked

their ass and pushed them back. And you know, you had John McCain like telling us like he was literally John McCain was calling for us to to bomb the tunnels that the Russians were driving their tanks and their armored vehicles through, and like just attack the Russians directly, Just madman for for what, you know, to bring Georgia into Ukraine something that doesn't improve or rather to bring Georgia into NATO, something that doesn't improve NATO's fighting ability,

its ability to extend nothing like that. Like all Georgia would be to NATO is an out of the way new obligation that really didn't provide any kind of countervailing benefits to NATO itself. And you know, it kind of shows what the purpose of a lot of this NATO expansion is. And you know, if Georgia, like Georgia is

not anywhere near the North Atlantic. You know, I asked a question when I was I was talking to a Lavian guy I know who's very very anti Russian, pro Ukrainian, and he denied that you know this, the NATO expansion was sort of targeting Russia, that it was directed at Russia, something that I think is sort of self evidently silly. But I said, why don't why aren't we trying to bring uh Brazil into NATO. Brazil's at least on the Atlantic,

you know, but we're trying to bring Georgia INTONATO. Why is that, like, why is it only countries that are pushing in and surrounding this one country? And I think

the you know, the answer is pretty obvious. And you know, a certain point, you know, a leader of a country has to has to you know, you come to a Meersheimer talks about this right where you can you know, you can believe like Vladimir Putin can believe that the United States and NATO don't want to attack Russia, that they can expand into Ukraine and Georgia and everywhere else.

And that does not mean and probably and almost certainly doesn't mean that one day they're going to wake up and it's going to be June nineteen forty one again in American tanks are just Russian Like, he doesn't think that's going to happen, but he's responsible for national security in Russia. And so unless he can say for sure that's not going to happen, you know, you have to take steps to protect yourself. And we just haven't respected

that at all. You know, we've treated Russia like like al Qaeda or something ever since you know, the mid two thousands, as if none of their concerns nothing, they say nothing, they worry, none of those have any legitimacy, Like we're not concerned with what isis' you know, grievances are, what their security concerns are. Just kill them that right, And we treated Russia that way like just they have

no legitimate interests or concerns whatsoever. And look, if you treat a country that's been around for a thousand years and has, you know, a strong sort of cultural base to build a sense of strong nationalism out of, if it comes down to it, eventually they're gonna buck. And you know, Russia bucked and and again hopefully with the with the resignation of Victoria Newland, we maybe coming to the end of at least this current cycle of that.

look at the beginning of the war. The Russian military did move in like for a while in twenty fourteen fifteen, and they routed the disorganized Ukrainian forces at the time, and they could have pushed them back, but they didn't, you know, they stopped their progress and then they went back to Russia, you know, other than some special forces

little green men or whatever. And when you know, they annexed Crimea, and the leaders in the separatist area of don Bass, they said, well, do us like we do us next, you know, we want to be annexed to Russia. And Putin said, no, you know, we did it with Crimea because like that's just so strategically critical for us that you know, we can't risk losing our navy base and so forth. But no, he told them, no, you literally had okay, like and this was what's really crazy.

It's a great documentary that PBS series Frontline put out back in twenty fourteen. I think it's called Yeah, I can't remember, but it's like a thirty five to forty minute documentary about what's going on in what was going on in Ukraine at the time, and it's remarkably balanced. You would never see anything like this on like American media,

mainstream media today, it's quite balanced. And they there's a scene where the reporter is in Kharkiv and you know there's like an old woman and a crowd of people, but like an old woman specifically who's on her knees and she's crying and saying Putin, please save us, Please save us from you know, from the fascists. They hate us, they're going to kill us, Please save us. And so those people asked Putin to annex them and protect them, and he said no because he thought like that was

a bridge too far. And you know, with the state that the Ukrainian military was in at that point, he easily could have done it. There's nothing Ukraine. There were a bunch of militias, you know basically at that point. You know, they're totally disorganized. We hadn't trained them, we

hadn't armed him, anything like that. And he said no. And so he spends years, you know, participating in these in these min's negotiations, which would have kept the don Bassist part of Ukraine, but you know, had a sort of semi autonomous governance system that would allow them to kind of do their own thing within the context of Ukrainian government to make sure that those people were protected from you know, a Ukrainian government that was was like

literally their parliament was full of people who had just led pogroms against Russians, like all across the country. And so, you know, I think he just genuinely wanted to find a peaceful solution to the whole thing, maybe partly because you know, I think Putin and you saw this a little bit in that Tucker interview, I think he's probably he seems like he's at the point now where he's done with the United States, like there's nothing we can say that he can trust, there's no deal we can

make that he would consider reliable anymore. But I think long term, he does still care about his relations with Europe and he's looking forward to a possible future where you know, Europe is something more than just an American base and he can start to repair those relations at least. And so maybe he pursued the Minsk Ac courts because

of that. But then you know, you go through all that trouble, all that trouble, and then you know, you see the German Chancellor as a French official, like people coming out and saying that was all that was all BS like, we didn't the whole Minsk thing was just to drag things out and to make sure Russia didn't move in and take over, to give us time to build up the Ukrainian forces and get them armed and trained.

And could you imagine hearing that like as a Russian official, I mean mean, yeah, it's uh, because I can, and it would it would pretty much permanently break you know, my ability to take any any negotiation with these people seriously again. And so you know, I think when he invaded, it's when it became clear to him that the peaceful solutions that that he had been pursuing up to that

point were just not going to happen. You know, if you look at the week or two right before, right before the invasion, from day to day to day, if you look at it, you know, there's a there's a

UN organization over there that was monitoring the ceasefire. Right they had a ceasefire where you know, you could use small arms and stuff, and so the Ukrainians could do counter terrorism stuff with like small arms, tactics and stuff, but you couldn't use a whole range of heavy weapons, artillery, and mortars and all these other things, and there were violets, you know, one way and violations the other way occasionally, like as like the Minska agreements were being negotiated and

so forth. And then in a couple of weeks just prior to the invasion, you know, it goes from like and they're all on one side, they're all coming from the Ukrainian side, firing toward the Donbass. It goes from like thirty violations, eighty violations, the next day, three hundred violations, a thousand violations. I mean, they're just ramping this up.

