#2500 - Scott Horton

>> The Joe, Rogan, experience.

>> Join my day, Joe Rogan, podcast, my night, all day. [MUSIC] >> That sound okay. >> Check, check, check. >> This is my normal complaint volume.

>> Right on one of those one year on when you're off, guys. >> Yeah, my right year hurts a lot from years of this. >> This is why I usually just leave it off. >> There's a volume adjuster thing too. So if it's too loud, you can turn it up or current down.

>> He's done good. >> No, it's just I have a pain in my right year so I try not to antagonize it. >> And thank you very much for the gift. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott Horton gave me a professorial pipe. >> And I go saying, Medsker uses a pipe now because of you.

>> Yeah, I love that guy. >> He's the best. >> He's so funny. >> He's such a nut. >> He wanted to do the room.

>> He just blows the room away, yeah.

>> Yeah, he's just a force in there, it's incredible.

>> And he's a giant dude, so he likes a lot of hovers over you, like, >> Oh, you didn't know, you don't know about this? >> Yeah, and then he just hits you with 15 conspiracy. >> He's in a real rapid fire with no breaks in between them. >> So, thanks for doing this, man.

>> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> We have a great mutual friend and Dave Smith. He recommends you highly, so I'm glad we could finally do this. I wish there was more going on the world right now. We could talk about, though.

>> Just like, I just have to go back over his mom or something. >> Yeah, yeah, the old stuff back when we didn't know any better. >> It's kind of a mess. >> Yeah, I've seen you argue on television like a thousand times. >> Do you enjoy that Pierce Morgan type chaos?

>> No, yeah. >> In fact, I just got back from England. I got invited to do the Oxford debate, which I lost on Ukraine. But then I invited myself on Pierce Morgan live as long as I was in town.

“>> And I say you lost debate, is that because the people voted that we're in the audience?”

>> Yeah, all those people with Ukraine flags? >> Well, they didn't have Ukraine flags that time. >> I think some show to old picture or something about it. >> Same crowd. >> So what happened was, yeah, when they leave, they leave through the yes door or the no door.

And the yes is had it, which was unbelievable to me, but not that I did my very best job. >> Well, on Pierce Morgan, I was trying to get myself just to interview. So I could just talk to him about some things. And instead, they just prefer that format where you got to mix it up with a guy, which I can do that too, you know.

>> Yeah, the interview thing is way better. The thing that he does though is really good for engagement. He's very smart, like Pierce has done, he's mastered it. He's taken like the Jerry Springer type format and thrown it into the world of politics and any other social issues. >> It's going on.

>> Yeah, but it is, too, like years ago, the guy from antiwar.com can't be on TV. But we can be on his show, he doesn't carry school with it. I mean, I got the same thing here, that's a big change from how things used to be. We just had this whole separate conversation going on below the higher one where he has reached up and down the chain, I guess, is a way to put it. >> Is he on TV TV or is it just a YouTube?

>> No, but he just has massive. >> Yeah, massive. >> So counts, I guess.

“>> TV TV is actually a hindrance now because the only way people watch TV TV is clips that someone takes him puts on acts or YouTube.”

>> That's it. >> Or they just see it accidentally. It's just on happens to be on when they're in the room or whatever. >> What a fucking dying market. >> Imagine if you're in broadcast television right now and you're just thinking, where am I doing?

>> Yeah. >> This is a bad format. You have to break for commercials every seven minutes. No conversation could ever get in a depth. There's executives in your ear telling you what to say and whatnot to say.

They'll edit out anything that they think is controversial. That's going to fuck with their sponsors or fuck with the government or fuck you. >> Whatever their narrative is. >> Well, it's just everything's changed when I first started doing podcasting. It was the archives of the interviews for my radio show and it was so important to me that I'm all on the radio.

That's religitimacy. That means somebody hired you. Somebody thought you were good enough to be there was podcasting. Any jerk can do from his basement and it just doesn't count. That just became not true and I kind of clung on to my radio show.

I actually gave up my last radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles last year. I mean, we're didn't matter anymore anyway and podcasting is completely changed the entire market.

“Do you know how many people were listening to actually on the radio before you quit?”

>> I think it's probably high thousands but not 10,000 KPFK in LA. >> It's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River. It's grandfathered in at 115,000 watts.

But the thing is about it too and it's always been like this, the programming on there is so inconsistent

that you're listening to Latina Lesbians one hour and then you're listening to crystal worship and then you're listening to hard hitting news and then you're listening to like leftist union organizing or then just whatever you know what I mean but it's just there's no like real rhyme or reason to us.

>> What kind of a channel is it? >> It's you know left of the dial at 90.7 FM so it's you know comparable to like KUT type. It's not actual public radio but it's no commercials all donations. >> Oh wow. >> Yeah I mean they were doing the radio show that's no commercials and it's not public.

>> Yeah that's interesting. >> Yeah it's like I don't know if co-op still exists here in Austin co-op radio.

“>> You must have made a lot of money from that.”

>> You must be so rich from doing that. >> Yeah not just radio with no no ads at all just donations. >> Boy you must be raking it in.

>> No they never did pay me but I looked at it like they let me be on there for 14 15 years or something.

And you know like even when I was writing my book about the Russia Ukraine stuff. I would do my radio show once a week and I was able to still cover what was going on in Palestine. And in a way that felt like you know you know something meaningful that I can do even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere. I still got all my guys from the libertarian institute in Antwerp.com.

I can interview them once a week and then when I left KPFK I got some response. I like oh no where are you going kind of things so I mean some people are caring for it at the time. >> Did you let them know hey I have a podcast you can see them all all these episodes be archived. >> Yeah I can always let them know that. You know I've done 6,200 something interviews since 2003 on my various shows.

So I always try to remind people to go check the archives if they want for the full dose of that stuff.

“>> Before we get into any of these subjects like how did you get into this?”

>> Well you know in the 90s I was you know when I was younger I was much more of like a new world order true through type. And but then I basically dropped all that I grew out of that I really defined new world order true type. >> Okay well I mean the new world order conspiracy was that American foreign policy ultimately is about building a one-world federal government under the United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States. The John Bert Society sort of idea of how and I I really like those guys and I believed that for a long time really through Clinton.

And even to the end of the beginning of W Bush, but then I could I finally realize with the way that the Iraq war was prosecuted that this is not about building up the UN Security Council. We got the National Security Council and Cheney and his Neocons and they have their own separate policy that just disproves that sort of new world order theory. And the American and in fact so what HW Bush meant by that was just the era of the American Empire with no end to stop us this time was all. It wasn't ever to build up the UN as the World Government, it was to build up Washington DC as the World Government.

And of course they've been failing and failing trying to establish that ever since. >> Yeah so the conspiracy was that the United Nations would would be the government of the entire earth and that all other governments would somehow another give up their power to the United Nations for what reason.

“Because they're all in on it together in secret whatever that's the point is it ain't right it's not true.”

>> Well the mine there's one question be like too many people have to exactly too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have to somebody else and they don't have to money. >> Yeah that's the other thing I mean as soon as you lose power then you lose access to insane amounts of wealth. >> Yeah so we don't want you know obviously it's the ultimate nightmare would be that you would have some kind of one world government. And then some kind of totalitarian regime take power with monopoly on nooks and monopoly on police power.

And you know but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now I mean that's just not going to happen anytime soon at all. >> You don't think there's any push towards centralizing things in that regard like. Wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules. >> That's just a podcast and a lesson from time to time, to all the north. >> For two or another 99, bring to your middle-class with sushi in three times.

>> Mm, lecker. >> And for one or another 99, go on to the next one for a little Ice-Side.

>> For all the north-fins you always have to pass.

>> Clean good? >> Then try the Snick time sushi box. >> For two or five grand for two or 99 or 90. >> Or mochi sandwich ice. >> The eight-stück for one or 99, 90.

>> That's good for all the price. >> Now in your filial. >> All the good for all. >> Well look, so yes, there's always the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can. At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America.

But there is no one world Army, one world police force to enforce these things. It's all about coercing and controlling governments to go along.

>> Right. >> That's what it is.

“>> You know, it's a pseudo empire, it's not exactly the same kind of empires and, you know, colonialism that we've had in the past, but it's sort of a neo-colonialism where if we can overthrow your government with some money,”

we'll do that, a little bit of CIA help, we'll do that, and we have to bomb your capital city.

We'll go for that if we think so. >> Yeah. >> And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz doctrine, you know, a various degrees, but this is a reference to right after the first go for Paul Wolfowitz at that time was the deputy secretary of defense for policy. And him and a couple other neo-colons, Scooter Libby, and Zalmey Kalilzot, they wrote up this document called the defense planning guidance, and it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the post Cold War era and the post first Iraq War, Gulf War era.

And what it said was, we're going to be the most dominant power on every continent, anywhere in the world, and we're not even going to tolerate any other nation or alliance or group of nations anywhere to try to join together, to balance against us.

We will be dominant everywhere, and we'll never let anyone get that bar ahead, or at least we're going to try to construct an order where our power is essentially permanent and they don't even try it.

“And so that's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in the Middle East, expanding our footprint in the Eastern Europe, and of course, you know, working hard at least on building their alliances,”

or tightening them and arming their alliances in Eastern Asia, and it's, you know, under the theory that if it's not us, it'll be somebody else, it'll be so much worse, so we have to stay and dominate everything forever. But, of course, you can't look at the debt and just see, well, we can't afford it, so I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep doing this. Right. And if you look at Wolf Woods, if you see Pupa image of Paul Wolf Woods, he looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the Wolf Woods doctrine.

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

So listen, there's a, there's a book about the New York Conservatives by Jacob Hillburn called, they knew they were right.

Which is, of course, right? Like, yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing. Really, you know, that's hilarious. Try this. Right. Oh my little head. Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up and down. So this was a, this is one of the things that when Coleman Hughes and our buddy Dave Smith got into it with was about whether and you remember when they brought up this seven countries thing that, you know, and he was saying that there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it. He was told that we were going to go into seven countries.

You know, I was talking to Dave about this the other day, he was like, I, if you just look at the fact that we did everything on that list except Iran, every single one of them took place except Iran. Like he's like, I really want to go and do that debate again, and I can't get Coleman to sit down with me. Yeah, yes, for people who are interested in this subject, you know, the term, there's no mystery about the connection between the neoconservatives, doctrines and then the activities that the W administration engaged in, you know, subsequent.

I mean, what happened was you have, you know, Andrew Coburn, the Great Journalist Andrew Coburn says that the neoconservatives are across between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex. The fighter bomber salesman needed eggheads to justify their policies, and the neoconservatives wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony. And so, took all the military industrial complex money to build their think tanks to create their consensus to build their policy. You know, their own kind of thousand little accounts of all foreign relations is to get what they want, and then when, you know, the seven countries thing is.

So what we're talking about just to clarify, Wesley Clark was given what was he was on some television show. I forget what the show was.

“Do you remember there's two different statements.”

One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from tomorrow. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And basically what he's talking about is, you know, he says that a general or, I'm sorry, military officer of some rank told then retired, but still with access, former general Wesley Clark, who had been the supreme ally commander of NATO forces in Europe under Bill Clinton did the coast of what war.

And he said, the way he told the story was he told him, hey, you know, they're planned for a war with Iraq. And he said, Iraq, why? And I guess I said, I don't know.

“And then the second part of the story was he came back a week later or something.”

And the same guy said, there's this memo that has the seven countries. And they say they want to take them all in five years. So they, meaning the office of the Secretary of Defense. So that's Donald Rumsfeld, who is not a neoconservative. He's his own separate thing here.

He's the Secretary of Defense.

But all of his guys, all of his most important guys are neoconservative.

So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz. The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is Stephen Kimbone. The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is Douglas Vite. And then under him is Abraham Scholsky and Bill Loody. And all of these guys, Michael Ruben and others, who were all working on this project to get us into Iraq.

And this is the Neoconservative Network of Power. Got Scooter Libby and David Worms are going to travel around from state to defense to the vice-president's office. Scooter Libby and John Hanne and the vice-president's office. He got Zalmi Khalil Zad and Elliot Abrams on the National Security Council Robert Joseph and Stephen Hadley and Eric Edelman. All of these guys were already the network of guys who agreed with this policy going back through the 1990s.

It was what they had founded the project for a new American century on.

“And so what they're saying is we should not tolerate any -- remember the time?”

And this was the state of doctrine. We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports terrorism. And supports terrorism can mean anything, right? Like Abu Nidal died in Iraq before the war even started. And was a washed up old terrorist from a previous day.

But like that's good enough. We got Muja Dini called commentators who've worked for us ever since, but at that time was a good enough excuse to invade Iraq. They would invoke that. And so they made up that doctrine. The Muja Dini were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan?

Well this is a particular sect of Muja Dini Cooks that were Iranian communist cultists who were had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein. And then we're, you know, he supported them.

“They had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism at that time, except, you know, I guess committing it when they had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution.”

But by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them and they've worked for American Israel ever since then. They have a base in Albania now. But in other words though, this was not any real excuse. They were just invoked the doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off this list of all of these governments that they didn't like. And coincidentally and incidentally and very importantly, of course, this was really, in many cases, Israel's list of enemies.

Where if it was a colon pal, which is what people thought they were voting for in the year 2000, by the way. Well I don't know about this W. Bush, but at least colon pal will be up there, we can trust him. They all said, if it had been up to him, we would have done a two-state solution in Palestine and solve that issue. And then we would have had probably the most limited of wars against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And that would have been it.

