Joe Rogan and Dave Smith question U.S. government credibility, exposing $700B+ defense budgets, CIA-linked psychedelic experiments (e.g., Manson’s LSD ties), and suppressed Hunter Biden laptop evidence as institutional corruption. They link Ukraine’s conflict to 2014 Soros-backed coups, Zelensky’s reckless nuclear rhetoric, and NATO’s refusal of early autonomy deals, warning of escalation risks. Criticizing media and cultural distractions—like sexualized children’s content in schools or drag queen shows—they argue elites manipulate narratives to maintain control, from Vietnam War fabrications to potential CBDC social credit systems. Rogan’s platform emerges as a rare space for skepticism amid systemic propaganda. [Automatically generated summary]
When you go over stuff, like when you talk about libertarian ideas and you look at the way the government is run now, do you run through that thought process?
Maybe the only way to do it is the way that we're doing it right now.
I mean, I'm guilty of not doing it, but I try my best to always be like, okay, well, maybe, theoretically, they know something I don't know, which kind of means this is the best way to do it.
Or maybe I'm just wrong and my theoretical model couldn't work and this is the best.
But try to give the toughest arguments against it and then go like, okay, but we still didn't need to kill a million Iraqis.
You know what I mean?
We still didn't need to do this.
Or we still at least didn't need it.
But I try my best.
It's dangerous, because the further into it I get, the more convinced I am that I'm right, and then that's also dangerous.
Because I'm not as insecure about it as I used to be.
It feels like the only way, like, the system is broken.
Everyone sort of agrees that.
And the only way to do it right would be to create a more ethical, moral, logical system that's actually based on constitutional rights and how the government is supposed to be.
In terms of like the kind of power they're supposed to have versus what they're always constantly trying to acquire.
But if you did that, how much would you have to blow the system up?
And how would we run things?
Like what period of vulnerability would we have while we're trying to re-establish a new system?
And how would we know if the system could even work correctly without being influenced by money and power and all the shit that's fucked it up for what we've got right now?
I think that, like, what Ron Paul used to always say was basically, I mean, these are my words, not his, but it was basically his plan was he goes, end all the worst shit first.
Like, end all the most evil shit first.
So the first thing is, like, stop bombing third world countries.
Stop locking people in jail for victimless crimes.
Stop doing, like, stop bailing out billionaires and corporations and stuff.
Like, stop that first.
You know, you don't start with, like, well, okay, if there's a vulnerable population that's, like, dependent on this government program, get rid of it tomorrow.
You know, so, like, you try to do that, and then the more of the corruption that you roll back, you're gonna see, you know, like, less wealth being extracted from regular American people and going to special interests, kind of build that up over time.
But it's a challenging thing.
To go from this insane system to something less insane is tough.
Well, it's kind of fascinating when you think that this is the only country that has been really established as like a colony that went on to take over the world.
And it did it inside of 300 years, which is pretty fucking wild.
Because going from being a republic to an empire has happened before, but we're the most powerful empire in world history, at least in terms of raw power, like the technology, the level of wealth, all that shit.
Imagine that she was dangling the carrot of the $10,000 we gave back in student loan debt forgiveness, that those people are going to have bank accounts.
And those people that got that free money, I'm going to take that free money out of your bank.
That was the immediate thing that she dangled, which lets you know some of the incentive involved in giving student loan debt.
It's not really that we want to help these people.
It's that now we will have influence over those people for voting.
Yeah, and then it compounds with interest over the decades.
Like I was reading a story about this woman who took out $150,000 in student loans and she hasn't been able to pay them back and now she's $250,000 in the hole.
You're just punishing the taxpayers for the debt of, in many cases, a more privileged group.
It's like the people who didn't go to college now have to bail out the people who did, you know?
But, man, it is such a fucked up system that they trap these 18-year-old kids.
It's ruthless.
And that no one at the colleges, even.
Like, the fact, I mean, obviously the politicians are, like, soulless and the bankers are just trying to make money, but that no one in the university Whoever has the basic human decency to look at one of these kids who goes, hey, you know you're spending $150,000 on a gender studies major?
Just think about that.
Think about whether or not this is really a good idea.
And what's really wild is then most, especially tech companies, they're so progressive and so liberal, and they're kind of trapped in that ideology which can hamper what they want to do and what they're allowed to do with their company because you get activists who are employees.
So your employees become, and they go straight from universities Where they're indoctrinated into this ideology and then they permeate these tech companies.
And some of them are fucked.
Some of them are realizing it and they're pushing back and they go, stop, stop, stop.
You guys are killing our stock.
You're fucking up the business.
It's a giant loss in terms of whether or not it's good for the overall company.
It's a giant loss for some of them.
Like Netflix.
Netflix took a giant hit after all that Chappelle shit.
Well, I mean, it just – and if you think about, like, with the tech censorship stuff, if you think about, like, in, like, 2014, 2015, this basically didn't exist.
This isn't that long ago that you kind of could say whatever you wanted to.
Yeah, I'll have a little bit.
Thank you.
You could say whatever you wanted to on Twitter.
I mean, I remember, like, really – Wild people saying crazy shit on Twitter.
And there was never even a thought like, oh, you're going to get kicked off for saying this.
It's a giant slippery slope and it shouldn't be navigated by people who are, again, indoctrinated into this system that they get straight out of universities and they're locked into these progressive ideas.
So the point I was just making is when you talk about the bottom line.
So you could see why...
Originally, back then, why they weren't kicking people off of their platforms is because, well, there's no incentive for them to kick people off the platform.
The whole point is they want people to be on their platform.
There'd certainly be no incentive to kick really popular people off of their platform.
That's how they get people onto their platform.
And it is there is a lot of truth to the fact that a lot of these kids coming out of the universities came in with this woke ideology.
But there was also like tremendous pressure from the top coming down.
So like what really, really sparked all of it was in 2016 once Trump won.
And then Congress hauled all the heads of the big tech companies in front of Congress and basically threatened the shit out of them.
That like, look, Donald Trump won.
And here's why he won.
He won because of fake news and Russian interference in social media.
And so you guys got to do something to crack down on them.
And you see that to this day.
Did you see Alex Berenson like shared the evidence?
I mean, he was able to get back on Twitter through that lawsuit.
But he shared that the White House specifically asked about Alex Berenson.
This is a very important point, which is why he's back on.
He was citing studies.
He was using the Israeli data.
He was talking to scientists that were willing to go outside of the company line.
And there's quite a few of them.
These are legit people.
So what he was getting in trouble for with the government was being correct, which is really crazy, because you're talking about a health pandemic.
So you're talking about decisions that could...
Possibly either save people's lives, ruin people's lives, save people's health, ruin people's health.
The only way you're going to know what's what is if you get accurate data.
So if there's a guy who's talking about data, but the data is inconvenient to whatever the narrative is, if it's because it's inconvenient because the pharmaceutical companies fund 75% of all the ads on television, and how many campaigns, and how much money do they have invested in this, and does the government actually have a piece of the Moderna vaccine?
Well, there was, so Rand Paul, I don't know if you saw one of these moments where he, it was months ago now, but where he was grilling Fauci in one of those Rand Paul versus Fauci moments, and he said that they found out through a Freedom of Information Act that it was something like $135 million in royalties had been paid out To scientists on the NIH, at the NIH, from pharmaceutical companies.
And he asks Fauci straight up, he goes, have you received any money?
Will you disclose all the money you've received?
And Fauci, in a roundabout way, you know, is like, well, Dr. Paul, I think I may have had one royalty for very small money, but now I don't need, the law doesn't require me to reveal that.
So I'm like, hmm.
Don't you think, like, shouldn't we know that?
Shouldn't we at least be able to know, like, how much money does Fauci make from Pfizer and Moderna?
Because that seems like a tiny conflict of interest.
But to your point with Alex Berenson's stuff, like, look, even if he was wrong, which he was right a lot more than he was wrong, put his track record up against Fauci's track record over the last couple years, he was right way more than Fauci was.
But even if he was wrong, theoretically, He was making data-based arguments.
They justified tech censorship with, well, what if someone's just a Nazi preaching hate?
Or what if someone's intentionally spreading false information to change an election?
But he wasn't doing any of that.
He was just like a guy who worked for the New York Times.
He was just a guy who was presenting sound arguments.
Even if he got some things wrong, the idea that we would shut that down is a really creepy, very creepy thing.
And then that it's coming from the White House, that it's coming directly from them.
This isn't just like some random, you know, like it's not just that, oh, there's a company with a woke ideology who doesn't think you should be allowed to do this on their platform, like the kind of almost the libertarian argument that some people make.
Well, they're a private company.
They can do what they want to do.
But that's not what's happening here.
Here you have the government who's saying, silence our number one critic to our policies of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all this stuff.
The FBI. Told us there was going to be this misinformation, this Russian misinformation coming.
Now, I'm not saying the FBI told him specifically, you have to turn down the Hunter Biden story.
But when you asked him about the Hunter Biden story, the first thing he said was, well, the FBI. So clearly at least he took it that way.
And then when the story came out, the FBI and the CIA and all these intelligence people are saying, this has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
And Joe Biden's bragging about this at the time.
So if nothing else, they at least clearly sent a signal to these companies that, like, this is the one.
Yeah, it's a weird situation where they're kind of asking you to have this level of expertise in a thing that is not your area of expertise, or do you just have some faith in the system and go, well, I mean, this is the FBI telling me this, and if they're saying it's Russian misinformation, then I don't want to put it out there if that could affect the results of an election, and so maybe you err on that side.
Imagine if you've been warned, and then it is Russian disinformation, but you also allow people to share it, and it turns out to actually affect the election.
It swings the election the other way, Trump wins again, and then we find out it's a hoax, and we find out he really is in cahoots with Russia.
Right, and there's an interesting thing like that because, and there's polling that shows this, like, I forget exactly what it is, but it's a very large percentage of Democrat voters still believe Donald Trump was in bed with Russia, even though the investigation found no evidence that there was any conspiracy or anything like that, and in fact anyone paying attention to it.
The whole thing was just completely orchestrated to box Donald Trump in.
Yeah.
Again, I'm not a Trump supporter, if anyone needs that disclaimer, but I'm just saying, objectively, he was framed for treason, essentially, for being a traitor to his country, working with Russia involved in a conspiracy to change the election results of 2016. Also, and then there was no public apology.
No, they just kind of in the last year of his administration stopped talking about it as much, never basically acknowledged that we had been saying Trump-Russia collusion for all this time.
After the report fell apart, they moved immediately over to the Ukraine gate thing, which is very interesting given the context of everything going on now.
And then they just pulled it up again in the presidential election of 2020 when this laptop came out and they were like, oh, this is Russia again.
The thing is, there is Russian disinformation, right?
There's that too.
How the fuck do you know if your Twitter or Facebook, and I'm not exonerating them for what they did, right?
They shouldn't have done it.
I don't believe in censorship, especially when it comes to censoring a story that's from the second oldest newspaper in the fucking country.
It's kind of crazy.
They're journalists, right?
Whatever you might think of the New York Post and their funny headlines, they're essentially journalists.
