Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Scott Horton Explains Everything
Aired: 2022-05-05
Duration: 01:35:15


=== Leaks That Swayed Public Opinion (14:43) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, Dave Smith.
[00:00:33]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I am Dave Smith, your host of this program, and I am joined by one of my favorite people in the world to talk to, the great Scott Horton.
[00:00:45]  You know him from the Libertarian Institute from antiwar.com.
[00:00:48]  He's the author of Fool's Errand and more recently, Enough Already, two phenomenal books.
[00:00:54]  First one about Afghanistan, the latter about the terror wars in general.
[00:00:58]  And it's been too long.
[00:01:00]  So we got him back on the show.
[00:01:01]  How are you doing, Scott?
[00:01:02]  I'm good, man.
[00:01:03]  How are you, Dave?
[00:01:03]  Very good.
[00:01:04]  Very good.
[00:01:04]  I got my new mic stand, which Brian just sent me.
[00:01:09]  I had the mic stand on the table and Brian was always complaining that it was like when I move my hands and hit the desk or something, it makes awful noises.
[00:01:16]  So anybody out there who noticed that, sorry about that, but now we should have it fixed.
[00:01:20]  Hopefully, all the my chat, like in the shows, would always just be Brian going, noises, noises.
[00:01:27]  So let's hope it doesn't still make noises or Brian, Brian might blow his brains out.
[00:01:31]  I think next step, Dave, is we need to get your camera closer to whatever you're looking at.
[00:01:36]  Yeah, maybe like this the whole time.
[00:01:39]  Yeah, that might be true.
[00:01:40]  I got a new camera that's like a really good camera that I still, I tried to set it up and it didn't work.
[00:01:44]  And anyway, I'm making some improvements here.
[00:01:47]  I got mine right in front of you on my screen so that it's an optical illusion.
[00:01:52]  Like I'm really looking into the thing, you know?
[00:01:54]  Yeah, that is better.
[00:01:55]  That is the best way to do it.
[00:01:57]  Okay, so there's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff I want to talk to you about.
[00:02:01]  I feel like we can't not at least kind of address, although we don't have to get too into the weeds on this issue.
[00:02:06]  But the big thing that everybody's talking about today is there was this leak from the Supreme Court that evidently they're deciding to overthrow Roe v. overturn Roe v. Wade.
[00:02:16]  I think I just wanted to what I wanted to touch on about it that I thought was really interesting is there's a lot of different angles here that are very interesting, particularly from the libertarian point of view.
[00:02:27]  Forget it even the debate about abortion, which I'm sure everyone's going to be having over the next few days and weeks.
[00:02:33]  And if this does turn out to be real, which it looks like it is because the Supreme Court already said they're investigating the leak and it wouldn't be investigating the leak if it was a fake leak.
[00:02:42]  They would just say, hey, this isn't real.
[00:02:45]  So that does appear to be legitimate.
[00:02:49]  But aside, look, there are libertarians.
[00:02:50]  I'm a pro-life guy.
[00:02:51]  There are lots of libertarians who are pro-choice people.
[00:02:53]  My favorite libertarian philosopher of all time, Murray Rothbard, was pro-choice.
[00:02:57]  I don't believe he ever, even in his paleo-libertarian days, I don't think he ever, at least to my knowledge, went back on that.
[00:03:05]  And I think that while most people will deny this, there are good faith arguments on both sides of that question.
[00:03:12]  I really do think that's the truth.
[00:03:14]  And a lot of people don't want to concede that, but there is truth to that.
[00:03:19]  But there's something really interesting for libertarians to pay attention to about all of this that I've been thinking about.
[00:03:24]  I was curious on your thoughts.
[00:03:25]  Number one, the leak aspect.
[00:03:27]  You know, we talk about kind of the government and how it operates all the time and opposing the government, but this is really something that's interesting.
[00:03:34]  And you saw this during the Trump presidency all the time, where there are these weaponized leaks, that this is actually a tactic where kind of like people, unelected people in the government working in conjunction with media outlets, kind of do that.
[00:03:51]  You could clearly see these were progressives who weren't happy with the way this was going.
[00:03:54]  So they're like, we're going to leak the information and make it this huge thing right now.
[00:03:57]  This happened over and over again in the Trump administration.
[00:04:01]  And I just think that in itself is a really interesting aspect that not that many people are talking about.
[00:04:06]  Do you have like any thoughts on that or the situation in general?
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:10]  Well, on the broader subject, my only opinion about abortion is that it's radio death, man.
[00:04:15]  Nobody's trying to talk about this.
[00:04:16]  Nobody wants to hear about this.
[00:04:18]  But on the leaks, I'm for all leaks at all times.
[00:04:21]  And you're right, they are all partisan and weaponized and whatever, this and that.
[00:04:25]  But that's just why we need even more of them.
[00:04:27]  Then that's why we need Julian Assange out of jail so he can publish those leaks and we can just have giant leak fights.
[00:04:33]  Now, I don't really believe that the government has a right to have privileged information apart from the rest of us.
[00:04:40]  In fact, now I really highly recommend everybody read the book Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg, his memoir of the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers leak and all of that.
[00:04:50]  And he talks about just the cult of the national government and how, you know, quite unlike if I don't know if you ever had a real job, Dave, Mr. Comedian for a living.
[00:05:00]  I've had a couple.
[00:05:02]  Yeah, for those of us who've had real jobs, you know, government jobs are just, you know, essentially, you know, the phrase good enough for government work or whatever.
[00:05:13]  It's just the dynamics are completely different.
[00:05:15]  And the dynamic, as he describes the dynamics inside the national government, it's essentially the cult of the boss where your only job is making your boss look good, no matter how much you disagree with what he's doing.
[00:05:27]  You've got to just help juice him up.
[00:05:30]  That way, later, when he gets a promotion, he'll bring you up with him.
[00:05:34]  And then maybe someday after 30 years of this, the president will listen to you say one sentence or something, and then you'll have like this little bit of power.
[00:05:42]  And he talks about how, man, it's been about 15 years, so I forget, but I'm pretty sure that the number he used was 40,000.
[00:05:52]  I think he said there must have been 40,000 people in the government who knew the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin, that there was no second attack there at all.
[00:06:00]  The whole first one was dubious and provoked by America anyway.
[00:06:03]  The second one never even happened at all.
[00:06:05]  And I'm not sure the first one even happened at all.
[00:06:08]  The second one certainly didn't.
[00:06:10]  And Ellsberg says something like 40,000 people inside the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies and so forth must have known that.
[00:06:19]  And they all kept the secret.
[00:06:22]  And not just on penalty of going to prison, but that, you know, kind of the theory is that, geez, my boss's boss's boss would not have made that decision if it wasn't the right decision to make.
[00:06:33]  And so we're just going to go along with this and pretend that it's right.
[00:06:36]  But meanwhile, like the answer is all 40,000 of those people should elite.
[00:06:42]  There should have been a bum rush to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal that did you guys know the truth?
[00:06:47]  That this didn't really happen.
[00:06:49]  They lied us into war and they just didn't do it.
[00:06:53]  It wasn't till Ellsberg, you know, seven, eight years later, when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, was it finally proven that that was a lie.
[00:07:02]  And before that, it was a crazy conspiracy theory that was dismissed, you know, like a moon landing hoax or something like that.
[00:07:09]  Right.
[00:07:09]  You know, when that was the truth, that the whole thing was fake.
[00:07:12]  In fact, one extra footnote on this footnote is that Gareth Porter says that McNamara lied to LBJ, that it wasn't even LBJ lying.
[00:07:21]  It was McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, who lied to the president and claimed that essentially buried the fact that the Maddox, the ship in question, had updated the Pentagon that, oh, whoops, our sonar man was listening to our own stupid propeller and we woke up the senior senior sonar man and problem solved.
[00:07:41]  And he just buried that and didn't even tell LBJ that.
[00:07:44]  So I don't even know if it was LBJ who really lied about that.
[00:07:47]  Maybe he wanted, maybe he had instructed Mac to not tell him everything.
[00:07:52]  Who knows?
[00:07:52]  But anyway, he's still a bad guy either way.
[00:07:55]  So don't worry.
[00:07:55]  We can still hate LBJ, whether he's responsible for that or not.
[00:07:59]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  Sure.
[00:08:01]  I mean, look, even if that had happened, it's not like he had to escalate the war whatsoever.
[00:08:06]  You know, he could have said, geez, maybe we shouldn't have been backing up those South Vietnamese special operations teams that we were infiltrating into North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.
[00:08:17]  Right.
[00:08:18]  That's what the ships were doing there was supposedly providing cover for these special ops missions behind enemy lines.
[00:08:25]  Yeah.
[00:08:25]  Well, listen, so I tend to agree with you in general.
[00:08:28]  I'm for all leaks, not the fake ones, I suppose, but all leaks that are genuine.
[00:08:33]  I'd have to support them.
[00:08:35]  I still do think, though, that it's interesting to kind of, and I think your, your, uh, story there kind of almost backs up the point that there are, it is unbelievable when you see, like, for example, this is a point I brought up the other night on Kennedy.
[00:08:48]  I think me and you talked on the phone about this recently, but when you see how many leaks there are, like how many leaks there were through the Trump presidency.
[00:08:55]  But then when you realize that Donald Trump gets impeached over the Ukraine gate thing, which is like at best, the best, you'd go, yeah, that was kind of a faux pie.
[00:09:06]  He shouldn't have really done that.
[00:09:07]  But the idea that it was an impeachable offense was just so silly.
[00:09:11]  But no one leaks in his own Justice Department that there's an active ongoing investigation against Hunter Biden.
[00:09:17]  Now, again, by the way, Media wrote this piece the other day where they corrected me and they said, they goes, really?
[00:09:24]  Well, they said they didn't exactly.
[00:09:25]  They wrote the piece was about Kennedy calling that lady a dingbat, but then they said, they basically said what I was arguing.
[00:09:31]  And they go, but like what Dave misses or something is that he was asking a different government to investigate them, not our own Justice Department, which like, obviously, I understood that.
[00:09:42]  I'm just making the point that the question with the Trump, you know, quid pro quo, there's no, there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's in the national interest.
[00:09:52]  The issue would be if it's in his own political interest, that's where, you know, you, there's always strings attached to deals that the government makes with other governments.
[00:10:00]  And think how drastically that would have changed the narrative if we had known that.
[00:10:03]  There's the grand jury looking at this guy right now, by the way.
[00:10:07]  The point is that number one, it would make his actual defense a bit stronger to say, well, I can argue it's in the national interest.
[00:10:14]  I mean, we're investigating him here for things involved with a Ukrainian company.
[00:10:19]  Why can't I also ask the Ukrainian government to investigate him?
[00:10:22]  It would make that case stronger.
[00:10:23]  And then, of course, to your point, just in the court of public opinion, just for this to be leaked to the Washington Post or whatever would make a huge, you know, it would very much help sway public opinion in his direction.
[00:10:34]  But that didn't get leaked.
[00:10:36]  And to your point with the Gulf of Tomkin, those things, I mean, it's not as if the State Department or the Defense Department, or in this case, the Justice Department are incapable of keeping a tight lip about things.
[00:10:47]  Like very important things can find a way to not leak.
[00:10:50]  And then all these other things.
[00:10:51]  So we should also remember, even though it's good if accurate information leaks, that, you know, keep in mind that what does leak and what doesn't leak is often done for political reasons.
[00:11:01]  And just, I, you know, I just think that's something to like kind of keep in mind.
[00:11:04]  Well, yeah.
[00:11:05]  And I think also the question always is, was this leak ordered by the chiefs or was this a lower level employee who was doing a stunt?
[00:11:13]  I saw Greenwald's piece this morning that just came out.
[00:11:16]  I only read like the first half of it or something.
[00:11:19]  It's about the role of the Supreme Court in this and that.
[00:11:21]  But he posits an equally plausible explanation that this was leaked by a clerk for one of the conservative judges who was trying to corner them and make sure that they don't change their mind now and back down.
[00:11:32]  I guess that's possible.
[00:11:33]  We don't really know who did it.
[00:11:34]  You know what I mean?
[00:11:36]  But I didn't even think about that.
[00:11:38]  That's a good, that's a good point.
[00:11:39]  That is possible.
[00:11:40]  Well, and so yeah, anyways.
[00:11:45]  But you know, I have another example from Russia Gate, as long as we're talking about that, because I like it, is we know now that the CIA told the FBI Carter Page is a loyal American patriot, an asset of our agency.
[00:11:59]  And they told him that in writing, and an FBI lawyer named Klein Smith whited that out from the CIA answer to the FBI's query about Page and then sent that to the FISA court, which is essentially perjury to the FISA court to get a warrant, not a search warrant, Dave, which requires probable cause under the Fourth Amendment, but no, a national intelligence surveillance court warrant that requires only probable cause.
[00:12:29]  I mean, pardon me, only a reasonable belief against an American citizen.
[00:12:34]  The only way to do that is to say that we have a reasonable belief he's an agent of a foreign power or a foreign terrorist group.
[00:12:41]  Only then can you get under the hurdle of the Fourth Amendment to surveil an American citizen.
[00:12:46]  And then the case of Carter Page, now we're talking two hops.
[00:12:49]  Everybody he's talking to and everybody they're talking to.
[00:12:51]  That's the whole Trump campaign got him right there.
[00:12:54]  And Klein Smith was convicted and sentenced to a slap on the wrist for lying to the court.
[00:13:02]  He was convicted.
[00:13:03]  The only conviction is the only conviction that they got in the whole hoax.
[00:13:06]  But yeah, that's right.
[00:13:07]  Exactly.
[00:13:08]  So, but meanwhile, for almost three years, like two and three quarters years, they smeared this guy, Carter Page, as an agent of the Kremlin.
[00:13:21]  And in fact, you may have seen Chuck Ross.
[00:13:23]  I retweeted it yesterday.
[00:13:24]  Chuck Ross went and found where the new minister of information was tweeting out the hoax that, oh, look, this guy, Carter Page, is tied to the Kremlin too.
[00:13:33]  It's not just Manafort.
[00:13:34]  It's also Page.
[00:13:35]  There she is, you know, right at the open spout of the Russia Gate lies, you know, one of the first people to regurgitate these things as they're coming out of the Clinton campaign in the summer of 16.
[00:13:49]  And so meanwhile, though, as everyone listening to this well remembers, they told 1,000 lies and leaked 1,000 stories about Trump and Russia from the summer of 16 through the spring of 19, right?
[00:14:06]  A thousand of them, maybe 2,000.
[00:14:09]  But at no time did the CIA ever leak to the public that this guy Page works for us and we like him and trust him.
[00:14:17]  And every time he meets an influential Russian government or private, he comes and talks to us and debriefs us on every word that for years now.
[00:14:26]  It's even worse if you look at actually what the guy did.
[00:14:29]  And I think this is ultimately why he went down because it was even worse than him just whiting out what the CIA told him.
[00:14:36]  He kept a part of it in there.
[00:14:37]  So basically, Carter Page had a relationship with the CIA.
[00:14:40]  He was something like an informant to them.
[00:14:42]  As an asset.

