Abby Martin and Joe Rogan clash over U.S. imperialism, exposing Trump’s $10M vacation spending, Syria/Iraq bombings tied to defense contractors, and Pentagon’s disputed civilian death tolls in airstrikes while critiquing media’s focus on Russia over military aggression. Martin details Israel’s occupation—settler violence, Nakba expulsions, skunk-spray attacks on Palestinian refugees—and contrasts it with U.S. hypocrisy, citing Sykes-Picot and colonial-era false flags. Rogan mocks DeVos’ "grizzly bear" school gun claims but agrees billionaires like Soros face unfair scrutiny compared to Exxon-linked Tillerson. They debate fake moon landings, ISIS propaganda, and systemic media failures, with Martin’s Empire Files tackling Venezuela’s U.S.-backed regime change myths next—setting up a potential fiery Rogan vs. Harris showdown on war narratives and tribal politics. [Automatically generated summary]
Dude, I just had a Twitter argument with Chelsea Clinton last night.
Oh no, you did not.
It's like these people don't understand.
Never respond to someone who's like way less than you.
Basically, I called her parents war criminals and she was like, yeah, you know, I should have listened more during the 2003 Iraq war to the anti-war activists.
But she initially called people who were protesting the Afghanistan war and like the AUMF anti-American.
And so she was like, yeah, because there was a story that came out that said Chelsea Clinton, actually with like American flags and all these things, like went and disrupted an anti-war protest after 9-11.
Yeah, like a group of like patriots, including Chelsea Clinton.
Probably like 22 or something?
Back then?
Maybe younger.
So then people were calling her out and being like, you know, like mother, like daughter, because there's stories of Hillary Clinton really working hard to quell the protests, the Vietnam War protests on campus and stuff, as the president of the Young Republicans Club.
And then she was like, I was talking about the Americans who denounce, like, you know, that America's an imperialist warmonger.
I was like, it is!
The country's an imperialist warmongering country that's killed millions of people, usurp the democratic processes of dozens of countries, and the world actually thinks that America's the number one threat to global peace.
So, I actually agree with the Americans you denounced, Chelsea.
Well, it's like, the problem is, as soon as you engage in someone that's calling anyone who is absolutely responsible for death a war criminal, as soon as you engage, it's like, well, then you have to define what do you think is a war criminal?
Like, what's okay for you?
Is it okay if 10,000 babies die?
I mean, like, you could kind of call any president ever a war criminal, except for maybe Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter gets slippery because he was really a peaceful man in a really weird situation.
And I think a lot of people capitalized on that weakness, including Ronald Reagan, which is the reason why the hostages in Iran weren't even released until after Reagan took office.
It's a crazy story because they literally kept those people prisoner and negotiated with their release based on Ronald Reagan winning the election to make him look better.
It was almost as good, the Chelsea Clinton recognition, as when John McCain tweeted a segment that I did about him on Breaking the Set, which was like the most scathing segment, calling him a senile, like crazy war criminal, like sadistic fuck.
And he like tweeted it out.
And he was like, thanks, Vlad.
Vladimir.
Vladimir Putin.
unidentified
Vlad continues his attacks against me and tweeted out to like his...
But, God, did you hear about all the DNI report, that intelligence report, that basically claimed that I, along with another show, cost Hillary Clinton the election?
I mean, this intelligence report came out.
After months and months, everyone's waiting with bated breath, thinking, okay, we're finally going to get evidence that Russia hacked the election, right?
This claim that Russia hacked the election.
And then they come out with this report.
Half of it was just bashing RTs.
And it named my show specifically.
And it said, this show covered fracking, Occupy Wall Street, government greed, Hillary Clinton's war crimes.
And they basically just insinuated that these things are what cost Hillary Clinton the election.
A show that had gone off the air two years before.
But what's even crazier about it is it's like, yeah, of course RT is pro-Russian.
It's fucking called Russia Today.
Of course they're going to cover Putin in a positive light.
The crazy thing is that the intelligence report essentially said that covering real issues, like covering greed and fracking, are Russian propaganda talking points.
And that was really bad because you're calling reality propaganda.
Like, people are living in poverty in this country.
Half the country isn't...
We're poor, living paycheck to paycheck.
So you can't call like covering that reality propaganda, Russian propaganda.
I am happy that I'm doing the reporting that I'm doing, which is more just on the ground investigation.
Since I last saw you, I've been to Palestine.
Now I finally really have a sense of these issues that I was covering from the studio and feel like I know them more after going and talking to the people in the communities and stuff like that.
This whole thing about Soros is this globalist and all these people are against the globalists, yet Trump, it's totally fine to have Rex Tillerson and all these Goldman Sachs bankers in the government.
So she, her and her, I think her husband's name's Dick.
But she married into this, like, education privatization scheme where it's like a super right-wing religious extremist education privatization thing where they're trying to, like, get vouchers for creationism and all these things, like private schooling that teaches creationism.
And so they funneled the Betsy DeVos, like, family...
I forget what the organization's called, but they've funneled millions and millions of dollars into this scam.
Meanwhile, her brother, Eric Prince, you know what he's been doing?
I mean, he's now working for like Qatar, Saudi Arabia.
It's like this family is working together to create these like obedient Christianized soldier children who are growing up in schools thinking that You know, the kingdom and the messiah are going to come.
I mean, it's nuts.
And when she was in the confirmation hearing, of course, she was the only one that actually wasn't confirmed and Mike Pence had to do the tiebreaker because everyone was like, she's the most unqualified fucking person.
She can't spell.
She's like a total moron.
Why is she even like in the running here?
And she lied multiple times in the hearing.
She was like, yeah, no, that was a clerical error when it said that I was vice president or on the board of this organization, which is this right wing extremist hate mongering organization that's Funnel millions of dollars to knock down all the gay marriage propositions in all these states and stuff like that.
So she lied and said she wasn't on the board.
But really, when you look at the paperwork, she was on the board for like 10 years or something.
I mean, how could a clerical error happen that long?
It's crazy because you could be on OxyContin and all sorts of disassociative drugs, SSRIs, which are almost entirely connected to school shootings and mass shootings.
If you look at mass shootings, The vast majority of them either were on psych meds or have been on psych meds or off psych meds.
And of course, then the argument, the real scientific argument is, you know, that they're not necessarily the cause, you know, that causation and correlation are not necessarily connected.
So no one knows exactly why those people do that.
But if you've ever talked to someone who's on like Zoloft or anything, one of the problems is there's a disassociation with reality and that nothing bothers you anymore.
Like I had a friend who was on it and she was telling me like, she's like, I could come home and my house could be on fire.
Everything was gray and black and white, and there was no color, and it was just weird.
She's like, my whole life just happened in a year, and then I got off of them, and then I was like, oh, okay, now I'm a person again.
Like, what the fuck happened to me for a year?
That stuff scares the shit out of me.
How many people they just throw on those goddamn things, and I know that some people benefit from them.
I've had friends that benefit from them.
I know there's a positive, but I gotta think there's too many people that are going right to them and not exercising, not changing their diet, not trying to meditate, not trying to seek some sort of a positive avenue for their life and their energy and see if that has any effect on their depression.
There's a medical use for heroin, opiates, things along those lines.
So I think they have different designations because of that, because they still refuse to admit there's a medical use for marijuana, despite all the millions of people using it for positive, including kids with epilepsy.
Unbelievable.
And autism.
I have a good friend who has a kid that had severe seizures, and there was nothing they could do about it until they started giving him, they would give him hash and like a piece of melon.
You know, like, and all of a sudden, gone.
Like all seizures, and he's more communicative, he's more responsive, he's got like pretty severe cognitive issues.
