Scott Horton dismantles Bill Kristol and Colin Powell, exposing how neocons orchestrated Iraq as a "bonus war" using lies about WMDs and forged intelligence. The analysis highlights Nancy Pelosi's double standard in refusing to impeach Bush despite known fraud while pursuing Trump, revealing a systemic lack of accountability that fuels populist backlash. Ultimately, the episode argues the US has lost its democracy to an illegitimate ruling class, necessitating a return to constitutional principles or anarcho-capitalism to restore true liberty against domestic overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Part of the Problem00:05:04
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm excited for this episode.
I promised this to you guys a few days ago, and I've gotten a lot of requests to do this one.
So, of course, we have returning to the show, my guy, Scott Horton, who, as I'm sure everybody knows at this point, because he's the most recurring guest on the show.
He is the author of Fool's Erin, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
He's also the author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
He's the host of the Scott Horton show.
He is the editor at antiwar.com, and he was one of the founders of the Libertarian Institute, which is really fantastic.
You guys should check out all of Scott's stuff.
Also, he's got a brand new podcast out with Pete Quinones, who's also a regular guest on the show, The End of the Empire, which is a great podcast.
You guys should check that out.
It's up on YouTube and I imagine other places where you can listen to podcasts.
But I wanted to do an episode recapping the recent debate between Scott Horton and Bill Crystal at the Soho Forum, which was really incredible.
I wanted to get the first episode, the first podcast that would recap it, but I've been out of commission.
As you guys know, I had a lot of stuff going on recently.
So Scott's already done like 12, but this one will be better.
I promise.
Maybe not.
But anyway, we'll get into it.
We could talk about some other stuff too.
But anyway, how are you doing, Scott?
Good to see you.
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me back, Dave.
And thanks for mentioning the Institute.
It just so happens it's our fun drive right now.
So if people like this kind of stuff, it's me and Pete and Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Ansloan, Tommy Salmons, Keith Knight, Patrick McFarlane, a bunch of great writers, Connor Friedman, Jim Bovard.
So if you like this kind of thing, libertarianinstitute.org slash donate.
Sorry.
I'll tell you, every person.
Who's that in there?
Every person you just named is incredible.
The Libertarian Institute is amazing.
And if you are able to help them out, I really think it's about as good a cause as you could help out.
So please do.
There's a bunch of great books that we're going to be publishing.
We've already published five great, well, three of mine and two of Sheldon's and one of Will Griggs.
We got another Will Grigg book coming.
Oh, awesome.
Brad Hoff is writing one about Syria, the war in Syria.
And then I got a guy named Richard Booth is writing one on the true story.
This is going to be the fool's errand of the Oklahoma bombing, dude.
It's going to be what's the new Will Grigg one coming out?
Well, so it's called The Stolen Life of Christopher Tapp.
And it's a series of articles that Will did about this poor guy who was framed up and railroaded for raping and murdering this poor girl in 1996 in Idaho, which was clearly the act of an absolutely insane psychopath, serial killer, murderer, bad guy.
And they blamed it on some idiot kid from the neighborhood that they coerced into admitting to it, you know, confessing to it.
And then they just railroaded him.
And then, of course, Will was right all along.
So that's how it turned out.
If people haven't read, by the way, which I feel like is one of the books that gets less shine than some of the other books at the Institute, but you could see it over Scott's right shoulder there.
No quarter is an ex book.
Your other right.
But that's really excellent.
Highly recommend people check that out.
And the reason for that is because he died before we published the thing.
The Pressure to Rebut00:06:52
We were already working on it, but it's hard for him to promote it since he's not alive anymore.
But I'm telling you what, it's such a great book.
I'm glad you said that.
I mean, I really know that people, you know, when they read it, they're just blown away by it.
And, you know, there's a few different subjects, but mostly he was our movement's very best guy on the cops, Dave.
So good.
You want to get good on that issue?
Read that book, No Quarter, man.
It'll change your life.
You know, it is really incredible.
No, it's, it's excellent.
It's, it's a book that's hard to put down once you start reading it.
It really grabs you.
So I highly recommend people check it out.
I could have just stopped that.
He was the best one of us, man.
He was the most articulate writer, most articulate spokesman.
He had a vocabulary 10 times the size of all of, you know, our, the rest of, you know, the most popular of us or whatever combined.
Yeah.
He knew the history.
He'd be like, you know what?
This reminds me of something that happened in Romania in the year 1124, see?
And blah, blah, blah.
You know, like I'm telling you about the Reaganiers or something.
That's this guy on everything that ever happened, Dave.
Yeah.
You know, it's just, man, he was something else.
Yeah, he was an incredible talent and unfortunately left us too soon.
But his work is still here.
So try to go appreciate that if you can.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So this debate was really something.
And I was, so I was not able to be there for it personally.
And that, I got to say that it was hard.
It was hard for me to miss this.
And if I could just, let's start this off by making this all about me for a little bit.
It was hard for me.
Believe me, I missed you there, Dave.
Dude, but it's okay with me that you weren't there.
I was.
So my wife ended up giving birth like a few weeks early, like three weeks early.
And I don't know why, just in my mind.
And I knew I, you know, I knew my son was going to need surgery and there was going to be a whole thing.
I knew if it happened after she gave birth, I wasn't going to be able to be there.
But for whatever reason, she went late with my daughter.
And I don't know why.
I just had it in my mind.
I was like, ah, three, it's like three weeks before the baby's dead.
That'll be fine.
She went late.
She'll go late again.
Like I just had it.
There's a kid's really let you know.
You're like, yeah, your plans don't really matter.
But I was like, no, no, no, this works out perfectly.
But anyway, she went early and I wasn't able to be there.
But I was going to tell Jane even before that that I couldn't do comedy at this thing.
I was like, I can't, I got to just be in Scott's corner.
Like I can't do, because I was so, it, it felt like a friend of mine is going into a fight to the death.
And I, I just, this was not a funny situation to me.
I just really wanted to be there to be in your ear, like just telling you the right things.
And, you know, again, don't get me wrong.
So, just because everyone knows, you're my guy who I look to for advice.
I'm not your guy who you look to.
Like, you know, way more.
You're, you're the foreign policy expert and all this shit, but I am kind of, I know a lot about this, that the dynamic of this performing.
You sent me a real nice text message about, you know, half an hour or something before I went on that, you know, well, I tried that.
I really did appreciate a lot.
Well, I tried my best.
And then, like, a few weeks before I was trying to tell you, because there's little things about how you perform this thing and how you kind of like keep the right attitude.
And, you know, it's one of the things I love about debates like this is that there's something you really get up for about it.
Like, it's, it is intellectually or whatever, the closest thing to a fight to the death you're going to have.
I mean, you here you have, you are Scott Horton, mrantiwar.com, libertarian institute.org, Scott Horton, the anti-war guy.
If you go into a debate with Bill Crystal, let's just say hypothetically, you get slaughtered in that debate.
You're done.
Like, that would have been pretty bad.
I mean, I don't know if you ever recover from that.
You know, like, so you have this, this dynamic where everything that you're about, that you support your family with, that is your identity, that is your reputation is on the line.
And I, I love that.
I love the kind of that moment.
But then on the flip side of that is you get the opportunity to go do what you did, which is embarrass the shit out of quite debatably the number one neocon in the world.
And it really went that way, man.
I could not have been happier with how it went.
So just meta discussing like the larger issues of the debate.
How did you feel about it?
Well, okay, I guess the way I was looking at it was, you know, my primary responsibility was not disappointing all of you guys.
I know people are counting on me to do well here.
So there was pressure on me in that sense.
But sorry, I'm a bit of a broken record.
I mentioned this a couple of times before, but, you know, when I get an email from Kennedy on Fox Business from her producer, Chelsea, hey, you want to be on the show tonight?
I'm like, oh my God, dude.
I got to like, call Dave, talk me down, man.
It's easy.
And what's funny is I know that every time I'm on there, when I'm looking in the lens, it's no problem.
What am I afraid or something?
It's fine.
But just the pressure there is so much more.
For this, it wasn't really like that.
And maybe that's just because Gene had originally arranged this thing two years ago, you know, just shy of two years ago.
It was like November, you know, two years ago.
And so I've had enough time to think about it and be scared and then let it wear off over and over again enough to where I guess that had just worn off, you know?
So I wasn't feeling any, you know, nervousness there, but I was, you know, in the more abstract sense, I was feeling the pressure that I better not let everybody down.
But then, you know, I knew that when that what I had written for my opening statement was solid and that what the hell was he going to say about that?
And my only worry was after I was reading it out loud to myself, like for time, because it's got to fit, you know, so I'm like reading it for time, which of course I blew the limit because I didn't, I read when I'm reading it to myself in my office or in the living room to the old lady, I read a lot faster.
But when I'm up there at the podium, I got to kind of give it a little more rhythm and whatever.
And that was enough to add a couple or yeah, like a minute and a half, two minutes to it.
But anyways, at one point, I'm reading that and I thought, oh, you know what, though?
Refuting the Lies00:05:01
He's going first.
And that means, so it's his statement, then my statement, then his rebuttal, then my rebuttal.
So my rebuttal, I can rebut both his first statement and his rebuttal.
But also, I really kind of should be rebutting what I can anticipate he's going to say in his opening statement in my opening statement since I go second.
And then I'm like, oh, well, crap, because I know he's going to want to completely avoid the Middle East.
And instead, he's going to want to talk about fighting Tojo and Hitler.
And then here I am not addressing Tojo and Hitler in my opening statement at all.
I'm talking about the 21st century, right?
So, and his wars, which coincidentally, I want to pay attention to and he doesn't, you know.
And so, but then my friend Anthony Gregory gave me the great advice that, listen, just say in right before at the top of your opening statement, just say, I'll address Hitler later.
That way, there's not like the Hitler in the room.
Oh, what about Hitler?
And then I don't address it.
So just go ahead and say, I'll address Hitler later on when we're arguing about Hitler.
But right now, this is what I got to say about this, which I think really worked because otherwise it would have been kind of weird that you're not addressing the World War II question, which is the center of everything, right?
But then, you know, overall, like, I don't know, I knew that he did bad.
I know that there were things that I wish I could have done better, especially, you know, I guess I had spent so much time worrying about how it might go off the rails.
If like, if I beat up on him too bad, he might react by just going, well, this isn't even really a debate.
You're just being a jerk and leave.
Or he could say, well, obviously you're an anti-Semite because you've mentioned three different Jews names so far or whatever kind of thing like that.
And then how am I going to handle that?
I'm going to have to have, you know, a funny response or a clever response to, you know, but I'm just thinking after our opening statements, we've basically got an hour of time for things to go bad.
So when I was considering that, what I wasn't considering is this guy's going to lie a lot.
And I really got to be a hawk and pay attention to every single thing he says and write down every single lie he tells to make sure that I at least get one word in to refute that.
Did he just say we didn't intervene in the Iran-Iraq war?
We backed both sides in the Iran-Iraq war.
Okay.
We didn't intervene in Syria.
Yeah, we did.
Well, I did.
I did confront him on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he brought up two major points about Syria.
One, we didn't intervene at all.
And two, Assad was used in the Sarin attacks.
And I was able to confront the first one, but I never did confront the second one, which in my book, right shoulder, I do, I have a subsection called Three Fake Sarin Attacks, where I debunk all three of the major ones at Ghouta, Khan Shikun, and Douma there in 2013, 17, and 18.
So for the record, but I didn't get to refute all the different lies he told or, you know, obfuscations and things where he kind of pretended that I hadn't already addressed that and then went ahead and pretended that something had never happened, that kind of thing.
And I wish that I had said, and he goes, look, there hasn't been a nuclear war.
And a lot of people thought there'd be one.
There never was so far.
So that's really good.
