Speaker | Time | Text |
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Wow, we are live, Abby Martin. | ||
How do you feel about that? | ||
I feel great. | ||
You've done that live shit before? | ||
Hell yeah. | ||
Hell yeah! | ||
You're free of the Russians. | ||
Free. | ||
Abby Martin, formerly of Russia Today, the lone standing voice. | ||
You were like the person, everybody would say, Russia Today, who the fuck's gonna watch that? | ||
Well, that chick seems to be speaking her mind. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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Hmm. | |
Gave a lot of credibility to the network when you have dissent against the funder. | ||
I mean... | ||
Yeah, that's a weird place to be though, huh? | ||
Like that whole Crimea thing when you were protesting, when you were talking and speaking, I guess in editorial fashion on your show about what was going on with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Crimea situation. | ||
They were like, well, you should go there yourself and see it. | ||
And you were like, fuck that! | ||
Was that when you were starting to think like, man, maybe I should not be here? | ||
Well, the problem was waking up to a press release saying that I was already going to be shipped there without asking me. | ||
So that was when... | ||
Shipped. | ||
Shipped. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
So I just said, no, I'm not going to... | ||
I just didn't want it to be a vetted press experience for me. | ||
You know, I wanted to make my own contacts on the ground in Kiev. | ||
Plus it was like a war zone at the time. | ||
I mean, maybe not Crimea, but Ukraine. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Even though it's part of it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So I wanted to get training and also make my own contacts instead of just going with like, Vetted Russians and just like going around Russians there and being like look everything's great They're all happy like we vetted everyone already. | ||
So here's your experience It has to be a weird gig working for Russia like the Russian sponsored news Network in America living in Washington DC like what a block from the White House yeah It's great. | ||
You're in the belly of the beast and you're also working for the quote enemy, right? | ||
It's amazing. | ||
Whenever I'd meet guys at bars and they'd be like, what do you do? | ||
I'm like, I work for Putin's propaganda machine. | ||
I'd just like shut it down right there and just make everyone really uncomfortable. | ||
Yeah, they'd be like, I don't want to text this chick. | ||
I'll get on a list, you know? | ||
I think they would put you on some sort of a list, right? | ||
I'm assuming that everybody who's friends with you is on some sort of a list. | ||
Well, I think, I don't like to live in fear of the NSA, but I think that obviously, you know, when you have John Kerry out there all the time fear-mongering about Russia Today and bringing it up, saying that using Russia Today as an example why the U.S. State Department propaganda apparatus needs tens of millions of dollars more funding. | ||
Which is called the Broadcasting Board of Governors. | ||
So it's Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. | ||
And it's what the US does to put their propaganda out to the rest of the world. | ||
And so John Kerry's using Russia Today as an example of how good Russia is at putting these counter talking points out there and using it to get more money. | ||
So you know that they're paying attention and you know that they are really bothered by it. | ||
But if they did anything like sanction the station or try to shut it down, it would look really fucking bad. | ||
They can't go that far. | ||
unidentified
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Oof. | |
It just shows you that the world is really just these odd shades of grey. | ||
It's not really black and white, because obviously Putin is a dictator. | ||
I mean, there can be no doubt, at a certain point, after a certain amount of assassinations and a certain amount of taking oligarchs' money and throwing them into jail and all the crazy shit that guy's done, he's essentially some sort of a new dictator, a new style of dictator. | ||
And yet, Russia Today reported on some real shit and gave you a lot of freedom to report on real shit, which is weird, you know? | ||
It gets everybody in this strange predicament, like, can I pay attention to Russia Today? | ||
Do I trust it? | ||
First of all, Putin's not a dictator because he was elected. | ||
Allegedly. | ||
But here's what's weird, is that he created this new position. | ||
So you have Medvedev, and then you have Putin basically re-emerging, right? | ||
It's like Bush coming back and just being like, yo, yo, yo, I'm going to fucking just create this position and just come back into government. | ||
So he did kind of create this caveat to come back in and have like a giant sphere of influence still. | ||
But I mean, he does have a huge... | ||
He has huge support there, and I think in due part to this Cold War resurrection going on in the West. | ||
So when you have Russia being bombarded with attacks constantly, it kind of reinforces that homeland feel to the people in Russia. | ||
And they're like, fuck y'all. | ||
You guys are just like constantly attacking us. | ||
So we're going to kind of maintain this strength here and really be nationalistic. | ||
So it's almost like helping Putin. | ||
What I don't understand about the whole thing is that We're not looking at communism. | ||
This is not the Cold War, so I don't understand what the U.S. is getting out of it when you have an oligarchy and an uber-capitalist nation that's basically in line economically with the U.S. I mean, it's run by oligarchs just like the U.S. is. | ||
We're not talking about communism versus capitalism anymore, so what are we getting out of it to kind of continue to create this dueling narrative? | ||
Well, I think, first of all, people are nervous about Putin. | ||
When you look at him, you know, at least the image that's being portrayed through the media, he's this very macho guy. | ||
You see him with his shirt off, riding horses and shit, and you have one guy, who was the guy recently that said Putin could be worth as much as $200 billion? | ||
When you look at all the money that he's stolen, all the different people's money that he's taken, all these oligarchs that he throws in jail and takes their companies, they think that he can be worth as much as $200 billion. | ||
You know what? | ||
People have said that about Hugo Chavez and Maduro, too, and they take all of the nationalized Like assets into account. | ||
They just say that Maduro owns like billions of dollars worth of wealth because of the nationalization of products. | ||
So I don't necessarily take that at face value and say that like Putin has amassed this giant wealth that he has. | ||
The problem with the propaganda wars is that you don't know what's fucking true. | ||
Right, of course. | ||
Investor, Putin could be the world's richest man with 200 billion stolen. | ||
Who's Hermitage Capital Management? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Bill Prouder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. | ||
It's so, so crazy. | ||
Scroll down, Jamie. | ||
Yeah, look at that. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, what I love about about the propaganda war, though, is that you have all these like establishment journalists who will immediately say that Putin and he very may well have killed that dude, you know, I don't know. | ||
But to immediately come on the media and say that Putin's politically assassinated all these people in the street right in front of the Kremlin, but then you can never ever question any sort of political assassinations that have taken place in this country. | ||
So it's like a way to just project all of these issues when it comes to either false flag terrorism or political assassinations or just suspicious deaths outwardly and then just say like, well, that's fucking batshit if you ever apply that to our political system here. | ||
Well, that would be sort of like if Rand Paul was assassinated. | ||
If Rand Paul was running against Putin or against Obama, it was like second term, and he was campaigning and running against Obama and then was murdered in the street. | ||
That would be what it would be more like. | ||
It's a lot more brutal and open than any of the political assassinations that may or may not have taken place under the United States. | ||
Can you think of a similar political assassination that you could attribute to the United States, like maybe Vince Foster, which allegedly was an assassination? | ||
I mean, of course, obviously, other than the Kennedys, MLK, Which, of course, a court case found that the government was complicit in his assassination as well. | ||
A Memphis, Tennessee court jury found that. | ||
But yeah, I mean, actually, there was an Embassy Row bombing of a fucking just car bomb exploded and killed some leader and it came back to some complicity within the US government and another government working together. | ||
So there has been shit like that happened. | ||
But yeah, I mean, nothing just as overt That guy was a very vocal supporter and he thought that his fame would protect him. | ||
That was what he thought. | ||
That didn't work. | ||
No. | ||
No. | ||
I don't know what the fuck is going on there, man. | ||
It's so, you know, it's hard. | ||
And this is when people would give me shit all the time. | ||
Why aren't you talking about Russia every day? | ||
And it's like, look, it's extremely hard to talk about any country that you don't understand fully. | ||
I've never been there. | ||
And also you're looking at a country that, you know, The Soviet Union collapsed not that long ago and they're figuring shit out. | ||
And so it's kind of like our moral imposition on the Middle East and being like, you guys are so barbaric and why haven't you evolved to where we are? | ||
And it's like, well, first of all, there's so many different factors playing into that on a completely different political evolution. | ||
So it's just like, just hold your fucking judgment for a second and try to understand how these countries are the way they are. | ||
Of course, you can call it criminal activity in other countries, but it just seems like people have a lot of shit to say without really understanding all of these different dynamics that go into global affairs, including myself. | ||
Yeah, I don't understand Russia at all. | ||
It's a fascinating place, though. | ||
It's interesting to think that when we were kids, when I was a kid, we were always worried about going to war with Russia. | ||
That was the big fear that was hanging over everyone's head. | ||
People really would go to sleep at night terrified of potential nuclear war, and we always thought we were one incident away. | ||
And then for a long time, it went away. | ||
You know, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia became this new, much more peaceful place. | ||
It seemed like that was never going to happen again. | ||
And now it's all ramping up again. | ||
They just sold missiles to Iran in the news in the last couple of weeks. | ||
They lifted their embargo of selling missiles. | ||
What scares me is there are two proxy wars going on right now between the US and Russia. | ||
Ukraine and Syria. | ||
I mean, that is happening. | ||
That is real. | ||
And now, you know, we have Ukraine. | ||
Obviously, the US is openly endorsing and funding the Ukrainian government with lethal aid. | ||
And then you have Russia arming these rebels there. | ||
So basically the US and Russia are fighting a war in Ukraine and then you have the Assad factor where Russia is funding Assad and then you have the US openly funding these fucking jihadist Islamic terrorists essentially on the ground in Syria. | ||
That scares me because the war is already happening. | ||
It's just through different mediums. | ||
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
I know. | ||
So you were working for Russia today. | ||
First of all, how did you get that gig? | ||
How does one get a gig and like working for Russia today and was there any hesitation on your part? | ||
I came from anti-war activism and long story short, realized that media was really the platform that we need to be fighting because I saw both parties selling the Iraq war. | ||
And I was like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
So then going back to Oakland and the police state just showed up in my backyard once Occupy Oakland happened. | ||
There was like seven police helicopters flying around the city at all times. | ||
There was tens of thousands. | ||
It felt like stormtroopers to respond to like 80 hippies camping out in a park. | ||
So I was like, this is fucking crazy. | ||
And then Russia Today was the only like legitimate news organization covering the Occupy movement. | ||
So during that time, the mainstream media was ridiculing Occupy so hard. | ||
And I just kept seeing videos pop up of like Russia Today, this little like Russian with the green logo. | ||
And I was like, what is this network? | ||
Why is it the only one covering Occupy? | ||
I didn't really give a shit, though, because I was just like, this is great that this network is covering it. | ||
I don't know why, but that's amazing. | ||
So I became kind of the liaison in Oakland for RT and DC and New York and Moscow and I was just like kind of conveying what I was seeing and a lot of my videos went viral from my website media routes that I was covering, you know, the police raids and them tear gassing people. | ||
One of my videos helped Scott Olson win his court case, the guy who got shot with the tear gas canister at his face like in point blank range. | ||
Anyway, so RT just really liked the videos that I was doing and asked me to come there for an interview and I just said there's no way I want to move to DC. That sounds horrible. | ||
But I just couldn't pass up the opportunity and they said that they wanted me to have a show and just do exactly what I was doing and just rant and have an international platform to do so. | ||
The only hesitation that I had, I mean, I talked to someone who initially interviewed me for RT and I asked her, why do you work here? | ||
Like, why is Russia today covering things that activists care about? | ||
Like, what is what is going on here? | ||
And she was like, look, if I have to work for the Russian government to tell the truth about what's happening in my country. | ||
That's what I'm going to do because we have to get the information out there. | ||
At that time, Russia was not in the news militarily or this crazy Cold War renaissance and resurrection in terms of propaganda wars. | ||
So at that time, I was like, that's great. | ||
And I mean, the editorial freedom that RT gives is completely unmatched. | ||
And of course, people are going to levy that gross generalization that everything on the network's propaganda. | ||
The problem is everything's propaganda. | ||
Every fucking thing is propaganda. | ||
Tell me one media source that is not... | ||
Used in some way to push a viewpoint or a bias. | ||
Everyone has bias. | ||
There is no such thing as, like, neutrality. | ||
You know, everyone comes with an opinion. | ||
Everyone comes with a bias. | ||
And I'd rather know the bias, which is Russia Today. | ||
You may not get the truth about Russia from going to Russia Today and watching Russia Today, but you will get the fucking truth about the U.S. government. | ||
And you will get the truth about corporations because it's state-funded so you can talk about those things without worrying about advertisers and sponsorship. | ||
So I always tell people, navigate around the bias. | ||
No, I'm not gonna tell people that there is no bias. | ||
That's fucking stupid. | ||
Of course there is. | ||
It's Russia today. | ||
It's funded by the Russian government. | ||
So there's a lot of factors that go into that, but I'd much rather know the bias blatantly in front of my face than not know the tens of thousands of, like, special interests and conflicts of interest going into the entire corporate media apparatus and all these other agencies. | ||
I mean, and that's even scarier because you have people on those channels that have been fired for criticizing the U.S. government, and it's not even state-funded media. | ||
It's just corporate media. | ||
The other thing about what you were doing that I thought was really interesting was you weren't easily definable. | ||
There's liberals and there's conservatives and they're on television and they kind of stick to a narrative because it makes their career more definable, who they are. | ||
The best examples are the really ridiculous Republican guys, like the Hannity guys. | ||
They're putting on a show, like the Bill O'Reillys. | ||
Those guys are putting on a show, whether they realize it or not. | ||
You will know their opinions long in advance before you ever hear it from their mouth, because you know what they're gonna be. | ||
It's real simple cut and dry. | ||
There's gonna be no surprises, there's no subtlety, there's no nuance, there's no consideration of all the objective facts that go into all these different things and objective reasoning. | ||
There's none of that. | ||
It's just, this is a Republican. | ||
This is a Democrat. | ||
This is Alan Combs. | ||
And he's going to argue with this guy, because this guy is Joe Scarborough, and he's a no-nonsense Republican. | ||
Who has a dead intern that has not explained. | ||
What happened? | ||
Joe Scarborough, who used to be like a congressman, and one day his intern was just found dead in his office. | ||
What? | ||
Yeah, and he was like having an affair with her. | ||
I don't know. | ||
No! | ||
I swear to fucking God. | ||
Wait a minute. | ||
He was having an affair with her? | ||
That's what they say! | ||
unidentified
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Who are they? | |
That's that fucking they! | ||
That's what they say! | ||
They say, the experts say that, Joe. | ||
See what you can find, Jamie. | ||
Yeah, find that shit, because every time Joe Scarborough will tweet something out, all the responses are like, what about your dead intern, Joe? | ||
Like, no one has let him live it down. | ||
Whoa. | ||
So when did this take place? | ||
2001. Okay, so it was a long time ago. | ||
Yeah, but... | ||
14 years. | ||
unidentified
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Lori. | |
And now, do you know that... | ||
Lori. | ||
unidentified
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Office worker. | |
His co-anchor or whatever on that show, Morning Joe, is Brzezinski's daughter. | ||
Did you know that? | ||
He's a big new Brzezinski's daughter. | ||
Who? | ||
Who's Brzezinski? | ||
He is like an oligarch, like, neoliberal strategist who wrote a book called The Grand Chessboard. | ||
It's like this giant, like, overlooking policy base. | ||
I mean, Obama's read his book. | ||
He's a very influential global leader in terms of, like, policymaking and foreign policy. | ||
He's kind of like an overseer of a lot of political ideology and thought that has been applied. | ||
Brzezinski's daughter, it just shows you the ancestral nature of the whole corporate media that you have like, you know, Andrea Mitchell and all these people have really close connections to the political establishment and very high places. | ||
The Gary Condit thing everybody knew about. | ||
Everybody heard about that scandal. | ||
Chandra Levy, she disappeared, she was turned up murdered, and he was never charged, and it was all very creepy. | ||
I never heard a word of this. | ||
Oh, so she was 28 years old. | ||
She was dead. | ||
She was found dead. | ||
No foul play or any outward indication of suicide. | ||
Well, what does that mean? | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Well, she was just found on the ground, and they said that she, like, hit her head on the desk and just died. | ||
It makes no sense, really. | ||
It really makes no sense. | ||
How convenient. | ||
She was found slumped next to a desk in the floor of the Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough's Fort Walton Beach office where Laurie had served as consultant service. | ||
So how do they know that... | ||
Is there any evidence at all that they had an affair? | ||
Or is it just bullshit talk? | ||
Or just talk, rather, I should say. | ||
What they say. | ||
That's what they say, Joe. | ||
That's what they say. | ||
That's what they say. | ||
Yeah, well... | ||
It's just crazy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's just weird, right? | ||
I mean, who just dies at 28 with, like, no... | ||
I mean... | ||
What a bummer. | ||
What happened? | ||
Did she have a heart attack? | ||
It's also... | ||
When someone does die like that, it's all, like... | ||
How does the person who is guilty, or accused rather, how do they react? | ||
Right. | ||
You know, are they bummed out that that person's gone, or are they immediately like, like, it wasn't me! | ||
Tell you one thing, definitely wasn't me. | ||
I have a feeling how Joe reacted that day. | ||
unidentified
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Slightly relieved. | |
This is very strange. | ||
It is. | ||
I didn't know that. | ||
unidentified
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It is. | |
But I think that when you're looking at RT and I wasn't easily definable because the my whole angle was coming outside of party lines because I'm so disgusted with both parties. | ||