Well, that's the only thing holding that Sessions guy back, is that 57% of Americans support legalized recreational marijuana, which is just unprecedented.
It's never been that high before.
And that's people willing to answer polls.
I would venture that if you really got down and dirty with a bunch of people like you and I that aren't answering polls, I bet you're going way over 70%.
I mean, as a comedian, I mean, I know that like the alt-right is kind of blended in with like this anti-PC culture that I think comedians relate to, but like, do you just wake up and think like, holy shit, Donald Trump is the president ever?
The EPA standards, that's some spooky shit, because that's literally the ground that we grow our food in, the water that we drink, the air that we breathe, is one of the most important things, but it becomes this ideological issue between right and left, where right wants work and jobs and industry, and left wants water to be clean.
It's fucking insane that that became one of those issues.
That it's an ideological thing.
That if you're on the right, you're supposed to, if not deny climate change, you're supposed to ignore it at the very least.
And if you're on the left, you're supposed to be a tree hugger and a hippie and you're supposed to be all about clean water.
The fact that these people can make these distinctions like that and then figure out a way to make money despite that you're poisoning the Mother Earth, it's insane.
Yeah, and the whole, like, climate accords or whatever that, you know, the US is not only the biggest polluter, the Pentagon pollutes more than any other entity in the world, but...
All the billions of plastic debris in the ocean, all the fucking bombs exploding, God knows what we're doing around the world.
But yeah, I mean, when the Pentagon's the biggest polluter, and then you pull out of the Paris Accords or whatever, like, Trump was just like, yeah, We're going to pull out of that climate change agreement.
It's like, well, who's going to hold it together then?
It already wasn't enough.
And then he just puts ExxonMobil in charge of the State Department.
I mean, it's so much crazier than Halliburton.
It's so much crazier than Condoleezza Rice's ties to Exxon.
The actual CEO, I just can't even wrap my mind around it.
Well, it would be good if you streamlined the business and tried to make it more practical and cut out waste and bureaucracy and red tape and made it better for everybody.
But as soon as you start saying things like, we're going to shut down all those satellites that track global warming.
Like, why?
Why are you doing that?
Shouldn't we know what the fuck is happening?
Shouldn't we have, like, good estimates as when the people in Miami are going to drown?
If you look at every department, Rick Perry, the guy who's, you know, we go from Dancing with the Stars to now he's in charge of the department he wanted to abolish.
Looking back on it, I do think, you know, I believed all the polls and I was, I don't know why, because they're, you know, it's coming from like this ivory tower elite who's totally out of touch with the rest of the country.
But I really did believe that Trump had no chance because I thought Hillary would Steal the vote.
I mean, if it came down to it, I'm like, they have measures in place to really lock this down.
I was like, there's no fucking way!
And when he won, I just couldn't believe it.
But looking back on it, it makes so much sense.
It's like, how could he not have won?
Hillary was the most corrupt clay candidate.
30 years of just a legacy of horrible death and destruction.
What did you think about that WikiLeaks claim that the young man who was murdered in Washington, D.C. was the guy who gave them the info on the DNC? Seth Riker or whatever.
Well, you know, that guy's like super problematic.
Regardless of how ridiculous the Pizzagate thing is and what's real and what's not real, what is real is that him and his brother were close friends with Dennis Hastert, who was the Speaker of the House, who was fucking kids for decades.
Fact, that he's in jail for fucking kids.
That was the Speaker of the House.
The idea that the Speaker of the House could be a serial child molester, and that's what he is.
I mean, it's literally what the judge called him when he sentenced him.
Look at Alan Dershowitz, Trump, and Bill Clinton were on the Lolita Express with that billionaire, that rape plane that had like a bunch of underage girls.
Whistleblowers go through significant efforts to get us material, often very significant risks.
A 27-year-old that works for the DNC was shot in the back, murdered just two weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.
So, and the guy says, Anchor, that was just a robbery.
Not true.
Nothing was robbed, says, I believe, wasn't it?
And Assange says, no, there's no finding.
And then the anchor says, what are you suggesting?
What are you suggesting?
He says, I am suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.
Huh.
But was he one of your sources, I mean, the anchor says.
And he says, we don't comment on who our sources are.
And the anchor says, but why make suggestions about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
Assange says, because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States.
Our sources face serious risks.
That's why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.
You know, I did a whole expose on Podesta, and he is a bougie chef, so it's not surprising that he would talk about pizza as being some, like, really highbrow chef, and they, like, pride themselves on how they cook all these expensive dinners and have these dinner parties, and then the spirit cooking thing is, like, they're really into this, like, elitist, subversive art scene, and so they have, yeah, they have weird-ass art, and it's really creepy, and What about the emails where they were talking about little kids coming over and getting in the jacuzzi and hanging out with them?
I agree with you, but little kids coming over the house and getting in the jacuzzi like that little kids are coming over for entertainment Did you ever read that?
I read the email it did and it seemed like they're just really out of touch with how to talk about like their child fucking They need to mask it better.
Okay, we plan to heat the pool so a swim is a possibility.
Bonnie will Uber service to transport Ruby Emerson and Maeve Lazon, whatever, 11-9 and almost 7, so you'll have some further entertainment and they will be in that pool for sure.
Bannon also worked for a bunch of child molesters at IGE, this internet gaming entertainment company that just like mined virtual resources in World of Warcraft games and would sell them.
And he was like a money bundler for Goldman Sachs because he's a Goldman Sachs shill.
And he was working for like all the people on the board were just pedophiles.
But what do you think about, you know, Trump being really one of the first people who's won a political office that has catered to, like, the conspiracy crowds and conspiracy culture and the Alex Jones crowd and all the conspiracy culture...
And he's on, I don't know how many different radio stations, but I want to say it's more than a hundred.
He's got a crazy reach.
So it was a wise move by Trump.
And as long as he gets on Alex's show and doesn't say anything too fucking crazy, like, those people are like, I can't believe the president is with Alex!
You get those people, and then you get the people that don't like Alex.
You get those people, too.
You get the hardcore Republican base who just want to, quote-unquote, make America great again and wear red hats.
And they're showing up at these Berkeley rallies and they're fighting with people now.
Now you've got people responding.
This is one of the real problems with the left.
There's a real problem with these really hardcore lefties that are outraged and want to do something and they want to be positive.
So they want to shut down all these people like Milo that they think are Nazis or Ann Coulter and all these people.
But by doing that and by having these gigantic protests and literally shutting down people communicating and talking, you invite people to resist that.
And then you start these anti-fub people who hit people in the head with fucking bike locks.
You see, they found out it was a professor.
That was hitting people in the head with bike locks.
This is going to have people show up and want to hit you with something.
But I almost feel like this is a manufactured thing.
Because I think that there's...
Being from the Oakland area, and Antifa's been showing up at every protest for as long as I can remember.
And the cops kind of are hands-off.
And so I feel like to provoke the Antifa block where you know that they're like really strategically oriented and keep going to Berkeley and keep going to Berkeley and then making it like this big free speech blowout where it's like why do you keep going and like creating the situation?
You kind of know what's gonna happen.
It seems like a manufactured thing and then at the end of the day it makes the left easier to demonize and basically protests Easier to demonize, where now you have 200 people facing felony riot charges at the inauguration protests, and a couple of them are just journalists who are filming, and all the Trump people are like, whatever, they're fucking rioting, and they're fascists, and they're Antifa.
It's like, well, because this happened in Berkeley, now, like, all protesters are, you know, they're scapegoated to these people.
Just like we were talking about how Reagan sort of mobilized the right-wing conservative people that were Christians that really weren't about politics before that.
And he kind of brought them in.
