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Jan. 7, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
50:57
If It Happens It Happens

Donald Trump is threatening to commit war crimes. The administration has no plan and no plan to even attempt a plan. Political analysts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the madness of warmongering, the tumultuous history of US/Iranian tensions, and the frustration of being at the whims of a demagogue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
So why is the president threatening Iran with war crimes?
We'll behave lawfully.
We'll behave inside the system.
We always have and we always will.
Do you have an exit strategy for Iran if war does break out?
You're not going to need an exit strategy.
I don't need exit strategies.
Let's go beyond the stale and tired narratives.
Let's use historical context and alternative perspectives to fully comprehend.
Let's dig deeper to tackle the news and bring a little order to these chaotic times.
That's what your hosts Jared Yates-Sexton and Nick Hausselman will do.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
Hey everybody and welcome to this week's episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm your co-host Jared Yates-Sexton and I'm here with my co-host Nick Hausselman.
Nick, I gotta ask, how's your stress right now?
Jared, it's actually not helped by the fact that we're in the middle of a big home improvement project that we can't afford.
And I just started a three-day juice cleanse for the new year.
So I'm all sorts of stressed.
How about you?
Well, the good news is we're not in the middle of, I don't know, lead up to a war that could possibly be helmed by one of the most incompetent, deranged presidents possibly ever.
So luckily that's not happening.
Thank goodness.
Yeah, so we're here.
The past couple days have been wild, just absolutely wild.
On top of escalation with Iran, Donald Trump in true Donald Trump fashion has been in rare form.
He has sent out a tweet, I don't know if everyone saw this, sent out a tweet that basically was supposed to serve as a notice to Congress
that if there's a retaliation uh that that he will probably meet it with retaliation that even exceeds that retaliation which um i'm not sure let me check my notes oh yeah that's a war crime and then proceeded for two straight days to tweet out his intention to commit war crimes on two separate occasions uh mike pompeo went on tv said we're not going to commit war crimes and then trump Corrected him and said, no, I'm planning on committing more crimes.
Truly, truly wild time in America right now.
You know, I think once and for all, and we kind of can envision what happens after Trump, if the other side ever takes power again, which you never know what might happen, but if it does, you know, the things we want to do, you know, to combat what he has done and taken advantage of, well, certainly the thing that we need to shore up, without question, it's been coming for a hundred years, is
We need to fix these laws so that the president cannot just unilaterally declare a war against another country or get us mired into it without Congress having say.
Yeah, we're going to talk today about the history of U.S.
interaction with Iran, but also the history of U.S.
intervention in other countries and this idea of unilateral preemptive war, which is what's happening right now.
Make no bones about it.
The President of the United States lashed out in an act of war that was not declared by Congress, which Congress, by the Constitution, is solely responsible for declaring war.
But since George W. Bush, there has been this doctrine that basically has given the president a blank check to decide at any moment what a threat is and what a threat isn't and has the ability to wage, I guess what you would call limited war that then turns into war creep and can turn into giant wars that last a generation or more.
You're absolutely right.
This is a situation, and I've talked to a bunch of people for years, and I was like, this is going to end up really, really poorly.
And the line has always been, well, everything will be fine.
There are adults in the room.
There are competent people.
They're not going to abuse this.
The people who become president are only going to use, you know, force that they need to.
There will always be the discretion there.
And it's led us into just a an apocalyptic situation now and you're absolutely right We have to do something about this and if we don't I mean I mean that the Constitution's out the window if we don't if we don't reign this thing back in I agree.
And I also feel like that a lot of times, especially what got Trump elected, was this notion of tearing it all down.
You know, look how it's not worked at all for all these years, all these smart people in the room and all their degrees and their fancy tooting, you know, looking down their nose at everybody's stuff.
And so I almost feel like this is another example where they would be like, yeah, this is great.
He's going to finally just stir it all up and once and for all do something we haven't done before.
And that's going to work.
We saw this mindset with North Korea.
When he was, you know, and it really ratcheted up the rhetoric and it made it, it was pretty frightening for a moment there, too, if you remember.
And they, but I think the right was sort of saying, or at least the real dyed in the wool Trump people would say, oh, this is great.
Because clearly the diplomacy that we've had all those years never worked anyway.
So let's try this.
This is definitely going to be better.
And I feel like this is more of the same.
And they've put us in a bind a little bit because the target that they did, Soleimani, was a bad guy.
And you really can't argue necessarily that he didn't necessarily deserve to be taken off the battlefield.
So it's in some way a shrewd move on their end, but certainly nothing that was thought out beyond, you know, a four-year-old's mind.
Yeah, and if you read any of the reports that are coming out about how this decision was made, and again, let's just go on the record, Soleimani was a terrible human being, and you know, is the world better off for him not being in it?
Yeah, absolutely it is.
The way that it happened and the brashness of it and the fact and you know, I was I was talking to some British people the other day and Boris Johnson is just absolutely pissed off at Donald Trump.
He gave no notice whatsoever.
We talked about this in our emergency pod last week.
He gave no notice whatsoever to American diplomats and people stationed around the world whatsoever so they could, you know, be safe and prepare.
He didn't tell our allies.
