Scott Horton and James Smith dissect Donald Trump's legacy, highlighting the First Step Act while condemning his Yemen war support driven by Saudi arms sales. They expose corporate media bias, Senator Lindsey Graham's moral inconsistency regarding Mohammed bin Salman, and the anti-war left's diminished capacity under Obama. The discussion critiques the Bush administration's sabotage of North Korea diplomacy, John Bolton's role in collapsing talks, and Trump's destruction of the Iran deal, arguing these actions make future peace impossible. Ultimately, the episode suggests that pettiness and corporate interests have eroded global stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trump Pardons for Assange and Snowden00:08:19
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.
We are back with part two of the legacy of Donald Trump.
And of course, I am being joined by the great Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, also author of The Great Ron Paul.
You can check out his show at thescotthortonshow.org.
Check him out at anti-war.com and thelibertarianinstitute.org.
All really, really wonderful sites with incredibly great work that I go to religiously every single day.
I'm on all of those sites.
So I advise you guys to check them out as well.
And like I said, I hope you had a great Christmas.
We're right back to it as Donald Trump's presidency is nearing the end.
We're talking about what the legacy of Donald Trump will be, how we grade his last four years.
If you didn't catch part one, go check that out.
We talked a lot about foreign policy, the Russia hoax, many of his just god-awful appointments.
And look, we end up knocking Trump a lot in that episode, and we're going to continue to do that today.
But as we did say last time, maybe I'll start just quickly again saying, because there were some really good things that came out of the Trump presidency.
And we both agreed on the last episode that just by far the number one thing, which really, it might be really meaningful and important for the country going forward, is that Donald Trump really did make it okay to be a right winger and say you're against these wars.
And there's real value that the talking point about Donald Trump was that, hey, he didn't get us into any new wars, as you made that point on the last show, Scott.
And on top of that, I think that Donald Trump did a lot to provoke an insane response out of the corporate press, out of the deep state, and thus by doing that, exposed them in a way that no other president I've ever seen has done.
The idea of a deep state is popularized now.
The idea that, hey, it's not really just the government that we see.
There's also these shadowy spy bureaucrats who are unelected, and they seem to control an awful lot.
That's more in the forefront of people's minds.
So I do think there's something really positive in all of that.
I also just want to briefly mention this because it wouldn't be fair to do this episode as two bleeding heart libertarians and give no credit to Donald Trump for the First Step Act, which really was something amazing.
And it's not as far as me or you would like to see it taken.
But Donald Trump, on top of signing the First Step Act into law, he gave clemency to a number of people, saved several human lives.
And I don't care if it's because that weirdo Kim Kardashian, who looks like a 3D printed lady, went to the Oval Office and convinced him to do it.
He saved a few people's lives who really didn't deserve to be behind bars.
And so I think he deserves some credit for that.
Anything else you want to add to that, Scott, or any other quick positive before we just rake the guy over the coals for another hour and a half?
No, but speaking of pardons, I mean, he pardoned a cop the other day who had sicked a dog on a homeless guy and so badly that a prosecutor somewhere wanted to hold her accountable for it.
Oh, my God.
So, I mean, that's the real Donald Trump right there.
Assange and Snowden, you know, one can stay in his dungeon.
The other one can stay in his exile.
But the cop that mauled the man with the vicious German Shepherd, she's fine.
She can go.
Yeah, and the Blackwater guys, he left all the stuff.
He's just wear masker.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, yeah, it's really awful.
And it just feels like such a, you know, it's like the same thing with Donald Trump.
He, he, even people like me, and I'm sure you to some degree too, he almost lulls you into this sense of rooting for him.
Oh, maybe he'll do the right thing here.
And every time it's just a big kick in the gut.
And, you know, there were like these, I think it was the, was it the Daily Beast or there was one of those popular online publications that that had a report at that he is seriously considering pardoning Russ Ulbric and and this might actually happen.
And like the, if people don't know, it's the Silicon, what was it, the Silk Road guy who was just awful, awful, horrible story.
Me and you both personally know his mother.
And it would just, that one personally would mean a lot to us.
And I was excited about that possibility.
Of course, there's the rumors that have been going on about Snowden and Assange and both of them, you could kind of see a reason why Trump might pardon them because, well, I mean, Snowden's the one who revealed the spying apparatus that was turned on him in his campaign.
And Assange was the one who released all that dirt that helped him get elected.
And so you'd think even just by his own narrow self-interest, maybe he'd have a reason to do that.
And I guess there's still a little bit of time left, but nope, he got Manaford and he got Roger Stone, which I do think both of those were right.
But it's, I'm losing hope that we're going to see anything great out of the lame duck Trump.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess I don't really remember this so much under Clinton and W. Bush, but under Obama and under Trump both, you have this phenomenon where there's this hope for the secret Obama in there who at the last minute is going to finally do the right thing.
It just never happens.
And I think, you know, you have the same phenomenon on the right where, I mean, come on.
If you were Donald Trump, you pardon Assange.
Why not?
What the hell is, you know, you'd expect him to, if only like the burden would be on him to explain why not to go ahead and do this, as you said, if only for his own political reasons, his own selfish reasons.
You know, Glenn Greenwald went on the Tucker Carlson show.
And at one point, he abandoned all pretense that he was even talking to Tucker.
And he's directly addressing the president of the United States through the camera.
They're like, listen, Mr. President, you know who would piss off or the pardon of these guys would piss off more than anyone else?
Susan Rice and Jim Comey and James Clapper and John Brennan and Hillary Clinton, right?
More than any other group of people, the very same people who are your worst enemies, people who, I forgot if he said this part, the people who framed him for treason with Russia, they're the ones who also hate Assange and Snowden almost as much as they hate you.
So if only to rub it in their face, pardon these guys.
And he still won't do it.
I mean, I don't know, man.
Yeah.
No, it is.
And, you know, hey, I mean, listen, I will be very happy to correct the record if he ends up doing any of that in the next couple of weeks and say, hey, and I'll, I'll praise him if he does it.
But yeah, it's to see him giving out these other pardons.
It's just really awful.
Although I do, as I said before, I do, I support him pardoning Manaford and Roger Stone.
I mean, first off, I'm a libertarian as you are.
Believe anyone should be in a cage who's not a violent criminal anyway?
Um, but also just the fact, like it was just so dirty how they did those guys you know like yeah yeah, absolutely.
Um, so we I I briefly mentioned some uh, some of the bright spots for Donald Trump's uh presidency.
Let's uh start with the?
Um, the most shameful aspect of his presidency and the worst part of his legacy, and just the worst thing in The world uh that perversely, me and you both love to talk about uh, which is Yemen.
Complicity in the Saudi Blockade00:15:42
Um the, the conflict in Yemen uh spawned his entire presidency.
Every single day that Donald Trump's been president uh, people have been dying in Yemen in, uh that, what was already the poorest country in the Middle East before uh, the Saudi U.s war there.
Um, so talk, talk about Yemen and and how that uh, how that that will always be a shadow over Donald Trump's legacy.
Oh yeah well listen, I mean, the whole thing is just absolutely criminal and in the quite literal sense, I have no legal authorization for this intervention whatsoever.
You know, if I tell you that I really disapprove of the way that Trump and Mattis handled the war in eastern Syria.
Hey, at least they can say somehow, by some twists and turns, that the authorization to use force against Bin Laden or, you know, whoever attacked us and anyone associated with them okay, Baghdadi and his guys in eastern Syria yeah, a court would uphold it or the Supreme Court would refuse to hear the case right, no question.
But in in uh, Yemen.
The war we're talking about this is not the war against Al-Qaeda.
There are Al-Qaeda in Yemen, but this is the war for them.
And so where?
When Obama came into power in 2009 and he started the war against AQAP there with the CIA and the AIR Force drone war there, that was at least authorized.
That's all you could say positive about it is that at least it was under the law.
But the war that you're talking about is the war starting in January of 2000 and or March, pardon me, of 2015, which is the war for Al-Qaeda, when America switched sides with the Saudis and launched the war against Al-Qaeda's enemies, the Houthis, and it's not directly for Al-Qaeda IN THE Arabian Peninsula, it's sort of a turn of phrase.
But then, on the other hand, they seized seven towns at one point, including the major port town of Makallah, and for ruled it for like a year, seized military bases and all of their weapons, you know, taxed the people, collected billions of dollars in revenue millions, at least, you know, high millions tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue uh, from people in these port towns.
And so, even according to all of the hawks too, with some concession of the American role in this, um but, and the consensus and the anti-war people too, there's just no denying the fact that Al-Qaeda IN THE Arabian Peninsula, the same guys that bombed the USS COLE in the year 2000 and who had helped to coordinate the September 11th attack.
The Flight 77, one of the guys, Hani Hanjour, who was one of the Flight 77 pilots, his father-in-law ran the switchboard house there in Yemen, where they communicated between Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and in the rest of the world there.
And so this is that same group.
And they have been one of the major and primary beneficiaries of this war.
And so, but that's what makes it absolutely illegal on the face of it to any American participation in it, because there's just no law authorizing it.
And there's no way.
You might twist it a little bit to connect to say the ISIS is still Al-Qaeda, so you can attack ISIS in East Syria, but you cannot twist it all the way 180 degrees and say it authorized the war for Al-Qaeda against the Houthis.