And then Russia invades, and you know, the sort of defenders of US policy over there will try to convince me that that had nothing to do with Russia invading, but you know, to me, like the default position should be to assume that it did, and that you know, that, along with a lot of other things, just led up to a point where Russia realized that if we wait another year, then they don't have to bring Ukraine into NATO. They're making it a NATO country right now, right before

our eyes. They're not calling it that, they're not moving forty thousand US troops in there yet or anything but

you know, they're in every other way imaginable. They're essentially turning this into what it would be if it was a NATO country, and they're going to get to a certain point where we're not going to be able to do anything about it, you know, because if it gets to to a certain point and they continue to think that we're just not going to act, and then, you know, in a very short period of time, you know, an executive order comes down and thirty thousand American troops are

landed in Ukraine and take up residence in a base that we're calling permanent. Now Russia has to face the decision of whether to invade and attack American troops. Like that's a whole different ballgame, and I think he just decided that we can't wait any longer. We just can't,

you know. And also actually around the same time, like a little bit beforehand, is when you had that attempted color revolution in Belarus, and that may have had something to do with like him just you know, deciding like these the Americans are never going to stop, Like these people are just absolutely relentless, and at a certain point, you just you know, there's even if you think you're

gonna get your ass kicked. Sometimes you have no choice but to plant your feet and punch the bully in the mouth.

to NATO standards. And I would say, you know, look, I think your average Ukrainian male, you know, who joins the military voluntarily, that he is not a hell of a lot tougher than like your average guy in France or Germany or America for that matter. You're damn right.

Ideas like those guys are no joke. These guys are are motivated, they're serious, they're well trained, they're well equipped, and other than honestly, like other than the US and maybe Turkey and Poland you go back to like just before the war started in twenty twenty two, and Ukrainian military probably would have kicked the hell out of any NATO country one on one, you know, in a straight

up fight. I mean, this is a formidable force. And you know, people talk about the difference in population, which obviously is coming into play at this point. But at the same time, you know, Russia doesn't look at Ukraine and say, oh, this is such a tiny country that Ukraine's got about the same ratio of population to Russia now that Germany did in nineteen forty one to the

Soviet Union. I mean, and they know how much damage you know, a small country can do they if they bust loose and break out, and so you know Ukraine is I mean, they showed it. Look, you take nothing away from the actual guys on the ground who were fighting. They showed their willingness for a long time. And it

looks like the edges are starting to fray now. But these guys showed their willingness to die in place, you know, to hold their ground and fight to the last man, very often not surrender when it was obvious that there was nowhere to go and that the fight was over. And you know, these guys are very motivated game fighters who who gave the look I mean Putin did not.

People look at like the initial invasion when Putin supposedly thought he was going to conquer all of Ukraine and take Kiev and all that kind of stuff, and you know, it's so silly, like when you look at the amount of troops and specifically like which troops, A lot of a lot of Wagner troops and stuff who were brought in. You know, it was the whole country coming in on five different axes. Was barely enough troops to throw at

one of Ukraine's secondary cities. I mean, if you're really going to take it like you know, it was clear from the beginning that that was not what they were trying to do. I think that they probably severely miscalculated and thought that is one. As we show that we're serious, than the ukrainians'll panic can come to the table and then they'll sign a real deal and we can you know,

get this done. And so you see it, and like the in the tactics they employed with you know, you have columns of armor just rolling down country roads with no infantry support, no nothing, and they end up getting shredded. And it's because I don't, you know, they weren't they weren't expecting a fight. They weren't expecting the kind of resistance that they got, so they didn't go in prepared

for it. But then even for months after that, you know, for months and months after that, it was very apparent. I think that Putin like he didn't want to admit that this was even a war. You know, they call it a special military operation for a long time, and it took them a long time to mobilize. And uh, you know, even to this day, Uh, you know, Putin's

rockets could have flattened Kiev a long time ago. You know, at the beginning of the Iraq War, both the Iraq wars, the first thing we did, we knocked out their entire communications grid, destroyed all their power all their clean water, they're all their infrastructure. We just wiped it out like the first night, you know, in Iraq. Putin didn't do any of that. For like a year, he wasn't doing any of that, and uh, you know, and he still is not attacking Kiev when he could be. He could

be doing that and he's not. And I think, uh, you know, he he for up until the mobilization, which I think was probably driven by internal pressure from people to his right in the Russian establishment. Uh you know that that he was still trying to find some way to get this done with minimal damage to both sides, you know, and then he finally just had to admit, Okay, no, this is a war, and I can't sign a deal with the Americans or with NATO nothing that they say

is reliable. I just have to, you know, fight this thing to the to the end until this country is no longer a threat to me and and not an

asset to NATO. And you know, at this point, like I don't, I don't know, you know, it's very unfortunate for the Ukrainians themselves, right, because you go back you mentioned that Zelenski and Putin were negotiating at the like in the opening months of the war, uh and that they had a verbal agreement, like a tentative verbal agreement that was gonna it was gonna bring it to a halt, and that Boris Johnson flew over there, it's all infamous now and told them, you know, oh no you're not.

And you think about that. I mean, it's really that's really evil. I mean, this is because this is a country that you know, Ukraine, like we had the power to tell them, like, you end this war and we're just gonna leave you hanging, and you can you know, you're you're blown up cities and you know, you're destroyed

economy and all that. You guys can just have fun with that because we're not helping even though you got into this whole thing largely because of you know, policies we were using you as a proxy for we could just abandon them and really put the hurt on them. We essentially blackmailed them into continuing to throw their young men into this, into this meek grinder, and you know,

it's really awful. But yeah, I think that at this point, unfortunately, you know, the Russians probably feel like they have to fight this thing to the end, which is not what Putin wanted to do. I think that's clear. And I'm not like, look man like. Putin is not like some

fuzzy friendly fella, you know. I mean, he's a he's a hardcore, ruthless dude, and nobody but a hardcore ruthless dude was going to pull Russia out of the condition it was in in the nineties, when you know, the government is controlled by the guys who own the entire economy, They control regions of the country with their own private armies.

And he managed to you know, re establish the prerogative of the Russian state and put that society back together and clip the wings of all those oligarchs without a civil war. I mean, it's amazing, It really is amazing that that happened. And you know, some guy who was you know, Bernie Sanders was not going to be able to do something like that. He's a he's a hard man who came up in a very very hard time and so but you know, yeah, I think that, But yeah,

I think that's where we're at. I think that Russia is finally kind of you know, reached a point of exasperation where it's affected you know, over the long term, I think that they have accepted that, you know, we're never really going to fully accept them and we're never going to let them in. And so that's why you know, they've solidified their relationships with China and Iran and India. You know, India didn't abandon Russia and a lot, you know,

a lot of the countries around the world. I mean, that's what you want to talk about, like the failures of the New end policy. I mean, the Russian military is way stronger now than it was beforehand. The Russian military has a ton of experience fighting NATO tactics and NATO weapons systems that it didn't have before. It's Russia has had a long and brutal war to advance their

understanding of drone tactics on the battlefield. You know, probably a decade or two worth of like military advancement in that space has probably been compressed into like two years. And you know, they've had to learn a lot of that the hard way, but they've learned it now. And if you look at the United States, like what we gained from this, you know what, like you know, our

other rivals around the world. You know, China Indian just not not rivals, but the other powers around the world have seen that there are limits to what we can actually do, which you know, maybe they believe that before, but they weren't sure. You know, they saw Iraq or or Libya or something and they say, okay, they you know, Americans weren't able to achieve their goal or whatever, but they can sure as hell cause a hell of a lot of problems, you know, for us that we don't want.