And I didn't say the most obvious thing, which is the USA were the only ones who ever nuked anybody's cities, dude.
You know, so that was a funny moment.
So he was asked a question at one point by one of the audience members during the question and answer segment.
And they said, what would it take?
Something along the lines of what would it take for you to admit that you were wrong?
Like what, what, how disastrous would the results have to be for you to admit that this is all bad?
And he goes, and he said, maybe a bunch of nuclear weapons going off.
Right.
I thought that was really something to go.
So that's your standard at that point.
As the seventh nuke drops, feel comforted in noting that Bill Crystal will be outside going, hey guys, my bad on this one.
I was wrong.
I guess you guys did have a point after all.
But you know, he did in the debate, he did back down on the Middle East, said two or three times, well, the Middle East is complicated.
And then eventually, and I'm not certain of this.
I guess I could actually really study this and look into it.
But I'm pretty sure that this is the first time that he ever said that we should not have done Iraq War II.
I think that was the first time that he had ever backed down that far to say that, yeah, we shouldn't have done that.
Yeah.
For people who were too young or not paying attention then or were bad guys then, he was outside of Dick Cheney's office or the Pentagon or George Bush himself.
He was the man most responsible for that war.
He was the leader of PNAC and of the Weekly Standard magazine and Fox News contributor and regular, you know, arranging all the American Enterprise Institute black coffee meetings, they called them and all of these things, orchestrating Chalabi.
Switching to Natural Products00:02:41
You know, he had Jim Loeb, I think, said he had a desk drawer with six different think tanks on six different pieces of paper in it.
You know, he was all right, guys.
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I wonder sometimes, because I'm a little bit older, you know, I'm like, I'm going to be 39 in a few months now.
And so sometimes I wonder, because I know there's a lot of young people who listen to my show and your show and stuff.
And so I mean, the ones who listen to your show probably are a little bit more keyed into this stuff.
But it's, I don't know exactly how to explain it.
If you're like 20 now, and maybe this all seems like kind of like, when we're the neocons, you just always kind of remember, maybe you know him as an anti-Trump guy.
Like that's kind of how the neocons have been rehabilitated in the corporate press, you know, image.
This is, okay, it's, this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's not that much of an exaggeration.
This is like if in a decade, Tom Woods debated Fauci.
Like it's not that far off from that.
Neoconservative Rehabilitation00:15:28
Like the guy, like this is so the neoconservatives were the ones who really, I mean, they kind of got their foot in the door.
I suppose they got their foot in the door in the Gerald Ford administration and then really in the George H.W. Bush administration.
And I guess in George H.W. Bush's CIA and Team B and all that stuff, like beforehand, but then in Reagan, really like became the dominant force within Republican appointees.
But it was in, and of course, George H.W. Bush, a lot of them had a lot of influence.
But after 9-11, they were the ones who really pushed the whole war on terror.
And they're super, and this guy, Bill Crystal, his father was, I mean, either him or Leo Strauss, debatably, were like the godfathers of the neoconservative movement.
And so this guy was such a huge, you know, figure in this whole thing and all these disastrous wars of the 21st century.
So it was a crazy thing to have you get to be on stage with him.
It's like what we always want.
It's kind of, it reminded me almost of Ron Paul Giuliani type thing, where we actually get to have our guy up there on stage with their guy.
And much like when Ron Paul would go debate all these guys, it's actually like as I was saying, oh, I wish I was there so I could like be like, okay, well, just remember this and just remember this.
Don't be too fucking mean, but don't not be mean and make sure you do this and all this.
And then as it's happening, you realize you're like, oh, he has nothing.
And it was like, as much as I know that their arguments are horrible and I know that we've got the truth on our side, it was still amazing to me to see.
Like, that would be like, but we get into more of the specifics, but my like meta comment on the debate was even after, even doing what I do for a living, I was blown away that you're like, well, here you have this guy, Irving Crystal's son, Irving Crystal, who's touted as this great intellectual.
And at City College, he'd be in alcove A or B debating all the other people in the other alcove.
And it was all about ideas and what matters.
And what are Bill Crystal's credentials?
Was he a Yale guy or something like that?
I'm not sure where he was.
Some elite university.
He's the Irving boy.
That's his credentials.
I promise you, he was at some elite university.
He'll be a guest speaker wherever he goes.
Just everyone goes, you know, he's the real intellectual and all this.
And here you are, the skater, you know what I mean?
Like community college dude.
And so you would think probably you'd be the one who would just come there with a narrative.
And he'd come there with dates and facts and names.
And this is what happened.
But he just got up there.
He had a narrative about the world.
America's a force for good.
And we've kept the peace and things would be worse.
And then you came with, look, here's the truth.
We did this, this, this, this, and this.
And this many people died here and this many people died here.
And here's what we could have done different.
And I look, I've watched a lot of the Soho Forum debates.
I've watched a lot of debates, a lot of Oxford-style debates.
This was the most dominant victory I think I've ever seen.
And I'm not just saying that.
I mean, he actually, and I've watched it a couple times now.
He quit after your opening statement.
In his rebuttal, he didn't even have his heart in it.
He was like, he was just, he had gotten pounded and he just was just going through the motions.
He then in the question and answer segment, he took one last, you ever see like in a boxing match when a guy's just getting pounded against the ropes and he's just getting hit and then he just goes, starts throwing wild one last time and then just basically loses.
So he threw wild one last time against you when you said the thing about like you were like, he asked you about Afghanistan or he asked you about the Taliban.
You were talking about how they, you know, what motivated the attacks of 9-11 and how it was our foreign policy.
And he goes, well, so do you think now that we've left Afghanistan, the Taliban is just going to be nice to women?
And you were like, what?
No.
And what does that have to do with anything?
And then he goes, well, it matters because people who care about freedom matter around the world.
And then you just bashed him over with that and he quit.
That was it.
After that, he had nothing left.
I mean, he actually started doing things.
Like, I mean, listen, we're going to put the debate in the link in the show link so you guys can go watch it and everything like that.
It'll be in the comment section.
But I'm not exaggerating when I say he would do things where you would make a point and he would go, well, if you're going to say America is a force for bad, then we just have a fundamental disagreement.
And you're like, yeah, you do have a disagreement.
That's why this is a debate.
Now, do you have a point to make about this debate?
He actually said at one point, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Like, who brings that to a debate?
We have to agree to disagree.
Actually, we're going to make arguments and see who has the more persuasive argument.
That's what we're doing.
It was incredible.
I think two or three different times, maybe just two times, but maybe three.
Gene said, Bill, do you want to respond?
Yeah, and he just said, no.
He just said, no.
Let it go.
No, he didn't take his full time for his rebuttal.
He didn't take his full time for his closing.
He literally just was like, I don't want any of this.
And it almost was to a point where you really, it was, I remember, like you said, about two years ago when this got scheduled.
And I talked about this on, I was on Tom's show on the great Tom Woods show.
Congratulations to Tom on his 2000th episode.
And I was on his show right after the debate got scheduled like a couple of years ago.
And we were talking about this and we were both saying, we were like to all these people on Twitter, like knock it off because there were these people tweeting at Bill Crystal who were like, dude, you have no idea what you're in for.
Like you think you're just debating someone on the wars.
You have no idea the matchup you just caught.
And we're like, shut up because there's a chance he doesn't know that.
And he's just going to go.
But of course, we all figured, and especially by now, after all this time, we go, he's not going to just not look up who he's debating.
He's going to know something.
I bet.
I mean, I was trying to prepare for the worst, but I bet that he would not even Google me.
He clearly did.
He didn't show up.
Because he's so used to just debating liberals who just make the same kind of pad arguments he makes, only the other side.
And so what's going to happen is I'm going to go in there and detail all this, you know, reality, this history of what happened.
And he's not going to know how to deal with that.
That's how I was betting it was going to go.
Well, can I tell you?
Like I expected.
I think there's, here's one of the major things.
There were a couple of major things that he wasn't expecting that you brought to the table.
Number one was just your knowledge of this shit, that you really know what you're talking about.
You don't kind of think that Iraq was a mistake or that Syria or Libya or Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia or anything.
You don't think this was a mistake.
You can, you wrote the book on it and you can tell him exactly what happened and who we sided with and who we opposed and why it was unnecessary and how many people died.
And that's, that's, that gives you a real advantage going in.
But even more so than that, there is this, as Tom would call it, the three by five card of allowable opinion.
And he's coming into a Reason magazine sponsored debate.
And Reason has some great people there.
Don't get me wrong.
But if you're a neocon and you're going to talk to someone at Reason, you still kind of assume that they're going to be within this window.
And within this window, what's allowable is that you could question whether or not one of these wars was the right move.
But you would never question the motives of the people who pushed the war.
You would never call it mass murder.
You would never, you know what I mean?
Like it's almost like he was completely unprepared for the fact that you were going to go in there and not only know more about all this stuff than him, but also really just call it like it is and say, no, listen, you run think tanks funded by weapons companies and you exploited 9-11 to get a bonus war when we never even needed the first war.
And I mean, maybe you didn't say it quite that directly, but basically that's what you said.
And he, I mean, just had no way of dealing with that there because there really is no response to that because he knows you're right.
Pete said right after he goes, well, you know, he could only answer generalities because the facts don't favor his position.
You know, I tried to cite the Weekly Standard when I could.
It was the Weekly Standard that reported that it was the joint staff in the 90s would say, well, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
Where they admit right there, it's being a superpower that causes terrorism.
What are they going to do?
Set off a truck bomb here or there?
Who cares?
What difference does it make?
Right.
And, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything compared to like actually being attacked by a nation state with an armed force.
So who cares?
And then, uh-oh, lost a couple of skyscrapers full of people.
So then now what do we do?
We'll just exploit that.
And then it was the Weekly Standard that where Stephen Hayes would write these lies drummed up by the neocons in the White House, would give, or, you know, the vice president's office and in the Pentagon, would give this stuff to Stephen Hayes.
Bill Crystal was the editor of the magazine at the time, would publish these articles.
And then Dick Cheney would go and meet the press and say, listen, Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard has this great write-up about how Saddam is friends with Osama.
It's all there.
And it was all lies, all of it.
And so, you know, I did leave an opening for him to say, well, geez, you're personally attacking me.
And the thing is, like you're kind of alluding to earlier, what your advice would have been.
Well, don't go too easy on him, but don't go too hard on him either because it is an Oxford-style debate.
You can't just get up there and pummel the guy.
And the question is not whether Bill Crystal is good or bad.
The question is whether regime change is good for America or not.
At the same time, he's not just like a right-wing professor from down at the University of Science or whatever, right?
Like he's the guy.
He's Goebbels, only without the official title.
But other than that, he is extremely responsible.
He's, you know, in a sense, absolutely at the vanguard edge of like pushing the case against free speech and association, right?
Like he's got this loophole where he's not a government employee.
So he's not exactly responsible.
But, you know, Justin Raimondo called it the axis of crystal.
That was the neoconservative conspiracy to lie us into Iraq War II.
He was the boss of it all, at least outside of the government.
He was the most influential guy.
And then all the people inside the government responsible for it, they were his guys.
They were the people that he had helped to organize, all of them, you know, Richard Pearl and Douglas Fife and Abram Shulski and all of these guys at AEI and the Project for a New American Century.
You know, they had written these letters demanding that Bill Clinton pass the Iraq Liberation Act and they got that act introduced and passed in the 90s, declaring it official policy to seek regime change in Iraq.
And Dave, in November, it might have even been October still.
I think it was November of 2001, about, you know, eight weeks after the attack, they wrote an open letter, the Project for a New American Century.
Bill Crystal at the top wrote an open letter to W. Bush that said, if you don't make regime change in Iraq part of the war on terrorism, then we're going to do everything we can to turn the conservative right against you and to call you weak and to call you an appeaser and to call you a colin powellite and whatever the hell.