And I think that that's why people are so disillusioned because they they're watching the media and they just think that there's just two camps, two parties that, you know, and it's bullshit. | ||
And both are perpetuating really disastrous policies on a domestic and foreign policy front. | ||
They're indistinguishable when it comes to war, so... | ||
Well, look at this, look at this. | ||
You found some shit? | ||
The medical examination... | ||
The medical examiner, Dr. Michael Berkland, said she had a past medical history that was significant, but it remains to be seen whether that played a role in her death. | ||
Soon after, a member of the immediate family reached out, rejected out of hand that Lori had any significant medical problems. | ||
She was, in fact, quite an athlete. | ||
Having recently run an 8K and a very respectable time, and she belonged to the Northwest Florida Track Club. | ||
As a result of the mandatory autopsy, however, it was deemed inconclusive. | ||
Dr. Birkeland ordered more specific toxicology tests. | ||
The results were expected by the middle of the following week. | ||
On the first or second day of August, Dr. Birkeland commented on the time. | ||
This turns over several puzzle pieces in the case of her death and reveals more of the picture. | ||
Now listen to this. | ||
Berkland, it turns out, has a very interesting background himself. | ||
Recently relocated to Florida as a matter of public record that Dr. Berkland's medical license in the state of Missouri was revoked in 1998 as a result of Berkland reporting false information regarding a brain tissue sample in a 1996 autopsy report. | ||
Berkland does not deny the charges. | ||
It's also a matter of public record. | ||
He was suspended from his position as medical examiner in the state of Florida in July of 1999. - Yeah. | ||
Motherfucker. | ||
And then look at down below. | ||
It says basically that she would have never killed herself. | ||
I'm sorry, was it a suicide or not? | ||
Like I thought that they ruled it out. | ||
Yeah, I thought she fell. | ||
What is going on here? | ||
unidentified
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Jesus Christ. | |
Look, it says Lori died as a result of a blow to the head. | ||
Because of an undiagnosed condition. | ||
Because of an undiagnosed heart condition caused her to collapse and fall. | ||
See, that's what I'm saying. | ||
Hitting her head on the desk. | ||
Sounds very sketchy. | ||
It's super hard to kill somebody by hitting their head on the desk. | ||
Like you gotta really fucking whack your head. | ||
Like, it can happen, boy, but it's not likely. | ||
If you fall and just bang your head off the desk, that's what your skull's for. | ||
Right. | ||
Your skulls can't hear you when you talk. | ||
You're not on a microphone. | ||
Abby's friend's getting a little excited here. | ||
She falls, hits her head, dies. | ||
This shady fucking medical examiner The whole thing is weird. | ||
unidentified
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Isn't it? | |
Boy, someone needs to look into that. | ||
So Cold Files, those TV shows, they bust everybody? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Need to look into that. | ||
But there's not much you can do after all this time. | ||
You know, when you're talking about like 14 years later. | ||
Yeah, it's still sketch, though. | ||
Well, you ever look into the Vince Foster? | ||
I read a book, The Strange Death of Vince Foster. | ||
That was the guy that was involved in, what was it called, Whitewater? | ||
Was the Clinton scandal, the real estate scandal the Clintons were involved in. | ||
He had some knowledge of that. | ||
He was found, he committed suicide, but he still had the gun in his hand, which never happens. | ||
The gun goes flying out of everyone's hand. | ||
When you shoot yourself, bang! | ||
You know, the gun goes flying. | ||
He still had the gun in his hand. | ||
There was a lot of blood missing from his body, but almost none at the scene of the crime. | ||
They're almost absolutely convinced that his body was moved, and that somehow or another he was moved to the spot where they found him. | ||
But yet, that was it. | ||
Guy killed himself, shot himself in the head. | ||
here's the gun we're good we're good that's insane man Well, I think if you're one of those cats that's willing to send people to war, and you have to be to be a president, almost every single, I guess let's say every single president responsible for someone's death. | ||
Even, you know, think of like the most, I guess Jimmy Carter would be the most peaceful guy. | ||
He had to be responsible for someone dying, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Gerald Ford had to be responsible for someone dying. | ||
Reagan, for sure. | ||
They're all responsible. | ||
I guess it's not that hard to just fucking... | ||
This guy is gonna sing and he's gonna fuck up everything and he's gonna ruin America. | ||
Let's just take him out. | ||
Well, perfect example of this is the anthrax attacks. | ||
Have you heard what the fuck is going on with this? | ||
No. | ||
Oh my god, man. | ||
All right. | ||
So, first of all, when the anthrax letter... | ||
You know what happened, right? | ||
We'll explain it for folks who don't know. | ||
So, right after 9-11, the nation was in a complete, like, traumatized state of hysteria and fear, right? | ||
So, literally, like, weeks later, I think it was, like, October, maybe even late September. | ||
I think it was October, though. | ||
The first anthrax letters were sent... | ||
In the mail. | ||
And they said, like, death to America, death to Israel, like, on these letters. | ||
And they were sent, oddly enough, to, like, Tom Daschle and other, like, people who were opposed to the Patriot Act at the time. | ||
And also it killed five postal workers. | ||
It got sent to, like, reporters and congressman's office and five postal workers ended up dying. | ||
Some of them were fake. | ||
Basically what came out after Cheney and Rumsfeld and all these assholes went all over the media and started tying anthrax to Saddam immediately and immediately saying that it was all Islamic terrorism. | ||
Weeks later it came out that it wasn't Islamic terrorism. | ||
After, you know, you have Colin Powell holding up the vial of anthrax at the UN, like using all of this to connect to Saddam Hussein, saying that there's like anthrax labs there and you have Judith Miller at the New York Times basically printing like all this bullshit about anthrax and bioterror coming from Iraq. | ||
All at the same time. | ||
Then it comes out that it came... | ||
It was a high-grade, like, anthrax strain, the AIMS strain, that came from a U.S. bioweapons lab within our own country, within our own government facilities. | ||
Then they blame this guy called Stephen Hatfield for years. | ||
They blame this guy who worked within the lab, and it was like case closed. | ||
They basically ruined this guy's fucking life. | ||
They made him a person of interest multiple times. | ||
John Ashcroft came out there and he said this is a person of interest. | ||
They never said what evidence they had against him. | ||
Years later, after everyone just thinks that it's this guy, it comes out that it's not this guy. | ||
He had to settle with the U.S. government taxpayer-funded settlement of like, I don't know, like $6 million for being falsely accused as the anthrax perpetrator for years and years. | ||
You know, they're stalking this guy, they're like threatening his family, searching through his garbage, makes him, you know, ruins his life essentially. | ||
And then next, they blame this other guy named Bruce Ivins. | ||
Once again, he had, like, there is no actual evidence that this guy did it. | ||
So Bruce Ivins was just another guy who worked with him. | ||
He was like a specialist in anthrax and they tried to pin it on him. | ||
Tried to threaten his hospitalized daughter. | ||
Bribe her. | ||
Searched his trash, stalked him for months and months. | ||
And he was a toxicologist as well. | ||
He ended up dying, committing suicide by taking an overdose of Tylenol, which is actually a really insane, horrible way to die. | ||
And it would toxify your liver, take like three days to die. | ||
And that would be really awful for someone who's a toxicologist and knows... | ||
How to kill yourself quickly. | ||
Why would you kill yourself that way? | ||
And then, so that was case closed, right? | ||
So here we are with no actual proof that Bruce Evans really did the anthrax. | ||
All of his co-workers are like, he didn't do it. | ||
There is no proof. | ||
He would never have done this. | ||
He was helping the government with the investigation. | ||
Here you have, fast forward a couple years, The FBI agent in charge of the anthrax case, this just came out a couple weeks ago, the FBI agent is now suing the government. | ||
He's suing the FBI because he's saying you purposefully hid evidence that proved that Bruce Ivins was not the perpetrator. | ||
There's exculpatory evidence that shows that he was not. | ||
I am suing you guys for fucking up the investigation. | ||
You put all these like low-level interns To run this investigation, and it was totally botched from the get-go. | ||
Obama administration shut this down. | ||
He shut down the case. | ||
He said they didn't want to reopen the anthrax case. | ||
Okay, best case scenario on the anthrax attacks is that there's still a bioweapons terrorist running around free. | ||
That's the best case scenario. | ||
Worst case scenario is that the government is complicit. | ||
And either way, the government's complicit because they are not investigating who the actual perpetrator is or wanting to find them. | ||
So whoever did it is out there. | ||
Yes. | ||
Whoa. | ||
Yep. | ||
Yeah, I had not looked into that at all. | ||
It's almost like there's too much shit going on. | ||
You can't pay attention to everything. | ||
And if you do pay attention to it, you can't keep paying attention to it because some new shit comes on. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But I mean, this is huge. | ||
This is the U.S. government being complicit in a bioterror attack. | ||
We went to Duncan Trussell. | ||
Duncan Trussell and I went to the Center for Disease Control in Galveston, the big lab that they have, where they keep all the anthrax and all the Ebola locked behind four-foot-thick concrete walls and bulletproof glass and everybody wears spacesuits. | ||
It's fucking creepy. | ||
It's so creepy. | ||
And they're working on this stuff and trying to find cures for it. | ||
I did this episode of that sci-fi show I did where we talked about weaponized diseases and viruses. | ||
I talked to guys from the Soviet Union and talked to guys that used to run the weapons division of the Soviet Union. | ||
The weaponized disease version. | ||
And they were telling me they had trenches of anthrax. | ||
Like, trenches. | ||
They had enough anthrax to kill the entire country. | ||
Why? | ||
Exactly. | ||
I don't know. | ||
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
I don't understand it. | ||
I mean, I think during the Cold War, when everything was really crazy, I think they were just ramping it up. | ||
Everybody was preparing for mutual self-destruction. | ||
I guess my biggest question about it is, if the government had nothing to do with it, why botch the investigation so hard? | ||
Why hide evidence to just try to pin it on this guy? | ||
Why was the Bush administration and press people on Cipro, which is like a really intense antibiotic for anthrax strain, before the attacks even happened? | ||
They were? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Who gave it to them? | ||
Exactly. | ||
Exactly. | ||
These are all questions that I have that I've never been addressed. | ||
And also, why would the letters be sent to people who are opposing the Patriot Act? | ||
And also, why would they frame Muslims in the letters? | ||
Like, nothing about it makes any sense at all. | ||
Very strange, man. | ||
Very strange. | ||
John Ashcroft was a, and still is, a creepy motherfucker. | ||
All of them are. | ||
Somebody sent me a vinyl album of John Ashcroft was in some sort of a Let's watch it. | ||
Let's watch it! | ||
Let's watch it. | ||
The idea that this maniac somehow or another got into office, if you've never seen it, have you seen the guy sing the Bank of America song? | ||
Guy was like super psyched to work for Bank of America. | ||
You ever seen the Bank of America song? | ||
It's equally, maybe more creepy, but Ashcroft, at least the Bank of America guy is just working at a bank. | ||
And he loves Bank of America in some strange way. | ||
Remember when John Ashcroft hid the titties of the Lady Justice with purple drape? | ||
Yeah, he was a fucking creeper. | ||
Like Haley Bopp Comet style, like the cult, the purple velvet. | ||
So bizarre, man. | ||
Let's hear him. | ||
You've heard Karl Rove rapping, right? | ||
I'm MC Rove and I'm... | ||
What? | ||
Yeah, it's super weird. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
No. | ||
Let's go with Ashcroft first. | ||
Karl Rove rapped? | ||
Yeah, it's disgusting. | ||
He just looks like Porky Pig on stage just running around. | ||
Do we have the video? | ||
unidentified
|
We need to see this He's like it's some like pharmaceutical Like some like think tank Oh my god. | |
Who will let him do this? | ||
I didn't realize that he actually sang this much. | ||
Oh yeah. | ||
I had no idea. | ||
unidentified
|
Do the damps the watch fires of a nation torn by war That we started She's far too young to die This is five minutes long. | |
It's so bad, too. | ||
It seems like he must have wrote it, right? | ||
unidentified
|
This is horrible. | |
How is she different? | ||
Was he doing a parody? | ||
No, no, no. | ||
I want to know how her soaring this time is different than her other soaring. | ||
How can she soar like she's never soared before? | ||
It's fucking soaring, okay, dude? | ||
It's not like complex math. | ||
She's just flying around. | ||
Yeah, she's a fucking bird. | ||
Yeah, I mean, what is she doing so different, you fuck? | ||
Let her soar like she's never soared before. | ||
What does she do? | ||
Is she getting crazy? | ||
Is she flying down like two inches above the ground and then back up to the sky and then down again? | ||
She's soaring like she's never soared before. | ||
This bitch is crazy. | ||
Look at him. | ||
That's a mentally ill person. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
That's what that is. | ||
That's a person who has a mental illness. | ||
First of all, he's socially retarded. | ||
He doesn't realize that this is a ridiculous thing that he's doing. | ||
He doesn't realize how awful it is in terms of like the artistic value of his work. | ||
Right. | ||
Unbelievably bad music. | ||
And he's a fucking creep. | ||
Wrapping it up. | ||
All those things together. | ||
God damn. | ||
So here's Karl Rove rapping. | ||
What is this? | ||
A radio television correspondence? | ||
You know those stupid correspondent dinner that everyone goes to and it's like a giant circle jerk? | ||
Okay. | ||
unidentified
|
Look at his hair. | |
He's so creepy. | ||
Besides fuck dudes. | ||
Besides skin babies. | ||
unidentified
|
I'd like to go home, get a drink, get a non-alcoholic nature. | |
Jerk off. | ||
Jerk bush off, actually. | ||
unidentified
|
Non-alcoholic drink. | |
Tear the tops off small animals. | ||
Tear the tops off small animals. | ||
They're so better when they're tired. | ||
Is that what he said? | ||
Tear the tops off small animals? | ||
unidentified
|
That's what he said. | |
The thing is he's not joking. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay, so do you actually have any hobbies that you can... | |
Other than tearing the tops of small animals. | ||
I readily admit that I'm a practicing philatelist. | ||
unidentified
|
A practicing philatelist. | |
What does that mean? | ||
God, I hope it's stamps. | ||
This is so awkward. | ||
Who's the dude? | ||
Probably some like douchebag journalist who's like the highlight of his life. | ||
What's that? | ||
Oh really? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
So you just think stamps, like from letters? | ||
Or... | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Okay. | ||
This is so fucking weird. - Ah. | ||
You might want to try the booze. | ||
Hey, uh... | ||
Hey, uh... | ||
Okay, here he goes. | ||
Wow, they brought a black guy on stage for this? | ||
What the fuck? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Now listen up, suckers. | ||
Don't get the jitters. | ||
But I don't see Rose. | ||
There's a heads off of critters. | ||
That's true. | ||
It's cruel to see. | ||
But he's gonna be about animal cruelty. | ||
He's a man. | ||
He's a treasure trove. | ||
Tell me what is your name? | ||
I'm MC Rose. | ||
That's right. | ||
He can't be This is so bad. | ||
Oh God, I can't. | ||
I can't. | ||
Whoa. | ||
This is just the comedian though. | ||
Right, this is not even, yeah. | ||
I had a weird memory of him actually rapping, I guess. | ||
Maybe he does later. | ||
He's so hideous. | ||
They're really getting into it. | ||
Look at him dancing. | ||
The black guy does not want any part of this. | ||
Look at him. | ||
He's like barely moving. | ||
They totally made him come up there just because he's black. | ||
I know. | ||
He realizes while he's up there, he's like, I know why they brought me up here, these fucks. | ||
It's not Wayne Brady, is it? | ||
It's Wayne Brady was on Whose Line Is It Anywhere, but the contrast is not so good. | ||
I hate to be racist, but we can't tell if it's Wayne Brady. | ||
No, it's not Wayne Brady. | ||
How many chins does Karl Rove have? | ||
Well, it's just one sloping, bulbous, cancerous, tumor-like chin. | ||
This is so painful. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, he only says MC Rove. | ||
unidentified
|
A bunch of old white dudes. | |
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
Sorry to put you through that. | ||
Those press dinners are strange. | ||
They're horrible. | ||
Those are really weird. | ||
It's like the antithesis of what journalists should be doing, you know, going and like, I don't even know, just going and honoring politicians and schmoozing with them and rubbing elbows with them. | ||
It's just strange. | ||
They get co-opted, right? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Well, they must. | ||
I remember when Dennis Miller said that he wouldn't make jokes about George Bush. | ||
And he goes, she's my friend, he gets a pass. | ||
Like, gets a pass? | ||
Like, you're a fucking comic, man. | ||
You're a comic, and he's the president. | ||
You gotta, you can't goof on him at all? | ||
Well, it's just like when Eddie Murphy said he wasn't gonna make fun of Bill Cosby. | ||
Well, I think he just didn't want to do a sketch, which is kind of understandable, if you're Eddie Murphy, especially because he's talking about it while he's got his foot pushing against his own closet, you know, trying to keep that bitch shut. | ||
Skeleton fingers are poking out of it. | ||
That's true. | ||
I mean, he's a guy who's been arrested with transvestites. | ||
Maybe he might want to shut the fuck up about a scandal. | ||
I mean, it just doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. | ||
If you've got a little dirt that you're trying to cover up your own stuff, you might want to shut the fuck up. | ||
unidentified
|
The Cosby thing was a very dark one, though. | |
It just keeps going. | ||
I worked at this place that told me that Cosby wanted people to watch him eat. | ||
He wanted people to sit and watch him eat. | ||
And he wanted the security guard to tuck him into bed at night. | ||
Are you kidding me? | ||
No, not. | ||
Security guy at the casino, they wanted him to tuck him into bed at night. | ||
Like he has all these like bizarre demands that he wants people to do. | ||
They said that he was very strange. | ||
They said he was very strange. | ||
Like you got this weird feeling around him like you never really... | ||
There was no real connection with him. | ||
It was entirely about you being in the presence of Bill Cosby and a bunch of stuff that you had to do in order to make Cosby happy. | ||
And then, you know, he would leave and everybody would go like, whoa. | ||
The thing that's so creepy about it is that he could have fucked all these women, I'm sure, but instead he wanted to rape their lifeless bodies. | ||
He wanted to rape like a dead body. | ||
unidentified
|
Allegedly. | |
That's allegedly, sorry. | ||
You know, when it comes to be 30 women. | ||
When it gets 100, then we could say he did it. | ||
You want to hear a really creepy story about Cosby? | ||
So this woman from AP interviewed him years ago before Hannibal Buress resurrected the serial rapist shit. | ||
And the woman said he was super condescending and crazy and fucking nuts because he's Bill Cosby and he thinks he's God. | ||
And after the interview was over, he was like, I'm going to send you fruit. | ||
To let you know what I thought of the interview. | ||
He told this woman. | ||
And she was like, alright, you fucking weirdo. | ||
Like, just forgot about it. | ||
So, a couple weeks later, AP gets a box for this woman. | ||
Like, he sent this to a news organization. | ||
And it was directed to her and she opened the box and it was just a dead, dried up apple. | ||
And it said, like, this is what I thought of the interview. | ||
Bill Cosby. | ||
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
What did she ask him about that was so upsetting? | ||
I don't know. | ||
unidentified
|
Nothing? | |
No. | ||