You might as well be, you know, attacking Japan or something.
It's just completely Brazil.
It's just out of the question.
It has nothing to do with it by any stretch of logic there.
But so, I mean, I'll try to say this quick.
Obama started this drone war in 2009.
It was counterproductive the whole time.
All it did was kill innocent people and draw more and more people into Al-Qaeda.
But anyway, in order to wage that war, they paid the dictator Saleh a lot of money and a lot of weapons in order to let them do that.
He took that money and those weapons and he used them to attack a group of Shiites in the north, Zaydi Shiites, a political group called the Houthis.
That's the family that leads the tribe, basically.
And in fact, he used the Muslim Brotherhood and even some of these Al-Qaeda guys to do it.
And anyway, too many details.
This is for, well, just for, because in case you get lost in the details, for anybody who has read Jeremy Scahill's book, Dirty Wars, or if you saw the documentary, Dirty Wars, that's about this war in Yemen, about the early war against Al-Qaeda.
This is where, what's his name?
God damn it, the American Al-Laki.
Yes, where Al-Laki was killed and where his teenage boy was killed later, and Jeremy Scahill goes into it.
So if you remember any of that stuff, that's this original war in Yemen in Obama's time.
And then the dictator's playing this double game where he's using the same people that we're bombing, that he's letting us bomb.
He's using them to attack these Houthis in the north.
And anyway, there's so many details.
If you think American politics is full of backstabbing, Yemeni politics makes the Americans look like the worst rank amateurs.
It's just crazy the way it is.
But I'll try to leave most of it out because it's in my upcoming book and it'll just take too long and no one will be able to follow.
But anyway, so America's bombing the Al-Qaeda guys in the south.
They're bribing the dictator in the capital city in the middle, who's taking the money and the guns and he's attacking the Shiites in the north, right?
But so then the Arab Spring comes in 2011 and all factions agree this dictator's got to go.
So the Muslim Brotherhood and the Houthis and the Southern Socialists and I don't know if the Al-Qaeda guys showed up, but everybody else was demanding his ouster.
And rather than let the people of Yemen decide, Hillary Clinton swooped in and with the Saudis decided to force Saleh, the dictator, out and replace him with his vice president.
Well, instead of retiring to his farm, you know, to a life of quiet study, he took about two-thirds or more of the military with him when he left.
And Saleh did.
And then he went up north and joined the Houthis in a major alliance with his former enemies because it turns out he's a Zaidi Shia, just not a Houthi, but he's close enough.
So they made this major alliance and ended up coming back.
And Hadi was a terrible dictator who just made, you know, error after error after error and turned everybody against him.
And so at the end of 2014, very beginning of 2015, the Saleh Houthi alliance came and took over the capital city and forced Hadi out.
But now this was over Saudi Arabia's dead body, right?
This was their guy now.
But it seems like they could have made a deal with Saleh right there.
Okay, you're back.
Fine.
America and Saudi backed him for 30 years.
We can't figure out something.
No, the Saudis and the UAE both insisted on launching a war.
And the Obama government... was complicit from the very beginning.
As the New York Times admitted, and this was not some scoop accusing them, this was the Obama government put this story in the New York Times to explain what happened here.
And it was essentially that the Saudis came to them and demanded that we help them.
And they were mad because the Americans were entering into this nuclear deal with Iran, which was almost done at that point, right?
It was going to be signed that summer.
But we were like through the negotiations.
It was obvious where it was headed.
And so they wanted essentially to be assured that they are still our guys and we're not going to tilt back toward Iran.
And to prove this to you in the words of the New York Times, although they're very tightly paraphrasing the Obama officials here, that this was to placate the Saudis, that they knew they didn't know what would happen in the war.
They knew it would be indecisive, long, bloody, and indecisive.
But they had to do it anyway, just to essentially get the Saudis to shut up about whatever their problems are.
And then the Saudis were pissed.
And the Saudis were always pissed about Iraq, right?
So they're like, you fought a war on behalf of Iran.
Now you owe us a war.
That's more or less American foreign policy.
And Obama was like, we do owe them a war.
So we'll screw the people of Yemen.
Same reason we were backing their crazy suicide bomber foreign policy in Syria for five years.
Exactly right.
We had to placate the Saudis because George W. Bush gave Iran Baghdad, or their best friends anyway, control of the capital of Iraq.
Exactly right.
And so now it's all a matter of playing catch up on that same, you know, overall regional strategy.
Absolutely right.
And so they launched this war.
And then, but the Saudis are totally incapable of waging this war without us, or certainly at first they were, but these are all American and British planes.
And then it's all American and British contractors and military and intelligence officials, civilian and military intelligence officials, who are doing the intel on the targeting, the actual picking of the targets, the, you know, all kind of advice about how to carry out all the war, all the logistics, you know, of how everything is carried out.
For the first about three years, it was American Air Force planes doing the mid-air refueling until Boeing sold them enough mid-air refuelers that they could do it themselves without us.
But the whole very first, you know, portion of the war was dependent on that.
And, of course, it's American bombs from Raytheon and Lockheed and also from the British BAE systems and others that are just coming in.
It's worth approximately $3 billion a year just to Raytheon in what they sell to the many.
So that's absolute chump change in terms of the American economy.
It's not like the American economy is dependent on this in any way.
It's just that Raytheon is very much dependent on it.
And then what it costs for them to lobby the government to keep the war going is nothing.
That's just absolute peanuts.
And in fact, surprisingly, there's a really good article in the New York Times about how Raytheon made friends with Pete Navarro, Trump's trade guy.
I'm getting a little ahead in the story, but telling him, like, look, you're going to put all these tariffs on China and disrupt all this trade.
Well, here's a part of American industry that you can subsidize to a huge degree.
And that'll be very pleased with your action.
We'll call it America first and protecting American business and whatever by supporting the Saudi war in Yemen at the expense of all these people just to sell these weapons.
And so, and we're talking a lot of bombs, Dave.
I mean, they've been bombing the hell out of them ever since, you know, now six years ago.
And this is hugely important.
And we have a new detail on this, right?
I've told you this story before, but now we know that our incoming Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was then at central command.
Dave, he was the one who had the alliance with the Houthis to kill Al-Qaeda guys.
It's in the Wall Street Journal and in Al Monitor by Barbara Slavin, who covered this presentation at the Atlantic Council by then Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers, where they explain, we're working with the Houthis.
The Houthis took over the capital city.
Fine.
You know who they like killing?
Al-Qaeda guys.
Because to the Al-Qaeda guys, these guys are the worst sort of heretics who deserve nothing short of death, right?
Full genocidal intention toward the Houthis if they could.
So the Houthis are like, yeah, so the American, you want to work with us?
We'll work with you.
The Americans start passing them intelligence, which according to Vickers, they were using to kill these guys.
And then Obama comes and says, two months later, March 2015, Obama comes and says, nope, we're changing sides.
Stab the Houthis in the back and take the side of Saudi UAE and Al-Qaeda against them.
And now that's the war we've been fighting for six years.
And another major part of the complicity of the Americans here, two major parts really, is, first of all, the naval blockade is a Saudi blockade.
But come on, whose ships are sailing?
Who rules the seven seas?
It's America and our 11 carrier battle groups and the rest of it can rule all the oceans and seas of the world.
And it's our naval battleships that help enforce the blockade and have, you know, repeatedly seized ships.
And it's funny because they see ships full of weapons, but and then they try to make big headlines out of it.
Oh, look, Iran is sending weapons to the Houthis, but these aren't Irani weapons.
In one case, Gareth Porter showed that in one case, it was, yeah, it was, oh, I guess in one, there was no weapons at all.
And in the other, it was, yeah, it was full of light arms, but it was a ship leaving Yemen on its way to Somalia.
Because even in a war, in wartime, there is such a surplus of weapons in Yemen that they're selling them over, you know, they're exporting them.
And I mean, the place is just lousy with guns.
The average Yemeni household has an AK-47.
They are better armed than Texans.
You know, and that's, you know, every house on the block has one.
Everybody has one kind of thing.
And so they've just never proven that the Iranians, which is a huge excuse for all this, is that Iran is behind the Houthis.
And so, but it's just not true.
I mean, they're friends, but they don't have an alliance.
And in religious terms, the Zaidi Shiites are much closer to Sunnis and are not so-called 12vers.
That is, the Shiite sect that rules Iran right now, the supreme leader and his guys believe that the 12th hidden Imam will come back at the apocalypse and whatever.
That's part of their tradition of Shiite belief.
These Zaydi Shia don't believe in that.
They have this whole other thing going on, which means that they're not, they have no religious devotion to the hierarchy in Tehran.
And the Shiites are very hierarchical.
The Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq and the Ayatollah Khamene in Iran do have severe authority, not total, it's not like Catholicism, popes and cardinals, but it's very hierarchical and hierarchical in that sense, anyway.
And so, but these guys are just outside of all that tradition.
They're really not.
And they are friends with Iran.
But again, America and Saudi have them under total blockade.
So the Iranians aren't shipping them weapons.
They can't.
You just hear a bunch of scare stories.
And people say, I've heard real experts without an agenda saying, well, yeah, they'd give them money.
They give them expertise.
They give them advice.
You know, somebody said they shipped them a high-quality 3D printer to help make drones out of or something like that.
