Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - War with Iran w/ Pete Quinones
Aired: 2020-01-04
Duration: 01:35:52


=== Heshy Socks: Smell Good All Day (01:48) ===

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[00:01:13]  Let's start today's show.
[00:01:16]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:01:18]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:01:20]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:01:24]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:01:29]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:01:42]  What's up, everybody?
[00:01:44]  Welcome to a brand new pre-World War III episode of Part of the Problem.

=== Creating America's Next Enemy (15:14) ===

[00:01:49]  Robbie the Fire Bernstein is out, but I have a great guest in today.
[00:01:53]  One of my favorite people who I always love to have on the podcast, and he's in New York City, once again, back at the studios.
[00:01:59]  Of course, it is the great Pete Mance, Raymond, Quinnanos, Raider.
[00:02:07]  I don't know.
[00:02:08]  Did I get them all in there?
[00:02:08]  Did I miss any?
[00:02:10]  Just my dad's like real name.
[00:02:13]  Oh, okay.
[00:02:14]  Well, whatever.
[00:02:14]  You know, it's close enough.
[00:02:16]  Oh, that's a long story.
[00:02:17]  He'll have a new name by the next time we have him on the show.
[00:02:20]  What's in a name?
[00:02:21]  That's well, that's right.
[00:02:22]  We're going to rose by any other name.
[00:02:23]  Smelled just as sweet.
[00:02:24]  How are you, brother?
[00:02:25]  Good, man.
[00:02:25]  What's going on?
[00:02:26]  Not much.
[00:02:27]  Welcome back to New York City.
[00:02:28]  You just got in today, right?
[00:02:29]  Yep.
[00:02:30]  Yep.
[00:02:30]  Well, and you're going to stay through the Soho Forum debate on Monday, which would be a real fun one.
[00:02:37]  Yeah, we're looking forward to that, guys.
[00:02:40]  If you want to come hang out with us on Monday, go to thesohoforum.org.
[00:02:45]  Get all the info that you need for the next debate coming up.
[00:02:49]  So, me and you both are in the same hilarious situation.
[00:02:54]  I listened to your latest podcast earlier today.
[00:02:59]  And you had, of course, the great Scott Horton on.
[00:03:02]  And I did my last podcast yesterday, and both of us recorded right before the huge news happens.
[00:03:09]  So we put out these episodes.
[00:03:10]  And by the next day, if anyone's listening to it, they're like, but where's the big story?
[00:03:15]  Where is the big story?
[00:03:17]  So, you know, anyway, that happens sometimes in the game that we're in.
[00:03:22]  It's unfortunate when it lines up like that.
[00:03:24]  How about both of us?
[00:03:24]  Five minutes after we stopped recording.
[00:03:26]  Five minutes.
[00:03:27]  I mean, it was like the same thing for me.
[00:03:30]  Like, it literally got on my way home, and all of a sudden, I start, you know, like my phone starts blowing up with all the text messages, news alerts, all this shit.
[00:03:39]  And you're like, oh, okay.
[00:03:41]  So something big happened.
[00:03:43]  Something very big and very dangerous in the conflict with Iran and Iraq and Hezbollah and Shiites of all flavors.
[00:03:54]  The Sunnis seem to be somewhat on the back burner on this one.
[00:03:59]  They're probably happy about it, too.
[00:04:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:01]  I'm sure.
[00:04:02]  So we're back to, you never can tell.
[00:04:04]  It's like in the last 15 years, America has fought on the side of the Sunnis, on the side of the Shiites, both times.
[00:04:13]  We've helped out.
[00:04:15]  We've basically been over there murdering people and handing gifts to our supposed enemies.
[00:04:21]  So, you know, it's like gifts to ISIS, murdering Sunnis in Syria, slaughtering Sunnis and Shiites alike in Iraq, but then handing the country over to them, giving Iran more influence.
[00:04:34]  Anyway, of course, since 2007, something in that area, and there was the big redirect, we've really been trying to diminish Shiite power in the region.
[00:04:47]  Of course, then the Sunni radicals who we were funding decided to storm Iraq and start killing journalists.
[00:04:53]  So Obama did go back into Iraq to fight on behalf of the Shiites whose influence we're trying to diminish in the region.
[00:05:00]  But don't worry, guys.
[00:05:02]  Now we're back to fighting Shiites in Iraq.
[00:05:07]  Of course, this whole thing started because we overthrew the Sunni government in Iraq.
[00:05:13]  So this is, it's reached levels of cluster fuck that you couldn't even put into like a dystopian novel.
[00:05:21]  They would be like, this is just getting too ridiculous at this point.
[00:05:24]  Like no one's going to be able to follow what's going on here.
[00:05:26]  So that's where we are.
[00:05:28]  Of course, if you guys don't know right now, it was, I know I'm going to fuck up the name.
[00:05:32]  Soleimani?
[00:05:33]  Soleimani.
[00:05:33]  Soleimani.
[00:05:35]  They said that it would be, I heard one person say that it would be the equivalent of like killing David Petraeus in 2007, 2008.
[00:05:45]  Right.
[00:05:45]  And I think Daniel McAdams said today it would, it really would be the equivalent of killing Mike Pence.
[00:05:50]  Huh.
[00:05:51]  Interesting.
[00:05:52]  So this was like a serious high-level guy who had, oh, just closer into the mic.
[00:05:57]  This was a very high-level guy who, at least it seems like there's points where he had claimed he was basically running the show of the Iranian military.
[00:06:07]  He was the head of their paramilitary group and a big deal.
[00:06:12]  And this is, look, as you just said with your example of whether it's Petraeus or Mike Pence, it's just safe to say this would be considered an act of war if it had been done to America.
[00:06:26]  And so now we've done this to Iran.
[00:06:30]  It was not, it was, it's pretty much come out at this point that this was a targeted strike.
[00:06:35]  This was intentional.
[00:06:36]  And this is a dangerous game, to say the least.
[00:06:42]  And it's the most impeachable thing he's done.
[00:06:45]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  I mean, he did this by fiat.
[00:06:48]  Yeah.
[00:06:49]  So people want to talk about, oh, quid pro quo.
[00:06:52]  I mean, this is something, I mean, this is Obama-level stuff.
[00:06:56]  This is Obama with his kill list, with his drones and killing American citizens.
[00:07:03]  I mean, this, I almost think that this is worse than Obama killing American citizens because the government's been killing American citizens forever.
[00:07:12]  But I mean, you're taking out somebody who's high level.
[00:07:17]  And he's not the only important one who was taken out.
[00:07:21]  I mean, they took out somebody else who could actually be worse.
[00:07:26]  Yeah, he was one of the militia leaders in Iraq, one of the Shiite militia leaders who we've been fighting alongside since Obama went back in, as Scott Hart calls Iraq War III, which was against ISIS.
[00:07:39]  And so, yeah, This is, look, the situation in Iraq has been devolving from the, you know, like Iraq kind of over the last, you know, what is it now, 18 years or so, 16 years, has had points of relative order, you know, judging grading off in Iraq the last 20 years curve, relative order, and then really descended into chaos.
[00:08:04]  And it seems to be on the descent already in the last couple months.
[00:08:08]  There's been huge protests, a lot of violence.
[00:08:10]  This is just going to be a nightmare.
[00:08:13]  And there's already, you know, the Trump administration has been critical of the Iraqi Shiite government for not defending America enough.
[00:08:25]  And now that we've really pissed off the Shiites in that country.
[00:08:30]  And if you just think it through, if all these years later, I mean, it's 2020 now.
[00:08:35]  We went in 2003.
[00:08:39]  If we don't even have the Shiites on our side at this point, what the hell are we doing there?
[00:08:44]  We fought this whole war, lost all these lives, killed all of these innocent people, killed some bad people too, all to give the government to the Shiites.
[00:08:55]  And now we've completely alienated them.
[00:08:57]  So it's just such a mess.
[00:09:00]  And it's so obvious that this whole thing has been a disaster.
[00:09:04]  But this is the situation as I see it.
[00:09:06]  And I've been, you know, I was tweeting up a storm today arguing about this stuff.
[00:09:10]  And it's really depressing libertarians that are like championing this.
[00:09:15]  Libertarians, right-wingers, the people who I thought were getting a little bit better about seeing through this bullshit.
[00:09:23]  And I'll tell you, and I saw someone tweeted at me something to this effect, but it's like, you know, as crazy as the left wing in this country has gotten, when you see these right-wingers after everything we've been through for the last almost 20 years, and they're just so quick to jump right back on the bandwagon for what would be, let's get, look, it's not a foregone conclusion that we're going to war with Iran at all.
[00:09:51]  The likelihood has increased from like yesterday, but the idea, a war with Iran would be more deadly, more costly than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
[00:10:06]  Pretty much every top military expert would agree with that.
[00:10:09]  And that's the reason, by the way, that we haven't had this war already.
[00:10:12]  If we could do this thing like Gaddafi, believe me, Iran would have been gone a long time ago.
[00:10:18]  And they're this quick, this quick just to jump on board.
[00:10:21]  It's like, oh, well, they came at our embassy.
[00:10:24]  So we're fucking, that's it.
[00:10:26]  We're going for it.
[00:10:27]  As Peter Van Buren pointed out, they barely made it past.
[00:10:32]  There's like four levels that you have to get past, and they barely made it past the first.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:36]  The whole thing about clearing out, oh, essential personnel was cleared out.
[00:10:41]  The only people that are left there are Marines.
[00:10:44]  All that is, is just precaution.
[00:10:48]  There was no threat to the embassy at all.
[00:10:50]  I mean, I've seen video footage and saying, oh, look at they're scrambling in the embassy.
[00:10:55]  I'm like, I don't even know that that's from today or from yesterday.
[00:10:58]  Yeah.
[00:10:58]  You know, I mean, I don't know what to say.
[00:10:59]  And no one has learned to just wait and get a shred of evidence before they judge.
[00:11:05]  I shouldn't say no one has learned.
[00:11:06]  A lot of people have.
[00:11:07]  But it's disappointing how many people.
[00:11:09]  And I will tell you, I don't care.
[00:11:12]  I don't care what left winger you're talking about.
[00:11:15]  I don't care if they're arguing that some fucking serial rapist should be able to go to jail and go, hey, I feel like a woman now and get transferred to a woman's prison or whatever crazy new argument they have this week.
[00:11:29]  If you're a right-winger who is advocating war with Iran right now, you are crazier than them.
[00:11:36]  are actually, you've outdone the left in crazy town if you're actually going along with the idea of another one of these wars.
[00:11:43]  And I'm arguing with these people.
[00:11:45]  And one of the, you know, the cases is that people, you know, they harp on these things.
[00:11:51]  So the fucking NPC, you know, regime talking points that just come out of their mouths.
[00:11:59]  So number one is that Iran is the aggressor.
[00:12:04]  And the idea that anyone would think in the U.S.-Iran conflict that there's any argument who the aggressor is.
[00:12:15]  And just, of course, you know, I'm sure we talked about this before on the show.
[00:12:18]  I know you've talked about this before on your show, but just to run down the greatest hits.
[00:12:22]  And this is what I said in one of my tweets.
[00:12:24]  I said, well, let's just say Iran, you know, had done it to us.
[00:12:26]  Let's say in 1953, Iran overthrew the elected leader, you know, in America.
[00:12:32]  Let's just say that's our history now.
[00:12:34]  Like Dwight Eisenhower was overthrown by fucking Mossadegh or something like that.
[00:12:40]  And they came in here, overthrew our leader, then funded both sides of a war where hundreds of thousands of people die in our country.
[00:12:50]  Like you know somebody, you know, your uncle, your father, somebody you know died because some fucking foreign power was funding both sides of the war.
[00:12:57]  They then put crippling sanctions on your country for decades.
[00:13:01]  Then they invaded Canada and Mexico and then started lying, saying that we had weapons that we didn't have for decades and decades, telling the world that we were developing weapons that we weren't, which was the pretense for invading Canada.
[00:13:15]  Would that be an act of aggression?
[00:13:16]  Like, would you, would you sit there and go like, oh, and then maybe we, some groups that were associated with us had killed a few people from this, you know, invading country in Canada while they were invading the country.
[00:13:30]  And you'd be like, well, they're the aggressors.
[00:13:33]  I mean, that's, that's the situation.
[00:13:34]  I had somebody on Twitter today say, because you bring up the 1953 coup and he's like, well, that was 67 years ago.
[00:13:41]  Take that up with Ike.
[00:13:43]  And my immediate response was, well, 9-11 was 19 years ago.
[00:13:46]  Take that up with Osama.
[00:13:48]  Yeah.
[00:13:49]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:13:51]  What are you supposed to forget about?
[00:13:52]  I mean, if the blowback continues, I mean, this is all about 1979.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  And what happened in 1970?
[00:14:00]  Why did they storm the embassy?
[00:14:01]  Oh, because they were lunatics?
[00:14:03]  No, because they were under oppression from a foreign power for, what, 20 years, over 20 years at that point?
[00:14:11]  Yeah.
[00:14:11]  It's like you might do the same thing too.
[00:14:13]  I mean, they install their puppet.
[00:14:16]  Now the oil is going wherever the United States and England says it wants to go.
[00:14:20]  I mean, come on.
[00:14:21]  Yeah, I mean, and Scott Horton said it like this once, which I thought was just an interesting way to put it, especially for guys, you know, around our age.
[00:14:28]  But he goes, so that's, what's the math on that from 53 to 79 is 26 years.
[00:14:35]  So 26 years ago today, Bill Clinton was president.
[00:14:40]  Now, I mean, that's not ancient history.
[00:14:42]  It might be to some of the 20-year-olds who listen to the show or something like that.
[00:14:45]  But to people, if you're RH, I mean, Bill Clinton was like, that's if Bill Clinton, something happened at that time in America, it's not like we're just over it.
[00:14:53]  By the way, to your point of 9-11, this is one president removed.
[00:14:56]  This is a few years before 9-11.
[00:14:58]  You're saying 19 years ago versus 26 years ago.
[00:15:00]  It's not that far of a distance.
[00:15:02]  So do you think in 1979 when they had that revolution, they kind of remembered what happened in 53?
[00:15:07]  I'm still fucking pissed.
[00:15:09]  It was 27 years ago.
[00:15:10]  I'm still fucking pissed about Waco.
[00:15:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:15:12]  Yeah.
[00:15:14]  And 28 years ago was Ruby Ridge.
[00:15:16]  Yeah.
[00:15:17]  I mean, these are things that I bring up all the time and should be brought up all the time.
[00:15:20]  This is not ancient history.
[00:15:22]  You know, if someone says, oh, well, you know, really, you shouldn't bring that up and everything.
[00:15:25]  It's like, well, I mean, then don't complain when the Iranians are talking about what they did with Mossadegh.
[00:15:32]  And of course, and the other thing is that you don't even have to go back that long.
[00:15:35]  It's not like nothing since then had happened.
[00:15:37]  It probably wouldn't be such a tense situation if nothing had happened since 1953.
[00:15:42]  But look at what these sanctions have been doing to Iran just over the last decade, over the last 20 years.
[00:15:47]  I mean, imagine, you know, like imagine someone poorer than the far, you know, far poorer than the poorest person you know, and they're being held there by a foreign power.
[00:15:56]  Yeah, of course, this is going to build up some resentment.
[00:15:59]  So the situation to me is pretty clear.
[00:16:02]  America is the aggressor.
[00:16:04]  This is, you know, they see Iran for whatever reason, whether it's, you know, just lining the pockets of the military industrial complex, whether it's about the petrodollar, whether it's about Israel, Saudi Arabia.
[00:16:15]  I, to be honest, think it's a mix of all of those things.
[00:16:19]  But they see Iran as a threat to the American empire.
[00:16:22]  And this has been true for a long time.
[00:16:25]  And the well, because Israel tells them they're a threat to the empire.
[00:16:31]  Right.
[00:16:32]  Israel is the one who, if you remember Iran-Contra in the 80s, it was selling weapons.
[00:16:40]  And like, you know, in that whole thing of Iran and weapons, they were getting funneled through Israel.
[00:16:45]  Right.
[00:16:46]  So, I mean, it's not like Iran, you know, in my lifetime, Iran and Israel worked together.
[00:16:51]  Yeah.
[00:16:52]  And then Gareth Porter says it was in the early 90s when people really started speaking out against the treatment of people in the Gaza, the Palestinians.

