Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Legacy Of Donald Trump pt 3 w/ Scott Horton
Aired: 2021-01-02
Duration: 01:48:05


=== Funding America's Next Enemy (04:46) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:09]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:11]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:15]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:21]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:00:33]  Hey, what's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome back to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  It is New Year's Day as we are recording this, our first episode of the year for 2021.
[00:00:44]  And of course, to start 2021 off right, I'm going to give you a nice dose of Scott Horton straight into your veins.
[00:00:52]  We are going to wrap up our legacy of Donald Trump.
[00:00:56]  This is part three.
[00:00:57]  This will be the final installment of legacy of Donald Trump, which, you know, we ridiculously thought we could do in one episode, but clearly we needed more than that.
[00:01:08]  Scott Horton, of course, as everybody knows, is the author of the phenomenal book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
[00:01:15]  He also wrote the great Ron Paul.
[00:01:17]  You can check out his work at antiwar.com, at the Libertarian Institute.org, and at the Scott, is it ScottHortonshow.org, right?
[00:01:26]  No?
[00:01:27]  ScottHorton.org.
[00:01:28]  ScottHorton.org.
[00:01:29]  Sorry.
[00:01:29]  I missed.
[00:01:30]  You have too many websites.
[00:01:31]  Sign up for the podcast feed.
[00:01:33]  That's all you got to do.
[00:01:34]  Yeah, sign up for the podcast feed.
[00:01:35]  Thousands of interviews.
[00:01:37]  If you really want to understand what's going on in foreign policy, there's no better resource that I could point you to.
[00:01:42]  So we've been talking in the previous two episodes about the legacy of Donald Trump.
[00:01:46]  We're going to continue on with that.
[00:01:48]  Of course, we've been focusing a lot on foreign policy, although we hit some other areas as well, and we will do that today.
[00:01:55]  We're going to talk about the election as well.
[00:01:57]  But I just wanted to mention, again, the reason we focus so much on foreign policy is it's not just because this is Scott's area of expertise.
[00:02:06]  It's also because this is, it's the worst thing that the government does.
[00:02:10]  It's the most important area.
[00:02:12]  And it is the area that the president has the most control over.
[00:02:16]  So it's the area that really, if you're talking about Donald Trump's legacy, you can make some excuses for other parts of the government where, you know, okay, this was also a lot to do with Congress and other forces.
[00:02:28]  But foreign policy, Donald Trump really has to take a tremendous amount of responsibility for as he is essentially the dictator of the military.
[00:02:37]  So we talked a bunch about Yemen, a bunch about Syria.
[00:02:41]  We talked about North Korea.
[00:02:42]  What I wanted to start with today was Iran, because we hadn't gotten into Iran too much yet, or we talked a little bit about it.
[00:02:53]  But Iran was really one of the areas where Trump was the worst.
[00:02:57]  I mean, he was terrible on Iran from the very beginning, even as a candidate.
[00:03:00]  Even when he was saying some positive things about other areas of foreign policy, he was really terrible on Iran.
[00:03:07]  And, you know, he would talk about how the Iran deal was the worst deal ever made, ever made in human history, the worst deal ever made.
[00:03:16]  A lot of us were hoping that that was just kind of campaign bluster and he wouldn't actually move to try to get us out of that, or maybe someone would, you know, talk some sense into him.
[00:03:26]  But it wasn't.
[00:03:27]  He got us out of the Iran deal.
[00:03:31]  Probably to me, the scariest part of the Trump presidency was when tensions really started escalating after that Salmani guy was killed.
[00:03:44]  And it actually looked like things could spiral out of control for a little bit.
[00:03:48]  So it's to you.
[00:03:51]  Let's talk about Trump and Iran.
[00:03:53]  All right.
[00:03:54]  Well, Happy New Year, Dave.
[00:03:55]  Thanks for watching.
[00:03:55]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:55]  Happy New Year.
[00:03:56]  Happy New Year, everybody.
[00:03:57]  Hope you had a good one.
[00:03:58]  Let's see if we can wrap this up here.
[00:04:00]  So, all right, look, anybody who heard either of the last two episodes, you could tell every time you ask me about Trump, I end up talking about how much I hate Barack Obama and all his horrible treason in Libya and Syria and all my tangents.
[00:04:14]  I can't help it.
[00:04:14]  This is a story.
[00:04:15]  And guys, as bad as Woodrow Wilson, or name it.
[00:04:20]  And so this is no apologia for him or for John Kerry for the love of God.
[00:04:25]  It ain't about that.
[00:04:27]  But the fact of the matter is, the entire scandal about Iran's nuclear program is a giant bunch of crap cooked up in Tel Aviv.
[00:04:37]  And it always has just been Israel's agenda, their big excuse, essentially, in their fifth column in Washington, D.C., their big excuse to make sure that...

=== The Iran Nuclear Lie (15:45) ===

[00:04:47]  I have seen direct evidence of a bomb that had black marks all the way up to the very top and just a little bit of space after that.
[00:04:56]  So are you going to tell me that that direct evidence presented by the great Netanyahu, what was it in 2011?
[00:05:03]  They only had this much to go in 2011, Scott.
[00:05:05]  Wasn't that funny?
[00:05:07]  They were only five years away in 1988 from getting a nuclear weapon.
[00:05:11]  You're telling me this is all wrong?
[00:05:14]  Yeah.
[00:05:14]  No, in 88, the Israelis still loved Ayatollah and was 19, the 90s.
[00:05:19]  Yeah, it was 90.
[00:05:20]  Yeah, it was 1990 when Shimon Perez first floated this thing.
[00:05:23]  You know, they could get nukes within five years from now.
[00:05:26]  And then Netanyahu's been saying it since 95 at least.
[00:05:29]  I think that's the earliest one that I can find.
[00:05:32]  In fact, if people want to find the full list of Israelis claiming that Iran is about to get the bomb, and especially Netanyahu himself, it's The Phantom Menace is the name of the article.
[00:05:42]  It's by Nima Shirazi.
[00:05:45]  And he just goes through and chronicles this whole giant list of these fake claims.
[00:05:50]  So the bottom line of it is this.
[00:05:53]  Back when Iran was ruled by America's sock puppet dictator, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, at the end of the 1960s, transition in the 70s there, that was when America helped them or was beginning their plans to help them build their nuclear program.
[00:06:10]  And the Iranians signed the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968.
[00:06:14]  The nonproliferation treaty says if you're a nuclear weapon state like America, you promise not to share your nukes with anybody or sell them to anybody else.
[00:06:21]  And you promise to, yeah, yeah, right, sure, get rid of them someday.
[00:06:26]  Okay.
[00:06:26]  And then if you're a non-nuclear weapon state and you sign it, then you promise never to get them, not by hook, by crook, by making them, by buying them, or anything else.
[00:06:34]  And you also promise to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was a pre-existing agency, to come in and you have to sign with them a safeguards agreement, which is your contract, which allows them to inspect all your nuclear facilities to verify the non-diversion of your actual nuclear material to any military purpose.
[00:06:54]  That's their mandate under the Safeguards Agreement.
[00:06:57]  So the very first rudimentary parts of their nuclear program, the Americans sold to them back in the 1970s.
[00:07:04]  And then after the revolution, it all got shut down.
[00:07:06]  None of it ever really went anywhere.
[00:07:08]  And they didn't even really restart their nuclear program until the very early Bush years.
[00:07:14]  And it's clear that they did it for a few reasons.
[00:07:19]  None of them were to make a nuclear weapon.
[00:07:22]  The first reason was so they could sell their oil because there's not really an international market for uranium and they have natural, you know, domestic uranium supplies.
[00:07:32]  So they can run their electricity off their uranium and sell their oil on the world market.
[00:07:36]  I mean, assuming that they're not under blockade and they're allowed to.
[00:07:41]  So that's the first thing.
[00:07:42]  It's just economics, just business.
[00:07:44]  The second thing is that it's essentially a latent Deterrent that if they, and they have, but if they can master the nuclear fuel cycle and prove that they know how to enrich uranium, that hey, we've proof we know how to enrich uranium.
[00:08:03]  So, like, I have a gun in my holster.
[00:08:04]  Don't make me pull it out and fill it with bullets kind of thing.
[00:08:08]  So, that's like a half-assed nuclear deterrent, if you understand what I mean.
[00:08:12]  And then, third, is a bargaining chip because they're under total sanctions and isolated from the international community.
[00:08:20]  So, especially in the Obama years when their program got advanced enough, they had enough of a nuclear program to trade away and get some peace.
[00:08:29]  If you listen to the Obama guys say, they'll be like, Yeah, our crippling sanctions force them to the table.
[00:08:34]  Like, nah, I think it was their giant stockpile of low-enriched uranium.
[00:08:39]  You talk about Netanyahu's cartoon bomb there.
[00:08:41]  It's filling up with a dud, right?
[00:08:43]  It's filling up with 3.5% or 3.6% enriched uranium-235 that doesn't go boom.
[00:08:51]  You can use it for nuclear fuel rods and that kind of thing, but you can't use it to make a weapon.
[00:08:58]  It has to be enriched to above 80 and typically above 90% purity to make a uranium atom bomb out of it.
[00:09:05]  So, they're not enriching up to that level at all.
[00:09:09]  And, you know, they're safeguarded and inspected and verified by the IAEA not to have done so.
[00:09:16]  But so, the problem is that.
[00:09:17]  Oh, and I just wanted to quickly point out, just to back you up, that even back when Netanyahu was presenting this fucking bomb that literally looked like the bomb that blows Daffy Duck's beak to the other side of his face and then he fights back in the next one.
[00:09:32]  Wiley Coyote versus the Roadrunner.
[00:09:33]  Yeah.
[00:09:34]  Yeah.
[00:09:34]  As he was presenting this bomb, just to be clear, it's not that a few dissident journalists like Scott and people at antiwar.com were saying, oh, they don't really have this bomb.
[00:09:45]  Both the CIA and the Mossad were saying, like, had all of this information, were saying they do not have a nuclear weapon.
[00:09:52]  There's no, they're nowhere close to having a nuclear weapon.
[00:09:54]  This is all, and that did not stop Netanyahu from getting up there and putting all of this forward.
[00:09:59]  Like, this was known by everybody who knew that this was all bullshit.
[00:10:03]  Right.
[00:10:04]  And in fact, so that's a great point.
[00:10:05]  We should go back to the Bush years for a second here.
[00:10:07]  So let's see.
[00:10:12]  In 2005, it was revealed by the Israelis through the Mujahideen-e-Kalk communist terrorist cult.
[00:10:19]  You know, they're the guys, whenever you hear about nuclear scientists getting assassinated, it's the MEK cult doing that for Israel.
[00:10:26]  And they revealed, and I guess it had already been known, it had been revealed and they kind of raced to get ahead of it, that the Iranians are beginning to dig a hole in the ground to put a nuclear centrifuge facility at Natans.
[00:10:39]  So they were not in violation of their safeguards agreement.
[00:10:42]  They're under the agreement, they have to give the IAEA six months' notice before they introduce nuclear material into any machine for any kind of purpose.
[00:10:51]  So they were far from six months, you know, from that at the time that it was exposed.
[00:10:56]  So they weren't really in violation of the deal.
[00:10:59]  And they had bought their nuclear equipment on the black market from the Pakistanis, AQ Khan, but only because the Bill Clinton government wouldn't let them just buy turnkey facilities from the Chinese or the Russians.
[00:11:09]  So they had to go to the black market to get it, but that didn't mean that they were making weapons with it.
[00:11:13]  But that was, of course, the presumption of the Bush government.
[00:11:17]  And all through, I mean, from at least, I don't know if they made much of a deal of it in 2001, but certainly from 2002 through mid-2007, they constantly just lie.
[00:11:31]  I mean, they had all these threats and sanctions, and they had the European Union negotiating for us, the E3, France, Germany, and Britain negotiating on our behalf in kind of a half-assed way to stall them, but with no real promise of negotiations.
[00:11:46]  For the whole time, this relentless propaganda campaign that the Iranians are making nukes and what are we going to do to stop them?
[00:11:52]  And everybody knows it's true.
[00:11:54]  And if somebody said, Yeah, but we know that they have a safeguarded electricity program.
[00:11:59]  I mean, it ain't, I mean, where's the nukes?
[00:12:01]  They go, well, there's a secret parallel program that we're pretty sure, you know, if you read David Sanger in the New York Times, he would say, and so then the diplomats this today in Vienna were discussing what to do about Iran's nuclear weapons program.
[00:12:15]  And then it just becomes asserted like a flat fact, like Assad's sarin gas attacks or whatever lie in the New York Times.
[00:12:23]  Everybody knows Saddam Hussein's making atom bombs.
[00:12:26]  Everybody knows Iran is making atom bombs.
[00:12:28]  We just assert it as a flat fact that they are, even though that was the entire debate was whether this is a weapons program at all or not, right?
[00:12:37]  And then so they had the bait and switch that, well, maybe there's a secret one or something.
[00:12:41]  Well, we certainly know now that was 15 years ago.
[00:12:44]  There was no secret parallel program anywhere.
[00:12:46]  There was nothing.
[00:12:47]  There never was.
[00:12:48]  That was a lie then, and it turned out to also not be true.
[00:12:51]  But it wasn't like it was an honest mistake.
[00:12:53]  It was just part of their propaganda.
[00:12:56]  But then in 2007, so in spring of 2007, Admiral Fallon, the commander of CENTCOM, had said, we'll go to war with Iran over my dead body, which is like the ultimate insubordination, only it's to stop a war instead of start one.
[00:13:13]  So it's not like MacArthur trying to get us into a fight with China, right?
[00:13:16]  It's like, I don't know, this guy's trying to keep us out of war with Iran.
[00:13:19]  I'll take a little of that.
[00:13:20]  It's important.
[00:13:21]  This is the second example in a row.
[00:13:22]  We have another one of these recently.
[00:13:24]  What was it?
[00:13:25]  On, oh, I'm killing Assad, where the military refuses to go along with the civilians, you know, hairbrain schemes.
[00:13:33]  So Admiral Fallon had really put the kibosh on this in the late spring, early summer of 2007.
[00:13:39]  And then in, I'm going to say it was September, so very late summer then of 2007, the CIA released the national intelligence estimate that said, we judge with high confidence they abandon all research.
[00:13:53]  They never had a weapons program.
[00:13:55]  They were never making weapons.
[00:13:57]  And they abandoned all research into making weapons back in 2003 when America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them and they didn't think that they needed one anymore.
[00:14:06]  And they certainly knew they couldn't build up an arsenal before America or Israel could get to them.
[00:14:11]  So conceivably building one to deter Saddam Hussein made some sense, but to deter the United States, nah, you know, we'll come and get you first.
[00:14:19]  That was clear.
[00:14:20]  And they knew that then, you know.
[00:14:22]  And by the way, and this is important.
[00:14:25]  I mean, I expect people to dismiss it too, which is fair and fine with me.
[00:14:28]  Like, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe this, but I think it's notable for at least, you know, part of the discussion that when America, when Ronald Reagan's government was helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and this is reported by the great Gareth Porter in Foreign Policy, it's called When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes.
[00:14:49]  And they came to him, the IRGC came to Ayatollah Khomeini and said, We want to make chemical weapons to use against the Iraqis in kind.
[00:14:57]  And he said, No, it's haram.
[00:14:58]  It is forbidden by Islam.
[00:15:00]  So this was taken in the Iranian system.
[00:15:03]  This it doesn't have to be written down as an official fatwa.
[00:15:06]  It's his position as the overriding supreme leader head of state.
[00:15:11]  That I didn't just say no, I said our religion says you can't.
[00:15:16]  That's it.
[00:15:17]  So that's the final word on it.
[00:15:19]  And so that included nukes because if you can't make chemicals, you can't make nukes.
[00:15:26]  So, and then the new Ayatollah, who's been in power since 89, Khamenei, he has reaffirmed the same thing.
[00:15:32]  So they've never had a chemical weapons arsenal.
[00:15:35]  And that's just the words of politicians in a way.
[00:15:38]  But I'm just saying, you can see how it's been, you know, implemented.
[00:15:42]  They, at the height of America, you know, Saddam Hussein is using Taban nerve gas against masses of Iranian conscript young men out there in the field and even on Iranian cities.
[00:15:55]  And the Ayatollah still said, no, you can defend against that only, but you cannot, you know, fight in kind.
[00:16:03]  So that's been their policy on weapons of mass destruction.
[00:16:06]  Anyway, so 2007, the CIA comes and says.
[00:16:11]  They never were making them and now they've even quit researching since 2003.
[00:16:16]  Well, this is an aside, but it's very important.
[00:16:18]  Gareth Porter shows in his book, Manufactured Crisis, that they never had a research program before 2003 either.
[00:16:24]  That was based on one, the Israeli forged fake smoking laptop, which they pretended was smuggled out of Iran, that it was an Iranian scientist's laptop that was full of fake documents.
[00:16:34]  And we'll get back to that in just a second, actually, when it comes to Donald Trump's decisions here.
[00:16:40]  And then the other facet of that was actually an honest mistake where the Defense Intelligence Agency had intercepted orders for some dual-use equipment that could be used for this or for that.
[00:16:55]  You know, that's what they call it, dual-use.
[00:16:56]  This could be part of a weapon system if you used it, right?
[00:17:00]  And they looked at some of these orders for some things and said, oh, these high-powered magnet rings are suspicious and some of these other things.
[00:17:07]  But later on, when the IAEA, and it was years later, but years later, the IAEA went and tracked all of that down, or at least major parts of it, and they found the actual pieces of equipment at Sharif University being used for non-nuclear purposes, just what they were claimed to be for.
[00:17:25]  So like if you were a spy, according to Gareth, you might have said, hey, hey, hey, I think this is cover for something going on.
[00:17:31]  And you could have made an honest mistake about that.
[00:17:34]  But we know now that that was not true.
[00:17:36]  And the entire conclusion that they were ever even really researching nuclear weapons was based on that.
[00:17:41]  Now, the New York Times reporter James Risen, who should just be out mowing lawns for a living right now after his Russia gate trutherism, I mean, who knows?
[00:17:50]  But he had reported the story that the worst the Iranians ever did in terms of planning to build nuclear weapons was when the CIA planted some fake nuclear bomb blueprints on them to try to bust them.
[00:18:06]  And then what was funny was there's just like one or two flaws in it, but they were major, obvious flaws.
[00:18:11]  And so the Iranians would have never fallen for it.
[00:18:14]  And the IAEA, through all their inspections, never found this fake brochure or whatever it was in the Iranians' files because they were not stupid enough to have fallen for that.
[00:18:23]  But that was the Americans.
[00:18:25]  The CIA gave them bomb blueprints with just a couple of different little thingamajigs.
[00:18:30]  Yeah, that's how we're going to stop their nuclear weapons program.
[00:18:33]  And I think Risen was credible on that.
[00:18:35]  He seemed to be verified on that as far as I remember the story.
[00:18:39]  But then, so, as I said, they were within the treaty.
[00:18:44]  They're within their safeguards agreement.
[00:18:46]  They are by the end of the Bush government, they are enriching uranium hexafluoride gas up to 3.6% 235.
[00:18:58]  And essentially, even after the NIE came out.
[00:19:01]  Oh, one more thing about when the NIE came out.
[00:19:03]  Sorry, I quote this in my new book coming out.
[00:19:06]  And you can go, everyone can go and read it in Bush's memoir.
[00:19:10]  Wait, that was Hillary.
[00:19:12]  I forgot.
[00:19:13]  Decision points, I think.
[00:19:15]  Anyway, it's in Bush's memoir.
[00:19:16]  He says, well, how in the hell is I supposed to start a war now at the CIA saying they're not even making weapons anyway?
[00:19:22]  And it's just, and the quotes, and it's funny, he goes, he talks about, you know, he's so George W. Bush's lacks in self-awareness to that perfect kind of degree, you know, where he's like, so here's what happened.
[00:19:34]  And he's like, really trying to like get us to sympathize with the position he was in, you know?
[00:19:38]  So I said to the king, Your Majesty, I know you must be so mad at me for the CIA coming out with the NIE, but it wasn't my fault.
[00:19:48]  You see, they did that to me too.
[00:19:51]  And now we're all so sad that we can't start the war because the CIA told the truth on us.
[00:19:57]  And then how am I supposed to get away with it now?
[00:19:59]  And it's just, you just see this guy groveling before the Saudi king like he's really is better somehow.
[00:20:05]  I don't know.
[00:20:06]  And I just Bush, I guess he is.
[00:20:09]  By the way, and it's just like, because I already hear one of the most frustrating responses that I'll get, and I'm sure you get too, when we have these conversations about Iran, is that people just go, oh, so you're blaming America for everything and making excuses for Iran for everything.
[00:20:25]  And, you know, and they'll point to things like, well, look how Iran treats its people and look what they do to like some girl in a mini skirt here or there.