But, you know, Nikki Haley tried to say that one of the missiles that the... that the Houthis had fired at Saudi Arabia was an Iranian missile.
But then that was debunked by Jane's Intelligence Weekly and by Scott Ritter and other weapons experts who's just said, no, it's not.
This is a Yemeni.
This is an originally a Soviet or North Korean rocket, but it's been, it's very old and it was modified by the Yemenis themselves.
This isn't how the Iranians do it.
You know, this is a local.
And it's just so, like, the thing that's so infuriating is it's like, and even if they find Iran trying to ship some weapons into this conflict, I mean, what did, what did Donald Trump end up selling them?
Like $100 billion worth of weapons over to the Saudis?
Debunking the Yemen Rocket Claims00:06:15
I mean, we should, you know, it's not even like it'd be one thing if you were making the argument that, well, you're shipping weapons to terrorists who could then use them against America.
But the idea of the Houthis using weapons against America is absurd.
It's, you know, like, if you want to connect something about, you know, terrorism here at home, we're on the side of the Saudis and Al-Qaeda.
We're on the side of the ones who were implicated in 9-11, not the Houthis.
And, you know, I remember when I was on an SE Cup show, I used to talk about this all the, I actually, a funny little like anecdote, and I'll let you get right back into it.
But so they, for a little bit, I don't know if you remember this, but for a little bit when I was a contributor on SE Cup show, they said that all of the contributors at the end of the show, you could pick a story.
Like usually it's just, you know, they ask you to comment on whatever story they pick, but they go at the end, you know, okay, everyone goes around the table and every contributor can like pick a story.
And I like where this is going.
Yeah.
So I think it was like day four or five of this where they, one of the producers called me and they were like, Dave, you, you can't talk about Yemen every single time.
Like that can't be your story every single time at the end.
Cause literally that's all I do.
I was every single time.
I just give an update on Yemen.
Oh, here's what's going on.
And it just made everyone uncomfortable and Essie hated it.
And then they got me, they told me to stop.
So I was like, oh, okay.
And then I started doing like a story about like Somalia or something.
Like I would just do a different one.
And then they just cut out that segment.
They just stopped letting us pick a story.
But I used to say this and in a couple of those viral videos, I said this to her, but I was like, why isn't anyone, why is it that we're always every day back then, this is like 2016, 2017, every day we were talking about how many people Assad killed and how many people are dying in Syria because that was the narrative to sell a war.
But we'd never talk about all the people who were dying in Yemen.
And it's like, well, why?
This makes no sense.
I mean, if we care about these poor people over there dying, then why don't we talk about the one that we could stop tomorrow?
I mean, like the president could really, you know, like even if your narrative is true and this awful guy, Assad, is killing all of these people, which is obviously only a small fraction of the whole story.
But even if that was true, that like, okay, well, that's a tough situation because then what do you do?
We'd have to start a war.
We'd have to overthrow the guy.
It never works out when we overthrow the guy.
So even if what you're saying is true, that's a tough situation.
But if the Saudis are killing people while we're refueling their jets at the time in Yemen, well, that is an easy solution.
Tell the president to get on the phone.
Tell them to stop.
They'll have no choice without our backing to stop.
So it's like, why don't we ever talk about that?
And a lot of these things, I just like to play these games because a lot of times this just exposes the agenda of the corporate press.
You know, like even what you were just saying, you know, we hear all this, oh my God, if Trump's ending a war, well, then we're abandoning the Kurds, our former ally.
But abandoning the Houthis, that never seems to be a problem.
Why doesn't anyone care about that?
Our commitments to our former allies.
This one just goes completely under the radar.
Yep.
And, you know, a lot of this is because it's just too complicated for these people to do anything beyond repeat the talking points in their earpiece, you know, and they just don't really know about it, unfortunately.
But then, you know, at the same time, yeah, a lot of times I feel like all these cable TV stations should they should be forced to go ahead and produce their shows at Raytheon and Lockheed offices and just make it official that, you know, there's a conflict of interest here big time in who's producing this news for you, who all these experts are, these former military officers, all these think tank people.
I mean, the Middle East Institute and all these things are financed.
I mean, look, the Brookings Institution, this mainstay of American liberalism, gets hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars from Qatar and from the UAE.
So it's not even just American military industrial complex firms that finance these think tanks, but the Arabian Royals themselves come in and just absolutely buy up all these expertise.
And then they sit there on TV and tell us this is the received wisdom.
This is what we need to know.
And nobody ever says, well, I mean, this guy is on the board of directors of Raytheon.
And this guy is from the Middle East Institute.
And his entire salary comes from the generosity of Sheikh Al Thani over there in Qatar, who hosts our airbase and finances Al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria.
Let me tell you what made me furious.
I remember this is at Fox.
I know that, and this is, I know this from Kennedy because that's the only show that was having Ron Paul on regularly.
But they decided, oh my God, I was furious.
And then I was just kind of like yelling at Kennedy, and it's not her call at all.
So then I just stopped because I'm like, this is why am I yelling at the only good person here?
But they were, they can't, which I think might still be in effect.
I don't know if it's still true, but it was at the time.
But they couldn't talk to Ron Paul about monetary policy anymore because he was doing like some gold commercial.
Like he was like the spokesman for one of these companies that was selling gold.
And he would, you know, like going like, yeah, it's a great way to protect yourself against inflation and stuff.
And they were like, okay, well, it's a conflict of interest.
So we can't have Ron Paul on about monetary policy anymore.
And I went, really?
Oh, is that the standard here at Fox News now?
Oh, okay, fine.
But then shouldn't we be applying this to every single, every single foreign policy commentator on Fox News?
Every single one of them.
There's not a single one of them that doesn't have some tie to some institution or some weapons company or some former government post.
Every single one of them is dirty by this own by this standard.
Yet we only go after Ron Paul.
He can't be the guy who knows more about monetary policy than any of your people.
He can't talk about that because he did a gold commercial once.
So it's like these people, they don't have conflicts.
They just have expertise, man.
That's all.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like over at MSNBC, they can have Clapper giving you information about the NSA or something like that.
That's fine.
There's no conflict there.
Cholera Outbreaks Amidst War00:11:05
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, all right.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
All right.
So let me figure out where to go.
Right here, it's Obama's the one who started this.
We should make very clear again.
It's 2015.
Obama's the one who stabs the Houthis in the back and starts this war.
And they named, of course, Operation Decisive Storm, which is why this was six years ago, not three weeks ago that we're talking almost, it seems like.
And they are no closer to their goal of installing, reinstalling Hadi on the throne in the capital of Sana'a.
The media, you'll hear him continue to call the Houthis the rebels, the Houthi rebels, as though they're attempting to overthrow the government from the outskirts of town, even though they overthrew the government and have run the capital city and everything north of there at least for six years.
Six years ago, they did this.
They're not the rebels at all.
And if you go, well, they're not legitimate because they're not elected.
I submit to you that the previous dictator, Abdullah Saleh, also was not elected, and that his successor, Mansur Hadi, was elected in a one-man ballot election held by Hillary Clinton, of all people, where you can just put in Hadi in Google images, and there's the ballot right there.
One man, one face, one oval to fill in on the ballot and nothing else.
And that was the election that supposedly made him the legitimate government of that country.
Yeah, it's also just a ridiculous.
I mean, we're allying with the Saudis.
I don't really think we should be lecturing the country about democracy.
I guess there's the royal rebels of Saudi Arabia who are conducting this war.
Yeah, they're going to seize Riyadh any day now.
We sort of ruled it since the 30s, but whichever, you know.
And then, so a couple more things.
Diplomatically, of course, America rules the United Nations Security Council.
The British, because it's their former colony, I like this tradition.
I'm only just learning about this tradition of global governance, Dave, is that since Yemen used to belong to Great Britain, they are the pinholder of all Yemen issues on the UN Security Council, which means that no other member of the UN Security Council has the right to bring up a Yemen resolution to say, let's do this, that, or the other thing.
Only Britain can, and Britain is selling them millions and billions of dollars worth of weapons and planes and bombs to kill these people.
And so they won't.
And so that's what it means to be a pinholder of some other country on the UN Security Council is to keep them dying.
And of course, you know, all if it wasn't for America and Britain and our government's role in this, then the rest of global diplomacy would have insisted on an end to this thing a long time ago.
It's the Americans are running diplomatic cover for them.
And I mean, the Saudis, they've tried to propose some peace conferences.
And then when the Saudis didn't approve of it, they threatened to withhold all their money from their financing of the UN, which is just like the Americans threatening to do it.
It's a lot of money.
And so, oh, you want us to shut down all your little departments?
And then they all scream, uncle, and the whole thing falls apart and goes nowhere.
And then, so the other most important thing here to talk about is the humanitarian situation.
So, you mentioned that this was the poorest country in the Middle East before the war.
Well, that's absolutely true.
They have very little developed oil resources, although they do have some oil, but it's not very developed stuff and very little revenue.
And they had been gangsterized by the International Monetary Fund in a previous era, I guess, in like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush times, that, you know, you guys ought to quit growing millet and sorghum and these things that, you know, sustenance crops for your population.
And you ought to grow more cotton and coffee in order to make money.
And then you spend that money on the international market, you'll be eating pineapples and, you know, participating in the international market.
It'll be great.
And which, okay, fine.
Yeah.