You absolutely must seek regime change against Iraq.
So when I say he sought a bonus war, yeah, he did.
That was exactly what they did.
And, you know, I think, and truthers will be mad at this, but I think one of the major reasons that September 11th was allowed to happen was because every time the CIA or the FBI, well, probably just the CIA, said anything about it to Connolly's Rice, famously co-for black and George Tennett, had tried to talk to her into having, you know, convening a principals meeting to talk about al-Qaeda.
And they just put it off.
And the reason why was because all the neocons led by Wolfowitz and Libby in them would say, no, no, no, Mr. President or Condi Rice or whoever it is, don't listen to the CIA talking about Osama in Afghanistan.
That's a big diversion from Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
All eyes on Baghdad.
And if we get bogged down going after this bin Laden guy, what's he going to do?
Set off a truck bomb or something?
If we're going to get bogged down in Afghanistan fighting him, then we'll never have a chance to go to Baghdad.
So then partially because of that pressure inside the government in the first eight months of the government helped to cause the September 11th attack to happen, to not be stopped because of the pressure against the people at the top taking it seriously and trying to do something about it.
Then as soon as it happens, and the smoke is still rising, you know, and the people, the couple that lived across the hall from my wife died in that thing.
And these guys don't wait a moment to say, see, we got to go to Baghdad when Baghdad didn't have a damn thing to do with it at all.
And every single one of them knew it.
They all knew it.
Yeah, exactly.
Bonus war.
Let's get away with bloody murder because now is our chance to.
Yeah.
Do you remember when there was that the building that collapsed in Florida a few months ago?
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I'm talking about?
And it was very clearly because there was like structural damage to the building.
Like right away, they were like, oh, yeah, there was like they were neglecting this building like crazy.
And there were a couple people in the Biden administration who were like right away like, well, it's because of climate change.
That's why the building collapsed.
And it's something like that, where it's just so transparently you just inserting what you already were pushing for right before that and just jumping on a tragedy to use it.
And everyone started mocking them online because you're like, dude, really, you're going to push climate change over this.
It was that, but after the biggest attack on America and to push a war where a million people ended up dying.
But it was, it was just that.
It was like they were already, this is all they wanted was this war in Iraq.
And then they just used the suffering, like the grieving mothers and fathers and children and all of this to try to be like, ooh, we could capitalize on that to go get this war that we wanted already.
War Over Climate Change00:14:50
By the way, for anyone who hasn't seen, there's this interview with Bill Clinton on Fox News during the George W. Bush administration.
I can't remember what.
It was early 2000s, probably like 2005 or something like that, where they start grilling him for not doing enough about al-Qaeda, you know, because they almost like that was one of the defenses that the Bush administration and his media would try to use: well, I mean, he had just gotten in there.
I mean, he'd only been in there for like, what was it, like nine months?
And then 9-11 happens.
You know what I mean?
Who's expected to do their job within your first eight, nine months on the job?
Yeah.
Nine months, you have a cup of coffee, you crack your knuckles, you barely sat down at the desk.
Meet the interns.
Yeah, come on.
I mean, so they were trying.
And Bill Clinton, who, by the way, I, me and Scott are both, we hate Bill Clinton as much as anyone in the planet.
Yeah.
We're tied for maximum hating Bill Clinton that you could possibly be.
But there is this moment, and it's so real.
And you got to kind of admit he's right in it.
Where one of the, I think it might have been, I can't remember if it's Chris Wallace or not, but it's one of the Fox News guys who's kind of like grilling him and like, oh, so, well, what about the charges that you didn't do enough about Osama bin Laden?
And he loses it.
And it's so real.
He's so furious.
And he's like, I didn't do enough.
I didn't do enough.
He's like, I was obsessed with Osama bin Laden.
George W. Bush and these guys.
I kept telling them, focus on him.
Focus on him.
And they were like, nah, that doesn't mean anything.
And he was like, we had a meeting every week about Osama bin Laden.
And these guys, and it's true, for the first nine months, the George W. Bush administration was their whole attitude was like, eh, whatever.
These guys don't fucking matter.
This over here is what we want to focus on.
And so anyway, it's one more note in history that's kind of lost because it was this weird time in George W. Bush's administration before 9-11, this weird period that is technically after the year 2000, but is really still the 90s.
You know what I mean?
Like it's like this weird time in history that people just forget about.
But that was there.
By the way, you know, Bush did say to Bob Woodward that, yeah, I wasn't really on point about that.
And I wasn't paying attention.
You know, he admitted his criminal negligence right there.
No, not criminal negligence, just admits it in a way.
He goes, well, we're going to call that one a whoopsie.
We're going to chalk that up to whoopsie and move right along.
Now, now here's the wars that I want.
Yeah.
And seriously, here's the other thing.
They knew, and I show this in the book, I demonstrate this.
It's been demonstrated by others before me.
They knew for a fact that Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden, had no alliance with bin Laden, wouldn't dare, wouldn't even consider, wouldn't have a nightmare about giving chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden to attack the American, you know, continental United States with this kind of thing.
What's he trying to do?
Get Baghdad nuked?
No.
I mean, the whole thing was completely absurd.
And for people who didn't believe in it at the time, it was completely absurd.
And then for the people who did believe in it at the time, the former group were a bunch of traitors.
How can you not want to protect America and preempt this attack by Iraq and Osama bin Laden that's coming and that they already did in the next one and all of this?
You, you know, commie simp, terrorist, loving, traitor, you know, whatever it was.
And then the former group was saying, no, you idiots, Saddam didn't do it.
That's why we hadn't attacked him in a year and a half.
You know, if Saddam had done it, we'd have started carpet bombing Baghdad immediately.
We already had no fly zones over that country.
They would have launched the war immediately.
And the reason they didn't, the reason they went to ask for a UN Security Council resolution, which would require the approval of the French and the Russians and the Chinese was because the law says you can't start a war unless you have a Security Council resolution.
In other words, Osama and Saddam have not started a war.
Well, Osama had.
Saddam had not started a war against us.
We were the ones starting the war, just on the face of it.
You know, and then all they could say is, and, you know, there used to be a great article by Sam Gardner, was this anti-war colonel, had written some stuff.
And he talked about how Bush, he had some good quotes of Bush, maybe even some video, I think, once upon a time, where Bush would say, you know, people ask me, why do we have to do Sept, why do we have to invade Iraq?
And the answer is because of September 11th.
A one and a two and a three and a four.
And he'd just sit there.
And then he'd say, because we learned the lesson that day, that from now on, we have to start all the wars so that nobody else starts a war against us, like what happened on September 11th.
Remember that?
But in the meantime, that giant silence, it sounds like he just said Saddam did it, right?
Why do we have to attack Iraq?
Because of September 11th.
Now he's George W. Bush, the idiot.
He can't string a sense together to save his life.
So you like correct his grammar in your own head and you go, oh, I get it.
He's saying Saddam did it.
And we're getting revenge for what Saddam Dunn did.
Simple as that.
And on the other side of that, like, what are you telling me, Dave, that George Bush and Bill Crystal and all of these people are going to lie to us and make us believe somehow that Saddam had done it or that Saddam is about to attack us, that we have to preempt it when that's not true?
Yeah.
I mean, that makes you a crazy conspiracy nut that you would think that they could be, this is the United States of America, okay?
Our government doesn't lie us into war.
They would never do that.
It's a democracy and all this stuff.
And that was how people saw it.
If you said it wasn't legit, you were the one who's not legit.
You know, the funny, the funny thing, and I guess this is like, it's quite a step beyond just like public choice theory or something like that.
But this is kind of, you know, me and you might be these like, you know, viewed as these anti-government radicals or something, you know, and I guess it's a dangerous thing to be without getting kicked off Facebook or something like that these days.
But it's a really funny thing that you notice is like a real, it's, and this is why the state is so evil and why it's such a destructive force in general, is that it has this air of credibility that we give no one else.
Like we, we, we're so much more cynical with everybody else in life who doesn't have any of the awesome power that the state has.
But, you know, if there's just like a local dry cleaner on your block and you were like, why are they doing things the way they did?
Why did they renovate their store?
Why do they have the prices they have?
Or why do they have that?
Like what's motivating them?
And I would say we're like, oh, they're motivated by trying to make more money.
Like they're motivated by their own self-interest that everyone would accept that.
And if someone were to say, well, they're motivated by helping all the dry cleaners and all of the neighborhood and all of this, you'd be like, oh, shut up.
No one really works that way.
Like, I'm not even saying they're anything evil.
You're just like, no, they want to make more money and have a better life for their family.
And they're motivated by self-interest.
Like we all are.
Like, I don't know.
What's that?
But when it comes to the government, if you even suggest, like, you know, that maybe there's the people who pursue these policies aren't just motivated by like, I want to help the world and I want to do all these great things.
And I'm a servant of the public, even though I make way more money than the average person in the public.
I mean, I'm still their servant, you know, like, oh, but you're not even allowed to suggest that without it being like, whoa, this is conspiracy land, dude.
Like, what's really the conspiracy here?
The idea that they also operate, they're also human beings, just like the rest of us.
And in fact, quite a bit worse.
But there's just, yeah, there's something about that that you're not even allowed to suggest.
Like even like, you know, even a fair amount of like the mainstream anti-war people would be like, well, I'd never suggest that they intentionally did this.
But then if you just follow even what they're saying, you know, there was this quote that I've mentioned on the show quite a bit because I thought it was really revealing.
And it was Nancy Pelosi unintentionally being honest a couple years ago.
This was when Donald Trump was being impeached the first time over the Ukraine gate nonsense.
And Nancy Pelosi was trying to make the point that it was so important that we had to impeach Donald Trump.
And so she's trying to make this point.
And she goes, look, I'm not like she, she, the point she was making was like, look, I'm not impeach happy.
I'm not someone who would just impeach anyone.
And she goes, in 2006, when I was, you know, first became the speaker of the house, there were a lot of people pushing me to impeach George W. Bush.
And I didn't.
And she goes, I was on the, her words, you can look this up.
She goes, I was on the House Intelligence Committee.
And so I knew what the intelligence was about Saddam Hussein.
And I knew they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
And I knew this was all lies.
I knew that.
And I still didn't impeach George W. Bush because that's how much I love the country.
And I didn't want to tear the country apart.
Now, from her perspective, she's trying to make that seem like, and that's why, that's how bad this Ukraine phone call is.
Like if you just remove yourself a little bit from her perspective, you're like, how would you even think this is making the point you think it is?
But so she's going like, so that's how bad this is that I, even me, the most anti-impeachment person ever, I still feel like I have to impeach Donald Trump.
But if you just don't buy into that for a second and look at it and you go, wait a minute.
So you're saying that you know that this president knowingly lied us into a war and that's not an impeachable offense?
Like, holy shit.
But yet we're the kooks forever like suggesting that now maybe you guys don't all have the purest of motives.
Yeah, of course.
And the thing is, too, it's because of all their political consultants saying that's not a winner.
People get upset by that or whatever.
But these guys are idiots.
I mean, you know, this guy, Mark Penn, and what's this guy's name?
Oh, man, I read the funniest article about one of these.
God, I can't remember his name.
It's on the tip of my tongue.
One of these Democratic, you know, electoral politics apparatchic types who there was this hilarious article about how he's never won a campaign ever.
Oh, my friend Lewis was telling me how much he hates this guy.
God's name's on the tip of my tongue.
But he just lost every Democratic election he ever touched.
You know, he's the one who tried to run Al Gore as Ronald Reagan against W. Bush, you know, and tried to run John Kerry as John F. Kerry.
Don't say you're anti-war.
People will like rebel against that.
Like, oh, man, that's the one and only issue of 2004 is George Bush lied us into war and he's got to go.
So how'd Kerry play it at this guy's insistence?