=== The Syria War Excuse Exposed (04:05) ===

[00:17:04]  That's when they went, we need an enemy.
[00:17:07]  We need something to distract from this.
[00:17:09]  Yeah.
[00:17:09]  And they chose Iran.
[00:17:11]  Right.
[00:17:11]  And it has been somewhat effective.
[00:17:14]  Now, yeah, I mean, they're five years away from a nuclear weapon.
[00:17:17]  Well, that's right.
[00:17:18]  Five years, 20 years ago.
[00:17:20]  So, you know, several.
[00:17:22]  I saw a headline from 1984.
[00:17:25]  Wow.
[00:17:25]  So that's, yeah, no, I know it started early because I said one time when I had Scott on the show where I was like, you know, Israel's been saying since the 90s that they're a few years away.
[00:17:33]  And he goes, 80s, since the 80s.
[00:17:35]  And I was like, oh, I actually, I didn't know that.
[00:17:37]  But maybe that's my age.
[00:17:39]  I don't remember the shit in the 80s.
[00:17:42]  But so for, and just like with, and this is one of the easy ways to smell bullshit with so many of these warhawk, you know, and Warhawks and their propaganda is like, so like take Syria, for example, where it's like, okay, well, we need to go in.
[00:17:59]  You know, you find, I mean, we find out from people like, you know, Wesley Clark that this was a plan right after 9-11 to topple the government in Syria.
[00:18:07]  But then all of a sudden, you know, in 2012 or whatever, it's like, well, Assad's killing all his own people, so we need to go into Syria.
[00:18:13]  And then that doesn't work.
[00:18:14]  So it's like, well, there's ISIS, so we need to go into Syria.
[00:18:17]  And then that doesn't work.
[00:18:18]  So it's like, well, he used chemical weapons.
[00:18:20]  So we need to go into Syria.
[00:18:21]  And then it's like, well, the Kurds are going to be slaughtered.
[00:18:23]  So we need to go into Syria.
[00:18:24]  And then, well, Russia's there.
[00:18:25]  So we need, and it's always a new excuse, but for the same war that they wanted all along.
[00:18:30]  And with Iran, the original excuse went like this.
[00:18:34]  And this one held for a very long time.
[00:18:37]  Okay.
[00:18:38]  What they said was, and this was the argument, that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
[00:18:46]  And this isn't like other countries that have nuclear weapons because you see.
[00:18:51]  Like Pakistan?
[00:18:52]  Yes, that's right.
[00:18:53]  How many people know that Pakistan has nuclear weapons?
[00:18:56]  And by the way, I remember when that first came out when India and Pakistan had nuclear weapons.
[00:19:00]  And everyone was like, well, this is a religious war, so they're just going to use them.
[00:19:02]  Of course, none of this came to fruition.
[00:19:06]  But maybe nuclear weapons don't exist.
[00:19:09]  Well, that is, I've been presented with that argument.
[00:19:11]  I've heard it.
[00:19:12]  But the argument from the neocons was that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, this country is such a theocracy.
[00:19:21]  They're so batshit crazy that they don't work like you and me and the rest of people who have self-interest and are interested in self-preservation.
[00:19:29]  If they get this nuclear weapon, they will use it.
[00:19:32]  And they've said over and over again that they'll wipe Israel off the face of the planet.
[00:19:36]  So they get nuclear weapons.
[00:19:38]  Israel's nuked.
[00:19:39]  The whole fucking world is going down in a nuclear war, and we can't possibly let them have nuclear weapons.
[00:19:44]  This was always the original talking point.
[00:19:47]  And some of them will still throw it out every now and then, although that has retreated into the background because it's just, you know, they would always give these timelines.
[00:19:56]  It was three years away.
[00:19:57]  It was five years away.
[00:19:58]  It's 12 months away.
[00:19:59]  Oh my God, it's only a couple weeks.
[00:20:02]  And then, you know, it never comes true.
[00:20:03]  It never comes true.
[00:20:04]  I think it was in 2012 that Netanyahu humiliated himself in front of the UN with the Daffy Duck.
[00:20:10]  Yeah, the bomb melted.
[00:20:12]  Yeah, the Roadrunner and the Coyote.
[00:20:14]  And blow Daffy Duck's beak to the other side.
[00:20:16]  And then he'd have to turn it back around.
[00:20:18]  And they were all the way up to the top.
[00:20:20]  So they must at this point be like really, really.
[00:20:21]  And then, of course, they went when Obama signed the or signed onto the Iran deal.
[00:20:28]  They went, well, now they're really on the fast track to the nuclear bomb.
[00:20:31]  Years later, no nuke.
[00:20:33]  It's always been bullshit, pure war propaganda.
[00:20:36]  I refuse to even confront people on social media like today.
[00:20:42]  I was saying, I just asked someone.
[00:20:43]  I'm like, do you know the difference between SUNY and Shia?
[00:20:46]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  And it's like, if they don't know the difference, they think, oh, it's all one thing and everything.
[00:20:51]  I had some guy who was like, oh, I was stationed over there and it's all the same.
[00:20:54]  And I'm like, that's a judgment upon you.
[00:20:59]  Yeah.
[00:21:00]  You know, you don't, if you don't know that there's a difference, I mean, ask somebody, ask anyone walking down the street who is responsible for 9-11.

=== UBD Data vs Fake News (02:36) ===

[00:21:10]  They're not going to say they're not going to say SUNY.
[00:21:12]  No.
[00:21:12]  They're not going to know that.
[00:21:14]  No, that's right.
[00:21:15]  Oh, no.
[00:21:16]  And Fox News and the like intentionally play off that.
[00:21:20]  I mean, they intentionally, when they go, you know, Iran is the biggest funder of terrorism, wink, wink.
[00:21:27]  You know, they don't think you're talking about Hezbollah.
[00:21:29]  They don't think you're talking about, you know, like these guys.
[00:21:32]  They think you're talking about Al-Qaeda.
[00:21:33]  They think, you know, and like, and it really is.
[00:21:37]  It's just pure evil, borderline criminal, the way they intentionally boogeyman for everything.
[00:21:44]  Right.
[00:21:44]  Al-Qaeda's in Yemen.
[00:21:45]  You got a bomb.
[00:21:46]  Oh, Al-Shabaab is with Al-Qaeda in Somalia.
[00:21:51]  Come on.
[00:21:51]  Right.
[00:21:52]  Well, now, and that's so any, basically, you know, any Sunni with a rifle is Al-Qaeda.
[00:21:56]  Any Shiite with a rifle is Iran.
[00:21:59]  Those are, that's more or less the way it works in the neocon worldview.
[00:22:03]  All right, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, our brand new sponsor.
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=== Why They Fear Direct Conflict (15:27) ===