=== The Plot Against Trump (15:11) ===

[00:14:44]  Right.
[00:14:44]  And he was approached by a group of Russians.
[00:14:48]  And so he immediately went to the CIA and told them that and goes, hey, look, I got approached by this group of Russians.
[00:14:53]  What do you want me to do?
[00:14:54]  Could I be useful to you?
[00:14:55]  You know, like, how should I play this?
[00:14:57]  And so the FBI was alleging that these Russians approached him to turn him as a Russian asset.
[00:15:03]  And the CIA said, no, we know those Russians approached him.
[00:15:06]  He's with us.
[00:15:07]  He told us all about that.
[00:15:09]  And he actually kept in the FISA warrant application that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by those guys, but left out the second part, whited out the second part that yes, and we know that because he's working with us.
[00:15:22]  So they presented it as if the CIA had backed up this claim.
[00:15:26]  It was like so egregious.
[00:15:28]  And to your point, no one from the CIA, and this is Trump's CIA at the time.
[00:15:35]  No one from Trump's CIA was willing to go, oh, no, this is all complete bullshit.
[00:15:40]  You know, of course, I know you've made this point before.
[00:15:42]  I've made this point a ton of times, but the fact that when you had that, what was it, the BuzzFeed story that Mueller did come out and say, no, this is not true.
[00:15:52]  Michael Cohen was not instructed to lie by Donald Trump.
[00:15:55]  So he had no problem coming out when something was written in a newspaper and saying, nope, that's not actually what's going on.
[00:16:01]  And yet, throughout, you know, you want to talk about interfering in an election throughout the entire midterm elections, never once came out to just go.
[00:16:09]  For the record, we have absolutely no evidence that Donald Trump is involved in some conspiracy as some agent of the Kremlin when this was being reported by far more mainstream news outlets than BuzzFeed.
[00:16:20]  It's not as, you know, like he, like he drew the line at BuzzFeed somehow for a way lesser allegation than the major allegation that was dominating the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, all of it.
[00:16:32]  Every day.
[00:16:33]  Yeah.
[00:16:33]  Every day.
[00:16:34]  It was the biggest story in America.
[00:16:35]  I mean, it's hard to, you know, COVID kind of eclipsed everything.
[00:16:38]  But before that, there was this accusation that the president was like working with the Kremlin.
[00:16:43]  And we're learning new things all the time because these court filings keep coming out.
[00:16:46]  By the way, I don't know if you've read Peter Van Buren's new thing in the American Conservative about it.
[00:16:50]  I interviewed him the other day too.
[00:16:52]  But we have now where Perkins Coy, the law firm that worked for the Clinton campaign, they are now traced back to be directly responsible for hiring CrowdStrike to come up with the bogus accusation that Russia did the DNC hack, which is still taken for gospel truth.
[00:17:13]  It's like, every bit of this was a lie except that, but there's no reason whatsoever in the world to believe that that's true.
[00:17:19]  And CrowdStrike even admitted under oath in front of Congress.
[00:17:22]  In fact, the transcript even has the guy pauses while his lawyer whispers in his ear.
[00:17:27]  And then he says, Congressman, I'm sorry, we have no evidence that they exfiltrated the data from the server at all.
[00:17:33]  Yeah.
[00:17:34]  Good advice from his lawyer there to not lie on that one.
[00:17:37]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is yeocratom.com, the home of the $60 kilo, the place to get Kratom.
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[00:18:13]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:18:16]  So they were responsible for that.
[00:18:18]  They were behind the Alpha Bank scam, this fake story that they printed Franklin Four in Slate that the Trump servers were secretly communicating with the Alphabank servers in Russia when this was just his hotel spam bot, you know, BS.
[00:18:38]  Then they were responsible for this funneling the CIA and FBI these claims that while they were doing their patriotic duty in scanning for intruders on the networks, they found all these Yada phones, YOTA, Russian Yada phones, kept trying to key into the network near Trump as he traveled around the country and all these things.
[00:19:04]  And the CIA dismissed that as completely bogus, like forged information.
[00:19:08]  They could tell from their forensics that it was fake.
[00:19:11]  And then I'm sorry, I'm forgetting one more, Dave.
[00:19:13]  Kick me when you see me next time.
[00:19:15]  There's four of them that were directly traced back to Perkins Coy there.
[00:19:20]  That was the center of this whole thing.
[00:19:23]  You know, the dawn of the Russia Gate scandal from the very beginning of the summer of 2014, that was where it all came from.
[00:19:29]  They were shopping all of these stories out.
[00:19:31]  And, you know, I don't know who he's quoting, but Van Buren quotes, he says he has an intelligence source that he asked him, hey, man, this is quite an up.
[00:19:42]  Like, what would it have taken to arrange all of this?
[00:19:45]  You know, and they compared it to essentially like a CIA station in a large foreign city just to be responsible for keeping everybody paid and making sure, you know, all these different aspects of the same operation are going.
[00:19:58]  This was a sophisticated thing that somebody came up with the idea, man, we got to try.
[00:20:04]  Trump keeps saying Russia, let's call him a Manchurian candidate and let's go full bore on that.
[00:20:11]  And they came up with all these different reasons to believe it and leaped, you know, to the FBI and to the CIA over and oh, and the Steele dossier.
[00:20:19]  I'm sorry, there's the fourth one.
[00:20:20]  It's the obvious one.
[00:20:21]  The Steele dossier was the fourth thing that they were behind in the first place.
[00:20:25]  Perkins Coy, the law firm that worked directly for Hillary.
[00:20:28]  So, and then the Steele dossier, of course, had all the accusations against Page and went, you know, on and on, you know, against Mike Flynn and all of the rest of the stuff, the P-Tape and all the stuff.
[00:20:39]  Yeah, the P-tape, all the stuff that was just attempting to be personally embarrassing to him.
[00:20:43]  It's all the whole works.
[00:20:45]  Yeah.
[00:20:45]  No, it's really, it's really something when you look back at the whole, you know, the whole hoax was, as I, I've, you know, been saying this for years, but I don't think there's any, I mean, I just think it's conclusively proven at this point that this was a coup attempt.
[00:21:01]  I mean, this was an attempt to overthrow the duly elected president of the United States, which even like for a libertarian anarchist, you know, it strikes almost my last bone of having some constitutional, you know, Republican, little R Republican.
[00:21:17]  Well, look, it has not, never mind reverence for Article 2.
[00:21:20]  How about just the fact that Donald Trump stood for election and James Comey and John Brennan did not?
[00:21:26]  And who in the hell do the CIA and the FBI counterintelligence division and the entire Justice Department later, of course, for that matter, think they are to try to frame up first, just a major party presidential candidate at all?
[00:21:40]  Like that ought to be absolutely untouchable, you know, like drive by on a Sunday in Baltimore or whatever.
[00:21:47]  You just don't do that, man.
[00:21:49]  You can't do that.
[00:21:50]  And then once he got elected anyway, because it didn't all come out fast enough and convincing enough to somehow work, they kept it going.
[00:21:57]  They tried to break the Electoral College to keep the Electoral College from seating him.
[00:22:02]  They tried to invoke the 25th Amendment.
[00:22:04]  They put this fake intelligence dossier three days before his inauguration and tried to invoke the 25th Amendment like it authorized a coup somehow.
[00:22:12]  When that thing's about if your president has a stroke like Woodrow Wilson, and now it's supposed to be just if, you know, the leaders at CIA don't like the American people's choice for president, they'll just remove him.
[00:22:24]  Or as the FBI counterintelligence division guys told CNN in right around this time, would have been, I think, April, not May, April of 2017.
[00:22:34]  Well, if we can't remove him through the 25th Amendment, at least we can hem him in.
[00:22:39]  And that was when they started the special counsel investigation, which then ran for another two years and as through the midterms.
[00:22:48]  They knew they were lying the whole time.
[00:22:50]  The investigation itself was the end.
[00:22:53]  That was the plot against Trump.
[00:22:55]  They can't shoot him in the head in Dallas.
[00:22:57]  Well, they can pretend to investigate him for high treason with the Kremlin for two years.
[00:23:02]  And that's pretty good.
[00:23:04]  No, the guy, what's his name?
[00:23:07]  McCabe, I believe, right?
[00:23:09]  McCabe, who was like the number three guy at the Justice Department or something like that at the time.
[00:23:13]  And he said to 60 Minutes, he just straight up told them that like, yeah, after they fired Comey, after Trump fired Comey, that they sat around and discussed options and they discussed trying to invoke the 25th Amendment, realized they couldn't get the support for that, that it was just going to be politically not feasible to get like, you know, to get Pence and all the people to agree with this and commit political suicide.
[00:23:38]  And so they went instead with the special counselor.
[00:23:41]  Like that, that was literally what he said, that the special prosecutor came because we couldn't overthrow this guy with this.
[00:23:46]  So this was the next best thing.
[00:23:48]  And he just openly said that.
[00:23:49]  Like this was what it was all about.
[00:23:51]  I mean, it's really, really pretty amazing.
[00:23:54]  It makes you, you know, it's funny because even as you pointed out, like, you know, okay, so Trump was democratically elected, these other guys weren't.
[00:24:00]  And there's a lot of different kinds of schools of thought about democracy within libertarian circles.
[00:24:06]  Obviously, notably, Hoppe takes like the most hard line against democracy.
[00:24:10]  And certainly, I think a lot of the moral arguments for democracy fall apart.
[00:24:16]  The idea that something is moral if you get 50 plus one of the population to vote for it.
[00:24:24]  No, it doesn't change the moral characteristics of that.
[00:24:26]  Slavery would be no more moral if 60% of the people supported it, or 70% of the people, or 10%, or 1%.
[00:24:33]  It's still the exact same thing.
[00:24:35]  And that really was like a Rothbardian, like central to the Rothbardian argument that the moral characteristics of an action don't change based on whether you're the state or not the state, and they don't change based on popular support or any of this.
[00:24:48]  They're still the same action.
[00:24:50]  Mises, on the other hand, made a utilitarian argument for democracy that basically it allows for the peaceful transfer of power.
[00:24:58]  And therefore, it's better than not having a system where you can allow for the peaceful transfer of power.
[00:25:03]  But one of the things that's been kind of eye-opening to me, and I was talking about this on the last podcast, is how much the bad guys actually fear democracy.
[00:25:14]  While they yell democracy all day long, and oh my God, we have to defend Ukraine because of democracy.
[00:25:19]  And oh my God, we hate right-wing populism because of democracy.
[00:25:22]  And this is a threat to democracy, and that's a threat to democracy.
[00:25:25]  They are freaking out over Elon Musk buying Twitter and saying that he'll let everybody speak because they actually are terrified that if Trump gets back on Twitter, he could win again.
[00:25:37]  They're actually terrified of the democratic process if they do not have all of their controls around it.
[00:25:42]  And of course, they're quite happy.
[00:25:44]  I mean, the whole thing with Twitter is that, like, look, they kicked off the sitting president of the United States so people couldn't hear from their democratically elected leader anymore.
[00:25:53]  They kicked off another sitting member of Congress, another, you know, none of them were like, oh my God, democracy is so important here.
[00:25:59]  They're actually really afraid of democracy.
[00:26:02]  And that's an interesting thing, however, you feel about it.
[00:26:04]  That's like really worth noting and paying attention to that.
[00:26:08]  These guys are actually very concerned about the democratic process.
[00:26:11]  And look, I think it was Greenwald or one of his buddies anyway who collected, pretty sure it was Greenwald, who collected all these headlines from the Washington Post and other places saying democracy is dangerous.
[00:26:22]  But it's not written by anarcho-capitalists saying that human liberty is the only thing that matters and where democracy is contrary to liberty.
[00:26:30]  It's not like that.
[00:26:31]  It's the rabble are stupid and don't know what to do.
[00:26:33]  And so the elites need to decide for everybody.
[00:26:35]  And that's the tone of them all.
[00:26:37]  And this goes back to even, you know, the trilateral commission in the 1970s.
[00:26:41]  That was one of their big reports that got leaked was the crisis of democracy.
[00:26:44]  And the problem is if the people have a say in how their government is run, they're going to choose different than how we won.
[00:26:50]  So, what we got to do is figure out how to keep up the illusion to keep everybody, you know, satisfied enough, placated enough to not overthrow us, while essentially not letting them have a say in the policies that their betters know to be better.
[00:27:07]  And so, that's it.
[00:27:08]  That's, you know, the famous quote from Carol Quigley, where he says, the only reason we allow there to be two parties, one to represent, or he says should, the only reason to even have two parties should be so that the liberals have a party and the conservatives have a party, and they can switch off every, they can throw those rascals out every eight or even four years, if necessary, in order to bring in a fresh face, new team,
[00:27:34]  placate half the population at a time in order to continue the same basic policies, which we all know.
[00:27:41]  And then he lists, we need steady but low inflation.
[00:27:45]  We need to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance.
[00:27:48]  We need to whatever, the policies of the American world empire that have nothing to do with the Constitution and have nothing to do with the will of the American people or what the American people at large would consider our national interest whatsoever.
[00:28:01]  And that goes back to the 60s.
[00:28:02]  He wrote that in 66.
[00:28:04]  Well, he's got his way for sure.
[00:28:06]  I mean, it's definitely, it's turned out well for what Carol Quigley desired.
[00:28:11]  And look, those, those, to your point, the, those articles I mentioned that Greenwald had collected about why democracy is so dangerous written by all these mainstream writers and these mainstream publications.
[00:28:21]  They were all in reaction to Trump winning the election in 2016.
[00:28:24]  You see what happens when we can't rig it for Duchess Hillary and Prince Jeb, and we allow, you know, the idiots to choose an idiot.
[00:28:32]  They choose an idiot, which was also right.
[00:28:35]  But of course, whose fault is that, right?
[00:28:37]  It's their fault because they had such an ossified and insular kind of, you know, enclosed political system that in the United States of America, the world's oldest republic or oldest democracy or whatever, as they like to brag about it, they literally had announced four years before from the moment Barack Obama was done being reelected.
[00:28:59]  That, well, obviously in 2016, it's going to be Bill Clinton's wife versus George W. Bush's brother.
[00:29:05]  And that's going to be it.
[00:29:07]  And Roger Stone saw an opening there.
[00:29:11]  But for who?
[00:29:13]  For one and only one American human to be able to pull this off, right?
[00:29:19]  Pick any other billionaire, pick any other Hollywood star.
[00:29:23]  None of them can fill in the space of Donald Trump.
[00:29:26]  Only Donald Trump is rich enough and famous enough and brash enough to just get up there and punch Jeb Bush in the stomach and be like, sit down, bitch, and just take over the thing the way that he did.
[00:29:38]  No one else had the guts to do that the way that he did.
[00:29:42]  And there's no one else who could have pulled it off the way they did.
[00:29:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:46]  Look at Bloomberg.
[00:29:47]  Because that's how rigged the thing is in the first place.
[00:29:50]  Right.
[00:29:50]  No, it took Trump's unique set of skills.
[00:29:53]  Because look at Bloomberg who has a lot more money than Donald Trump did.