Oh, well, you know, I'll just be a better manager of the war that I used to be against, but now I'm not against anymore.
And that I'm going to see it through and win it.
Like, oh, my God, how could you?
And so the people who told Pelosi, oh, yeah, no, impeachment would be terrible for you and the Democrats.
I don't see how.
Hell, if she impeached Bush and Cheney both, then she'd be the president of the United States.
And in fact, she could demur and give it to the president pro tem of the Senate and let the Republicans have it so it doesn't look like it's just a partisan witch hunt.
It would have been Ted Stevens from Alaska would have been at that time, would have gotten it, but that would have been fine as a caretaker government till the next election.
And then, yes, that's exactly what impeachment is for.
Somebody, a president that abuses the power of his office to start an unnecessary war.
I mean, that could be worse than in the Federalist Papers as like brought up as an example by Hamilton of something that you would impeach somebody for, you know, doing some insane abuse of power like that.
And again, and I do demonstrate this, and I'm borrowing from a lot of other people in demonstrating that they knew that they were lying.
They didn't think they were defending this country.
They were getting away with murder.
That's what it was.
And, you know, back to the whole narrative about that thing.
Again, like you were saying, just detach yourself a little bit and compare Iraq War II to the Ukraine gate and how silly that is.
Well, detach yourself from, you know, look at it from this point of view, from this time instead of from back then.
How absolutely ridiculous it is, the narrative that W. Bush and Dick Cheney, so stupid, combined with ruthless and corrupt psychopathic, you're, you know, sociopathic type operator in Dick Cheney, and then all surrounded by the Likud Party in the form of the neoconservative movement and Condoleezza Rice, who got her PhD in Russian history,
who doesn't speak Russian and who doesn't know anything, right?
And all of these people are essentially a bunch of, at best, a bunch of boobs and at worst, a bunch of, you know, real psychos with alternative agendas.
Donald Rumsfeld, who, you know, is maybe other than Trump is probably the most self-interested political operator in modern times.
And people propped up this group, you know, ineffectual Colin Powell, ignorant Condi Rice, cross-side moron W. Bush, ruthless throat slit and killer Dick Cheney, bunch of Lakudnik traitors, the neocons, and said, these guys are the most competent administrators in world history.
The same crew that 9-11 just happened on their watch.
And they are due absolute deference for when they say what must be done to protect foreign policy.
And then everything that they touched caught on fire.
Everything.
You know, someone on Twitter asked me, Dave, well, who do you think would be a formidable opponent in a debate?
The 9-11 Watch Crew00:04:14
I said, well, I guess John Bolton, because I know at least he likes scrap.
He's not just going to curl up into a ball like Bill Crystal did, and he'd at least fight.
But man, I'd barbecue the hell out of John Bolton.
And he's already declined an opportunity to debate me at the Young Americans for Liberty.
And I'd have him cooked in my opening statement that because there's no one person on the planet more responsible than him for the, other than maybe Kim Jong-il himself, for the fact that North Korea has an arsenal of nuclear weapons right now.
He is the one who broke the deal.
And you can read, there's a great article by Gordon Brader people can look at.
It's called How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes.
And by Bush, he means John Bolton.
And it's all about how in 2002, they broke the deal.
They added sanctions.
They claimed a new policy of seizing North Korean boats on the high seas.
And they put them in the nuclear strategy on the list for a possible nuclear first strike.
And then only then did North Korea quit the nonproliferation treaty and withdraw from their agreement with the IAEA and start harvesting plutonium out of the Yongbyong reactor and making nuclear bombs.
We had a deal.
In fact, Colin Powell said that the policy is we're going to continue the Clinton policy.
It seems to be working.
And the Hawks were like, no, and overrode him on that.
And now they've got something like two dozen bombs that they never had.
And that's, you know, all of their, you know, Bolton's fault and Bush's fault.
They just absolutely pushed them into it.
And by the way, I'll say one more thing about Colin Powell since the, you know, I've said this numerous times because I want people to understand, you know, it seems like all this is just history.
It's just what happens.
It's what had to happen or whatever.
But the thing is that that's really not right.
And I've raised this the counterfactual numerous times.
Forget Al Gore, okay?
Screw Al Gore.
I hate Al Gore.
I've always hated Al Gore.
I've never known of a thing to not hate about the guy.
I mean, he's married to Tipper Gore.
How's that for starters?
Screw him.
Never mind him.
But just if it had been W. Bush elected in 2000, but if he had just nominated a couple of generic governors from the Midwest to be his vice president and secretary of defense and not hired the Project for a New American Century and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the American Enterprise Institute to run the Pentagon and the vice president's office, the neocons.
If he'd not done that and he had just stuck with Powell, which is what the people who voted for Bush in 2000 thought they were voting for.
Good old Colin Powell.
We can trust him.
George W. Bush might be kind of a dim wit, but good old Colin Powell will keep track of things and keep everything tied down there.
That's what people said.
Oh, I mean, I heard him say it over and over again.
That was the narrative.
And then, but if that had been the case, there never would have been a record two.
You know, they would have certainly been, it would have been easier for them to have stopped September 11th from even happening if they had had somebody who like him is less ideological and less, you know, determined to look the other way.
And if he had not had all that torturous interference from all the neocons and the in Rumsfeld and all that on that.
But even presuming the September 11th attack, I'm sure they would have gone to Afghanistan and they probably would have stayed, but they would not have done a record two.
It took the neoconservative movement to make that happen.
It took Dick Cheney to make that happen.
And if W. Bush had just had Colin Powell, Powell told him not to do it.
Powell said, look, man, I got to tell you, this could be a hell of a thing taking over this country.
And once we invade it, we're going to be in charge of setting up a new government and, you know, all of this stuff.
It could be really ugly.
And then when Bush said, I'm going to do it, he said, okay, I'll help you do it.
And then he went and testified before the UN and made the case.
And if it hadn't been for him, they wouldn't have been able to launch the war.
He was the key in really moving public sentiment by double digits in favor of the thing.
Because if even Colin Powell swears to God that all this stuff is true, that's how we know it's true.
Yeah, well, that's a so let's let's talk about Colin Powell for a little bit.
So Colin Powell, of course, people know, just died.
Colin Powell's Legacy00:02:40
And he died of COVID, I guess, or with COVID.
So with COVID maybe is more accurate.
It was also vaccinated and make of that what you will.
But anyway, died as an old sick person with COVID, which is.
He's 84, I think.
Yeah, right.
It's quite quite often who dies of COVID.
Old, sick people, very disproportionately.
But so there's been a lot of, you know, kind of talk about Colin Powell on Twitter.
And he's, I've seen a mix of people really roasting him and also people, you know, kind of, you know, more of the blue check marks being like, well, whatever you say about Colin Powell, you have to admit he was a really good dude or something.
And his public enemy put out a tweet praising him.
Rest in power, dude.
Said public enemy.
Can you believe that?
Yeah, it's weird.
It just makes me feel old.
Someone pointed out that Chuck D has his own Twitter account, and that might not have been Chuck D who said that.
You know, I don't know.
I'm going to blame Flavor Flav for that.
I know.
It must have been Flavor, right?
So, but, you know, so, but there's a thing about these guys, like Colin Powell was really the first after when they became anti-Trumpers, they all kind of got rehabilitated in the corporate press's image, all the Bush administration.
And then it became, you know, oh, we long for the days of Bush.
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Let's get back into the show.
The corporate press, and this is something for people who are younger.
Debunking the Presentation00:15:49
I don't know if they even appreciate this, but so the corporate press was after 9-11 completely in the tank for George W. Bush and his administration.
I mean, they marched lockstep with him.
They pushed into the war.
Yes.
It was in the middle of the day.
Until the end of the summer of 05.
When there was no, when they saw what was happening, and this happens quite a bit.
This is kind of the way the system operates in the same sense that, say, Barack Obama could say, oh, absolutely, marriage is between a man and a woman.
What are you talking about?
What are you, some type of weirdo?
Of course, marriage is between a man.
And then as soon as the opinion polls are like 55% favor gay marriage, he goes, you know, I really believe in gay marriage.
And then the entire corporate press is like, yeah, what are you?
Some fucking Nazi.
Of course you have to believe in gay marriage.
And it's like this whole other time is forgotten.
And they switch right around.
So as soon as the public really turned against George W. Bush, which really was after Katrina, or the public turned against George W. Bush, then they threw him all under the bus.
And it was, but, but up until, you know, the first six years of his administration, the corporate press was carrying him.
But then they really buried him for the last two years of his administration.
But Colin Powell was kind of the exception.
He was the guy that they still tried to kind of rehabilitate.
And well, he was always against the war.
He was the voice of reason.
He was the good guy.
And then he was used to come over and he endorsed Barack Obama against John McCain at the time in 2008.
And so this was a big deal to them.
Well, look, you got Bush's Secretary of State, Mr. General, who he's even saying that Obama is the guy, not John McCain.
was a big deal at the time like a big feather in obama's cap to have that that guy on his team and i i gotta say there was always something about it that drove me crazy that they would try to give this guy this image of like well no he was the really good one out of them because he was privately saying oh we shouldn't go fight this war in iraq And it's like,
oh, okay, so you're telling me that you were the wisest out of all of them and you still went and lied through your teeth to sell this war to the world.
And what's the key to getting it?
Yes.
And somehow this is supposed to make me have some elevated opinion of you when you went to the UN with drawings and little like little capsules of salt and were pretending that this was some meaningful presentation.
He went there with drawings of what was that mobile WMD?
Yeah, yeah, mobile germ.
Just completely made up nonsense to sell the war.
And like, yeah, look, I'm sorry.
I mean, I know some people on Twitter are like mean and stuff and a guy died and feel however you feel about that.
But how are you supposed to remember this guy?
Look, he never apologized, Dave.
You know, Walter Jones was famous for renaming French fries Freedom Fries because the damn Frenchman didn't want to get on board for Iraq War II.
And he went along, he was caught up in all that stuff.
And then after, I don't know how long, a year or two years of writing letters home to the parents of dead GIs, he got down on his knees before Jesus and begged for forgiveness.
What the hell was he thinking?
And then for the rest of his life, he was a Ron Paul guy against the wars.
And he was from one of the most heavily militarized districts in America in South Carolina, like three different military bases or something like that, you know, in his district that he represented.
And they loved him for it and kept re-electing him, by the way, even though the bad guys led by Crystal and others tried to stop him and donate and run bad guys against him to get rid of him.
Wish I'd mentioned that in the thing.
Mr. Anti-War, he says now.
But Colin Powell didn't do that.
That's Walter Jones's story.
That's not Colin Powell's story.
Colin Powell, the closest he ever came to saying he was sorry was he said, yes, the UN speech is a blot on my record and I regret that.
A blot, you know, that he one time made a presentation that turns out that it wasn't all the way right.
But never mind the consequences for the people of Iraq, for the people of this country, or for the, for that matter, the people of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and all the aftermath of Iraq War II and the way all of that's played out.
You know, yeah.
You know, W. Bush, too, one time said something very close to, I'm sure he says this all the time, in fact, that, yeah, you know, decisions are things that we make.
And, you know, once you make them, then they're decisions.
And, you know, what are you going to do about that?
So that's, I don't really spend time thinking about the past or, you know, decisions that I might have made because I made them already.
Some, you know, ridiculous kind of tautology like that.
We're just, what are you going to do?
Right?
Too late now.
So why, why worry about it?
And that was apparently Colin Powell's attitude.
Well, he never did the slightest thing to redeem himself here other than, as you're saying, in the eyes of the American media, he did by supporting Obama and opposing Trump.
But in terms of actually making up for what he did in any meaningful way whatsoever, nothing.
And just real quick, and I won't elaborate, but I'll just say this guy helped cover up the Milai massacre and other atrocities against the South Vietnamese.