When they print something like this, you're supposed to think first about Where is it coming from?
Think first about, like, what's the ramifications of censoring this?
What if it's accurate?
I don't think anybody thought that.
I think the orange man scared the fuck out of everybody and they all acted irrationally and I think that's one of the things that broke mass media mainstream media in terms of like television media and news and It was just this this hate for Trump was so overwhelming It's like you had to say that he was bad no matter what the story was.
He pissed off a lot of people in a In an unbelievable way.
But he also, I mean, he really pissed off people in like the intelligence agencies and people at very high levels for a bunch of different reasons.
But like that stuff, it's like the same thing with the Alex Berenson thing.
It's like, okay, but then you censored that story and you turned out to be wrong.
And they turned out to be right.
And they were telling the truth.
And so now while you, in theory, may have been correcting for this one mistake, which was, oh, Russian misinformation could sway an election.
What ended up happening was that the intelligence community interfered in the election and that they did not allow this story—the intelligence agencies and big tech interfered in the 2020 election.
They silenced this story, which was a newsworthy story.
No matter how much weight you put into it, whether it's—is it—should it change your vote that the son of the president, then former vice president, is clearly— Selling his last name for political, you know, his political influence to make money from foreign governments.
I don't know how big a deal you should think that is, but that is a story.
That's something that if someone broke that, that's a story there.
And then there were questions about what did Biden know about this?
Was he getting kickbacks from that?
Bobulinski, something like that, I think was Hunter Biden's partner.
He testified, or not testified, but he was interviewed by the FBI. We just found this out last month.
That he was interviewed by the FBI and told them this.
Told them that, yes, I've met with Joe Biden several times.
He knew about all these business dealings.
Well, Joe Biden is claiming I've never talked to my son about his business.
This is at least worthy to print, this story.
And to have Twitter shut down one of the biggest newspapers in the country, and then make it so you couldn't share the link.
And then Facebook, as Zuckerberg said, I don't know.
Lowered the signal in a significant way, I think was the way he put it.
I don't remember what he said the way he said it, but essentially he admitted that there's some complex shadow banning type mechanism that's in place for information, you know, and fucking the whole thing's so complicated and I do not envy them at all.
Imagine being someone at Facebook and the FBI tells you that.
And even if you look at the way that the Congress talked to him when they hauled him in front of Congress several times, I mean, they like really kind of shake him down.
They're like, what are you doing about this?
What are you doing about that?
How are you making sure that...
And imagine the task of making sure...
You create a platform where people can speak to each other, and you now have the task of making sure they're all being honest.
It's like, because all the people who are like selling the war in Ukraine right now and how we have to send more weapons in and we have to crack down harder on Russia and be more involved in the war.
It's like all the same people who sold the war in Iraq.
I mean, not all of them, but a whole bunch of them are like the exact same people.
And those same people were complaining about misinformation.
And they're like the ones who sold the war in Iraq.
And then they go, okay, remember how I told you that Saddam Hussein was in bed with Osama bin Laden and he had nukes that he was going to detonate in Kansas?
Well, let me tell you what's going on now.
You're like, how do you get to tell me what's going on now?
That get funded by the weapons manufacturers and then those think tanks come up with pieces about why we need to go fight a war and then they go and lobby the politicians to support some other war.
It's like Yeah, it's something out of like a crazy movie.
It was during the lockdown regime before Operation Warp Speed.
So before the vaccine regime when we were still in the lockdown regime.
And this video, I haven't seen go as viral, but I played it on my podcast.
Part of the problem, if you go look, it's in like one of the last five episodes if anyone wants to check it out.
But he was saying, point blank, during the COVID lockdowns, that when people were going, well, maybe we could get a vaccine and that'll get us out of these lockdowns.
And he was like, no, no, no, because even if we got a vaccine, it would take at least two years of trials before we would know whether this vaccine was safe.
And then sometimes vaccines can have a negative effect Actually, you're worse at fighting off the virus afterward.
And he kind of breaks down this whole thing.
Then all of a sudden, once Operation Warp Speed starts, and then once Biden gets in, you're not allowed to talk about that anymore.
And in fact, when I was on with you, it was a couple times ago.
It was the clip that you got all this heat for, and Fauci even responded.
And essentially what you were saying was like, hey, if you're a young person, just be really healthy.
That's my advice to you.
Eat healthy, exercise, get a lot of sunlight, get vitamin D, like all these things.
And it's also, if you talk to virologists about respiratory illnesses, you can't contain them.
Can you stop yourself from getting it?
Yeah, if you completely isolate from humanity and you stay on a ranch and you never leave and you get your own well water and you wait this bitch out.
That's possible.
You could do that.
But other than that, if you're going to be in contact with human beings, And especially something that you can spread before you know you have it, which apparently is the case.
Like, people could have a mild form of it and be spreading it, and then other people can die from it.
And you might not be affected by it at all, but the other people that get it might die.
And so that was the big fear, right?
And everybody was like, if you are irresponsible at this point, you're contributing to this horrible situation.
I get that.
But why didn't we put that same sort of focus and same sort of pressure on people to take care of their health?
Because that makes a big fucking difference.
A giant difference, as big as anything, is whether or not you're healthy and you have a robust immune system that can fight off any kind of infection.
Not just this one, but all the ones that people get constantly and die from.
I mean, there's fucking...
In the neighborhood of 30,000 to 50,000 people every year die from the flu, right?
Yeah, and this has been true way before COVID in America.
According to the CDC, I think it was between 66% and 70% of medical costs are associated with preventable illness.
Yeah.
So whether it's obesity, smoking, you know, drugs, you know, all this like unhealthy lifestyle type stuff.
And then, you know, we have like these debates over like Obamacare and all these other things.
And none of that ever comes up.
Like no one ever brings up the fact that like, well, if we actually want to have a solution to the health problem in this country, well, we kind of know what the solution is.
Solution is to eat good and exercise and things like this and don't do drugs, or at least the unhealthy ones.
Don't smoke cigarettes.
That's kind of the solution.
And no one ever seems to be like, well, we're asking the people to do this.
I'm certainly not advocating forcing anyone to do anything, but...
Well, you know, I mean, you could find a world in which that would be encouraged, where it could be encouraged in a positive way and it would really literally change people's lives.
Like they would start doing it and start feeling better and then that would become a new way of life for them.
And then they would look back a year, two, three years from now with so much more energy and so much healthier and feel so much better and go, God, why didn't someone tell me this earlier?
And that's a thing.
That's a real thing that we can do.
This is just such a fucking fascinating time to watch people's thought processes and how quickly people are to join the herd mentality and to not question things, especially the people that put all their faith in some of the Companies that have been shown to be the most deceptive and profited the most from that deception and have been penalized,
even though they've been penalized financially, if you look at the gain versus loss, it's not even a slap on the wrist because they were still allowed to make billions of dollars from pharmaceutical medications that killed millions of people.
Well, that's what Abramson said when I had John Abramson on, who's a guy who's litigated against pharmaceutical companies in the Vioxx case.
He got the internal memos where they said there's going to be all these complications, but we will do well.
They knew the health complications that were going to be associated with this medication that wound up killing at least 50,000 people, which is fucking wild.
And they made like 12 billion, they got penalized a few billion, and so they made profit.
They made profit off of a disease which they pushed through knowing that they were hiding data.
And then, you know, when you look at things like when they had these COVID passports in all of these big cities, you know, the thing that's so crazy is like, so then they go, okay, so the government is basically forcing you to consume this pharmaceutical product or you can't participate in the society that you live in.
And then all these people get forced into it.
It's clear as day that this did nothing.
I mean, they put the vaccine passports into effect in New York City before the Omicron variant.
And when Omicron came through, it just wiped through.
Everybody got Omicron in the city.
It was like the most contagious variant.
It did nothing to stop this.
And then ultimately it was like so obvious and the people just weren't having it, so they pulled back on it.
But then there's no admission that like, oh, we got that wrong.
There's no reconciliation, no correction.
But the pharmaceutical companies, they kept all the money for all the people who were forced to consume their product.
Look, whenever there's a pandemic or whenever there's a new thing, there's a crisis, there's always going to be mistakes made.
And it's whether or not we learn from those mistakes and whether or not you have a healthy distrust for narratives that are being pushed by people who have a financial incentive for these narratives to be correct.
Here's another one we don't talk about.
Respirators.
Do you know how many people died because they were on respirators?
Is it a correlation or is it a causation?
Well, they don't fucking use them as much anymore.
That's a fact.
And 88% of the people in New York, something like that?
Find out what percentage of people got put on respirators who wound up dying.
You could say, well, they were going to die anyway, and that's why.
There's some people that disagree with that and they say no you blew out these people's lungs Well, the reason I tend to I think that you're right to disagree with that is because what you said is that the so at the beginning Right.
This is when Cuomo when he was still a governor there was demanding that Trump send in 50,000 more respirators Because we needed them or people are going to die and then the doctors basically all from the bottom up Determined like we're not going to be putting these people on respirators anymore because there are so many of them are dying Most New York COVID patients on ventilators died.
And this one, to your point though, I would say I don't think there was anything malicious about this.
I do think doctors were trying to save people, and then they quickly started realizing, our patients are doing really bad when we put them on these ventilators, and then they backed off, and they were like, let's not do this anymore.
So to your point, yeah, mistakes will be made, and I think that one was an honest mistake.
But the point is that at least the doctors then corrected that.
And then went, okay, we're not going to do that anymore.
We're going to wait until we absolutely need to, to put them on these ventilators.
But there seems to be with all of these other, like, major policies from the federal government and from a lot of these state governments that there's just kind of...
You know, there's like no admission, no recognition.
And I mean, I remember like when Texas here, when you guys first opened back up and just ended all of the COVID restrictions, all the blue state governors were saying, this is so reckless and insane and people are going to die.
And then the death rate was no worse than in any of these other blue states.
Everyone who wants a point to Florida, like Florida, what they did, they had the highest rate of death in COVID. Yeah, but they have the oldest people.
And if you age adjust, it's no different than California.
If you age adjust, that was the right way to do it.
He was right.
No one's saying that COVID's good.
It was not good.
But these people that did things that were not good for society, were not good for small businesses, were not good for people's mental health, were not good for the development of children's language skills, like all these things were wrong, man.
It's going to be like a generation before we even see the damage from the lockdowns.
And we won't even be able to know for sure what exactly, like trace it back to what exactly was the damage from the lockdowns.
But just think about what a nightmare, you know.
2020, I mean, there were riots in that year that were obviously about the George Floyd thing, but were very related to the lockdowns as well.
Like, it wasn't a coincidence that after three months of being locked in your home with no bar, no sports, no friend's house, no work, you know, then all of a sudden people were rioting.
Because cops have done, you know, fucked up shit a lot of times before, and this one led to national, you know, riots.
That was all part of the cost of lockdowns.
So the economy, the inflation that we're dealing with right now was a huge part of the lockdowns.
And it was partly because they printed trillions of dollars as a result of being like, well, what are we going to do to make sure we're not in a depression if we just stop the economy right now?
So, of course, the answer is always, well, we'll print trillions of dollars, hand out most of that to big corporations and give some crumbs to the American people.
