Temp check. What kind of summer are we having this year? A family road trip summer, a beach bum summer, or a wake-me-up-when-the-sun-sets summer? With Instacart, choose your own adventure and skip the shopping side quests. Where available, you can get ice cream delivered to your hotel, sunscreen to the pool, or cold brew to your bed.
Well, door, in as fast as 30 minutes. Wherever you find yourself this summer, you can get the goods. Download Instacart for free delivery on your first three orders. Offer valid for a limited time. Minimum $10 per order. Excludes restaurants. Additional terms and fees apply.
Have you ever covered a carpet stain with a rug? Ignored a leaky faucet? Pretended your half-painted living room is supposed to look like that. Well, you're not alone. We've all got unfinished home projects. But there's an easier way. Thumbtack is the app that makes it easier to care for your home. Pull out your phone and in just a few taps, search, chat, and book highly rated pros right in your neighborhood. Download Thumbtack and start caring for your home the easier way.
You're listening to the Gas Digital Network. We need to roll back the state. We spy on all of our own citizens. Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders. If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now. Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big. The Gas Digital Network.
What's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith and I'm in Austin, Texas doing shows at the Comedy Mothership and that means I'm joined by the great Scott Horton. What's up buddy? Hey guys, how you doing? Good man. We've been having a lot of fun hanging out on what has turned out to be kind of a historical weekend. Yeah, seriously. Well, I want to talk to you about a lot of what's going on, but we should tell people you've been writing a book.
just part of the reason why people probably haven't seen as much of you lately as they did before i you did send me the most updated copy it's phenomenal i'm really excited for everybody uh everybody to read it because it's like it's just an un it's a if you loved enough already and and fools errand you're gonna really love unprovoked when it comes out it is provoked
I'm sorry, provoked. I'm sorry. I messed up the propaganda versus Scott, but it is, the book is just a great Hortonian. Like it's just this overwhelming case. It's like, uh, as, as I was reading it, so you sent it to me. I was, I was, I had, I had read like an advanced copy a couple of years ago, but then when I was doing this, uh, debate,
with Vouch on Ukraine, you sent me the updated copies. I was kind of going over it. And it's like, you know, that meme, the Simpsons meme of stop, stop, he's already dead. It's like that. Like every chapter is just like that. You know, it's like, okay, here's the case for this. And you're like, all right, like halfway through the chapter, you're like, okay, I tap. Yes, we provoked it. Okay, fine. Like I can't. The Maidan revolution was an organic uprising. Like,
no it wasn't and here's the case anyway very excited for that thanks and then the other that's what's taken so long is the overkill that you mentioned there yeah but i'm working on every day i promise yeah no well it's it's fantastic and then of course the other thing is the that you're the libertarian institute which is your organization is having their uh their fund their fun drive this week right that's right our summer fundraiser and um
you know i think we probably talked about this back then that when i started the institute it really was just sort of a nice way of saying donate money to me and will greg but so that we don't seem quite like bums that maybe we'll like call it an institute yeah there you go but no now i got like 20 guys and i published 14 books including four of my own um and uh
And I got just an incredible group of guys and we just added, you know, only recently we've added new fellows, Bill Buford, who's a army veteran and a
expert critic of counterinsurgency warfare, the Chasing Ghosts podcast, and he's been writing a bunch for us. And then there's Jeremy R. Hammond, who is- I love Jeremy, he's great. This guy is the libertarian movement's foremost expert on Israel-Palestine, bar none. He wrote the book Obstacle to Peace. He's our very best guy that we got on that. And then, of course, the great Danny Sanchez, who's an editor over at the Foundation for Economic Education,
But then it occurred to me like, oh, I could have him at the Institute too? Well, hell, I love this guy. He used to write for me at antiwar.com back 10 years ago. And he's just a wonderful guy. So we brought Danny on and he's going to be writing for us a bit here. And then also Tom Edlum is our new William Norman Grigg fellow. And he actually was Will Grigg's sort of friend and protege at the New American Magazine back in their old John Bircher days, you know, 25 years ago. And Tom is an Austrian school economist.
and uh really accomplished author and writer and brilliant guy and then and that's just the new guys but anyway we got a great stable of writers all the best writers and podcasts of course uh the ubiquitous and charismatic keith knight i love keith knight obviously he's coming on i think we're doing a podcast later this week oh okay but yeah he's great oh he's the
And then Kyle Anzalone, who everybody knows, I think I hired to replace me as opinion editor of Antiwar.com. And he hosts the podcast Conflicts of Interest, which is fantastic. And then there's Connor Freeman and Will Porter and Hunter DeRensis and all our great guys. James Bovard and Laurie Calhoun. See, this is the thing. We've got our senior guys.
um, take Galen Carpenter, you know, Kato's fired their very best guy. And now he writes for me. Yeah. And, um, and that's take Galen Carpenter. And then of course got the great James Bovard, which his other job is writing for the New York post, right? Yeah. He's the biggest, big shot in libertarian journalism ever. Uh, and is my good friend and is a senior fellow there. And Lori Calhoun, who's working on another book for us. And, um,
uh sheldon richmond of course founding partner with me and will grigg uh who writes for us every friday and you know all-time libertarian great so yeah well awesome man libertarian institute.org slash donate to help me pay those guys that's all it is basically we don't have a big office building and uh you know as you know my truck is 30 years old i'm not blowing this money on anything except paying these guys to do their work that's it well if you do if if you care about uh
the ideas of freedom. - It's 29 years old, my truck. I don't wanna embellish. - Yeah, so let's be real here. You're doing okay. - Yeah. - But it is, if you care about the ideas of liberty and stuff like that, and you got a few bucks that you can part with, it's as good a cause as there is in this movement to donate to. It's from the outside looking in, it's been very cool to watch. When we first became friends,
Well, I guess like I had interviewed you a few times on the podcast, but it was like, I think the first time we met in person. Yeah, it was right around and started or it was like just getting started. So it's kind of it's cool to watch, you know, like that's.
It's something beautiful about life, like the way you kind of manifest ideas in your head and then, you know, where you have ideas in your head and then they manifest in reality and then it grows. Speaking of that, we got all these great kickbacks because we publish all these 14 books so far, including our latest book is this guy, Gary Vogler. I guess I need to make him some kind of fellow or something, but he was the American sort of civilian viceroy of oil during a rock war, too.
and knows all the dirty secrets. And we publish his book, which is Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq oil war. Wait.
You're telling me Israel had something to do with the war in Iraq, Scott? I'm afraid not. I know you've read enough already twice, so it's in there. But no, so what happened was actually he read my book and I have this thing about the neocons and they'd been promised by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iranian-backed lie spinner that, oh yeah, we'll rebuild or reactivate the old British oil pipeline for most of the Haifa and how the neocons bought it and Netanyahu bought it. And this was a big part of, because what had happened was, yeah.
Sorry, I'm off on a tangent. You got to read this guy's book. It's so good. Gary Vogler and Inside Story, Names, Names, all throughout of the neocons. So we're giving that away as a kickback along with the great Tom Woods COVID book. Which is so good. This is the one, by the way, for people listening, Tom's book is the one that I gifted to Chris Cuomo at the debate. That's right. So if you saw Dave give that book to Cuomo and you thought, I'd like to have that book. If you donate to the Institute, you can get that book as a kickback.
- There you go. - You know, as our friendly gift to you as a token of our appreciation for your support of our nonprofit organization. - You know, my only regret about that, and I didn't even think about it till afterward, but I was like, I should have gotten Tom to like sign the book for Chris Cuomo and like write like a personal like little message. - It was great though, 'cause you could see it the whole time he's talking, it was there like right side up on the, or almost, I think he moved it eventually, but through like three quarters of the whole thing,
You could read the spine of the book the whole time. - Dude, I loved doing it. I loved that. I loved when you debated Will,
and you gave him your book and- - Justin. - And Justin Ramond's book, that's right. And I don't know why it always, if you don't, so whatever, like the moment that made me a libertarian or my first introduction to this is the Giuliani, Ron Paul, which is almost like hacky to be like the moment, that's the moment a lot of people of my age who are libertarians found it. But like a lot of people forget this, but it was so awesome. It was the next day, Ron Paul had a press conference and he gave Rudy Giuliani a reading list
which was it's such a funny johnson robert pate michael schoer yeah that's right all those guys dying to win and all and um and that was like my first thing was like i gotta read these books you know like he kind of gave me a reading list too yeah because i was just interested in it but it was so funny because in that moment you know giuliani is he's like two
dumb to even know that the point he's making makes him sound really dumb. So he goes, "You're saying that bombing Iraq had something to do with 9/11? You know, I've heard a lot of ridiculous things, but I've never heard that." He brags that he's never heard that.
And you're like, "Oh, well, all right. Maybe read something about it." And you'd realize this- And of course, a big part of the spin was that Iraq had done it or had been in on it, that their foreign minister had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague and had given him a flask of anthrax, the Israelis claimed.
and all of that. So, well, why would Iraq attack us then? It had nothing to do with our bombing then, like even if he thought that. Anyway, sorry. Right, right. Even if you were going with the neocon lies, it would still kind of make sense that there was some connection, right? Like, okay, why was Saddam in on 9-11? No, this was Egyptians and Saudis avenging those Iraqis, but they'd never been to Iraq. It had nothing to do with that. Right. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about
What's going on the elephant in the room, I guess which is like impossible to get away from so as we're recording this And and you know this podcast will be out pretty soon But we do kind of live in a world where I'm like this may all be irrelevant by the time this comes out because maybe the 25th amendments Invoked before we finish recording this who the fuck knows what's gonna happen, but yesterday truly historic moment Donald Trump was apparently shot in
in the ear amazing it's just listen new york post has the close-up of his ear and it's you know it hit him just like yeah i mean and then if you see the the footage he's he's taught i think he's already looking to the right but then he looks a little further to the right and it's like just that that was like what made it his ear or then he or maybe it's when he turns back
no no it's when he turns to the right because it's like it would have got him here but he's like huh and so it gets him here well it's just it's unbelievable it's unbelievable it could have been like he went oh a penny i mean they call him i was joking on stage about it i said he just inspector gadgets his way through life like it just seems like everything works out for him and the the idea that we were like we
we were so close to being on a radically different timeline in this country. I mean, Donald Trump's brains get blown out on live TV at this. I mean, what that does to this country. But then, of course, he just turns and gets hit. If you're going to get shot, the absolute best place to get shot is
- Just in the ear. - You think about it. Yeah, like I don't know, maybe the little toes. Yeah, no, the ears, probably the best. - I mean, it's unbelievable. Like people pierce their own ears. - Yeah, right there, yeah, exactly. You can just put a little hoop in there and be all right. - And then it turns into the best photo op in the history of,
And you got to give him credit for that, that right in that moment, he was like, oh, hell yeah, I got blood on me. I'm not dead. You can actually hear him go to the Secret Service. He goes, wait, wait, wait.