People really, like, they look at it and go, hey, look, this is an angle.
You know, there's an angle we can take that no one's been taking.
It's kind of like a bait-and-switch, this whole Milo-Berkeley thing, because they know exactly what's going to happen when they go there, and then, of course, that's exactly what happens, and then they can use it to be like, free speech, free speech.
And Milo, at one point in time, by the way, was a guy who was very anti-hate speech.
You know, and it was very anti shutting down people who are writing things to hurt people people like pulled quotes of his from the past Which is interesting because I mean, I'm sure people's philosophies changed.
I'm sure mine have and yours have but this is like one more piece of evidence that what you're seeing with a lot of people that are in the public eye that are involved in this whole political arena is You're seeing their working angles.
They're like, what's the angle like?
Okay, let's go that way And you can justify it.
Look, I could justify a lot of different angles.
If I wanted to do that, if I wanted to be an anti-Trump protester, an anti-free speech protester, if I wanted to be a person who thinks that free speech should be limited because hate speech is not protected by the Constitution, like Howard Dean just said.
That fucking asshole.
He said hate speech is not protected by the Constitution and the First Amendment.
You know, and just thrown out, and everybody is sort of repeating it over and over and over again, and I just don't think he thought about it when he was saying it.
Yes, it was about Ann Coulter's upcoming speech in Vermont.
The Vermont DNC chair, Howard Dean, elaborated on his argument that Ann Coulter's upcoming speech at Berkeley does not have to occur because hate speech, in quotes, is not protected by the First Amendment.
It's such a fundamental idea that we all know that in order to, if you're going to have a discussion with someone, you have to let that person establish, this is what debates are about, right?
Let that person establish their position and then give your counter to that position.
This is like so firmly established in the way we communicate and the way we go over ideas.
That is essentially the marketplace of ideas.
You have your idea.
Someone has an opposing idea.
If you don't let that person establish their idea and you Shut it down!
Shut it down!
And you're throwing rocks and burning cop cars and throwing fucking bricks through Starbucks windows.
You are feeding the whole resistance to your ideas flames.
You're feeding the people that are saying that they're right and you're wrong.
Yeah, I think that they still are, like we were saying before, Nazis still have rallies.
No one's shutting down these from a government level, so I think the whole censorship thing is not relevant to this situation, because that really does mean the black end of the state coming down and blocking you, and instead we have what we see Antifa Blocking, like, physically these venues, but it's not like these people are blocked from having venues or access or speech platforms.
I mean, they're fucking everywhere.
It's like, I feel like all over the news, it's Richard Spencer, the dapper Nazi, like, giving all these interviews.
I think the better way to go over ideas is you have a moderator and two people in a room together.
You know?
That simple.
One person has an allotted time where they can express themselves, then the other person has an allotted time where they can counter, and you're not allowed to chime in, you're not allowed to interrupt, you're not allowed to in any way disrupt this person's flow of ideas, then there should be a time set aside where you could go back and forth with each other.
And unless you do it that way, you're going to involve the cult of personality.
You're going to involve the cheers from the crowds.
You're going to involve all these different people that can organize to sway things one way or another.
All this, shut it down, shut it down, shut it down.
And it gets as ridiculous as like Jordan Peterson's speeches.
I'm sure you've seen that professor of University of Toronto that doesn't want to use all these made-up gender pronouns.
The 78 now accepted gender pronouns.
Canada has really weird laws.
You know, and Canada has...
They don't have free speech the way we have free speech.
And they have a human rights...
Council, and they've decided that these 78 or whatever the fuck they are, however many they decide on, gender pronouns, that if you don't use them, if someone says, you know, I want you to call me Foxkin 26, but for real, like, if you don't do that, you're imposing on their human rights.
Other people have debated him and say that though that's not how it should be interpreted but he's like a very staunch critic of Marxism and he understands the the real ideology of Marxism and how it went horribly wrong all throughout the world throughout history and That he thinks that what you're trying to do when you when you're invoking When you're asking the government to tell people what they must or must not say,
that you are going down this road, this very dangerous road of cultural Marxism.
Well, you'd have to talk to Peterson about how it...
But he makes a very compelling argument about how the two of them are connected.
Essentially, what people are trying to do is control your behavior, and they're trying to, in some way, force you to behave the way they would like you to behave.
Even if it's a preposterous thing like making up words and you have to call them this instead of he she or even like even like the people that want to use they Which is you know plurals, which is fine.
I mean I mean, like, that's a real word, you know, if you want to use it in an incorrect way.
And it does get used, like, you know, it does use, like, if anybody wants to use the bathroom, they can go ahead.
You can be using that in a singular term, you know, and it's non-gender specific.
Social political movement that promotes unreason and irrationality through the guise of various causes often promoted by so-called social justice.
This is a perfect example of it.
These causes and their proponents are often contradictory and are almost always never rooted in fact.
Indeed, true argument or discussion with proponents of these causes is almost impossible, as most attempts at discourse descend quickly into shouting, name-calling, and chanting of slogans.
Well, that's a perfect...
Otherwise known as the regressive left, a play on the contradictory nature.
I think that this seems to be like a hub of the alt-right, where this is founded on this reactionary movement on PC culture, on things like the gender pronouns thing.
And it seems like there's no real political ideology behind what is the alt-right other than just a reaction to this, like, I don't want to conform to this progressive, whatever, cultural Marxism.
But to me, I feel like...
I don't know.
It doesn't bother me as much.
What bothers me right now is just the empire fucking killing people in my name and Trump being a disgusting war criminal who's flip-flopped on all the shit that he said that he's going to do.
But to not address that or to write it off, it empowers the people that are fighting against it, because you're ignoring it.
To them, it's a giant issue.
The issue of free speech, the issue of not having people enforce whatever ideology that they have on you that you have to Behave the way they want you to and communicate they want you to, or you're a bigot, or you're a Nazi.
Meanwhile, there's actual Christian evangelicals employing top-down policy that's actually telling people, here's how education's going to be run, here's how you're going to be indoctrinated.
Like, that's what I feel like we're really missing the boat here.
All these, like, new atheists who agree with what you're saying, like, don't want to be policed and are more, like, in line with Trump.
How come they're not speaking out against, like, the Christian evangelical hold over this administration?
I saw this chart of how many times, like, you know, this is kind of a stupid thing because I'm not opposed to, like, taking vacations or golfing or whatever, but the amount that he's gone, where he's just, like, gone half the week in Mar-a-Lago, like, golfing.
He's so pampered he can't even get away from this world that he's a part of where he has to go to his fucking country club and be surrounded by billionaires.
Remember how weird that was when he would have all these props, like the steaks and the manila folders and all these things, like the magazines and shit?
I didn't even know Trump steaks were a thing until last week.
Was it Moshe?
Moshe turned me on to Trump's takes?
Moshe Kasher was a show that's on Comedy Central right now.
Moshe's a super hardcore lefty.
It's really interesting because he and I were having this conversation on the phone last night.
We're texting back and forth.
He goes, we were talking about, he asked me to find like a suitable representative of the alt-right to come on his show and sort of talk about these ideas.
And I'm like, oh boy.
Like, who the fuck is a suitable representative?
So I threw some people at him.
Every name I threw at him, he's like, ugh!
I'm like, I know!
I know, but that's what you're asking for.
He's like, Milo would have been great, but he's so tainted now.
I find it interesting like the Tommy Lauren thing was fired because she was pro-choice it's like that went too far for the blaze you know like the pedophilia things too far for for the alt-right I was thinking that about Hillary Clinton how crazy would it be if Chelsea Clinton went to work for the blaze oh god if she just started she started going super hardcore right and she's got two flags motorcycle jacket on pearly whites Hey, just go interrupt those anti-war demonstrations again, Chelsea.