That's how he made his promotions in the first place.
He was Reagan's national security advisor during the death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador during Iran-Contra.
I don't know exactly all of his role.
He's very involved in the stuff in El Salvador.
I don't know exactly his role in Iran-Contra and all that, but he was the national security advisor at the time.
So, at the very least, he would have, could have, should have known everything about it and advised the president to not do it.
And he sure as hell didn't do that.
And then he's the guy that did the what he was chairman of the joint chiefs under H.W. Bush, did the war in Panama and then went on to launch Iraq War I, which is really what made him into this star, right?
And raised his profile for all the media hype from Iraq War I.
I mean, they talked about running him for president during the 90s, that he would run maybe in 96 or in 2000 before it was clear they were going to go with a Bush son.
And then, of course, Iraq War II.
And by the way, you know, in Iraq War I, as I document in the book, as they all bragged about to the Washington Post, that's how I got it, that they deliberately targeted the water, the electricity, the sewage, the bridges, the trucks, and everything that the oil facilities and everything that there's a civilian population of Iraq needed to survive and to thrive.
And they target all those things in their own words, they said, because the people of Iraq are responsible for Saddam Hussein's actions.
Even though there's no pretension that they live in a democracy, that there's anything that they could possibly do about Saddam's power.
Bush had encouraged them to rise up after the war and then stab them in the back and let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks and kill 100,000 people, crushing their insurrection.
And then they turn around and say, Yeah, well, if you don't overthrow Saddam, then you don't deserve to have electricity or clean drinking water for your babies.
And then they kept it like that for 10 years after something.
Isn't it something to say?
Like the people are responsible for what their governments do.
Iraqis are, but not us, though.
Yeah, let's say, while our government is destroying the drinking water for babies, you're like, man, if the people are responsible for what your government does, man, God have mercy on us.
I know.
That's their excuse.
And listen, you know, I'm being a broken record from Kyle's show earlier, but it's true that Bin Laden talked in this exact same way.
Like, if you look, if you read the Air Force generals talking to the Washington Post, it's almost identical word-for-word statements as Osama bin Laden saying the people of the United States are responsible for their government.
You pay taxes, you vote for these people.
So your blood is open season.
You count as combatants.
And that's exactly what these guys are saying about the Iraqis.
And who's saying it first?
Who's declaring war on who first?
Who's bombing who from bases in Saudi and who's not?
You know what I mean?
Well, look, I'm not saying that justifies anything, but I'm just saying who is echoing who.
The terrorists are echoing their former masters, the Americans.
Yeah, look, if you want to say, and this is the final point I'll make on Colin Powell, and then I want to get back to the debate.
But, you know, if you want to say, because there's this weird, you know, I've seen like people on Twitter who are like, I've seen some people in our camp, and I think you too all kind of like, fuck him, you know, burn in hell, like type attitude.
And then I'll see some people being like, yeah, well, that's, come on, man, like a man just died, have some class or this or that.
And it's like, okay, well, look, if you want to say that, like, I don't know how a mass murderer, how you would feel after that guy dies, it's like, if you want to say fine, just don't say anything nasty about him because, you know, he just died.
Maybe he has a family who's not guilty of that.
I could almost accept that, but you don't praise the guy.
You don't say anything nice about an evil person after they die.
And look, if you go back to what is, you're right that the first Persian Gulf War is what made him a household name.
And of course, at the time, and you document this very well.
You've talked a lot and written a lot about this.
At the time, it was real easy to sell that war, even if, you know, those minor little details, like we're blowing up bridges and stuff like that.
Well, look what an easy, quick, quick war it was.
And we're like, no casualties on our side and all of this, except the problem with that is what?
That decades later, we're still fighting in Iraq.
Two more wars since then and full bloody wars with hundreds of thousands of casualties on their side.
And as you pointed out in the debate, if you count all the soldier suicides, stuff like that, quite a lot of casualties, tens of thousands on our side.
And not to mention just the wounded and stuff like that.
There's a brand new study out, Dave.
I don't know if you saw this.
The Cost of War Project did a new study and I interviewed the guy about it.
It's 30,000.
It's a new and much higher count.
But I think his research holds up.
You can look at it yourself at the Cost of War Project at Brown University.
So 30,000 suicides of Iraq and Afghan war vets.
Look, if you say, let's say, right?
Like, even if you're going to say, because even after all that, the most famous thing Colin Powell will ever, you know, his most famous moment ever will be that UN speech.
There's no way anything will ever be more the Colin Powell moment than that.
And even if you were going to say that he believed every word that he was saying and got that wrong, like let's just say he really believed those drawings were good intelligence, you know, if you could even extend, you know, your suspend your, you know, disbelief that much.
I mean, imagine like if you thought like someone was an intruder coming into your house and it was just a little girl and like you shot and killed her or something like that.
I mean, you'd have to feel horrible about that for the rest of your life.
Every night before you went to sleep, you'd have to feel so terrible.
What could I have done?
What could I have done different?
Why, why didn't I check?
Why didn't I look out the window?
Why did I just assume this was an intruder?
You know, like, even if you just got it wrong, you'd have to just feel like, and come on, that's not what the case was here.
He knew.
You cannot convince me that Colin Powell actually didn't know that he was lying through his teeth when he delivered that speech to the United Nations.
Hold on, hold on.
You just got muted for a sec.
Sorry, I turned it off because I was burping.
Go ahead.
Dango, I can prove it too, man, because he took the first draft of his speech and he threw it in the garbage because it was written by Scooter Libby.
Is that true?
Yeah, it was written by Scooter Libby, the liar from the vice president's office.
And he said, this is such garbage.
Like it included Saddam Hussein's guy meeting with Mohammed Atta in Prague and included, you know, probably did the anthrax attacks and all this stuff.
So that was too far for him.
That was too far.
So he just ripped that up, threw it in the garbage, and then called the CIA and said, George Tennant, I want you and your guys to stand right here and you're going to help me write this speech and you're going to stand behind every word of it.
And then he knew as they were telling him.
And Colonel Larry Wilkerson was his chief of staff at the time.
And I've interviewed him multiple times about this.
And he's written about this at length and been interviewed numerous times by others about this as well.
Lawrence Wilkerson, again, is his name.
And he's talked about how they knew that they were bluffing, man.
They knew the CIA is telling him, yeah, we got this al-Qaeda guy who told us the Saddam told him how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons.
And they, I don't know if he knew exactly, but they were suspicious that this is not true.
And of course, the reality was that was tortured out of this poor guy by the CIA and the Egyptians.
And it wasn't true at all.
And then, of course, as you said, drawings of mobile biological weapons labs that they got from Curveball, who was the cousin of the secretary at the Iraqi National Congress, the neocons friends, the exiles, the Iraqi exiles that made up so much of the fake intelligence.
And they knew a lot of that going in.
The aluminum tube story that, oh, these aluminum tubes must be for Saddam to use to make centrifuges to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
They were for rockets, and the Washington Post had debunked that in September of 2002.
And the UN inspectors had debunked it at the very beginning of December 2002.
They went and they saw where they had aluminum tubes exactly like this at the rocket factories, just for Katusha rockets for the back of your pickup truck, you know?
And they even explained why they were anodized the way that they were was for weatherproofing and this and that and whatever.
They had all the work orders, they had everything.
It was a thousand percent proven fact.
These aluminum tubes were for little old rockets with a range of a few hundred yards or whatever it is, a mile and a half or whatever it is.
And Colin Powell went out there and pretended to believe that these were for centrifuges and that he didn't know that this stuff had already been debunked.
And this was this was the neocon stuff.
Not that Colin Powell was a neocon, but he was certainly became a prop for the neocons or he became what got the neocons over in the war that they desired.
But this was the fucking, this was the team B shit in the CIA, right?
That it was like anything was evidence of their narrative, right?
I mean, you know this stuff.
But let me just say the thing, like, where you go, like, wasn't that the whole Team B thing?
Like, if there were no Soviet ships detected by radar, then that proved that they had ships that could not be detected by radar, right?
Like it was like this crazy thing.
Like there was this mentality of whatever you find is proof of the narrative we're trying to push.
Right.
And then the point we're on here is that Powell and Wilkerson, they knew that they agree with you.
They knew then that that's what's going on here because we're just like with Team B, that we're just doing whatever we can to build a case for war.
And Wilkerson said, when Powell gave the speech, he walked out of the UN building and said to himself, Oh my God, they're going to barbecue us.
Building a Case for War00:02:15
We are cooked.
We are done.
That speech was so terrible.
That presentation was such garbage.
There's no way anyone's going to accept it.
And we're going to, this will be the humiliation of our lives.
Our careers are over.
What are we going to do?
But then he wasn't counting on Fox News and the rest picking up the slack for him and just pretending that, like, man, Dave, those were really compelling drawings of what mobile biological weapons labs might look like if they existed in time and space somewhere, you know.
And they, they all celebrated as a great success.
And Wilkerson said, you know, because he knew that it was such BS strung together, you know, with bubblegum and string to try to look like something impressive.
You know what they were going for?
I'm sure you're familiar with this was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets denied that they had put any nuclear missiles in Cuba.
And so Adelaide Stevenson, the ambassador, brought these gigantic blow-up pictures of the missiles and said, oh, yeah, well, here's a giant blow up pictures of them.
How do you like that?
So now this is kind of known as the Adelaide Stevenson moment.
And that's what they were trying to do for Powell.
This will be his Adelaide Stevenson moment where he gets up in the UN Security Council and proves all this stuff before the world.
And then, like you're saying, no, it was just junk.
They didn't have pictures.
They just had drawings.
They just had drawings.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I was just posting on my Twitter this clip of Dave Chappelle on David Letterman.
And he's saying, you know, then Colin Powell, he gives this speech.
This is right before the war.
He says, Colin Powell, he gives this speech.
And I don't know if it was good or bad.
You know, he placed some guy speaking in Arabic, Durka Durka.
And then he goes, See, you can't get any more clear than that.
We've got to go.
And like, yeah, that was right.
Like, we don't speak Arabic.
All we can hear is like some guy mumbling something.
And then Colin Powell's translation, and as I show in the book, he lied.
The translation was this long and he added it and padded a bunch of stuff at the beginning and the end of it and had the guy.
He was actually saying, Hey, double check and make sure there's nothing in there.
And then they added all this stuff to make it sound like he was saying, Oh, no, you know all that stuff that's in there?
You better make sure to remove it all and hide it and this kind of thing, which is not what he was saying.
And they just twisted it all, you know, adding all this stuff to it.
Connecting Ancient History00:02:13
So anyway, you know, and look, they killed a million people and probably working on 2 million, Dave.
You count, I mean, the Pakistani thing is not really a break off of this.
Afghanistan, I mean, look, Afghanistan is partially his responsibility too, of course, in the terror war there.
But especially if you want to count Iraq and Syria and Yemen and Somalia, I mean, we're talking somewhere on, and really the aftermath of the war in Libya too, spreading down to Mali and all of this.
I think we're looking at, you know, certainly more than a million dead.
You know, probably closer to 2 million.
I think the most conservative estimate would be over a million.
And if you're talking about in terms of lives ruined, people displaced, you're in the tens, tens of millions for sure.
And it's, yeah.
Oh, and the greatest refugee crisis.
Wait, I got a number for you here.
37 million refugees, which is the greatest refugee crisis since World War II.
And, you know, I think that one of the things I would try to stress, and I try to make this connection a lot on the show.
And I just, I don't think there's enough people out there who make this connection, but this might seem to, you know, again, like I kind of go back to some of our younger listeners because I know, you know, look, we have a lot of young listeners.
And what I really care about is, you know, reaching younger people because that's kind of what we want to do is get like the younger people to understand that there's a whole different way to see this shit than what you're given, not only by the corporate press, but really by most of the alternative like internet people as well.