[00:23:46]  I think this is just unbelievable.
[00:23:48]  UBD, go check them out.
[00:23:50]  Click the link in the episode description below.
[00:23:52]  It's funny to me that the talking point, which was always the problem is that Iran just, they will not, it's not like they know they'll get nuked back in return, but they just don't give a fuck if they get the bomb.
[00:24:08]  They're this reckless and this, this bloodthirsty that they're just going to go for it if they get the bomb.
[00:24:13]  So we can't let them have it.
[00:24:15]  And then, of course, there's always, you know, the other, after that didn't work out, there's always other reasons why we have to.
[00:24:20]  You know, it's the pallets of cash and we, you know, the worst deal of their own cash.
[00:24:26]  But then it's, then it's something about, you know.
[00:24:28]  Why did it have to be cash?
[00:24:29]  It's like, well, you took them off the SWIFT system.
[00:24:31]  You can't just like digitally send it to him.
[00:24:34]  Yeah, that's actually why.
[00:24:36]  But, and people still repeat, you know, the bullshit.
[00:24:38]  They go, Obama gave them taxpayer money.
[00:24:40]  It's like, listen, no one's more concerned with spending taxpayer money than me.
[00:24:44]  This was actually an example of not taxpayer money.
[00:24:47]  If a libertarian is saying it's not taxpayer money, it's freaking not taxpayer money.
[00:24:52]  You might want to trust us on that.
[00:24:53]  I don't know your history.
[00:24:54]  Because I care more about taxpayer money than you, Mr. Military Supporter.
[00:24:58]  That's, you know, that costs a little bit of taxpayer money also.
[00:25:02]  But so what's interesting is that what's become clear to any sober observer of this is that it's not only that the neocons were wrong in the fact that Iran has no self-interest.
[00:25:18]  What's been clear since the Obama deal up to now, undeniably so, is that Iran does not want war with America.
[00:25:30]  They have just as much, if not more, interest in self-preservation than any other country in the region.
[00:25:36]  The U.S. doesn't want war with Iran.
[00:25:39]  No, I agree with that.
[00:25:40]  That means a ground war in Iran, they're going to get slaughtered.
[00:25:45]  But what the Iranians have been working for, no, I agree with you.
[00:25:50]  Both of them don't really want this conflict.
[00:25:54]  But what the Iranians have made very clear since signing on to the deal with Obama is they're just like, look, what we want is to remove the pretext that you guys are going to use for fighting a war with us.
[00:26:07]  That's what we want to do.
[00:26:09]  And, you know, for all the quotes that they bring up, they'll be like, they said they're going to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
[00:26:15]  Scott's done a great job of taking that whole bullshit apart.
[00:26:18]  But they said this.
[00:26:19]  And look, I'm sure you can find some quotes in Bluster where the Iranian government has said some things.
[00:26:24]  And of course, I can find you quotes of Hillary Clinton saying we're going to obliterate Iran or John McCain with this bomb bomb bomb Iran and all these things.
[00:26:33]  But every single time I hear a high-level member of the Iranian government speaking to the news media or speaking to their own state media or any of that shit, every single time what they say right into the camera is, we don't want war with America.
[00:26:50]  We don't want this.
[00:26:52]  And of course they don't want this.
[00:26:53]  Of course.
[00:26:54]  Look, I mean, let's get real.
[00:26:56]  Like, it would be a bloody fucking war, but there's no doubt who'd win this fucking war.
[00:27:00]  America would win it.
[00:27:01]  We would just have to suffer huge losses.
[00:27:05]  And particularly to, you know, strategic locations in the region because we have so many troops there.
[00:27:11]  But of course they don't want this war.
[00:27:12]  Look at what America does to all these fucking countries.
[00:27:15]  We might be slowly bankrupting ourselves, but we don't slowly bankrupt Libya or Yemen or Iraq.
[00:27:21]  We fucking destroy those places.
[00:27:23]  We tear down nations and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.
[00:27:28]  So of course they don't want it.
[00:27:29]  But here's what's so fucking stupid about this targeted drone strike and what just happened here is that this is the predicament you put Iran in.
[00:27:38]  It's like, so in the same sense, like when people talk about Kim Jong-un and they go, well, maybe, you know, we could negotiate with him to, you know, ease up a little bit on his own people or liberalize the society or something like that.
[00:27:53]  He can only do that so much.
[00:27:56]  I mean, he is himself.
[00:27:57]  I mean, I'm not feeling bad for him.
[00:27:59]  He's a fucking murderous psychopath.
[00:28:01]  But what is he going to do?
[00:28:03]  Just fucking let information in?
[00:28:05]  And then his people slowly start eating a little bit more and slowly start figuring out that he's been lying his ass off to them for decades.
[00:28:12]  I mean, he's going to end up like Muamm Qaddafi, dragged through the streets and sodomized to death by his own people.
[00:28:17]  So there's only so much he can do.
[00:28:19]  And that's the truth with leaders all around the world.
[00:28:22]  Pretty much every government is about as totalitarian as they can be.
[00:28:27]  And they work within as much as they can get away with.
[00:28:30]  I mean, what do you think the fucking Democrats and Republicans don't want to disarm Texas?
[00:28:36]  Of course they do.
[00:28:36]  They know they can't.
[00:28:38]  That's why it hasn't happened yet.
[00:28:39]  That's why they try, well, well, how about bump stocks?
[00:28:40]  How about this?
[00:28:41]  How about, you know, a little bit more?
[00:28:42]  You know, it's like they're always putting feelers out there.
[00:28:45]  What we're doing with this targeted strike is pushing Iran to the place where, look, any government, and obviously, as me and you both agree, all governments are illegitimate.
[00:28:55]  All governments are evil.
[00:28:56]  But the only way that governments can survive is they have to, at least to some degree, maintain the illusion that they can protect you from the outsider.
[00:29:07]  That is the baseline of how you justify your existence.
[00:29:10]  It's all fear.
[00:29:11]  Yes.
[00:29:11]  Yeah, right.
[00:29:12]  You have to be afraid of something, and I have to convince you that I can protect you.
[00:29:14]  Otherwise, why would you give up your liberty to me?
[00:29:18]  So Iran gets pushed into this position where it's like, well, you said this was a line in the sand for you that we couldn't cross.
[00:29:25]  Well, they just crossed it.
[00:29:26]  So now what are you going to fucking do?
[00:29:28]  So the fear is the only real, like the worst thing that can happen in this situation is you put them in a position where they're like, if we don't respond in some way to this, we're bitches in our own fucking, you know what I mean?
[00:29:42]  Like our own, like, it's like if you confronted some guy with his fucking girlfriend and there's like six of you and, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, oh yeah, your bitch got a fat ass.
[00:29:52]  And you're like, keep walking, honey, keep walking.
[00:29:54]  And you're like, well, what am I going to do?
[00:29:54]  There's like six guys there.
[00:29:56]  And then they fucking like slap your girl on the ass and you're like, well, now I have to go fight six guys.
[00:30:01]  And I know I'm going to lose this.
[00:30:02]  But my other option is I go home and I'm a bitch for all of eternity.
[00:30:06]  So I'm going to have to go out on my shield here.
[00:30:09]  And that's the fear is that you could push Iran.
[00:30:12]  It's the opposite of what the neocons thought.
[00:30:14]  You actually are going to have to push them to get them to want this fucking war that they can't possibly win.
[00:30:20]  So why are you trying to push them?
[00:30:22]  What strategic advantage is this to us?
[00:30:24]  Donald Trump said today that he didn't order this targeted strike to start a war.
[00:30:29]  He ordered it to stop a war.
[00:30:31]  And it's not about what this guy had done in the past.
[00:30:34]  It's about what he was going to do in the future.
[00:30:36]  So what?
[00:30:37]  You think the Iranian influence on Shiite militias goes away now?
[00:30:42]  Or do you think it consolidates even more?
[00:30:47]  Wow, that just shows.
[00:30:49]  Who gave him that?
[00:30:50]  Was that...
[00:30:51]  I want to know if that was him speaking for himself or if somebody handed him that.
[00:30:57]  That just doesn't make sense.
[00:31:01]  No, of course not.
[00:31:02]  I mean.
[00:31:04]  It's an act of war by any definition of an act of war.
[00:31:08]  And the idea that you committed an act of war in order to prevent a war.
[00:31:12]  I mean, the silver lining of it, I guess, is that maybe it indicates that Trump is still on some level like, no, I don't really want to get into another war.
[00:31:22]  Which the other, you know, the other aspect, and I talked about this on the last show a little bit, is that it is this idea of starting a war in a re-election year.
[00:31:30]  I mean, it's hard to talk about this situation and not think about the fact.
[00:31:33]  Here, let me actually read this because this I thought this was from an article from Politico.
[00:31:42]  So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, fake news, enemy of the people.
[00:31:47]  But they, so they're going through Donald Trump's decision.
[00:31:52]  You know, he was calm, cool, and collected, said radio host Howie Carr.
[00:31:57]  Okay, so here was an interesting quote that I thought was interesting.
[00:32:02]  We had authority before the strike to take that action, said the official who wouldn't say how recently Trump gave the Pentagon that authorization, whether it was hours, weeks, or even months earlier.
[00:32:15]  As recently as New Year's Eve, the president was telling reporters that he didn't want war with Iran.
[00:32:21]  Another quote.
[00:32:23]  I don't think it was so hard to find him because he was not below the radar in the last two or three years.
[00:32:31]  But the last two or three years, he worked in the open.
[00:32:34]  So this is according to a former senior Israeli governmental official.
[00:32:41]  So, and now continuing.
[00:32:43]  We've known every minute of every day where Salemi is for years.
[00:32:49]  There's no moment of any given day where five or six intelligence agencies can't tell you where he is.
[00:32:56]  It's been one of his talking points.
[00:32:58]  The Americans can find me at any time.
[00:33:01]  They just don't dare hit me.
[00:33:04]  So it seems like everybody's acknowledging that there was, we could have taken this guy out for a long time.
[00:33:11]  We don't know exactly how long, but that Trump gave this authority over to the Pentagon before this strike.
[00:33:17]  So it does kind of lead you to wonder, well, why right now?
[00:33:21]  So is this, this is what, retaliation for this, this fucking nothing that happened at the embassy.
[00:33:26]  And it's hard to not at least speculate, and I don't know that there's anything to this, just speculating.
[00:33:32]  But, you know, Donald Trump is in an election year and is being impeached.
[00:33:39]  And historically, that's kind of the thing you do in an election year.
[00:33:44]  And that's the thing you do when you're being impeached.
[00:33:46]  You start a foreign conflict, you start bombing somebody.
[00:33:50]  It appeases the whole military-industrial complex.
[00:33:52]  It appeases the whole corporate press, which is nothing but the mouthpiece for the military-industrial complex.
[00:33:57]  And then it kind of rallies voters around you, like, well, we're at a time of war now, and this guy's being Mr. Toughshot, you know, and he's keeping us safe.
[00:34:07]  So we better rally around him.
[00:34:09]  And I just wonder, given the kind of unique circumstances that Trump finds himself in, whether that would actually work.
[00:34:16]  And I really got to think that Trump, if he were to start a new war, I just think it would be a disaster for him politically.
[00:34:24]  I just don't think the country has the appetite for it right now.
[00:34:27]  It would be interesting to see if the left became anti-war again.
[00:34:30]  Maybe.
[00:34:31]  Maybe they would.
[00:34:32]  I mean, they certainly would be against Trump's war.
[00:34:34]  I don't know if they'd go anti-war, but they would oppose this if Trump did it.
[00:34:38]  But the absurdity of this all is that I think this is probably more blowback on the United States part for that contractor getting killed.
[00:34:51]  But the reason that contractor got killed is because the United States and Israel have been bombing those five militias into the Stone Age for the last three months.
[00:35:00]  So they decided to lob some bombs back.
[00:35:03]  Yeah.
[00:35:04]  So, I mean, that's what I'm sure it was like, holy crap, we got Salamani and we got the other guy right there.
[00:35:14]  Oh, let's bomb both of them.
[00:35:16]  We got both of them right there because they can't be.
[00:35:20]  And it goes back to these militias were fighting alongside the United States against ISIS.
[00:35:27]  And it's like, I mean, they turn on, it's like when I was talking to Scott on the phone today, I was like, it reminds me of 1990.
[00:35:36]  It's like, oh, yeah, Saddam, go ahead, go into Kuwait.
[00:35:39]  Oh, well, wait a minute.
[00:35:40]  We changed our mind.
[00:35:41]  We don't want you to go into Kuwait.
[00:35:42]  Yeah.
[00:35:42]  It's like, wait a minute, hold on.
[00:35:44]  And then we'll start a war over that.
[00:35:46]  Yeah.
[00:35:46]  And it was most likely Saudi who, you know, Saudi's like, hey, we can't let them go into Kuwait.
[00:35:51]  I mean, it can just be awesome.
[00:35:52]  And it's just, you put yourself in a tough situation.
[00:35:55]  This is the scary thing about it, because like we said before, it is pretty clear that Iran doesn't want war with the United States of America.
[00:36:03]  And the United States of America doesn't actually want war with Iran either.
[00:36:06]  I mean, certainly there are people who want war with Iran.
[00:36:09]  I think Israel wants the United States of America to have a war with Iran.
[00:36:13]  But there's too many people in the military, high-level people in the military, who know what this would cost.
[00:36:21]  And they're just like, look, we actually can't do this.
[00:36:24]  And understand also, we don't have a draft, an active draft right now.
[00:36:28]  We're relying on this fucking volunteer force that is pretty overextended and is going through the longest wars in American history right now.
[00:36:38]  And the nation is, you know, pretty, you know, has war fatigue or whatever they call it.
[00:36:43]  So it's not, so they don't want it.
[00:36:46]  But the problem is that like it's very, very easy to start a war and it's very hard to end a war.
[00:36:51]  And when you have these situations, so once you dig your heels in and you go, these Shiite militias are Iran-backed militias.
[00:36:59]  Okay.
[00:37:00]  So this is Iran.
[00:37:01]  And then you start bombing them and you've got these troops stationed over there.
[00:37:05]  Well, what if one of them pulls off an attack and kills a few hundred American soldiers?
[00:37:10]  Then what do we do?
[00:37:11]  Then do we have to go attack Iran?
[00:37:13]  You know, what if this is the thing where you start to see what's really scary about this situation is like, look, just in Syria alone, which is really a proxy war against Iran, in Syria alone, you have the U.S. You have Assad, the Syrian forces, you have Iran, you have Israel, you have Turkey, you have Russia.
[00:37:37]  I mean, this has the makings potentially of a world war.
[00:37:41]  And we've been able to avoid that so far, but these things can spin out of control, you know?
[00:37:46]  I mean, by the way, credit to Vladimir Putin when those Russian contractors were killed a couple years ago that he didn't really, you know, pull the trigger there and escalate things.
[00:37:56]  But this is always a possibility that this thing can really get out of control.
[00:38:02]  So it's just, it was a terrible move by Donald Trump.
[00:38:06]  Peter Van Buren said that one thing that we really have going for us as far as not getting into a war with Iran is that the current Ayatollah has more of the kind of temperament as like a Putin, where it's like, yeah, he's not going to, he's not going to allow himself to be knocked around.
[00:38:26]  But no, they don't want to get into a war.
[00:38:30]  And they're not going to do anything that would cause a real escalation, you know, like a 9-11 kind of thing.
[00:38:38]  They're not going to do anything.
[00:38:39]  Well, it's weird.
[00:38:39]  I think about it as the CIA might do something like that and make it look like I almost think about how like our position as people who are against the state that we live under, where you go like, look, like if you want to make like a moral, you know, argument, you could certainly argue that we have the moral right to violently resist our own government.
[00:39:03]  But none of us are really trying to do that because we know we're outgunned right now.
[00:39:07]  So you kind of try to walk up to the line as much as you can and like, let's build up numbers, let's fucking resist them.