Hold on like this is pretty cool. It was like amazing It was like in a Jerry Maguire if you ever saw that movie where Cuba Gooding jr He's like taken out with a vicious hit and they think he's like paralyzed or some shit And then there's a moment where he wakes up and he goes wait. Wait, let me enjoy this It's like Trump has that wait. Hold on. We're gonna we're gonna milk this thing for what it's worth. Sorry, just a total of
like disaster for joe biden really is what it all i mean to the juxtaposition of of joe biden going through these few weeks where the big thing is man his brain doesn't work and then you juxtapose that with donald trump like blood dripping giving the fist i mean it's just it's fucking incredible yeah well and also and look i'm not a partisan i'll never be a republican or a democrat i never have been i'm not a former either never could be anything like that but i just
You don't even have to favor Trump over Biden at all, which I admit I do a bit. Not that I'd ever support him really, but I think you could even just be a Democrat. Go, you know, all this stuff where Biden, every time he addresses Trump, he says that this is like a world historical threat to the future of democracy on the planet earth and whether people will ever be free again after this guy turns America into a Nazi dictatorship and all that.
Like this is mostly just Israeli propaganda, but it works like all around too. Wouldn't you kill baby Hitler? Even if he's a baby to stop him from doing the terrible thing. Well, Trump's not a baby. He's already been president before you saw how dangerous he was when Russia was in there or whatever crap, you know, liberal Democrats spin. You'd see, it seems like the leftists, they like no CO and tell pro when they see it. Right. But the liberals, they buy into the stuff. But, um,
Anyway, this guy apparently was a liberal who did this thing, but it just seems like, yeah, they can't just say, well, I don't know. They have nothing to run on really at all other than this guy's so uncouth and he like
Well, we don't quite control him. We're afraid Netanyahu controls him more than we do or whatever their small fear about him is. But so then they build him up into this. It's the same thing that they do to Putin or Saddam Hussein or whatever. David Koresh, they call him Hitler and they accuse him of being like the world's worst enemy. Are you really surprised that on the margin, a random kook grabs a rifle and decides he's going to be a hero and try to do the right thing and stop this evil from destroying the land? I mean, you can't help but...
It's like a fact, right? Joe Biden said that and this kid heard it. And it at least must have been some part of his thinking here. Yeah. You know what I mean? And like the most in the most extreme interpretation of Trump ratified by the president himself. She says, yes, you are right to be that afraid of this guy winning. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is arms list dot com. America's Firearms Marketplace.
unwavering in their belief of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. ArmsList.com has been in the fight for our Second Amendment rights with multiple court victories protecting your right to bear arms. ArmsList.com is not only at the forefront of the fight for your rights, it's your go-to platform to buy, sell, and trade firearms, ammo,
optics and more locally or tap into their nationwide network of firearms dealers. Arms List has over 90,000 active listings with a ton of unique items to shop for and deals to be found. For a limited time, Arms List is extending an exclusive discount to part of the problem listeners
head to armslist.com and use the coupon code problem to get your first month of premium membership for just 99 cents join the fight and come and get what they want to take right now at armslist.com and once more if you use the promo code problem you'll receive the first month of premium membership for just 99 cents armslist.com promo code problem
All right, let's get back into the show. Well, it's so, you know, it's so fascinating on so many different levels. And obviously this is all like, um, there's all of these, it's kind of a principle of within reason, you know, I'm not saying that anybody, even somebody who makes the most hyperbolic, you know, insane claims about Donald Trump, they're not responsible for someone then going out and doing something violent. Um, but at the same time, you know, like, look, uh, um,
- Put the shoe on the other foot and see what would they say. - Well, sure, sure, right. But look, someone like Henkley, right? That was the guy who shot Reagan. So Henkley, well, he did it to impress Jodie Foster or whatever. Now you can't blame Jodie Foster for that because that's just insane. But there is something, like to your point, I think almost my first- - Well, if the president had been saying, or say, I don't know, George Bush, the vice president had been saying,
You really want to know how to get Jodie Foster to like you, John. You know what I mean? Like really inciting him in that way. That's kind of the equivalent. Well, it's one of those things like when I first saw it, you know, like a few minutes after it happened, I got like a bunch of texts and I'm looking on Twitter and stuff and
the, it's almost like you have two contradictory thoughts. Like when it first happens, you're like, how the hell was this guy able to get a gun into like an event with a former president? And then like a beat later, you're like, how has no one done this yet? Like how, when tempers are so high, has, has this not happened? How did it take this long? You know? And there is something like, to your point where it's almost like a,
Because the establishment was so vulnerable and on some level they know how corrupt they are and how bad a job they've done that they couldn't just make the case against Donald Trump, which if the establishment was at all competent would be very easy to just be like, guys, look.
We don't want to have this buffoon be the leader. I mean, come on, this guy's got no experience. He speaks in such an unprofessional way or whatever the argument might be. But instead, they know they don't have that. So it's been DEF CON forever.
you know, for since he was running in 2016 and all of the outrageous lies. I mean, the, you know, Vladimir Putin is involved in a conspiracy with him to overthrow democracy or whatever. You know, he incited an insurrection. They're not bringing that up, even though
the stakes are a hundred times higher because we're in the middle of a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine right now. And they're not saying, yeah, it was about to be in again. Yeah. No one's saying, Oh my God, they're going to, which in itself, which is interesting because it's right. So that in and of itself is an admission that this was all bullshit. Right. And then the same, they don't even want to try to make the case again. Well, I tweeted, I guess just cause it was yesterday and it was such a big thing, but it's gone. I've never had a tweet that's gotten as much, uh,
attention as this one. It's got like hundreds of thousands of likes on it or whatever. But just tweeting yesterday that look, isn't look, Barack Obama and now today, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, all of them come out. They wish Donald Trump a speedy recovery and they denounce political violence. And you're like, OK, look, he's either literally Hitler or you wish him a speedy recovery. Yeah, you got to pick one of those two. You don't wish Hitler a speedy recovery like that's just if democracy is on the ballot and this is the end of
America, as Hillary Clinton has said, this is the end of America if Donald Trump gets elected again. Well then, okay, but then political violence is justified, right? So it's gotta be one of the two of those. And it's just interesting. - Well, and we know the answer is they're lying. They've been embellished in their case against him this whole time 'cause he was only supposed to be a foil. That was how they wrote him into the story.
I'm sure I bet we probably talked about this on your show, the Pied Piper strategy email from 2016 from the Podesta campaigns at WikiLeaks.org. Anyone can find just type in Pied Piper strategy. That's what they call it.
we want the media to promote the wingers. They're the ones will be easier to beat in the general. And that's Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Donald Trump. And especially they obviously focused on Trump building him up. And then the idea, and remember how easy to see it was. As soon as it was clear, he had the nomination locked up. They turned on him on a dime and tried to character assassinate him the rest of the way. That was how it was supposed to work, but he won anyway. As Norm Macdonald said, the American people hate Hillary Clinton so much that
they voted for someone they hate even more than her just to fuck you lady, you know, and make that point. And so-
that but that ain't how it's supposed to be all this stuff is supposed to be planned out work real well it's probably supposed to be jeb because nobody thinks hillary could have beat anyone really but it certainly wasn't supposed to be this guy and it's just that loss of control over the system itself that i think has them so panicked yeah i think there's no panic over w bush the the moment the supreme court ruled that we're stopping the counting bush wins
every news reader on MSNBC and CNN and all the channels click their little heels and went, President-elect George W. Bush today, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They were just in 100%. You know what I mean? Yeah. There was no threat from him that they perceived in that way at all, the way that they treat Trump. No, it's absolutely a different thing. I mean, they've pretended-
to really be scared of other people or really hate other people. But you can also kind of tell like where the difference is. And that's one of the things Trump kind of exposed. By the way, just to your point about the Podesta email, the Pied Piper strategy. I mean, this was during the primaries. And if you remember at the time, I mean, MSNBC and CNN, they covered every transaction
Oh, yeah. Every event. That was it. I mean, they just they gave him all the free publicity in the world that they wanted. And yeah, it's because it says in the middle, contact our friends in the media and ask them to do this for us or whatever. Yeah. Right there in the thing. Yeah. This is clearly what happened. I mean, remember Morning Joe. They'd had Trump on all the time. It's such an important show for D.C. people. They have him on all the time. The moment it's clear that the nomination is locked up, they all completely turned on.
Yeah, such a like artificial and obvious way. Yeah, and it's it's so interesting like the the corner that they've painted themselves into and this has just been so fascinating over particularly over the last few weeks when you know, they did kind of they in a sense it really blew up in their face because
You know, there is there's like a kernel of truth to the media narrative. You know, it's surrounded by much more bullshit, but there is a kernel of truth to the narrative, which is that, you know, obviously anybody who has two eyes is
and and two ears and it does not have a brain that's so warped by confirmation bias that they could just see what's right in front of them to see joe biden's been in severe mental decline for quite a while now there's just no question about this you know he wasn't that bright to begin with he always thought he was a lot brighter than he is like younger joe biden but he's he's fallen off quite a bit however the kernel of truth in the media narrative is that actually it's
It's gotten drastically worse recently, like this version of Joe Biden right now is actually substantially worse than he was a year, a year and a half ago, even though he was already slippery. I mean, it's like really, really bad now. But so this is blown up in their face. But, you know, it was like they OK, the it's debatable.
But I think Bernie Sanders was actually more unacceptable to the establishment than Donald Trump even was like they were really determined to get that guy at like he was not allowed to to be doing what he was doing. And I think not that, you know,
I think for both of them, for somewhat similar reasons, it was always more about their rhetoric and what their campaign meant than it was about any actual policy agenda. Yeah, they don't really mind him being a senator, do they? Not all these years. Well, also because, look, what...
What Bernie Sanders is always advocating is always going with the wind. So it's always that there should be more centralized power in D.C. And they're fine with that. You know, it's kind of like if anybody if you read Murray Rothbard's The Progressive Era book, you know, it's like the powerful business interests are fine with this, like,
general direction of a managed economy. We're going to be doing the managing and we'll be controlling how the actual legislation goes. But like, but so you say, oh, you want universal health care by the time it makes it through the DC machine, it'll be Obamacare. We're fine with you saying that it'll just be good for business, you know, but the short version left and right, the prospects for liberty by Murray and Rothbard, 1965.
- So good, such a great piece. But the issue with Bernie Sanders was none of that. The issue is that his whole campaign, whether he says it directly or not, the spirit of the whole thing is fuck billionaires.
And fuck banks. And you know, turns out billionaires and banks, they've got some influence over our political system. And they're not such a big fan of that being the central message. So he was unacceptable for those reasons. And so they had to get him out.
And there was just nobody else. They floated out Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and all these Pete Buttigieg. Beto O'Rourke, remember that? It was the only one they had a shot with was Biden. And then they took Kamala Harris as his VP to add like a historic aspect to the campaign. And now they're painted into this this corner. Well, oh, and they've lied this whole time about he's just fine. And yeah, I don't know if I showed you this or your audience, you know,
Um, there's a guy named Orf and he, uh, is associated with Matt Taibbi, but how you spell his name with a zero instead of an O. Yeah. You sent me his video. It's so great. He's got this great video. And he did the one, if people remember like the cult, the video collage of them saying about Trump, Oh, the walls are closing in. The walls are closing in. It's the same guy.
And they're just going, oh, Biden is sharp. He's so sharp, man. He's sharp. He's sharp, sharp, sharp. He's sharp, sharp, sharp. And then like sort in the second half, he like fades the montage over into sharp as a tack, tack, tack, tack, sharp as a tack. Boy, is he sharp as a tack. He's sharp just like tacks are sharp. You know how sharp tacks are. Biden's just like that.