And now Pompeo is all over TV talking about how he's really disappointed in how the allies are reacting to this thing.
There was no planning.
There was no nuance in this.
It took forever for anyone to come out and say what had happened.
And the truth is that Donald Trump, as president, has no interest actually in being president.
He loves the attention of being president.
He hasn't been interested in filling any positions.
We have a State Department that basically only exists to shepherd Rudy Giuliani to Europe to search after conspiracy theories.
And we don't have an apparatus right now that is supposed to work.
And I was talking about this on the pod last week.
American foreign policy, as faulty as it is, and as wrong as it has been, and as dangerous and damaging as it has been, it's been this constructed web that was supposed to hold, right?
Like, basically the idea of American hegemony is that nothing will challenge it and it will just stay in place.
And it's about not letting things progress, not letting things fall back.
It's about staying at like a constant level.
This destroyed that and there's nothing in place.
There's no idea behind it.
It's not like there's an actual Trump doctrine and anybody who says that there is has no idea what they're talking about.
This person is not a guy with a philosophy.
I'm old enough to remember when Trump ran on America first and an isolationist take where he didn't want us to be involved in all these expensive wars and do all these different things around the world.
But that was always a lie, too, because you knew as soon as somebody, you know, poked him even the slightest bit and provoked him, then we could be stuck in something like this.
Now, interestingly enough, it didn't happen with North Korea, because they fell in love.
Kim Jong-un and him fell in love, supposedly.
But now... How'd that work out?
How'd that work out, Nick?
Yeah, oh, they got a surprise for us, I guess, still coming, but certainly we know they have not stopped developing nuclear weapons.
So Donald Trump going over and meeting with Kim Jong Un and giving him not just attention and love but international standing and basically gifting him incredible power, that didn't work out?
Nope.
Oh, okay.
I was just checking.
And this is even worse, because like you said, the State Department's been decimated, so we don't even have the normal diplomatic channels that we could go through to discuss what's happening and figure out if we can't calm anybody down, which is not going to happen.
There's going to be imminent retaliation, I imagine.
And that's really what we've always been worried about.
And the thing I think I was more worried about was if somebody like provoked us first in a much more of a provocative manner than has happened.
The real worry now is that in response to the impeachment, he is going to create the situation.
And by creating it, it probably makes it worse because at the very least, if we were attacked first, you know, let's just see what Trump is about or if he can respond or mobilize the populace to be behind him.
This is now so clearly his doing that we're not going to get the kind of help that we probably would have from other countries either across the world.
And this is where it gets really kind of scary.
And I understand why Boris Johnson would be upset, too, because I'm sure that they're as much of a target as we are.
And frankly, Israel would probably be the first target they would want to hit, too.
And that can't be making it any easier on them either.
I just want to put out there that in the 10 minutes that we've been talking about this on our podcast today, we have probably talked about it more and in more depth than the president of the United States talked about it before he committed the action.
And that's the problem here.
And you know, I was arguing about this earlier.
People want to pretend like there's some sort of secret genius to Donald Trump.
Right?
Whenever you hear pundits talk about it or analysts talk about it, they're all the time, they're like, oh, you know, like he's, he's not really this, this oaf.
He's actually like, he's actually pretty smart and his instincts are great.
That's ridiculous.
These are people who don't want to believe that there's a madman at the wheel.
Like their, their minds just will not allow them to because it reflects poorly on the institution.
It reflects poorly on America.
And to be honest, and let's just, you know, talk about it.
It's a horrifying concept.
Right.
The idea that right now we're in the middle of an international crisis with a guy in control who's not only not capable, right?
Because most people would not be capable of handling this.
This is a person who I don't even think he understands what he's done.
And you know what?
I don't think that.
I know he doesn't understand it.
This is a person, all these old clips are coming out.
He had no idea who Soleimani was.
He doesn't understand Iran.
Like, we're going to talk a little bit today about the history of US-Iranian interactions.
There's no way he knows this.
None.
The only thing that Donald Trump knows, and I thought this was really telling.
I don't know if anybody else picked up on this.
In the tweet where Donald Trump threatened to commit war crimes by hitting cultural sites inside Iran, which if you're rooting for us to hit civilian targets and kill a bunch of people, you really need to take a look in the mirror and think about yourself and how you look at the universe.
Wars are between nations and civilians and innocent people get caught in the middle.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing, he said that he had targeted 52 sites for strikes if they retaliate.
52 is the number of diplomatic hostages in 1978 or 1980, I'm sorry.
That tells me, and this is the thing about Donald Trump, not only is he not a deep thinker, the only thing he understands about America is a tertiary understanding, right?
Like, it's so, so shallow of an understanding.
The only thing he knows about Iran is about the Iran hostage crisis.
That's it!
And it shines through in all this.
He has no understanding of the box that he has opened and the situation he has created at all.
Oh, I kind of felt like he was going to do 52 attacks for each week in the year.
Like, it's as random as that, in all honesty.
And I think it's frightening that, you know, we like to think again that there was adults in the room, but when they presented him with a menu of things, and I get it, if you want to be completely prepared, you give him a really extreme, and then a really, you know, almost a nothing response, and you have everything in between, and you figure, oh, he'll choose one of the ones in the middle.