=== Appeasing Iran Only Strengthens Them (14:58) ===

[00:39:14]  But it's like, you know, like if 99% of the society were ANCAPs and then some tax collector showed up, I'd have no problem being like, what's up, Mr. Tax Collector?
[00:39:23]  No, I don't think so.
[00:39:24]  But right now, I'm like, well, here you go, Mr. Tax Collector, because we're not quite there yet.
[00:39:28]  And I think that's what a lot of these countries are like, too.
[00:39:30]  Like they know they have to stay on their ground as much as they can, but they know they don't fucking want to see a direct military conflict with the United States of America.
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[00:40:50]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:40:52]  Anyway, turns out, so someone posted the Ben Shapiro show in the part of the problem inner circle Facebook group, which, you know, oh, I knew it was going to drive me crazy.
[00:41:04]  And I watched it.
[00:41:05]  And then you had posted an episode that I did on your show, Free Man Beyond the Wall, a great podcast if you guys don't listen to it.
[00:41:11]  And last year, I guess we recorded this and we were talking about an old, you know, Ben Shapiro article where he was, you know, like advocating genocide or something like that.
[00:41:21]  And anyway, so it just, hippie, you're coming on.
[00:41:24]  We got this Ben Shapiro clip.
[00:41:25]  So why don't we, it turns out, by the way, we're wrong about everything we've been saying for the last 40 minutes.
[00:41:29]  And Ben Shapiro is going to tell us why.
[00:41:31]  So let's start from the top, the Ben Shapiro show.
[00:41:35]  Iranian forces attack the American embassy in Iraq.
[00:41:37]  Anti-Semitic attacks become commonplace in New York City.
[00:41:40]  And Democrats continue to push impeachment.
[00:41:42]  Happy New Year.
[00:41:43]  I'm Ben Shapiro.
[00:41:44]  This is the Ben Shapiro show.
[00:41:49]  The Ben Shapiro show is sponsored by Express VPN.
[00:41:52]  Oh, you can skip like 30 seconds or something.
[00:41:55]  Thanks to the fact that the Obama administration decided to basically make room for the Iranians.
[00:42:00]  And now you're seeing all these members of the media, all these members of the left who are suggesting that it's President Trump's fault that Iranian terrorists attempted to storm the U.S. embassy over the last three or four days.
[00:42:11]  Okay, so let's pause it already.
[00:42:13]  Already.
[00:42:14]  I love the characterization right from the beginning, just giving, you know, one side of every story.
[00:42:20]  Oh, they just stormed the embassy.
[00:42:21]  Yeah, Iranians.
[00:42:22]  Right, in Iraq.
[00:42:24]  Iranians stormed the embassy.
[00:42:25]  I mean, they had Hezbollah flags.
[00:42:28]  Right.
[00:42:28]  We don't even say it's like, forget saying, like, you know, Iranian-backed Shiite militias without ever showing the evidence that they're directly Iranian-backed.
[00:42:40]  Just say Iran.
[00:42:42]  Iran did it.
[00:42:43]  Sure, why not?
[00:42:44]  You know?
[00:42:46]  So anyway, the other part of this is that it's like, if you want to use this logic that a militia that's backed, let's say they get some weapons or some funding from one group, then they're Iranian-backed militia.
[00:43:03]  Well, then, okay, ISIS is an American-backed militia or ISIS, right?
[00:43:09]  Isn't that essentially what they are?
[00:43:10]  They're an American-backed terrorist organization.
[00:43:13]  Anyway, the idea, the claim that, and believe me, I'm fucking 10 times more critical of Barack Obama than Ben Shapiro is.
[00:43:25]  Ben Shapiro is never going to tell you Barack Obama should be tried for war crimes.
[00:43:29]  Ben Shapiro is not going to tell you Obama should go on trial and spend the rest of his life in a fucking cell.
[00:43:33]  I know he likes to posture like he's Mr. Anti-Obama.
[00:43:37]  He's not anti-Obama like any of us are.
[00:43:39]  The idea that Obama, his policy was to make room for Iran.
[00:43:44]  Look, he made this one deal with Iran that neocons like Ben Shapiro should celebrate because for years they were saying their whole issue was Iran getting a nuclear weapon.
[00:43:54]  So if you got a deal where it slowed down their non-existent nuclear weapons program and gave more transparency so that it could be checked on, I mean, you guys should be happy for this.
[00:44:06]  But actually, anybody who's at all familiar with Obama's policy in Iraq or Syria wasn't too friendly to Iran.
[00:44:14]  It wasn't too friendly at all.
[00:44:15]  He was backing the fucking Sunni radicals in both Iraq and in Syria.
[00:44:20]  So don't fucking tell me that Obama made room for Iran.
[00:44:24]  You know who did make room for Iran was George W. Bush, your fucking precious Republican George W. Bush.
[00:44:31]  He carved up all of fucking Iraq for Iran, okay?
[00:44:34]  Or at least the majority of it.
[00:44:36]  So you want to talk about making room for Iran?
[00:44:39]  Well, nothing did that more than overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
[00:44:43]  But Ben Shapiro doesn't seem to be critical of that war.
[00:44:45]  And neither does Israel.
[00:44:47]  Shocking.
[00:44:48]  Well, he's just speaking to his people.
[00:44:50]  Yeah, I mean, he's just speaking to the I wonder what age he has to have.
[00:44:56]  When I picture his audience, it's like 20 to 25 and 60 to 75.
[00:45:02]  I don't know.
[00:45:02]  I don't think there's much in between there.
[00:45:04]  But he's just speaking to his audience.
[00:45:06]  That's all he's doing is they just want to, this is what they want to hear.
[00:45:09]  I mean, I can't believe he hasn't said pallets of cash.
[00:45:11]  Yeah.
[00:45:12]  Oh, it'll probably, it'll get it there.
[00:45:13]  Yeah, let's keep playing.
[00:45:15]  Suggest that this is because of Trump's harsh policy on Iran.
[00:45:18]  No, this is because when you appease a power like Iran, their power grows and they are able to stage events like this one.
[00:45:24]  And this is two very different views of foreign policy.
[00:45:26]  And it's something that we ought to take note of because there is this tendency inside the right to be isolationist as well.
[00:45:31]  And these views of foreign policy, one suggests that the role of the United States in the world should be basically we stay within our own borders.
[00:45:38]  We wait to be hit.
[00:45:39]  If we are hit, then we lash out in sort of quick fashion and then we retreat back inside our own borders and that the outside world has nothing to do with us.
[00:45:47]  And this was America's foreign policy for large sloths of time up until the beginning of the 20th century, essentially.
[00:45:53]  And then there's the other view, which is that the world has become a very, very small place.
[00:45:56]  And what that means is that when things happen abroad, eventually they are going to end up as being threats to the United States.
[00:46:03]  And so one of the goals of the U.S. military, one of the goals of American foreign policy.
[00:46:07]  Let's pause it here.
[00:46:08]  So I love the characterization of fighting a war when you're actually threatened.
[00:46:14]  It's like, oh, you just kind of hang out and let them hit you and then hit them back and then come home.
[00:46:19]  And it's like, yeah, in other words, you don't fight aggressive wars.
[00:46:23]  That's your life.
[00:46:24]  That's how you walk through life.
[00:46:25]  Yes.
[00:46:26]  Yo, that's how a human being walks through life.
[00:46:28]  You don't go to lash out at people.
[00:46:30]  If someone lashes out at you, you lash out back.
[00:46:32]  It's like I just walk down the street punching people in the head and you're like, well, what am I going to do?
[00:46:36]  Just stay within my own body and wait for someone else to punch me.
[00:46:40]  It's like, yeah, nobody's saying you can't try to dodge a punch if it's coming at you, but you don't get to just go fight wars.
[00:46:45]  And then this thing that he goes, well, the world's a very small place.
[00:46:48]  So if there's bad things happening outside, it's going to come into our shores.
[00:46:52]  It's like, really?
[00:46:53]  Is it going to?
[00:46:54]  I mean, I don't know, Ben Shapiro.
[00:46:56]  There's a whole bunch of bad shit happening all over the world.
[00:46:59]  Like, pretty much every continent has lots of bad shit happening in it.
[00:47:03]  Pretty much every country has bad shit.
[00:47:05]  Like, really, you know, like, um, you know, the entire continent of Africa, lots of really bad shit happening there.
[00:47:12]  And South America, lots of really bad shit happening.
[00:47:15]  And then Europe, especially Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, lots of really bad shit happening there.
[00:47:20]  Asia's pretty goddamn repressive.
[00:47:22]  You know, we got like some real repressive regimes over there.
[00:47:25]  But it only seems to be the seven countries surrounding Israel where Ben Shapiro actually, you know, puts this logic into practice and wants to go fight those wars.
[00:47:35]  Like, it's just interesting that those are the ones he seems to be like, well, we got to go fight him there.
[00:47:41]  And that's the whole point of why he thinks Iran is an enemy.
[00:47:46]  He thinks Iran is an enemy because, I mean, I don't want to say he's in Israel first or, but I mean, he takes Israel, Israel is very important to him.
[00:47:56]  Yes.
[00:47:56]  So, you know, when the Lakudniks start saying, oh, you know, Iran's our biggest enemy, well, what is he going to say?
[00:48:03]  Yeah.
[00:48:04]  He's just going to go with it.
[00:48:05]  I would just, I would, Ben Shapiro is not a dummy.
[00:48:08]  He's a smart guy.
[00:48:09]  I would just respect him more if he came out and said it.
[00:48:12]  Just be honest.
[00:48:13]  Tell these fucking, you know, corn-fed Iowa fucking white boys that they got to go fucking die for to protect your Jewish state.
[00:48:23]  Go explain to them that I need a Jewish ethnostate in the middle of this fucking Arab desert, and you guys are going to have to put your lives on the line for it.
[00:48:31]  And the rest of you guys got to pay for it.
[00:48:33]  Yeah, I'm not a real big fan of that whole thing that's going on where they're going after Charlie Kirk whenever to ask him questions about Israel and everything.
[00:48:43]  But I wish there was a forum, a debate to talk about this.
[00:48:49]  Because, I mean, this is really important.
[00:48:51]  I mean, they do not have their whole method may be all wrong, but I mean, it is important.
[00:48:56]  You need to talk about it.
[00:48:57]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:48:58]  And, you know, like a lot of these things where it's like there's a lot of ideas where if there are genuine ideas that are completely reasonable to debate and you make them off limits to debate, then the people who are going to be willing to debate them are oftentimes going to be, you know, jerks.
[00:49:19]  And those are the people who are going to be like, well, I don't give a fuck about social norms anyway.
[00:49:23]  So, you know, like, and that's not, there's even within that group, there's a range, you know what I mean?
[00:49:29]  But like, yeah, no, there, it should absolutely be a reasonable discussion whether or not we should, like, like we have this unique relationship with Israel, and it should be, it should be up for debate whether or not this is beneficial for America to have this relationship with them.
[00:49:46]  100%.
[00:49:47]  You know, this is, what was it, 1947 that the UN declared the two-state solution?
[00:49:54]  Okay, it's 2020.
[00:49:56]  What we're still not allowed to talk about whether we need to be sending them billions of dollars a year and engaged in all of these military conflicts.
[00:50:03]  You know, you're not even allowed to bring up the whole UN resolution and everything.
[00:50:08]  Yeah.
[00:50:08]  No, no, that was there was already all these Jews there.
[00:50:11]  Yeah, like 7% of the population at that point.
[00:50:14]  Oh, no, this is what they used to, they used to say, right?
[00:50:17]  It was a land without people for a people without land.
[00:50:21]  There was no one there.
[00:50:22]  It was just Jews, no one else there, except 750,000 Muslims who all got displaced.
[00:50:28]  And the great Sheldon Richmond, who's my partner at the Libertarian Institute, loves to point out that, yeah, it seems that research is pointing to the fact that those people who were there are actually the real Jews, like who had converted over the centuries because Muslims came in and overthrew them and said, well, you know, you don't have to pay taxes if you convert.
[00:50:51]  And they're like, okay, fine.
[00:50:52]  Really?
[00:50:52]  That's interesting.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:54]  I didn't know that.
[00:50:54]  That's really fascinating.
[00:50:55]  That's in his book Coming to Palestine, which the Institute of Project.
[00:50:58]  I have it.
[00:50:58]  I have not corrected it.
[00:51:00]  He talks a lot about that.
[00:51:01]  Okay.
[00:51:02]  And of course, that's something you can't bring up.
[00:51:05]  He talks about the Khazars, the whole Khazar conspiracy that most Ashkenazis are just, they converted over the years and everything.
[00:51:15]  And that pisses people off.
[00:51:16]  No, that does.
[00:51:17]  And it kind of makes sense.
[00:51:18]  Yeah, okay.
[00:51:19]  Interesting.
[00:51:20]  Well, so, you know, it's right.
[00:51:21]  And it's like, what is this?
[00:51:24]  You know, there seems to be, and much just like the same way the left uses the, you know. pejorative racist, if you bring up any issue that they feel uncomfortable with, the Ben Shapiro neocons of the world just call you an anti-Semite if you ever question whether or not you think we should fight wars to help Israel.
[00:51:44]  I mean, it's like, or fight wars.
[00:51:47]  Ron Paul, Ron Paul is an anti-Semite because he's anti-war.
[00:51:50]  Yeah.
[00:51:51]  But that means he doesn't want to fight wars for Israel.
[00:51:55]  Right.
[00:51:56]  Or fight wars for anything.
[00:51:58]  Right.
[00:51:58]  He didn't want to fight wars for anybody, you know.
[00:52:00]  And I certainly don't think Israel is the only one who's influencing us into wars.
[00:52:04]  I mean, Israel isn't the major influence for why we're fighting the war in Yemen right now.
[00:52:08]  That's Saudi Arabia.
[00:52:09]  You know, I mean, there's lots of other influences, but they're the biggest.
[00:52:13]  They are the biggest one.
[00:52:15]  All right, let's keep lying.
[00:52:16]  Threats before they occur.
[00:52:18]  It's to make sure that we can minimize the possibility of risk growing.
[00:52:21]  And so to take an example, there were two views that were prevalent in the United States in the 1930s in the lead up to World War II.
[00:52:27]  And this is none of this is meant to suggest that we're about to go to war with Iran, which we are not.
[00:52:31]  Okay, but there were two views in the 1930s in the lead up to World War II.
[00:52:34]  View number one was the old sort of isolationist view.
[00:52:37]  And this was predominant in the United States.
[00:52:39]  It was the view of the Republican Party.
[00:52:42]  It was the view of populists like Father Coughlin.
[00:52:44]  It was the view of many people who suggested that the United States basically had no role in the world.
[00:52:48]  If there was chaos over in Europe, well, that was a Europe problem.
[00:52:52]  If there was chaos over between Japan and China, that was really a Japan and China problem.
[00:52:56]  It wasn't really a U.S. problem.
[00:52:58]  And then that problem started to arrive on America's front doorstep and back doorstep, as it turns out.
[00:53:04]  And then Pearl Harbor happened.
[00:53:06]  Now, what's interesting about the reaction of the United States to Pearl Harbor is that we immediately got our backup and we recognized that our role in the world had to change.
[00:53:14]  Because the fact is this, the United States pretty easily could have come to some sort of accommodation with the Japanese that would have allowed them to maximize their regional power even after Pearl Harbor.
[00:53:23]  And in fact, it's possible that's what the Japanese government thought was going to happen is that the United States was not going to go to full-scale war with Japan even after Pearl Harbor because isolationist sentiment was so strong.
[00:53:34]  And so they felt like, okay, well, if we hit them, then maybe they'll back off.
[00:53:37]  Okay, that's not what happened.
[00:53:38]  The United States got its backup.
[00:53:39]  And instead, the United States ends up defeating Japan and occupying Japan for the next 80 years.
[00:53:43]  The United States does the same thing with regard to Germany.
[00:53:47]  America's role in the world fundamentally changes because we recognize after World War II that there is no more of this.
[00:53:53]  We can retreat within our own borders and everybody will leave us alone.
[00:53:55]  All right.
[00:53:56]  Well, that has only become worse.
[00:53:57]  So what a shocker.
[00:53:59]  Ben Shapiro went to World War II.
[00:54:01]  I've never heard one of them make the World War II argument before.
[00:54:04]  You know, that one is brand new to me.
[00:54:06]  Hey, Ben, now do World War I.
[00:54:09]  No, I mean, you did such a great job with World War II.