And, and it's, and then it's just like a million of them. It goes on and on for, I don't know, eight minutes or something of just these little clips of all these kooks. And of course, if you're like really media literate, you recognize a lot of these voices in there. And then it's just crazy picture of Biden looking like a lost zombie in the, in the debate while they're all saying that it's just the memo again, like the Pied Piper thing, the memo has gone out. Biden is sharp. You believe that. And you're going to tell everybody that
Get out there and smile and say it. It's unbelievable. So what'd they do? Because of that, they canceled the primaries. They had no primaries. And they refused to allow RFK or Marianne Williamson or any of these people. And of course, if it was open, a lot more people would have got into the thing.
And, of course, as you're saying with Kamala there, they can't just anoint her the leader. He could resign right now like Gorbachev resigned. I mean, pardon me, Yeltsin resigning three months before the election to give Putin a boost. They could try that right now. But, of course, he's not going to do that. And...
And she's so weak. And I think it's funny to read the Democrats talking about, yeah, no, maybe we could run Kamala Harris. And it's just like, man, you guys are in denial. She is just so incapable. Well, I thought Van Jones made a really good point. I played this on the podcast last week, but I actually and it was still, you know, it's Van Jones. So you could tell he's like he just has a different like
more philosophical outlook than us. Like he's like an Alinsky trained, you know, like progressive. And so he kind of alludes to that without alluding to where he's like, hey, listen, like if we're going to do this, we got to be all behind Biden, you know, blah, blah, blah. So it's like, OK, like I won't say anything if we're not allowed to. But he's like, just so you know.
We should be running Kamala Harris because we're already running Kamala Harris. Yeah. Like Biden's at the stage where if you're running Biden, Harris, nobody thinks this guy is going to be president for four more years. And just think of that, that you're running a president where it's universally understood he won't be finishing the term and no one thinks that he will. But we're still running him, though.
It's unbelievable. At all. Yeah. And it was funny. I saw someone talk about, oh, we got a real deep bench. We ought to have a great convention and free all the delegates to vote and let all of our great governors and senators get up there and debate. And it's like, who? They're talking about Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom? Like, what has Gavin Newsom got? Got hair.
And even then, I think he's got a little bit of the Horton pattern ball that's going on. Right. But then he kind of grows it out long. Doesn't work. You know, I learned. But but otherwise, he's known as the guy who ran the land of milk and honey into the ground. It's the first time the population of California had a net loss since the Spanish began conquering the son of a bitch 500 years ago.
and hundreds of thousands of people left california san francisco and la are world renowned for being dystopian nightmares and i've been to la like a year and a couple of months ago i went out to la to do that waco thing and man it is just bad dude it is crack zombies or heroin junkies or whatever everywhere dude like
No, dude, you ought to be able to bring your gun when you go to California, man. It's yeah. Well, no, my buddy, uh, Jay, uh, Oakerson was a great comedian. Who's not, he's not political at all. And he just always loved San Francisco. He goes, it's like one of the best comedy cities.
I should say, I love LA. I mean, I might be a Texan, but I lived there a couple of years and I got a soft spot for it. No, but it's, it's, it is what it is collapsing. Yeah. And then it's even Jay was saying about San Francisco. He was like, uh, he was just there recently. He goes, it's miserable, man. It's like, it goes, it's sad. It's like, I used to love this city and it is miserable. You don't want to walk down the streets there, dude. Like you're walking over needles and shit. It's horrible. They're going to make this guy, their guy. Very hard, very hard to do. Um,
- You're talking about Governor Pritzker? Who's like a born billionaire? - Yeah. - The heir of, is it Marriott Hotels, I think, fortune? - Is that right? Yeah, maybe. Well then the crazy thing in the backdrop of all of this is that the Republican National Convention starts tomorrow.
Like that's fucking Donald Trump's. I don't know what day he's supposed to speak there, but like it's coming up in a few. How long are they usually three days or something like that? Like it's coming up pretty soon. And so that will probably be I'm guessing just purely guessing. I'm guessing that that's going to be like the last time we see Donald Trump is the fist with the blood.
And the next time we see Donald Trump is his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which is just like all of this is just like out of a fucking movie, man. Like it's you just couldn't even write it. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Nevin Eyewear. The summertime is here and you need some cool
sunglasses, and these ones are a steal. Crisp lenses, a lot of styles at fantastic prices. You got to check out Nevin Eyewear. If you're like me, you've bought really expensive sunglasses and lost or broken them, or if you grab pairs from the gas station or convenience store, they don't look good. They don't feel right. The lenses are all off. Nevin Eyewear has polarized lenses. You're going to love the clarity of the shaded lenses. They've been,
They've been great. I just brought a couple pairs of them on vacation with me. They're super affordable. They got a bunch of different styles and they look and feel great. Check them out. Nevin Eyewear. And right now, fans of this show, if you want to try a pair of regular sunglasses, you will get...
You will get 50% off any one regular pair when you use the promo code problem. Or if you want to stock up, you can get there by one, get any two free deal. These discounts are not available on prescriptions, but everything else is by one, get two free. So go check them out. NevinEyewear.com. Quality shades at a great price. NevinEyewear.com. All right.
Let's get back into the show. Did you see the New York Times photograph of the air being disturbed by the bullet going by? Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah, it was pretty incredible, dude. I mean, it's really... Now, you know... And look, wait, sorry, because I got Biden brain myself real bad. It's self-inflicted, but it is what it is. The...
The BBC interview with the redheaded guy, important one, the eyeball witness to the guy on the roof and the key there. And this is highlighting the New York Post today, although it's not in the New York Times. They didn't talk about this in the Times is that he was saying he was like, hey, Secret Service guys, there's a guy on the roof like for two to three minutes before he started firing.
And they just essentially ignored him. And he didn't say it was in the, the reporter didn't ask enough good enough followup questions about like, well, which cops standing where you were hollering from how far away, or you went up and talked to them or what, you know, exactly. And in fact, the reporter did say, he goes, well, do you think that they could see him? And he goes, no, cause he was on the other side of the ridge of the roof. So they probably couldn't see him. Um, but yeah,
And then he just goes off on his opinion instead of sticking to the facts. But it was a smart take was why wasn't there a secret service officer on that roof already himself? Anyway, you let other people control rooftops around where you guys would have assumed. Yeah. Like any rooftop that's within rifle distance, which you assume would be. And I have to assume that the guy is right to assume.
the way he did, that they heard him, that he was saying there's a guy with a rifle because then he says, not just there's a guy like he was pointing, but he let them know the guy had a rifle and he said he couldn't understand why Trump was still on stage, why they hadn't already hollered code red or whatever and ad-libbing that part, but why they hadn't called the alert to get him the hell out of there. And so-
And this just goes to like basic accountability in the American system of government that we didn't all wake up this morning with the head of the Secret Service resigns. Yeah, really? That's a great point. I didn't even think about that. Yeah, of course. And like, what do you mean she didn't resign?
Like we're living in a world where that I'm the only one who thought of that or what are we talking about? She should not even be in office at all today. It should have been over. But when the sun came up, she should have been at the White House delivering her resignation and apology. Or is no one responsible or what? And and I think we need to know the Secret Service accused by Redhead of ignoring his warnings.
I want to know their names and their excuse for what they thought. Because they say it was the sniper, the Secret Service sniper, who took the guy out once he started firing. And he was himself on an elevated position on a roof. So could he really not see the guy the whole time? And in fact, I mean, I don't know. I got the impression at one point that
The Secret Service sniper had noticed him, but just hadn't killed him. You know, like was maybe had maybe didn't see the rifle. So he was just kind of suspicious. But the guy got off eight shots before they took him out.
Yeah, it's a lot of shots to get off. Or actually, I don't really know. Well, maybe some of them were the CIA or the Secret Service. There's a burst of three and then there's a burst of five. For all I know, it's the Secret Service shooting the five. Although I don't think, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Maybe some more of this will come out. It looked like more of a single shot type rifle that the Secret Service sniper would have had. But I'm ignorant of such things really. I don't have a picture of it. I will say it was also, okay, it was fairly unbelievable to watch.
that there were, first of all, the Secret Service, when they come and they do what I was joking looks like a Jewish bar mitzvah type thing where they circle him or whatever, like they're gonna lift him up on a chair. But when they're around him, then they're leaving his face exposed. - Yeah, his head's exposed. - But like covering the rest of his body, which you're like, that seems like, and then it's the amount of women. - This one woman is like,
She's a little- One of them was cowering behind Trump. She like ducked down. There's a still photo where she's ducked down behind him. And then one of them can't figure out how to like holster their gun once they get him into the car. So this is the funny part that I saw was, so yeah, when they're putting him in the suburban, there are two or three Secret Service men who are standing like this.
And then behind them are four or five women or three or four women running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They don't know what to do, where to look, what to where to go, how close to the truck to stand, what they're doing. As you say, the one tries to holster her weapon a few times, but she misses and I maybe realize how stupid she looks. So she stops trying for a second and then does it again. You know, like it's unbelievable. It is. Yeah.
You know, I don't know, man. Like your bit about, hey, there are roles for men and women. Look, the role of security guard for the president should start with giant barrel chest because that is literally the job, dude. The upper body strength is the shield. Yes. To take the bullet. You got to, you know, I'm not a very big guy. Got a woman about my size.
Up there trying to block him. What the hell is she blocking? Look at me. I'm a foot and a half wide. I'm not blocking anything. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, I remember talking about this when they started having female refs. Yeah, something like that. They started having women refs in the UFC. And I saw there's one time where there was like a chick reffing a heavyweight fight.
And I was like, dude, I've seen heavyweight fights before where the guy doesn't break when the ref tells him to break. Oh, yeah. And like the ref has to physically break them up. Like, what the fuck is a chick going to do to a fucking heavyweight UFC fighter? I don't care who you are. He's a heavyweight in the UFC. By definition, there's no woman who can fuck with this guy. You know what I mean? It's not like you have to beat him in a
fight you just got to be able to grab them and peel them off of somebody right but i would say you know it's like the same thing a lot of strength if there was a restfully the guys on full adrenaline beating the hell out of a guy on full mode it would also apply to like you said to me or you me or you should not be allowed to ref a heavyweight ufc fight it should be a heavyweight who has martial arts training you know what i mean who can at least like
theoretically hold this guy off you look at the secret service agents in all the footage of hinkley shooting reagan they're all big linebacker looking dudes who at least like played college ball or whatever you know what i mean they're big guys that's the job i mean you're talking about security like what boxes are you trying to check other than are best equipped to protect this guy's life there's other boxes looks good in a ponytail or whatever like
You know, we have a very diverse Secret Service. Yeah. So but it's just it's it's a wild time to me. I mean, this is more or less this is how I've looked at it for for a while is I've said that. And I think to some degree you see this this dynamic shift.
being somewhat revealed since Biden's horrific, catastrophic debate performance, that you kind of see where the power really is. And that there is something where it's dispersed, right? Like it's not as if the way the United States of America's power structure works is that it's just in this sector or it's just in this agency, right? Like there's different competing power sources. But you see where obviously there are people who are in Biden's cabinet
um or even in his family or people like that who are highly incentivized for joe biden to get another four years right like like jill biden especially his son well well right someone who your father's in the white house can pardon you at any time for any federal charges jill biden is just some lady if if joe biden isn't the president rather than being
I don't know, whatever she, a first lady who's punching above say first lady, typical levels of, of influence because clearly the guy does not completely have his mind. And plus she gets to be on magazine covers and be fancy and all that. Right. Exactly. She's in the, and then you have people like you have whoever his chief of staff and his national security advisor and his, these people, they have a job with him. They maybe don't have another job at this level without him, but,
Then there's real power. You know, there's weapons companies, there's big banks, there's big pharmaceutical companies. There's all this. Now, all of them, all they care about is that it's not Trump. Like they are fine with an establishment Republican. It could be Mitt Romney. It could be Jeb Bush. It could be Hillary Clinton. It could be Kamala Harris, like whatever. Just get someone in there who's going to keep this thing moving. And they have recognized that Joe Biden is not the best candidate.
shot at beating Donald Trump. And so this is why you see in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, like the knives are out for Biden. And it's amazing to watch. The New York Times right now about Biden is incredible to see. And it's almost like the Iraq war, like Syria type agenda that like
This is the narrative and everybody turn it up to 11. Biden's got to go. It's all like, you know, betrayal from within his own faction to the nth degree, which he deserves and which I love and I relish. I think.