She probably just didn't treat him with reverence. | ||
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
Like, the king. | ||
But also think about how long it takes to get an apple that's rotted. | ||
He must have sent an intern out and he was like, go dig in the dumpster and find me a rotted apple. | ||
That shit takes months to rot. | ||
You can put an apple in your fridge for six months and it won't rot. | ||
That's a really good point. | ||
You've got to find a rotten apple. | ||
That's like mafia shit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And send it to a news writer. | ||
I think that those guys that were around a long time ago like that those guys were like today Almost anything you do gets scrutinized and gets criticized by not just the press But like say if you were a Bill Cosby type character like say like like Kevin Hart who's a huge famous comedian If he did a bunch of really creepy shit or said a bunch of really creepy shit, people could talk about it on social media. | ||
And it would start chitter chatter. | ||
But back then, you could kind of get away with doing anything, and then the publicist would just hush it up. | ||
So, you know, I'm certainly not exonerating him. | ||
I'm not making excuses for him. | ||
But I wonder what the climate was like When he was famous in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. | ||
Like, he was a giant, huge fucking superstar. | ||
And I wonder, like, how much enabling was going on. | ||
Oh, totally. | ||
How many people just would cover up for anything that happened. | ||
Ray Donovan-like, you know, just going and sweep up all your problems. | ||
And if you're a creepy old guy that's just not connected at all to regular people, he hasn't been a regular person. | ||
I think Richard Pryor and him were the two most famous black comedians and the first famous black comedians in the world. | ||
And he was a god at that time. | ||
And definitely, I think there's a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood when you look at things like Jimmy Savile from the BBC. He was just straight up raping little... | ||
Little children, yeah. | ||
And he was like visiting hospitals. | ||
He was like fucking ordained by the royal family to be like, you know, a lord or whatever. | ||
And he's just treated like royalty. | ||
And then you have Gian Gomeshi in the CBC in Canada, the radio host of Q. Yeah, that's a weird one. | ||
Who would just like punch women. | ||
Randomly. | ||
Yeah, what is that guy's deal? | ||
He would say that it was like bondage or playing. | ||
BDSM, yeah. | ||
I'm super fascinated with this because it just goes back to how these things are able to happen for so long and why they're covered up. | ||
And Gian Gomeschi is a really interesting case because he's this attractive, kind of hipster-looking guy who's had rape culture debates and is a feminist and puts himself off as this guy who really cares about women's issues. | ||
Super sensitive. | ||
Super sensitive, dude. | ||
So then it came out that he just would coerce these women who he met at book events and makes them feel special, of course. | ||
And then he would go on a date with them and randomly just punch them in the face. | ||
Just fucking sock them in the face. | ||
Or he would just be hooking up with someone and then just rape them with his hand. | ||
And they'd just be like, what the fuck? | ||
Start strangling them and just rape them. | ||
I like how you're doing. | ||
You've got this hand miming thing going on. | ||
And then he has this bear that he would turn around and be like, my bear can't see this. | ||
What? | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
And many women had the same story. | ||
He would have this stuffed animal bear and be like, my little bear can't see me. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
What if the bear had a camera on her or something? | ||
Yeah, dude, it's all sick. | ||
And that's the thing is, how did no one know this? | ||
And the thing is, they did. | ||
You're telling me that people at BBC didn't know that Jimmy Savile was like, why were they bringing all these little kids and like, you know what I mean? | ||
It's like, don't tell me that you didn't know what was going on. | ||
Well, like the Sandusky case. | ||
The Sandusky case where, I mean, everyone kind of knew that guy was a child rapist. | ||
Everyone knew it. | ||
It was just this weird thing. | ||
thing where no one was saying anything everybody wanted to keep their job and he had reached this prominent position of power where it was almost you know they no one knew what exactly to do dude that's fucking crazy because that guy's just a coach didn't someone see him raping someone and then they're like oh yeah i'm going to pretend like i didn't see that one yeah no he he reported it and i don't know exactly what happened but that's where the whole paterno joe paterno thing ended so awfully | ||
where joe paterno was like a god in that state i mean I mean, he was the man at Penn State, and when it all went down, Joe Paterno got sick, like, really quickly afterwards and then died of cancer. | ||
He was dead within a year and a half, two years. | ||
Right, that was really crazy, yeah. | ||
He was dead quick after that. | ||
I mean, it must have been devastating to him as a person to realize how horribly he had fucked up and let this monster be amongst him for so long and not do anything about it. | ||
I'm just happy that Bill Cosby's alive to see these women coming out because I really do believe that he raped them. | ||
And I think it's great that, you know, unlike Jimmy Savile, who's just dead and like no one, you know, he was just glorified until he died. | ||
And then it comes out after that he's a fucking pedophile. | ||
Well, the Savile thing is very strange, too, because there's this thing going on right now in the UK where they're investigating all of these royals and all these politicians, all these people that are involved in child pornography and child rape, and you're aware of all this stuff? | ||
Like, what exactly is going on with that? | ||
I don't know enough to really lay it down, but there is a lot of weird sex ring child pornography stuff going on with British royalty and also politicians. | ||
It's really strange, and I haven't really dug into it. | ||
And Clintons? | ||
That was a different one. | ||
Clinton was tied to this other guy and he had spent time at this guy's compound. | ||
This guy was getting child prostitutes and underage prostitutes. | ||
What the fuck, man? | ||
It's insane. | ||
It just shows you all this culture of suppression. | ||
Like, did John Ashcroft's The World? | ||
Let the eagle soar! | ||
All that is like, you're creating a diamond. | ||
You're creating something. | ||
This this weird culture of suppression that these people operate under by being this fake thing this operating Politician this operating president this operating game show host talk show host this You know, whatever the thing is that you're pretending to be Joe Scarborough or all these different characters not a murderer. | ||
Yeah, they're not a Not themselves. | ||
Bill Cosby. | ||
Bill Cosby, who was always Mr. Clean. | ||
There's that famous bit that Eddie Murphy did about Bill Cosby calling him up and telling him to stop swearing. | ||
And Richard Pryor saying, do the people laugh? | ||
Do you get paid? | ||
Tell Bill to have a coconut smile and shut the fuck up. | ||
And that is a real incident. | ||
Bill Cosby used to call comedians. | ||
He did it to Chris Rock. | ||
He would tell them to stop. | ||
Pull your pants up, black people. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
What a fucking... | ||
How about stop raping people? | ||
Yeah, just stop raping people. | ||
And drugging them, too. | ||
Don't even drug them. | ||
Don't rape them or drug them. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Either or, I'd still drug them and I'll just jerk off on them. | ||
No, that's still kind of rape. | ||
You fucking asshole. | ||
You're psychotic, dude. | ||
It's also, it's what kind of a person gets... | ||
What kind of a person sees a naked person, like, completely... | ||
Right. | ||
And just can do that. | ||
A necrophiliac? | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
Yeah, what the fuck, man? | ||
Yeah, that's what's so crazy about it. | ||
I would love it if somebody took Bill Cosby and gave him, like, Ibogaine or some, you know, some sort of psychedelic and made him talk about it. | ||
I've always said that if someone actually wants to do, like, functional terrorism, they should just dose the punch bowl at the White House, like, correspondence dinner with acid. | ||
I mean, that would be like a really good strategy if you wanted to fuck with the establishment. | ||
Not that we're endorsing that. | ||
Not that I would ever. | ||
Or suggesting that even. | ||
It's just a theoretical. | ||
It's theoretical. | ||
We lived in a different dimension. | ||
The same human beings existed in that dimension. | ||
It'd be interesting to see what would take place. | ||
But then again, here's DC, which overwhelmingly passed marijuana legalization. | ||
So why is everyone such douchebags still if everyone smokes weed? | ||
That's the people, though. | ||
That's not the politicians. | ||
How about this fucking Chris Christie fuck, this fat slob? | ||
What happened? | ||
He said that if he becomes president, he will actively go after all the states that have legalized marijuana, and he would put a stop to it. | ||
And he cites something about- he cites some nonsense about addiction. | ||
Addiction. | ||
What difference does addiction mean if no one's dying, you dumbass? | ||
Like, you know what people die from? | ||
Being fat as fuck. | ||
Right. | ||
Okay? | ||
You're fat as fuck. | ||
Right. | ||
300,000 people die in this country as a direct result of obesity every year. | ||
It's like right below cigarettes. | ||
And this guy is talking about, I mean, you want to talk about the kettle calling the pot black. | ||
Like, dude, look at yourself. | ||
You are a walking poster boy for American excess. | ||
People that are starving in other countries can look upon you and you are a symbol of American greed. | ||
Crack down and not permit legal marijuana as president. | ||
Well, guess what, fucker? | ||
That's why you'll never be president. | ||
When you've got a giant percentage of America that believes in personal freedom, especially when it comes to something as innocuous as marijuana, when you can die from fucking Tylenol, like you just said. | ||
You can be a goddamn toxicologist and die from Tylenol. | ||
No one's ever died from pot. | ||
A lot of people thought they were dying. | ||
You know what's amazing is these people are just going against the current. | ||
The gay marriage thing and marijuana. | ||
It's like, dude, you guys are fighting a losing battle. | ||
Like, what are you doing? | ||
This is not where the fight needs to be. | ||
Dude, look up Jared Polis and the DEA... I forget her name, but it is one of the best clips I've ever seen because it shows you... | ||
You've seen that, right? | ||
Where she's just like... | ||
He's like his crack more damaging than marijuana and she's like, I don't know. | ||
Yeah, this is amazing. | ||
Yeah, play this. | ||
unidentified
|
Is it better for a person than marijuana? | |
I believe all illegal drugs are bad. | ||
Is methamphetamine worse for somebody's health than marijuana? | ||
I don't think any illegal drug is good. | ||
Is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana? | ||
I mean, yes, no, I don't know. | ||
If you don't know, you can look this up. | ||
You should know this is the chief administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency. | ||
I'm asking you a very straightforward question. | ||
Is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana? | ||
All illegal drugs are bad. | ||
Unbelievable. | ||
Heroin causes an addiction. | ||
Okay. | ||
It causes many problems. | ||
I like how I said that. | ||
Michelle Leonhardt, Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator. | ||
unidentified
|
I think you're asking a subjective question. | |
Can you believe it's still? | ||
unidentified
|
No, it's subjective. | |
Just looking at the science, this is your... | ||
What is it? | ||
Schedule 1? | ||
Yep. | ||
Still Schedule 1. Unbelievable. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm just asking you as an expert in the subject area, is heroin for someone's health and marijuana? | |
An expert in the subject area. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm answering as a police officer and as a DEA agent that these drugs are illegal because they are dangerous, because they are addictive. | |
It seems like she's stoned on like pills right now. | ||
She's probably on a little Xanax, just to deal with the anxiety. | ||
To deal with the grilling. | ||
unidentified
|
Generally, the properties of heroin, yes, more addictive. | |
Is methamphetamine more addictive than marijuana? | ||
Well, both are addictive. | ||
That's not true. | ||
unidentified
|
No. | |
See, the thing is, she can't, because then she can't justify the classification. | ||
Yeah, of course. | ||
Yeah, she's stuck. | ||
Well, marijuana is no more addictive than playing video games. | ||
I mean, it's an addiction in terms of you decide that you need it in your life, just like a person can be addictive. | ||
Right. | ||
But there's no physical properties that are addicted, unless you have some really weird biology. | ||
Some very rare person, like the type of person that would be allergic to sunflowers. | ||
There's weird things out there, biologically. | ||
But the average person, that just shows you this is a criminal organization that's in charge of pretending to be looking out for the people, but really just in charge of keeping things as usual, just keeping policy as usual, moving forward the same way. | ||
And that's what that woman's doing. | ||
Yeah, even the DOJ, it's not even just Chris Christie. | ||
The DOJ has basically gone rogue and said that they're still going to prosecute individual marijuana users. | ||
And you're like, dude, But what are you talking about in states that have legalized it? | ||
They're actually saying that they're going to overstep state law. | ||
I don't understand why people are focusing on something that makes life better. | ||
Well, because they get pressure. | ||
They get pressure from three big factions. | ||
One, prison guard unions, privatized prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. | ||
Those are three big pressure organizations. | ||
The prison guards and private prisons, there's a lot of money involved in keeping people in jail. | ||
They have a vested interest in continuing to arrest the same amount of people or more people every year. | ||
Because whenever you make a business, businesses don't like to stay static. | ||
They like growth. | ||
They like more business. | ||
And when you have a business that's for profit, like a prison business, their business, like, what they're involved in is locking people in jail. | ||
They would like to lock more people in jail. | ||
That's how they make more money, you know? | ||
Fucking... | ||
Chocolate bars. | ||
Hershey's selling chocolate bars. | ||
They don't want to sell the same amount of chocolate bars next year. | ||
They want to sell more. | ||
Look, we've got a new ad campaign to get people involved with chocolate. | ||
We've got some new chocolates. | ||
We've got a little chocolate guy that waves to you, and he's going to get you to buy more chocolate. | ||
That's what businesses do. | ||
That's the natural function of a capitalistic business. | ||
You want to make more money every year. | ||
Well, guess what? | ||
That's the same thing when it comes to the industry of locking people up for drugs. | ||
They want to keep locking people up. | ||
If they made X amount of money this year, they want to make Y next year. | ||
And that's just what they do. | ||
It's a part of being a part of a business. | ||
No matter what your Apple computer, or whether you sell legal paper, or whatever you sell. | ||
You want to sell more. | ||
You want to make more money. | ||
That's the problem. | ||
I know that you're going to disagree with this, but that's the problem with capitalism, is this planned obsolescence in order to make more money. | ||
Like, for example, the fact that... | ||
I'm gonna disagree because I because you're all about you I've heard that you talk about how you know capitalism encourages competition which it does but at the same time if it encouraged sustainability and competitive advantages in terms of like how to be sustainable which it does not that's the problem I just wish that people gave a shit about making things like harmonious with how the earth functions instead of just like sucking up all this shit and just I can I completely agree with you. | ||
But saying it does not is looking at it in a very blanket way. | ||
Capitalism is just the way we do business. | ||
But you can certainly have ethical capitalism. | ||
Capitalism doesn't have to be pushed to the nth degree to where All-out profit is the only motivation at the expense of the environment, at the expense of the people, at the expense of laws. | ||
It doesn't have to be that way. | ||
I don't believe that. | ||
I think that we have decided it has to be that way because of this competitive nature that people have, where they put the number, the score, above and beyond everything else. | ||
But it doesn't have to be that way. | ||
Sure. | ||
And Marxism doesn't have to turn into the communist structures that we've seen, you know, fail. | ||
I mean, that's all philosophical. | ||
It's like people who say that voluntarism is the ideal society. | ||
Sounds great. | ||
And conscious capitalism sounds great, too. | ||
But I don't see how we can just turn it into a conscious functioning system that works with the, like, planet. | ||
People will demand it. | ||
People have to demand it, and they have to vote with their dollars. | ||
They have to demand only ethical companies. | ||
They have to demand that they only support companies with their money that are involved in an ethical, sustainable business. | ||
And if you don't do that, then we're not interested in spending money on you. | ||
And how many people have to die? | ||
Like, look at seatbelts and cars. | ||
Ralph Nader never tried to, you know, never forced the government to actually make that a mandate. | ||
How many tens of thousands more people would have died until the market, quote unquote, corrected itself, where people forced pressure and just didn't buy from the cars that weren't putting seat belts in? | ||
Well, that's interesting. | ||
That's an interesting way to put it, because motorcycles are still legal. | ||
You know, there's a lot of stuff that's legal that's way more dangerous. | ||
If you really think about all the activities that people are involved in, where they voluntarily put themselves in harm's way, Seatbelts, I certainly use them. | ||
I think they're important. | ||
I think all safety measures, whether it's airbags or, you know, they should certainly be encouraged. | ||
But I think that people would have naturally leaned towards them if they found out that they were safer. | ||
I think the competition... | ||
Involved in creating cars that are more safe and that are provably more More safe for the passengers that that would have helped in the long run them sell more cars And it would have like encouraged other companies to do the same thing then tons more people would have died You mean if Ralph Nader didn't step up as a consumer advocate? | ||
No, I'm not arguing against consumer advocacy. | ||
I think what Ralph Nader's done, not just with seatbelts, but with a lot of things, is super important. | ||
You have to have someone that's looking out. | ||
But that's also a different era back then, a much less transparent era where the age of information hadn't really been established like it is today. | ||
The problem with today is you have such a saturation of information and you have these multi-billion dollar companies that aren't conscious capitalists, you know, that are just all about the bottom line and maximizing that shit, chasing, you know, the port, you know, in Bangladesh, let's say, just like chasing wherever the dollar is stronger and bigger for them. | ||
They saturate the information airwaves so much to put out so much disinformation and propaganda that it makes it way harder for people to sort through and understand what's an ethical company, what's a moral company. | ||
And then also the monopolization of these industries makes it that much harder. | ||
Like, let's say I Comcast is like the monolith that where I live, like, I don't even have a fucking choice anymore. | ||
So even though I hate Comcast, it's like that's that's your only option because they've swallowed up all the other options in the area. | ||
And I think that that's another huge problem. | ||
So even though you might want to be a conscious consumer and buy from like ethical companies, it's really fucking hard because everyone you can't be a big corporation and not have bloody hands somewhere. | ||
No, I think there's certainly a point to that. | ||
I think the internet is starting to dissolve a lot of these monopolies. | ||
And I think things like Comcast controlling vast majorities of the cable business, and I think that's slowly going to get eaten up by various internet companies. | ||
And you start seeing things like, what is it, HBO Go? | ||
Is that what it's called? | ||
HBO Now? | ||
HBO Go. | ||
Now? | ||
All those things where you're seeing these traditional cable channels that are now available on the internet. | ||