The rest of it would have been police and/or special forces action. There would have been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war and he's responsible for that. But that was not his policy. That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative set. And it's really, as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the clean brake doctrine, which David Worms are in Richard Pearl.

Oh, I neglected to mention Richard Pearl and his friends on the defense policy board. But Pearl and David Worms had written up this policy paper called a clean brake in 1996, and they wrote it for Netanyahu, when he was first prime minister the first time back then. And what it said was, instead of going along with the Oslo peace process and making a deal with the Palestinians. We should just forget all that and just, we'll have peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors.

And so, but the problem, of course, is, and of course, meaning continue to devour Palestine. What's left, the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.

But the problem is, we have his ball on or northern border.

And his balla is backed by Iran by way of Syria. So if you just picture the Middle East, if you want, you can throw up a map and just kind of show. There's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran through Syria and to Hezbollah, this Shi'at militia in southern Lebanon. Now Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power. But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives.

There's stupid as they are arrogant and certain in their policy. And they believe in this hair-brain scheme, essentially, that the Jordanians and the Turks would be dominant in the news Saddam Hussein less Iraq.

By either their original plan was the Hashemite king, the cousin of the king of Jordan.

And then they threw that out and that was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first place.

And Iraqi exile, you might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalibi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress. They said, "Well, we'll just make him the guy instead," which ended up not happening. But that was their plan and they said, "The new Shi'at dominated Iraq will then, the religious leaders in Iraq. Will then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel instead." And then, even, build an oil pipeline to Heifa, a reopen old British oil pipeline to Heifa Israel.

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

It's called Tyrannys Alley, America's failure to remove Saddam Hussein.

Get that America's the Alley of Saddam, just because we won't launch a war to regime change and they're right in the title.

And then, based on the same hair-brain scheme and what's funny about this is this guy David Worms are now tries to defend himself. And he did an interview on a podcast not too long ago with this born and again Christian about September 11th and stuff. And, but he talked about this and he's like, "Yeah, no, that's still right. They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do, those she has. They just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet."

But if that was true, as Dave Smith pointed out, "Well, then how come you can't just call the King of Jordan right now?" And ask him to ask the eye at all, let a knock it off. Call him and ask, have him ask his balla to stop being friends with Iran. Why couldn't they just don't that this whole time?

“Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad?”

Before you can make this magic wish come true. And the whole thing is completely stupid. And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the prophet Muhammad. But one, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them. And two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites who are Sunnis and a whole separate line

and are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan who used to rule Iraq back 70 years ago or something, but have no purchase there whatsoever. And of course, what happened just real quick? What happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran. They didn't empower Jordan and Turkey and American Israel over the Iraqis.

They just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before. When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the American space. This episode is brought to you by Zipra Cruder. It's good to be passionate about something, exploring what interests you adds more color to your life,

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“Do you think that that is because of total incompetence and stupidity?”

Or do you think that it was a scam? And that they kind of knew this was going to happen in the first place. But what they really wanted to do was sell a lot of weapons, sell a lot of war, make a ton of money. I mean the amount of money that was generated.

How much money did we spend on the Iraq War? Oh, I mean on Iraq alone at least five or seven trillion. I think it was probably 10 trillion for the whole team. Let's stop and think about that. Five or 10 trillion.

Let's just say five. Let's be nice. Yeah. Where's that money going?

“How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that?”

How many defense contractors are involved in lobbyists, policy, influencing change, influencing certain actions? Why would they do that? Why would they push a hair brand screen? Is it because of stupidity or is it because they don't give a fuck what the excuses? Let's get the party started. I think let's get some missiles.

Yeah. Okay. Boom. But okay. So we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced Trump.

This would be easy. And then it wasn't. I think that's the same thing here. Iraq was supposed to be easy. And it was easy after all.

Right. You send the Marines to take Baghdad. They could take it.

The third infantry division in the Marines were done regime changing the place in what five weeks.

But then it was a matter of occupying the place. And the whole thing devolving into civil war and all that. And I think. Well, I'll put it to you like this in the clean break. It might be in coping with crumbling states.

“But it might, yeah, I think it's in coping with crumbling states.”

Which is the same thing. Oh, we back. Sorry with that. We had stupid glitch again. Yeah, this is my room.

Did we get a new computer? I've done everything. Even yeah, I've talked to the company that I'll know. It's mother. Fuckers.

Very good. Oh, yeah. Anyway. Let me. Can I ask you that?

Sure.

So well, on the stupidity of the plan.

I mean, look, plan A is. It'll be fine. And then plan B is. Well, at least we can make some money and push this thing on. And let both sides fight.

And we can each other and these kinds of attitudes. For sure. But that's the point. But they genuinely think that this plan would work, or was this plan just a feasible excuse to talk to them and to get in the party started.

I have one good argument in your favor there for sure, which would be Senator Joe Biden at the time insisted that we break a rock into three. Our great president. Yeah, right there with the worst, that we draw these lines. And essentially enforce ethnic lands that are sectarian cleansing and create three sort of

many states within Iraq. And, you know, Anthony Blinken was his right hand man then. And I mean, that's who these guys are. Very, very much. I mean, Israel first.

Israel instead types. There is something before the clean break called the Odedian on plan.

“From, I believe, 1981, which is a real riot to read.”

And this is really strategist. And the premise of the thing is that the Soviet Union is certain to conquer the entire planet. Talk about one world government. We're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow. And poor little Israel's going to be all alone out here.

So we have no choice to smash every near Arab state into as many warring tribal pieces as we possibly can to weaken all of them relative to us as this desperate strategy. And of course, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the end of the decade. But that was the premise for the thing.

And this, oh, and here's what I was going to say before the glitch was.

There is a statement in, I think it's in coping with crumbling states where he kind of says, Yeah, you know, these states are pretty artificial. And without, you know, the bothtist construct in Iraq and Syria, you would have these smaller tribal based type units. So then, you know, in other words, if you can't have a completely compliant sock puppet there,

might as well make them fight and destroy their countries. And that certainly happened in the case of rock certainly happened in the case of Syria under Obama as well, where they just said, look, if we can't get the al-Qaeda guys to sack Damascus and get rid of Assad, at least we can just destroy the place. Do you think there's a parallel in when we first went into Iraq like Desert Storm?

It was very easy, right, relatively minimal loss of American lives.

“And I think everybody got a little cocky.”

Oh, yeah, that absolute was part of that. Just like what we just saw with Venezuela, it was so easy. And people asked me right after Venezuela, so what do you think this means for Iran? And I was like, bad news, right? Like, nobody thinks we're going to go in there and kidnap the Itola.

But if you put eyeballs on them, you can put a bomb on them. They killed them. Yeah, that's all you got to do. And that didn't even help. Of course, that's like, yeah.

Is it true that whenever they've been negotiating with someone Israel kills them? I think that happened at least a couple of times early in the war, yeah. I mean, that was what they said. In fact, I forget if it was Bansor Trump who said, well, we can't say, I think it was Trump said, we can't say who we're negotiating with because they'll get killed.

And like you're supposed to think that what like hard liners in Iran will kill them for trying to negotiate. But no, this is the Israelis will kill them. Yeah, that is wild. Yeah, that's wild.

That's true. One of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran, we rarely talked about is Ukraine. Yeah, it's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness. It's like they now just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing. And the Ukraine thing is fascinating too because it was one of the few words that I saw leftists support.

It was very interesting. It was like kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from their profiles.

That's good how to joke about that. Did he like, yeah, he starts to have like, hey, invading Ukraine is bad. Can't we all agree on that? Like he really gives him like he like leans on. Can't we all agree that it's bad?

But it wasn't cure for COVID. Yeah. And it was. They just switched from night to day on that. And then yeah, the other thing I look a big part of that is Putin is a great stand-in for Trump.

If you're a angry liberal something, you got to be angry with something. And he represents now where the common turn and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force.

“And so like if not the Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean?”

And they're anti right everything that the Russians are the right. The Ukrainians are the left, but whatever. And Russia is obviously the much larger country.

And the one that invaded that crossed the border first here.

And they are the aggressor in the war. So it's as far as the narrative goes. It's easy to justify sticking up for those, you know, plucky defenders. Which is, you know, I was actually surprised. But I shouldn't have been right when I went to Oxford and lost that debate.

That was who was, it wasn't not that they are leftists, but they're liberals in our progressive type, you know, college kids. And they're just totally on the side of Ukraine. And in fact the question of the debate was, this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world. That's not even debatable.

They've got H bombs. 7,000 of them. And we're not having a war with Russia. I don't even know what you're talking about this. And then, well, I should have made my case better because they did not like me or my case at all. They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that.

That they think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbass, which is just absurd. But I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough.

I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place.

I would barely have to make my case. I just thought I'll just make a H bomb joke, and that'll be the end of that. You know, I said, "How have you ever seen threads of your scene threads?" It's like the British version of the day after. We're Margaret Thatcher gets some nuked in a... No.

It's like moving.

“Yeah, remember the day after from 19th time he was Steve Gutenberg.”

Yeah. So this is the Russians version from the same time frame. Oh. And I was like, "Have you all seen threads?" Which, of course, they haven't there a bunch of little kids.

Well, they probably think it's that social media app. Yeah, right. The Instagram one? Yeah, exactly. We should talk about how this whole thing got started in Ukraine.

Because most Americans don't even realize that the United States kind of overthrew the government there. Yeah, absolutely. Twice in ten years. Yeah. In the orange revolution of 2004 and in 2014. And in fact, you know, George Soros bragged that he had really influenced the vote

toward the pro-Russian candidate in 1994. You know, back ten years before that. He bragged about that in an interview with the New Yorker, Connie Brook in the New Yorker magazine. He said, "Like real estate investment trusts, I make it happen with my investments." Yeah.

And so, yeah. And look, I mean, Russia and Ukraine have a long and difficult history. But the long and the short of it for our purposes is that they wanted out at the end of the Soviet Union. And in fact, even embarrassingly for the Republicans. George Bush, senior in his government, even intended the USSR to stay together.

They wanted not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to Belarus and Ukraine and at least some of the stands. And what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet Union. The most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it. And it was actually in the aftermath of a hard-line communist coup in August of 1991, which failed.

And so, it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day, but then ended up doing his own coup, basically. And just destroying what was left of the USSR and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out.

“So, why did the United States get involved in Ukraine and why did the stage of coup?”

Well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since. Right, and so back to the Wolfowitz doctrine. And they talked about this in rebuilding America's defenses. The Peenak strategy document from the 1990s, 1998, I guess. And I believe in the defense planning guidance of that he wrote in 1992.

Wolfowitz, that we got to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. And this is the debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not. But, and in fact, in the neither, some people who opposed expansion altogether.

But then there was another school thought there just said, "Well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in, but then they never did."

And so they ended up expanding the military alliance up to Russia's border in a threatening manner in a way that did not include them at all.

or yes, security and cooperation in Europe, where those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO. We're NATO would be more political. This is what James Baker and under H.B. Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians. So we're going to make NATO a political organization, and we're going to have, as a security organization, it'll be the OSEE or the PFP, which will include you guys, and which was not true.

They're basically never really meant to live up to those promises.

So it's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America had lost the Cold War from all the spending in the 1980s, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe, and then they started moving into the Caribbean, and then they started overthrowing the government in Canada when they voted wrong.

“And this is Ukraine's Russia's Canada. Right, Kazakhstan's their Mexico, Ukraine's their Canada. It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but it's the same difference here.”

And so that narrative gets lost here. Yes, it does. But it's weird because it's so obvious when you lay it out like that, and when you look at the agreement that was made at the fall of the Soviet Union, that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of Russia, and yet they consistently did that. Absolutely. And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second, because people dispute that and say it's not true, but it is true.

In fact, H.W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in Malta in December of 1989, that if you let the Eastern European war saw pact, states go, not the Soviet republics, but the war saw pact states. If you let them go, we promise not to take advantage, like full stop. That's it. 100% and then from there, and I cover all this in my book provoked, and it's even overkill on the research, because I wouldn't sure where to stop. So it's all there for you, where it wasn't just on February the 9th. It was all of these meetings over the course of months, where the Americans, the British, and especially the Germans, but with the American standing right there, in many cases too,

affirm to the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians, over and over again, that we are not coming. We are not going to integrate Poland. We're not going to integrate Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, Chedens Blitapart, yet. And we have no intention to do in that, and that was, you know, came from Hans Dietrich Gensher, the former minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmet Cole, the chancellor, Margaret Thatcher, and John Mayger, the primeisters of England, Douglass Hurd, therefore in minister, and even Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, and along with George Bush's government, over and over again, promised them that we're not going to do this.

And then they just went ahead anyway, and the Clintons went along with it too, and in fact, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it.

And by the way, so when all of the anybody in that era, on America side or on the west side, whenever they opposed this, it was always for one reason.

There was no variety of reasons. There's always one reason. This is a unnecessary provocation against the Russians.

“These are our friends who just overthrew the Communists for us. So why would we pick a fight with them? Why would we disrespect them?”

We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the west, into Europe, into everything. And this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic. That was the one and only reason. And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kenan, who had coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s. And you know, had been ambassador in Moscow, and he was the one who said, we got a contained communism. Well, now he's saying, we should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't do anything.

And he said, in fact, in an interview in the New York Times in 1998, Kenan said, and he was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so-called foreign policy great beers. And he told Thomas Friedman the New York Times, because I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen here, okay? We're going to expand NATO right up close to Russia, and we're going to get a negative reaction from the Russians.