And he's the perfect symbol for the empire, really. I almost would rather keep him for that reason, but I don't really wish the worst on my country, but I just think he's just the perfect avatar for the empire itself at this point. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. That's where America is, is Joe Biden. That's the stage of empire that we're in. And you think, you know, I keep writing these history books about how bad all the presidents and their policies are. And, uh,
I guess like one way you could sum it up, all these things, the terror wars in the Middle East and all of our Eastern European policy too, is like Joe Biden has been the president this whole time. He didn't drop out on a plagiarism scandal in 1987. He won the election of 88
And he's been president since 1989. And every bit of this is what he did or would have done. Although actually I think that's not true because I think he opposed Iraq War I. He did. But then he felt really bad about that. And he was determined to live that down and become the world's worst Hulk ever since. He's not the only one. Yeah.
- Christopher Hitchens, I think was against the Persian Gulf War. - Although he was only a governor at the time, but still. - Yeah, did he oppose the first war? - Yeah, and then was real sorry about it too. It turned out everybody really loved Operation Yellow Ribbon. That's bad PR to have opposed that. - But it is interesting, and of course you've written the book on it, but it is, I certainly remember well, I was a little kid during that war, but the lesson
that everyone took from the first war in Iraq was how much we can do this type of thing. - Oh, it's so fun and easy. - And like this was, listen, like zero American casualties
relatively speaking cheap you know what i mean like it doesn't didn't really make any dent in our economy or anything like that and look we could just get the result we want we got a bob hope special everyone's happy you know like okay some fucking iraqis got incinerated or whatever but you know hey listen they were saddam was treating him pretty bad anyway and so that's that we chose to leave him in power so at least you know you didn't see the catastrophe of
In Iraq of what happened when we took him out. Right. So you leave him in power, just a weakened version. OK, yes. Some Kurds got slaughtered because we told them to rise up with some Shiites or whatever. And they but no one over here really cared about that. And the lesson was that essentially the the neocons, I mean, you know, they're right.
That's a unipolar moment and we can do this type of stuff. And that's that. Yeah. And, and worse, the only flaw in the whole thing was that we really should have gone all the way to Baghdad and took care of that evil Saddam Hussein right then. Well, that's what led you. Well, the fact that we didn't do that is what left open the room for people to say, ah, man, we should have just done that one more thing. Cause look, this worked out so great. Anyway, we could have made them a full democracy. You know, if we had just done that and it,
Interestingly enough, it was actually Dick Cheney.
who is on tape. This became pretty famous later, but that Dick Cheney was, and what was his job in HW's administration? Secretary of Defense. He was the Defense Secretary, right. So he was, and he's going, no, no, no, listen, you would have had a quagmire. You know, there's, and it explains it pretty perfectly how it would have gone. And I like how he's actually at AEI headquarters when he says that, which is war party headquarters circa 20 years ago. Right. And yeah, it's 1994. Yeah.
And you can tell he's not just defending Bush senior's policy. You know, he's saying it was the right thing to stop because we'd have had to hunt down Saddam Hussein, which might have taken a long time and been a costly, you know, deadly campaign. We'd have been trapped in fighting an urban warfare. He had Iran. He goes, pieces of Iraq might fly off.
and iran would come to dominate the south oh huh you don't say and then he weirdly says and syria would like the west which is not right only when you get rid of the alawites and replace them with the islamic state caliphate in another 10 years will they take the west but close enough dick and then he says and of course if we set the kurds in the north free then that brings them into conflict with our nato allies the turks and so who wants to get involved in a big as
As you say, it'd be a quagmire. So we decided, forget it. Sure would. Sure would be one. Dude, the fucking one of the best things. Biden had the solution, though. Biden said, we just go in and break the country into three.
And I mean, yeah, they'll a million people will die in the process, but whatever, man, he knows what to do. Well, there was in those days. Right. And this is part of what part of what transformed the Democratic Party into being the just, you know, cartoonish monsters that they are today is that.
the knock on, you know, you, if you remember, cause we're a little older than maybe some of the people who listen to this show, but so you had, you know, Reagan got two terms. Reagan was president from 1980 to 1988 or 81 to 89. And then his vice president, George H.W. Bush comes in and this is, you know, that's when the war happens. And, and so this is a, it's a 12 year
run of Republicans controlling the White House. And in this environment, you know, the knock on Democrats is that they're weak, you know, and they're still kind of living in this. The last Democratic president is Jimmy Carter. Right. And so it's like they're weak. Look at the hostage deal. You also cover this in your book and like that, which is a real interesting chapter in American history, like the Reaganites working out this deal. But
So that's so to understand 90s Democrats.
which is what Joe Biden is essentially still to this day. Um, and what Bill Clinton really transforms the democratic party into is that it's a constant like counter running to this narrative that we're fucking pussies. And so what do you do when you're pussies? Well, I'll throw every goddamn black in jail and I'll bomb any country. You tell me to bomb. That's how not pussy we are. You know, it's kind of like Trump sending the weapons into you,
crane hillary's the worst at this too yes the women are the worst because if you're a democrat you're considered a woman anyway so if you're a democratic woman now you got to prove you're willing to kill anyone yeah right and they're all like this too they're all the worst hawks and and hillary i mean she lost obama in 08 because she was a hawk and he was less worse and then what does she do as soon as she gets in there she starts a war in libya she makes obama let her do it
Because the whole plan was she was going to run on Libya in 2016. I remember. Her great accomplishment of the war. They started immediately after it. They started running pieces about what a great accomplishment this was. By 16, they shut up. Oh, no, they weren't running on that. What was it? Years later. There's a funny clip you can find at Real Clear Politics.
um where they asked hillary about libya in one of the debates and she goes hey look that was obama did that i mean hey all i did was like give him some advice but that was him that made that call not me yeah there was no there was no more running on that that was i'm an alzheimer here and you that made that call lady i remember yeah well but they just dropped it because nobody cared anyway right but so but so the point being
That this is part of what happened for those Democrats like Joe Biden who opposed the first war in Iraq. Now, of course, we know, right, like if you read Scott's book or if you've just listened to podcasts that we do together or your show or something like that, you know that like obviously it's like, well, no, actually, the lesson is that it was another 30.
30 years of bombing Iraq, of losing thousands, thousands of American lives lost there. And as you point out, tens of thousands, if you count the suicides in the wake of the war, which probably should be factored in also, not to mention the small little price of like well over a million innocent Iraqis being killed and trillions of dollars. But at the time,
the lesson was, oh, you look like such an asshole for opposing that war now. Now you don't get to celebrate at the Bob Hope special. You know what I mean? And they corrected- The pressure was hard. It was crazy. And never made that mistake again. There was never a war that they weren't going to jump on board with. I mean, maybe some, there were some House Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq, the second one. Well, and you know that there's such a crazy dynamic with Trump where
The government itself hated him so much that the liberals could still identify with the government just as much as they had during the Obama years. It was just the president that they hated. And so they didn't have, you know, I guess whatever, any kind of policies, whatever they opposed that was going on during his time was just put on him. Right. And was never, you know, in a way where during the W. Bush years, it's not like they turned anti-government. We're still talking about liberals and progressives and leftists and whatever.
They were like, certainly on the national security state stuff, they were like really non-interventionist because Bush was torturing people to death. And just, he told 10 million lies. Well, I mean, they counted it was 937 lines to get us into a rock war too and all this. So because that was the centerpiece of everything that was so corrupt and wrong about Bush, it was something that they became really good on there for a little while.
and really like if you go back what they did the democratic party took advantage of all that like genuine decent sentiment humanitarian sentiment and they just used to climb back into the congress i mean they you know cindy sheehan held her great rally at um you know her campground there camp casey uh near george bush's ramp ranch in 2005 and six wasn't really a ranch it was a pr stunt that they but anyway um
And the Democrats basically just climbed on her back into the Congress in 2006. People go, it was when Obama came. It was really just Pelosi. It was when Pelosi came in, you know, sworn in the new Congress in 07. And they were like, whatever, Iraq, do what you want. Oh, you want to do a surge? Here's the money. You want to double the war that you've already lost here.
and let him do it. And based on, you know, getting elected on all that anti-war sentiment then, and then of course Obama came and it was like, that was actually, you know, blew that anti-war sentiments brains out. That's right. It was, I'll tell you, that was a big part of, uh, of my political evolution was that democratic Congress taking over because I, uh, you know, you know, I was, this is almost 20 years ago. Um, and so, you know, I was,
young and stupid. And I thought I remember being really happy that the Democrats took the House in, you know, Senate and go. That's right. Took the whole Congress. Yeah. And and I remember going like, well, that's the end of that, you know, because the Democrats have been out here saying this guy's a war criminal and all this shit. And now they control the purse, the purse string. So that's it. They're not going to fund your war anymore. And then there was kind of like, OK, so that was, you know, disillusioning to see that like, oh, actually, not only are they funding it, but as you pointed out, they're funding a cert. We're escalating the war.
that I thought we just had repudiation of. 'Cause you know, he won-- - Don't worry Dave, we got benchmarks. We're gonna do these benchmarks and they're gonna do benchmarks. - I was smart enough to see what bullshit that was. Like even that couldn't fool a dummy, a young dummy like me. And so that was, so it was the beginning of 2007.
when they took over, I got disillusioned with the Democrats and how much all that rhetoric was just to get elected. And then it was Ron Paul just a few months later who had in the Giuliani moment. So it was like it all kind of was like had lined up perfectly to be like, OK, let's hear what this guy is saying. They were all just full of shit opposing Bush. But this guy sounds like he really means that. And he did, of course.
The overall lesson here being that partisanship is the mind killer and the spirit killer and the honesty killer. But also that every time the parties change in power and they're all such hypocrites and such liars that then a lot of really great people wash out.
of the left and right leaning movements because there's just no place for them there. And that's why they ought to be looking into libertarianism, which we're just against everything. That's it. Which is like pretty easy. Yeah, just quit. You know, I was talking about this when I was on Tim Pool's show, whatever, last month, I think. And I don't know why, but it was just interesting. So I had a tweet that went, you know, kind of viral. And it was...
