June 29, 2025 - Slightly Offensive - Elijah Schaffer
57:18
THIS is Where It ALL Went Wrong.. The Rise of NEOCONS | Rift Book Club | B1E2
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In this week’s episode we go over the first 3 chapters of “Where the Right Went Wrong” and discuss the birth of neoconservatism, American imperialism and the creation and cultivation of the Islamic boogeyman.
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Oh, when the Soviet Union and empire started to unravel with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War that had defined America's mission came to an end.
Kirkpatrick, a former UN ambassador, held out the hope, I'm already laughing here, that we might become again what we had been before a half century of hot and cold war from 1939 to 1989.
Quote, the time when Americans should bear such unusual burdens as the Cold War is past.
With a return to normal times, we can again become a normal nation and take care of pressing problems of education, family, industry, and technology.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's my joy and honor to announce that Kirkpatrick's dream for America came true.
And at the end of the Cold War, we did it.
We started focusing on the home front.
And the right wing focused on conservatism and the family.
And we figured out black crime and shut down the immigration.
And we finally did it.
No, I'm kidding.
Welcome back to our book club.
This is episode two.
We are going through chapters one through three of the book Where the Right Went Wrong from Patrick Buchanan.
He is a paleoconservative and we're talking about this.
Why?
Because we are currently trying to begin another war with Iran.
And this book is about how the neoconservatives, the current right, right?
Con Inc., the people that if you criticize Israel, call you a Qatari agent.
The people that call you, you talk about China having better infrastructure.
Crowder's team said that I was being paid by the CCP to just point out the fact they have better trains than us.
These people are so lame.
They're boomers.
And how did they get so much power?
Where'd Shapiro come from?
This is our book club.
I hope you've read it.
If you haven't read it, you can pick it up.
The book right now.
It is, again, where the right went wrong.
I don't know what happened to.
Here it is.
By the end of the show as well, we're going to announce the winner of the Kindle.
And you'll find out how you can win another one of these next week as well.
If you had taken a picture of yourself and sent it to mike.mendoza at rifttv.com, you are entered in a chance to win.
So we'll give that away at the end of the show.
Anyway, I'm Elijah Schaefer.
I read the book so far.
I've been enjoying it.
I've been loving it.
Joining me for this book club and review, my co-host today, Sarah Stock.
I think it's interesting just because, you know, like obviously the parallels to our time, it's just, it's, and, you know, you'll see the same thing with people like Peter Brimlow, who I hope we can read.
But it's funny because 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they thought it was over then.
So, you know, it would be interesting to see in the future if we could get interviews with these authors too, the ones that are still around, because, you know, I mean, things have only gotten worse and worse and we're on a path to destruction every single day.
I'm going to be leading the discussion on chapter one.
Hennessy will be leading the discussion on chapter two.
And Ms. Stock will be leading it on chapter three.
If you're with us, whether you have a Kindle or whatever, I want to just jump into it.
Okay, so the introduction is pretty interesting.
We kind of went over an introduction to Buchanan, neoconservatism, what's going on, what that means in the last section.
But we get into understanding, you know, where this all kicks off.
And chapter one is pretty interesting, I think, because it's talking about like the wartime president.
We all know that we have the war on terror, this never-ending Islamic battle for what?
Like, that's what no one can answer.
It's like, were we there for oil?
Were we there for opium?
Are we there for the Jews?
Is it the military-industrial complex?
And this is what Buchanan is seeking to answer, which I think is important that we have the answers.
It's kind of, I guess you could say, all of those things.
But the question is, how did we get here?
So we got to kind of go back a little bit and talk about, you know, reversing.
Did we just get bombed by Muslims and then we just went, we got to take down Al-Qaeda?
Who the hell is Al-Qaeda?
And why are we taking them down?
How do we get into Iraq?
Okay, it's all, it's actually all connected.
All right.
So he kind of begins by talking about this idea of the fall of the Soviet Union.
There's a really important quote here.
I guess it's on me on like 12 or 13, page 13.
But he said basically that he wanted to have a vision that was more grandiose.
This idea that we could work as a hegemony with Europe and Japan.
We could build ourselves into something great, this new universalism.
And he talked about, he advocated for non-interventionist foreign policy rooted in our history, traditions, and the wisdom of our founding fathers.
With the Cold War over and no mighty and ideological empire arrayed against us, we could return to traditional foreign policy rooted in the national interest.
Under this policy, America would dissolve now obsolete Cold War alliances, shed commitments to defend nations against a Soviet empire that no longer existed.
We would pull up tripwires planted by duels and Akasin all over the world that were certain to ensnare us in every future war in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, though U.S. vital interests were no longer at risk there.
I urged a policy of enlightened nationalism and warned specifically against any Wilsonian crusade for global democracy, even then being buried about as America's new cause in the world war.
However, he points out this is where this is where we had a fight.
So as the Cold War ends and the Soviet empire collapses, you have two groups of people who sort of emerge.
You have people who see the end of the Cold War as a moment to get air, right?
To be like, we can collapse our military-industrial complex.
We can denuclearize, we can take away all of our tripwires.
He's talking about like, you know, removing the mines from the jungles of Vietnam to the DMZ in Korea, and we can actually focus on building what was a very crumbling society.