=== Sanctions and Broken Deals (07:48) ===

[00:20:32]  And just to be clear, no one here is making excuses for the government of Iran.
[00:20:37]  They're bad people, just like all governments are, and maybe a little bit worse than some other governments.
[00:20:42]  The point is that in this conflict, America is not in conflict with Iran because of the way they treat their people, because they're repressive to their people.
[00:20:51]  I mean, just for proof of that, we're good friends with the Saudis, for God's sakes.
[00:20:57]  We're not concerned with a government repressing their people's freedom.
[00:21:02]  And we would like to see everybody in Iran free and everybody in Saudi Arabia free.
[00:21:06]  The point is that in this conflict, American politicians and Israeli politicians have been lying to the world to provoke conflict with Iran and that in this conflict, Iran is not the bad guys.
[00:21:19]  And just to throw that disclaimer out there.
[00:21:22]  Sure.
[00:21:22]  Yeah, no, I mean, that's absolutely true.
[00:21:24]  Look, I'm from Texas.
[00:21:25]  I'm not Iranian.
[00:21:26]  I don't have any tie to Iran or a partisan reason to favor them in this contest.
[00:21:31]  We're just talking about the truth.
[00:21:33]  And our government and the Israeli government are constantly trying to lie the American people into war.
[00:21:38]  My job is explaining why that shit ain't true.
[00:21:41]  So that's what this is, simple as that.
[00:21:43]  That's why it takes me so damn long to answer the question about Donald Trump withdrawing from the stupid treaty.
[00:21:48]  Because I got to explain it so that people know, right?
[00:21:50]  So here's the deal.
[00:21:52]  So after Bush is whining to the king and groveling to the king, the narrative that Iran is a nuclear weapons threat never really went away.
[00:22:05]  That NIE that came out in 2007 was like a hiccup, but then the narrative was back again very soon.
[00:22:11]  And of course, with the Israelis making false charges, and in the Obama years, you know, they had this massive, well, massive, but pretty, you know, extensive assassination campaign where they killed four nuclear scientists in between 2011, 2012 inside Iran.
[00:22:28]  And that went on until Obama himself, it was obviously the Obama government, leaked a major story about it to NBC News to burn the op, basically, and force the Israelis to stop it.
[00:22:41]  And there were people, you know, people I knew who usually know better were worried that this could be it, man.
[00:22:47]  I think the Israelis are really going to launch the war and force us into it and this kind of thing.
[00:22:53]  There was a real worry about that kind of thing in about 2011 and 12.
[00:22:56]  And so the fact of the NPT and the safeguards agreement, I mean, it's not like Barack Obama or anybody else was other than me and Gordon Pray there at antiwar.com and, you know, other people like that.
[00:23:07]  But there was no one in power saying, look, damn it, they're in the safeguards agreement.
[00:23:14]  They are verified to have not diverted their nuclear material to military purposes.
[00:23:18]  And we're going to keep watching them like a hawk, but that's it.
[00:23:20]  There's no secret parallel program.
[00:23:23]  There's no real weapons threat here.
[00:23:25]  So shut up.
[00:23:26]  No one did that.
[00:23:27]  Instead, what they did was sign a new deal.
[00:23:31]  And the New Deal, oh, and I should reiterate: through the Obama years, they had a massive sanctions campaign and starving people to death, depriving people of medicine, doing every, you know, causing massive inflation, you know, and destruction of the value of the Iranian currency and everything they could to disrupt society there for those people.
[00:23:50]  And then, as I said before, it wasn't the sanctions that brought them to the table, it was Iran's advances of their nuclear program that brought the Americans to the table.
[00:23:59]  And so, because they had finally built up enough to trade away to, yes, get some sanctions relief.
[00:24:04]  So, there, you know, a sanctions sounds like such a clinical term or something, even embargo.
[00:24:09]  I don't know, what's an embargo, but this is a virtual blockade, right?
[00:24:13]  This is you know, destroying our Treasury Department is second only to the Pentagon in power on this planet, okay?
[00:24:20]  When they decide to shut down financial transactions to your country, they can do so to severe degrees, you know.
[00:24:29]  And of course, big smile Obama, not like that mean old unilateralist Bush or that mean old isolationist Donald Trump.
[00:24:37]  Barack Obama has a nice big smile and gets along great with the French and the Germans.
[00:24:41]  And so, he got all the Europeans to go along with all of this too.
[00:24:44]  And for that matter, got the Russians and the Chinese to go along.
[00:24:48]  We're going to do this maximum pressure campaign to get them to give in and do it our way.
[00:24:53]  So, then they did.
[00:24:55]  And really, the Iranians, I mean, they had nothing to lose.
[00:24:58]  Again, they were not making nuclear weapons, so they were not foregoing their ability to make nuclear weapons that, ah, geez, they really wanted to hang on to, but now they're giving it up.
[00:25:06]  That wasn't really what was happening at all.
[00:25:08]  All that was happening was that essentially America was recognizing officially that, okay, you're safeguarded.
[00:25:16]  That was it, right?
[00:25:18]  And so, what that deal meant was on the Iranian side, it meant that they poured concrete into their Iraq heavy water reactor, making it inoperable for all time.
[00:25:31]  They're converting the Boucher reactor to a light water reactor so that it can only produce plutonium waste that's so polluted by impurities that could never be really refined to be used for nuclear weapons.
[00:25:44]  And all of that will be taken off to Russia anyway.
[00:25:48]  They already have H-bombs, so we can trust them with H-bombs, with plutonium.
[00:25:53]  And they restricted the number of spinning centrifuges at Natan's.
[00:26:00]  They have a secondary centrifuge facility at Comm or Fordo, where essentially they converted it to a research facility only rather than actual production of uranium there.
[00:26:13]  And they agreed to limit their stockpile, the amount of low-enriched uranium they have at any one time, to a small enough amount that they couldn't make it into a nuke.
[00:26:24]  So, this is what's really important to all the wonks, Dave, is what they call breakout capability.
[00:26:30]  How long would it take for Iran not to make a nuclear weapon, but to have enough weapons-grade uranium to make a nuclear weapon?
[00:26:41]  And if the answer to that is under a year, then we all panic.
[00:26:45]  If the answer to that is a year, then I guess that's okay.
[00:26:49]  So, then the idea is if they have this few centrifuges running and this amount, this low amount of uranium on it on the stockpile, then that reduces their breakout time to a year.
[00:27:01]  So, that even if they withdrew from the treaty, kick the inspectors out and said, ha ha, screw you, now we're making nuclear bombs.
[00:27:07]  It would take them a year to do so so that Joe Biden would have enough time to draft us all to invade Persia to prevent it, right?
[00:27:17]  So, that's basically the deal.
[00:27:19]  And that was the deal that Kerry signed.
[00:27:20]  Now, what did America do?
[00:27:22]  There's a huge scandal about the pallets of cash.
[00:27:25]  And they did send them literally pallets of cash, which makes for a great or terrible photo op, if you want, for public relations purposes.
[00:27:33]  And I think they had to scrounge up the cash from different places.
[00:27:37]  But look, dollars are fungible.
[00:27:40]  That money was not American money.
[00:27:43]  It was not American tax money or even money we borrowed from the Chinese or even inflated out of thin air.
[00:27:48]  That was money that America had stolen, that Jimmy Carter's government had stolen from Iran because they were in the middle of a massive weapons purchase from the United States at the time of the Iranian Revolution and then the hostage crisis.
[00:28:02]  So those accounts were frozen.
[00:28:04]  So all John Kerry did, the entire American side of the deal was, okay, you can have your money back that we stole from you 40 years ago, 35, and we will lift sanctions.
[00:28:19]  And of course, the Americans never lifted the sanctions at all.