I said it was just like a simple tweet, which are the ones that do the best, the dumb, simple ones. But I just said Thomas Massey is more America first than Donald Trump will ever be. And it's not even close. And the reason I said that was because I had like I had been watching, I guess, that day
Thomas Massey had done Tucker Carlson show and he had that really it was really good I was totally good and worth about one of the things interesting guy. Yeah, he's great. I love him I met him at the the convention we got to talk for a bit and he's just great guy and Condolences to him on losing his wife recently horrible But uh, but yeah, he's the best member of Congress, you know by far and so anyway, but so he was talking on a
to Tucker Carlson about how a pack like has been trying to ruin his political life and how he basically just told him from the very beginning, like in a Ron Paul way where he's like, just don't even bother coming to me. He's like, there's no point for us to even be taught. And then that he like, it's actually really funny, but that he won't speak to anybody from a pack. Like they're not allowed in his office, but then there are these people who are like associated with a pack or whatever. And they'll like come to his door and they'll have like a pack
pins on. And he goes, if you take it off, you can come in my office and speak to me. And he like makes them take off their eight. Anyway, it was very funny. He's talking about, he's talking about, imagine a Congressman having the balls to take on a pack that way. It's just great. Well, they spent, they threw millions into his primary and he survived it, which was great. And he won. Um, but so that day, you know, he said that, and then Trump had an interview like the same day where he was just like, uh, talking about how, uh,
he's really pro-israel and joe biden isn't as pro-israel as he is a palestinian which by the way i made this point on pierce morgan the other day that isn't it amazing by the way that uh the
Just kind of like the Democratic establishment, the corporate media, but I repeat myself and just like progressives in general have just spent the last like eight years, maybe even 10 years since the birther stuff screaming about what a bigot Donald Trump is. He's such a fucking bigot. And yet that comment.
That got no attention. No one's appalled at the bigotry of turning to someone and calling them Palestinian as a pejorative, as like an insult. Like the worst thing you can fucking be is what Palestinian it's like,
It's on the level of if he just called him a Jew. I mean, okay, it's not a religion. But whatever. It's like the idea that just this entire people is an insult to you and not a peep. Like no one even... Now, look, I understand the story of the day was Biden fucking his disastrous performance. But like we could never get to that point. And this lifelong committed Zionist Joe Biden is a Palestinian. It's the same way that Trump lost the last election was...
trying to portray Biden as a communist and a left-wing radical when, dude, the whole point is that Joe Biden is the man. Yeah. He's a senator from Delaware. He's Wall Street's, that's where all corrupt corporations are based in the Western hemisphere, other than the Cayman Islands or whatever. That's where, you know,
which actually you should incorporate there too, 'cause it'll protect your tax, whatever situation, I don't know. But anyway, that's where he's from, right? And has always been the center, they call him the center for MasterCard, 'cause he's the guy who made it illegal to declare bankruptcy over your credit card debt. - He's the credit card company's senator. He's not a fucking communist. Like how retarded are you? - And who's Trump in this situation? I mean, if you are Trump's campaign manager, we're talking 2020,
Look, you may be the president, but you're still an outsider, clearly. And we got to continue this campaign of cleaning up D.C. against this horrible, evil establishment. What do they do? They run Trump as the status quo. And you don't want to let a dangerous revolutionary like Joe Biden mess with the status quo, do you? Yeah. Huh? And just...
They're the worst. Well, and it's everything right wingers. They're only going to do so good of a job, man. Even like even like people who I really love and respect, like even I remember Tucker Carlson, who was great throughout 2020. I mean, really was like nothing short of heroic, especially because he had been the guy who
who was ringing the alarm bells about COVID. You know, like he was such a China hawk that early in 2020, in January and February, he was like, yo, they're all downplaying this, but this is a really serious virus that China's doing to us. And then when the lockdown started, it would have been so easy for him to just take a victory lap.
and be like, hey, look, I was the one who took this serious while Nancy Pelosi was out in Chinatown. I was telling you this is a serious virus. So, yeah, it's serious. But then he heroically turned right on them and went, no, this is a crazy overreaction. We shouldn't be doing this. And this is not going to mitigate the virus. It's just going to destroy the country. And so he's but he did, I think, make the error of also lumping in like the Black Lives Matter
riots with Joe Biden as if like he used to refer to them as Biden voters. Biden voters are out looting in the streets. And you're like, OK, listen, I've seen the videos of those kids looting those stores.
they're not anyone's voters. These kids don't vote. They're not showing up for election day. They're trying to get some Nikes right now. You know what I mean? Or even if they're a black block, they're not... You can make the connection in a more sophisticated way to understand what's really going on here, which is essentially, I mean, it seems more and more to me that I'll just say you're more of an expert on this than I'll ever be. But there were a lot of...
Like I've read a decent amount stuff you've written and stuff others have written about like color coded revolutions in other countries. And let's just say there were many similarities in the year 2020. There was a way color coded revolutions in like Eastern Europe seem to go down. There was certainly a destabilization type campaign. There was a huge part of why they overreacted on COVID the way they did.
obviously in the democratic states more than the others which is actually a neat trick that instead of taking the rap themselves they still got to push the blame onto trump because it still trumps america even though it's michigan is the totalitarian police state in question you know um and she got reelected it's unbelievable i
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Lumen, the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs.
Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals so you know exactly what's going on with your body in real time. Then, Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine. It's how your body turns the food you eat into the fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does,
Optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It also tracks your cycle as well as the onset of menopause and adjusts your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings.
So if you want to take the next step to improving your health, go to lumen.me slash problem. That'll get you 15% off your lumen. That's l-u-m-e-n dot m-e slash problem for 15% off your purchase. All right, let's get back into the show. And then, yes, the riots. There's the famous Time Magazine article about how actually, yeah, we did rig it to save democracy, of course, and all that. And they talk all about...
how, you know, the Black Lives Matter riots that apparently like they could quite easily just turn them on and off and they would activate them to go in this town or not in that town. And then for one major example, they instructed everyone to not show up on January 6th. So this is going to be between the right wingers and the cops and we're going to not be there at all. And they didn't show up at all. But it's like,
wow, that's a hell of a text messaging network that you guys got where you can get the black block and, you know, these, you know, Antifa and all of these people who fancy themselves as revolutionary leftists to just step right into the pattern as determined by some democratic party NGO overlord. Yep. You know, like that's really something, man. Um, and yeah, that's,
It seems to have worked. I mean, and you know, another part of it was the major censorship of all the new right leaders on social media. It was a huge thing. And then of course the Hunter Biden laptop and also speaking of Gretchen Whitmer, that's right. You know, everybody knows about factured October surprise. Exactly. Yeah. The, the fake kidnapping and murder plot of Gretchen Whitmer that was a put on by the feds. They, people forget they debuted that at the beginning of October of 2020. So, and then the, the narrative went out that this is,
Trump supporters doing this. You know, the other thing is we always talk about the humiliation that Charlie Savage deserves for the rest of his life for the Afghan bounties hoax of 2020. But remember, the story wasn't just smearing Russia.
The story was, and Donald Trump didn't do anything about it while the Russians are killing our God. - Because wink, wink, nod, nod, because he's compromised by the Russians. - Accusing him of treason. - That's why he's still not, and you know, this was one of the points that I tried to really-- - It's completely fake, by the way. There's nothing to that story at all. And Charlie Savage is a despicable liar. - And if, again, for people, when the book comes out, you gotta read "Provoked Man" because it goes through all of this stuff. - I got a section on that.
This was one of the points that I really tried to hammer home when I was doing that debate with Vouch the other day, that it's like, look, this is all this stuff. Vladimir Putin overthrew our democracy, had bounties on US soldiers. This has almost become like a punchline now in America, and rightfully so, that it's like, look at the ridiculous narrative. But let's sit back and actually look at this. Imagine this from Vladimir Putin's perspective, where you're like, yo, you'd almost have to feel like
You know imagine how Saddam Hussein felt like right after 9/11 as they start building this case you're like yo You are framing me right now. There's like except the difference is that we're treating Vladimir Putin like he's Saddam Hussein Yeah, but he's not yeah, he's fucking sitting on a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons So there's a giant with the biggest country in the world like just fucking push this guy around like that so there's this new book called nuclear war a scenario by Annie Jacobson and
And it's based on all expert interviews and highest level sources and research and whatever. But then it's a fictional future scenario for how a potential nuclear war could start and get out of control. And the lesson is, and we know this from all the different war games that they practiced over the years, that if there's a nuclear war at all, it always devolves into general nuclear war. There are essentially no workable off-ramps.
from nuclear war. And she shows this as well. And in the book, I'll go ahead and ruin it for you. So if you want to read Annie Jacobson's book, put your fingers in your ears for the next 90 seconds or something. But in the story, she's,
North Korea nukes the United States, D.C. and California. And nobody really knows why, but you know how the North Koreans are. George Bush forced them to get nuclear weapons and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden completely failed and refused to negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons program and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula. So here we are. And they nuke the United States.
And once would be one thing, but once they nuke us twice, that means now we got to nuke them off the face of the earth or they're going to keep nuking us. So now we launch 50 H-bombs at North Korea. But the Russian satellite system is some janky ghetto type satellite software type situation compared to what the Americans have. The Americans can find...
uh, via infrared, any exhaust plume from any rocket launching anywhere in the world in an instant from space. The Russians don't have that and they can't even look straight down. They got to look at the horizon and their satellites often confuse clouds or, or sunlight for, uh, for rockets come in. And so they have to always do double and triple verification, this, that, whatever. Anyway, in the story, the Russians, uh,
see the launch at North Korea and they think it's being launched at them. And instead of going, nah, come on, they're just nuking North Korea. The fictional Putin in the story reasonably concludes that what the Americans are going to do here is they're going to nuke our Russia off the face of the earth. And then they're just going to lie. And they're going to tell everybody it was us that nuked them.
because that's how they are. They lie about Iraq, they lie about everything, they lie about Russia all day, every day. - By the way, this is a great plot because we probably would. Our government probably would do that. - That's right. And so then he launches everything he's got and America ceases to exist. And that's how it goes and that's a reasonable scenario. And it's based on interviews with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the Strategic Air Command
And it's, it's a worthwhile read. You know, it's everything she says in there is, is based on actual war plans, actual war games, actual everything. There's very limited menu of options once a nuclear war starts. And essentially it always just goes to nothing.
full holocaust full apocalypse well it is crazy i mean there's a did you see i mean i know you saw this because we talked about it the other day but in joe biden's uh in his interview post debate where he was trying to prove how fit he is for the job so he he takes the you know the steel man test he does a 20 minute interview with george stephanopoulos you know like it was just because to prove clinton's man yeah right a democratic operative you know get but whatever but
But so he's trying to break basically his messages. Yeah, look, I've slowed down a little bit. Maybe I don't quite debate like I used to. I used to be a ferocious debate. Remember when I took out Sarah Palin? Whatever. Anyway, but so but he's a that was a real accomplishment. Yeah, right. So I should talk. I debated Laura Loomer. All right, whatever. But the point is.
It's not doesn't take much. But so he's there and he goes and he's like, but look at the track record, you know, look at the track record of success. Like we're supposed to pretend Joe Biden has been like this amazing success as a president. But he goes, I'm the guy who put the Middle East peace plan together.
into play and I'm the guy who expanded NATO. As if like the level of tone deafness, that's what you're bragging about. The successful NATO expansions and the peace, all the peace going on right now in the Middle East. It's just unbelievable. - He brought that up in the debate too. He said against Trump, hey man, I'm the one who came up with that great peace proposal for Palestine.