And so now...
You think of the cost of inflation.
I mean, people are getting destroyed from the value of the dollar going down right now and the cost of everything rising.
These things are all interrelated.
It's very hard to measure the cost of shutting down society.
But really, I mean, in hindsight at this point, looking back at it, that if the government had just said, look, there's this virus, this nasty upper respiratory virus that's coming over here, And we think that if you're in very bad health, because by March, it was very clear in the data of who was dying from this.
It was very clear that it was old and sick people.
No, but I'm just saying, if you were being honest and not focusing on the outliers and actually looking at, like, what we can learn from this data, they could have just said, look, if you are at risk, we really recommend you isolate yourself.
For everybody else, try to be smart.
Try to be as healthy as you can.
Like, you know what I mean?
And then if you feel sick at all, don't Come into work.
Do not power through it.
Do not assume it's allergies or a cold or something like that.
Make sure, get tested.
And the tests weren't as readily available back then, but just stay home, wait it out, you know what I mean?
Whatever.
Just doing that and not locking down the economy and not having all of these crazy restrictions would have...
It's unquestionably been a much, much better way to handle COVID. Because look, from all these states, if you look at the lockdown states versus the non-lockdown states or the lockdown countries versus the non-lockdown countries, if you look at the mask mandate counties versus the non-mask mandate counties, there's You can't draw any conclusion from any of them.
The truth is that this virus just moved the way it was gonna move.
And so all you were doing was just destroying people's lives.
You were just adding more of a cost than the virus itself was gonna add, which was already significant.
When they got data and the data was pretty clear that a large percentage of the people in the ICU for COVID were deficient in vitamin D. And this is not saying that vitamin D is going to prevent you from getting COVID, but it 100% will increase the power of your immune system.
Vitamin D deficiency is a real problem with people's overall metabolic health.
And there's a large percentage of our country because we stay indoors all the time, we don't do things, we're not active outside.
Vitamin D is a hormone and your body produces it from the sun and that's the best way to get it.
But if you're not getting it that way, you can supplement.
And it's a definite best second choice, and it really helps, and it makes a big fucking difference.
It makes a big difference in everything, in muscle development, brain function, like it's a real fucking problem with human beings.
They had that data.
There was no public declaration of this.
Yeah, this was known way before COVID. Such a simple thing to tell people, vitamin D is so important.
And just the insane thing is that they all accuse people like us, who talk about it like this, of spreading misinformation throughout the whole time.
Meanwhile, the people who say that you should stay inside, they don't get accused of spreading misinformation.
The people like the President of the United States and Dr. Fauci, the head of the pandemic response, who say, if you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID and you won't spread it.
Well, it also just, if you just had anyone who knew anything, I'm not a doctor or anything, but if you know anyone who knows anything about it, you would just look at that like I did the second I read that story, go, that doesn't sound right.
Because ivermectin is known for being a very safe drug.
Whether the argument is that it helps with COVID or not, it's the reason why at the beginning doctors were giving it to people is because they were kind of like, well, this may help or it may not, but it's definitely not a dangerous drug to take.
That might have worked on some people at the moment.
Where people are like, oh my god, these idiots are taking horse paste.
But now, given the amount of time that's gone on, what it's done, really, is it's eroded significantly people's respect and people's trust in mainstream news.
And this one with COVID is the biggest one by far.
But even when people would...
I remember, like, when Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, and the people in the corporate press, who I know some of them, and they'd be saying these things like...
They'd be like, he's just calling us fake news and liars and all of this.
And, like, how is this resonating with so many people?
And they were, like, completely like...
And you're like, guys, I don't know.
I mean, you sold a war where a million people died off...
This guy had weapons of mass destruction, and he didn't.
Like, real people's kids went and fought in that war and then came back and blew their brains out.
Tens of thousands of American soldiers blew their brains out.
You know, like, a lot of people knew that guy.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
And they know that you sold this war.
Do you think that in the next 10 years after that, the fact that people have no trust in you, there might be a connection there?
Do you think the fact that even like Barack Obama saying, you know, whatever, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.
All these lies.
People remember this stuff.
But man, if they think that the people in 2016 didn't trust the corporate press, after this, the amount of people who will never, will never look at CNN again, will never look at the New York Times again.
As if there's any pretense of even your pretending to tell the truth.
Well, I think what CNN's trying to do now is rebuild.
And they're trying to become a source of objective news.
And I think this new guy recognizes the mistakes of...
You're allowing editorials by some of the dumbest fucking people on television, and people that are only there because they were hired.
One of the beautiful things about, whether it's Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar, who is my favorite show, one of the best points about it is there's no one running that but them.
You're getting objective information from people that you trust.
They're gathering up everything they can find and they can give an assessment based on their understanding of these issues and then they debate it and they talk about it and they go over it back and forth.
People chose them.
People know they can trust them, so they follow them.
But what gives me hope about those two, Crystal and Sager, is that they are a right-wing populist and a left-wing populist, and yet they're very good friends, and they get along great, and they have respectful conversations about things.
And you actually realize that they have a lot of overlap.
Mostly.
Which is a big thing that I think that the kind of powerful, like the establishment, work very hard to make sure that you don't Right.
How much actually that your average like, you know, left of center person, right of center person has in common.
And that they and this is why they love pumping these culture war issues so much, because they're the things that get the two sides fighting with each other while they're off at the top.
Not caring.
Like, you know, like what JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs or the Federal Reserve, what they love is when left wing America and right wing America are at each other's throats and they're just raking in billions of dollars in profits because no one's looking at them.
But if you really think about the things that most people care about, like most regular Americans care about the most, is they're like, you know, My healthcare is, like, really unaffordable.
You know, groceries just went through the roof.
My rent just, like, went up by 25%.
So it's like, you go, well, you know, like, does inflation fuck over left-wingers or right-wingers?
It fucks over both of them.
Like, it's all of these things.
It's not a left-versus-right issue.
It's like a top-versus-down issue.
You know who it really helped?
It helped all of the people that got the big corporations who got all that bailout money when the Federal Reserve printed $6 trillion in 2020. It was really good for them.
It's really bad for you.
It's the old George Carlin thing, right?
It's a big fucking club and you ain't in it.
And that's a left winger or a right winger.
You're not in this club.
It's that club versus you.
That's the narrative.
And they have a lot more in common with each other.
Let me tell you, the Republican politicians and Democrat politicians have a lot more in common with each other than they have with you.
And left winger and right winger American, you have a lot more in common with each other than you do with...
And those culture war issues, that's the most important thing that you're saying.
And this is something that people need to get in their head, that these culture war issues that we're seeing in the news every day, there is an element of distraction about that.
No matter how much you think these issues are important, they are important.
But they're not talking about them because they're important.
They're talking about them because they know this will solidify people's adherence to the ideology, whether it's the right-wing ideology or the left-wing ideology.
When you have people like Stacey Abrams saying that a fetal heartbeat is an illusion, like how did she say it?
But anyway, you ever see, to the point of the culture wars as a distraction, you ever see, like, you know in those, like, nexus charts where you can chart, like, words that are used in mainstream, like, big newspapers and stuff?
So you could chart, like, a word in the New York Times and how many times it's used.
So, you know, Washington Post or whatever.
If you take any of these, like, woke...
Take the term racism, and you put it in a nexus chart, and they'll show you throughout the years how many times the term racism is used in the New York Times.
And it's like this, and then around like 2011, 2012, it goes way up.
And social justice, way up.
Toxic masculinity.
Way up.
And this isn't coming from the young kids.
This isn't coming from 20-year-olds.
This isn't coming from the college universities.
These are the biggest corporate media platforms in the country.
All at this time, flooded the market with this woke shit.
Now, I'm not saying it didn't exist in college universities.
I'm not saying that that wasn't already going on.
I'm just saying that what changed...
Around that time, and it was right toward Obama's second term, what changed was that all of a sudden the woke shit went from being shit that was taught, like critical race theory, and this stuff was taught in college universities, but all of a sudden it had the backing of all of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world, and all of the political class, and all of it just got pumped in.
And the theory kind of is that what had happened right then in 2010 was Was you had these huge – this big left-wing populist movement and this big right-wing populist movement.
You had the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement.
And they were kind of started over the same thing, which were the banker ballots.
Like the first Tea Party – like things were started over the Ron Paul campaigns and the TARP. That was like when the first tea parties broke out.
And then the Occupy thing was in direct response to the banker bailouts and all of this stuff.
And you had these big movements.
And the lefties back then were standing outside of the big banks screaming, we are the 99%.
And when they were saying 99%, they didn't even mean 99%.
They meant 99.9%.
They were like, we're the people who don't own banks.
Like the people who own banks versus the people who don't own banks.
That's who we represent.
That was like the leftist populist movement.
And then all of these huge publications.
I'm not talking about mom and pop newspapers.
I'm saying the New York Times and the Washington Post.
You know what I mean?
All they wanted to talk about all day was what divides all of them.
I was like, no, no, no.
You're not the 99%.
You're the whites versus the blacks, the gays versus the straights, the trans versus the cis.
And now you look at it, and you see the gay pride parade floats, and there's a Bank of America float.
And it just seems to me like these big banks essentially bought off the left.
With all this woke shit, completely distracted them from where their eyes were on the prize, and then turned the left and right against each other, where now they're all fighting.
So to your point, it's not that what they're fighting about doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Some of them are very important issues, but none of them affect the bottom line for the most powerful people in our society.
And what are the bankers doing now since those banker bailouts?
They got a whole new round of bailouts in 2020. They're raking in profits still.
Nothing was ever addressed about that whole corrupt system.
So do you think that there was a concerted effort to do this?
Like, was there a conversation?
Like, how do you think something like that happens?
If you think that there's this ramp up and it's been proven by these studies that if you look at the words, like, is it a function of people graduating from these universities and taking these jobs in these companies and deciding to push this agenda because they think that social justice is important?
Because they do see, you know, these opponents of Obama as being these racist people that are like this is like underbelly of society that we weren't totally aware of.
It needs to be addressed.
Or do you think that there is really like a concerted effort from corporations to get people to divide?
So, look, the thing is, essentially the answer is I don't know.
Because, you know, I don't have, like, factually, I don't know for sure.
But there's, I think it was either, I can't remember if it was Michael Tracy or if it was Matt Taibbi.
One of them said it.
But he goes, I'm not saying wokeism is a CIA operation.
But if it was, everything makes perfect sense.
I don't know.
And again, those nexus charts, they're not even like studies.
They're just mapping the word and how many times it's used.
But there is no question that amongst the most powerful forces in media, there was a concerted effort to do this.
And my guess is that it's much less likely that that came from the 20-year-old interns than that that came from some power source up at the top.
And I think there was an effort to do this.
And I think it came from the very top.
And this has been going on, by the way, for a long time.
Back in the day, this is what they did to the right wing in this country.
This is what National Review did when they turned the right wing into culture warriors, when they never were before.
The old Robert Taft, who was known as Mr. Republican, his whole thing was like non-interventionist foreign policy, Sound money, some protectionism, so you protect American jobs and stuff like that.