=== Sheath Underwear Sponsorship (02:27) ===

[00:28:21]  They lifted, what, two out of 100 or whatever it was.
[00:28:24]  They did not live up to their end of the deal.
[00:28:26]  Just like, and I forgot to say this on your show the other day about the North Korean deal, the agreed framework that Bill Clinton signed.
[00:28:31]  He never gave them the light water reactors or the money or the oil.
[00:28:34]  Never lived up to their side of the deal, but they did live up to theirs.
[00:28:37]  And that reminds me of another correction, or that was just an omission.
[00:28:42]  This is a correction.
[00:28:43]  The George Carlin joke was not entirely accurate.
[00:28:46]  I said it was entirely accurate.
[00:28:48]  It was actually in India, not Pakistan, where the chemical explosion happened.
[00:28:52]  And it was 2,000 people who died, not 6,000.
[00:28:55]  Thank you very much to the person who emailed me to correct me on that.
[00:28:59]  That's why I'm right about everything is because people say, no, no, no, that's wrong.
[00:29:02]  And then I get it right after that.
[00:29:04]  This is what, just for that person who emailed Scott, just so you understand the mind of Scott Horton, that will keep Scott up at night that he got that detail wrong and that he's texted me six times since then.
[00:29:15]  Because I'm correct.
[00:29:16]  The next time, the next time I got to correct this.
[00:29:18]  I'll tell you what.
[00:29:20]  The point of what you were saying is still true, though.
[00:29:22]  Yeah.
[00:29:22]  If he had said you're wrong, but didn't correct me and so I didn't know, that would have kept me up at night.
[00:29:27]  Okay, fair enough.
[00:29:28]  Okay, fair enough.
[00:29:29]  Now that I know the truth, it's all good.
[00:29:32]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
[00:29:34]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear.
[00:29:38]  Sheath makes the most comfortable boxer briefs I've ever worn in my life.
[00:29:43]  It's all I wear at this point.
[00:29:44]  If you're sick of boxers that are too loose or briefs that are too tight, Sheath is for you.
[00:29:49]  Here's what makes Sheath unique.
[00:29:51]  The stretchy fabric is made out of a moisture-wicking technology.
[00:29:55]  They feel super soft, keep everything cool, comfortable, in place.
[00:29:58]  It's the perfect underwear for working out.
[00:30:01]  Plus, the most unique thing about Sheath Underwear is they have these dual pouches that keep your man parts separated, which prevents things sticking together or being in the wrong place.
[00:30:11]  I'll tell you, I was a little skeptical about the pouch, but it's a game changer.
[00:30:14]  It's unbelievable.
[00:30:15]  And if you don't like the idea of the pouch, you don't even have to use the pouch.
[00:30:18]  You can just wear them like regular underwear, and they'll be the most comfortable pair of boxer briefs you've ever put on your body.
[00:30:24]  I promise you.
[00:30:25]  I recommend Sheath.
[00:30:26]  Plus, the owner is a huge supporter of the show.
[00:30:28]  He's a libertarian, so make sure you go support this company.
[00:30:31]  Go to sheathunderwear.com, get the most comfortable pair of underwear you've ever owned.
[00:30:36]  And if you use the promo code problem20, you'll get 20% off your order.
[00:30:41]  That's sheathunderwear.com, promo code problem20 for 20% off your order.
[00:30:47]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Trump Pulls Out of Deal (15:10) ===

[00:30:49]  I always said I just love, there was something beautiful, like from a comedic perspective about the Iran deal.
[00:30:55]  And it is like, cause, look, as much as like I think it was, it was good, and I know you do too, this is the thing that you get when you deal with governments.
[00:31:02]  Like nothing's ever perfect when two governments are working together.
[00:31:05]  But the whole thing was basically a big farce.
[00:31:09]  Like it was the thing that was positive about it was that it removed the neocon excuse.
[00:31:18]  It removed the war hawk, you know, like justification for why there would be a war with Iran.
[00:31:26]  And so that made it a good deal.
[00:31:27]  But this whole thing that was like presented in the media was basically like, well, we gave Iran money so Iran would abandon their nuclear weapons program.
[00:31:36]  And in reality, it was money that was never really ours and it was a program that they never really had.
[00:31:42]  So all of it was just imaginary, but it was still better than not having happened because it took a very real threat of war off the table, at least temporarily.
[00:31:53]  As Seth, then, of course, the problem is, as we've covered numerous times, and as unfortunately, I think I predicted at the same time I was supporting the deal.
[00:32:01]  Not like that made the difference or anything, but I'm pretty sure I told Tom Woods in support of the Iran deal on his show that, you know, hey, all other things being equal, man, because the Saudis might do something crazy.
[00:32:15]  I don't know.
[00:32:16]  And then so that was the problem, is that's exactly what they did.
[00:32:20]  And as we talked about, Obama helped them do it.
[00:32:22]  And they launched the war in Yemen in order to make up for the fact.
[00:32:26]  And look, what are we doing for the Saudis with the nuclear deal?
[00:32:29]  We're locking down Iran's program double extra more than before.
[00:32:34]  Additional protocol to the safeguards agreement.
[00:32:37]  So what are they crying about?
[00:32:39]  And that in itself is, if not proof, damn strong evidence that all of these actors are just lying through their teeth.
[00:32:46]  Because if Netanyahu really was concerned about, like, if this was a genuine concern about Iran developing a nuclear weapon, and if the Saudis were genuinely concerned about that, and if the neocons were genuinely concerned about that, then they all would have cheered Obama and Kerry's deal.
[00:33:02]  No matter what they thought about Obama and Kerry, they would have gone, look, this is good because we were all so worried about this.
[00:33:08]  But the fact is, none of them cared about that because none of them were ever really worried about Iran having a nuclear weapon.
[00:33:15]  What they were mad about is the thing that we love about the deal.
[00:33:19]  They were like, hey, you just removed our pretense for aggression.
[00:33:23]  What the hell are you doing?
[00:33:24]  And so, and that is pretty revealing.
[00:33:27]  Yeah.
[00:33:27]  And I mean, that's exactly right.
[00:33:29]  They don't want peace.
[00:33:30]  They don't want a deal that could lead to peace and rapproachment.
[00:33:33]  And I think probably I doubt Netanyahu really wants war either.
[00:33:38]  I think Cold War with Iran in perpetuity serves his interest just right.
[00:33:43]  You know, because it gives Arab states a reason to side with Israel and for the things that Israel can do for them in that sense.
[00:33:52]  And it serves as it always has for his political career since the mid-1990s, since he became prime minister the first time in 96.
[00:34:01]  It serves as the perfect excuse to distract from what they're doing to the Palestinians.
[00:34:06]  Hey, look, Iran, which is like, it's got to be the oldest trick in the book by now, but it still works every time.
[00:34:13]  And just to consolidate power over his own people, even.
[00:34:15]  I mean, it's like every government benefits tremendously from having this exterior threat that they can always use at any moment.
[00:34:22]  Like, oh, you know, this whole, they always love that.
[00:34:24]  The invaders, the outsiders, whatever it is.
[00:34:27]  It's governments benefit from their citizenry being scared of an outside threat.
[00:34:32]  And it's a perfect distraction tool.
[00:34:34]  And so, yeah, they benefit from all of that.
[00:34:36]  Right.
[00:34:37]  Okay.
[00:34:37]  So now at one hour in, I start to answer your question.
[00:34:40]  What's up with this?
[00:34:43]  Half hour into the recording.
[00:34:45]  We talked.
[00:34:45]  Oh, that's right.
[00:34:46]  We were BSing for a minute.
[00:34:47]  Okay.
[00:34:48]  That doesn't count.
[00:34:50]  Okay.
[00:34:50]  So now Trump comes in.
[00:34:52]  And as you said, he ran against the deal.
[00:34:54]  It's the worst deal in the whole wide world, which, you know, he said it at the beginning just to make sure that no Republican could be harsher on it than him.
[00:35:02]  That was all.
[00:35:02]  He didn't know anything about it.
[00:35:04]  He never said one detail about it.
[00:35:05]  He never said, you know what really sucks about that treaty?
[00:35:08]  One detail ever, right?
[00:35:10]  It was just bad.
[00:35:11]  And people say, oh, he just hated it because of Obama, but I don't know.
[00:35:16]  I could see he wanted to undermine Obama's accomplishment.
[00:35:18]  I think that makes sense as part of it.
[00:35:20]  But part of it was just in the primary, making sure he was quote unquote the best on it in a Republican field from that point of view, right?
[00:35:29]  And then that's what Sheldon Adelson and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to hear.
[00:35:33]  And so, you know, I think it was about that more than it was about Obama, really.
[00:35:38]  And so Trump also politically had a problem because this was a poison pill that the Republicans put in the ratifying thing.
[00:35:47]  They didn't really ratify it like a treaty.
[00:35:49]  They ratified it with a law with bare majorities in both houses, which is kind of weird, but whatever, man, at this point.
[00:35:55]  But there was a poison pill in there that said the president has to ratify that the Iranians are doing a great job every quarter, right?
[00:36:02]  Every three months, Donald Trump has to give the Ayatollah a big, you know, happy face stamp.
[00:36:08]  And that was humiliating.
[00:36:09]  He didn't want to do that.
[00:36:10]  And so I think at one point he refused to do that, even though America officially certified that everything's going fine, but he refused to put his name on it.
[00:36:21]  And then in early 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu came and gave Trump a presentation where they claimed that they stole all these intelligence documents out of Iran, nuclear weapons secrets out of Iran.
[00:36:33]  And guess what they say?
[00:36:35]  They were lying all along and they're got a secret nuclear weapons program all along, Mr. President.
[00:36:40]  And so Donald Trump says, I forgot if it was before or after he gave the public presentation of this.
[00:36:46]  Trump gets us out of the deal then.
[00:36:48]  Netanyahu goes and gives the public presentation.
[00:36:51]  I think maybe Trump pulled out right after the public version of it.
[00:36:54]  But anyway, and he has all these props.
[00:36:56]  He's got all these binders on shelves and things just, oh yeah, no, I'm sure they're all sure of nuclear C, all full of nuclear secrets.
[00:37:04]  He says, here's this nondescript warehouse in West Tehran somewhere, I think it was, where, oh yeah, they just had all the nuclear secrets in the world there in this nondescript warehouse.
[00:37:14]  Not on a military base, not in an intelligence facility locked in a safe in a basement somewhere, but in this, you know, what could be like a warehouse for where groceries are transported or something, you know, this kind of thing.
[00:37:28]  And then there was only two real claims in there, two new claims.
[00:37:33]  And one was that somebody said that they overheard a boss ordering some parts that sound like they're probably for a nuclear weapons program.
[00:37:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:42]  Just throw that right out.
[00:37:43]  Even assuming that that much is true, it doesn't mean anything that somebody said that they heard somebody say that.
[00:37:48]  Come on.
[00:37:50]  And then the other one was supposedly a blueprint for the future of the program, which had no stamps on it, no seals, no signatures, no traceable reason to believe, no reason, no affirmative reason at all to believe that it was a legitimate document.
[00:38:07]  And then what else does he show?
[00:38:08]  The same old bullshit from the smoking laptop that's already been debunked, right?
[00:38:14]  And, you know, even David Albright, who's really a hawk on these kinds of issues with Iran, he got a big fight and criticized and defeated David Sanger, the evil David Sanger of the New York Times, when Sanger was, you know, pushing this myth and claiming that, oh, yeah, there's all these designs for how to marry a nuclear warhead to a missile here.
[00:38:37]  And Albright wrote in even to correct them and say, no, that's not what it shows.
[00:38:43]  You know, it shows, you know, possibly a delivery vehicle, but that could be for any kind of explosive possibly, you know, there's no reason to think that that's specific to a nuclear weapon of any kind.
[00:38:53]  You guys are just embellishing this, you know?
[00:38:56]  So like when the New York Times story is getting slapped down by Albright, you know they're way off the reservation there, man, because he's always, you know, not always, but he's a pretty reliable so-called expert for the Hawks' point of view on a lot of Iran issues and always has been.
[00:39:12]  And Garrett debunked it because Garrett said, oh, look, see, you can see what happened here.
[00:39:18]  The Israelis, when they forged the specs for this missile, they didn't know the Iranians were in the middle of redesigning their mid-range missiles.
[00:39:26]  And so they, in the forgery, they say, here's how we would have this warhead designed, would fit in a cone-shaped tip on the rocket.
[00:39:37]  But at that time, the Iranians were switching to this dolphin nose or baby bottle nose shape for their rockets, which would require an entirely different design.
[00:39:46]  And so, but the Israelis made a great educated guess when they forged it, but they didn't know the Iranians were working on a new generation of rockets, which then made their document look ridiculous because why would they design a warhead for a rocket that they're putting out of service?
[00:40:00]  Right.
[00:40:02]  And then there was green salt laboratory experiments and whatever garbage in the smoking laptop.
[00:40:09]  It was the same stuff that Netanyahu recycled again.
[00:40:12]  And that's how you know that's a perfect hell that all of it's legit.
[00:40:15]  He added two lies to the same lies that we already know are not true, left over from 2004 and five.
[00:40:22]  Get the hell out of here.
[00:40:23]  And so that was all he had.
[00:40:25]  But it was under that bogus presentation by Netanyahu and on his word that Trump pulled out of the deal or used that as the excuse to pull out of the deal.
[00:40:35]  And then so the Iranians in response, I'm not sure how long they waited before they did this.
[00:40:40]  I think they waited a couple of months before they did this.
[00:40:42]  And then they said, well, look, and it says in the deal they can do this.
[00:40:45]  This is part of the deal.
[00:40:46]  That if you break the deal, then we can break the deal too.
[00:40:49]  If you get out of the deal, then we can at least stop abiding by parts of it.
[00:40:53]  And all this stuff is specific in there.
[00:40:55]  And so that was what happened.
[00:40:58]  They said, well, listen, we're not leaving the deal.
[00:41:00]  We are still officially in the deal with the rest of the UN Security Council powers.
[00:41:03]  That's who they signed the deal with, was the victors of World War II plus Germany.
[00:41:10]  They all signed it.
[00:41:11]  And Iran said, okay, we're still in the deal with you guys, but we're no longer going to abide by the limits on our heavy water production.
[00:41:18]  And we're no longer going to abide by the limits on our uranium production.
[00:41:22]  It's still almost all 3.6%.
[00:41:25]  I think they've done a little bit that's up to approaching 20%, but that is for their medical isotope reactor in Tehran.
[00:41:32]  It's still not weapons grades.
[00:41:33]  Although you could take it as a latent threat, that like, oh, yeah, maybe we'll go up to 20% for a little bit here, you know, and like push your buttons a little bit.
[00:41:41]  But that's about it.
[00:41:44]  And so, and they've said that, you know, as soon as Biden comes in, they're willing to rejoin the deal.
[00:41:50]  Biden's government, you know, people had said that originally too.
[00:41:54]  But then Jake Sullivan, AQ is on our side in Syria, boss.
[00:42:00]  That guy, Hillary Clinton's right-hand man, is now going to be Biden's new national security advisor.
[00:42:07]  And he already gave a statement and said, yes, we would love to get right back into the nuclear deal with Iran, provided that they agree to stipulate by all its stipulations and to enter into new discussions about the new deal because we're altering the deal.
[00:42:23]  And so that's the thing.
[00:42:25]  And I don't think the Ayatollah is going to do it.
[00:42:27]  I think if that really is the Biden government's position, that they're essentially going to be like Trump Jr. on it, or not like the son, but son of Trump on this, that, you know, give this half-assed thing, oh, yeah, no, we'd love to cooperate, but here's your poison pill, you know.
[00:42:45]  I don't think the Ayatollah is going to go along with it, man.
[00:42:47]  I think they're crazy if that's if they're going to, or not crazy, but I think it's if they do that, if they stick by that, then that's just sabotage.
[00:42:54]  Yeah.
[00:42:54]  If they don't just send John Kerry over there to shake hands with Zarif again, that's the foreign minister.
[00:42:59]  You guys go over there, shake hands, re-sign the thing, and now it's a thing again.
[00:43:03]  And if you want to revisit, and look, this is what Trump should have done all along.
[00:43:07]  If Trump was really the alpha dog he claims to be, he should have told Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson and the entire Israel lobby, look, I've got this, okay?
[00:43:16]  I know what to do.
[00:43:18]  And he should have got on a plane to Tehran and he went and he should have sat down and had some tea with the Ayatollah and said, listen, George Bush and Barack Obama and all those guys, fuck them, man.
[00:43:30]  I don't, you know, I ain't seen Hillary Clinton since my wedding, my third wedding.
[00:43:34]  I don't care about these people.
[00:43:36]  I don't care about anything that they ever did or said to you.
[00:43:38]  Jimmy Carter, too.
[00:43:39]  Forget them.
[00:43:40]  You know, here's the deal, man.
[00:43:42]  I got the Israelis all up my ass about they want these sunset provisions to be lengthened.
[00:43:49]  Think he could give me some lengthening of some sunset provisions?
[00:43:52]  And in exchange, maybe we can do some business on some other things.
[00:43:56]  Isn't this Donald Trump, the businessman, the art of the deal?
[00:43:58]  And that was, and look, the other Israeli demand, really, because they're just, they're desperate to come up with something of substance, is they want limits on Iran's medium-range missiles.
[00:44:07]  Well, you're not going to get that, but, or certainly not any new limits.
[00:44:12]  But how about, hey, what's your longest-range medium-range missile that you have right now?
[00:44:18]  How about we sign a separate deal, not contingent on this, but wouldn't it be nice?
[00:44:22]  And you sure would make me happy if you would sign another deal that limits the range of your medium-range missiles to what you already got and not do much better than that.
[00:44:31]  How about that, Ayatollah?
[00:44:32]  Maybe we could, you know what?
[00:44:34]  How about I fix up your F-14s and your civilian air fleet for you that the Americans sold you back in the 1970s so your planes stopped falling out of the sky?
[00:44:44]  Something like that.
[00:44:45]  How about I buy some oil from you, put it in the gas tank of the people who live there in New Jersey who need gas to get to work?
[00:44:52]  And then you guys can take the money and forget that we were ever the great Satan.
[00:44:58]  That's the art of the deal.
[00:44:59]  And the Ayatollah would have been cool with that.
[00:45:01]  If he'd done that, if he just said, and wasn't that the whole point of Donald Trump?
[00:45:07]  Yeah.
[00:45:07]  Was that we all repudiate, we thought we were repudiating Clinton and Bush with Obama.
[00:45:13]  The American people, you and I didn't.
[00:45:14]  The American people, they thought that electing the black guy meant they were repudiating Clinton and Bush.
[00:45:19]  Well, that didn't work.
[00:45:20]  I know.
[00:45:21]  Let's see if we can repudiate him with this guy.
[00:45:24]  And that was the whole point of him.
[00:45:25]  So he could have approached every issue like that.
[00:45:28]  Look, everybody knows that that idiot George W. Bush and that weakling Donald Trump got us into this mess.
[00:45:33]  That's why X.
[00:45:35]  And he could have done that and made a break with whatever policy of theirs that he wanted.
[00:45:39]  He did it with Korea.
[00:45:40]  You know, I didn't get a chance to say last time that Barack Obama spent eight years not doing a damn thing about Korea except watching them make more and test more atom bombs and hope maybe China does something about it, something like that, you know?
[00:45:54]  So screw them.
[00:45:55]  They suck at this.
[00:45:57]  Why not do the opposite of whatever they're doing?