=== World War II Was Unnecessary (05:16) ===

[00:54:12]  Now explain World War I to me.
[00:54:14]  Why was it that isolationist tendencies were so prevalent in the country?
[00:54:19]  Because we had just fought a world war for no fucking reason.
[00:54:23]  We just went off into the biggest war at the time in human history where, you know, 10 million people get fucking killed and the lines of the maps get redrawn exactly the same way.
[00:54:33]  So of course people felt like, yeah, why do we give a fuck if Europe is having a war?
[00:54:38]  Why do we care?
[00:54:40]  Like, why would anyone care?
[00:54:41]  And yes, of course, that was the attitude.
[00:54:43]  And then we, you know, we realized that if you don't, because World War I never happened, evidently.
[00:54:50]  So the lesson of World War II is that we, you know, we realize that if we don't go around the world fighting wars, they come to our doorsteps.
[00:54:57]  Now, just imagine you fight the biggest war in the history of humanity, and that leads directly to another war that's even bigger than that one, okay?
[00:55:08]  So you have the World War I, we get involved, we smash Germany, make them sign the Treaty of Versailles, destroys this crazy Weimar Republic system where they have to take on the entire war.
[00:55:21]  I forget the numbers.
[00:55:21]  I think they would have been paying it off till the mid-1980s if they had stuck out the Treaty of Versailles.
[00:55:28]  And weren't they like the fourth country to enter the war?
[00:55:31]  And they like took all the blames?
[00:55:32]  Yes, and Germany had to take all of the fucking blame, which it was ridiculous to argue that the First World War was all Germany.
[00:55:39]  And you wonder how someone like Hitler could rise up.
[00:55:41]  And then you have the Bolshevik Revolution, you have the Nazi Revolution, and now, so you fought the biggest war in the history of the world.
[00:55:50]  And then just a few years later, you have to fight an even bigger war than that.
[00:55:53]  And your lesson is, this is what happens when we don't fight wars.
[00:55:57]  This is what happens when we stay out of wars.
[00:55:59]  It's great if you just start at that point.
[00:56:01]  Just start, pick whatever point you want to.
[00:56:04]  You know, it's like I punch someone in the face, and then they go to wind up and throw a punch back at me.
[00:56:10]  But I'm going to start right at the wind up and go, this is what happens when you don't punch people enough.
[00:56:14]  They just start punching you.
[00:56:16]  Like, yeah, rewind the story a little bit.
[00:56:18]  So this is, by the way, the World War II thing, it's all a fucking myth.
[00:56:22]  It's like, okay, it was all fucking a continuation of World War I. There's actually a lot of evidence that fucking FDR was tipped off about Pearl Harbor and basically didn't do anything about it.
[00:56:36]  Aside from that, it's like, so then we, you know, then we were able to defeat Japan and Germany and we occupied them for many decades.
[00:56:44]  And it's like, right, okay, you're kind of skipping over a little bit of a bloody point in the middle of that.
[00:56:50]  And also before that, we slaughtered mass slaughter of civilians, women and children.
[00:56:58]  I know it's like we're only supposed to care about the people who died on the other side of the war, but you know, a whole bunch of fucking Germans and Japanese, the same way, you know, there's people like me and you who aren't particularly fond of our government policy.
[00:57:09]  There's a whole bunch of fucking like kids who was just some fucking seven-year-old boy.
[00:57:13]  He didn't have anything to do with fucking, you know what I mean?
[00:57:15]  Like whether or not fucking Hitler decided to annex Poland.
[00:57:19]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:57:20]  Like he's just some fucking kid and he gets burned alive.
[00:57:24]  You know, so just wars against civilians, which actually was not the norm for like the hundred years before World War I. Humanity had somewhat advanced out of wars that targeted civilians.
[00:57:36]  And this brought us right back into it.
[00:57:38]  Then, of course, we nuked cities.
[00:57:40]  Maybe we didn't nuke cities.
[00:57:42]  And didn't have to.
[00:57:42]  I have been told that we didn't nuke cities.
[00:57:44]  But yeah, nuke cities firebombed Tokyo after the war in Europe was over.
[00:57:49]  After there was no threat anymore.
[00:57:51]  And then we occupy these parts.
[00:57:53]  So you skip that part.
[00:57:54]  Also skip the part about how we sided with a more murderous dictator than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and handed over half of Europe to him for him to fucking occupy and go on to fucking, you know, do all types of horrible things to the people that he controlled there.
[00:58:08]  So, you know, skip all of that part.
[00:58:10]  But even if you were to give the World War II, you know, an analogy to them, it's like, okay, so do World War I.
[00:58:16]  Now do every war since World War II.
[00:58:18]  So even if you had one, which you don't even have, oh, this is the argument.
[00:58:23]  Back to World War II.
[00:58:24]  Everything's Hitler.
[00:58:25]  Okay.
[00:58:26]  So that's why we have to deal with Iran, because much like, you know, the powerful industrial Germany, Iran is also going to take over the world.
[00:58:36]  Well, you also have the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and this is, oh, we have to stop the rising tide of communism.
[00:58:45]  The wars in Latin America for the same thing.
[00:58:47]  It's like, well, maybe if you didn't take their side in World War II, maybe if you would have let the Nazis And the Soviets kill each other, which they were going to do.
[00:58:58]  I had John Denson on my podcast, and the title of the podcast is, Did the United States Have to Fight World War II?
[00:59:05]  And he's a friend to the Mises Institute.
[00:59:08]  I mean, he's responsible for the Mises Institute being in Auburn, Alabama.
[00:59:12]  And he just ran down and he's like, Look, they didn't have to fight this war.
[00:59:16]  These guys were going to kill each other.
[00:59:17]  They were just going to, you know, it would have been a slaughter.
[00:59:20]  And there was really no American interest to get in that war at all.
[00:59:24]  Yeah.
[00:59:25]  It's a great, it's great to listen to.
[00:59:27]  I think it's episode 301 of my podcast.