But they see that there's limitations to that is to you know, what we can actually do. A lot of countries that were you know that we're friendly with and we're still friendly with, you know, India, Brazil, uh, Mexico, a lot of these countries. We told them, you know, you have to, uh we we need you to be with us on this. Cut Russia off, you know, uh

follow these sanctions. And most of those countries said no, and you know, outside of outside of NATO said no. And there were no consequences for that, you know, we we weren't able to impose any consequences on them. And the fact that you know, the these financial institutions that the United States has really used as as instruments of global control for you know, since in the post war period, like the like the IMF and all all these others,

the Swift system and so forth. You know, these are things that before countries had to worry like what actually will happen if they cut us off the swift system? Like that could be armageddon, Like that could be all. But now everybody's seen it that actually, you know, you can get by. You can get by just fine, and you know, we're in a much weaker position now. We

Europe is in a much weaker position. Although you know, I've heard people hypothesize that maybe that was, you know, kind of part of the goal of this whole thing was to you know, was to make sure that you know, Europe didn't I mean, if you go like everybody knows that Russia asked Yeltsin and Putin one time, asked about Russia joining NATO because that was one of their solutions.

They were like, in fact, Yeltsin said, look, why don't we This is when we were talking about the first tranch of expansion in the mid nineties, and he was like, I'll tell you what, why don't we join NATO first? And then we'll bring in all the countries between US, and we won't have anything to worry about because we're part of the program. And of course we said no, you know, we were. That was never on the table because ah, you know, NATO is it's just the dealing.

It's it's it's the you know, it's it's the instrument of American control over Europe. That's what it is. We're not going to you know, share the share the room with another large power that we can't control and has

ideas of their own. But then also it was you know, if Russia's our friend, then Europe might start looking around and say, well, wait, okay, what do we need you know, an American military base in Germany for If Russia is our friend, what do we need to continue to like take dictations from Washington, d C. On our foreign policy?

If the only country that's even feasibly a threat to US is now not just not a threat, but an ally and you know, so uh, it's uh, it's dark and crazy to think that you know that that that planners might have been thinking that way. But at the same time, it would be in keeping with you know a lot of their behavior where you use controlled chaos, you know, a lot of times, chaos is the goal. You know, if you look at like this is something Putin talks about all the time, and most Americans are

just like, huh, what's he talking about? But uh after during as well, but uh then even after the second War with Chechnya it was over, we were over there like funding training you know, these jihadists who were there. This is after the war's over, Like they're not gonna retake you know, Gros near anything like that's all over.

But what we wanted was just to keep enough chaos going in that region so that you know, a pipeline couldn't get built down to the Black Sea that Russia was trying to do for years, and a lot of these other things you couldn't develop, you know, the region

strategically because there's just too much chaos popping off. And then by the way, and I and I uh, you know some of this is public knowledge, but you know, I have like confirmation from a marine who was a part of the training operation working out at Istanbul when

Marsak was was training these jihadis and arming them. One of them, one of our main guys was there were four main warlords that we were like really working with on their own militias, and one of them his group, you know, and as far as I know, uh, you know, we were not working directly with them anymore at this point, but it was his group that went and did the

Beslan school attack in Russia. And so I mean, you know, you just again you have to try to put yourself in the in the position of the Russians and you see something like that, you know, and think of how we would respond to it. And you know, I think about like you know, you've heard like Dan Crenshaw, Lindsey Graham. You guys just total maniacs. You know, they go on Twitter, they go in public. Dan Crenshaw actually said this is

almost word for word. I think he said, you know, I don't understand why people have a problem with what we're doing over in Ukraine. A bunch of Russians are dying and it's not costing us anything but money. Like that's literally what he said. And so imagine like we're in Iraq and the Russians are just training, arming and not even on the sly They're just like basically leading the insurgency against US, and Russian politicians are out there

in public saying, oh, yeah, we don't. Our only goal is to kill Americans, Like we just want to see more dead Americans. Like other than that, like if that happens, we're you know, we're happy. Dead Americans is cool in our book. That's enough for us. You think these people are fucking maniacs, you know, And and I think that's where the Russians are with us at that at this point.

And it's unfortunate because you know, I love Russia. I mean I you know, I started reading Russian literature when I was a teenager, and you know, I've always loved it. I love the culture, and I find it to be a real tragedy that that our relationship to that country has been dragged down by a few, you know, really malicious interested parties.

ethnic and ethnic vendetta. Basically that Victoria Nowlan her husband Robert Kagan Kagan is Russian for kne that it's a Jewish animosity for the pale of settlement, stettles, the pogroms. How do you answer? What do you think of McGregor saying that, what's your opinion?

you want to repeat that? And he tells him. He's like whatever, it was fine, and so you know, a few hours later, or however long later, see smoke on the horizon and tanks start rolling in and the air force rolls in. The Chinese military comes in, just flattens Poland, just wipes out the guy's village, everywhere else destroyed. And then they go home and he says, all right, so I want my second wish, and he's like, what do you want this time? You want me to rebuild the country.

What is it you want? He said, I want China to invade Poland again, and he's like okay, And so the whole who same thing happens again, and third wish he wants China to invade Poland again, and so it happens again. He says, I got to ask you, like, why is it that you want. Don't you love your country like or do you really hate your country? Why do you want want China to come destroy it?

of the Soviet Union, some more willingly than others. You know, Poland honestly is one of the one of the ones that was part of the Soviet Union much more unwillingly. But you know, the Soviet Union was a was a multi f multinational project, especially early on before Stalin kind of reconverted it into a sort of a Russian empire. But you know, this is a multi ethnic, multinational project that had participation, you know, from strong communist parties like

across Eastern Europe who were who were doing this. You know, it was not it was not a bunch of Russians who were going into you know, country A and you know,

attacking the ethnic people over here. It was their own communist parties who were leading those efforts, you know, and taking leadership from Moscow obviously, and so this went on for a long time, and I think like, uh, you know, there's some there's something of once the Soviet Union fell, and these countries are sort of reckoning with their own past, their own the fact that you know, you're a country

that that was part of the Soviet Union. Now you're not, but you're still living in the you know, next door to a guy who was part of the Secret Police. You're living next door to a you know, a communis apparatchic over here is something and you have to figure out how are we gonna knit this society back together? Like how are we gonna And I think one of the ways that they've done it is they just think, now, like the Soviet Union was Russia, Russia is the Soviet Union.