=== Conflict with Hezbollah Groups (15:30) ===

[00:45:59]  And instead, it's like, oh, I guess I'm the Israel lobby's humble servant.
[00:46:04]  Yeah, you know, and then he lost anyway, Dave.
[00:46:06]  What did he get out of it?
[00:46:07]  Nothing.
[00:46:07]  Yeah.
[00:46:08]  It's, you know, it was pretty funny.
[00:46:09]  Did you see it was, I mean, it was like a couple days after election day when it still wasn't completely clear.
[00:46:17]  It actually wasn't like clear who was going to win the election before Netanyahu was congratulating Biden on winning.
[00:46:26]  And it really is funny to almost see like, hey, Mr. Art of the Deal, for giving Israel everything they wanted, everything they wanted.
[00:46:33]  They'd stab you in the back the second it helped them.
[00:46:37]  You got nothing out of this.
[00:46:39]  Nothing.
[00:46:40]  And it's and then Netanyahu, by the way, Netanyahu said he absolutely forbids America from getting back in the Iran nuclear deal.
[00:46:47]  Just for the record there.
[00:46:48]  Yeah.
[00:46:49]  In case we weren't clear on that.
[00:46:51]  So that is, you know, like if you're going to give someone credit for art of the deal, Netanyahu is the guy who should get it.
[00:46:57]  I mean, that motherfucker wins every one of these exchanges.
[00:47:01]  So I just, I want to ask you, because I do, we got to move on because we want to hit a couple other topics, but I just want to ask you about the incident when Trump ordered the assassination of Salamani and what you thought about that whole exchange.
[00:47:14]  To me, that seemed actually, like, I know there are a lot of people in the military who are like, look, we really don't want this war with Iran because it will be a nightmare.
[00:47:21]  It'll be like 10 times worse than the war in Iraq and might even be worse than Vietnam.
[00:47:26]  And a lot of, you know, like military targets are vulnerable to, you know, if we were to get into a war with Iran.
[00:47:32]  But it did seem pretty dangerous there where we assassinated one of their guys.
[00:47:36]  Then there was like this retaliation that kind of seemed like it was a retaliation like to save face without actually provoking a war.
[00:47:45]  But what did you think of that whole exchange?
[00:47:47]  Well, you're right about that.
[00:47:48]  I mean, thank goodness.
[00:47:49]  The Ayatollah, it ended.
[00:47:51]  We'll do the end first.
[00:47:52]  The Ayatollah shot missiles at the empty corner of an American base and Trump let him have the last word.
[00:47:59]  Yeah, that could have been way worse.
[00:48:01]  Absolutely could have.
[00:48:03]  But so, and I'm sorry, because I spent too much time on the nuts and bolts of the nuclear thing.
[00:48:08]  But the point is with Trump's policy is he adopted what they call the maximum pressure campaign.
[00:48:14]  Get out of the deal.
[00:48:15]  All these brand new sanctions or renewed sanctions again and all of these threats.
[00:48:20]  And essentially the plan was not a war and not, well, I think maybe some of these guys might have been happy if they could have gotten a war, John Bolton and some of the others.
[00:48:32]  But I think the policy, the agreed upon policy was not to provoke a war.
[00:48:37]  It was to, and it wasn't to like, you know, foment a CIA style 1953 coup and overthrow the government.
[00:48:45]  They know that they don't have that kind of reach inside Iran to do something like that.
[00:48:49]  But what they were hoping to do was essentially break the economy so badly that the government would fall and that there would be some kind of popular revolution.
[00:48:59]  And or just hope for the worst and hope something terrible happens and as an excuse to escalate from there or something.
[00:49:07]  But the thing is, I mean, I think you can tell that's stupid, right?
[00:49:10]  The Ayatollah's government is not going anywhere, right?
[00:49:12]  Even as mad as the American people ever were at the Obama regime or the Trump regime, we get rid of them.
[00:49:19]  We don't overthrow the whole constitution and system of government over it.
[00:49:23]  You know what I mean?
[00:49:24]  So if the worst kind of revolution broke out, we might get a new supreme leader, but probably not overthrow the entire Islamic Republic.
[00:49:33]  Like under what circumstances would the entire post-79 system be torn down by the people of Iran?
[00:49:40]  A foreign-assisted one only, right?
[00:49:42]  Like otherwise, it's just never going to happen.
[00:49:45]  And I think they recognized that.
[00:49:46]  So they kind of had just this half-assed policy of, you know, Cold War, pretty, pretty brutal Cold War against Iran.
[00:49:54]  And then it was a year ago, Christmas of December 27th of 2019, that somebody with a pickup truck fired some rockets at this American base in Iraq.
[00:50:09]  Now, what are the Americans doing in Iraq?
[00:50:10]  Well, they're embedded with the Iraqi Shiite army that is also aligned with these Iraqi Shiite paramilitary militias who are aligned with Iran.
[00:50:19]  And what are they all doing aligned together?
[00:50:21]  Fighting ISIS.
[00:50:23]  What's left of the bin Ladenite Islamic State, right, that Obama built up and then destroyed in order to build up despite these same Shiites and then destroyed on their behalf again.
[00:50:34]  And so now our guys are there fighting what I call Iraq War III and a half, left over on the permanent mopping up exercise and counterinsurgency against what's left of ISIS, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq in western Iraq.
[00:50:51]  So somebody shoots some rockets at our guys at the base.
[00:50:53]  Wouldn't you think that maybe ISIS would be the first suspects?
[00:50:56]  Nope.
[00:50:57]  They blame it on Khatib al-Hezbollah, a Shiite militia tied with Iran.
[00:51:03]  And maybe they did it or maybe they didn't.
[00:51:05]  The New York Times came back two months later and said, you know, or no, no, no, sorry, just a few weeks later after it happened and said, oh, I guess beginning of February, it's like a month later.
[00:51:14]  They went, oh, you know, yeah, actually, that could have been anybody that did that.
[00:51:18]  And I talked to an Iraqi journalist who said the same thing, that that particular area where that base is, that... armed groups of all descriptions have free reign of that place.
[00:51:27]  Who could have fired a pickup truck bed full of rockets at this base?
[00:51:30]  Anybody.
[00:51:31]  But it's also just so like, I remember talking about this when it happened.
[00:51:35]  And it's just so like, I don't even care.
[00:51:36]  Like, even if it was like a Hezbollah Shiite group that, you know, is connected to Iran or something like that.
[00:51:43]  Like if you just told this story to any reasonable person and you're like, okay, so we're hanging out with this gang of Shiite militias who we fought a war for in Iraq.
[00:51:55]  And then fought two wars for in Iraq and then fought a war against in Syria and then came back to fight with to clean up our mess from the war we fought with them in Syria against them in Syria.
[00:52:06]  So now we're fighting with them again to clean up our mess.
[00:52:08]  It's like, wouldn't anyone just be like, what the fuck?
[00:52:11]  Like that plan just sounds insane.
[00:52:13]  Just get out of there.
[00:52:14]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:52:15]  So now we got to fight them again because the first time we fought for them and then we fought against them.
[00:52:21]  And then when we were fighting with them, they crossed us again.
[00:52:24]  So now we're going to fight against them.
[00:52:25]  And you're like, this is literally getting like, this is to epic, goofy proportions.
[00:52:31]  And again, we don't even know that it was them that actually did it.
[00:52:34]  But what they did.
[00:52:36]  My book that explains all this is coming out in just a couple of weeks.
[00:52:39]  So everybody, just hold your horses.
[00:52:40]  But yeah.
[00:52:40]  So then it gets crazy.
[00:52:42]  I will get you on and we're going to do a whole thing on that book when the book's released.
[00:52:45]  So this really gets to your point, though, is that the general, the American general in charge of that war wrote a letter to the Secretary of Defense and the president saying, excuse me, guys, you might not know the difference between the shirts and the skins over here, but I do and I think it's important.
[00:53:02]  So let me explain it to you.
[00:53:04]  We are fighting with the Shia against the Sunni extremist bin Ladenites.
[00:53:10]  You guys want to start this war all over again against the Shiites.
[00:53:15]  My guys are going to be in danger.
[00:53:19]  Or I think he says it nicely, I will need tens of thousands more troops, please, if that's what you're changing my mission to.
[00:53:27]  We've been fighting for 17 years to put this group of men in charge of the Baghdad government and the Baghdad army.
[00:53:35]  You want me to go to war with them?
[00:53:37]  I need you to understand that at least that's what you're asking me to do is turn around and fight my allies.
[00:53:44]  So will you please shut up now?
[00:53:46]  And then they finally did back down.
[00:53:48]  But I mean, this is the thing.
[00:53:49]  What you just described is really right.
[00:53:51]  And it's so ridiculous that literally the Secretary of Defense didn't get it.
[00:53:56]  The Secretary of Defense was like, well, we're against the bad guys over there or something, right?
[00:54:00]  And he needed his general to say, no, dude.
[00:54:04]  We are fighting with these bad guys against those bad guys.
[00:54:07]  Get it straight.
[00:54:08]  And to be perfectly clear about this, if this had really escalated into a war with Iran, our soldiers in Iraq would have been dead.
[00:54:15]  It would have been like Order 66 in Star Wars 3, where you have essentially the white imperial officers embedded with the local indigenous troops, in this case, serving as the clones.
[00:54:30]  Just stab them right in the back, shoot them on sight the moment the first bomb falls on Tehran.
[00:54:35]  As simple as that.
[00:54:36]  And Muqtad al-Sadr and Abdul Al-Aziz Alakim, who had been the leader of the Supreme Islamic Council, they had both said back in 2007, if you bomb Iran, we will do our duty, which means kill you.
[00:54:50]  Thanks a lot for helping us take over the country.
[00:54:53]  But if you think we're going to stand by and let you bomb Iran, you're crazy.
[00:54:57]  And so, but then we skipped forward a couple of steps there.
[00:55:02]  After Trump, after the rocket attack, Trump bombed a Khatib al-Hezbollah base, and then they staged a riot at the Green Zone Embassy.
[00:55:10]  No one was killed.
[00:55:11]  It wasn't that big of a deal.
[00:55:12]  There was some spray paint in the background that said Soleimani is our leader, supposedly.
[00:55:17]  And then so Trump killed Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport the next day, and along with the leader of Khatib al-Hezbollah, this powerful Shiite militia.
[00:55:29]  And then the Iraqi parliament voted unanimously to kick us out of the country, which should have been fine.
[00:55:35]  And especially for Donald Trump, he should have said, fine.
[00:55:38]  You don't want our help against ISIS no more?
[00:55:40]  You want to pall around with these Iranian militias?
[00:55:42]  And not that this is even necessarily true, but you want to turn a blind eye while they kill us, your best friends.
[00:55:47]  Well, screw you and leave.
[00:55:49]  But instead, no, he goes, you know what?
[00:55:51]  If you do that, I'm going to put you under a mess of sanctions and shut down your economy.
[00:55:54]  And I'm going to confiscate all the gold in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
[00:55:58]  And, you know, implied, I'll bomb me if I have to.
[00:56:01]  You're not kicking me out of here.
[00:56:03]  And then they asked him, they asked him before, why are we even in Iraq?
[00:56:07]  Are we there to fight ISIS?
[00:56:09]  No, we're there to keep an eye on Iran.
[00:56:11]  What does that mean?
[00:56:12]  That means that Bush already lost the Iraq war to Iran 15 years ago.
[00:56:17]  And the Americans are trying to find a way to make Baghdad like us more than them.
[00:56:22]  And it ain't working.
[00:56:23]  And it hadn't worked yet.
[00:56:24]  And there's nothing that we can do about it.
[00:56:27]  Yeah.
[00:56:29]  And it's just the thing that's so frustrating about that.
[00:56:31]  I also, you know, remember talking about this at the time, but it was like, I mean, that was when you knew that really there was like no hope of Trump pulling out of that conflict, at least, because it was the perfect.
[00:56:44]  It was really the perfect.
[00:56:45]  And in a way, it almost worked out to be the perfect excuse if you actually were looking to get out of these conflicts.
[00:56:53]  You go, well, you know what?
[00:56:54]  We did everything we could for them.
[00:56:55]  They decided to side with these awful Iranians and they want to kick us out.
[00:56:59]  Okay, you know, sink or swim on your own.
[00:57:02]  And by the way, let me say right here, because I can anticipate all the comments right now.
[00:57:06]  But yeah, last time we left, ISIS took over.
[00:57:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:09]  Last time we left, Obama spent a billion dollars a year for four years working with Qatar and Saudi and Israel and Turkey and Jordan to build the Islamic State, which then invaded Iraq in 2014.
[00:57:22]  That could have never happened without American and Allied support.
[00:57:25]  So give me that safe haven shit.
[00:57:27]  There's no way in the world that anything like the Islamic State could take over Western Iraq as things stand now.
[00:57:35]  Right.
[00:57:35]  Yes.
[00:57:35]  No, if you don't want, yes, don't fund and arm your enemies if you're concerned about them taking over.
[00:57:41]  Seems like fairly reasonable advice.
[00:57:44]  But does Trump, let me ask you this.
[00:57:46]  Does Trump get any credit for, because there also was, there was that other incident that we didn't really talk about, but that could have been bad when they shot down that unmanned drone and the military had the plans to strike back against Iraq.
[00:58:03]  And Trump did say no.
[00:58:04]  And he said he talked to his military guys and they were like, whatever, a couple hundred people will probably die, which who knows whether their estimates are not always accurate.
[00:58:11]  But that's even what they were saying, a couple hundred people.
[00:58:14]  And he was like, eh, no one on our side died.
[00:58:16]  No, it's probably too much.
[00:58:18]  We don't need to do that.
[00:58:20]  I think, if I remember that right, he even raised the question, I think, just barely about where exactly was this drone when it was shot down, too?
[00:58:28]  Yes, because Iranians say it was here.
[00:58:30]  Yes.
[00:58:31]  The Americans say it was there.
[00:58:33]  I don't know why we should believe the Americans.
[00:58:35]  Yes.
[00:58:36]  So I did, I certainly gave him a little bit of credit for that one.
[00:58:39]  And I think he deserves a little bit of credit for at least like, like I do think, obviously the whole situation was bad, but there's some credit that should be given to the Ayatollah for that, as we said, kind of firing a rocket back at the base, but not really taking anyone out.
[00:58:55]  And then some credit given to Trump for being like, okay, we'll let that go.
[00:58:59]  And they both kind of stopped the pissing contest and things settled down.
[00:59:03]  You know how much I hate liberals?
[00:59:05]  A lot.
[00:59:06]  And you know why?
[00:59:07]  Like for one example was their merciless, endless attacks on Trump for playing down the injuries to the American soldiers in that rocket attack.
[00:59:15]  They did have some traumatic brain injury.
[00:59:17]  It ain't nice to have bombs going off anywhere near you.
[00:59:20]  Right.
[00:59:21]  And then Trump goes, well, you know, that was basically a pretty bad headache, but they're tough guys.
[00:59:26]  And then the liberals and the Democrats go, how dare you when, guys, he's backing out of a war.
[00:59:34]  Would you shut the hell up and let him back out?
[00:59:37]  Right.
[00:59:37]  You know, the meme of Homer Simpson backing up into the hedge.
[00:59:42]  That's Donald Trump is backing up into the hedge.
[00:59:44]  And the liberals are grabbing him and going, no, don't you want to do something about the horrible thing they did to our guys?
[00:59:50]  What he should do is he should round up all the liberals and then drop them on Iran from 40,000 feet and then they won't talk anymore and then I'll be happy.
[00:59:58]  Yeah, no, really.
[00:59:59]  I mean, you're like, guys, like, you know, what do you want to do here?
[01:00:02]  You want, you think, like, again, not downplaying what happened to those troops who had like some head injuries and stuff, but like, how many injuries do you think are going to come out of a war with Iraq?
[01:00:11]  Okay.
[01:00:11]  If you care about the troops not being hurt, like this is not what you want to do.
[01:00:16]  And again, that's, that's one of the biggest points, right?
[01:00:19]  Because sometimes I will, I feel like we focus a lot on in this, when we're talking about this stuff, is we focus a lot on, you know, the people who are killed in these conflicts in these poor countries and the innocent people who get, you know, their lives ruined, which is the most important, you know, kind of part of this, that it's just, it's so evil to do this to people living in countries that have nothing to do with us, that are far poorer than us and that are just living their lives, you know, not just the like million people that were killed in the,
[01:00:49]  in the war in Iraq, but the like close to 20 million people who were displaced, who's just lives have been ruined.
[01:00:54]  And, you know, family members have been killed and stuff like that.
[01:00:58]  But it's not just, it's for Americans as well.
[01:01:01]  I mean, this, this, like, if you have somebody who you know who's in the military or somebody who's, you know, like connected, someone you know has someone in the military in their family, this is just going to lead to nothing but bloodshed for the American military for no benefit, for no benefit, only just to destroy this region more.
[01:01:19]  It's not even like a sacrifice for something.
[01:01:22]  It would be just like all of these other wars, except worse, a sacrifice for nothing.
[01:01:28]  So thank God that this didn't.