But I do think that putting this one in the extreme category and not even considering the fact that he would indeed choose that one is really a dereliction of duty as well in the Defense Department, whoever was in charge of that menu.
And that's the problem.
So the question only, and perhaps here's what they thought, honestly, it was probably the last thing on the list.
So they probably thought that he would never get all the way to the bottom of the list.
Unless it included his name, which we know is the only way that they can get him to pay attention to briefings, is by putting his picture and name in the briefings.
Well, I don't think he understands, and going back to the idea of the relations between the countries, I don't think he understands that Iran's arch nemesis is the United States of America.
Period.
This has been a showdown that has been boiling for decades and the only reason that it hasn't boiled over in a larger way is because cooler heads have prevailed.
You have two sides that have basically dueled each other for, you know, decades now and there's always a moment where the escalation stops because neither side wants to keep going.
Donald Trump is the most insecure human Probably in America, I would say.
I would say he's way up at the top of that leaderboard.
This is a person whose masculinity is so fragile that he can't even handle, like, the smallest critique.
If he finds out... I mean, people have been talking about this forever.
This is a guy that he reads everything that's written about him, and if somebody critiques him, he'll send them a critique of what they've said about him.
I mean, that's how thin-skinned this guy is.
That's not someone you want in a one-on-one, ratcheting up, puffing out of the chest contest.
This is not the guy that you want in charge of this, much less the fact that he's completely ignorant of the entire situation.
Well, let's talk about the situation for a second, because I also feel like most of America is ignorant to Iran as well and what that is all about, You know, because there's a big moderate swath of the country in Iran who just would probably rather have normal relations with their outside world.
And they're not extremists, and they're not Muslim extremists.
And they're kind of sort of trapped in this area where they have, you know, the government is sort of oppressively extreme with their views.
But there is a whole culture that's been able to carve out a little bit of a life where you can go to work and you can come home and you have dinner with your family.
Now I can think of a lot of reasons why that's going to be an issue with them too because we've had sanctions on them for so long that the quality of living is very poor in Iran and it makes it difficult for them to get things like medicine.
This is where we are in a situation where, you know, one little thing like this, or a big act of war basically that we just did, could galvanize the country.
I mean, here, do I like Mike Pence?
No.
Would I hope that he gets voted out of office?
Yeah.
If another country assassinated him, would I be probably marching in the streets in favor of war on that country?
Probably.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
And we saw this yesterday in the memorial service.
I mean, it was over a million people in the streets beating portraits of this man.
You know, he's now a martyr.
And, you know, there's this neoconservative fantasy.
And so much of this Iran thing is baked in the pie at the neoconservative level.
Neoconservatives are people who worship the altar of a guy named Leo Strauss, who basically said, lie to everybody as long as it's a compelling myth it'll win, which is part of the reason why these people have portrayed America as the shining city on the hill, which we'll talk about in a little bit as well.
But these neoconservatives think that if you just go in and say that America is great, and you bomb a country, then the citizens are dying to come out for America, right?
That's not what's happening right now.
America is the great Satan to these people and and now they are going out in the streets because it's not just a civic situation now, it's a religious situation now.
This is not at all just two countries facing off.
I mean there are elements of religious war in this and and there is the idea that American crusader armies have been going into the Middle East which To be honest, those neoconservatives and the people who are in charge of this war right now, there is a lot of crusader tendency.
So there's like a larger upsole of that.
It's not like they're going to come out in the streets and welcome us, right?
We heard that with Iraq and look where that got us.
This whole situation is a tinderbox and the more that we push this towards an apocalyptic showdown, which by the way, both sides kind of want an apocalyptic showdown, That's not good.
That's the worst case scenario.
And before we get there, let's talk about Iraq for a second, because would you think, is it safe to say that the George W. Bush administration had more competency in their foreign policy?
Is it safe to say that compared to now?
Oh my god, you're putting me on the spot to give a compliment about the Bush administration's foreign policy.
Well, in relation to what we have now.
I would say, wow, man, that just gave me a shiver up my spine.
Well, I will say that at least they had philosophy, right?
The neoconservative idea of how you do these things, and there were these reports that were written up.
The thing that drove the second Iraq war was this plan for a perpetual American hegemony, and they basically would take Iraq, and they would take control of the oil, and they would Basically have a base where they could tamp down any Potential rivals that that was the plan.
There was like a big giant.
I think there's like 200 250 page thing I was reading it and it is really really terrifying but at least they had a Concept right?
This is not a concept.
This is a madman you know strutting around yelling at a country that he doesn't understand and thinking that they're just gonna back down and Right.
And remember, we had Colin Powell.
I mean, we had, you know, some people around that you could kind of think, oh, I had some sense of how this all worked.
Well, look how bad that turned out.
Even with even the barest semblance of competency.
I mean, like you said, like, We probably would have been greeted as victors if Paul Bremer hadn't just, you know, had decided to sort of re-employ the Iraqi army instead of just taking their guns, or sorry, letting them have their guns and then just becoming part of the resistance.
So now you have to imagine what we are now.
And there is no thought process behind that.
And they have no idea how they're going to do this.