=== NATO Allies and Made-Up Threats (15:13) ===

[00:59:29]  And it is just, he is so amazing the way he just breaks it down because, I mean, it is history.
[00:59:36]  And just to talk him up a little bit, Judge Napolitano said that John Denson is the greatest historian of 20th century war that he knows.
[00:59:47]  And John Denson's not a historian.
[00:59:48]  He's a judge.
[00:59:50]  Yeah, that's pretty incredible.
[00:59:52]  Well, yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, and then, of course, the, you know, idea that, and this is the view of the progressives.
[01:00:01]  This is why I love, you know, when Michael Mallison, he's not the only one who's made this observation, but the idea that conservatives are progressives driving the speed limit.
[01:00:07]  And that's who the conservatives like Ben Shapiro, who are within the fucking, you know, accepted mainstream narrative.
[01:00:15]  This is what they do.
[01:00:17]  They basically go along with the kind of, you know, progressive view on things, which is basically that if anything happened, that's because we learned a lesson and we progressed.
[01:00:34]  Okay.
[01:00:35]  So it's like, this is always, and this is why, of course, the great Murray Rothbard, who was to me the best historian at kind of revealing this stuff and going through and showing you what actually happened.
[01:00:45]  But I've had this before where I argue with progressives.
[01:00:49]  And what they'll say are things like, if you talk about, you know, regulation and the economy, it's like, well, the fact is, right, that we used to not have this regulation and we have it now.
[01:00:59]  And how they take that is, well, we tried not having this regulation and then we realized we need this regulation.
[01:01:08]  And so we started this regulatory agency.
[01:01:11]  That's basically the idea of history, that it's always been if it happened, it's because the right thing happened.
[01:01:19]  And therefore, we looked at, you know, the situation it was and the people decided, this collectivist, the people decided that it was better to have this regulation.
[01:01:28]  And what Murray Rothbard pointed out, he's great on this in his book, The Progressive Era, is that if you actually trace any of these regulations that happened, it's never that there's this like popular uprising amongst people that just decided, oh, we need to regulate this industry.
[01:01:43]  What it is is that it's lobbied into existence.
[01:01:47]  Lobbyists lobby the government to use the government in their favor.
[01:01:52]  It's not just because it happened doesn't mean it's right.
[01:01:55]  And of course, this is how Ben Shapiro's view of war.
[01:01:58]  So we used to kind of be isolationists, but then we realized that we were better off if we engaged in the world.
[01:02:07]  Well, when exactly did we realize this?
[01:02:09]  When exactly did we realize this?
[01:02:10]  I mean, Elvis.
[01:02:11]  Right around the time they built the Pentagon.
[01:02:13]  Right.
[01:02:13]  Right around the time the military-industrial complex became very, it became very important to the economy.
[01:02:20]  The true story is that the military took over the fucking country and we became the world empire.
[01:02:25]  But there's no evidence.
[01:02:26]  Show me the evidence of when the people of America decided we realized we need to be the world empire.
[01:02:31]  I mean, you go through it.
[01:02:32]  Ron Paul used to point this out all the time.
[01:02:34]  Go through all of the candidates.
[01:02:36]  I mean, even Lyndon Johnson, when he was fighting the war in Vietnam, the way he beat Barry Goldwater was they said he's going to drop the bomb.
[01:02:46]  That was the whole campaign against Barry Goldwater.
[01:02:48]  He's going to drop the bomb.
[01:02:49]  So you don't want to go with this guy because then we're going to end up nuking people.
[01:02:53]  And then Richard Nixon wins, promising to end the war in Vietnam.
[01:02:56]  Of course, he goes on to escalate it before ending it, but that's what he ran on and won on.
[01:03:01]  It's every single time.
[01:03:02]  And you can go through it to George W. Bush, no nation building, no policing of the world.
[01:03:06]  Barack Obama, we're going to end all these wars in my first term.
[01:03:09]  Donald Trump, we're going to end all of these wars.
[01:03:12]  Where exactly was this popular uprising that we want to be the policeman of the world?
[01:03:16]  Let one politician stand up on stage and say, I think we should fight wars of aggression and be the policemen of the world and involve ourselves in nation building.
[01:03:25]  And show me the poll numbers that he gets for that.
[01:03:28]  Because, you know, Lindsey Graham ran for president.
[01:03:30]  Jeb Bush ran for president.
[01:03:32]  What did they do?
[01:03:33]  Did they get 1% between the two of them?
[01:03:35]  I don't think they did.
[01:03:37]  You know, so it's like, but that's the progressive view of how things always go.
[01:03:42]  That if it happened, it's because if the government does anything, it's because there was this popular uprising and they decided, well, we tried it the other way.
[01:03:49]  You know, we tried not fighting wars of aggression.
[01:03:52]  That didn't work out.
[01:03:53]  So, well, so now we got to fight wars of aggression.
[01:03:55]  Of course, there's a million questions that this Ben Shapiro philosophy would lead to.
[01:03:59]  Like, oh, okay, well, when do we decide who to fight a war of aggression against?
[01:04:05]  I mean, like I said, if you're saying, what, dictators?
[01:04:08]  Okay, what?
[01:04:09]  How many states in the world have dictators right now?
[01:04:12]  Like a few hundred?
[01:04:13]  Are we going to go after all of them?
[01:04:14]  What is it when someone's oppressing their own people?
[01:04:17]  Like, what is it?
[01:04:18]  Or is it just if you're a country surrounding Israel who doesn't have nukes?
[01:04:23]  Because that seems to be more like how it actually plays out.
[01:04:26]  And of course, the other thing that he completely misses is that, you know, the idea of blowback, which is, you know, kind of central to all of this, that it actually has the reverse effect.
[01:04:38]  And that when America, you know, before World War II, as he was saying, when we had that whole isolationist streak, which we weren't that isolationist, but we were a lot more than we are.
[01:04:46]  Teddy Rosa was very isolated.
[01:04:48]  Right.
[01:04:48]  Yeah.
[01:04:49]  You know, like we always meddled around, particularly in Latin America.
[01:04:52]  But if, to be fair, we were more non-interventionist before World War II.
[01:04:59]  And why weren't we dealing with all these Muslim terrorist fanatics back then?
[01:05:04]  I mean, why weren't they coming like bombs existed?
[01:05:06]  Why weren't they strapping them to their chest?
[01:05:07]  Why did Syria vote to have America rule over them after World War II?
[01:05:13]  Like, why?
[01:05:14]  I mean, why did they like us over there?
[01:05:16]  Why is it not until the creation of Israel, until we side with Israel, until we put our military bases there, until we starve the children of Iraq to death, that then we deal with Osama bin Laden?
[01:05:26]  I mean, if you're telling me it's, if you're telling me when we're non-interventionist, the threats bubble up and then come over here, shouldn't it have been worse then than it is now since we've been way more interventionist?
[01:05:38]  If you're telling me it's just radical Islam, did the religion of Islam get radical in the last couple decades?
[01:05:44]  I think it's been pretty much the same thing for like, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years.
[01:05:53]  They hit us for our freedoms, Dave.
[01:05:54]  Well, yeah, there you go.
[01:05:56]  There you go.
[01:05:56]  All right, let's play a little more of Benny Boy.
[01:05:59]  Over time.
[01:06:00]  And every so often we're reminded of this.
[01:06:02]  In 9-11, we were reminded that we can leave the Middle East alone.
[01:06:05]  We can basically have a light footprint in the Middle East.
[01:06:08]  We can say that that region of the world has not much to do with us.
[01:06:11]  And that will not stop terrorists from hating us and wanting to attack us and wanting to kill American citizens.
[01:06:15]  And again, there are two ways of viewing America's military response.
[01:06:18]  I mean, look, we can have a light footprint.
[01:06:22]  Except when did Osama bin Laden really get radicalized?
[01:06:27]  I mean, our light footprint involved, you know, military bases in Saudi Arabia.
[01:06:34]  It involved bombing campaigns in Iraq, a full UN blockade around the country of Iraq.
[01:06:41]  It was actually, I mean, come on, it's when we increased our footprint in there that we started dealing with more of the terrorism.
[01:06:46]  The relation is undeniable.
[01:06:49]  And, you know, it's like...
[01:06:50]  He said it in a letter to America.
[01:06:52]  Yeah.
[01:06:53]  And what's funny is people are like, well, you know, in that letter, he also mentions, you know, women in this immorality and everything.
[01:07:01]  I'm like, yeah, he's just using that to rally the, you know, the radical, the more radical people to him.
[01:07:07]  Well, of course, no, I agree with you on that too.
[01:07:10]  But even part of that is, in a sense, America imposing their will on that part of the world.
[01:07:17]  I mean, right?
[01:07:18]  So like somebody like this is where they show these pictures of like women in mini skirts in Iraq under the Shah.
[01:07:24]  And then they're like, oh, I'm sorry, in Iran under the Shah.
[01:07:27]  And then when, you know, there's the Iranian revolution, they're like, oh, well, look at them now.
[01:07:31]  And it's like, yeah, yeah, okay.
[01:07:33]  I don't think that's great.
[01:07:34]  But, you know, the libertarian in me isn't really saying we can go tell everybody how they're going to run their fucking, you know, like their country.
[01:07:43]  And also, it's like, well, how does that play to the radical Islamist?
[01:07:47]  He's like, oh, look, you used to have women in mini skirts when we fucking enforced our rules on you.
[01:07:52]  They're like, yeah, we don't want that shit.
[01:07:53]  So what you'd want to do is have some, you know, let them kind of come to their own conclusion and hopefully realize, oh, you know, freedom to wear mini skirts isn't the worst thing in the world.
[01:08:01]  But like, yeah, so, okay, so he threw that in there too.
[01:08:04]  But do you really think women in mini skirts would be enough to fucking rally people up to go want to fucking blow themselves up, killing people?
[01:08:13]  Or would it maybe be, you know, if you, if they've seen their family slaughtered, that might help a little bit more.
[01:08:18]  You know, what's interesting, though, is I know a few people from Iran and they're the nicest people I've ever met.
[01:08:25]  And then if you talk to somebody who has been to Iran, who doesn't have an agenda, doesn't go there with a preconceived notion, they talk about how they're just the nicest people.
[01:08:37]  I remember Anthony Bourdain talking about how they were just everything that he had been told about the Iranian people was just completely wrong.
[01:08:45]  Yeah.
[01:08:45]  Yeah.
[01:08:45]  And they do have like nightclubs and shit like that.
[01:08:48]  There's a whole like underground culture where they don't fucking listen to the goddamn government.
[01:08:52]  And you know what I mean?
[01:08:53]  It's like, you know, again, you can think of a lot of things that are against the government rules here.
[01:08:58]  They like don't kill like gay people.
[01:09:01]  They like, they actually have, I learned this about Tehran and it blew me away.
[01:09:07]  They're the plastic surgery capital of the world.
[01:09:10]  And one of the reasons they do it is because if they find out one of if a family member finds out someone's gay, they like try to convince them to have a sex change.
[01:09:21]  So that really, yeah, I didn't know that.
[01:09:24]  Yeah.
[01:09:24]  It's some pretty interesting stuff going on.
[01:09:26]  Wow.
[01:09:27]  Yeah.
[01:09:29]  It's, but yeah, I mean, like, I have a really good friend who's from Iran and everything.
[01:09:34]  And he doesn't want to live there and everything.
[01:09:36]  But, you know, he's, he doesn't have the most horrible things.
[01:09:40]  You know, he doesn't have all these horrible stories and everything.
[01:09:42]  And especially about the people.
[01:09:44]  And that's, that's the problem is, and I know this is really fundamental, but associating the people of a country with their government is just the worst, man.
[01:09:54]  I don't want to be associated with this government.
[01:09:57]  I don't want people to think about when I've traveled outside the country and people start asking me questions and everything.
[01:10:03]  I'm like the first person.
[01:10:05]  Even this was 20 years ago.
[01:10:06]  I was the first person to go, whoa, wait a minute.
[01:10:08]  Whoa, whoa, whoa.
[01:10:09]  I'm not my government.
[01:10:10]  I'm just here for peace.
[01:10:12]  I'm a peaceful person and I'm here for commerce.
[01:10:15]  We're going to have some drinks and everything like that.
[01:10:18]  But yeah, people forget.
[01:10:20]  And it's so easy.
[01:10:21]  And they demonized, and it really started with Russia demonizing the people of Russia because of their government.
[01:10:30]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:10:31]  And then, of course, you see like with the Soviet citizens, even after, what was it, 70 years of Soviet rule, they still were, as soon as they got the opportunity to break that thing up, they were ready to do it.
[01:10:44]  They were happy to tear down that wall and start dancing in the streets with the people of West Berlin.
[01:10:51]  Well, yeah, because they were suffering that East German Stasi-made porn.
[01:10:55]  Did you see that?
[01:10:56]  Did you see that a couple months ago?
[01:10:58]  It came out that like porn in East Germany was like made by the Stasi.
[01:11:03]  Really?
[01:11:04]  Yes.
[01:11:04]  Oh, really?
[01:11:05]  No, I didn't see that.
[01:11:06]  That's fucking hilarious.
[01:11:07]  And I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I can find that somewhere online, but I really don't want to.
[01:11:13]  I'm going to pass on that one.
[01:11:15]  Well, yeah.
[01:11:16]  Okay.
[01:11:16]  Yeah.
[01:11:16]  I'd be tearing down that wall too in that situation.
[01:11:19]  I need some free market porn.
[01:11:22]  But it is like, you know, and of course, you know that from living here.
[01:11:26]  It's like, and obviously different cultures are different, but the idea that anybody would be completely associated with their government and we live under a supposed democracy.
[01:11:38]  I mean, in Iran, it's not even like they're getting a real vote.
[01:11:41]  I mean, maybe they get a vote, but it's like, it's even more of a sham election than ours are.
[01:11:44]  Like, they're really like the people that are selected to be allowed to run.
[01:11:49]  But anyway, all right, let's play a little bit more of the Ben Shapiro show.
[01:11:53]  Response to events like this.
[01:11:54]  One is that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, which killed on the order of 2,000 Americans, that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, America then entered a war in which 200,000 Americans were killed, right, in World War II.
[01:12:07]  Was that a disproportionate response?
[01:12:09]  Yes.
[01:12:09]  In some ways, I think there are some isolationists who would argue, yes, Pat Buchanan, for example, has sort of argued yes.
[01:12:15]  The same thing has happened in the aftermath of 9-11.
[01:12:17]  There's the argument that was made that they, yes, they killed 3,000 of our citizens, but then we've been involved in wars that have killed more American troops than that.
[01:12:25]  More American troops have died in those wars.
[01:12:27]  But this fundamentally misstates the role of the American military and the role of America in the world.
[01:12:31]  And that is the American military, people sign up.
[01:12:33]  It's particularly now.
[01:12:34]  It's a volunteer military.
[01:12:35]  These are heroes who are signing up to defend America's freedom.
[01:12:37]  They're not signing up in order to be paid to sit at a base in Georgia.
[01:12:42]  That is not why they sign up and to treat them as children, to treat our soldiers, as the left likes to do, as sort of pawns in political games, where anytime somebody says we need to use troops to defend our embassy in Baghdad, for example, then the left says, well, how many troops are you willing to put at risk?
[01:12:57]  Listen, that's a fine question, but it's not a fine question if you do it every single time.
[01:13:01]  We talk about using military force in defense.
[01:13:04]  Pawns are right there.
[01:13:05]  They are pawns.
[01:13:06]  But Ben Shapiro says that if you ask how many troops you're willing to risk, which he then even catches himself and goes, and look, that's a fair question to ask, but to ask it every time.
[01:13:15]  Yeah, Ben, we're going to ask it every time.
[01:13:17]  Every fucking time you ask, how many of our young men are you willing to fucking sacrifice for this mission?
[01:13:25]  And then you have the nerve of saying that's the left using the troops as pawns.
[01:13:30]  You are quite literally sending them in as pawns.
[01:13:33]  Like the definition of pawns.
[01:13:35]  This is what you do with pawns.
[01:13:39]  That's the whole point of pawns, that you can sacrifice them.
[01:13:42]  You ever notice the people in the press, people like Ben Shapiro that are most happy and exuberant to send men into harm's way are the ones who would never do it themselves.
[01:13:57]  Never.
[01:13:58]  That article that we talked about when I was on your show, the episode you just recently shared, that was an article from Ben Shapiro when he was of age to go join the military.
[01:14:08]  And it was 10 months after 9-11, and he had plenty of time.
[01:14:12]  You know, it's like, I think I was recently talking with the bird from Friends Against Government, and I was like, after 9-11, it was like after a week and a half, I stopped being upset.
[01:14:23]  You know, I got my mind back.
[01:14:25]  I got my composure back and everything like that.
[01:14:28]  10 months later, he's putting out these articles about how, I mean, just kill civilians.
[01:14:34]  Who cares?
[01:14:35]  Just bomb everywhere.
[01:14:36]  It's like, can you call someone at the CIA to learn about blowback?
[01:14:41]  I mean, that was a term.