You don't have to fall into any of these boxes that are presented for you.
But this might seem kind of like it's like, oh, this is kind of ancient history, you know, and like, yeah, yeah, we got everything wrong back then, but whatever.
And I get that because we are going back, you know, from 20 years ago to 15 years ago or whatever.
And I remember being young and I remember being 20 and 20 years ago is the whole world, you know, and, you know, 15 years ago is forever.
And, you know, the older you get, that doesn't seem like quite as long ago.
But let me just make this clear.
Spiraling Political Reactions00:08:14
This is the reason why everything is wrong right now.
Like it really is all connected.
This is the whole reason.
It's everything from the COVID regime to the culture wars to the domestic war on terrorism, the war on terrorism being turned inward and every problem that we're facing in the country right now, from the debt to the inflation, all of it.
It's all because of this.
And that's not to say there wasn't anything that came before it that affected it as well.
But this is really where the country lost its way.
Like this was it, that after our biggest moment of weakness, you know, when we got hit and our towers were decimated and thousands of Americans died and Americans, myself included, as an 18-year-old kid at the time, looked to the government and were like, hey, what's going on here?
And they went to the UN with drawings and lies to get the war that they wanted.
And this is where America lost its soul.
And this was all the right wing.
You know, this was all the right, the Republican politicians and Fox News.
And don't get me wrong, they had help from all the corporate press.
They had help from the New York Times and from the Washington Post and CNN and all of this shit.
They sold us all on the worst thing ever that was all built off lies that was nothing but death and destruction.
And this is what destroyed the right, the right wing of America, which has never recovered, has never rose to prominence again since then.
They've never had a seat at the political table or the cultural table in the way that they did after 9-11.
And so then you had what?
Just the left, unhinged.
unencumbered and free to continue.
And when I say right and left, I mean broadly speaking, the right half of America and the left half of America.
And of course, what happened on the left was the powerful amongst the left rose up and the neoliberals kind of took control in the Obama administration and continued all the worst of the policies because they're making all the special interests filthy rich off of this.
And there was no cultural counterpunch to it.
And this is when Trump got elected.
This all leaves the left stay dominant.
Yeah.
But this all leads to Trump.
It's like it all spiraled from there.
Bush was such a disaster that then the populace was like, well, we're going to vote for whoever the most anti-Bush guy is, which couldn't be Clinton because Hillary Clinton supported Bush's wars.
So instead, we'll go with Obama.
So they voted for Obama.
Now, Obama just continues the Bush policies.
Now, to distract from that, Obama had to really go woke.
This is why in Obama's first election campaign in 2008, he's running on end Guantanamo Bay, end the war in Iraq, reinstate habeas corpus, all of this like real shit.
And by 2012, he's like, you know, gay marriage.
And then before you go after that, it's like, you know, has to throw all these social issues into it.
Not saying you can't care about gay marriage.
I'm just saying it's not as important as the other shit that he was talking about.
And then it like kind of spiraled into this thing where all the jig was up.
All the powerful corporations, all the powerful politicians had sold out the country.
So now they had to distract everyone with nonsense.
This is where everything starts splitting off into.
The economic crash, you know, the Great Recession.
Well, that's right.
The Great Recession, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street.
All of the cultural distractions come in.
This all leads to Donald Trump.
This leads to a huge reaction from the establishment back, which puts us to where we are today.
But really, like these neocons are so responsible for all of this.
They're really the ones who set us on this path.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that was what I was trying to say in my statement with Crystal was that, look, man, you promised us national greatness.
You said this was this great noble experiment that we're going to use our power to go do good in the world.
And look what you did.
You killed all these people.
And at the end of the day, you discredited the very idea of democracy in the planet.
You know, Bill Crystal is now at the forefront of complaining that he's afraid of the death of democracy all around the world.
And there are fewer democracies in the world now than in the last, you know, if you go back 20 years, they're declining and countries are moving to the right.
You heard him mention in there about how worried he is about the rise of the right wing in Poland and in Hungary and, you know, comparing those guys to national socialists and stuff, which I guess they are to some degree.
But, you know, and I don't mean that like, oh, yeah, no, they are all just Nazis, but they are, you know, pretty far populist, right?
Not conservatives, you know, and not, you know, a happy part of all of the European community and the American alliance system and whatever Angela Merkel wants and that kind of thing.
They have their own interests.
So, and especially like on the immigration crisis.
So Bill Crystal's panicking about this and saying you have the rise of the right in the European parliament and the rise of the right in Eastern Europe and all of this.
But what are they reacting against?
They're reacting against the total loss of the credibility of the American-led global system because the Americans are the, at best, doofuses who ruined everything.
You know, in the Middle East, who've caused nothing but chaos, for example, and again, are responsible for North Korea being armed with nukes because of their horrible diplomacy and on down the line.
So you have people in America moving further to the left and further to the right away from neoliberalism and which is sort of a compromise between the New Dealers and the libertarian, more free market types.
The neoliberals, right-wingers call them socialists.
That's what's good about them is that they're not.
What's bad about them is they're not libertarians.
They're liberals.
So that just means they're pro-business, which means they're pro-empire because they're willing to be bribed by business.
So they're pro-capitalism in the worst way rather than in any kind of real free market sense.
But so they're completely discredited because of all of this.
Like Bill Crystal himself stands right in the center, right?
That's what the neocons are.
They're former Democrats, some of them communists, but all of them liberals and leftists who moved to the Republican Party for pro-war purposes.
But they never move more than a click to the right of center on all domestic issues.
You know, they're essentially, you know, if you ask a neocon, they'll tell you, no, we're against affirmative action.
We're for rolling back the welfare state to a degree.
And we're for rolling back, you know, government regulation to a degree.
But essentially, they're very moderate on all of that stuff.
They're just really, you know, bad hawks on foreign policy.
So these are exactly the people who have taken, you know, the things that are the best slogans because they are good things.
Free market capitalism, property rights, individual liberty, natural rights theory, and self-government, regular elections, and a rule of law and all of these things.
And they've discredited all of those things by dressing up their foreign policy in it and saying that's why we're invading Iraq is just to give these people all the blessings of the kind of system that we have.
And that's what Bill Crystal did in the debate.
He's discrediting the idea.
Well, and Bill Crystal did it in the debate with you.
There were several different times where he said for people who care about liberty, they care about, you know, the military presence over here or over there.
He said, he said at least four or five times.
Well, for those of us who care about liberty, we do care about going to Afghanistan and making sure women can vote or whatever this is.
And then, and of course, he even said he's anti-war at one point.
Like they still do try to take our language.
And that's why it was so great at the end when you said you guys never understood what liberty is.
And defense fund defense weapons companies who fund think tanks aren't liberty.
It's the worst form of corrupt cronyism.
And so I thought that was a really powerful point in the debate.
Funding Corrupt Cronyism00:13:37
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It certainly is true, I think.
I think it's undeniably true that there is a real crisis of democracy in America in 2021.
And the truth is that many people on the right, again, I'm just speaking in terms of like if you had to split the country in half, like the right half and the left half, broadly speaking.
But many people on the right don't believe that the last election was legitimate.
Many people on the left don't believe that the one before that was legitimate.
And certainly, I think many of them would support their will being imposed on the other side, even without a democratic majority.
Like, I don't think people really believe in democracy anymore.
You know, the left, the left half of America wants what they want, and the right half wants what they want.
But if you were going to look at that, you know, the reason to me why there's such a crisis in democracy is forget like my own, you know, libertarian views about how democracy is just mob rule or something like that.
But the truth is that we haven't had democracy in a very long time.
There's nothing even resembling democracy in this country.
I mean, yeah, people vote.
And yeah, no, I don't even, I'm not saying the elections are stolen.
Let's say every single vote was exactly accurate, you know, over the last 20 years.
Not one has been miscounted.
Everyone exactly who should have won one.
It's like, okay, well, George W. Bush ran in the year 2000 on limited government and a humble foreign policy and no nation building.
That's what America voted for.
And then the president after him, Barack Obama, won on ending Gitmo and ending the war in Iraq and all of this.
And Donald Trump ran on like a wall and controlling immigration and ending the wars and all of this.
And Americans have gotten none of that.
So the idea, like at this point, why would any average American believe in democracy when they know that this is all a joke?
And even with Biden, you could say, oh, we're going to get serious about COVID and he's going to be a uniter and all of this stuff.
And he's been the most divisive president.
He's been more divisive than Trump in just the first year already with the vaccine mandate stuff.
I mean, he's so, yeah, it's how, how can you sell democracy if you if the ruling elite doesn't even feel that they need to pretend that the American people get a say in their own government?
You would think just in the interest of stability and them continuing to milk this cow, they would say, all right, we better at least make them think they get a say in this.
Right.
You know, like if Trump won on the wall, just build them a stupid wall, just so they at least feel like they got what they wanted or, you know, whatever.
It's something, but they don't.
I know.
And, you know, it's slightly worrisome how it's going to shake out.
Guess I don't predict total instability because you see what happens every time there's a crash, they just fill the hole with more paper money and move on to the next bubble.
And it's as destabilizing as it is.
You know, I can't say I'm seeing the 50 states breaking up anytime soon.
I mean, if people just completely lose faith in the dollar altogether, but I don't think that's going to happen.
But don't you talk more and more about it?
Something over the last 19 months have been something else, Scott.
I mean, you got to see that.
Look, yeah, no, and look, I mean, people talk about national divorce and all this.
And I've been saying for a long time that the most obvious solution that people ought to be able to agree on, not that they will or could, would be to simply abide by the Constitution of 1787, the one that we have now.
But just, and a guy, you know, put this absolutely correctly on Twitter to me, I think yesterday, that look, what we have to do is we have to fix the abuse of the necessary and proper clause and the interstate commerce clause and these things that the Supreme Court since the 30s has pretended give the national government power to create a unified state in this country,
where the 50 states are really just big provinces or counties under the United federal government and national government in a way that just overthrows the whole idea of having really a federation of states.
And so I think you need massive devolution of power there.
But and look, like I love Sheldon Richmond's book about like, hey, the Articles of Confederation would be a hell of a lot better than this.
Like, that's fine.
I'm not opposed to that.
And I'm not, you know, I'm all for pure anarchy.
But I'm just saying, honestly, if you read the Constitution of 1787, you apply that to what we have now, and you somehow force all these people to stay within its limits.
Or, you know, the American people would just enforce it to such a degree.
You'd be about 90% of the way to anarcho-capitalism from where we are right now.
No, that's true.
Yeah.
I mean, because it's a what, four or five trillion dollar a year government now, this massive world empire and this insane federal police state.
And I mean, it's funny because, you know, I guess I'm a libertarian, so I got my confirmation biases and all of that.
But there's a lot of the time I just think that we just don't need them at all.
And it seems like everything that's wrong is something that government caused in the first place.
And that we could just, if we got rid of them altogether, we'd be so much better off.
As Alan Bach said, man, who do you think really is the greatest cause of violence and instability in our society, man?
Is it really the mob?
You know, the really poor black gangsters in Chicago.
Nah, man.
You know, and look, and this is why the government is, you know, has this crisis of confidence.
Another one of the major reasons because there's just no accountability.
And, you know, the Free Thought Project every single day covers cops killing people.
It's extremely rare that they don't have a cop kill somebody story to run at the Free Thought Project on an absolute every single day basis.
And then they all come also with the judge and the DA and everybody in charge and the police chief and internal affairs and everybody, they're all in on it.
They're all co-conspirators against you.
And, you know, in this one, rarely, but it does happen.
A prosecutor will try to prosecute a cop and then they get off anyway.
And there was one, the one that I saw yesterday.
The cop was going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit on a surface street, not on the freeway, on a surface street.
He's going 30 miles an hour over the limit with no lights or siren on.