It was all this old-school right-wing thing, and then National Review, and all this new right rose up in the 60s, and they were like, no, no, no, no, listen.
What really matters is like...
There's homos out there.
All right?
Like, that's really what us right-wingers care about.
What we really care about is abortion.
What we really care about is...
Again, not saying abortion's not an important issue.
I'm just saying, but they used that, and then they were like, oh, and by the way, that non-interventionist foreign policy thing?
Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.
We're called warriors now.
And we're going to fight communism all throughout the world.
Get on board.
And so, it just...
It seems like...
This is a tried-and-true tactic to break up these movements that can actually threaten where the real gravy train is.
And where is that?
That's in the military-industrial complex, in the banking complex, the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
That's where the real American fascism lies.
Not in some people who trespassed on government property on January 6th.
Who had nothing, was completely powerless, and then is now sitting in solitary confinement for how many hundreds of days?
That's not like the face of fascism in America.
If you want to talk about fascism in America, look at like the Patriot Act.
Look at vaccine passports.
Look at like, you know, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
I think there were some people in there that had they gotten their hands on Mike Pence or something like that, like something very ugly could have happened.
So I don't mean to downplay it.
I'm just saying that, like, those people, even had they done something to Mike Pence or something like that, would have been shut down by – I mean, the military would have come in, the National Guard would have come in.
They were never a real threat to take over the United States of America and implement fascism.
My point is that these people that I'm talking about are really powerful and actually affecting the lives of everyday Americans.
And my other thing is that a lot of those people in January 6th weren't that guy.
And were just people kind of in the crowd who entered the building.
And also, what the hell was going on with Mike Epps and how does it make any sense that he is being...
I know that that day, and I know that point blank, it was Ray, the head of the FBI, and one other woman who is like, I think one of the top people in the Justice Department, were straight up asked in congressional testimony if there were any FBI agents or people working with the FBI involved in She would not respond.
And to this day, I still hear people saying that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind or misinformed or under-informed or purposely ignorant because you want it to be Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The more you read about—you ever talk to Oliver Stone?
Yeah, also really worthwhile is watching his interviews with Putin, that series of interviews that he did, particularly considering what's going on right now, which is like, to me, the most important thing in the world, and this is like the next thing where now, you know like how kinda now me and you could talk about, like you could talk about, I tweet, I put things on YouTube about like the vaccine, you know, and negative effects of the vaccine, and I'm just like not worried about it.
Yeah, and just that comment, and then going on to say I would tell them to be really healthy and all of this.
That comment, it was like trending for a week afterward.
The White House is commenting on it.
But now this conversation we just had?
Doubling down on it and defending it this isn't gonna trend because it's just we're not in that right now But right but then you see with with the Russia thing when that first starts Then all of a sudden if that's what's hot now and this is how they always do this like in the moment They try to really make it they try to make you intimidated to say the important thing in the moment But man dude this thing with Russia is just like the craziest thing in the world like the idea that we're actually Flirting with a nuclear conflict with Russia is
the most important priority in the history of humanity, is that America and Russia do not go to war.
There's nothing more important than that.
That's it.
We'll destroy the human species if we do this.
And yet there's this war right on Russia's border, and there's no effort to negotiate going on.
There's, like, no effort.
In fact, from very solid reporting, that actually America, through Boris Johnson, told Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia at the very beginning of the war, when they had a deal worked out.
They had a deal worked out.
There's been reported in multiple sources that they had a deal worked out, and the deal was basically that Vladimir Putin would pull back.
He would pull back his troops and leave Ukraine under the condition that—the very simple conditions that Ukraine— Guaranteed autonomy for the Donbass region and agreed to never join NATO. And that was a deal.
Like, okay, I'm not saying everyone thinks that's the perfect deal, but it's better than what we got right now.
Dude, the official narrative on this whole war, it's just like it makes no sense.
And again, like I said, remember, the same people who are pushing this are the ones who are telling you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and stuff.
But the official narrative, Joe, is basically that...
Okay, so...
Vladimir Putin is a madman, a crazy war criminal who's hell-bent on reforming the Soviet Union, and this is a real threat that he could do this, but also he's getting humiliated in this war in Ukraine.
He's losing to the poorest country in Europe, and he's just getting humiliated and beat back, but he's still a real threat to take over all of Europe.
And he's a complete madman, by the way, Joe.
But when he says he's gonna use nuclear weapons, don't listen to that.
He'd never actually do that, even though he's a complete madman.
And as everyone says, this war, the word they use over and over and over again, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, all of them, unprovoked.
Vladimir Putin led an unprovoked war in Ukraine.
But then, it's just like with Osama Bin Laden, what they did with him then.
Don't listen to him.
Whatever you do, don't listen to what he's actually saying, because none of that's his motivations.
Like, his motivations are what we tell you.
Osama Bin Laden hates us because we're free.
And then, like, Ron Paul would just go like, yeah, but that's not what he's saying at all.
Like, Osama bin Laden was so clear about why he hated America.
And he's like, look, I hate you because you murder innocent civilians in the Muslim world, you prop up brutal dictators in the Muslim world, you prop up Israel who mistreats the Palestinian people, and you have your bases in our Holy Land in the Arabian Peninsula.
And then they're like, nah, he hates us because we're free.
He didn't mention anything about freedom there.
And then if you say that, they're like, well, are you defending Osama bin Laden?
And you're like, no, I'm just saying, listen to your enemies.
There's a reason why he hates us.
And if you listen to Vladimir Putin and what he's saying, I mean, look, he's wrong for invading.
I mean, you know me, Joe.
I'm the most anti-war fucking person there is, and there's no excuse for that.
Like, tens of thousands of people have died.
It's horrible.
And a lot of them are soldiers, but a lot of them are civilians.
But to say he was unprovoked is, like, insane.
It's just only people who know nothing about the history of this conflict would say there was no provocation.
Look, this is what he was saying, and he's absolutely right, that the promise when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and this was verbally promised and put in writing, was that NATO would not expand one inch to the east.
And NATO at that point, the line then was through Germany.
Right?
Like, the western half of Germany was in the west, and the eastern half was with the Soviet Union.
And they were like, we'll let all of these nations, you know, secede, and the Soviet Union will collapse, and we're giving up on communism.
It was one of the greatest things that ever happened.
And the deal was, OK, you do that, then we won't move NATO.
We won't move our military alliance into your area that used to be your realm of influence.
And every single president since then has moved NATO east to the point that NATO is now on Russia's border.
And in Ukraine, even though they didn't officially join NATO, there was always talk of it.
Kamala Harris, right before the start of the war, said we're looking to put Ukraine into NATO.
And they put under George W. Bush, they put in Poland these dual-use rocket launchers.
There's a big complaint that Vladimir Putin has that he's like, these can be used to get nukes here in a matter of minutes.
Like, this is like a threat to us that we cannot tolerate.
And then, in 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that was completely led by the West.
I don't know if you've ever heard, but I think I sent you actually once the tape of Gideon Rose, who was the editor for Foreign Affairs magazine on the old Stephen Colbert Report show, back when Colbert was hilarious, and he was just openly bragging about what the game is here.
And he was like, well, Ukraine is kind of like the Robin to Russia's Batman.
And so our job is to steal Robin away from Batman and make him come over here and join us.
And aha, Vladimir Putin's so stupid that he won't do anything.
And then Colbert's in his old character.
So he's like, well, shouldn't Obama be spiking the football and saying, yeah, in your face, Putin?
And Gideon Rose is like, well, no, no, because then Putin might invade Ukraine.
So, we wouldn't want to spike the ball, but there's these...
Countries have to develop over time, and Ukraine basically, after the end of the Soviet Union, faced two tracks.
It could stay a sort of stagnant, corrupt, authoritarian country tied to Russia, or it could essentially join the West.
It could modernize, liberalize, become a democracy.
At the last minute, when it looked like it was going to trade up from its sort of abusive relationship with its boyfriend from the hood to a nice, yuppie...
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And the president, who himself was tied to the old elites and the eastern part of the country who ties to Russia, decided to back off the change and go join Russia.
The problem was the western parts of the country and the younger parts of the country and the more modern liberal parts of the country basically knew that they had no future being Russia's vassal, and so they took to the streets.
Why isn't Obama spiking the ball in the end zone and calling Putin and saying, hey, you might have won the medal count, but we won the country count, biatchi?
It's actually a very good question, and the answer is that we don't want Russia to intervene and kick over the table like a game of risk and take Ukraine back.
The reason we don't want, we don't want, we don't want Putin to get involved in this and so we are basically, we want to try and involve him in this decision so that he allows Ukraine to go.
We actually want to not, we want to say we want a non-exclusive relationship with Ukraine.
Ukraine is basically choosing its future between two completely different courses of action, and we're trying to blur that choice so the old boyfriend doesn't get too upset when it makes the right choice.
So, just to, that's basically, that's the point, but just to add to this, right, so, and it's not just that the guy at Foreign Affairs is saying stuff like this, right, but you also have those, when he says the people took to the streets, you can trace where they were getting their funding from, and it's a whole bunch of NGOs that are Zach and I said George Soros, too.
So it's just all these George Soros-funded NGOs were funding the militias on the ground who were overthrowing the government, and then there's a tape of Victoria Nuland.
Who was at the State Department at the time, one of the top people at the State Department, and she was basically talking about who would be the new government that took over, who America didn't want in, who we did want in the new government.
So it's not, you know, what happened basically was as Gideon Rose was even saying, the Ukrainian government was kind of siding with Russia, or at least a lot more pro-Russia.
And then we overthrew that government and installed a pro-America government.
And this to Putin, he had said over and over again, was a huge red line for him.
Like Ukraine was the big line.
And you could look, imagine, take it from our point of view, if like Russia was coming over here and overthrowing the pro-America government in Montreal and installing a pro-Russia government there.
And, you know, like, this would be seen as, would you call that an unprovoked attack?
You know, if we were to go in there and then go overthrow that government?
So, again, I'm not justifying what he's doing.
But and then the other thing to this, right, that's important, Ed, is like you remember the two big things that it's so weird.
No one like at least in the in the larger conversation, I don't see anyone connecting these things is that there's two things like involving Ukraine that were very big that happened very recently in American history that very much connect to this war.
And one is that our last president was impeached over a thing with Ukraine.
And like, what was that?
And then the other thing is the current president's son was getting paid millions of dollars from a company, Burisma, in Ukraine.
And these things all connect.
Basically, what happened was after the 2014 coup...
This company, Burisma, they were...
And by the way, Matt Taibbi has done incredible reporting on this.
I highly recommend everyone read his stuff, his sub-stacks.
But so basically, Burisma was in bed with the old government that had allied with Russia.
And so when this government was overthrown, they were very worried.
Because they were like, oh, we were in bed with the old government, and now there's this new government who's in there.
And so instead of bribing the new government, They just went right to the source and bribed the son of the sitting vice president.
Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was in charge of Ukraine policy.
So that was why they put him there.
And then they put some other CIA guy or something like that on their board.
They're just paying him money to just be like, hey, keep us in with you.
And then Trump was telling them to investigate.
All of this shit.