And then as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us that will never happen, don't worry about it.

“We'll then say, aha, see, that's how the Russians are. That's why we have to do this, which is exactly what they say now. See, the Russians are coming. That's why we need NATO more than ever before.”

When it was building up NATO more than ever before was what created this antagonistic relationship in the first place. And then, you know, and I should specify, I am from Austin, Texas. I don't have any connection of Russia whatsoever. I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever, as has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever. This is like whatever. What can I say? I've reluctantly admit that, and I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for war, but I'm saying that this is true, essentially,

but it turns out that no, it just became a colony of the United States of America. It's totally controlled by America.

So, but we're just not going to stand for that. You know, so we're going to intervene. We're going to do what we have to do at least to mitigate that. If America is still going to control Kiev, then at the very least, we're going to control the Donbass and the South Eastern coast here. And so, I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm saying that was essentially true. That America had, you know, almost like it was a British colony, just had total sock puppets in charge of that country.

In fact, there's a clip that I quote extensively, at least one of the only block quotes in my book, because I got rid of almost all them for space.

“But I think I have the block quote of Victoria Newell in testifying, that's Robert Cagan's wife, very important neoconservative,”

worked in Dick Cheney's office in the W. Bush years and everything, helped, you know, cause all of this problem.

And she goes on and on describing the level of, what can you call the infiltration, essentially, of the Ukrainian government by the United States. She says, we have our people, State Department people, and who are working at every level of the Ukrainian government. Throughout their police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch, throughout, you know, and out in the provinces and everywhere, we're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country.

And you know, the WikiLeaks are very beneficial on this story, because they show where the Americans understand clearly, by the Americans, I mean, Washington, the State Department, whatever these guys, that they know good and well that Ukraine is deeply divided, especially politically on questions like whether they should join the NATO alliance or whether they rather be closer to Russia. Try to split the difference and stay out of it or anything like that. And so they say, well, so we just have to push them, which has to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda campaigns.

It will just have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes. And essentially, it's America, you know, that the book is called, sorry, I keep mentioning the book. It's how Washington provoked how Washington started the new Cold War and the catastrophe in Ukraine. I'm not blaming on Kiev. I'm blaming it on essentially buscing your through Joe Biden that they, all of them, had such a ham-handed Russia policy that it led to this. It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day.

When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible.

Of course. But no one gave any background. No one really talked about and made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet Union or Russia rather took over Canada, you know, or was proxy in Canada. Yeah, exactly. Or if they went back at all, they would go, well, you know, this all started when Russia sees Crimea. But of course, they sees Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government and the so-called revolution of dignity in February of 2014. So then it's a complicated mess. But Crimea happened after that, but they just want to start history at places where it's the most convenient for them.

“And there's also the control of Ukraine is also connected to resources, right?”

I mean, there's immense amounts of minerals, natural gas. There's trillions of dollars of that stuff there. And this also connects Parisma to the Biden administration, right? Yes. So like I would not buy anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people, for our better men or anything like that. Only as Ross Paro called them, the special interests, right? Chevron wants that oil and car guilt and archer Daniels, Midland and Monsanto have investments in those grains.

And so this is about them, but that didn't necessarily us. You look at, you know, whatever benefit they have to our GMP or GEP is negligible, certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that. These are all the free riders. These are, you know, the excuse makers for this kind of policy, but essentially, I think what it really is is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible.

“And, you know, like there's this really important Rand Corporation study that was published in 2019.”

So the Rand Corporation is a Pentagon sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara. They put it in California, so it would be somehow a little bit less political, little insulated from East Coast stuff and be able to come up with their thing, but that's that's basically who they are. So of all the think tanks there, like the most directly connected to the Pentagon itself. And they came up with this thing, it's called extending Russia. And by extending Russia, they mean overextending them, in other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves right during the Cold War.

They said maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again, which they actually did in 2020. They had done it before in 2005 and 2001 failed all three times.

Which if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right there. And, you know, want to succeed in, especially a bloody, if it turned bloody a coup and Belarus, my God. But anyway, then they said, we could increase weapons to the Jihadists in Syria. We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan. We could increase support for the Ukrainian military.

“And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying, do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off balance, to keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend, right?”

But then all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers, where they say, don't listen to us, if you do this, it'd be terrible, like if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just invade it immediately. And stations nuclear weapons there to make the point, right? If we support the Jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the idlib province and sack Damascus, and that we'd have an al-Qaeda government in Damascus, which, of course, exactly what happened at the end of 2004.

They said, we could increase support for what was in the ongoing civil war that have broken out after the revolution in 2014, and we could increase support for the Ukrainian side of that, or the Kiev side of that war.

But then that could provoke the Russians into a full-scale invasion of the country, which would of course be terrible for Belarus, I mean for Ukraine, and terrible for the United States.

But massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international standing at prestige, and, of course, untold chaos for the people of Ukraine. And so we'd better be real careful about pursuing these policies, and then I swear you look at how Biden ran things, and it was like, he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers, and they just went ahead and did all of these things. And in fact, they were messing around, it was actually the last year of Trump that they tried to overthrow Belarus, so that was independent of Biden's wishes, that was already going on.

And then they were messing around in Kazakhstan, in January of 22, right on the evil war, right when you might have hoped that the entire pressure in Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from breaking out.

“What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin to try to prevent him from invading Ukraine? Is it threatening to do?”

And we're building up their forces in preparation for it. And then what they do, they support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is, that's the big one.

Right on Russia's southern border there, out of all the stands, it's the most important one, which is just madness, and it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to.

When it comes to that is just, you know, if we can't overthrow Putin, we're going to still weaken him, hemaments, surround him, agitate him and force him to make commitments. And of course, this is why the war has been going on for four years. America could tell Kiev, under Biden or under Trump, that look, you guys are just going to have to compromise here, obviously. You've lost, you know, all of Lohans can most have done yet, can, you know, at least half of Zaproja and Kerson. And so just make a deal, figure it out, and we're not supporting you anymore.

“Instead, what they say, remember they said, over and over again, we want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Russia might win the war, or, but no, we promise they won't, but yeah, but if it takes a long time good.”

And in fact, I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits and all of these people would say, and maybe they still say this, we're getting such a good bang for our buck in Ukraine, because just think about it. Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not. So all we got to do is we just give him money and then they go fight. And sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian soldiers at all hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed hundreds of thousands of whom have been horrifically maimed.

Major part of this country completely destroyed huge segments of their population fleeing the country's refugees, many of whom to never come home again, right, the total destabilization of their culture and society in every way. And then, but you can tune into Fox News or hell, the Democrats, too, talking about maybe worse, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck because we're killing Russians, we're sending them home and body bags, we're sending them home and coffins, we're even killing their generals in the field, but none of our guys are dying.

I don't know what that is. Oh, on South Park, the poor, I think it's butters, the underpants-nomes are stealing somewhere and they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work and they don't really have it worked out what they're going to do with the underpants, but they're sure they're going to make a lot of money in the end.

“And that's the same kind of thing here where they skip the step about, well, is this really weakening Vladimir Putin's regime or maybe it's strengthening his regime? Is it, you know, increasing American power and influence in the region?”

Or in fact, we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves. And we've done more than, you know, you could have imagined to push Russia towards China and toward the rest of Eurasia, you know, Joe Biden essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization and to emphasize their turn to the east. That seems to me to be a terrible mistake, you know, and I think part of it is part of the longer term cold war with China too. And you hear them talk about this, Joe, they'll say, you know, essentially Russia's friends with China. So there's two things we can do there. And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do would be just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China. Maybe he's already decided to late for that or he doesn't know how.

And then the other side was no lure Russia into eastern Europe bogged them down so there no use to China.

You know, weaken their power, give, inflict them on them the strategic defeat and Ukraine so that then they won't be as useful to China in our Cold War with them or worse.

“And which I think is stupid and didn't work. I think that was the choice that Joe Biden made. And I think it was totally wrong, because it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China.”

The Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened, well, not that new about 12 years ago, that they opened to China and they keep adding to it. So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want and the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got. So, you know, they really don't need Europe.

Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe, totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.

The blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this. This was to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe. Yeah, in fact, more specifically, right, it was to to make this break between to solidify the break between Germany and Russia. It's the previous German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She had this project. She called Eurasian home and and what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in Europe. And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff.

All the green movement, you know, environmental stuff that closed down all their nuclear in Germany and then the idea was don't worry. We're going to import all this clean burning CH4 from the Russians.

“And then, but to the Americans, this is the worst thing that could happen would be an alliance or this strengthening any any part of any strengthening relationship or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians.”

Because with, you know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials and both of their at least potential military strength that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep everybody else out.

And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there. And, you know, there's here in Austin. There's that sort of corporate CIA Strat for run by this guy George Friedman.

What is it? Strat for it stands for strategic forecasting. They do 30 tricks. Yeah, that's here in Austin. Oh, no. They do some dirty tricks, but I think they mostly like do like, you know, pseudo CIA briefings for corporations and stuff. Let them know what's going on in the world. That kind of thing. Mostly, their emails got leaked on wikilyks.org years ago. And, you know, they're involved. They're, they're close with some of these color-coded revolutionaries. And anyway, I don't know them or anything, but their leader is a guy named George Friedman.

And I'll give him credit. I know he opposed a rock war two in 2003 because I heard him on the radio back then. But, I mean, I'm not vouching for the guys like a good guy or whatever, but just to say he sort of like a realist school foreign policy analyst type. Not too ideological or anything like that. And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words, "Prymordial fear." This is the primordial fear of American imperial policy planners. He said you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russians.

And so anything that we can do to prevent that will do. Now, I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at least the support of the United States.

And there's six different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it was used and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever. And it's all meant to confuse. And but this episode is brought to you by visible. Oh, spring is in the air, which means time for some spring cleaning. We're cleaning out the garage and finally tossing those mystery cords. But while you're cleaning out your junk drawer, take a look at your wireless bill. Don't fall for wireless traps tacked on fees, confusing bills and empty promises. Join visible and cut out the nonsense with visible. You get unlimited 5G data and hotspot on Verizon's network for one flat cost just 25 dollars a month taxes and fees included.

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The bottom line is more nobody wants to know right see more herish. What did he say happened he said that it was.

Miners based out of Pensacola floater. Meaning not pick ax minors or children, but meaning.

“Divers that go down and disable sea mines that that was their expertise those with the guys that they sent to do it. And that was in I think he did that in the lender review books or something like that is that disputed.”

Yeah, and including by people who blame the Ukrainians and people who blame. I don't know like Polish or I guess Polish groups whatever they had all these different investigations that all lead different directions. I don't share me. I think Jeremy scale had one version of it and then James Bamford who I really respect he's the guy that wrote all the books about the national security agency over the years. And he had it that it was the Ukrainians and they used robots to do it and he's you know, such that out through documents and stuff and decided that that must have been what had happened.

So I don't know. There's there's six different versions of it. And I have not choosing which is the favorite here. I think it's clearly was in America's interest.

And of course Joe Biden and Victoria Newell and have both sort of cheekily said we're not going to let this proceed. And if they do, we will do whatever it takes to stop it. And so evidently they did. And you can see how they would consider that to be, you know, what they would be trying to prevent would be this strength and relationship.

“That's when Jeremy Trash has going now. So just pouring right into the ocean. Well, eventually they kept it. But I think it was the biggest release of methane into that atmosphere ever.”

It was a huge thing. It was a massive if you were a liberal progressive Democrat environmentalist type. That ought to be like the most offensive thing you ever heard of. Yeah, that's way worse than cow burps. Oh, yeah. And they're worried about cow burps.

Yeah, it's centuries worth the cow burps.

centuries worth. Jesus. So the Kazakhstan Kazakhstan thing I never heard of.

I hadn't heard of people about that. I had no idea that we were meddling in Kazakhstan. Yeah, it was one of those where much like what just happened in Iran and January where there's protest over some economic policy. I think in that case they had cut the gas ration or something like that. And it's, you know, it's a country that's divided by ethnicity. Those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever. So you have sort of the ruling cast and the people on the out.

So whatever. So you had a big protest movement and then all of a sudden there's arm gangs of guys. Killing cops, season police stations trying to seize airports and this kind of thing. And, and then what happened was the Russians invaded. They sent regular troops across and they were asked by the government there to come an interview. They sent troops. They crushed the insurrection and then it was funny because Anthony Blinken said, oh, there's a lesson when the Russians come.

They don't ever want to leave and then the next day they turn around and left and then they invaded Ukraine. They haven't left there since. But so yeah, who were these insurrection? I don't know.

“I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or something, you know?”

I don't know. Yeah, them too. And so this whole thing was just what you were saying earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible. Spend as much money as possible causes many problems in as many places as possible. And in fact, the same George Freeman from Stratford.

I think it's in that same speech or maybe a different one where he says,

When Russia is doing better, you hit them. When China is achieving a thing or two, you hit them.

You do whatever you can to always be up and with everybody all the time.

“And in order to, you know, that's how to press your advantage, which I think is totally just short side.”

It's a high time preference, you know, sort of government thinking, right? That like, well, if we can get away with this now, we should without really thinking about the long-term consequence. In fact, that was one of the things that failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up, that I thought was crucial. That is in my book is a strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton's guy who originally opposed NATO expansion. And then later championed it in 2018 when it was the middle of the war, the civil war, so called,

for the America supporting Kiev and the Russian supporting the so-called rebels on the other side. New York Times reporter named Keith Gesson went and interviewed Strobe Talbot. And it just kind of went without saying that, like, clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO expansion has sort of blown up and caused all these problems.

