Who Killed JFK & Why Are We Always At War? | Scott Horton & Chase Geiser | OAP #67
Scott Horton is director of The Libertarian Institute at LibertarianInstitute.org, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio for Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and host of the Scott Horton Show podcast from ScottHorton.org. He has conducted more than 5,600 interviews since 2003. He is the author of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism (2021), Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan (2017) and editor of The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 (2019). He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna Horton.
I don't know you well enough to be presumptuous like that.
That uh intro might be um oh I like life and liberty and property and stuff.
Yeah.
Okay, cool, cool.
So, dude, um, I think we were on a podcast together with um uh read and liberty lock pod um like weeks ago when I was in Illinois.
Uh Dave's uh um uh Smith was on it.
Uh I can't remember what what we were even talking about a whole crew of people on there, yeah.
I remember exactly exactly.
So I got I was lucky enough to make it into like the you know the top 10.
I don't know what what color that metal is, but that's cool.
So um uh I've been following you on Twitter for some time, and I actually know very little about you other than the fact that a lot of people that I really like and respect um like and respect you quite a bit.
So I just thought it would be a fun conversation.
Sure.
Well, okay, um I'm a pirate radio guy from Austin, Texas, basically.
Uh scathing driver, and uh I I started hanging around with the anti-war.com guys right around the dawn of the terror war, and was very thrilled to find out that Rothbardian libertarians owned that URL and were you know holding down that whole effort on the part of the old right and the libertarian movement during that time and ever since then, and um basically I'm an interview host.
I've done 5,600 something interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy.
Um, but some stuff on the police state and Austrian economic theory and that kind of stuff here and there too.
And um, and I wrote these two books.
You can see, oh, you see one of them over my right shoulder there.
Enough already is the latest one, time to end the war on terrorism, and before that was fool's errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan, which started out as chapter two of this one and turned into a whole book.
So then I went back and started over and did this one, which is all the Middle East Wars from Jimmy Carter through right now, uh, or through the end of the Trump era.
And um, and so I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com now, and I'm also I founded uh with Sheldon Richmond and William Norman Grigg, I founded the Libertarian Institute back in 2016, and so I'm the director of that now, and we got a great group of podcasters and writers and everything there at Libertarian Institute.org.
And that's basically it.
Or I say I'm on the radio in LA on Sunday mornings on KPFK, the uh Pacifica radio network station there.
So I um I own a small advertising business, and it was basically consumed all of my focus until I don't know, six months ago, uh eight months ago, maybe.
And it's gotten to the point with all the political stuff that's going on.
Um that it's it's absolutely it's like totally consuming.
It's hard for me to think about anything else.
What was it that got you consumed?
Because it's not like an it's not immediately obvious that it's like lucrative, it's not lucrative to be uh interested in politics and the amount of time that it takes to study uh and the amount of time it takes to write books and the amount of time it takes to do podcasts.
I mean, there's there's so much gigs.
I've always to put in yeah, you know you ever have the thing where like on uh well I haven't been on Facebook in many years now, but you know the thing where you're on Facebook and you talk to your old friend from elementary school for and you text back and forth for an hour or whatever and say hi.
So I ran into an old friend of mine that I had gone to elementary school in junior high with, and he said, Oh, you're the guy from anti-war.com now, huh?
That's no surprise to me, because I remember even back in third grade, he used to do nothing but just talk mad shit about Ronald Reagan all the time, you know.
So I mean, I don't even remember like what was I even saying in what 84 or whatever, you know, when I was in third grade, 83, 84.
Um, but I was you know, luckily I was, you know, I turned four or I was I was four when Reagan was inaugurated, so you know, before that, I don't remember anything.
And then so my entire political childhood, my parents are not radical leftists of by any measure, but they're just run-of-the-mill Democrats, essentially, centrist type Democrats.
Um I was lucky enough to Not be raised to you know revere Ronald Reagan and George Bush the way a lot of kids in my neighborhood were, you know.
So I was raised not necessarily anti-government, but at least anti this government.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is my mom, like watching the black and white TV in the kitchen and being upset and me asking her what's wrong.
I'm four years old.
She's like, a very bad man is becoming the president today, you know.
So um then by the time that was over, I mean, I was young enough to understand that they were selling missiles to the Ayatollah, their avowed enemy, who they were backing Saddam Hussein against at the same time,
and then taking the money to pay for these right wing death squads in Nicaragua, and then the death squads in Nicaragua were selling cocaine to poor black people in LA and poor white people in the South.
And then the same government was waging the just say no, war on drugs against them all, and locking people in jail for consuming the cocaine that their own government, the the government itself was bringing into the country at the time.
And I understood that much before Bush Sr. was gone.
I mean, I think even before Reagan was gone, I had somehow learned about the cocaine.
I don't know exactly where I first learned about the the contra cocaine, but it was very early on.
It might have even been because John Kerry, Senator Kerry investigated it back then.
And so there was some official talk of that.
And maybe maybe I just heard that from like bigger kids in the neighborhood or you know, somewhere that had gotten around, you know.
So that was before even H. W. Bush.
And then when the first Iraq war happened, I thought that was a lot of fun.
I was 15 and I like fighter jets and explosions and you know, tanks and cool, like, you know, discovery channel militarism, I guess you could call it, right?
Um sure.
World War II controller.
Yeah, but I remember objecting to the idea that Bush has a Security Council resolution from the United Nations, and so he doesn't need a declaration of war.
And I just knew from government school that only Congress can declare war, and George Washington and then made sure that that was very deliberate that the president can't get us into a war.
And this is like he's going around Congress and Bush Sr. had said then that even if Congress says no, I'm still doing it anyway, and whether they authorize it or not, and even if they deauthorize it and try to like ban me from doing it, I'm still doing it because I have a UN Security Council resolution.
And I knew that that was wrong.
And then, you know, he talked about the new world order all the time, which you know, in conspiracy theory culture means one world government, not run out of the United States, but run at the expense of the United States, where eventually we lose our independence too, just like we've been doing to everybody else, taking theirs from them, that we lose ours too.
And that's kind of the whole, you know, from people to the right of the Bushes.
Um, that was the conspiracy theory, you know, of the 90s.
And then he only did one term and in came Bill Clinton.
And in conspiracy theory culture at the time, in right-wing conspiracy theory culture at the time.
What was wrong with Bill Clinton was that he was really secretly George Bush's agent, and that because Clinton was a member of all the same elite organizations as Bush, they sold him as the boy from Hope, Arkansas, but he's a member of the trilateral commission in New York City with David Rockefeller and all these powerful people.
And that, you know, he was clearly an establishment guy.
He was an insider um who had you know very powerful connections.
But then what the conspiracy kooks knew and were right about was that and right wingers, they weren't loyal to the Bushes, right?
The Bushes are skull and bonesmen, blue bloods from back east, right?
They're not of us at all, at least in this area, this is before W. Bush, right?
And what they got right was that when Ronald Reagan was bringing in all that cocaine into the United States, it wasn't just coming into South LA, it was coming into MENA, Arkansas under Governor William Jefferson Clinton,
who all of this was happening, obviously with his participation and with his knowledge that there's this covert operation going on where they're Running drugs and guns and money back and forth and using the Nella Airstrip outside of Mina, Arkansas to do it all.
And so Clinton was in on that.
So if you understand anything about who these people are at all, you understand that the Bushes are the blue bloods, right?
They're like the Pierces and the Walkers and the Abbots and the Whitneys and all these important families from American history, right?
Who's Clinton?
He's the bastard son of nobody, right?
So why, you know, what's special about him is he's connected to all these guys.
And in the Ron Cop Contra operation, it's not like he's running things.
It was the vice president, H.W. Bush was running that thing out of the vice president's office where he could get away with it.
No one could oversee what he was doing.
Who was Bill Clinton?
He was some governor who'd been brought in and as like a trusted guy to be part of thing.
So that was how I started off, my understanding of the Clinton administration when I was like 16, 17 years old or whatever.
I was a high school kid, as he was being inaugurated, and all my teachers were like, Wow, a liberal is being elected.
We're so impressed.
And I'm like, ah man, this guy is part of the power elite.
It's all a big scam.
You know, Bill Clinton, uh Bill Hicks had he saw right through it right during that same time frame.
And he had that same, he had that great bit about how as soon as Bill Clinton bombed Baghdad, he goes, I knew Bill Clinton was one of the boys as soon as he bombed Baghdad over the alleged fake assassination attempt against George H.W. Bush in Kuwait, which was totally fake.
Bill Clinton bombed Baghdad.
And Bill Hicks goes, I get a feeling like what happens is when you become president, they take you back, you know how you have your big gala and your big party and everything.
Then they take you back in this dark, smoky room with these 12 industrialists, capitalist, you know, power mongers, and a screen comes down.
There's a guy chomping on a big cigar.
The screen comes down, they show you footage of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before.
And then they say, You got any questions?
Uh, this is my agenda is first we bombed Baghdad.
You got it.
And so I mean, I was just call that like my red pill right there was I I grew up my entire childhood was the Republican power establishment in power, and then the first time the other party wins, the guy that wins is one of them,
you know, and as is widely known and even celebrated now that as soon as Clinton beat H.W. Bush, which isn't it funny that it was the third party candidate was Ross Perot who helped run guns during Iran Contra for the CIA from his businesses in Mexico, that he came in to be the spoiler to get the loyal democrat in there.