He got on the phone with them and was like, I want to investigate everything that was going on with Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine.
And Donald Trump did.
He got into an area that it was, there's an argument it was not okay what he was doing.
Because he was kind of going like, maybe you don't get these weapons that I was going to send in.
Unless you go investigate them.
And this was his political opponent.
So it was a little bit of a shady thing.
But then the other story about that is that ultimately Trump caved and he sent in the weapons to Ukraine.
So now not only did Obama overthrow the regime when Joe Biden was the point man, Joe Biden was running Ukraine policy.
Obama leads this coup, overthrows that government and puts in a pro-Western government.
Then Trump comes in, sends in a whole bunch of weapons to this new government that Obama wouldn't even send in because he was concerned it would provoke Russia.
And then the next president is Joe Biden, the last guy who was the point man on Ukraine, who was there when this coup happened.
Then he comes back in.
This is all like the context that led to Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
So, again, I'm not saying the other little thing I should mention there, too, is that that Donbass region on the eastern portion of Ukraine is like majority ethnic Russians.
And they got really pissed off at when the new government came in 2014 and they were basically warring with with the you know, the Kiev Western portion of Ukraine since then.
And they had a referendum in 2015 and voted overwhelmingly that they wanted to be a part of Russia.
Vladimir Putin didn't take him, but they said they voted that they wanted to be part of Russia, not a part of Ukraine.
So it's just a very complicated mess.
And it's the same thing with like the war on terrorism.
If you're going to tell this story of like what led to this, to understand where to go from here, the story has to include that America was intervening in the Middle East for decades before 9-11.
The story can't just start at 9-11.
You know what I mean?
And so...
I guess the biggest part is what I said before, that the concern of all of us should be just that there's no nuclear conflict between America and Russia, which seems like we're dangerously close to.
So once he starts finding Cleveland's number, and here you see him finding Cleveland's number, he's really starting to land some decent combinations on him.
And Cleveland's still coming forward looking to land the haymaker.
He's got serious power, and that's why he's so confident, right?
He's like moving forward because he knows if he can hit this fucking dude like he hits everybody else, everybody goes night-night.
And all this dancing and moving around and stuff would be inconsequential if he could land on him.
It kind of reminds me of the way Anderson Silva used to fight like in his prime where he'd dance around and then when he'd start really getting in his rhythm just open up like crazy, but he was 185 pounds.
He would download all your movements and put them in the master computer, and then somewhere around the end of the first round, he would start lighting you up, and you'd be like, oh shit.
He's got the best insight whenever we come to him.
Yeah, he's great.
He should be doing commentary for events as well, not just doing the thing that he's doing that way.
I would love to do a show with him where me and him do commentary, like if it's one that DC can't make or something.
He's great.
But it's like, whatever...
Whatever magic that we're talking about here with fighters like Ali had it in a way during I think this fight This was like my favorite version of Ali because it's kind of a little bit of a mismatch ultimately We know because Ali went on to be the greatest arguably of all time But when you're watching the way he's able to do it like there look at that one two moving backwards Moving let me see that again.
Before Jerry Quarry because Jerry Quarry was his comeback fight and Jerry you could see in that fight like his body looked different It says here this was on November 14th 66 and the article I have here that says he was convicted on June 20th 67 so he could have had another one in between Let's go to his Wikipedia and see if that I I want to say that that was it.
I want to say that was it.
But that to me is like...
There's fights where you like...
For me, it's like...
I know it's not the most important fight in his career, but Marvis Frazier versus Mike Tyson.
Well, that's one of the reasons why he was so important is because he wasn't just an important athlete, like the greatest boxer that we'd ever seen as a heavyweight, for sure.
But he was also an important cultural figure.
Because when he was saying, no Viet Cong guy ever did anything to me.
I'm not going to go over there and kill people.
And he said it publicly.
Like, this is why I have no problem with Vietnam people.
Why am I going over there to fight them?
Why is my government telling me to go over there and kill people?
The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred August of 1964. North Vietnamese warships purportedly attacked United States warships, the USS Maddox and the USS C. Turner J. Two separate occasions in the Gulf of Tonkin, a body of water neighboring modern-day Vietnam.
But what actually happened?
New documents and tapes reveal that what the historians could not prove there was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964.
Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by the Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.
So was there an initial attack and not a secondary attack?
Right, but is it a conspiracy is my question, or is it just proven fact over time that just hasn't been accepted because the initial narrative by the government has never been rescinded?
But sometimes you repeat it based off your previous memory of this, but I'm like, no, I remember knowing this, so I'm pretty confident in repeating it.
But even as crazy as the war in Vietnam was, and it's just horrible, it slaughtered so many people in a country so we could impose that they wouldn't be ruled by the communists or something like that.
Okay, American planes hit North Vietnam after a second attack on our destroyers.
Move taken to halt new aggression announced the Washington Post headline on August 5th, 1964. The same day, on the front page of the New York Times reported, President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats.
Supporting facilities in North Vietnam after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But there was no second attack by North Vietnam.
No renewed attack against American destroyers.
By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold.
Continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.
The official story was the North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an unprovoked attack against a U.S. destroyer on a routine patrol in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2nd and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a deliberate attack on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.
The truth was very different.
Rather than being on a routine patrol on August 2nd, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence gathering maneuvers in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Navy and the Laotian Air Force.
The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam had taken place, writes scholar Daniel C. Hallen.
These assaults were a part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964. On the night of August 4th, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf.
A report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV later that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war, airstrikes against North Vietnam.
But Johnson ordered US bombers to retaliate for North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.
Yeah, but basically the whole thing was completely misconstrued and made up, right?
So what they're saying is that they acted like, oh, it was just this unprovoked attack on one of our naval ships.
When actually, the first attack, our naval ship was involved in this what they called aggressive intelligence gathering.
So basically coordinating with the other side who was bombing them.
And they had just been bombed twice by the other side in the days preceding it.
So they responded.
And then the second attack just never even happened.
So that's, I mean, it's, and the thing about it is that it's like they knowingly lied about this because they wanted a pretense to get into the war.
And that's, it's so much how all of these wars start and all of the ones since.
But the difference is like, at least in Vietnam, basically the thing has been since World War II that like, we fought a whole lot of wars.
But we don't fight wars with nuclear-armed powers.
We fought a few proxy wars with nuclear-armed powers, like Vietnam.
Kind of a proxy war with Russia in Vietnam.
Or in Korea.
Like a proxy war with Russia, but in Korea.
But there was a buffer zone there.
Like it wasn't right on Russia's border, and it wasn't right on our border.
So we could kind of like fight these proxy wars out there.
But the thing with Ukraine is that it's like...
Like I really think...
The thing that scares me about the nuclear threat from Vladimir Putin is that I feel like he can't lose this war.
And the American position is that he must lose.
He must completely lose the war and retreat and give Ukraine all back to Ukraine.
And it's like, however you feel about that, that's just not gonna happen.
That's not gonna happen.
He's not handing the whole thing back over.
And you may think that's wrong, and I kind of think it's wrong, too.
I don't know.
I think maybe he should keep Donbass.
I don't really know.
But it's like...
It's not going to happen.
And Joe Biden is acting like he must win this war.
But that's not really true.
We don't really need it.
But Vladimir Putin does need it.
He can't lose a war right on his border.
That's a different type of thing to give up.
And so now he's saying that if the territory of Russia...
Is infringed on, he will use nuclear weapons.
And he said straight up, this is not a bluff.
He goes, this is not a bluff.
I will use nukes.
He just said this the other day.
And then Zelensky goes on and gives a speech.
And Zelensky says that his standard is not just that Russia has to retreat and give back all the territory to Ukraine, but that Russia must be punished.
For the aggression into Ukraine.
And then Zelensky says that if Russia even thinks about using nukes, that the other nuclear-armed countries should use their nukes against Russia.
And you're just like, dude, what the fuck are we talking about here?
I'm like, I'm sorry.
No.
No.
We shouldn't.
We shouldn't use nukes against Russia preemptively because this Zelensky guy wants us to.
Yet we're entrusting them with the biggest, most important thing ever.
Avoiding a nuclear war.
Imagine how crazy that is.
Now imagine what kind of person wants that job.
Like these unexceptional people that we're talking about before.
These aren't the people that are like the thought leaders of the world.
These are the people that win the popularity contest.
And a lot of them are winning because they're...
Connected to whatever the fucking current hive mind ideology is, and they pump up, and they use these words, and they say the certain things that that group is saying, whether it's on the right or the left.
I think that's going to be like life before the internet and life after the internet, but like times a million.
And I think it's coming.
And I don't think it's an if.
It's a matter of when and only if we don't blow ourselves up or Get involved in some sort of a natural disaster, get hit by an asteroid, super volcano, that kind of shit could fuck everything up.
But if that doesn't happen, if we can just keep going on this path and let these super nerds figure shit out for the next thousand years or hundred years or whatever it is, it's gonna change everything.
Because we're gonna know how people actually operate, how they're actually thinking.
And it's going to be really weird.
Because all of our thoughts of romance and interpersonal relationships and how people really feel about you, all of them are going to be exposed like we're all on mushrooms.
And I'd imagine, I mean, I don't know enough about this, but I'd imagine even before you get to the point of just reading someone's thoughts, you probably get to the point of just reading whether they're lying or not.
You know what I mean?
Just knowing whether what they're saying is a lie.
Like being able to kind of like figure out, not like a lie detector test, which isn't as like reliable, but like actually being able to find out, no, we've figured out the scientific like, you know, indicators that somebody's lying and you could wear something, you could have a lens on that will tell you this person's lying or whether they're telling the truth.
And then it's like the more heated things get, the more people get dug in to each team because you're so furious with the other team that you're like, well, I gotta be with this team.
So then even if that team does something wrong, you're like, well, I gotta be with this team to protect me from this other team.
Because, you know, if that's what they're saying, the Brothers of Italy or something, I think, is their political party.
And they're saying that they represent some neo-Musolinian movement or something like that.
I don't, you know, I don't know, but I do think that, like, I don't know what you think about it, but I thought what she said in that speech, I got it, and I get why it's appealing, and I don't think there was anything, at least in what she said in that.
We're assuming this is the translation is correct.
If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone.
We will do it for all Italians, and we will do it With the aim of uniting the people of this country, Maloney said at her party's Rome headquarters.
Italy chose us, she said.
We will not betray the country as we never have.
As polls in the run-up to Sunday's vote showed her as likely winner, Mallory has moderated her far-right message in an apparent attempt to reassure the European Union and other international partners.
This is the time for being responsible, Maloney said.
Appearing live on television describing the situation for Italy and the European Union as particularly complex, Maloney, who campaigned on a motto of God, country, and family, said the result was only a beginning.
This is a night of pride for brothers of Italy, but is a starting point, not a finish line, she was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
Yeah, well, but already that, just at that point, because they're saying, like, well, she campaigned on God, country, and family.
And I understand, I can understand, because I grew up in a very liberal, you know, area, and I understand where, like, a lot of people on the left don't like the idea of a political leader campaigning on God, nation, and family.
Like, they're like, hey, this should somehow, like, government should be neutral on those issues or something like that.