Global capitalism is great until the U.S. Navy rolls up in one of their star destroyers and puts your planet under blockade.
And now what are you going to do?
And so they're, of course, you know, this caused major disruptions.
And the thing is, they can't compensate because they're at war and they can't import anything.
They're under total blockade.
So I don't know for sure, Dave, but I bet they quit planting so much cotton and are trying to plant food where they can.
But then again, as Martha Mundy from the London School of Economics has shown in her great study, they have deliberately targeted, and a lot of other UN and humanitarian groups have documented this as well.
They deliberately target the farms and all methods of food growth and distribution in the country.
So they, first of all, they bomb the water works and the sewage and the electricity and the basic infrastructure for everything, the hospitals, all of that.
But then when it comes to the farms and the food, they bomb all the markets.
They bomb all the trucks.
They bomb the flocks of sheep in the field.
They bomb the grain silos.
They bomb the horses in their stables.
How do you like that, animal lovers?
The Saudis use your money to bomb horses.
Now, I know a little baby Yemeni human starving to death or being blown apart himself.
It might upset you a little bit, but how about an animal?
I know animals are a lot more important than people to Americans.
So, you know, you got to meet people where they're at, Dave.
You see?
They bomb the horses in their stables and just whatever they can to disrupt the ability of the civilian population of the country to sustain themselves.
It's just absolutely violates Section ABC and whatever you got of every Geneva Convention ever signed.
And the American War Crimes Act that enforces these laws against American federal officials, supposedly, provides for them to be prosecuted for committing these crimes and violating these treaties.
And there they go.
No big deal.
And so we have, this is an important phenomenon.
And it's funny when I talk about this, people recognize this.
I've heard, I've gotten reactions from people when I mention this, that for years they said, as many as 10,000 people have died in this war.
And they just kept saying that over and over again throughout 24, you know, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
And we go, come on, guys.
You can't be waging a genocidal war, deliberately targeting the civilian population of a country, carpet bombing their apartment buildings for years and tell me that as many as 10,000 people have died and the number just won't increase.
It's just not true.
And they'd be like they would increase the number of cholera cases.
That number would increase, but the deaths they were reporting wouldn't get budged at all.
And you're like, this is obviously not the full picture.
Right.
And so there's a Yemeni journalist named Nasser Arabi who confronted the United Nations representative on this.
I'm sorry, I forget his name.
I interviewed him too, I think.
Gold something or other was his name, Dave.
I'm sorry.
I got what Biden's got here.
I just, God damn.
But he admitted that, no, you're right, man.
I'm not saying that that's the ceiling.
I'm just saying that's all I've been able to prove.
But it's, you know, it's unfortunate if people are quoting me as saying that that's all that's happened here.
You know, it's just, what am I supposed to do?
I can't get out there and count.
There's just too much chaos to get out there.
But then, so years later, I think it was in the very end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, the UN updated their number to 233,000.
And it's certainly much higher than that by now.
And then that included, I think, the way that they had calculated it was something along the lines of 70, I'm going from memory here, but it was something like 75,000 actual combat casualties.
And then the rest were, you know, civilian deaths from, you know, whatever deprivation from the war.
And then, but you mentioned the cholera.
They've had the worst cholera outbreaks there in recorded history.
And that includes when you compare to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton's deliberate sanctions war against Iraq, which led to a massive cholera outbreak in southern Iraq in the 19, what, say, 93, 94 era, I think.
And so this is worse than that.
Worst cholera outbreaks in recorded memory.
And as you said on the Rogan show, and I'm so glad that you brought this up, that it's a very simple bacteria infection.
And a lot of times you don't even need antibiotics.
You just need fresh water.
Well, they don't have any.
And their cholera hospital, the Americans bomb it.
And I would caution against the number, which you may have seen that a million people had cholera.
I think this was the number from 2018, something like that.
That's not true.
And I talked with the people from Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam and whatever at the time.
And they said that, well, we're basically, we have no way to test.
We have no real way to know.
But as people are coming in, we're just deluded with people coming in with, you know, severe, like lethally, dangerously deadly diarrhea.
And we just, anytime that happens, we call it cholera at this point.
But in fact, there's diphtheria going around.
There's all kinds of other stuff.
Again, they bombed the sewage in the water works.
So people had nothing but filthy water to drink.
And so, you know, they're drinking water to survive, but it's the same thing that's killing them, you know.
Sinister Motivations Behind Woke Culture00:15:11
And then, and this is all just going on for years and years and years and just on autopilot.
And you might remember, of course, this just makes it, you know, ironic only that Donald Trump in the campaign in 2015 and 16 would denounce Saudi Arabia.
And why do we have to kowtow to these guys and do whatever we say and all this?
But they handed him a fancy sword and wined him and dined him and promised him.
I mean, I don't know how much of this, Dave, is him inflating the number himself and how much of this was the actual smoke that they blew up his ass in the first place.
But by the time they were done playing the telephone game and Donald Trump was telling the media and telling the American people what was the justification for this, it was that the Saudis were spending $450 billion on American weapons.
And so therefore, you know, like our entire economy is dependent on that.
Millions of jobs, he said, this is a total lie.
And the military expert William Hardtong, who is, I'm almost certain, no, that's Bill's story.
I forgot this is Hardtongue's background.
But anyway, Hardtong's been great on this stuff for a generation.
And he did all the calculation.
He's like, no, they spend about $10 billion a year.
And that's like 30,000 jobs or something for if you can get one on the assembly line putting together cruise missiles and satellite kits for paveway bombs and whatever it is.
And so this is just all these guys, even if they couldn't get jobs, even in the middle of a depression, Dave, you could fire them and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to the unemployment, to the overall performance of the economy in any way.
In fact, you'd be freeing up talented engineers to figure out how to better distribute goods and services to people and all this other stuff.
It'd be a net gain for the economy in every way.
And when people ask Trump about, you know, God, how can he stand by this guy, the crown prince, who is really like the de facto king now, Mohammed bin Salman, after he hacked up this Washington Post reporter into little pieces with a bone saw and all of this stuff.
And Trump said, Look, they're giving us $450 billion.
And he just repeated that again.
Like, this is who the Americans are.
People ask him about the war in Yemen, and he just refers to the money.
He's got nothing else to refer to.
He wouldn't even, it wouldn't even occur to him to pretend he's trying to fight terrorism or help the humanitarian situation.
He just simply says, I and therefore you, my fellow Americans, we are mercenaries and we kill people for money.
That's why.
Okay, shut up.
There was a great Rand Paul interview.
I believe it was Wolf Blitzer on CNN who basically took this line with him.
And he goes, Yeah, but you know, I mean, the Saudis, like, they contribute so much to our economy.
And Wolf Blitzer asks Rand Paul at one point, he goes, So, so this is obviously economically beneficial.
So for you, this is a moral issue?
Like, yes, like a question.
It's like, yeah, you know, like, right.
Like, murdering babies is probably under the realm of moral issues, I would think.
But it's really, but there was something about the, what's his name again, the journalist who the Saudis killed, who you just brought up?
Oh, Khashoggi.
Khashoggi.
There's something about the Khashoggi thing just really disgusted me, where you saw for a little bit, I mean, not that they made it a huge issue, but for a little bit, that was like an issue for the corporate press.
It was like, oh, hey, man, they killed a journalist.
That's a little bit too far.
And it's like, you motherfuckers, they've been slaughtering children.
And none of this you thought was worthy of your 8 p.m. hour, but all of a sudden, what?
A journalist that is somehow, that's supposed to be, you know, like on a higher level than some four-year-old?
I'll tell you what, too.
Lindsey Graham, the senator, said, I'm voting for this War Powers Act resolution against the war in Yemen.
But I want to make this clear, and I'm very tightly paraphrasing here.
This is real.
You can Google me.
I want to make this clear.
I am not doing this because I care at all about what's happening to the people of Yemen.
Screw them.
This is not about that.
This is about me.
That guy, Mohammed bin Salman, he made me look bad because I said he was cool right before he did this.
And I take that personally.
So that's why I'm voting against the war in Yemen.
I just want to make sure that nobody thinks it's because I'm against killing anyone ever, because of course I'm not, except, I mean, or not in war anyway.
And so that was it.
And he made that clear.
It was, this was personal only.
And by the way, that was how this war started too, Dave.
And Patrick Coburn did a great write-up on this.
At the time the war started in 2015, Mohammed bin Salman was the brand new deputy crown prince.
His cousin, Mohammed bin Nayev, was the crown prince.
And he had just been named deputy crown prince and defense minister.
And so for his own little, you know, internal office politics inside the Saudi royal family, you know, public choice theory, there's no Saudi national interest.
There's only the individual interests of the people who run the Saudi nation.
And in this case, the new deputy crown prince had something to prove.
And so he was the one who launched this war for his own reasons.
And then it was after that, shortly after that, when the momentum was with him, that he arrested his cousin.
Mohammed bin Nayev and made himself crown prince and de facto king.
So it worked.
It worked.
Right.
Right.
It's just so, it's really interesting that Donald Trump, who really, his campaign really played to, or maybe not played to, but well, certainly played to, but captured this energy of tremendous hostility toward Muslims in around when he ran.
Around 2015, 2016, you had the huge refugee crisis, the huge migrant crisis in Europe.
You know, obviously there were, you know, immigration in this country was one of the major issues that he talked about, but specifically the Muslim ban.
