Abby Martin and Joe Rogan expose U.S. foreign policy’s contradictions, from the $1.8M lawsuit debunking Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s fabricated heroism to ISIS’s rise linked to Iraq/Syria interventions. They critique Pentagon casualty counts, drone assassinations, and the militarization of society—like Star Wars’ failures and suspicious scientist deaths—while comparing Cuba’s healthcare-driven internationalism to U.S. exploitation of defectors. Martin highlights Skid Row’s neglect versus Cuba’s ration-based stability, Rogan dismisses Cuba’s system as oppressive; she counters with medical education access and Venezuela’s oil-for-doctors deals. The episode ends questioning why the U.S. clings to Guantanamo despite 1903 lease terms, even as it trades with nations like Saudi Arabia that still deny women basic freedoms. [Automatically generated summary]
I just feel like they're manufactured kind of outrage and feign outrage for people to just feel better.
I mean, yes, of course you should...
You know, love animals and love humans and have solidarity with all living things.
But it just seemed really manufactured, especially when I read interviews with people who lived there and they were like, who the fuck is Cecil the lion?
Like the way the hysteria in this country made it seem like he was like their national animal.
Like this was the lion that was like a beloved, the lion, right?
This beloved creature.
And everyone was like, why do Americans care so much about this lion?
I mean, someone else wrote a really poignant editorial, this African woman, and she was just like, there's so much death and destruction, basically, because of just so many things.
Globalization, especially with the raping of the Congo, the Civil War there.
And she was like, but lions matter more than black lives.
And that's the absolute truth.
I think when people can, you know, anthropomorphize this, like, creature and feel some sort of connection to it, you can do that about anything.
We do it with our dogs, but the truth is we're eating animals every day.
You know, it just seemed like picking and choosing just because it's this, like, majestic creature.
It actually hit me a little bit too close to home because I saw this wave of hysteria and vitriol against this guy and actual lambasting him with death threats over and over again.
People going and smearing blood on his office and stuff.
And I just was...
Really, really horrified because I was like, holy shit, this happened to me on a really like micro scale with the Chris Kyle stuff.
I was just like getting like incessantly peddled with death threats.
And that's awful.
It's wrong.
You can't do that to someone.
We're all human beings and you can't do that even if you hate someone or Think that they you know if you personally want someone to die like you can't just be like You should die because you hunted a line you should die because you wore a fuck Chris Kyle shirt I just think that apply it across the board and this kind of online bullying and like Driving people into a hole or doxing them and exposing their personal information because you disagree with something that they did It's wrong Mia Farrow dox the dentist Mia Farrow.
And I just want to make it very clear that I have a lot of respect for veterans and soldiers who choose to defect.
There's a lot of heroic people like Ben Griffin, Special Operations, and In the UK who basically went to Iraq and just refused to go back.
So there's a ton of amazing veterans and soldiers who I think that should be praised, especially when we're looking at something like the Iraq War, which was a complete disaster.
Countless dead, countless maimed.
Now ISIS is erupted.
So when we have these heroes that are mythologized in our society, and when we have someone like Chris Kyle, who's the pinnacle of what the hero should be from that war and rewriting the history of the Iraq War, I think it's really dangerous.
I talked about what I really felt about Chris Kyle.
People got really upset.
My friend Leo, who runs this clothing company, printed a shirt.
A one-off shirt.
Fuck Chris Kyle.
He wanted me to wear it.
I was like, yeah, fuck it.
Let's take a photo.
I posted it on my Instagram account.
My Instagram account doesn't have that many followers.
I did not know the shitstorm that would be ensuing whatsoever.
I wore the Fuck Chris Kyle shirt.
Tits out.
You know, two weeks go by and I was like, whatever.
Nothing happened.
I wake up to every...
Like, it almost started where I was like, oh shit, this is going to be a really good art project because I was getting peddled with like the craziest shit you've ever heard.
Like rape...
Like, genital mutilation so detailed that I was like, is this ISIS actually writing these comments?
Because it seems like these people actually admire ISIS because it's like the most grotesque, disturbing things about my vagina and what they wanted ISIS to do to it that I was like, holy fuck, like, you guys must have, like, some sick admiration for ISIS. Now, when you saw that, do you report those people?
So, it started...
I remember I was going to Baltimore and I just was getting it so frequently that I was like, holy fuck.
So my Instagram account, I had to make it private immediately because people had gone through and said, we're going to put our raping shoes on and find you, all this shit.
So I shut that down.
And then I went on Facebook and saw that every single art post that I had on my art page, every single public.
So I didn't want to shut it down because I was like, I don't want to Defer to these threats but at the same time it was getting so extreme that I couldn't handle like the volume of of death and rape threats because at first I was like cataloging them and I was like okay I'm taking screenshots of all these I'm gonna make this giant like like art project and I was like no fuck this this is like not this is actually getting way way too crazy and then I got doxxed by this guy This veteran who basically just wrote me and he was
like, hey, I just posted your address and all the veteran and sniper forms.
I was like, there's sniper forms?
And he was like telling people, you know, how to find you.
And then I found out that my mom got doxxed.
So my mom's personal information got exposed.
And so luckily I was already moving in a week, but I was just like, this is this is bad shit crazy.
So I tried to contact the cops for like the I think there was like 10 really graphic like I'm going to come to your house this Saturday.
Cut your clit off like let you bleed to death on the floor like just I mean things like that I was like and it was a person's public Facebook page you can see is like license plate in the photo he had like a baby You know they're just like these people out there who are just totally proud to be like completely homicidal and and rapey and really Sociopathic acting so I went to the cops and I was just like look there's like five people who I know who they are They've said that they're going to come kill me or rape me or cut my clit off and I was like is there anything that you can you can do and And they basically
It just upset me so much because people were comparing me to Pamela Geller.