I mean, that was part of my you know, red pill and conspiracy lore at that time too was that that whole thing was obviously a hoax.
Bush Sr. was willing to lose to to throw that election essentially because they needed a Democrat to get NAFTA passed, you know, and this kind of thing.
I don't know if that's all really true, but that was the way I looked at it at the time.
So, and then they killed the branch divideons.
I mean, right then, like a hundred days in, this is the whole thing, this is the beginning of the Clinton government was the siege at Waco.
And um, you know, it wasn't, I mean, for the most part, it was the it was the FBI, the ATF and the FBI that did that, but Bill Clinton gave the final order, and at the very end of his presidency, he admitted it finally that he was the one who told Janet Reno to send the tanks on and to do the final assault that ended up killing 80 people, including 17 kids, and you know, gassing them and crushing them and burning them, machine gunning them to death.
This horrible massacre, like it was of it was our foreign policy on this little plot of land in central Texas of all things.
It's just crazy.
And if you don't know anything about that, check out the the documentary Waco, the rules of engagement that might have been before your time.
Um, that's a good introduction to that story, a sound one.
Um, but so then I mean, that was it, man.
Um Waco radicalized me and a lot of other people, and you know, I'm not sure now if I knew about Ruby Ridge before that or not.
I think Maybe I had heard a little bit about what was going on up there, but not too much.
But I ended up learning a lot about it afterwards.
And then, you know, those actions by the FBI made a hell of a lot of radical right wingers and a hell of a lot of libertarians out of regular people, you know.
And so I was already very predisposed to that kind of thing.
And so then in Austin, there was um a really um, you know, uh what thorough, well-established um uh community access TV, and so Alex Jones was on there, but so were a lot of libertarians and militia guys and end times there's there's one guy on there always talking about Mikhail Gorbachev with Satan and was gonna make the take us over.
Um, but there are a lot of militia guys, a lot of conspiracy theorist guys, and a lot of good libertarians on there.
Terry Liberty Parker and a lot of other great libertarians were on there, so that was a big exposure to things, and then you know, of course, Harry Brown ran for president in '96, which was huge.
And then I barely took note of Ron Paul during that same campaign season.
That was when he ran for Congress again.
And I heard him on the radio one time for a little bit, but it wasn't a very good or important interview or whatever.
I didn't get much out of it.
He's just some guy running for Congress.
I don't know who he is.
But then he won.
And then I saw him on C-SPAN in 1997, and it was probably right around May '97.
I think it was like the spring of 97.
So, like, I got my uh, I was uh 10 years ahead of everybody who got red pilled on Ron Paul's Giuliani moment where he fought Giuliani over the causes of the motivation for the attackers of September 11th there.
But so for me, it was 10 years before that, watching him on C-SPAN accusing George Bush of selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein right up until the time that Hussein invaded Kuwait with American permission to go ahead and invade Kuwait.
And I remember going, wow, what a balls congressman to say such a thing on C-SPAN on the House floor.
And then at the bottom of the screen it said, Ron Paul R Texas.
And I was like, no way, because and you know, this is also you're a bit younger than me, I can tell.
Um, I don't know if you know this, but Bush Sr. was like sort of kind of nominally a Texan there for many years and was a very important, you know.
He came down here and made his fortune in oil, was a very important guy in Texas politics in Houston.
He'd run for Senate, I guess for house.
I don't think he ever won, or maybe he won for house for one term or something, he ran for Senate and lost, but you know, he was not in the way that W. Bush is known as a Texan, but he was sort of kind of known as a Texan.
He was certainly a very powerful, you know, character.
Obviously, his right-hand man, James Baker the third, uh, was you know, is a Houston lawyer that represents all the oil companies down there and that kind of thing.
So for Ron Paul to be willing to say that about H.W. Bush on, you know, on the con in the congressional record on the house floor like that in the same time.
To me at that time, right?
And this is the age before the internet, right?
This is it's not like now where everybody has an opinion and everybody can tweet it all day long if they want.
The only people who got to have their opinions heard was, you know, TV and you know, people who have like real media careers, the average person, all you could do is call in a talk radio show, right?
Or maybe get an access TV channel, even that is like a special gig for a very small people, you know.
Yeah, and ham radio, yeah, nobody's gonna listen to that.
That's you know, micro audiences.
Um, but you know, there's no way really to talk back.
So to have someone like Ron Paul saying things like that on C-SPAN, it was like you don't get to hear anybody say something like that on TV ever.
And here's a Republican congressman essentially accusing H. W. Bush of treason, or I guess the way I took it at the time was that he was saying he was still selling them chemical weapons after the start of Desert Shield and the build-up before the war and our invasion.
But I think I must have understood that wrong.
Now that I think back on it, I think I misunderstood it then.
And he was just saying he was still selling them chemical weapons up until the time that Iraq invaded Kuwait, which is still bad enough, right?
I think I misunderstood that and gave Ron even more credit.
They're like, wow, he was selling them weapons, even leading up right up to the war itself, even during the buildup against him.
Holy crap, you know.
So anyway, but that's how I found Ron Paul.
And then so Harry Brown and Ron Paul are two of the greats.
I mean, you look at them both of the all-time greatest libertarians in American history, and they're both men of class and character, you know, both of them, you know, um wonderfully happily married types with no scandals.
You know, Ron is the got 18 grandkids or 25 by now or whatever it is, um, you know, still married to his high school sweetheart, um, and a doctor, not a lawyer, and a guy whose voting record backs up every word out of his mouth, which is correct about everything.
And I know because I've interviewed him 30 times.
And if I ask him, well, what do you think about the thing in Korea?
He knows everything about it.
You know, he goes, Well, you know, the president Moon is proposing this, and Trump is saying that, and what they should do on the when they meet on the 26th, they should, you know what I mean?
Like, he knows everything about it about whatever it is that we're talking about.
Um, and Harry Brown was the same way.
He died in about 2004.
But when he died, he was writing a book called The War Racket, which was going to be about every war since World War One and how it was all a scam and it was all against you, and it was all you know, rent seekers using the government against the rest of the people of the country for their own benefit.
And um, and and both of them, you know, great champions of peace in the era of the terror war and and speakers of the truth.
And to me, that's what is you know, especially in the mold of Ron Paul.
That's what is important about libertarianism is because we're not beholdened to power or partisanship in any way.
I mean, even if you're part of the libertarian party, still, it's not like there's any power at stake.
There's no power there.
You know what I mean?
It's a vehicle for you know, trying to radicalize people and educate people, and in some cases, win on you know, local elections and and and statewide elections or whatever, but you're not gonna win the US Senate on a libertarian ticket, they'll find a way to prevent that no matter what.
But um, and so because we're not compromised, we can just tell the truth.
And Ron Paul, of course, he had this advantage, he was a Republican, but he had delivered like two-thirds of the population of his district, right?
Where they were like in the Johnson family, all seven of us vote Paul, because he had been the obstetrician for their entire brood, right?
And so, like he just had his district locked down, like all the money in Israel couldn't stop him from getting re-elected, no matter what.
So they just didn't try, they just let him go, you know, and and get up there and give his speeches and try to ignore him, you know, as best they could.
But he was a huge inspiration to me and to a lot of other people, and because he was he was good on everything.
I go back, I quote him in my book, um, where you know, in 1997 and 1998, and over and over again, he's warning that Bill Clinton's Iraq policy, bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia is going to get us attacked by terrorists.
Okay, he's warning that in 1997.
Ten years later, he tells Giuliani in that debate the reason we got attacked by those terrorists is because we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia.
That's the truth.
And then Giuliani said, How dare you take that back?
And Ron goes, no, it's called blowback.
The CIA coined the phrase, it means consequences of CIA policies, man.
You know, this is what happens.
If you think you can go around the world killing people and never suffer consequences from that, you act at our own peril.
You're acting blindly in a way that's going to get our country in trouble.
And you know, you think about that, that moment changed Ron Paul from this little old congressman that nobody even knew who he was to all of a sudden he's a global superstar, and more importantly, an American one, and and millions of people, especially.
I mean, look, not that many leftists, and there were some leftists who were impressed enough and liberals who were impressed enough to follow Ron, who was almost entirely libertarians and conservatives and right wingers who went for his message.
I mean, a lot of college kids, a lot of college kids like consumer Because he was earnest kind of like it was kind of like the Bernie phenomena, ironically, given that they're pretty much opposites.
But also like AM talk radio, too.
You know what I mean?
Like moms and pops and churches full of Christians and you know, conservative American patriotic Republican types, people who just a few minutes ago were George W. Bush supporters, and then they rallied to Ron Paul because he fed them the most bitter pill of all, which was that September 11th was essentially America's fault.
It was Bill Clinton's fault for bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia for eight years, you know, and H.W. Bush before him, that that's what had brought that on.
Nobody wants to hear that.
Your mom and dad don't want to hear that.
And Ron Paul was like, Look, mom and dad, that's the truth.
You understand me?
That's what happened.
And it's important that we understand that that's what's going on, so we can stop doing the kinds of things that put us in danger.
And people said, you know what?
Holy shit, I can't believe I just saw politician treat me with respect enough to just tell me the truth about what the hell is really going on around here.
And you can tell when Giuliani denounced him, Giuliani didn't even know what the hell he was talking about.
