Fri Episode #2221: Propaganda, Oil Shock, and the Road to War With Iran
Charles Goyette and Eric Peters dissect the March 2026 Iran crisis, arguing that President Trump's undeclared war violates the Constitution while profiting from defense stocks like Raytheon amidst a $39 trillion debt. They expose historical lies regarding the 1953 Shah coup and Saddam's aggression, criticize the "lapdog press" for suppressing school bombing details, and warn of an engineered authoritarian takeover by 2030. The discussion further condemns automated braking systems and ethanol mandates as tools to erode liberty and inflate costs, suggesting current policies serve deep state agendas rather than national security. [Automatically generated summary]
In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday the 13th of March, year of our Lord 2026.
Yes, folks, it was exactly six years ago on a Friday the 13th in March that we had Trump roll out his COVID lies.
And of course, the Emperor had no clothes then.
He doesn't have any clothes still.
It's just naked tyranny.
He had no pandemic.
He has no justification for his war.
We're going to be talking to Charles Goyette first.
He's a New York Times best-selling author of the book, Empire of Lies.
How appropriate and timely to talk to him.
The subtitle is Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And then after Charles Goyette, we're going to be talking to Eric Peters.
What's going on with the Iran war?
Why are we not allowed to know what's happening in this war?
We can't get the truth from anybody.
Everybody is hiding what is happening.
Everybody has got AI and bots lying to us about what is happening to their side and to the other side.
Stay with us.
We'll be right back.
All right, joining us now is New York Times bestselling author Charles Goyette.
His book is Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And he's had a lot of experience with the military, with weapons systems.
We're going to talk to him a little bit about his experience with the Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan had and kind of get his take on what's happening with this anti-ballistic missile thing, as well as where are we going now?
Where are we right now in this war?
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles.
So it's a great pleasure to be with you, David.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well, thank you.
The Disaster Of The MAGA Coalition00:15:39
You know, we don't really know.
We're getting all these contradictory statements every day talking about an empire of lies.
Is it nearly over?
Are we just beginning?
We get different stories even from the same people in the Trump regime.
So exactly where are we?
We always got the fog of war, don't we?
And I guess it's mainly because we're getting a lot of smoke blown at us by the government on both sides of the war.
Tell us what you see in terms of what you're watching.
First of all, we're not at war.
But then don't forget that we've been at war for 47 years.
That's right.
So it's total confusion, the fog of war, I guess.
That's not good enough.
It's just political fog.
You know, just to get off track for one second, there's a great deal to be said for the virtues of the Founding Fathers who knew the historical precedents for these kinds of events.
And they decided that on good precedent, they decided that the American people should have the power to declare war through their elected representatives.
And it was because, first of all, I mean, two primary reasons.
First of all, of course, they knew the precedents did suggest that executives, kings, and so on, popes even, had a propensity to engage in needless wars.
That's right.
And that if you lodge the power with the people who had to pay for them and die in them, then there was a certain amount of reluctance that didn't appear in the executive branch.
So they moved the war-making authority without ambiguity over to the people.
But it had the second advantage of having the debate about the objectives of the war clarified in a declaration of war.
So you know that in signing the Declaration of Independence, the founders pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
In a declaration of war, generally the authorities, the relevant authorities declare they declare what the objective is, who the enemy is, how much resources they're dependent on devoting to it.
And then you know how the end game plays out.
We don't ever have any of that.
And it has the additional virtue of making clear to potential opponents that we're at war with these people.
And if you do anything contrary or that befriends them during this period, and especially to our own people, that would be an act of treason.
But I hear people bandying about the word treason all the time in the United States today, and yet there is no declaration of war.
And without, I mean, the president can't wake up in the morning and say, you know, I'm really, really angry at the people in Bolivia.
And so they become the objects of a war.
And you could commit treason by doing business with the people in Bolivia.
It's insane.
That's one of the reasons why we need a declaration of war.
And of course, we haven't had one since World War II.
But I'm sorry, I got off track there, David.
But no, you're absolutely right.
But, of course, that's what this president does.
I mean, we could wake up tomorrow morning and be at war with Canada or Greenland.
That's what we're looking at for the last year.
When you put this in, people talk about Taco, Trump always chickens out.
I said this is a Trump always is capricious as well as odious in what he does.
And so we never know from moment to moment because neither does he.
He doesn't know from moment to moment what he's going to do.
He hasn't made up his mind.
And I guess when we look at this war, that's one of the key things.
He's back and forth.
He doesn't even know where he's going because he hasn't even defined the objectives and what winning looks like in his own mind, let alone for everybody else.
And if you had a debate with this, you would expect at least one person out of the 500 and so in Congress would ask the uncomfortable question, why are we doing this?
And what does winning look like?
What is the objective in this?
And we don't know any of that right now.
And so everybody's just wondering how long is he going to go on this escapade that he's on?
Well, you know, he's going to go, one, he's going to go one to unconditional surrender.
And two, he's going to go to the point where oil prices get too high and he becomes desperate to get out.
You know, one of the news sites, I think it was political, reported the other day that Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, her hair was virtually on fire trying to figure out, you know, calling all the secretaries, what can we do to suppress gasoline prices?
Because we're in big trouble in November.
Well, that's funny.
Here's what you could do to suppress gasoline prices.
Don't go to war.
That's right.
So think about everything.
You know, there's so much guidance in the backstory and the history and the accumulated wisdom of mankind to prevent these kinds of things.
It's not just a declaration of war.
You know, the story of what is her name, who let all the sorrows of the world out of Pandora, Pandora's box.
Well, Prometheus is the one who stole the fire from the gods, the fire of light, you know, that we would be able to use our ration, our reason, and so on and so forth.
And was tormented for having done so.
But Prometheus means forethought.
And then his brother was afterthought.
His name was Epimetheus.
So, of course, his bride was Pandora.
You think about things later when it's too late.
Gee, I wish I hadn't opened that box.
So we have this, not a Promethean society, but an Epimethean society that thinks about everything later.
That's right.
You know, when we look at this, again, we go to war and we've got our gas tank is half full.
Don't even have the Europeans are debating as to whether or not they're going to release their strategic petroleum reserves.
We go to war with ours half empty.
Of course, it was emptied by Biden because he had put sanctions on, and then Trump didn't fill it up.
Even though he's bragging about low oil prices last year, he didn't fill up his tank when you say prices.
And didn't Biden dump the strategic petroleum reserves to make things look better just in time for the November election?
That's right.
That's right.
You know, this is how they work.
I mean, we're all at play, and our affairs and our prosperity and our liberties are all at the hands of these guys that don't know what the heck they're doing and will do anything to further their own fortunes.
I saw, I saw the story, I believe, yesterday that the Trump family, I guess the sons, you know, I mean, we're already up to our eyeballs at profiteering and crony capitalism thing.
You know, I saw wristwatch TV for Donald Trump.
I'm your favorite president.
Here's my wristwatch.
You know, one of these days, somebody's going to really look into the cryptocurrency stuff.
But the boys came up yesterday.
They're investing in war drones now.
They have some sort of a deal to take a substantial stake in the production of war drones.
I mean, you know, would Jefferson or Washington have behaved like this or would they have let their family behave like this?
Not a chance.
I guess the most disgusting thing I've seen is everybody is talking about who's responsible for bombing this girls' school and killing like 160-something children.
And Trump doesn't even have the respect for the American people to try to come up with a plausible excuse or deniability, right?
He just makes stuff up.
Like, yeah, we sell the Tomahawk to everybody and Iran's got them and Iran probably did it and all the rest of the stuff.
It's just childish what he's doing and a total disregard for human life.
He doesn't.
We've had the senator from Louisiana, Kennedy, apologize publicly for that, but neither Trump nor Hegseth apologized.
They just said, well, I don't know, maybe, you know, somebody else.
We'll look into it and see what happened.
They don't want to accept responsibility for it.
They don't want to apologize.
They don't offer any plausible deniability to the American people.
They figure we're just going to go along with whatever they do.
And evidently, they're right.
That's the amazing thing about that.
Evidently so.
Yeah, and you're talking about profiting.
Look at Lindsey Graham gloating about how we're all going to get rich.
The we, I guess.
Who is we, David?
Who exactly is we?
You know, I posted on my X account today, I think, or yesterday or today, a stock chart of Raytheon stock, Makers of the Tomahawk.
Oh, they're doing great.
You may be paying five bucks in California or more for gasoline, but Raytheon shareholders, they're just doing great.
So we are going to get rich.
It's a big club, but you and I aren't in it.
That's right.
Which brings us to replenishing all these arms that they're rapidly running out of.
I mean, that's the kind of the subtext of a lot of this is you had Kane, who's the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying as they were getting ready to go on, you know, we may not have sufficient ammunition really for this, right?
As well as allies.
So they were low on allies and ammunition.
They're also low on strategic petroleum reserve.
But hey, let's go to war anyway.
We'll let Israel set the timetable and tell us who we have to go to war with.
But when you look at this and you look at your experience with the Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan began, the Indian missile thing, what is your take?
Have you been following what's happening?
I've seen a lot of different stories about how this is shaking out on both sides.
Which side is running out of missiles first?
Whether we have radar sites that have been taken down.
What is your take on that?
Well, my take is I simply don't know.
And secondarily, I don't believe anything the state says.
You know, the mutual assured destruction defense policy of the United States that prevailed during the 60s and into the 70s was a disaster.
You know, it didn't provide any defense.
Look at the defense budget that we had at the time.
It provided no defense for the American people whatsoever with one small carve-out, and that is that the governing classes in Washington were able to provide a small missile defense system for themselves, but not for the rest of the country.
I mean, it was an absolute disaster.
And, you know, by the game theory, by the game logic of mutual assured destruction, people that were opponents of it said, well, if we have a defense capability, which is what Reagan was trying to institute, if we have a defense capability, then the Soviets will be at a disadvantage because we can strike them and destroy them and they can't retaliate.
And that was the whole standoff logic of that mad period.
And so Reagan said, to everybody's shock, Reagan said, well, we'll just give them the technology too.
Now, the reason, whatever you think of that, and I was, I admit, being stunned by it, but there's an internal logic to that.
But whatever you think of him wanting to do that, Reagan genuinely believed that the United States of America is not a country that preemptively attacks other countries.
That's right.
He literally believed that.
There may have been substantial evidence on the other side.
I'm not prepared to say, but it's just been gangbusters since then of attacks on other countries.
And, you know, we're not very good at it.
We make a mess of things.
I mean, you know, you could look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, the mess in Ukraine, and now the mess in Iran.
And there's no reason to think that the current mess in Iran is going to turn out any better than the prior ones.
No, no.
Yeah, it has been a pragmatic disaster when you look at it from that standpoint, no question about it.
But it is also a moral disaster if we can attack people that have not attacked us.
Throughout history, that has always been the litmus test for who is justified in their war.
Is it a war in defense or is it a war of aggression?
And we've taken the aggressor point over and over again.
And that's, I think, where we are right now.
So as people are talking about nukes and we've got reports about some Trump cabinet members who are building nuclear bunkers, they've got the guy who makes a lot of money doing that.
He's not at Franceberg or whatever.
He says, yeah, I've got a couple of Trump cabinet members that are asking me when's it going to be ready?
And a lot of people are concerned about that.
What's your take on that, reading the tea leaves that you see in public?
Well, I've told friends since before the last election last fall that I didn't think that Trump would last two years of this term.
And, you know, that's a safe bet for somebody like me to make because you win so many ways.
You know, there's the ugly way of, you know, we know he's been attacked.
There have been assassination attacks, but there's also the matter of his health, which can't be swept under the carpet forever.
That's a challenge.
There is the prospect that this will go very badly and the people will recognize it pretty quickly and decide to do something about it.
There's the chance that his mental deterioration will catch up with him like it didn't with Biden, and there's provision to remove him.
There is also the chance, I think, that Americans, I don't go down this because I'm not a master of this topic.
I look at it and it grows by the day.
And I guess I alluded to it a few minutes ago, but somebody's going to have to do something serious about looking at the extent of cronyism in this administration.
Oh, yeah.
It is off the charts.
I have never seen anything like this.
And it's run rampant.
And it's right in here for everything that's not nailed down.
That's right.
And it's nailed down too.
That's right.
And they don't even try to hide it.
That's what I said.
They have so little respect for the intelligence of the American people because he is surrounded by yes men and loyalists.
So he figures everybody is that way that supports him.
So they don't bother to come up with a plausible lie.
They don't try to cover up the corruption and the cronyism, as you point out.
It's all in everybody's face.
It's truly amazing.
Yeah, and the Congress, you know, all they care about is their next reelection.