You know, this was like his thing, this radical Islam that, you know, Obama was too scared to say and he was willing to say it and confront them and all this stuff.
And you had a lot of, you know, there was kind of the rise of the alt-right types in that period and just like a hard right in America who was like, yeah, we don't want Muslims in this country.
We don't want to deal with all this crazy shit.
Their religion is nuts.
They're, you know, they're prone to this kind of jihad mentality.
There's a lot of stories on like Breitbart about the like rape gangs in Europe and all of this stuff.
And a lot of this energy, in some ways, almost replaced where the Ron Paul energy had been in the Republican Party as like the young kind of, you know, more brash Republicans coming up.
And of course, Ron Paul left and Rand Paul fell flat on his face and we didn't really have a leader anymore.
But it was interesting that then you have Trump kind of take the reins here.
And yet, even with all of this, what does he do?
He immediately, his first international trip, he goes and kisses the rings of the Saudis, gets even further in bed with them with all these crazy weapons deals.
I mean, the most radical Islamists on the planet in Saudi Arabia, and then, you know, is fine to support them in this war against Yemen for his entire presidency.
Meanwhile, the entire media class bashes him for his Islamophobia when he's talking about the travel ban, but is silent on his Islamophobia, you know, as he's slaughtering or aiding the Saudis and slaughtering these helpless Muslims in Yemen.
And of course, in lots of other countries, the whole thing is just so bizarre.
It's so incoherent.
Well, what happened was someone said, look, you know, you can talk about Islam, Islam, Islam to the public, but in the Middle East and our policy, there's a big difference between the Sunni side and the Shiite side.
And we are on the side of Osama bin Laden and the Sunnis and their paymasters in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.
And so the enemy is not the guys that knock the towers down.
The enemy is the people that the Israelis hate the most, the Iranians.
And, you know, the people who declared independence from the United States back in 1979 and haven't been forgiven since.
And so it's just so, it's interesting.
It's something that I always, I mean, I was talking a lot about at the time, but it really is.
And I don't exactly, like, I don't completely get it.
But there is something like the um the idea of being an immigration restrictionist is very taboo amongst the elites.
That's not really something that they like.
And I mean, they're okay with some of it, but they don't really like to talk about it.
They do what they have to to win votes.
But I don't know if the neocons have a thing.
I don't know, maybe it comes from like their Trotskyite background and the fact that they basically support an American empire.
So I guess who needs who cares about borders if you run the entire world or something like that, you know?
But that was very offensive.
The idea that Donald Trump would talk about not allowing Muslims to come into the country.
Yet all of a sudden, you know, it's like that you can slaughter as many as many of them as you want to in their country.
Yeah, it's been like that since W. Bush, too.
W. Bush goes, look, man, these people are part of the Abrahamic tradition with us, you know, and we are not at war against Muslims.
We're only at war against some.
And you'll hear liberals go, you know, especially in the face of Trump and his belligerents.
We really miss George W. Bush would say conciliatory things about Muslims sometimes.
And I was like, well, yeah, but I mean, he killed a million of them.
But that doesn't ruined everything for the Arab world and, you know, the larger planet Earth ever since then.
But yes, he did say that, look, these are, they call us the people of the book.
So, you know, they're not that alien.
You know, right?
They're not that different from us.
They believe in Jesus.
He was just a prophet, not their savior.
But this kind of thing.
I don't know if Bush ever said that exactly.
Right.
No, but he would, he was always kind in his rhetoric about and the liberals always thought that that was okay, right?
War is okay, but just don't insult anybody's sexuality or whatever, man.
Yes, because the liberals have become the people of meaningless token gestures.
They really and do not, do not deprive them of their token gestures.
That is really, really awful what you do, you know, like they really, really care about these gestures.
And then I think there are some more sinister people at the top.
I think this is part of the whole woke thing in general, but then there's some more sinister people at the top who really like you getting your moral outrage out in these areas that aren't the really big deal.
You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's really, because I remember the story, there was this one Iraqi guy who got like held at the airport for like a few days when Trump first put the ban into place.
They were all over this.
I mean, there were protests and all these news stories.
And I was like joking around on Twitter and I was like, this is like the nicest thing our federal government has done to an Iraqi in 30 years.
So like I'm not saying, I'm not even saying it's not wrong.
Like you can think this is wrong, but really, this is the story.
So it's, if you're trying to get away with these wars, it's certainly very useful for all of the moral outrage to be kind of redirected over here at this thing that is kind of irrelevant to the bigger picture.
And after all, listen, what Billy said about Sally is always easier to understand and be upset about than, or even some guy getting stuck at an airport.
I mean, essentially, you just summed up the whole story to me in one sentence.
In fact, the first part of your sentence before you finished about all their hokey pretended outrage.
You're like, yeah, this Iraqi guy who was stuck at the airport for a little while.
So anyway, right.
But you can't talk about Yemen like that.
Well, we've been killing them all for like five years, six years.
But anyway, you know, like, if you're going to explain it, you got to, there's like some stuff to learn there, especially if you're going to be able to defend the point, explain it to anybody else.
And that's a lot of trouble.
And so on the lowest common denominator level, you can always get people much more upset.
I tried to joke on Twitter about Donald Trump kills transsexual Yemeni kid in bombing.
It was like, okay, well, I don't know that any transsexuals died in the bombing, but like 350 people were killed in just one bombing.
So like there could have been decent chance and someone might have like called them a homo like as the bomb was falling and that would have been really outrageous, right?
Everybody they bombed the funeral and killed 350 people.
Oh, it was a funeral where all the different tribes were meeting where they might have been able to end the war.
Oh, and we accidentally bombed the thing.
Yeah, sorry about that.
But anyway, who cares?
But maybe if Donald Trump had, you know. called someone some sort of sexual slur as the bomb was falling, it might have gotten the attention.
But then again, maybe the explosion would have turned.
I mean, the other thing, right, is all this is far away.
You know, somebody, someone being politically incorrect down at your local university is accessible.
There's a great George Carlin routine about this, where he talks about how you're working around the house, you have the TV news on in the background, and then you hear 6,000 people died in an explosion today.
And you go, where, where?
And they go, in Pakistan.
And you go, ah, fuck Pakistan.
That's too far away to be any fun.
And, you know, of course, I only found out about this years later that that was a true story.
That really happened.
6,000 people were killed when the Union Carbide plant exploded in Pakistan and left this giant poisonous gas cloud that killed like 6,000 people.
And Carlin, like, use that as that was the real example.
It sounded so made up, right?
6,000 people killed in an explosion in Pakistan.
Yeah, no, that was real.
And then he says, of course, but if there's a train wreck in your town, come on, Dave, let's go look at the bodies.
Let's go look at the bodies, you know?
But it does seem like there's, there was amongst the left in America, obviously in Vietnam, people really were outraged over the war in Vietnam and were protesting it.
And in Iraq, there were massive protests against the war in Iraq.
And I got to think there was a mix.
I think there's a few different things at work.
Like my running theory for a long time has always been that Obama just broke the anti-war left.
I mean, not that there's not still some good anti-war leftists, but speaking in general.
Freezing Point Cream Sponsorship Break00:02:47
And I think it was a particularly unique thing.
This was when we did the episode about Obama's legacy.
This is what we both said was like the worst part of Obama's legacy was just the damage he did to the anti-war left, that he inherited a very strong anti-war left and decimated them.
And I think part of it was just he was like being the first black president and being such a charming guy.
And so much of the identity of the American leftist was being the not racist guy.
And to love him was to absolve yourself of any connection to racism yourself.
And there was just something about it that just played on the psyche that it was like, we can't blame him for that.
And there was, and, but so I think that's part of it.
And then even through the Trump years, to really get mad at Trump about Yemen, you'd have to convict Obama in your mind also.
There was no separating it because I really do believe that if Trump had started a war in Venezuela or had started a war in Iran or started a war in North Korea, he flirted with all, but did not ultimately, that I think it would have been the anti-war left would have at least been louder.
But they weren't going to convict Obama with throwing Trump out.
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Gender Division in Military Conflicts00:14:27
The other thing that is a pretty big factor there is that our military wasn't really as involved as they were in Iraq and in Yemen.
I mean, excuse me, as they were in Iraq and Vietnam.
I mean, Vietnam, a big part of it was like you knew someone who was being drafted.
Like everybody knew someone who was drafted or was dodging the draft or something.
It affected your life in Iraq.
We were seeing the soldiers come back over wounded and stuff like this.
Whereas in Yemen, eh, our guys are refueling the jets, but really we're just kind of paying the Saudis off.
You know, we're really just supporting them to go do all the dirty work.
And I think that was part of it too.
I don't know.
Yeah, just like with the drone wars.
I mean, you know, there's a conversation between Jeremy Scahill and Bill Maher, where Scahill is saying, look, man, this drone war, and he's not even talking about taking the Houthi side.
This is before that.
This is where he's just talking about fighting Al-Qaeda.
And he's going, listen, this drone war is horrible, man.
They're killing innocent people.
They're making Al-Qaeda more powerful.
It's just horrible.
And Bill Maher, you know, he's a great example here, right?
Because he can't think, right?
He can only just sort of like react against a little colonel of a thought.
And so he just says, Yeah, but George W. Bush marched the whole army of Marines into Iraq.