Giuliani said, that's one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
And I've heard a lot of crazy explanations for 9-11.
And as you know, there are a lot of crazy explanations for 9-11.
But it was blowback from America bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia to Giuliani.
That was the wildest thing he ever heard.
Except that if you knew anything about it at all, you knew that Osama bin Laden had been saying since 1996, since 1996, we're at war with you because you're bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia.
Right.
It's like the hostage situation and over again.
It's just like the hostage situation for from a couple of weeks ago here in Texas, where the FBI is like, you know, we're still we still don't know the motive.
And the dude is literally screaming the motive while he's holding people hostage.
It's just like all you have to do is watch the tapes of these radicals saying why they're they're pissed off.
They tell you why they're pissed off.
I mean, even the Columbine kids had a fucking manifesto, you know, as evil as that was what the combine kids did, they had their reasons.
Like just read the fucking manifesto.
And then so then that's the last part to the answer to your question is once September 11th happened, and these guys went on the biggest bullshitting spree in world history, then and everyone lined up.
I gotta serve my country by supporting the war.
I'm gonna send my boy to join the army.
Like we didn't already have a standing army capable of going to eastern Afghanistan.
We we need to everybody needs to send their son to join the army now.
Everybody needs to call talk radio to say, I just am concerned that George Bush isn't blowing up enough people fast enough.
And I decided, you know what?
I'm signing up on the other side of that.
And frankly, knowing that anti-war.com was there, and I remember checking and reading and Justin Ramondo, because I didn't really even have the internet at that time, and I had read anti-war.com before, but I wasn't like a full-on Ramondo junkie yet, you know.
But I remembered tuning in and checking anti-war.com, and it was good.
You know, they were still anti-war, they weren't saying, Oh, now everything's changed, and so now we're stupid.
You know, they didn't do that, they stayed good from the very beginning, and they're running Ron Paul articles on their site.
And I'm like, Yeah, this is my crew.
And I then like I was mentioned, I was a conspiracy nut, like along the lines of the one world government stuff, which I should have been over that after the Kosovo war.
I mean, that's bullshit.
To give myself a little bit of credit, I was pretty smart for a kook.
And my my uh my conclusions about the idea that they were really building a world federal government were based on some real things, like for example, when the Clinton people were expanding NATO, they were saying, and this turned out not to be reality after Kosovo and after especially W. Bush came in with Dick Cheney and their policy.
But in the 90s, they were saying, listen, we're gonna bring Russia into NATO, and I thought, see, that's the skull and bones, Hegelian dialectic, there, right?
You go, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Now we join together, and now we go to war against Islamic South Asia.
In fact, Vladimir Zranovsky, the Russian nationalist, was saying that that's the plan.
We're gonna do this together and all of this stuff.
And and and the Americans were saying that too.
So there was reason for me to think that that's what the new world order meant was that we were going to essentially bring Russia into NATO, and then we would have the one world white army of the north that would rule against Islamic South Asia and China and whoever you know was next, uh, you know, and that turned out not to happen.
And I should have known once Bill Clinton bombed Serbia to break off Kosovo over Yeltsin's dead body, and there was nothing he could do about it.
That and he had to go around the United Nations and just use NATO to do it because the Russians would have vetoed it on the UN Security Council.
I should have known then that well, so much for world order, you know what I mean?
You had to do Kosovo, but you just cost yourself Russia.
So but it took me too long to get that through my thick skull.
But once the terror war started, and I started reading Justin Ramondo at Antiwar.com, then I knew that this guy knows a lot of things that I don't know, and he knows all about this sect, these weirdos, these neoconservatives, and that that's not Carol Quigley's old Anglo American establishment, it's something else.
Frankly, it's the Israeli American establishment is what it is.
And these were the guys who lied us into war in Iraq, was the vanguard of the Israel lobby in America, and it was just an entire different story.
It didn't have a damn thing to do with building up the United Nations to be a world government, it just wasn't about that.
And and once I finally figured that out, um, you know, that really helped because uh, you know, I had I really learned a lot of history from being when I was a kook because the kooks a lot of times, especially like some of the more advanced kooks.
If you read their bibliographies, they got some really good books you ought to read, man.
Going back, the real history of the 20th century is something else, you know, it really is.
It's not necessarily whatever QAnon says it is or whatever, but there's a lot there.
There's a lot of revisionism that's that really tells a different story than the way we learn it in school, you know.
So I'm I I learned a lot from that, and that was really what got me so into this.
But then I quit being a kook right at the time that the most important chapter in all of this took place, which was the dawn of the war on terrorism.
So then I wasn't, you know, following the loons off on a diverted path.
Oh, Rumsfeld shot a missile at the Pentagon while he was sitting in it and all this stupid crap.
And instead, I was, you know, uh reading people who knew what the hell they were talking about about who the neocons were and how they were trying to pin 9-11 on Iraq and go to Iraq for Israel's sake, and then the rest is history from there, right?
Because from Iraq, the war spreads into then Libya and then Syria and all throughout North Africa and down into Yemen and all the rest, and it all you know essentially spawns from the terror war there.
So um only regret my ignorance, but what benefit was it to Israel that we were in Iraq?
Ha, yeah, exactly.
I mean, these guys, that's the whole thing.
I mean, there is absolutely as idiotic as they are nefarious here.
I mean, if you go back and I write it all about this in enough already, but all you gotta do is uh pull up a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm, and this is the thinking of David Worms and Richard Pearl, some of the most influential neocons in Dick Cheney's orbit, and you know, who really came up.
This is the the backbone of the thinking behind the plan, and it goes like this, and this sounds really crazy and stupid because it is what we're gonna do is we get rid of Saddam Hussein.
They really want to do a coup, they weren't proposing invasion then.
They wanted to do a coup, and the idea was we'll get rid of Saddam, and then Jordan will be dominant in Iraq because Jordan Peterson, ha, yeah, exactly.
He's very persuasive to some people, apparently.
Um I like uh no, the king of Jordan, King Hussein will be dominant, and the reason they know that is because the Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi had blown all the smoke up their rear ends about how the Iraqi Shiite supermajority will bend right over and obey whatever King Hussein of Jordan tells them.
He'll be able to make himself or his cousin the king of Iraq with the snap of his fingers, essentially, because the Hashemites, that's the royal family of Jordan, they claim to have the blood of the prophet Muhammad, and everybody knows that the Shiites will do whatever they're told by anyone who claims to have the blood of the Prophet Muhammad, and then what we'll do is our Iraqi exile friend Ahmed Chalabi tells us he promises us this will work.
We'll have our new Hashemite king of Iraq tell the Iraqi Shiite clergy in the city of Najaf in the south to pull their Shiite rank and demand that Hezbollah in southern Lebanon stop being friends with Iran.
Okay, but this is completely stupid and wrong in the name.
Because in fact, the the she the Shiites do revere the family of the Prophet Muhammad, but not anybody who claims to be descended from him, just this particular line, I think starting with his son-in-law.
I need to go back and reread all this.
But the original Sunni Shiite split is some of them wanted to follow the family of Muhammad, and some of them wanted to just pick their own imams, basically, right?
It's almost like Catholics versus Protestants in a way.
So to oversimplify it vastly.
But anyway, guess what?
The Hashemites are not among those revered by the Shiites at all.
They're Sunnis, and they got nothing to do with that tradition whatsoever.
And back when the British had foisted a Hashemite kingdom on Iraq back in the 1920s, the Shiites had a thoughtwa that forbid anyone from cooperating with the king in any way.
This whole thing was completely inane.
And the idea was that this is going to help Israel because we'll make the Shiites in Iraq pull rank and they will influence Hezbollah and make Hezbollah start being nice to Israel and stop being friends with Iran.
And then, of course, that's not what happened at all.
Once they did the war and invaded and put the Shiite supermajority in power, of course, they're allied with Iran and backed by Iran, which is part of the reason that after Bush won the war for them with the cost of about a million people killed in that civil war, but he won the war for that Shiite supermajority.
And then they said, Great, now beat it.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
And they didn't, you know, they didn't even really say thank you.
They just said get lost.
Um, after we put those factions in power because one, they're the supermajority, and two, they're best friends with the country next door.
So they didn't need American support anymore.
And um you know, that's the story of Iraq War II, right there.
And it and it comes from these neocons being absolutely as ignorant and ridiculous as they are arrogant and and um and determined, you know, as fanatical as any group in American history to get their policy rammed through after the crisis of September 11th.
That no matter what, we are going to Iraq, you know.
In fact, I think a big part of the reason that September 11th happened was not because Bush was deliberately looking away and letting it happen.
It was because every time anyone brought up bin Laden, the neocons would say, no, no, no, no, no, forget bin Laden in Afghanistan.
It's all about Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Saddam's behind al-Qaeda anyway.
It's all about Saddam.
What's al-Qaeda gonna do?
Set off a truck bomb somewhere or something.
We don't have to worry about that.
All eyes on Baghdad.
If that's if you listen to those losers over at CIA and try to and go after Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, man, we're never gonna get to Baghdad.
We're gonna be stuck in Afghanistan.
That's gonna suck.
And I think that's why September 11th happened was because of this constant kind of propaganda campaign by the neocons inside the government that don't listen to the professional government, not to give them too much credit.
But the CIA was concerned about Al-Qaeda.
You know, they're the kind of they're the people who stay when political appointees come and go.