I mean, that's sort of been established that he's very impulsive.
So I also think that he's got this desire to be a strong leader and to be a guy who makes strong decisions and it's not going to take any bullshit.
You know, and I worry about that.
That scares the shit out of me.
Because when you really find out how much the power the president has in terms of like launching a nuclear strike, And then you look at the conflict that we're getting into with North Korea.
It's entirely possible.
I mean, they are moving nuclear submarines right now as we speak off the coast of North Korea.
That is happening right now as we speak.
They were talking about it today.
It's in the news right now.
This is terrifying because if they decide to launch a warhead at North Korea, The odds of someone retaliating are so fucking high.
And if they do retaliate, it's probably going to be Los Angeles.
It's probably, I mean, we're the closest.
We're the closest to North Korea.
And we're also the closest, I guess, we would be the target for China.
I guess we would be the target for a lot of places.
Yeah, let's talk about this North Korea thing really quickly, because the media is painting it like North Korea, like we're going to strike back, really.
When North Korea has repeatedly said, we will never strike the US ever, we'll never strike anyone unless we're attacked.
And we have historical amnesia where Americans don't know geography until we bomb somewhere, right?
So we have completely no memory about the Korean War, where the US military invaded North Korea Most people don't even know.
Like, they don't even think about, why is there a North and a South Korea?
Like, what the fuck is this, you know?
So, Kim Jong-un, obviously, probably what he's learned by now, in terms of U.S. empire, imperialism, and interventions, is that you have to not only act like you will use nukes, like you have to have nukes, and you have to act like you will use them if you get attacked, unless you want to get invaded.
Look what happened with Gaddafi, Saddam, all these things.
Assad, you give up your chemical weapons, and then it doesn't matter.
I'm terrified of this whole North Korea conflict, as I think everybody is.
It's a terrifying place, first of all, because it's one of the last really obvious military dictatorships in this country, in the world, rather.
There's not a whole lot of them left.
But that's one of the last ones.
It's one of the ones that's like, you can see, they're so extreme.
You see them goose-stepping, walking down the street.
You see the people wailing in agony when Kim Jong-il died.
Like, it's a very, very strange world where people are born in prison and they live as prisoners their whole life and some of them have escaped and detailed the horrors of the prisons and what's going on over there.
That's probably why we're still fucking there, to be honest.
16 years later, we dropped that mother of all bombs, that dick measuring contest that Trump just laid his dick out on the table and was like, I'm going to drop this giant fucking bomb, dust it off from the shelf.
It's been sitting there.
Bush wasn't even crazy enough to use it.
And all of a sudden people are like, wait, we're still in Afghanistan?
And it was like, and then Fareed Zakaria, you know, here they are telling us that Trump is a mentally unfit puppet of Russia who's retarded, yet the second he starts bombing, it's like, oh, love at first strike.
Like, he started bombing Assad, now we all love him.
Rachel Maddow has been talking the last 30 days or three months, six months, about how he needs to be impeached, he's guided by Putin, and then the second he started bombing Syria, oh, it becomes a commercial for Tomahawk missiles.
Rachel Maddow did a 30-minute segment just analyzing how efficient Tomahawk missiles are.
I think that there's a bipartisan establishment consensus on foreign policy and there has been...
This is what the Empire does.
The corporate media completely loves the Empire.
They love imperialism.
They love selling wars.
They have for a long time.
Joe, that's how I became a journalist because I saw the Iraq war being sold by quote leftists or liberals on TV and I just couldn't understand why they were selling a completely insane unnecessary illegal war.
Well, there was a lot of people that were selling it, or at least in support of it, because we were really terrified after 9-11.
So after 9-11, there was this movement to do something, and this massive amount of people that ordinarily would have a lot of distrust towards the right, they all of a sudden were trusting in Bush and trusting in the government to go and take adequate measures.
You're not supposed to be a stenographer because you're scared.
That's like the time that you're supposed to step up and say, okay, I need to question my government's claims because we're in such a state of hysteria and acquiescence that I need to, as a journalist, question authority, question my government.
I mean, I agreed with the Afghanistan war at the time because I didn't really know.
And then I went into college and learned about what the fuck this government and country has been doing to the rest of the world and what militarism and empire has been doing.
So I kind of put it together.
But that was just Afghanistan.
I really woke up when one day my mom called me and she was like, did Saddam bomb us?
She said because every single media outlet has just switched over from Afghanistan to Iraq, unquestioningly.
And she was trying to sell that Russia shit real hard.
I mean, she talked more about Russia than any other issue.
And that's the problem with this so-called resistance, is that when you focus on a fake issue, like Russia usurping Trump's brain or, like, occupying Trump's brain and puppeting him, then you forget about all the rapid-fire executive orders he's throwing down.
You aren't focusing on the real important things that he's doing that we could actually galvanize and stop.
And especially when you're just pro-war.
These motherfuckers are funded by defense contractors and banks.
I used to think that he had some interesting rants.
I think the problem is too many people liked it and then he like got drunk with it.
It seems like now he's...
His speeches are almost like a parody of a guy who is...
It's almost like an old Christian Slater movie about a guy who's got some sort of a ham radio thing and he's fighting against the oppressive government.
I stopped watching when it became really like all about the Putin character because you know first Frank Underwood's like he kills a journalist and then...
Because I look at them as a unit, just like the Underwoods, you know, and they work together where Clinton even admitted that Hillary was the one who sold the Yugoslavia bombing and stuff.
And she was like, I'm going to appoint Bill to run the economy.
It's like, I think scholars, educators, people who actually understand the consequences of these ideological structures that we're trapped in.
These are structures.
Left versus right is a structure because they provide you with a predetermined pattern of behavior that you adopt.
And there's many, many easily influenced people that go super hardcore right or super hardcore left because they want Social brownie points within the structure and that's a natural part of being a human it's a natural part of tribal behavior and It has to be addressed and it has to be addressed openly it has to be addressed from an Understanding a fundamental understanding about the way the human mind works and the way the human psychology works and our need for social acceptance works There's
a lot of the way we behave that's just based and predicated on these really simple obvious principles that everybody knows peer pressure The desire to be loved, those things all play a massive part in how you're manipulated and how you manipulate yourself.
You convince yourself of certain things.
I really firmly believe that when you go super hard right and super hard left, the distance between these two is not nearly as far as you think.
And that the ideological point of views and what they want and what they're trying to accomplish is very different, but the way they think The way they've locked themselves into these predetermined thought patterns.
They're not much different.
They just were indoctrinated one way or indoctrinated another way.
They might have gone through the church system or they might have gone through the university system.
But they've sort of both taken these hard line stances, whereas the reality of the world and of most reasonable people is there's a lot of weirdness and there's a lot of variables to be considered.
And most people are not hard right.
And most people are not hard left.
And you have to take one or the other.
And it's really the best way is probably a gigantic group that gets to decide on all sorts of different things and many, many different parties to choose from.
Like, I think Holland.
Oh yeah, totally.
Don't they have like 16 different political parties or something crazy?
It's insane that we have this two-party dictatorship and I was reading this quote from Chris Hedges that really says it all.
It's like exactly what you're saying right now.
You have, you know, conservatives across the country who are worried about abortion and obsessing about these issues and then you have the liberals in New York who are obsessing about creationism in schools.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs continues to fucking win.
It doesn't matter what you guys are squabbling about on the ground.
Left, right, liberal, conservative, like, these people are in power and they're going to further entrench their power.
We're all the losers here.
And it's, yeah, like you were just saying, I mean, why do we have a system that props up these two parties that, going back to the corporate media, continues to sell war after war, continues to just sell off our government to corporations?