They're like, okay, Abby can wear a Fuck Chris Kyle shirt and Pamela Geller can have the Draw Muhammad contest.
I'm like, first of all, stop deifying Chris Kyle as a prophet.
That's insane.
Second of all, we're not talking about a marginalized portion of society, which is Arabs who are basically this generation's demonized I was like, we're talking about Chris Kyle, which is like the peak of the Empire, this, you know, homicidal soldier who's like glorified in war propaganda and shit.
So you can't really compare the two.
But I just think it's really important to understand the real history of the Iraq War.
And I think American Sniper really not only whitewashed it, but just doubled down on the myth.
And, you know, the establishment chooses these war heroes to perpetuate and Chris Kyle is not a hero.
I think that there are countless heroes that we would be much more appropriate to hail.
What's hard to, when you look at a story like the American Sniper story, it's hard to figure out what really happened.
Because there were definitely some fabrications.
So it's hard to figure out, okay, military people, when they retire, they do not get much money.
It's piss poor and it's quite an embarrassment.
It's an embarrassment as far as the way they're treated medically.
The UFC has worked really hard to provide money for the Intrepid Institute for traumatic brain injuries, which is a huge issue with soldiers because the medical community has made so many incredible advances that people lived that didn't live, you know, 30, 40 years ago.
So now these guys are living with some significant brain injuries.
And while we were doing one of these fundraisers, it was hitting me.
I was like, why?
The amount of billions and billions of dollars that are spent on this war, how the fuck could they not allocate a similar amount to take care of the soldiers?
It's because the soldiers don't have a voice.
Nobody gives a fuck for them.
Nobody cares.
So when these guys retire, there's not a lot of options.
And so I was trying to figure out, okay, why would a guy like Chris Kyle...
Make up all these stories.
He was talking about shooting carjackers in Texas.
That turned out to not be true.
He said he was shooting people in Katrina that were looting.
There was all these stories that didn't hold water.
And I was trying to think, do you think maybe this guy was trying to fabricate a bunch of crazy shit and put it in his book because it would make the book more sensational and sell and this would be a way that this guy could provide for his family.
Oh, you mean like bringing it back to the human level?
I'm sure.
But I mean, I keep going back to the people who just...
It's like, yeah, I feel for soldiers who come back with traumatic brain injuries.
But I do honestly think, especially, you know, dating a veteran who was in the initial invasion of Iraq and stuff, there are people who join the military because they want to kill people.
A lot of people join the military because they have no options.
A lot of people join the military because they believed in the Iraq War.
And the war on terror, and a lot of people just want to slaughter people, and I think Chris Kyle was one of those people, unfortunately.
Well, I think we should feel for all humans equally, especially people that we don't know and the idea that they're not as valuable because they live over there.
If there was something that happened over here where there was a foreign invasion that caused a million casualties from innocent civilians, we would be up in arms and horrified.
And I don't know what the real numbers are for the Iraq invasion because it's hard to figure it out.
There's a bunch of different argued numbers.
Let's say it's the lowball number, which is more than 100,000 innocent civilians.
That's horrific.
It's horrific to think that that's the lowball number, and the highball number is somewhere around, I think, 2 million.
Well, here's the problem, and this is all I'm going to say about Sam, because I know that you offered the debate, and I really appreciate that, and I really, really appreciate you offering that, because I know that we've been going back and forth on Twitter and shit.
Or he, you know, just the fire hose of bullshit saying that all I was saying was like hyperbolic, sensational figures and stuff.
And the problem that I have with Sam Harris and debating him is that I don't feel like I should or need to debate a neuroscience about foreign policy.
I'm interested in what he has to say about neuroscience and interesting things about what he's studied, but as far as someone arguing with me about US foreign policy and empire, who's a neuroscientist, I don't see any reason that I would get out of that, especially someone who talks about mass casualties with zero empathy.
Journalists, I think, are much more credible than just like scientists who are just jumping in the mix, new atheism movement, and just being like, let's have a giant debate all about Islam.
But I mean, the information is kind of available to anybody in this day and age, right?
What he is, maybe he has a degree in neuroscience and he is a neuroscientist, but really he's an author.
He researches things and he talks about things and agree with him or disagree with him in the way he presents the numbers and the way he's presenting this argument.
I think...
There's a lot of debate as far as how many people died over there.
Yeah, I just think it's funny that that's what he hammered in on, is me basically blowing up the numbers when he basically went to the most extreme, small calculations that have been determined by military personnel.
When basically, the General Dempsey said, we don't do body counts.
That's what he said during the Iraq War.
We don't do body counts.
So, yeah, it is really hard to tell how many people died, but the International Business Times did a study in 2006 that said a million were dead at that point.
And they include, but they include Shia and Sunni infighting as well, right?
Which is, a lot of it was caused by the Iraq War, which really triggered a huge amount of Civil unrest because there was a power struggle going on between the Sunni and the Shia, which was more under control when Saddam Hussein was in control of Iraq.
That is calculated in that casualty figure that's talked about when it comes to the Iraq war.
And I think that's one of the things that he argues against, that you can't attribute that to the United States military invasion, because it's sort of a side effect of the military invasion, the civil war that's going on there.
The happenstance but the truth is everyone knew what was gonna happen so you know Well, I think that's what he's just saying that it's difficult to attribute that number to what the United States is responsible for because it's really civil war Based on a complete destabilization and destruction of an entire entire population an entire population that was run by an evil dictator and his homicidal sociopathic sons and And?
Yeah, I mean, it was all gross before that, too.
I mean, more people are dead now, but it was gross then, it's gross now.
The whole part of the world is terrifying.
You know, the thing about ISIS, did you see that shit where they blew up some ancient structures a couple days ago?
They blew up some ancient monuments.
Pull that up, because this is fucking terrifying.
They beheaded some guy who's the head of antiquities in Syria.
Apparently, this beloved guy who just was unwilling to bow to their demands, they behead this guy, and then they blew up some ancient monuments, some really well-preserved ancient structures that were, you know, archaeological treasures.
Yeah, now we're in Syria with ISIS. And Obama just issued this statement saying, like, we can now attack Assad forces while battling ISIS if we need to.
So it's just another proxy war that's gotten completely out of hand.
And now we have, like, look at these people that were, like, training, too.
Basically training all these Syrian revolutionaries, all these people in these rebel groups, and then they go over, they either abandon post after we spend a shitload of money training them to fight ISIS, or they join ISIS. It's a complete disaster.
Well, it's hard to get Muslims to fight against Muslims, you know, when their core values and their core beliefs and religion are so much a part of their life.
And then they have these people that are telling them that you're supposed to fight these people that have these same core values that celebrate Ramadan, that believe in halal.
It's so interesting, though, when you look at every civil war that's happened in the last 10 years, like Libya, and then you have Ukraine going on, Syria.
You're about to, you're a part of a military decision that who knows how many fucking people it's gonna kill, whether or not it's gonna trigger World War III, whether it's gonna trigger a new nuclear war, and he's playing poker on his phone.
Because it's just fucking KGB, motherfucker, you know?
It's so funny watching him.
Every time he does a sit-down, he always just says the weirdest shit.
He's just on another level.
Like Obama tried to crack a joke with him.
They were sitting at some press conference and it's him and Obama sitting there and he just like looks at Obama and he's like, you're trying to make this funny right now and it's not or something like just like completely Obama's like sitting there nervously laughing.
Well, you remember when that guy who's the guy that got murdered in broad daylight with his girlfriend that was Nobody remembers that's that's what happens when you kill Putin people just forget your name and it just Water under the bridge just vanish.
That's a fucking crazy country right now Roy Jones Jr. is going to be a citizen.
Roy Jones Jr. is going to be a citizen in Russia.
Apparently, this is what he said, which is fucking hilarious.
He goes, the people of Russia love Roy Jones Jr. I love it when people love me.
But I definitely think that, God, can you imagine who was just surrounding him at all times?
Like he had Hillary Clinton barking in his ear, McCain, like these crazy neocons who are just like, we need more war.
And I think that you saw all the neocon establishment really promoting Obama until the Syria thing happened where we backed down.
And that's where you kind of saw this like ridiculous schism where now Netanyahu is coming to visit and it's like this crazy where Obama is like weak now.
Yeah, and the moments he's dying, like the moments they captured him, and they're all screaming, and you're seeing something that no one has ever seen before.
It's never been documented and then distributed to everybody.
I mean, we could all watch it.
We could watch it right now.
Jamie could pull it up right now, and we could kick back from the comfort of this Woodland Hills office suite and watch this fucking guy get bayoneted in his asshole.
You know, this disaster porn that's put out there by like JSOC in this video.
And yeah, I know the US didn't film the video, but it was showed everywhere.
And we also released photos of Saddam's sons with all the bullet holes in them on TV and shit.
And we're like, look, like, look what we did.
That's fucking sick, man.
And, you know, we can see ISIS videos all day long of these crazy Hollywood style sets where people are getting beheaded and it's like in Gitmo jumpsuits and it's like this crazy fucking manifestation of like Hollywood culture and the military industrial complex rolled into one.
But at the same time, you have our military uploading every drone strike on a fucking YouTube channel.
All I know is that ISIS has gotten a shitload of US military equipment and billions of dollars.
So maybe we should stop just a bit like, you know, all of the stuff that we've tried to train the Iraqi army, like it isn't working because they're abandoning posts and like ISIS is just taking large swaths of like equipment and Humvees and grenade launchers and shit.
So, I mean, when I look at stuff like that happening, it's just like we just need to remove ourselves from the situation and let like allied states that are in the area really take hold of Of what's going on.
If you look at what's going on with ISIS right now, I mean, when they're decapitating the Syrian head of antiquities and blowing up these ancient, cherished monuments, is there justifiable war?
Well, war with ISIS because ISIS was created out of the vacuum of just a large war and countless casualties and refugees and the civil war thing that happened there.
So I think that ISIS is a direct result of US military intervention.
So I think that more US military intervention to stop ISIS is just going to exacerbate the problem.
And I definitely do not think that that should be an option whatsoever.
First it was al-Qaeda, now it's like ISIS is pulling at people's heartstrings so much because they're seeing these crazy images and it's like, how can we just sit back and do nothing?
The thing is, there's genocides happening in the Congo.
Are we going to go invade and take out...
I mean, it's just like, why are we picking and choosing what we're putting in front of the TV screens and brainwashing everyone and saying, what are you going to do about ISIS? First it was fucking Ebola.
There's so much going on, I just think, to hone in on ISIS and just say, like, we all need to focus on destroying ISIS militarily is just a farce, because A, it came out of military intervention, and B, we're not going to fucking destroy ISIS. It's just going to galvanize more people to join ISIS. That's why their recruiting is so high across the world.
People are just like, fuck this.
I mean...
They're being drawn to ISIS because of the endless warfare going on.
So I just think, I don't have the answers.
I do think that regional players need to take a step in.
That means Syria, that means Iraq, people in the region that understand the region and are not coming from this neocolonial lens and just like, all we have is military solutions because that's all we fucking know!
I don't think that there's any clear solution, and I think that's a real part of the problem.
I think that everybody who looks at ISIS decapitating this Syria head of antiquities and blowing up monuments and lighting people on fire with slow motion.
I mean, did you see that video that they did where they have slow motion video cameras, like complicated techniques, where they're showing these people getting It lit on fire.
I mean, what they're doing is promoting terror.
They're trying to scare people, and they're doing it with these videos.
68 years without lighting in these buddies fucking city so it glows in the dark.
That's kind of crazy.
That's amazing.
But what's truly amazing is how much ignorance was involved in the testing process, the initial bombs that they blew up in the desert where they had soldiers run at the bombs.
See if you can find those, Jamie, because they're amazing.
No, they didn't do it because they didn't think it was going to affect them.
They were teaching them to run towards the blast.
The idea would be that this nuclear bomb would go off, everybody would be disoriented and fucked up, and that these American G.I.s would run in there and take over!
My god look at like the not just the plume, but those crazy like light or smoke formations to the left You know what my favorite one is the one that they did in the ocean Yeah, the one they didn't really know how much of an impact it was gonna have they fucking just tried shit Yeah,
you know just like they tried this see if you could find the ocean the video of the ocean nuclear explosions that they did I think they did it off of Guam I think that's where it was I don't remember though, but they they had all these Battleships that they stationed around where the bombs would go off.
And when they did it, everything got fucked up.
I mean, everything anywhere near it got fucked up.
It's just a really, really horrifying museum because we grow up...
That is probably the biggest myth that we grow up learning is that the bombs were necessary to end the war and that they saved lives and It's just like a way to legitimize a really horrific atrocity.
Well, the issue is that Japan was already willing to surrender and that we didn't want them to surrender because we wanted to try the bombs out.
Whether or not that's true, that's the big debate.
And that's something that a lot of people...
We still to this day argue back and forth on whether or not it's actually the case.
If it is the case, it's even more horrific, because just like what they wanted to do in the ocean, where they tried that bomb out and watched a mile-high wave of water overcome that fucking battleship, they wanted to see what happens when you drop that shit on a city.
It's just these people kind of holding on to this last ditch like gasp of air just to hold on to like American exceptionalism.
And it really just is totally debunked at this point because even Truman himself instilled an atomic bomb survey.
University of Colorado featured a compilation of just like dozens of American military experts and leaders Internal interviews, diaries, other declassified materials basically involved in the bomb decision and all of them had one unanimous commonality among them that every single one said the bomb was not of military necessity and it did not need to happen for the surrender that Japan was ready to surrender.
Because if you remember, I think like 100,000 or maybe 80,000 people were incinerated in Tokyo just weeks prior with the firebombing.
So the US had already dropped all these bombs, basically eviscerated Tokyo.
And so countless people died.
Way more people actually died then in the initial atomic bomb drops.
So it's just a really, really unfortunate kind of thing that's perpetuated and people just still hold on to it.
You know, they say it would have saved lives.
It's like, well, it would have saved U.S. soldiers' lives, but instead it took like probably half a million Japanese, if you look at the countless maimed and radiation poisoning.
I mean, I think like 80,000 died instantly with the incineration of the blasts.
The only argument that could be said that it saved lives is that it kept other people from using nuclear weapons because they're so horrific.
Otherwise, you look at all the war that has taken place since 1947 and not one person has used a nuclear bomb, it could be argued that it was because how horrific that was when it did happen.
And it's also, like, irritating that the U.S. is the one fear-mongering the world about, like, he can't have a nuclear bomb, he can, he can't, and it's like, well, you guys are the only ones who've only used them twice, so why are we the arbitrators of who and who cannot utilize nuclear weapons?
It doesn't mean that there aren't people that genuinely go into the military, like I'm sure your boyfriend did, thinking that they're going to do good, that they have these ideals that they want to protect.
They want to protect liberty and they believe in the American way of life.
And then, you know, it all gets convoluted because you're either with us or against us.
Yeah, the people that are complete neocons, that are complete chicken hawks, that are outside of the consequences of war, that are the ones pulling the strings.
I think there's a big problem with just the militarization of our society where we have, you know, every sports game has this giant military just like drama thing going on where we put taxpayer sponsored fucking fighter jets flying over the stadiums and shit.
I mean, every single thing is militarized.
And we're when we're conditioned in this way to glorify the military so much that it becomes and especially when you're at the helm of the empire, that is the largest military force in the world that's consolidated like military superpower.
That's the only solution to everything.
Yeah, Ebola sent in the fucking military ISIS.
Let's bomb them more riots in the streets or like, you know, let's send in the fucking militarized riot cops who just got trained next to Israeli troops in Bahrain and It's like, good God.
I mean, we need to start really removing ourselves with this kind of militaristic, I don't know, characterization of our society because it's really fucking toxic, man.
Well, and also, it creates military problems abroad because the rest of the world identifies us with that as well.
And if we're doing shit like what we've done in the Iraq War, which, whatever the number is, whether it's Sam Harris's number, the one that he adheres to, or whether it's the one that the far left adheres to, It's a lot of fucking people.
It's a lot of fucking people died.
And those people, it creates, without a doubt, martyrs.
And it creates, without a doubt, support for the opposition.
Because we're looked at, in other parts of the world, as the dark empire.
And also, if they're Muslim and they support Muslim ideals, and then they see that these people, who are of a completely different faith, are attacking and invading their homeland, It's pretty easy to support that.
And then it just piles on, and next thing you know, we got a problem.
And we got a current problem, and we have a past problem, and we got a future problem.
And we have a military-industrial complex that's just fucking raking it in and loves problems.
Because problems means we get to make more missiles, and more missiles means more money, and it keeps going.
But one of the best parts about it was McGovern, when he was recounting his days with Hunter, when Hunter was writing that...
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and he followed around the press corps for a year and wrote that book.
But McGovern was just talking about how he was just sick and tired of old men in air-conditioned buildings making decisions that are to send young men off to war.
And I'll just never forget the way he was saying that.
And you know, McGovern, when he was doing that, He was an old guy when they were doing that documentary.
He died in 2012. But he was old when they were doing that documentary.
And he was just, I'm just tired of it.
I'm tired of it.
And he died very shortly after that documentary was made.
So this is like some of the last days of his life.
And he ran for president in, was it the 70s?
72, I think?
70?
72?
72?
Whatever it was, but it was during the Vietnam War.
And it's just that kind of voice.
He didn't win.
One of the reasons why he didn't win is because his vice presidential candidate turned out that he had undergone shock therapy, electrical shock therapy, and kind of hid that from everybody, and it came out during the campaign.
But he was ahead.
McGovern was ahead.
And part of the reason why he was ahead was because Hunter was supporting him, and Hunter was writing for the Rolling Stone.
He would write crazy shit.
That was where...
He wrote about Ed Muskie, who was also running for president.
He was saying that Ed Muskie was bringing in Brazilian doctors and they were treating him for his Ibogaine addiction.
Yeah, and that Ed Muskie was clearly exhibiting signs, and it was really funny because they interviewed Hunter on one of these, in the documentary, he's on one of these talk shows.
He goes, well, there was a rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine, and I started the rumor.
But he was a journalist, but he wasn't.
I mean, he was a journalist, but he was writing fiction.
But he was like, I thought everybody knew.
I thought everybody knew it was bullshit.
He's my favorite of all time.
He's one of my favorite people that's ever lived.
And he knew it was bullshit, but he thought...
Other people knew it was bullshit, but he also knew that he could make an impact with this.
So he thought that Muskie was just this fucking ridiculous hack.
So he just mocked him and talked about him being under the throes of this addiction, that he had brought in this Brazilian doctor, and...
And then Muskie, like, had these breakdowns on the campaign trail, because he was dealing with the...
Because nobody had ever dealt with that kind of negativity from the press before.
Nobody ever running for president had dealt with just someone fabricating craziness about them.
And it's the pressure of this, you could tell he wasn't...
Today, if you run for president and you don't have a thick skin, you can't deal with people getting mad at you on Twitter, making shit up about you in the HuffPost or whatever they would want to do, you really shouldn't be running for president.
You have to develop some sort of rhino skin at this point in time.
There had only been a few presidents that were on TV. And they don't have the billion dollar campaigns where they have a spin master trying to skew it all.
Yeah, I mean arguably right up there the most powerful figurehead in the world if not the most powerful Certainly top four or five just thought of something really fucking crazy The bomb that we saw the atomic bomb that was obviously dropped on Hiroshima Nagasaki We have that's like fucking baby shit.
Yeah hydrogen.
Yeah 33 hundred times stronger I don't even understand.
I think the expectation for continuing the trillion dollars that they're going to spend just updating and refurbishing the nuclear arsenal is that they keep doubling down on the fucking Star Wars fantasy that Reagan had.
Gorbachev went to Reagan and he was like, let's disarm.
Let's fucking end it.
And Reagan was like, no, I'm senile and I want to create this giant Star Wars program that's going to like You know, like this shield in the sky and we're going to do this and that.
And everyone was like, all right, it's never gonna fucking work.
And of course it didn't.
But that's still like a justification to battle asteroids, to have these nuclear weapons here and continue to...
Like, if you have something, you don't annihilate it.
If you have something that has mass, it's five miles across, you're going to develop a hundred, you know, half-mile ones or whatever, you know, or 500-yard ones.
No, go ahead, just do your pee and I'll have Jamie pull this up.
Pull up, I want you to pull up the Star Wars scientists that have been killed.
Star Wars scientists that have either been murdered or committed suicide.
Because what's really fascinating about the Star Wars program is I'll have to at least slightly reiterate this when young Abby Martin gets back because I don't think she is completely aware of this but when the Star Wars weapons defense system was created the idea behind it was the United States was going to create a military they were going to create some sort of a military solution with satellites that could shoot
these missiles out of the sky now While they were doing it they were spending fuck loads of money on this and apparently it was never effective and If you you could pull up the numbers just pull up like there's a list of all the Star Wars see if you could find a better article See like that who killed all the Star Wars?
Scientists here's see if you could find out could go to like a rents is rents legit R-E-N-S-E is not like a super conspiracy website Mysterious deaths of scientists.
Like, scientists killed.
Star Wars scientists murdered, killed.
But a giant number of them have all been killed.
Let's see...
I don't know, like, what's a good...
What's a good, like, website for this?
We should probably find a good one.
Because there's so many fucking goofy conspiracy theory websites that lump the Star Wars people in with chemtrails.
So, the...
The Star Wars program, the theory being, the Star Wars program was apparently never really effective.
And the scientists that were behind the Star Wars program, a fuckload of them died.
Like, by suicide, by murder, and there's a giant list of them.
And it's one of the most fascinating conspiracies in modern time.
You find it?
Okay.
These guys that knew, the people that knew, the scientists, the engineers, dead.
Like, almost all of them.
They all died, like, murdered, suicide, and, like, very, very suspicious.
Someone did, like, a number.
Like, you know, they did, like, a percentage.
Like, what are the odds that all these people were murdered?
The Star Wars program, they had spent millions, untold billions of dollars to develop this completely ineffective system to shoot missiles out of the sky.
It was never proven to work, ever.
And those scientists are all dead as fuck!
Here it goes.
Dead scientists.
Look at this.
There's the list.
Marconi scientists mystery.
The 1980s.
Over two dozen science graduates and experts working on the Marconi or Plessy?
How do you say that?
Plessy?
P-L-S-C-C-Y? Plessy, yeah.
Plessy.
S-S-S-Y? Defense systems died in mysterious circumstances, most appearing to be suicides.
The MOD denied these scientists had been involved in the classified Star Wars projects and that the deaths were in any way connected.
Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Godley, expertise, head of work-study union at the Royal College of Military Science, circumstance of death, disappeared mysteriously.
If the people are interested in going over to some place that we don't belong, killing people, the idea that they're not going to kill you because you want to stop them from killing people, that's crazy.
Pat Tillman's brother believes that Pat Tillman was killed because he was speaking up because he was a very public figure and then he was speaking out against the war.
You know, that's going back to the little Chris Cowell thing because every single myth that has been resurrected out of the Iraq invasion has been like, you know, the Pat Tillman thing.
They were so hard and on for Pat Tillman because he really was a fucking hero.
I mean, he's abandoning like a million dollar career.
To go fight, you know, because he really believed it.
And he's really fucking smart, and he realized that it was based on lies and shit, and he had this diary, and it's an incredible documentary that just talks about his transition, and people who knew him, and when he was changing his mind, and he had this diary all written up, and they fucking burned it, dude.
When they killed him, if they did, they say it was friendly fire, who knows?
But his brother thinks that it was targeted, I don't know.
But he definitely would have come out and been, like, another, like, Chomsky.
Like, he would have come out and said...
He would have been a figurehead against the war and he died from friendly fire and then they burned all of his shit.
And they said she was raped and all of a sudden she was like the Iraqi like military was like helping her just put her in a hospital and like taking care of her.
The narrative was that she was trapped and she was being kidnapped by the Iraqis and that the United States military went in and rescued her.
And she was this hero and she was paraded around on television, but she spoke out against it and she got death threats and she essentially vanished and she just went quiet on it and they never talked to her again.
I mean, when you're dealing with death and you're dealing with what you would call sanction murder, right?
I mean, that's what...
Look, if...
If you're in the military and you are supposed to go over there and shoot some bad guys, whether they're good or bad guys, you're going to go murder those people.
That's sanctioned murder.
And it's one of the weirdest things about civilization is that we salute sanctioned murder.
Murder is awful.
When you don't like someone and you kill them, we want to lock you up.
But if we tell you you can kill someone, as long as it's written down on paper and we all collectively agree, but we don't really collectively agree.
That's where it gets weird.
There's a small group of people that decide who you can and can't kill, and then everybody else has to fall in line.
Well, if those people were beyond reproach, if they were these incredibly enlightened people that had only our best wishes and hopes in mind and could not make a bad decision, Well, then it makes sense to just give in to them.
They're smarter than us.
We're the ants and they're the geniuses and we'll just follow along.
And the thing that bothers me about the Obama administration is that he's feigned as this like transparency president.
You know, we talked about the whistleblower thing.
It's like everything's the opposite of what it is.
It's like this Orwellian new era where you have the NSA spying now like the Patriot Act sunsetted.
We think the Patriot Act's over it wasn't.
It was just that the clause that they were able to illegally spy on us through the NSA in the Patriot Act expired and then they just passed a new law to basically codify illegal spying just through another caveat.
And the Pentagon just issued this field manual to basically for all the branches in the military and in it, I guess, because citizen journalism is like on the rise and it's really hard to distinguish like who is like an official established journalist or not.
Or who's like embedded with the enemy.
And they basically said that journalists can be killed legally now by US military personnel.
When they look back at us in the future, when they, you know, civilizations 100, 200 years from now, look back at what we're, you know, when we look back at World War II and looking at these people that were running towards this bomb, you know, we look at them like, fuck, man, these poor bastards.
I was just thinking the other day about reality TV and how back in the day we had the fat lady at the circus and the bearded lady.
It's like we still have that.
It's just in the realm of reality television where we're trying to empathize with this fat lady, but really we're just watching a giant whale live her life and it's just like the circus.
And it's the same with horror movies and shit.
We don't have the Coliseum, but we still like people being ripped limb from limb.
And blood and fucking guts.
It's something about us.
And yeah, it's evolved through technology, but it's still that weird innate human trait that I don't really understand.
Because I'll watch the, I'm walking on sunshine, the episode of the girls doing the duster, and I'm like, alright, I guess I don't feel bad about smoking this much weed, because I'm I'm not eating tape.
I wonder what it is about human beings that when everything is great and you have too much resources and it's too easy to get food, we just start getting really fucking strange.
It's probably bullshit, most likely, but sounds from the sky, like crazy, like horns, and people are trying to figure out what these sounds were.
Well, they took a video, this one guy sent in this video, where he was just, it was actually, it's really hilarious, because the one guy that they put the video, he was like a chemtrail believer.
And it's so interesting, Joe, because I had an agent for a little while looking for work and stuff, and every single thing, because I guess I come from the same questioning government narratives, and oh shit, you're tinfoil hot wearer if you fucking question what the government tells you.
And so it's always these shows.
They're like, we're starting a show to basically dissect...
JFK and chemtrails.
I'm like, isn't there anything else fucking happening other than like the same five fucking things that you guys want to create shows around?
I don't think like, I think a lot of substances are just not, that's why vitamins, if you get vitamins, like most vitamins, you look at them, they're not really effective after like six months or a year.
They become less and less effective over time.
I'm pretty sure that's the case with LSD. Don't Don't quote me on it, though.
But I know it is with weed.
Is it?
Yeah, yeah.
Old weed doesn't get...
Unfortunately, it doesn't last.
It's like life.
You gotta get it when it's hot and fresh and young.
We just took this epic road trip and got back this morning, which was amazing, but I wanted to tell your audience just about the Utah thing because it was so funny.
I mean, here you are in these fucking massive rock formations carved by millions of years of water, sandstone, fucking...
Whatever, like, slate, all this shit.
Insane!
Like, anyone who has not been to Utah, you need to go.
Bryce Canyon National Park is one of the most absurd things I've ever seen.
It's like these things called hoodoos that are just carved over millions of years with a stone.
Anyway, Arches National Park, obviously that iconic, like, all the orange arches that are carved in...
Millions of years like we can carbon date them.
We know the geological processes very easy to explain through science So we're reading the official park literature and I'm just like man I'm like so so fascinated like how did this form and so like crazy and it makes you just like Appreciate time like that's what the desert is like you fucking appreciate time Like that is it's like you look at that and that's the top of the grand staircase Joe.
That's the newest part of the grand staircase That's amazing.
It looks like a standing army Yeah, people that are just listening to this, what it looks like, obviously it's not, but it looks like something that someone has designed.
So anyway, in this official park literature in Arches, it explains everything very precisely.
At the very end of it, it's just like, okay, we just explained how all of this worked.
This is the history of Arches National Park.
And then it says, probably...
All of the evidence is circumstantial.
And I was just like, what the fuck?
I was like, what do you mean?
All the evidence is circumstantial.
I was like, all the evidence is not circumstantial.
All the evidence is proven.
We know how old these rocks are.
We know exactly what's carved them.
We can test all the sediments.
We can test all the rocks.
So I was just like, holy shit, like, has the Mormon lobby just lobbied all the fucking parks in Utah, which are the best parks in the country and the most amazing state, and basically forced them to say, none of this is real.
unidentified
Joseph Smith in 1820 was 14 years old.
He found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus.
That the lost tribe of Israel were the Native Americans?
You didn't know that?
Yeah.
What?
They even tested, this guy was this rich Mormon dude, tested Native American DNA to try to prove that they were Israeli and that they were the lost tribes of Israel.
Mitt Romney actually has a really interesting story, because he, at Bain Capital, when he ran Bain Capital, he was, like, taken in and trained by Monsanto executives.
And he, like...
I think he was given his first big loan by a Monsanto executive, and then he was like, all right, y'all, you guys are a fucking toxic chemical company, fucking Agent Orange, all this shit, real bad.
Real bad look.
Why don't we shift this over to food now?
So he basically was behind this giant PR push to switch Monsanto over from chemicals to biotech, which is really interesting to be like, why is Mitt Romney's in the fold?
You know, it's just like super weird that he was just like right there in the wings kind of helping foster this transition is super weird.
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is just like, yeah, it's like abortion's legal, and I would rather them utilize the tissue for something that's scientific instead of just throwing it in the garbage can, so...
I think what a lot of people were worried about, not just this, is that they were going to somehow or another influence people to do it for money, influence people to have abortions for money.
Yeah, it's super confusing because the video implies that Planned Parenthood was profiting off of it and that this woman was trying to say that she could sort of structure it so they could make more money.
Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown, is now the flashpoint in a debate about whether employers should be required to fully cover contraception even if they have religious objectives.
But a guy who got prosecuted for some drug-related offense.
And the...
The fucking judge literally told him when he was sentencing him that he was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the way over and how Rush was saying that we have to give drug abusers a wake-up call and that drug abusers need to know that there's consequences for their actions.
So because of this, I'm gonna fucking sentence you for X amount of blah blah blah blah blah.
But this was right before Rush got popped for chewing like 90 oxys a day and having his fucking maid go out and buy him for him with her assumed names.
She's wearing a fake mustache and shit.
Oh, my bike is not so good.
And she's buying a fucking...
But this guy was like talking about this crazy shit on the radio while he was popping pills.
It's like, yeah, I'm sure that you've seen, you know, you've traveled to a lot of countries, seen a lot of horrible poverty, went to Haiti, saw bad things, but then there's really nothing that compares to Skid Row because it's this crazy community Living on the fucking street just taking over downtown LA like excess of humanity that's just spilled out Mentally ill drug.
I mean, they're just like shooting up in the street taking a shit It's it's fucking nuts thousands of them thousands Yeah, and it's blocks and blocks and blocks just like society is just like abandoned this portion of their people It's very surreal and really scary and we live right by there.
It's an interesting thing You know someone wants to look them and go how do we capitalize in this market?
So many people right there.
They all have similar interests It's a fucking crazy scene.
I remember the first time I was there, we were filming Fear Factory downtown and we were real close to it and someone brought it up and we drove by and I was like, you gotta be I'm fucking kidding.
During the Reagan administration, they sort of changed the rules for what made you mentally ill and what, you know, what the distinctions were, and that's when they sort of opened up the doors and let all these people out on the street.
I remember it, like, really, really clearly when I was a kid, because there was a big debate, like, oh, like, wait a minute, you can't, there's a lot of people that are like, you can't fucking do this, you can't just change the classification For people that have mental illness, but they did and all throughout New York and Boston there was like all these like new Mentally ill people wandering around the streets.
Yeah there I just read the statistic that homelessness has gone up like 25% in the last four years and just in LA of people living in homes on freeway overpasses and shit and I remember like I posted I swear to god and I remember I posted and someone was like dude just move out they can't afford LA just move out and I'm like We can't afford to move.