The 70s and 80s were a time of turmoil in the U.S.
Yes, you had Reaganite policies that helped the economy, but things weren't looking good socially.
But he brings up these groups of people like Wattenberg, who actually urged not that America come home, but they launched this, what he calls a global campaign to wage democracy all over the world.
This is an early form of neoconservatism.
We get this phrase of like, we are not going to defend ourselves.
We are going to go on an offensive, this group of people said, to take democracy and we are going to spread it to the fascists, to the dictators, and most importantly, where were the fascists and the dictators?
They were in the Islamic world.
And I thought it was really interesting, you know, that people don't talk.
Between 1991 and 2001, there's this 10-year struggle that he goes through here of all these neoconservatives trying from George Bush Sr. To Clinton to continually convince the president to use our power from the cold war to instead of focus on their country to become a global empire.
And I don't think people talk about that a lot, that it took them about 10 years from the time of the end of the Cold War.
It mentions a bunch of people, by the way, and a lot of plans that they tried and tried and tried and tried.
But they really systematically got into places of power and they had a goal.
And it was what?
to create a global empire in the Middle East.
It wasn't some random thing that happened in 2001.
I don't know if you were shocked about that, but he covers the whole history of that.
And I feel like we got to talk about that.
Like this was deliberate.
And it makes you wonder: was September 11th planned in order to allow them to get what they wanted?
Yeah, I mean, it really shows how the, you know, the neocons infiltrated.
They were pushing for endless wars.
Actually, talking about 9-11, we'll get into that in chapter two.
They do bring that up as well about how a lot of this was, you know, our grudge with Iraq, our grudge with these, or the neocons' grudge with Iraq, and Netanyahu's grudge with Iran and all these other countries, and how they were trying to push for us to be more of a country that's on the offensive instead of the defensive, which is really just changing how we were for, you know, many years.
Even World War II, you know, we stayed out of it for majority of World War II.
We eventually got dragged in once you had Pearl Harbor.
I mean, yeah, Pearl Harbor happened.
Then we were more on the offensive.
And what these neocons did is they pretty much pre-planned this endless wars.
And yeah, I was shocked by a lot of it because it kind of relates to what we're seeing now with Iran.
Yeah, what I found shocking about that part, about that chapter, was learning about the fact that these neocons all used to be communists and they just switched parties completely.
So if you think about it, that is pretty crazy.
All of these neoconservatives were communists and now they try to pretend like, you know, it's just like this fake opposition, really.
It's like they're not conservatives.
There's nothing really conservative about them.
They just didn't serve the Zionist agenda to be communist anymore because the far left started to become sort of like anti-colonial.
But you see why he's labeled anti-Semitic because he makes a point in here several times that these neocons, these people who came in, they essentially were like, yeah, like liberal, socialist, sort of like the bourgeois educational class, you know, like what we might call like college professors now.
And they had this vision for a global hegemony, which it's hard to define.
It's not that like he said they were all Zionists.
It's just that Zionism and imperial neoconservatism aligned and kind of became the same thing because the United States wanted to extend its power and its empire into the Middle East and to what he calls this spreading of democracy or this democratic utopianism.
I think there's an exact phrase here.
You know, they were warned that wars were the death of republics, but there's a phrase that with George W. Bush, with the attack on 9-11 and with the push of people to actually do something about what, But to do something, he made a phrase saying that either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
He also said that this was a war upon all nations and that he was now going to extend peace.
I quote this by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.
And so what's kind of weird is that like these people came in and they pushed this idea that the United States could become some sort of, I don't even know what to describe it, but like they sold this lie to Bush and to the American public that we could just take Americanism and take our ideology and remove despots and dictators all around the world, which for some reason, this is why we'll talk about Zionism,
for some reason really had to be Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, right?
It had to be all of Israel's enemies, but that the way that the U.S. could push its interests and remove democracy would be by fighting Israel's wars for them.
But you don't have to tell that to the American people.
What you tell the American people is that we are spreading democracy and democracy will liberate women.
It'll give gay people freedom and we're actually bringing freedom.
So we have this lie, right?
We have this lie that was invented, this big lie, that we were no longer going to war against a country.
We were going to war against an ideology.
It's how neoconservatives kind of got control.
We were now fighting, he calls it the clash of civilizations, right?
We're now fighting terrorism.
We're fighting radical Islam.
And what are we replacing it with?
We're giving democracy to nations that never even had it.
It seems like a pipe dream.
And it's weird in 2004 that Buchanan literally predicts, he's like, this is literally not going to work.
It's going to fail because, you know, obviously we'll talk about in chapter three a little bit, you know, the history of Islam and what occurred and sort of why we'll find out why this would never work, historically speaking.
But I did find it just to be funny that it's like, it's 2004.
We had just invaded Iraq.
It fell.
And he's going, listen, Bush might have been a fucking moron because I think he might have actually believed that he was going to spread democracy and he might be the dumbest person ever.
And it's like kind of the parallels between Biden.
It's like when these people, these, when the deep state, you know, we call them neocons, the deep state wants to take power, they sort of find this dumb puppet and then they do whatever the hell they want.