What Netflix is doing. | ||
Netflix now has all sorts of new programs that they're creating themselves. | ||
House of Cards, a bunch of different ones. | ||
The Jail one, Orange is the New Black. | ||
There's like critically acclaimed shows. | ||
They're creating in-house. | ||
And I think that having just a connection to the Internet is going to be the new cable. | ||
And then it's going to be about monopolizing Internet connections. | ||
And how long are people going to tolerate that? | ||
I mean, that's the real portal right now, I think, is the Internet. | ||
And I think that's the real portal for information as well. | ||
I think that all these cable companies that Are producing new shows whether it's CNN or CNBC and like that antiquated format of delivering the news like that shit is not gonna fly You're entering into a new age. | ||
This is this age if people aren't gonna tolerate this old-schooly Bullshit that you're doing this weird wearing a tie talking like a robot like that stuff is out the window I think The age of information that we're involved in right now, all of us, whether we realize it or not, this is like one of the craziest times in human history. | ||
And people are aware of more things than they've ever been before. | ||
And I think that the people that are involved, even in these corporations that are involved in these unethical activities and monopolization of resources and just control over foreign governments and all the different shit, all that stuff, it's got a time to it. | ||
It doesn't have much time left. | ||
Well, every empire is going to fall, and especially when you have one as arrogant as ours, it's just a matter of time before that happens. | ||
So they've got to get their shit together if we want to survive. | ||
And you look at what's going on right now. | ||
I mean, look at the political dynasties that might be running for president. | ||
Jed Bush and Hillary Clinton. | ||
Are you fucking kidding me? | ||
Well, they are running, right? | ||
They're both running. | ||
And now Rand Paul, the guy who tried to get my press credentials stripped. | ||
Why do you try to get your press credentials stripped? | ||
When I first moved to D.C., I confronted Rand Paul with my friend Luke, and we were going to a public press event. | ||
We had passes. | ||
I was in the halls of Congress, and he just started walking toward me in the hallway, and I was like, oh, well, shit, let's ask Rand Paul the question right now, since he's right here. | ||
So I asked him why he endorsed Mitt Romney, because Mitt Romney is a psychotic warmonger. | ||
Is that what you said? | ||
That's the way you said it? | ||
No, I just said, why do you endorse Mitt Romney? | ||
A lot of people who are followers of yours have questions because, you know, he's the opposite of what you claim to be in terms of foreign policy. | ||
And Rand Paul just put his head down and kept walking, and that was it. | ||
A week later, the video goes viral, and I walk into RT. This is when I first moved to DC. Walked into RT, and they were like, why is the Capitol Police threatening to come and arrest you and strip you of your press credentials? | ||
And I was like, I don't know. | ||
And they're like, what did you do to Rand Paul? | ||
They're talking about charging you with harassment and stalking. | ||
And I said, have them come and arrest me. | ||
This is great. | ||
Film it. | ||
I was like, we're at a fucking TV station. | ||
If Rand Paul wants to arrest me for asking him a question, that's fantastic. | ||
Let's film it. | ||
Let's do it. | ||
So it turned out to be all empty threats. | ||
But the guy who runs the Capitol like media center told me that he wanted me to come in for a meeting. | ||
And nothing was in writing because he knew that it was all empty. | ||
So I was really nervous. | ||
I was like, should I get a lawyer? | ||
I was like, let's come up with a story. | ||
This is a huge story. | ||
So they were like, no, just see what he wants to say. | ||
Don't get a lawyer yet. | ||
Go and meet this guy. | ||
So I went and met this guy in an interrogation room in the Capitol building with all of the bureau chiefs of all of the major media organizations in this room. | ||
And I sit down with them and I was like, what in the hell is going on? | ||
Why am I here? | ||
What is happening? | ||
And the guy was like, look, how did you get in here? | ||
Like, how did you sneak Luke in? | ||
And I was like, we didn't sneak in. | ||
It was a public event. | ||
We have press credentials. | ||
And he was like, look, we have worked for decades to get the access that we do to these politicians. | ||
And he was like, we cannot have people like you coming in here and fucking up that access. | ||
In so many words. | ||
It was very, like, House of Cards-style shit. | ||
Where they were basically saying, we have worked to get this special access, like this. | ||
And it's all, like, pre-determined. | ||
You probably have everything vetted you go and they all know you, you know, and they don't want people coming up and fucking that up. | ||
So they don't want anybody asking real questions. | ||
They don't want anybody asking uncomfortable questions that would get these politicians to pull back. | ||
And restrict access. | ||
So they're saying you're not playing the game. | ||
That's what they said. | ||
You don't know the game. | ||
We've set this game up for 20 years. | ||
Abby Martin. | ||
You fucker. | ||
Coming in here ruining our thing by asking them real questions. | ||
unidentified
|
It was crazy. | |
We had questions. | ||
That we've all been approved. | ||
They have softball questions. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, it was a bizarre, like, kind of weird awakening. | ||
How'd you end that? | ||
How long did the conversation last? | ||
He told me. | ||
It was like a 30-minute conversation, and after I left the office, I, like, taped it all on my phone because I couldn't believe that it actually happened, and I wanted... | ||
No, it's on my old phone. | ||
I think it's on my computer. | ||
And I was just like, this just happened because it just seemed so fake, and it ended with a guy. | ||
I think his name is Mike, and he was like, I'll let you know, like, what the final charges are going to be. | ||
Charges? | ||
And I was like, what charges? | ||
What charges do you get for asking a question? | ||
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
Exactly. | ||
You didn't touch them? | ||
No. | ||
So how the fuck could they charge you with anything? | ||
It was totally insane. | ||
And when I came up with the story- Who is this Mike guy? | ||
Mike who? | ||
Exactly. | ||
What is his name? | ||
I don't know his last name. | ||
You fuckhead. | ||
unidentified
|
Charges. | |
But what's crazy is all the people who will defend Rand Paul to me still, because they like Ron Paul. | ||
And look, I voted for Ron Paul in 2008. I like him. | ||
I agreed with a lot of his stance on foreign policy and civil liberties. | ||
And I just, Rand Paul is not his father. | ||
Right. | ||
Is it possible that he didn't, I mean, just given this particular circumstance, is it possible that he didn't have anything to do with that? | ||
It came directly from him. | ||
I got that confirmed, that he made the complaint and had them come after me. | ||
Oh, so he said, I want you to strip their credentials or something along those lines? | ||
What a dick. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Rand. | ||
You dick. | ||
Rand. | ||
It's like, dude, out of all people, Rand? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Really? | ||
Come on, son. | ||
It's very strange, but the Hillary Clinton thing is just so fucked up because you have a Bush and a Clinton. | ||
I got why people supported Obama. | ||
I don't understand how anyone can support Hillary. | ||
I really don't. | ||
They're happy to have a chicken there. | ||
And so next time, are we just gonna have a gay person? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
Because this is bullshit. | ||
You got any evil gay people that we can slide in? | ||
Evil gay people are super into war. | ||
Is there any out there? | ||
There must be. | ||
I mean, is this just... | ||
unidentified
|
We can find them. | |
Has this just turned into just pure symbolism? | ||
So we're just gonna have the first black guy and then the woman and then a gay person and then that's it. | ||
Well, then we'll have to go back to straight evil. | ||
Right. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all to have this system that we have in place. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
It doesn't make sense. | ||
Anyone who's a strict Democrat, like I had a conversation once with a friend and he was talking about Democrats versus Republicans in an election and he kept using the term we, you know, we got to win this and we got to win that. | ||
And I'm like, we? | ||
You're talking like you're talking about the Red Sox, man. | ||
Right. | ||
You're talking about getting ready for the World Series. | ||
You're talking like a team person. | ||
These are politicians, man. | ||
You know who they work for? | ||
Fucking corporations. | ||
They don't work for you. | ||
This is a dog and pony show, and you're completely committed to it. | ||
We've got to get rid of it. | ||
We've got to get rid of that. | ||
It's got to be who has the best ideas. | ||
The party system has failed us for so long that we are just invested in having the best version of this failed, fucked-up party govern us. | ||
I mean, it's a terrible version of what could be the governing principles of the greatest nation the world has ever known. | ||
And I don't think any other country has this kind of absurd show, multi-billion dollar show, where it's like a Hollywood extravaganza, you know, and it gets worse every year. | ||
And last year they spent over a billion dollars each. | ||
Did they really? | ||
I can't think of any other country that has the same kind of charade. | ||
You mean last term? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
Sorry. | ||
I just can't. | ||
And it is a complete facade. | ||
And the fact that you need millions of dollars to even get on the ballot, almost, and maybe not millions, but I mean, you need a substantial amount of money to get even on the ballot in every state. | ||
And then to get into debates, it's completely impossible because it's all run by like the oil and gas, like all these corporations fund the presidential debate system somehow. | ||
Commission for Presidential Debates, a privately funded institution. | ||
There you go, yeah. | ||
And so you can't get on it. | ||
Well, they used to be able to get on it with a small percentage of the popular vote in certain elections, but you can't do that anymore because of our good friend Ross Perot. | ||
Ross Perot fucked things up back in the old days. | ||
Because this guy, if you guys aren't aware of Ross Perot or you weren't alive back when this was going on, it was a very unique moment in human history because this guy, who was worth billions of dollars, just said, fuck it. | ||
This is pre-internet. | ||
This guy said, fuck it. | ||
I'm going to buy a half an hour of time on ABC during primetime or NBC. I don't I don't remember what network it was. | ||
And I am going to show everyone what's fucked up about the tax system and show everyone what's fucked up about the Federal Reserve. | ||
And I'm going to talk about what kind of changes I would make if I was president. | ||
And everybody was like, look at this guy. | ||
And he was able to debate with these guys because during the primaries, he had gotten whatever number of the popular vote you needed to get in order to be involved. | ||
So they changed it. | ||
They jacked it up. | ||
But it's virtually impossible for any third-party candidate, which is why, you know, everybody looked at Ron Paul and saying, well, Ron Paul is this wild independent. | ||
Actually, he's a Republican. | ||
I mean, you can call him a wild independent in terms of a lot of his ideas are very controversial and unique, but he's not an independent. | ||
He's a Republican, because if he wasn't independent, he would have never been in those fucking debates. | ||
There's no, no independents are ever going to get to that point where they are like there's three candidates being considered for the the number one position in the country and one of them is completely untethered to the system. | ||
It's not gonna happen. | ||
And it's all like this political and intellectual bribery on so many levels because first it goes to the Supreme Court. | ||
I mean we're basically have a monarchy running this country that our Supreme Court justices have more power than like the fucking Queen of England. | ||
So they're the final arbitrator on so many different things that are really life and death shit here. | ||
And it's basically turned into like, well, do you want like a crazy neocon to pick the next Supreme Court justice? | ||
And it's like, that's what we've come down to. | ||
Like, that's what it's all generated down to is just who's going to pick a Supreme Court justice if someone dies. | ||
I mean, no, fuck that. | ||
I'm not going to capitulate my moral compass to vote for a war criminal. | ||
Hillary Clinton is a war criminal. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
What makes her a war criminal? | ||
Because she has voted, first of all, let's just look at the Iraq war vote. | ||
Killed 2 million people in Iraq. | ||
New figures just came out that said that 2 million people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. Not even to mention the million babies who died from sanctions in the 90s. | ||
Aside from that, Hillary Clinton, the Gaddafi, Libya, Syria, she wants to bomb Iran. | ||
I mean, she is the worst. | ||
She said she wants to bomb Iran? | ||
You look, someone did a report, I think it was in the New York Times, kind of an embedded report in the National Security Cabinet. | ||
And they said that she is on par, if not worse than John McCain, of all of her war hawkish ideals in terms of foreign policy. | ||
It is scary shit, man. | ||
So as much as people want to pretend like she's like this liberal do-gooder... | ||
I'm most concerned about ending imperialism, militarism, and U.S. hegemony, so I'm not going to be voting for Hillary Clinton because she's a fucking woman. | ||
I don't give a shit if someone's a woman, if they're black, if they're gay. | ||
If they are perpetuating war crimes and killing innocent people, I know, going back to what you said, it's hard to be a president and not have someone's death on your hands, but fucking A. You don't have to just sign up to kill millions of people on a fake war against a non-existent threat. | ||
I wonder what motivates someone like Hillary Clinton at this stage of her life. | ||
Golf money. | ||
You should look at who funds her campaign. | ||
It is unbelievable. | ||
The Clinton Foundation, dude, check this out. | ||
The Clinton Foundation, not only all these giant corporations and banks, The real creepy part is when you see Saudi and Gulf states actually giving her tens of millions of dollars over the years. | ||
That shit is scary. | ||
Saudi Arabia basically has bribed so many politicians. | ||
Harvard, Oxford, like all of these institutions to get Saudi money. | ||
And then you start to understand the culture of silence around Saudi Arabia and why we have this double standard, this egregious double standard in the war on terror and this unholy partnership with this country. | ||
Now we're bombing Yemen together. | ||
Bombing Yemen together. | ||
Saudi Arabia and the US. Bombing the shit out of Yemen, the poorest country in the entire Arab world. | ||
What good is that going to do? | ||
How is that going to exacerbate the problems there? | ||
Bombing the poorest country in the Middle East. | ||
What is the motivation? | ||
So Saudi Arabia doesn't want the Houthi rebels because they threaten Saudi Arabia. | ||
So Saudi Arabia like backed a coup and supported a puppet regime in Yemen a while back and Yemen is just kind of a thorn in Saudi Arabia's side. | ||
What do we get out of bombing Yemen? | ||
Bribery, political bribery and hegemony and domination, regional influence. | ||
And plus Saudi Arabia wants us to. | ||
But when you look at the coalition that's actually bombing Yemen, it's like brutal, oppressive monarchies and like genocidal dictators like Sudan's dictator. | ||
And then you have like, I think, Egypt, Bahrain. | ||
And Saudi Arabia and a couple other countries, it's like, wow, great job. | ||
Great job. | ||
Why is the US supporting bombing Yemen? | ||
And on a side note, the US has been bombing Yemen with drones for years anyway. | ||
And then you keep hearing on the news that Iran is backing the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and that's why we need to go in and destroy them. | ||
But I talked to this guy who's like an expert, and he's Saudi, and he runs this institute. | ||
Everyone check out the podcast on Media Roots. | ||
It's really, really mind-blowing shit, because he just breaks down really what is happening on the ground. | ||
And he says, look, Iran is not backing the Houthis any more than Saudi Arabia is backing ISIS. Like... | ||
All of these things have influence, and yeah, the money's filtered down, but it's such a double standard. | ||
If we're gonna say Iran's backing the Houthi rebels, then we need to say that ISIS is funded by Saudi Arabia, and so is Al-Qaeda. | ||
Because, for a large part, it is. | ||
It is. | ||
That double standard in Saudi Arabia is bizarre. | ||
It's bizarre and creepy. | ||
It's unbelievably insane. | ||
Saudi Arabia is orthodox. | ||
Like, they are the worst interpretation of Islam that exists. | ||
It's Wahhabism. | ||
It's the most orthodox, oppressive, bastardized version of Islam. | ||
And we look at them and say, like, this is the only good Arab state? | ||
Like, that is fucked. | ||
Because not only are you telling the rest of the world that that version of Islam is somehow good, but you're also making it seem like... | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's just unbelievable. | ||
You should see what kind of rights women has in the country. | ||
They can't exercise. | ||
They can't play sports. | ||
unidentified
|
Why? | |
Do they want fat chicks? | ||
You wouldn't be able to tell because they're covered in... | ||
They're not allowed to exercise? | ||
Yeah, that's what this guy was telling me. | ||
Is that because they're not allowed to fight back? | ||
Well, first of all, they're property. | ||
So women can't do anything without a mailmaster, like approval of a mail. | ||
So they can't go to school, they can't go to work, they can't drive, they can't do a lot of things without having a mail permit. | ||
How many people live over there? | ||
I don't know. | ||
They also do public beheadings in the middle of freeways. | ||
They'll do public floggings of someone who simply criticizes the king online. | ||
They'll behead women for, you know, adultery, sorcery. | ||
This is the shit that we're talking about. | ||
Sorcery? | ||
Sorcery. | ||
Some chicks can't cast a spell, though. | ||
You gotta be careful. | ||
Don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
There might be a little sorcery going on that you gotta put a stop to. | ||
Can't drive. | ||
Can't exercise. | ||
Fuck. | ||
And you can't escape either. | ||
No. | ||
Oh, and, you know, King Abdullah, when he died, everyone was saying he was this great reformer. | ||
The Pentagon even, like, did an essay contest honoring King Abdullah. | ||
Giving out prizes for people. | ||
Like, that's how insanely twisted this whole scenario is. | ||
Meanwhile, of course, the 28 Pages movement that shows that Saudi Arabia was involved in 9-11 were actively carrying up that. | ||
Bandar Bush, which was in the Saudi government, and they actually called him a Bush because he was so close with the Bush administration. | ||
And he, I mean, Bob Graham, Senator Bob Graham has come out and said, why did Bandar Bush, like... | ||
Why are we protecting Saudis who were involved in the 9-11 attacks? | ||
I mean, straight up. | ||
Everyone ask yourself that. | ||
If you can give me a good answer, that would be great. | ||
If it's not about political bribery, what the fuck is it about? | ||
If it's not about, like, paying off these politicians with tens of millions of dollars, I don't know. | ||
What else could it be about, if you really stop and think about it? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I mean, what else could it be about, except having an ally, in quotes, in the Middle East? | ||
But it's the worst ally to have. | ||
If you really cared about stopping terrorism, Saudi Arabia is the biggest exporter of terror. | ||
Wahhabi terrorism. | ||
How dare you? | ||
What are you saying? | ||
It's unbelievable, man. | ||
They're our allies, Abby Martin. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
Well, yeah. | ||
Yeah, that is pretty fucked. | ||
What I was getting, what started this all off, was I was trying to figure out what would be the motivation of Hillary Clinton at this stage of her life. | ||
Like, how much money does she need? | ||
How much does she have? | ||
And how much does she need? | ||
Hillary's $2.5 billion obscene fundraising goal. | ||
That's her goal in order to become president? | ||
unidentified
|
Grrr. | |
I remember an article came out that said that she had a student discount on the speaking tours that she was giving, and it was like $250,000 was a speaking fee at a university, and that was the student discount. | ||
$250,000 to speak. | ||