=== Trump's Unique Political Skills (04:40) ===

[00:29:55]  Sure.
[00:29:55]  I mean, just fell flat on his face because he didn't have that ability to get up there and really kind of mix it up and fight.
[00:30:01]  And he also looked to Trump's to Trump's success.
[00:30:06]  Donald Trump also, and I don't know how sincerely he believed any of these things because he's been all over the map.
[00:30:13]  If you look back at his, you know, dabbling in politics earlier, like when he was in the reform party and stuff before that.
[00:30:19]  But he, I always felt like he just saw pocket aces laying on the floor.
[00:30:26]  And he was like, no one else wants to play these cards.
[00:30:28]  Okay, I'll play these cards.
[00:30:29]  These are really good cards.
[00:30:31]  And he railed against our immigration policy, our trade policy, and our foreign policy, and just took positions that are far more popular with the American people than the ones that the establishment is taking.
[00:30:44]  And he was just like, I'm going to stick with these positions.
[00:30:46]  And they do, and people liked it.
[00:30:47]  That sounded pretty good to people.
[00:30:49]  Even amongst the Democrat base, they wouldn't give Trump credit for anything.
[00:30:54]  But those policies in general, the policies of like, we should, again, forget how you as a libertarian even feel about this.
[00:31:02]  I'm just saying the policy of we shouldn't have completely uncontrolled immigration.
[00:31:06]  We should have some controls over who comes into our country.
[00:31:09]  The policy of we shouldn't completely deindustrialize our country.
[00:31:12]  We shouldn't ship jobs overseas.
[00:31:14]  And the policy of we shouldn't fight all these stupid wars are way more popular than the opposite of those.
[00:31:19]  That's just the reality of the situation.
[00:31:22]  And he was able to play to that and play it, you know, played it very well.
[00:31:26]  Yeah.
[00:31:26]  You know, there's this interesting piece in, I don't know, maybe it was the Atlantic or something.
[00:31:32]  You might have seen this.
[00:31:32]  It was about why the last decade has been so stupid.
[00:31:37]  And he essentially blames it all on the retweet button and the like and share buttons on Facebook and Twitter.
[00:31:43]  And how, you know, even before when you had to RT and type it out or whatever, copy and paste it, it was something.
[00:31:50]  But the like and the share and the RT and the whatever, it just makes it where the most engaging thing is the most angry thing and is the most the other guys are the bad guys and they're out to get you and that's why you need me kind of things.
[00:32:03]  Those are the things that get liked and shared the most.
[00:32:05]  It's just simple fact.
[00:32:06]  So then it just everything gets bent that way.
[00:32:09]  It's like the Alex Jonesification of all media, which is everything is full on.
[00:32:14]  Hell, look at the liberal women right now.
[00:32:16]  It's all full on paranoid schizophrenia from Trump, you know, Russia Gate to whatever you got, right?
[00:32:22]  Like whatever it is.
[00:32:25]  Liberal women's tears.
[00:32:26]  So Richard Hananya had a piece about this the other day, like rules the political marketplace.
[00:32:32]  Oh, by the way, I'm sorry.
[00:32:33]  I'm sorry to interrupt you, but as Claire McCaskill tweeted about the abortion thing specifically, but she just tweeted today.
[00:32:39]  She was like, I'm sad, I'm scared, and I'm worried.
[00:32:43]  Like, it was just like a tweet like that.
[00:32:44]  And you're just like, yep, that's the number one priority.
[00:32:47]  Oh, you're sad and afraid.
[00:32:48]  No Americans have been through that in the last two years.
[00:32:51]  It's just you.
[00:32:52]  It's a rich liberal woman, a rich liberal white woman is scared and afraid.
[00:32:56]  So, you know, that's priority number one.
[00:32:58]  It's like that.
[00:32:59]  But so here's the thing, though.
[00:33:01]  Before I space completely out, in that article, the guy's right in the way that he frames it.
[00:33:09]  Like he's one-third right that the extremes of American politics are getting all this attention.
[00:33:18]  And by that, extreme left and extreme right, and depending on how you have defined that, but you could say in the Marxist sense or the most woke sense on the left and the most kind of right-wing nationalist or even racist-leaning on the right, that kind of thing, gets all this attention because they're the angriest and because they got like a unified field theory of their how things should be.
[00:33:41]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:41]  They got ready-made answers for everybody and they're angry all the time.
[00:33:45]  And so then he's complaining that, of course, the further you go to the fringe, the dumber of humans that you're talking about.
[00:33:53]  And it's reasonable college professors like him in the center who are the ones who are right about everything and are the only ones who are emotionally centered and all of this stuff.
[00:34:03]  And then, of course, he's completely refuses to address anywhere in the article: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the financial crash of 2008, you know,
[00:34:17]  the daily outrage on Twitter about, you know, kindergarten teachers trying to convince children to change their genders or whatever it is that people are upset about that the center has adopted and has made their consensus and pushed on us.