And he talks about Rumsfeld and Connolly Sa Rice and these, you know, interesting individuals that got pushed into our government, Dick Cheney, they sort of controlled the government and Bush was just a puppet.
He might not have been evil, but he might have been naive.
Yeah, I mean, a little bit of a chapter spoiler, but yeah, I mean, Bush, when he came in office, there was times when he was asked about different countries.
He couldn't even name the correct name for each country that he was asked to name.
There was like four leaders that four major nation leaders of four major nations.
He couldn't even put that together.
So what he did is he surrounded himself with all these neocons who were really pushing, telling him, hey, listen, if we want to have stability, if we want to have it so you're not attacked later on, this is what we need to do.
And, you know, Bush went right along with it where he maybe he felt like he was doing the right thing.
I still have questions about the Bush family.
Obviously, his father, I don't think, was great.
I don't think he was a great president.
But you can see how they kind of directed him towards being, okay, we need to be the world police.
We need to overthrow these countries and then lead them into a more democratic type of civilization.
It was interesting how it was like immediately the day after 9-11, the media just starts putting out lists of like, here's five Islamic countries that we need to go to war with.
They have nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
It was just like this instant, it was like, it did when Buchanan was talking about that, it really did make it seem kind of like pre-planned.
Like they just had these lists ready of like, oh, we need to go to war with these countries now because, you know, this one terrorist hit our building.
I think it's funny too how they, you know, obviously like the rhetoric for the last 20 or 25 years has always been that like, oh, you know, Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism.
Or sometimes they'll say that about Saudi Arabia because the Saudi Arabian or the hijackers were, I believe, from Saudi Arabia, from not mistaken.
And they also did flight school down here in Florida, which is also interesting.
But what I found interesting in the first part of the book in the intro, one thing he mentioned is that, you know, interventionism is the biggest incubator of terrorism.
Because obviously, you know, what did they tell us in the early 2000s that they hate us for our freedom?
I was actually watching, there's a clip that had popped up on my Twitter last night.
It was like a family guy clip of like Osama bin Laden or whatever, where like he was saying that like he hated our freedoms and that we like, you know, watched Marvel movies and like this and that.
I guess Marvel movies weren't really around at the time.
But in retrospect, yeah, it's so ridiculous because obviously you can see with the Clean Break memo and all these other plans that they have laid out for 20, 30, 40 years that, you know, they always had a pretense to bring us into these wars, but then they just needed kind of those things to spark it off.
And then, you know, it is funny that we go into these places and then we intervene, whether it's because they have a dictatorship, because they're gassing their own people, like how they said with Assad, but then they strike back and then we're all so confused about why they strike back.
But, you know, but supposedly Iran is the greatest predict.
Meaning like, I want to make two more points before we go over to chapter two.
Because yeah, because the intro itself, we could have spent more time on it.
Because I think he also talks about the fact that, you know, kind of the confusion that we have here is two quotes that, you know, the American people have demanded in every survey that illegal immigration be halted and legal immigration reduced, but the president and Congress refused to do their constitutional duty to defend the states of the union.
And also he said the Republican Party, which had presided over America's rise to manufacturing preeminence, has acquiesced in the deindustrialization of the nation to gratify transnational corporations whose oligarchs are the party financiers.
U.S. corporations are shuttering factories here, opening them in China, outsourcing back office work to India, importing Asians to take white-collar jobs from Americans and hiring illegal aliens for their service jobs.
The Republican Party has signed off on economic treason.
So he kind of points out the fact that yet a lot of these, you know, these parties have betrayed us.
They don't serve the American people anymore.
And maybe part of the pretense for why, you know, not everyone's trying to just help the Jews or help Zionists, these wars serve as a great distraction and a great, literally a great distraction for the ransacking and the destruction of our country.
But how do we get here?
I end with this.
The way he sets this is that this is so dangerous, neoconservatism, this interventionism, we'll just call it, because he says, you know, the idea that we're going to go to war with Islam is going to be, it's in 2004, it's going to be a disaster and there's no exit.
Because he said, Israel, even Israel, with a superb military and unrivaled intelligence, has been unable to even lift the dark threat of terror from Jerusalem itself.
Not only do Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the IRA, FARC in Colombia, the Basque ETA, the Tanil Tigers, and the Chechen rebels employ terror, so do regimes and guerrillas all over the third world.
So the idea that you're going to war with Islamic extremism and terror, terror is a universal thing around the world.
How can you defeat it?
That means that you potentially could launch a war on any country, on any group, anywhere in the world, which again will invite more terror.
It is a self-evolving problem.
And this is my last point.
You know, he talks about the fact that history thus seems to justify preventative wars, but in American policy, in American interventionism was never really a thing.
We were always trying to prevent communism from spreading.
We were always trying to protect other countries.
This idea of launching a war on Iraq, getting involved in these strikes, which, by the way, parallel with today is like why I'm telling people, it's funny.
They don't think it's war.
It's like, oh, we're just striking Iran.
That's an act of war.
These preventative strikes, we're at war with Iran right now.
It's just that we don't even call it war anymore because it's now the American way of life.
And he's warning here that America's huge footprint.
You know, he talks about it in chapter three, but he does reference it here too.
That the reason why 9-11 happened partially was because Osama bin Laden was upset about female soldiers being on the ground near Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
He says it's a defilement of the patriarchy of their holy religion of Muhammad.