Anytime you have one person or one organization that has control over a group, whether it's a dictatorship, whether it's a government, it's like, what is a government for?
Is it to control groups of people or is it to provide people with services like schools and utilities and infrastructure?
That should be really what it is.
And the idea that war is inexorable.
It's inexorable.
You can't remove it from our culture.
If you ask people, do you envision a time in your life where war doesn't exist?
I mean, every country with a military tries to enforce that military in some way, shape, or form on other countries.
I mean, it's gone on since the beginning of time, as far as people getting together in groups and then going over and conquering other people that have resources.
Well, some people would say it's the it's the system, the economic system that once you control one area, you have to move capital and extract capital from other areas through force through military force.
And that's the extension of imperialism through capitalism.
And then so you just go and now we're the biggest, most powerful empire controlling the entire world.
And we have to go after the last remaining sovereign, quote unquote, sovereign states to completely control.
I mean, yes, other countries have done that before, but never on the level of what we're doing.
It's part of the whole thing with the internet, is like these little 140-character soundbites you're getting off Twitter, but then the fact that it's coming at you from websites, it's coming at you from Facebook, it's coming at you from Instagram, it's just coming at you in a way that, like, there's no fucking way you can keep up with all this.
Just a short bunch of essays on things, but they wanted this is what they asked me to do They asked me to transcribe my stand-up once they were like they read some of my writing because I used to do a lot of blogs and I used to put up a lot of blogs on my website and I put them on Online and some other venues.
And they were like, hey, we want to give you a book deal and we'll just write whatever you want to watch.
Okay, yeah.
And then once you get some money from them, then it's like, we want you to write what we want you to write.
And then they wanted me to write.
One of the thoughts was they wanted me to take my stand-up and transcribe it.
I don't want to do it That's crazy that they would actually change like the language of what you how you would even write I'm never gonna do it again That way.
If I do do it again, if I do write a book, I'm going to write a book, and then I'm going to sell the book, or I'm going to put the book online if nobody wants to buy it.
If nobody wants to buy it and turn it into a book, I'm going to go, okay, this is the book.
You can think it sucks, but at least it sucks, and it came from my head and my fingers.
Like, I'm going to write it, I'm going to think it.
You can totally think it sucks, and you don't want it.
The reality of things is, when someone creates something, it's going to resonate with a certain amount of people, and other people are going to hate it.
There's fucking music that I think is terrible, and people love it.
They wait in line.
They go to see these concerts that you would have to strap me to a chair and pry my eyes open like clockwork orange for me to sit there and watch it.
And they can't wait.
They can't wait.
So tastes and people's desires vary.
But as soon as someone tries to enforce their ideas of how you should express yourself...
To me, I thought of it as very similar to stand-up in the way that if my stand-up...
If somebody came along and was some publicist that I didn't even know, not even a friend, and wanted to edit my stand-up...
You can think my stand-up sucks.
You can not like it.
But as long as I'm actually paying attention to it, as long as I'm actually sitting there and I'm actually going over it and editing it and thinking about it myself and practicing it on stage, I don't want your opinion.
Well, I think a movie has to be a collaboration, right?
Like, if you're doing a movie, you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, you have producers, you have the people that are giving you the money.
That's got to be a goddamn nightmare, because there's a lot of different cooks in that kitchen.
But that makes sense to me, that you have to collaborate with these people.
Say if you're playing some chick in some movie, and you have this idea of how it's supposed to be, and that's how you audition.
But then you get on set, and the director's like, Abby, what I want you to do is play a Chinese lady in the 1500s.
And you're like, what?
You'd be like, that's not what I got hired to do.
What the fuck is this?
Then you have this chaotic sort of...
It's a lot of nonsense.
One of the pure things about writing, whether it's writing stand-up or anything, it's like, here's the world, and here's my vision.
Here's the world through my eyes and my fingers.
As soon as you allow someone to start fucking with that, I just think...
It's a recipe for disaster.
So my experience wasn't good.
Not that you can't have a good experience writing a book.
I mean, maybe other people have, but everybody that I've talked to that wrote a book, they told me it was terrible.
Everybody I know that wrote a book.
I have to talk to Whitney about it.
She didn't have a bad experience.
Get there.
Go use that restroom, Abby Martin.
Abby Martin's my favorite hardcore lefty, I think.
She can't figure out where the door is.
She's my favorite hardcore lefty.
She's so rabid.
I want to get her in a room with Sam Harris, though, because she hates Sam Harris, and she thinks Sam Harris wants to fucking bomb every country where brown people live.
She just takes things...
You see how she ramps up?
Like, she wants to take things so far.
Like, you can't even talk to her about, like, what social justice warriors do.
She's like, she's not even thinking about it.
She's just like, yeah, but why are they paying attention to that while Trump's doing this and they're ready to bomb North Korea and blah blah blah.
Yeah, but that's still an issue.
It's still a something.
There's a thing going on.
unidentified
Yeah, it's hard to pick your thing.
You gotta pick one.
Like you said, so much info going on now, you get distracted from one, especially if you have a tinge of ADD. I do.
Yeah, like that whole collapse documentary that they did where they interviewed him and he's just sitting there smoking cigarettes talking about the end is near.
I'm like, Jesus, dude.
Meanwhile, all these years later, everything's fine.
Like, he wasn't right about peak oil and a lot of the other things.
And he was always inclined to go towards doom and gloom.
But I think...
That movie, that documentary, Collapse, and his worldview, a lot of it was based on how he thought of things, because he was really depressed.
Well, he was an LAP narcotics officer, and he stood in front of that CIA guy, and I forget what the meeting was about, and he was talking about how he had witnessed CIA agents selling narcotics, and that they had been doing it forever, and that he had been stopped from prosecuting and arresting them, and everybody went crazy.
I will tell you, Director Deutch, as a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective, that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.
Director Deutsch, I will refer you to three specific agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus, and Watchtower.
I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency.
I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 70s to become involved in protecting agency drug operations in this country.
I have been trying to get this out for 18 years, and I have the evidence.
My question for you is very specific, sir.
If in the course of the IG's investigations, and Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity, and it's classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity, or will you tell the American people the truth?
I mean, that's how he made millions and millions of dollars, by selling the CIA's drugs, and that's how they funded the Contras versus the Sandinistas.
Because I think Afghanistan is the only other country other than, if I'm not mistaken, Kenya, that is actually not only the metadata, you know, like we're collecting metadata everywhere, but that is one of two countries in the world that WikiLeaks exposed that we're actually collecting every phone call.
Every phone call is being archived and recorded from Afghanistan.
So which kind of adds to the weirdness that somehow these this giant heroin opium manufacturing like operations going on and we still can't get a grasp on where it's coming from.
Yet it really affects America.
I mean, goddamn, what is it, like more than car crashes now are pill overdoses and opiate overdoses?
This is why Philip Seymour Hoffman and so many other people die of overdoses because the drug war and these people just sell like laced heroin and shit and it's so dangerous and yeah, it's absolutely horrible.
He had a great show on Massachusetts on his CNN show and it was about the heroin epidemic that's hit Massachusetts and many other places as well, but he kind of talked about Massachusetts.
Because they had a few people that they were referring to where these people, they got hooked on like Oxycontin, synoxycodone.
But I'm not good with anything that makes me feel stupid because I feel vulnerable.
I'd rather be hurting and aware.
I'm not like a numb guy.
I don't like numbing out.
That's one of the reasons why I like pot because it makes me hyper-aware.
It makes me hyper-vigilant and really sensitive.
You can call it paranoid.
Some people call it paranoid, but I think it's more like hyper-awareness.