“You know, what are we going to do? And what do you think now, Paul? I forgot exactly what he phrase of is sort of, you know, what do you have to say for yourself, Strobe?”

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

Maybe. In other words, at the time what they were thinking is, we want Lockheed Dollars and we want Polish votes for 1996, Illinois's Crucial Swing State, right? So, or was, I don't know if it's so.

“So, that's why we got to do this, because it's in America's national interests that Bill Clinton get re-elected, and we all get to keep our jobs.”

So, we're going to make these promises to these people and pursue this policy for our narrow interests as rulers of the empire. But then, if he had had a higher wiser conception of America's national interests, he might have thought, wow, are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century? Maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important than America continuing to get along with the Russians. And again, when the communists are long gone, so whatever problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't evangelical Marxism at the point of a rifle, right?

I mean, this is just whatever it is, we can deal with it. And so, no, they chose the lower-dummer conception of America's national interests instead of the higher wiser one, and they blew it, you know? Is there anyone that's ever made the argument to you, like where you've had these debates, where you have a utopian perspective on international relations, and that this libertarian ideology of like staying out of people's business, staying out of the, what you'll do, if you don't fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them stretched out, they'll just amass more and more power, and then they'll start to try to take over what was traditionally the Soviet Union.

Yeah, you know, it just so happens, right, that America never leaves anybody alone, so we just don't have a controlled experiment, right?

You're constantly provoking, and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction. And just like when we talk about terrorism, again, I'm not in any way justifying it, but I'm just saying, we have so much intervention preceding the terrorism, you have to be able to attribute that. Now, so how would things be otherwise, for example, if H.W. Bush had just said, okay, well, we won the Cold War, Pat Buchanan's right, let's just come home, and had brought the empire home from Europe. Then what would happen is the Germans would have re-unified, and then they would have joined into a new European Union army with the British and the French and probably the polls, and then it would have been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller countries in their region,

and hopefully strike a long term security partnership with the new Red White and Blue Republican Russians. And, you know, if people want to say, but in fact, the other side in that debate at Oxford, Daniel Fried said, yeah, but it was polling, wanted to join our lines. It's not like we made them, they wanted to, but the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia based on old things, but the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence? It's too far from here, and it's something that we're no good at, we only cause problems, and something that the other European states who are all Western, Christian, capitalist democracies and friends of ours, that they can all work together and solve on their own.

There's no reason a world that America should have had to have, for example, like the big part part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power between America and Germany, over who's going to be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. We should just let the Germans have it, or I mean, not have it in kill everybody or whatever, but got it, it hardly have been worse than what America helped cause there, by trying to compete with the Germans for dominance in a land that's quite literally 6,000 miles from here.

But it's the fear from the American side that if you let other countries consolidate power, if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keep it in spread out, like we're doing with Russia, that they'll eventually get stronger and then they'll become a real problem.

And they keep them weak, keep them distracted, keep them engaged in this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up, and that keeps them down.

It's like this, when it was the Cold War against the Communist Soviet Union, I was a kid, and it's not an expert on all of that history.

“I think there were real questions about the dangers of world communism at that time, where at least I'd be willing to hear you out.”

But since the end of the Cold War, no, there's just no justification for it, because as Bill Hicks would say, right, like just spin the globe, and there's no countries out there, right? Every power in Europe is our friend, and no threat to us, a mean us, no harm whatsoever. There are no powers in Egypt, I mean, part of me in Africa that counted all except for Egypt, which is our friend, India will be a power in a hundred years from now. China is a rising power, but we've been there friends for 50 years, even when they were still communist, Nixon went and made friends with them in the early 1970s.

So we at Union, but I think constantly infiltrating our different universities and, well, I ain't endorsing that, you keep them out, but it's not infiltrations kind of crazy, like what they're doing in America.

It's like, if you're saying there are friends, you know, the mayor of Arcadia just got stuck to that.

She was a communist spy, she's a fucking mayor of a city in California. I'm putting that on the FBI counter intelligence division. That should have never been allowed to happen in the first place. And no, I don't mean that they're totally benign, but, look, worst case scenario, China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates Taiwan. That doesn't mean they're going to invade Korea. It doesn't mean they're going to invade Japan or Australia or have the appetite to want to do that.

“I think China's already a pretty overextended empire and it's very poor and many parts of it. And they have something, is it 14 or 15 neighbors that they got to do with already.”

You know, their greatest ambition is to build this highway and fiber optics and whatever from Shanghai to Lisbon.

Right? Why am I forgetting the name of the damn thing? The great new highway, they're trying to build all the way across your Asia.

They can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. They can cut through Tajikistan. You know, these are wildlands. They're going to make deals the whole way across if they're going to do that. You know, they're, and if you look at the way they're building their empire so far, it's all just brief cases, you know. Right. Government backed businesses making deals and buying up resources and stuff. But I, I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden going,

“Yeah, that's what I want to do for my country is blow my own brains out trying to take over the whole rest of the planet earth.”

Well, and you know, you know, just to point to what you're saying, it's like China's not invading anybody. They're not doing what we're doing. And I'm not saying they're nice guys or whatever, but they don't rule us and they're no threat to North America. They have no need to pick a fight with us. People say, oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan. Well, then move them to Austin. We've had advanced microdevices here for 30 years or whatever, 35 years. Maybe more than that. They can build that stuff here.

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

No, no, no, no. They're just way ahead of everybody else. I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a chip manufacturing plant in Texas. And I think their yields were so poor. I don't know what the actual store with that is. So, I'm speaking way over my pay scale here.

And they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve, despite spending an enormous amount of money.

So, it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there. You just crank out chips. Like apparently these chips are super complicated to make. Sure. Not worth it.

Not worth it. No, not worth it. Not saying it's worth hardly worth it. But I'm just saying that this idea just move them to Austin. I don't think it's that easy.

“I think chip manufacturing is one of the most complex technological challenges in 2026.”

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we've had, I don't know what all the AMD does here. But I'm pretty sure that that them and Samsung and others have, you know, all the facilities they need here to do it. I don't think that's quite true. Or they should be able to. They maybe could with enough resources and time.

And maybe stole all the fucking eggheads from Taiwan and bring them over here. All the geniuses that have figured out how to make chips. Maybe, maybe they wouldn't let them. But what happened with the Samsung chip factory?

It's never been fully open and it's not done yet.

Oh, okay. But what was there was-- I used to be a renocop at some pretty fancy factories here, you know, back 25 years ago. Oh, yeah. What kind of factories?

I think it would have been AMD or Android Samsung. It's a pretty fancy, like, chip fabrication and stuff like that. Well, let's ask for aplexity. Let's ask-- And I did have a job being a renocop because he escaped parking garages at work and do my homework at work.

It was great. Yeah, easy job for the most part, right? Just free time.

“Let's ask for aplexity. Why are all the wires so many chip manufacturers in Taiwan?”

Because I'm pretty sure there's something about the advancements they've made

in chip manufacturing that no one's been able to replicate. Well, there was it doesn't make sense that China wouldn't just make their own. Yeah. Like, they're right there. I read this thing not long ago about how, like, with the China's AI stuff,

they figured out how to write their program where they need much less computing power to do the same kind of effort in the way that they did it. So you just found their own work around. Yeah. Well, they also-- there's a lot of SP announced going on too.

Yeah, probably. A lot of the world's chip manufacturers isn't Taiwan because the island deliberately built a specialized ecosystem around contract chip fabrication foundries then compounded that early lead with huge investment, dense clustering of suppliers and talent and strong government support over several decades. So early strategic bet on manufacturing, starting in the 1980s,

Taiwan chose to focus on precision manufacturing, fabricating chips for others. Instead of trying to build its own big consumer tech brands. And then their dominance in scale. Yeah. Founded in 87 other words, leading contract, TSMC, the leading contract chip manufacturer produces over

half of the world's advanced semiconductors. And more than 90% of the most cutting edge nodes. Because of advanced phabs, because advanced phabs cost tens of billions of dollars, and must run near full capacity to be profitable. Only a few players can keep up, and Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out.

See, that's what I'm talking about. I don't think it's easy. The biggest thing was that no customers as well kept popping up. What is that? There are no customers.

I mean, the thing is at the same time. The huge problem delays, because there's no one to buy them. Well, why not? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it was a customer capacity.

And it's a lot probably. We got Samsung and Dell and AMD and IBM here. Seems like they can invest their own money and build their own whatever they need to. Right? Right.

But just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved and keeping it running.

“I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of expertise.”

Not that I have any. But they're so far ahead that this process that they bet on early on, that they've got their manufacturing to this point where they've already invested this enormous amount of money. And the money, and they have to keep them running constantly. I don't think it's simple.

I don't think it's like car made. And then you know, by no customers, you mean that essentially everybody needs these chips. It's already getting them from Taiwan. There's not much more demand than that. Well, not necessarily.

It could just mean that they already have contracts that they don't need them because they've already, you know, made commitments to Taiwan chip manufacturers. If Beijing is a military threat to Taiwan. And these people would rather not be under the rule of Beijing.

There is, but again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step.

I don't think it's just like move here.

“I think it's an enormous investment in capital, like beyond normal things.”

And then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment. And it's very difficult. And again, if Samsung doesn't have any, if right now, they don't have any customers. Didn't they have an issue with yields though? Wasn't there an issue with chips being made to standard?

I think there was something else on top of that. I didn't see anything, but they're trying to get to two nanometer production. They started on trials, and then there's rumors about why they have not moved to mass production. And that's all these articles are saying. Well, the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year.

Let's just cut all that.

Then we'll have plenty of capital freed up to the larger market for you.

They're not going to do that. Who needs a little empire? Hey, look, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is that empires good for nothing anyway. All right, we have H bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us.

“But America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt, right?”

That whole thing was a hollow bluff. And the Iranians just called it. And we lost. I mean, our bases have been evacuated. They keep coming out.

I know you, I think you talked about this on a show. Right. How they were covering up the satellite photos. They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos. And you could get them online, whatever other countries had them.

And then you've had the New York Times and I hate to sight CNN, but it was a well-source story. Where they got all these great satellite photos and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched 18 bases from herbal and northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman. And took out all radar stations and pitted our runways, hit refueling tankers and AWACs radar planes. And took out the entire, not the entire, but a huge percentage of the overlapping radars.

For the missile defense systems over there. Left our allies in Saudi cutter, UAE, Bahrain, wide open. You know, our naval fifth fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline. I read this thing said the Qataris are main air base in the Middle East. The headquarters of Central Command and our main air base at cutter.

The Qataris made a deal with Iran. Please stop hitting us. And they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of cutter. Our main air base during that war. And so as Justin Logan from the Kato Institute said,

"Well, what could it be a military base that you can't fight a war from?" You know, it's just like that, I know you see this, right, that old meme.

“Well, if Iran doesn't want trouble with us, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases?”

And it has all the map of all our bases in the region. The thing is Donald Trump, I guess, didn't understand was that those were a trip wire that were essentially, we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war. Those bases were preventing war because it should have been out of the question that we would attack Iran, because all those bases would be up for grabs against them.

So how would they survive? How would they survive? Poorly defended. That's what I understand. Like how was it so easy for Iran to attack these bases?

And did they have any four knowledge of this? Did they understand? Oh, yeah. So why they were so poorly defended? That's got to be political decision making among the brass, right, about like,

what we don't want to admit that we need these sort of occasions in the first place,

maybe, or just the other general said, don't. So we don't want to fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what? I just don't know. No good investigation. It's not a good investigation.

I can't be because, listen, I'll tell you man, in January of 2007, the chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon. And they told him, look, we'll do your rock surge where we increase the war in Iraq. But we really don't want to go to Iran. And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance,

or at least we won't have it. I shouldn't have said that, I was overseeing it. We will not have escalation dominance there. And that means that, you know, it's a Pentagon term for if we're going to get into a fight, we don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage of that conflict. And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right?

As Paul Wolfe would said, Iraq is doable. In the case of Iran, they have most importantly of all. A short and medium-range missile force that we cannot defend from. Now, we can defend from it. Some, we have our Patriot missiles and our other type of interceptors.

But they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can protect from.

and then plus still, as we still do, tens of thousands, Air Force and Army in Kuwait,

“Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain.”

I guess Air Force and Army in UAE, and I didn't know in Oman, but, of course, in Oman, they had, you know, some naval presence there as well. So, and they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs, and then the straight of Hormuz will also be at risk. And in fact, it's true.

At anti-war.com, you can find in the archives there. I wrote an article in August of 2005 called, "Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran?" And I say, in there, they can close the straight, and they can inflict economic damage, drive the cost of a barrel of oil, above $200 a barrel, and all of that.

So, there were people lost some art of the me who were writing about that at the time, that I was interviewing on my show at the time, who we're just saying, "Look, we can start a war with Iran, but we don't really have a good way to finish one." And so, and we talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in the sect too, but point being that you want to do a regime change.

As you just said, you killed the eye at all.

It doesn't do any good. They have a new eye at all. You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the eye at all. But then they'll just appoint a new ruling council.

“So then you can dump in the 80-second airborne division,”

but they can't occupy and control Tehran. There's no good land route to invade the country. They have two massive mountain ranges. And one of those preposterous narratives was getting the people to rise. Oh, yeah.

We're going to arm up some Kurds. Yeah. Yeah. Not just the Kurds. They were trying to get just the Iranian civilians.