=== Soros Money and Malinvestment (09:54) ===

[00:34:36]  And every bit of which has been a disaster.
[00:34:39]  Like the last 20 years, our government hasn't done a damn thing right other than, you know, back off of criminalized pot a little bit.
[00:34:47]  But that was them stopping doing something, right?
[00:34:50]  Like even then.
[00:34:52]  And so, and by the way, I just want to add, just to that, because I think there are some libertarians who miss this point.
[00:34:59]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:35:00]  It's good that the government, that the state governments backed off of the criminalization of marijuana.
[00:35:06]  This is undoubtedly a good thing.
[00:35:08]  But you can also understand that governments sometimes do good things for the wrong reasons.
[00:35:15]  And I don't think that it's a complete coincidence that there was kind of seemingly like decisions made by very powerful people that at this time, when young people are being so screwed over and are so volatile and so angry about this, because they're basically being handed six figures of debt coming out of this college scheme.
[00:35:34]  They have no prospects for a job.
[00:35:36]  Houses cost $600,000 and they're in debt and they work at Starbucks that they went, let's give them all a lot of weed.
[00:35:43]  You know, like, no, I'm not saying, listen, I'm not.
[00:35:45]  I like the correlation, but I mean, the reality is, is people have been fighting like hell over this.
[00:35:50]  No, this year.
[00:35:51]  Yeah, there's no question, but there is also people have been fighting over this in the 90s.
[00:35:55]  I mean, people were fighting over this like crazy.
[00:35:57]  That was when they started winning.
[00:35:58]  I mean, you look at where it started.
[00:35:59]  It started with a bunch of dying cancer and AIDS patients in San Francisco and Dennis Perrone and these guys.
[00:36:05]  And they got George Soros money to back them up.
[00:36:08]  And then there you go.
[00:36:10]  Right.
[00:36:10]  They got a whole lot of George Soros money.
[00:36:12]  Okay, which also is how the coup in Ukraine was effectively.
[00:36:16]  That's true.
[00:36:17]  But look, I mean, the fact of the matter is that George Soros gives money to liberal causes.
[00:36:21]  Yes.
[00:36:22]  That's broadly speaking and always has.
[00:36:24]  And that's.
[00:36:24]  Well, he also gave money to.
[00:36:26]  So if you agree with him on something, I mean, you could look at it like, oh, yeah, no, everything the guy does is meant to destroy America.
[00:36:33]  Therefore, that's why he helped legalize weed.
[00:36:35]  No, listen.
[00:36:36]  If you look at it like somebody said to him, you realize there are people in California in solitary confinement for decades who are in there on a goddamn pot charge.
[00:36:47]  And he said, you know what?
[00:36:48]  Here's a few hundred thousand dollars to make that less worse.
[00:36:52]  It's quite possible.
[00:36:53]  I'm not saying, look, and also much like the Koch brothers were the same way, where they'll actually, they give so much money to so many political causes that they'll be on the opposite side of the same cause at times.
[00:37:03]  Like Soros gave money to Obama in 2008, who was going in and raiding and locking up sick people in California when their state had nullified federal pot laws.
[00:37:13]  This is like a little chapter that gets brushed over that Obama.
[00:37:16]  That's the part where he's trying to destroy America.
[00:37:18]  See?
[00:37:18]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  No, listen, I agree.
[00:37:20]  Either way, I'm saying it's a good thing.
[00:37:21]  Any drug being decriminalized, any nonviolent crime being scaled back.
[00:37:26]  If they give him one less year in prison, that that's a good thing.
[00:37:29]  I'm just saying that it's like, it's also possible that some people are in this for the wrong reasons.
[00:37:34]  But I do want to back to your, back to your point that you were making, which I think is the bigger point.
[00:37:39]  And it's not, I do think now there's this tendency to blame everything on social media.
[00:37:43]  And there's no question that social media exacerbates some of these problems.
[00:37:48]  But it really to me, and from my libertarian diagnosis, I look at it as kind of the bigger government gets, the more corrupt the system is and the less it works for regular people.
[00:37:59]  And the government getting, you know, if you look at the kind of like the huge explosion in the size and scope of government under the George W. Bush administration, and then Barack Obama takes that and makes it much bigger.
[00:38:09]  You see the problem bubbling up.
[00:38:11]  But to the Carol Quigley point that you made before, I think one of the main things that's going on here is that people are, it's like it's right in front of people's faces and they can't not see the fact that democracy is an illusion.
[00:38:26]  And that's kind of okay.
[00:38:29]  This is always the case always in every government everywhere.
[00:38:32]  But that's kind of okay as long as the system is working for regular people.
[00:38:36]  They will accept to some degree that, yeah, they cast one vote out of 100 million votes.
[00:38:41]  They're not really having an effect on this system, but whatever, things are working out okay for you.
[00:38:45]  But when things aren't working out okay, it's hard to ignore that.
[00:38:48]  Look, George W. Bush in the year 2000 ran on the promise of reigning in the government and not fighting wars for the sake of nation building and only using the military for defense and balancing budgets and restoring dignity to the White House and all these things.
[00:39:04]  And he didn't do any of that.
[00:39:05]  And then we'll look at what Barack Obama ran on in 2008 and ending the wars and closing Gitmo and all this.
[00:39:11]  He didn't run on, I'm going to give you legal gay marriage.
[00:39:14]  I mean, that was the only thing he ended up handing to the left, but he didn't.
[00:39:18]  That's not what he ran on.
[00:39:19]  And so people vote.
[00:39:20]  It's like you have this big vote.
[00:39:22]  Like you have John McCain saying, we're going to keep Gitmo open and we're going to fight, stay in Iraq for 100 years.
[00:39:27]  And Obama going, no, we're going to close it and end the wars.
[00:39:30]  And the people are like, well, I vote for that.
[00:39:32]  I like that.
[00:39:33]  But like the Tom Woods rule, right?
[00:39:35]  No matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
[00:39:37]  So now we just get John McCain that looks like Obama, you know, but what do we get?
[00:39:40]  The wars continuing and then even being escalated and spread to multiple different theaters with Gitmo still open, all these.
[00:39:47]  And then, of course, the big one that I think, as much as we may want it to be, the wars, the biggest one was the financial crisis.
[00:39:55]  The biggest one was that the economy was completely wrecked by these people and it was never fixed.
[00:39:59]  They just had artificially low interest rates and record high government spending.
[00:40:02]  That was what they called the recovery.
[00:40:04]  That's what they've been calling the recovery.
[00:40:05]  That's what Trump called his booming economy.
[00:40:07]  It's what this whole thing has been since then.
[00:40:09]  And not even just like what Rothbard would complain about in the 80s or 90s to a level that's like, it's not like, hey, the interest rates are at 6%.
[00:40:17]  And I really think they should be at 9% if the market was declaring this.
[00:40:20]  And now we have this kind of like, you know, we have some malinvestment here or there.
[00:40:23]  It's not like that.
[00:40:24]  You're talking about interest rates at like 0% for almost a decade.
[00:40:28]  I mean, like things that are a completely artificial economy that's just terrible for regular people.
[00:40:36]  And you can only fool them for so long.
[00:40:39]  This is why Joe Biden's approval ratings are so in the garbage right now.
[00:40:43]  You can't really fool people that it's like, you know, I don't know, the cost of like strawberries is three times higher than it was four years ago.
[00:40:50]  Like people see that.
[00:40:52]  Yeah.
[00:40:52]  I mean, the thing of it is in the imperial court around Washington, D.C. and in New York City, they're the ones getting all that money first, the Cantillian effects, right?
[00:41:02]  Where you, the people who get the inflated money first are the ones that get all the value out of it.
[00:41:06]  And the rest of us schmucks are the ones getting cheated by the counterfeiting, you know?
[00:41:11]  And so to them, it's very plausible.
[00:41:14]  I mean, look at a blue check liberal on Twitter.
[00:41:17]  To them, like the average one, some lady writes for slate or whatever.
[00:41:21]  Right.
[00:41:23]  Their whole idea and they're convinced this.
[00:41:26]  You read it all the time.
[00:41:27]  That if anybody ever says that there's economic anxiety that worries the American people and that would have them choose somebody like Donald Trump over somebody like Hillary Clinton, who, of course, is the legacy of the last 30 years, you know, up until that point.
[00:41:41]  That's just a code for racism.
[00:41:43]  You know, anybody with anyone who claims economic anxiety, they just hate black people.
[00:41:49]  It's like, yeah, but you just live in Washington, D.C. and get paid a cushy salary by a think tank that takes all their money from Lockheed that takes all their money out of the U.S. Treasury.
[00:41:59]  What do you know about economic anxiety, Miss Study writer?
[00:42:03]  Well, look, I got $40,000 for writing a study about why we need to arm the moderate suicide bombers in Syria.
[00:42:10]  You know, what a great job.
[00:42:11]  I don't know, economic anxiety.
[00:42:13]  Yeah, in other words, you hate Mexicans.
[00:42:16]  Jeez, I don't know.
[00:42:18]  You know, what's interesting is that this is what happens.
[00:42:21]  And it's why, like, there's some good people like on the left.
[00:42:25]  This was interesting to me about talking to that Ben Burgess guy, who's a Democratic socialist, but like is really concerned with economic issues.
[00:42:31]  He's like an old school lefty is that there seems to be this thing where amongst those people, amongst that class that you're talking about, they have completely bought into the identitarian version of power.
[00:42:44]  So like power is straight white men and the oppressed would be, you know, women or people of color or LGBTQ.
[00:42:52]  This is kind of the fashionable way to look at things.
[00:42:55]  And so you have someone like this.
[00:42:56]  We were talking about the other day, this Taylor Lorenz lady who's whining about what a victim she is.
[00:43:02]  You know, I mean, this is just a woman who writes for the Washington Post and the New York Times and, you know, went to Georgetown and lives in like this world.
[00:43:09]  And it's like, she's like, yeah, but I'm a woman.
[00:43:10]  I'm a woman out on the internet.
[00:43:12]  And therefore, me, you know, like I'm in this oppressed class.
[00:43:15]  But the Minister of Information too is wrote a book about that.
[00:43:19]  How to be a woman on the internet and survive.
[00:43:22]  Oh, that's right.
[00:43:22]  I'm sorry.
[00:43:23]  I might be confused.
[00:43:23]  She might be the one who went to Georgetown.
[00:43:25]  No, no, no, you're right.
[00:43:26]  Yeah, maybe they both went there.
[00:43:28]  And it's like, so, okay, so this is your version of who has, you know, like anxieties or who's like, who's the imposed upon?
[00:43:37]  But in the real world, it's like, well, no, you live in one of the richest districts in the world.
[00:43:43]  Everybody you know is a millionaire, all off of this racket, all off of this same kind of system, which actually is siphoning money off of real working people in America.
[00:43:52]  And that someone, whether, you know, like, obviously there is something to the fact that overall, all other things being equal, it might be in certain fields a little bit more difficult to be a woman, or it might be more difficult to be a person of color.
[00:44:06]  Certainly growing up as a gay kid is tougher than growing up as a straight kid.
[00:44:11]  Like, it's not that there's nothing to any of these things, but if you're saying like when you reduce it to this identitarian like goop, it's like, are you saying like Obama's daughters are somehow inherently oppressed?
[00:44:23]  Whereas like some white like farmer in Iowa is like, what?
[00:44:28]  He's the oppressor in this situation?

=== MarPipe: Creative Testing Secrets (02:04) ===

[00:44:30]  It just makes absolutely no sense.
[00:44:32]  And you'd think traditionally economic leftists should be the first ones to get this.
[00:44:37]  But right, the people outside of that bubble, they're not enjoying any of these spoils.
[00:44:43]  They're paying for it.
[00:44:44]  It's on their back that like all of these millionaires are being made.
[00:44:48]  And so that's like the huge disconnect.
[00:44:50]  Yeah.
[00:44:50]  Yeah.
[00:44:51]  I mean, they have no idea.
[00:44:52]  They have no idea.
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=== Federal Reserve and Economic Pain (15:45) ===