And so then that's it.
That's the benchmark now.
That's the baseline.
So anything less than that is now permissible because he did do that.
He did march the entire 3rd Infantry Division in there.
He did, you know, we were up to 130,000 troops in Iraq.
More than that.
And so then Obama gets graded on this scale.
And the way that they talk about the drone war, especially, is: look, these are surgical strikes.
We use the drone, Dave, as a scalpel.
And now you know a drone is not a scalpel, right?
It drops a 500-pound bomb, enough to kill, depending on how many people are there, a whole building full of people, you know.
But compared to marching the 3rd Infantry Division in there, same thing with Libya.
Oh, yeah, you know, this is a kinetic thing, sort of, but it's actually doesn't rise to the level of kinetic because we're leading from behind.
And the things that explode, we're, you know, yeah, it's us doing it.
But anyway, we're, you know, this is sort of a NATO mission.
The French and the British and the Italians were really on us to do it.
And they're helping.
Although, of course, America has all the planes and, you know, our Navy and our Air Force have all the planes and the bombs to keep the war going.
It took them nine months to kill Qaddafi, right, to finish that war.
France and Britain couldn't wage a nine-month air war over Libya, you know, leading from behind my ass, but it's the same thing in terms of the political cover, you know.
And in fact, the Libya chapter of my new book starts out with the quote: We had a war in Libya.
Because, I mean, that was far more expansive than the drone war in Yemen and Pakistan, which was focused on a small subset population inside the country with the permission of the central government.
This was a full-scale air war, not a drone war.
This is a full-scale air war with our bombers and fighter bombers to overthrow an entire government.
Right.
And there are people, just regular Joe Americans.
And it's funny because I've repeated this so many times now.
I don't remember anymore, thank goodness, who it was that told me this because I'd still be a little mad at him.
But it was either somebody in my family or it was one of my skater friends or somebody, but like a real person that I know from real life who had said to me, We had a war in Libya.
And, you know, Muamar Gaddafi was a pretty famous guy, right?
Like he's in the naked gun part two and whatever.
Like he's a he, the wacky colonel with the mere sunglasses and the big mayor Quimby sash, you know, and all the medals on his shirt and all of this stuff.
And I mean, he's a larger-than-life character.
America destroyed his country.
Had, you know, I guess it was, they say it was French special operations guys or spies who lynched him, put a stuck a bayonet up his ass and then shot him in the head on the side of the road like a Saigon spy, you know, just straight lynched him and murdered him.
And this barely made the news other than why we have to start it.
Oh, no, he's raping every woman and girl in the country.
He's giving Viagra and all his soldiers to stop fighting so they can stop and rape every civilian they can find.
And it's total, you know, the kind of stuff that makes Saddam's weapons of mass destruction sound true.
I mean, give me a break with this crap.
Oh, he's when he gets to Benghazi, Gaddafi swore he's going to murder every last man, woman, and child there.
No, he didn't.
And he had no intention or capability.
He sent 2,000 men.
How are they going to genocide a town of 300,000 people, man?
The whole thing was just completely made up.
I'm sorry.
The crazy thing was that the crazy thing was that they talked about Benghazi every day.
They talked about Benghazi in the news like every day.
And I remember watching it and being like, they're going to have to, they can't talk about this without talking about why are we at war in this country to begin with.
But it's like, nope, yeah, actually they can.
They can talk about it.
And it's the old, the old Noam Chomsky line where you have like a very, very small parameter of allowable opinion, but then you allow for fierce arguments within this, you know, so that Hillary Clinton's yelling at the Republicans, but it's all about Benghazi and it never becomes about the bigger picture of like what's going on in Libya.
And even on Benghazi, it was, oh, no, there wasn't enough security.
And the military and the CIA weren't allowed to come in and swoop in and save the day.
They never asked, well, what was he doing in Benghazi?
Right.
He was taking jihadists, terrorists, and weapons and sending them off to the next war in Syria is what he was doing there.
And that was what got him stung.
So boy, talk about a vigorous fight within a narrow range.
Even on that story, they only told you a third of the story.
And then meanwhile, like you say, blacking out the entire background of what the hell are the Americans doing in the middle of North Africa?
Since when did we have a base in Libya?
I thought that place was run by Qaddafi.
Did we have a war over there or something?
I don't know.
And it just goes completely over people's heads.
TV doesn't mention it.
And then, you know, you talk about the sabotage that Obama, really Pelosi before him when she won in 2006.
They dropped the war immediately.
The Democrats did.
But then Obama made it so much worse, as you say.
And then this is like the greatest invention.
We talked about the greatest invention on behalf of on the part of the peace movement of Donald Trump convincing the right to abandon the Bush legacy and turn against the wars, you know.
But The worst part of the way that Trump was used against the left was that the liberals and the progressives, I guess the more progressive and leftist you get, the better you were in this stuff.
But the liberal Democrat types and centurists were so caught up in this Russia gate, you know, alleged treason on Trump's part, where the greatest heroes throughout the whole story are the FBI's counterintelligence division and the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice and their special counsel,
who happens to be George W. Bush's head of the FBI, who rounded up thousands of innocent Muslims and held them without charges, who lied us into war with Iraq, who framed up 200 and something, you know, half wits into saying they loved Osama when they had no intention of a terrorist plot whatsoever.
This guy who belongs in prison himself.
And now Clapper and Brennan and Comey, these monsters are held up by liberal Democrats as the saviors of the Republic because of all the things about Donald Trump.
You take your genocide in Yemen or whatever you got, Dave.
The worst thing about him is that he's not patriotic enough and he doesn't care enough about America and its national security.
He would sell us out to those dastardly Russians.
And so you even had in the midterms, you had a ton of like, they call them the CIA Democrats.
You have all these national security.
People are literally like, I'm a woman from the CIA and now I'm running for Congress.
And then people elect them.
Democrats elect them.
Well, it's a really, it's a fascinating story.
It's actually bigger than just the Trump years.
But slowly, I really kind of started, I guess, in the 90s with Bill Clinton and has been building bigger and bigger.
But the Democrats became the Republicans.
I mean, that's like one of the major stories in American politics.
It's the Democrats became the political party of the billionaire class.
They became the country club political party.
This was the Republicans.
Like when I was a kid, that's what the Republicans represented.
And that's changed.
And Hillary Clinton really made a concerted effort in 2016 to be like, I'm the Republican.
If you looked at the DNC at the national convention, it was all militarism and it was a whole bunch of Republicans.
And she was like, you know what?
I see an opening here where Donald Trump is insulting John McCain and there's, you know, National Review is like, never Trump.
And it's like, that's what we'll be.
We'll be the Republicans.
I remember, but I'm glad you brought this up because this is a big part of Donald Trump's legacy.
Whether or not it's fair to blame him for it, this is part of what happened as a result of him being president.
Because I remember like when Donald Trump first won being kind of like, oh, well, now let's see where the left goes from here.
Because the left, I actually saw as overall better than the right during the Bush years.
Like when I first became a libertarian, I mean, first off, I wasn't a libertarian before and I was just against the wars.
So I, and I was a lefty, so I saw them being much better.
And then even after I became a libertarian, I was like, well, you know, they're better on the biggest issues.
I mean, they're better on war and mass incarceration, torture, the Patriot Act, really important things.
And then they were awful during Obama, again, with notable exceptions.
And then I was like, well, now Trump's in.
Maybe they'll kind of, you know, snap back into being better than they've been.
And what I never saw coming was that the liberals would turn into the cold warriors of our days.
I mean, they really became Reagan Republicans, essentially.
Like everything was about fighting this Cold War.
They even, even when Trump was...
I mean, I got to say, Dave, I think, you know, the new left anti-war type thing is an aberration from the Vietnam era.
And that the Democrats you're describing are what the Democrats have been since World War II.
They are Harry Truman national security war mongers.
And, you know, there's a quote from Obama's new memoir where he puts it in plain English, just like you knew he thought that I had to wage this, you know, rigorous war on terrorism, this drone war against these terrorist targets, because Rahm Emmanuel,
my chief of staff, who happens to be an extremely Zionist, you know, operative in Washington, D.C., he insisted he would not let his liberal Democratic president look weak on terrorism.
He had to do it for his own purposes.
I saw a funny tweet that somebody posted where he said, oh, I'm sure all the survivors of the thousands of dead people in Pakistan and Yemen, wherever, will be glad to hear that their loved ones were killed for optics rather than sport.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is, you know, exactly.
That's all he's saying.
That's all it was was this is the same thing with Hillary Clinton.
And she said this in plain language before, but you see it often with women politicians, especially Democrats, is they have to move as far to the right on national security as they possibly can so that no one will call them a weak woman and whatever.
When, you know what?
Like you might think that maybe being a weak woman would be the thing that we would support about a woman for president, that you're going to be less hawkish than these knucklehead men who've gotten us into all the last wars.
Maybe sell us on that.
But that was always the theoretical feminist selling point.
If women ran the world, there'd be no war.
Like that was their argument, which that part would be pretty cool.
The reality is if women ran the world, they'd be like, look at me, joint chiefs of staff.
I'm the toughest, tough guy woman you've ever dealt with.
Well, yeah.
Let the bombs fall.
This is one of the major flaws in radical third wave feminism is that it turns out that women are in fact human and come with all of the flaws that men come with as well.