And so they're afraid that Trump will endorse their opponent and steer money to their opponent and so on.
So they dare not say anything.
But at one point along the way here, it's going to have to reach a critical mass.
The American people are losing faith in him.
The MAGA coalition is toast.
It's history.
It's dust.
It's finished.
He has split it so bad.
And I don't know what gets reformed out of it.
But, you know, now the Republican establishment is cheering for that neocon deep state figure, Marco Rubio, to be the next presidential nominee.
And so, I mean, we're just in a mess, but the whole thing is going to fracture in my view before the end of this year in some unforeseen way.
Well, I think this war is a good start to the big ultimate fracture.
When you look at that and you look at, of course, the Epstein files, that is something that's become a big problem for Trump with his base.
I'm sorry.
The what files?
I'm sorry.
I don't recognize the term anymore.
It was something they used to talk about last year.
They've driven that off the front pages for sure.
Yeah.
Haven't driven it out of this show.
I mean, we slow the developments that are there, but they've done the best they can to make that go away.
But that really has broken faith with his base that is there.
And I think that's part of the issue.
I'm not sad to see the MAGA coalition go away because it is a coalition that has coalesced around an individual, not around principles, not around the Constitution, isn't it?
Yeah.
MAGA is what I say it is.
That's what he told, I think it was Tucker Carlson in the response to his break with Tucker Carlson.
He said, well, he's not MAGA.
MAGA is what I say it is.
Well, that's funny.
I remember the expression, make America great again, long before Trump was out of high school.
I mean, there have been Make America Great movements for a very long time.
And the idea, you know, this is supposed to be a government of laws and not a people.
Resignation And Slush Funds00:08:15
And that should have been drummed into the American people from the earliest age, but it's not by whim or caprice, whatever the dear leader says.
We don't have dear leaders in this country or we're not supposed to.
So when somebody runs on a platform of ending these awful, counterproductive, elective regime change wars on a program, he should be shamed by the people to the ends of the earth if he breaks that vow.
And he did.
He did.
And not only him, but everybody that was running with him.
You had Tulsi Gabbard, you had JD Vance.
All of them were adamant that we're going to not do this regime change war.
Now, what are we doing?
We're doing the regime change war.
Yeah, I wonder, and I like Tulsi Gabbard very much.
And I debate with myself, and maybe you have a thought about this, but I think, well, she's got to make a statement and she's got to resign.
And, you know, they're marginalizing her at every extent, if not insulting her as well.
She's got to make a statement and resign.
We know on the record what she stood for, and we know what she said.
And then I think, you know, maybe she feels obligated to stay in there and do what she can to minimize the damage.
I don't know what the answer is.
And JD Vance, by the same token, I'm not, you know, JD Vance has always been a question mark for me.
I mean, I've trusted Tulsi, but JD Vance, I'm not sure.
You know, he says a lot of good things, but I've never been exactly comfortable or sure.
And now we're watching this, and I think, you know, the only thing he can, honorable thing he can do at this point to me, if it were me, I would resign.
I'm not trying to say that that's what he must do.
Maybe he, you know, maybe he knows that Trump will be gone before the end of this year, as I surmise.
And he wants to be there to pick up the threads.
I guess that could be part of his reckoning.
Maybe that's wise.
And maybe I'm foolish by saying, you know, somebody's got to resign because that has a tremendous clarifying effect on the people.
It'll be the topic of discussion for months if he were to do that.
And maybe it would have a salutary effect.
I agree.
And of course, when you talk about Tulsi Gabbard, I think resigning would be the best thing that she could do if she wanted to try to minimize what Trump is doing.
What better way to do it than to lead people away from this and to foment a rebellion against this illegal war?
But for her own personal benefit, I don't see how it benefits her to stay there and deny all of her principles and become a boot-licking lackey like the rest of them.
It's just amazing.
But speaking of Congress, we talked about Congress being essential to declare war.
Look at what our Congress has done.
They basically said, I don't want this hot potato and they kicked it away.
They don't want to have a they shut down a resolution to hold a vote on this.
And then you've got Mike Johnson saying, well, they attacked us.
They hit three of our embassies after you unleashed a barrage on them.
That's the most twisted thing I've seen out of all this stuff coming from Mike Johnson.
It's so twisted.
And he's twisted right along the way.
He actually is one of the ones among many who said, well, this is not a war.
But he's been twisted.
And it's not just that.
I mean, he is the one that, for example, there was a movement.
I guess Nancy Mace led it.
There was a movement to open up the slush fund.
There is a congressional slush fund to pay off people who charge Congresspeople, elected officials, with sexual harassment.
They don't pay it themselves.
Their insurance company doesn't pay it.
We pay it.
We pay it.
And so there was a movement to open the books, take a look at it, see what John Cornyn has done if he's one of the perpetrators and see what kind of a rat's nest this place in Washington is.
And of course, they couldn't have that.
I mean, that's so flagrant.
That's so, it's embarrassing to this country.
It's embarrassing our moral character.
You look at Dennis Hassert, longest serving Republican speaker of the house.
And he was a pedophile.
They picked him.
He was a wrestling coach.
They picked him run for Congress and put him as speaker.
And we've seen this happen over and over again.
He was on with Rush Limbaugh defending, what was it, Tom DeLay, I think, in terms of payment.
Yeah.
And he was saying, oh, it's just politics from the Democrats.
There's nothing there.
Same stuff that Trump is doing now with the Epstein files.
And it truly is amazing that that has become so endemic, the sexual misconduct in Congress and their slush fund that they want to keep all that stuff.
They've got their own fund to pay for it.
I guess that's one of the perks of Congress, right?
Yeah, they operate with impunity.
Well, you know, I mean, harken back to where we started about a declaration of war.
One of the other virtues of that is that you could hold people responsible for their bad judgment.
When they declared a needless war, it cost the American people and it costs lives.
The people who exercise bad judgment or were pressured into supporting the war by their contributors, which certainly happens a lot.
Well, then at the end of the day, when the dust settles, we can run them out of office and they could be shamed for their lives too.
But they operate entirely with impunity.
And they only get in trouble when they cross the deep state.
And then, oh, boy, they unleash the big batteries of guns.
Oh, yeah.
What do you think about boots on the ground?
We talked about likelihood of escalation in many different ways.
And we don't know where this is going.
And the guy who's running it doesn't know where it's going.
But there's a lot of uncomfortable movement about boots on the ground.
What's your take?
Yeah, this is the camel's nose in the tent business, as far as I'm concerned.
What have I seen recently?
They were talking about, well, we'll put some troops in, some special forces on Karg Island, you know, for special operations to protect shipment, protect oil.
We'll do that.
And then, oh, by the way, we'll arm the Kurds for an operation in northern, western Iraq.
I'm thinking, you morons, you know, Erdogan is not going to like that.
Turkey is not going to like that.
You're going to use the Kurds again for American cannon fodder as we've done in the past.
And that will be the end, in my view.
I mean, Turkey is a NATO ally.
That will be the end of NATO if they do that, because Turkey, I can't imagine they would put up with that for a minute.
So maybe that's good.
I mean, the NATO and NATO alliance has been nothing but trouble anyway for several decades.
Well, of course, Charles, that begs the question.
You know, when we saw everything that was happening with the Strait of Hormuz and it being choked off and the people realizing what the consequences are going to be finally, and then Trump throws a life preserver to the market and says, don't worry, we'll protect the Strait of Hormuz.
First, he said we'll do it with the Navy, and then the Navy shot that down and said, we can't operate there.
You can't say it would be too vulnerable.
Then he's talking about putting special forces on the island.
The reality, though, is it just emphasizes, I think, the fact that there was no thinking, no planning, no strategy to any of this stuff.
If you wanted to do regime change and use the Kurds, wouldn't you have started that right away?
Had them ready.
Now they're reacting to what Iran is doing.
And I think reading between the T lines, tea leaves, that kind of tells us that maybe things aren't going the way they thought they were going to go.
And why, if you understand the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, why wouldn't you try to secure that area as one of your primary strategies?
I don't understand any of that.
But it looks to me like they haven't thought through any of this stuff.
Well, answer me this.
I mean, if shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is dangerous enough to your 10 million barrels of oil that you're shipping through there, the Lloyds of London doesn't want to insure it at any cost.
Debt, Socialism, And Global War00:10:58
Why should the American taxpayers pay to secure it and to insure it for oil that we're told we're energy sufficient?
We produce our own petroleum in this country.
Why should we pay to secure that petroleum that's going to places like China and other nations?
You know, or just it's sort of a global socialism.
You know, everybody benefits and we, the costs are, the benefits are socialized to the whole world, to the global American military empire, but the costs land in the lap of the American people.
That's right.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not that that would be right under any circumstances, but these are very perilous circumstances.
You've got, you know, now we're virtually $39 trillion in debt.
That's the visible portion of the debt.
You know, most of the debt is under the water line and unfunded liabilities.
But it is debt that cannot be paid.
It simply cannot be paid by any of the normal mechanisms.
You know, as creditors start to back away, I was looking at these numbers yesterday.
China, not too many years ago, was a creditor of the United States.
For your listeners that don't listen to these things or pay attention to these things, you know, when they buy U.S. Treasury bonds, they're loaning us money.
And the U.S. Treasury says, yeah, give us $10 million.
We'll give you this bond and we'll redeem it.
We'll give you all your money back plus 4% or 5% interest, whatever it is.
So China lends us a lot of money.
So not so, and as do a lot of other, in fact, we are dependent on the kindness of foreign nations.
But as so many others do, China loaned us, they were one of our top creditors.
So a few years ago, they were up to almost, well, over $1.3 trillion in U.S. treasuries that they had owned.
In other words, that they had loaned to the United States to keep the U.S. government, to keep Washington spending going.
They loaned that money to the United States, and now they're backing away.
They know perfectly well the only expedient available to the United States to pay off that debt is to print more money and devalue the dollar.
So they're down 50% in the U.S. treasuries that they owned.
And the rest of the world clearly is backing away from the dollar.
Look, these foreign central bankers, you know, they know the money printing game.
They know the fiat money game perfectly well.
And they don't mind fleecing their own people with it, but they just don't want to be fleeced by our money printing any longer.
And so that's why, you know, reserves are flowing to gold and alternative global monetary systems are being erected and stuff.
And, you know, we're our own worst enemies.
We're as they're moving away from the dollar anyway, because it's not a trustworthy vehicle anymore.
We're driving them by our weaponization of the dollar, by freezing assets all over the world and claiming that people aren't entitled to their own money.
And then when we release their own money to them, Sean Hannity and the other nitwits on Fox start screaming, we gave them, we gave them all this money.
Well, we didn't give them any money.
We released the money that they owned that we had stolen from them to begin with.
I agree.
Yeah, you said it's like a global socialism.
And of course, I think that's part of the goal of government and socialism is to create dependency, right?
And so if he can use us and the debt, you know, the massive credit card that just keeps building and building, if he can use that to get people in debt to us.
But of course, another thing has kind of surfaced in Lindsay's gloating, and that is the idea that the empire now, as you point out, it's an empire of lies, but it's also an empire that is trying to set up a global hegemony on oil.
That's exactly what Lindsey Graham was saying.
He said, we're looking at the combined control of Venezuela and Iran's oil, two of the biggest ones that are there.
Yeah.
I wonder how the American people could countenance.
We're self-sufficient in oil.
We've been told repeatedly.
And yet somehow we can go around the world and steal the production, the oil of other countries.
You know, there will come a time when we're not the big gun in the world anymore.
That's right.
You know, nothing lasts forever.
These empires don't last forever.
They collapse.
There is a syndrome that I write about in Empire of Lies Fragments from the Memory Hole.
There is a syndrome called imperial overstretch.
It didn't start from me.
It's well known.
It's well recognized that these empires in extremis, as they see their global hegemony or their control of places far and beyond their own borders, as they see their hold beginning to slip, they react to it and they react to it typically violently.
But, you know, their hegemony such that they had their dominance and stuff was the result of their economic might.
It was a result of their productive capacity.
It was result of the work of the people and the wealth and the riches that they had produced.
That's what enabled the creation of the empire in the first place.
But when it starts to crack, as we're seeing now of the United States, the geniuses in Washington, the statist, the deep state, the establishment, they react to it as though it is a threat to their military dominance.
And so they divert even more funds from the productive economy to beef up the military.
This is exactly what we're doing now in Iran.
I mean, we're spending a trillion dollars a day in new money there.
I think the president just asked for another $50 billion supplemental.
We spend more than the next, I don't even know the number anymore.
Was it the next seven, eight, nine countries of the world?
Combined, we spend more on war.
We call it defense, but it's spending on war.
We spend a trillion dollars a year.