And the worst part about it is that there is no winning this one.
So, you know, what happened in Afghanistan?
The Taliban are back.
We've actually sat down at the table and had to shake their hand and come up with an agreement.
And that is exactly how this is going to have to end if it wanted to end at all and have it be somewhat peaceful in any amount of stretch of the imagination.
But guess what?
Again, I'm old enough to remember that we had the makings of this framework when we had Obama negotiated the nuclear deal with them.
Where they were not developing nuclear weapons.
We actually didn't see an uptick in attacks from their proxies.
So we were on our way.
Sanctions were being lowered a little bit to allow humanitarian aid into Iran.
So like, we had it.
We had this with this administration and they've now flushed it all down the toilet.
Yeah, and there's just a big, long history of all these things just blowing up in our face.
I mean, this goes back, you know, tensions with Iran go back 66 years, back to 1953 where the U.S.
and the CIA led to a coup simply because the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran was nationalizing oil.
And so we went in with disinformation and overthrew him and replaced him with the Shah.
And then for two decades, the Shah is this oppressive leader.
And then we have a rise of a revolution that is religious in nature.
Guess what?
That's what happens when you go in and you try and control things.
That's the problem with American foreign policy constantly, is that we feel like we always have to put our thumb on the scale.
Well, guess what?
If you put your thumb on the scale and people know that you put the thumb on the scale, it backfires.
If they know that you tried to manipulate them and take away their sovereignty and their free choice, they will resent you and you're not going to have a partner there and you're not going to have any help.
Then, on top of that, so, you know, the Ayatollah takes over, and we start working with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which is the thing, nobody wants to talk about that.
And this should be all over TV.
We should be getting the context of American-Iranian, you know, interactions.
We don't get that, right?
It's just a blank slate.
We have a country that we're about ready to go to war with, and they hate us, and what happens?
Well, we helped Saddam Hussein in a war against Iraq and Iran, a terrible, terrible war, We knew that he was using chemical weapons against them.
I was reading the files the other day.
We said, oh, they make great offensive and defensive weapons.
We knew that.
And then, of course, later on, we used that as a reason to go in and fight the guy, right?
That's what we keep doing.
We keep putting our thumb on the scale.
We keep messing around and screwing around in people's backyards.
And that's not a way to get allies or make the world safer.
We have always been making the world more and more dangerous.
And I say this constantly.
The most dangerous thing with humans is this idea that you can win with war, or you're playing a game and you can win a game and the other person can lose and you gain an advantage.
You win when you don't play a game.
You win when you communicate and when you, you know, you act in good faith.
And that's not what we've been doing.
And by the way, that doesn't mean Iran is right.
We're both wrong.
Both sides are wrong in this situation and the rest of us are stuck in the middle of it.
That's the terrible thing.
You should have put a spoiler alert for the movie War Games, because that's exactly what you just described by the end.
And also, I was going to correct you, because I almost wanted to say, you got the whole thing wrong.
You were actually talking about bin Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Russians.
But you know what?
It's the same story there, right next door.
And again, we were partners with bin Laden.
We were partners with them fighting against the Soviet Union then, in 79.
And so, and by the way, there's no, it's not a coincidence that it's the same time frame as the fall of the Shah and the Afghanistan war with the Soviet Union.
These are all related.
So, and one of the relations is that we have just been terrible at doing this.
There's a movie that had come out a long time ago with Tom Hanks where they, you know, after they drove out the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, we had a chance to support them.
Let's do a thought experiment.
to help them develop their country.
And instead, we just pull out and abandon them.
And then they're trying to attack us not even 10 or 15 years later.
Yeah, let's do a thought experiment.
All right.
Let's say, and I do not feel like this is what's going to happen.
I feel like this situation is way too large and complicated for Donald Trump to succeed in it.
But let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say after the assassination, after this brinksmanship with Iran, let's say Iran blinks, right?
Let's say Iran is like, you know what?
We have a lot of bluster.
We said we're going to retaliate.
But they decide it's a better thing not to retaliate.
You know, they call it the madman strategy, which is what Nixon tried to do.
It was bombing Cambodia and hoping that people said, oh, Nixon's crazy, don't mess with him.
It didn't work.
So let's say that Trump's quote-unquote madman strategy, and it's not a strategy, it's just him being him.
Let's say it quote-unquote works.
Let's say Iran doesn't retaliate.
They're going to be on American television in the next few weeks and there's going to be so many pundits and analysts talking about how we won, right?
How Donald Trump is a secret strategic genius.
Well, okay, fine.
So Iran blinks.
Did this help American standing in the world?
Is there any way that we have an ally that looks at us now and says, that's a country that's acting in good faith?
That's a good ally?
Is there any other country in the world right now who looks at what we've done and says, I think the United States did the right thing in this case?
No!
We assassinated a person.
That's what happened.
Let's take that one step further.
You might have missed, but on state TV in Iran, they came out and officially, finally, disengaged themselves from the JCPA.
So they are now, and they're not only disengaging from that agreement, they are now actively going to develop nuclear weapons.
Now, if you might not have known, that framework of that agreement was still in existence, and other countries and Iran were sort of tenuously holding on to this agreement a little bit.