You know, and that hyper-awareness, you have to take into account all the variables, that you are going to die, that you are in a ball that's spinning a thousand miles an hour with a thin layer of gas.
Everybody that I talk to that believes in flat Earth, you show them that Japanese satellite that takes a photo, high resolution, every 10 minutes from 22,000 miles away, a full picture of the Earth.
They think it's fake.
That's all you have to say.
It's fake.
By the way, they keep saying that you can't fly over Antarctica.
The moon landing at least happened in 1969, and it happened with a limited amount of people that had access to all the technology, there was no internet, they controlled the media, and we never went back.
So there's all sorts of beautiful things that connect together to form a nice juicy fat conspiracy that I love.
The moon landing conspiracies- Oh, it's a fun one, yeah.
I secretly, not even so secretly, covet that one like no other conspiracy.
There's a there's a great quote from Bill Clinton from his book my life on the moon landing and it is It's fascinating because he's talking about an old carpenter and he says the carpenter says that Them TV fellows that he didn't believe the moon landing that those TV fellows I never believe anything because they can pretty much do anything and make you believe that's real and you don't he goes back then I thought he was a crank but after eight years in the White House I was wondering if he's not ahead of his time That's in Bill Clinton's book.
And people are like, oh, you're going to go on about the moon landing again, bro?
I thought you gave up on that.
I will give you the most cryptic piece of information about the moon landing.
Neil Armstrong gave a speech on the 25th anniversary of the moon landings, and it is one of the most what-the-fuck speeches you'll ever hear in your life.
Because it's not a guy saying, look, we went to the moon, it was amazing, and you can't Kids are going to accomplish amazing things as well.
On the 25th anniversary of the event in 1994, Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance and held back tears as he spoke these brief cryptic remarks before the next generation of taxpayers as they toured the White House.
At the end when they show the Apollo mission and it shows them putting the piece of paper where it makes it look like they're farther away, I was like, what the hell is this?
Now here's what someone explained to me, that it's entirely likely, and this made a lot of sense, that it's entirely likely, this is during the Nixon administration, by the way, which was all going on, massive deception.
I mean, Nixon was just a fucking fraud in every way, shape, or form, and a crook, and a liar.
That it's entirely possible that they filmed a lot of stuff and that they filmed all this fake stuff and they passed it off as the real footage, but that they actually did go.
But they couldn't get footage of it.
And one of the reasons why they probably couldn't get footage of it, if that's the case, is that you can't even get that fucking film through the radar detector at the airport or the x-ray machine at the airport without it killing it, right?
The spaceship itself and all the stuff they were wearing would have protected them from most of the radiation that would have potentially harmed them or anything.
Like, the way they move around is not the same on Apollo 11 as it is on Apollo 16 or whatever the last mission was.
It looks different when they're moving around.
But this one is the weirdest one.
Because here these guys are, they're in one-sixth Earth's gravity, and they're just fucking jumping around through the air, and you can't see their feet.
Like you only see their feet when they're in the air.
They're hiding behind this lunar module and they're bouncing around in a way that you never saw them bounce around before.
That's not in any other moon mission.
So I think it's entirely possible that they fake some stuff.
And that there could have been an issue with them being on the surface of the moon.
Yeah, and also being on the surface of the moon, the radiation on the surface of the moon, there's no protection on those cameras, and there's no magnetosphere, there's nothing.
Those Hasselbad cameras that they had, that they kept in the center of their chests, those weird-looking cameras that they used, there's nothing different about those.
There's nothing protective about them.
unidentified
Their suit was protecting it from what I was reading.
The thing that bothers me about the ISIS stuff is that, like I said before, that 70,000 number, it's like you could just say anything's ISIS. Like the ISIS caves that we dropped the Moab on, and it's just like, oh, it's an ISIS cave.
And that's why 70% of Americans just support bombing the shit out of Afghanistan because ISIS was there.
What happened?
I felt like there was more critical thinking that people were upset that we were playing judge, jury, and executioner.
But now we just kill ISIS in mass and it's just no one questions it at all.
And you know what Trump learned after the Syria strike?
He learned that he can get, because all he cares about, he's like a little child, wants positive reinforcement, and he hates, you know, the fake news, CNN, why don't you cover me fairly?
He goes out there and does these press conferences begging the news to cover him better, because that's all he cares about.
But that's what he learned, is that he can get bipartisan support and praise from the media if he just bombs the shit out of people.
So that's what he learned.
So then he dropped the Moab.
And what's next, Trump?
Because you know now how to be popular.
Just like Reagan came in and was seen as a joke until he got swept into the military-industrial complex and became a war president.
And I think that Trump came in as a reality star president joke.
And he's surrounded himself with more generals than any other president since World War II. And he's just...
Letting them lead him wherever they want.
And of course, generals just want to be in charge of conflict so they can get more stars and emblems and honors and lead us into different wars.
I was going to bring this up earlier, but I forgot.
That was one of the things that was most creepy is that he's saying he's gonna let the military do their job like like oversight of the military is what Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his term I mean remember when Eisenhower was leaving he talked about the military industrial complex and everybody's like what the fuck but that was something that was broadcast on television and back in the day That's when it ended.
It was broadcast on TV, some people listened, and then business went about as usual.
And it wasn't like today, where you could watch that video over and over again.
When you see that video, Eisenhower saying, military, industrial complex, yeah.
Well, first, abolish money in politics and start some sort of true democratic representation where you have simple laws to prosecute criminals whether or not they have money or they're billionaires.
So if you're a corporate criminal, you go to fucking jail.
I mean, yeah, it's hard to say, but I just know that Trump is taking us down a very dangerous path, and these people who are thinking that he's somehow anti-empire, anti-deep state, are very confused.
So everyone mistakenly thinks that Hamas controls Palestine.
That's not true at all.
There's three different areas that were drawn up with the original partition.
It's the West Bank, which is...
Totally under military rule by Israel.
And then there's the Gaza Strip, which is like the open air prison, which they bomb the shit out of like every couple of years and Hamas controls that area.
And then there's Jerusalem, which is an international city center that both Arabs and Jews live in.
But the West Bank has been occupied militarily since 1967 and it's complete martial law.
There's checkpoints.
All political parties are illegal.
Having a gun is like the least of it.
You can't hold a flag.
You can't belong to a political party.
You literally can't do shit if you're a Palestinian.
You just have to sit there and submit.
And even if you share a photo of someone who was killed by an Israeli soldier, you go to jail.
And you go to jail for the amount of months that Yeah.
Based on the shares and likes of the photo, they'll penalize you more and put you in prison for longer and longer.
Of someone who died and they'll be like, you're sharing a martyr and inciting people to commit suicide on behalf of Palestinians.
You go to jail and they put them in jail.
There's 99.7% conviction rate.
Kids are tortured.
Kids are in prison.
It is absolutely insane.
We went to the first day that we were there.
We went to a funeral of some guy, some farmer who was shot by Israeli forces, and we went to the funeral.
It was horrible.
You know, all the women are wailing and crying.
And as we're leaving, the Israeli forces had set up a checkpoint right outside of this dude's house and started tear gassing and shooting rubber bullets like at People who were simply attending the funeral, just to punish people for attending the funeral.
We went to another girl's house named Aya who got shot in the vagina for peacefully protesting at some protest and they shot 200 people that day.
One guy next to her died, another guy was paralyzed.
They have a policy called shoot to cripple where they shoot guys in the dicks.
Yeah.
It is fucking nuts, man.
The West Bank is no joke.
I thought that I was going to die several times.
We were at this checkpoint going through Calandia, and there was this old man walking, like, clearly drunk or something, and kind of, like, walking a little bit toward the checkpoint.