And three or four weeks ago, the president said, no, we need to bump that up to 1.5 trillion.
We need a 50% bump in our military spending.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that's what we're doing.
And when we look at this, you know, especially if they want to get into a long war with Iran, the asymmetric warfare is one of the things that has consistently been our downfall.
The boots on the ground and trying to do regime change and nation building.
I don't know how he thinks people don't see this as they say, well, we're not going to do nation building.
Well, they want to take the oil.
They want to change the regime.
I mean, aren't you talking about putting boots on the ground and trying to control the people that are there after you have rained death and destruction from the sky, as War Pete says, and boast about it?
It's amazing to see him revel in the carnage like this.
Yeah, and it's not just that we want to replace the leadership.
We want to make sure we name our own guy.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Sure, that'll go over well.
You know, years ago, this is kind of vague memory, but anybody interested in these kinds of issues that we've gotten on now should look up a story by Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books.
I think it was in Blink.
And he wrote an account of Millennium Challenge was, I think, 2002 military exercise.
And there was the red team and the blue team.
And it was a Pentagon-run military exercise.
It had to do with the Gulf, had to do with the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and a war with Iran in 2002.
And the A team was what we are today.
Well, we're more advanced, but it was the same thing.
You know, it was high-tech, electronic warfare, remote missile launching, and whatever they had, the equivalent of what we have today that is remote and high-tech.
And the B team were the stragglers, the asymmetric warfare guys that didn't have anything.
And the guy that led the B team was a general by the name of Paul Van Ripper.
And instead of using like interceptible messaging and cell phones and things, he used couriers on bicycles.
And instead of big Navy craft, you know, he used little speedboats that zipped in and zipped out.
And I mean, it was all this downscale, primitive warfare against Goliath, the behemoth of modern technology and America's superior military budget and high-tech equipment.
And guess what?
The B team won.
And it was so embarrassing before they could declare victory, the Pentagon called off the exercise because, you know, they were being humiliated by some inventive stragglers using primitive means of communication, smoke signals, light signals, and so on.
Wow.
So somebody ought to look that up.
Yeah, you've got the Machiavellian industrial complex that's out there.
They're making a lot of money off these very complicated, expensive weapon systems.
And yet, we've already seen at the beginning of the Iran war how Iran did not, the decapitation strike didn't affect them the way, obviously, the Pentagon thought it would, because they have decentralized leadership, decentralized command and control.
And then they attacked our highly centralized radar systems based on what I've heard several analysts say.
And that appears to be the case.
And so we have these very, very complex systems that are incredibly expensive.
And of course, that's to the benefit of the people like Raytheon who are making these things and the people that they keep in Congress, like Lindsey Graham.
That benefits them.
They are the we who are making a lot of money off of this stuff, but it doesn't really help the United States.
And certainly, this adventurism, this empire abroad, does nothing for the safety of Americans, which has nothing to do with national security.
National security is like continuity of governance and continuity of the empire.
It doesn't have anything to do with the safety of the American people because they are putting us at risk by creating enemies everywhere.
Yeah, everywhere.
It is said that Osama bin Laden's fondest hope was to lure the United States into a war in Iraq, that he hoped to do that to break the global powerhouse, to drain it, to bleed it dry.
Not thinking that he and a bunch of other guys in fatigues off in the mountains at Kandahar someplace could prevail militarily, but they thought that they could take America down financially if they could drain them long enough, much like we thought, much like Brzezinski thought that we could do to the Soviet Union with his Afghanistan initiative.
And what they're trying to do to the Soviet Union with Ukraine as well.
We're using the Ukrainians as our cat spaw and figure that we're bleeding the Russians dry.
And I've heard people like Lindsey Graham boasting about that.
Look at how many soldiers and tanks and all this kind of stuff Russia has lost in this war.
That's what we want.
So it's a war of attrition.
And yet we get suckered in by that same strategy on the other side.
And it's so short-sighted.
It's not even short-sighted.
It's blindness.
They have no vision at all to wonder, I mean, what happened to the economically drained and crippled nation of Germany after World War I and with the perpetual payments from the Versailles Treaty of Reparations?
Revolution, Tyranny, And Destruction00:12:53
I mean, what do a broken, are a broken down people with no hope and no direction susceptible to the fringe elements like Hitler?
Well, of course they are.
So what do you think is going to happen if you topple the Russian government, you topple Putin and everybody else in the Kremlin, and you break the bank of the Soviet, the Russian economy, which is what they openly talk about hoping to do is collapse the Russian economy.
What do they think will take its place?
It was only a generation or two ago that they had the Lubyank prison.
They had walls and barbed wire.
They had the Gulag archipelago.
I mean, what do they think is going to arise in the place of these guys?
Have they given that any thought?
Well, again, on precedent, no, because they never give anything any thought.
It's just destroy, destroy, destroy.
That's right.
Yeah.
What is the regime change going to look like in Iran, for example?
And the bottom line is our history with Iran began with regime change.
It began with a coup back in 1953.
And that has blown this whole thing up.
They always start the clock 47 years ago with the Iranian revolution against the Shah, the guy that we put in and equipped his secret police.
It's just very bad story.
Yeah, I blanch when I hear them say we've been at war with them for 47 years.
Where do they get that number?
Do they think, you know, it's the Iranian revolution.
Do they think those millions of people that turned out in the street to cheer on the abdication or the fall of the Shah, they think that they poured out in the street because they lived under such a benign and lovely government?
Of course not.
They lived under a cruel despotism.
You know, the historian laureate of the Reagan people was a great, it was a great scholar by the name of Paul Johnson.
And all the Reaganites read his history books and they all thought they were great.
I guess they've been slipped down the memory hole too.
But Paul Johnson wrote a short account of exactly what the reign of Pahlavi the Shah was like.
We were told, the American people were told, because, you know, well, we don't want communism and we don't want to visit communism on these people.
Well, the elected government, Masada government, was no more communist than, you know, the prevailing beliefs in the Republican and Democrat platforms these days.
He just didn't want us stealing his oil and not getting paid for it.
But in any event, the Shah that we instituted, I wrote a piece for this.
It was published by The Blaze a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, it was published by the Libertarian Institute and anti-war.com.
I wrote a piece called The Deep State Wants to Restore the Reign of the Persian Stalin.
And it's hard to swallow when we've been told that the Shah was so great.
But you know, when we installed him, when Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, ain't it peculiar how CIA heads always seem to show up in these deals, just like Brennan showed up in toppling the Ukraine regime.
He checked in under a false name, but Dulles was out in the open and he escorted Pahlavi to the Peacock throne when the Mossad arranged.
You know, we hired thugs, we hired revolutionaries, we hired the worst elements possible in the streets to foment a revolution there like we do.
And then they escorted Pahlavi to the Peacock throne and he proceeded to, oh, one of the things he did was he put the Mossad and he put General Schwartzkopf.
This is a good one.
People will remember, people of our age will all remember Storman Norman, General Schwarzkopf from the first Gulf War.
But his father was one of the guys that was sent in to help the Shah, along with the Mossad, learn how to torture his opponents.
And that's where the cruel and notorious Savak were born out of that.
But of course, the expatriates, the people that fled that were on friendly terms with the Shah and live in Los Angeles now and are urging the United States to go to war and put in the Shah's son.
Of course, they want us to do their fighting for them.
But the people that turned out in the street in 1979 weren't all there because the rule of the Shah had been so enlightened and liberating and prosperous.
It was a very ugly time for all the mainstream media news events where they would show the Shah and his family and show Iran.
It's like, look, he's modernizing Iran.
He's making it like America, you know, that type of thing.
And yet when I was in college, that was my frame of reference for Iran.
I was surprised to see all these Iranian students that were at the engineering college where I was.
And they could get over here if they were an engineering student, but they were out there protesting Iran.
I thought, what are they doing that for?
I mean, it's like he's creating the kind of environment that they want to live in.
And they were wearing these Balaclava masks.
And so I asked some of them, because I had a lot of them in my classes.
I said, so what's going on?
What's up, all the masks and everything?
That was the first time I seen anybody protesting wearing a mask.
And they said, well, because the SAVAC.
I said, what is that?
And they filled me in on what was going on there.
It's horrific what was done.
The CIA Mossad, and as you point out, I didn't know that Schwarzenkopf was, his dad was a part of that as well.
But that has been the history of the empire the CIA sets up.
And that is murder, coups, assassination, torture, secret police, all the rest of this stuff.
And we have to ask, why do we think that we're immune to that here?
And of course, we're not.
And if you're paying attention, you've already seen a lot of these aspects already in operation.
They just haven't become so pervasive and in your face yet.
Well, you jogged my memory by you jogged your memory by talking about your student days because I remember it was after my student days, but being just a little bit horrified about these mobs out in the street burning American flags in Iran and chanting death to the American to America and the great Satan, I didn't really understand.
And most Americans didn't.
And that is the fault of our education, I guess.
But it's the fault of the media.
It's the fault of the state that whitewashes and sanitizes all of its deeds and it doesn't want anybody to know anything else.
But I remember being shocked at what is wrong with these people.
And it took a few years for me to really understand.
You know, I have been on a book tour talking about my book, Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And one of the surprising things that I hear, I mean, you would think out of all the sloganisms and the reasons to actually go to war, it'd be something more substantial than this.
But I hear, I have heard many times from different people, well, you know, they call us the great Satan, and these are the people that have been chanting death to America for 47 years.
And I go, so what?
Is that a thin pretext for a war or what?
Do you remember Ronald Reagan getting ready to do his radio address?
And he said, okay, we're bombing the Soviet Union and the bombs start falling in five minutes.
And the leadership was horrified.
But this goes on all the time.
John McCain ran around the country going, singing like he was, you know, some crazed beach boy, bomb, Iran.
He was a presidential candidate.
Yeah.
So they hear what we do, but we don't hear what we do.
We only hear what they say.
And the things don't translate very well anyway.
Well, you know, Charles, I've heard some people, I listened to an Iranian official who was being interviewed, and he said he's actually a teacher in the university.
He said, we tried to tell the students what it was like under the Shah.
They just didn't believe us.
They didn't believe what we were saying about the Americans.
Now they see it.
And that's the issue.
When we do these types of things that we're doing, that shows people the character of our government.
And now he said, now they understand.
If they wanted regime change, the thing to do would have been to just sit back and let it happen.
It was already in a process.
But instead, they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory because then what they did was they made themselves the greater enemy that's there.
And of course, part of what was happening was also a pushback against westernized abortion and other things like that in Iran coming in.
They didn't like that.
That was part of what they were saying was satanic.
And we just saw the burning an effigy of Baal, or Baal, the pagan god with symbols of the U.S. and of Israel.
That's the way they see us.
And so they burned that in effigy.
They did that at the beginning of the revolution.
And, you know, when they took over the embassy, that is the starting point of Americans understanding anything about Iran.
To them, basically, Iran didn't exist.
We don't know anything about these other countries until that happened.
And then you had this long thing every day, day number one, day number 10, day number 11, on and on.
It went through the nightline doing that.
And America held hostage by Iran.
That was ingrained in the memory of people.
And it was done without any context at all as to why they would take over the embassy.
And of course, they held them hostage, but that was extended because of the Iran-Contra affair.
We certainly don't remember the Iraq-Iran war in which we provided, you know, when the weapons inspectors went into Iraq looking for the missing weapons of mass destruction, what they did find was leftovers from the Iraq-Iran war.
They were inert by that time, but they found some.
This was technology.
These were precursors.
This was technology and targeting and stuff that the United States gave to Saddam Hussein.
Oh, he's worse than Hitler.
But we were giving him technology to underwrite his war with Iran.
We encouraged it.
We provided him resources, illegal resources, I might add, to pursue that war.
And I don't remember the number after all these years, but it was, I think it was at least 200,000 Iranians died.
They had to send kids out in the battlefield.
The population was being drained so much by our.
And we don't remember.
I remember, you remember the Iranian Airbus that was shot down with 290,000 civilians killed by the USS Vincennes.
And Bush had the nerve to award the captain of that awful incident, I think, some kind of medal of commendation.
Oh, it was an awful event.
I've talked about that many times.
You know, that's what this Iranian official was saying.
He says, yeah, I've told the kids, and he still believes that that was deliberate, deliberately done by the U.S.
And I said, well, you know, I've said for the longest time, I didn't think it was deliberate.
I thought it was accidental because I thought they did the same thing with Flight 800, having naval exercises.
It's just that when it happens over American territory, they can cover it up, but they couldn't cover it up there.
And I said, you know, I thought it was remarkable restraint.
Of course, what could Tehran really do about that?