What is she going to say? | ||
What is she going to fucking say? | ||
Well, when Bill got blown by Monica Lewinsky, I was super bummed out. | ||
We smoked a victory cigar together. | ||
But I knew that one day I would be president, so I let it slide. | ||
Yeah, what? | ||
Huh? | ||
Hillary Clinton is the worst, man. | ||
She's the fucking worst. | ||
And, you know, the whole Saudi Arabia thing really grinds my gears because it's, you know, here you have Saudi Arabia beheading people for sorcery, exporting terrorism around the world. | ||
And then you have Cuba, which today, you know, here we go, 56 years after the Cold War, Cuba finally got removed from the state sponsors of terrorism list. | ||
Yeah, you can buy cigars now. | ||
They're sweet. | ||
State sponsors of terrorism. | ||
That's what Cuba was on for decades and decades for no fucking reason. | ||
Not even North Korea is on the list. | ||
Really? | ||
We're weird. | ||
We're so weird. | ||
I just feel like we just need to hang in. | ||
We need to hang in there until all this becomes so obscene and ridiculous that they're forced to change. | ||
But probably not going to be in 2016. It's probably not going to be this go-around. | ||
There's no good choice there between Jeb Bush, who's just the creepiest, and Hillary, and then Rand Paul, who now I hate. | ||
Right. | ||
I don't like you, Rand. | ||
It's really unfortunate. | ||
Even Bernie Sanders. | ||
You know it's bad when a sitting congressman or senator comes out and is like, we need a massive political revolution. | ||
Like a massive grassroots revolution. | ||
He's in Congress. | ||
We certainly do. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
Yeah, and these Chris Christie types who I think he realizes he'll never be president anyway, which is one of the reasons why he's saying those things in order to... | ||
Keep the coalition or whatever he's established with whatever powers that be that are trying to keep marijuana illegal in New Jersey. | ||
He's somehow or another in bed with those fucks and that's what he's doing. | ||
He's serving them with that speech. | ||
He doesn't really think he's gonna be president. | ||
He knows that the shit that he did by blocking the bridge and the various scandals that he's involved with. | ||
The Bridgegate thing, that was so ridiculous. | ||
He's a scumbag. | ||
Yeah, he's a New Jersey scumbag. | ||
And plus he's fat. | ||
You can't be that fat and be president. | ||
And people are like, ooh, you're fat shaming. | ||
Can you imagine a woman that fat being like in his position? | ||
Hilarious. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
It would be insane. | ||
You can't. | ||
Look, if you're that obese, it shows you have no respect for your body. | ||
I don't care what anybody says about metabolism and all this nonsense talk. | ||
Oh, emotions. | ||
Stop. | ||
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Stop. | |
You're a fucking grown adult. | ||
If you want to be a leader, you're a leader... | ||
How can you be a leader when you have such poor respect for your very biology? | ||
Your very body is awash in shitty food. | ||
You have made terrible choices with your diet and with how you present yourself. | ||
You're presenting this disgusting, slovenly, lazy thing that's your meat wagon. | ||
That's what you're walking around in. | ||
You know, if you went over someone's house and there was stacks of old newspapers and cat shit all over the floor, you'd be like, oh, this person's a fucking nut. | ||
That's the same thing when you see a morbidly obese person in a suit that wants to run America. | ||
Other problems, dude. | ||
You need to start eating vegetables, you fuck. | ||
You need to start drinking water. | ||
Whatever you're doing to your body is not good. | ||
And getting your stomach stapled or whatever the crazy fucking procedure, that just shows me you can't even deal with it on your own. | ||
You've got to do... | ||
That's not a leader. | ||
And I'm not talking about the average person who is... | ||
Emotional issues or whatever that causes you to overeat and you know, I hope everybody who listens get that under wraps, whoever you are, but when you're when you're stepping up and saying I want to be a leader I want to be a leader of the country the entire Country you can't be fat. | ||
You just can't you can't be that I mean not saying you have to be like super fit, but you can't be morbidly obese that guy's morbidly obese He's a dumpster, just big waddling, fucking thighs rubbing together, gut overflowing over his belt, pulling it up, and just a big doughy asshole. | ||
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He's fat shaming! | |
Fat shaming is a hilarious thing. | ||
Because, you know what, we're not talking about shaming someone who has, you know, a congenital disease or some disfigurement because of an accident. | ||
We're talking about... | ||
You're slovenly behavior. | ||
You're stuffing your body with way more food than it needs. | ||
Do you not have mirrors? | ||
Do you not have a scale in your fucking house? | ||
Do you not see yourself being like, man, I probably am unhealthy as fuck right now, and I'm still eating. | ||
What's that all about? | ||
Sitting there with a napkin tucked in your shirt. | ||
Bitten in the big fucking fat forkfuls of food in your greedy asshole mouth. | ||
Fat shaming. | ||
No! | ||
There's a reason to mock fat people like that. | ||
There's a reason. | ||
Especially when it's Chris Christie. | ||
Yeah, when you're trying to be a leader and you have a horrible, like, real obvious poor judgment when it comes to your health. | ||
No! | ||
No, you can't. | ||
No, you can't. | ||
By the way, you can't shoot heroin and be president either, asshole. | ||
If I catch you in your fucking office with a big rubber band around your bicep and you're fucking banging it at lunch. | ||
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It's a disease! | |
Yeah, exactly. | ||
That's what they say about everything. | ||
Right. | ||
Everything's a goddamn disease. | ||
Right. | ||
Did you see that video of the police car that just came out last night just going full speed into a dude who just robbed a store? | ||
What? | ||
Yeah, dude. | ||
Check this out. | ||
It is unreal. | ||
Marie and I were watching this. | ||
We were like, what the fuck? | ||
I've got a theory that I've been throwing around a lot lately. | ||
I don't think anybody should be a cop. | ||
I don't think anybody's qualified. | ||
I really don't. | ||
I don't think anybody's qualified to be a cop. | ||
I don't think anybody's qualified to be a president. | ||
Cop especially though. | ||
I think that job requires so much self-control. | ||
You mean you almost have to be like a monk. | ||
You almost have to be some enlightened being who's separate from the pressure that the average person is going to receive the PTSD by, you know, going into how many domestic violence situations do you have to go into and watch, you know, men and women who have killed each other in these horrible love triangles or robberies or, you know, fill in the blank rapes or, you know, how many times do you have to see these horrible things before your brain is just broken? | ||
I mean, how many times you have to just think that everyone is out to get you everywhere you go because you've had guys, you know, try to grab your gun or you've had, you know, prisoners try to punch you as you're trying to put the handcuffs on them. | ||
I think those guys are broken. | ||
I think I've met a lot of them and I know a lot of them. | ||
They're good people and I think they do the best job they can. | ||
But I honestly think that it is we're asking for someone to do something that the human body is not designed for. | ||
To be the professional enemy. | ||
And also the professional power. | ||
Like you have massive power as a cop. | ||
And I don't think the average person is qualified to wield that kind of power. | ||
The psychological ramifications of being a person who can end someone's life with your finger anytime you want by squeezing some small muscles in your finger, it's insane. | ||
When you see that guy, when that guy's running in South Carolina, and that guy's running, and that guy pulls that gun out and he's shooting him as he runs, what the fuck has to go through your mind where you're seeing a middle-aged guy running away from you and you're shooting him in the back? | ||
A lot of people want the kill. | ||
It's like the military. | ||
And I talked to this guy, Ray Lewis, a former captain of the Philadelphia Police Force, and he said that they purposefully vet sociopathic and people lacking empathy for the job. | ||
And if you're too intelligent, they actually don't want you to be a cop. | ||
I've seen that. | ||
I've seen guys who have high IQs actually get turned down. | ||
There was a story about that. | ||
This guy had some genius IQ, and they turned him down for the police force. | ||
Maybe because they don't want you to overthink and they just want you to react quickly. | ||
It's hilarious. | ||
As if your brain works too good, you're going to overthink? | ||
I like the idea, and I've posited this before, of disarming police. | ||
Not the society. | ||
Not taking away guns from people, but taking away guns from cops. | ||
Until they can understand how to properly use them. | ||
There's other countries that have many guns per capita, like some European countries, and I forget which, I want to say Norway. | ||
They have guns, they have a shitload of guns, but their cops don't. | ||
Iceland, for example, their police do have guns, but they don't ever use them. | ||
A cop, I think, killed one guy and the whole country mourned. | ||
It was like the first time that it happened since the existence of Iceland, like since the revolution. | ||
Well, here's a crazy statistic. | ||
Cops in America have killed more people in March of this year than since 1900 in England. | ||
Mm-hmm. | ||
And in England, there's been like axe wielders, like people running around with axes, and it shows how cops can peacefully disarm them instead of just executing people. | ||
We have a serious problem here. | ||
It's definitely a serious problem, and it's not just a problem with standard police officers, it's a problem with the DEA. I mean, anybody who's seen those DEA raids where they kick in doors and shoot little dogs, like fucking Shih Tzus and shit. | ||
Throw flashbang grenades in cribs. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
For what? | ||
Someone has some substance in there that's not sanctioned by a tax stamp? | ||
You know, and a lot of times not even. | ||
Like the one where the kid with the crib, they didn't even have any drugs there. | ||
They never find anything, yeah. | ||
Yeah, or there's a famous, in the culture high, the documentary, there's that famous... | ||
Video where they shoot this guy's dog because they had found like some pot in his his trash They had found like a grinder or something in his trash So they they did a SWAT raid on this guy's house in front of his family And you hear bang bang and the dog's yiping the guy's crying you shot my fucking dog like why'd you shoot my dog and And, | ||
you know, they're handcuffing them, and it's just that power over people, and that power without reason, without reasonable understanding of the situation, a reasonable conversation, just kick down the door, bulletproof vest, gun down the door, gun down the dog. | ||
This is what we do. | ||
Yeah, SWAT no-knock raids are insane. | ||
And there's been instances where they've done no-knock raids in the middle of the fucking night. | ||
And then a person will shoot them thinking that it's just an armed robber, and then they'll go to jail for the rest of their lives. | ||
And they're like, how is this legal? | ||
I think one of the most insane things that police are doing right now is called civil asset forfeiture. | ||
Have you heard of this? | ||
Sure. | ||
Or they just can seize your assets for no reason. | ||
Literally no reason. | ||
One state just overturned that. | ||
What was the state that just... | ||
I'd heard that. | ||
I don't know... | ||
Yeah, who... | ||
That's actually a really good point. | ||
I need to write about that. | ||
Well, Jamie will find it out. | ||
But some states are stepping up and saying, look, enough already. | ||
It's basically the mafia. | ||
Cops can just stop anyone they want. | ||
Take all the money on them, and this has happened many times, and it's tragic, it's heartbreaking, because someone will maybe lose $30,000. | ||
People who don't want a bank account, per se, they want to keep cash on them, because why not? | ||
Yeah, why not? | ||
It doesn't mean you're a fucking drug dealer. | ||
And so they just take their cash, and then they just won't get it back. | ||
And if they can afford to hire a lawyer for $10,000 and spend months In litigation to get their money back, then maybe they can. | ||
But really, like these people, maybe they had a giant pile of cash because they wanted to refurbish their kitchen or in the restaurant they were working in. | ||
A lot of people have had to close down their businesses after the police have stolen their cash. | ||
And then they're allowed to use that cash. | ||
And then they're allowed to use the cash. | ||
They take that cash and it's theirs now. | ||
It goes in their coffers. | ||
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Totally legally. | |
It's just so weird. | ||
We've entered into this really weird time. | ||
Especially when it comes to law enforcement, it's being exposed now in a way that's never been before because of all these YouTube clips. | ||
Because of cameras, yeah. | ||
Yeah, you're just getting to see cops shooting people and beating people up. | ||
Those cops, they found that guy who would run away from them on horseback. | ||
So they're kicking him in the head while he's laying face down. | ||
They're just punting him in the head. | ||
And the guy's out. | ||
He's out cold. | ||
They're beating the shit out of him, kicking his body. | ||
Like, what are you doing? | ||
You're not a cop. | ||
You're a fucking criminal right now. | ||
And also, don't you know that people are probably filming you? | ||
They didn't know. | ||
I mean, they were being filmed by cameras above them. | ||
That was helicopter news cameras, I believe, that caught them kicking the guy in the head. | ||
Wow. | ||
Because it was a wild chase. | ||
The guy was on fucking horseback, and they were trying to catch the guy. | ||
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Whatever. | |
You don't get to kick a guy in the head just because he ran. | ||
You're supposed to capture him, you lazy fuck. | ||
And then once you capture him, you lock him up. | ||
Did you find the video of the car? | ||
What's that? | ||
The NBA players in New York City. | ||
What? | ||
This player, Thabo Cephalosha, there was a really crazy story that happened last week. | ||
This player for the Pacers named Chris Copeland was stabbed in an incident outside a club. | ||
And a couple hours later, two other players from a separate NBA team showed up. | ||
And there's a video of this guy. | ||
unidentified
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He's actually black. | |
Thabo Cephalosha? | ||
He's not from America. | ||
unidentified
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I forget the country he's from. | |
But he's shown getting beaten and arrested by like six cops. | ||
And it ended up being that he broke his leg. | ||
And the incident has ligament damage. | ||
He's out for the rest of the season in the playoffs. | ||
It's a little bit of an incident right now. | ||
There's a lot of stories coming out right now. | ||
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What actually happened. | |
Why they were... | ||
The charge was that they were arrested for obstructing... | ||
The police from setting up a crime scene. | ||
Setting up a crime scene? | ||
Yeah, like I said, this is hours after the incident. | ||
And right now, I think they're going to sue the police. | ||
It hasn't really come out exactly, but like I said, what's going to happen yet. | ||
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This is every day. | |
The NBA players unit is investigating. | ||
unidentified
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The FBI, I think, is investigating. | |
So, I'm sorry. | ||
I'm still confused. | ||
So, what does it say there? | ||
That he was provoked by the police before the arrest? | ||
unidentified
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When I pulled up the story, this just came out today, too. | |
There's sources that were outside of this club filming it, and people are saying, I saw this happen. | ||
And I was just reading this just now. | ||
It said that he, during this incident, him and the other player, Antic is his name. | ||
unidentified
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I forget his first name. | |
It was a like 6'10 white guy. | ||
He wasn't roughed up by the cops at all either by the way. | ||
They didn't rough up the white guy? | ||
He was just sitting there in the video. | ||
And they said he attacked or ran towards a cop and then another source said he didn't really do that and the cop was stalking him like a defensive back. | ||
And when they were walking away towards the car he just simply said to the cop, what's your problem with me? | ||
And that's when what the video picks up there and he's getting beat up. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
And this is just coming out? | ||
Yeah, this just happened maybe last week? | ||
Or this week? | ||
Oh, boy. | ||
Yeah, no one should be a cop. | ||
We need Robocop. | ||
You know how all the people are saying, you know, where are the moderate Muslims whenever, like, there's, like, some sort of attack? | ||
Where are the moderate police coming out and speaking out against every single cop? | ||
That's a good point. | ||
That's a very good point. | ||
Where are the moderate police? | ||
Where are the moderate cops? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Supreme Court overturns forfeiture of homes as a state failed to show law. | ||
That's Tennessee. | ||
That's one statute. | ||
Actions under Tennessee's civil forfeiture statute. | ||
State must present evidence. | ||
It's cash, too, yeah. | ||
So that's good. | ||
unidentified
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Oh, good. | |
Good, very good. | ||
Good for Tennessee. | ||
That's brilliant. | ||
That's really surprising, actually, in Tennessee, but good. | ||
Well, you know what? | ||
Someone along the line will probably go, fucked, and they're just enough already. | ||
You're stealing money from people. | ||
You can't just steal money. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
Yeah, I mean it all... | ||
The idea behind it... | ||
Probably there's some good idea behind it if you're dealing with organized crime and them having massive sums of money they've got through nefarious ways and then you figure out a way to catch those people and take that money from them. | ||
But as soon as you allow regular people like the police, regular people like that fucking dumb old man that shot that guy the other day because he thought he had a taser out and he had a gun out and he said, oops, I shot him. | ||
That's the type of people you have as cops? | ||
And he was 73, by the way. | ||
Which is fucking way too old. | ||
That's like John McCain. | ||
Like, why are you in a position of power? | ||
Why? | ||
You better be a badass fucking 73 guy to be a cop. | ||
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He was a reserve, I think. | |
I think he's a donor. | ||
That reminds me of... | ||
What do you think of Tom Cotton? | ||
Have you been following this douchebag? | ||
No. | ||
This, like, overly buffed-up military dude who's, like, in the Marines. | ||
He came out on the scene, like, six months ago, and then all of a sudden is trying to, like, go to war with Iran. | ||
Like, you know, you have Obama. | ||
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What does he do? | |
You have Obama doing these diplomatic negotiations with Iran, which I completely support. | ||
Diplomacy. | ||
Amazingly. | ||
You have all these assholes. | ||
I think 47 senators or congressmen signed on to this letter by Tom Cotton, who's basically backed by these neocon war hawks in places like the Foreign Policy Initiative and Bill Kristol, who love war. | ||
Their whole problem is that the public is too war-weary. | ||
He's actually written this. | ||
So they pick people like Tom Cotton. | ||
To be like they're trolls like this guy comes out and writes this letter to Iran basically saying like we don't support these like diplomatic negotiations and encouraging all of these congressmen to sign on to this letter to basically stimmy the process and it's like it's unfucking heard of it's like since when does this asshole Get to come out and kind of like usurp the president. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
And all these people sign on to it. | ||
And every time you look at like a military intervention in the last decade, it always stems from these letters from these think tanks that like try to shape policy. | ||
And here's this semester's guy, Tom Cotton. | ||
He's a total troll. | ||
So it says here, I love this, the red state, the title, Tom Cotton, rock star. | ||
Tom Cotton. | ||
He also, like, just as blatantly funded by defense companies. | ||
100%. | ||
Is he? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whoa. | ||