US we're pure victims of Russian imperialism and that was our role in the Soviet Union, just as victims, and so even our people who are a part of that or whatever, like you know, we really had no choice, and we can all kind of come together, and so I think it's been like a mechanism for pulling, you know, those societies back together in a cohesive way. I don't want to say it's the beginning and end of it, but I think there's something to that.

war stuff. And I read through it back then. But I'll tell you it's one of those books that I think the last fifteen years that have passed since that time have really given the book a new flavor in a way, because you know, I read it back then and I enjoyed it. I've been rereading it because we're going to talk about it, and I've been getting a lot more out of it. There's a lot more to draw on, for sure, So I'm looking forward to.

power with in a state. It can be compared to a cookery book in the sense that it aims at enabling any lay person, equipped with enthusiasm and the right ingredients, to carry out his own coup. Only a knowledge of the rules is required. Two words of caution. In the first place, in order to carry out a successful coup, certain preconditions must be present, just as in cooking Bullyabase, one needs to needs the right source of fish to

start with. Second, readers should be aware that the penalty of failure is far greater than having to eat out of a tin. The rewards, too, are greater. It may be objected that should such a handbook be inadequate or misleading, the readers will be subject to great dangers, while if it is an efficient guide to the problems, it may

lead to upheoples and disturbances. My defense is that coups are already common, and if as a result of this book a number of people learn how to carry them out, this is merely a step towards the democratization of the coup, the fact that all persons of liberal sentiments should applaud. Finally, it should be noted that the techniques here discussed are politically neutral and concerned only with the objective of seizing control of the state, and not at all with subsequent policies.

When jump into chapter one, let's do it all right? Chapter one? What is a coupd'tas? I shall got a couple quotes here. I shall be sorry to commence the era of peace by a coup de ETAs such as that I had in contemplation, Duke of Wellington, eighteen eleven. No other way of salvation remained except for the army's intervention. Constantine Collius, April twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, Athens, all right.

Starting with the text. Though the term coupdata has been used for more than three centuries, the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development, the rise of the modern state, with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records and officials, can follow intimately and if it so desires, control the

activities of lesser organizations and individuals. Totalitarian states merely use more fully the detailed and comprehensive information available to most states. However, democratic the instrument is largely the same, though it is used differently. Right off the bat, when you start reading this, it really seems like he's describing the managerial state, right, what has existed since let's call it the late twenties to early thirties.

and that's what he's talking about here. And you know, for Lootwalk, the coup is really only possible with the legal rational when you get that distinction between the political authority and the state machinery where there's sort of two distinct things and you can swap people out at the top and they are conferred genuine power from their position, you know, in a traditional authority structure, which is just

basically like a patronage system. Everything from you know, say Saudi Arabia today to feudal systems in the past, you know, these things were built on organic relationships, like that's what the system of power represented was the totality of these organic relationships. And a coup. You can't really pull off a coup unless you're maybe you know, a brother taking out the you know, the crown prints and taking his

place or something like that. But that's about it. And same with charismatic authority, where leader, you know, leadership sort of coalesces around the person of a single charismatic individual. A lot of times you don't have much of an organization to go with that. The organization is, you know, the gathering of people around the man, and it's very

hard to pull off a coup in that environment. Once the legal rational system gets in place, though, and especially once it gains a sort of autonomy and self awareness, you know, of itself as a class and as a as a as a as a function, it starts to learn how to defend itself and it'll start to, uh, you know, fend off challenges from charismatic leaders or traditionalist you know, patronage type type networks, and you know, and it's only that type that, yeah, that that you can run a coup against.

so show residual features of the earlier structure. The importance of this development lies in the fact that if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership an a legal seizure of power must take the form of a palace revolution, which essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler. That ruler may be forced to accept new policies or new advisors, or may be killed or held captive. But whatever happens, the palace revolution can only be conducted from

the inside and by insiders. An insider might be be the commander of the palace guard, as in ancient Rome or the Ethiopia of the nineteen sixties, and if the dynastics system is preserved, the aim is to replace the unwanted ruler with a more malleable descendant. The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the outside and operates in the area outside the government but within the state, the area formed by the permanent

professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties. I don't know that people saw, like when you read that last paragraph, how clearly you can see what he talks about with The aim is to detach to permanent employees, which would we would call the deep state now, from

the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done. I don't know that when he wrote this, it was even sure. Burnham had written the manager or Revolution thirty years thirty three years earlier, or thirty years earlier, But I don't know that that was as widely understood as it is now. The fact that we're basically run by managerialism.

goal in doing that, in detaching political authority and government machinery. Right, if you go back to like the late eighteen hundreds, most American cities, local and even state governments, which the federal government was much smaller and weaker back then, so that meant most of government in America, you know, it was run by ethnic patronage networks that sort of emerged more or less organically as a way of organizing people

for political activity. And the Progressive movement was a very explicit, you know, the Good Government Movement, very explicit sort of attack on those patronage networks. And you know, you can take that all the way up to like like Colonel House's book, or all the way eventually in the apotheosis obviously in the New Deal Revolution when that all really came together, and they're quite explicit about it. But for some reason, Yeah, it's something that's that's been lost a

bit today. You know, when you when we were kids, we watched Schoolhouse Rock. They had that little commercial, you know, where there's like the piece of paper and he's like, hey, folks,

I'm a bill and here's how I get passed. There's three branches of government and so forth, and like you know, and this is how your government works, and that you know, that's that's not how the government works at all, right, I mean the government ninety nine percent of the government and certainly all of the functional parts of the government,

the ones that actually take action. It's this unelected bureaucracy that that that's purpose is to be completely detached from political authority, which is to say, you know, quote, you know, in an ideal world, or if our system worked the way it was supposed to, which is to say that it's detached from accountability from from the you know, the population.

of the dynasty. Similarly, after and rulers typically appoint members of their own tribe to the key posts in the armed forces, police and security services. When a party machine controls civil service appointments, either as part of a more general totalitarian control or because of a very long period in office, as in postwar Italy till the late nineteen eighties, political associates are appointed to the senior levels of the bureaucracy, partly in order to protect the regime and partly to

ensure the sympathetic execution of policies. In the communist countries of yesteryear, all senior jobs were of course held by party appoatrics. Saudi Arabia provides an instance of traditional bonds. In this case, the lack of modern know how on the part of the traditional tribal affiliates of the royal house has meant that what could not be done individually

has been done organizationally. The modern army, manned by some one hundred thousand unreliable city dwellers, is outnumbered by one hundred and twenty five thousand or so enrolled in the White Army of the Bedouin, or at least nominally be followers of the Saudis officially known as the Haras al Watshani Guard of the Homeland or National Guard, the so

called the White Army. It includes a tribal militia of some twenty five thousand official official officially designated the Iman Imam Muhammad bin Saud Mechanized Brigade based in the capital of Riad and plainly ment as an anti coup force. Have you been to Saudi?

of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department, there must be an accepted chain of command and standard procedures have to be followed. Thus, a given piece of information or a given order is followed up in a stereotyped manner, and if the order comes from the appropriate

source at the appropriate level, it is carried out. In the more critical parts of the state apparatus, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, all these characteristics are intensified with an even greater degree of discipline and rigidity. The apparatus of this state is, therefore, to some extent, a machine that will normally behave in a fairly predictable and automatic miss manner. What happens if it stops operating in a predictable and automatic manner?

start if they stop reacting in a predictable manner? I mean, at that point you're very very very close to the edge. You know, the whole uh, the whole purpose of that.