But the key point that you're making there about Saddam Hussein is that after they had suffered for a couple of decades under the Shah, which basically just means it's Persian for king, after we overthrew their republic and their democracy and we installed a king who had a secret police that tortured and killed people for the longest time, we did two decades of that.
And then after that, we, I think, helped to instigate Saddam Hussein attacking them because as it was a new government, a new revolution, thought they would catch them at a weak point.
And yet Saddam Hussein really wasn't doing very well with that until we jumped in with additional equipment and intelligence and other things like that.
And then the tide started turning towards Iran, towards Iraq versus Iran.
And so all of that history is just ignored.
And all the history of our intervention, our preemptive attacks, our empire wars of lies, all of that stuff is just forgotten.
We don't have any context for this at all.
It's totally forgotten.
Shredded Documents And FBI Lies00:12:16
And the subtitle of my book is, well, it's Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And as people will remember from reading 1984 by George Orwell in high school, in this dystopian future, the Ministry of Love is where dissidents went to be tortured.
They took them to the Ministry of Love.
Everything was inverted.
The Ministry of Truth is where the protagonist in the novel was rewriting history.
And he'd take the old history, we rewrite the history, put out the new truth.
And then the old truth was consigned to an incinerator that was called the Memory Hole.
I want to mention, since we were on the topic, the U.S. Embassy in Iran, and I talk about this in Empire of Lies, it is now a museum of what the people there went through under the Shah of Iran and the spying CIA.
They took, oh, yeah, at the time that the embassy was stormed, the employees began shredding documents furiously.
Imagine this.
The students, they were supposed to be these crazed out-of-the-mind students.
They went through the laborious process.
I think it must have taken them years of pasting all those shredded things together and reconstituting all the destroyed documents that the CIA and the embassy staff destroyed about what had gone on there.
And you see case after case, they have rooms where there were the eavesdropping room.
This is where they did this.
This is where the CIA did that and so on.
And they have reconstituted those documents so that the people in Iran can familiarize themselves with the politicians that we were paying off, the freedom movements that we were subverting, the measures that would liberate the country, the measures that would empower the central government more at the expense of the people or engage them in warfare at the Iranian people's expense.
All those shredded documents of CIA spying for years and running the government and bribing and paying it off are all there for the Iranian people to see.
Now, the American people don't know anything about that.
But it's been reconstituted.
And so when you wonder why they say death to America, within the recall of living Americans, they have an idea of what we were doing at that time.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
Well, maybe they could do us the same favor for the Epstein documents, what do you think?
With some Iranian students to come over here and piece together that.
I'm sorry.
Epstein, the name rings a bell, but I'm not sure I remember.
It's slipping down the memory hole too.
That's right.
Well, I guess they can't put together those shredded desk drives that are.
That's a different challenge.
That's right.
Now, tell us a little bit about the book, The Empire of Lies.
Yeah, the book is, it's not just a collection of the sequential lies of the empire.
It also covers the media and the media as the lapdog press that furthers the deep state.
I'm pretty clear about these terms.
I don't toss them along casually.
The deep state is identified.
I identify the deep state as the executive arm of the global American empire.
My executive arm, I mean, they call the shots and they are a collective.
They are like bees in a hive.
They don't sting one another, but they have different jobs.
The deep state is not coordinated by a central authority, but they all work like the bees in the hive for the good of the hive.
And of course, it is a mistake.
It's common enough for people to believe that the deep state is consigned to a few actors, you know, like Brennan and Clapper, who both lied to Congress, by the way, and felt no repercussions for having done so.
I remember Clapper said, well, when he was caught lying about the U.S.'s surveillance on American citizens, illegal surveillance, he answered under oath in Congress.
I think it was Senator Wyden that asked him.
No, we don't do that.
No, no, we don't do that.
And when he was caught up, he offered this excuse.
Well, I gave the least untruthful answer I could give.
But when these people are sworn in, they're not sworn in for the least untruthful answer.
They're sworn in for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
But it's not just those guys.
The deep state works its way all the way down through a bureaucracy of minor petty bureaucrats.
And one of them that I cite just to represent the case is Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Vinman, who was on Trump's National Security Council in the first term.
And he's the one that set the wheels in motion for the first Trump impeachment.
And what was the graviment of his complaint against Trump?
It was this, and he told, he said this to Congress.
It was, well, the problem with Trump, he said, is he is not following the interagency consensus on Ukraine.
And we have to ask ourselves, what is an interagency?
And where does that appear in the Constitution?
And how does it operate?
And does it vote?
And who gets a vote?
And where does it fit in the balance of power and the checks and balances?
And who's a member of the interagency?
And can I be a member?
And who do they benefit?
And where are the records of their meetings and so on?
I mean, it's pure balderdash, but that is the deep state.
And that's not just the heads of the CIA and the NSA or the FBI.
That is all the way down the bureaucracy.
And yet it's so typical.
And then, if you'll indulge me one more thing, is the role that the lapdog press plays in this thing.
And there is a, I identify this, I think, is very worth reading just if it were just this alone, is this syndrome.
You won't find this in any standard psychiatric diagnostic manuals, but I have identified it, and I think it should be in the manuals.
And I call it combat envy.
And it's very, very ubiquitous in the halls of government, this combat envy syndrome.
You know, you could run into a guy, I suppose, at a bar at some point in your life that tells you tales of daring to about, you know, I was a Navy SEAL or Green Beret in Vietnam and stuff.
And it doesn't do her any really any harm.
But when these elected officials are leading newscasters and opinion makers in the United States make up these lies about where they have been and what they have done in cheering on our wars for national television audiences, it's pretty destructive.
Fox News had a guy named Wayne Simmons that they used for years.
And he was a national security former CIA expert.
And he came on there with the most nonsensical, warmongering, crazed advice.
And they liked him.
And that's why they brought him back year after year because he fit the network's agenda.
He'd come up with stuff about, you know, well, you know, we need a ground investment 10, 15 years ago.
We need a ground invasion of Iraq.
So eventually, I guess some of the real CIA guys got a little tired of his balderdash and they blew the whistle on him.
And it turned out he wasn't a national security guy and he wasn't a former CIA guy.
He was a doorman and a hot tub manager and a felon too.
So they've had to get rid of him.
But look, you had Brian Williams on NBC.
Brian Williams made up his own personal tales of close calls talking about, well, in the first Iraq war, I was part of this helicopter assault and we flew in and then the RPGs were flying at us and it was harrowing and we had to do a corkscrew landing and I came within the, and then with each retelling, he would embellish the story and it got worse and worse.
Oh, I saw an RPG and it was headed right down and I could see the tube and it was headed right at us and it was that and it got bigger and bigger.
And finally the guys that were actually on the mission and by the way, the name of the mission was Big Wendy.
I guess they anticipated Brian Williams' role in it.
But the guys that were actually in the mission told the story to Stars and Stripes.
So Brian Williams got found out for his embellished tales of combat envy.
And when he was found out, he said, oh, I must have had a brain tumor as he tried to excuse himself.
And the network that, you know, we trust for feeding us reliable news and information, having known now that their primary anchor was lying to us, they suspended him for a while.
They didn't care enough about the credibility of their network or their news anchors or the trust that the American people might lodge in him to get rid of him, to apologize for him.
They suspended him and then they gave him back another slot.
I think he anchored MSNBC for years after that.
So this stuff goes on.
You know, there are countless officials that engage in this combat envy stuff.
There are commentators the next time we visit, or maybe people want to just buy the book and read the story of, oh, this is a good one, Bill O'Reilly on Fox and his combat envy.
It borders on the ridiculous.
So I chart some of these things so people can see this is the deep state and how it works.
This is the establishment, the American political establishment.
This is their role.
This is the lapdog press.
But the point of it all, I tried to direct people to is if we do not begin to honor, to demand, and to honor the truth of our press, of our public officials, of the so-called American establishment, if we don't demand the truth of them, then this is our fate.
And I'll walk you right up to the ragged edge.
This is our fate if we don't.
And there is no sign yet that the American people have turned and maybe this Iran war will be the last straw and people will wake up.
Well, let's hope so.
And it is good to go back and to remind ourselves of how we got here and this long trail of lies and deceptions, which is what your book does.
You know, we're hearing this week, we've got this echo chamber throughout media, both left and right, of the short-term pain, long-term gain.
And they're all repeating this slogan all the time.
It's like, you talk about the complicity of the media and you talk about people who present themselves as intelligence experts.
I worked at a place where that person was Steve Pieczenik that kept coming back on and he was selling one lie, crazy lie after the other.
It was much worse stuff than what you were talking about from the NBC anchor.
But again, nobody ever pays any penalties for that.
The people, they know that if they lie to people and if it's sensational enough, they get viewership.
And they know that once they're caught in that lie, that it's not going to affect them whatsoever because people are entertained by it.
And I think there is a certain aspect of it that they don't really care if it's true as long as they're entertained by it, right?
Right.
They don't really care if it's true.
You know, you mentioned earlier, we didn't really talk about it, but you mentioned earlier TWA Flight 800.
And it was so peculiar amidst all the misinformation.
Eyewitnesses to the event testified that they saw a streak of, you know, come up from the horizon or come up from the sea and hit the aircraft and stuff.
And they gave statements to the FBI.
They were dumbfounded later at the end of the investigation when they got a chance to see their statements that they had given themselves to the FBI and they'd all been changed.
Yeah.
They were a little dumbfounded by it.
But the CIA, this was unprecedented.
The CIA actually put out a video.
I remember seeing it on YouTube.
And it was this comical 1950s announcer style.
And he said, and it was in like, you know, all caps, red letters, underscored and stuff in this video they put together.
The people did not see a missile take down TWA 800.
Juicy Revelations From The Deep State00:03:42
And okay, whatever you say, sure, that works.
Magic bullet, too.
That's right.
Yeah, they got Voice of America.
Used to that kind of broadcast style.
It just doesn't cut it anymore with most people.
It also doesn't help when you've got people who are air traffic controllers saying the FBI came by and stole the records that we had showing what was going on with this missile.
So, yeah, the FBI, I refer to them as Fed's blocking investigation because that seems to be what they're doing more often than not.
But thank you so much for reminding people.
Again, the book is Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
We need to be reminded of this long history that we have.
It's bipartisan, and it is what the true government of our country is.
Forget about these elections.
It's the true government that's running it, which is the deep state as you're talking about.
This bureaucracy that remains there from whoever wins the election.
They're the ones who are really calling the shots and calling the coups and the wars as well.
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles Goyette.
And you have a website.
I do.
It's charlesgoyette.com.
I have another one, empireoflies.com.
You can find a little bit of information about the book there and links to buy it like on Amazon.
So that would be great.
And I think everybody will find it very compelling.
It is, actually, I'll tell you, actually, David, it's pretty juicy, too.
Certainly sounds like it.
I'm anxious to see it myself.
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles.
Yeah, thank you, David.
I appreciate you very much.
Thank you.
Making sense.
Common again.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
All right, joining us now is Eric Peters, a friend of the show.
We've had him many times.
Always interesting to talk to Eric.
And EricPetersAutos.com is where you'll find a lot of articles about liberty and mobility because you can't separate the two.
It's kind of like what Jefferson said about life and liberty.
Diesel Costs And Fuel Manipulation00:03:25
The hand of force can destroy but cannot destroy them.
Well, that's true of mobility as well as liberty as well.
So thank you for joining us, Eric.
Oh, thank you, Dave.
I always have a good time coming on your show.
I always enjoy it.
Yes, let's talk about the you've got several articles about what's going on with this war.
And I think one of the key ones was the news blackout that you talk about.
And I'm having that same problem as well.
I'm looking at all this stuff.
There's so much disinformation and very little real information.
And there is a point to all of that.
Yeah, doesn't it kind of feel to you sort of like Groundhog Day in that it's kind of back to 2020 where we weren't allowed to have access to real information about what actually was going on.
And instead, a steady stream of regime propaganda was foisted upon us to try to persuade us of things that were not true.
Now it's even more egregious.
It's startling how effectively they have managed to suppress any news about what is happening within Israel, for example, or what has happened to our bases in the region.
That's right.
They've got plenty of images about things going on in Tehran.
And it's clear they're trying to manage the perception of the war.
And this is outrageous because Americans have a right to know what's happening to their sons and daughters in that part of the world, as well as what the consequences of this.
I'm just frustrated about it, this evil, idiotic, unnecessary, gratuitous war.
It's evil.
It is evil.
Everything about it is evil.
And their lies are not even plausible.
The lies that they tell us in terms of the cruise missile hitting the school and all the rest of this stuff are as implausible as a lot of this AI slop.
And that's another aspect of it that's out there.
We didn't have that six years ago.