At least I would think, if you're a liberal or a leftist or something, at least understand why do you think it is that that message is so appealing to so many people.
And you have to almost objectively say that, look, those things are things.
That a lot of people care about.
You know, like, just in the 20th century alone, how many people were willing to go and fight in wars under the banner of nationalism, like, for their country, you know?
And, like, people care about their country.
And obviously people care about their god a lot.
And obviously people care about their family a lot.
And what I saw of her, assuming the translation was correct, in her speech was she was saying that these things are constantly under attack right now.
And there's no need.
Like, we don't have to live in a society where, like, Christianity and patriotism and family is constantly being demonized.
Like, all of the things that we like to identify as are constantly being demonized.
And I would at least, like, say to, like, left-wingers, You know, if you keep up this game of, like, demonizing all of those things, there's going to be a right-wing response to it.
People are going to rally around the political leaders who are, like, saying, like, no, we're for traditional families and Christianity and national greatness.
I'm not even saying I'm for that, but I get the appeal of it.
It wouldn't be offensive if it was a particular god.
So, like, if you're talking about Islam, like, if you are against anything that is Islamic or Muslim, you'll be thought of as Islamophobic.
There's no Christianaphobic, which is fascinating.
It's really weird because there's a political leaning in this country where people look at people that have certain religious beliefs and they'll mock them.
I also think you're right about all of that, but also a distinction that I'd make is, like, it seems to me when there's the mocking of Mormons or something like that is more of a kind of, like, making fun of them, whereas with Christians there seems to be, like, real vitriol in it with them.
In fact, the truth is that for better or for worse, and there was a lot of both, there was a lot of good and bad, but Christianity had a huge impact on civilization, and it was the Foundational ideology of Western civilization.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to be a Christian, but all of that is really dismissed, like the contributions that Christianity made to the world that so many of us enjoy.
Like people aren't practicing slavery and aren't practicing treating women like second class citizens the way it's laid out in the Bible.
And, you know, the thing like the flaw to me, at least the flaw in atheism is that it's always.
The idea is always sold as like, well, look, you have reason and then you have faith.
And faith is believing something in the absence of reason, so reason is preferable to faith.
But the issue is when you remove religion...
It never is, in any mass level, replaced with reason.
It's always replaced with another religion.
Because the desire to worship is so hardwired into humans.
You look at the most insane woke kids.
campus, they're all atheists.
But they're not atheists.
They're the most religious zealots amongst us.
You know what I mean?
So it's like you remove this thing and then it's like the promise of this vacuum will be filled with reason never really comes true.
And at least while you're right when you say like, OK, well, these religions are very old and outdated.
But the flip side to that is like, well, they've been stable for thousands of years.
These have at least been able to work.
And if you accept that basically there's going to be some religion, whatever it is, you know, like the Nazis basically got rid of religion.
The commies really got rid of religion.
But there was just state religion is what, you know, filled the void.
And it was much worse, much worse than Christianity.
So you're like, if there's going to be a religion one way or the other, I'd probably like the one that is at least has thousands of years of stability behind it and has at least like moderated on its worst issues and is no longer being used as a justification for how many times you can beat your slave a day.
even though that is in the book.
You know what I mean?
But, like, people aren't really doing that anymore, so...
With all these things, there's a lot of benefits, but there's also the negative sides, right?
So it's like people do have...
Particularly with psychedelics, like with mushrooms and LSD and stuff like that, people do have these pretty amazing experiences.
And I've had some, and there's a lot that you can learn about the world through them.
But then they also do make it kind of like, I've never done a DMT or ayahuasca or whatever, but particularly with those, you are in a state where if you have some guru or whatever who's leading you through the journey, Well, that person is put in a position of a lot of power over you now.
You know what I mean?
And you see this stuff with Manson.
He would stay sober and give them all the mushrooms and then guide them in these crazy directions and stuff like that.
It's like there is this thing where it's like, wow, this has so much potential, it's very interesting, and we don't exactly understand it, but it really creates these experiences.
And then it's like you leave it to the government to be like, well, let's use this in the most fucked up way imaginable.
The problem is your behavior patterns lack structure and discipline.
If you knew the things you had to do and you went out and did them and you pursued them because they were the most important things, whether it's finding meaningful work, whatever you're trying to do in your life.
Focus on that primarily because that's what's going to get you ahead in life.
And if you're not doing that, that's the problem.
And if you're smoking pot at the same time you're not doing that, it's not the pot's fault.
The life expectancy is going down because of the overdose epidemic.
And we still can't just work up the like the will to just be like, give it up.
Just call it quits on this war on drugs that they're dying because they're getting fentanyl on the black market.
And they have no idea what the dosage is of it.
And people are going out and getting what they're told is heroin and they're told is cocaine and has all types of other shit in it.
They're not they can't get these opioids anymore.
So now they have to go and try to get them from drug dealers.
You got people dying in the drug trade, the smuggling coming in from Mexico, and that all goes away if you just legalize it.
I'm not saying everything's perfect.
I'm not saying, and when I say all of it, I mean, I don't mean like that nobody will ever abuse drugs if they're legal.
I'm just saying that the smuggling is completely over, and then the overdose numbers will, like, Drastically be reduced because at least people will know what they're getting and know they're getting clean stuff and like know they're getting the right dosage and stuff like that it's just like it's insane like it's such an emergency right now in America like no one is really well and then you hear these people even Trump what a fucking idiot he is the other day where he goes oh what we need is the death penalty for drug dealers you're like that's it by the way uh president operation warp speed Is
concerned with drug dealers.
What the fuck?
Yeah, that's the problem.
We haven't had harsh enough punishments for drugs.
Well, it has to be regulated and it has to be legal.
Because if it's not, you're going to get unregulated illegal drugs and you're going to prop up criminal organizations that are extremely violent that could just walk across the border.
That's what's happening.
And all this talk about the border not being important, then why do we have it?
What are you saying?
Is this a real issue that thousands of people are coming across every day?
All of a sudden, they start sounding like everything that they called racist right away, you know?
Like, it's just kind of like, you know, like, well, this is a big issue, and it's a strain on our resources, and they have to go somewhere else, but we're still the good guys, and we love them, but we simply, at Martha's Vineyard, cannot accommodate 50 people.
Did you see that hilarious interview where Kamala Harris is- The border is secure?
Yeah.
You know what she's like at this point?
Do you know how there's those comics that are really good comics, but they have a girlfriend, and the girlfriend does comedy too, but she bombs every time.
And maybe takes her off the road for a little bit, tells her she's got to tighten it up, and then next thing you know, like, who's opening it for Jeff?
Oh, he brought his girlfriend again.
Like, oh no.
Oh, no.
He's gonna give it another chance.
Like, they trot her out every now and then.
They're like, give her one more chance.
Let her talk.
Let her talk.
And it's always chaos.
It's like now she's so trigger burnt.
Like, she's so, she's like, you could tell that she's, she's shell-shocked almost.
So he comes out the other day and just says, and the whole point of the One China policy is basically, and this is actually one thing that was smart, strategic U.S. foreign policy, is that they basically went, okay, So we recognize China.
Okay, this is your area, China.
But, you know, we also like Taiwan.
And we'd also like to see a reunification and we kind of like it to all be peaceful.
And we're very ambiguous about where we stand.
Because the problem is, if you were to come out and say what Joe Biden just said the other day, he goes, oh, if China invaded Taiwan, we would send in the military.
Well, the problem with that is, like, that might be the encouragement Taiwan needs to go, okay, then we declare independence.
And if they declare independence, China will invade Taiwan.
And then, holy shit, and by the way, all of our, like, Navy, like, war games say that we lose that war.
China sparks new Taiwan invasion fears with threat to crush anyone who tries to stop its reunification with the self-governing island after Biden kowtowed to Beijing at UN. That's why having a guy like him in office is fucking dangerous.
And I mean, look, this was the knock on Donald Trump is like, well, he'll say reckless things.
But I mean, what is more reckless than just like, and the crazy thing about it, you know, even Henry Kissinger like came out recently and was talking about how insane this whole Ukraine policy is.
Because he's like, well, what do you do?
Is the plan here that we're going to provoke Russia and China?
We're going to provoke nuclear conflict with the two countries who you just don't want to have a nuclear conflict with.
And whatever anyone says, and I know there's some of the populist right-winger types who are real China hawks and are really concerned about China, but the truth is that neither one of these countries pose a military threat to America.
There's just no way.
There's no way that they pose a military threat to us.
Does China pose a military threat to Taiwan?
Perhaps you could argue that.
Although the peace has been kept for many decades now.
But you can argue they pose a threat to them.
But they don't pose a threat to us.
And the idea that we're trying to find...
It's just so bananas that you go, okay, so we have 20 years of the war on terrorism.
Which is basically, at this point, almost nobody even argues that it was anything short of a disaster.
I mean, I saw Bill Kristol debate Scott Horton, who's incredible.
Everyone should check him out.
Scott Horton at Antiwar.com.
And he debated him in New York City.
And one of the people in the crowd asked a question, Bill Kristol, you know, neocon number one guy.
And he goes, what was the last U.S. intervention that was successful?
And I think he said, I can't remember if he said, he ever said Kosovo or something like that?
Maybe Bosnia?
I can't remember which one he said.
But even he didn't try to defend any of the interventions of the 21st century.
He didn't even try to say, he couldn't, he couldn't even look this kid who asked him the question, look him in the eye and go, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.
Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan.
Like, no.
He couldn't.
He couldn't even tell them.
So we have 20 years of just disastrous wars.
At least a couple million, you know, innocent people dead.
Not to mention, I don't know, what, 50,000 of our soldiers who have blown their brains out after they came back from these wars.
A few thousand who died in the battles.
You know?
And trillions of dollars wasted.
Nothing to show for it.
And finally, we end the longest one, the war in Afghanistan.
You know?
And we're finally kind of moving toward, like...
Okay, we kind of recognize this is wrong.
So let's start provoking a war with Russia.
And how about China too?
It's like what you were talking about at the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And then you're like, oh good, we don't have to be at war no more.
And you're like, Saddam Hussein, we got to go fight this guy now.
We're just always trying to find the next war.
And I'd say this is potentially even stupider than that.
Because the Biden guys, they're talking about Putin like he's Saddam Hussein.
Like he's Muammar Gaddafi.
Like we could just tell him what to do and he has to fucking do it.
But he doesn't because he's sitting on the biggest nuclear arsenal in the history of the world, second only to ours.
We have these really narrow narratives that we're fed in this country.
And this is one of the things that I love most about this conversation is because all these things that you've laid out and all of these things that most people are not aware of about the history of this conflict, like now people get an understanding of how this is a pattern that just is going, this is what Eisenhower warned of.
This is a pattern that exists and is going to exist in this current form if we keep supporting it.
I mean, you could argue that, like, in post-World War II, Japan and Germany.
But, by the way, that also came with the price tag of slaughtering their civilian population.
You know?
Like, it's not as if that just went easy.
But, you know, then if you look at the war on terrorism, I mean, we went to spread freedom to the Middle East, but that comes with the price tag of the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security and, you know, all of this stuff.