I mean, if you think about the base level of all government, right, and maybe this has something to do with Weber's traditional you know, patrimony based system of authority, but at the bottom of it is whoever can provide physical security and whoever can distribute resources that people need to live or secure and distribute those resources, then that's

gonna that's the government in time. Like it might not be today, but eventually, if the government that you think you have can't do those things, then that's not gonna

be the government for long. You know. You see this with like terrorist organ I mean we had to come to terms with this, Like in Iraq for example, right when we went into Iraq, people really did go in with all of these for all the cynicism of the neo cons and everything, like these people when they you know, they really had sort of pioped themselves into believing that the people of the world are just Americans in embryo.

And as soon as they're given the opportunity we get rid of at Am Hussein or whoever, then they're gonna throw roses at our feet and be happy to become because they were thinking of you know, Poland in nineteen eighty nine, you know, Czechoslovakia in nineteen eighty nine, like just take that boot off their neck, and they want to wear blue jeans and basically be Americans, like if they're given the opportunity, And they really did sigh off

themselves into believing that to a degree. But then once we got in there, we had to deal with the reality which the terrorist organization, the insurgents understood much better than we did it first, which was, you know, they knew that if they could prove that the Americans could not protect you, could not provide physical security, and that the Americans weren't able to ensure that you and your family could eat or have water or then we weren't

going to be governing that country for very long, you know. And the people who are capable of turning those things, the violence spigot or the resource pigot on and off, if the insurgents, through violence could make that be them,

then they would, you know, replace us. And they understood that we had to kind of we had to kind of adapt to that, and we got to the point once you got up to like six o seven, where we did kind of just accept that, you know, Betraeus went out with like hundreds of millions of dollars and just started paying off tribal cheeks. Not so much so that, you know, it wasn't so that they could go stuff it in their Swiss bank account and flee the country

if things go bad later on. It was so that we were conferring upon them the legitimacy they needed as distributors of resources. You know, they could actually give their people things that they needed, while we provided physical security to actually get them on our side. You know. It's that's that's like really the fundamental kind of base level

of all of all government and so at that. I mean, in that sense, if it started starts acting unpredictably at that point, then you're already in a period of you know, of severe breakdown.

warrior and his friends. You know, if you're a farmer and you're out here and you have a bunch of lions terrorizing your livestock, and you know, threatening your children when they go outside, and it's a pack of lions, and you're a farmer, you know, in the days before firearms, you know, that's a real problem for you. In fact, that's like a that's a that's a life or death problem for you, not just whether or not you get killed by a lion, but whether you can actually do

the things you need to do to eat. So a guy shows up on a horse with six of his friends and says, where are the lions there? That way? And he goes and kills those lions. That dude's in charge. And you're fine with that, you know, And that's a legitimate basis of human government in a lot of ways.

to which the state really functions as a machine. We will see that some states are so well organized that the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion according to a given conception of what is proper and what is not in the orders that it executes. This is the case in the most advanced countries, and in such circumstances

a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership to allow room for a coup, as as is still the case perhaps in the ex British protectorates of Southern Africa, Botswana,

Lesotho and Swaziland. Fortunately, most states are between those two extremes, with bureaucratic machines both large and unsophisticated, and thus highly vulnerable to those who can identify and seize the right levers. One of the most striking developments of the twentieth century was the great decline in general political stability. Since the French Revolution, governments have been overthrown at an increasing pace. In the nineteenth century, the French experienced two revolutions and

two regimes collapsed. Following the military defeat in nineteen fifty eight, the change of regime that brought Charles de gaul to enduring power was a blend of those elements. People every whe have followed the French example, and the lifespan of regimes has tended to decrease while the life span of their subjects has increased. This contrast sharply with the relative attachments to the system of constitutional monarchy displayed in the

nineteenth century. When Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians secured their freedom from the Turkish colonial system, they immediately went over to Germany in order to shop around for a suitable royal family. Crowns, flags and decorations were designed and purchased from reputable English suppliers. Royal palaces were built, and where possible, hunting lodges, royal mistresses and a local aristocracy were provided as fringe benefits.

Twentieth century peoples have on the other hand, showed a marked lack of interest in monarchies in their paraphernalia when the British kindly provided them with a proper royal family. Unhappy Iraqis made numerous efforts to dispense with it before finally succeeding by mass in nineteen fifty eight. Military and other right wing forces have meanwhile tried to keep up with violent mass movements, using their own illegal methods to seize power and overthrow regimes. Why did the regimes of

the twentieth century prove to be so fragile? It is, after all, paradoxical that this fragility increased while the established procedures for securing changes in government were becoming more flexible. The political scientists will reply that although the procedures became more flexible, the pressures for change were also becoming stronger, and the increase in flexibility did not keep up with the increased social and economic stresses. Violent metho you want to say.

bit too. I was thinking about when he was talking about you know that you have to kind of have this Goldilock's bureaucracy, right, this goldilocks state where it is developed enough that it's worth taking the reins of you know, if you that if you get the control of it, then you actually have power that you know, it's developed enough for that, but that it's not so mature that it can exercise self will you know, if it doesn't like who the leader is or what the leader wants

to do. And you know, there's a there's a sense in which if you think of like the National Socialist Revolution in Germany, you know, obviously that wasn't a coup or kup atah or anything, but it really was like a I mean, it was a revolution and the system of government there for sure that if you were to go back, you know before that, well it was something

that like it like not understanding this. The this part, I think kind of led to it was part of what led to the conflict that eventually emerged between the regime and the sort of the old school hardcore revolutionaries of like the Essay for example, right, because once Hitler got into power, he had to he had to deal with the fact that this machinery existed that he was now at the controls of that he had to compromise with on someone you know, because it was developed enough

to resist anything he wanted to do if he couldn't co opt it like that, and he had to make certain compromises to accommodate it. And you know, the ernst Rome's of the world and stuff. These were hardcore, like street revolutionaries, and they didn't like that. And you see that in a lot of these revolutions, and it's why, you know, in revolutions all over the world throughout the twentieth century, the first thing that happens is the revolutionary

seized control of the government. And the second thing that happens is most of the revolutionaries get killed off by the boss. You know.

you know, the book I would write. I would love to read a book that is about It's a biography or a mini biography of the period of Hitler's life from the rise to power, like through the twenties, you know, from the Puts and on its way up, all the way up and ends in nineteen thirty four when he had to kill Rome and a of these essay guys, and just the inner turmoil that he had to have gone through, you know, having to having to take out, uh, so many of the people who had you know, been

who had ridden with him up to that point and been through everything with him, and coming to the conclusion and having to carry out uh something that you know that was necessary but but maybe very distasteful to him. I think I would. I think that would be a great story.