And instead, now they've officially said, we are starting up again.
So you explain to me how we're any more safe Now, then after that, and that is another thing they didn't think about, because clearly that's what have been the most logical response is what they're doing.
That actually ended up could be what their response is.
Right.
They might they might not try and assassinate somebody else or do a big thing.
But then again, how are they going to control all these thousands of factions they have that are underneath their umbrella?
That's the other problem is somebody could easily go, quote unquote, rogue and cause a lot of problems, too.
They're tied to Iran.
And by the way, that this would not stop the U.S. from tying some other rogue outfit to Iran anyway to continue to escalate this, to continue to distract from perhaps even the impeachment.
It's one thing after another.
When you open the lid on the box, which is what Donald Trump has done, the safety of everybody goes down.
Now, he believes it's a risk worth taking, you know, because this is a person who not only has he failed at everything, but he's never suffered the consequences of failing.
Right, every time that he's had to declare bankruptcy, he gets bailed out because, you know, he's worth more as a quote-unquote success than otherwise.
This is a person who, every scandal that's ever hit him, he's managed to evade it somehow or another.
He's never suffered the consequences of his own failures.
So, he's playing with house money.
He doesn't care, you know, what happens with Iran and what happens with everyone elsewhere.
If there's a terrorist attack, this is terrible to say, but he'll just go tweet about it and it proves his worldview.
Right?
That's who this guy is.
It's not like he has a deep-seated concern for Americans or people abroad or anybody who could get hurt.
I mean, again, you don't go on social media as President of the United States and start talking about, and maybe he was joking, which I don't think he was, right?
But you don't go in there and you don't talk openly and flippantly about destroying culture and destroying civilians.
That's not a person.
And that is a war crime.
We know that anyway.
You're not allowed to do that, according to the – it's not the Geneva Conventions, but whatever.
We have the conventions that govern the entire world for war.
So that would be a violation – that would be impeachable right there if you want to go that far.
It's really crazy because, again, the people who support him will probably just say, yeah, yeah, he's just joking.
He's just blustered.
That's what he wants.
He's going to try and back them down because clearly Iran only responds to force, which is another neocon ideology.
Whereas the only way you're ever going to get anything done with these guys is if you have to continually slaughter them and attack them and show them that you're the stronger person.
And I think that's a good question.
I don't think it works that way when you are the The President's, you know, superpower, like pretty much the only superpower left in the world.
We have to act in a different way because it's the upstart, you know, other smaller countries that need to act that way to sort of establish themselves.
And kind of like we mentioned with North Korea, they now have standing because Trump was willing to meet with them, meet with him.
And that's a real problem diplomatically, but also if you're talking about, you know, fanning the flames and trying to recruit more people that want to do harm to Americans, it's a real easy way that he's been doing it.
Yeah, under the neoconservative philosophy, America is a restless giant.
That's who we are.
We always have to take on one threat after another, and anybody who's studied any of this knows that when you squash a threat, or try and squash a threat, it doesn't flatten.
It squeezes out somewhere else.
It always has a situation that goes somewhere else and moves, and so when you try and maintain a hegemony, you never rest.
This, I mean, you know, I know I'm going to preach the choir to the podcast here, but As long as you're having wars, you're not going to be paying for education and infrastructure and healthcare and all those things.
I mean, the amount of money that's being relocated to the military-industrial complex has created a situation of austerity for the rest of us.
Our lives are worse because these decisions keep getting made.
But you brought up the idea of war crimes and impeachment.
We don't believe in that.
Like, I just want to throw this out there, and I want this to stick with people.
The President of the United States of America, in open public, threatened to commit war crimes.
And we're not even really talking about it that much, right?
Like, that's not even like a big story.
I mean, I read a thing in the New York Times today, I think it was like on page five or six, it was like a little thin column that's like, he's threatening, you know, civilians.
Well, we don't care about that as a culture, right, as a pejorative culture.
We believe in this idea that whatever America does is right.
We have a right as the benevolent arbiters of, you know, the benevolent universe That everything that we do is God's will, and that's one of the reasons why we're reaching this crescendo, this apocalyptic showdown, and why somebody like Donald Trump can do the things that he's doing.
Why his son, by the way, can get on social media brandishing a weapon with crusader iconography, which I mean that's not...
That's not accidental.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's a message in all of this stuff.
And the idea is that America can do anything it wants because it is God's chosen country.
And that's why we're where we're at.
Well, remember, he ran on this.
He ran not understanding why we couldn't, like, torture more people.
You know, if they're doing it to us, we have to be able to do it to them.
But I think his understanding of the world is probably more like through movies.
He saw, you know, Mel Gibson getting, you know, tortured in Lethal Weapon, and he went, that's what we have to do.
And, you know, not only do we not know that, like, torture doesn't work, it doesn't give you the intelligence they think, but, like, who's in charge of the CIA now?
Gina Haspel.
She was completely involved in that whole cover-up and part of the enhanced interrogation techniques they came up with back then and it's just an endless series of people who don't seem to get punished for those kind of crimes and in fact get promoted and get continually brought back into the administrations.
Yeah, you bring up the idea of Donald Trump campaigning on this.