=== Jerusalem Capital Controversy (04:05) ===

[01:01:30]  But again, when you play with these situations, it's very dangerous.
[01:01:35]  I mean, there was a tremendous risk that maybe Iran just took it as such a threat that we would just assassinate this Solmani guy, that they'd go, you know what, we have to strike back now.
[01:01:43]  And they strike back.
[01:01:44]  And then we have no choice.
[01:01:45]  Now we have to be in a conflict with them.
[01:01:47]  Or maybe, you know, like they try to shoot a rocket that doesn't hit anyone and ends up killing five soldiers.
[01:01:54]  And now all of a sudden, Trump is in a position where he has to strike back.
[01:01:56]  And this is how, look, right?
[01:01:58]  World War I started over like one fucking assassination.
[01:02:00]  Like things can lead into a slippery area where all of a sudden, you know, like fucking now, and there are lots of different countries that are involved.
[01:02:08]  You don't know what could end up happening in these situations.
[01:02:12]  So it was a really dangerous game.
[01:02:13]  And thank God we got out of it, you know, just with that amount of conflict and not something much, much worse.
[01:02:21]  Yeah.
[01:02:21]  Now ask me about Palestine.
[01:02:23]  I'll try to really hurry.
[01:02:24]  Okay.
[01:02:25]  So let's, well, let's talk about Palestine.
[01:02:27]  We'll try to get through this quickly.
[01:02:28]  And I also want you to talk about, because I know you wanted to with the idea of Donald Trump creating all of these peace treaties in the Middle East that some are giving him credit for.
[01:02:39]  So I want to try to try to speed rush through these two topics, the stuff with Palestine and the peace treaties.
[01:02:44]  Okay, so it all started back in 1919.
[01:02:47]  No.
[01:02:49]  So the thing of it is this.
[01:02:51]  So Trump comes in and he did a few major things for the Israelis.
[01:02:56]  First of all, obviously, we just talked about his Iran policy.
[01:02:59]  But then also he officially moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.
[01:03:03]  And this is something that I'm not sure about Reagan or Bush Sr., but I know Bill Clinton had promised to do it.
[01:03:10]  And George Bush and Barack Obama had promised to do it, but they didn't mean it.
[01:03:14]  They were, you know, satisfying domestic constituencies that, you know what, we're going to do that right as soon as the time is right, but the time is not ever right.
[01:03:22]  And the reason this is such a big deal in terms of not just for the people there and whatever, but in terms of global politics and all this, is because by doing that, they are essentially saying that America recognizes Israel's claim to the entire city of Jerusalem as the united, undivided capital of Israel.
[01:03:46]  And what that means is the eastern half of the city cannot be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
[01:03:53]  It means it's one of the final nails in the coffin of what was always really, at least in effect, it depends on who you ask, whether they really believed in it or not.
[01:04:03]  But I think mostly all along, it was just a trap, the two-state solution, the promise to the Palestinians that one day they'll get independence and then they'll need their own capital city.
[01:04:15]  This kind of made that lie no longer even a credible lie.
[01:04:19]  That, you know what, you're not going to, they said, oh, you know what, we'll do well, you'll have this suburb something den out on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and you can have your little capital there, and it'll be, you know, your capital of your tiny little divided Bantu stands separated by Jewish-only highways and all this Jim Crow craziness all throughout the West Bank.
[01:04:39]  And you won't have anything like a state to rule from your nothing like a capital.
[01:04:44]  So that was a major step back for the idea of a Palestinian state, which is good in the sense that the lie got taken down a peg, too, but the reality on the ground, the facts on the ground, as they call it, have gotten that much worse in that sense.
[01:05:00]  He also just completely screwed the trues of the Golan Heights, which belongs to Syria and which Israel, you know, won, stole in the 67 war.
[01:05:11]  And they officially claimed to annex it in 1981, but Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton and George Bush and Barack Obama had all refused to recognize that annexation.
[01:05:22]  Donald Trump, in fact, there's an anecdote about this where they were like, well, geez, we want to see about setting up deliberations on the beginning of having some talks to see about talking about maybe whether we could do a thing about recognizing the Golan Heights.