And then Trump, of course, only attacks him for being weak and soft and a Palestinian instead of going, what are you talking about, dude? The war is still going on. Netanyahu laughed in your face and threw that thing in the trash. And that was two and a half weeks ago. Yeah. That conversation is over. That whole stupid plan was just a PR stunt. All it did was what? Kick the can down the road for.
five days until someone could come up with another new stupid lie or something. Yeah. It's not even worth talking about. Yeah, it is. It is pretty incredible, particularly to watch where there's. And by the way, you know, the Israelis murdered 90 people yesterday at this refugee camp, just blasted them to hell. And there's a story on antiwar.com where the 16 year old girl describes this
toddler, she says, or a very young boy, got his legs blown off and he's screaming at the top of his lungs, crawling on just his hands. And then they bombed him too, right in front of her eyes. That's Zionism. It's an absolute moral abomination, like equivalent to communism.
It's just, it's the sickest thing. It's like back when it was legal to own human beings in Alabama. That is the moral equivalent of supporting Israel now is being involved in something like that. It's the sickest thing in the world. I just, I defy anybody. Look at antiwar.com. Three days ago, four days ago, did you see the video? They bombed the soccer game. These kids are playing soccer in a parking lot and they bomb, repeatedly bomb.
Yeah, it's it's absolutely sickening. The level of how evil what Israel is doing to Gaza and all that is on Joe Biden. 100 percent of that is on Joe Biden himself. And, you know, they go, geez, I don't know. Is this guy clever enough to talk right into a microphone? Has he got the stamina to be the president for another two or three years?
Well, how about let's review the shots he's been calling lately. Yeah. How about the fact that he said again in the debate with Trump, as he said in the State of the Union address a few months ago, Vladimir Putin swore in his declaration of war that as soon as he's done with Ukraine, he's coming for the rest of Europe. Well, that's not true.
And the thing is about Joe Biden is, yes, he's a liar. And of course, Mr. President, you can tell any lie that you want. But does he know that that's a lie? That's a good question. Does anyone who works for him today? Are they are they not too afraid to say to Mr. President, you got to stop saying that you can't base your whole policy on the idea that Putin has vowed he's coming for Poland and Germany next.
He did not either, man. What he said a thousand times over was he's trying to protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who got left behind and then screwed over by the United States of America, by the way. You know, it was John Brennan who started this war in 2014, him and Barack Obama and Victoria Nuland. They're the ones who started this war, not Russia. No.
No, that's right. Yeah, 100%. And we've discussed many times, and you're working on a book about this, but it is interesting how even the hawks on this who support the policy will kind of acknowledge that it all started in 2014. You know what I mean? Yeah, went to Crimea.
Yeah, right, right. But you're like, okay, but so something there is really the start of this, right? Because they almost say, like he invaded the country in 2014 and not just referring to Crimea, but referring to whatever, the little green men or whatever, who he did send into the Donbass region there. In August. But it is, you know, I've heard not just from Joe Biden, but I've heard from many people in the corporate media that line about how Putin has said
That if he's successful in Ukraine, then the Baltics are next and Poland's next. And these NATO countries are going to be next. And they say, like, I've been fairly convinced. I'm like, I think that lady on the news believes that.
Like, I don't think she's lying through her teeth. You know, it's always like, yes, you're speculating. But I'm like, I think like whoever's in her ear is telling her that. And I know from my limited time in the cable news world, I do know like that that is how it works is that these people like in the same way that like I have my like kind of like, you know, experts who I rely heavily on, you know, and everybody, everybody,
does for the most part um you just kind of like you got to pick a good group you know of people to have but like so if i have like you know like i have you and the guys at antiwar.com who i you know like seriously all the guys who some of whom you mentioned earlier from the libertarian institute but all of those guys like uh dave decamp and connor and kyle and it's kind of friedman and kyle anzalo am i saying it was alone and alone um like these guys help me out a lot
um, you know, I'll, I'll shoot them questions sometimes and they get me, you know, like good sources on it and everything. And I've got like Gene Epstein and Bob Murphy, like economic, you know, kind of experts. And you have like, but the people in cable news, it's the same. It's just, they have really, really bad people who are, you know, like, it's, it's like when Essie cup would be, you know, she would tell me like we, when we'd be talking before the show, but she'd be like, yeah, I just got off the phone with Dick Cheney's chief of staff.
And he's telling me that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about Syria. You know, not like this was Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, but. And you're like John Hanna, that son of a bitch. You're like, yes. Oh, the guy who's wrong about everything that he said. But, you know, but so they've got these people and they oftentimes are not engaging with primary sources.
you know what i mean they're hearing from someone who's deemed expert who has a very fancy sounding title you know what i mean like this is the guy this is the number three at the rand institute you know what i mean like he's and so they're getting and i do wonder how many of them like don't know that like not only has vladimir putin never said anything remotely close to i'm reconstituting the soviet union or i'm gonna move on poland he's
you know, take him for his word for whatever value it is. But he's explicitly saying, no, I would, the only way I'm going to be in a war with Poland is if Poland attacks Russia. Like he's very clear. As you say, he very well could be lying his ass off. Sure. But let's not go misquoting the guy. We're in the middle of a war. Right. And we're pretending that all of Europe's future is at stake instead of Dnipro. No, it's good.
which nobody actually gives a damn about. - Right, right, exactly. And so like, let's be honest about what the battle is here. - And I'm not sorry that I said that wrong. I don't care. - That's right. The question is more about like whether Luhansk will be ruled by Kiev or Moscow rather than does all of Europe fall to the Soviet Union that doesn't exist. - In fact, he's like repeatedly mocked this. He goes, look, man, you know,
Our entire gross domestic product is less than you guys spend on your military. I'm going to get involved in a war with NATO, a conventional war with NATO. Yeah. Like it just makes no stupid. No, not either. Yeah. Which I know the Hawks take that and they go, yeah, well, that's why we got to bring Ukraine into NATO or that's why we should have. But the thing is, no, that he would have just invaded faster then. Yeah. Yeah.
earlier than to prevent that outcome. No, it's like, oh, we should have brought Ukraine into NATO. It's like, yeah, first of all, you were trying. And that's what led to this. Right. And then the other thing aside from that, right, which is like the obvious retort that you just gave is that no, he look. And again, because of the heroic Julian Assange, we know the Burns memos and stuff to Condoleezza Rice. The net yet means yet like, no, he made it very clear this was his red line and he would move on this. But the other thing is that it's like it's total bullshit.
that the reason Ukraine isn't in NATO, even aside from Vladimir Putin would have, is because you guys couldn't. You couldn't get them in there because they, first of all, there was too much resistance from Germany and there was too much resistance from other Europeans who knew this would be such a provocation of Putin. And also because Ukraine is such a fucking mess that they were never going to meet the requirements. You know what I mean? Like it was always so stupid to be openly like,
bragging about how we're about to do this thing and just provoking a war for nothing when you never even were going to be able to bring them in. - No, it wasn't about bringing Ukraine into NATO. It was the sacred principle that we can if we want to and you can't stop us, even though, no, of course we're not going to.
You know, we can't for all these other reasons, but certainly not because you said we can't. Yeah. You know, and then that was it. That was what the war was over from in terms of not the civil war or the Ukraine-Russia war, but the America-Russia war here, which is the rest is encompassed within, was over that. It was over this made up.
what lingo, right? The open door policy was just something they came up with at a NATO conference in 2004, or maybe it was in 1999. I think it was in... I had this wrong and I just corrected myself in the book. I think it was in 1999 that they first said that. And there's this Helsinki accord where they agreed that any country can join any alliance that they want and whatever. So they were building on that from back then. But still like
These are just words. And so are, hey, you better respect my sphere of influence or I'm going to start bombing the place. Those are words too. You know what I mean? It's the same. And you might say it's totally unfair. Like, why should Ukraine have to suffer Russia?
only because they're next door same reason the palestinians got to suffer the israelis i guess you know what i mean same reason the the poor people of latin america have had to suffer the united states for the last 200 years you know because those are the breaks yeah but that's how progressive america is we make people suffer even when they're not next door
You don't even have to be that close to us. You're in our sphere of influence. If you're on the globe, you're in America's sphere of influence. That's right. No sphere of influence for you because the entire sphere is our sphere of influence.
Keep yours within your borders only. And even then, until we can come up with a color-coded revolution to overthrow your ass. Yep. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is YoKratom.com, home of the $60 kilo, longtime sponsor of this show. If you're over the age of 21 and you enjoy Kratom, make sure to get your Kratom from YoKratom.com.
They've been supporting this show for a long time, so go support them. Plus, it's quality stuff. It's all lab tested. It's delivered right to your door, and it's $60 for a kilo. The price of everything else has gone up, but the price of a kilo from Yo Kratom is still just $60. YoKratom.com, home of the $60 kilo. All right, let's get back into the show.
Well, it does seem to me and we're coming up here against the end of time, but I'm curious for your thoughts on this since you are the guy writing the book on it right now. So I kind of felt like when the war first broke out in Ukraine, and I mean in 22, not the civil war that started in 2014, but it seemed like, okay, this is like an incredibly dangerous game. Then as you know,
Look, certainly, whatever. When did Vladimir Putin say he could be in Kiev? In two weeks? Was that in... In 14. That was in 2014, right? Yeah, he said to an Italian diplomat. Look, there's no question that the period between 2014 and 2022, where in many ways Ukraine was...
like a de facto member of NATO. They're doing joint military exercises with NATO and Ukraine. And and then, of course, the weapons that were sent in pre 22. And then, of course, the insane amount of weapons that have been sent in since then. This does seem to have changed the calculation where Ukraine could put up more of a fight now than they would have probably otherwise been able to put up. Yeah. But it also did seem like over the last year that
Russia's winning. It's kind of an inevitability. If you remember, was it like around six months ago, there was that Time magazine piece that really was like, it was like Zelensky's lost his own military. They're not even following his orders anymore. None of these guys. He fired the chief and replaced him. Right. But like, they were like, no one believes he can even win the war anymore. And it did seem like it was at least
the worst dangers of it, from my perspective, at least, were like kind of being tempered because, well, if Vladimir Putin's winning, he's not about to start launching nukes. It's like the bigger fear was like him losing and what somebody does when they're losing, you know, like the biggest fear for any leader who has nukes
Is that they'd be in a Gaddafi like position where they think they're about to get like fucking sodomized to death and then fuck it. Maybe that's the time when you just like let some nukes fly. But then now over the last few months with this stuff with like approving attacks within Russia's borders, it just seems like, oh, we've escalated the worst case scenario again for no apparent reason.