They started shooting at him.
Bullets are ricocheting off the thing.
And I, you know, my partner Mike, who was an invading soldier of Iraq, was just like, we're going to die.
Like, they're shooting this guy.
There's bullets ricocheting.
It was absolutely insane.
And as we go through the checkpoint, the soldier's like, hey, stay safe out there.
And I was like, yeah, when you guys are arbitrarily shooting people.
And the person who was driving us had just told us that a couple months prior to that, some woman, Palestinian woman, because you can't go to Jerusalem, like if you're Palestinian, there's like barely any Palestinians who are even allowed to go pray at the most holy site, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
You can't go to the beach.
You're just completely constricted in a prison.
And you can't travel.
And he was just telling us that months before we went through this checkpoint, someone was going through the checkpoint because they got a permit to go into Jerusalem, which is like a lifetime golden ticket, like Willy Wonka.
And they're walking and they get and she just got executed.
And then what?
Yeah, she just got executed.
And she was bleeding out at this checkpoint.
And her little brother tried to help her and they shot him, too.
And they're like hiding the video of this.
Because they fucking hate Palestinians and Palestinians are animals to these people.
It's sick, man.
It's sick.
It's really, really sick, Joe.
And I couldn't even get into Gaza.
We were banned from going into this territory because I was told by the Israeli government that I was a propagandist and that I was like an enemy agent.
And so I wasn't allowed to go into Gaza.
So Gaza is hell.
But the West Bank is under martial law and everything's illegal and you can't do a goddamn thing.
And it's super cool.
Like we went to this place called Ramallah that was just like Oakland where they're smoking weed.
There's like openly gay people there.
Like it's just completely different than what people think of Palestine, you know?
And Hamas is like, you know, you elected Hamas and like, well, Hamas doesn't want Israel to exist.
It's like, well, actually Hamas is controlling this one area for a reason because it was built as this surplus when Israel was created.
Millions of refugees were put miles away from the homes that they were ethnically cleansed from.
And put into refugee camps in Gaza.
And when the Israeli military wanted more and more land...
By the way, all settlements in Israel are illegal.
All of them are illegal in the West Bank, but they just keep creating more and more and more.
And we would go to these villages of just Arab people living in these villages and the settlers will come.
You have to be a fanatical fucking asshole to move from California to an Arab village in Palestine and set up a goddamn tractor trailer and just live on top of their home.
And they can have, you know, giant machine guns.
They can firebomb you.
They can shoot you.
They can beat you up.
They're protected by the state.
You can go with a tractor trailer, set up a home.
The state immediately runs a water line, a power line, and a military outpost to protect you.
And the Arabs are just sitting there waiting to get killed or attacked.
It's absolutely insane.
And the way home demolitions work are insane, too.
Because they either deliver a piece of paper with a rock over it, and they're like, here, if you find it, Good for you.
And if you don't, then you're screwed.
And that's if you're lucky.
If you're not lucky, your home will be invaded by settlers.
And you'll be forced out of your home.
There's videos of this all over the internet of groups of settlers going and literally taking over Arabs' homes.
And then they just are forced out.
It's crazy, man.
It's completely way crazier than I ever could have imagined.
And we were, you know, we were simply and people want to quabble about like, oh, it's not apartheid.
There are different fucking license plates for Arabs and Jews like you cannot go to areas like Israeli soldiers were arbitrarily set up checkpoints and just shut you out of your neighborhood and force you to walk three miles to your home like they can do whatever they want because you are under martial law.
And you can't, you have no mobility, like you have no freedom.
So it's really, it's really bad.
And we just did a whole series on the Empire Files talking about how Israel was created up until today.
And we go over like the settlements, the demolitions, the jail, and why I think there's no hope from within Israeli society to change.
Because it's becoming a more theocratic state and a more fascist state as it grows.
rose because you have to be to maintain this Jewish supremacist state.
You have to be like more fascist and more controlling and more militaristic in the way that you rule society.
Just like the US.
I mean, people who were considered outlier fringe assholes 30 years ago are now like the Christian evangelicals are now in power.
It's really, really crazy.
I mean, it's not the same because Israel is a white nationalist, like ethno supremacist state.
And you see the way that they treat Ethiopians and African refugees and it becomes obvious that even if you're a Jew and you're black, you still are a second class citizen there.
In order to really reject the notion, it's like rejecting being an American.
It's like such a hard thing for people to really accept.
So there's a huge mobilization within Israel, people who are opposed to the military, who talk openly about how awful the occupation is, how brutal it is, all the crimes they committed.
But you'll very rarely find anti-Zionists who will come out and say, the notion of a Jewish state is wrong.
Because then it means you're just rejecting everything that you are.
And like, who are you then, if you're an Israeli and you are not Zionist?
You know, it's like, it's just a really hard notion for you to wrap your mind around.
But we interviewed about 40 Israelis, man on the streets.
To be leftist is a slur.
So, like, a lot of Israelis don't even entertain the notion of, oh, maybe there shouldn't be an occupation at all.
They're all just like, okay, well, maybe we should have a more humane occupation.
Maybe we should give them water.
Like, maybe they should have their own water supply.
So, the West Bank has been militarily occupied since 1967. So when Israel was created in 48, there were those three partitioned areas that I talked about.
And ever since that happened, Israel has just continued to take over more and more land in the West Bank.
So these settlements just keep growing and growing and growing and growing.
And so, you know, over time, there was like mass resistances that happened.
And then in 67, Israel was like, we're just going to do a large scale invasion and try to take over all the land.
And then they just stayed and occupied this area.
And they just have been there ever since.
And so that's like the huge international crime.
When the international community is like, by the way, these settlements are illegal and we're like condemning you at the U.N. and the U.S. just vetoes it every time because the U.S. is just like boys with Israel unconditionally.
It's sick, man.
And they just signed that $10 billion aid package, giving it to Israel for the next 10 years.
Actually, I think it was $30 billion over the next 10 years, which is crazy because this would never be able to happen if it weren't just completely supported by the U.S. And why is it supported by the U.S.? I don't know.
I think that the U.S. loves using Israel as a military garrison.
They love using that strategic point in the Middle East to have.
And also, someone was shedding some light.
This Israeli soldier that I interviewed, who's amazing, his name is Arana Franti.
He was telling me that the military aid package that we just signed with Israel, it may look like just a gift to Israel.
We're like, here's $30 billion.
But he said, really, what it was doing, Israel has been like its own arms dealer.
It actually is one of the number one weapons dealers in the world now.
It actually did like this huge deal with India.
And so the U.S. felt threatened, right, because we're the military might.
And so we kind of locked in Israel with this giant packet and we're like, you have to buy U.S. armaments.
So if you accept this $30 billion aid deal, you have to go through our military weapons to buy if you want this money.
So that's what this guy was saying.
He said it's actually a gift to us that we're locking down our control over this country.
But honestly, it's becoming so unpopular.
Obama had a big feud with Netanyahu.
I mean, Trump is disgusting because Jared Kushner is personally invested in illegal settlements and he like his boys with Netanyahu.
Oh my god yeah and people are just it's so confusing and convoluted on purpose because that it really relies on Israel being the victim and for people not really understanding that Palestinians are not all terrorists and that it's really just a case of being occupied and like getting freedom so it's it's really tough man but a lot of these Israelis want they just want to push the Palestinians completely and where do they want them to go they want them they don't care as long as they're gone As
long as they're gone.
I mean, here's an example of how crazy it is.
El Orozaria is a soldier there.
You know, in the US when police kill black people and we have rallies like Black Lives Matter, people have rallies in support of these people who get killed.
In Israel, they have mass rallies, 10,000, 20,000 people strong in Tel Aviv.