And because we're over there trying to push our empire, they come over here and they kill our people.
And it's a self-perpetuating system that he's saying, look, if our intervention already led to September 11th, then further intervention is going to lead to further terrorism.
And it's going to be a constant battle.
And then the American people are going to think that the war started in 2001, but it's actually been going on for a much longer period of time.
And it's kind of like the October 7th parallel with Israel, where people are like, well, Hamas shouldn't have started the war in October 7th.
And you're like, are you that retarded?
Do you think they started the war?
Do you know why they commit terrorism against Israel?
It's because they are occupied.
It is because Israel is occupying their land historically.
And so I'll end with this.
He warns, he warns, this is final warning.
He's going to chapter two.
Let it be said, this idea that America can intervene.
Here's his quote, and that we can spread democracy.
This is utopianism.
This is democratic imperialism.
This will bleed, bankrupt, and isolate this republic.
This is on page 47, by the way.
This overthrows the wisdom of the founding fathers about what America should be all about.
This is an American version of the Brezhnev doctrine, wherein Moscow asserted a right to intervene to save communism in any nation where it had once been imposed.
And he kind of leaves there saying, guys, I want to warn you, this is 20 years ago.
If we do this, you will see the complete collapse of American society, government, and economy.
And I hate to say, I think it was prophetic, but you can transition to chapter two.
Yeah, America was not a country that would go ahead and just preemptively attack.
It was more of a defensive.
We actually, in World War II, which when you dive into the second one, it talks about how for 18 months that we didn't even join the World War II because we were trying to stay out of it.
But after Pearl Harbor happened, then that's when we engaged.
And basically what happens is our country, anytime we've seen these types of wars, it's usually towards the end when we would actually get involved.
We would try to stay out as much as possible until our hands were forced.
And what the second chapter dives into is it kind of, first off, tells you more about the neoconservatives, who are these neocons and how they came into place, which Sarah actually mentioned before, how they were actually a party of the left.
They were supporting people like, you know, I think it was JFK and FDR and a few others.
But then once the Democratic Party decided that they wanted to break free from these endless wars, they kind of drifted over to conservatism.
He also says it's, I just want to point out the quote that I thought was funny on page 51.
He says, basically, if you want to look at the playbook for these neoconservatives, it's not just the left, but you actually should read the magazine of the American Jewish Congress, which he calls the neocon Bible.
And he does mention that, like, again, a lot of critics of the neocons are Jewish.
So it's not safe to say that all Jews are neocons, but it is safe to say that almost all neocons are Jews, which is interesting.
And what they were saying is they also come out and say that it's because our path that we want to have for our country aligns perfectly with Israel.
And that's not really the case.
You know, what they ended up doing is they tried to force us into these endless wars in the Middle East.
And it all started with, you know, in this chapter talking about how George W. Bush, you know, he basically didn't have any idea of what was going on in as far as, you know, the rest of the world.
He's kind of not the smartest or sharpest tool in the shed.
And what he did is he surrounded himself with all these advisors who were pushing him endlessly to say, okay, listen, what we need to do is we need to have an active war against terrorism.
We need to go out and search for them.
And it's not even just terrorists that we were searching for, any country that had the ability to grow more into having a place to harbor terrorists.
So that was a big thing there.
And before 9-11 happened, because it does talk about 9-11, before 9-11 happened, they were already pushing for us to go invade Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, and, you know, even with Palestine.
And they were saying that these are the countries that we need to go in.
We need to attack.
So then after September 11th hit, they basically talk about how we knew that Al-Qaeda had ties to it.
We knew it had something to do with bin Laden.
I personally think it had to do with our government as well.
But we knew that that was the country that we had to go.
We had to, you know, clear out these threats to us.
And basically they came to the table, all his people surrounding him, and they were like, listen, you know, yes, we can go after Afghanistan.
We could go after Osama bin Laden.
But what we need to do is we really need to focus on Iraq.
Iraq is the country we can go in.
We could have more of a better chance there to kind of clear out the democracy.
He said that basically it would fall easily, thinking that Iraq would just be a walk in the park for us.
Just clarifying to people, this is before we went into Afghanistan.
People don't know that.
Before we went to Afghanistan, like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, all of these neocons, they actually, just so you're describing, if you didn't read the book, that their original goal was they wanted to attack Iraq first.
And basically also eight months before 9-11, they had a meeting about that, about how we had to go in, how we had to take on Iraq and all these other countries.
And then they even got to the point where they were blaming other countries.
So for instance, as I mentioned, you have Libya, Syria, Iran, and Palestine.
They were saying these guys are big threats to us as well.
We need to also analyze this.
But those countries I just named were actually coming out and they were saying that they condemned the actions of September 11th, that they felt horrible for the American people.
But all the war-hungry neocons at the table were like, no, these are the countries we need to pay attention to.
So what we did is we started to actually go towards the invasion of Iraq, choosing that as our enemy, even though Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th.
We kind of just got baited into fighting them and tricking the American people.
Like as you mentioned, either you're, you know, you're for the terrorists or you're for America.
And that famous speech, I think, was in chapter one, where it was Bush at West Point talking about that.