=== Morocco Peace Agreement Scandal (15:28) ===

[01:05:36]  And Trump goes, just take it.
[01:05:37]  You can have it.
[01:05:38]  How about that?
[01:05:38]  It's yours.
[01:05:39]  I said so today.
[01:05:41]  See how they like that one, hardy, harhar, harhar.
[01:05:44]  And then that was it.
[01:05:45]  So that was, you know, Trump's official recognition of the Golan Heights.
[01:05:48]  We don't got to study this.
[01:05:50]  Don't call the deputies committee to order.
[01:05:52]  I'll just do it.
[01:05:53]  Well, how about that?
[01:05:54]  You vote for me now?
[01:05:55]  You know, whatever.
[01:05:57]  And then, you know, he had the entire, you know, the Jared Kushner plan, basically, of bribing the, supposedly bribing the Palestinians to accept their permanent, you know, stateless status.
[01:06:12]  They're like helots in ancient Rome or Sparta or wherever.
[01:06:18]  People there.
[01:06:18]  They're not slaves because the Israelis don't really want them there.
[01:06:21]  They don't really have any political or civil rights at all, you know, or civil liberty protections.
[01:06:27]  They don't, you know, they're stuck inside someone else's jurisdiction, but outside of its protection, only under its domination, you know, if that makes sense.
[01:06:36]  The whole thing is completely corrupt and crazy.
[01:06:38]  And it's, it's, um, um, and then, and the Palestinians, they're not accepting that deal anyway.
[01:06:44]  I mean, ideal of the century thing didn't go that far, but where it meets the road, where the rubber meets the road, then is what I'm dying here because I think I'm leaving one major thing out and I can't think of what it is.
[01:06:53]  I got what Joe Biden's got.
[01:06:55]  That's my permanent excuse now.
[01:06:56]  Self-inflicted, but it is what it is.
[01:06:58]  Um, yeah, but you were starting from a much stronger point, so you know, yeah, lucky I got the I had a strong memory a long time ago.
[01:07:05]  Um, so I can remember that back when I did.
[01:07:09]  Um, but then he signed all these so-called peace deals, and people want to give Trump.
[01:07:13]  And look, I understand why people want to give Trump credit.
[01:07:16]  You know what?
[01:07:17]  I was there when we were all laughing and pissing on Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton's grave in 2016, and all humanity owes this guy a debt of gratitude for that.
[01:07:28]  And a lot of us thought, like, hey, maybe he'll be less worse than them.
[01:07:31]  A lot of people thought that about Obama.
[01:07:33]  Hey, stopped Hillary Clinton.
[01:07:34]  He can't be all bad, right?
[01:07:36]  Stop John McCain.
[01:07:37]  That's the same.
[01:07:38]  That's probably worse than that.
[01:07:39]  Look, it's true.
[01:07:40]  It's true.
[01:07:41]  I mean, look, and I remember talking about this back on the Obama legacy episode that we did together.
[01:07:46]  Say whatever you will about Barack Obama.
[01:07:49]  He did stop both Hillary Clinton and John McCain from being president of the United States.
[01:07:55]  Like, holy shit, as bad as he was, we still owe him a debt of gratitude for that.
[01:08:00]  I mean, fucking John McCain as president of the United States of America, you know, and Trump.
[01:08:06]  It's like there's a chance it could have been a Jeb Bush president.
[01:08:09]  Probably not.
[01:08:10]  I don't think a Bush could have ever won again.
[01:08:12]  But Hillary Clinton could have certainly been president.
[01:08:15]  And my God, that could have been just so much worse, not just in terms of the policy, but just spiritually damaging for all of us to have Hillary Clinton as the president.
[01:08:25]  And I do understand where to your layman, to your Joe Six Pack out there, you know, you're comparing them to Bush and Obama, and you go, well, he didn't get us into any new wars, and there seemed to be all of these peace agreements.
[01:08:38]  And I don't know, it's better than that.
[01:08:41]  Right.
[01:08:42]  So here's the thing about those peace agreements.
[01:08:44]  They're not peace agreements.
[01:08:46]  So they're with United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco are the ones who signed these new peace deals with Israel, they're calling them.
[01:08:54]  Well, Sudan is the only country of these on the list that's ever been at war with Israel.
[01:09:00]  And that was back in 1967.
[01:09:01]  And they just like barely showed up and did anything.
[01:09:03]  And nobody even notices.
[01:09:05]  People talk about the 67 war.
[01:09:07]  You don't ever hear mention of Sudan.
[01:09:09]  They talk about Egypt and Jordan and Syria, right?
[01:09:11]  What do you mean, Sudan?
[01:09:13]  Anyway, so and then, and still, that was 50 years ago.
[01:09:17]  Okay.
[01:09:19]  Then the UAE and Bahrain and Morocco have never had beef with Israel.
[01:09:24]  What's really happening here is not that peace deals are being signed.
[01:09:27]  What's happening is the Palestinians are being sold out worse because these Arab states had promised that they would never officially recognize Israel and normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians get their independence.
[01:09:41]  Now Donald Trump's using our money and diplomatic power and the rest to bribe them into going ahead and throwing the Palestinians overboard and moving on without them.
[01:09:51]  And so the UAE gets a bunch of F-35 fighter jets, which you're better off with your F-16s, guys.
[01:09:57]  But anyway, and they get a ton of money.
[01:10:00]  And this is just a side point, but Dave, really, I swear to God, the Israelis started screaming, what do you mean that you're giving all these F-35s to the UAE?
[01:10:10]  Now you have to give more F-35s to us so that we can maintain our qualitative military edge when the only reason we gave them the F-35s was because they're signing a peace deal with Israel.
[01:10:21]  Now that's the reason for an arms race with Israel?
[01:10:24]  And this all takes place within one week?
[01:10:26]  And I got to put up with this shit.
[01:10:28]  And Murray Rothbard used to say, are we to be spared nothing from these people?
[01:10:32]  For God's sakes.
[01:10:34]  Anyway, and then they give them a bunch of money.
[01:10:37]  And then the latest one is Morocco.
[01:10:40]  And this might sound like far away and who cares, but this matters a lot too.
[01:10:43]  There's an article by Doug Bondo about this in the American Conservative magazine about how what Trump did to get Morocco to sign on to this thing was he recognized their seizure of a major portion of a country called Western Sahara in the Western Sahara.
[01:11:00]  It's a coastal country on the very, you know, in Northwest Africa, just south of Morocco.
[01:11:06]  And Morocco had seized this massive portion of it.
[01:11:08]  And I take Doug Bondo's word for it.
[01:11:10]  I don't know this myself, but I was reading Doug earlier today, and he was saying they have no historical claim to this land whatsoever.
[01:11:17]  No ethnic tie, no ancient tie, no trade, nothing, no linguistic, whatever the hell.
[01:11:23]  These people are separate independent people in Western Sahara.
[01:11:27]  And the Moroccans just stole the land because they want the land.
[01:11:29]  I don't know if it's the oil or what it is they're stealing from them.
[01:11:33]  And then so Trump just trades them away and says, okay, you can keep that portion of Western Sahara if you'll sign this deal with Israel.
[01:11:40]  Well, Western Sahara doesn't belong to Donald Trump to give to anybody.
[01:11:45]  And it's against the international law that America has dictated to the planet Earth over the last 75 years that this isn't how we do business anymore.
[01:11:53]  Somebody tell the Israelis and the Moroccans, we don't just invade countries and steal their territory.
[01:11:58]  It's against the law.
[01:12:00]  And then so Trump just does, you know, abets another little mini Israeli seizure in Morocco in order to get them to essentially what?
[01:12:10]  Provide a public relations stunt for Trump and for Benjamin Netanyahu, who gets to say, see, I can make peace with the Arabs without having to give up a thing.
[01:12:20]  And the Palestinians can just rot.
[01:12:23]  Not give up a thing to gain.
[01:12:25]  I mean, literally to be bought off for the privilege of coming.
[01:12:28]  It's amazing how like entitled to American taxpayers' shit that Netanyahu feels.
[01:12:35]  I don't know if you saw, but some people were like, you know, what was it in this, in this latest, there was the COVID, like the COVID relief plus the omnibus spending bills that got packaged together.
[01:12:47]  And it brought, they gave an extra 500 million, I think, to Israel, which brought them up to like over 3 billion for the year.
[01:12:54]  And they were actually doing the math where they were like, now this is, of course, this is silly.
[01:12:58]  This isn't the reality of the situation, but they were like, if Israel gave the, I think it was $3.3 billion, if they just cut checks to all their citizens, so it came out to like $300-something dollars a person.
[01:13:09]  And they were like, so American people get $600 each and Israel gets like 300, Israeli citizens get like $300 and something each.
[01:13:17]  Like you're like, oh man, well, I mean, I guess we're getting a little bit more than they are.
[01:13:21]  So we should really be so grateful that, you know, like it's, but it's just, it's unbelievable, even after this current year that you'd still be giving billions away in foreign aid and, you know, military assistance.
[01:13:34]  Of course, don't get me wrong.
[01:13:35]  The government of Israel is every bit as corrupt as our government.
[01:13:38]  So they're not just going to cut checks to their citizens.
[01:13:41]  They're going to just, you know, build up their own military.
[01:13:43]  I'd actually feel better about it if they were just passing out checks than doing this crazy shit.
[01:13:48]  But yeah, it's not at all what it appears to be when they brag about all of these peace deals that Donald Trump's putting into place.
[01:14:00]  And this is why some type of deal with Iran is much more valuable than any of this stuff, because this is actually a volatile situation that you'd want to worry about avoiding conflict with, unlike.
[01:14:11]  And by the way, maybe it's hard to conjure or care about Sudan, but they just overthrew their multi-generational dictatorship and created a real democracy there.
[01:14:24]  Like they had built up enough kind of separate civil society type institutions that they were able to insist that the military step aside and allow them to create a civilian elected government.
[01:14:34]  It's the first try for real democracy in Sudan ever.
[01:14:37]  And then America and Israel come and say, you have to sign this deal, which I don't know a lot about Sudan, Dave, but I got to bet has cost the new government there X number of legitimacy points among the population whose popular sovereignty they desperately need to see if they can establish this democratic state as a permanent fixture of things there, or whether we're just waiting until the next military coup.
[01:15:05]  And so now, do the Americans and the Israelis care about the health of the democracy in Sudan Sudan?
[01:15:12]  And then they use the same talking point about how like, but Israel's the only democracy in the region where we destroy every other democracy that's anytime somebody we don't like wins, we cancel the election.
[01:15:23]  I always had fun with it, particularly when there was like the kind of like, you know, in 2017, there was like the rise of like the kind of alt-right shit posters online that just drove the neocons crazy.
[01:15:36]  You know, and by the way, just a disclaimer for anyone who has to twist my words around.
[01:15:40]  I don't like the alt-right.
[01:15:41]  I think the alt-right sucks.
[01:15:42]  And, you know, ethno-nationalism is stupid and evil and all that.
[01:15:47]  But it would be so funny to watch the neocons like just get so outraged about it, the idea of an ethno-state.
[01:15:53]  And I'd be like, that's the most evil thing ever.
[01:15:55]  And then you're like, right, but what is Israel exactly?
[01:15:58]  And you're like, that's completely different.
[01:15:59]  That's nothing like this ethno-state over here because that's like, well, you know, it's a bad part of the world and stuff.
[01:16:05]  So they're the only ones.
[01:16:06]  No, Dave.
[01:16:07]  There's a clip.
[01:16:08]  The worst one of those, there's a clip of Richard Spencer, the notorious white supremacist, gave a speech at Texas A ⁇ M University, and a rabbi came out to debate with him.
[01:16:21]  And he said, look, so let's have open immigration to Israel then.
[01:16:26]  And then the way I read it anyway, assuming the legitimacy of the news report, the rabbi was simply left speechless and did not say another word after that.
[01:16:37]  He just turned around and walked away because he had just been completely checkmated.
[01:16:42]  Yes.
[01:16:43]  Jim Crow is just fine in the Israeli Mississippi.
[01:16:48]  Nobody cares.
[01:16:50]  Look, and this is a big part of one of the things that people do resent about Israel.
[01:16:56]  And by the way, obviously there's another answer to this.
[01:16:59]  The answer doesn't have to be, you know, being speechless.
[01:17:01]  The answer could be that, like, yes, the idea of an ethnostate is wrong there and here.
[01:17:06]  You could come, you know, you could come to a much better consistent position than this one.
[01:17:10]  But it will be when you see these, you know, the kind of like very pro, the neocon types who are very, very pro-Israel and then outrageously appalled at Trump's nationalism.
[01:17:24]  And they're like, build a wall.
[01:17:25]  What do you mean, build a wall?
[01:17:27]  We're completely against walls.
[01:17:29]  And you're like, right, but okay, you're pro-Israel and anti-wall.
[01:17:36]  Do you kind of see where some people might smell hypocrisy on you?
[01:17:41]  And then it's always, and like you said, they are speechless because there's no, you know, you can't bring those two positions into, you know, into sync.
[01:17:48]  It's like, oh, yeah, well, no, but their wall's different because Muslims or something, you know, and then and then the Trump, you know, like nationalists are like, yeah, we don't like Muslims either.
[01:17:59]  So there, so now can we have our wall or whatever.
[01:18:01]  Anyway, but it's even worse because it's like building a wall around the Navajo reservation.
[01:18:06]  This is their land.
[01:18:08]  It's not like they're the invaders and then some of them are left over somehow or something.
[01:18:12]  It's the Palestinians who don't even get to keep the measly stinking 22% of Palestine that's left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip there.
[01:18:22]  So this is like if we just we're still treating the American Indians the same way we did in the 19th century this whole time.
[01:18:31]  Just build a wall around them, carpet bomb them every once in a while, you know, experiment.
[01:18:35]  And the Israelis brag about this.
[01:18:37]  We've been testing out our new weapons on the Gazans, and they work really well.
[01:18:40]  And we're going to put them on the international market.
[01:18:43]  It's absolutely shameless.
[01:18:45]  Yeah.
[01:18:45]  And listen, if you want to, by the way, for anybody who is listening, who maybe, because I know we always get like, we get a big audience here, and there's always be some type who are, you know, are like, well, wait a minute, but this isn't like, you know, I like Israel and this isn't the story.
[01:18:58]  If you don't want to take like our word for it, we don't have time to go into this in detail now, but you can go look throughout the short history.
[01:19:05]  Israel is not that old of a country that former prime ministers, leaders of the military of Israel themselves have basically admitted all of this stuff.
[01:19:14]  This is not like some conspiracy stuff.
[01:19:16]  Like, I could say this really fast: look, this is the liberal Zionist imperative of the two-state solution: we've got too many Palestinians.
[01:19:26]  And if we want to keep our Jewish supremacist state, we've got to let them go.
[01:19:31]  Because what's the alternative?
[01:19:33]  We keep the West Bank and millions and millions and millions of Palestinian Muslims and Christians on the West Bank.
[01:19:40]  That they essentially, unless we get in a major war with China or something, they're not going to have the opportunity to purge these people, to force march them off their land into Jordan or into the Sinai.
[01:19:53]  They're stuck with them.
[01:19:54]  They conquered them.
[01:19:55]  You know, when they took most of Israel, they kicked all the Palestinians off the land.
[01:19:59]  But since 1967, they've owned all the people that they took the land from, too.
[01:20:04]  The people are still there.
[01:20:05]  Only like 200,000 were purged, but millions are left.
[01:20:08]  And so Ehud Barak, who was the former prime minister and who was Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister's defense minister, said we have to let them go.
[01:20:19]  Otherwise, we have an outright de jure, apartheid state.
[01:20:24]  And that can't last.
[01:20:26]  The international community just won't put up with it any more than if the state of Mississippi tried to go back to the law in 1950 about the way blacks are treated there.
[01:20:35]  No, sorry, canceled.
[01:20:37]  You'll be overruled from above somewhere.
[01:20:39]  That you are not going to be able to get away with that.
[01:20:41]  And that looks like that's their worry for people who want to keep it an ethnic state for the Jews.
[01:20:48]  And then you have people who are more nationalist and more like biblical based who say, well, whatever, we'll kill the Palestinians or drive them off the land someday because the Bible says we got to keep that land.
[01:20:58]  We got to take that land no matter what.
[01:21:00]  So that's the conflict there.
[01:21:02]  But people who are just, you know, they're all right-wingers.