Yeah. But no arms. Yep. And they'll talk about, you know, arming the Kurds and arming the Belukis, which I don't know if there are other factions,

but that seems to be a direct reference to groups like John Dahla, who the Obama and the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed about 15 years ago, who were bin Ladenite head choppers to a side bomber guys. They're, you know, no different from Al-Qaeda or ISIS.

And they, you know, John Bolton on Pierce Morgan, that the same show that I was on was saying, "Yeah, we could arm up the Belukis." And stuff is crazy. I actually wrote in that article at that time,

the Neocons Daydream that if we just start the war, then the people will rise up and create a new pro-American government there. But that's crazy to bet on that. There's no reason to believe that. And so, and there's video of me in 2010,

worn in the same thing. And I'm not claiming any great insight. I didn't go to college, man. I just, you know, I'm interested in this stuff and I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about it at the time.

And it was just complete consensus. Everybody knew. They can reach out and, and boy, over 20 years, I must have said this a thousand times. It's not only hit all of our military stuff in Iraq, in Kuwait,

in Bahrain and Qatar, etc., Saudi, etc., but a trillion dollars of economic targets all up and down that Gulf, which is exactly what they did. They hit refineries. They hit chemical plants.

They hit not just at the street of horror movies. They hit American Oldtankers up near Kuwait. Just to show that, like, we poem this entire thing now. So, back to my original point when I got on this tangent, was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt.

Donald Trump just blew his big bluff. That we're the big player in the region. We're actually not in the region. We're here. The region is over there.

And the entire, you know, threat of our dominance over there is basically call.

I mean, obviously, we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even nukes and all that.

“But can the leaders in Bahrain in Qatar and UAE and Saudi rely on America to defend them?”

Right. Well, they've got to come up with their own different policy now. Have we also used up, like, two thirds of our Patriot missile supply? Oh, yes. I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot.

And they're admitting now that the Iranians still have 70, 75% of all their missiles and launchers. All that stuff about, we decimated everything they had was all just. They're admitting that. Who's admitting that? Government officials talking to the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last three days.

Yeah. Oh, I hadn't. 70, 75% they got all their launchers, all their missiles. They dug out missiles that had been buried. They refurbished some and finished some that were on the assembly line.

That was what they told the post. They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went ahead and restarted up again. And don't they have some crazy, like, missile elevator system where they're, they're very deep underground. I don't know how it works exactly, but yeah, they, and even they have apparently like the factories are very deep underground as well. And just disperse throughout the country. And so they've been preparing for something like this for a long time.

Yeah. And so these bases that we had are all of them non functional, all the ones that have been hit. I don't think so. I don't know the exact extent of that, but as far as they're usefulness over the long term,

Let's see what the conventional news says.

New York Times and CNN have two big profiles on this. I don't know off the top my head better stuff than that. The CNN with one, oh, an NBC also had had one within. The CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks. The New York Times is about six weeks old, maybe.

One of the things that disturbed me to know, and we talked about this a couple of times the podcast, was there was one of the guys who was over there who attended a briefing. And they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon and that Trump was anointed by Jesus Christ and that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return. And that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing.

And then the guy had a, whoever this officer was, it was talking about this said that the guy had a giant smile on his face. When he was telling this, which made it all the more creepy. Oh, good. The end of the world. Nobody wants to die alone, right? But they were saying that there's a faction in the military.

That is these religious fundamentalists that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus's return. So look, there's a guy named Commander Claim Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify Iran strikes. So there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein. This is a little bit, look at this. It's just over this real quick.

Yeah, this is so crazy. Because this go up to the top, please. Right there. So no, but the top. So it's where it says who it was.

So it's a military commander told a group of non-commissioned officers that President Donald Trump anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth. Yeah. And then that's, that's Mikey Weinstein right there. The military religious freedom foundation.

“He was, I believe he was an Air Force officer, maybe as an Army officer.”

And then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military. And it's been a long time since I spoke to him. But he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of the Air Force, the highest ranks of the Air Force. They really believe this stuff. It is time to bring on that apocalypse.

And it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nuke so that they can use them according to the divine plan. It is scary stuff. People need to know this. So go back to that please because there's one quote that's below that. This is, this is so fascinating.

He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan. And he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of revelations. Referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He imagined if you're over there, you already think the war is sketchy. Like why the fuck are we doing this?

And then this guy comes down and you're like, oh my God, we're cooked. That's a big part of how they justify Iraq. I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible. Get it? Middle East?

Your 2000 sort of ish. This is how you're going to get raptured up to heaven in your body.

“And all you have to do is support this aggressive war.”

And all this magic stuff is going to come true. And in fact, this is why there's such a massive crash in evangelical support for Israel and these kind of foreign policies. Now, it's because people just don't believe that anymore because that's with the left behind series at Wal-Mart.

It's said 25 years ago and then it never happened.

It didn't come true. It's being another one-world government and all this stuff. Where's Satan? Where's the deal? Instead, it's just Obama and Trump.

You know? So how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing? Because JD Vance, very against it. A lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it. Just what the fuck happened?

I think that Netanyahu essentially, you know, all this talk about four dimensional chess and whatever. I think what it is is it's just checkers, right? Is Netanyahu goes listen. For Iran to have a civilian nuclear program.

Come on. That's just cover for really a weapons program. It's just a stage in a weapons program. We know eventually they're going to make nukes and then they're going to attack Israel with them. And we also know that and you already said that you're not going to let them have nukes.

Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes. Same difference. And you already agreed to that, right? Right. Okay.

Well, and they won't give up enrichment. So what do we do? We got attack. It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapon scare in Syria there. Once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone.

And now like we gotcha on this technicality, double jump. You already agreed with the stupid things I said.

“And so now you have to do the thing that I said.”

And then Trump goes, okay. And then plus on top of that, just the flattery. And like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing.

Back when he was on Twitter and his first term, I used to tweet at him.

And I would say wealth, strength, gold.

Hight, power.

“And we're like, just tell them things that he likes, right?”

With get out of Afghanistan in the middle.

And so this is what Netanyahu does. As he goes, listen, you're greater than Abraham Lincoln. You're greater than George Washington. You're a world historical figure. You're sure to go to heaven now.

You're like if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in 1935 and prevented that whole thing from ever happening. But you're just guessing that this is how he talked. Well, kind of, but wouldn't be awesome. Because he keeps a lot of it.

Oh, it would be great. But he repeats so much of it back that I think that, like, yeah, you could pretty much tell. This is what they're saying to him. And then this is what he's responding is Obama wasn't man enough to do it. George Bush wasn't man enough to do it.

He knows what has to be done. He's willing to do it.

And he's ill informed enough to believe that it makes any sense that if you just bomb

their nuclear program that somehow it'll go away. If you just hit him hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say. It doesn't work like that. It oftentimes does not work like that. And with these guys, they've made it clear that we're not making bombs.

But we absolutely reserve our right to enrich your name for peaceful purposes. And we will suffer your airstrikes. We will not give up that right. And so that's it. And they've been completely clear about that this entire time.

But Netanyahu convinced him. Right? This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormus was not at risk. Because Netanyahu convinced him once we hit him. Once he killed I had told it, the whole thing's going to fall apart.

There will be no one too close to Strait of Hormus. Because we'll have already won by then.

“But what do you think happens if you run does get nuclear weapons?”

Hmm. Probably the other states in the region will. You know, Darryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show provoked. And I know good friend of yours. I love Darryl.

He is so great. And awesome. And he was pointing out. Like I guess boy, does he get fucking misrepresented on? Oh, he does.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Heroic guy, man. Very fucking smart. And if you listen to fear and loading in the new Jerusalem.

Anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's anti-Semitic is fucking crazy. Yeah. You're crazy. All that stuff is so small. It's out of context.

It's so balanced and so objective. And you know, his perspective on it.

“And just people take that one thing that he said about fuck.”

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

It's not excusing him. It's not like saying Hitler wasn't a fucking evil cunt. It's not like saying Hitler's a good guy but Winston Churchill's the bad guy. Somebody was saying it all. But he was saying Winston Churchill also a bad guy.

Right. Also wanted to attack Soviet Union right after they were done with the war. And he was actually even introduced a subject by saying to Tucker that, you know, I like to pick on my friend Jaco who's very waspy. And I like to pick on him and joke with him that, you know, Churchill was the real bad guy.

Because he wouldn't accept, you know, peace for an answer. He had to finish the regime change no matter what. Even if it took America to inform and whatever.

And then his point about, he never even finished the point about the people starving in the camp.

He was totally taken out of context to mean that the only people who died in the Holocaust, all that happened was the Germans didn't care enough to feed them well enough for something. But that was not what he was saying at all. He was essentially arguing that even if you were some kind of German apologist, even you would have to admit that every single soul they took possession of,

they took responsibility for. And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody could deny that. Right, and then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Holocaust. His point had nothing to do with like trying to diminish the rest of it or discount the rest of it or anything like that.

He was just saying, you know, arguing even the devil's advocate would have to admit so much of the case on the face of it. And then there he was signaling right into a point about Gaza. And how he is railies, Gaza is not a country. Gaza is an Indian reservation.

They were already whipped and conquered and besieged. And so you take control of people like that, then you're responsible to make sure that they're fed, and that they're not starving to death in this under your captivity, which was the point that he was making. So it ended up being, you know,

half of a thing ingest and half explained about Churchill.

and I think in some cases, honestly, misinterpreted. But, but what's dishonest is people pretending like he didn't explain himself on the record over and over and over. Clare for what he meant by all that stuff. And that's the problem with video clips. Yeah.

Clips are a real problem because you lose the context of the entire conversation. You get one person's point where they might be stealing something else or they might be like trying to be provocative. Or whatever it is.

But to me, it's always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate.

Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not be true. I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history where we have gotten a completely objective 100% accurate representation of why the war started. What were the factors, what were the motivations, we could go all the way back to Smedley Butler. And Smedley Butler's war is a racket, which I always point up because here's a guy in 1933 that was realizing he was a major general realizing at the end of his tenure like holy shit.

What did I do? I thought that I was doing this to make the world safer. And really, I was making it better for bankers, better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever the fuck they were. They were actually doing. And you can talk about that.

But if you get into discussions about World War II and anything involving the Nazis, anything involving the Holocaust and all of a sudden anti-Semitic gets thrown around. All of a sudden you're a bad person. Yeah, as he says, it's, you know, a huge part of our civic religion, basically, you know, we're like George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln and all that stuff is too long ago, where it's really Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are the founding fathers of the American Empire.

And they're a great project, the greatest generation and all of those things.

“That's how we know that that's who we are. I mean, my grandfather was in that war and my great uncle was death march by the Japanese and that war and stuff like a lot of people have connections to that.”

As Bill Crystal and his friends would say, this is how you build national greatness. You need big projects that we can all do together and World War II is the biggest project of all. So it's the kind of thing that people don't really want to question. And it's also, we should point out that they were bankrolling, smedly butler trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government. That's why he refused to do it. Yeah, he marched to Capitol Hill with the documents and showed him.

Yeah, they were trying to get him to throw a military coup on the United States government and take it over. Yep, I mean, you thought FDR was bad. And he's guys wanted to overthrow him. He wasn't, you know, it was not crazy. Wrong faction, I guess.

But look, I'm not an expert on, and I've only read a few books about the Second World War.

And you'd have to read hundreds to really know what you're talking about on that one. But I can tell you that Pat Buchanan's great book, Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war that pat knew that everybody was going to try to smear him and everyone was going to attack him and nobody wanted to hear his version of how this all happened. So he only quotes the highest level, most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford. And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever. He's quoting only these English historians.

Here's how the idiot, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill essentially fumbled into this war, screwed up and got us into this war. We were way worse than we ever could have hoped. They ended up turning poll and over to the comics at the end anyway.

“And all of that. And it's really honestly is what I think it is is a decent take on World War II without all that religiosity that you're referring to there and just take a cold look at it.”

You know, like they say, the dubious Bush, he's the Winston Churchill of the 21st century. And I'm like, you know what, maybe that's right.

And maybe Winston Churchill was really just the George W Bush at the 20th century. It's just you're supposed to never admit that. Who's talking about Churchill's Dick Cheney?

Oh, yeah, that's a good question. I don't think Kenny, but that was boy, that guy, he had no pulse for a while. Yeah, you know, is that on in the Bible or something like that? Yeah, should be a fucking guy who wants war who is giving no bid contract contracts to the company that he was the fucking CEO of. Yeah, where they're going over there and fixing for billions of dollars shit that we blew up.

And this guy doesn't even have a pulse. I know. It's a really fake heart. He lives so long, too, like only the good died young kind of thing. I mean, how many people dropped dead after COVID of heart attacks that were young and healthy.

And this fucking guy, keep on trucking.

“Remember when he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologize?”

Yeah, he fucking, they were, they were doing, which is one of the most,

It's called a canned hunt.

I know what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they say what it is, they just release-- Like a gaza. Very similar.

They just, well, this is, you know, birds. They just release these birds from a cage, literally, and they fly. And then they shoot about the sky. And even then, he blasts his friend. And then, he wouldn't get it in hunting.

Well, allegedly. So he wouldn't do any interviews or anything. Wouldn't talk to anybody for like 24 hours. And so he had a sober up or, you know, allegedly, or whatever. And then his friend was like, "Oh, that's what I was talking about."

But my, my name is understanding. Got a few pellets in my face with the fuck. I'm very sorry if this reflected negatively on the vice president. That's why my fault for putting my face there. Isn't that amazing?