=== Israel Occupies Southern Lebanon (15:31) ===

[01:14:42]  It was already there.
[01:14:43]  Right.
[01:14:44]  You know, it's like, I mean, come on, don't you understand exactly what you're doing?
[01:14:47]  I mean, forget about the whole morale.
[01:14:49]  Forget about the morality of it for a second.
[01:14:52]  Just how many enemies are you trying to make?
[01:14:55]  I mean, Scott talks about, you know, in the book, Fool's Aaron, that when McMaster was on the ground in, was it McMaster?
[01:15:05]  Who was the general, the one that Trump had as it might have been Mattis.
[01:15:13]  Mattis, yeah.
[01:15:14]  Mattis was on the ground there, and there was like, what?
[01:15:18]  400 members of al-Qaeda that they were trying to kill.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:22]  And then they let they dropped that daisy cutter and got a bunch of them and everything, but then they escaped into the mountains and everything like that.
[01:15:31]  And they could, and Mattis calls and goes, yeah, let us go.
[01:15:34]  Let's go after him.
[01:15:35]  And they're like, stand down.
[01:15:37]  It's like, come on.
[01:15:38]  What do we do with this?
[01:15:39]  You want to talk about pawns?
[01:15:41]  Yeah.
[01:15:41]  Those people there, those men there who were, they were the biggest pawns.
[01:15:46]  It's just ridiculous.
[01:15:47]  Yeah.
[01:15:47]  And it's not even, I mean, you know, and the idea that if we don't, like, if we don't, and Scott's made this point too, that if we don't like occupy Afghanistan, the problem is that, you know, if we retreat, then they'll just plan another 9-11 from Afghanistan as if there's something so special about Afghanistan.
[01:16:09]  They planned it from Germany.
[01:16:10]  And they planned it from Europe.
[01:16:12]  And it was legal immigration of how they got in.
[01:16:15]  They had visas to come in.
[01:16:17]  So like, I mean, this whole thing is like, it's just absurd.
[01:16:24]  And of course, you know, Ben Shapiro is talking about how because it's a, which is funny that he mentions because it's a volunteer army, you know, that they're all heroes, even though World War II was his great example, which wasn't exactly a volunteer army.
[01:16:39]  But, you know, well, this is a volunteer army, and I will not have you use them as pawns by questioning whether or not we should send them off.
[01:16:48]  And the idea that these soldiers join up, they don't join up to go sit in a base in fucking Georgia or something like that.
[01:16:57]  It's like, yeah, I'm sure.
[01:16:59]  Why don't we let them voluntarily pick?
[01:17:01]  Why don't we let the soldiers voluntarily pick whether they get stationed in Germany or Fallujah?
[01:17:07]  And we'll see.
[01:17:08]  I mean, some of them probably actually do go because they want to fight and see action, but a whole bunch of them are going for like the benefits and the shit they're getting bribed into this for.
[01:17:16]  And they'd be just fine to go chill.
[01:17:20]  Yeah, my cousin joined the army at 34 and he became a cook.
[01:17:28]  And they sent him to Afghanistan.
[01:17:30]  Guess what he was doing two weeks into his Afghanistan tour?
[01:17:34]  What's that?
[01:17:35]  He was out on patrol.
[01:17:36]  Yeah.
[01:17:38]  Yeah.
[01:17:38]  So, yeah.
[01:17:39]  Join the military.
[01:17:40]  Be a cook.
[01:17:40]  You know, be a chaplain or something like that.
[01:17:42]  Don't be surprised.
[01:17:43]  Or, you know, the worst is, I don't know if people realize this.
[01:17:47]  I had a former Coast Guard guy on my podcast.
[01:17:51]  Yeah.
[01:17:51]  He was fighting Somali pirates in the Coast Guard.
[01:17:55]  What coast is he protecting?
[01:17:57]  Right.
[01:17:58]  I don't think a lot of people realize that, that the Coast Guard was sent over to fight Somali pirates.
[01:18:04]  They're part of AFRICOM.
[01:18:06]  Yeah.
[01:18:08]  And it's just, you know, it's the idea that, and it's not as if this is being said like in a vacuum.
[01:18:14]  This is said in today's world after fighting the longest wars in American history.
[01:18:20]  And we're all over the place.
[01:18:21]  I mean, we've fought wars in, you know, since 9-11, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, in Pakistan.
[01:18:34]  I mean, all over the place.
[01:18:35]  If you're saying where there's military strikes, I'm missing a few.
[01:18:38]  Niger, it's like all over the place.
[01:18:40]  Ethiopia.
[01:18:41]  Ethiopia, yeah.
[01:18:44]  Financing and training Ethiopian soldiers to go into Somalia to fight against al-Shabaab.
[01:18:49]  And in every last one of these places, I mean, we have nothing to show for a single one of them.
[01:18:55]  So it'd be one thing if you're talking about like, well, you know, if you're like, well, you know, I mean, hey, we, we lost a couple thousand people here and then we've lost thousands more since we had these wars, but is that disproportional?
[01:19:08]  Well, Pat Buchanan would say yes, but you know, I think it's that's not the role of American foreign policy.
[01:19:12]  It's like, okay, well, what are we sacrificing those guys for?
[01:19:17]  Just please explain this to me.
[01:19:18]  What is it that we're sacrificing?
[01:19:20]  I mean, there's more, you know, radical Sunnis who want to fucking kill us now.
[01:19:26]  Now there seem to be more radical Shiites who want to fucking kill us.
[01:19:29]  Which one of these countries is better?
[01:19:31]  Who have we helped?
[01:19:32]  Who have we made safer in the world?
[01:19:34]  Can anyone actually argue that we're less likely to deal with terrorists because Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein are gone?
[01:19:43]  That we're more likely to deal with this?
[01:19:45]  All right, let's just play a little bit more because there's another part that gets pretty good in this.
[01:19:49]  Of American assets abroad.
[01:19:51]  So what we have to decide is what we want America's role in the world to be.
[01:19:54]  And also we have to be realistic about the fact that if America retreats from certain areas of the world, other forces take over.
[01:19:59]  If Iran takes over Iraq, if Iran takes over Syria, if Iran takes over Lebanon, if Iran takes over Yemen, that has significant ramifications for America's foreign policy, not just in terms of the economy and shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, but in terms of actual security policy.
[01:20:14]  The fact is the Iranian government is the chief sponsor of worldwide terror on planet Earth right now.
[01:20:19]  If the Iranians take over the region, that maximizes Russians.
[01:20:23]  So here's the, okay.
[01:20:26]  Here's what's funny.
[01:20:27]  Why would they close the straits of Hormuz?
[01:20:29]  Well, yeah, I mean, it's just right.
[01:20:30]  That's that's their big threat that they could close this fucking Strait of Hormuz, even though they've never done it theoretically.
[01:20:35]  If they could, then why wouldn't they?
[01:20:37]  And of course, as we've said before, where you go, well, you know, there's a vacuum if we go over there, and then a Iranian power could come into that vacuum and take it over.
[01:20:46]  It's like, look, by the way, fair enough.
[01:20:48]  The safe haven myth.
[01:20:49]  That's what Scott calls the safe haven.
[01:20:50]  But there is something to be said for the fact.
[01:20:53]  I don't completely disagree with the idea that America is exerting power in lots of different areas.
[01:21:00]  And if they leave, somebody else will most likely exert power in a lot of those areas.
[01:21:04]  I'm not expecting them to become Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist states tomorrow.
[01:21:08]  So yes, somebody else is going to exert power there.
[01:21:11]  However, if we topple regimes, somebody else also exerts power there.
[01:21:17]  And that's how Iran got all of this influence in Iraq to begin with.
[01:21:21]  So you can at least start by saying, man, we got this Iraq war completely wrong.
[01:21:25]  I mean, if you can't admit that, that's just crazy.
[01:21:27]  But this fucking Fox News Rush Limbaugh that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world.
[01:21:38]  Just, guys, next time anyone says that to you, answer in one word, receipts.
[01:21:45]  I need to see the receipts on that.
[01:21:47]  I know you make this claim a lot.
[01:21:49]  I know you like to throw this out there.
[01:21:50]  Number one sponsor of terrorism in the world.
[01:21:54]  Show me in what world Iran has sponsored more terrorism than Saudi Arabia, Yisrael, and America.
[01:22:04]  Cutter, UAE.
[01:22:05]  Cutter.
[01:22:06]  I mean, please show me.
[01:22:07]  Show me in what world they've sponsored more terrorism.
[01:22:09]  By the way, we've fucking sponsored more.
[01:22:11]  The United States federal government has sponsored more terrorists than Iran and way more effectively.
[01:22:16]  Al-Qaeda's air forces.
[01:22:18]  Yeah, really?
[01:22:18]  We're sponsoring them right now.
[01:22:21]  And Israel throw Turkey on that list too?
[01:22:25]  Iran just gets this credit.
[01:22:27]  And like nobody's ever pushed to go like, show me the evidence.
[01:22:31]  Show me the evidence that they support more.
[01:22:33]  Am I the only person who during that whole thing where they're like, oh, we're worried about the Kurds because Turkey's, I think I was the only person going, if they're our NATO ally, don't you just get them on the phone and say, can you guys stand down a little bit?
[01:22:47]  Well, the funniest thing about all that was that it was such a great argument for just the fucking absurdity of NATO.
[01:22:54]  So you go, oh my God, our big concern is that Turkey's going to slaughter the Kurds.
[01:22:59]  And you go, do you realize? that if the Kurds heard you say that and attacked Turkey, we have to go to war with the Kurds in defense of Turkey because they're our NATO ally.
[01:23:11]  And that's what NATO is.
[01:23:13]  It's a joint defense agreement.
[01:23:14]  So isn't it this at the very least an argument that Turkey shouldn't be in NATO?
[01:23:19]  I mean, like, at the very least.
[01:23:20]  And they're like, no, no, NATO's a historic institution.
[01:23:23]  Have to keep the institution.
[01:23:26]  You know, an institution for institution's sake.
[01:23:28]  And I've heard a lot of people like shit on Chomsky because they say, oh, Chomsky's blind spot is Turkey.
[01:23:35]  Well, Turkey's fucking evil, man.
[01:23:37]  Turkey is really evil.
[01:23:39]  Oh, yeah.
[01:23:40]  No, and Turkey, of course, was in with the U.S.-Saudi CIA-Israel plan of arming ISIS.
[01:23:47]  That was all of them together.
[01:23:49]  But the other thing, the other element to this that I think is really funny, right?
[01:23:55]  Is that, and this is, I guess, just back to the pure anarcho-capitalist philosophy stuff.
[01:24:02]  Uh-oh, you're going to upset some people in the group.
[01:24:04]  Yeah, well, I sure will.
[01:24:05]  But, well, fuck them.
[01:24:06]  This is an ANCAP show.
[01:24:07]  Deal with that.
[01:24:09]  But so the definition of terrorism, more or less, is acts of violence for a political purpose, but not if a state does it.
[01:24:24]  But if Iran does it.
[01:24:27]  So Iran is not only the sponsor of terrorists.
[01:24:30]  Understand what everybody in the corporate press has been saying.
[01:24:32]  Donald Trump just killed a terrorist.
[01:24:34]  And Donald Trump just killed the terrorist, but he was a state actor.
[01:24:38]  So wait a minute, how come he's not shielded from this terrorist label?
[01:24:41]  This is a guy who's working directly with the government of Iran.
[01:24:45]  Not working with the government of Iran.
[01:24:47]  He's a member of the government of Iran.
[01:24:48]  Okay?
[01:24:49]  So why does he so now, no, no, no, hold on.
[01:24:52]  If we're taking that shield away, which is just an imaginary fucking shield, the idea that when a government does it, if the U.S. military does it, it's not terrorism.
[01:25:01]  But if Hezbollah does it, it is.
[01:25:03]  Why?
[01:25:04]  By the way, Hezbollah has got some fucking political control inside Lebanon.
[01:25:08]  I think they still have some representatives there that are official Hezbollah.
[01:25:12]  So do they get off that list now too?
[01:25:14]  I thought once, like, because if you're going to take that shield away, and now all of a sudden, being a state actor doesn't protect you from the charge of being a terrorist, well, now who's the worst terrorists?
[01:25:27]  Now who's the worst terrorists since your great World War II, Ben Shapiro?
[01:25:31]  Who's killed more people abroad?
[01:25:35]  How many does Iran have on their track record?
[01:25:38]  I'm just asking a simple mathematical question.
[01:25:41]  How many innocent civilians has Iran killed since 1945?
[01:25:46]  And how many has the United States of America's military killed since 1945?
[01:25:51]  Because spoiler alert, ours is in the millions.
[01:25:55]  Well, millions.
[01:25:56]  You know what they'll say?
[01:25:57]  What he'd say is he'd say that Iran has been sponsoring terrorism all along.
[01:26:02]  So every life that's lost in Islamist terrorism is on Iran.
[01:26:07]  That's right.
[01:26:08]  It's all on the...
[01:26:09]  And like you said, receipts.
[01:26:11]  Yeah.
[01:26:12]  Prove it.
[01:26:12]  I just want to say it.
[01:26:13]  Prove it.
[01:26:13]  Yeah.
[01:26:14]  Just show me that.
[01:26:14]  Because you say this like it's a statement of fact.
[01:26:17]  So I would just like to see the evidence for that.
[01:26:21]  And we have proof that about Saudi Arabia and everything, the whole, was it JASTA where they were going to allow American Americans who lost people on 9-11 to sue people in Saudi Arabia, especially the ones that they knew financed 9-11 and everything.
[01:26:39]  And then it was, it was shut, that was shot down.
[01:26:41]  Yeah.
[01:26:43]  Which would have opened up a can of worms about how many Muslims can sue America.
[01:26:49]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:49]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:26:50]  Which is an interesting idea.
[01:26:52]  Oh, it'd be great to shut everything down.
[01:26:54]  Yeah, and of course, the problem with going after governments for money is that governments have no money.
[01:27:01]  They just have tax, you know, cattle.
[01:27:04]  And fucking those people didn't necessarily do anything to you at all.
[01:27:07]  And so you just end up, it's basically somebody else is going to get robbed.
[01:27:11]  So it's, there's no real way.
[01:27:12]  This is one of the worst things about the state.
[01:27:14]  There's no real way to get justice against the state because it's like they don't have anything.
[01:27:17]  They just have what they steal from their people.
[01:27:19]  Well, yeah, they steal from us.
[01:27:21]  And then when they fuck up and have to pay something out, they steal from us.
[01:27:26]  To pay it out.
[01:27:27]  Yeah.
[01:27:27]  Yeah.
[01:27:27]  To pay out their damages.
[01:27:29]  Right.
[01:27:29]  Yeah.
[01:27:30]  No, it's really, it's really something.
[01:27:31]  But this, this idea that Iran is the, you know, the great sponsor of terrorists.
[01:27:36]  Well, look, I mean, again, what Ben Shapiro is clearly concerned with here is Israel.
[01:27:43]  And he gets to at some point.
[01:27:44]  We're not going to have time to play it, but at some point he basically says it.
[01:27:48]  But it's like, okay, Hezbollah, look, this is the same way.
[01:27:52]  Scott Horton said this to me once, and it really changed forever, like my perspective on these things because I realized he was right.
[01:27:58]  And we were talking about Iran.
[01:28:00]  It was like, I think a couple of years ago, and I had him on, and we did a show about Iran.
[01:28:03]  And I was just like, this is just so ridiculous.
[01:28:05]  And I was, I was, you know, like kind of saying some of the old, you know, Ron Paul lines that he used to use at the debates, which were amazing.
[01:28:11]  And he'd be like, Iran, like, everyone's talking about Iran using a nuclear weapon.
[01:28:16]  He goes, Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and they don't have an air force capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to us.
[01:28:22]  This is all a made-up conversation.
[01:28:24]  And he would say, Iran is an oil-rich country that doesn't have enough gasoline for their people.
[01:28:30]  This is how backward they are compared to us.
[01:28:32]  This is no threat to us.
[01:28:34]  There's no threat.
[01:28:35]  And I was talking to Scott about this, and I was like, how can these people pretend that Iran is the number one threat?
[01:28:40]  The idea that Iran poses a threat to the United States of America is so laughably absurd.
[01:28:47]  And he was like, yeah, because he goes, but Dave, that's because you're looking at it as a threat to our nation.
[01:28:54]  But that's not what they're talking about.
[01:28:56]  They're saying they're a threat to America to them means they're a threat to the empire.
[01:29:01]  And in that sense, it's kind of true.
[01:29:04]  From that perspective, they're not wrong.
[01:29:06]  They are a threat to us ruling the world.
[01:29:09]  They're a threat to us ruling that part of the Middle East, us, the federal government, not me and you.
[01:29:16]  And in the same sense, Russia's a threat because they're not under U.S. hegemony.
[01:29:22]  They're not under U.S. control.
[01:29:24]  So in the same sense, and in this sense, Hezbollah is a legitimate threat.
[01:29:31]  Hezbollah is a legitimate threat to Israel's ability to occupy southern Lebanon.
[01:29:37]  They are.
[01:29:38]  Now, to any sane person, you'd be like, yeah, but Israel doesn't have a right to fucking occupy southern Lebanon.
[01:29:42]  They're not a threat to Israel, the nation.
[01:29:45]  But that's not what they look at it as.
[01:29:46]  It's the empire.
[01:29:47]  So that's where they go, oh, they sponsor this terrorism.
[01:29:50]  Like, oh my God, Hezbollah attacked Israel in southern Lebanon when they were occupying and kicked them out.
[01:29:56]  It's like, okay, that's their big crime is they won.
[01:29:59]  They fucking drove them out of Lebanon.
[01:30:01]  So they fucking won.
[01:30:02]  But if you're in America, if your concern is the nation of America, like who can actually attack us over here?
[01:30:10]  Well, fucking Hezbollah has never posed a threat to us at all.