There was just a phone call that was recorded by a Deutsche Bank, I think, analyst and Lockheed Martin CEO, where the Deutsche Bank guy was saying, hey, we're really worried that the Iran negotiations is going to depress weapons sales. | ||
What should we do? | ||
This is how these people talk. | ||
This is actually happening. | ||
That they're worried that diplomacy with Iran is going to You know, hurt the bottom line of the military-industrial complex. | ||
Isn't that just comforting? | ||
Whenever you have any sort of a political environment, you're going to have extremes on both sides. | ||
So this guy is the extreme on the right side. | ||
And these articles about him, pro and con, that I'm seeing right now, they seem to... | ||
To highlight how smart he is. | ||
The guy is smart, very articulate, and very, very aware of all the minutiae of the Middle East and the conflict in the Middle East. | ||
He's not a newbie asshole who's just in the military and thinks that that makes him have fucking experience, and it doesn't. | ||
unidentified
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I'm just reading what they're saying about him. | |
Your take may vary. | ||
But this is... | ||
This is also the people who invited Netanyahu to come speak at Congress. | ||
Completely bizarre move, unheard of, to invite a foreign leader to come, like, try to usurp a diplomatic process that's going on. | ||
Because, of course, Netanyahu's insane and wants to bomb Iran. | ||
So that happened. | ||
There's a lot of these fucking people that will jump on board with this guy, though. | ||
There is, yeah. | ||
We get scary is if a guy like that can weasel his way all the way up to the top and run for president. | ||
That's when shit gets weird. | ||
If we've got a really hawkish military-based president who is totally down to just start bombing. | ||
Mm-hmm. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Especially a guy who's got a little PTSD. Yep. | ||
Maybe been over there a little. | ||
Seen some shit. | ||
Seen a little too much. | ||
Did a little too much. | ||
Yeah, Tom Cotton is a total douche. | ||
How dare you? | ||
Total douche. | ||
How dare you? | ||
But I like that you said it's the extreme ideologues, because I think that that's the way it is in all of these conflicts. | ||
It's not a fight between Islam and the West. | ||
It's a fight between the most extreme ideologues on all sides and the most militaristic, fascistic ideologues, you know, that you'll see that take these to the extreme. | ||
Unfortunately, in America, these people have suits and they're called politicians, a couple of them. | ||
Well, this guy, this Tom Cotton guy, the picture in the Red State article where it says Tom Cotton, rock star, is him in full fatigues with a machine gun in his hand. | ||
That is insane. | ||
Why is he posing like that? | ||
Look at his head is so small, too, compared to the rest of his body. | ||
unidentified
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He's got a very small neck. | |
Very small neck, very narrow shoulders, which would lead to a lot of overcompensation. | ||
That's not good genetics. | ||
Redstate.com. | ||
What the hell is this? | ||
Never heard of his website. | ||
Rockstar. | ||
He's a rockstar. | ||
What is that? | ||
There's gonna be people like that, right? | ||
There's gonna be the Karl Rove of the world. | ||
It's gonna be the Ken Starrs. | ||
But then there's the Obamas who you think are so much better, but then look at he has what seven countries that he's bombing under his belt. | ||
He's sold more guns in the first five years of his term than Bush did in the entire eight years term. | ||
Well, it's one of those things where you can't be in that position unless you're playing the game. | ||
It doesn't seem like you can get there unless you're playing the game. | ||
And he got in and he showed he's playing the game. | ||
He's doing what everybody else did, making everybody money. | ||
I wonder. | ||
I would love to see a rationalization of that. | ||
You know, if there comes a time one day when Obama's like 80 years old where he gets to sit down and explain like the way Jimmy Carter does speeches today. | ||
You know, Jimmy Carter does interviews today where he talks about the Iran crisis, the hostage crisis, and it's pretty sobering when you, you know, you realize that he knows that the Republicans were already negotiating for the release of the hostages before he was, you know, I mean, he didn't really have a chance. | ||
They kept those people in there Up until the moment where Reagan won and Reagan got in office and then they were all magically freed. | ||
It's really creepy. | ||
And when you hear him talk today with very measured tones and very measured sentences, you know, I would love to see that kind of a conversation with Obama in the future where he could really tell us, like, what was going on during this whole drone thing, when you were getting the statistics, when you were realizing that 80-plus percentage of the people that you were killing were innocents. | ||
Like, how is that? | ||
And you're still using surgical drone strikes as that was the narrative? | ||
Like, how is that possible? | ||
How are you allowing that to happen? | ||
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What was going on behind the scenes? | |
Going back to that report that said that 4 million have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, 80,000 people have died under the U.S.'s warrant here in Pakistan alone. | ||
And we've never sent ground troops in there. | ||
We've only been using drones. | ||
80,000 people have died from drones? | ||
I don't know if it's directly from drones or if it's a result from whatever the hell the US has been doing. | ||
I'm sure there's like a lot of covert operations going on as well. | ||
But it shows you the numbers that we're being given are completely And this is from what year? | ||
This is since 2003. In Pakistan. | ||
80,000 people. | ||
That's a lot of people. | ||
Hopes, dreams, shattered lives. | ||
And that's just not them. | ||
It's like you were saying. | ||
It's widows. | ||
It's, you know, children. | ||
How about when you find out about the military suicide rate? | ||
That's where it gets really bizarre. | ||
More people have actually committed suicide than have died in Iraq. | ||
There's one every 65 minutes. | ||
A veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes. | ||
Wow. | ||
Well, if it's timed like that, can't someone just get there at 64 minutes and take the gun away from it? | ||
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Stupid. | |
Sorry. | ||
It does seem like it's a different thing than has ever existed before. | ||
I mean, when Smedley Butler wrote that famous piece, War is a Racket, back in 1933, you could read that and apply it today to, and Smedley Butler was a, what was his position, something in the Marine Corps, very highly ranked in the Marine Corps, Sergeant General or some shit, I remember. | ||
I forget what his actual... | ||
Title was in the Marine Corps, but what he said back then it applies today and If you read it and you're reading something about the 1930s This guy thought that he was going over there saving the world and really was making it safe for bankers or safer oil people or safe for this or safe for that and It's exactly the same shit that's going on today and when guys are involved in that and they have the going with this ideal They really are in their mind. | ||
They want to be heroes. | ||
They want to stand up for their country They believe in it They believe in justice and they want to be a hero and they go over there and they realize oh, I'm just a hitman I'm a hitman for this creepy fucking corporation that wants to keep sucking the oil out of the ground over here and doesn't want to deal with all these people that wanted to stop and That's got to be a very sobering point of view, a very sobering perspective. | ||
Yeah, I think that does play a lot into it. | ||
The military is not seen as something that's good anymore to a lot of people. | ||
And I think a lot of soldiers who get in just out of desperation and then they realize that, what the fuck are we doing over here? | ||
Yeah. | ||
What are we doing? | ||
An interesting aspect of that statistic, though, is that the majority is over 60. Who are committing suicide. | ||
Over 60? | ||
Which means that this is like World War II Vietnam and Korean War era. | ||
The majority are over 60? | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
And they factor that in when they talk about veterans committing suicide, I think what they were talking about is currently active veterans that were committing suicide. | ||
If you add in, that's probably where the 65-minute thing comes from. | ||
Is it? | ||
Check it out. | ||
Yeah, I think that probably makes sense because what they were talking about when they were saying that more people have committed suicide, I think they were talking about active military right now. | ||
Than have died in combat. | ||
Than have died in combat. | ||
Which is insane. | ||
That's hard to believe. | ||
Is there any more evidence that your fucking system doesn't work than the people that are doing it commit suicide? | ||
Fuck. | ||
Did you ever see American Sniper? | ||
I did not. | ||
I had friends that liked it and I had friends that hated it. | ||
Duncan had a really funny thing about it. | ||
Duncan hated it. | ||
Ari Shaffir hated it. | ||
Tom Segura really liked it. | ||
I didn't see it. | ||
I didn't have a desire to see it. | ||
I think the story itself, the actual real story, is very fascinating. | ||
I think Chris Kyle as an individual It's a very, very complex case. | ||
It's a very complex thing to discuss, but if you even talk about him, you're a coward, and Chris Kyle was a hero, and you just sit there realizing that your freedom that you have is because of a guy like Chris Kyle. | ||
What? | ||
Huh? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Is sniping like heroic? | ||
Because to me that's like super fucking pussy, dude. | ||
How dare you? | ||
You're gonna fucking snipe someone? | ||
How dare you? | ||
Go with fucking nunchucks or a knife. | ||
You want to fucking fight someone? | ||
That's dumb. | ||
Nunchucks or a knife is a really dumb way to go about it. | ||
That's a silly way. | ||
You gotta snipe them. | ||
No, that's bullshit. | ||
And someone who snipes like a fucking 150 people, how is that heroic? | ||
How is that heroic? | ||
If those 150 people were going to kill Americans or eagles. | ||
I hate nationalism. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
If they're going to keep the eagle from soaring like she's never soared before. | ||
You never know. | ||
It could be. | ||
And another problem, I mean, the people who did see it in American Sniper, Clint Eastwood actually inserted things that weren't in the book at all, like the human shield myth that we talked extensively about before that they used to justify all these mass casualties in Gaza, saying that everyone uses a human shield. | ||
They showed a human shield myth playing out in the movie that never existed. | ||
It showed a woman being guarded by her son and holding a grenade or whatever. | ||
And in the book, when you read Excerpts of Chris Kyle's book. | ||
He talks about how these people were barbaric. | ||
It was almost like Christopher Columbus in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. | ||
You can read Christopher Columbus's journal entries when he first came here. | ||
He was saying that everyone should just be killed, raped, and they were all barbaric animals. | ||
And that's what Chris Kyle talked about Iraqis as. | ||
He said that he hated them with a vengeance so strong that it was inhuman. | ||
They were inhuman. | ||
He didn't kill enough. | ||
His only regret is that he didn't kill more people. | ||
He said that he would beat animals just for fun. | ||
Like, he's a sick bastard, man. | ||
And you know what? | ||
And he went out in such a perfect way. | ||
Killed by a fucking fellow. | ||
Killed by someone with PTSD. Yep. | ||
Well, you know, I don't know what happened there. | ||
I wasn't there. | ||
I don't know if it was perfect. | ||
It seems to me like a fucked up way to go. | ||
He was working to try to help people with PTSD. I don't know the dude. | ||
You know, also there's an issue I have. | ||
What is it? | ||
National estimate? | ||
What are you pulling up, Jamie, in the middle of a conversation? | ||
Oh, the veterans. | ||
unidentified
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The suicide veterans. | |
Okay, what does it say? | ||
National estimate based on Department of Veteran Affairs analysis of death records from 21 states. | ||
Though it is usually cited... | ||
Most of the suicides and older veterans. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Most of the suicides involved older veterans who account for the vast majority of the nation's 22 million former service members. | ||
Among veterans in the current study, there is one suicide a day. | ||
So, I'm confused. | ||
So there's one suicide a day of active soldiers? | ||
It seems that's what they're saying. | ||
That's not nearly as much. | ||
That's 365 a year. | ||
But that's insane. | ||
So that means that there's that many more, like 23 older veterans committing suicide every day? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's ridiculous. | ||
That's a lot. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Yeah. | ||
22 veterans take their lives each day. | ||
22 every day, only one active. | ||
Hmm. | ||
That's bizarre. | ||
You know, one of the things about the Chris Kyle thing, I think if you look at it fairly, you have to take into consideration the fact that this guy was, I mean, he's a Navy SEAL, and he's out there doing this incredibly difficult, very dangerous job that, again, I don't think anybody's qualified for. | ||
Just like a cop, just like, there's no perfect human being. | ||
Sniping mothers from like five miles away? | ||
Super dangerous, dude. | ||
That's not. | ||
Exactly all he did. | ||
I'm just joking. | ||
I'm with you. | ||
I mean, I'm not taking a side here. | ||
But what I'm saying is you've got to think that this guy gets out, he's got virtually no financial future. | ||
If you look at what those guys get paid as far as what's the salary that they receive once they retire, it's nothing. | ||
You can barely live off it. | ||
You barely survive, which is... | ||
If we're going to have military, you've got to fucking take care of them. | ||
You know, the UFC donates in a large way. | ||
We hold these events every year for the Intrepid Institute for Traumatic Brain Injuries. | ||
And when you find out that they're... | ||
Dependent upon outside sources to fund them and that these people that are veterans that get blown up and they have all sorts of head traumas, all these injuries, they don't get any help unless someone else donates. | ||
That's insane. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
The amount of money that is involved in the war as far as the amount of money that they give defense contractors, the amount of money that's spent on, you know, various operations is staggering. | ||
The amount of money that's spent on taking care of the soldiers once they get out is very small. | ||
So you're left with this guy who is a Navy SEAL who's been involved in I mean what PTSD to the fucking gills I mean how could you not you're shooting people from a distance watching heads explode your friends are dying people are dying all around you're in a death business and you come out and you've got this book to write and You know there's a lot of the stuff that he said in the book that's turned out to not be factual But if I was trying to sell a fucking book Okay, and I was in that sort of a desperate situation. | ||
I would put a bunch of shit in there that's not factual, too. | ||
I'm like, what do I want to do? | ||
I want to sell a book. | ||
Yeah, you said that he was killing black people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. | ||
Like, killing looters, as if that somehow... | ||
He was killing looters, yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, it turned out to not be true. | ||
Right. | ||
That was one of the things that turned out to be true. | ||
But again, you've got to look at it. | ||
I mean, you don't have to. | ||
But I try to, whenever I'm looking at any sort of a story like that, a very complex story involving a hired killer. | ||
You give someone a license to go kill people. | ||
You say, this is what you're supposed to do. | ||
This is what you're doing. | ||
And then you give them a bunch of medals for doing that. | ||
And so you have this culture of support. | ||
You have all these people. | ||
Thank you for your service. | ||
You know, you have these people that salute you. | ||
There's this enabling aspect of this that goes along. | ||
And then you have this bizarre conundrum where this guy is forced into this life where he's not going to have any fucking money. | ||
I mean, he's going to be this guy who's struggling to make ends meet with all sorts of psychological issues. | ||
I'm sure all sorts of physical health issues as well. | ||
I mean... | ||
I think Chris Kyle is a disgusting scumbag and I hate him, but I understand that this is systemic of just like a very large problem. | ||
Like there's a problem of empire and when you have a government who's extra judicially assassinating brown people around the world, we should not be surprised that this militarism bleeds in and we have like a culture of empire babies where you have cops going around and killing black people. | ||
You have, you know, military people thinking that they have a license to fucking do whatever they want. | ||
And people themselves going and just shooting a bunch of people in a movie theater or, you know, taking down a bunch of people with them. | ||
I really do think it all bleeds from the same problem with American culture when you have, like, a global empire. | ||
And a shitload of guns and people who have American exceptionalism and think that they're the best country in the world that can do no wrong and that they're better than everyone else. | ||
What does that do to a society? | ||
Well, it definitely gives a society a sense of entitlement in some sort of a weird, bizarre way where you ignore all the faults of the people that are on your team and you highlight all the faults of the people on the other team even if they are lesser or equal. | ||
Whenever you have a team, whenever you have this team mentality, whether it's the Democrats versus the Republicans, us versus them, East Coast, West Coast, you get this stupid idea that we're not all one, that we're not all one superorganism sharing the earth, which is what human beings are. | ||
That philosophy, that way of viewing the world is exactly what keeps wars going. | ||
You have to have this team mentality. | ||
If you have this abundant resource mentality that really, hey, there's plenty for everybody. | ||
The problem is the vast majority of what we're taking out of the earth is being sucked up by a very limited few people that have control of the overwhelming majority of the resources in the world. | ||
And they're the ones who are instigating wars. | ||
They're the ones who are funding and actively campaigning to get these things going and to make sure that, just like we were talking about with private prisons, they want to keep the business of war booming. | ||
The business of war does not want to taper off. | ||
The business of war wants to grow like every other business. | ||
And when you have business and profit involved in going to places and shooting things and taking their stuff... | ||
And Halliburton, which fucking Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, he leaves Halliburton, becomes the vice president, and then Halliburton gets these no-bid contracts to repair places that Cheney is involved in instigating these... | ||
What the fuck, man? | ||
I mean, it can't get any more transparent than that. | ||
That is the business of war in action. | ||
The business of this funnel that has figured out how to draw money out of an area and how to filter it into the coffers of all these people that are responsible for all these companies that sell things to the government that are involved in war. | ||
And he says, there's a lot. | ||
There's a lot going on there. | ||
There's a lot of moving pieces. | ||
And that's where a guy like Obama steps in, you know, in 2012. You know, this guy steps in, or 2008, this guy steps in, and you get to see this scenario play out where this new entity steps into this machine that's already been established. | ||
He has all these ideas in his head about what he's going to do, and then once he actually gets in there, you see what he's really doing. | ||
It's just very little. | ||
Very little. | ||
I mean, very little different. | ||
It's really a lot of it is business as usual. | ||
And it almost seems like untangling that gigantic profit machine is extremely difficult. | ||
And whatever ideals that he might have had as a young man or as a guy who's campaigning to be president with these unique ideas. | ||
I'm going to close Guantanamo Bay. | ||
I'm going to pull us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
None of that happened, man. | ||
None of it happened. | ||
None of it happened. | ||
And even talking about pulling out, they're not really gonna pull out. | ||
They're gonna pull out and leave behind thousands of troops. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Like, how are they pulling out? | ||
Like, that's not pulling out. | ||
Pulling out is no troops. | ||
Right. | ||
Zero. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Zero bases, zero troops. | ||