Violent methods are generally used when legal methods of securing a governmental change are useless because they are either too rigid, as in the case of ruling monarchies where the ruler actually controls policy formation, or not rigid enough. It was once remarked, for example, that the throne of Russia was, until the seventeenth century neither hereditary nor elective, but occupative occupative.

The long series of abdications forced by the Great Boyar landlords and the Streltsi the Kremlin Palace guards had weakened the hereditary principle so that whoever took the throne became czar. Precedents by birth counted for little. Some contemporary republics have ended up in this position, which comes about when a long series of illegal seizures of power leads to a decay of the legal and political structures needed to produce

new governments. Thus Syria went through more than a dozen coups before the Assad family dynasty was established by Hafez A la Sad's nineteen seventy coup, and the provisions for all open general elections written in the Harani Constitution could no longer be applied because the necessary supervisory machinery decayed and disappeared. Assuming, however, that there is an established procedure for changing the leadership, that all other methods must fall

within some category of illegality. What we call them depends on what side we are on, but skipping some of the details, we use one of the following terms. All right, so a bunch of lists of terms here, though with brief explanations. Revolution.

more than any their places. One part of its geopolitical and it's obvious, right that was the those are the places that were up for grabs in the Cold War, right, and so they had both sides sort of vuying for them, but also from like a lootwalk perspective, you know, it's interesting because they those those were the countries that kind of fit the model that he's talking about here the best in the sense that you had these say in Africa,

you had these countries that really were only countries because the French and the British drew some lines on a map.

don't identify with each other. There's no nation underlying this thing. In other words, the power of structure doesn't actually represent any organic power. It's just this thing that's there that's sort of that that's sort of imposed on people. It's not it's not representative of anything that really like on the ground. Right, Like if you look at Afghanistan, for example, you know, there are people who are we going to

call them geniuses or anything. There's people with basic common sense who back in two thousand and one we're saying, this is a this is just never going to work in the long term for the very simple reason that the Northern Alliance, all these people that like, we're going over there and wanting to ally with that, these people, it's a it's a big coalition of all the different minority groups in Afghanistan, and you want to bring this

coalition together. They have nothing in common. They really don't have, you know, any anything that they share other than their opposition to the postune majority. And so it's going to make them completely dependent on the United States occupation forces.

And once that occupation forces leave, whether it's now, whether it's in a hundred years, those people are are going to scatter to the winds because the real power, the organic power in this country is the postune majority that is organized under the Taliban, and you know, and that's real power, whether or not, whether or not they are represented in the government or not. Usually, uh, you know,

reality wins out. And so you have a lot of these African countries and other post colonial countries that had that state machinery with nothing underneath it. And even a place like Liberia. Liberia is actually a great example because it was never a colony. You know, it was like you had essentially like Monrovia was like a city state where you know, a bunch of former American slaves had gone to had gone to live. And they never really even left Monrovia or the immediate environs of Monrovia much.

They didn't go out to the hinterlands, you know, or anything. But then once the Wrench in the British really started to get on their colonization spree in Africa, we started putting pressure on the Americo Liberians in Monrovio. We're like, you need to become a country. You can't just be a city state. We need you to form the country of Liberia, and we're going to define its borders so that we can say to the French and British, like, you can't come in here, you have to stay out

of this area. And so they did, and they went and they created a quote unquote country of Liberia with a government of Liberia, you know, and they created a sort of national quote unquote police force that went out and found which tribal authorities and chiefs could be co opted, getting rid of the ones that couldn't, and then reinforcing the co opted ones authority with the national you know,

security forces. But it was it was always just very very very inorganic, you know, it never had any purchase like on the ground. In most of the country. It was something that they existed on paper to a large degree. And you saw in the twentieth century that you know, with the slightest push, a place like that comes apart.

than a few plotters who did the whole thing. Thus, the obscure aims abd Abd al Karim Kassim had in mind when he overthrew the Iraqi regime of King Faisal the Second and Prime Minister nourri said are locally known as the Sacred Principles of the July fourteenth Revolution. Next one is civil war. Civil war is outright warfare between elements of the armed forces and or the population at large.

The term is perpetually unfashionable. Whenever there is a civil war, all sides typically deny its existence, variously passing it off as an international war, such as the war between the states of the Confederacy, or more often as a foreign aggression. Though in Franco's Spain, the civil war of nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine was always la Cruzada the Crusade siamiento. This is an essentially Spanish and South American version of the military coup de'ta, but many recent African

coups have also taken this particular form. In its original nineteenth century Spanish version, it was a highly ritualized process. First came the trabajos, literally the works, in which the opinions of army officers were sounded. The next step was the compromisos, in which commitments were made and rewards promised. Then came the call for action, and finally the appeal to the troops to follow their officers in rebellion against

the government. The pronunciamanto was often a liberal rather than a reactionary phenomenon, and the theoretical purpose of the takeover was to ascertain the national will. A typical liberal concept. Later, as the army became increasingly right wing while Spanish governments became less so, the theory shifted from the neoliberal national

will to the neo conservative real will theory. The latter postulates that the prospulates the existence of a national essence, a sort of permanent spiritual structure which the wishes of the majority may not always express. The army was entrusted with the interpretation and preservation of this essential s Spain, and the obligation to protect it against the government and, if need be, against the people. Siamiento was organized and led by a particular army leader, but it was carried

out in the name of the entire officer corps. Unlike the pusch, which is carried out by a faction within the army, or the coup, which can also be executed by civilians using some army units, the pronounciamiento leads to a takeover by the army as a whole. Many African takeovers in which the army had participated as a whole were therefore very similar to the classic pronouncmento what do you?

How do you? This was written before before Chile nineteen seventy three would how would that be How would that even fit into that?

But when that happened, you know, sure Mubarak was in jail and everything, but if you looked at it, I mean, every time CEC was on stage, like he was on camera somewhere, it's just nothing but four stars flanking him on either side. And if you look at something like the twenty was it fifteen or sixteen attempt against ern and I remember when they first went on the people who were pushing the putch or coup, whatever you want to call I guess this would be a putch in

Lutwalk's terms. And I remember watching it and seeing like I think there was like a two star on stage talking, but then there was like a couple of colonels and then there was like a captain on stage. I'm like, if you got a captain on stage for your coup, like it's over. This is not gonna work. There's just no he should be like getting coffee for somebody, for all the four stars that are or else. This is not gonna work. And sure enough it didn't work.

fighting regime that would prosecute the war. Had he succeeded, the city would perhaps have borne his name instead of Lenin, as it did until nineteen ninety one liberation. A state may be said by supporters of the change to be liberated when its government is overthrown by foreign military or diplomatic intervention. A classic case of this was the installation of the communist leadership in Romania in nineteen forty seven.

The USSR forced to then King Michael to accept a new cabinet by threatening direct military force by the Soviet Army. You ever read what Evela had to say about the Iron Guard.

set up a rival state structure. This can be politically, ethnically or religiously based, as with the Taliban, whose aim is in Afghanistan wholly converted to their own Deobandi or Wahabi Islam, which contrives to be both the official state religion of Saudi Arabia and a rigorously fanatical ideology that denies any legitimacy whatsoever. It's any other form of Islam,

let alone non Muslim faiths. As for secessionist insurgencies, they are necessarily ethnically based, though ethnicity can be all in the mind, as with the Eritreans and Ethiopians, as with the Kurds of Iraq as well as Iran and Turkey, the Somalis of Kenya and Ethiopia, the current people in Burma and formerly the Nagas of India. All Right, the

definition of the coudetat drink real quick. A kudata involves some elements of all these different methods by which power can be seized, but unlike most of them, the coup is not assisted by the intervention of the masses or by any large scale form of combat by military forces. The assistance of these forms of direct force would no doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would be unrealistic to think that they would be available to the organizers of a coup. Because we will not be

in charge of the armed forces. We cannot hope to start planning of a coup with sizable military units already under our control, nor will the pre coup government usually allow us to carry out the propaganda and organization necessary to make effective use of the broad masses of the people. A second distinguishing feature of a coup is that it does not imply any particular political orientation. Revolutions are usually leftists, while the which and the pronunciamiento are usually initiated by

right wing forces. A coup, however, is politically neutral, and there is no presumption that any particular policies will be followed after the seizure of power. It is true that many coups have been of a decidedly right wing character, but there is nothing inevitable about that. If a coup does not make use of the masses or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state. The short answer is that power will come from the state itself. The long answer makes up

the bulk of this book. The following is our formal and functional definition of a coup. A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. And there is footnotes for chapter one, start chapter two and cefr we get.

ilitch Ilyanov lenin October nineteen seventeen. The process of decolonization that started soon after the end of the Second World War first doubled and then more than triple the number of independent states, so that the opportunities open to us have expanded in a most gratifying manner. We have to recognize, however, that not all states make good targets for our attentions.

There is nothing to prevent us from carrying out a kup and say the United Kingdom, but we would probably be unable to stay in power for more than a short time. The public and the bureaucracy have a basic understanding of the nature and legal basis of the government, and they would react in order to restore a legitimate leadership.

This reaction renders any initial success of the coup meaningless, and it would arise even though the pre coup government may have been unpopular and the new faces may be attractive. The reaction would arise from the fact that a significant part of the population takes an active interest in political

life and regularly participates in it. This implies a recognition that the power of the government derives from its legitimate origin, and even those who have no reason to support the old Guard have many good reasons to support the principle of legitimacy. I guess that's really important when you have so many people, a good percentage of your population who's actually employed by the governm or living off of its teeth.

And that's look, that's a that's a noble impulse, you know, I mean, it's it's a sense that they have that you know, we have this this bolwark that if we give up and we give that up, then there's going to be real chaos on the other side of it. And so we have to suffer what we must in order to sustain it. But but that's that you know, principle of legitimacy that people hold on to long after it really has any any reality to it.

Pressure groups are formed, letters are sent to the press and the politician, and the press and the politicians. Petitions and demonstrations are organized, and this adds up to a continuing dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. I automatically think of Uncle ted over socialization when I read those two paragraphs right there. This dialogue does not depend necessarily

on the existence of a formally democratic political system. Even in one party states where power is in the hands of a few self appointed leaders I muted, But nevertheless, active dialogue can take place. The higher organizations of the party can discuss party decisions, and in time of relative relaxation, the discussions extend to the larger numbers in the lower

echelons and to publications reflecting different currents. Though only within the wider framework of the accepted ideology and the broad policy decisions of the leadership. The value of the dialogue from that takes place in non democratic states. Let me repeat that again. The value of the dialogue that takes place in non democratic states varies greatly. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived. Okay, so I'm assuming this is these are updates that he wrote in the

He wrote in the new edition. I think what is it? The twenty sixteen edition?

at least echoed those debates. In the process, while there was still no democracy, the population evolved from subjection to participation, learning to scrutinize and question orders instead of simply obeying them, so that they were increasingly likely to resist a coup.

In the Arab world, by contrast, the nominal ruling parties that function from the nineteen sixties, the Arab Socialist Union of Egypt and the Bath Party of Syria and Iraq very soon degenerated into mere rubber stamps for the ruling dictators Damal Gamal abdel Nasser, Havez al Asad and Saddam Hussein. As time went on, their pretended deference to parties councils dissolved, but all along they made every significant decision by themselves,

while the parties could only cheer them on. When the question came up of whether Egypt's ASU dominated National Assembly would accept now sirs withdrawal of his resignation following the June nineteen sixty seven debacle known as the Sixth Day War, an observer pointed out that the Assembly will jolly do what it is told. You want comment on that at all?

It was becoming a holding company for all the public wealth and much of the private wealth of China, whereby officials continued to receive their modest salaries, they did not exceed R and B eleven three hundred and eighty five or basically eighteen hundred and fifty four dollars US dollars per month in twenty fifteen, even in the very highest rank. Meanwhile, the party officials collected large amounts of bribes, ensuring a degree of affluence even at the village level, rising to

sometimes very great wealth at the top. As a faithful fan of Beijing's top discos, I grew accustomed to seeing the young sons of party officials driving up in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Little aside by Ludwak.

locked up for corruption. So you know that previous part you read too, It's like, you know, it's an interesting point because you know it kind of it speaks to the fact, like we have this bias over here in most of the West, I mean definitely in America that representative government, you know, the people being gaining having representation

is synonymous with democracy. And I think that, you know, if you really think about it for more than two seconds, you know, we can see that there are functional democratic systems like ours, like so many in Europe that don't represent their people at all, that everybody's very unsatisfied with, and that go their own way. But that even in one party states or dictatorial states, that there are other means of allowing people the dialogue with the government and

express their needs and their interests. There are other ways to do it other than you know, mass democracy. And I think you know, there have been plenty of examples of governments throughout the twentieth century. Usually you know, they didn't they didn't last too long, partly because we placed

him in the crosshairs for one reason or another. Who managed to represent their people and involve them in the participation of their own governments without having everybody go to the polls every two or four years.