[00:46:34]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:46:36]  You know, Kelly Vlajos did this piece for the American Conservative back, I'm going to say, like five years ago, about the suburbs of D.C. and how this is cliche now.
[00:46:45]  And spread this around, everybody.
[00:46:47]  People should know this.
[00:46:48]  The richest counties in America are the suburbs of Washington, D.C., right?
[00:46:53]  Not Silicon Valley, right?
[00:46:56]  Not, you know, the heart of, I don't know where anybody makes steel anymore, but not even New York City, right?
[00:47:03]  It's, it's, you know, it's government contractors, government salary takers and government contractors.
[00:47:09]  And Kelly wrote this article about how they were bulldozing entire neighborhoods of nice two-story middle-class homes from the 80s and building McMansions on them on the on the land.
[00:47:28]  Like they're bulldozing perfectly good houses, like not decrepit old, man, these need to be condemned.
[00:47:34]  We need to try a different development program here or something.
[00:47:36]  They're like just buying people out, tearing down, you know, a perfectly nice neighborhood to build gianter houses on fewer plots of land in the same area.
[00:47:49]  And all this is just money that they stole from us in the name of freeing the people of Iraq.
[00:47:55]  Right.
[00:47:55]  And then that money went back into the bank accounts of these scum.
[00:48:00]  And just, yeah, boy, again, tell them once economic anxiety is just code for racism.
[00:48:08]  And these people, like 99% of them white, will be like, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:48:14]  That's what it is.
[00:48:15]  Because they don't want to admit for a minute that, yeah, well, actually, every cat, every check I've cashed for 20 years has been a government check for, you know, for my colleagues.
[00:48:26]  And also got it from the national government in order to consult a weapons manufacturer for how to kill Iraqis better.
[00:48:34]  And that's how we bought our mansion and that's how we sent our daughters to college.
[00:48:38]  They don't want to admit that they are the single worst thing about America, that they are the enemies of the nation of America.
[00:48:47]  They think they're our Praetorian Guard.
[00:48:49]  They're here to protect us from the dangerous world out there, Dave.
[00:48:52]  I mean, they are the greatest enemy.
[00:48:55]  And they'll never admit it.
[00:48:56]  If you waterboarded them, if you electric them like an Iraqi, they'd still never admit it.
[00:49:02]  No, because they'd pass a lie detector test.
[00:49:04]  And it's also, it's kind of true in their worlds.
[00:49:07]  I mean, like, if you grow up in these, like, you know, the 10 of the 13 richest counties in the country that are all outside Washington, D.C., and you go to these elite private schools and your world is completely white.
[00:49:18]  I mean, you know, they have like some token diversity or something like that, you know, but it's like 95% white.
[00:49:24]  And they go, yeah, white people are privileged.
[00:49:26]  Everyone white I know is privileged.
[00:49:28]  It's like, it's true in their world.
[00:49:30]  And what they know of black people is kind of like what they see in hip-hop videos or something like that.
[00:49:34]  It's like, yeah, I don't know.
[00:49:34]  They seem pretty oppressed.
[00:49:36]  We're pretty privileged.
[00:49:36]  And that, like, it's almost true to them.
[00:49:38]  But if you want to, I mean, it all, this is the number that I try to bring up a lot.
[00:49:43]  This, I was talking about this in the speeches I was giving around the country at LP events, but this is according to the Federal Reserve.
[00:49:48]  And the Federal Reserve is actually very good at this.
[00:49:50]  I mean, they're an evil institution, but in terms of keeping data, they're very good at that.
[00:49:54]  And they, so according to the Federal Reserve, between the year 2007 and 2010, the average American net worth decreased by 40%.
[00:50:05]  40% of American wealth evaporated.
[00:50:07]  It didn't really evaporate.
[00:50:08]  It was transferred, right?
[00:50:09]  From like the regular class to the elite class.
[00:50:13]  And now a decent amount of that came back, but it came back through reinflating the bubble and kind of you collecting the crumbs while these people got rich and became millionaires.
[00:50:24]  And I mean, you want to talk about economic anxiety.
[00:50:27]  I mean, look, I've never been through anything like that before.
[00:50:30]  And I was kind of a young person in those days.
[00:50:34]  But I mean, just imagine being like a family of four, a family of five, and having 40% of your net worth evaporate.
[00:50:42]  I mean, this is like something that this will profoundly affect the way you are for the rest of your life, even if you got it back.
[00:50:49]  And they didn't really get all of it back.
[00:50:51]  They didn't really participate in the recovery.
[00:50:53]  But even if you got it back, just the fact that you could lose that all so quickly.
[00:50:56]  Like, is something that will, yeah, you want to talk about anxiety.
[00:50:59]  I mean, this is like something that will change somebody psychologically.
[00:51:02]  Like, whoa, we really need to have somebody in here who's looking to protect me.
[00:51:07]  What a shocker that the guy who said, I'm going to bring your jobs back and win for you was appealing to many of these people.
[00:51:13]  Many of these same people who Obama was appealing to when he said he was going to end these wars.
[00:51:18]  And the science proves it there.
[00:51:20]  I mean, the margin of victory for Trump was the same people who voted for Obama.
[00:51:24]  That was how racist they were.
[00:51:26]  They were Obama voters who said they either stayed home for Hillary or they switched and voted for Trump like Reagan Democrats.
[00:51:32]  You know, no, no, no, but the truth is, and this is what's so infuriating about this kind of like racialist, like identitarian stuff is that average working class black people and average working class white people have way more in common than they do with the Taylor Lorenzas of the world.
[00:51:47]  It's like all of us, like all of us have are way more the most people want to like raise their family, have a decent enough house, you know, be able to afford decent health insurance, be able to send their kids to school, like the very basic things.
[00:52:03]  That is, that is what the priorities of most Americans are, most regular people is like, hey, I want to have all that.
[00:52:10]  And it'd be cool if I have a little money left over to like maybe take the kids on vacation once a year.
[00:52:14]  Like that's basically the priorities of most people.
[00:52:16]  Most people do not exist in this like insane identitarian world or this kind of like this, even this like politically tribalist world.
[00:52:26]  This is really more of a comment on this like elite ruling class than it is on regular Americans.
[00:52:32]  Yeah, totally right.
[00:52:33]  And listen, speaking of the Federal Reserve, there's this great book.
[00:52:35]  Well, it's not great, but it's worth reading.
[00:52:37]  It's called The Secrets of the Temple.
[00:52:39]  It's basically the Washington Post version of the creature from Jekyll Island.
[00:52:43]  Oh, yeah, I've never read.
[00:52:44]  I've heard of this book.
[00:52:45]  I've never read it.
[00:52:46]  So it's William Grider.
[00:52:47]  And essentially, he's mad that Volcker raised interest rates in order to crush the inflation of the last great stagflation of the 1970s there, which was horrible.
[00:52:56]  I mean, they, in other words, it's hard for people to understand maybe if they don't know much about this, but read nises.org and catch up.
[00:53:04]  But essentially, the stimulus policy of the 70s was the boom that never came, right?
[00:53:13]  They just kept inflating and inflating and inflating, and yet unemployment remained high.
[00:53:18]  It was Jimmy Carter's like horrible malaise speech and all this.
[00:53:22]  And I forget the inflation rate, but it was out of control.
[00:53:25]  So Paul Volcker came in.
[00:53:27]  And what's the solution to a period of artificial prosperity, even if it doesn't even feel prosperous at all?
[00:53:35]  The only way to liquidate all those bad debts and beat that inflation is if you have central banking, it's not to allow the free market to operate.
[00:53:43]  It's to then force a recession.
[00:53:46]  So Paul Volcker raised interest rates eventually up to like 23%.
[00:53:51]  Yeah.
[00:53:51]  And just absolutely put the American economy, the American people in a headlock, in an absolute stranglehold in order.
[00:53:58]  Cause in their eyes, geez, we already printed all this money.
[00:54:02]  The only way to stop the inflation is to force the American people to stop borrowing it.
[00:54:09]  Right.
[00:54:09]  And the only way to do that is to drive them into bankruptcy.
[00:54:14]  And that'll beat the inflation.
[00:54:15]  And then what they do, Dave, they immediately crank.
[00:54:17]  He resigned.
[00:54:18]  They cranked the rates right back down to 2% or whatever it was.
[00:54:21]  And they had another big bubble that popped in 87.
[00:54:25]  So what the hell?
[00:54:26]  You might as well have just kept it anyway, right?