So not only do you have these people actively suppressing information about what's going on, but they're also putting out a lot of fake stuff.
You got people splicing together real clips from previous incidents that happened in other areas and putting those out as if it was something that just happened.
And then there's clearly AI clips.
Those are easier to spot.
So it's kind of interesting when I look at it on X, a lot of people are saying, hey, Grok, is this real?
And I know that that's become, that's mocked in and of itself.
And yet it is pretty good in terms of between community notes as well as Grok, it's pretty good at filtering out the lies that people are deliberately putting up there to promote one side or the other because they'll say, well, this particular clip is a mixture of this clip from back here and that clip from back there.
And they'll give you links to those things, as well as sussing out when you can see the artifacts from artificial intelligence.
And of course, sometimes people will put up stuff that still got the Gemini logo on it.
And then they'll argue with people who call BS on that.
That aspect of it is new.
I hadn't seen that before.
None of us had seen that before.
It's frustrating and fruitless.
And I like to hang my hat on things that can be ascertained to be absolutely true, such as how much the cost of fuel has increased in this country.
That's an obvious consequence.
Gasoline on average is 50 to 60 cents higher now than it was just 10 days ago.
And I think the more relevant, the more important aspect of this, it's really not being talked about that much, is the effect upon diesel fuel prices.
Yes, yes, even more so.
Yeah, it's now up over $5 a gallon in most parts of the country.
And a lot of people don't make the connection between what they are paying at the supermarket and Walmart and everywhere else for things and the cost of diesel fuel.
Zionist Aggression And Israeli Prestige00:15:42
Because of course, things are moved from A to B, generally speaking, by heavy trucks that burn diesel and diesel-electric locomotives.
So if the cost of diesel fuel goes up 25 or 30%, who do you suppose is going to pay for that?
We are.
That's right.
And we have all these hidden costs.
Going back to the OPEC embargo, which I know you remember as well as I do, who could forget it?
And when you have a shock to the system at the energy price level, it percolates through everything just like a value-added tax.
Every stage, it gets added there, especially because of the transportation of goods and services.
And diesel is a big part of that.
And diesel has gone up more than the gasoline at the pump.
And I think there might be a reason for that.
Might be some kind of manipulation that we're seeing there.
But you point out that it's so hard to find out what is happening in Iran.
We have some people like Colonel McGregor.
Have Scott Ritter who are talking about the damage that's been done to radar systems that control the Thad and Patriot missiles.
But, you know, they have sources and we can't verify that.
Of course, that's the part of that is the fog of war that you're always going to see.
But a big part of it is that they're always blowing smoke at us.
Well, you know, when they do that.
Yeah, left and right.
The right is particularly egregious, but predictably so.
The thing that's astonishing is the so-called left, which at one time at least posed as being anti-war.
It was the left that aggressively reported about what was going on in Vietnam, for example.
Dan Rather on the ground, looking at what was happening over there and helped to generate public outrage about what was going on over there.
Now the left is as bad as the right.
They're both the captive poodles of the same interests that are keeping us from knowing what's going on so as to try to render us powerless to really intelligently come to any conclusion about what's happening and then to do something about it.
And then the absurd lies.
I mentioned this every time I talked to somebody about Mike Johnson saying, well, they attacked us.
They shot at three of our embassies.
And it's like, well, you know, when that happened, that happened after you attacked their entire country.
It's incredible the lies that they push out there.
But you were talking about the fact you can't assess how much damage is being done to Iran or especially to Israel.
They have put out a complete news blackout in Israel to see what is happening with the missiles coming in.
Yeah, and it's being respected by the U.S. media, which tells you something.
After all, don't we have a right, irrespective of what the state of Israel and the government of Israel say, I think we have a right to know what's happening in this situation.
And yet, you know, we're being prevented from having that knowledge.
It's infuriating.
The whole thing is infuriating on so many levels.
It's hard.
Yeah, but look at how this has been shaking out over a period of time.
I mean, we went through this as everybody was pushing back against the atrocities in Gaza.
You had the Zionist lobby push very actively to get any of that protest against what that foreign government was doing to call that racism, anti-Semitism, and to censor it as hate speech.
And of course, this is where the Republicans who always said they hate these hate speech regulations, they hate censorship, they were eager to jump in and do it for their masters.
And so we have seen legislation after legislation proposed, some of it enacted by the Republican Party.
I still am astounded that Ron DeSantis went to Israel to sign a speech censorship bill on behalf of Israel.
Why would a governor of a state go to a foreign country and sign a censorship bill?
Of course, that's a rhetorical question.
Either he's owned or he's scared.
I'm not sure which it is.
It doesn't really matter ultimately.
There's another aspect of this, though, that I think bears discussing.
And I think Colonel McGregor has touched on this, and it's the despicability inherent in the kabuki theater of the negotiations.
I put it in Airfinger's quotes before Trump decided to launch the war.
They had the Iranians believing they sent these two arch Zionists, the president's son-in-law, Kushner and Witkoff.
I mean, ridiculous to send these two guys who clearly are partisan agents to supposedly sit down with the Iranians to try to hammer out some sort of a deal when there was no deal.
It was a foregone conclusion that the attack was going to happen.
That's the sort of despicable thing that Americans of another generation got up in arms about when the pardon the language, the dirty Japs sneak attacked us on Pearl Harbor.
That was considered bad form.
That was considered contrary to the way civilized nations behave.
And also being the aggressor, attacking when you've not been attacked, attacking on behalf of Israel, who had not been attacked at that point either.
And so all of that, the treachery, the lies, the sneak attacks is just disgusting.
And in the back and forth, it came out that Benjamin Netanyahu called Donald Trump on the carpet because he said, I hear the Iranians contacted you secretly.
You're not talking to them without my permission.
Oh, no, no, we wouldn't do it.
And so to cover themselves, they said, We're not anti-Netanyahuism, right?
Because that's really what we're talking about here.
And so they said, We're not against him.
As a matter of fact, we got Kushner and Witkoff talk to him and the Mossad chief on a daily basis.
And it's like, well, that's kind of traitorous right there, isn't it?
Well, the thing that worries me most is that these lunatic ignoramuses, I kind of regard them as such, have now painted us into a corner in the sense that they put American and Israeli prestige, so to speak, on the line behind this.
And apparently they thought that by assassinating the foreign head of state, the Ayatollah Khomeini, that they would cause the regime to topple and it would be another cakewalk, kind of like the Venezuela operation.
And then they could strut around and show everybody how tough and big and bold they were.
Well, Iranians aren't folding.
And any thinking person understands why, because from the Iranian point of view, this is an existential thing.
That's right.
They know that if they lose this, they lose their nationhood completely.
They become a vassal state.
And therefore, they are going to fight hard to the very bitter end.
They're not going to give in.
And you can't just bomb these people into submission.
It's not going to happen.
It isn't happening very evidently.
And so, what's next?
Are we going to commit half a million ground troops?
Where are they going to come from?
And that would take months.
And are the American people going to put up with a draft?
I hope that's the best way to do it with their sons and daughters being dragooned to be sent over to Iran.
And what then?
If that doesn't work, what's the next step?
In other words, they've now placed particularly Israel in this position.
Israel likes to be perceived as sort of the invincible hegemon in the area.
If the Iranians win by simply not losing, that's all they have to do.
I think it's not out of the bounds of possibility that the maniacs that run that state might resort to nuclear weapons to try to end this, in a win, as they see.
As a matter of fact, there's some clips that I've seen people talking back and forth.
I'm not sure myself what the status is of it, but it certainly looks like a nuclear bomb.
And if they don't use a nuclear bomb, they could use out of their arsenal things that are as destructive, if not more destructive, than many nuclear bombs that are conventional weapons.
But, you know, that is the magic word going nuclear.
And yet, when you look at the massive destruction that they're unleashing, and I think the most sickening thing of all this is Pete Hegseth and how he revels in all this carnage.
It just is a maniac.
He's out of hand.
He's one of those people who thinks that by blowing up the Middle East, he's going to hasten the return of Jesus.
He's lecturing the soldiers over there, apparently, that this is the end times.
It's this eschatological apocalyptic view based upon the Schofield Bible that some of these people have.
Huckabee is of the same mind.
That's right.
These people should be in a mental hospital, not having their lovers, hands on any levers of power.
Yeah, and I keep telling everybody, this is not Christianity.
Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers, because they'll be called children of God, not somebody who has physically traced their genealogy and claims that they got a connection.
And of course, there's questions about that as well.
But that's the reality.
And so he's out there quoting things like, you know, God who prepares my hands for warfare, my fingers for battle.
That's not what that's about either.
Because as a Christian, he should know that is metaphorical for a spiritual battle.
God doesn't equip our hands for warfare so we can go out and do preemptive strikes against civilians and murder hundreds of schoolgirls.
That's not following God.
And it disgusts me to see this.
And his tattoos are just as phony, and his crusader ideas are just as nonsensical as his Christian ideas.
He does not represent Christianity in any way, shape, or form.
He is anti-Christian.
There's some other aspects of this.
The state of Israel, people like Netanyahu, he's at best a secular Zionist.
He's not even a religious observant Jewish person.
And there is antipathy and worse toward its Christians in Israel.
They get attacked in the streets.
But nothing gets done about it.
Now the state of Israel is bombing, as you know, the Christian enclaves in Lebanon, killing Christian people.
And you've got, less, apparently, it doesn't bother Hegzf or any of these other crazed, demented Zionist, whatever you want to call them.
It's really something to worry about.
Yeah, they don't care about fellow Christians.
They only care about people who say that they're Jewish.
And this is really a sad thing.
But, you know, when we look at this, Eric, I'm looking at the gas tank for the U.S., the strategic petroleum reserve that we've got there, right?
What kind of idiot clowns go to war without filling up their gas tank?
And they didn't.
It's still less than 60%.
It's at 58%.
I started looking this up.
The stupidity of this, it almost beggars articulation.
You'll hear Trump talk about, well, we have Venezuela.
There is a lot of oil in Venezuela.
Yeah, it's in the ground.
And it's quite a different matter to get that oil out of the ground and get it refined and get it shipped and get it into the supply chain.
That's something that's going to take years to happen.
And it's not going to happen without resistance either.
As we're seeing in the Gulf states, it's very easy to do a terrorist attack, if that's what you're inclined to do, to attack the infrastructure of your enemy.
If they regard the United States as a bully and as an enemy, there's a lot of people.
They could take it out on the infrastructure that's there.
And you may not be able to get any of that stuff out.
But you also had Lindsey Graham prattling around talking about how we're going to get rich.
We're going to control over a third of the world's oil between Venezuela and Iran.
You may not have any of it.
I mean, Israel started blowing up the oil refineries in Iran.
And at first, Lindsey Graham and Trump said, don't do that.
Don't do that.
We want that oil when we get it.
Now they're joining in with Israel, blowing this stuff up.
And now Iran is apparently looking at, they've already made a couple of preemptive strikes against desalinization plants, as well as a liquid natural gas plant and an oil refinery.
And they could basically, by attacking ports and refineries and factories, they could basically shut down the supply of oil and gas without even shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
And it could take a very long time to get that back.
Effectively, they're doing it.
My understanding is that a couple of ships have already been hit in the straits.
And Trump, in his usual poltroonish, bellicose way, says that, well, they should just grow some guts and they should drive their tankers.
Said from Mr. Bonespurs, who dodged the draft back in Vietnam, and whose son, no offense, I mean, I mean, Baron Trump is just a kid.
I don't want to see Baron Trump get dragged into this any more than anybody else.
But the point is, you know, he's not going to suit up.
He's not going to go.
Trump's not going to send him.
Lindsey Graham has no skin in the game.
None of these people do.
There's like this evil gerontocracy that just has no moral compunction whatever about putting other people's lives and fortunes at risk and at peril and then just disregarding the havoc that they cause.
It's obscene.
That's right.
And he's more than willing to put the deepwater navy in that tiny strait, which is shallow water.
It's very different the way they operate.
It's set up to be operating to hit things at a distance that are there in deep water.
They can't operate in that strait.
And if he puts them in there, and yet you still have his Secretary of Energy come out and lie about the fact that the Navy is escorting tankers to the Strait of Hormuz, had a big effect on Tuesday in terms of oil.
Even after people realized that it was a lie, and even after they took the tweet down, even after the White House pulled back and said, well, no, that's actually not true.
It still had the desired effect on the marketplace, which is really true.
Yeah, temporarily.
You know, I think maybe Trump's idea is to goad the Iranians into attempting to sink an American aircraft carrier or something, which would then perhaps give Trump the pretext to nuke the Iranians.
The man literally said something about he's not limited by anything at all except his own view of what is right.