Like we need to be the people who go out.
We need to be the ones who search for them ahead of time.
Preemptive, like just a quote from there, by the way, because he said, like, you know, this idea that we have to go after anyone who harbors terrorists means that we have to go after potentially every Islamic country, which he said, we're 57 nations from Morocco to Malaysia.
So it's like, so now we're at war with like, yeah, we're at war with everyone and anyone.
And basically anyone we want to fight at any point, we can now fight.
And because of you took down, because Osama bin Laden took down our towers, and that if you don't agree with us, you are a terrorist yourself.
So it set up like a dichotomy in the world of like, there's us or them.
And I thought that that was actually kind of crazy because when I was eight, I believed that.
I thought as well when I, when I was younger, for sure, I thought as well.
I was like, yeah, we need to get over there and, you know, attack Iraq as well.
And it's, it's really sad because that was the first time you've seen the country kind of have so much patriotism, the American flags flying everywhere, you know, love for the country, but we were guiding into a war that we should have never been in.
And it even talks about how this is so far away from what our founding fathers wanted.
You know, in George Washington's farewell address, which I had here, you know, his farewell address, he wanted us to stay out of foreign conflict as far as other countries and that we shouldn't be have any permanent alliances or passionate alliance.
So you're telling me, wait, before we invaded Iraq, Netanyahu, we're not talking about his speech last week about Iran having weapons of mass destruction.
If we don't act now, they're going to destroy the West and Israel.
You're saying that literally the exact same speech he gave about Iran several weeks ago is the exact speech he gave about Iraq.
And you can also see how Netanyahu's been trying to play that card with Iran for a while because I believe it goes back all the way to 1995 or somewhere around there, where he kept saying, okay, in six months, Iran will have this weapon.
Eight months, Iran will have this weapon.
And throughout the years, it was just him trying to bait us into going to war for them, pretty much.
So, you know, I found the second chapter to be very enlightening and just a lot of good points showing how these neocons basically baited us into this war, how this war has been something that they've been waiting and planning for for the longest time and use the, you know, the tragedy that happened on September 11th as a tool to orchestrate all of us to fight the endless wars for them.
Can I say, Sarah, I want to hear your opinion on this.
I just want to point out a couple important quotes if people want to highlight them in their book.
One of the things in page 52, he says, intervention, wars for democracy, and passionate attachment to Israel are what neoconservatism is all about.
Those three things.
So think about that.
Intervention.
So getting involved in things.
You know, you like, you're like, why are we getting involved in this shit?
And why are we like fighting for democracy when we like democracy isn't even working out for us?
Like you see Jasmine Crockett and you're like, why is a DEI black woman leading our government?
You know, why do you see Kagan and Soda Mayor and Katanji Brown Jackson?
Like, why do we have like lesbians, you know, in the Supreme Court running our interpretation of the Constitution?
It's like, maybe, I don't know if that's what Muslims need is like dyke haircut lesbians deciding interpreting Sharia law, you know?
And I think it's like, so it's that and then passionate attachment to Israel.
It's like, well, why are we so passionately attached to Israel?
It's because the architects of our current foreign policy, back to Bush Sr. on after the Cold War fell, were all Jewish people, pretty much, majority Jewish people who saw that they could achieve Israel's or Zion's desires and tie it to American interventionism.
So a lot of Americans were not passionate about Israel, but now they all are.
So that's when you see neocons, they all run the government.
And there's another quote too, where it said, where is it?
Oh, yeah, he said here that is that also on top of that, the military-industrial complex went along with it because the Pentagon planned appeared to be primarily aligned at finding new ways to justify Cold War levels of military spending, which was a big one.
So there was a lot that went into this.
Like I mentioned, he's saying that, look, it's not just, it's not just the Jews.
It is the Jews.
It is American imperialists.
It is the military-industrial complex.
But they all kind of came together and their ideas aligned.
And like, if we get in these forever wars, it makes us money.
It accomplishes what Israel wants.
And it brings this hegemony, this democratic utopianism, which is, by the way, the last quote here is that he said, the neoconservatives seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
So like they never forget.
They always remember their goals.
And he says they are often clever, but never wise.
I don't know, Sarah, you had any quotes from there, but I thought that was funny too, because they are clever, but they just aren't wise.
Well, okay, so transitioning, though, into chapter three, so he, so he goes through this.
And by the way, this is like a really like vague understanding of the book.
Like, this is why you should be reading it.
You're going to get a lot more out of this conversation if you had read it because you kind of, well, there's so much we're not saying.
It's kind of like the movie version leaves out all the details.
You know, and if you have your quotes in the comments below, drop your favorite quotes.
If there was like a quote that you just were like, dude, that was crazy.
Like drop it in the comments.
And remember, if you join the locals, you can get into our Discord and talk to people.
We'll probably create a tab for book discussion.
I think we should do that, right?
The Discord, create a book club discussion in there.
And so you can always do that.
Again, we don't expect this show to get a lot of views, really.
It's not really about views.
Maybe a few thousand people will watch.
But really, we're just trying to get a couple hundred of us to be reading the book.
That's really like 100, 150 of us to kind of just be like getting educated.
And I hope if you haven't, if you got behind in the reading, that you get caught up because like part of the reason why we're doing this is not just be like to give a chore.