[00:54:28]  But anyway, so during this time of the forced recession, is what Greer is complaining about here is the suffering of the American people through this time.
[00:54:35]  He's really right about this.
[00:54:36]  Yeah.
[00:54:37]  And it wasn't so much like it was, you know, oh, and they're cutting taxes at the same time, which was, you know, stimulative and therefore inflationary at the same time, they're trying to put the economy in a stranglehold.
[00:54:49]  You know, so the whole thing was a government program.
[00:54:50]  It was completely, you know, stupid.
[00:54:52]  But anyway, point is, they kept charts at the Federal Reserve.
[00:54:55]  You talk about all the data that they keep.
[00:54:57]  They kept charts, not just of the different rates and all of these things, but they keep charts of bankruptcies, business, and personal bankruptcies.
[00:55:08]  They keep track of divorces and foster care and murder rates and all of these things.
[00:55:15]  They know at the Federal Reserve, at that Eccles building, their little, you know, bean counters and number crunchers know they cause men to stick guns in their mouths and blow their brains out.
[00:55:28]  Right.
[00:55:28]  That's what they do.
[00:55:30]  And they know that if they turn the dial a little this way or they turn the dial a little this way, a guy's going to blow his brains out.
[00:55:36]  And his kid's going to go to foster care.
[00:55:38]  And they know it.
[00:55:39]  And then they do it anyway.
[00:55:40]  And they measure their valor as doing the right thing, no matter how horrible it is.
[00:55:47]  Because look, they're central bankers.
[00:55:49]  So all they can do is screw us coming or going, right?
[00:55:52]  One way or the other.
[00:55:53]  They're either punishing us through inflation or they're punishing us through a forced recession when they finally panic about how much inflation they caused.
[00:56:01]  And so, and then the American people are just completely jerked around in the middle.
[00:56:04]  And I just know, and this is not a scientific study, but my job is reading the damn news all day, every day.
[00:56:09]  It's all I do.
[00:56:10]  And I know that in 2009 and 2010 and 11, they're right in that era.
[00:56:15]  It's just constant, just every day, all day long.
[00:56:18]  Man kills kids, wife, self, man kills kids, wife, self over and over and over and over again.
[00:56:25]  Man kills mother self.
[00:56:27]  And what it all is over and over again is these men who, you know, the cliche is it Hazlitt who said this that we all suffer the effects of inflation, but not one man in 10,000 understands what is happening to him, right?
[00:56:40]  So this seems like the force of nature, you know, that just comes and blows you away.
[00:56:45]  Or if not a force of nature, maybe it's just your own damn failings.
[00:56:50]  That here, you're supposed to be a man and take care of your family, and you only got one set of skills.
[00:56:56]  And now the company's closed down and you've been laid off.
[00:56:59]  And now you got no health care.
[00:57:01]  You lost your health insurance because, of course, the government made it where you get your health insurance through your company.
[00:57:06]  So if you don't have a company, you don't have any health care.
[00:57:08]  And so if your mom has cancer, now she just dies of cancer, you know, and that's just the way, you know.
[00:57:14]  So I remember this one sticks in my head: the guy's old mom was sick, and he just like when she was asleep, he like covered her face and shot her in the heart and killed her.
[00:57:25]  And then he blew his own brains out and he left a big note about how sorry he was that he couldn't take care of business and whatever.
[00:57:31]  It's not his fault.
[00:57:32]  It was Andrea Mitchell's husband, Alan Greenspan, who did it to him.
[00:57:38]  But he didn't even know who to be mad at.
[00:57:40]  He could only despair.
[00:57:41]  And he didn't know who could help him because there was nobody to help him.
[00:57:44]  Yeah, it's why it's so much more.
[00:57:46]  It's and Rothbard wrote this as well: why the it's the most insidious of like government taxes, which it is in effect.
[00:57:52]  Because at least if it's like they raise your income tax, you know exactly what did it to you and what took your money.
[00:57:57]  Whereas when they have these inflationary policies, it comes years later.
[00:58:00]  A bunch of people blame it on different things.
[00:58:02]  You see that right now with Putin being blamed for price inflation and stuff like that.
[00:58:06]  And they blame the speculators and all of this.
[00:58:08]  And then it's all just so vague and ambiguous.
[00:58:10]  And you don't know.
[00:58:11]  And look, for every article like that, like the most drastic thing where someone kills their wife or something like that.
[00:58:19]  I mean, how many of it just like the anxiety led to like all this bickering that ended up destroying a marriage that ended up having kids raised in a broken family?
[00:58:28]  That I mean, those are like way more common than just like slightly more subtle ones where still like lives are just never what they would have been or could have been if it was, you know, just like the worst.
[00:58:38]  A lot of the suicides are based on that same dynamic, right?
[00:58:41]  That like, well, if I can't be the father of this family, it's not like I'm going to let some other man come in and take my place.
[00:58:47]  And I'll be damned if I'm going to let that happen.
[00:58:49]  Some other man is going to come and raise my kids or whatever.
[00:58:52]  And then in that, in that despair, that's the choice that they make.
[00:58:56]  That's just, it's a, you know, I'd like to see the statistics on that.
[00:59:00]  The suicides and the murder suicides and see the line graph compared to the boom bust cycle generated by America's central bank.
[00:59:10]  Yeah.
[00:59:10]  You know, no, absolutely.
[00:59:12]  Yeah.
[00:59:12]  Along with the rise of pro-socialist sentiment in America.
[00:59:15]  You know, I saw a thing on Twitter last week where they're going on about the price of house.
[00:59:21]  I see this all the time.
[00:59:22]  See it on Reddit all the time.
[00:59:23]  Reddit is so socialist and left.
[00:59:25]  And they nobody, and look, not one man in 10,000 understands the force going on behind this, right?
[00:59:30]  You can't blame him.
[00:59:31]  I saw this kid.
[00:59:32]  He says, you know, I moved out of my parents' house.
[00:59:34]  The house across the street was $138,000.
[00:59:37]  And my idea was I was going to go to college.
[00:59:39]  I was going to come back and I was going to buy that house, right?
[00:59:42]  I came back from college and the house is now worth $400,000.
[00:59:46]  And it just sold for $800,000, $700,000,000, right?
[00:59:52]  At the height of this mania, this, this bubble going on right now.
[00:59:55]  And again, because of the zero percent interest rates that you cite there.
[00:59:59]  And the kid just says, and all of Reddit agrees, we need communism.
[01:00:05]  It's just not fair.
[01:00:07]  What are you supposed to do?
[01:00:08]  Just sleep under a damn bridge?
[01:00:11]  Where are you supposed to sleep?
[01:00:12]  My rent for this house, just rent is $1,800 a month.
[01:00:17]  You know, they just kicked Consortium News off of PayPal.
[01:00:20]  They kicked me off of PayPal.
[01:00:23]  I'm living in my truck.
[01:00:26]  You know, people, and look, I choose to be an anti-war activist for a living, but there are people who work really goddamn hard for what they have, a lot harder than me.
[01:00:37]  You know, sorry for labor theory of value here, but who, and, and who've made proper arrangements to trade value on the market for a decent living, who get completely, you know, the rug completely pulled out from under them every eight or 10 years, over and over and over again.
[01:00:56]  And then, you know, the other more most important margin that should never go unmentioned is the IRS.
[01:01:02]  You know, I got a skater buddy of mine, not political at all, dude.
[01:01:05]  He's just a dude, worked his whole life.
[01:01:08]  Friend came up with the idea, man, let's sell furniture.
[01:01:11]  I got really great wholesalers and I got a really great gig for the for the location and the thing and the whatever.
[01:01:17]  And they went into business selling furniture.
[01:01:19]  It's just a mom and pop, literally like my friend and his wife running this thing.
[01:01:24]  And they're gone now.
[01:01:25]  He's got a, at least he's working.
[01:01:28]  He's got a job now, but his business is over because of the internal revenue service just came to extort him and take every bit of profit that he ever squeezed out of that thing.
[01:01:40]  And so now, you know, I go on and on about this agency and this agency, goddamn ATF, Pentagon, CIA, and IRS.
[01:01:49]  And he goes, IRS.
[01:01:51]  Yeah.
[01:01:52]  Yeah.
[01:01:52]  They're the ones who destroyed you in order to pay for the rest of these guys to destroy everybody else.
[01:01:58]  You know, and just think of just how completely insane it is.
[01:02:04]  Like just how irrational it is in the first place to have income tax.
[01:02:09]  Like if you are a socialist and you want to destroy capitalism, then that makes a lot of sense, right?
[01:02:16]  If you're just a government employee and you just want money without working, fine.