That's right.
Yeah.
He just says anything he wishes.
When he was talking about the tariffs and his temper tantrum after the Supreme Court shut down that illegal move that he had there, when he was talking about that, he said, I can do anything I want.
I can apply any tariff that I want to to any country.
I can destroy any country that I wish.
And of course, he knows it's a tax and he knows that a tax is a power to destroy.
But of course, he can destroy any country he wishes with arms as well.
That's what he's trying to do.
And back to what we were talking about in terms of the war and how it's going.
Iran has watched what the United States has done for a very long time because we have been at war with them, not for 47 years.
The clock didn't start when they took over the American embassy and they put in the Ayatollah.
That was a response to what we'd done about 26 years earlier in 1953 when we overthrew their government.
And I know because I knew some Iranian students in college who were telling me about that.
They were protesting the Shah's horrific regime when I was in college, and they were showing up, Balaklavas over their head and everything.
I said, what's that all about?
And they said, well, let me tell you about the SAVAC, you know, this thing that's trained by the CIA and Assad, secret police that would kill and torture people if they realize that you're a political opponent.
That's why we have the Ayatollahs is because we did regime change once before.
And we don't know what we're doing when we do regime change.
Sometimes we put in something that's even worse.
And if they say that the Ayatollah is worse than the Shah, well, you caused that.
Just like Trump caused the pump prices to go up, he caused the Ayatollah as our American policy by the CIA and the continuing deep state is what caused us to have an Ayatollah there.
And so these people have been looking at this for the longest time.
They realize that the Achilles heel of the mighty American military is to have a drawn-out war of attrition and to use asymmetric warfare against our very expensive, complicated, and centralized systems.
And they have a decentralized system and even taking out the Ayatollah.
And again, I got this from Al Jazeera because you have to read some of these other sources out there and try to figure out that the truth lies maybe somewhere in between these two extremes that we get here, the pro-Zionist media here in America and the anti-Zionist media that's outside of the country.
Illegal Orders And The Ayatollah00:07:21
And so what they were saying was they had what they called the fourth successor.
And they had people for deep to replace the individual leaders that were taken out, as well as decentralized command and control.
And so they're in it for the long haul.
Absolutely.
You know, Americans, unfortunately, have a very superficial understanding of history, even their own recent history.
Iraq is a parallel for what's going on in Iran, the sort of situational morality.
For many years, Saddam Hussein was considered to be a great ally of the United States.
You know, there are famous pictures you could find online of Don Rumsfeld going to Iraq and shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.
And we use him as an ally against Iran.
Yes.
But then he became inconvenient for one reason or another.
And all of a sudden, at that point, they seem to have recognized, oh, he's a bad guy.
He has, you know, he has dungeons and he has secret police and he drags people off into the night.
Exactly like the Shah.
Yeah.
You know, and for the people who live in these countries, it's just beyond contemptible to hear.
It's bad enough what they do, but the way they have this moral unction when they do it and pre-posture as if they are fighting some sort of great crusade in the name of all that is good and decent when they are the most depraved, duplicitous, and evil people that you can possibly imagine.
Yeah, C.S. Lewis had a quote that was similar to that.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it's like, you know, there's nothing worse than somebody who's on this moral crusade and think that God is on their side.
And I said, yeah, you know, the question is, are you on God's side?
First of all, if somebody tells you that God is on my side, beware of that person.
Yeah, because they typically think they're God, right?
Yeah.
And Americans in the main, a lot of them, not all, but a lot of them have difficulty viewing things from the point of view of others.
How do you suppose American Catholics would respond if, let's say, Iran had attacked the Vatican and killed the Pope and half the College of Cardinals?
That's right.
What do you suppose the reaction would have been?
You know, you don't have to like the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The point is, he was their spiritual leader.
And generally speaking, most people don't like their leader being taken out by some foreign country.
That's right.
All they succeeded in doing was generating the fury of the Iranian people.
And the piece de resistance was the bombing of that school and killing 170 kids, girls.
That just doesn't wear well.
And they can't even apologize for it.
Senator Kennedy apologized for it.
John Kennedy out of Louisiana.
He apologized for it.
They can't have the decency to say, I'm sorry, we made a mistake.
That's not the type of thing we do.
Instead, you've got Pete Hakeseth, we're going to kill everybody.
We're going to rain death and destruction from the skies.
How more disgusting can you get?
It's just beyond belief.
In the next 24 hours, they scrape the bottom of the barrel.
The barrel turns out to be even deeper.
That's right.
Well, you're talking about killing the Pope or whatever, killing the Islamic Pope.
You are a spiritual leader, not just to a lot of people in Iran, but to all these Shiites.
And that's about 500 million people, roughly.
And so that's not limited to Iran.
And so the war is not going to be limited to Iran either.
Yep.
You know, it's so obviously stilted, so obviously malicious.
People see it.
And I'll tell you, the thing that worries me the most right now is that as vile as Trump is, that he has, he's kind of gamed this out.
The only thing I can come up with to explain the gratuitous arrogance of his actions lately is that he doesn't fear consequences.
He's not worried about the midterms because I think that it's very possible that he's going to pull a Zelensky and declare an emergency.
And in an emergency, we can't have elections because it's too chaotic.
You know, I wouldn't put anything past it.
Yeah, I wouldn't put anything past that guy.
He absolutely has, just like Hakeseth, they have nothing but contempt for the Constitution, for any law, for any rule, for any morality.
They have contempt for it all.
And Trump's MO, I said, we've got three branches of government now, right?
We've got the legislative, the judicial, and the emergency branch, because that's the way he operates.
He declares an emergency and then he does whatever he wishes.
It's not even the executive branch anymore.
Right.
And now Americans have gotten used to the sight of body-armored goons marching around on the streets.
So it won't seem that odd to them if all of a sudden the emergency gets declared and they lock down the cities using these American latter-day version of the SA, back in Germany, back in the 30s.
Like you, I put absolutely nothing past this man anymore.
Or Pete Hakeseth.
Don't you find it amazing, you know, going back to this fight over you shouldn't follow illegal orders.
How dare you say that?
We're going to punish you.
We're going to take your pension and all the rest of the stuff for saying that.
Instead of saying, I didn't do any, I didn't give any illegal orders, he said, how dare you tell people not to follow my illegal orders.
And now we've got the same type of thing happening yet again with Pete Hegseth, this time with Anthropic and saying, we've got some red lines.
We're not going to allow our stuff to be used for.
We're not going to let you do police state domestic surveillance.
And we're not going to let you do autonomous killing machines.
And so then Pete Hegset says, how dare you?
We're going to destroy you as a company.
That's also unprecedented.
We've never seen that happen to anybody.
Somebody that they're still using their product in this Iran war for targeting and for other intelligence, but they're now going to try to destroy that company.
And they're just off the charts in so many different ways.
There's also a matter of historical amnesia here in the sense that it was literally considered to be a war crime to claim that you are only following orders.
You know, the Nuremberg Code did not excuse what was done by the individual soldiers and the chain of command down the line when they claimed, well, you know, the legitimate government of the state ordered me to load people into boxcars.
It ordered me to shoot these people.
I was only following orders.
That was not considered a legitimate defense.
Even though the orders were technically legal, they were still considered immoral.
So, you know, now we're in a situation where, again, the question isn't, well, are these orders constitutional?
Are they immoral?
It doesn't matter.
They're orders.
You must follow orders.
That's right.
You know, regardless.
And Americans are being conditioned to be good Germans.
These people are so filled with hubris, they know that there's not anybody that's going to stop them.
Nobody's going to oppose them except the other tribe, and it's going to be just dismissed as a tribal opposition.
But nobody has the power to arrest them in some kind of an international criminal court.
And so it's like, yeah, you and what army is going to bring me up to a Nuremberg trial, which they should be facing.
You're right.
They should be facing that.
But that's why they're acting this way.
And of course, the GOP as a group is just rolling over for all this stuff.
They're rolling over for the war.
This is the party that wants to tell you that they're pro-life.
This is the party that tells you that they're for protecting children and yet they're protecting pedophile predators that are there.
It's disgusting to see this.
And they want to tell you that they are there to protect the economy.
Right-Wing Suppression And GOP Betrayal00:06:45
And we've probably never seen anything as destructive as this particular war for the economy.
Yeah, particularly, it couldn't have come at the worst possible time, at the worst possible time.
You know, we've been reeling now for five years since COVID.
You know, people are just barely clinging to their status quo.
Can you imagine what will happen when it costs $100 to fill up a vehicle?
And when $100 buys you, maybe a small bag of groceries at the store, if there are any groceries.
That's right.
This is economically, politically, culturally catastrophic.
People, when they are pressed into desperate situations, are going to begin to behave desperately.
And then it's game on.
And who wants that?
Nobody.
Apparently, only people who want that are Trump and his sycophantic apologists.
Yeah.
He's a one-man tool of chaos.
I think that was his purpose of being put in.
I call him a one-man fourth turning, war and depression, right?
And he wants to take us back to the last fourth turning of World War II and the Great Depression.
And he's doing everything he can to take everything down because they need to do that to rebuild their technocracy or whatever communist authoritarian nightmare system they've got planned.
They have to first destroy the system that's here.
Trump has been doing that throughout his first and his second term, especially in the second term.
He's really accelerated that.
They're getting very close to their timing of 2030 where they want to have this new system in.
They've been boasting about that for the longest time.
And so it's got to all happen in this term.
And he is doing everything he can to create chaos and economic depression and war.
Yep.
You know, I apologize.
I voted for the guy again, stupidly.
I'll never do anything like that again.
And I allowed my hope to overcome my judgment.
You know, I should have remembered the way that he behaved during his first term, particularly the last year during COVID, when he did not end the emergency, when he had the power to do it.
And when it was very obvious by the summer of 2020 that the whole thing was an overblown, overhyped fraud.
He could have at that point ended it.
He chose not to.
And what did that do?
That set the predicate for the mass absentee balloting and for election months that assured we were going to end up with Joe Biden.
That's right.
And now he's out there threatening to shut down the government if they don't pass his SAVE Act, which basically is to say, you're not going to do any vote by mail.
It's like, you're the guy who put the vote by mail in with your lockdown stuff.
And I said it wouldn't happen.
I said, this is going to be disastrous.
This is going to be the biggest manipulation of the election that you've seen.
I thought it was going to be manipulated, but I thought it'd be manipulated through computerized voting machines primarily.
But that offered another entirely new dimension.
And now he's out there even calling it Save America Act.
And Save America was the name of his pack that he used to grift money off of people after the election that he had thrown with his rules and lockdown and vote by mail.
Then he sets up the Save America PAC and raises like $250 million and sends people to January the 6th.
He picked their pockets and put their head in a noose.
It's amazing.
I think it's difficult for most of us who aren't sociopaths and psychopaths to really understand how these people operate and what they think, because we've got an internal check that, you know, if a certain thought crosses your mind, you go, oh my God, I could not, I can't do that.
That would be horrific.
I'm not going to do that.
So we don't think like they do.
And therefore, it was difficult for me.
I'll give you, you know, to see that Trump was put in there in 2016 to further a certain purpose.
Come 2020, we get Joe Biden.
What did we get with that?
We got the LGBTQ stuff, trannies, we got the summer of love.
And that naturally outraged most normal Americans.
They just and the COVID stuff on top of it.
So it sort of set the stage for this resurgent populist nationalist movement that Trump is the head of.
He's going to ride his white horse in and he's going to save us.
And people voted for that.
And I saw that at InfoWars.
I saw the people that Alex is bringing in that were associated with the intelligence agency.
And people think of the intelligence group as being these people like Clapper and Brennan who are left-wing.
There's a big right-wing component to it.
And those are the people that Trump was, that Alex was bringing in all the time to push Trump.
These are the people who were behind him the entire time.
So this is basically really a right-wing coup.
And I mean a real right-wing coup, like a Chile type of Pinochet type of coup that they're really queuing up here.
Well, it was brilliant because let's hypothesize that Harris had won.
Most of the people who are on the Trump side would have been hyper-vigilant, would have been outraged and protesting by the things that Trump has done.
But because it's Trump and there are members of the Trump cult, the Red Hat cult, they find ways to bend themselves over backwards to come up with some 55D chess explanation for it.
It's beginning to fall apart, but it's astounding the degree to which they have snapped into line, just like the people on the left that they derided as NPCs, you know, robotic sheep who were just following whatever the narrative was that was being deployed by the left.
Well, it's exactly the same thing now.
So, you know, the setup seems to be that if we do have elections, there's going to be this horrendous backlash against everything that is tainted by Trump.
He's going to have tainted populism and nationalism, perhaps irrecoverably for a generation.