They lie.
They're vindictive.
They're just like men in that regard.
Anyway, so no, listen, you're right completely that the Democratic establishment is completely controlled by the war hawks, but I'm just speaking more for the kind of rank and file, like for the voters.
For the average Democratic voter, they were always at least somewhat suspicious of the CIA and the FBI.
They were always the ones who were a little bit more likely to be like, well, this government secrecy is a little bit of a problem.
But under Trump, it was like whoever is again, they became purely reactionary.
I mean, even down to the point that like when Trump would talk about tariffs, they'd become like supply-side economists.
They were like, tariffs destroy the economy, like Democrats lecturing you about, which, you know, I agree with, by the way, I think they're right about that.
But it was just weird to see it coming from them.
It was an interesting part of the Trump legacy is that there was this reshuffling of where people in America stood.
And a lot of it was negative.
Even in terms of like, you know, the Republican voters, I mean, if we're going to give Trump credit for making it okay to be anti-war as a right-winger, which he deserves credit for, he also made it okay to just completely drop the pretense of fiscal responsibility at all.
Like forget any of this, like, we're against big government.
I mean, that stuff is all pretty much over.
Like, it was just, you know, I mean, and as libertarians discussing Trump's legacy, we can't, of course, we focus on the foreign policy because that's the worst thing the government does.
And it's where the president has the most power.
But Donald Trump presided over the biggest government in human history and with absolutely no apologies for it.
Same thing with Nixon and Ford and Reagan and both Bushes and Donald Trump.
The Republicans are always bigger spenders than the Democrats.
They talk a game about, oh, we care about the deficit when Democrats are in charge of it only.
Ending the Korean War Ceasefire00:14:59
And that's just as simple as that.
They don't mean a word of that.
Dick Cheney meant what he said when he said deficits don't matter.
And the rest of the Republicans said, Yeah, that.
Let's do whatever we want.
We'll just complain when it's the other guys.
Somehow they have a reputation of being more responsible, but they have certainly not earned it in any way whatsoever.
Yeah, no, no, you know, but on the Democrats being more and more horrible now, that's a great segue into Korea where Trump actually tried to do something right.
He spent his first year, and this wasn't just Trump, okay?
This is the entire national security state, blob, deep state, whatever consensus up there in D.C. All the think tanks agree.
You can't let the North Koreans have missiles that can reach DC and warheads that they can marry to those missiles.
Now, Lyndon Johnson did not launch a preemptive war against Mao Sedong to prevent him from obtaining that capability back in the 60s.
Ike Eisenhower specifically rejected the idea that he should launch a preemptive attack against China on that basis as well.
Truman didn't, he might have, but Truman didn't attack the Soviets before they could detonate a nuke.
So this would be a huge new adventure, you know, advance, I guess, in America's new Japanese foreign policy that we start all the wars from now on that we've had for this whole century long now.
But so this, they all agree, is the red line.
And so when Donald Trump came in, he got briefed on this, and he went pretty far overboard in provoking Kim Jong-un, who's the grandson of the founder of North Korea.
Kim Jong-il, the guy in Team America, died back a few years ago.
This is his son now.
And he called him rocket man, little rocket man, and made fun of him and threatened him.
There's a book that's called this, threatened him with fire and fury like the world has never seen before.
In other words, a preemptive hydrogen bomb strike against North Korea if they keep up their testing and what have you.
But then, and by the way, his national security advisor at the time, Army General McMaster, was recommending a limited strike, what he called the bloody nose option, where we go in there and bomb their rocket program and bomb their nuclear program and then stop.
And then they better not react or do anything.
And that'll be like, okay, you got a bloody nose.
You better not do anything else.
And then that'll just work.
That was the advice that he was getting from the grown-ups in the room, Dave, was to launch a preemptive war.
And then, in fact, I think it was James Mattis who ran interference on that and said that he did not agree with that.
He was the Secretary of Defense at the time.
And I think he butted heads with McMaster on that.
But then they have a new president, or at that time they had a new president in South Korea.
He's still there.
I'm sorry.
Kim J.
No, no, no.
It's Moon.
I'm sorry.
I forgot the rest of his name, President Moon.
And so he had this policy of he wanted to open back up, man.
You know, Lindsey Graham said, yeah, there could be a war, but it would be over there.
And the South Koreans are like, what?
You know, like, yeah, it would be over here, be millions of us killed like last time.
Forget it, you know?
And, well, it wasn't millions of South Koreans that died last time.
It was millions of North Koreans.
But anyway, the millions to die.
And they really reacted against that.
And so then Moon came to Trump, and this is the great part of Trump's unpredictability: Moon sent his people and said, Listen, we want to talk with North Korea.
Let us do this.
We think we have a real opening here.
And Mike Pompeo, who at that time was the head of the CIA, for whatever reason, told Trump that, yeah, go ahead and pursue this.
He needed to have somebody tell him it was okay to do it.
And he did.
And so then they pursued it.
And so the only reason they got as far as they got really was because the South Koreans were taking the lead.
And Trump told them, go ahead.
And so they had a lot of discussions and talks.
And then Trump ended up meeting with Kim twice.
Well, really, three times.
One was just for a photo opportunity where they crossed the DMZ and all of these things and took pictures shaking hands and all of that.
And so that was great.
And then they had two big meetings.
One was in Singapore and then the other one was in Hanoi in Vietnam.
And the first one was really just kind of laying the groundwork.
The real negotiation or like actual steps forward were supposed to take place in Hanoi.
And you may remember that the day of the negotiations, the Democrats in, I forgot if it was the House of the Senate, I guess in the House, had Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, come and testify against him.
So in order to divide his attention, this is very deliberate.
And, you know, if the Republicans had done a big, some kind of huge thing like that to Obama on, you know, while he's in the middle of negotiating or something like that, the Democrats would have called that sabotage.
And for Donald Trump's attention being that badly divided, it really weakened his entire game there.
And then they also had the narrative, and I don't know who wrote the memo, Dave.
Maybe one day WikiLeaks will publish the damn thing.
But the memo went out that Donald Trump is a weak-minded fool and the wily genius mastermind, Kim Jong-un, who again, you might have been able to somehow like put that on Kim Jong-il.
He seemed like more of like a dastardly kind of a figure.
But the son is this brilliant, evil, mad genius mastermind somehow.
And he is going to walk all over Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump is going to concede everything to him.
He's going to give away the whole store, give away the whole game.
And this was the narrative on every channel.
And they never even had to be able to do that.
They never even had anything that was scary to give away.
I remember them trying to sell it.
They were like, Donald Trump's going to give away our war games in South Korea or something like, who cares?
Wouldn't that be so worth it?
Just the fact that he got those, was it like three or four hostages he got back?
Right.
Just that alone was worth giving up everything for.
Like, I don't know.
These are real people who were Americans who he got back from North Korea.
How is that not great?
Right.
And the Americans and the South Koreans are plenty well trained on their rehearsals for how to invade and attack North Korea.
You could suspend them for a little while.
But yeah, you're right.
It was just anything to claim that there was an outrage here to be outraged about and that Donald Trump is, again, selling out the foreign policy of the United States because he's so lax in patriotism and loves dictators so much.
Right.
But so he was.
That's the narrative, loves dictators.
Of course, by the way, you know, as we mentioned before, when Obama could work with, you know, whoever in the Muslim world, and that never becomes the narrative that he loves dictators, but, you know, but Putin and making a deal with Kim Jong-un makes him a dictator lover or whatever.
Yeah.
Right.
And so, but the thing is this.
Well, I'll go back to the history.
It won't take too long.
In 1994, Bill Clinton had a deal with North Korea.
And the deal was, we will give you oil and money and build you light water reactors that produce plutonium that's so polluted with impurities that there's no way you could make a bomb out of it.
Basically, that's the trick to the light water reactor.
And in exchange, you'll stay within the nonproliferation treaty, which they had signed in the days of the Soviet Union era, and you will keep the inspectors in the country.
And we will promise to further negotiate this on the way, whatever.
And the last chance on further negotiations expired during the Bush versus Gore recount when Clinton was going to go over there and then cancel that at the last minute.
And so it didn't happen.
Then Bush Jr. comes in 2001, and the American people thought Colin Powell was going to be in charge of all this kind of stuff.
And Colin Powell goes, Yeah, well, we're going to pick up where the Democrats left off on this North Korea stuff.
And Dick Cheney and the neocons were, no, you're not going to do that.
And so George Bush, John Bolton, who was then at the State Department, really led the effort to sabotage the agreed framework with Bill Clinton.
And the first thing that they did was they seized on reports that the North Koreans had a uranium enrichment program.
Well, they never did.
They had bought some parts for one from AQ Khan, the Pakistani black market nuclear arms dealer, but they had never really put anything together.
And now we know after they've tested, what, a half dozen nukes or more, they've all been plutonium bombs, not uranium bombs.
They were never seeking a uranium path to the bomb.
And in fact, that would not have been in violation of the agreed framework or of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
You know, the nonproliferation treaty guarantees them the right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
And in fact, their reactor ran on highly enriched uranium, like almost weapons-grade uranium.
So even if they'd been enriching to weapons-grade and had been caught red-handed doing that, that still didn't necessarily prove they were making weapons with it.
They might have just been doing it for their reactor.