Yeah. I don't know. What do you think? Well, look, I mean, I should say that, that like, if we're talking about any two countries fighting and one invades the other, then like, go ahead and invade them back. I don't give a damn. Like, well, you know, I don't know. But in this case, America is completely implicated in this. So it's not a matter of like Ukraine doing what they want. They got to stay within the restrictions of the United States. And they more or less have.
but then those restrictions keep getting loosened if you go back to the start of the war the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff mark milley uh there's a piece in the washington post about this where forgot them all but rule number two was keep the war geographically contained inside ukraine
Like even on the last day when they win and force the Russians back across the border, don't chase them. You know, just fighting for every inch of Ukraine and that's it, etc. Not that they're ever going to get that, but that was the stricture. Then as they're getting more desperate, now they're lashing out. So what strategic advantage can be gained?
from using these hymar rocket artillery to hit and they're hitting missile trucks you know like in other words equivalent artillery right uh you know on the other side this kind of thing what strategic advantage do they get for that nothing you know hitting a air base or whatever it is that they're getting all that can be replaced quickly right it's not even necessarily a tactical advantage and you know maybe it would be in the middle of any one battle or something overall
What it's really doing, I think, it should be looked at politically. It's meant, I think, to provoke the Russians into doing worse in order to provoke the Americans into providing more aid and doubling down Western support. It's a tough position to be in, leading a weak country, getting the crap kicked out of it by a much more powerful one. But you also have all these powerful allies, but they're only so willing to help you sometimes, whatever. And this is something that...
you know, in the Bosnia war, the Muslims would often fake attacks against their own people. I mean, really kill people, but do false flag attacks and this kind of thing in order to cry victim on CNN, Christian Amanpour and all that would carry the message and to get Bill Clinton to intervene. And he's bet that the good Vic, I don't know how to say his name. I sometimes can say his name, the leader of the Bosnian Muslims. He said this openly,
Yeah, we're trying to get our own people killed more so that would provoke Bill Clinton into coming and helping us You know this kind so well, there you go. That's a tiny mining again. I know I'm always doing that was what I got a Criticized for the other day is the they said oh, we're talking about Israel propping up Hamas and they go Oh, you're just your quote mining. This is used as activists. Oh
by, this is like a technique, you know, you find, oh, random quotes here or there. And now some of these quotes are taken out of context. You're like, how about everyone? Here's everyone admitting it in their own words. That's not, that's not evidence now. That's kind of a fun thing. We're like, okay, from now on, no one can ever cite anything that anybody ever said before, especially like if they're admitting something that you're trying to use against them.
Because I got this new phrase. I just say, quote mining. And then you have to stop. And I don't have to pay attention anymore. Your Honor, I'd like to submit into evidence Exhibit A. This is a written confession by the defendant. Objection, Your Honor. Quote mining. They're quote mining in the courtroom. I got this 400-page memoir that the guy wrote here. Can I quote out of that? It seems very deliberate what he's trying to get across here. Well, I also like when there'll be like a...
There'll be one thing where like you'll be like hey look this guy admitted it in his own words And they'll be like yeah well this other guy denied it and it's like yeah But like look man if five people come out of a room, and there's like a dead guy and
And like four of them were like, we had nothing to do with it. And then the fifth guy's like, I admit it. We all fucking did it. It's like, well, one of them denies it. One of them confesses to it. I guess it's just, we'll toss both of those out. It's like, no, let's focus on the confession part. That seems like it's relevant. The statement against interest here. Yeah. Like, right. Isn't that, isn't that fairly relevant in this? But, but anyway, it is something where, you know, so like immediately after October 7th, you know, there were calls from, you know, okay. In,
insane people, but insane people who are senators like Lindsey Graham to bomb Iran. And why is that? Because like, well, even if we don't have evidence that they were directly implicated in October 7th, we know they've funded Hamas and therefore they're
You're now guilty along with them and you're like, okay, but how does that not apply to Israel? Why because because they did their funding Indirectly through cutter that then what it's like it's okay like it doesn't go and then just what's the real Intel on Iran funding Hamas lately anyway, I know they had a big split over Syria because Hamas al Qaeda's side in that one at least rhetorically and
and the Shiites were pissed off about that. So like, I mean, if you told me that they had resumed some payments, I'd believe you, I guess, but I'd like to see the actual extent of that. No, I've seen no evidence that there's been, that they've been like recently propping them up or anything. And it is pretty funny, just like the mental gymnastics around the Qatari money going,
to Hamas, even like with the New York Times reporting about the Mossad chief going over there just a couple weeks before October 7th. But even like what's also like funny about all of it is that it's like, okay, Iran, this country who just happens to be, you know, the one that was put on the axis of evil and it just happens to be like this country that the neocons have had a boner for a war with for the last 20 plus years, really 30 plus years or something like that. Mm-hmm.
Well, these guys funded Hamas. Let's just say for the sake of argument, whatever, they've funded Hamas. They've certainly done business with them in the past, right? But it's like, okay, but Qatar over here, or Qatar, they're an ally.
of the US and they're at least in effect, a partnership with Israel. You know what I mean? - But their treason was part of the Netanyahu doctrine, Dave, so that doesn't count. - Exactly, so they're just off the hook for that. And then somehow it's just like, oh, well that was humanitarian aid is how it's like for, oh, Israel's guilty of allowing aid in. 'Cause this is what everyone's saying now. - That was the guy was arguing with you and was saying, look, all this was about was, look, we got them under siege, so we got to at least, you know,
Like it says in the WikiLeaks, we got them on a diet. We want to keep them hungry, not starving. Right. Which is like the sickest thing in the world. But then he's saying that's all this is, is-
We're keeping them just hungry, not starving, Dave, by letting them have some humanitarian aid in or whatever. But what's funny about that is that's not any kind of refutation of the accusation, because in all of the quotes and most all of this stuff comes from Israeli media in the first place where they talk about this, that as The New York Times quotes them, putting it buying quiet.
That was always part of it. The quote of Netanyahu saying, listen, guys, if you want to prevent a two state solution, we have to keep propping up Hamas because that keeps them good and divided and conquered so we can go on and do our thing. That ends with him saying, don't worry, we control the height of the flame. In other words, the point is we've tamed them.
I figured out how to control these people with my carrots and sticks, and I'm giving them just enough money to keep them compliant, to keep them under wraps. Well, at the same time, I can turn to the global community, such as it is the West, the Europeans, the Americans, and I guess in Tel Aviv, you know, big city liberals in Israel and tell them, look, we have no partner for peace.
It's such a wonderful slogan. It's very easy to memorize and repeat. And you take one look at Hamas, really wants to negotiate with these guys. And especially if you don't know that much about them, you can just go, well, no, they're
absolute beasts who never could sit down and sign a deal worth the ink it's printed on or whatever. Like we're just supposed to take that as a given. Yeah. Well, look, even when, in fact, I mean, it is, it's not just a terrorist organization and it is, and they kill innocent civilians and damn them for it, but it is also a domestic insurgency. I mean, these people aren't just fighting because they're Muslims and
They're fighting because they're under total despotism, under total control and occupation by this foreign military power. People don't understand a lot of times they talk about Israel, Palestine. Sounds like they already have a country. Right. But Israel's on top of Palestine. These Palestinians are essentially living on an Indian reservation here. They already got whooped back in 67 and they've been under Israeli control this whole time. So you're saying you got to.
Do X until they stop resisting. Well, X is not going to work, especially if it's just X means bomb them. Yeah, because they're going to keep resisting. And of course, the leader we've been at this for almost 10 months now of them bombing these people, or maybe it is 10 months now. And the Israeli generals now echo the American CIA and the New York Times saying this isn't going to work, by the way.
This can not work. And at the end of the war, Hamas will still be there because Hamas is an idea. All it means is it's an acronym for whatever they originally called it, but it just means fighting age males who dare to fight you. And as long as you keep these people on your thumb, they're just going to keep fighting. It doesn't justify what they're doing, but it's especially when they're killing innocent people, but it,
It certainly explains the reality of the situation and certainly compared to the way that they portray it on TV here, where you really might think that Palestine is the country next door and that they've invaded Israel and the Israelis are now only fighting them off. Yeah. Look, to the initial point there about which Netanyahu and many others have admitted, but
we here we go quote mining again um that part of the the strategy of propping up hamas was that you could turn to the world and as ehud barack and i think a couple others even admit also to liberal israelis right you know what i mean to also well the you know this is the establishment
pro-israel talking point i mean this is what dennis prager said to me when we debated is he goes listen man like you know i was crying when bill clinton and yasser arafat and yitzhak rabin all shook hands and stuff and i was like yes we could have a two-state solution finally peace for like the jewish people in the region like i you know he was like i was so on board with that
And then this is what Noam from the Comedy Cellar told me the same thing. That was like, look, there were all these people who were for a two state solution. And then second intifada, this changed it all, you know? And then it was like, oh, and then Hamas started the second intifada.
Well, Mohammed came up from hell and told them to. Right. I guess it wasn't anything Ariel Sharon did threatening to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and take it over for the Jews. That wasn't a big deal or anything. And that's on the heels of the peace process kind of crumbling. Right. So it's like the hope goes out and then you have the Temple Mount. It was right in the middle of it. It was in the fall of 2000. It was, you know, at the I guess just the very tail end of.
Camp David, but before Taba. - Right, right. - And of course, yeah. And was a deliberate provocation. Why would Ariel Sharon do such a thing? 'Cause he's such a devout religious man.
Yeah, he's trying to start a war. But there is something kind of interesting, even in that admission, even from the Israeli or the pro Israeli perspective where they're kind of like, look like I was all for a two state solution in still until these Hamas guys start being a bunch of fucking terrorists. And you're like, well, yes, exactly. So all you got to do is just take that and go, OK, but they're also telling you in their own words that they get that.
that. They get that about you. That they get that like, yeah, see, here's one of the ways in which Hamas is an asset. It takes all these people who otherwise would be for a two-state solution and makes them go, no, well, then I guess we just got to subjugate these people forever instead. You're like, that does seem kind of convenient. That's brilliant. And look, so if people search, it's easy to find. It's by my guy, Connor Freeman and myself. It's called
Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired. And I've shared it several times. I just tweeted it the other day. But yeah, definitely worth reading. And that's I mean, there's more since then. There's a New York Times story since then. There's a couple more things since then. But we have a huge compendium of quotes there of Likudniks talking about this policy. The whole reason for bolstering Hamas is part of the Netanyahu doctrine to keep the Palestinians divided and calm.
while at the same time making these phony Abraham Accord peace deals with the Sunni Arab states, which essentially just symbolized them finally selling out the Palestinians all the way down the river that they had always promised will never fully normalize relations with Israel until they give justice to the Palestinians. And Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and White House advisor, Netanyahu's godson, said, well, what's your price? The American people can afford it.
They're living under a bridge. They got no expenses. And so he gave our money to Qatar, Bahrain, no, pardon me, to Bahrain, UAE, Sudan, and Morocco to sign these accords. And then Netanyahu famously, well, should be famously, should be infamously, gave that speech at the United Nations.
at the end of September saying, ha ha, I won, you lost. I get it all and you get nothing. You get no citizenship. You get no independent state. You get full subjugation on your reservation and no one's coming for you, scumbag. You were holding out hope that someone was coming for you. No one's coming for you. That was Netanyahu's mission accomplished.
- That's exactly what it was. - It was the height. - And even has a visual aid like he always does, instead of a car tube bomb this time, it's a map of the new Middle East. Now that was mocking Shimon Peres who said the new Middle East is we're gonna deal with the Palestinians so that we can make peace with the Sunni states. Now Netanyahu's going, I made peace with the Sunni states without doing business with the Palestinians.
So, haha, screw you, Shimon Peres's legacy. This is the Netanyahu doctrine, Uber Alice. I win and you all lose. - It reminds me of the mission accomplished moment 'cause you're almost like, you're like, dude, if you could freeze time right there,
you could kind of make it look like you won. Like if you just don't play this tape forward at all, just leave it right there and you go, see, my strategy worked. But then you're only like a couple weeks from like catastrophe, like the entire thing blowing up in your face. And- - Hey wait, that reminds me of an important point too, that people have to understand this and TV is never gonna explain it in this way, that like Hamas got really lucky
And the Israeli government was absolutely derelict in their duty of keeping those people penned in their prison effectively. OK, but the point there being that that's why we call it October 7th, because it was over by suppertime and it didn't continue into the 8th and the 9th and the 10th. It was a one day event.