I agree.
It's like a Herbert Hoover all over again.
I agree.
We're going to get an authoritarian leftist dominated government for the foreseeable future, maybe forever.
I agree.
He's there to poison.
Uh, all the uh, the perspective of anybody you know.
Uh yeah, it's just like this Christian nationalism thing.
It's like oh, you're Christian oh, you support this Christian nationalism stuff.
It's like no uh, but it's this odious thing that they associate you with and then people start running the other way.
Uh and, and it's kind of interesting too, because remember when Tulsi Gabbard got in now she has basically discredited herself completely uh, opposing the war now staying silent and staying in the regime.
She said, my position here is to restore trust in government.
Rfk Jr said The same thing, and they have used that blind trust to betray people in terms of what people expected them to do.
They expected Rfk Jr to push back against the coveted shots, to expose the vaccines and other things like that, and he hasn't really done that.
He's allowed that stuff to take on.
I think it's been very effective at demoralizing people.
Smart Cars, Quotas, And Lost Trust00:08:18
Yeah, you realize that nothing ever, ever gets done for the good.
Uh, this Epstein thing.
The reason it never goes anywhere is because both parties are they're all involved in this.
That's right, you know.
They have a common interest in suppressing what was going on.
They have a common interest in making sure that nobody is ever held accountable, not Bill Gates, not Dr Fauci, whatever happened to any of that.
You know, these covets, these people who visited unprecedented harm on the American people.
Nothing happens to them.
You or I, you know we drive by a cop not wearing a seatbelt.
You know, and we'll get you know, we'll feel the full force and effect of the law even though we've harmed absolutely nobody.
But you know, you can harm hundreds of millions of people if you're Albert Borla or or Dr Fauci, and nothing happens.
And meanwhile they co-opt people like Rfk Jr and Gabbard.
You know people think oh, they're gonna, they're gonna do something for good, and maybe they've done a little bit of good here and there, but at the end of the day they got played also and they just look like fools.
That got bamboozled again uh, you know, by the Orange man.
It's appalling.
Well, you're talking about uh getting pulled over for minor traffic violations.
We just had uh a uh.
It was exposed that there was um, the State Highway Patrol had some um uh quotas evidently, and you had uh, certain officers who were very aggressively charging people with drunk driving and yeah, one guy like 50, some odd people from one trooper and uh, half of them were were not uh, drinking at all.
They were completely sober, but he charged them with drunk driving.
So yeah, this is the kind of stuff that we get when they put out quotas with this kind of stuff.
Um, you get uh, what we saw with ice in Minnesota and uh, you also see what Scott Ritter said was he said, they go in on this strike against Iran and they've got quotas in terms of the number of places that they want to hit, which means that they're not really careful About what they're targeting, right?
And so you wind up with a situation like we did at the girls' school.
That is the way all this stuff is being managed.
But let's talk a little bit about cars.
Absolutely.
You've got an interesting article there: braking for a bag.
Tell people what you're talking about.
Yeah, an interesting story surfaced the other day about a guy who was driving his SUV with something called automated emergency braking, which most new cars have now.
And essentially, the system confused a plastic bag that was tumbleweeding across the highway with some kind of an object.
And the system is designed to slam on the brakes, you know, in the event that it thinks that the car should break and the driver hasn't braked.
And of course, you know, on a highway, when that happens for no apparent reason, it tends to result in somebody rear-ending you.
That's just the nature of the thing.
And, you know, this AEB thing, the really pernicious thing about it is that the federal government has mandated that come 2029, all new vehicles have to have this technology.
Wow.
Their argument is that, well, we'll save, again, we'll save lives, you know, because inadvertent people who aren't paying attention to what's going on in front of them, the car will break for them.
The problem with it is, of course, that you have situations like this, inadvertent braking that are in and of themselves a danger.
I've had it happen to me.
You know, the federal government has registered thousands of incidents of this.
A couple of years ago, I was driving a Toyota Prius and I was the only car on the road.
Nobody was around me.
And all of a sudden, the car just slammed to a stop.
I guess it saw a ghost or something.
You know, because they always use the word smart when they talk about these technologies.
Smart.
It's just programmed.
You and I are smart in the sense that we can, you know, we can perceive things with our eyes.
And that this wonderful biological computer that we have called a brain can then filter and interpret the information.
And we can immediately say, well, that's just a plastic bag.
You know, it's not a child.
It's not a deer.
It's not anything I need to hit the brakes for.
I'm just going to keep on driving.
These dumb systems that rely on a camera find distinction.
So, you know, I was hallucinating, I guess.
Yeah.
But you remember a few years ago when they had, I think it was an Uber self-driving thing.
And they had fully autonomous driving because they had somebody behind the wheel and it ran over that lady who was homeless, who was crossing the street with a shopping cart or something.
And they said, well, it was dark.
She wouldn't have been able to see it.
And of course, the camera that was watching her, she's sitting there playing with her phone because she's been lulled into passivity because this thing is doing most of what it needs to do, but it doesn't stop when it sees a person coming.
But, you know, they said, well, you can't see her.
She's out there in the dark and she's not in the headlights.
I said, yeah, so this thing's got LIDAR and it can see in the dark.
Why didn't it slam on the emergency brakes?
And I said, well, we disconnected the emergency brakes because they're constantly kicking on for no reason at all.
So we just disable those.
And it's like one system after the other, right?
Failure.
There's a dehumanizing aspect to this, in my opinion, in that it detracts from agency.
What do I mean by that?
Well, you know, when I get behind the wheel of a vehicle, I'm in charge of the vehicle.
I'm responsible for controlling it.
And if I am neglectful, if I'm pecking at a cell phone, I don't do that.
But let's say I'm pecking away at my cell phone while I'm driving and I pile drive into somebody else.
Well, then I'm morally responsible as well as legally responsible because I didn't maintain control of my vehicle.
The accident could have been avoided.
Now, what they're doing with these technologies is placing people in the position of not being either morally or legally responsible.
You know, after all, the car is responsible.
Well, who's responsible then when somebody gets killed?
Who are you going to bring into court or sue for damages?
And people get killed.
And how is that going to be compensated?
And think about that in terms of the autonomous killer robots, right?
Just like we saw with the situation at the school, if that was targeted and directed by artificial intelligence to whatever role it had, but once they go to fully autonomous killer robots, then they can come back and say, well, who's responsible for that?
It's not my job, right?
Everybody can pass the buck on to somebody else and nobody has to take responsibility for it.
And that's another huge reason not to have these things because it allows people to avoid any responsibility.
So it allows them to be a lot more reckless and careless with what they're doing.
Yeah.
And there's another aspect of this I think people should be aware of, which I worry about.
It is that once these things are a federally required safety feature, which they will be in 2029, which is less than three model years away from now, they will probably come up with the argument that a vehicle that does not have it, older vehicles, constitute a threat and a hazard.
They'll say, well, if every vehicle on the road had this automated emergency braking, then all sort of follow each other in a correct conga line.
And, you know, if this car breaked, then that car would break and they would all be in communication through V2V technology and we wouldn't have any problems and we'd reduce the fatality rate.
You know, it will help improve safety.
And then they'll say the only way that you can continue to operate a vehicle that does not have that technology on government roads, they call them public roads.
They're the government's roads.
Well, if you retrofit it, the problem is that that's not feasible to do from a technological or economic point of view with older vehicles.
You just, I suppose, could do it if you had limitless amounts of money and completely re-engineer the car, but it's not like adding a third brake light, let's say.
It's an extraordinarily complicated piece of technology.
And I see this as a way, another way.
There's so many of these pincers that are moving to shut us out of cars, that this is a way for them to effectively outlaw pretty much every vehicle that was made before roughly 2015 or so when this technology started to come online.
That's right.
It is very much like a singularity where you have all these different regulatory threads, as you point out.
It's like some kind of a spider's web.
It's all coming together to control every single aspect of our life and to make everything illegal.
I think they're just kind of waiting for the older ones of us to die out.
I saw this when we were in Virginia trying to cover an event at one point in time, and we were having difficulty seeing this thing.
So we thought, well, what we're trying to cover, so he said, let's get a boat and we can get a different perspective on it.
So we go to get a boat and you had to have a license in Virginia to drive a boat.
Ethanol Traps And EV Obsolescence00:10:50
And I said, I've been driving a boat since I was eight years old.
And I said, well, you're old enough that your grandfathered in.
So it's like anybody that was over 50 or something like that, they didn't require him to have a license.
But if you were under 50, you had to have a license.
And we're starting to see this with smoking cigarettes, for example.
I think it was New Zealand or Australia.
One of them made it illegal for anybody to ever smoke a cigarette if you were born after a certain date.
And so this is a kind of insanity.
They're just gradually ratcheting everything down into a slave state.
They're doing it.
It's kind of like, it's an interesting dichotomy to me in that it's sort of the superficial moralizing.
You know, like, how dare you smoke a cigarette?
How dare you have a beer?
Those things are outrageous and they must be stamped out forevermore.
On the other hand, these people are perfectly willing to commit genocidal mass murder, you know, and do horrible wholesale things to people that are egregiously immoral.
That's okay, but you better buckle up for safety.
That's right.
I saw a funny joke about Trump.
They said somebody just threw a beer at Trump.
Fortunately, he was able to dodge it.
I had a lot of experience dodging the draft.
So yeah, let's talk a little bit about ethanol blues because while we're talking about alcohol, I was at a think tank once and it was all these conservative think tanks.
Heritage Foundation, of course, the biggest one.
But all these different states have think tanks as well.
And so this is a big convention of them.
And this one organization was hosting an event and they set it up as a speakeasy.
And as they handed out the invitation, they said, if you want to come to the party, you just show up and knock at the door and say, I'm here for the ethanol subsidy.
So you got ethanol blues again.
What's that about?
Well, it's just an ongoing thing that has been in existence now for what, 40 years at least, maybe 50 years.
When as a SOP to the agribusiness lobby, which is almost as powerful as AIPAC politically, they created this requirement in federal law that requires the introduction of ethanol into the fuel supply.
So most of the gasoline that's available at the pump is not actually gas.
It's 10% ethanol, 90% gas.
That's what you're buying.
So it's adulterated with ethanol.
Why does that matter?
Well, among other things, ethanol has less energy BTU content than gasoline.
So the unit volume, you know, if you have a gallon of E10 versus a gallon of 100% pure gasoline, you're going to get lower gas mileage.
You're not going to be able to drive as far on that.
So it costs you more to drive the ethanol-laced gas than it does real gas.
For older vehicles, it's a really sneaky way for them to sort of accelerate the obsolescence of vehicles that were made at a time when the assumption was that gasoline would be the fuel that would be used.
And this was all the way through the 80s.
That's when the RFG thing started to ethanol thing started to come online.
Well, vehicles that were made before then, you know, the engineers assumed that the gas tanks, fuel lines, rubber parts, everything that came into contact with the fuel was going to be coming into contact with gasoline, not alcohol.
Alcohol is chemically different than gasoline.
It has different properties.
It interacts differently with things like steel lines and plastics and rubbers, and it deteriorates and degrades them.
That's why, you know, even though vehicles have been made to be ethanol compatible now for 40-something years, power equipment isn't.
You know, if you buy a chainsaw, if you buy a lawnmower, you'll probably see a little sticker on it that says, do not use ethanol fuel in this thing.
You have to find a station that sells, they call it now pure gas.
It's kind of like pure bloods.
You got to find a place that sells pure gasoline.
And it's worth the extra cost, particularly because it doesn't store very well.
That's the reason why they don't want you using the E10 in outdoor power equipment that sometimes will sit for four months out of the year, you know, during the fall and the wintertime.
If you leave that stuff in the fuel tank, odds are your equipment isn't going to work come spring when you need to cut the grass or whack the weeds.
Yeah, when you look at it, Big Ag, you're talking about the footprint that they've got.
I remember the back and forth.
Even people like Al Gore was raging about ethanol.
He says, we don't want this.
We don't need this.
And so the environmentalists weren't pushing it.
It was Big Ag that was pushing it.
And we just saw the last week or so, the Trump administration and the Republican Party saying, we're not only going to not stop glyphosate, a known carcinogen that is permeating our food supply and poisoning our farmland, but we're going to mandate and compel its production.
And as part of that, we'll give them legal immunity against lawsuits.
And the Republicans applauded that when Trump did that as an executive order.
It's just insane.
Well, they're well paid to do that.
They're also talking about making E15, which is 15% ethanol, the new standard.
Because again, there's a lot of money.
And, you know, people don't really understand the sort of tiered effects of this.
It's not just the effects in your vehicle or your outdoor power equipment.