He runs over and kills a 12-year-old girl.
And the prosecutor says, well, I'm putting you in jail for that, dude.
You can't do that.
And the cop says to the judge, well, I was just going by my training.
And the judge says, not guilty, free to go.
Yeah.
And then, so I think about how much that makes me hate that judge and want to see that judge suffer.
And then I think, wow, I wonder how that little girl's father feels.
And then I think, wow, you know, I wonder if a revolution's going to break out.
I wonder if people wonder why cities burn.
You know, everybody complains.
And I was complaining today, I interviewed a criminal justice guy on the show today.
And I was complaining about the riots too.
But I had to concede to him that the cops start every one of these riots.
They all start because the cop kills somebody and everybody knows he's going to get away with it.
And that's what starts the riot.
And then really, that's what starts the protest.
And then the cops attack the protesters and the cops riot against the protesters.
And that's what turns the riot into a riot.
And then they go, see, what would you do if it wasn't for us?
You know, just like creating Osama bin Laden and then slapping him in the face 10 times and then saying, what would you do, Dave, if we weren't here to protect you from this terrorist menace that we created?
It's the same thing.
You know, every one of those riots last summer was caused by a cop getting away with murder.
Or at least on the George Floyd thing, they had good reason to believe he was going to anyway.
Yeah, look, but I, well, right.
Well, he didn't get away with it.
But even that, look, I think there are a lot of opportunities.
And you could argue because of the riots, because people burned half the city down and they said, well, burn the other half of the city down if you don't convict this son of a bitch.
Well, there's that's that's for sure that it is possible that that had a huge impact on it.
And I think that is very likely, in fact, because it is very rare that I've ever seen actually the police department throw one of their own under the bus.
Like they really, they knew what was coming if they didn't convict this guy and it would have.
And they were going to, I mean, I think the whole country would have been lit up if they had let that guy off.
So, but I do think there's a lot of opportunists who come in, you know, people like looting the Nike store and tearing down mom and stuff.
No, I'm not starting.
I agree with you.
I agree with you, but I think that as unacceptable as all of that shit is, and it's not okay to victimize other people who have nothing to do with this.
And I'm not making excuses.
Me, believe me, I think my track record's pretty good on this.
I'm not making excuses for any of that behavior.
But there also is something where it's like, this is what happens.
And it's the greater picture in America when the system has lost all credibility and is just nakedly corrupt.
It loses the ability to pull in the excesses, to rein them in, because you can't anymore look around at people and be like, hey, you know, look, if we had a really healthy country where people were, we were, you know, had prosperity and peace and relative stability, you know, relative, not that any of this is going to be perfect.
I'm not saying we live in perfect anarcho-capitalism or whatever, but we live in a, in a healthy society.
And someone comes along and they go, I have this radical plan to overthrow everything and have a revolution.
Most people are going to be like, yeah, okay.
Like, no, we're not doing that.
In the same way that like, if I have, you know, I have a healthy marriage and a good family and all of this.
And someone goes, hey, do you want to radically change everything about your life?
Like, no, you know, we might change some things around the edges, but like, no, we're not going to do that because everything's going very good right now.
So, however, if you're, you know, married to some drunk and you're abusive and your kids are like on drugs and all that.
And someone goes, hey, you want some radical change?
You want to like have a divorce and a this and that?
Yeah, you might be open to it because things are falling apart.
And so that's more or less what's happening right now.
And I think that, you know, and I've said this for years on the show, if people go, if we're talking about kind of like, you know, like, you know, when people say in like in the hood, where they're like, well, why do these black kids like identify with the gangsters over the over the cops or over law and order?
Or why do they identify?
Why are they sagging their pants to be like the ones in jail?
And why are they doing all this?
And it's like, well, because fuck you.
Because you're the gangsters too.
And they see that on some level, they get that.
And this so this is why the radical left and the radical right, the the socialist left or the woke left or the nationalist right or the alt right or the whatever all of these different groups, the reasons why they've been able to gain traction is because, well, what the fuck is a neoliberal or a neoconservative going to tell them about them being too extremist?
Measuring Intervention Success00:14:58
I mean, here you have to bring it back to the topic of the show, Bill Crystal, Bill fucking Crystal was asked, and this to me was one of the biggest moments of the debate, where he was asked by one of the people in the audience there said, hey, Bill Crystal, what war can you look at?
What intervention can you look at and say, hey, that was a really good success?
That was worth the money.
And that was not that bloody.
And that worked out really good.
And he said the Balkans.
Now, you went on to tear him up about why that's actually not right, but leave all that aside.
Forget it.
Let's say he was right about the Balkans.
We've had the longest wars in American history for the last 20 years.
And Bill Crystal, this motherfucker, neocon number one, can't point to a single one of them that he could even pretend was a success.
And that's right there.
You go, when that's the establishment, why should anyone listen to you?
And why should some left wing or not go, well, the problem is the banks or some, you know, the most, the problem is property or some right-wing or the problem is the Jews or the problem is that why should any of them not be allowed to say that if Bill Crystal can't even point to one success in all the wars he advocated for?
Like you were the chief guy who led us into 20 years of nonstop war and you still don't apologize for it and you can't point to one success.
I should have said that, Dave.
Yeah, well, you know, I've had time.
I've had time to think about it.
You know what a good one?
They're like, yeah, really, that's the best you can say.
But yeah, and that was true that he really couldn't say he didn't.
And he's wrong about the Balkans.
By the way, he's wrong about the Balkans, too.
That's not even that wasn't right at all.
It was, that was the Americans' fault.
They had a peace deal and the Americans ruined the peace deal.
And so, you know, got the war going.
So, yeah, I'll tell you what, I think that really is the story of our era.
So then that raises all the right questions of like, what's going to happen now?
I mean, Biden is there, not as like the triumphant return of the establishment, but as the just barely were able to pull it off to, you know, kick Trump out of there and like the last gasp of the establishment, of the old establishment.
But, you know, I don't know what the hell they think they're going to do now.
They're going to run Kamala Harris.
And who do the Republicans have other than DeSantis and Trump?
Do they have anyone?
And, you know, DeSantis, I guess, is populist on some things, but seems like pretty much an establishment guy to me, you know, on the most important stuff.
But do the Republicans have any other talent at all?
Well, he doesn't sell us at all.
Well, what DeSantis can sell you on is that he really was heroic on the COVID stuff.
And so he's got that going for him.
And there's nothing there to downplay, but it just doesn't seem like much of an argument for why that should be president.
You know what I mean?
It's like that seems like a really good argument for why he should stay governor of Florida.
But what is what does really the president have?
Oh, okay.
I mean, it's better.
Look, I guess DeSantis at this point.
What does the establishment have, though?
Who do the centrists have?
They have who do the, who does Bill Crystal have to champion?
Who's his mechanic?
Kamala Harris.
I mean, that's it.
That's who they've got.
I mean, they're screwed.
I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be stupid.
You know, but no, listen, I think, remember on the Joe Rogan thing, the way you explained that, like, if you took the craziest stuff that the wocist left says now and the craziest stuff that the right-wing nationalist populist people, what they want now, it's not obviously worse and crazier than the centrist moderate establishment.
And in fact, led by these neocons, the centrists, the Bush, Biden, you know, Clinton, McCain consensus here in the center is absolutely the craziest.
And can you really say that Bernie Sanders' domestic spending on ridiculous welfare projects and infrastructure projects and whatever would have been worse for the last 20 years than the terror wars?
Yeah.
You know, it's just possibly, you know, you could absolutely say, and I've made the arguments many times on this show, right?
Like you could make arguments against universal health care.
You can make arguments against, you know, abolishing student debt.
You can make arguments against whatever policy of Bernie Sanders you want.
And you can make arguments against Donald Trump, you know, building a wall or, you know, banning Muslim immigration to the country or, you know, certainly his like protectionist stuff against China and all this.
I've made arguments against all of this stuff on the show.
I think they're all bad ideas.
Every last one of those is a bad idea.
But are you really going to tell me that any of them are anywhere near on the level of crazy as we should invade seven, you know, we should invade two countries and then have air campaigns and supply weapons and support for armies in seven other countries, spend ourselves $30 trillion into debt, have the world's largest prison population.
I mean, like militarize the entire police and then turn the war on terrorism inward.
Do any of them even compete?
Like, does Ilhan Omar have one idea that's as crazy as just Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton and George Bush and Bill Clinton?
I don't think so.
And look, I mean, back to, you know, the very basic idea of self-government and all of that, where just we don't have that, right?
What we've had for the last 30 years since the end.
Well, look, for at least since World War II or World War I, whatever you want to go back, but let's just take the post-Cold War era.
I mean, the Soviet Union just ceased to exist.
And Nixon had befriended China 15 years before that.
And then the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
We could have just completely disarmed.
There's no power on earth that threatens us.
There's no order we need to keep.
Spin the globe.
There's no power in Latin America whatsoever.
The most powerful state in Latin America is Brazil.
They don't have a Navy or an Air Force or ambitions at all.
None, right?
Look at Africa.
The greatest power in Africa is Egypt.
And they're not a power at all.
They're completely under our thumb.
We pay them $2 billion a year to pretend to not hate Israel and to keep their own people, you know, oppressed.
Even if we've pulled back, and even if we pulled back the money on Egypt and didn't intervene there after the last time we pulled back, I mean, the worst case scenario is it's the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's not like they're coming over here to take anything over.
And it's not like they're going to close the Suez Canal either.
They don't want to get blasted off the face of the earth.
And we wouldn't even have to do it.
They would have a problem with every other power on earth if they tried to close the Suez Canal.
That ain't going to happen.
India.
It's a large state, a billion people, absolutely impoverished, completely beset by internal problems and religious schisms and sectarianism and all kinds of crazy problems.
China itself is a vastly overextended empire already.
And I keep paraphrasing this because I like it so much.
Grover Norquist pointed out when I did this panel discussion at the Reason magazine thing at Freedom Fest that Norquist pointed out how China is absolutely surrounded by powers.
And how America's got Canada, Mexico, and two oceans.
And on the other side of the ocean is Europe that we're friends with every single state in Europe.
And on the other side is Japan and South Korea and Australia and all of this and all of our friends in the Pacific.
We have no threats whatsoever facing us.
And meanwhile, China's got, I have it here, they got Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal, Obutan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, more Russia, and the Koreas and Japan, that they have to have a foreign policy for every single one of those on their frontiers and are completely beset by internal domestic problems in the Xinjiang province, in Hong Kong, and all of these things.
They've got an extremely politicized economy.
They're building a defensive naval force, not an offensive global power.
They're not trying to be a sea power to challenge America and Britain on the seven seas.
Give me a break.
Never happen.
They're not even thinking that.
The Russians, despite how big they look on your map, have a GDP the size of Italy or Massachusetts.
They are a nuclear weapons power, but they are not really a global power at all.
And, you know, John McCain was being a jerk about it, but he said they're a gas station with big borders or something like that.
It's essentially right.
There's a very small economy.
It's a regional power.
Obama mocked them.
Russia's a regional power.
Well, that's right.
They're a regional power and they're not a threat to any of their neighbors.
They're not invading Eastern Europe.
They're not going to the Baltic states or any of this stuff.
Eastern Ukraine, the Donbass region, voted during the war in 2015 to join the Russian Federation.
And Putin told them, yet, I don't want you.
You're not welcome in.
He took the Crimean Peninsula, but he did not take Eastern Ukraine, which is all Russian speakers who wanted to join.
And then that's it, Dave.
Spin the globe.
We're out of powers.
Who's going to rise up?
Australia?
Japan again?
And Japan's going to declare an empire and conquer Asia again?
Come on.
I think this might be why, in some ways, that if you listen to the kind of neoliberals today, that what they'll tell you the enemy is, is domestic terrorism now.
It's Trump supporters.