And then, by the way, we didn't bring any freedom there either.
That what we were saying earlier about the way the internet has kind of changed the way people view governments and people view information and people have access.
We're more informed, maybe more confused in a lot of ways than ever before.
We're fucked for a while because there's gonna be mad chaos where people try to make sense of people's real thoughts and real intentions and the real mechanisms behind everything that runs the world.
All of our money, our government, the mindsets of people that are just trying to acquire money and how insane that is.
How insane is that just the pursuit of only numbers, that's it.
Well, there's also like, it's, it's, there's this thing where there's like the pursuit of money is almost like I break it up into like two categories where there's like, there's a lot of people pursuing money, but a lot of people are pursuing money like private citizens, you know, like in the marketplace are like, even if they're really trying to pursue money, basically, the only way they can get it is like by offering a product.
To people.
And see if they want it.
It's like, if you want this, if you're willing to buy this, then I can make money off of that.
But you only buy it if you think, like, well, I would like to have that.
I value that.
And then there are these people who are connected to the government who are basically in rigged games, where they've stacked the deck against regular people, where you essentially have to give them money.
You don't have a choice.
And those people are just like, that's a win-lose relationship.
Not like a win-win relationship.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I really think the only hope, like I've said this to you before, but I think the only hope for America is some form of liberty, some form of libertarianism.
Like we've just gone way too much in the other direction of like the government having way too much power and running everybody's lives.
And the only way to like to like save this thing, to cool off the culture war, to stop drowning the next generation in debt and destroying our currency and all of this stuff.
There's got to be some form of decentralization, limiting of the power of government, rolling back some of these institutions, and the only way to do that is to get enough people to demand it, and then enough powerful people to support that.
Get enough powerful people on board with this, and enough popular support to just be like, okay, there's real will.
They've had a rigged game for a long time to open it up to an ethical, logical, reasonable playing field at this point in the game where it's like really locked down.
So I think what it's almost got to be is some combination of where there's enough of the people who are so angry and are just demanding their freedom and that this rigged game be rolled back.
And then it's almost kind of like they're like, look, you got away with this for a long time, but you're going to meet a very bad fate if you continue on this path.
You'd much rather be like, hey, look, take this deal.
Cut your losses now.
Like, you did this.
You got away with it for a long time.
Go away.
Stop doing it.
Because look how angry you're going to make these people if you continue ripping them off.
But you always want a peaceful solution to all of this stuff.
But there's got to be...
You know, like, look, I'll say the thing that to me is like the silver lining, the note of optimism, is that there really is something important about people waking up.
There's a reason why they work so hard to propagandize people.
There's a reason why they flipped out on you so much for having just like Dr. Malone and people like that on your show.
They're really concerned about that.
They're really concerned that you might talk to people and that they might hear from this expert and they might believe him.
It's like, why are they so concerned about that?
Because if they knew that, they may not support these policies.
And if they don't support these policies, they may not be able to get away with them.
That's ultimately why the COVID passports failed, just because enough people were outraged about it.
They didn't even give this a lot of coverage.
There were huge protests in New York City over this stuff.
And then it was just like people weren't doing it, they weren't following the rules and stuff, and eventually they just walked it back.
I think there's at least a hope for the country now that it's like people don't trust these institutions that they shouldn't trust because they're just lying to them.
And there's platforms like yours, you know what I mean, that are bigger than any of those platforms where people can hear the truth.
So I'm optimistic at least for that as long as we stop provoking Putin and we don't fight a nuclear war.
Maybe it'll confirm people's suspicions that no matter how good a candidate is, if they're not one of the two candidates, one of the two parties, they're not going to support them because it's a wasted vote.
Yeah, you do get that, but I also just kind of think, and this is why I'm a member of the Libertarian Party, and this is why I joined, and I'm excited about it, because my camp kind of just took over the whole party.
There was a little civil war in the Libertarian Party between the Gary Johnson people and the Ron Paul people.
I'm like the Ron Paul people's guy, and we won.
We took over every position in the party now.
But my thing about why a third party is just that...
At a certain point, you're like, look, there's an argument to this, like, okay, if there's a lesser of two evil, well, then the third party might help the more evil of two evil get in or something like that.
But at a certain point, you're just like, this is the United States of America still, kind of, or at least it's supposed to be.
And both of these two major political parties have just committed treason against the American people.
Like, absolute treason.
Just raped this country and destroyed everything it was supposed to be about.
And we're better than that.
And we should, at a certain point, just go, no, you know what?
We won't support either of you guys anymore.
Because, like, fuck you guys.
You don't deserve our support.
Somebody else should get it.
And then, hey, there's this party over here that just stands for what?
Liberty.
Like, how about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?
Okay, but then I also have to tell people, go to lp.org slash join, because you've got to join the party, because that would actually send a lot of messages.
But yeah, it's like you could just take that clip of you explaining what it means to be a libertarian and what you stand for and just put it out there.
You have to think about like what kind of nuclear war are we talking about?
Are we talking about just like Los Angeles and New York get evaporated?
Or are we talking about every major city in the country?
If it's every major city in the country then it's over.
And then anyone who lives The lawlessness that you see in horrible YouTube videos and on TikTok or whatever, that will pale in comparison to living in a post-apocalyptic world with no power.
If there's no power, shit will get so primal, so quick, and you will also realize how few bullets there really are.
You need to understand, like, if you're, like, hunting every day and trying to find food and you're protecting yourself from gangs of outlaws that are trying to steal your livestock and your family members, like, this is the kind of world we're talking about.
We're talking about, like, Walking Dead.
Like, real Walking Dead shit where people behave like monsters.
It's interesting how fragile civilization is and how easy it is for us to just be so removed from that.
You know what I mean?
And by the way, I don't think we're going to go to nuclear war.
I don't mean to be alarmist on that, but I'm just saying it's so dangerous to play this game.
And if we had sensible adults in charge of anything, everyone would be together.
The obvious number one priority here is like everybody get in the room and make sure we don't go to this.
You know what I mean?
So freaking China the other day at the UN. This is how pathetic it is that we let China, who's this like one party fascist dictatorship, you know, like kind of right wing communists.
Now they're like communists but who believe in business or something like that.
We let them at the UN. Biden's up there and he's like, Putin must surrender and everybody should be on the side of Ukraine against Putin, blah, blah, blah.
And then China, they get up there and they go, we call on all parties to de-escalate.
And you're like, did you just let them be the adults in the room?
Did we literally just let this one party authoritarian dictatorship come up there and sound like the reasonable ones?
We ceded that ground to them?
That we can't even just say, like, no, actually, everybody should be trying to take the temperature down here.
It's like, why is one morally and ethically superior and why is that one war?
I mean, think about the two different business models that you're talking about, that ours is morally and ethically superior because we have free speech.
Is that what it is?
Because we have abortion?
Because we have all these things that we want over here, so we're okay with doing what we do in other countries?
That's where it gets squirrely because, like, if you say what China's doing is scary and dangerous and awful, like, yeah, yeah, so is what we do, right?
Imagine if there was drones that were targeting people that, you know, the Iraqis wanted dead, or the Iranians wanted dead, and they were killing 90% civilians.
90% Regular people that were just going about their day, but unfortunately were grouped up with a person who had metadata on them.
Jim Jeffrey, who also gives advice to President-elect Biden.
So he still gives advice to Biden while he admits to playing shell games with information.
We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had here.
There, Jeffrey said in an interview.
The actual number of troops in Northeast Syria is a lot more than the roughly 200 troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019. Trump's abruptly announced withdrawal U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps the single most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office.
And for Jeffrey, the most controversial thing in my 50 years in government The order, first handed down in December of 2018, led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump's special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.
Okay.
So basically what they're saying is that...
This one guy stepped down because he was upset at Trump, and the next guy just lied.
So Mad Dog Mattis, who was Trump's first defense secretary, which is so bizarre.
It's such a Donald Trump thing, too, is that Donald Trump was running on ending the war in Syria.
He ran on that in 2016. And then he picks this guy, Mattis, as his defense secretary.
And then when he tries to end the war in Syria, Mattis resigns over it.
He's like, I will not do this.
I'll resign before I carry out these orders.
And you're like, Did you guys never have a conversation about this?
Like, when you were running on ending this war, and then you picked a guy to be your defense secretary, did you never, like, talk to him about, like, hey, by the way, I mean it?
Like, I actually want to end this war?
So he resigns.
Trump's, like, whatever.
I'm still pulling out of the war.
And then the next guy who comes in and moves up the ranks just starts lying to him about how many troops there are there.
And by the way, the story at the end of this is that Trump just backs down and just doesn't end the war, which is basically what Trump did on everything.
But look, I mean, I think you want, but you want badass guys like that, but who are also, like, wise enough to recognize, like, what's strategically in America's interest and what's there.
And, you know, Donald Trump did get the guy and the guy.
Is Colonel Douglas McGregor who's like – he's like one of those real badass dudes but who is wise enough to completely like turn against American foreign policy in the Middle East early on.
I think he got out in like 2005 or 2006 or something like that and he was like – and he's basically just been speaking out against it sooner.
He was like, this is not in our national interest to be doing this and we're doing nothing but bankrupting our country and putting ourselves in a more dangerous situation and all of this stuff.
And Trump hired him and he made him the top advisor at the Defense Department after he lost the election to Joe Biden.
So he had him there in the lame duck period after Biden was there.
And they tried to work out a deal.
In fact, I think Trump signed off on the order to immediately withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan and I think one other theater.
And then a couple days later, Trump rescinded the order.
I mean, what Donald Trump ran on in 2016, and just for the record, I don't really never know with Donald Trump how committed to any of this shit he was, because the only thing that I've ever seen Donald Trump truly be committed to is his own greatness and his own...
Winner.
Yeah, his own, I'm the winner, you're the loser.
Winner.
That's what he seems to really be motivated by.
But he said in the 2016 campaign, he goes, wouldn't it make sense if we were just friendly with Russia and we worked together since they were fighting ISIS in Syria?
He goes, we also want to fight ISIS. Let's work together, fight ISIS, and then leave the Middle East and not worry about regime change wars in the Middle East and we could be friendly with Russia.
We could make a deal with them and get along with them.
There's no reason why we shouldn't.
And that's what he kind of ran on.
And then, you know, just all day long, everyone in the media, in the entire corporate press, all they were saying is, Trump-Russia collusion.
Trump's in a conspiracy with Russia.
So now it's like, go try to make a deal with Russia.
How can you?
How could you make a deal with Russia when all day long everyone's saying you're involved in a conspiracy with Russia?
And then you come out and go, I just made a deal with the Russians.
They'd be like, proof!
Proof!
There's a conspiracy with Russia.
So they deliberately boxed him in To be like, so now he had to prove how much he wasn't in bed with Russia.
You know what I mean?
And he did this in a bunch of things.
Like, he tore up the INF Treaty, the, like, Intermediate Missile Treaty.
Here's how much I'm not in bed with Russia.
I'll tear up a nuclear treaty.
You're like, wait, what?
That's an insane thing to do.
He pulled out of the treaty, however you want to call it.
He's like, by the way, it'd be really good to be in that treaty right now.
And then he ended up, same thing with Ukraine, he bailed, he caved and he sent in the weapons.
They have all these techniques.
And a lot of that shit happened to Obama too.
Like that whole thing when General McChrystal went on the news and spoke directly to the press and was like, we need all of these troops here in Afghanistan and I haven't even had a conversation with the president.
And then it was like, oh, all the Republicans get on him like, but he's not even talking to the generals on the ground.
And they need all these troops.
And then Obama's like, fuck, I guess I gotta send all these troops in.
So they have ways of like just putting political pressure on guys where, you know what I mean?
They don't even really necessarily have to threaten them.
But then also, by the way, I don't know, they also might be threatening them.
Although it was only four years, because I think Trump's ego actually, like, I remember one time Bill O'Reilly was interviewing Donald Trump.
I always thought this was, like, an interesting insight into who Donald Trump is.
But Bill O'Reilly asked him this question, and he was kind of like, he was like, do you ever just, like, you know, walk around at the White House and you're just like, Wow, this is just unbelievable that I'm at the White House.
Like, I'm the President of the United States and I'm in the White House.
And Trump goes, yeah, it's a nice house.
Like, it was just...
It was just such a like, it was like, yeah, I don't know, this is right about where I should be.
Like, my house is a nice house, this house is a nice house, whatever.
The one thing that Trump is truly a genius at is he's like a genius-level self-marketer.
And it's all instinctual.
It's not like he intellectualizes it.
He just kind of knows.
He knows how to make himself the center of the story.
He knows how to say the thing that will get the reaction out of people.
And that turned out to be an incredibly useful skill in campaigning.
You know, like, he applied that to campaigning, and then it just took off.
And he also, you know, he tapped into something.
Even with the, like, even with the birth certificate stuff with Obama, which I think is all goofy, you know?
But he tapped into, like, the level of distrust that people had in this government.
And the level that they knew how much everyone was lying to them, that they were even willing to entertain this really big lie could have been told to them.
Maybe this whole thing's a fucking lie, you know?
It's kind of like, I think this has been building up throughout the 21st century in America.
And this is why there's like, things like You know, and on both sides, the Russia conspiracy stuff, the QAnon stuff, even back to like a 9-11 truth or like loose change and stuff like that.
People are very, when there's so many lies being told by powerful people, people are very open to the idea that they're lying about a whole bunch more stuff.
And that's one of the things that's most dangerous about finding out that intelligence agencies are involved in censorship, because it makes people even more suspect to propaganda, more suspect that they're less likely to trust the government now than ever before.
And the rise of a far-right candidate is more likely now, I think, than probably ever been before.
You know, like, sometimes I'll see, like, the most insane of, like, the woke shit.
You know, like, whatever it is.
You'll be like a...
You know, it's like some, like...
You know, drag queen giving a lap downs to like a six-year-old or something.
And you're just like, this is like, it's like my first thought is like, this is the most outrageous, appalling thing I've ever seen.
And then my second thought, almost like right, not even second, it's like that's one and then one A is like, oh my God, we're going to live under a right-wing dictatorship.
Because, man, I am the most just freedom, liberty-loving person.
And it's like you're trying to turn me into a right-wing dictator.
You see this stuff and you're like, oh my god, the reaction against this is gonna...
And this was the thing that Jordan Peterson initially warned about.
If you remember when he first...
Those videos where he was arguing with those social justice warriors.
And he goes, you are poking something and you have no idea what you're poking.
You have no idea what the response to this is gonna be.
Yeah, and people, when they have an idea in their head, like this progressive ideology that they think is so important that it needs to take over the world, they're trying to indoctrinate people into it.
Yeah, it's like, I'm sorry, it's not some government employee's job to instill the values into, like, seven-year-olds.
Like, that's on their parents.
And if their parents are Christians, or their parents are atheists, or if their parents are left-wing or right-wing, that's like, they have a right to, like, try to, like, you know what I mean?
It's the wildest shit because like that's not your job.
If we're talking about purely heterosexual relationships, we would all agree that is absolutely not a teacher's job to explain to a child how, what kind of sexual acts males and females like to do to each other.
And one of the things that's really interesting, right, is that, like, you...
And this is what's new about today's dynamic, right?
Is that...
So then you'll see these people, like, in the corporate press or whatever, and they'll be like, oh, none of this is happening.
This isn't happening at all, but it's like, no, this is a different world now, man.
We have libs of TikTok.
You know what I mean?
Here you have this Twitter account that just blew the fuck up simply by showing everybody.
No, these are their teachers and this is what they're saying.
Now, I'll admit first, when you see those videos, you don't always get the clearest perspective of like, wait a minute, so how many teachers are like this exactly?
What schools are they?
But regardless, this is a thing that's happening somewhere.
And they have a lot of videos of them.
So whatever the size of the problem is, it's like, I don't know, there's a lot, and now there's no way, you can't convince people that this isn't really happening, because we can like see it ourselves.
How did anybody imagine, again, the heterosexual version of that, imagine a bunch of Strippers that are in their 30s and 40s, and they're getting young girls to strip and dance for men in the audience.
Imagine.
Imagine.
Imagine if you ever saw that.
That would be a horrendous thing.
Like, what are you encouraging?
What are you doing to these children?
Why are you taking away their innocence at such an early age?
But if it's a drag show...
And you have a 10-year-old drag queen, and he goes out there, and he's fabulous.
Look at him.
He's amazing.
It's so weird.
But you're sexualizing this young person.
You're still doing something to someone who hasn't even gone through puberty, and they're probably not even interested in sexual activity.
But for whatever reason, if you're doing that in an LBGTQ sort of...
Thing yeah, and that like with with the drag queen show like they're still doing some of those Yeah, they still have like we're drag queens and little kids are together like what was cuties?
Well, those I think are just things that they have, like just like things that they have at local, like for like Pride Month, they had a bunch of them.
I don't know what the events were, but I have seen those videos.
It's not just like one thing like there's been a lot of videos of this that have been shared and it is um Yeah, it's you know, I remember imagine like proposing that to someone Yeah, and it does seem like drag kids.
I said something about this when this stuff was coming out, and I got people giving me pushback and stuff, where there's people on Twitter and stuff who were like, oh, but I bet you wouldn't have a problem.
I was like, oh, there's this six-year-old at this drag show or something like that.
And they're like, oh, I bet you wouldn't have a problem bringing your six-year-old to Hooters.
And I was like, well, first off, I wouldn't bring my six-year-old to Hooters, because I do think that's kind of inappropriate.
But second off, it's not nearly as inappropriate.
It's like there's just levels to this.
Exactly.
If the girls in Hooters were in thongs and giving lap dances, yes, that would be just as inappropriate as this.
And even Hooters.
I probably wouldn't bring my little kids to Hooters.
Anyway, we were in Dallas and we're staying, we're doing the Dallas improv and we're the Addison improv.
We're staying at this hotel that had a drag queen show.
No, excuse me, a child beauty show.
We're staying at a hotel that had a child beauty show.
I want to differentiate, but not by much.
So we're walking around the hotel and there's these little kids with high heels and they can barely walk and they're wearing skirts and they're just full clown makeup, crazy hair.
I'll tell you, not in the sexualized way at all, but another thing that I find very bizarre that I always judge is the guys in the cable news things who color their hair and get work done and stuff like this.
And you're like, you're a fucking newsman, I thought.
I think Noam Chomsky went over this back in the day, but how the advertising just gets longer and longer, and the segments get shorter and shorter, and just what they're saying gets dumber and dumber.
And particularly the fact that they pose no threat to you and that you're a part of the biggest, baddest, most powerful society that's ever existed.
And they're a part of, like, these very weak, vulnerable societies.
And yet you're convinced.
But this is what I say.
I think the ultimate, like, optimistic thing is that...
All trust in all of these institutions is completely evaporating.
I think that's happening.
A lot of people talk about how we need to unify the country and we're so polarized and wouldn't it be better if we were more united, which I understand the idea of that, but I think the most united times in my lifetime, the time the country was the most united was right after 9-11, where everyone was really together.
And then the politicians just exploited that and gave us the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and this whole disastrous start to the 21st century.
And then I actually think everyone was pretty united when COVID first came.
For a little while.
And it was like, 14 days to flatten, 15 days to flatten the curve.
Okay, we'll give you guys a couple weeks.
And then the politicians exploited that and just took advantage of the whole thing.
So it's like, there's real weakness to being united.
Maybe it's better at least if we're united, let's be united and not trusting any of the institutions.
On the books, I think it's like $700 billion, but if you look at all of the things that are also basically part of it, it's over a trillion dollars a year.
There's going to be some maintenance or something like that, sure.
But let's just say, hypothetically, I mean, look, we spend more than I think the next 13 countries combined or something like that on our defense budget.
So let's just say we cut it in half, hypothetically.
I think you – probably my guess is like, yeah, there would be enormous pushback from all of the special interests who are losing their money.
So in other words, the only way it could work is if someone – like let's say the person who won the presidency won by – I'm going to cut the defense budget and got overwhelming support for it.
Because then if there was so much support for it, it could be kind of like no matter how much you push back, it's just not going to matter.
That being said, I don't really think there's going to be a centralized federal political solution.
I think what's much more likely to happen in this country is that this system is going to fail and fail and fail more.
And hopefully at that point you get more and more decentralization.
And just like different areas are going to like not.
Follow federal guidelines and things like that.
To your point, there's so much entrenched powerful interest in Washington, D.C. It's very hard to see someone rolling it back from there without a huge movement behind them.
But the thing that's not a bummer is that it's like, yeah, dude, like, dude, this show gets more, like, people listening to it than all of these shows that aren't talking about— Are you trying to get me paranoid?
I think more and more people are waking up, but it takes a long time to truly grasp the depth of all this chaos.
And just you laying it out today to me, not just like enlightened me in some ways, but also refreshed my understanding of how fucking crazy corrupt the whole United States scheme has always been.
Ms. Waters framed the competition over new forms of central bank money as a new digital asset space race.
The Biden administration and the Fed don't share a sense of urgency.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
If you let them control the money, if you let them have all...
All the ability that they would want if they had something like this, which would be to tell you when you can and cannot spend money.
Look, Visa has announced that they're going to separately classify gun purchases.
So if you're a person with a lawful firearm license and you decide to purchase a handgun for home protection, now you can't do it through Visa without it being labeled in a different way.
I'm scared of that more than anything because I'm scared of people thinking that, you know, they'll get it connected to some sort of social justice issue.
They'll get it connected to some sort of cultural war issue and next thing you know, you're a supporter of this, that or the other thing if you don't agree with letting the government have those kind of powers and rights.
And that's what's scary about them having the power to tell you to do anything, including medical interventions, including anything, anything that they tell you to do.
They're not telling you to do for your best interest.
They're telling you to do because there's some sort of a financial benefit to doing it that way.
It says, War is a Racket is a speech in a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.
Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.
We'll just read a little bit of that and then we'll just close this out.
Click on that.
Just click on the speech because it's pretty fucking crazy what he actually says.