=== One-Term President Legacy (06:22) ===

[01:21:04]  Ehud Barak is a right-winger too, but call him like a liberal right-winger, a little bit less to the right than some of the others, is at least willing to admit that we're, we've painted ourselves into this corner.
[01:21:15]  Yeah.
[01:21:16]  No, absolutely.
[01:21:18]  Okay.
[01:21:19]  Let's move on because we don't have much time left, but I think the last thing that I want to cover, because this is really, I think, going to be just, you know, probably the biggest, or at least one of the biggest parts of Donald Trump's legacy as president.
[01:21:35]  And I know you have some feelings on this, and that is going to be his election loss to Joe Biden and how he's handled it, how the whole thing went down.
[01:21:46]  Now, let me just make a couple caveats real quick because I want to get your take on this.
[01:21:52]  That number one, you know, look, you can say Trump goes down as a one-term president.
[01:21:58]  That's part of his legacy.
[01:22:00]  Okay, that is true, technically.
[01:22:02]  There aren't that many one-term presidents.
[01:22:05]  In my lifetime, Trump is, it was, I wasn't, I was born after Carter.
[01:22:11]  So it's George H.W. Bush and Trump.
[01:22:15]  That's it.
[01:22:17]  And, you know, but it's not exactly fair to call him a one-term president in terms of his legacy, because look, the truth is that 2020 was like the year from hell.
[01:22:29]  And without that, he probably wins again and has a second term.
[01:22:33]  I mean, there's really no question to me that with 2019, there's an election between him and Joe Biden, Donald Trump wins in a landslide.
[01:22:42]  I mean, maybe not a crazy landslide, but he wins comfortably.
[01:22:45]  The truth is, fucking global pandemic, these fucking huge lockdowns that we never could have foreseen coming just, you know, nine months ago, the protests over the summer, the riots over the summer, the violence, the just crazy shit that happened in 2020 that ultimately, and of course, the way that we vote was completely overhauled.
[01:23:12]  I mean, like whether or not you, you know, whether or not you think that there was fraud or there wasn't fraud or any of that stuff, the fact is that we changed the natural barriers to voting that made it much easier for people to vote.
[01:23:25]  And so there was much, much higher turnout on all sides.
[01:23:28]  So all of these things were very different.
[01:23:30]  And without them, my guess is Trump probably is a two-term president.
[01:23:34]  So I don't know how fair it is to put one-term president on his legacy.
[01:23:38]  However, him not accepting the results of the election and calling this whole thing a fraud will no question be a huge part of his legacy.
[01:23:48]  The fact that this is really, to me, I think a game changer in American political discourse.
[01:23:52]  And I got to say, completely, full disclosure, I kind of love it because I think it's complete poetic justice for after what the Democrats did with the whole Russia gate and that you stole the election in 2016.
[01:24:03]  And even with like people like Stacey Abrams and stuff, I just think it's completely poetically just that you're like, okay, you guys set the standard of we don't accept the results of elections.
[01:24:12]  Like, okay, well, two can play at that game.
[01:24:15]  That being said, I don't know.
[01:24:17]  Give me your thoughts on what you see from the 2020 election and how they affect Trump's legacy.
[01:24:24]  Well, you read my mind on a bunch of this stuff, Dave.
[01:24:27]  First of all, in the 19th century, he had major turnover power.
[01:24:31]  Presidents mostly did four-year terms.
[01:24:33]  But in the 20th century, it's almost all been two-term presidents.
[01:24:37]  And all the way through, I said to my dad, yeah, Trump's going to win because presidents always win.
[01:24:42]  Americans love presidents.
[01:24:43]  You know how that goes.
[01:24:44]  Incumbents always win in my lifetime, pretty much.
[01:24:47]  And my dad says, hey, in my lifetime, he was born at 42 during FDR.
[01:24:52]  FDR, president for life, Roosevelt, you know?
[01:24:56]  And then Truman did like a term and a half kind of thing there.
[01:25:00]  And then Ike did two.
[01:25:01]  Kennedy absolutely would have done two if they hadn't shot him in the head.
[01:25:06]  And then, you know, Johnson is kind of an anomaly because he did a term and a half, although he would have lost if he'd run for reelection.
[01:25:13]  That was why he quit.
[01:25:14]  So that's something.
[01:25:16]  Nixon did one and a half, but of course got impeached and removed.
[01:25:19]  But also, but look, Nixon won the election.
[01:25:23]  A landslide.
[01:25:24]  Was it 49 states, I think Nixon took a huge landslide win?
[01:25:28]  Ford doesn't count because Ford was never even elected in the first place.
[01:25:31]  He was appointed vice president after Agnew was forced out.
[01:25:34]  And so everybody was, you know, he was the end of Nixon.
[01:25:37]  And that was, so that made sense.
[01:25:39]  And then Carter doesn't really count either, Dave, because George Bush and the CIA conspired with the Iranians to keep the hostages held longer to hurt Carter and help rescue the opportunity.
[01:25:51]  So there's a big asterisk on Carter.
[01:25:54]  And then George H.W. Bush doesn't even really count because that was a 12-year run coming off of Reagan.
[01:26:00]  And you could also blame Carter on Volcker, too, where he didn't have control of the interest rates.
[01:26:04]  But over at the Federal Reserve, they're raising him up into the double digits overnight.
[01:26:08]  And just that was a bust.
[01:26:10]  That really was.
[01:26:11]  Oh, that's for sure.
[01:26:12]  I mean, look, if you can imagine if Ben Bernanke had pumped up the interest rates 2% during 2011, Obama loses in a landslide to Mitt Romney.
[01:26:24]  I mean, you can control a lot with that.
[01:26:26]  And they pumped it up a lot more than 2%.
[01:26:29]  So, yeah, that's a good point.
[01:26:30]  So, really, in some ways, that's how rare it is to not have the two terms.
[01:26:35]  Incumbents virtually always win.
[01:26:37]  So, then you're right, though, that there's like a perfect storm of all kinds of crazy things here that happen other than fraud.
[01:26:44]  Let's talk about fraud in a second, but I'll just say this for the people who doubt the results of the election.
[01:26:50]  Fair enough.
[01:26:51]  There's room for doubt.
[01:26:53]  Now, for people who say that it's a guaranteed fact that it absolutely was fixed, that the Democrats stole five states and otherwise Trump definitely would have won.
[01:27:03]  Yeah, I'm not buying that.
[01:27:05]  I don't think that that's right.
[01:27:06]  But there's no question that there are questions about some margins in some places and enough to be concerned about.
[01:27:15]  But the only reason that it really matters is because the election was so close, right?
[01:27:20]  And so, this is where you got to put responsibility on the incumbent president for his own screw-ups.

=== Election Fraud Debate (14:15) ===

[01:27:26]  I mean, he didn't invent the virus, but his leadership on it was a total disaster.
[01:27:31]  His whole government came out saying, masks are bad for you.
[01:27:35]  Don't wear one.
[01:27:36]  Right when, you know, in New York City, for example, it would have been nice if the people on the subway had been wearing their masks right then.
[01:27:43]  And instead, you know, they're having this major surge of people getting sick because they're trying to manage a shortage that they caused with all their regulations and interventions in the market and the rest of that stuff.
[01:27:54]  He could have taken command of these kinds of things and didn't.
[01:27:58]  Oh, and he was just like the foreign policy.
[01:28:00]  It's just like his foreign policy.
[01:28:02]  He was completely incoherent the whole time.
[01:28:05]  It's like, what side are you even on?
[01:28:07]  What is your position here?
[01:28:09]  It's the same thing as like, we're going to end all of the wars, but also we're going to do whatever Israel wants and whatever Saudi Arabia wants.
[01:28:14]  And it's like, well, that's not ending the wars.
[01:28:16]  Like, what?
[01:28:17]  Like, well, we're going to end all the wars, but we'll bomb the crap out of them and take their oil.
[01:28:21]  And you're like, wait, wait, what side of this are you?
[01:28:23]  So even when he was in the debates and he'd be like, you know, we did the lockdowns.
[01:28:26]  The lockdowns were the good thing, but we've got to open the economy now.
[01:28:29]  And listen, I was the one who decided the lockdown.
[01:28:31]  And it's like, what side?
[01:28:33]  You're the one who declared the national emergency.
[01:28:35]  You're the one who authorized the Defense Authorization Production Act and all this stuff, which was a big farce anyway.
[01:28:42]  But it's like he never knew what he was trying to do or what he wasn't.
[01:28:46]  It was all just all over the place.
[01:28:48]  Right.
[01:28:48]  And look, mostly this works for him, right?
[01:28:50]  To be on all sides of every issue so everybody has something to like about what he says, you know, but also it can work against him when, like you're saying, he's just all over the place and anybody can see it.
[01:29:02]  He's talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time.
[01:29:05]  And look, these reports where Woodward has them on tape saying, oh, well, you know, I didn't want to get everybody upset and all this kind of thing.
[01:29:12]  Yeah, well, your job isn't to lie to the American people like they're your children and you're our, you know, our owner or our master or some kind of thing.
[01:29:20]  And it's the same thing with Mike Pence.
[01:29:22]  They had a plan to send masks to every address in America.
[01:29:24]  Mike Pence said, no, that'll cause panic.
[01:29:27]  No, it won't.
[01:29:28]  Shut up.
[01:29:29]  Who are you?
[01:29:29]  My Sunday school teacher or something?
[01:29:31]  You get to tell me, and why would that cause panic?
[01:29:35]  Listen, everybody, try to not trade flex of spittle with each other, okay?
[01:29:40]  Oh, no, now we're all going to run screaming into the street and start killing each other, right?
[01:29:45]  As soon as he tells us that cover your goddamn mouth and nose because there's a respiratory virus.
[01:29:50]  And also the idea that literally Trump is declaring a national emergency.
[01:29:57]  Right.
[01:29:58]  Like, you're the one calling it an emergency.
[01:30:01]  But, but giving people masks will create panic.
[01:30:04]  I mean, listen, the government, the media on every level this entire year has done everything they possibly could to create mass panic.
[01:30:11]  That is the fucking truth.
[01:30:12]  They've done everything they could to make people panic.
[01:30:14]  So the idea that you couldn't just be straight with the numbers or you couldn't give people masks because that might lead to panic.
[01:30:20]  I mean, give me a fucking brain play.
[01:30:22]  It's just ridiculous.
[01:30:23]  And you know, but that also brings up the point that I should have made first, too, that like you look at how completely, and you made this point about the Russia gate and the fair play here in a way that like they refused to allow him to be the president.
[01:30:37]  I mean, I remember when the Supreme Court ruled that George Bush was going to be the president-elect, every single hairdo on TV news, you could hear their heels clicking.
[01:30:46]  President-elect George W. Bush today said this, that, whatever the hell.
[01:30:50]  That's it.
[01:30:51]  They line up.
[01:30:51]  They respect that.
[01:30:53]  And yet with Trump, nah, the Russians did it.
[01:30:56]  Nah, he's not really.
[01:30:57]  And they, Jesus, you know what, man?
[01:31:00]  I mean, I don't think you can overstate this.
[01:31:02]  The way that the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA frame Trump for treason with Russia is just one little hair to the left of shooting Jack Kennedy in the face in Dallas, dude.
[01:31:16]  I mean, this is just absolutely, you got to be kidding me that you're going to do this to this guy.
[01:31:21]  They did everything in the world to hem him in.
[01:31:24]  The news media, they didn't even pretend for a minute to be neutral anymore.
[01:31:29]  It's the job of the New York Times, the Post, the TV news.
[01:31:32]  We have to take this guy down no matter what.
[01:31:36]  But still, this is my point: he's still responsible.
[01:31:39]  Because as Hillary Clinton said in September of 2016, how come I'm not ahead by 50 points?
[01:31:47]  Yeah, good question.
[01:31:48]  How come Donald Trump did not completely stomp Joe Biden into the ground?
[01:31:54]  And you're telling me just because of the virus?
[01:31:57]  Just because his messaging was so mixed up, Joe Biden is Joe Biden.
[01:32:04]  Joe Biden is just Bill Clinton's wife.
[01:32:07]  That's all he is.
[01:32:08]  He's the exact same group of guys from the 1990s.
[01:32:12]  He's not even as smart as her.
[01:32:14]  And John McCain and Bill Clinton, who did every horrible thing that they wished that we wished they had not done, including was George Bush and Dick Cheney's primary handmaiden in the U.S. Senate lying us into the war with Iraq.
[01:32:32]  Yeah, no question.
[01:32:32]  There's no, you're absolutely right.
[01:32:34]  I mean, look, I think without all of the craziness of 2020, Donald Trump wins, but there's no question that if he could have just been a little bit less awful, just a little bit less awful, he could have won.
[01:32:46]  Two more things before I forget, because I'll space out with my Biden brain.
[01:32:50]  I talked to someone who was on the Trump campaign and I said, look, man, you got to do this and that and the other thing.
[01:32:56]  And she said to me, yeah, well, listen, man, I mean, it's just, it is what it is.
[01:33:01]  And these guys are just incompetent boobs.
[01:33:03]  And it ain't Bannon and it ain't, what's his name?
[01:33:05]  The other guy, not, you know, never mind Manafort, but the other guy that got fired and had his, you know, public freak out.
[01:33:11]  I forgot his name.
[01:33:12]  But it was just these incompetent kind of guys who they just weren't, they just didn't have their act together.
[01:33:18]  And look, Trump has always been, and this makes no sense, he's resonant to spend his own money.
[01:33:23]  But it's like, dude, you're 73.
[01:33:26]  Let's say you live to be 93 still.
[01:33:28]  You got, according to the New York Times, who got a hold of his taxes right before the election, they said he has like $5 billion, not $10, but $5.
[01:33:36]  Well, man, you can't spend a measly $100 million on your own campaign.
[01:33:41]  You can't spend a measly, stinking $100 million that you wouldn't even miss just to make sure you have a good ground game in the battleground states to make sure that you're saturating TV news with low-profile footage of very tall towers.
[01:33:55]  And, you know, that's how he, I mean, I don't know if you remember this commercial from 2016.
[01:34:00]  It's like you're rolling up in a car and then you like look up at the gigantic Trump tower and they're like, Trump, success, America, whatever.
[01:34:08]  They didn't do that.
[01:34:09]  They didn't do that.
[01:34:10]  He's like, oh, I'll just sit here retweeting bullshit all summer, you know, with no real game.
[01:34:15]  And his campaign just did not have it going on.
[01:34:18]  And then this is the most important thing of all day that Donald Trump did to unelect himself.
[01:34:24]  And I can see what he's thinking, and it's really stupid.
[01:34:27]  You referred earlier to the fact of COVID meant that states across the union changed their laws to make it easier to vote absentee and vote by mail and whatever you call it in the different areas.
[01:34:38]  And they just loosened all the rules because they knew they're going to have the deluge of ballots coming in from people who don't want to go out because of social distancing and all of this.
[01:34:47]  And so it's going to be this way.
[01:34:48]  Now, you could presume, if you want in the first place, or if you want to look at it in like post, you know, hindsight, looking back at it, you could presume all of the worst motives behind this.
[01:35:04]  And I wouldn't dismiss the idea that Democrats across the country were kind of licking their chops and saying, oh, this could make some things easier for us to move some margins or something like that.
[01:35:14]  Why should they play fair?
[01:35:15]  Look at who we're talking about here.
[01:35:18]  So, you know, that was possible.
[01:35:20]  But then what was Trump's strategy?
[01:35:22]  And who did he come up with this strategy with himself?
[01:35:26]  Did anybody talk this through with even the people on his jet or anything that like, here's what we're going to do?
[01:35:32]  We're just going to say mail-in ballots are bad.
[01:35:35]  Mail-in ballots will give you cooties.
[01:35:37]  Mail-in ballots are gay.
[01:35:38]  Mail and ballots are corrupt.
[01:35:40]  Mail-in ballots lose wars.
[01:35:43]  Mail-in ballots are for the weak and stupid.
[01:35:46]  And then where's all this going?
[01:35:48]  He spends three months saying, essentially, if you're not man enough to show up and vote for me in person on election day, don't bother.
[01:35:59]  Well, guess what?
[01:36:00]  They listened to him and they believed him.
[01:36:02]  But he had no plan, Dave.
[01:36:04]  It was like the underpants gnomes on South Park.
[01:36:06]  Is this too old of a reference now?
[01:36:08]  No, I love it.
[01:36:09]  They steal the underpants.
[01:36:10]  And then that's step one.
[01:36:12]  Step two is all question marks.
[01:36:14]  We haven't really worked out that part yet.
[01:36:15]  And then step three is profit, right?
[01:36:18]  Except that there's no resale value on these underpants, man.
[01:36:21]  There's no profit to be had here.
[01:36:23]  It's the same thing with Trump.
[01:36:24]  Well, I'm just going to sit here and smear and slander and bully and badmouth mail-in voting.
[01:36:30]  And then question mark, question mark, question mark, I'll be president.
[01:36:34]  Yeah, right.
[01:36:35]  But what he needed for step two was the state judges and secretaries of state of the land will all be persuaded by my charm to throw out, I don't know, tens, hundreds of millions of ballots because I don't like them.
[01:36:53]  And because, well, these are the ballots that come from the black part of town.
[01:36:56]  We don't want to count those.
[01:36:58]  And there's like, how transparent can you be?
[01:37:01]  He had, he thought, because this is what usually works for Trump, that he would just be a dick about it and things would work out his way.
[01:37:09]  Yeah, that he could just beat his way into victory.
[01:37:12]  Yeah.
[01:37:12]  That's right.
[01:37:13]  And then, and because he could see he had real reason now, to be clear here, people understood.
[01:37:19]  People who lean right lean less afraid of the germ and lean pro-Trump lean less afraid of the germ.
[01:37:24]  People who are Democrats and liberals tend to be more afraid of it and would want to prefer to vote by mail.
[01:37:30]  So we knew that the vote by mail numbers are going to favor the Democrats.
[01:37:35]  Everybody knew that.
[01:37:35]  Trump knew that.
[01:37:36]  And that was why he did it.
[01:37:37]  That was why he tried to slander and slander and slander.
[01:37:40]  But if he just been, as you said, a little bit less worse of a guy, he might have said, hey, everybody, you know what?
[01:37:47]  We're going to kick their ass on election day.
[01:37:49]  Everybody knows that.
[01:37:50]  But we've got to do really good by mail, too.
[01:37:53]  Yeah.
[01:37:53]  And you know what?
[01:37:54]  Here's another thing here.
[01:37:56]  Here's who skews Trump.
[01:37:57]  Old people skew wealthy and Republican.
[01:38:01]  They also skew pre-existing condition, comorbidity, and afraid of the germ.
[01:38:07]  So go ahead and say he should have spent.
[01:38:09]  And you know what, Dave?
[01:38:10]  Here's how we know this is right.
[01:38:11]  We have the counterfactual.
[01:38:12]  He went to Florida and he goes, mail-in ballots will give you the cooties.
[01:38:16]  And the governor of Florida said, Mr. President, don't say that.
[01:38:20]  We win by mail in Florida, man.
[01:38:23]  Big time.
[01:38:24]  We win by mail in Florida.
[01:38:26]  You don't want to do that.
[01:38:27]  And Trump went, oh, okay.
[01:38:29]  And then he stopped saying that in Florida.
[01:38:33]  And then he told the rest of the country, no, When he should have been saying, we're going to kick their ass on election day, let's kick their ass by mail too.
[01:38:41]  Yeah.
[01:38:42]  Do you know anybody who wants to vote for me, but they're afraid of showing up on election day because of the germ or they can't or for any other reason, by all means, vote Trump by mail.
[01:38:52]  And then he would have won, Dave.
[01:38:53]  I swear to God, he would have.
[01:38:54]  I think he would have won a Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon landslide.
[01:38:58]  Because what did he do?
[01:38:59]  What did I just say?
[01:39:00]  If what I said is right at all, then he suppressed his vote by what, three or four percent in all 50 states in the goddamn union, man.
[01:39:08]  That's your margin of victory in almost every state.
[01:39:12]  Yeah, yeah, no.
[01:39:13]  I mean, it's definitely several factors, but that was a huge one for sure.
[01:39:19]  And it was the thing about it that was so crazy is that there was like, as you pointed out, it was like with no plan.
[01:39:24]  It was like with no like, okay, so if the plan was like to say three months out from the election, mail-in ballots are right for fraud.
[01:39:30]  And this is why we're going to push our people in every single state to change the laws so that we don't have these mail-in ballots.
[01:39:36]  That's one thing.
[01:39:37]  But there was no action tied to it.
[01:39:39]  It was just, let me let you know, this is going to be fraud.
[01:39:41]  And then after it happened, it was fraud.
[01:39:44]  Okay.
[01:39:44]  Like, how are you going to like, like, what is actually the plan here?
[01:39:47]  And the other thing, and I grant your point, I think you're absolutely right about this.
[01:39:51]  But on top of that, there was fatigue.
[01:39:55]  There was Trump fatigue.
[01:39:56]  And not just Trump fatigue, but there was Trump media reaction fatigue.
[01:40:00]  People were sick of this kind of like things always being up here.
[01:40:04]  And especially after such a tough year for so many people.
[01:40:07]  And the truth is that, you know, it does look, if you look at like the data, like the, what do they call it?
[01:40:14]  The fucking, you know, post-voting data, all that shit.
[01:40:20]  It does seem like exit poll.
[01:40:23]  Yeah, the exit poll data.
[01:40:25]  It does seem like he did really turn off white suburban women who are a big part of his coalition in 2016.
[01:40:34]  And I think a lot of them, they do kind of care about like decency and, you know, like they're just not being a dick.
[01:40:42]  They're not really into that brash stuff that the guys kind of look past.
[01:40:47]  But a lot of the soccer moms were just like, we're kind of over the, I don't know.
[01:40:51]  I got three kids and I don't really like them.
[01:40:54]  And I think it's, I think part of it's the media too.
[01:40:56]  It's like, it's always him being crazy and then the media being crazy and him being crazy and the media.
[01:41:00]  And I just, let's just go normal old boring Joe Biden.
[01:41:04]  Yeah, that was the first time I thought that he might lose.
[01:41:06]  Actually, I was talking to Doug Bondo on the phone and I was saying, oh, no, he's going to win, dude.
[01:41:09]  Incumbents always win.
[01:41:11]  And Joe Biden is so weak.
[01:41:12]  And I think I told you on your show all my reasons why I thought he was going to win.
[01:41:16]  And Doug said, I don't know, man.
[01:41:17]  I'm talking to my friends and they are just exhausted.
[01:41:21]  And that was the word.
[01:41:22]  And I heard him say that.
[01:41:23]  And I was like, you know what?
[01:41:24]  Like, that actually really makes a lot of sense.
[01:41:26]  And after all, the reason he's president is because he was running against the single worst person alive on the planet Earth today.
[01:41:35]  Yeah.
[01:41:35]  And people just hate Hillary Clinton.
[01:41:38]  They always have.
[01:41:39]  Men hate her.
[01:41:40]  Women hate her too.