It's to get back in the discipline.
Like reading is a chore in some ways.
And we're trying to, you know, I have kids.
Everyone's got children and wives and husbands and college and all this stuff.
It's like, yeah, it's all of that.
But also like, remember, the reason why we're in this place is because people have forgotten our history.
And they teach American history, which that's why I'm going to transition to chapter three.
It's funny because we teach things like World War I and World War II, the Holocaust and now, versus like chapter three explains why it's so dumb to be at war with Islamism, why an empire focused on battling civilization will never work.
And one of the things that it does is it's like, it doesn't even call World War I World War I.
It like tracks the history of war for hundreds of years from like 1200 on.
And it essentially just talks about the culmination of a long-standing war from 1638 on that involves the United States, but it's kind of a forever war with the Serbs and the Turks.
And it's kind of like, oh, when you realize that the world isn't like there was just bad Nazis in Germany and Jews were murdered.
It's like there has been this war between Islam, this struggle between Christianity, secularism, humanism, Bolshevism.
And it's been going on for centuries.
And the Muslims were not always Islamic extremists.
They added things to our culture.
And the Christians were not always the most advanced civilization.
And, you know, he brings up a quote.
We'll go over to Sarah on chapter three where he says, you know, and the world is hard to predict because, you know, you never know who's going to win or lose based on strength because Rome was strong, Christianity was weak, but Rome fell and Christianity survived.
You know, like we can't get cocky.
And this chapter is dense.
There's a lot of names.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, just, you know, there's a lot of names, a lot of events, et cetera, et cetera.
But I want Sarah, go ahead and jump in here.
Chapter three is pretty intense.
Sorry for giving you like the hardest chapter to cover, but go ahead and then give your synopsis on it.
Yeah, I mean, I don't really want to cover the whole thing because it is, it's basically just a zoom out history of Islam and really its relationship with Western civilization and kind of the ongoing battle between the two.
So I don't really want to, I feel you can just read it for yourself if you want to know that history, but it kind of takes us to where we're at now and just the fact that Islam is, although it has obviously taken over over 50 countries now at the same time, these Islamic countries are not, they're not like rich countries.
They're not successful.
They're really not expanding anymore.
They haven't, especially in recent decades, they haven't really managed to capture the hearts of the youth in these countries, especially in places like Iran.
The youth are being influenced by Western media.
So they're not passionate Islamists.
And it's actually, because of that, it's kind of crumbling and dying and they're not financially successful.
And then what I found really interesting about this chapter was the reasons why these Islamic countries hate the West.
Because we hear it's like, oh, they just hate our freedom.
It's like, that really doesn't make any sense.
So I think I'll just read, I'll just read these different bullet points of the reasons why this is on page 81 if anyone wants to check it out.
But the reasons why Islamists hate the West and these Islamic governments hate us is because one, we preach democracy and human rights, yet prop up dictators and oligarchies who oppress Islamic peoples and steal and squander their wealth.
Two, by moving thousands of U.S. soldiers, especially women's soldiers, onto the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, we've insulted Arab honor and defiled the land on which sits the holiest sites of Islam.
I think I guess you could make an argument when these neocons say that Islam hates our freedom.
I mean, I guess they kind of do.
That's the part that they hate is the fact that we're sexually degenerate, basically, in the West here, and they don't want their youth to be influenced by that.
Number four, Americans use a hypocritical double standard in dealing with Arabs and Israelis.
Sure, we all know that.
And number five, we attacked, invaded, and occupied a prostrate Arab nation that did not attack us, did not want war with us, and could not resist us on the pretext that Iraq had played a role in the 9-11 horrors and was building weapons of mass destruction to attack us.
So basically our endless interventionism and just destroying these countries that really didn't do anything to America and had nothing to do with 9-11.
Yeah, but I think we really bombing some of their countries.
Yeah, but we really do need to go through the history because it's like it's pretty fundamental to cover what he states earlier because what he's explaining is something that we lack in the United States, which is a contextual understanding of like that we are not in a modern or a postmodern era, right?
We're in a post-postmodern, as they call it.
It's so postmodern that it's not even creatively called anything.
I think that's always ironic.
It's like we're in the post-postmodern era.
You can't even create an eloquent term for our positioning in world history.
He's kind of saying like, look, America is a young country that views itself based upon a modern history.
We don't even look at the totality of our history.
We don't look at our own founding fathers.
And we assume and we buy the propaganda of our government because they tell us things like they hate us for who we are and they hate us because we're free when in reality our women are whores.
We push pornography, alcohol, drugs.
And, you know, even just the idea of having women in our military, you know, overseas in their holy lands is offensive to them because they see this as thousands of years of history.
Like the Jews and the Muslims view the world in totality is what he's explaining in chapter three.
It's like they are seeing a historical fight between people.
They don't view America as a young country.
America is an imperialist head.
It is a continuation of the Roman Empire and of Christendom and at the head and the throne room of post Islamic caliphate colonialism.
So like he sets the standard here of like, listen, Muhammad, like why are the Muslims radical and why should we not fight them?
And why is this going to lead to our collapse?
It's like, well, Muhammad is actually, he calls, they call the, the old Catholic writers called Islam, which I never heard before, a Christian heresy.