You know, he talked constantly about this apocryphal story about perishing, killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig's blood, which is this really gruesome war crime apocryphal story.
He talked about it all the time at his rallies.
And then in the rallies, he would talk about, oh, we're not just going to torture, we're going to do more than torture.
We're going to, you know, And he was totally dedicated to this.
At other times he was talking about the military, and you're exactly right about the movies thing.
He talked about Patton all the time.
And he talked about how the reason why we don't win wars is because we don't have people like Patton.
We don't have people like Perishing.
I'm sorry, but there's a reason why he's pardoning war criminals.
All of this comes together, which is this mindset, which basically says that America has become weak because it's afraid to commit war crimes, is the message.
And that's truly what he believes.
And that's not hyperbole.
That's what we're on the edge of right now.
If this thing keeps escalating, America is going to, under Donald Trump's stewardship, I mean, there's a possibility that some really, really awful things are going to happen.
Oh, I agree.
And, you know, it kind of reminds me of... So, in the aftermath of, quote-unquote, liberating Iraq in 2003-04, like, the whole country just descended into madness.
You know, looting, rioting, torture, all sorts of horrible things by its own citizens.
And I remember wondering back then, like, where are all these people, these bad guys, coming from and doing this?
Were they sitting in their houses under the oppression of Saddam Hussein for all those years just waiting for the opportunity to start killing and torturing and robbing and doing all sorts of, you know, crimes against humanity?
You know, or was it just the act of being unleashed from such a such an oppressive regime that sort of you lose your boundaries of what is right and what is wrong?
You know, man in the state of nature, Thomas Hobbes or whatever, Locke, all those different things.
So I almost feel like there's a similar parallel to America because Trump getting elected seems to be a little bit of a similarity there where the people that were sitting in their houses for all those years with this ideology and with these horrible, you know, intent to do people harm and who want to enact laws that will do people harm and intent to do people harm and who want to enact laws that will do people harm and cause a lot of problems and then maintain their their their status as well, I This is the same kind of thing.
They've been sitting in their houses all these years, you know, the anger building and building until finally it was unleashed when Trump quote-unquote liberated them.
I had a piece in the Daily Beast a couple of weeks ago that was about the roots of American fascism.
It's always been here.
We have, I mean, everything from the eradication and genocide of the Native American population to the enslavement of African Americans, you know, the list goes on and on and on.
There's a fascistic streak in this country a mile long, two centuries long.
I grew up, I came of age, I should say, during the second Iraq war.
I was going to college when it broke out.
You know, obviously I got involved in the counterculture.
I was very, very focused on this stuff.
And I can tell you as somebody who is around a lot of Trump supporters, people who are Trump supporters now, they were talking constantly about fascistic war crimes.
They were talking constantly about wiping Iraqis off the face of the map and they were talking about torture.
They were talking about You know, basically they would come out and they would say the Constitution is only good for me everybody else It doesn't matter.
It doesn't apply to them, right?
The law is about restricting other people for me I deserve it and and it's good and and this is white nationalism white fascism, whatever you want to call it and This is the same strain that we're talking about now, and I can tell you, I've been keeping up, I keep ties with a lot of these people, a lot of evangelicals, a lot of white identity Christians, and I do it because I like to keep my finger on the pulse of this thing.
I can tell you right now that the conversations I'm having with them, they feel like Donald Trump is the leader that they've been waiting for.
It's the president who's not afraid to offend people.
They feel like he is the president who's going to take the gloves off and America is finally going to use its vast armies and weaponry And they are ready for a crusade.
They are ready for an apocalyptic battle against what they think are the forces of evil.
And I'll tell you this, during that apocalyptic battle, war crimes and Geneva Conventions, those are gone.
You know what I mean?
It's just you win because you're fighting for the forces of good against the forces of evil.
Well, you know, it's also a two-fold because we get back to sort of, you know, movies where they have this world, this is the Rambo view or, you know, all these Vietnam movies we had in the 80s and, you know, the war movies in the 90s where, you know, you have these conflicts and you sort of, you kill them all.
You kill the enemy, there's none left.
When like you had said you kind of squish that so you kill somebody let's just say innocent civilian who has to be a Muslim gets killed in a country like Iran you've now spawned 10 people who are related to that person that now want to you know suit up and kill themselves while killing more Americans.
And I feel like that's a view that doesn't seem to resonate at all with people who want to support these kind of wars.
And, you know, of course, we're just like, you know, commie pinko bastards who never want to, you know, have any conflicts.
But the other part of this is the religious aspect, which is really what makes me concerned, because, you know, the religious fanatics in America are convinced that we have to have the conflict in that part of the world.
Right?
So they don't, the Vietnams and Venezuelans or whatever else we have, that doesn't really necessarily, I don't think, resonate with them.
It's what gets them excited is when it's the Middle East, because that seems to indicate, oh, here it comes.
Here's the big rapture.
Here comes the Messiah.
And when you combine those two ideologies like that, that's what I think is so dangerous where we are now.
They're two sides of the same coin.
I mean, both sides are approaching this from the perspective and the worldview of, there's another way to put it, they're death cults, right?