No lawsuit, no nothing.

Your friend shoots you in the face.

No worries. And what angle exactly did he get shot that he was okay after that? Well, the thing about it is it's bird shot. It's just bird shot. And if you bird shot spreads, right?

And depending upon the distance and how far he was away from him, he could have just got clipped for the cause.

“Most likely, that's what tap, because I think he was 70.”

You know, if you're 70, get shot in the face of the shotgun. Usually, that's a wrap. So I think he just got clipped with a couple of pellets. Yeah. He probably should have just shut the fuck up and not reported it.

Right. I don't know how it even got out. He must have had to go to the hospital. Yeah, he said, I fucked up. I dropped my gun and went on.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, he don't. The vice president shot me. I mean, don't tell the newspaper. I said that.

If that was my friend, you know, I would probably say, let it go. Let's figure this out. I have to go to the fucking press. Yeah.

He's a full-fammer. Killed and wounded a lot of people. That's for sure.

Mostly vicariously, but not always.

Well, I mean, there's a special place in hell. Is there already? It's just so weird that that worked. You know, just all of it. The no-bid contracts, the fact that he was essentially running in.

Remember when he was in a bunker? And Bush was running around. He was in a bunker somewhere. Like, why is he in a bunker? Like, what, look, a fuck, that whole war was so weird.

It was to pretend that there's a threat. That there's ongoing threat when there wasn't. I had a bit about into my act. It's like that the elites really have no idea how dumb people are.

“And the only way to find out how dumb people are is make a dumb guy president.”

And that's what they did. And then when we went into a war with Iran, where the Iraq rather, like, how did we, how did we justify that? And they bought that? What the fuck?

And then the bit was like, he want again? Right. He wanted to collect it on that. Yeah. And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going.

I think we can go, Dumber. That was the idea of the bed. There's the only way to find out how dumb we are. Like, that Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron, or there's like the ruling elite, but the president.

I think of the president in the movie of his Tim Curry or something. He's a total like buffoon. And they just, the real powers all behind the throne run a thing. Well, my favorite movie about that is Dr. Strange Love. Because it's like, because it's kind of humorous.

And you know, but the whole thing is like, oh my god, I think. When you see this Pete Hexas thing with this guys are talking about this. And this commander is saying that it's all to bring about Armageddon. This is right out of Dr. Strange Love. Yeah.

“Now, you can tell, and this is one of the most disparating things, right?”

When you can tell a lot of times when these people are talking that, wow, he's really not lying. He really thinks that that stupid lies true. And he's telling us what he thinks is true. Like, depending on their tone and the way they explain it,

he is sometimes like evil with Donald Trump. Like, it's possible he's even talked himself, or allowed himself to be talked into believing that they really were making nuclear weapons. And that then they were going to use him on us. I mean, that might just be this dumbest lie.

And he knows it. But if they did, certainly not true, it would be a giant problem. Because the Iranian government, just we'll get they've done to their people, the executed protesters, they've done some wild shit. No, I don't know.

You don't think that's a big deal. What they've done to their protesters? In fact, that's where we got off on, on Armageddon, they're a minute ago, was because on our show he was saying, right now through their conventional power,

and especially because W. Bush gave their best friends back to that. Iran is by far the dominant power. In the region, conventionally speaking, other than us. If they rushed to an atom bomb, say to somehow deter us, which I don't think that would work.

I think we just attack him if they really did it. We just attack him again. But if they did somehow get an atom bomb, well, then that would then incentivize all of the other powers. I mean, other states on the GCC, their Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain and UAE

to get their own nukes.

because now they got nukes too.

And so now nobody has a strategic advantage. Right, but no one can do to them what happened to them now if they had nukes. This was the argument for Ukraine not. But that would include them happening. That would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as well.

“And I think you see, like this, here's how it worked, okay.”

The Iranians, their members of the non-properation treaty go in way back. They had a safe guarded civilian nuclear program, with the IEA could verify they're not diverting their nuclear material. How could they have verified this? Oh, they have their bases all underground.

I mean, no, no, because all that stuff was open and declared and safeguarded by the IEA. So they're enriching at two major facilities at Fordo and Natan's. And then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb from the mind through the conversion process.

How much of it could be?

How much of it could be done in secret?

It was very robust. And up until, you know, last June, essentially they're proving the negative there. Can I pause you there? Because they didn't know that the Iranians had the capacity to, to, they, they sent one 4,000 kilometers, right?

The Diego Garcia. Oh, yeah, the missile. So those missiles had a far greater range to anything that they declared.

“Actually not quite because, well, first of all, that's,”

the missile stuff is totally separate from their safeguards going with the IEA. They have nothing to do with that. But as far as the missiles, the only limit on their missile range previously was a political limit. And it was in capability.

That's right. So they wasn't that they stated that all we have is this. They only previously, but then in October of, I'm pretty sure it was last October and the aftermath of the June war. And so then in October of 25,

the IEA told Announce were lifting our limit on the range of our missiles. And they said that publicly that they were doing that. And so that was as a result. Again, of this provocation of the war last June. So that's the separate from the nuclear stuff, though.

But go ahead. I'm sorry. So it wasn't an inability thing. It was just an agreement. Although they don't have the capability to launch a three stage intercontinental ballistic missile to the United States of America.

They can hit Israel. But they can do that with an intermediate range missile. But if they're cooperating with China and China has the capability. Because Bill Clinton gave it to him. Yeah.

Yes. James, why did you do that? I love this story. For the money.

“If you remember the scandal of 96 and all the Chinese money in his campaign in 96,”

they spent all their money. Hiking or all the media attention. Hiking up Charlie Tree and Johnny Chun, who were like low level fundraisers who didn't have anything to do with anything. And then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist.

And he went holy. And the evil FBI persecuted poor went holy. And it was this huge distraction from what really happened. Which was this Chinese Indonesian billionaire named Riyadi, who was directly tied to Chinese intelligence.

He got his guy, John Wong, appointed to the Commerce Department, where he was put in charge of licensing missile technology transfers to China. And they took that authority away from state and defense and gave it to the commerce. And then John Wong was the guy who got to represent those missile technology transfers. So then he was aircraft and morale corporation.

Then sent their very best three stage rocket technology to China. Oh, because this cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know. So they were not. I don't think able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United States before that. They were able to because I mean for a few hundred thousand dollars.

Or maybe a couple of million dollars or whatever they were able to buy this from Bill Clinton.

Jesus Christ. I know crazy. But no, you're right. That look. Good China.

Good. Good Iran with Chinese help or whatever some day be able to deliver or hear here. Yes. However. The much better solution to that certainly would have been.

I know we can't go back. But certainly would have been just normalizing relations with Iran and just dealing with them. The reality was Iran's position was not that they were racing to a new. Their position was they had this safeguarded program. Again, the IAEA is essentially proving the negative.

We know where all their uranium is. It's right where it's supposed to be and they haven't taken it and diverted it yet. And we know how much they're enriching and we know where it all goes. And so then Israel would say America, they're making nukes if they have a nuclear program at all. This is the same during W. Bush during Obama.

This is true under Omar as well as under Netanyahu who's been in charge almost the entire time since Obama. And the policy was from the Israelis. America bombed them. They got a civilian program and you know that's just cover for they're going to make nukes someday. They're going to use them on us and just go ahead and let's get them now.

Then America would say no we're not doing that. This is under W. Bush again under Obama under Trump one and under Biden.

But we will warn the Iranians. Don't you break out and try to make a nuk now because if you do then we will attack you. And we'll bomb your Manhattan Project before you can complete it and before you can get an atom bomb. We'll see you then. But then the Iranians would say we're not making nukes.

So don't attack us and then the heavy implication was if you attack us then we might make nukes. So they had a latent deterrent right a half-assed nuclear weapons deterrent. They proved that they had mastered the fuel cycle that they could enrich uranium.

If they wanted to up to weapons grade they never did.

But they said they were essentially saying we have a revolver in one pocket and bullets in the other. Let's not escalate this. And that could have been should have stood. I said this is what this is the answer to your question about how do they get us into this. Because Netanyahu convinced Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli line.

That for them to have a civilian nuclear program at all is equivalent to the exact same thing as them making nuclear weapons and we're just not going to allow that.

“So how much understanding do we have of their capabilities and how do we have that understanding?”

Like how much do we know about their enrichment program?

How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon? Because haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear weapon? Well, do you think that the warsters are not a threat? I think what in fact if I know the statement that you're talking about. They were saying look we're not making nukes and the proof that we're not is the fact that we know how to.

We could and we're still not and you can see all this time. They mastered the fuel cycle back in 2006. Once you okay so it's like this and they have been set back on this. They got their facility blown up last June.

“But essentially you have remember yellow cake don't drop that shit.”

You had that refined yellow cake is refined uranium ore. Then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas. And that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges. Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges. A whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes.

And then you spin the uranium hexafluoride gas in the centrifuges. And you spin the U238 which is heavier out in a way from the 235 which is the sweet stuff. And the more you enrich it then the more capable it is of being used for nukes. Well one way to put it. So they would they need like 3.6% U235 for their electricity program.

They need 20% U235 for targets for their medical isotope reactors. For like cancer treatment radiation or like that radioactive die that they put in people for to see your circulatory system and stuff. But then to make weapons-grade uranium you need typically above 90% pure uranium 235. In any case once you spin it through the centrifuges to whatever stage of purity then you got to convert it back into a metal again. Whether you're going to make fuel rods or whether you're going to try to make a bomb warhead out of it.

So under the Obama deal of 2015 the JCPOA was really just an extra layer on top of the non-pliferation treaty and on top of the safeguards agreement that we already had. But the way that was worked out was a big part of it was that they would scale back their capability to enrich. By shutting down I think it was 2/3 of their centrifuges at Natans and then at Fordo they would change it from a production facility to just a research facility. And then whatever stock pile of uranium they came up with would be transferred out of the country to Russia and they would turn it into fuel rods and send it back.

That way they have no stock pile that they could just quickly reintroduce into the centrifuges and enrich to a higher grade.

They'd have to basically start at nothing again.

And so under the theory in the way the scientists worked it out that if they withdrew from the treaty kick the inspectors out of the country and so we are now making atom bombs. It would take them a year to enrich enough uranium weapons-grade to make one bomb out of it.

“Then on top of that you have to have the actual experts who know how to machine it into the exact specifications as and how to detonate it and everything else.”

And the simpler the nuke the harder it is to deliver. So typically like the Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type nuke where you just shoot one uranium pit into the other one. And which they didn't even test. The Trinity test was the Nagasaki bomb basically. They knew it would work, but essentially a very heavy bomb and very difficult to deliver. And virtually all miniaturized implosion bombs in the world that can ever be married to a missile. They're virtually all made out of plutonium. And they don't have a plutonium route to the bomb because under the Obama deal they poured concrete into the Iraq that's ARAK, which was supposed to be a heavy water reactor,

which can produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste. But they poured concrete into that thing and shut it down completely before it was even open.

but it's much more difficult. They would have to shut it off all the time to harvest the stuff out of there and all of that under inspections they can't do that.

“>> So this is all monitored. >> This is all monitors. Like if you had a gun shop and you have an ATF cop sitting at the bar stool,”

well unless he was fast and furious smuggling your gunster cartels, but assuming not that, but like assuming he was a irregular cop. You can't accuse me of selling illegal laser rifles from my gun shop when I've got a cop sitting right here and that's the deal here. They've got inspectors throughout the place. And then what happened was, so we had that perfect Mexican stand-off, right? Where is Israel saying bomb them, they're making nukes. We say no, we won't bomb them, but we will if they do. And then saying don't bomb us because we're not, then Trump called their bluff last June.

I've really Netanyahu did, and then Trump jumped in the thing. And they really did set their nuclear program back quite a bit. Now, I don't think there's any proof that they destroyed the centrifuges at Nutons and Fordo. They're deep underground underground underground and very hard to get at. But they got the elevator shafts and they got the air shafts.

And if anybody who's working down there, they're buried alive. The Iranians were incentivized to move giant boulders in front of the doors to protect them from missiles and attack and stuff like that.

But so all the reporting is that the Nutons and Fordo facilities are essentially just frozen right now. There's nothing going on there. There's open source reporting from last November, and then there was a report in the newspapers just two weeks ago or maybe three based on classified information that there's nothing going on there. You know what my deep concern is? Okay. No one said what you said to the president. Yeah, see? That's right. Not only that. You're right. That the people, these elected officials and these appointed officials, they get into positions around him. They don't know this, right, which is crazy.

Dude, I'll tell you what, that New York Times article. Did you read that one where Netanyahu came and they sat across from each other at the table like this instead of Trump sitting at the head of the table and Netanyahu gave him the whole presentation about how easy the war would be. So as soon as he left then they said, everyone else at the table said, don't listen to him boss. He's he's blowing smoke, man, that this is going to be so easy.

Now, they didn't really tell him don't do it, but they told him don't trust Netanyahu and that ought to be a snap the way that he promises and all that.

But then, and look, it's Maggie Haberman and them at the New York Times. I mean, it seemed like a very well-reported story from, you know, the principles are talking to her about this stuff. And the joke kind of said as well, right? Yeah. So they go around the table and Rubio has his say, the vice president has his say, the chairman of the joint, she's the staff and whoever. But, as you just said, none of them say what I just said, and it really is, it's like four or five dudes in a room who may or may not know very much about this really and talking about it.