And so anyway, assuming the truth of all the accusations, it still should have only been an opportunity to negotiate further.
There was nothing really, they weren't in any real violation.
But John Bolton then announced for the Bush administration, they were canceling the deal.
The agreed framework of 94 was now off.
Then they announced new sanctions against North Korea.
Then they announced something that was called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which is their own ad hoc, you know, outside the UN type rules for seizing boats on the high seas that they suspect of transporting weapons or weapons technology or whatever it was.
And then at the end of December or beginning of December 2002, they released their national security, pardon me, the well, the national security strategy was bad enough, but it was the nuclear posture review that they released in December 2002.
So maybe the North Koreans are on the short list for a nuclear first strike.
And it was only then that the North Koreans announced they were withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty, kicking the IAEA inspectors out of the country, which just like in the deal, they did six months later.
And only then did they begin to run their plutonium reactor again or their uranium reactor that produced plutonium waste and then harvest that plutonium waste from their Pyongyang reactor and start making nuclear weapons out of it.
So in other words, George W. Bush and his government almost forced, they held a gun to Kim Jong-il's head and essentially made him make nukes.
And I don't really know if, Dave, honestly, man, I don't know if they even really had this discussion all the way through.
You might think that the plan was, well, once we're done in Baghdad, we'll go straight to Pyongyang or Pyongyang and make sure that we don't have this problem, right?
We're pushing them out of the treaty.
We're not going to let them make nukes.
We're going to get a regime change before then.
But then they never did.
And so then Kim just started making nukes.
And now they have nukes.
And they started and they perfected them.
They have, you know, working A-bombs.
You almost wonder because there certainly were people in the Bush administration who believed the cakewalk narrative, that they were just going to go right into Iraq.
It would be easy-peasy.
And then maybe they thought they could move on to that.
And they ended up getting bogged down in what became a very, you know, unpopular, disastrous war.
So who knows?
Maybe that is what their plan was.
You know, I talked to a military guy in, say, early 03.
Oh, it would have been April 03, right at the time of the fall of Baghdad, right when my interview show started, April of 03.
I talked with a military intelligence guy who said, Look, you make a point about the neocons and all this stuff.
I'll tell you what, if we go to Iran next or to Syria next, then you're right.
It's the neocons.
But if we go to North Korea next, then I'm right that it's really just the Hawks and the neocons are only useful for what they're useful for.
And then they ended up not doing either because the Iraq war was such an absolute disaster that they didn't dare, you know, try to go on to Iran, Syria, or North Korea after that.
Thank God.
I said that now North Korea's got a bunch of nukes.
If anyone wants to read a great article about that, it's called How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes by Gordon Prater, the great nuclear weapons physicist Gordon Prater wrote that up back years ago.
I was the editor of it.
Totally stands up to this day.
And then, so now they have what, like a half dozen nukes, something like this.
And here's the point I'm trying to get to, Dave, is they're never going to negotiate away these nukes.
Probably.
Okay, like 99%, they're never going to negotiate them away.
Okay.
But if there was the slightest opportunity to negotiate the nukes away, to get the North Koreans to give up their nukes, especially after Libya, he gave up his AQCon, you know, Pakistani centrifuges in a warehouse, and they ended up murdering him seven years later, right?
After that precedent, after Saddam has nothing, we invade him.
Libya has nothing, we invade them.
The Iranians have a rudimentary, they have essentially a latent deterrent of a civilian program that could become a weapons program if we test them too hard and we stay out of there.
So the North Koreans can, you know, follow a pretty simple model here and know that they need these nukes to protect themselves.
The only way possible to go a different route than that, to actually get them to give up their nukes, if it's within the realm of possibility at all, it would be for America to sign a real peace treaty to end the Korean war that Harry Truman started back in 1950, that we still only have a ceasefire and we still don't have an actual peace treaty to end that war.
That'd be step one.
Step two, drop all the sanctions, drop all the threats, all the military exercises, and go Operation Kill them with kindness.
Whatever the South Koreans want to do to get along with the North Koreans, we support that.
And we got some ideas too.
Oh, you like basketball?
Any basketball player who's ever been a friend with Dennis Rodman, we're sending them all over there to party with you guys.
We're going to just do everything we can to open relations.
And on top of that, we give you an ironclad.
And I don't mean George W. Bush.
I mean Jack Kennedy to Khrushchev over Cuba.
Ironclad security guarantee.
The United States of America will never invade North Korea.
We are friends.
George Bush and Obama and Trump are gone, or at least Bush and Obama are gone.
Honoring Deals With America00:04:11
Sorry, I'm talking about Trump years here.
Bush and Obama are gone.
This is the way we're going to move forward.
Bad old days are gone.
That's the only way they could have done it.
And this isn't just libertarian, you know, Scott Horton partisan stuff because Trump's special emissary, I forgot his exact title they gave him on North Korea issues at the State Department, Stephen Began, gave a speech at the Brookings Institution where he said, I'm almost positive it was Brookings, but anyway, anyone can search this Stephen Biegun speech, North Korea.
And he said just what I said, that look, we got to put weapons last.
We can negotiate every little thing.
We can just drop a bunch of things and start trying to get along in everywhere we can.
And with a determination and an agreement from them that we will talk about nukes.
And we do want to talk about nukes.
And nukes are important.
We're going to try to undo George W. Bush's mistake here if we can, but let's not let that stop us from negotiating anything else.
And then what happened was they got to Hanoi and Stephen Biegun had to sit in the back and John Bolton got to sit at the table and the whole thing.
And Trump, again, was under all this political pressure and had no one supporting him and saying, hell yeah, sign a deal with North Korea.
No one was on that side of it that he could hear anyway.
And so he let the thing fall apart to protect his own political interests.
And then they never went back again.
That was it.
And February 2018.
And as is the case with a lot of these things with Trump, there are other forces that you can blame, you know, and that really do deserve blame.
I mean, I have never been, let me hesitate to say that, but I was pretty disgusted at the entire corporate press when you would watch these proceedings and you would just realize how psychotic these people are.
I mean, they'd be playing around with two nuclear powers trying to talk to each other and you're undermining it at every turn.
Like, do you guys not just have your own, like, you're human beings with families too, right?
Even if you're like on the bad team, don't you kind of at least root against nuclear war?
Like, oh, okay, let's, let's like this we can't even say like, okay, it's good.
If we're talking, we're probably not nuking each other.
So that's better than not talking.
So there's a lot of blame to go around.
And obviously, as you pointed out, there's a lot of blame for the Bush administration for pushing them toward getting nukes in the first place.
There's a lot of blame for the Obama administration.
I mean, look, what they did in Libya undermined the ability to ever convince any other regime that we have hostilities with to abandon any type of weapons program.
And for good reason.
I don't know if people can really appreciate how profound the consequences of that are.
That now nobody will ever, you know, that you'd have to be an idiot to give up any type of weapons programs or to cooperate at all because you could meet the worst fate imaginable, literally sodomized to death in the streets after doing all of that.
But Donald Trump has to take a lot of the responsibility here too.
Number one for having John Bolton at that table at all.
I mean, it's just inexcusable.
It's just inexcusable that he was your guy who you sent there.
And, you know, number two is the Iran deal.
I mean, this really is going to have devastating effects of diplomacy in general.
I mean, why make a deal with America if the next president is just going to rip it up to be a dick to the last president for no other reason than to just say, like, yeah, I think that guy sucks and I want to take away his accomplishment.
That's it.
And, you know, like, if Donald Trump wasn't so just incredibly petty, you know, he and cared about like the country at all or anything like that, it would have said, you know what?
We made this deal.
This is a deal with America.
I don't like it.
I wouldn't have made it.
But you know what?
When you make a deal with America, we honor that deal.
And the Iranians say whatever you will about him.
They honored their end of that deal.
And so, you know, like now you have that between the mix of Obama's war in Libya and Trump tearing up the deal in Iran, who the fuck would ever want to negotiate with us?
Like, if you just look at it from their perspective for a second, why would you ever want to scale back your weapons and sign a deal?
Part Three Coming Soon00:01:26
Okay.
Well, guess what?
We'll still kill you.
And the next president might just rip up this deal.
So, you know, I guess if it was ratified by Congress, maybe that would be a little different.
But still, it's, you know, it's a disaster.
The president can always withdraw from any treaty.
You know, you don't need the Senate's consent to undo a treaty, only to sign one.
Right, right, right.
Okay.
That's right.
So, so, so there you go.
Um, all right, dude, listen, we're gonna have to do a part three because I'm up against time.
I got to get this over to my studio.
And we still, I still want to talk about Venezuela and I still want to do a whole thing about the election.
Oh, yeah.
We got to talk.
The whole thing is just a disgrace.
All right.
I got to listen.
This is squeeze that out there.
I can't believe how retarded I am for thinking ever that this was going to be one episode.
But I'm going to have to conclude part two there.
And we'll have to do a part three in the next few days because there's just so much more I want to talk to you about.
And I love all of this.
I wouldn't have wanted to cut any of this out.
So I'm glad we're doing it this way.
All right.
Guys, go over to antiwar.com.
Go over to thelibertarianinstitute.org.
Go support those guys.
If you can, if you can donate it all to them, that would be great too.
Just some of the best resources on the planet.
And Scott, thank you so much for this episode.
And we're going to have to do a part three in the next few days.