And they're saying Al-Qaeda's a problem.
And the neocons are saying, don't listen to them, don't listen to them.
They're trying to distract you.
Eye on the prize, eye on the prize.
Then once September 11th happens, they go, Oh, yeah.
Well, that's why we have to do Iraq is because of this attack by Al-Qaeda, and just imply and do everything they can to make people believe that somehow Saddam Hussein was behind Osama bin Laden and the September 11th attack, which really blended on the on on the fake um uh chemical weapons, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
Fake, yep, fake WMDs and ties to Al-Qaeda.
And on the eve of the war, 70% of Americans believe that Iraq had done 9-11, and which is hilarious because if you think about it, that's a year and a half after 9-11.
So any idiot, even if you just like lock him in a room alone without any information or a newspaper or a pencil or anything, ought to just simply be able to think, well, wait a minute.
If Saddam did 9-11, why didn't we start carpet bombing Iraq a year and a half ago when we started carpet bombing Afghanistan?
Why are we waiting a year and a half?
Why are we begging the French and the Russians and the Chinese to vote permission on the UN Security Council to start the war?
You remember that.
You only need a US Council to start a war, not to remember Freedom Prize?
You know, yeah.
Freedom Prize, man.
Remember that with the French?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, Freedom Fries.
Yeah.
You know, there's a cool story actually with that.
Was the guy who did that, Walter Jones was a congressman from North Carolina, and he ended up becoming a great Ron Paul type figure.
He was a Catholic.
And what happened was he would write letters home to the uh parents of the dead guys.
Oh, and he was um I forget now, maybe he was South Carolina.
I forgot what it was.
I think it might have been South Carolina, but he had a bunch of military bases in his district, like seven or something, like some crazy amount, or or really important ones, or whatever it was.
See a guy's dying all the time and getting blown up to death, right?
Close casket, and he's got to write letters home.
You know, he's determined to write letters home to every mom and dad who this happens to their son over there.
And at one point, he told the story.
At one point, he just got down on his knees and begged for forgiveness, and then that was it.
And he became a Ron Paul guy after that.
Wow.
He was like, What have I done that I took speaking to the CIA?
Yeah, have you um have you had a chance to watch the Oliver Stone documentary on JFK that just came out?
Yeah, I did watch that.
What do you think of that?
What you think?
You know, I'm not as well versed in this stuff as you are.
I've just really taken an interest in the world.
I'm really torn about it.
I mean I'll try to go.
I mean, I never became a JFK conspiracy guy when I was a kid because I just assumed that the CIA and the military did it because they didn't like his ass, and that was good enough.
And I knew also that there's a stack of books this high, I gotta read, and then I'm still not gonna know because they go, there's just too much all over the place.
So I didn't ever really want to solve that one that badly because I didn't really care because he was a bad guy anyway, and Kennedy.
Um, it was his own.
I mean, he had just done a coup against DM three weeks before, you know.
Um I just figured I can't solve it, but I've already solved it.
Alan Dulles did it, or his friends did it, or you know, because I saw JFK the movie the first time when I was 14 or 15 back then, so I just figure, yeah, whatever, you know, it's good enough for me, but nothing else that I know or think or believe hinges upon that.
You know, a lot of people think like, oh, everything changed after that assassination.
Like, yeah, I'm not so sure about that.
Like I I could see how Johnson was worse, but this is a very gray scale to me, you know, not black and white in that way.
People talk about the prince of Camelot and all this crap.
I'm not impressed by that.
People talk that way about Barack Obama, but I wasn't impressed by that either.
You know what I mean?
Um, I don't I don't buy into that kind of deal.
But when it comes to actually who shot the bastard and from which directions, I just don't know.
And I gotta tell you, it's so funny, man.
I just watched this thing last year.
I'm sure it's still on Amazon Prime.
It's called The Smoking Gun or something like that, I think.
And it's about a guy back in the 1970s who did a study for men's magazine that you never heard of, but it's like the small bro man type character, you know, hunter and sportsman and forensic expert and former lawman and whatever he was.
Can tie any knot.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just said can tie any knot.
Yeah, exactly.
Right, exactly that kind of guy with uh uh plaid flannel shirt, right?
Six foot three cowboy hat.
Um, so he does all the recreations, whatever, and to spare you the long story short here, his conclusion was that the first shot went wild.
Oswald's first shot hit the street, or whoever was shooting from up there.
He didn't get into characters, he wasn't looking at Cubans and whatever, he was doing a forensic examination.
So whoever was behind him up there apparently took a shot that hit the street.
Then he he said the second shot was the shot that went through the president's back of the neck, went out of his throat, and you see him go in the Zapruder film, and this is the so-called magic bullet.
But this guy's contribution and the magic bullet is he says there's nothing magic about it at all.
All that happened was the first shot had rung out and gone wild.
So Governor Connolly had turned to see what was going on, and at that moment was when the bullet came out of the president's neck, and that explains how it hit his shoulder, his hand, and his leg in a straight line.
It's not a magic bullet at all.
It's just that was how he was lined up when he turned in his seat.
Okay, I don't know, but all right.
So that's shot two.
Then he says the shot three that killed the president did not come from up there.
And you can tell from the video.
Blasting out this way, and the trajectory type thing don't match.
So he takes the notes.
Now, this is based off of the notes of the autopsy, and he notices he says, Well, that's funny.
It says here that the entrance wound is 6.5 millimeters, but the full metal jacket bullet that's the so-called magic bullet.
Well, it's only six millimeters.
Uh, wait, wait, I screw that up the other way.
The hole in his head is six.
The full metal jacket bullet was six and a half millimeters.
So, in other words, it's too big for the entry wound.
So he goes, Well, what the hell is that?
That's weird, right?
I don't know, huh?
So he takes, you know how they do with the sticks and the string and whatever, and he lines up the trajectory, and he takes the string and he walks it back and he walks it back and he walks it back.
And guess where it lands?
Not up there in the sixth floor depository, and not over there in the grassy knoll.
He goes to the back seat of the Secret Service follow car.
You think the Secret Service whacked him?
So this was this was what he put together.
The first shot rings wild, hits the street.
Second shot hits the president in the back of the throat or back of the neck, exits the throat, hits the governor, etc.
At this point, the secret service agent in the back seat of the follow car picks up his M16 from the floor of the car.
And then at that point, the driver either hits the brake or the gas or something, presumably, he loses his balance, and he fucking accidentally shoots the president in the back of the head and kills him.
Oh and there's a still shot now.
In the Zapruder film, you can see the follow-up.
But at the time that he shot, you can't see the follow car anymore.
It's just not in the Zapruder film.
But there is a still picture where you can see the guy in the back seat of the follow car and you can see an M16 in the air.
And then that bullet fits.
And then also it's not a full metal jacket bullet, it's a hollow point or I don't know exactly fragmentation round.
And that would explain the giant exit wound.
And so then that would explain a whole cover up of the autopsy and a clamp down of everything without a coup, without the CIA and the Cubans and any of that stuff.
But we gotta hush this up.
We're not gonna hang our own guy out to drive for this accident kind of thing.
And so they let the guy get away with it and let everybody, you know, risk nuclear war with the Soviets over it and everything else instead of taking responsibility.
But then here comes the new Oswald, the new Oliver Stone, and Oliver Stone says, No, man.
This actually the back of the head.
Yeah, first of all, this one hit him in the throat was an entrance wound, and the exit wound wasn't back here, it was way lower, indicating like he was shot from on top of the bridge or something.
I don't know, from the front, but like from higher to lower.
Right.
Um, then he's got um I don't know about this part, man.
It's possible that an entrance wound can cause a big whatever.
I don't know.
It sure looks to me from the Zapruder film like this is an exit wound.
And I know that he's just backing to the left and all that, but I don't know, maybe that's physics.
The bullet exits and the head kicks back from the bullet exiting.
I'm just making that up.
I don't know.
But I don't see a big exit wound in the back in the Zapruder film, but maybe that wouldn't be obvious in the film.
Well, there was a piece of a stall in the back of the car.
That's yeah, that's right.
Yeah, they they say that, and then they also have at one point in the new Oliver Stone thing, they divide up the screen in like eight or 12 or 16 different people, all of them going like this.
You know, their hand is like this to show like a circular wound, you know, the size of a silver dollar or something, and they all go like this.
This is the exit wound right here, right?
And and then there, and then he's got doctors and nurses and other doctors, and the guy at the autopsy, and all of these people saying this was an entrance wound, this was the exit wound.
Um, and then and he's also got people, I think quite credibly saying that the autopsy photos are fake, and that they put his head in the back back together and colour covered it up and did you know a coroner's job on his head, and then they took pictures of it to replace the original pictures by the original photographer.
They got all of his stuff is gone, and they get all this other stuff instead that they took not in Texas but back in DC and this kind of thing.
So I don't know, I really had no idea.
Then that isn't that everything, like which direction was the guy shot from.
And by the way, here's the other thing that Stone says, which I think is right, is that it wasn't Oswald, whoever pulled that trigger up there, uh, or if that's even where any of those shots came from, that sixth floor depository window, and because he demonstrates virtually conclusively that there's no way he ran down those stairs and could have been seen eating in the little break room cafeteria thing on the second or third floor,
whatever it was, um, without being seen, uh, because there were other people in the stairwell at the time coming and going and wanting to go and see what's going on and all these things, and he has all their testimony saying that yeah, I looked, and there was Lee Oswald was sitting there eating a sandwich and didn't have any idea what was going on, and no, he couldn't have run down the stairs because there's only one stairs, and I was in them at the time.