And none of them, man enough to say like Mr. President, permission to speak freely here sir, don't make this mistake.

“But you know what I mean, they don't know as much as you know about it. I think they probably don't, which is wild.”

I've been at this for a long time, but that is wild. That is really crazy that you'd be in a position of making these decisions without having this understanding of the fact that they're not even really capable right now of making nuclear weapons. If any of them were capable of really knowing about it, like this, it would be Rubio or Vance. Or Hell came to the chairman of the joint, she's the staff. He, all of these guys should have been able to say to the president. This is in the lose-rethrit sir.

What's in this hand really not right there? It wasn't Vance not there. What was he going on? He was not there for the Netanyahu part, but then he came in later, which he was in Azerbaijan prepared for the war. All right, where he was, is why he was. He wasn't Azerbaijan, didn't they have some sort of a peace agreement with Armenia? At the time?

No, I don't know, both of them. Oh, I don't know. I had missed that then. You're right then. I didn't know that. He visited both of them, and that's one of the reasons why he couldn't come back. Okay.

I assume he was in Azerbaijan as preparation for the war where they were on. If you visit Azerbaijan, you also have to visit Armenia. Otherwise, it would cause some sort of an international conflict. Yeah, because we support the hereditary dictatorship in Azerbaijan because they help us run the oil pipelines west instead of north through Russia.

“But it was also because they had made some sort of a peace agreement, correct?”

Didn't, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there you make up. Possibly. I mean, they're fighting over. The contest was over whether Armenia is going to open this corridor across Armenia to an Azerbaijani.

Or could you, and Zara, on the Turkish border? Okay. France, met in Baku, JD Vance, and how do you say his name?

Met in Baku discussed the implementation of historic August 8 White House peace summit.

And reaffirmed their shared commitment to regional peace, security and prosperity. Leaders signed the US Azerbaijan Strategic Partnership Charter, which will strengthen bilateral relations between our countries. The United States remains committed to working with Azerbaijan to unlock the great potential of the South Caucus region. So it was a peace summit.

And so he met with Azerbaijan, and he also had to meet with Armenia as well. This is February 10th, so this is right before the war. Okay. So yeah. I guess I thought he was like just tipping him off.

No. Are on your southern border in a week or two? I'm pretty sure that the reason for this was that he had to meet with both of them. So he could not be there. So if I was JD Vance, and I knew, or rather, if I was Netanyahu,

and I knew that JD Vance was really not into this war, and didn't want to be a part of it at all. I would probably try to. Time it for then. What a good time.

Can you come back. Yeah. That makes sense. What does it say? Ah.

The gathering had been deliberately small to guard against leaks.

Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea. It was happening. Also absent was Vice President JD Vance, who was in Azerbaijan. And the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time. Now, if I was Netanyahu, and I knew that JD Vance is going to be an Azerbaijan.

Yeah. I don't really, you know, try to spend too much time on the symbolism of things.

“You know, I leave that to the symbol minded, right?”

It's called a symbol minded. Yeah. But like, isn't it meaningful that this is the situation room? The President's supposed to sit at the head of the table. Instead, Netanyahu sat there and Trump sat here.

Opposite him and let him run the thing as an equal. Instead of, why do you think that is? Why do you think that is? I don't have influence. I really don't know.

They've been friends for a very long time. All the speculation about him being compromised. I mean, it's very possible, but unknowable, really, right? Netanyahu would do that. I mean, he brought up Monarchal Winsky to Bill Clinton.

Did he? Oh, yeah. You know we're tapping your phone homeboy. We've got you on tape. You better let Jonathan Pollard out of prison.

And then Bill Clinton refused to do it because George Tenet and the whole top tier of the CIA were going to resign over it if he did it. So he didn't do it. It was Trump that let Pollard out. And now Pollard is running to the right of Netanyahu.

He's now announced that he's running for the connecid over there.

“So the reason why the Monarchal Lewinsky scandal went public?”

No, because no, no, I don't think so. And Yahoo's said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard. All they had tapes. What do you mean that? The like recordings?

So maybe you were. It may have been after the scandal had broken, but they had him on tape with her. Because the only tapes were her on the phone with Linda Tripp. That Linda Tripp had recorded her. But they had him on the phone with her.

I forgot her name.

You know, the story is the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in 1989.

They were in the room for half an hour or something. And when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated. And says who the F does this guy think he is? Who's the superpower? And who's the client state?

Because Netanyahu had just told him like, look here. Butler, here's your orders. For half an hour, just barked commands. That Bill Clinton in a way that he was just like I can't believe this guy. Wow.

It's hard to feel sorry for him. In fact, here's one, too. Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic. This is only time I've ever been sympathetic with Barack Obama. He's caught on a hot mic talking to the president of France.

And he is a man. You think you hate him. I got to deal with him every day. And that was about Netanyahu. About Netanyahu.

“Well, wasn't there an issue with JFK and Israel over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons?”

Yes. So he was demanding inspections of Demona. There are nuclear facilities there. To this day, they don't officially have nuclear weapons. Correct.

And the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give aid to a nuclear weapon state that refuses to sign the non-polliferation treaty. And so, and they don't want to do that. In fact, they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before the change after apartheid.

But if they openly possess nuclear weapons, then I mean, help. It should already be illegal because everybody already knows. But the Glenn Simington law says that you can't give a military aid to a nuclear weapon state that won't sign the N.P.T. That's America's treaty that we force the whole world to accept.

And which, by the way, is interrible jeopardy now, right? Because, you know, Saddam Hussein goes, look, my hands are up. I got nothing. They invaded them anyway. The North Koreans armed up with nudes.

The Libyan said, "Well, look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no operational

They killed him."

“And then the Iranians said, "Look, we can make nudes, but we're not making nudes.”

So leave us alone already, and then we kill them." So America is the great destroyer of America's non-polliferation treaty that we

always do on the world by which the non-nuclear weapon state promise, the non-nuclear weapon states promise never to get them.

And the nuclear weapon states promise never to share them. So, and that's all in jeopardy now. That may not even exist anymore. The polls are talking about getting their own nudes now because of Trump's pivot away from Europe in the middle of a war. That America helped cause over there.

Jesus. So Israel officially doesn't have nudes. Officially, they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least 200. And in fact, I have that personally from Mordecai Venu, who is the Israeli whistleblower, who went to prison. They kidnapped him in a honey trap plot.

I think in England or in Italy. Which chicks? Which chicks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They went to get him laid and they kidnapped him.

And they held him in solitary confinement for 25 years or something. But he gave the whole story to the Sunday Times, the London Times. And they published it back in, I'm going to say 86. And then what happened was he was on Twitter. He may still be on Twitter.

But I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower of the Pentagon papers. And who was a friend of mine for a long time, he died a couple of years ago now. But he had an anecdote about Venu knew that turned out was incorrect. But I asked Venu knew, is this correct? He said, no, it's just like I told this Sunday Times back then.

And that was that they had 200 atom bombs by the time that he squealed on. And we know from Grant F Smith's research, he got this through some FOIA documents. He's from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy. Really great researcher on this. And he showed that they had at least been researching hydrogen bombs, the big ones.

Although there's no proof that they ever actually made H bombs. And I don't think it's been reported that they've made them. But at least we're looking into how to choose. And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel. Yes.

“And trying to register what was then, I think the American Jewish Council, I believe, is what it was called.”

The predecessor to APEC as a foreign, as foreign agents. And then they dissolved it and created APEC instead, I guess, is the long and the short of that. How they got around that. And they were people. You know, and it was, you know, I don't know.

And honestly, like I told you, I was more of a conspiracy theorist in the 90s.

But I never did all read into JFK because there's just a hundred books about it in a hundred different theories.

And I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French Hitman to do it. Or if the Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it. Or if Alan Dullis got some Cubans to do it. Or what the hell, right? Like I don't know. And so it's a really good, you know.

I don't, I don't think I ever really could figure it out. So, well, no one really knows. I just can't understand what I'm saying. There are a lot of people who have been talking to you. Yeah, you know what's funny about that.

And I think he even admitted this at one point, man. You watch the whole movie, JFK. Oh God. You watch the whole movie, JFK. And I'm sorry, man.

No worries. It's just Dr. Pepper. I like a little stains on this table. There you go, index it, live.

“In the edit later, we'll just clip to Joe and back.”

No, we'll just show the Dr. Pepper. Why Dr. Pepper? Why are you so into Dr. Pepper? I should tell everybody. He brought a whole cooler, filled with Dr. Pepper. I got to have Dr. Pepper, man.

This is going to work here. No, the, the, you watch the whole movie, JFK. Right? He's got every theory under the sun in there. And then as soon as it's over, it says,

"Produced by Arnand Mill Chen, who is in Israeli spy, and who helped Benjamin Netanyahu steal cry trons, which are in a such a part of these nuclear trshirts. That's who produced their weapons?

That's who produced the movie. And so then someone asked all of her stone like, "Hey, man, in Israeli spy, produced your movie, where you point the finger at everyone

that's set to maybe the Israelis. What's about that?" And he's like, "Wow, you're right." I forgot exactly how he says it, but he acknowledges that, you know what?

Like, it could have been even that my own film was part of a put-on there. Well, especially when you could set the fact that his own film was made in what the 90s. Yeah, I came out in '91, I think.

Right, '90, '90. So back then, he probably didn't know as much.

Right, yeah, probably never even heard the angle

that would have been the Israelis. But of course, you know, LBJ was very close to the Zionist and even had a massade agent for a girlfriend. I'm sorry for get her name, but one of his mistresses was a massade agent.

And then he completely reversed all those policies as soon as he was in power. But of course, same thing with Vietnam, he reversed, well, at least, released any skepticism about Vietnam and said, "Let's go ahead

and escalate there and all that."

it's too muddy for me to try to wait through

and figure out exactly the culture on that one. It's all the trigger on that one. Crazy. The not-so-secret life of Matilda. Was that an issue here, name?

Matilda Krim. That was James Really Spy, girlfriend? Yeah, I believe that's her. Good old Phil Weiss. I love that guy.

He's a great guy. That's a manga Weiss.Net. It's a great website for anti-Zionist. The No Daily Policy, the US Alignment with the Israeli government. So obviously today, it trumps deference to Netanyahu.

Was born under Matilda Krim's dear friend, Lyndon Johnson. And the feverish week surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who had once immigrated to Israel and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, continually at Johnson's side and advised him,

"I'm what to say publicly." I mean, you got it. Give it up to a country, the size of a Rhode Island, that has that kind of fucking pull over the world. They got their priorities straight, that's for sure.

Kind of amazing. That they've been doing this since the '60s and before. Yep. I mean, they threatened Harry Truman. They bribed him, and they also threatened him.

They sent his daughters, and they were saying the Zionist sent letter bonds to the White House. And they'd stop at nothing to get their state. Truman. Yeah.

Wow. And they pay for his reelection, too. In fact, there's a great scholar named John B. Judas, J. U. D. I. S. And he wrote a book about Jesus.

Yeah, kind of. You missed pronounce it, you know. He actually also wrote, as long as I'm talking about him, he wrote a great article for Foreign Affairs in 1995 about the Neo Conservatives, called from Trotskyism

to anachronism. And it was about how now that the cold war is over, who needs these crazy hawks anymore. Right. And then these are the guys who took us who launched the Iraq War, you know, a few years later,

seven years later or whatever. He was saying they're a spent force. They should be by now, because they had been Trotsky at Communists and then had moved to the right for the militarism and stuff.

But he wrote a book about how Truman did this.

“And I think that was part of it was this intimidation campaign.”

And it was his own daughter that in her memoir, said that they sent letter bombs to the White House. And they also paid for his election. So it was, you know, a carrot and stick kind of a thing. And then, yeah, look, if you ran the Israeli Foreign Ministry,

you only have one priority in the world

that outranks every other priority by a million billion.

And that is your relationship with the United States of America. How friendly is the President? How friendly is the Senate? What do we got to do to make sure that everything stays in line? It's everything to them. So let me ask you this, what do you think happens with Iran now?

Like, how does this play out? If you had to speculate? Well, I'll tell you that first of all, they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now than ever before,

although I'm not necessarily predicting that. I think, you know, Trump has proven by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent. He has proven he's willing to bomb them. They really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon.

It's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing.

“And then this President, and I think the next one too,”

would be willing to go back to war over it. As Barack Obama promised, he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb. And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, called As President, I don't bluff,

where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to tell Netanyahu and them, I really, really mean it. If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them. But just let me try to solve this another way. So I think that promise stands.

This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden, and I think that will continue to last into the next presidency. And if the Iranians are smart, what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is, we're not giving up enrichment.

We're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day,

but we're never going to call it that.

And just don't do this to us anymore and try to bet on the fact that Trump's only got three years left, and the next presidents won't be so belligerent. And they won't call the bluff and go ahead and launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke.

And as Darrell was saying, they're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally. They really have no need to make a nuke later bomb.

“And they can, I think, successfully deteriorate Israel,”

even with their conventional missile force. And we saw them just absolutely blast a crap out of Tel Aviv. So I was very underreported, right? And I think, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatola, right?

And they kill him and apparently like the new Ayatola his son, they killed his mother and sister and mother and wife and baby. And that's the new Ayatola over there. He's got to be more radical than his father. He's got to be angry or less than his father ever was.

Well, this is it's so unfortunate because, honestly,

you know, whatever. Maybe some genius at something tank has a better idea,

“but I really think that the thing to do is just quit.”