And from that point on, they could have simply laid siege to the place as they already have, but like increased security there, taken divisions away from confiscating land from innocent Palestinians on the West Bank and put them back on guard duty.
And then there's no ongoing threat from Hamas to the Israeli state or the Israeli civilian population whatsoever. I mean, they had these kibbutzes were right outside, you know, just, you know, a mile or two miles or whatever from Gaza and separated quite a bit from the rest of Israeli, you know, urban society further north from there. And for a variety of reasons, including, you
Netanyahu's fight over the Supreme Court, which had caused a bunch of officers to resign and including making a political alliance with these right-wing kooks in order to keep him in the prime minister chair and therefore out of prison. He had to move a bunch of troops from Gaza guard duty to go and babysit the religious kooks as they're confiscating land, settlers confiscating land from Palestinians on the West Bank and all this. But so in other words, just like with the Branch Davidians,
You can afford to wait. Not that the Branch Davidians ever killed anyone. I'm not making that parallel, but I'm saying you can afford to wait these people out like there is no ongoing threat here. They make it sound like this is some kind of existential fight for survival for Israel. The Israelis are in no danger at all from Hamas if the IDF just shows up for work.
They don't have to do this at all. They've killed tens of thousands of people. They've razed the entire place to the ground. If people don't know this, you can search the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
All compare the devastation to Dresden and Hamburg in World War II to Tokyo. And of course, Netanyahu does too and says, I've never heard of the Geneva Conventions that were created after World War II. World War II is the benchmark. And if you guys can burn Dresden and Tokyo, then I can burn Gaza, even though Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto, not the Third Reich. Yeah, really. But still, that's, you know.
He's written himself a moral permission slip to kill every last one of those animals, as he and his government call them. And just what they've done is so far beyond what even any psycho could pretend is necessary to defend the people of Israel. It's just like 30 years ago, they did pretend.
that the Branch Davidians were a threat to the people of Waco. They'd been there for 60 years or whatever, but they were going to march. And they said, I got quotes of this from my thing that I did last year on it. But they said, oh yeah, no, the Branch Davidians, they were going to march on downtown Waco. They were going to kill everybody at the McDonald's and then they were going to seize the city council. Liars, liars. But that's what they do. They pretend that they're protecting you, but they're not protecting you. And of course the Israelis, they're just fed
pure military censored information in their media. So who knows how skewed their point of view on it. But just to reiterate how absolutely unnecessary this is. Again, when the head of the Israeli military admits there's no such thing as a situation where they're going to punt down the last Hamas guy and then Hamas has been eradicated, like in their stated goal, the impossible.
And so instead, this is all just collateral damage on a mission that cannot be accomplished. Yeah. And the irony in some weird way here is that the only genuinely existential threat to Israel is continuing this. Like, this is actually what's putting Israel in a real, like, in actual jeopardy. Where you're like, dude, you have turned, like, you have for at least a generation,
greatly altered the perception of Israel. I mean, and look, and that does come with a lot of ugliness, too. I mean, there has been look, there's no question like I see it on social media and there has been a rise of anti-Semitism and Jew hatred that's resulted from from all of this. And
Look, if you want to argue that that was always under the surface and that it kind of like was brought up by this, it's like, okay, you could make that argument to some degree. That's true. Hard to quantify exactly to what degree it is, but it's like, well, bullshit. Well, listen, right wingers who are actually anti-Semitic,
don't give a crap about Arabs and Palestinians at all. And it's not their issue. They can talk all day long about Jews, but, and they might say, look at how horrible they are to the Palestinians just to say how horrible they are, but it is nothing like sticking up for the Palestinians. And as far as people on the left or libertarians or leftists who are sticking up for the Palestinians, man, there,
They're not anti-Semitic, they're not any kind of racist. That's the worst thing in the world. - Against white people. - You could be as a racist. - Maybe against straight white people or something. - Maybe. - I get your point. - But honestly, even then, Jews in America and everywhere else still have the reputation of being an oppressed minority. Even if they're wealthy, there's still a small number of them and they're not allowed in some places and the WASPs are still mean to them. They're also a minority and are considered one by other minorities.
generally speaking, what happens is people learn about what's happening in Israel, Palestine, and they go, oh, I'm actually not seeing a bunch of poor downtrodden Holocaust victims here. I'm seeing a bunch of vicious Holocaust perpetrators who I no longer have any sympathy for whatsoever has nothing to do with their religion other than that they invoke it to justify their sins. Well, I'm just I guess, look, the point I'm making is just that, like, I do see on social media and you never know with this stuff. Like, I don't know half of it.
People are trolling, there's teenagers on there, I don't know. But there are people who would legitimately be classified as Jew haters. But I'm just saying even for those people-- - But I'm just saying not who stick up for the Palestinians. - No, no, no, yes, yes. - You know what I mean? - This is a whole separate thing. - I'm not conflating those groups. But I'm just saying if you wanna argue that that's on the rise,
Well, then like the worst thing you could do is to conduct this war in the manner that you've conducted it in over the last eight months in the most brutal way. I mean, come on, talk about like just giving them propaganda when it's totally unnecessary to do this. But look, I mean, I will say I have been there's OK, so.
roughly speaking, you have kind of like this interesting reemergence of an anti-war left over the last few months. And I do think that there's a ton of baggage that the left has inherited from the last...
you know, decade plus that has been a weird fun house mirror version of left wing ideology. And they have a lot of that baggage with them. There's things that I've seen that have been like disturbing, like the things on social media and things that have been said at some of these protests. But like the bottom line, I thought actually Dave DeCamp had such a great tweet
Again, the best tweets are always the really simple ones, but it was, he responded to, go follow Dave DeCamp, by the way, if you don't already. He does a morning show for antiwar.com. Yeah, he's our news editor at antiwar.com. And his pieces are always just brilliant. But he wrote, I think it was Barry Weiss, I want to say, wrote something where she goes, you know, I just saw something like,
a copy of like the diary of Anne Frank, like was like burned or something like I forget what she was. Yeah, statue, whatever. I can't remember the exact thing, but she goes, you know, I just saw this statue of Anne Frank, blah, blah, blah. And I, you know, it's amazing. The symbol of anti-Semitic hate that I just witnessed, blah, blah. And Dave DeCamp just quotes tweets already goes, oh, I just saw a Palestinian's child who had their skin blown off their face.
And it's just like, isn't that the perfect way to say it's like, Oh look, look, I'm willing to grant you that the thing you saw was kind of disturbing, you know? But like, could we talk about this first and then we'll get to that one later? Because like, come on here. Let's like re like who's really the victimized group here. And so like that pretty much to me says it all. These IDF guys said last week that they kill people out of boredom. They, they kill innocent Palestinians when they're bored. They said that.
They said that. Quote mining again. I guess. You're guilty again of quote mining. I know, yeah. Whenever someone admits that I'm right about something and I cite that, I gotta stop doing that. Look at you remembering what they admit. That's cheating, dude. You're not allowed to do that. You're just allowed to, I don't know. You know, one of your comedian friends asked me the other night at the mothership, so why should I be a libertarian? No, Waco. Who asked that?
I'm sorry, I forgot his name, the kind of muscular black guy. Really, like, kind of funny guy, dude. Oh, yeah, that's right. Very high-spirited guy. Very happy guy. Oh, I'm blanking on his name. I fucking, I know the guy. He's Robbie's guy, which, by the way, I...
Was able to hang out an amateur night in the backyard with Robbie. I admit I'm not quite ready for the stage at the mothership yet, but I was okay in the backyard. But anyway, he asked me, he goes, why should I be a libertarian? I go, Waco, dude.
they burn all those little kids and call it a suicide there's a hundred miles from where you live now yeah yeah like i gotta elaborate like what else do you need to know these people are your enemy i was just reading this morning well i said that to him it's now two days ago whatever this story's in the new york times magazine right now about a guy who they convicted and gave him 25 years in the pen for shaking his baby to death but man he didn't shake his baby to death
Just this subhuman scum, police officers, district attorneys and judges, these government employees and these cops wives on the jury. They just conspired to put this innocent guy in the pen because his baby died.
And they do this all the time. They do this to people all the time. You hear people that go, man, they ought to take, you know, I don't know about deporting every single immigrant, but like every immigrant felon's got to be deported right now. Okay. But I know a lady who was convicted of burning a building down, but she didn't do it. They just convicted her of it. Cause you know how it goes, right?
The courts are a government program and they don't give a damn about the defendants coming in and out of there. It's like they're flipping burgers. Next, next. I got to do 30 of these today. Next, next. They don't care. Well, it's the thing that Thomas Sowell
uh, he credited with turning him. So he was like a young Marxist and then he got a government job. And I think it was in like the labor department. I can't remember exactly what he did, but he was like, Oh, just the experience working there, like converted him away from it because he was like the, the, the undeniable truth that you come into contact with right away is like your theory, your dippy theory, however you feel about it. Nobody at the labor department is concerned about
even kind of concerned with whether what they're doing is actually helping people or not. Like that's just not the concern. The concern is like, you know, their institutional survival instincts and like, how can we grow our power, maintain our power? How can we do this? And you recognize the same thing. If you, if you know anyone who's been touched by it or you've been touched by the,
justice system in America. They're like, it has very little to do with figuring out whether someone's guilty or not. It's about prosecutors who want to pay out their records. Keeping you on probation, paying fees and going to classes. And how are you supposed to have a job when you have to go to your PO at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon and all these things, everything about it. It's just like the conversation we had with our new friend Scott the other night, who was a B-1 bomber pilot in Afghanistan.
And talking about no one asks about whether they're succeeding at any thing that they're like, I'm trying to use the broadest language I can. Are they succeeding at anything that they're trying to accomplish? Are they actually trying to accomplish anything other than
Put that bomb on that target. And no one even knows why. No one even knows what the end is that this means is supposed to be justified by. It's simply a matter of the previous captain in charge. He only dropped X thousand bombs over his four month tour. I got to beat that. Right. Get out there and drop more bombs. Yeah, it's.
it's actually that insane all right listen we're we're up against time here so we got to wrap but dude this was great always great uh having you on and i just i can't tell people enough when the book comes out i'm really excited for everyone to see it it's just it's a masterpiece you know what you should do you should tell them really quick how much you like the last book enough already dave dude is that pretty good listen enough already is look are you saying it's for sale now i'm just yes that's right okay let's let's promote the one that is for sale but listen man if you haven't
And I say this everywhere I go. It's the book. If you want to read a book and understand the history of the terror wars from Jimmy Carter up through Donald Trump, you got to go read enough already. It's freaking incredible. And of course, as we mentioned up top, this is the Libertarian Institute Summer Fund Razor. If you can help at all with that, in this world of libertarianism, there's no better cause that I could vouch for than the Libertarian Institute. All the great guys over there.
Thanks, buddy. Absolutely. Thank you, man. Oh, wait. And also I host a podcast. I've done 6,000 interviews and you can listen to them all at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow and all your favorite podcatchers and that kind of thing. Hell yeah. All right. Thanks for listening, guys. Catch you next time. Peace.