He would have had to pass me to get there, and this kind of thing, and that was one that I learned from my dad when I was a little kid, was it always seemed funny that he his alibi was that yeah, he was in the building, but he was many floors below, seen calmly eating a sandwich within a couple of minutes, you know, and having somehow discarded the rifle and whatever it was, taking care of everything, and then come down there, and then that was his great excuse.
It wasn't to get out of the building and get the hell out of there and deny he was ever there, but it was to be seen eating a sandwich in the break room, and then when they parade him before the cameras, he goes, I didn't kill anybody on the Patsy.
Like, now maybe that was a more common back then.
Yeah, but like he was making a joke.
he could have just said, Look, I didn't do anything.
They got the wrong guy.
Right.
But he said he was a Patsy, so he implied a conspiracy.
Right.
Sounds like he knows that he was told to be at that building at that time.
And then he went, Oh, I see what's going on here.
You're framing me up for this thing.
God dang it, Bobby.
I should have known, right?
Like it's just such a specific claim of innocence, isn't it?
How many times have you ever heard anyone else say, I'm the Patsy for whatever crime being committed?
Well, you know, and let's just let's just think of it from a psychological profile for a second.
Let's just say you're a lone radical gunman.
Yeah.
And you got him.
You got it.
You don't lie about it.
You like those guys all say, Yeah, I fucking shot him.
Jack Ruby didn't try to like say I didn't shoot, you know.
Anyone, like anybody who would do that admits it.
They write about it before they write about it after, or they stand, you know, the like you look at any mass shooter, whatever, they all own it, they own it.
And the fact that he was saying he was a Patsy so emphatically right off the bat is just indicative to me that he was just that.
Yep.
Well, you know, I know a lady who her family, they're Republicans back then, which was there's no such thing in Texas, they're very 63.
I'm sorry in 63, yeah.
And or even before, and you know, the right the Democrats were the right, you know.
Um in the South and in Texas, and um, but they were the rare Republican family, and she told me that when the day that the minute that Jack Kennedy named Lyndon Johnson to be his vice presidential candidate, that they all just laughed and said, Oh, he's a dead man.
Lyndon is gonna kill him dead and take his chair and like start your stopwatch.
It's on what a fool of all the people to make your vice president.
Like, I know you need Texas and all of that, but man, what a mistake because he's gonna kill you.
What was so menacing about LBJ before um the Kennedy presidency?
Uh I'm sorry, what was the first part of that?
Sorry, I was just asking, what was so menacing about LBJ before the yeah, before the Kennedy presidency.
I mean, he was he was a very corrupt player, man.
He was a very tough guy.
He was the kind of guy, you know.
I think he won his big, you know, his first race for the Senate.
I don't know about going to the house, but I know he won his first rate for the Senate by essentially every cemetery in Texas voting for him, and he was known as a hard drinking late night whore and mean old son of a bitch, man.
He was something else, you know, a force that you can kind of pick up on that just listening to his phone conversations.
You can pick up on that, the personality sort of dude.
I mean, they talk about him.
This is a late night show, right?
They talk about him, how should I say, uh molesting young ladies right there in front of his wife in front of everybody, just doing whatever he wanted, you know.
Like, yeah, he was a yeah, so you know, I don't know who all he had murdered before Jack Kennedy, but I just know like this family, they just immediately predicted that this is what's gonna happen.
So I don't know if he was directly in on it or not.
One thing I like about Oliver Stone's take on this is that it's the right wing cowboy establishment, the military industrial complex, not the bankers and the oil men from back east, but it's you know what he calls the beast, it's the new right, and um, that they're the ones who did the shooting here, and then um I forget exactly how he does this in Nixon.
I think well, anyway, it if you ever seen the the Oliver Stone movie Nixon, it's really great.
It's got um Hannibal Lecter uh plays Nixon.
Anthony Hopkins, yeah.
Anthony Hopkins plays him.
It's so I saw the interview one, the uh Nixon Frost one is what I saw.
Oh, okay.
Frost Nixon.
So in the in the Oliver Stone movie of Nixon, there's a scene where, and this is the true history that people will raise this to this day that Nixon was in Dallas the day before the assassination.
So Oliver Stone has a treatment on this in the movie.
And it's he's shown earlier in the movie that Nixon has to go and court these Texans.
And I guess the implication is they're Lockheed from Fort Worth or something, you know, along those lines.
And then here they summon him, essentially.
And he comes and the guy is played by J.R. Ewing of Dallas, you know, the the astronaut from I Dream of Genie is the uh what's his name?
Major Nelson, you know, probably know exactly who you're talking about.
But yeah, so when he's playing a mean old Texan, he can do that character very well, right?
A very powerful he's playing very powerful, J.R. Uing type character, right?
And he's just reading the the law, he's just telling Nixon, here are your marching orders, and here's what you're going to do.
And Nixon is like, Oh, I'm the president of the United States, can't talk to me quite like that, you know.
And he's like poking his finger in his chest.
You're the president of the United States because I say you are, and I can own President United States your ass anytime I want, and all that kind of thing.
Oh, that's later.
No, no, that's later.
The first time he meets the first time he goes and meets him is the day before Kennedy's shot.
And he goes and and they have this long talk and whatever, and then he leaves town the next day Kennedy's shot, and then so Nixon is all paranoid as hell because he can see that essentially they've compromised him, that they brought him close enough.
These are the guys who killed him, and that but they brought him close enough that he can't say anything about it now because what the hell was he doing in Dallas the day before?
And this kind of thing.
So now essentially he's been caught up in it, and then Oliver Stone is not the source for this.
This goes back, I don't know to who originally claimed this, but essentially the idea was that whenever Nixon talked about the whole Bay of Pigs thing, that that meant the assassination of Jack Kennedy.
That you know, that was the whole Bay of Pigs thing was you know, from beginning to end here.
This whole thing with the right wing Cubans working for the CIA and the mob and the way that that all blew back in their face, and that these were the guys.
And the general the the general conspiracy is that the intelligence community was so pissed off that Kennedy didn't uh allow for the use of uh American troops in in Cuba during Bay of Pigs that they whacked him.
No, no, I think the idea is that was that I think that was the big star.
I mean, he fired Alan Dulles over that, and that was obviously the start of the huge acrimony between him and them, which it was really their fault.
I mean, they completely screwed that up completely, and I think the idea they did it on purpose.
I think they wanted to push they wanted to force Kennedy's hand, and he just had integrity on that particular issue.
Well, I think it was both.
I think it was supposed to work well, but they still were gonna force him to provide air support, but there it was such a disaster, there was nothing to support.
In fact, I got a great book here.
I forgot, I'm trying to remember the guy, Howard.
Um, there's a couple of great books on the Bay of Pigs, but uh Howard.
Um, I interviewed the guy about it too.
It's just a great boy, he just shows how the plan kept getting changed and changed and changed and changed.
But the people who wrote the original plan weren't there to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't change it that much, right?
It just got like passed down this chain to where by the time they're doing it, there's just no way this is gonna happen.
And they moved the landing zone from here to there and every other thing, you know.
Um, and they were you're right that they were trying to essentially they were counting on Jack Kennedy to order air support, and he was like, 'No, you're trying to roll me into this.
I'm not gonna do that, you know.
Um so I don't know that you could say that they killed him for that, but I guess the idea is that the motive was that he really, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, really wanted to end the cold war, and uh that he meant to do so in his second term, and that he was going to refuse to escalate any further in Vietnam.
Now, I don't really know if that's true, but I I will tell you that um my friend Mike Swanson in his book The War State, he doesn't get into who shot him at all.
But I he has done the best job of convincing me that you know when people say that Jack Kennedy when he gave the American University speech that he really meant that that this was You know, signaled a real change in his policy, and he was gonna go to Moscow and make a deal and somehow end the cold war and all this stuff, and that that was what they would not tolerate.
Now, I don't know if I really buy that.
It could be more narrow than that, like not necessarily end the whole cold war, but maybe he was just more reluctant to go to Vietnam, and they were more determined to get rid of that military equipment, man, in the name of the Vietnam.
Stone implies that um JFK was determined to end the CIA, and he he quotes them as saying, I will shadow the CIA into a thousand pieces.
And that's a famous quote.
I'm not sure how true that really is, or whether I mean, I think in the movie JFK, he portrays him as already ordering it, and that he gave a memo to the joint chiefs saying that you will now take over intelligence from the CIA, and they I can't think of a damn good thing they've done.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's really true, man.
You think about it, you know, if somebody had assassinated Barack Obama, they would have come up with all this mythology about how great he was and all the great things he was about to do, if only they hadn't stopped him, and it must be why they did what they did is because of the greatness of all the things that he would have, could have should have done if only he'd had the chance or whatever.
So it's hard for me to buy into that too much.
I know that there are people like you know, Noam Chomsky, who's much older and lived through all that time, who says it's that's total BS that JFK was nothing but Barack Obama, who was nothing but Hillary Clinton.
There was nothing special about this guy, there was nothing peaceful about him.
Now you could say that maybe Chomsky is just such an ideologue, he couldn't see the shades of gray where they did exist.