=== Incumbent Advantage Explained (03:03) ===

[01:41:42]  You know, she's not pretty.
[01:41:44]  She's not attractive in that way.
[01:41:46]  She's not a soft, nice grandmother in any kind of way.
[01:41:49]  She reminds you of your horrible boss that you hate.
[01:41:52]  Period.
[01:41:52]  That's it.
[01:41:52]  That's also got some blood on her hands.
[01:41:55]  Yeah.
[01:41:55]  What's the Jungian archetype that she fits in?
[01:41:59]  The lady I wish would leave me to hell alone or something.
[01:42:03]  Women don't want to be her.
[01:42:04]  Men don't want to be with her.
[01:42:06]  That is Hillary Clinton.
[01:42:07]  And people like Joe Biden.
[01:42:09]  People like Joe Biden.
[01:42:10]  I hate him.
[01:42:11]  I hate the son of a bitch.
[01:42:12]  But people always thought that Joe Biden was a decent guy.
[01:42:15]  I mean, regular people, they meet him and he goes, hi, look at me in my sunglasses and let me give you a nice handshake there, chief, or whatever.
[01:42:23]  And they like that.
[01:42:24]  No question.
[01:42:25]  Even in this bullshit, fucking Delaware fucking, you know, state that he's been elected.
[01:42:30]  No insult to people who live in Delaware just saying, you know, in like in the grand scheme of things.
[01:42:35]  But, you know, he's a Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
[01:42:39]  Hillary Clinton was never good at politics.
[01:42:42]  Forget what you like about her, you know, like, or hate about her policies.
[01:42:47]  She was never good at it.
[01:42:48]  Hillary Clinton literally, she only became a senator because she was the first lady and Rudy Giuliani got sick.
[01:42:57]  That's why she was a senator.
[01:42:59]  And she only became, you know, a contender for the nomination in 2008 because the establishment decided they liked her and she was good for business.
[01:43:08]  She lost to Barack Hussein Obama in what was supposed to be a layup.
[01:43:12]  She struggled to beat an 80-year-old socialist in a primary and then lost to Donald Trump.
[01:43:18]  She was not good at politics.
[01:43:20]  And Joe Biden has been elected 5 trillion times as a senator and like is, you know, somewhat knows how to play the game.
[01:43:28]  And so there was that.
[01:43:29]  Look, we got to wrap up so I can get this episode out in time.
[01:43:32]  But I would say, to your point, just that even if you are a Trump supporter, look, by the standard that the corporate press used of election interference, meaning that the Russians placed Facebook ads and that makes an election not legitimate, by that standard, you have every argument in the world and then some that there was election interference, not only in this election, but in the midterm elections where Mueller kept the investigation going through the midterm elections and never came out and could have just said, hey, just so you guys know,
[01:44:02]  we have absolutely no evidence that Trump is in bed with Russia in any way.
[01:44:06]  They let the Democrats take the House off of that as a big part of it.
[01:44:10]  The media was completely in bed with the Democrats the entire election.
[01:44:14]  Social media was censoring stories that would damage Joe Biden.
[01:44:17]  So there is an argument there of if you want to play by the same standard.
[01:44:22]  Although all of that stuff, all of that stuff goes in with all fair and love and war and politics.
[01:44:26]  Now, outright stealing votes is one thing, but the media's jihad against him, hey, those are the breaks, man.
[01:44:32]  That's the playing field that you're on.
[01:44:33]  And there ain't no fairness when it comes to that.
[01:44:35]  But it should be said here, David, it is absolutely shameful the way that he has dealt with this.
[01:44:40]  You know, when Jack Kennedy stole the election in 1960, Richard Nixon said, well, screw it.

=== Gay Marriage Law Politics (02:08) ===

[01:44:46]  And went home to California.
[01:44:47]  And his people said, why don't you fight?
[01:44:50]  And he said, because it wouldn't be good for the country.
[01:44:52]  That's why.
[01:44:52]  And so he went home because Richard Nixon had class, Dave.
[01:44:57]  Yes, Richard Nixon had class compared him.
[01:45:00]  And Hillary Clinton didn't have the class that Richard Nixon had.
[01:45:03]  And Trump just went, oh, you want to see no class.
[01:45:07]  Right.
[01:45:07]  Oh, I'll show you no class.
[01:45:09]  Oh, man.
[01:45:10]  And then he's making a horrible bastard out of all these right-wingers, too, who are saying, oh, yeah, no, forget constitutional federalism.
[01:45:17]  Forget the fact that it's the state legislatures who decide, not you, not the president.
[01:45:23]  They decide the rules for their elections.
[01:45:25]  You believe in the Constitution or don't you?
[01:45:27]  Instead, they say, no, we support over at big league politics.
[01:45:30]  We want him to declare martial law and rerun the elections in the five states that we say were stolen because he lost them.
[01:45:37]  The most important ones that he lost.
[01:45:39]  I mean, give me a fucking break.
[01:45:41]  That's absolutely sickening.
[01:45:42]  And nobody cares.
[01:45:45]  All of these things.
[01:45:46]  It's funny, right?
[01:45:47]  Because nobody, when it comes to politics, and you know what?
[01:45:50]  You could put us in this category too, because if somebody, some completely unconstitutional process, like some deep state bureaucrat was just going to illegally seize the government and end all the wars and institute liberty, you know what?
[01:46:05]  Me and you might be as unlikely as that sounds.
[01:46:07]  I might be like, you know what?
[01:46:09]  That's how it happened.
[01:46:10]  That's how it happened.
[01:46:11]  Good results.
[01:46:12]  No one actually cares about democracy.
[01:46:14]  Nobody.
[01:46:15]  Like left or right, they don't actually care.
[01:46:17]  It's not, you never saw a left winger when the Supreme Court came in and said gay marriage is the law of the land for the whole country.
[01:46:24]  Even the 20-something states that still don't allow it, gay marriage is the law of the land.
[01:46:28]  Sorry, that's our decision.
[01:46:29]  There was not one left-winger who went, we should really have a vote on this because we care about getting there through a democratic process.
[01:46:35]  They went, no, we win.
[01:46:37]  We get our policy and we win.
[01:46:38]  And it's the same on the right wing, too.
[01:46:40]  They just want Trump in.
[01:46:42]  It doesn't matter.
[01:46:43]  And the same way on the left, they just want Trump out.
[01:46:47]  Nobody really cares about the process and all of this shit.
[01:46:50]  Politics is about power and they want to win their fucking power.

=== Support Scott's Audio Book (01:10) ===

[01:46:54]  And that's, I think that's pretty much it.
[01:46:56]  All right.
[01:46:57]  And the reason these elections were never really controversial before was because it was always Bush versus Clinton.
[01:47:02]  So what difference does it make?
[01:47:03]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:47:03]  No one's power was really threatened by that.
[01:47:06]  You know?
[01:47:06]  All right, listen, we got to wrap.
[01:47:07]  Dude, I appreciate so much you doing three episodes with us to help us all understand this stuff and break it down.
[01:47:13]  And I can't wait when the book is officially out to have you back on so we can go through all that.
[01:47:18]  We might need 10 podcasts to get through the whole book.
[01:47:21]  We'll just do one.
[01:47:23]  I'll make people read the book because we're not going to be able to do all of it.
[01:47:26]  But I look forward to that.
[01:47:27]  And everybody, please go check out and support Scott.
[01:47:31]  I've benefited so much from Scott's work.
[01:47:34]  And of course, read his book, Fool's Errand Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
[01:47:38]  Read that now because the new one's coming out soon.
[01:47:40]  So you got to get that one knocked off.
[01:47:43]  There's the audio book, too.
[01:47:44]  That's right.
[01:47:45]  And you can get the audio book.
[01:47:46]  And of course, the great Ron Paul, just really, really phenomenal.
[01:47:49]  It's just a transcript of all the interviews with Ron Paul over the years.
[01:47:52]  Just a bunch of amazing stuff in there.
[01:47:54]  Antiwar.com, the Libertarian Institute.org, scotthorton.org.
[01:48:00]  Got him right this time.
[01:48:02]  All right, there you go.
[01:48:02]  Thanks a lot, brother.
[01:48:03]  Thanks, all you guys for listening.
[01:48:04]  We will see you later.