Dude, speaking of, really quickly before we wrap it up, I wanted to tell you, we should talk about Cuba next time because I went there and did a whole report on it, but zero homelessness.
That was the most iconic thing about being in Cuba.
No trash, no homelessness.
Because everyone has their basic needs.
The shelter.
And there's a ration system and stuff.
But it was just interesting to see the low crime rate when people have basic shelter and healthcare.
A lot of problems.
Still very interesting.
Because it was very different than every other Latin American country.
I was just like, holy shit, there's no homeless people.
So that's what my friend who's an economist actually, when I came back from incubation, was like, so how is it?
Like, everyone's assigned a job.
And I was like, no, it's not like a brave new world where babies are born in incubators and like trained to be like, you're a doctor, you're a florist, you're this.
It's not like that at all.
And, you know, there is a ration system and they do get paid very little.
But it's just interesting because people just have a completely different mindset.
Like, I remember I spoke to a bunch of doctors and I was like, why are you a doctor?
You're not getting paid anything.
And they're like, why would I care about it?
They're like, I'm helping my community and family.
It's just like a totally, like a wall of understanding.
I'm like, I'm coming from the hub of capitalism and I'm like, I don't understand the incentive.
So they've also developed, instead of invading countries and bombing the shit out of people, they've also developed an entire, like, medical thing for their, like, So they basically lease out doctors around the world.
Even when you go back to, you know, the Haiti earthquake, they were the first country that sent out the biggest contingent of doctors.
Ebola, biggest contingent of doctors.
So they basically lease out, like, doctors to get oil from Venezuela, to, like, get help.
It's interesting because people are like, oh, well, they're, you know, they're, like, creating doctors to, like, just get oil and shit.
It's like, well, they're doing what they can with the resources that they have.
They're under a very crippling economic embargo.
They have subversion programs going on through USAID every year.
Despite the normalization process that's going on, the USAID is still spending $20 million a year to subvert Cuba's political process.
So we've subverted the hip-hop movement there.
We've created a fake HIV program.
We've created a fake Twitter called Zunzunio that's tried to get people against Castro.
But the most disturbing part is this medical internationalism, where you have 75,000 doctors Working around the world on all these fronts and the US has created a law that said you can defect to the US and become a doctor here and just leave your post.
So it's like why are we trying to like subvert like actual medical missions and humanitarian missions that Cuba is doing?
Really the only reason is because we want to subvert the socialist government that survived after the Cold War that we still fucking can't accept.
And there's also the wet foot, dry foot policy that offers Cuban immigrants, no other immigrant in the world has this, where you can just come here and just be an American citizen if you're Cuban.
No, and you know a lot of people, look, when you're Cuban and you're on a ration system and you're living in this country that's kind of isolated and you're like watching American movies and you're like, wow.
why the fuck am I here when I can be there?
You know, and you're seeing mountains of cocaine and AKs and shit and you're like, why are you...
But the problem is a lot of doctors defect and they come over here and then they're caught for years and years and years.
Their license doesn't apply.
They end up being like a waitress in a restaurant for a decade trying to become a practicing doctor.
But when I was over there, not only do they have free healthcare obviously for everyone in the country, but they also have an international medical school that trains doctors.
Whoever wants to train all over the world can go and just be a doctor for free.
So I met like 20 Americans who were there and I was like, why are you here getting your medical license?
And they're like, because I don't want to fucking be $100,000 in debt in America.
And they're like, I'm here to get my medical license so then I can go train and be a doctor.
So, a lot of shit can be talked about how things are run, but it's a totally different society when you have basic needs met and when healthcare and, like, humans come first out of necessity because of the blockade, because they had to create this, not necessarily of altruism, but it's evolved into such an insane just dichotomy of how society has, like, functioned.
And now Raul has like opened up some private enterprise and stuff.
And that was a whole diplomatic process within the country, too, where they lifted some economic things.
So now private businesses can flourish.
And so it's opening up because they've realized that they can't obviously have it like that forever, especially now that the travel's lifted.
But it's going to be really interesting to see what happens, especially now that the U.S. still has this subversion tactics going on, these programs in place that encourage people to defect, and then also Gitmo.
It's a perpetual occupation of fucking Cuba that Raul has said time and again, give us Guantanamo Bay, you leased it under false pretenses, we really want it back, and the U.S. says it's off the table.
Batista was, like, a corporate fucking lord, you know?
And so we had all these private enterprises in Cuba, and then the Socialist Revolution happened, and then...
The lease agreement said this has to be agreed by both parties to continue.
Or, I'm sorry, to dissolve.
And then when the Cuban Revolution happened, Cuba was like, give us back Guantanamo.
And the U.S. was like, you know what?
We don't agree to that.
So we're just going to keep it.
and they never accepted a dime they never cashed a dime for the rent of the lease after the 1956 or whatever the um the revolution was so yeah it was it was that's really disturbing to me because i'm like dude just give them back i'm going to pay like you can pretend that we're normal with cuba but it's never going to be normal unless you give them some respect and if you're so scared of socialism and if you are so sure that socialism is a failure then let them fail on their own lift the blockade and let Let's Cuba just function, and let's see what happens.
But right now, it's been so crippled in so many ways that it's impossible to really know what the country would be like without U.S. interference.
Well, it's very bizarre that we're allowed to trade with all sorts of different countries that are accused of all sorts of different heinous crimes against humanity, but we can't with Cuba.
I mean, just think about all the different countries that we're allowed to trade with.
I guess not 15. For the first time in the country's history, women in Saudi Arabia have been given the right to vote and stand as political candidates in the upcoming elections.