You have groups of people, there are groups of fanatics inside America who believe that they are God's chosen nation and that they fight on the side of God and Christ and all that stuff.
I was actually shocked, I was doing a research on the, you know, the terrorist death cults like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
They also believe that there's going to be the exact same clash, and eventually there's going to be a clash, and guess who's going to show up on their side, Nick?
Jesus Christ.
And that's one of the craziest things I had ever read.
I had never even considered it, but they actually both sides sort of believe that they are the same thing, right?
And so they're running at each other on a collision course, and there's so many different factions in all of this.
On our side, it's not just the fanatics.
There are fanatics who have wanted this Middle East war, this apocalyptic showdown.
That's one part.
There's another group who blame Iran for the problems we've had in Iraq.
There's the neoconservatives who think the moment that we topple a regime and it goes well, everything else is going to fall like dominoes.
They'll welcome us in the street as liberators.
There's another group, the Trumps, Who, you know, either want to, like, show off and have a big victory, or they want to distract from impeachment, or any number, or win re-election, or any number of things.
So there's, like, all these different factions that have sort of combined together to create, uh, not just a bad situation, but a bad situation that there's no... Oh, did you hear this?
He said, I don't need an exit strategy.
And one of his cronies laughed because he was talking, obviously, about just absolutely decimating an entire country of people.
Like, these people do not have a plan.
They have no idea what they're doing.
All they know is that every faction thinks that they are in the right and things will work out.
And guess what?
That's what Iran and everybody over there thinks, too.
Well, you know, that reminds me, by the way, of the same notion of him choosing the last thing on the menu to assassinate Soleimani.
But it's almost like he knows he's cavalierly suggested, oh, I could just wipe Afghanistan off the face of the earth in a week.
And obviously what he means is dropping some nuclear bombs and just destroying everything in its path.
And I almost feel like if that is your mindset and you know in the back of your mind you could in reality do that, this is how you would behave.
So it's almost like he's behaving kind of knowing that it's like, oh yeah, I can always just drop a few bombs and then we'll end that.
That'll take care of it.
We'll be done.
And that's what's really scary because the whole point of having those weapons is that you don't use them.
One of the first questions he asked me when he became president was, why don't we use bombs?
That's documented.
That was one of the first things that he said.
And again, I get hope from a few things.
Like, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day.
One of the things that gives me hope is the fact that Donald Trump is a coward.
Straight up, right?
Like, you know, he rattles the saber a lot, but obviously this is a person who didn't just have the steel not to go into war and serve, but is obviously afraid of the actual conflict.
If he's a coward, maybe he'll blink and we'll be fine and we'll have damage or whatever, but...
That's one thing that gives me hope, but I have to tell you that he's such an insecure, fragile man-child that I am afraid that if this thing just keeps escalating, like, why wouldn't he take the gloves off?
And unfortunately, we live in a country where the sole authority to use nuclear weapons lies with the president, which I think, you know, we're gonna do a pod somewhere down the line about what we need to do and reforms and stuff.
I don't know if that's gonna be on the podcast, but it should be.
The idea that Donald Trump can win an electoral college but not a majority of voters and can go in and make a momentous decision like that, that has me second-guessing the whole thing.
I agree.
I think that, and here's what also the part of this notion is, is that a lot of people surrounding Trump are guys who think, like William Barr, who think that he doesn't have enough power.
In theory, there are presidents we've had in the past who could handle that kind of situation, right?
what's called, the Supreme Presidency, Imperial Presidency.
And so that is another problem because, you know, in theory, there are presidents we've had in the past who could handle that kind of situation, right?
They just have the presence of mind.
They're smart enough.
They're reserved.
They know how to control themselves.
But again, when you don't, you can't guarantee that it's always going to be the case in the White House.
So if that's the case and you cannot grant those kind of powers to a president, if you truly want to have a democracy.
So again, I can only hope that we can get rid of him, right?
I mean, this is the whole key here is that we can't ever be able to have a guy like this come into power again.
And so that's what we have to figure out once and for all.
And the very smart people can really focus on this.
I'm sure there are some very simple fail safes you can install that, you know, like taxes be having to be, you know, your tax returns have to be exposed.
In theory, I'm convinced if he had done that, then he never would have gotten elected.
Well, one of the safeguards that has been in place has basically been a coup by people in the Trump administration who have basically said if Trump orders some sort of action like dropping of a bomb to first come to me and go through that, that's unconstitutional.
Which, you know, I'm not in favor of random coups.
That's also something that took place when Richard Nixon spiraled into a mental breakdown.
You know, they had to put the brakes on there.
For the audience who is interested in this, because I actually, I think it's fascinating how we got to this point and kind of terrifying.
The presidency was supposed to be an executive position that, you know, oversaw things and was limited in scope.
What we have now is an aberration.
It's a mutation that's taken place.
Initially, at the turn of the 19th century, it goes back to Thomas Jefferson just deciding that he could, you know, by the Louisiana Territory, right?
The Louisiana Purchase.
And then right after that, you have, oh, Andrew Jackson, you know, that charmer of a guy who actually made an argument through his surrogates that because the President is the Commander-in-Chief, the Commander-in-Chief enjoys the privilege of a general.