You know, it's probably both certainly Jack Kennedy started out as Hillary Clinton, a center left, you know, very center left democrat.
Um, and you know, supposedly anti-communist, though, which is something you don't see from the left very often today.
Well, I mean, nowadays communism doesn't exist anymore, really as a thing, so it's not much of a thing, but that's the Democrats.
Not in the same not in the same sense, but the Marxism definitely exists.
Uh, yeah, but I just mean there's no Soviet empire to accuse people of being loyal to it and that kind of thing.
You know, it's a funny thing, dude.
I saw uh I watched uh Cannonball Run and Canonball Run 2, and there's this funny scene where uh have you ever seen those?
You're too no man.
Um where are those?
It's Dean Martin.
It canonball run was a race across the country from from New York to LA that they did in the late 70s with muscle cars and all this stuff, and then they made movies out of it with Burt Reynolds and Dom Delawise and um Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and all these guys.
So in the movie, the the uh Burt Reynolds character is always playing pranks on or you know, getting the other guys in trouble, Dean Martin and um Sammy Davis Jr. are a team, and they're dressed up like priests, and so uh and they're driving a red Ferrari, and then so uh Burt Reynolds tells the local sheriff's department in this small town.
There's some communists coming through here, and they're they're dressed like priests and they're driving a red Ferrari and they're wanted for raping girls or some terrible thing, some terrible commie thing.
You guys do your patriotic duty and stop them for us, and then so they show Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. in the Ferrari, but they got a police radio scanner, so they can hear the cops talking about him.
Everybody be on the lookout for two priests and a red Ferrari, they're communists, and we gotta stop them.
And Dean Martin goes, communists, I'm not even a democrat.
That's a great they don't make him like that anymore.
And and lots of kuntosh in both movies, which makes them both worse all you know five hours, whatever three hours.
So it seems apparent to me that the military industrial complex coupled with the intelligence community, which are basically the same thing in a lot of ways, are the source of most of our problems uh in the United States today.
What the fuck are we supposed to do about it?
Yeah, good question.
I mean, look, um ultimately, as Ron Paul said, even in the Soviet Union, the people get the government that they demand.
And if people won't go along with it anymore, then it won't be gone along with.
And you can see where people's opinion does have an effect.
You know, for example, when Obama wanted to bomb Syria over the fake chemical uh attack in 2013, the American people were just against it.
I mean, the entire American right was against it, led by Breitbart and then therefore talk radio and everything.
They were just completely against it.
And you know, there are liberals who are willing to go along if it's Obama's war, but they didn't really want to do it.
You know, they their heart wasn't really in it.
They'd still got a little bit of that legacy of the Vietnam era, new left in them that doesn't really like to fight, you know.
I know we already been at war for 15 years.
And we'd already been at war, you know, yeah, at that point for 10 years, and and um and Obama backed down.
I mean, Obama said, Look, we're gonna continue to do CIA covert action in there, but we're not gonna go to war.
Uh, we're not even gonna do what we did in Libya in Syria.
We're just you know, and he was afraid that he would end up really with Al-Qaeda rule in Damascus.
Um, in a way that in Libya the Al-Qaeda guys were part of the war, but they didn't end up really just or even the guys who did take over weren't quite as bin Laden as they had been previously, so it wasn't nearly as bad as what happened in Syria.
But you look at the rise of the caliphate with Baghdadi and all that, he was really afraid that would happen in Damascus, that they'd lose the whole country.
So um what I don't understand is what purpose the the CIA and the FBI serve because they serve themselves passage to the serve themselves.
I mean, that's it.
Right, right.
But we don't need the past they passed the Patriot Act, which is like a total violation of all the US citizen rights, and they still didn't fucking prevent the Boston bombing.
No, it's like I mean, they were busy.
Boston FBI was busy and trapping some idiot into a fake plot while all that was unfolding right under their nose.
You know, what do you think about it?
Speaking of fake plots, what do you think about January 6th in hindsight?
Um, well, you know, I've interviewed Darren Beatty about it a couple of times, me too.
And I think that um I think he makes a pretty good case.
Uh, there's there's severe reason to believe that there were a lot of informants inside the thing.
Now, if the I tend to try to go with the Occam's razor, simplest thing first.
The simplest thing first is not that the FBI told them to do that as much as just FBI informants did a thing, and now they got to cover that up because whenever the FBI compromises the guy, they also are compromised by that guy, right?
Um, in fact, this is one of the theories about JFK is that the mob killed him for business reasons, but they did so knowing that they were so close to the CIA and the plots to kill Castro at the time that the CIA and the FBI would have to cover it up for them and let them get away with it rather than reveal all that they had been doing together, you know, because they were had compromised the feds right back who had compromised them.
So um, you know, that's like the simplest explanation.
I mean, I have to tell you, I am not of the belief that the CIA and the FBI gotta be behind every dang thing that happens.
Um I think that when you see the guys in the who who is Ray Epps, when you see those videos and you read those articles and you look at these guys, I don't think there's any question that they were working together, that they had very specific goals.
Your job is to do this, and your job is to do this, and at this time and all these things, it's speculation, you can't see it happen.
But it's to me, virtually certain that these six or seven men knew each other and knew exactly what they were doing when they were doing it and all of that.
That doesn't imply government involvement at all necessarily.
If you can't get a uh room with six right wingers to plan to do a thing, I mean, you can.
That's it's crazy to think that you can't do that without it being a government op.
You know, it's could very well be the case that you had you know, one or more of them telling their FBI Agent handlers, what's really going on here, and that they knew or should or could have known.
I think it's already clear they would have could have should have known that they would need way more men than they had there to secure the place.
And there's an article in Vanity Fair about a guy who was embedded with the Secretary of Defense that he wrote it, um, who said that Donald Trump himself said you're gonna need 10,000 men, and I hereby authorize it right now that you can bring out the National Guard and you have 10,000 men.
And they were reluctant to bring them out because they thought it would look like those men were sent there by Trump to overthrow the Congress, and that it would be bad optics like that, like it was part of some coup when really they would just be there to keep the peace and prevent anything crazy from happening.
But so that reluctance led to then craziness.
So, you know, but as far as like whether the whole thing was a setup and the FBI wanted to like, let's get these guys to do the craziest thing they can and see if we can get them to attack the building, break into the building, try to hunt down congressmen inside it and that kind of deal.
Probably not, you know.
Is it possible that the FBI would go that far and trying to make their enemies look that bad?
Yes, but what if we look at it though?
What if we look at it in the context of the entire Trump presidency?
Uh, from the Russian collusion standpoint.
If we look at the the lies about the Pfizer warrant in order to spy on the campaign, and then the lies revolution, you can just sum that up right there.
Every bit of Russia Gate was a lie.
100% of it, all of it.
And so it seems to me that the community was out to get Trump from the from the get-go of his presidency for whatever reason.
I don't know.
Um, that being said, you know, it I think it's in the the um art of war, Sun Tzu, you know, crush your enemy entirely, and it could it it stands to reason that you know they couldn't literally assassinate Trump because that would have been mayhem, but they basically did everything that they could do up to the point of assassinating him in terms of just like attacking from every front, shattering his reputation as much as possible.
And you know, that would be my explanation for why the FBI would have had incentive or motive to catalyze what happened on January 6th, is that it was such a blow to his reputation and the reputation of his supporters that that happened that it was basically an assassination without you know, with only one with only Ashley Babbitt dying.
Maybe I mean that really is kind of like a hindsight rationalization sort of a deal, though.
I mean, in fact, he was already discredited, and they must have known.
I mean, they absolutely must have been tapping all these phones and had to have known, if you know, not the criminal division, but the counterintelligence division that Mike Pence was not going to break the law and try to send the electors back to their states to get new instructions and all this.
There's no provision in the constitution for that whatsoever.
And Mike Pence is not that close of a team player with Trump.
He's a Republican Party guy.
And they even asked him, he said he called Dan Quayle, who was also from Indiana.
And so, what do you think, Dan?
And Dan Quayle said, dude, what are you gonna do?
You count the votes.
There's nothing in there that says you have the authority to decide which votes to count.
There's nothing in there that says you have the right to send votes back to the states because you don't like them.
The electoral college voted, you're there to perform a ceremony.
That's it.
The election's over, and which is true.
So um, but you know, I mean, it is true too that Trump and his people, the closest loyalists to him, they were doing everything they could up until like halfway through that day to try.
That's why Trump said everybody marched to the Capitol.
I don't think he wanted them to go inside.
His idea of fight, fight, fight means stand outside and chant.
That's the American way, you know.
I'm sure that's what he meant when he said that.
But the idea was to pressure Pence into going along with this ridiculous plan to try to keep him in power, which is just insane.
And the fact that the electoral college had already voted, you know, when Jack Kennedy stole the election from Richard Nixon in 1960, Nixon wanted to cry about it and fight about it.
And Ike Eisenhower told him, No, you're not gonna do that.
It'd be bad for the country to do that.
He stole it from you fair and square, dick.
Cry, go home and cry.
Yeah, that's it.
And in this case, I don't know if they stole it from him or not.
I kind of think not.
All the Republican narratives about how stolen it was to me seemed preposterous and and very thin to say the least.
I mean, the way they really rigged it was by all the democratic governors locking the economy down for a year.
You know, that was how they rigged it.