It's whatever they want to call it, white nationalists or racists or something like that, because it is true that they're almost out of enemies.
And now I guess the real enemies is like angry moms at school board meetings who don't want their kids, you know, wearing masks and taught.
Yeah, that's, I guess, who we really got to deal with because we're out of enemies to attack.
And really, the central message of this whole libertarian business for a long time has been that, hey, Mr. American citizen, your real enemy is your own government, much more so than any of these other forces.
And those are the ones.
And that's right.
And, you know, I'm not saying you got to like the people in China or Russia or Iran or any of this other thing.
And you certainly don't have to like their governments.
None of us like their governments, but they're not putting your child in a mask.
They're not kicking you out of work and deeming you non-essential.
They're not throwing you in jail for having a plant.
They're not sending the cops down to bust down your door on some, you know, SWAT raid.
Oops, we got the wrong address.
They're not doing any of that to you, but your own government is.
And so that's kind of, that's the heart of our message, I guess.
Hey, look, we got to go.
We got to wrap up.
So last your last comment.
Sorry, just real quick.
Yeah, Jacob Hornberger.
I should say something nice about him.
You really should.
You owe him one.
Yeah.
He would always say, oh, no, the terrorists are going to take over our country and create an FBI and an IRS and a Social Security Administration and all these things to rip us off, you know, and oppress us.
And like, oh, wait a minute.
We already did that to ourselves anyway.
Like, what could a foreign power do to us that we haven't already let our government do to us?
Well, that's what I was saying.
I was saying a thing.
I had some tweet earlier today about how we need libertarian populism.
And someone at Reason Magazine got pissed off at me.
A bunch of them always get pissed off me for that.
But it's funny how the term populism has almost come to like, I guess maybe it's my fault for not being clear, but they're like, oh, so you just mean that you're a Trump supporting right winger or something like that.
And I'm just saying, it's like, well, no, just the idea that like the regular person is screwed over by the elite.
And it is the target audience.
Yeah.
I totally agree with that.
Look, I mean, my books are written for you and your friends and family.
It's not written for wonks in Washington, D.C.
Yeah, persuade my overlords or whatever.
It's written for the people of the country to understand the truth, you know?
Yeah, in the same way that like if you were like, if you were like an abolitionist who was against slavery, you wouldn't be like, well, I can only talk to people with a degree in economics who understand that a more efficient way to pick cotton would be to not have forced labor.
It's like, no, any regular person could understand.
This is fucking wrong.
And we're against this because it's wrong.
Right.
So I think you're right, though, that they probably just misunderstood what you meant by that.
But I think, you know, by libertarian populism, if you mean by that, the same thing that Rothbard meant by it and the same thing I mean by that.
Ron Paul saying by it.
Yeah.
It's just saying, yeah, let's not put our think tanks in DC and try to persuade congressmen and these kinds of people.
Let's move to Alabama or wherever it is.
In the case of the Independent Institute, you know, David Thoreau was one of the founders of Cato as well, and he was exiled to the Bay Area, you know, when Cato went through all their schisms back when and whatever.
And they said, you know, of course, we're trying to educate the populace of this country and move the needle, get, you know, enough people to at least stop believing in it and enough people who will refuse to line up in favor of these policies as they're introduced and try to limit this stuff and roll it back as much as possible.
And at the end of the day, and this is something that's very Ron Paulian too, that, you know, the goal is education of regular people.
And that's what it's all about.
And the first time I ever interviewed Ron Paul Dave was in, I'm going to say June or July.
I guess it was in June of 2004 at the Libertarian National State Convention or National Convention.
And I, you know, he came out to my hotel room with Jeff Deist and sat down and did a face-to-face interview for about 20 minutes or something like that.
And I had asked Karen Katowski, geez, what should I ask him?
What would you ask him?
And she said, Well, ask, well, geez, if there's only one Ron Paul in the house, what are we ever going to do?
Like, how screwed are we?
And what can we ever do to change things?
You know, so I asked him then.
And he said, Well, look, you just keep teaching people about liberty.
Withstanding Government Propaganda00:08:26
It's not your job to predict the future and to predict the worst.
And just a few years ago, we'd have never believed the Soviet Union could just vanish, just cease to exist.
And it did.
And the reason why is because at the end of the day, even in a totalitarian state, the people get the government that they want, that they demand that, you know, comes down to it, not in every circumstance.
Sometimes, Donald, I'll just round you up and kill you all.
But at a certain point, if the people just won't go along with propping up the thing, sort of like I was saying about the judge who let the cop go who ran over the little girl.
If that judge was a good person in the first place, if that judge was the kind of person who would never do something like that, then he would never do something like that.
You know, you get that your country is run by the people of your country.
As George Carlin said, this is the best we can do, folks, you know, but maybe we could do better.
Like that's, that's the whole point of it is if you have a population who believes in what we believe, then the government won't be able to behave as it operates.
As we've been talking about in this show, George Bush and his neocons were able to whip the American right into this war, into this frenzy.
And absolute Guinness world record level of sanctimony beyond belief in pushing all of this stuff.
Well, if they had known better, if they had been intellectually tougher, if they had had more morality to consider the lives of the innocent people that would be caught up in all of this fun and all of that, then they wouldn't have been able to do it.
And let's get real: 150 million Americans knew better and opposed it.
Well, listen.
So the other 150 million could have too.
But also, let's say this, right?
Like, and here's the flip side of it: is like, what if they, like, I'm trying to think of wording this the perfect way, but like, what if either they hadn't propagandized people or someone had blown up their propaganda?
You know, like, what if someone had proven, no, they don't have weapons of mass destruction and they're not involved with Osama bin Laden.
They have no connections.
They hate Al-Qaeda.
They're bitter enemies.
Okay.
And also, I can expose to you that all these neocons are lying to you about that.
Like, what if all of that was exposed to the American people?
Then they never could have sold that war.
And that's kind of the important point to me.
Like, if you look, look, they wanted the war in the year 2000.
And even after the planes hit the towers in September of 2001, we didn't go into Iraq until 2003 because they spent that whole year plus with a massive propaganda campaign.
I remember I was there for every day on the news.
Every Sunday, the New York Times had some new piece about what Saddam Hussein was doing now and this and that.
And they had to go.
And look, you see, even after, like, even with the COVID thing, right?
Like, it's not just like, oh, COVID came and so there were lockdowns.
You had to have this completely concerted effort where all the news was saying all day long, all the entire thing was COVID, COVID, COVID scared the bejesus out of people.
This is why we see these like opinion polls.
I don't know if you've seen this, but I've talked about it quite a bit on the show.
There was this New York Times opinion poll where they asked people what they think the odds are that you'll be hospitalized if you get COVID.
And for Democrats, they put it like, I think over 40% of them put it 50% or higher.
Like they just think it's like, hey, you get COVID, you go to the hospital.
You know, it's like 1% is like really the answer.
But even Republicans put it at like 30%.
Like because everyone's just been so propagandized about COVID, COVID, COVID that like there's no people are terrified that their eight-year-old is going to get COVID.
Like it makes no sense.
But if they rely so heavily on the propaganda, then of course there's value in undermining the propaganda.
And that's kind of what we're in the business of doing.
So that's the last thing I'll say.
And we got to wrap up on this, but for anybody, and maybe I got to have Pete on sometime soon and me and him could argue about this because I know I think he's he's drifting in that direction to some degree, but not him so much, but other people, anyone who's just like predicting the future or what the worst is going to be or why this is hopeless, never for a second think that standing up and telling the truth is pointless.
It's not.
This is why they lie because they don't want people to hear the truth.
Telling the truth is a valuable thing that you can do.
Live the best life you can live and tell the truth as much as you can tell it, especially when it's a difficult, unpopular truth to tell it.
If more people did that, we'd live in a much better world.
Totally agree with that, man.
I mean, that's my thinking when I was 16, 17, 18 years old.
They're like, look, they do nothing but lie.
So if people are looking for the truth and they'll believe lies, then it ought to be easy to get them to believe the truth.
And the truth doesn't favor all this horrible stuff that they're doing.
And so it should be able, we should be able to stop it by telling the truth about what they're doing and inoculating people from feeling like they have to believe.
You know, that's the other half of it, right?
And the way I change people's impression is by delusion them with facts.
But what really matters is that people's impression is changed for whatever reason, whether it's because their uncle Bob says so and influences them or their favorite band says so and influences them or their favorite comedian or whatever it is.
And I mean that not just flattering you, but like George Carlin and Bill Hicks were huge influences on me when I was a kid and still to this day.
You know, and in fact, there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on Raw Time where he explains, and this is before the age of the internet and everything, but he explains how he felt so isolated and alone and how he feels like he's going crazy because he sees the world so different than the way it's portrayed on TV and in all the popular media and everything.
And then occasionally he finds someone to get up there who would get up there and tell the truth and say, you're not crazy.
You're right.
It's crazy.
The situation is crazy.
The propaganda is crazy and you're the sane one.
And how he thought that that was really important for him to do, that he could get up on a stage and say to his crowd that it's okay for you to think differently than what you're being told and the common narrative that you're, you know, you feel this social pressure to go along with.
Well, here's your permission slip.
You don't have to believe in that because I'm telling you, it's bullshit, man.
It's bad for you.
That's Carlin, but still.
And so I really took that to heart too, that that really is important, not just to tell the truth, but to show other people that you too can tell the truth, you know, and that truth.
Look, we just saw in that debate.
The lies can't withstand it.
The lies can't withstand it if you get a fair hearing.
If you get a fair hearing and you have the right person who's confident enough and knows his stuff enough and has like done his homework and prepared the right way, and for it won't be true for everyone, but for the people who are interested in it, the truth hits different.
And the reality of the situation is that probably something like at least 80 to 90% of people, they're just kind of followers anyway.
They're not really interested in all this shit.
And that's, that's fine.
I don't say that like as a knock on them.
Like they fucking, most of them go to work and serve some function in society.
You know what I mean?
Like I, I don't be.
Hey, that's what we're fighting for so that people can just be free and mind their own damn business.
They're supposed to anyway.
But all it fucking takes, you know what I mean? Is like Ron Paul always said, it was like that important 10% of the population who really believes in this shit and really cares about the truth and is going to make themselves the leaders.
Again, for people out there who say, oh, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what the people think because the ruling leader are just going to do what they want to do anyway.
Then why do they spend so much time and effort propagandizing us?
If they didn't care what we think, if they could just do it anyway, then they wouldn't have to tell you Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
They would just say, yeah, he doesn't, and we're still going to go to war with him.
How come they don't just do that?
How come they have to lie?
Because if the truth was out there, they know they wouldn't be able to get away with it.
And so that's anyway, that's what we're in the business of.
The Power of Truth00:01:21
Hey, look, dude, this ended up like I thought it might be, not really being a recap of the crystal debate, but we touched on some of it and then talked about a lot of stuff.
But I really enjoyed it.
I'm going to put the video link to the Bill of Crystal debate in the comments or in the show description.
So people make sure to go check that out.
Please go check that out.
Get the numbers up because it really was.
It was so cool.
It felt to me in many ways like the culmination of so much of your work.
And that it was cool that you just got to do that.
Like you got to have that moment up there with that guy.
There's something about like it reminded me of the Ron Paul days where there was something so powerful about him being able to say it to those guys' faces.
Not just like, man, this sounds really good in our little corner, but they have their little corner and maybe they'd have something really good to say to this that we just don't know.
But then seeing them meet and realize, they really don't have anything good to say to this at all.
They got nothing.
So that was really cool.
And I was really proud.
You made us all proud.
So congrats on that.
And yeah, we'll talk again sometime real soon.
And yeah, anything else you want to like plug or promote before we get out of here?
Everybody, sign up for my podcast.
I got 5,616 interviews for you at scotthorton.org.