=== Taxing the Economic Middle (08:28) ===

[01:02:20]  Okay, sure.
[01:02:21]  But assuming the premise that we have a capitalist society at all, how can you have a system of fines where the more you earn, in other words, the more successful you are, the more trouble you're in.
[01:02:36]  And the higher your fine is.
[01:02:38]  It's a crime to be productive.
[01:02:40]  It's a crime to be productive.
[01:02:42]  And you must confess the Fifth Amendment won't protect you either.
[01:02:45]  You must confess, you must account for every nickel and dime out of every account.
[01:02:49]  I mean, there's your cashless society right there.
[01:02:51]  They don't even have to ban paper money.
[01:02:53]  They just make it where you have to put everything on a card so that you have a record of it for when they audit you.
[01:03:01]  And you can try to get away with saying, no, that time I filled up the tank doesn't count because that was for I had to travel for work or whatever it is.
[01:03:09]  You know, you have to account for every nickel and dime in and out in America, the land of the free and the land of supposedly private property and free market capitalism.
[01:03:18]  You're telling me there's not a better way than that.
[01:03:22]  And of course, as any dingback could tell you, Dave, because anybody knows, as we've been discussing, they just type the money up all day.
[01:03:31]  Why do they even need to tax us through income taxation at all?
[01:03:36]  Again, if you're a commie, you'd support that kind of inflation and destroy all the savings of the middle class and everything else.
[01:03:42]  But if they can just type up the money all day, then why do we even have an IRS at all?
[01:03:47]  Except as a form of enslavement, except as a form of making every single individual in America accountable to the national government for everything they buy and sell, which sounds to me like totalitarianism.
[01:04:02]  It is.
[01:04:03]  And I'm not just saying that because they're coming for me for more money than I could ever pay for the rest of my life that I couldn't possibly owe them right now.
[01:04:10]  But I've been saying this my whole life too.
[01:04:13]  You know, on behalf of everybody else whose lives they've destroyed.
[01:04:17]  And I've met, you know, I think I know you know, some of your listeners may know I drove a cab for about eight years back around the turn of the century back then.
[01:04:26]  And I met 50,000 dudes.
[01:04:28]  And I swear to God, I met a thousand been ruined by the IRS with just an absolute horror story to tell.
[01:04:34]  So like anyone out there who your cousin works for the IRS or someone in your family works for the IRS, you should ridicule them until they quit.
[01:04:42]  You should just be absolutely merciless.
[01:04:45]  If you have to like put them in a headlock and give them a noogie until they cry, uncle, or whatever you have to do to bully anyone you know out of participating.
[01:04:53]  And look, just like the Soviet Union, like Ron Paul says about even the Soviet Union, when the people said, enough of this, we're not going to support this anymore.
[01:05:00]  The whole thing just unraveled.
[01:05:02]  Well, what if the IRS all stopped showing up for work because their cousins all kicked their ass, you know, or their older brothers?
[01:05:10]  And just, look, I'm not letting you go to work at the IRS.
[01:05:12]  You're going to have to get a real job.
[01:05:14]  I'm going to slash your tires.
[01:05:15]  You're not going.
[01:05:16]  Yeah.
[01:05:17]  You know, that's what I would do if someone in my family was in the IRS.
[01:05:20]  I would ridicule them like at Christmas in front of everyone who would cry.
[01:05:24]  And then that would be the end of that.
[01:05:26]  Yeah.
[01:05:26]  Well, it really is.
[01:05:28]  It's like when you think about it in the abstract, like when you're like, imagine we didn't have this system and then someone proposed this system.
[01:05:36]  You'd be like, oh, you're proposing, you're proposing to enslave free men in the United States of America.
[01:05:41]  Like that's what's completely crazy.
[01:05:43]  And, you know, even commies like aside, but even just like the people with like socialist, you know, like leanings.
[01:05:52]  This is one of the things that was a real like awakening and disturbing like thing to me was after I became a libertarian.
[01:05:58]  Now talk to some of these like left-leaning people about this stuff where it'd be like, but wouldn't can't we all get on board?
[01:06:04]  Since like you guys care about the working class so much, like can't we stop taxing them?
[01:06:08]  Wouldn't you all be on board with like not taxing the workers?
[01:06:11]  Like, hey, you're always talking about how we have to figure out a way to get more wealth to the working class.
[01:06:15]  Like, why don't we start by letting them keep their salary?
[01:06:18]  Wouldn't that be a good start?
[01:06:19]  And it's never, I mean, it never appeals to them.
[01:06:22]  It's always, it's like really is this almost like religious, you know, statist view that it's like, no, this has to be done through the government.
[01:06:29]  There's not another way.
[01:06:30]  But then they always invoke taxing the rich.
[01:06:32]  This is always the way it's sold.
[01:06:34]  You know what I mean?
[01:06:35]  But it's like, okay, fine.
[01:06:36]  Even if I can't convince you of that, that it's better, you know, like that on, you know, a utilitarian level, it's better to let these rich people allocate resources the way they do.
[01:06:46]  But you're telling me that you can justify in any way a person making, I mean, if you're making like $50,000 a year, which I still have my 90s brain on, where that sounds like a good salary.
[01:06:57]  Oh, someone's making $50,000, but you got a family of four, you make $50,000 a year right now, you're drowning.
[01:07:02]  I mean, you're drowning.
[01:07:03]  We can't at least say that person shouldn't be paying any taxes.
[01:07:07]  The system we have now is that people like at that tax bracket with families of four, they pay taxes and then have to go back on government assistance because they still don't make enough money to, but they have to pay their taxes and then go beg for money from the government.
[01:07:20]  I mean, who could defend that?
[01:07:22]  Shouldn't they at least have the dignity of just being able to like keep their own money and just not have to beg for it?
[01:07:29]  I mean, I think the only way it makes logical sense is if you are a full-fledged communist determined to see real end of capitalism, right?
[01:07:38]  If you want to destroy the system, yeah.
[01:07:40]  I mean, I had this conversation with Max Blumenthal about, um, I mean, this was a private conversation, but I don't think this part, I think it's okay to talk about this.
[01:07:49]  Yeah.
[01:07:50]  Um, he has been very vocal recently, especially about the COVID regimes and the lockdowns and contracts for the tracking app on your phone to whoever and all of these things.
[01:08:02]  He's been doing great journalism in the Blumenthal style on all of this.
[01:08:05]  He got really frustrated with the left.
[01:08:07]  And, you know, he's he's a leftist.
[01:08:09]  He's to the left of the progressives.
[01:08:10]  He's some kind of socialist or something.
[01:08:12]  You know what I mean?
[01:08:12]  Definitely would never call himself a liberal or a Democrat, you know, definitely a leftist.
[01:08:18]  But he got so pissed off at the leftists because of look who's being hurt by the lockdowns.
[01:08:24]  It's not a bunch of latte drinking limousine liberals writing for slate who never leave the house anyway.
[01:08:30]  It's working people, the people they claim to care about, liberals and leftists and progressives who are really suffering economically here.
[01:08:40]  And it to him, it just didn't make any sense that all of those working people, I mean, you want to like these liberals just think of the small business owners, but the employees are only their exploited victims, not people who really need that job and wanted to keep it, please.
[01:08:57]  You know, this kind of attitude.
[01:08:59]  And I think he didn't get it.
[01:09:01]  I think he was asking me, like, what the hell?
[01:09:03]  You know, and I was saying, I mean, my only explanation is, and I think that this is right, is that small business owners are the enemy too to the communists.
[01:09:13]  That working, you know, even salaried or hourly employees, wage earners, essentially are the enemy, are participating in the evil enemy capitalist system.
[01:09:26]  And the worst part of capitalism isn't the evil rich billionaires.
[01:09:30]  Their day will come.
[01:09:31]  The worst part of capitalism is the middle class, which I'm not, I'm quoting the commies thinking here.
[01:09:37]  This is not me for anyone who wants to be in the commie way of thinking.
[01:09:42]  The middle class stands between the poor and revolution.
[01:09:47]  They're the cushion who will show up with the guns to protect the evil rich oligarchs from the poor masses who would otherwise overthrow them and create a communist utopia or whatever.
[01:09:58]  So if we can bankrupt them through lockdowns or through inflation or through whatever it is, we can run every small business owner out of business, then they will have to drop their pretensions of ever being a larger business owner.
[01:10:12]  And then they'll all be so poor and hungry and desperate like the rest of us, then they'll join with us poor people.
[01:10:21]  Supposedly, not that the commies are ever really led.
[01:10:23]  Yeah, they're never right, right?
[01:10:24]  They're never really the poor people, but right.
[01:10:26]  But yeah, anyway, I mean, identifying, yeah, led by the poorest professor down at the university, um, uh, will then be able to overthrow the rich because they'll have enough of the people on their side.
[01:10:37]  So, those if the middle has to be made to suffer in order to be won over to the further left, then that's the answer.
[01:10:44]  By the middle, I mean economic middle has to be made to suffer to get them to move left politically.