Who in times of war can decide to, you know, withhold laws based upon their own ideas and their own instincts, which goes back to what you're saying.
The idea we're supposed to have a president who can do this or do that.
This isn't how this country is supposed to work.
And the country is flawed and the construction is really, really bad.
But what we've let happen, and this goes back a long time, What we've let happen in this country and what we've let the presidency grow into is a really dangerous thing.
And, you know, Donald Trump is one thing, and I'm going to do it every episode.
Donald Trump is a symptom.
He is not the disease.
We have let this turn into a situation where one individual or, you know, the heads of state can war with each other as nations Well, the people don't really matter.
The people are just there to be collateral damage.
And that's not the way any of this is supposed to work.
And we have to back away from that.
When this is over, we have to put some safeguards up.
And we have to move towards a place where something like this can't happen.
Because this shit is going to be the end of us.
It just is.
I agree.
Well, I feel like I spent my time on this pod this time just ranting and raving and you were like the calm guy keeping us, you know, in the boat.
But I'm like already, I'm like, I've already jumped off.
I'm halfway down to the water at this point.
I don't know.
I apologize for being so that way.
But man, it's a real problem.
It's ugly out there.
I've been talking with people and they're... That's one of the most frustrating things.
I know we're wrapping this thing up, but we're sitting here talking about war, and we're talking about decisions, and we're talking about politics.
It's not a pastime.
You know, it's not just something that we should be talking about like sports.
It's not something that is flippant, right?
People right now are in danger, right?
Like thousands, if not millions of people right now stand on the edge of total annihilation because we have a madman in office and because we're in a state of play with another country and it's a complicated situation that he doesn't understand, his people don't understand, and we've got people who are lost in their own myths and their own alternate realities.
And the rest of us who just want to go to work and just want to have decent lives and enjoy ourselves, we're stuck in the fucking middle of this thing.
And it's so absurd and it pisses me off to no end.
I'm right there with you and just the fact that there are people who are stressed out about it and are suffering for it, it just pisses me off and I think it should piss off all of us.
Yeah.
Well, just like what they hope for is that most of the people in America just want to like, you know, go to work, come back home, have dinner with their family, go to sleep and then wake up and do the whole thing the next day.
You know, keep their heads in the sand and not worry about these things.
And then and then meanwhile, they go about just raping the country and stealing all of its wealth.
So that's what they're hoping.
And I do wonder how this republic is going to work, because for so long it was this notion of, you want a better life for your kids, and then your kids want a better life for them, and we want to have this progression.
Well, at some point, you don't have a better life than your parents.
You get to the crest where it starts going the other way.
And are we in the situation where, do I expect my kids, well, you're going to go to college, You're going to get a job.
You're going to get married.
You're going to have kids.
We've been going through the same kind of pattern for so long that I just kind of wonder what's happening here and if we can get back far enough into a macro sense if we're noticing where this is leading to isn't good.
What you're talking about is how it's supposed to work in theory, which is backing away from this stuff and figuring out a better way to live.
But when you live in an era of hyper capitalism, when all of the money and all the resources are on one side, and they're damned up, Crises help, right?
If we're having a crisis, if we have to spend our money on wars, if we have to build a bunch of machinery and we have to be constantly terrified, you know what we're not talking about?
We're not talking about health care right now.
We're not talking about education.
We're not talking about infrastructure.
We're not talking about better lives for people.
Instead, we're talking about personality battles.
We're talking about terrorism.
We're talking about threats.
And so as a result, that money can stay over here where it's been relocated.
And anybody who wants to stay up at night, study how all of this, and by the way, the worst thing you can say is redistribution of wealth.
That's what happened here.
All of the wealth has been redistributed and this is where we end up.
And unfortunately, that's where we are.
And it won't matter, none of that will matter.
Not one single thing you mentioned will matter at all because we're not talking about climate change.
Oh, no.
How could you be talking about climate change?
We have a crisis that's happening right now.
We don't need to be talking about how an entire continent is on fire right now.
Right.
So, and it really is not going to matter.
It's going to be, that's going to be the thing that we're all going to wonder, and maybe even in our lifetimes.
So, have a great week, Jared.
Hey, you know, I'll be honest with you.
I just hope that we can get through this week without having to do an emergency podcast.
I, you know, I love doing this.
I love getting on here with you, but I'm just hoping that we don't have some reason to come back on here and talk about, I don't know, the world on fire in one way or another.
I will say, and I know that this has been some bleak conversation, it's time to have some bleak conversation.
You know what I mean?
It's one of those moments that it really is a rough time and we need to have rough conversations.
But I will say, and I think I speak for Nick here, I gain a lot of comfort and hope based on what we're doing.
The conversations were having the people who are coming in this podcast.
I am just so touched and it's been I'm sure for everyone else.
It's been a rough few months.
It's been a rough few months for me.
I am just absolutely touched at a human level and so grateful for people coming in this podcast.
Please continue to tell people about it because we're having conversations other people aren't having we're hoping to give you the context that is missing in other places.
Let people know.
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I am at J.Y.
Sexton.
My man Nick here is at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
We'll be back next week.
Until then, please, please, please, please stay safe out there.
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