The thing to do is for America to just come home for Trump to say, "Look, they're lost." I won, yeah. But we don't really need these bases over there. The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East.

We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore, so forget the Carter doctrine. Let's just come home. And I think if we do that, we bring all of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our bases close them all up and come home.

And that shifts the entire burden on to Iran that they still have to deal with the rest of Eurasia. We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. Everybody else is.

So are they going to now leave the attacks to get through

the Strait of Hormuz? Absolutely. But too bad shouldn't have started this war then. Nothing we could do about that now. Willie Nelson said, you know, so like the way going forward is,

and by the way, like in Panama, they tax ships going through the Ithismus there through the Panama Canal.

“The Indonesians, I believe it is, attacks people going through”

some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. And so it's not entirely unheard of that, you know, the dominant power there is going to levee a fee on people coming in and out of there. But again, too late, too bad.

I mean, America already, we had the exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now. We had on February the 27th.

And then they launched this war on the 28th,

which by the way was the anniversary of the Waco raid. This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war. And in fact, as long as I'm on that, I don't know you know this, but it's really worth dwelling on that they killed not just one,

but two girl schools in their initial assault. They killed in one building, they killed a hundred, and I think 73 or 74, almost all little girls. And then in the other one was 20 more. And with that was an experimental new Lockheed missile

that fires tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates or as it detonates and creative new way to cut people to shreds. And the thing is about that is as there's this great media critic named Adam Johnson who pointed out, this is equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing,

which you know for young people, Oklahoma was 9/11 before 9/11, right? It was massive. And nevermind, it was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it.

That's another interview, Joe. But it was on another interview. And that's a deep one. Yeah, it is. I'm here for you, buddy.

Yeah. Yeah, but they kill a hundred and sixty-seven people. We're killed in that thing. And it was just the ugliest damn thing. And it included like 20 kids in the daycare there.

Right? That was the cover of Newsweek, was a fire fire hurled holding a dead baby. So worse thing. This is the most traumatic thing for this country. And in the heartland of Oklahoma City and all that.

Well, that's what America did to Iran. Only the entire building for the kids. All 167 of them have a few teachers, but virtually all of them little girls. And another school down the street, too,

are relatively nearby, where they, at the volleyball game, where they killed even more. So now think about the Pearl Harbor attack, with Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl Harbor, out of context, but still it was a sneak surprise attack

in the middle of negotiations on behalf of a foreign country over a lie and then they killed a bunch of kids. So imagine if that Pearl Harbor, if our story of Pearl Harbor, was that they sank all our heroes and drowned them down in their ships in the halls stuck in their halls down there.

But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls. The children of those sailors, who drowned at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day, too. Oh, and also as a Catholic country, and he's also the Pope. Imagine how we would react to that.

Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what our story of World War II would be. It would be that we kept new kingdom till they were all dead.

“Is what our story of World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor.”

It's just, somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should. If that had happened to us, again, just like we, you know, we did a little on Ukraine there, and the way America just absolutely pushes their luck. If Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years,

'cause they kept voting wrong, we would invade Canada and Nuk Moscow. And in fact, when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd. Right? How ridiculous is it that the Russians would dare try to overthrow the regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our bases in Alaska,

and refuse to accept the Nukuhunta.

This comic book crazy, they wouldn't dare, but we do that to them. You know, when we act like, as Dr. Paul said, if we go around the world, killing people like this, bombing people like this, and we think that we can just get away with it, and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at our own peril.

And he was speaking for the government, as a member of Congress at the time, that we're putting the American people in danger by acting this way. It's completely crazy. You know, remember the Shiite Fatwa, that the old Iatola before last last co-mani put on Salman Rushdie,

the author of the book The Satanic Vs, where people have tried to kill him numerous times, including God's eyeball in one case. We've had a real problem with bin Ladenite jahadi terrorism over the time. We have not had the Shiites.

We have not had the Iatola's Sistani in Iraq,

or the Iatola comedy, declare that all good believers should attack the West now.

They could do that. And that's the kind of fire that we're playing with. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank. He was just a rich guy who he had earned respect,

because he was wounded in battle and stuff. He had money and influence. But if the Iatola's Sistani put out a full jahad, which I'm not saying he would do that. I don't have any real reason to believe that he would go that far.

But he's been willing to stand up to the United States numerous times, especially during the war, in the last couple of wars over there. And so, and remember what happened, the night that they started this war,

on the February of the 28th, the next day on Saturday the 29th, or I think it was Friday was the 28th, and it was like late in the night they started the war,

“and then Saturday I believe was the 29th,”

and an American immigrant from Sierra Leone. Here in Austin took an AR-15, put on a shirt with the Iatola and an Iranian flag on it. I didn't even know they had sheights in Sierra Leone,

Joe, but I guess they do. And he went down to sixth street and he shot 18 people, killed three and wounded 15 people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack. I caught back draft, I coined the phrase in my book that,

and if blowback means long-term consequences from secret foreign policies that the American people don't understand and are left up to false explanations, or susceptible to false explanations. Well, then back draft terrorism is when the consequences

of your over foreign policies just blow up right in your face. And, you know, frankly, like those three people were crucified for Israel, for their sins, for 15 more wounded. And I don't know how terribly wounded for all of them.

People are still in the hospital or that thing. And that was a immediate blowback terrorist attack from this war, just right away. And the kind of danger that our government continues to put us in through these interventions over there.

At some point, you know, all those sort of hypotheticals about, yeah, but would of Russia took over the world or would of China did if it wasn't us or whatever. Those have got to just kind of fall away, you know, by the way.

So, there's no real reason to fear that in the first place,

“but also who in the hell are we to stop at this point?”

Right? Another South Park reference. When Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics ceremony, he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us, so he recruits butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese way.

And then over and over again throughout the episode, butters keeps like closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick. Just over and over again. And then by the end of the episode, Cartman says,

you know what, just forget it, okay? If that's the best you can do butters, let's just stop. We're just going around where this is not working or intervention. It's just not. What do you predict is going to happen with Iran?

No, I don't know. I'm really worried. I mean, I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's, you know, or too literally when he's being hyperbolic. But he has threatened to nuke them over and over again,

and just the other day, he said the country's going to have a glow around it, you know, when I'm done with him or whatever. You really think he would do that? I mean, I, no, no, I'm not predicting that.

“But I think it's symbolic right of his frustration.”

He absolutely just should not have done this. And now he has no good way out of it. Right? He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me. In fact, there was this story in the Jerusalem post. The end of April, I think.

I think it was April 28 about how Trump ordered the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just walked away. Right? And then they're looking into it. Well, just how bad will Iran exploit the new vacuum that we've created

How bad will it really be? Because he has no options to fix it. He just doesn't. You want a regime change in Tehran. You can drop a hydrogen bomb

on the capital city and kill 10 million people

and then claim the desolation his piece or you can just forget it. And like, man, you know what? We're all tough and badass enough to kill all these people. We should be tough enough to admit when we screwed up then.

Look at Afghanistan. We stayed for 20 years because Washington couldn't admit that we can't win this war. There's only one way to tame the posh tunes and that is killed him all and we're not willing to do that.

So what are we doing? We're just losing slowly and then what they do. They finally admitted it. They finally just said fine. I guess we lost and left.

That's what we got to do here. But sooner is better. Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of his regime

“and then whoever comes into power in 2028 then gets out?”

God, I hope not. I can't imagine what's going to happen if this keeps on for three years. This is a real flaw in our system quite frankly. We had a parliament.

We could just vote no confidence in this guy and put a new guy in there who's fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it. Instead, all we can do is wait three years, wait for him to kill over a heart attack or wait for his own cabinet to overthrow him

and the name of him being, you know, to demented to continue, which is not going to happen. You know, that's 25th Amendment.

They always invoked that like they could do a coup against him

for being a Russian agent or whatever back in his first term. They didn't do that. They didn't do that. Yeah, they didn't do it with Biden. He would have to be completely off his rocker

and to to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow him, which I just think is virtually impossible. So the good news is right is that he just flip up on anything. He just changes mind about anything.

In fact, when he announced the ceasefire, he said, we're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11-point proposal. Like, okay, and fine, right? Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally, like call it whatever you want.

And he is good at that.

“You could call that a gift if you want to,”

politically. He can just pretend like, yeah, no, I meant to do that. So what is the hold-up? Like, what are they disagreeing on?

Well, he's got to deal with Netanyahu, right? The master blaster thing, you know, he's under dome on his back, shouting in his ear, what he's got to do and what he's got to not do. In the 60-Minutes interview, he tells the major Garrett

that, you know, we're not done. The war's not over until we get that uranium. And Gary says, well, how are we going to get it? So Trump promised me. He wants to get it.

He's going to get it. And of course, they have this ever since they announced the ceasefire. Immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire. This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has clearly been somehow enslaved by Netanyahu that he's willing to put up with that.

As Bill Clinton said again, who's the superpower and who's the client state? How is that we have a ceasefire deal? And then you can come and veto it like this. And then not be chastised and not told to get back in your corner, we're handling this.

And I really just don't know the answer to that. Some people speculate that it's blackmail or it's just the bribery or he's just into it. And then he just, you know, he wants to be great. He wants to have a legacy. This is, I really should study more about this.

But this is a part of libertarian economic theory called public choice theory. And which is kind of a clunky name. But it just means that the public choices are still made by private individuals. And they're acting based on what's good for them, rather than what's good for the country, like strobe Talbot, we need those lucky dollars.

We need those Polish votes.

So we do a policy that ultimately is bad for the country, even though it's good for the Democrats at the time.

And same thing here. What's good for the country is to just come home. But you can hear this just built in. People don't even question. It's just built in, of course, to every single discussion about this.

“How are we going to do this in a way that it looks good enough for Trump that he's willing to accept his defeat here?”

Right? How can we spin it for him? How big of a gold medal do we have to give him? How big of a ticker tape parade do we have to give him? How firm of a pat on the back?

And a congratulations do we have to give him for him to decide that it's okay to come home? Otherwise, and without looking like too much of a jerk himself for what he's done here. And then having to live with it for three years, the aftermath of, however, it works out with Iran, newly dominant. And so again, Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Obama put him up two pegs by building the caliphate and then helping them destroy it again.

And then, of course, al-Qaeda rules to mask us now. So that's a big hit against them. But what Donald Trump has done with this war is about at least equivalent to what W Bush did in terms of enhancing Iranian power in the region.

And, of course, the goal for the other team.

Do you really think it's that bad? Oh, it's absolutely. I mean, America looked before. Despite the destruction of their -- Absolutely.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

“Because, I mean, it's just as simple as this, right?”

On February the 27th, the Gulf was open for business. And the illusion of American conventional air and naval power kept it that way and nobody questioned it. It's America's dominated order. Yes, Iran has Iraq and they have his ball and southern Lebanon. But hell, we even got Sunni's role in an Damascus now.

And so the GCC, in including Jordan and Turkey and Israel, this is America's empire in the Middle East.

On February 29th, 30th, I mean, well, no, sorry, there's no one to leap here. On March 1st, 2nd, 3rd this year, all that was over. I mean, Darryl Cooper again is, you know, we did this show provoked every Friday night. And he said, listen, I'm here and from my friends in the Pentagon. This was one week into the war. He goes on here for my friends.

This war is not going well. They're hitting all our bases. They've killed a couple of our guys and they're hitting our runways and hitting our radars and hitting our planes. And we knew it then, right then, just -- and I'm sorry, man. It's just true. Told you us so for 20 years.

“All of our assets in the Gulf are up for grabs.”

They can reach out and touch us there and they're in a damn thing that we can do about it. You know, and just absolutely is true. It's got your real bummer, but thank you. It's a lot of fun, isn't it? It's talking to me.

It's good to get your perspective, and I really wish someone had had your perspective before this all got started. At least an understanding of the ability to enrich the Iranian, humanitarian, and actual weapon. But thank you very much. Tell everybody about your shows, where people could find them, where people could find you. Absolutely. So I do the Scott Horton Show, which is my interview show,

and "Provote with Darryl Cooper." And -- Where people get those? Here on the YouTube and on Spotify and all those things. And then I have -- I'm the editor of director of antiwar.com.

The director of the Liberton Institute, that's Liberton Institute.org. And for the deep, deep dive and the deep background on all this stuff, I have the Scott Horton Academy, a foreign policy and freedom at Scott Horton Academy.com. And, oh, you know what I have here? If I can -- Just show my books real quick.

I can find this, if we're on this thing. Got it. Fool's Aaron on Afghanistan. Enough already on the war of terrorism, and provoked on Russia and Ukraine.

Boy, those are some fat ass books. Dude, you do a lot of work. I do. I have a lot of jobs. I work real hard on this stuff. And these have been very well received.

You know, I'm -- I basically -- my job is --

I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this. When I was a young kid, there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on Raw Time, which was the heavy metal show on the access channel here in town. And this is probably not too long before he died. This is, of course, the days before the internet and everything.

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

you know, impenetrable force field. And then he was just saying, he says, "Well, well, if that guy can do it, well,

“maybe I can do it and I'll get up there and I'll say what I think is true too."”

And then that kind of deal. And so, I've been more or less following that same path since then. Well, thank you for all this. Because the amount of work that's involved in putting together these books and all the interviews and all the podcasts you've done for most people to occupy their mind with the kind of information that's in yours.

It's got to be very troubling. It's probably not so much fun. And it's also very important for people like me who haven't done that work to have access to it and to get an understanding of it. So thank you.

Thank you very much for having me. We'll do it again, Scott. All right, bye, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING]