Dan Carlin and Joe Rogan dissect U.S. political decay, from NSC 68’s post-WWII intelligence expansion to CIA/NSA overreach—like warrantless tracking and drone strikes fueling retaliation—and Truman’s Korea precedent eroding presidential checks. They critique donor-driven campaigns (e.g., Clinton ambassadorships, Biden’s 1988 plagiarism) and media reliance on partisan operatives, while debating JFK’s assassination: Oswald’s lone shooter plausibility vs. Warren Commission’s discredited "magic bullet" theory, and CIA’s history of false-flag schemes like Operation Northwoods. Ultimately, the conversation reveals systemic corruption and a governance model resistant to reform unless forced by crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
Daniele Bolelli had a great line to me because you know he does a history podcast now too and he started off by doing just a talk one like my common sense kind of is and he said the difference with the history one is you actually have to it actually has to make sense when you're done I mean the facts so That's a huge...
I mean, I sit there like forever and I end up in my...
My wife's never heard it, by the way, and my kids don't understand why anybody would want to hear me talk.
I think what happens is, I think, you know, originally, if you recall, If you go listen to the old shows, they don't sound like the newer ones.
It's because I thought I was just going to talk about funky stuff in history.
And then people wrote and go, I don't really know the story.
Can you tell more of the story?
And so you inadvertently start telling the story.
And then you go, wait a minute, I'm not qualified to tell the story.
And so it's an interesting way it's evolved.
And it's also interesting...
I was, you know, I warn people when they go and buy the old shows.
I say, you know, the old shows aren't going to sound quite the same because they were good by 2007 podcasting standards.
But, you know, the standards of what we all do are so much higher than when we started doing them.
You know, if you grade this on a curve, go to iTunes and look at the stuff that's up there with you and compare it to the stuff that was up there 10 years ago.
I was competing with kids in dorm rooms 10 years ago.
Now we're competing with NPR and, I mean, all the pro outfits.
You get better at being in tune with the person that you're talking to, or at least attempting to.
That's something, for people that are listening, when you try to consider how a podcast is made, one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to express ourselves, but we're also trying to monitor ourselves at the same time.
Make sure you're not too overbearing or you're not talking too much.
Or sometimes you have a point and you just, oh my god, I gotta make this point.
But the other person's talking, you don't know when to jump in, but you also have to listen to the person who's talking.
So then you forget your point and you're like, fuck!
It's a weird juggling act because we're both doing it sort of free-balling.
You know what's happening to me now, I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm starting to get that thing, I'm 50 now, and I'm starting to get that, you forget the name, or you forget, you know, I compare it to a computer.
I have more stuff in my computer, but the computer's slower than it used to be, and so I'll have this point where I'll be talking and everything will be going good, and then all of a sudden there'll be this really long pause, what I can't think of.
And that's when we have to just, you know, if there is a Ben, he has to cut out and just, you know, sandwich the two pieces together while I try to remember the name of the person I wanted to say.
So I'm getting to the point now where I'm not sure I could go live anymore without these really long pauses where I forget what I was going to say or I forget the point I was making or the tangent I was on.
So 10 years from now, this is going to be a very interesting podcast.
Well, it also deals with the amount of hard drive space you have.
I think if you keep remembering things, like there's things that I used to know so well just 10, 15 years ago that I just have pushed aside because I haven't brought it up in a long time.
I haven't gone into that folder in my mind in a long time.
You know, I'm from here, and coming back home is weird, because I told my wife recently, my kids are Oregonians, and I haven't gotten used to that fact.
It just seems weird to me.
And I told her, I still feel like this Angeleno up in Oregon, but I've been there 20 years.
I don't know when you start feeling...
I mean, you're from the East Coast originally.
Do you feel like you're an Angeleno, or do you still think of yourself as a transplant?
Like, oh no, I'm gonna fucking have to drop out or I'm gonna have to go back to school.
The dread of the...
And it wasn't like the school was so horrible.
It was really like the uncertainty of the future and life and the insecurity and just the...
The angst, the teen angst of, you know, slowly realizing that, or not even slowly realizing, but becoming an adult and knowing that it's just a few years away that I'm going to be completely responsible for myself, but I'm completely lost.
You know, so there's like this unbelievable pressure that comes with going from being a teenager to an adult.
I mean, to say unbelievable pressure is nothing compared to being like growing up a kid in Laos, you know, or living in fucking Somalia in the middle of You know, all sorts of different crises that are going on.
So it's really, like, the most privileged angst possible.
So, see, because I come back here, I told my mom, I was reading this book written by, if you remember, William F. Buckley, the famous, you know, talk like this a little...
getting ready to pass away and whatever.
And at one point, his dad, who was in Florida, said he wanted to go home to die, which I guess was Connecticut.
And he said dying in Florida was like contrary to nature.
So he wanted to go home where everything was the same.
And I thought to myself, if I went home, you know, to die, home isn't anything like home I drive through the places I'm from, and it doesn't ring a bell anymore.
If I wanted to go home to die, I'd have to have a time machine, you know, because everything is so different.
For those who don't know, Los Angeles, like every 15 years, bulldozes itself and rebuilds itself.
And so I'm like three generations of L.A. bulldozing from where my time was.
Well, I think if you live there and you grow up there, probably.
Like if you live there and grow up there, like I was talking to an endurance runner that lives there and he said it takes three years for your body to completely acclimate where you get all the benefits of training up there.
But when you work out there, man, it's crazy, the impact.
Like, if you're just standing around talking, it seems normal.
Like, if you and I were having this conversation up there, it wouldn't be any different.
But if you had to walk up a flight of stairs or climb a ladder or something like that, all of a sudden you're like, Jesus Christ, did I age 30 fucking years in 10 minutes?
But anyway, going back to my high school, when I go to my neighborhood where I grew up in, it looks pretty much the same.
So it hasn't really blown up.
I grew up in Newton, Upper Falls, Massachusetts, which is a small suburb of Boston.
As I get older, I never cared about L.A. history when I lived here.
But now that I'm getting nostalgic and stuff, I buy all these old books with pictures of Magic Mountain when I was a kid and Disneyland when I was a kid and all those kind of things.
Yeah, well, the whole country, if you really stop and think about it, I've been talking to people about that a lot lately because we've been sort of discussing how bizarre this election has been.
And how recent this country has existed, how recently this country was established.
I mean, when you think about 1776 and you think about the rest of the world, like, this is an insanely new country.
Oh, in the West, my wife's grandfather died recently, he was 94, and I said, do you realize that two of your grandfather's lifespans and there's no non-natives here on the West Coast?
Well, and then let's remember that, you know, you still had the Jim Crow laws and the segregation up until you and I were kids.
My mom did a film in Florida in 1972, and I'm not talking about the, apologies to Floridians out there, but the civilized part of Florida.
We were in the swamp.
It was a place called Weeki Wachee.
If you've ever been there, the big draw is they have a live mermaid show that they try to get you to slow down for enough to eat at the local cafe or whatever.
And so we're in Wikiwachi, Florida.
We took a picture when we left, and the whole hotel staff was out there.
And it looks like something out of a time warp.
Because you realize, like, three or five years of, you know, segregation's been gone that long.
I mean, that's how recent this is.
Although I realize the more I talk to young people, even being 50 sounds like a long time ago.
But when you and I were kids, that was the tail end of the time when, if you were a black person in certain states in this country, you couldn't stay in a bunch of hotels.
I had this cop from Baltimore, Michael Wood, and he was telling me about the laws that they had in Baltimore that they had a systematic, they really had racism that was so a part of the city that you couldn't sell houses in certain areas to black people.
Oh, Frank Robinson tells a story about being with the Baltimore Orioles, and he says he got traded from the Cincinnati Reds to the Baltimore Orioles, and his wife was able to find a house really quickly until they realized it wasn't Brooks Robinson's wife, who's a white guy, it was Frank Robinson's wife, and then all of a sudden the house disappeared right off, you know, two seconds later.
So, but that's almost...
You know, you don't know what to say about that, because there's two kinds of racism.
There's the kind where the government is involved and the state's involved, like you said, system, you know, institutionalized.
And then there's, I'm a white home buyer whose neighbors, you know, I remember there was an All in the Family episode where Archie Bunker or one of the neighbors was going to sell to a black family.
Well, they used to do this thing called blockbusting.
And it happened with my grandfather.
My grandfather lived in Newark, New Jersey.
And these realtors would go door-to-door and literally tell the homeowners, black people are moving into the neighborhood.
You have to sell your home.
The property value is going to crash.
Holy cow.
They just started selling like crazy.
My grandfather stayed.
My grandfather was like, I like black people.
Get the fuck off my lawn.
He was one of those guys.
So they left and the neighborhood changed.
First it became black.
Then it became Puerto Rican.
And then before my grandfather died, it had been like a weird mixture of ethnicities.
Dominicans and different people from different environments.
It was a really fascinating place to live because there was extreme, there was poverty and then there was a lot of crime and stuff like the next door neighbor when my grandfather lived there.
Is a kid who was selling crack and they battering rammed his front door.
He had it all reinforced and everything.
He had an Audi in the driveway, like the whole deal.
He was just selling drugs.
And they, you know, broke down his doorway and arrested him and everything.
It was a pretty dramatic moment.
But the rest of it was like, when you look at like a bad neighborhood, it's not like you go down the street and it's like a war zone.
Guns are going off and people are getting stabbed.
For the most part, it's pretty friendly and lively.
It's just when you're dealing with poor people in a crime-ridden neighborhood, It's just going to happen more often than it's going to happen in a place that's really nice.
But most of the time when you go outside, it would be people playing music, and there was kids playing in the street, and there was people hanging out in their steps.
It was really interesting to watch from the time I was a little kid.
Remembering his neighborhood to what it was before he died.
And it just kept shifting over and over again, where new sort of lower-income, disenfranchised groups would move into the area.
But for the listeners' sake, there's a whole theory on how, if you look at boxing, you can see...
of immigrants most recent was because boxing became a way for people to get out of the ghetto yeah and so if you look at say early 1900s up into the middle 1920s and 30s there were a lot of Jewish boxers because their parents had come over on the boat and they were first generation Italian boxers during the same period Irish boxers and then you move to eras where I mean poor African Americans have always been in boxing for because that for the same Hispanic boxers.
I saw a whole article once on America's immigration story as told through boxing.
And they would suggest that by the time the next generation came along, most of the time the parents had done well enough so that the kids didn't have to go into boxing.
But it was an interesting story.
I think the article was entitled something like, Why Don't You See Any Great Jewish Boxers Anymore?
And it went down the whole list.
I didn't know there were Jewish boxers when I first...
It's also that you're growing up in these really hard environments where fisticuffs are much more common and people seek to train themselves to learn how to fight because they're dealing with conflict all the time.
No, but I go to a website sometimes when I'm bored and I have nothing better to do that is just, you know, stuff that people upload, you know, just to blow your mind or say, well, and half of them are from Brazil for some reason, you know, and they're always terrible.
You just go, I know it's giving me an unusually wrong version of what Brazil is like, but when they said the Olympics were going to be there, I said, you know, half the videos on this site are from Rio, so...
Well, it does have a history of violence, that's for sure.
It's a strange place in that it's kind of the reverse of LA, in that LA, you essentially have the expensive homes in the hills, and then the people that have the less expensive homes are on the bottom.
But in Rio, it's the opposite.
The people in the bottom, like near the ocean, is the really expensive homes.
I didn't know you could do that in LA because, like in New York, they have to have a device that hooks up to the horse so it doesn't, you know, have manure on the streets.
I mean, you know, there's a lot of cities in the United States and in Europe and stuff that have built giant open spaces, you know, whether it's a central park in New York or anything like that.
It changes the whole feel of these urban centers, doesn't it?
I tell Angelinos that, and they're really the only people, New Yorkers and Angelinos understand when you say, I can park anywhere, dude, and they just go...
That was when that sagebrush rebellion type thing happened up in Oregon, you know, in the one area where they're still having trials about and everything.
See, 20 years ago, I would have remembered their names right off the bat, but there's a wilderness thing up in Oregon.
We had that whole thing.
Well, I mean, their complaint was that the federal government doesn't have big tracts of land in the eastern part of the country where things started.
They reverted that land back to the public, but they had these huge swaths of land in the West because it was kind of a different government by the time they were out here in the West.
I truthfully am kind of thankful they do, because if they didn't, it wouldn't be here anymore.
That whole land thing was really confusing for people.
They were trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
Because unless you really dive into the story and try to find out who's angry at who and why is the government moving in on these people and what's happening, because there was a few of these sort of rancher-type disputes with the government.
I actually can speak to this a little bit, because when I was a talk radio host up there, Those people were actually a large part of any talk radio show audience, and they were a little different back in the day of, say, the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s, but the modern movement kind of grew out of that.
And if you understand the position of those people in those small towns...
Those people essentially made a living in resource extraction.
So they didn't have the big factories that they had back east in Detroit and everything.
They logged, or they mined, or they did those kind of things.
And so when the government will decide, for example, we have a problem with the spotted owl, so we're going to cut back on the logging, The people in places like Portland, where everybody's got a software job, they're like, absolutely, that's a wonderful thing.
But those devastated some of those communities.
And it's everything from the schools in those areas not getting a lot of tax dollars anymore, or the problem they have in Oregon is a lot of those small communities, all the young people are gone.
Because there's no jobs.
So the old people who have homes stay.
There's no jobs because everybody was in logging.
And they get very resentful.
So when they wanted the public land turned over to private people because they were hoping the private people would start off the mills again and people could work.
So in that sense, I felt like the media really didn't really didn't look at that side of the story, which is I'm not saying these people are right or wrong.
But understand that this wasn't a question of the government's got to get off of our land.
It was jobs, and I think we can all understand jobs.
Well, what was going on in Oregon was cattle ranchers and public land, and they didn't want to pay.
Yeah, they didn't want to pay for public land.
Now, before I had ever, like, ventured into public land, I didn't understand the whole cattle grazing thing, but when I was in, the first time I was in Montana...
So you had these ranchers who didn't want to do that, and then you have a bunch of people in the community who were sympathetic not so much to that part, but the fact that the ranchers were mad at the same people that they were mad at.
So that's why you would hear a lot of people speak in these things saying, I'm not really on their side, but we all generally have sympathy to the idea that we would like the federal government to stop telling us how many logs we can cut or those kind of things.
And they replant it with a single monocrop instead.
They always call it like they want you to think it's like growing tomatoes.
They always say this is a renewable crop.
Yes and no.
And like you said, the clear cuts are awful because you do think to yourself, couldn't you take like every fifth tree?
Right.
Landowners will do a better job of it.
Not always.
Sometimes they'll just think, my kid needs to go to college, it's time to just level everything on this hill.
Sometimes, though, their attitude is, okay, this is my view, right?
I mean, I look out, I don't want to see a clear cut, so I'll take every third or fourth tree, and it becomes like an extra bank account for some of them, so...
of growth you're looking at when you're looking at this huge lumber yard filled with trees like how many years of growth is that how do you sustain it right this is how much you need today how do you make sure you have that much 15 20 years you know what they're doing right now is is the Canadians are logging a lot and in Russia in the places like below the the They have a forest line in Siberia, and they're logging a lot there, too.
I mean, it's kind of like gold that grows for those people.
And so in one sense, you find it hard to tell them not to, because I'm doing just fine, but you can't log and make money.
On the other hand, you know, we all do kind of share this, and so it's hard to figure out how to manage things, you know, for the greater good, as they say.
That's the good point, is that it's really, I mean, it's no one's, you could call it property, but what it is, is like we're all sharing the resources of the earth, and What's going on in the Amazon right now and what happens when people move in and farm for cattle is one of the best arguments against factory farming and against supporting the meat industry.
And you can see, by the way, how much money is involved, because in some of those countries, the people that campaign, a lot of times they're indigenous people, it gets violent and people die, and, you know, that's how much money we're talking about.
And, you know, everybody kind of knows, this is, you know, you're taking, I mean, it's pretty brave when you think about what those people do, because they get the threatening letters long before anything happens to them, and then to keep doing it.
Yeah, I mean, who knows if they're even getting letters.
They just might get bullets.
You know, I mean, if you start making a mess and making a lot of noise and making it problematic for the people that are earning a shitload of money chopping those trees down, things can get real ugly.
They get real nasty.
I was in Mount Rainier and that was the first time I ever saw like real clear-cut areas and that's an interesting place because it rains so much you would think like it's a real fertile environment like whatever trees that they do have but when I was talking to one of the guys was up there one of the cops that was um you know was like forest ranger type character he was saying that they do it but it takes like 20 years for these things become trees again Well, and they use different growth trees for different things.
So you can grow the quick, you know, I always hear from the guys who want to grow hemp and say, well, if they would just grow hemp, it would make up, but it would make up for some uses.
The old growth trees, like if you go into some of these, there are some Oregon hotels, for example, that are all built with old growth.
And you go in there and you see what old growth can do and you say, okay, there are no other logs that you could do this with.
You know, it's just a...
And you see the band saws that they use to cut that stuff?
It's a whole different level of tree.
But the replacement time period is like 150 years or something for those kind of things.
Yeah, the different densities of trees and the different grains and patterns.
And when you look at actual hardwood, it's such a fascinating, not invention, but creation of nature.
The variety of the grain and the way they look, it's really like a work of art.
And it's strange how it affects us visually.
Like, if you look at a piece of redwood that's been polished and sanded and cut, it's like, you see the grain in it, it's like, wow, that is so pretty!
But that's another thing that's really fascinating about this time.
It's like slowly in your state, Washington state, Colorado, you're starting to see so much money coming in from it being legal that it's going to trickle down into other states.
And I've said before, and I might have even said on this show the very first time we got together, I think we may have talked about You know, what's going to happen, because we have this divergence between the states and the federal government, and as you probably know, only a couple of weeks ago, the federal government decided to leave marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug for the same reason they always did, which is they say that the research doesn't show anything, and then you find out, well, they're not really permitted to do the research, so it's this catch-22.
Right.
Either the feds are going to have to move toward the states, or somebody's going to get into power that says, enough of this dichotomy, we're going to crack down.
But look at what What the feds have already done in roundabout ways.
For example, one of the things that they've said in some of these places is if you have a medical marijuana card, you can't get pain medication prescribed to you.
If you have a medical marijuana card, a judge just upheld, didn't they, that you can be denied a gun.
So the only reason that that works is because you have a disagreement between state and federal law, and they're siding with the higher law, which is the way the law is supposed to work.
But at what point do we have such a division between the reality on the ground in these states and what federal law says that the rubber is going to meet the road somewhere?
I don't know who wins, but there's going to be a moment where you have a rubber meets the road moment.
Yeah, and it's an interesting case with the National Rifle Association, too, because the NRA, which is always, of course, pro-gun and really trying to stop any laws that infringe upon the rights of people to Uphold the Second Amendment, but when you get to this pot thing, they don't want to fuck with the pot thing.
Yeah, there's a lot of closet pot smokers out there.
Because it's, obviously the stereotype has always been that it makes you lazy and it makes you dumb and it sort of gives you brain damage and you forget things.
That's been shown time and time again to not be true.
I mean, when you are high as fuck, you do forget things.
I remember reading a study once where they were studying population in Jamaica where a lot of these people who were 75 years old had been doing it their whole lives, and they didn't show anything that would make your eyes bulge out, your hair stand up.
I mean, nothing seemed that...
Out of the ordinary in terms of whether you're talking about cancer rates or any of these other things.
All the proponents of pharmaceutical drugs and all the people that are making money off of marijuana remaining in the Schedule I category, which are pretty significant.
There's a lot of people that make money off of it.
So it's the alcohol industry, and then there's also the fentanyl industry.
It might be a little bit earlier.
Just scroll down a little bit further, see if you can find it.
But it's just bizarre that we allow that stuff, and it's so transparent today, as opposed to this stuff all went on behind the scenes 100 years ago, which, of course, is why marijuana got made illegal there.
Fentanyl maker donates big to campaign opposing pot legalization.
But I would make the case, and this is pretty much what my political show has been about since the very beginning, is that that's a factor of the corruption in our system.
When it's a pay-to-play system, well, I mean, then that's how this happens.
If you're going to impact somebody else's business by legalizing something else, then the way you fight that is you go out there and you donate to the cause.
I mean, in other words, instead of the people getting what they want, it's whomever donates the most.
And I remember Justice Scalia, before he died, was part of a ruling where he basically said, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
This is the way the system is supposed to work.
You know, money is supposed to represent the views of people, and if it's poor people, they can bundle it all together.
And then if there's no money, obviously there's not a lot of people who care, and that was the theory.
But what it's really done is mean if you don't have money flowing into Washington, you don't count.
You're not at the table.
Right?
So there's whole sectors of the American society that are essentially unrepresented because there's no money coming from them.
And wasn't this sort of structure, the government structure that sort of enforces that or relies on that, it was kind of established before corporations were.
And definitely established before corporations were allowed to act as an individual and donate insane amounts of money to campaigns.
And you look at it and you can see how it happened.
Because you can see that the people that gave a little money back in the days when you could only give this much money had a little influence.
So what do you want to do?
You want to influence them to let you give a little bit more.
And slowly but surely you evolve into a system.
I mean, I was talking to my wife about this the other day where we were talking about...
How it was never a good system, but it was a fairer system back when I was a kid in the 1970s because some of the money came from entities that represented people who were blue-collar people.
So, for example, when unions were big, private employee unions, not the public employee unions that are so popular now, so if you were a pipe fitter or a plumber or those people that had, you know, electricians had pretty powerful unions, Those people would bundle money and those unions would give money to candidates that sort of compensated for the fact that you had corporate money or whatever in other directions.
In the 1980s, when the Democrats started getting waxed regularly and where, you know, due to Reagan changing tax policies and whatever else, we started to get some really wealthy people and the unions started getting less powerful.
All of a sudden, you know, Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was famously asked, you know, why do you rob banks?
He says that's where the money is.
Well, in the 80s, you know, after 84, especially after Mondale got waxed by Reagan, they that's when superdelegates started to they went and they looked and they said, OK, what do we need to compete?
Because if you look at the long term trends, the people that Republicans tend to get money from, they're just getting more money.
The people that we tend to get money from are getting weaker.
And that's when that's the role Bill Clinton played in the Democratic Leadership Council, where they basically said we can go and get money from those same sources.
So they did.
Okay, so fast forward to now.
Everybody's taken money from those same sources, and the people that are lower and middle class have no way to break into that game, right?
So if, you know, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, did a great book called Republic Lost, where he pointed out how he went and interviewed politicians who didn't even realize there was another side sometimes to the issue they were voting on because they hadn't heard from any money.
Right?
So you almost felt like a lot of these people were almost blameless because in their minds, well, nobody cares about this or I would have had some money coming in for that.
It's strange how the systems evolved.
But the one thing you can say for sure is you're not getting money from people who don't have money.
And also, you have to think about how many people feel disenfranchised by this system.
And it doesn't seem like it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
Because the amount of people that are contributing to these campaigns, when you look at the percentage of human beings on this landmass, is very small.
So the amount of people that have influence, it's a very small amount of people that are affecting the lives of a vast majority of people.
And it becomes a very weird sort of scenario when we continue with the same representative government structure that we had back when it was impossible to communicate with people on the other side of the country.
You know, Morse code or a guy on a horse with a letter.
It was hard.
So this is why they decided to have representative government in the first place.
You couldn't communicate with people.
Now that you can, it's like we really ultimately have to decide, I think, one day, is one person, one vote?
Like, do we all, as a mass, as 300 million people, get to decide, like, if a 190 million people think one thing and the rest think another thing.
How does this all work out?
Like, how do we decide?
Because right now, we have delegates, we have representatives, we have senators, we have all these different people that sort of buffer us from the actual decisions that are being made.
And I think as we...
As it becomes easier and easier to communicate and express your opinions and give your thoughts on things, the option of voting online and the option of voting directly for issues without representation seems more and more enticing to people.
I'm reading a book right now that talks about our government actually operating sort of between the lines of the Constitution.
So there's room to maneuver, and over time, for understandable reasons, like security and other things, I mean, the fact that nuclear bombs were invented changed everything, that within those lines, there's room to sort of expand what you can do.
But you do that generation after generation, and then you look around and go, how did we get...
You know, from where we were in 1940 to where we are now, it's almost inexplicable.
And sometimes when I talk about reform, you try to figure out how you can dial things back, but we've come so far beyond any point you could dial it back to, it becomes really hard to imagine.
It's like you have an old mainframe computer that you've patched and patched and patched, and the only way now to make any real reform is to throw the computer out and buy a new Mac and start from scratch.
And nobody can do that.
I mean, you can't even figure out how to get that done.
Something has to be catastrophic in order for them to try to reset and rebuild a completely new system.
And then people would have to agree.
They'd have to get together and go, okay, are we going to go back to that thing that was written on hemp by people that wrote with feathers?
Or are we going to redo this?
Are we going to figure this out from a modern perspective?
Knowing what we know now about our ability to communicate and knowing what we know now about all the things that the founding fathers of this country did an amazing job of trying to protect from corruption.
You know, trying to make sure that their vision of what America could be, that this experiment and self-government, and they put all these safeguards in play.
But there's no way they could have ever predicted how far technology would have taken us in the 200 plus years since they did that.
There's just no way.
They they they couldn't have any idea.
So now that we know where we are now and we can sort of kind of extrapolate where it's going to be in the next 50 100 years and maybe plan for the future, the digital future that we're dealing with now.
And then we you know that it was the case.
We would have put in some some things that people would agree with in regards to like what the NSA got caught with, you know, with the mass surveillance of the public.
Let's talk about that for a bit, because I was just going to go there.
You know, I was thinking not that long ago, if they forced you, because we all understand that history is an evolution.
So all of this is the result of decades and decades and generations and generations of building stuff on top of other things.
But if you had to pick the time that was most transformative for all those things you were talking about...
You have to go back to the United States between 1947 and 1948. That's when Harry Truman and the government passed these rules that made everything we talk about today.
The NSA, the CIA, all those things are developments from like national security.
I mean, NSC 68 is one of those big ones.
A bunch of these rules that created the modern United States We'll call it the secret government that we know about today.
And, you know, if you go back in time, you can certainly understand what they were thinking.
I mean, you have to remember how crazy it was after the Second World War and this feeling that the Soviet Union was this threat to the whole world.
And now you have nuclear weapons.
And can you really declare war if there's nuclear weapons that could be?
You know, there's a whole bunch of things where you go, hey, I kind of get what was going on.
But it didn't take Harry Truman long, you know, after he left office to say, I made a few mistakes, including things like the CIA and whatnot.
But once you start those programs, there's an autopilot that happens and they develop a momentum of their own.
So if you said today, because I would make this case, if you wanted to look at this the way my stepfather would, he was a total profit and loss guy.
And you would look at something like the CIA, you would say the CIA is a terrible failure.
They miss all the big things, whether it's the fall of the Soviet Union, you name it, right?
The CIA's got major failures.
And then you said all the things that they've done that were nefarious, that they shouldn't have.
So if this were a private business, you'd turn around and go, well, listen, that's a lost thing right there.
Let's take that division, scrap it, start over...
You can't do that in a government for some reason.
It's almost impossible to decide, this whole area has been a failure, so let's start over.
And that's the problem, because I'm not sure you can reform things that are flawed at the seeds.
Do you know what I mean?
And the CIA is a perfect example, but even the NSA, I mean, did you see that this week they're once again trying to slip a bill in that would allow the government, without a warrant, to track every website you go to and all these things?
How does this stuff get that far?
They're going to attach it to a totally unrelated bill so that you don't know about it again.
So I don't always, you know, you have to cut them a little slack.
But there's no weighing at all about the downside.
I mean, it's almost like the only thing we pay attention to is the terror side of the ledger, not the fact that do you, John McCain or Lindsey Graham, do you really want the government knowing every website?
Especially Lindsey Graham.
There's got to be some websites there that he really would not like the government to know about.
Come on, at least think about yourself, you know?
So I don't know how you stop this dynamic.
We're such a fearful people that that's what's going to kill us.
What's really sad is I've always had this rose-colored view of us, and I acknowledge that it's a myth, but I always look at the myth of America, as I call it, the 1950s high school textbook view of America.
That, to me, is what I want to move towards.
So when they talk about creating a more perfect union, that, to me, is the goal.
And anything that conflicts with that self-image, to me, is the problem.
So when you see sometimes how we really operate, anything Dick Cheney does, and I don't use the word evil, so I'll use the word nefarious.
Dick Cheney is, to me, when you say, what do you want to avoid in this country?
I want to avoid where Dick Cheney wants us to go.
Because nothing conflicts with my 1950s mythological American textbook idea than what Cheney wants us to be.
And when you look at some of the things we've done, some of the things based on that 1947-1948 America idea, Which we thought, okay, we have to do everything to stop global communism.
They're going to take over the country.
Once you look at some of the things we did and you realize some of what we're dealing with today is blowback, you don't know how to undo that.
I mean, you almost think it's like permanent damage.
Look at the way some in the Middle East see us.
I mean, I'll talk to people, like I remember talking to Sam Harris about this, and he was talking about, well, you have to see things this certain way.
And I said, yes, but that's not going to help you solve the problem.
How do you solve the problem if we've already...
If we've already soiled our bed so much that you don't know how to fix that, you don't know how to go and say, listen, we're sorry about this, can we start from scratch?
You can't do that in foreign affairs just like you can't do it with the mainframe computer that is the government, you know?
I can't figure out how to reverse course to a point where we can once again fix stuff, right?
I think we're trying to make a battleship move like a race car.
I just think it takes a long time to shift course.
And when we're looking at these people that are in the Middle East that are opposing the US right now and angry and want to attack the US right now, you're most likely never going to get to them.
You might get to their grandchildren.
And I think that might be the only way things slowly but surely settle down.
And that's the argument for the NSA and the CIA to continue to monitor things that are really kind of ridiculous and invasive level.
Because there's so many people out there that hate us.
Or hate the government, hate the military, and hate what's happened to them.
And so many martyrs are created every time a drone strike goes wrong.
I mean, you talk to the Ron Paul supporters and they think we should just separate and don't police the world and take care of our own and just stay out of these countries.
I'll tell you what upsets me, though, because we were just talking about getting off the merry-go-round.
It means kind of not perpetuating the same mistakes we've made before.
But what drives me crazy about our system is that the people who make mistakes—and I've always said, you know, you've forgiven.
People make mistakes.
You're going to make a mistake, right?
You shouldn't be allowed to make another one, though, right?
At the highest levels of government, when you send people to war and we shouldn't have gone to war, I'll cut you some slack, but I don't want you then going on CNN and being the expert who tells us how to handle the next crisis, right?
Because your track record sucks.
Dick Cheney's got a terrible track record.
We still listen to him.
He still gets to be a person who moves the public debate.
And there's a lot of people like that.
You look at the John Boltons.
There's a heck of a lot of these guys who are consistently and regularly wrong.
But we put them out there as though, oh, this is somebody you should listen to now.
He's going to analyze how we should handle North Korea.
Yeah, but he was wrong as heck about Iraq and all these other things, so we're going to listen to him on that next subject?
We don't make people who are wrong in this country pay the price, which means, you know, if you're a doctor and you screw up a few surgeries and people who should not die, die, you're done.
You'll be out of business.
They will take your license.
You won't get to kill any more people.
In government, you can continue to make these errors and you'll be promoted.
But that's a perfect example, though, of why this is so tough to defend yourself against.
Yes, because and this is the same thing, by the way, the country has been worried about American radicals for decades.
I mean, you go look at how we treated the 1960s leftist radicals that were putting bombs in the Pentagon and stuff like that.
I mean, it always blows my mind to realize that if those guys were doing that today, we might waterboard them at Guantanamo.
You know, so I think the domestic radical idea has been something the government's been worried about since the first Red Scare in the 1919 era and the anarchists and that whole era.
Yeah, and I think whenever you have a government, whenever you have people that are in charge, there's going to be people that oppose those people, and they're going to try to go through—some people that are opposing them are going to go through legal channels, and they're going to protest legally, and they're going to organize and give speeches, and other people are going to say, look, that doesn't work.
We're going to do this— So now we come to the hacks, right?
See, I argued in the last Common Sense program that the hacks are kind of a chickens coming home to roost thing.
That when, you know, we deputize our representatives to keep some secrets from us, because we all understand that there's going to be some of those.
But if you did that in a private business, Joe, if you work for a boss, you're delivering pizzas at the pizza company, and the boss says to you, listen, sometimes I have to have a little plausible deniability.
So if you have to stamp something top secret on your order form, I won't look at it and we'll all be cool.
Okay, so one day you're out with prostitutes and drinking beer and you don't deliver your pizzas and you think, if I put top secret on this, the boss won't see it and we'll be great.
I mean, it's human nature that after a while you're going to start to classify stuff that really shouldn't be secret, right?
And I said this in the last show, I talked to an intelligence operative once who wouldn't tell me anything except I asked him a question once about if you had to guess what percentage of stuff is the stuff that Americans would agree should be kept secret.
He said about 10%.
I said, what's the rest?
He said, everything you can think of.
He said, cover your own rear-end corporate deal that a senator doesn't want his constituents to know about for 40 years because he'll get voted.
And it becomes a point where when you're keeping that much stuff from the American people that they have a right to know, it seems to me inevitable that there will be literally leaks.
Like you're trying to cover too much dam with too little concrete.
It's natural, I think.
And some of these guys, like William Binney is the one that everybody knows.
He said, I went through every channel I was supposed to go to, and I ended up with officers pointing, federal agents pointing machine guns at me as I came out of the shower.
So when the system breaks down to the point where the whistleblowers go through the proper channels and they become the ones who get into trouble, then you're asking for leaks.
And it's hard to say, I feel sorry for you that they leaked that vital information, but if you haven't been keeping non-vital information from us for so long, that might not have happened.
And then you do get release of stuff that none of us thinks should be released.
If you are an operative at the Democratic or Republican parties, how much would you want to bake it into the cake that you try to see that there'll be a leak against your opponents before the next election?
How much does that now become a part of your strategizing?
Yeah, I wonder what, if they checked the Republicans, if they checked, like, what kind of crazy shit was said when they realized that Donald Trump was running away with it.
I heard something that there'd been a hack, and it was like new news, so I'm not up to speed, but that there'd been a hack of the RNC2. Did you see...
Everybody's freaking out now over the fact, and again, we have to make the disclaimer that the Russian hackers or whomever, I have this Russian hackers who get mad at me when I say that, whomever it was that did this, that they've been known to alter stuff.
So you have to take it on with a grain of salt.
But what came out, I guess, was a list, and this is from the Democratic Party's main list of donors, right, their internal documents, which shows the top donors, how much they gave, and then what was given in return.
Ambassadorships, director of homeland security, all that kind of stuff.
Now, here's the funky part.
That's as old almost as the republic.
It was called the spoil system in the early 1800s, right?
I win elections, so all my buddies get jobs, right?
Everybody who supported me.
There have been acts, though, ever since then, the Hatch Act was one, where they tried to limit that.
And both parties act like they don't do it anymore.
So when it comes out that they still do, people freak out.
But here's the truth.
If the Democrats do it, I'm sure the Republicans do it, too.
I'd love to see a list from the last Republican administration who their top donors were.
And all you have to do is look at who the ambassadors were, and especially the ambassadors to good places, right?
Who's the ambassador to Bermuda?
Who's the ambassador to London?
The UK one is always a coveted position.
How much did that guy give?
And because it's always been the way it is, there's a part of me that goes, eh, what are you going to do?
But the other part of me goes, that's the corruption you wish more Americans knew was built into the system.
Right.
If you found out that the guy who's in charge of making sure this country's safe in the Homeland Security Department got the job because he gave money to get the job.
How much less safe are we than if you gave it to the most qualified candidate?
So all we have to do is get some really rich marijuana grower to give enough money so that he becomes the Department of Homeland Security director and you can get that corruption thing working in your favor.
You know, I was in talk radio during that whole administration.
And they're relatively unique people as a couple.
And they're very hard to describe.
And I always try to be fair.
You know, I'm very into fair and seeing context.
But let's be honest.
These are two people that, you know, here's the way I look at it.
If you're Hillary Clinton, and they have been after you since before your husband was president, you know, in Arkansas, they were after them, right?
So you know how on you they're going to be.
Wouldn't you stay so far away from any lines that nobody could ever come close to saying you were—but they don't.
They both walk and straddle, and that—you know, if you talk to people in Arkansas, they just say, that's the Clintons.
They walk, they straddle the line, and a lot of times they go, you know, in too much of one direction.
Why would you do that?
We talked about this with Anthony Weiner, you and I, a long time ago.
If you know that stuff's out there, why would you go and run for office again?
It's the same thing with Clinton.
If you know you're the most watched man in the world, why on earth would you have an affair with a teenage intern who you know will not stay quiet about it?
It boggles the mind.
So if you're Hillary Clinton and you've got everyone trying to come up with dirt on you, Why would you do anything that was even suspicious?
Well, don't you think that, first of all, their patterns and their behavior and their attitudes towards things were established in the 1980s when the world was a much simpler place?
And you can get away with what happened in Mena, Arkansas.
With all that craziness, with dropping drugs out of airplanes, which is all part of that Narco series.
It's in the Narco series.
I mean, somebody was in on it.
I mean, the guy who got shot and killed, who was about to testify for George Bush, what the fuck was his name?
See, in a country that cared about reform, How many of those things have to happen before somebody would turn around and say, okay, we have a big problem, and we have to weed that problem out of the CIA or whichever agency you want to name so that it doesn't happen again?
When that doesn't happen...
I remember looking into police departments that had problems, and in LA when I was growing up, you knew which ones to avoid.
For example, there was one in Signal Hill, and we all knew you don't want to get pulled over there.
So eventually they had to disband the whole police department and start from scratch, because every time they tried to reform it, there was a culture in that little police department that absorbed new members.
And the people that wouldn't become part of the culture ended up transferring out, and the people that worked with the culture stayed.
That's a microchasm of how all these giant agencies work, where how do you change the culture of something when you would have to get rid of The people who are there now who all bought in or they wouldn't still be there.
It's like we were saying about the mainframe computer.
If you wanted to start the CIA over today, would you use any of the people that are in it now?
Hard to know because I think if you didn't, you'd end up with an agency that thought, listen, We're keeping America safe.
And if we have to dose people with LSD, as happened in the late 50s, early 1960s, as a way to make sure that our people aren't dosed with LSD, we're going to do it, you know?
If you go look at Bill Clinton in the primaries, When he was basically chosen to be the Democratic candidate to run against the elder George Bush.
And you look at those stiffs he was up against.
It's how it always is.
I mean, when you look and you go, okay, there's a bunch of people who I could never vote for in a million years, and there's one person who's got some charisma, right?
I don't know how it happens that way.
I mean, if somebody wanted to say, well, that's the part that's rigged.
Listen, the two parties here are private entities that can do whatever they want.
Someone said to me the other day, what happens if Hillary Clinton drops out for health reasons?
You know, who naturally does the job devolve to?
And I said, whoever the Democratic National Committee wants it to.
unidentified
Which is really fascinating when those people are registered Democrats.
Well, but that's why you said the founding – you talked about the founding fathers earlier, and I'm always blown away that Madison, who's the guy who's most responsible for writing the Constitution, was like 23. I was the most irresponsible goof-off in the world, I think, at 23. So you look at those guys and you realize how much they had a problem with what they called factions.
Their version of factions is what we would call parties today, and they thought it was poisonous.
And yet it was like a generation later, and what did they have cropping up?
Factions.
So it would be a really difficult thing.
It must be an evolutionary, natural thing to normally develop in a society like ours.
But if you decided that that was the poison pill What could you write into the founding documents that prevented that?
I don't know.
But to me, that's the root of so much of our evil in this country.
We have two parties that control a corrupt system, and in order to fix the corrupt system, the two parties would have to be on board to do it.
Well, okay, that's asking, what have we said, the fox to redesign the chicken coop?
Well, it's also what we're talking about, whether it's the CIA or the NSA. If you're asking them to redesign this thing, you're asking them to relinquish some power.
If you say, I don't want you spying on us anymore, and the next 9-11 attack we have happened because they couldn't spy on us, you better believe they'll point that out.
So if somebody really audited it, you know, whether it's the CIA or the FBI or the NSA, I mean, 100% sure they're doing their best, but there's no way it's done really well.
It's just the government.
The government fucks up almost everything, because most people don't want to work for the government.
So who do you get?
You get a bunch of people that, well, okay, I'll do that job.
It's like, is anybody clamoring to be the guy at the NSA that gets to read Dan Carlin's emails?
No, I think what it is, I mean, a better way to put it is, is the system's decline.
I mean, it just deteriorates over time.
And every system is remarkably hard to go back and fix.
And the government especially.
You know, we've got 240 years of dead wood, and you don't often go in there and have a spring cleaning session, you know?
Right.
And I think the Founding Fathers were people who were aware.
They used to talk about lifespans of countries.
And so, you know, that computer analogy we use is a pretty good one.
This is an old computer that we've patched many, many times and also tasked to do many, many more things than the Constitution ever envisioned because you have a Great Depression or you have a Second World War or you have nuclear weapons appear on the scene.
So all of a sudden, we have a flexible Constitution to deal with unforeseeables, as you pointed out.
Okay, but how flexible is it?
I mean, at what point have you stretched it so far that it's become a fig leaf?
I try to remind people, we did a whole series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and what a lot of people don't know is that when the Roman Empire first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, they kept all the forms.
Senators were still elected.
I mean, you have an all-powerful emperor, but they still went through the process of electing senators as though nothing had changed.
They still held elections.
They still had people giving money to senators to give them favors.
But we had a system in Rome, as if I was there, but at that point, it was a total dictatorship.
But we elected senators anyway because the forms had a long and noble tradition that was tied to the way Romans saw themselves, the same way we're tied to that 1950s high school textbook of who we are.
If we had a dictator someday, they would never be able to get rid of senators because the forms are very important.
Well, that's one of the biggest fears about the Patriot Act, right?
And the Patriot Act II as well, is that if something did happen and martial law was declared, would we really have the same system that we think we have?
Would we have that 1950s textbook version of America?
Or would we really have a military dictatorship that's disguised?
You know, back 20 years ago, people who wrote those books were conspiracy people who had no real...
Now the people writing those books are all insiders and they have generals writing blurbs on the back.
And this guy, it's kind of a boring book because he talks so much about FEMA and Katrina and all these things.
But sometimes when you're diagramming how these things happen, it's not...
Spy thriller type stuff.
It's really sometimes run-of-the-mill.
We had this problem.
We had...
His point is that we've been living in a society that's operating between the lines in the Constitution for 50 years now.
And that...
The government is absolutely petrified about all the threats out there to us, and in order to protect us, things like little writings on hemp paper from 240 years ago are not going to stand in the way of us protecting us from another 9-11 or a nuclear bomb going off in a harbor or something like that.
But how convenient it is that you are also controlling vast amounts of wealth, controlling so much of the ability of the United States citizens to do their jobs, to get through life, to do anything they want to do without being That's
one of the weirder Aspects about real government corruption because the real corruption is the legal shit like you're talking about the ledger showing what people did what and what they received for those donations and how much they gave and how much they got out of it and how they became like that is how is that?
Legal and insider trading is illegal.
How is that legal and Martha Quinn goes to jail, not Martha Quinn, she was a DJ. Martha Stewart, rather, goes to jail for a stock trade, you know, where she was not honest about the information that she knew about profiting off a stock trade.
It's insane, like, the disparity.
It's insane how much...
How much weird corruption is just entangled into the system that the only way to get rid of would have to be you would have to stop all those jobs that evolve around all that money coming in.
You're dealing with untold millions of dollars that's being siphoned from the system by all these people, all the lobbyists and all the special interest groups that constantly work in the Washington Hive to extract the Those people at this point, it's almost impossible without a total reset of the system.
So, for example, when the Founding Fathers set up war powers, which they understood to be the most important thing, they separated the part where we decide to go to war from the power of fighting the war.
And they gave the power to fight the war to the president.
He's the commander in chief.
But they did not give him the power to decide to go to war.
Right?
That's too much power for one guy.
They gave that to Congress.
So Congress has the power to declare war.
Once they do, the president has really extreme emergency authority to fight the war.
When Harry Truman took us into Korea in 1950, he He called it a police action.
And he called it a police action because you don't need to declare war to have a police action.
But he sent the United States.
We lost 50,000 guys or something in Korea.
And, you know, a lot more Koreans.
Once you do that, we've never declared war again.
As a matter of fact, no president even...
It throws that out there.
They would love to have a support, a declaration of support by Congress.
But once you do that, you break an important wall, the wall that says that the president has basically unlimited powers in wartime, and now he has the right to decide when wartime is.
That's a firewall that had been built into the system, that once it's broken, you can never repair that.
You can never go back.
Congress has no way to repair that firewall.
So now, somebody said to me, if Donald Trump's elected president...
Can he use a nuclear bomb against a country?
Or can he decide, I'm going to scare the heck out of North Korea, and I'm going to, you know, drop a bomb off their coast?
Yes, and he can do it without asking anybody.
And the only people that might tell him no are the military.
And if the military starts telling the president no, that's almost as scary as a president that can drop a nuclear bomb whenever he wants to.
So that's, in the founder's Construction of the country, in their mind, you would have had to have gone to Congress and say, can we drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea?
And then Congress would have voted, decided, and then the president would have been empowered to take whatever measures were necessary.
That firewall's gone.
The president has extreme emergency authority and foreign policy now.
He didn't have to ask Congress for anything.
There's only one thing Congress can do.
They have the power of the purse, so they can cut off the funds.
But can you imagine our troops, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Congress doesn't want them there anymore, so the choice they have is to stop sending them meals and replacement bullets, and it's not going to happen.
So those are the ways that the Constitution gets destroyed.
And Truman, I mean, you look at what we mentioned earlier, the CIA, the NSA, that power.
Truman did more damage to this country in one presidency than anyone I can think of.
And yet, I cut him some slack because the world had never existed like it existed in his era.
He had whole new challenges to deal with.
It's like when Obama came into office and promised to undo the extremes of the previous administration.
Had he done that, we could have said, okay, 9-11 happened, we freaked out, and then we fixed it.
We got our balance back.
By not doing that, he codified it.
Now that's the rule, right?
When both parties agree on something, it becomes the way we do things now.
So if Truman had left office and Eisenhower had come in as a member of the other party and said, whoa, this CIA thing is more like an American Gestapo.
We're going to get rid of it.
Boom!
Truman is a blip.
But when he decides to embrace the CIA, now that's the way we do business.
So, if the two parties don't sort of look out for each other and say, listen, 9-11 is a one-off strange experience, okay, we understand how somebody could overreact and freak out, we'll fix it, and instead say, no, we'll keep things the way they are, Then you've taken another step down, another firewall's been broken, and the Constitution's been stretched again to the point where there are big holes in it now.
Is there a Fourth Amendment anymore, really?
I mean, there's amendments to the Constitution.
And people will say to me all the time, Dan, you say our freedom's going away.
Let's not take the American people off the blame list.
If another 9-11 happens, they're going to go and call for the heads of the people that voted against spying on it.
I mean, that's how we are.
We're such a panicky people that we're not willing to suck up a lot of casualties if that's what's required to defend some of this stuff.
If you're going to say you can't spy on Americans, just understand, some nasty Americans are going to get fertilizer bombs and blow up stuff sometimes because they slip through that protection for you and me and everyone else.
Yeah, I wonder if over time, like going back to that battleship analogy, like that's going to be the only thing that clears this up, is that the people that start getting elected into office deal with the new level of transparency, and the people that are growing up now who eventually become politicians, they grow up in a different world.
And so their view of what's possible and not possible is very different than, like we were talking about the Clintons, who...
You know, just kind of had an open pass to kind of do a lot of shit that they wanted to do back in the 1980s and in the 90s.
And they're still kind of operating.
Like when you're talking about Hillary Clinton and the Clintons just kind of doing their thing.
If you look at the difference between...
This is not a conspiracy theory.
If you look at the difference between what Hillary Clinton says the FBI found out about her emails...
Versus what the FBI says about what they found out about Hillary Clinton's emails.
Someone's lying, and I don't think it's the FBI. Someone's lying.
Her version of it is a lie.
It's just not real.
Like, what she's saying is not what they're saying.
The entire Clinton administration was the Republicans trying to get them for something.
So imagine she gets elected, imagine that they continue to hound her the way they do, and remembering that they tend to walk that line, right, being the Clintons.
There's going to be 90% of nothing in there.
Travel Gates and Rose Hill law firms.
But there's going to be something they find eventually, and they will impeach her for that.
And if she's the first woman president to be impeached, how does that help you?
If the first African-American president had been impeached, that wouldn't have looked very good, right?
And I've got to say, President Obama, I don't like a lot of stuff he's done, but from a scandal standpoint, he'd been pretty good.
If you grade these people on a curve, his scandal record's been pretty good.
But it seems like a scandal when people find out the numbers of innocent people killed by drones and also the real issues with him saying that he was going to support whistleblowers and what they've actually done with whistleblowers.
And how hard they've been on the freedom of the press.
It's been a very confusing time for a lot of people that were Obama supporters eight years ago and thought, like I did, that this was the answer.
Like, finally we have this super articulate young guy who has a view of the world that's similar to us.
You know, a part of you can say, listen, they took him in the back room and said, here are the threats we stopped last month.
Do you really want to do what you say?
You know, you don't, but you would love the president to at least say, okay, I'm going to hold a televised press conference now, and I'm going to say, here's what I said when I ran for president.
Yeah, but I was going to say, when they don't do that, you open up the door to what the hell's going on, right?
He gave you this small promise and that small promise and maybe a health care reform, but he said he was going to essentially repair the Constitution, and he didn't.
It's also hard to understand, like, when you've seen a guy like Trump, and I want to get back to the Clinton Foundation before I forget, but when you've seen a guy like Trump And you listen to the people that have actually interviewed him or talked to him and had conversations with him.
Like, one of them was...
I forget what head of military that he was discussing this with, but he was talking about the nuclear option.
It's funny because, you know, on Twitter, some of the Trump supporters, and I don't ever want to broad brush because I know a lot of people that are going to vote for Trump that are old people, that are fine people, that are...
But there's certainly an edge on some of those people that support him that has certain racism, all kinds of things.
We see them on Twitter.
And so...
When one of them was talking about how Donald Trump is this...
Cuck-servative is one of the words they like to use now.
But to me...
No American who understands the United States well would want to vote for some strongman.
That whole attitude of wanting some strongman figure is as un-American as I can think of.
And if you go study your Roman Republic history, it was the strongman riding in on a white horse that really signaled the beginning of the end.
Anyone who wants too much power and promises to use it, that's somebody to be afraid of.
Look at who he was up against on the primary stage with a bunch of stiff robotic people repeating talking points.
It was a little like Clinton was in his primaries in the early 90s when it's a bunch of deadbeat, stiff, cardboard cutout pretend figures and one person that you don't know what they're going to say next and that becomes interesting.
Well, what's interesting is the charismatic type people that we are so attracted to really are not what you want as a leader.
You don't want that person that needs so much attention that they polish their persona to a point where they're incredibly influential.
Because a lot of that when you're seeing, it's like they're entertainers.
I mean, that's what it is.
When you're a really charismatic person, you figure out a way to speak in a way that...
People like you more.
And then you've exercised that to the point where it's a well-honed muscle with incredible endurance and you have a great sensitivity to how people are perceiving you so you know how to come across as noble and patriotic and brilliant.
We all know that some of the things that people say, like standard things that people say, there's some of them that you really shouldn't even be able to say anymore because it doesn't mean anything and you shouldn't be allowed to just hijack those words and just use it to gain merit like, God bless our troops.
When people freak out over that, I always say, listen, it'd be nice if we freaked out a little bit about what these songs and flags and symbols represent, instead of freaking out over the symbol and ignoring the stuff.
I mean, we're talking about a person who's in an incredible position of influence, and they're saying these things that are kind of not like a real sentence.
It's not really what you thought.
You just knew that other people have said that.
It's something you say, so you're saying it.
But you're saying it about a very important thing.
You're saying about the young people, the children of all the people that are here, the 18-year-old kids that are sent over there to shoot people they've never met.
And you're saying, God bless those people.
What is God?
Are you saying the invisible man in the sky with the harp?
Is that who you're saying?
You're saying, God bless our kids to go kill other people's kids?
Are you sure that that's how you want to say that?
Like you just wanted to have this open statement, God bless our troops?
Do I want our troops to be safe?
Of course.
Do I wish that we didn't have to use them?
We didn't have to have...
Absolutely.
It's not a negative in any way, shape, or form towards the military, but it's these expressions that leaders are just...
They're freely allowed to plug into.
It's like a happy birthday to you, or like a weird...
You're dealing with massive issues that are super...
Like, not just charged, but the consequences of being wrong or right or being unsuccessful are massive.
You mentioned something I've always found very interesting, which is the charisma of the individual.
Yeah.
A poli-sci professor back in college who happened to be a German guy.
So he was sort of viewing our system from outside our system.
And he said, you know, this is how he said, the problem with you Americans is you have a president that combines two jobs.
If you were a European country, that would be two jobs.
One is the bean counter guy, the one you were mentioning, the guy you want to be president, the one that's, you know, he's maybe not so great at the big speeches and you don't want that guy going to the funerals and representing America.
And he goes, and then we have in Europe chancellors or presidents that these people physically represent the soul.
They go to the funerals.
So he said, you want John Wayne to be that guy.
And then you want some bean counter to be the other guy.
But in your country, you require both of those things in the same person.
He says, you know how often you get John Wayne, who's also a bean counter?
He goes, that's your problem.
He goes, you end up usually electing the John Wayne and wishing you'd had a bean counter.
So, I mean, in Europe, he said those are two separate jobs.
What I was getting at by the expressions is like saying things like God bless the troops or God bless America is that just the whole way of talking as a politician is so it's so false and so accepted that we know that they're gonna stand in front of all these people with this pre-planned out speech that is like this weird rally this weird Artificial strip club DJ voice that they put on.
He exposed kind of the artificial kabuki theater sort of way this has developed.
And I liked that because I think it's good when more Americans see what it really is, right?
In other words, most of the time, you're right.
They either get fooled by that or they've heard it so many times they don't even pay attention.
Trump helped expose that.
So in that sense, that was good for the system.
Of course, now we've gone quite a bit farther down that road, and I don't think it is so good for the system anymore.
I do think Anybody would beat Hillary Clinton almost.
I mean, I think, you know, Democrats keep saying to me, if you don't vote for Hillary Clinton, you're going to put Trump in office and that'll be your fault.
And I keep saying, it's not my fault you put Hillary Clinton up as your candidate.
I mean, in 2008, we saw how unpopular she was.
She shouldn't have lost to Barack Obama.
She was going to be coronated then.
Do you realize if she hadn't had a 70-something-year-old democratic socialist who, let's be honest, does not have a ton of charisma, and a guy nobody's ever heard from as her only two primary challengers up on that stage, she wouldn't be here.
If Joe Biden, and this is the first time I can think of that, a vice president hasn't tried to run himself.
If Joe Biden had run, he would be up against Trump now.
And I don't think Trump would stand a chance, to be honest.
And I don't like Joe Biden, but I just think he's a zero.
And right now, Trump is a negative running against Hillary, who's a negative.
I mean, Michael Moore, of all people, came out with a piece about three weeks ago, and he started the piece off by saying something to the effect of, you don't have to believe what I'm about to tell you, but I will tell you that I have spoken to people who are in the know who tell me that Trump doesn't even want this gig, that this is something that has gotten out of control.
That this was more of a, I'll get a TV series afterwards, and that he didn't expect he'd do this good.
And I thought to myself, okay, I don't know that I believe that, but if that's true, this is the most unusual, funky, weird American political history story I've ever heard.
Well, this was in Lawrence Lessig's book, Republic Lost, which, by the way, if anyone wants to go check out, he put it on the internet for free now.
So you can read it.
Was he a commie?
Well, Harvard, maybe.
But one of the things he said in there that was so interesting is he showed how people who are getting started, you know, running for mayor, you know, the low-level things, how the parties begin the weeding out process.
And the first thing that they want to know is, how good are you at raising money?
And this determines whether or not the party lets this mayoral candidate put the R or D after their name, or that mayoral candidate.
So in other words, from the very beginning, one of the main qualifications is how good are you at raising money?
Okay, so fast forward to when that guy or woman is up on the stage running for president, and they have four other elected positions leading up to that, all of which require you to be a better fundraiser.
When that's one of the number one qualifications required for the parties to let you progress, Then what do you end up with at the end of the line?
I mean, what are the carrots and sticks that they're looking for?
A little bit different than maybe what you and I as voters are looking for.
If you go watch those TV shows from like the 1950s and you see their portrayal of a 70 year old, it's sitting on the porch falling asleep and whittling.
Trump doesn't even have experience, so it's even more bizarre.
So it's not like you're dealing with this elderly statesman that has so much knowledge and so much invested in our system of government and really believes in it so much that he wants to lead this country and make America great again.
No, you gotta...
Super rich guy who's famous for going, you're fired!
And when Trump supporters say, well, he'll pick the best people, I always want to point out, you know, he's already shown some of the people that he likes, and there's the same old group of people you've had before.
I mean, he's not going and picking other business people who've never...
He goes and finds his four...
And you're going, okay, it's the same group.
I mean, so I get Donald Trump presiding over the same old group of people who've been wrong about everything so far.
I mean, that's the problem, is that how do you get away from the people who are consistently wrong?
In a merit-based system, the people that should be promoted are the ones who are right more often.
We don't get that.
We have the same faces forever.
Forever.
I mean, the same guys who are on...
I always say, if CNN is going to put, to just name one, these experts to tell us what this latest North Korea nuclear missile thing means, would you please put up their track record the way you would put up the wins and loss record of a manager in baseball?
Do you want that manager who's 4-72 explaining to you the World Series strategy, or are you going to say, this guy doesn't know Jack?
Because if they put the records of these people they have on the programs, you'd look at it and go, I'm not listening to this guy.
It seems like if CNN or any of these news networks decided to help support this independent idea and bring in independence and show that, that independents are the vast majority of the voters, or the majority, rather, the slight majority, of the voters in America, if they showed that and promoted that idea, people would go, wow, I didn't know that.
The money is interviewing and getting on camera the people that are the most popular right now and most likely to win.
That's why one of the most amazing things that Trump did was all that shit talking he did, talking about Mexicans being rapists and all this nuts about the wall and all the different crazy things that he said.
When he did that, the news was forced to cover him.
You know, when you look at the American electoral system like an analyst does, they notice important states you have to win, right?
This state has to, you know, as Ohio goes or as Florida, there's certain places.
And then there are other places that are gimmies.
This state will always go blue.
This state will always go red.
So the battleground are the states that are the toss-ups.
In a bunch of those states, Hillary Clinton is leading.
And so the attitude that the Sharpies at least have is that it doesn't matter what the polls look like.
It matters how Ohio goes and it matters how Florida, you know, so in other words, those are the choke points.
I mean, when Hillary Clinton decides four years ago, I'm going to run for president, okay, get into Ohio now.
Start working those places now.
And so when people talk about Trump not having a robust establishment or organization on the ground, this is where he's going to get...
Killed.
They'll kill him in those states.
And then he may win.
You know, you could conceivably come up with an election where Trump gets more actual votes, but Clinton wins the Electoral College and wins the key states.
And that's how the Sharpies, who do this for a living, as consultants and as campaign strategists, that's how they win.
I don't know what I'd do, but I mean, what we require those people to do with this permanent campaign that goes on forever, and these are 70-year-old people, as we said, I'm amazed they both haven't broken down.
And if I'm Trump, I would look at this and go, do I really want this?
If this is how hard the job will be, I could be in Hawaii.
You know, there is a part of you that would love to just have a view of what it, you know, like a Gilligan's Island episode where you have a dream sequence where the coconut hits you on the head and you imagine what it's...
I don't want to live through it, but I'd love to see it for a minute to see what it would look like.
Hillary Clinton will just be more of the same.
We're heading towards an iceberg here, and she's one of the people that set the course.
So that's my problem with her.
She's doubling down on what we've always had, whereas Trump is the wild card.
Another thing, I'm having a bad track record myself.
Maybe you shouldn't listen to me at all.
But on the racism thing, which I don't ever want to put a number on what percentage of the Trump supporters fall into that category that we see Twitter people trolling us on.
But I thought that was going the way of the dodo.
I am more surprised by that than anything else.
The rise in overt, and I don't even want to say racism, but just people who look at the world with that viewpoint, that lens.
I thought we were, you know, not evolving, but I thought those people were dying out.
I thought they were like Archie Bunkers, and they were just going to be...
And to see that recur is the biggest surprise I've had in my adult lifetime, I think, when analyzing politics.
There's young kids like I would have done when I was 17. If you gave me a computer when I was 17 and I knew I could tweet to Al Gore, I'd probably make the meanest fucking tweet.
I would try to be funny.
I just think there's so many voices out there that when you see racism attached to the Donald Trump campaign, you can't really say what percentage of Donald Trump supporters are.
Is it more of a problem in the Trump campaign than the Hillary campaign?
I just had this moment outside my body where I thought, we're really talking about this stuff.
I mean, you know, there is...
And, you know, you had brought this up earlier, and I wanted to point out, we had talked about people growing up, young people today, and whether or not they're going to go back.
In other words, say, oh, this is all so far, you know, beyond where we should go back.
Or if they're going, this is the new normal to them.
You know, to them, they don't even remember when Dan Carlin talks about the laws of the Fourth Amendment, they're going, what?
I don't even remember what you're talking about.
God, that'd be crazy to let people do that or whatever.
I mean, you wonder if once you haven't had a freedom for a while, does it seem radical to go back to that?
There was a great quote, I use it all the time, by a historian a long time ago named Charles Austin Beard.
And he said, to be considered a dangerous radical today, all you have to do is go around spouting the phrases of the founding fathers.
That'll get you on the NSA watch list today.
What does that mean?
You know, if you take that out, smack in the mic, but if you take that out and you try to analyze that, what does that say about how far we've come?
You know, revolutionaries create your country, and then we very quickly lose that revolutionary ardor, and we become much more conservative, which is natural, I think.
But, you know, we talked about life cycles of countries.
Are we over the hill?
I mean, could you make a case that the United States concept, which is really a utopian one, this we can all be free, we can all run the country, is that something that is past its prime, its sell-by date?
Well, I think the corrupt amongst us have tried to whittle away at it, like you're talking about the Fourth Amendment or the Second Amendment or even the First Amendment, any of the amendments.
Where you look at the freedoms that people are really worried about losing.
And when something like the Patriot Act or the Patriot Act 2 gets passed, and you realize that they can just sort of detain you, and they don't have to charge you with anything, and they can detain you indefinitely if they just decide.
They don't have to present you with any evidence.
They don't have to give you a trial.
They don't have to give you a court date.
Like, well, okay, well, what are we operating under then?
If you can make an act like that, and that sort of dissolves the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for people who you decide are the bad guys, if you can just do that, then we don't really have...
The protection of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights anymore.
I mean, if you're going to create a group and get a lot of money to defend an amendment to the Constitution, even if Americans can argue what the Second Amendment means, but I love the idea of money coming to legislators, because that's what they pay attention to, to protect those rights.
My problem is that the amendments that are getting so shafted are the ones that don't have a lot of money, and often have a lot of money on the other side.
Well, it's just bizarre that you could get so much done with money and that this is our system of government, and it slowly but surely crept its way into the root system of it and just entangled it and choked it down.
I mean, I think that basically this is the way it always is, and we would have had to have held it back with all of our force to keep it from doing – because money has a way, doesn't it?
I mean, we all are vulnerable.
Once you have enough money so that you don't have to be vulnerable, it's different.
But I mean, if you are just a person struggling to get by and somebody offers you a lot of money to do something, it is a heck of a challenge to have, okay, here are my philosophical beliefs.
Here's food for my children or whatever.
That becomes very difficult.
And with these legislators, the pity is that they all want to be re-elected so much that they can let the money sway them out.
If they didn't care that much about the jobs, the money might not mean that much.
Once you get elected, if you said, this is all I want, then you don't care what the money says.
You only care what the money says if you want to get re-elected, which argues for term limits and all that stuff, maybe.
Trump's had an MSNBC. No, this is not the first time, though.
This is after he got slammed for not doing enough to disavow.
So in other words, this is like the follow-up question.
So the first time he said something like, I don't want to misquote it, but I recall him saying something like, I don't know anything about the KKK or something like that, and everybody lost their minds.
But if you said to yourself, okay, 5% of my support is from people who would like a guy like David Duke...
I'm not going to cut out 5% of my support.
I don't know.
The whole thing is surreal to me a little bit.
Once again, you know, if I've been caught off guard by anything, I've been caught off guard by this.
And I can't process it yet.
I don't know how to fit Donald Trump and that one segment of his supporters into my worldview, because I thought they were a dying breed.
I didn't think that could be resurrected.
I talked to a guy when I was a reporter during the Bosnian War.
And he was a Croat.
And he tried to make the case to me, and he very well might have been right, that a lot of those people in that area where they have historic problems with each other and always have, were getting along just fine while economic things were okay.
He said we were intermarrying.
Serbs could fall in love with Croats.
It was going okay.
But he goes, once everything hit the fan and times became tough and the economics came into play, all those old feelings came back.
And I thought to myself, is that something that is applicable on this racism thing?
I don't know, but one could make a case that we haven't been this unsettled in a very long time in this country.
Are we seeing...
I don't know.
It's hard to factor how much that plays a role versus how much the internet and the ability for these people to speak out when before they would have had to be Xeroxing things and leaving them on your car, you know, when you come out of the grocery store.
I mean, you couldn't find that many like-minded groups if you lived in a neighborhood full of progressive people and you were like a really conservative person.
And they also, they're apologists and they're not honest about the faults of their candidates.
Like there was this thing about Hillary about, like I said, people were talking about how it's sexist that people are commenting on her health and that if it was a man that was running for president who got...
Weak during 9-11, during, you know, after some sort of a service for the fallen troops, that that would be totally acceptable.
No, and history shows it because people forget that George McGovern had to drop his vice presidential candidate because the guy, it had been released that he had visited a psychiatrist for some depression problems.
and then released them, but they also had altered something and then released that version too.
And so they tripped themselves up so that you could compare.
These are the documents they hacked.
Then these are the ones they released to the public and they had altered something.
And I said, everyone, when they found that story out, breathed a sigh of relief because now you have an out and you see it already.
The DNC's going, well, listen, Russian hackers are known to alter this stuff.
So the minute that came out, it was the greatest boon to all the politicians in the world because they could say, whatever that says is probably altered, you know?
So it's the wonderful get-out-of-jail-free card on the hacking.
I mean, I would actually probably support a hack if I was running for president in that sense, because you could say, look, you're not going to trust evidence that came from someone who got it through illegal means.
Well, case in point, we We talked about Clinton and women.
The press knew that Kennedy was doing all that stuff, but there was an unwritten gentleman's agreement that you didn't talk about that kind of stuff.
Never mind that he might have been having sex with Sam Giancana's girlfriend, Judith Exner, at the same time, and that there might be some problems with that.
Nowadays, I mean, that's why, to me, people say Bill Clinton was just impeached over sex.
In my mind, anybody who's either dumb enough or whatever you want to put in there that he thinks he can get away with that is somebody I don't want with a hand on the nuclear button.
I mean, come on.
Anybody with half a brain knows, I mean, Joe, if you wanted to get away with something, would you pull that one?
I mean, come on.
There's no way.
He was 100% going to get caught and did it anyway.
It was a conversation between this guy and fighter pilots about the high incidences of swingers.
And one of the things that I think they were saying, I forget where I read this, but they were saying that...
What was going on was that these guys were in such an intense job where there's a high likelihood of them dying.
And one of the ways to ensure that their loved one would be looked after is if someone loved them as much as they loved them.
So they would literally be in these fighter runs with these planes, flying into hostile territory, getting shot at, thinking any day could be my last day.
So there's this desperation of like, you're leaving behind a wife and a family And one way they alleviated that, this was the idea, was that they would wife swap.
And that it happened naturally.
You know who it was?
I think it was Chris Ryan.
I think it was Chris Ryan that was explaining this.
I can certainly see the risk taker thing where you said these are people who live on the edge because that's their...
When you fly those planes, you're a risk taker.
If you wanted to say, okay, a person who's willing to do risky behavior here, I'm not thinking the wife swapping as much as having a lot of girlfriends that aren't your wife.
But at the same time, listen, like you said, some of those personality traits are probably what you want in those guys.
Yeah, well, I think the way Chris was explaining it, too, was that their bond and their camaraderie between each other was so powerful that it's sort of...
It sort of eclipsed jealousy in a way, you know, because they counted on each other so much and they were brothers in war and literally life or death struggle.
So there's a bond and a camaraderie that sort of superseded everything and that the idea of like that they could swap wives and they just love each other more.
You know, for those who have not seen all of the appearances I've had on this, Joe started off breaking me into being on the Joe Rogan podcast with some comments initially.
So now I just flow with it and it's going to get me killed eventually.
But what do you, like, when you see what the reports are about the Clinton Foundation, I don't totally understand what's legal and what's not legal, but I don't think I've seen anyone said that anything they've done is illegal, right?
Yeah, it falls into that category, the same category that maybe the giving of ambassadorships to people who give money fall into the...
For example, there's no question that the Clinton Foundation goes and does good work.
There's no question.
But how much does the fact that they do good work and that your name is attached to it end up being something that helps you for less...
Charitable reasons, right?
In other words, it makes you look good as a candidate to be somebody that, you know, helps vaccine people against polio, right?
So all of that right there has a subsidiary effect that you could, if you wanted to, say, oh, you're benefiting from this.
Well, now add the fact that people can give money to the foundation, then the foundation can pay Bill Clinton to run the – I mean, it becomes...
And then if you gave money to the foundation, does that mean you get special treatment?
I can hear the Hillary Clinton supporters saying, well, that didn't happen.
But it's the reason that people put stuff in a blind trust when they become president, so that you don't even know what your money's doing, so that you can't possibly be favoritism toward...
And the Clintons have basically made it sound like they're not going to do that.
And once again, as I said to you earlier, if you know they're after you like they're after the Clintons, wouldn't you just leave as much room between you and any potential whiff of scandal as you could?
Well, and you know, you've done this and I've done this.
We've both been around some of these high rollers before where you realize how much they pick up the phone and talk to other high rollers and how interconnected that network is.
And there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, but you could easily see...
That that networking can be used for nefarious purposes, good purposes or no purposes, but they all have each other on speed dial, right?
In 10 years, how is this email hack scandal going to change protocol on how all these people do things?
Because it is.
You watch.
Colin Powell and everybody watching what's unfolding right now are determining that there are going to be new ways we communicate, and it's not going to be like that.
And the corruption is both parties, and we have no options besides the both parties.
So this is where, you know, like we said on the Common Sense Show for 11 years now, this is your focal point of the problem.
We have a corruption problem.
Both parties benefit from it.
They have no real interest in addressing it.
The only time they're interested in fighting corruption is if they can manage to fight the kind of corruption that helps the other side without impacting the ones that help them.
So the Republicans always say that about Democratic campaign finance reform, that it goes after Republican funders, but not Democratic ones.
In other words, they're not holier than thou.
They're just trying to figure out another way to game the system, utilizing reform as the tool.
That's just like what you said about Hillary Clinton and the fact that she had said that the FBI director said this about her when he had just said something kind of complete.
But she knew that the 5% of people that would realize that didn't count.
Same thing.
The 5% of people who realized, wait a minute, you just hired that...
And there's another day, and more news stories, and a plane goes down to Singapore or something, and there's another news story, and some fucking nuclear test in North Korea, and everybody's gone.
It's gone.
Three weeks later, it's gone.
There's just so much going on that you can't really maintain any story like that in the news.
That's why the Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, the way that they approached that was structured the way it was to come out in chunks, because they had said, if you release it all at once, it'd be this huge story, but then it's done.
If you understand how the news cycle works the way you just mentioned, you want to release a nice chunk and then wait until the headlines die down again and then release another chunk.
And that's the way Wikileaks is doing that right now with these hacks they have.
They're releasing it in chunks because as soon as the news cycle dies down, they want to take advantage of the next one.
The WikiLeaks thing is one of the most bizarre scenarios where you have this guy that if you ask the United States, like just the United States, like what percentage of people support what Julian Assange did?
What percentage of the people support letting people understand what is really going on behind the scenes?
It would be pretty overwhelming.
I would guarantee it would be in the high 70s.
Some people are blindly patriotic and they would just want their government to just have carte blanche.
There's a few of those, but I think most people would support the, yeah, I want to know what the fuck's going on.
But here's what they have to do if they want to keep playing the straight and narrow.
They have to get a hold of some leaked documents from the other side, because otherwise, it's like if you only get the leaked documents from one side, that does impact the election, and that calls into question the motives of the leaker.
If you're saying, I release information, then you can be above the fray.
If you say, like a lot of journalists understand how to do, what you omit and don't release has as much value as what you do.
So if the only leaks you're getting are from the Democrats and the Republicans aren't being leaked, then that's influencing the election.
Because you know as well as I do, the other side has crap that is just as shocking and upsetting and corrupt as the Democrats.
You know, I'm ashamed to say that there's a part of me that says, yeah, let's see that.
I don't want to be that way.
But I read somebody online said the other day that there's people who are going to vote for him just for the entertainment value because they don't want to be bored for the next four years.
And I thought to myself, that's when the country's really jumped the shark.
When we're voting for candidates, I don't care what they'll do.
Anybody who tells me that they support the troops again, but are willing to send them willy-nilly anywhere at any time, to me, supporting the troops means you value their lives and their families and the fact that many of these guys and women have had to go back and back and back and their lives have been on hold and they suffer.
I mean, how many stories have we read about what these people deal with every day?
Go to the VA, and let's say you want to support the troops, fix the VA, right?
Do the things that matter to the troops, and then don't send them into harm's way unless it really, really matters.
See, like, we were talking about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the last Common Sense show.
Yeah.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, there were parts of it, very important parts of it, that were not released until 2005. 2005, if you found out within a month that the Gulf of Tonkin, which for those who don't know, this is sort of the excuse for why we were able to ramp up the Vietnam War, which killed a ton of people, right?
If you had known within a month, in real time, basically, that that didn't happen the way that they said it happened, that's time enough to impact the decision making.
They classified it so that by the time it comes out, everyone's dead and it's in a history book, you have no ability to impact the decision-making.
That's where classification kills us, because if you, the electorate, say, to heck with this, we've got to go out in the streets or we have to have a protest online, you can't do that if you don't know what's going on.
Well, I did come up with reasons, because I felt the same with you, and I had to figure out a cause, right?
What would explain it that was rational?
And here's what I came up with, and I'm hardly the only person who realized this.
You remember Oswald had ties to Cuba, and he defected to the Soviet Union and then come home.
Okay, so if you're average Joe or Jane, and you don't know much about what's going on, but you find out a Cuban defector, a Cuban-supporting Soviet Union defector killed the president, and that maybe that might...
Do you see how that...
If you were reading the Guns of August on how World War I started, and you thought it wouldn't have taken...
And Serbians were behind that in the way that the people whose Archduke was killed.
So, I mean, if Americans thought that the Soviet Union killed their young president that they all loved with his wife right there and the two little children, what would the...
How much might that have impacted the president's ability to keep us out of a war or not?
I mean, I can see if somebody said that you might have a very good reason for hiding the fact that Oswald had really close ties.
I don't know.
I was trying to find out a rationale that made sense to me.
And that would be a rationale that made sense to me.
I don't think you have to classify it for a lifetime, which they basically did.
But, I mean, they have leaked some stuff or released some stuff due to the Freedom of Information Act that people would consider incredibly offensive, and they found out about it.
Like 1962, Northwoods, Operation Northwoods, where they designed attacks on Guantanamo Bay.
They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, potentially killing who knows how many soldiers.
They were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans.
My favorite line from Kennedy was always the one where he says, those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.
I mean, those are the kind of things where you wonder about us now, where you say, listen, the ability to have our system evolve in ways that make it better are going to prevent really bad things from happening in the future.
If we can't get it together now, just follow the current trends outward.
If nothing changes, what is the 2020 election going to look like?
And so, I mean, when you talk about a conspiracy and having motive, there were a lot of people that had motive.
I always hate it when they, you know, the Oliver Stone movie drove me crazy because, in my opinion, the movie he did on JFK, he took every conspiracy theory out there and threw them all in.
Oliver Stone didn't get funding for Snowden in the U.S. In Germany, he found both financial support and filming locations for his political thriller, but its release is low-key.
Well, I mean, originally, you know, when you follow the story, see, it's not just the fact that it probably happened a certain way.
It's when you follow the conspiracy talk and you realize, you know, what they're bringing to the equation.
How much do I believe the David, you know, the Cuban idea?
How much do I believe?
And after going through it, you know, if you go read, like, Bo Yossi's book, he was the guy who wrote Helter Skelter.
He prosecuted Manson.
He was a guy I liked a lot.
And he wrote a book where he did it like a prosecutor, right?
So here's how I would have prosecuted Oswald.
And when he lines it up the way he does, you sit there and go, okay, this is not...
And I know Bugliosi, he was a guy that would have loved to have written that it wasn't.
He would have loved to have said Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, but he didn't.
And he ran down the list and you sat there and go, okay, if I was at the trial...
And I was on the jury, and they said, what was the preponderance of evidence?
And did the prosecutor, you know, prove his case?
I would have had to have said, after reading Boyosi's book, that unless I really had a vested interest in believing the conspiracy theory, that he had done a damn good job of making his case.
Here's my problem with it, and this is one that, for whatever reason, I don't see brought up very often.
I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive.
I don't think Oswald was innocent.
I think Oswald very well might have shot at the president.
But I think it's highly likely they set up more than one shooter.
I think there's a possibility that gunfire echoing from that building could make people think that it was coming from the grassy knoll.
But there's so many people that said that gunfire was coming from the grassy knoll that you have to wonder.
And you look at the shots that hit Kennedy...
Like, the one in his neck, that's one of the more interesting books that I read about it was Case Closed, not Case Closed, Best Evidence by David Lifton.
If he was hit from the front and from the back, it's entirely possible that Oswald also was involved and that there was a bunch of people involved.
It's entirely possible that if you're going to assassinate the president, if you're going to have a conspiracy to assassinate the president, you're going to use a bunch of people.
Why wouldn't they use someone like Oswald?
Why wouldn't they use some crazy fuck who emigrates to Russia and comes back with a Russian wife and he's involved in communist propaganda and all sorts of other crazy unsavory shit.
He shoots at generals.
Yeah, that's exactly a guy you would use.
And he might have been involved too.
It might have been, and I don't, it's somehow or another, it always, the debate is always a mutually exclusive thing.
Either Oswald acted alone, or the CIA killed Kennedy, or the NSA, or whoever the fuck, the Cubans, the mob, and they blamed it on Oswald.
Well, it could totally be he was a part of it all, and that there was more than one shooter.
The guy who was my mentor when I first started in news was a local guy here that everybody in news knew, a guy named John Babcock.
And Babcock was a Texas guy originally.
And he was in the motorcade, in the very last car, because they had press writing.
But he was in the motorcade.
So he was at Parkland when it was announced that Kennedy was dead.
And then he told me the story.
He had good stories.
He had good Manson stories, too.
He was in the room with Ruby before they brought Oswald out, before Ruby killed him.
And he said, what are you doing here today, Jack?
And Jack, and he had a conversation beforehand.
I don't recall what John thought in terms of conspiracy or not conspiracy, but I remember that that was like a seminal moment in his career, because he was broadcasting live, he was on the radio while it was all going on, and he was there at the scene.
He also had the most Awesome Manson stuff.
Because the station I worked at, KABC, was big in the Manson investigation.
They're the ones that actually found the bloody clothes a year later on the hillside while they were filming a recreation.
And that's how the bloody clothes got found.
And he would go and speak to Manson all the time when Manson was not convicted yet.
So he's on trial and awaiting trial.
And he and Manson became friends, and up on his wall, he had a photo of Charles Manson with, in pencil, a note.
And I still remember what it said.
It said, to the trial, come early, stay late, it'll be quite a show.
And he said, look at that writing that Manson did.
And I looked at it, and it was weird.
You could see that the pencil was broken, like he would snap the point off the pencil every couple of words.
the point of the pencil snapped.
I go, "No." He goes, "Because the guy had no education, but he was pretty smart, and he used to get so frustrated at his inability to express himself that he would break the pencil." So then once he was convicted, and remember he was sent to death row, John said, "I stopped paying attention to him because, you know, he's on death row, I'm moving on." So Manson started sending him messages saying, "Why don't you come and visit me anymore?" And so finally John went and he said, Manson said, so why don't you come and visit me anymore?
And John said, well, you know, Charlie, you know, you're going to the...
And Manson says, so you don't think I can, you know, you don't think I'm...
And he goes, no, no.
So he said, come back in a week.
And so John says, so I come back in a week.
And all Manson did was slide under the table like a cocktail napkin type thing.
And on it was drawn the layout of John's house.
And he said, "I went home and I bought three shotguns, and I put them loaded in various parts of my house." He said, "They're still there to this day." Jesus Christ.
But basically, wouldn't that scare the hell out of you?
that have somebody draw, in other words, he'd send somebody to John's house to go look around and then tell him what it looked like.
And then send him the cocktail napkin.
He had so many good stories.
He was an old-fashioned news guy.
But he was in the Kennedy thing, and we used to talk about that all the time.
And now I wish I could remember, 50-year-old brain, bus speed, what John had told me about his thinking on it.
I guess my attitude is I'm always disinclined to believe conspiracy theories unless the preponderance of evidence convinces me otherwise.
That's an absolute false flag conspiracy that was perpetrated on the American public, resulting in us going to war, ramping up the war, killing who knows how many people.
Okay, if you're all in an office and you're working with the president and the president gets shot, you think you're going to get more information than the average person in the street?
You're probably not.
You're probably going to have to read the news reports just like everybody else.
You're going to see Oswald paraded out there.
You're going to see Jack Ruby shoot him.
You're going to have people in your organization tell you that they shot the guy who shot the president.
And you're going to believe it.
Until you see the Zapruder film, until you're watching the Geraldo Rivera show and Dick Gregory brings on the Zapruder film, what was elected?
And, you know, unless you're some dude in a movie who wants to get to the bottom of it and you sneak into the building in the middle of the night with a flashlight.
Well, as I told you, there's a good reason to have covered it up if you believe that the American people would draw a natural conclusion that a Soviet agent killed our president.
And remember, you know, Kennedy had been trying to assassinate Castro, too, so there were reasons for a Cuban group of people to take— I mean, there's a— Sure.
Well, and like I said, I get angry when the conspiracy theorists who write these books, and it's an industry, as you well know, I get angry when they don't include things that might disprove what they say.
You want me to believe you, I want you to lay it all out, right?
Well, there's some tightly grooved paths when it comes to discussing that conspiracy.
That's why I've always found it so weird that no one mentions, or very rarely is it mentioned, that Oswald might have been a part of it.
The idea that he got off those three shots, because they determined that it was three shots based on people's reporting, and You know, if you believe that he got off those three shots in a short amount of time, and then you see Jesse Ventura trying to recreate it and say, it's impossible, no one can get that off.
Well, someone can do that.
That's not true.
There's people that are capable of getting off three shots in six seconds or whatever it was.
Although, let's be honest, that becomes a lot harder to hide later.
So if you're worried about exposure, because exposure would show the tentacles, well, then you want to make it as cut and dried and simple as you can.
You start triangulating on a president...
You know, you don't know, as you well know, what those bullets are going to do, right?
I think you open yourself up to massive problems if those bullets go.
I mean, in other words, if something had gone another way and it would have been impossible to deny that there was another shooter, how does that change the whole investigation?
That was part of the investigation itself, leading to the magic bullet theory.
The magic bullet theory was created because a guy was walking under the underpass and the curbstone got hit by a bullet.
He was hit in the head with a ricochet.
So because he was hit with a ricochet, they found the spot where the bullet had hit, and they had accounted for one bullet.
So then they had the headshot that killed Kennedy, and then they had this neck thing, and then they had this other bullet, and then they started trying to figure out, well, how many bullets are involved here, and how does Connelly have a bullet lodged in his leg?
Like, how does this happen?
Or how did he get shot in a bullet that shattered his bone and went through his leg?
Also went through Kennedy?
Is that what we're saying?
Like, what are we saying?
So they had to come up with that one bullet doing all that damage specifically because somebody got hit with some spray.
And this is the part where it's kind of hard if you want there to be anything cut and dried.
If you're the Warren Commission report, and you're doing this not that long after Kennedy's assassination, I think you have to allow for the idea that there are going to be unknowables.
Right?
And especially ballistics.
I mean, ballistics are crazy, right?
Bullets tumble.
And, you know, you fire 900 bullets at something, most of them are going to be deformed, but some of them might not be.
Well, see, this is where, had I known I was coming here, I would have brought both those books, so we could have looked up how Bugliosi and Posner explained the magic bullet, because they...
And just imagine if you're the CIA in 1962, and you're getting together with all your cronies, and you've been responsible for jacking people all over the world.
And you've got this guy...
And he's going to disband your entire organization.
And then you're talking to some other people that are upset at him because of the Bay of Pigs.
And you're talking about some other people that are upset about him because of this and of that and all the other things that he's trying to do that people don't agree with.
And you go, look, there's a simple solution to this.
And you bring in that Lee Harvey Oswald character and you get that ball rolling.
You set up a bunch of different people that are really good at rifles.
Here's one thing that always bugged me about the Supruder film.
When you watch his head, his head does go back and to the left, but the spray from the bullet, in my eye, seems like it's going forward, like he was hit from behind.
Well, it seems like a little bit of it, but then sometimes when you hit someone, like, you can hit things and just the impact of the bullet causes a reverberation.
There's executions of Chinese nationalists killing Chinese communists, and you watch them and they'll do it over and over and over again, and most of the time things go the way you think they should, and sometimes they don't.
And I'm also going to say that the reason that it would be interesting to know the answer, I mean, if somebody could come down from the extraterrestrials and tell you, you know, this is what really...
In that sense, the problem with it, though, is if you buy into the conspiracy theory as it's normally told, then that basically takes you down this road that, okay, there was a coup, the president was killed by the government, and then that all subsequent history from that point on then takes a, you know, like, you know, they say with time travel, you change something and you go off on a totally different course.
All history goes on a totally different course if that's what really happened.
In other words, everything must be looked through a different lens.
Right.
If I was to believe, as I used to, that that was done by the government, then my whole common sense show would be totally different.
But doesn't, I mean, don't you have to look at everything from a different lens when you find something like Operation Northwoods?
When you find the Northwoods documents, you see that it's signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this was a real plan they were thinking about implementing, and Kennedy put the boycott on it.
The problem that all those people have is if they think I always try to get people the benefit of the doubt and say, if you came to me with secret information and says, blah, blah, blah, the country needs to do this now.
And you say to yourself, but I could never get the American people to go along with that.
So if they knew what I knew, they would, but they won't.
So because of that, I'm going, you know, so you start to try to figure out instead of just automatically going the conspiracy, right?
You go, okay, could there be a logical reason that I would accept and understand that would explain the same sequence of events?
I always try to do that.
Now, I say that as somebody who clearly knows the CIA's record.
I mean, that's been one of my interests forever.
The stuff that they do, I can't think of any natural limitations on.
I can't think of anything where the CIA would have said, no, I wouldn't do that if the president wanted us to.
I don't think many people know this, but, you know, in the Nixon administration, there was talk about killing Jack Anderson, the investigative reporter.
And it was G. Gordon Liddy who had offered to run him down with a car.
So when you talk about that and there are people around the president who are willing to consider the option, well then I have to say, you know, Dan, you have to open up your mind to the possibility that these things can happen.
And as I said, my opinion for years was that it did.
As I said earlier, though, Cheney is really a nefarious character in terms of, you know, if you weigh him next to the 1950s, the idea of fair play in the American way, he didn't believe any of that stuff.
It's a dog-eat-dog world, and whatever you and I consider to be American values is marketing, and you react, you know, I mean, it's all about, you know, it's realpolitik, as they call it, right?
He's such a weird character, because he's almost biblical.
Like, when he had that heart implant, and his body wasn't giving off a pulse anymore, and the heart was just, this artificial heart was just circling the blood, like, he literally was alive without a pulse.