=== The Vague Meaning of Racism (03:06) ===

[01:30:14]  We have had four countries.
[01:30:16]  Yeah, really.
[01:30:17]  Now, we have had an issue in America with two terrorist organizations that legitimately have attacked us in the West and inspired attacks in America.
[01:30:29]  two are al-Qaeda and ISIS.
[01:30:31]  That's it.
[01:30:32]  Both Sunni, both radical, both funded and armed by the United States of America.
[01:30:38]  Us with our tax dollars.
[01:30:41]  So you want to talk about sponsoring terrorism.
[01:30:44]  Sorry, look in the mirror.
[01:30:45]  And then your other precious country, Israel, Ben, has also sponsored those guys.
[01:30:49]  So sorry.
[01:30:51]  Like this Iran shit is all bullshit.
[01:30:54]  And let's hope we don't fucking go to war with them.
[01:30:56]  God damn.
[01:31:00]  The problem with the Ben Shapiros of the world is, you know, and we've talked about this before, is that for somebody who hates identity politics, I mean, his whole identity is wrapped up.
[01:31:11]  I mean, he never takes the Amica off.
[01:31:13]  I mean, it's his whole identity is Jewish and Israel.
[01:31:18]  Oh, yeah.
[01:31:19]  And it's just, and, you know, like Ron Paul, he is always saying that Ron Paul and pretty much anybody who speaks out against the relationship, which I don't even know what it really is.
[01:31:35]  I mean, I can ponder what the relationship between Israel and the United States is, but he always says anybody who criticizes that is anti-Semitic.
[01:31:43]  Right.
[01:31:44]  I mean, and he's gotten to the point.
[01:31:45]  I mean, really, like racist.
[01:31:47]  What does anti-Semitic mean anymore?
[01:31:49]  Yeah.
[01:31:49]  I mean, Semitic includes the Arabs.
[01:31:52]  So technically, he doesn't, you know, it's just a pejorative to shut people down.
[01:31:59]  Yeah, shut down conversation.
[01:32:01]  Yeah.
[01:32:01]  I mean, it's like, what is it?
[01:32:02]  That's what I was saying, like, with the term racist.
[01:32:04]  It's like, what does it even mean?
[01:32:06]  Like, are you saying you want to like take black people's shit or you want them enslaved or you want them like forced segregation by the government?
[01:32:15]  Or are you saying like you don't like them or you say mean things?
[01:32:20]  Because those are pretty different, you know?
[01:32:22]  Or maybe it's not even any of that.
[01:32:24]  It's just that you're like, I don't believe in affirmative action.
[01:32:27]  You know, it's like, it's all of that.
[01:32:30]  All of that gets like literally from I think we should fucking like ethnically cleanse you to I don't believe in affirmative action all falls under the banner of this term racist.
[01:32:41]  And you're like, those are wildly different things.
[01:32:43]  Like they range from evil to correct.
[01:32:46]  And they all fall under the banner of this one word.
[01:32:48]  And anti-Semitic, again, falls, it takes the banner of like, we should throw them all in ovens to I don't believe in foreign aid.
[01:32:56]  And that's all under the banner of anti-Semitism.
[01:32:59]  And after a while, someone calls you these terms and I've been called both of them.
[01:33:03]  And it's like, what does this mean?
[01:33:06]  Like this is just the term is so broad that it means nothing.
[01:33:10]  And like, again, there's like, and then it's like, well, you're racist and you're anti-Semitic.
[01:33:14]  It's like, well, I'm very against the evil half of that.
[01:33:17]  You know, like I'm against all that shit over here on the evil side.

=== Libertarian Institute Guest Matt Freeman (02:31) ===

[01:33:21]  But over on the reasonable side, I think we should probably talk about that.
[01:33:25]  So it's all, you know, it's all a goddamn joke.
[01:33:28]  All right.
[01:33:28]  Anyway, it's always fucking great.
[01:33:30]  Always great having you on.
[01:33:31]  So people can read your stuff at the Libertarian Institute.
[01:33:33]  LibertarianInstitute.org.
[01:33:35]  See my name up in the masthead.
[01:33:37]  Fuck yeah.
[01:33:38]  Free Man Me on the Wall podcast.
[01:33:40]  Got an episode dropping on Monday with the holidays and everything.
[01:33:44]  I was doing episodes that were old, like released the episode from a couple years ago that we did.
[01:33:51]  And I did.
[01:33:52]  I released today an episode where somebody else was interviewing me on their show.
[01:33:56]  But Monday, episode 360, we're going to be talking about gun grabs because, you know, talk everything about Virginia and they're going to gun grab.
[01:34:05]  Well, we're going to talk about the most important gun grab that most people don't know about in U.S. history, and that's wounded knee, the massacring of Indians because they didn't want to give up their guns.
[01:34:15]  Yeah.
[01:34:15]  And that's about 70 minutes of history of the Indian wars.
[01:34:21]  Oh, awesome.
[01:34:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:34:22]  So is that just you or you got a guest on that?
[01:34:24]  I know I have a guest, Matt Freeman from the Status Quo podcast.
[01:34:28]  He's really, what a story, too.
[01:34:30]  He was in Iraq, soldier in Iraq, came home, all sorts of problems, got hooked on painkillers, started dealing with painkillers, did three years in jail because of it, came out, totally turned his life around.
[01:34:45]  And his podcast is, we talk about receipts, he brings the receipts for everything he talks about.
[01:34:53]  Awesome, man.
[01:34:53]  It's going to be amazing.
[01:34:55]  Yeah.
[01:34:56]  So, yeah.
[01:34:57]  Just that.
[01:34:57]  And Libertarian Institute, we had a big fish step up and say the next $20,000 that people were doing, the fun drive, and the next $20,000 that people donate will be matched by this one person.
[01:35:15]  Awesome.
[01:35:16]  So, yeah, we're in the process of that.
[01:35:18]  LibertarianInstitute.org.
[01:35:19]  You open it up, you'll see it.
[01:35:21]  LibertarianInstitute.org is literally one of the most just incredible websites on the planet.
[01:35:27]  A great organization.
[01:35:28]  I literally go to the website every single day.
[01:35:30]  So I highly recommend it.
[01:35:31]  Free Man Beyond the Wall is one of the best podcasts out there.
[01:35:34]  So please go check that out.
[01:35:35]  Always a pleasure, brother.
[01:35:36]  Always love having conversations with you.
[01:35:38]  And if you guys want to come hang out with us, we'll both be at the Soho Forum on Monday.
[01:35:44]  Soho Forum is always a good time.
[01:35:46]  Always a good time, brother.
[01:35:47]  All right.
[01:35:47]  That's our show for today.
[01:35:48]  We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode.
[01:35:51]  Peace.