Like, gone. | ||
Yeah, that's like saying, I'm gonna pull out when you're having sex, but you still... | ||
And you still impregnate someone. | ||
They're like, well, I pulled out, sort of. | ||
I only had left the tip in. | ||
unidentified
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Still came just a little bit. | |
Yeah. | ||
You gotta pull out all the way. | ||
Just a little bit. | ||
This is ridiculous. | ||
And another problem with the way things are going now is, like, I think under the Bush administration it was so blatant and in your face and obtuse, and now Obama, you know, there's all this covert warfare going on. | ||
The General of AFRICOM, which is like, who knew that we were at war with Africa, right? | ||
Well, apparently there's military operations going on every single day across Africa. | ||
United States? | ||
Yes. | ||
Yes. | ||
And they've told, like, a room full of defense contractors, like, we are literally at war with Africa. | ||
And this is Africa. | ||
Africa the continent? | ||
unidentified
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Yes. | |
War with the whole continent? | ||
War with the fucking continent. | ||
Is that a first? | ||
That's a first. | ||
Because we usually just pick a country. | ||
This country sucks. | ||
And amazingly, it all goes together, too, when you look at the global empire and how it all works, like the extraction of resources and all these countries working together in terms of Saudi Arabia and Israel. | ||
And when you look at the drone wars, cobalt Is a mineral that's really essential for the military industrial complex to build machinery and weaponry and cobalt comes from the Congo and when you look at the Congo For the last decade or so, or more than that, there's been like six million people who have died there. | ||
There's basically a genocide going on in the Congo, facilitated and protected by the U.S. government. | ||
In State Department documents in the late 90s or mid-2000s, they've said that they need to keep Congo unstable, basically. | ||
They need to keep this civil war going so that we can secure the cobalt extraction. | ||
It's all fucked, man. | ||
And it all stems back from Wanda, the genocide there, and... | ||
What is cobalt used for? | ||
I don't exactly know, but I know primarily something in drones. | ||
It's a component in drones. | ||
But it just shows you how complicated it is, right? | ||
And how many things are tied together with the military-industrial complex. | ||
And I really do think it's like an autonomous machine. | ||
That if a bunch of these people died, the machine would still thrive on. | ||
It would still live on because there's so many components and everyone's compartmentalized in how to Keep the machine going. | ||
And so it's like they don't even know. | ||
It's just weapons and bombing are the only solutions that they know because that's all that they do know. | ||
It's like, of course, building schools and hospitals would actually be way better in the long term for Afghans. | ||
Education. | ||
If we're going to prop up that that girl Malala or whatever For the Taliban almost killing her for wanting to get educated That should be our focus if we really want like an educated world in society and build up peace and stability in the Middle East schools and hospitals and really investing in the people instead of just continuously bombing them Into the stone ages and then being like why are you guys so barbaric? | ||
We need to bomb the shit out of you more. | ||
Why is ISIS here? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Maybe because you bomb the shit out of all of these different religious sects that Saddam was actually had a stranglehold on. | ||
Because at that point in time, the political evolution and climate of the society, they needed a dictator and like some sort of dictatorial rule to keep those factions in line. | ||
That's how the society was functioning. | ||
So to just bomb them into oblivion and just be like, we've democratized you. | ||
Why is ISIS here now? | ||
Like... | ||
Any logical human being would look at that region and say, well, of course, that's what's going to happen. | ||
Even Cheney, back in 1994, he was giving this interview about the invasion of Iraq because, of course, Bush Sr., we know he wanted to go into Iraq, too. | ||
And he was saying we'd never do that because pieces of Iraq would fly off. | ||
And he was like, it would be a total disaster. | ||
He basically laid out exactly what happened when we did go in there. | ||
These people aren't dumb. | ||
It's almost like ISIS is just an excuse to keep it going. | ||
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
Yeah, it's pretty insane. | ||
Okay, you're really good at pointing out all these things that are fucked up in the world. | ||
But do you have any ideas about how it could be fixed? | ||
I think that everything that you said about how we're one human family living on one organism, we have the technological capabilities in front of us. | ||
That's why I love what Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist movement are doing, because they point out the possibilities and the capabilities that we have. | ||
The hydroponics, the open source ecology and all of these different movements, you know, decentralized tools online or Bitcoin or This is all happening. | ||
People are starting the revolution on their own. | ||
But I think that as long as we are ingesting media that makes us scared and keeps pitting us in camps against each other and keeps reinforcing American exceptionalism and also these identities, these false identities and nationalistic tendencies that makes us not have empathy, not extend our empathy from our brothers and sisters in Gaza, our brothers and sisters in Iraq. | ||
That needs to be stripped down, first and foremost, because if we keep reinforcing the fact that we're different because we're American and we're white and we were born, we just happen to be born within this nation, we're going to have a really long road ahead of us in terms of how we can really change this because if the system is globalized, the struggle needs to be globalized and so does the consciousness. | ||
That's a good point. | ||
That's a good way to phrase it. | ||
I agree. | ||
I think blind nationalism, blind anything, is just unhealthy. | ||
It's just not right. | ||
And that's the type of shit that you're going to receive and hate tweets because all the shit you said about Chris Kyle! | ||
Fucking coward! | ||
I got so much hate last time I came on. | ||
About what? | ||
A lot of people, I know that you had on Sam Harris also who kind of responded to my whole argument about, you know, Islam and how these things have happened and why, you know, why Palestine is the way it is and Sam Harris, his whole thing is why he doesn't criticize Israel. | ||
I got a lot of hate from people who said that I just, they just didn't agree with me because it's controversial. | ||
But I totally disagree with Sam Harris in this new atheism movement. | ||
Reinforcing the American exceptionalism in the Empire and imperialism. | ||
I mean, it's unbelievable that someone like him and Richard Dawkins can get out there and say, all that matters is your pure moral intentions. | ||
Islam is so fucked up that even if Islam kills a million people and the US government and Western imperialism kills a billion, Islam is still worse because our intentions were pure. | ||
We have the moral imposition. | ||
I don't think he's saying that. | ||
I literally heard him say that in response to something about Noam Chomsky. | ||
Maybe he didn't mean it. | ||
Maybe I didn't hear the full context of what he was saying. | ||
But it sounded really just completely unfounded. | ||
He's a very, very measured guy. | ||
And he's a friend. | ||
And one of his takes on religion is simply that... | ||
If I could speak for him, the way he looks at Islam, the real underlying issue with any overwhelming philosophy or ideology is what are their core principles? | ||
And one of the core principles of Islam is If you leave, you're supposed to be killed. | ||
If you're apostate, you're supposed to be killed. | ||
If you commit adultery, if you commit homosexuality, if you look at these things, like in the religious doctrine, like in the Quran, how it's addressed, the fundamental rules of this ideology, it's very divisive, and it's very strong, and it's very clearly stated. | ||
Really, how come so many more billions of people are not getting killed? | ||
What do you mean? | ||
There's a billion and I think it's like one sixth or one fifth of the world's population is Muslim. | ||
So shouldn't we be seeing a lot more just completely like barbarism and terrorism and death and destruction from Muslims if that's really what the entire Muslim religion is about? | ||
Well, I'm not even saying that he's saying the entire religion is about that or denying even that there are some moderate factions of the religion. | ||
But I think as a neuroscientist, his point of view is on ideologies and cult thinking and dangerous philosophical trends, like dangerous trends of behavior, like jihadists, like ISIS, like things along those lines. | ||
Not denying the origins of The reason why they're so upset in the first place, the conflict that's brought them to this position, or even the fact that they may have been funded. | ||
Okay, because I don't ever hear him talk about that. | ||
I don't ever hear him talk about that. | ||
You'd have to have a conversation with him specifically about it, like, in a debate, which would be kind of interesting, because you're a very fiery young lady. | ||
Look at you, Ernie. | ||
It'd be interesting. | ||
He's played some pretty fascinating videos. | ||
He put one of them up on his site about this guy, and they were speaking from this large group of Muslims. | ||
And one of the things he was saying was that everyone wants to say this is radical Islam, these ideas of radical Islam. | ||
But he said, this guy in this video was talking about if someone says that Whatever punishment that should be deemed out for anything. | ||
Whatever the punishment that is in the Quran is the best possible punishment because it is from Allah. | ||
And do you guys agree with this? | ||
And they would say yes. | ||
Like, the way they treat homosexuals, is this radical Islam or is this Islam? | ||
And they would all agree with it. | ||
Like, if this is deemed by Allah that you should be stoned to death for adultery, there cannot be a better way to deal with this. | ||
And I think when you get down to the core philosophy, could you imagine If we were seeing that spread across the country with Christianity. | ||
I mean, there are certainly some radical forms of Christianity. | ||
I mean, let's, like, we're labeling things, just all ideologies across the board, whether it's Catholicism or Baptism or Scientology or any pattern that you are expected to follow very rigorously and very, very strictly. | ||
When you start applying those patterns to the real world and inside those patterns, it includes Death for things like adultery, death for things like homosexuality, very strict, rigid rules like you were describing. | ||
In Saudi Arabia. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Here's the missing element of that whole argument is that religions evolve. | ||
you have bombed the shit out of the Middle East into literally like stripped their evolution. | ||
I mean, you can look at the Shah of Iran to the funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and how warped and twisted and backwards like women's rights, let's say, have become in the last 50 years in those countries. | ||
And a lot of it has to do with the stimming and stifling from Western intervention. | ||
Religions evolve. | ||
What did Christianity... | ||
Did we used to stone people? | ||
Did we burn people to stay? | ||
I mean, all of these religions have evolved over the millennia. | ||
And I think when you're looking at Islam, we have to give it room to grow and evolve without... | ||
And it's really hard to look with such harsh judgment and single out Islam in terms of the rest of the religions when... | ||
There's been so much military intervention in this region of the world and that has reinforced religion because a lot of times people, you know, people in Gaza or Iraq or Syria, I mean, their prayer is the only thing that they have to keep them going when you have fucking nothing. | ||
Right. | ||
So it's a little bit hard. | ||
I didn't mean to come down on Sam Harris. | ||
I just disagree with him. | ||
And a lot of people for some reason were like telling me that I needed to get schooled. | ||
You need to get schooled by Sam Harris. | ||
Well, you know, I don't think either one of you are wrong. | ||
I think your point of view and his point of view, although they're very different, having a conversation like this in third-party form, or not even having a conversation, but disagreeing on points like that, you really have to sit down with someone. | ||
There's a lot of people that I've gotten to disagreements with, whether it's online or in reality, or in real life. | ||
Where I think if you had the time to discuss and sit down and talk about, like, what do you think about this and why do you think about that? | ||
And it's a long-form conversation. | ||
I mean, that's a long conversation. | ||
It's not something to be, like, sniped back and forth from blog entry to blog entry. | ||
Or Twitter is the worst example of it. | ||
140 characters. | ||
Like, good fucking luck. | ||
Right. | ||
I think there's a lot of middle ground there and a lot of ways to look at his point of view and a lot of ways certainly to look at your point of view, which I very much respect. | ||
It's just I think there's both. | ||
There's certainly a lot of legitimate arguments to the fact that we have fucked up the Middle East almost Unfixably. | ||
We have like ruined lives to the point where you're talking about if the new figures of two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's the new figure. | ||
That's just the people that are dead, man. | ||
What about their families? | ||
What about the people that knew them and loved them? | ||
What about their friends? | ||
What about their neighbors? | ||
You're talking about just generation after generation after generation of hate and pain and suffering. | ||
And I don't know how you engineer that away. | ||
I don't think it's possible. | ||
Even with philanthropic missions and building schools and helping people, you're not going to take away the sting of someone's baby getting blown up by a fucking drone. | ||
I mean, I just don't know how you erase that. | ||
I think it needs to start with stopping. | ||
Stopping all the... | ||
And this is what I asked that Saudi scholar. | ||
I was like, how can we, and I always come from this angle, like, how can we help the people and their sovereignty without supporting disastrous military intervention? | ||
He was like, we don't need your help. | ||
He was like, this is what you guys need to understand. | ||
We do not need your help. | ||
What we need you to do is stop supporting oppressive monarchies and dictators. | ||
That's what we need you to do. | ||
We don't need you to help us because freedom cannot be given and liberty cannot be given. | ||
It can only be one. | ||
And we need to do that for ourselves. | ||
But we can't do it with your backing of these like crazy oppressive systems. | ||
I think it's also there's a philosophy of keep throwing bombs at the problem until it's fixed. | ||
Like you bomb people and then the people that are angry that you bombed and then they come after you. | ||
You gotta just bomb more. | ||
You gotta shoot more people. | ||
So the angry people are dead. | ||
So all the people who lost family because of this as well, they're dead too. | ||
So there's no one left that has any connection to it. | ||
And those are the people that'll be the new citizens of the new Iraq. | ||
It's like state-sanctioned genocide in a lot of ways if you look at it that way. | ||
And it's hard to... | ||
It's hard to rationalize, in any other way, the idea of killing a million people. | ||
How else did it get done? | ||
I mean, if that's not what you're doing, if you're not killing the... | ||
Was there a million army people? | ||
No. | ||
So how is a million people getting killed? | ||
Well, you're killing people, and then you're killing extra people, and then there's people that are mad that you killed those extra people, and they're coming after you, and you're killing them, too. | ||
And then it just keeps going on and on and on and on. | ||
It becomes this vicious cycle, especially when you're invading. | ||
You're invading foreign countries. | ||
I mean, can you imagine the fucking shitstorm if someone tried to park boats off of our shore and invade the motherland, the soil that Chris Kyle protected? | ||
I mean, could you imagine? | ||
Chris Kyle, by the way, get ready for some Chris Kyle tweets, young Abby Martin. | ||
They're coming your way. | ||
People got mad at me, and I didn't say anything about him other than the fact that what he said in his book wasn't truthful. | ||
Never said a negative word about the guy, didn't see the movie, don't know much about him other than the numbers of people that he killed, and people were so mad at me. | ||
Especially in the hunting community. | ||
unidentified
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The hunting community has blind reverence for Chris Kyle. | |
They do. | ||
Well, I'm not impressed with people who just snipe a bunch of innocent people. | ||
So, what are you gonna do? | ||
They might not have been innocent. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I don't have a direct account of all the people that he shot in the head. | ||
I'm sure the dogs he beat were guilty of something, too. | ||
They were bad dogs. | ||
unidentified
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That's what I heard. | |
I heard those dogs hated America. | ||
He beat dogs? | ||
Yeah, he like brags about beating animals. | ||
So if people want to defend Chris Kyle to me, that's fine. | ||
You should just sit and look in a mirror and ask yourself, why? | ||
Because America. | ||
That should be a shirt. | ||
Because America. | ||
Yeah, it's just the same people who look at me and they're like, you're a Russian propagandist. | ||
It's like, I can't even... | ||
Where do we start? | ||
I mean, do we want to really waste our time here? | ||
Are you a leftist? | ||
Are you lefty? | ||
Because you were talking about capitalism earlier. | ||
You said right away you're going to argue. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But I'm not really a righty. | ||
So I think capitalism has completely failed us in the corporatism. | ||
But then you have all these people who are like, this is not true capitalism, right? | ||
And we can do better. | ||
Well, to me, this is what the beast of capitalism turns into. | ||
This is like the inevitable outcome of capitalism when you leave it unhinged and people say we need less government. | ||
To me, that doesn't make sense because that's how we got here in the first place is like letting down all these barriers and having this ancestral relationship between the industry and government sector. | ||
So I don't I don't know. | ||
I don't endorse any sort of like alternative economic system. | ||
I just think that we can do a shitload better. | ||
And we have to, otherwise we're going to die. | ||
I'm sorry to sound like Chris Hedges here, but I mean, we need some sort of massive shift. | ||
I think everyone knows deep down that unfettered capitalism cannot and will not last. | ||
And every empire falls. | ||
And if we don't do something fast to save the planet, then we're going to be kind of screwed. | ||
What's the alternative to capitalism? | ||
That's the problem. | ||
I don't like when people put you in a box and say, you need to explain to me a complete alternative, otherwise we just can't. | ||
There's no discussion. | ||
I think that we can do better. | ||
We have the brains, we have the mind power, we have the smartest people in the world. | ||
They're going to do a fucking head transplant, for God's sake. | ||
That's where we're at now. | ||
In Russia, by the way. | ||
Elon Musk wants to create an internet in space that will provide free internet for everyone on the planet. | ||
In every remote corner of the earth. | ||
These are the things that we can do. | ||
We can mine Mars. | ||
We can do these things now. | ||
So don't tell me that capitalism in the form that it is now is the best that we can do. | ||
I don't fucking believe it. | ||
That's kind of a straw, man, because no one's saying that. | ||
No one's saying that capitalism in this form right now is the best. | ||
They're saying that capitalism is the best and that we just need to fix it. | ||
How? | ||
But I'm not arguing with you with that. | ||
I'm just saying, like, what do you think can be done? | ||
I'm not saying that you have to have a solution, but I'm saying if you have an argument that you think capitalism is inherently unfixable, broken, evil, fill in the blank, what could be done? | ||
What could be done differently? | ||
Well, I think that we need some sort of actual democratic kind of cooperative governance locally, where people are actually invested in like a cooperative level, which is actually what democracy should be. | ||
That is actual democracy in its truest form. | ||
And a lot of what Marx wrote is like that. | ||
Unfortunately, I hate that we're just put in these two camps where it's like either you're communist or capitalist. | ||