It costs a great deal to produce this ethanol.
And crops that ordinarily would have gone toward feedstocks, let's say, for cattle, are instead diverted to the production of ethanol.
So it has had a secondary effect of causing an increase in the cost of food.
People don't understand and realize that that's going on.
Who benefits?
It's not, you know, mom and pop Farmer Joe down the road.
It's these gigantic cartels, these combines that are using the government to rob us blind and ruin us at the same time.
Yeah, that's right.
You got an article about EV, the real purpose of the EV push.
But let me just say, you know, one of the things that you talked about, I think it was the Chevy Volt, Volt.
Was it Volt or Bolt?
The one that had the generator, right?
Oh, you're talking about the Volt that was technically a hybrid, but it carried its engine chiefly as a generator.
That's right.
Well, now, as Ford is pulling back from this, they're moving towards what they call, they're now calling those extended range EVs, ER EVs.
And as you pointed out before, that's probably the best use of an EV that you could have in terms of using the motor as a battery and simplifying it so that you don't have to have this hybrid system and complicate the transmission stuff that's there and everything.
You don't have to use it, the gasoline as an engine.
You can just use it as a generator to charge the EV and you get a very long range out of it.
But what's going on with the EV push right now besides that?
Well, I was thinking about this the other day and it occurred to me that one of the effects, and I consider it to be an intentional effect, of the attempt to push EVs, and they were pushed very hard for a number of years, was to push us out of vehicles both directly and indirectly.
Here's how.
By pushing the EVs, what they did was to greatly increase the cost of vehicles generally, not just the EVs.
Reason why EVs are money losers.
You know, Ford said that it lost about $20,000 on the sale of every one of its F-150 Lightnings, probably more than that.
All the manufacturers that were required to manufacture these EVs for the sake of regulatory compliance, they had to figure out a way to staunch the bleed somewhat.
So what they did was they pushed out some of the costs of the EV thing into the price they were charging for their other vehicles.
And that's why the cost of vehicles has gone up.
But the other aspect of it that's much more subtle is that the same regs that pushed the EVs pushed hybrid drive frames into mass production.
You know, originally when the Toyota Prius came out, that's sort of the archetypical hybrid.
And it came out, what, about 20 something, 20, maybe even 25 years ago.
The whole point of it was that, okay, this is a vehicle that is focused specifically on very high gas mileage.
It was fundamentally an economy car, and it made sense in that context.
Essentially, they were using the hybrid drivetrain to kind of compensate for and overcome the fact that new cars have gotten so freaking heavy because of all the government safety candidates.
It used to be possible to make a 50-mile per gallon car without a hybrid drivetrain.
That's become impossible.
So anyway, that was the purpose of the Prius and its competitors, such as the Honda Civic Hybrid.
That went on for a number of years.
Now, if you look at the new car landscape, half of the vehicles or more that are on the market of all kinds have a hybrid drivetrain, including, and I think this is the telling part, high-end luxury vehicles, Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Lexus.
It's risable.
It is ridiculous to believe that a person who spends $60,000, $70,000 on a premium luxury vehicle is sweating paying another $30 a month for gas.
They don't care.
They're not buying it because it's a hybrid, and yet it is.
Mercedes and BMW, two good examples, have cheapened out some of their formerly premium vehicles.
Used to be that in a vehicle like an E-Class Mercedes or a BMW5, the minimum you got was a six-cylinder engine for that money, a nice six-cylinder engine.
What do you get now?
You get a two-liter turbo four augmented by a hybrid system.
It's a compliance drivetrain.
And at the same time that these hybrid drivetrains have come online, the price has gone up.
The E-Class Mercedes is now $60,000 without the V6.
It's thousands and thousands of dollars more expensive.
If you look at the current Dodge Charger, that was an electric car until they realized it wasn't going to sell.
And they put their new six-cylinder engine in with a hybrid drivetrain, much more expensive than the previous charger with just an engine.
You know, and you look at any vehicle you choose to pick that has a hybrid driveframe and compare its costs now versus what it cost just a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, without the hybrid.
And it's many thousands of dollars more expensive.
I've just been test driving the Toyota Grand Highlander.
As recently as 2022, that car came with the V6, Toyota's excellent 3.5-liter V6.
It now comes with a 2.4-liter turbocharged engine, hybrid augmentation, and all of that.
And it's $7,000 more than it was just three years ago.
And these are these subtle costs that are being imposed on us.
And who can afford it?
You know, it's ridiculous to believe that working and middle-income people are going to be able to pay $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 for a basic family kind of a car.
So what can you conclude from that?
You can conclude they're trying to make it so that regular working and middle-income people can no longer afford to drive.
That's the idea.
That's absolutely it.
Yeah, absolutely.
They did everything they could to incentivize the EVs.
And now, as you see, and as you and I talked about this for the longest time, said, well, we know it's going to happen.
They're giving them preferential treatment.
They're subsidizing them.
They're banning other cars from these low-emission zones.
You can only go in there if you've got an electric vehicle.
Now they're coming after the electric vehicles.
Now they're taxing them by the mile and doing other things like that.
Lockdowns, Trucks, And Luxury Cars00:07:58
We know that that's the way they want to go because then that requires that they track you all the time, right?
So many aspects of this.
But the bottom line is they don't want you to have mobility because mobility leads to liberty.
Just look, that was our lifeline during COVID stuff: the car.
And you can imagine how much more effective the lockdowns would have been if the majority of the cars that were in circulation, if they could have, you know, thrown the proverbial switch, let's say, and simply disabled the vehicles remotely, the lockdowns would have been a whole lot more effective.
I certainly wouldn't have been able to do what I did, which was to jump in my truck and have a look at what was going on out in the real world.
I would drive by the local regional hospital just to see whether the bodies were stacking up and the lines were forming outside.
And then I did videos and recorded that.
And of course, I got demonetized on YouTube for doing that.
I was able to do it.
I live out in the country.
If I had been stuck with a connected vehicle, an EV, and they just shut it off, what am I going to do?
I'm going to bicycle the 30 miles into the city to see what's going on?
Probably not.
Yeah, with all the electronics in it, they can very easily geofence you out of any area that they want or keep you in the areas that they want to keep you in.
Let's go down memory lane because it's one of the things I love about EricPetersauto.com.
The fact that you go back and look at some of the things that we have grown up with.
And you've got an article talking about the things that are no longer seen.
Talk about a little bit of those.
Yeah, I think it's fun.
Just generationally, you know, like guys our age, you know, if you went to a car show when we were kids, let's say, and you looked at a Model T Ford and you saw all these strange things in the car, you know, what's this little lever on the steering column do?
What is that?
And the pedals look weird.
You know, and you had to have an old timer come along and explain to you, you know, what these things did and how the car worked.
Well, you and I are familiar with things like, you know, my old muscle car that I have out in the garage, my 76 Pontiac Transam.
It's got this little four-mounted dimmer switch.
Show it to a 23 and see if they know what that is.
You know, that's gone.
You don't see that anymore.
Well, you know, time progresses.
And I kind of thought, well, okay, imagine 30 years from now, if we still have car shows and, you know, and people are looking at vehicles from this time, 30 years from now, and they're going to see things like these weird little rectangular things.
You know, what is that for?
What do you do with that?
And we'll have to explain.
Yeah, there was a time, you know, we plugged in our devices into these things.
So that was just one example.
There are a number of others, you know, people who are too young to have remembered the 90s.
You remember when they had those seatbelts that buckled you in when you opened the door?
Oh, I had a car that had the Volkswagen Rabbit that I had did that.
It had a knee bar to keep you from getting hung, I guess.
If you submarine under the seatbelt, but the seatbelt was actually plugged into the door.
So when you open it up, it would pull it out and you could just slide out.
And I remember taking Karen's grandmother in it, and it would fluster her to know.
She didn't know how to get out of it.
She's trying to pull herself up and around it.
She'd always wrap herself up in the seatbelt, not have to go around and detach it from the door to get her out.
It was kind of crazy.
Yeah.
Yep.
Those have been out of production now since I think the late 90s, early 2000s.
I can't remember when they were last available new.
So it's been 25 years.
So, you know, somebody who's 25 today will probably have absolutely no memory of those kinds of things.
So, you know, when they see it.
One of the things you mentioned is opera windows.
Yeah, there's another one.
That was a strange thing when it was done, an opera window.
But I guess we used to have these things called personal luxury coupes, you know, models like the old Chevy Monte Carlo and the infamous, the infamous Chrysler Cordoba, you know, that Ricardo Paul Bond did in those commercials.
And actually, they were neat cars.
They were sort of big cars, but they had two doors.
You don't see that very often in Corinthian leather, whatever that was.
Fine Corinthian leather.
And one of the features that they used back then to signify that you were driving something luxurious was the opera window, which was this round piece of glass, fixed glass.
It didn't open that was on the rear C pillar of the car, you know, before the area where the rear glass is that supports the roof.
And it was just considered very stylish, very chic.
You never see that sort of thing anymore.
It's gone the way of T-tops too.
You never see T-Tops anymore.
That's right.
And of course, I think of opera windows.
I think of American Graffiti and that Thunderbird that I think it was Suzanne Summers was in that movie.
But the other thing you don't see, which is kind of in your picture here, and that is the fake vinyl roofs that are there.
And in the picture that you've got here, it's like a one-quarter vinyl roof.
It was chic to make it look like you had a convertible, even if you didn't have a convertible.
And now when we talk about, you know, drive around, we have a convertible.
We put the top down.
And when I see another convertible, I look over and invariably is some old geezer like me that's right.
I know it's quite something.
Now, you know, the thing that I've moaned the most is that, you know, we no longer have genuine luxury cars.
There was once a distinction between a luxury car and a sports car.
And then because everybody decided they had to be BMW, this began in the 80s and then in the midlight, BMW was considered sort of the Euro cache thing.
Everybody wanted to be like BMW.
And instead of having like really comfortable three across bench seats, for example, and a column and a ride that was designed to be plush, you're not in a hurry.
You're just you're wanting a comfortable, smooth riding car.
Now we all have luxury sport cars with these sent you in bucket seats.
And I look, I like sporty cars.
The point is, everything doesn't have to be sporty.
Now minivans are sporty.
It's absurd.
You know, they all ride on 18, 19 inch wheels and they have rough rides.
You know, those who are kind of people who have never had the chance to ride in a big land yacht American car from the 70s are really missing out on something.
There used to be a really profound difference in the way you felt when you were driving something like a Cadillac Sedan de Ville or an Olds 98 and something like my Transam.
I mean, there was a big, big difference.
Now they pretty much all drive the same, irrespective of the make model type of car.
They're all pretty much the same.
Yeah, I remember my dad had a big Cadillac Sedan de Ville, and my car was a little Triumph Spitfire.
And to go from one to the other, literally going to rip your head off.
You know, where you're in this, like you said, this gigantic, smooth riding, you know, bench seat and everything.
It's like a mobile living room.
And then you go from that to this little tiny rattling thing that's looking like you can drive underneath the truck that's right next to you.
It truly was amazing.
Yeah, those are the days, weren't they?
Yeah.
Yeah, they were.
And I think it's a shame that there was this concerted effort, a marketing effort, to kind of make fun of, you know, the old man's car, the, you know, the sedan deville with the white walls and the wire hubcaps.
I think we've lost something as a result of that.
You know, we've lost the diversity and difference that used to exist in the marketplace.
Everything is just homogenously, bleakly the same now.
And there's something ridiculous about all these 300 horsepower, 400 horsepower cars puttering along, you know, at just barely the speed limit.
That's right.
That's right.
I can deal with it when I, you know, when I roll up behind somebody who's driving, say, an old Volkswagen Beetle, because I used to have one, I know the car is struggling to keep up.
You know, it's having a tough time keeping up at 65 or 70 miles an hour.
But it's just obnoxious to come up behind some guy, you know, driving 47 and a 55, and he's driving his truck with, you know, 400 horsepower V8.
It's just, it's gratuitously, stupidly wasteful, in my opinion.
And I see it as an almost as a temptation that I almost cannot get past when I've got these big engines and lower speed limits.
So I don't like that aspect of it as well.
It's like they're really tempting me to do something here.
Well, it's always great talking to you, Eric.
Protecting The Unsophisticated Common Man00:01:33
Thank you for joining us.
And I love EricPetersAutos.com.
It was much more what he's talking about there as well.
As we didn't even get to Corvettes and what's happened to them over the years, but always great content.
Thank you, Eric.
Always a pleasure to have you on.
Oh, thank you, David.
I always enjoy our talks.
Thank you.
The Common Man They created Common Core to dumb down our children.
They created Common Past to track and control us.
Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing in the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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