Did you see that?
They call it a Christian heresy.
That it's like, because it's, because it respects Judaism, it respects Christianity, and it doesn't seek to replace them.
In fact, it would allow Christians to exist and allow Jews to worship just if they paid a tax because they respected Abrahamic, their Abrahamic father.
And when the Arabs came in, you know, the original Islam actually produced 700 years of advanced civilization that pushed as far as Western Europe and created a capital in Cardova and took over Portugal and Northern Africa.
And it was the global hegemonic power.
And so there is definitely like this idea that we think of Islam as like this modern, failed, radical, weird, neo-fascist countries.
But Muslims today feel a little bit like white people do in the West today.
We see a collapsed empire.
We feel resentment towards non-white people.
We feel resentment towards Jewish people.
This is why the far right does.
I felt a lot of parallels between myself and Muslims in maybe these resentments of like they see a seven, eight hundred years of like giving a civilization that at some point we surpassed them and we punished them.
We humiliated them.
We carved up their empire, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and we sort of destroyed Islamic idealism.
We placed in our own leaders, right?
Which then barely in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they replaced the Shah and Qaddafi came in, took down the prince.
And we ended up basically they're trying to come back from over like a thousand years of oppression, right?
And so they see themselves as liberators and they believe because of this final thing that Osama wrote, that's like Osama wrote, like, the only way that we are going to get back our caliphate, that we are going to get back our empire, is by spilling the blood of Americans, of the civilians and the government.
And so you actually, like, we have to rid them.
And why?
And why then?
Why do we have to kill the civilians?
It's because our blood is defiling their land and we are occupiers and we have destroyed.
They'll never recover.
And his proof was that like UAE and Qatar, these countries only survive.
Even Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi and stuff, they only survive by making deals with Americans.
Americans have, you know, the Muslim world held by the neck.
And so like they just see America as the tail end empirical head of the snake of what destroyed who they were.
And there's like a thousand year old bitterness and resentment, you know, from 1638 on, they, they view us as, or 1683, and Habsburg imperial capital was rescued by King John Sabiski of Poland and the Ottoman Empire had a calamitous defeat.
So they view from 1683 down to 2001 as being like 350 years of white Christians taking revenge and raping the people in the land.
And the United States is the hegemonic imperial head that is keeping them from recovering.
So it's like you realize it's not just like sand people who are a prehistoric and just want to spill blood.
Osama bin Laden comes in and goes, you know what, you know what worked?
Mogadishu?
Terrorism.
We got them out of Mogadishu.
You know what got them out of Beirut?
Terrorism, killing 241 soldiers with a bomb.
You know what got them out of the French out of Algeria?
Terrorism.
So you know what we're going to do?
We're going to become terrorists and terrorize them until they're so sick of this, they leave.
Yeah, no, that's how they, you know, that's how they feel.
Basically, we've painted them into a corner where they're stuck.
You know, we've done endless campaigns across their country.
We've changed their leadership, as you mentioned, which makes them stray away from their views and their values.
And even though we may not agree with their views and their values, that's what they were raised on.
That's what their culture was built on.
And then we come in as like the world police working on behalf of all these, you know, maybe Israel, our neocons, and the, you know, in our government as well.
And we go ahead and we strip them down.
We strip their land down and we set guidelines to them that, you know, they don't want any part of.
And I wish it stopped in 2001 because you said up to 2001, but that's not the case.
But I'm just saying he wrote, I'm saying in 1999, he wrote that letter in the chronicle that I'm saying, like from then until then, he said, now we got to spill their blood.
So I'm saying like they're saying he viewed it as like in 1999, it's been 350 years of oppression and now let's let's get back.
And by the way, it wasn't just through spilling blood, but also through immigration and having children.
This quote, I'm going to read it real fast because I want to hear from Sarah.
Page 100 says that.
Why do they hate us?
Is it for freedom?
No.
He says, because we preach democracy and human rights, yet prop up dictators and oligarchs who oppress Islamic peoples and steal and squander their wealth.
Two, by moving thousands of U.S. soldiers, especially women soldiers, onto the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, we have insulted Arab honor and defiled the land on which the holiest sites of Islam.
As Ian Baroma and Avishi Margalit, the authors of Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of the Enemy, write, true Wahhabi believers such as Osama bin Laden view the presence of American women, American women soldiers in Saudi Arabia as an act of defilement.
To him and his followers, it's as if Americans were sending their temple prostitutes to defend the unmanly rulers of Saudi Arabia.
America's neo-pagan culture, alcohol, drugs, abortions, filthy magazines, blasphemous books, dirty movies, hellish music, it is a satanic lure that corrupts the morals of the Islamic children.
Americans use a hypocritical double standard in dealing with Arabs and Israelis.
We embargoed and blockaded Iraq with the cost, the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi children because Saddam defiled U.S. resolutions, yet we give Israel all the aid Sharon demands to defy UN resolutions.
We attacked, invaded, and occupied a prostate Arab nation that did not attack us, did not want to go to war with us, and could not resist us on the pretext that Iraq had played a role in 9-11.
To millions of Muslims, we are the evil empire.
We are a Christian empire plundering Arab wealth and trampling with infidel feet on the sacred soil of the Hejaz.