Um, that was the color-coded revolution in it all, right?
Was um, and and unleashing the street protests and then refusing to contain them at all when they turn into riots and that kind of thing.
I mean, that's the that's the part where they really undermine him.
I don't think so much the ballot stuffing, but um it is true though that Trump and was insisting that his people figure out a way to do this.
In fact, I don't know if you saw this, but he just put out a thing recently saying that Trump, you know, slamming Pence, Pence denies that he had the authority to overturn the election.
Yes, he did.
It actually ends with the phrase, he could have overturned the election.
Exclamation point, you know, and damn him for not overturning the election.
That's the words of Donald Trump's press release from yesterday, I think, or two days ago.
Um, and the thing is about it, like, man, you know, ain't nobody hates Hillary Clinton more than me.
I got the trophy.
I beat all y'all at that years ago.
I mean, that's again, you know, like all this, none of this is partisan whatsoever.
Um, you know, I've never been a Trump guy, but I sure did enjoy watching him defeat everybody he defeated to get that job.
Um, if I had to choose, I would rather side with him than them bastards.
But I think it's just true that he's just a narcissist, that he has got a mental handicap in that he can just never say, okay, he just can't.
He's can't bring himself to say it.
And you know, you almost have to have a problem in order to have the audacity to run, right?
Absolutely right.
And and frankly, like I think he's probably the only man in America who is rich enough and famous enough and brash enough to win the presidency without being a governor, a senator, a vice president and totally vetted by the establishment 100% of the way there.
I don't think there's any other person who could do it.
Mark Cuban couldn't do it.
Uh Elon Musk couldn't do it.
Must be even a natural born citizen.
Uh yeah, well, there you go.
But I mean, even if he was he might be rich, but he ain't tall and he ain't famous, not like Trump.
I mean, Trump is essentially what they call like a megastar, right?
When you're when you're Michael Jackson famous and you out even, you know, Elizabeth Taylor doesn't compare to you because you're that god dang famous.
I mean, that's how famous he is.
He's like been a feature in rap music for 30 years.
Sure.
He's famous for different reasons every decade.
Yeah, he's a brand.
His name is Trump for God's sake, like the winning card in the deck, you know.
The guy's um, and and and here's how I knew he was going to win was as soon as I read that the apprentice was on for 14 seasons.
I was like, Oh, well, there you go.
He's gonna win.
That's it.
That's absolutely unstoppable.
Which I had already said that even Jeb would beat Hillary.
Hillary couldn't beat anybody, but there was just no question that Trump was gonna win the primary and win the election.
14 seasons.
Are you kidding me?
You can't beat that.
Nobody could beat that, you know.
How many seasons was the Cosby show?
Uh, probably pretty close, you know.
And frankly, I bet Bill Cosby could have been a senator if he wanted to have been, you know.
Yeah, before the scandal, for sure.
For sure.
Do you think Hillary's gonna run in 24?
Nah, yeah, she's watching that's just bullshit.
Clickbait.
Yeah, she's too old.
Who's it gonna be?
Well, I mean, that's what's hilarious, right?
Because the Democratic Party knows that they're stuck with Kamala Harris, and there's nothing they can do.
It's either gonna be Biden or Harris, and I think Biden, man, is he pushing his luck?
He might run, he might run.
But he also, I think that there's you gotta get I give it like a 6040 shot that his wife is gonna talk him out of it and tell him Joe, you did great, you stopped Trump, you saved the country, but now it's time to go back and pass the baton.
In fact, he could quit a little bit early and let Kamala Harris get a running start like Yeltsin did for Putin back in 2000, you know, let her sit in the chair a few months before the election.
But the Democrats are stuck with her because she's a black woman, and for them to overthrow her in favor of anyone else of a different identity would just it wouldn't work.
You know, huh?
But she's terrible in the polls.
All right.
Well, but that's the thing.
So, but what are they gonna do?
They just can't throw her overboard.
They just can't.
The Democratic Party leadership.
Think about the position that they're in right now.
They're gonna throw her overboard and then nominate who like a white man from some governor from somewhere or something.
I don't know, even know who they would nominate.
You know, Gavin Newsom is handsome, but everyone hates his freaking guts.
He almost got recalled.
He's the most totalitarian, second, third most totalitarian governor in America.
And it was he's too young.
Yep, they can't run him.
She's too young.
So um, they're screwed, man.
The the Democratic Party has an extremely weak hand, even if it's Biden running and he's the incumbent, he's either gonna be in the midst of an massive inflationary bubble or a massive depression from the popping of one.
Uh, either way, he's gonna be completely screwed on the economy.
Um, yeah, older than he is right now, you know.
Um so um it's gonna be Trump on the right.
I think it's gonna be Trump because I don't think anybody could beat him on the right.
Well, I'll tell you this.
I think he's made a mistake trashing DeSantis.
He should have said to Santis, you know you're my boy, but you gotta wait four more years.
Instead, he's been trashing DeSantis in a way where DeSantis is gonna feel like, well, what am I gonna do?
I might as well run against him now.
Why wait?
Um, but I think they'll be fighting over the same voters, and Trump will be telling all his people that this guy is a rat bastard traitor, probably worse for the Chinese communists, or God knows what he's gonna do to smear DeSantis.
He's gonna attack him mercilessly.
So, and I think that'll stick, it'll work.
I mean, Trump succeeds in that when he when he, you know, little Marco is stuck to this day, you know.
Um, not exactly a poker face, yeah.
And I and I don't think anyone, yeah.
I don't think anybody else could stand between Trump and the nomination.
I tell you what, I've got a lot of problems with Trump.
I got the same problems with Trump that you mentioned earlier.
But the the amount of joy to my own fault that I felt and feel uh how triggered he makes everyone I really hate, right?
Makes it very difficult for me not to vote for him.
I voted for him both both cycles last time, and I don't know if I'm gonna vote for him in the primary or not, depends on who runs against him, but it would be very difficult for me not to vote for him.
Yeah, I could never vote for him, but I'll tell you what, I mean, I do think that in a very important sense that he's a hero for stopping Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in one year, you know.
It was kind of unfortunate that he was the one who had to fill the place instead of them because he was really a horrible president.
Um, as you said, you know, he had a full court press against him from his own government the whole time.
Um that's the decisions that he made a lot of really really horrible decisions, but I never would have thought that a Republican president would have written everybody a check.
Yeah, well, I mean the thing is I mean, he was the liberal democratic whole life.
Yeah, he's he's not really a conservative, he doesn't even know what that means.
He never called himself, yeah.
He's right, yeah, and even then he's just acting as one, right?
He's not a populist, he's a fucking billionaire, you know, he's a TV star.
Um he's uh you know, I do think that maybe I'm being naive.
I do think he loves the country, though.
Yeah, sure, in a kind of yeah, but in a way that like anybody can, it's very easy to do.
But it's you know, I'll tell you what, man.
I read this thing, I admit it was at Salon.com.
I don't know what the hell I was doing there, but I was reading something, and it was in the right-hand margin, and it was this is after the election and after January 6th, and everything like that.
But in the margin, it said what Trump is liable to Do if he loses.
Now I thought in the summer that just, oh, he's gonna win.
I was more worried about what the Democrats were going to do.
And they had run all these articles about how they were even willing to um, they were gonna fight just like Trump.
I mean, they were willing to uh try to fight over state electors, they were even threatening that they would have the West Coast state secede from the union rather than let their um uh rather than participate in the United States if Trump were to be re-elected, that would be their ultimate threat, would be all this was in the Washington Post.
Um, of the lengths that the Democrats would go to, you know.
So I was pretty much ignoring all the articles about this is what Trump will do if he loses, because I was like, he ain't gonna lose.
So it's kind of that's stupid anyway.
Right.
But so I clicked on this article, and it wasn't by a Democrat talking about, oh, he's gonna try to rig the electoral college vote in Michigan or whatever.
It wasn't like that, it was a psychiatrist, and she was just talking about him personally, so she wasn't getting into like what he would do with the mechanics of things um in a political way.
There was a psychological response.
Yeah, like this guy is a paid straight out of my textbook, okay?
He is a narcissist.
He that's what he is.
He's got narcissism syndrome B or whatever to the nth freaking degree.
And what that essentially means is that he doesn't love himself, he doesn't think to himself that, like, yeah, basically you're all right, man, you know, the way most of us do.
Um, and that's probably because he was raised by his father to hate himself and never feel like he was good enough and that kind of thing, whatever it was.
But so when someone is really like that, and uh they compensate for that lack of self-regard by always just having to be the best at everything to always always have to win, and then if they don't win, it's universal.
They just accuse the other side of cheating, they refuse to admit that they did not win.
If it's a foot race or if it's an electoral race, or you know, if it comes down to a business deal and the other guy screwed them, they'll say no.
I'm the one who got him in the deal the other way, and there's always deny, deny, deny, never never apologize, never back down, never admit that okay.
Well, this time you're wrong, I was wrong, I guess, or whatever.
And it's just so what will he do if he really loses?
What will he do?
He'll throw a temper tantrum and he'll say it was rigged, he'll say that they cheated, and he'll demand that all the people who like him believe him and agree with him and do everything they can to fight for him.
And like there's all different reporting about from inside his administration after the election, but before the inauguration, where you know, he's talking with his lawyers, Giuliani and all his men and whatever.