No, I see good in both. | ||
And I think that a lot of European countries have done it right, where they incorporate a lot of social aspects into their society. | ||
And people who want to shit all over like socialism, I mean, we have libraries, firemen, like these are all socialist aspects of our country right now. | ||
Schools, public education. | ||
So I think that it's been a scary and vilified word for no reason. | ||
And I think that we need to really grow up and understand how we can incorporate aspects of both to really benefit society until we can figure out maybe what's next. | ||
Right now, we have a country where people applaud politicians who say that we're not going to give you healthcare, that we want no government, that we want to give more power to the market. | ||
I just see a lot of problems with that because I just feel like that's why we have a lot of the issues that we have today. | ||
A lot of European countries have free healthcare in college and I totally support that because Being unemployed for the little time that I have and I looked into Obamacare thinking that it was gonna be like really cheap. | ||
It's $250 is the cheapest plan. | ||
I can't even afford that right now. | ||
$250 a month? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's the cheapest plan? | ||
That's the cheapest plan. | ||
I thought it was supposed to be free. | ||
That's what I, no. | ||
What? | ||
Costs money? | ||
Yes. | ||
We got fucked. | ||
Right. | ||
We got fucked with that Obamacare shit, huh? | ||
I don't know a single person that really likes it. | ||
No, it's awful. | ||
It's like, it's just the insurance companies just wrote a bill, basically, and now we have to buy healthcare. | ||
Yeah, it's like, instead of giving everyone free healthcare, you have to buy healthcare. | ||
That's what it seems to me. | ||
unidentified
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That's insane. | |
That's what it is. | ||
That's exactly what it is. | ||
I've never heard anybody argue successfully that it's a good plan. | ||
unidentified
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No. | |
I've heard people argue that, well, it needs to evolve and change, and it's good in principle. | ||
You know what's good in principle? | ||
Socialized medicine at least as a an available thing for everyone I mean if you want like elective procedures, you know if you want a boob job or something like that Yeah, you should be you should be able to buy that if you have a doctor that has you know some Extreme ability to fix knees or something like that and it costs a lot of money to do his stuff and Insurance doesn't cover it, but he charges more money. | ||
Yeah, that makes sense but but The idea that you could go into debt because you get hurt or sick, and you might not ever be able to come out of that, and that our government doesn't look at that as being one of the primary objectives of a government, of a leading group of human beings that are supposed to be in charge of allocating resources. | ||
Taking care of education and taking care of health. | ||
Those are the two primaries. | ||
Food, education, health. | ||
Those should be the primaries. | ||
Of course firemen, of course all the things that are police, all the things that are already established as being things that we pay for, that the state pays for, those things should be there as well. | ||
But the idea that healthcare wouldn't be in that group, it seems barbaric. | ||
It seems rude. | ||
It seems also incredibly debilitating to poor people. | ||
Yeah, no, and that's exactly who it affects. | ||
And I'm not going to sit here and praise Cuba, but I did go there and did a bunch of reports about Cuba. | ||
And yes, it's communist. | ||
Yes, it has a lot of problems and they don't claim to be the best system, but their health care and their altruism in terms of like fighting like epidemics worldwide. | ||
Cuba was on the front lines of after the Haiti earthquake. | ||
They sent the largest contingent of doctors to Haiti. | ||
They sent the largest contingent of doctors to Liberia to fight Ebola. | ||
They have put... | ||
Their values are different. | ||
I mean, their values are to take care of, like, healthcare as a human right and shelter as a human right. | ||
And so that's why you have, like, such low crime rates in Cuba, too, because when everyone has basic needs, shelter... | ||
Healthcare. | ||
I mean, what does that do to a society? | ||
There's a lot of problems in Cuba. | ||
I'm not saying that's the answer. | ||
I'm just saying it's interesting to see countries do it differently and see how it affects other people. | ||
You know, and then you have America, this hegemonic force that basically thrives on making money off killing people. | ||
And Cuba, you know, sells doctors. | ||
That's their biggest export is doctors. | ||
Ours are guns. | ||
That's our biggest export? | ||
Really? | ||
Yep. | ||
I thought it was like corn. | ||
Nope. | ||
You would think so. | ||
Really? | ||
We send more guns to other places than anything? | ||
We're the biggest exporter of arms in the world. | ||
Again, because America. | ||
That's a shirt. | ||
Biggest exporter of arms in the world because America. | ||
It's just amazing. | ||
I mean, if Cuba can do this being economically crippled under blockade, what can we do? | ||
What can the richest country in the world do? | ||
Not only for our people, but for the world instead of just killing people. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
Well, talking about it helps, right? | ||
I mean, doesn't it enlighten young people, stimulate ideas, get people thinking about the problems? | ||
There's a benefit to this type of conversation that people oftentimes criticize. | ||
Well, you guys aren't doing anything. | ||
You're just talking about it. | ||
Why don't you do something about it? | ||
Now that you're not at RT, what are you going to do? | ||
So I'm doing work for Media Roots, which is my website. | ||
I'm in talks with two different show ideas right now. | ||
A lot of great things on the horizon. | ||
By September, I should have another show up and running for a network that I won't say anything yet, because in case it doesn't happen, I don't want to make any declarations, but definitely not going away. | ||
Media Roots thing. | ||
What do you do at Media Roots? | ||
So Media Roots, it's a citizen journalism project that I started, and that's how RT found me through Occupy Oakland coverage, but it's just a multimedia forum that I have a hub of censored information that I've collected over the years, and now I'm doing podcasts on there. | ||
The Abby Martin Experience. | ||
No, just kidding. | ||
Why not? | ||
It's a good name. | ||
Just biting you. | ||
How about just call it Fuck Chris Kyle? | ||
unidentified
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Amazing. | |
Imagine if you had a podcast and you called it that. | ||
unidentified
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That'd be really good. | |
Holy shit. | ||
Talk about clickbait. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And definitely leave a comment section. | ||
Right. | ||
I've never got, yeah, the Chris Kyle fans are... | ||
People who, when I've made fun of Bill Cosby, people get really pissed off too. | ||
It's Bill Cosby and Chris Kyle fans get real upset. | ||
Well, as much as Chris Kyle or less? | ||
Less, but still very, like, upset for some reason. | ||
See, you never made fun of Chris Kyle on this podcast before, though. | ||
This is gonna get ugly. | ||
This is gonna open up that can of whoop ass. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm gonna get ahold of this leftist girl and let her know what I think. | |
I think we need to get rid of these divisive labels. | ||
Left, right, Democrat, Republican. | ||
Do not put yourself in a camp. | ||
Do not capitulate your values to endorse people that you don't wholeheartedly agree with. | ||
We have other parties. | ||
We have local referendums. | ||
That's where things are happening on a local level. | ||
So as much as there's this fascist takeover on the federal level, People get it. | ||
They're voting for same-sex marriage. | ||
They're voting for marijuana legalization. | ||
They're voting to repeal shit like civil asset forfeiture. | ||
All of these things will only happen locally. | ||
And if the DOJ or federal government wants to, you know, usurp people's rights, then at least it will be really obvious where they have to say, like, we don't care what you voted for. | ||
We're going to do this anyway. | ||
Then at least it'll be like completely obvious that there's like a coup that happened. | ||
But right now we can do all these things on a local level. | ||
And it's also the seismic sustainable shifts. | ||
Agriculturally, like all of these things, the organics residence, labeling, these things can all be done locally. | ||
Unfortunately, if the Trans-Pacific Partnership passes, then corporations will have the right to sue actual nations and overturned laws that we pass. | ||
Did you hear about this? | ||
unidentified
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What? | |
So there's another trade deal coming, and Obama's trying to fast-track it through Congress, which is like he's going to bypass the congressional vote. | ||
So we know how fucked up NAFTA and TAFTA and all this shit was. | ||
Like, disastrous, right? | ||
Has just exacerbated poverty and crime across the borders. | ||
So now the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it's like this Asian-Pacific trade deal between 12... | ||
Pacific Island nations, including the United States. | ||
And what it's going to do is create an international court tribunal full of lawyers and corporate CEOs and lobbyists. | ||
The public has not had any sort of like... | ||
We have not seen the text. | ||
The only text that has been released is through WikiLeaks of people leaking these documents. | ||
And it looks really bad. | ||
And what the court tribunal is going to do is basically give corporations the right to sue governments. | ||
So let's say... | ||
The United States finally passes a labeling law and we just want to label GMOs or something. | ||
Something to do with food or some sort of intellectual property rights law. | ||
They can just say, you know, you're hurting our profits. | ||
Monsanto's profits are being hurt by the labeling law, so we're going to go ahead and overturn that. | ||
And a lot of people are calling it a corporate coup d'etat because it's done with completely no oversight. | ||
There's no public input to this. | ||
And Obama's trying to pass it through. | ||
And every time he gives a speech about it, he just very briefly mentions this trade deal. | ||
And you're like, this is probably the biggest thing going on right now that no one is talking about. | ||
And it goes back to the corporate media structure. | ||
Because why would they want to talk about something that all of their benefactors are involved in? | ||
It's really scary shit. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
If it's really as simple as that, that is crazy. | ||
Yeah, one of the whole chapters, and it's gonna be like, it's gonna send more American jobs overseas. | ||
It's gonna make medicine costs higher. | ||
It's like every single thing is gonna be fucked up through this bill. | ||
Intellectual property rights. | ||
Remember SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act? | ||
It was like this huge thing. | ||
Aaron Swartz, before he died, was just like, this is terrible. | ||
He was on the front lines to defeat it. | ||
TPP has a whole chapter on intellectual property rights that basically would employ the worst aspects of SOPA, just blankly. | ||
So now Hollywood, the industries are getting behind TPP, wanting to pass it through because of that chapter. | ||
It's a mess. | ||
And there's no debate. | ||
Like, no one knows about this. | ||
It's awful. | ||
When is this supposed to be fast-tracked through? | ||
It's like gonna get fast-tracked through soon. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Trans-Pacific Partnership. | ||
Largest trade agreement in American history. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah, it's bad. | ||
Oh, wow, look it. | ||
An example is the opposite. | ||
Oh, I thought I said Chris Christie. | ||
I was like going back full circle. | ||
What is Chris Christie's role in this? | ||
Yeah, he's fast-tracking donuts to his fat face. | ||
Yeah, look, the biggest problem, the public doesn't know what's in the TPP. The text negotiated in secret hasn't been released. | ||
WikiLeaks provided a sample. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
I mean, it just takes globalization to a whole new level. | ||
Damn it, Abby Martin. | ||
I hate to end on a bummer. | ||
Oh, I'm so sorry. | ||
Are we over? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Man. | ||
Is there anything positive we can talk about before you leave? | ||
Yeah, I'm having an art show this Friday in Ventura. | ||
There we go. | ||
Art show in Ventura. | ||
Art show in Ventura. | ||
unidentified
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And this is an example of your art. | |
Oh, awesome. | ||
People can get a zoom in on that. | ||
Can you zoom in on that, Jamie? | ||
Where did I put it? | ||
Hold on. | ||
Is that good? | ||
This is something that Abby Martin gave me from the studio. | ||
Yeah, check it out. | ||
It's at a place called The Lab. | ||
Check it out in Ventura. | ||
I think that the positive takeaway is that there's so many people who are like-minded out there, and we just gotta free our minds, open our consciousness, do art, do music, get creative, put your voice out there, don't live in fear of the NSA. Stop getting disillusioned and disempowered from the federal government's ineptitude and criminality and just live true, be true. | ||
Find the like minds in your area because they're out there and it empowers you and it also motivates you to do shit locally. | ||
That's at least how I feel. | ||
I feel like we're so detached from each other in our technological society. | ||
Everyone's on their phones. | ||
No one talks to each other at the market. | ||
But I think that if you did, you'd find out that a lot of people think like you. | ||
You can get on the same page. | ||
You can make shit happen, man. | ||
I think a lot of us feel like we're kind of trapped in this big gigantic system that we don't really have a voice. | ||
We don't really have a say. | ||
But when enough like-minded people get together, then you do have a say. | ||
And that's never been more evident than today. | ||
Never been more evident as far as the impact. | ||
Remember when we were going to go into Syria? | ||
And then Obama had that big speech and, you know, essentially, like, it's on. | ||
And then the entire country went, fuck that! | ||
And then it stopped. | ||
All the rumbling stopped. | ||
And coincidentally, that's when the ISIS activity picked up, right afterwards. | ||
And then all of a sudden, we have this real issue with ISIS that was also involved in Syria. | ||
And see, we told you, these guys are bad. | ||
I think... | ||
What you're saying is like total hippie talk and a lot of people are gonna get really mad at you for it, but you're right in a lot of ways I mean this is just life it doesn't last that long and we're caught up in the lives of Millions of people that have been lived before us and the momentum of all these shitty decisions and all these bad choices and and really corrupt ideas that have sort of facilitated The system that's in place right now, | ||
it's almost like we're born into this system that we don't have any control over. | ||
You just gotta hone in on your passion and what speaks most to you. | ||
And you can't, I mean, you can't just live in constant misery of just how depressing the world is and how fucked up everything is because we are winning the information war. | ||
There is a global consciousness shift going on that is completely obvious and you're either a part of it or you're not. | ||
You know, I wonder sometimes when I think about America, because America has been around for just such a blip, when you think about human history. | ||
Human history has been around for a blip in terms of world history, but the United States is the real blip. | ||
I mean, 1776? | ||
That's a fucking joke. | ||
That's a couple hundred years ago. | ||
That ain't shit. | ||
I mean, that's amazing how short of a time that is. | ||
And in that time an entirely new nation has arisen and I always wonder like is there ever gonna come a point in time where people were like fuck this place and they do it in mass the same way they came to the new world You know, I wonder if like my family all came from immigrants my grandparents on both sides came from other countries Mostly Italy, but a little bit of Ireland, too. | ||
And it's because it sucked over there. | ||
And they took a chance in moving to another fucking land. | ||
And I always wonder, is it possible that in our lifetime or several lifetimes from now, whenever it is, that we find a spot and we all get together and go, you know what? | ||
Fuck this. | ||
You can't keep living like this. | ||
And maybe if we do, we or they, the people do, it's going to be the same thing that happened when the British tried to take back America, when we had the Revolutionary War. | ||
It almost seems like that's the only way things are ever gonna change in terms of like the way America was so radically different than the countries that we departed from. | ||
The countries that people immigrated from and came to America and the founding fathers of our country tried to establish this ideal environment, wrote the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, tried to make laws and rules that made sense, that taking into account all the errors of the past and all of the shit that they didn't want to deal with with Europe and with England create some sort of a new establishment some sort of a new Nation and I wonder if | ||
it's too late to do that again I don't think it is, and I think that it's unfortunate that you have politicians now on the backs of the ashes of the monarchy that we rose out of. | ||
Now you have these politicians protecting the last bastion of absolute monarchies in the world, which is these Gulf states. | ||
I think that once we realize that money is not What really makes us happy. | ||
And unfortunately, I just think a lot of people still don't understand that. | ||
It's really drilled into us with the materialistic society that we live in. | ||
But if people would understand that happiness comes from something much deeper, and that's why people in absolute destitute poverty can be happier than the richest person in the world. | ||
Well, they say Mexico is one of the happiest countries in the world, but yet one of the poorest countries in the world. | ||
And if you go to Mexico, it's such a laid-back sort of environment. | ||
I mean, everybody has this idea of Mexico based on the border states and the border cities and the drug war, which is because of America. | ||
unidentified
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That's because of our fucking insatiable desire for coke. | |
Oh, they already have a shirt, because America, that's why. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
The shirt already exists. | ||
Hmm, of course. | ||
Of course it exists. | ||
Why would I think it didn't exist? | ||
Right, absolutely. | ||
There's probably one that says, because Chris Kyle, America, that's the way, too. | ||
Well, that's coming. | ||
It's going to be your face on it. | ||
I wanted to talk more about this Cold War stuff, but we'll have to do that next time. | ||
Hopefully we can hold off on going to war with Russia in the meantime. | ||
Do you think we will? | ||
Do you really think we're in danger of going to war with Russia? | ||
I think that you have a lot of... | ||
There's war hawks that are on that side of the aisle who now want to shift the conversation to really aggressive posturing with Russia. | ||
It's very obvious. | ||
The Middle East is already destroyed and now Russia and China are the next big prizes. | ||
I think that they're very threatened by Russia, even though I don't know why, because Russia is not a really big, strong economic force. | ||
But I think it also perpetuates that enemy, right? | ||
To have an enemy to keep the military industrial complex churning, to keep this kind of like Cold War bullshit going. | ||
So people live in fear and there's nothing the establishment fears more than a populace not living in fear. | ||
Powerful lefty. | ||
Powerful lefty Abby Martin. | ||
Down with war, man. | ||
War is bad. | ||
War is bad. | ||
Let's do art. | ||
unidentified
|
War is bad. | |
Let's do art and hug it out. | ||
Everyone check it out, abbymartin.org, and check out my brother's documentary called American Anthrax if you want to learn more about the whole anthrax shit. | ||
And send all your love, not your hate, to Abby Martin on Twitter. | ||
If you hate, just don't say anything. | ||
Only if you hate Chris Kyle. | ||
Just keep... | ||
How dare you? | ||
Thank you. | ||
Abby, it's always awesome talking to you. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
unidentified
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It's always fun. | |
Let's do it more often. | ||
Yeah, absolutely, man. | ||
Now that you're free from the Russian shackles. | ||
unidentified
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All right. | |
We'll be back at 6 o'clock with Jim Norton. | ||
And that's it. | ||
See you soon. | ||
Bye-bye. |