So, I mean, like, that's that's you should just play out of context for Crowder's team so they can tweet it out and say, I'm also paid by the Wahhabi.
unidentified
I don't know, Sarah, but that's what Sarah was saying in the end there.
But yeah, I mean, I guess like the, we're trying to figure out like what the solution is, though, because it's like, yeah, we can understand they have these grievances, but like, that's because we kind of are their enemy.
I mean, we have to remember what if we're going to think long-term, if we're going to think over the past 2,000 years, too, these Muslims totally subjugated Christians as well.
And they're still persecuting us in all of their countries today.
And yeah, obviously they want to conquer us through, what is it called?
They say like through birth in the ballot box.
And like, that's what they're doing in England.
And they want to do it in America too.
So they're totally trying to do that.
But I think Papua Candid made a good point when he was saying like, we're not really doing anything to combat this because we're trying to combat this with secularism, which tries to treat all religions the same and welcome diversity, welcome multiculturalism.
We don't really care about the Christians being slaughtered by Muslims in other countries.
And he says to defeat a faith, you need a faith.
And I thought that was a really good point.
Like, we're really not going to be able to maintain our own culture.
If it's like, what are we fighting them with exactly?
We don't, we're fighting them with multiculturalism.
We're never going to win.
We need Christianity and we need to like basically remember our European heritage too.
I mean, and kind of in totality, obviously, it's like the book's not over.
It is, it is so relevant to today's conversation.
And I, and I, and I really want to be careful in this book club that we're not doing the remember Mike in college?
Like, so how do you feel about that?
Like, how do I feel?
Does it really, is it, is it, is it relevant how I feel about the Islamic world?
What I think is that the craziest part about it is that like he was saying, like, you know, look at, we think we won World War I and World War II.
And in fact, we just engaged into a war that was already ongoing.
And that war actually was the destruction of Western imperialism.
And it was, America sought its way to become the global superpower.
And now we are overextending ourselves and the world is against our imperialistic plan, including our own people didn't want to intervene in Iran and they don't listen to us.
They don't care.
And it's just scary as we go through this.
It's like he's basically saying that, look, imperialists, Jewish Zionists, you know, military industrial complex, they're all in power.
The issue is like the unholy trinity.
Their views are aligned.
And neoconservatives, you know, you cannot be a neocon for just interventionism.
It's about Israeli interests too.
And you notice what all the three things it says about neocons, it's just as relevant today as it was in 2004.
In fact, maybe more relevant today, if you actually look at what's going on, it's unfortunate that none of their ideas, none of what they want is to make the lives of Americans at home better.
It's not to improve anything here.
It is all about extending our might, our power overseas, fighting other people.
It is a bloodlust and it is Jewish led and controlled.
And that's why he got called an anti-Semite because he's saying like, you know, again, he's not an anti-Semite because he's not saying all Jews are a part of this plan.
He's just saying that this plan is a Jewish plan, which is which is a very, it's a hard statement to understand.
Like, hey, not all Jews are a part of this plan, but it's Jews who made this plan.
You know what I mean?
So, you know, not all Jews are communists, but a lot of communists were Jews.
It is a hard way not to be called an anti-Semite because it sounds anti-Semitic to most people.
But I want to end on that and just say, I'm excited for chapter four.
Interested to see, you know, more of this book each and every time.
It's kind of shocking to me, the parallels of what happened in the past compared to what happened now.
And you're right, it's not all Jews.
You know, anytime you hear anti-Semitic, it's just anytime you say anything bad about the Israeli government, they'll consider you anti-Semitic.
And what you're doing is you're actually questioning their government that they have.
But the one thing to point out is they always say history repeats itself.
And I mean, this is a perfect example of seeing history repeat itself, us falling into the same types of beliefs and trends that we had back then.
We're doing them now.
More American people have woken up and they have seen that this is not something that we should be doing.
We should not be engaging in and we need to pull away from it.
But the problem is that the government is so controlled right now with maybe organizations like APAC or other ones that are funding these government officials, making sure that they're put in office.
But their plan is to move full steam ahead.
You know, they coined the phrase, you know, like a new world order kind of set up, which they've mentioned in this book as well.
Bush Sr. himself has even mentioned that.
So their plan is just to change the way the world is now and how it works.
And it's not really focused on helping the American people, how we can help protect our country, how we can actually become a better nation.
When they say protect us, that's not really what their plan is.
Their plan is to achieve their goals at no cost.
Like it doesn't matter.
Whatever it takes, we have to achieve these goals.
If it makes our country fall apart from within, if it makes us create all these enemies, to them, that's fine.
Let's just go ahead, let's continue.
Let's get the machine moving and let's continue these wars, which in the end, it's only going to destroy us.
So I am very interested to read more about this and see what's coming up next in the book.
And Mendoza, I know that you really got, no, I know you, I think you really should, because technically you're just producing.
So he's not technically an official member of the book club yet.
But for people that actually do join that actually are a part of the book club, we're going to get Domino's Pizza and Cut, the pizzas, the slices into three more sizes and give you a half cup of juice, you know, for the book club members.
We'll get you get a star.
I wanted to say, did we, are we going to have to pick a winner after this?