But the continued transformation of the Communist Party of China into a mega corporation man by the ambitious duly rewarded with increasingly overt payoffs was interrupted by the decision of Jijingping's high party colleagues to elevate him to a seat of unprecedented power. They did so, most likely because they feared that the party's further degeneration into an open, corrupt

enterprise would lead to an outright collapse. The problem with bribes is that their distribution is very uneven, generating corrosive resentments and embarrassing leaks. As a result, Jijingping is left with the pretty problem of finding a substitute for both a putrefying ideology and the lost and sensive of corruption, with only Han nationalism ready at hand. Still, for the time being, the Communist Party persists, as does subjection rather than citizenship.

to make a coup possible. The events of nineteen fifty eight in France were marked by a formal adherence to the then constitutional rules, but were nevertheless analogous to a coup. Twenty years of warfare, which had included the ignanimous defeat of nineteen forty, the German occupation, the installation of the authoritarian Vishi regime, and from nineteen forty six, long and losing continual wars in Indo, China and Algeria, had thoroughly

undermined the country's democratic consensus. The continual changes of government had dissipated the interest and respect of most, and left the bureaucracy leaderless. Because the complex business of the ministries could not be mastered by ministers who were only in

power for months or weeks. The French army was left to fight the bitter Algerian War with little guidance from Paris authorities, because more often than not, the ministries were too busy fighting for their survival in the Assembly to

worry about the other, bloodier war. The cost of the Algerian War, in both money and lives antagonized a general public from both the army and the government, and many of the French felt a growing fear and distrust of the army's leadership, whose national sentiments and martial ideology seemed alien to many of them and against the spirit of

the times. While the structures of political life under the Fourth Republic were falling apart, Charles de gaul the grand heroic figure long and simulated retirement, gradually emerged as the only alternative to the chaos that threat. When the army in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly drastic action and yet another government was on the verge

of collapse, de Gaull was recalled. He was able to impose his own terms on May twenty ninth, nineteen fifty eight, when Rene Coti, the last President of the Fourth Republic, called on him to form a government which was invested on June first, to Gaul was given extraordinary powers to role by decree for six months and to write a

new constitution. Under the terms of this constitution, presented for consultation in mid August and approved by referendum in September, elections were held in which de Gaul's newly formed Union for the New Republic UNR party won a majority. On December twenty first, De Gaull became the first president of the Fifth Republic. He was an American style president with wide executive powers, but without an American style congress to

restrain them. Nineteen fifty eight, France had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The circumstances were unique, of course, But while the political structures of all highly developed countries may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets, if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally. Of those temporary factors, the most common r A severe and prolonged economic crisis with large scale unemployment and runaway inflation.

B A long and unsuccessful war, or a major defeat, whether a military or diplomatic c Chronic instability under a multi party system. Italy is an interesting example of an

economically developed, socially dynamic, but politically fragile country. Between nineteen forty eight and circa nineteen ninety end of the Cold War, the persistence of a large communist party that opposed Italy's alignment with the West, if less vehemently after this Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight, forced the moderate majority to keep voting for the increasingly corrupt Democrazia Christiana DC, which itself ruled with the smaller but even more corrupt

Socialist Party. Its leader, Mattino Krazzi, would die a fugitive outlaw in Tunisia. Because even the two parties did not attain a parliamentary majority, every government required a broader coalition, whose formation amounted to an intricate puzzle. The DC was the largest party, but with only thirty percent of the votes, it could not rule alone. Even with the Socialists, it only reached a forty percent mark if it brought in the two small left of center parties, the social Democrats

and the Republicans. The right of center parties, including the MSI neo fascists, would not join in, but if the latter were invited to join the coalition, the left would break away and no government could be formed. In the end, of course, were procured one way or another, mostly by handing over control of parts of the vast array of state owned businesses, everything from oil and gas to ice cream, in exchange for parliamentary support. The votes, however, did not

stay bought for long and coalitions had short lives. Between nineteen forty five and nineteen ninety four, there were thirty three governments until the nineteen ninety four election victory of the television and advertising tycoon Silvio Burlasconi, whose brand new party Forts Italia was originally formed by its own employees and the Milans football team fan club. Do you remember that?

and the Soviet control of the Communist Party there. You know, that's what you've seen in a lot of these countries is that a lot of the chaos and instability is caused because because they're being vibe.

restore the competitiveness of Italian exports. Equally, the inability to make the state efficient was offset by the lax enforcement of tax collection. Thus Italian entrepreneurs, ill served by an inefficient state, only had to pretend that they were paying tax paying their saxes first one and then the other.

Of these practices came to an end once Italy adopted the common European currency, the Euro, in nineteen ninety nine, prohibiting competitive devaluations, and since then its economy has stagnated,

with little or no growth and chronically high unemployment. Politically, on the other hand, Berlusconi's combination of a economic power his enterprises could offer very many jobs, consultancies and contracts, b media influence through the control of publishing houses, newspapers, magazines and three television channels, and c of course, electoral power through the votes he won by vigorous and well organized campaigning ensured his political preponderance from nineteen ninety four

until twenty eleven, even went out of office as of twenty fifteen, the government of Matteo Renzi is sustained by a parliamentary majority that still requires Berlusconi's votes.

very young or very young prostitutes. Hence, his prominence in Italian politics is quite enough to describe the country's political order as fragile. He could not have survived in a fully functioning democracy that requires of its leader some semblance of discretion in their personal conduct and the careful concealment of significant conflicts of interest.

is too gummed up. And I think both of those, I mean, especially de gaul, you know, where they were very aware of the fact that they were they were reaching this this point of crisis in the in the government, and they they turned to him almost in a you know, periclean sort of Cincinnatus type type of way, to be the guy who has the weight, who can come in

and and be that guy. And Berlisconi wasn't quite that direct, but you know, just the fact that he stayed in power as long as he did in a system that had previously been so unstable and just changing out all the time, it kind of shows you that he played that role as well. You know, you see that very often where I mean you see that in a person

like Putin right for example. You know, people in the United States who watch regime media, you know, often have this idea of Putin and all dictators really and even like historical monarchs or whatever. But they have this idea that you know, these are like god emperors who can just you know, order the general top generals of the army to be tortured and executed with their families and nothing will happen because they're in charge. And obviously that's

that's never been reality. It's not reality. You look at somebody like Putin. Why is Putin there? Putin is there because he's the only person in Russia who all the different power centers, all the different interest groups that have and can wield organize power. He's the only person that they actually trust to mediate and arbitrate their you know, their conflicts of interests and their disputes, and they know that if they get rid of that guy, you know,

maybe I want to take his place. You know, I'm from this interest group or that power center, and I want to be Putin. I want to take his place. But I know that if I get up there, I'm not going to have the buy in of all of these people, and my power is not going to last.

And so you know, that's that's the source of like real sustainable power in a person like that, doesn't you know, you can you can extra size, all the force you want, but unless you're well, I wouldn't even say in less because I was going to cite Stalin, but that's not even really true, Like you can exercise all the force you want if you're not if you're not able to occupy that central position as the one that's recognized as like if we get rid of that person, then we're

all going to fall into chaos. Then you're not going to sustain your power.

returning the power of the presidency to FDR levels. Would that be considered a coup?

could call it a coup. You know, it's an illegal seizure of power, illegal exercise of power for the purpose of transferring the center of gravity and the government from from one place to another. So I guess you could maybe say that cool, and by saying that, I'm totally okay with it and they should do it, by the way.

the only way you're going to dismantle. The administrative statu is to keep going, so.