And the line is, are you willing to fight for this president?
Are you still willing to fight for him or not?
And he's that's what he's demanding of his team.
He's not saying, guys, do we agree that we have a constitutional path forward here or something like that at all?
It's just are you willing to fight until the end to do no matter what you can do.
Let's come up with this harebrained scheme where we try to get Pence to refuse to count the votes and just whatever we can do.
And then and yes, he was able to get to sign up some people to on his team to go along with that, and he was able to sign up tens of millions of Americans to believe him.
That just like with George W. Bush, he wouldn't lie to me about this.
I have to believe him, right?
This is my president.
He tells me Saddam Hussein is a threat to this country that I have to let him defend me.
Well, I'm going to do that.
If Donald Trump, the sitting press of the United States is all hands on deck, everyone come to the Capitol on January 6th to protect the constitution and the rule of law from the evil commie Chinese Democrats overthrowing us and whatever all this.
Um, you know, Maduro and Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines and all this.
That's just essentially his personal narcissism playing out because he just any other person would just say, okay, fine, you beat you stole it fair and square.
I'll have to try again next time.
But at some point, I mean, think about If you're in a race and the guy does cheat, and you know he cheated, but the referee refuses to admit it.
Are you just gonna sit there and stomp your feet and cry on the track all afternoon in front of everybody's dad?
Or you're just gonna suck it up, man.
Because sometimes you get screwed, bro.
That's it, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and frankly, if I if I lost a presidential election and I knew that the my opponent cheated, I wouldn't say anything.
I mean you might say something, but you're not gonna fight beyond the election.
You know, but but the but the belief in the system, even if the system is not worthy of faith is so crucial to peace.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I mean, uh, the truth is the truth, you know.
But I agree, I wouldn't lie, but yeah, I mean I I empathize with the with the Machiavellian approach, like hey, you know, take one for the team.
Well, yeah, I mean, that was the Nixon thing.
Eisenhower told Nixon, you're just gonna have to suck this one up, kid.
Right, I don't know what to tell you, buddy.
It's a tempting approach, and everybody knew that they stole it.
Everybody knew that all the dead in Texas and Illinois voted for Jack Kennedy, yeah.
Yeah, it's even everybody madmen series.
Did you ever see the Mad Men series?
No, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, but in Madden, uh, one of the main characters says in Kennedy would or uh Nixon would have won too if it wasn't for every corpse in Cook County.
That's like a line that was written in that show that takes place course of that election year, yeah.
So it's obvious that the culture knew, but yep, everybody did.
Um, but what's once he got away with it, it was like, dude, what are you gonna do?
You're gonna tear this country apart, you're gonna pit uh regular American citizens against each other over this partisan fight to that degree, and of course, at that time, while the commies are watching, we're gonna go through this where there's a question about who has command authority over our military.
No, we're not gonna do that, and it's just frankly it's the most irresponsible thing in the world to continue.
We just need an airtight, we need an airtight blockchain-based election solution or something because the technology's there to make it foolproof.
You know, I don't know why we need to have this government at all.
You know, I think reasonable, you know, yeah, it is.
You know, frankly, I'm a lock in gathering.
I'm a locking man.
Without it.
I'm a Lockheed, man.
I think that you have to have a third party to protect your rights from other people.
Maybe, but even then, you could just how about we have the 50 states with extremely limited powers, but without a national government.
Why do we need a national government?
So we can have a unified foreign policy.
I would rather not have a foreign policy, you know.
I don't want 50 separate foreign policies, but why can't we just trade and not have a security state?
I mean, we're not threatened by anyone anywhere.
We got Canada and Mexico as our neighbors, yeah.
Yeah, uh, it's obvious that the greatest threat to national security is the CIA and the FBI and their own government, and I'm way more afraid of our own government than I have more.
I wake up in the middle of the night, or when I look at my one-year-old daughter, I I have like flashes of fear that one day I'll be in prison, and I have no intention of committing a crime, and I never ever fear for a moment that I'm gonna be the victim of a terrorist attack.
But I do have flashes of fear, like, oh shit, what if I get locked up for yeah?
What if you get framed up for fucking reason?
You know, yeah, yeah.
What if you're not gonna do it?
I have no intention of committing a crime, I swear to yeah, right.
Like, what if they throw me in the pen because I'm a fucking political dissident?
Like, I'm pretty vocal on on on Twitter, and that's fine now, but what if it's not fine 20 years from now?
Right, you know.
Um, yeah, no, you're totally right, and even not even for being a dissident, but might be just because you got brown hair and you're walking on the street, and they go, Well, he looks like the guy that we were told to look for and nail you to the wall, they do it every day, you know.
It's something um that I think about that.
And like people really have to worry that their security force will wrongfully pin something on them.
You ever notice you ever see like on court TV how different a criminal trial is on that kind of still surveillance type camera compared to when they show you a TV drama or a movie, you know?
It goes from like man, the the wood paneling and the close-up zoom shots and all that from the scenes in the movies compared to just watching this group of bureaucrats in a room Rittenhouse sit there in a suit sad for eight weeks or whatever.
In fact, that one was that one was actually like a bad example, I think, because that made it seem more like an episode of Matlock or something.
Where in the in a real trial, it's like they're just flipping burgers in there.
This guy says something, this guy says something.
We all know he's guilty, he's guilty, off you go.
And the guy doesn't even really get a chance to say it his way.
I thought Radley Balco wrote a great piece for the Washington Post where he said the written house trial and the Ahmed Aubrey trial, even though the results of both were correct.
But he said the trials themselves were bad for America because it made it seem like the justice system was intact.
That's right.
They make it look like this is what it happens when someone is prosecuted for murder, but it's just not that's not how it works at all.
It's 99%.
What's crazy about that is that it proves that the government knows how to do it right.
Right, they just don't unless everyone's watching it.
The court's completely clogged with people guilty of offenses, and so they have no time to prosecute crimes.
So instead, the way that they prosecute crimes is they go, look, we're gonna charge you with 75 things unless you plead guilty to five of them.
And then it's like, how am I gonna go before a jury illegal to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit?
That should not even be legal.
Yep, then they just bury you another prison for that.
I mean, you think about it, you want to how about like accountability for prosecutors who knowingly prosecute people who didn't do it, or at least you know they don't for public defenders who win to actually give them an incentive to fucking win if you win five grand if there was accountability for prosecutors who prosecuted innocent people, then they would just destroy the process, they would destroy the process for proving your innocence after trial.
They would just do anything they could to undermine the ability to even have something to hold them responsible for.
Then they would find it.
I swear to God, if I was on a jury, I I am like the number one juror that you want, dude.
Because unless unless the victim is like a child, even if I'm convinced that the person's guilty, I'm probably gonna just insist on not guilty.
Well, I gotta admit, I testified in a trial one time for the state.
I was not ratting on a friend who I was guilty with or anything like that.
I had walked in on an armed robbery at the quickie mart, and the guy split the old man's head open.
Man, that was the craziest thing.
I still remember how orange the blood was.
I was just all you witnessed the crime though, that's different.
Yeah, bring yeah.
So, but I did not point my finger at the defendant because I didn't really know if that was him or not.
Man, I was looking at the club in his hand more than I was looking at his face, and I don't really know.
I didn't identify him from the pictures that they showed me at the police station that day either.
I was just like, he might be one of those, but I'm not gonna convey, I'm not gonna point at an individual.
I'll tell you what I saw happen.
Whoever did it, this is what he did, but you guys decide who the who is.
I'll I wouldn't take insides on that because I just whatever, man.
He was a 20-something-year-old black guy, somewhere between like five, 10 and 6-1.
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, um, yeah, but um uh I know that from that trial that it was like a crazy like bumbling thing, man.
Like I was reluctant to participate in it at all.
So I'm like, I really don't believe in this, you know.
But then I'm like, well, somebody split this old man's head open, and this is the way we do it around here, they have a monopoly on doing this kind of process, and he is getting a jury trial and whatever.
I don't know, I guess, you know, do the thing, and he was convicted.
Um but you know, it was for a real crime.
I mean, he he brutally attacked an old man just to rob him, you know what I mean?
There was no mitigating circumstance whatsoever in the thing, it was just a premeditated criminal act of of violent aggression towards a helpless person, too.
Is the old man okay?
You know, um, I mean, he survived.
I don't think he was okay.
No, I think he was, You know, I I I saw his son around after that a couple of times, and they owned a couple of quickie marks.
I'd seen his son around, and I guess his son had said that you know he had retired after that or whatever, and they all took over the business from him after that and this kind of thing.
But um well, dude, I really really enjoyed this conversation.
I'm so glad we finally got to hang out.
I appreciate you hopping on.
Yeah, I would feel bad for you.
But um uh where before we get off the call, where can people find you?
All right, I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, that's libertarianinstitute.org, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com, which everybody should read every day.
And I wrote the books, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism and Fool's Erin, time to end the war in Afghanistan.
And you can get the audiobooks of those audiobooks of Enough Already just came out.
Um, so you can get that.
Did you read them now?
I'm at Scott Horton.org.
I got a bunch of interviews for you there, and um that's about it.
Oh, I'm on the radio on Sunday mornings in Los Angeles on KPFK 90.7 FM.
Did you read the audiobooks?
Yes.
Very cool.
All right, man.
Well, I'm gonna end the stream and um thanks so much for coming on.
