Abby Martin joins Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience to dissect RT’s moral dilemma—reporting U.S. police brutality while funded by a state framed as Putin’s propaganda—revealing its oligarchic alignment with Western capitalism. They expose media cover-ups: Lori Vallow’s 2001 death (medical examiner’s license revoked), the anthrax attacks post-9/11 (AIMS strain traced to U.S. labs), and Clinton’s $2.5B fundraising tied to Saudi Arabia, a "good ally" despite funding terrorism and executing dissenters. Martin links empire’s arrogance—like destabilizing Iraq to fuel ISIS—to systemic corruption, from the military-industrial complex’s weapon exports to the TPP’s corporate power grabs, arguing change demands globalized empathy over fear-based nationalism. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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The hunting community has blind reverence for Chris Kyle.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.