If a soldier executes an unarmed Palestinian man and gets a slap on the wrist, like this guy Elor Azaria executed an unarmed Palestinian.
It was on video.
It's a horrific video.
And because there was this international uproar about it, Israel had to put him on house arrest.
The Israeli government put him on house arrest.
And that was enough for, like, mass mobilization of tens of thousands of people to come out and protest the fact that he was getting even reprimanded, a slap on the wrist to get house arrest.
He's been there and he documents these crazy rallies, these fascist fucking rallies that no one else has shown.
And until I saw that, until I saw people chanting death to the videographers because they hate when you even film what's going on there, Death of the leftists.
Because of the whole circus, the world would say that Israeli army are really murderers.
We gave them an official license to call us murderers.
Instead of covering it up and dealing with it ourselves, why make so much noise?
Whoa, she's pro-covering it up.
Once a soldier understands that he can be charged with manslaughter, next time he'll think twice, and that hesitation is likely to cost soldiers lives.
They're chanting "Eloi the hero." They're chanting "Eloi the hero." They're all taught summary execution is like an institutionalized thing.
So they're all like, why the hell is this guy getting persecuted for something that everyone just acknowledges that this is So the soldiers have to be, in their eyes, soldiers have to be able to just execute Palestinians anytime they want.
Well, he definitely doesn't want different races breeding, so I think that he probably just wants like an insular society of all just like white people.
When you get a bunch of people and everybody has to join the army, there's a bond that they have that's very different than a regular civilian bond.
The indoctrination that you get once you've been in the military and you fought side by side with your brothers and sisters in arms, it's a totally different feeling.
I know a lot of people that have been in the military and some of them got deeper in it than others.
And those people, it's almost like an us versus them.
There's society, it's that whole Chris Kyle sheepdog thing.
They're protecting us.
But they together as a group are much tighter than any other group in the United States.
Like, I mean, there's division in all groups, right?
But I got to imagine that the bond that they have as Israelis, all of them have been in the military, all of them living in this one small area surrounded by Arab states.
I mean, Sykes-Picot, Western, you know, empires, basically just drew a line through the Middle East and divided all these countries and formed all these borders back like a hundred and...
I don't know.
When was Sykes-Picot?
I don't know.
Somewhere around that time.
So anyway, fast forward to when the Ottoman Empire was colonizing this area and the British were occupying what is Palestine, right?
And the Zionist lobby was really strong.
This is well before the Holocaust and they were super, super strong and emboldened and they were negotiating with the With the Brits about where they can form like a Jewish state and and there really was no support until the Holocaust where they were able to sell like you know the fear more and there was even false flag attacks where Zionist organizations were going around different Arab countries and committing terrorism and then saying like all right like the Jews need to come and escape that you guys are being persecuted like they would actually carry out terrorism at like synagogues and stuff and this is all documented yeah But
the ethnic cleansing that went on, I mean, it's horrific.
There's dozens of massacres that happen in the formation of Israel.
Because even though it was partitioned initially by the UN, I don't know who gave this international body the authority to partition a country on top of another country.
But on top of that, there was several massacres that just continued to take more and more of the land, as I said, and that was called the Nakba.
And so all these people were expelled violently and purged from their land.
We visited some of these refugee camps and the people were just like, we literally, our houses are like five miles away and we're just stuck in these camps and we've been here for 50 years.
Yeah, it's sick.
And they have no water.
They just have one water tank every month.
And Israeli soldiers will go and spray skunk spray, which is like a military manufactured, disgusting, toxic tasting spray that tastes like sewage water.
And they'll just go target these water tanks and then your water will be fucked for the whole month.
There's just little things like this just to make people's lives a living hell.
Well, we have four episodes out where we, you know, I go to anti-refugee rallies and I'm talking to people who are telling me that these people are subhuman infiltrators who need to be executed and rounded up and put in chains.
I mean, it's really crazy and you really don't understand how bad it is and why it's so dangerous and how really it's been the crux of so many problems in the world.
Especially in that region, like what we've done just to create this settler colonial state in the middle of the Middle East and expel all these people violently and then just unconditionally support Israel no matter what war crimes they commit, no matter who they bomb, no matter who they kill, it's sick.
And people don't respect us for doing that.
And it's super hypocritical when we're engaging in military operations in the name of fucking morality and humanitarianism.
I don't believe the whole Zionist lobby controls the U.S. I think that it's a partnership.
I think that the U.S. sees a lot of...
Leverage having Israel there, but I think it's becoming more unpopular where it's almost becoming a liability because the rest of the world is increasingly realizing how fucked up the situation is and trying to boycott like the state, you know, and and the US is it's not gonna be a popular thing.
Like even when Obama was leaving office, he did that kind of cursory like superficial thing where they for the first time didn't veto Israel or didn't veto like the condemnation of Israeli settlements.
And so that was like we didn't not do it, but we just like didn't veto it for the first time in a long time.
And that was like a huge slap in the face to Israel, even though it was like nothing but just a symbolic empty gesture.
But that was kind of Obama's like, fuck you as I was leaving.
But it really didn't do anything.
But it shows you that there's a lot of divisions, I think, from the inside.
And I think the government is realizing, like, it might not be worth it.
If the pressure continues to mount, I mean, we need to put pressure on our government to stop this occupation because it's completely inhumane and disgraceful.
And we also went to the Amazon and saw the mess that Chevron left there, like 18 billion gallons of just oil just festering in the Amazon jungle that's just been left.
Yeah, and they just lied about a bunch of pits and never cleaned it up.
And so we went and I was like standing in this oil pit and I was like, what the fuck is this?
Everyone's dying of cancer.
I mean, it's a whole nother level when you're, you know, you're not just reacting to the news and giving like commentary like we were saying before in a studio.
So you just felt like when you were on RT that you were kind of shackled by being in the studio and to really get a feel of these subjects that you're covering.
According to Reuters' report on Monday, it looks like General Motors is abandoning Venezuela for a while.
Two employees told Reuters that the giant...
Employee plants employees were all fired via text message blah blah blah Corporate email accounts were all deactivated over the weekend.
We received a payment and text message The size of the payments was not disclosed were not disclosed but according to the union leaders they were too low of course unions never said they paid us perfect Everything's great.
He's like, just give corporations giant tax breaks and all the jobs will come back here!
You're like, wait, corporations already have giant tax breaks and they're never gonna fucking come back here unless they can pay people 10 cents on the dollar, like they do in Bangladesh.
But if you looked like you and, like, I'd grab men by the dick, be like, yeah, go pussy riot.
You know?
Those pussy riot girls are cute, you know?
That's why it works.
Yeah, you know, it's true.
I mean, look, there's a lot of shallow thinking in pretty much every part of the world.
I mean, human beings are involved in this Weird sort of a race for for resources and for breeding rights and for you know for social You know, social position.
There's a lot of weird shit going on with people.
And we're like in some weird stage of evolution where we're close to like getting better than we are now, but we're not there yet.
And the Trump thing is like a little slide back, the longing for nostalgia.
You know, we've kind of slid back a few steps.
But I always feel like...
I mean, my take on things is always that unless there's some sort of resistance...
The real hard work doesn't get done.
And I feel like this situation that we're in right now, which is really unappealing to a lot of us, is going to force people to activate politically, socially, and also, I think, like, this Berkeley shit that's going on, these riots and everything, it's going to force people to reexamine the way they interact with each other.
This is not the functional way.
This is not a good way to interact.
And that's where I think, like, you know, we're talking about, like, what's important about This regressive left ideology and addressing it.
It's important because it fuels the right.
It fuels these alt-right people to have some sort of regressive left.