=== Quitting Smoking with Fume (02:34) ===

[01:10:49]  Then that's the program.
[01:10:50]  That's why it makes perfect sense.
[01:10:52]  That's why there's not a contradiction there.
[01:10:53]  Geez, we're hurting poor people.
[01:10:55]  Yeah, I mean, we're hurting them now, but we're leading to a better future, you know?
[01:11:00]  Yeah, we just got to break some eggs.
[01:11:01]  And then, but for Blumenthal, he's like, Well, that's absolutely intolerable.
[01:11:05]  F you, what are you talking about?
[01:11:07]  He's talking about people going hungry.
[01:11:08]  He's talking about people's families being torn apart, you know, talking about some eggs and omelets, you know?
[01:11:16]  So, I really respect that guy.
[01:11:17]  You know, we disagree on a lot of things, but um, I don't give a damn because he's good on the stuff that matters to me.
[01:11:22]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is fume.
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[01:13:12]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[01:13:14]  Yeah.
[01:13:15]  All right.
[01:13:15]  Well, speaking of, because we got to wrap up soon, but speaking of the stuff that matters to you, I do want to, before I, you know, we went off on a lot of stuff I didn't plan on, but it was great.

=== NATO, Russia, and War Risks (15:26) ===

[01:13:24]  But tell us what's the latest from what you can ascertain of what's going on in Ukraine.
[01:13:32]  Obviously, in the fog of war, it's hard to always know exactly what's going on.
[01:13:37]  It does seem to me at first, I was really not sure whether this was like complete propaganda where they're constantly mocking Putin, how he's failing, and it's not going as well as he thought.
[01:13:49]  There were a lot of people who are kind of pointing out like, now, actually, a lot of this isn't accurate.
[01:13:53]  But now I'm starting to think that might be more the case.
[01:13:57]  What's your assessment of like what's going on in the war?
[01:14:01]  Yeah, I think that's a good way to frame it.
[01:14:03]  I just interviewed Colonel McGregor yesterday.
[01:14:05]  It just posted.
[01:14:06]  Okay.
[01:14:06]  People want to check that out.
[01:14:07]  It's on my YouTube channel and scotthorton.org and all that.
[01:14:12]  Stitcher and Spotify and iTunes.
[01:14:16]  So, a week ago, I talked with William Arkin.
[01:14:20]  Now, I know he pissed off a lot of my listeners, but I respect the guy.
[01:14:24]  We don't agree on everything either.
[01:14:26]  But he is a straight shooter.
[01:14:29]  And his case essentially was part one: the Russians do suck and they've been having their asses handed to them this whole time, which is, you know, very much the CNN narrative.
[01:14:38]  But I would, you know, temper people's harsh reaction against that with acknowledging that he made two other major points, which are three.
[01:14:48]  One, which was bogus accusations of genocide were used to disrupt and destroy the negotiations, which is not a CNN narrative.
[01:14:59]  It's the genocide that was.
[01:15:02]  Another one was that all this talk about, oh, now we need to increase military spending because of the Russian threat.
[01:15:11]  Well, all that is obviously BS.
[01:15:13]  The military has all the money it needs and more.
[01:15:16]  And this war proves, in his view, that the Russian military is a paper tiger.
[01:15:21]  They're not coming against a NATO country.
[01:15:23]  And if this show, if CNN agrees with him that, and the Congress all agrees with him that this war shows Russian weakness, then they should agree with him that our Pentagon doesn't need any more money because we can handle them, no problem.
[01:15:37]  If the Ukrainians can handle them, then Poland sure as hell can.
[01:15:41]  What threat is he to take over half of Europe if he can't even handle it?
[01:15:46]  And then his other argument was we should be in ceasefire negotiations now and damn the Democrats for not doing everything they can to end this war.
[01:15:55]  And the first order of business should be giving Putin an out and finding a way to compromise that is agreeable to all.
[01:16:02]  It might not look nice, but to end the fighting before this thing gets any worse and any more dangerous.
[01:16:07]  So in other words, people might not like all of what he says, but clearly he's not carrying water for anybody.
[01:16:13]  He's got his own opinions about these things.
[01:16:15]  So I asked McGregor about what Arkin said.
[01:16:18]  And McGregor actually agreed with quite a bit of it.
[01:16:22]  I think he thought one major area of disagreement was the giant convoy that moved toward Kiev that then stopped and then eventually turned around.
[01:16:33]  Now, McGregor thinks that that was a feint and was essentially designed to prevent any armed forces in the north of Ukraine from moving south to engage them there.
[01:16:45]  And that this would keep them bogged down in the north.
[01:16:47]  Now, Arkin dismissed that, said it was too many men for a diversion.
[01:16:50]  It was a failure, is what it was to him.
[01:16:54]  And McGregor was like, eh, we don't really know either way for sure, but looks like it was a diversion to me.
[01:17:01]  Anyway, their primary goal obviously was to take the land between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula.
[01:17:09]  That's the coast of Azov there between, you know, where Mariupol, the city of Mariupol is.
[01:17:15]  And this is essentially the southern part of Donbass.
[01:17:18]  And they're creating this, what they call the land bridge, right?
[01:17:23]  Essentially creating a continuous, contiguous area between Russia and Crimea.
[01:17:29]  It's very important that they guarantee fresh water sources for Crimea.
[01:17:33]  So they were willing to negotiate about that, but the Ukrainian side wasn't so.
[01:17:39]  Now, the most important thing I think that McGregor said was, again, echoing Arkin, that these accusations of genocide were built up and destroyed the negotiations.
[01:17:54]  We had two tracks of negotiations going on.
[01:17:56]  The Israeli prime minister was at least shuttling back and forth, but they were holding real talks in Turkey.
[01:18:02]  Right.
[01:18:02]  That all of that ended with the reports of the massacre in this town of Buka or Buka, north of Kiev.
[01:18:12]  When the Russians withdrew, they found bodies in the street.
[01:18:14]  It's not altogether clear whether the Russians killed them or there are at least some indications that they were killed by people punishing them for supposedly being collaborators with the Russians.
[01:18:27]  Like they had Russian MREs, you know, meals, food rations next to their bodies and had their hands tied with white scarves, which are ties that was meant to signify that they were Russian traitors.
[01:18:41]  So that's at least a possibility.
[01:18:43]  I'm not certain about that, but it doesn't matter because we're still talking about what dozens of people, and they go, oh, it's genocide.
[01:18:48]  It's systematic genocide and murder, which is totally just not true.
[01:18:52]  As Arkin said, the Russians aren't fighting very well off-road.
[01:18:55]  He compared it to when America invaded Iraq.
[01:18:57]  They just cut straight through the desert to Baghdad.
[01:19:00]  But in this case, they have to stick to the roads.
[01:19:04]  And so, because it's just boggy, wet ground and whatever, they're not very good off-road, the Russian tanks, whatever.
[01:19:10]  So they have to stick to the roads.
[01:19:11]  That means there's fighting in the towns all over the place and civilians are being killed.
[01:19:15]  No question about it.
[01:19:15]  It's horrible fighting going on everywhere.
[01:19:17]  But the idea that this is genocide, it's a systematic destruction of Ukraine and all of that is, as Arkin put it, was just political in order to thwart the negotiations.
[01:19:28]  Or I don't know if he put it that way.
[01:19:30]  It certainly was used for the effect of thwarting the negotiations.
[01:19:33]  Sure looks like hyperbole for that purpose to me.
[01:19:36]  And well, and you mix that with the fact that people over here are being quite open about wanting to prolong the war.
[01:19:43]  And so, I mean, if they're saying that, then you would think that negotiations would be the enemy of that strategy, right?
[01:19:49]  I mean, if you're trying to just keep sending in billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine, as like Hillary Clinton has openly said, they want to have this be a long drawn out conflict.
[01:19:58]  A few people in Biden's administration have said that.
[01:20:00]  Well, if that's the case, then what's the negotiated ceasefire is the enemy of prolonging and bleeding out the Russians.
[01:20:08]  Right.
[01:20:08]  Yeah.
[01:20:09]  No, Blinken and Austin, both Secretary of State and Defense, have both said they want to, the point now is to weaken Russia and to hurt Russia.
[01:20:17]  Well, so now, one point where, another point where Arkin and McGregor agreed was that the Russians invaded from 20 different directions at once, kind of thing.
[01:20:28]  The Americans invaded Iraq from Kuwait.
[01:20:30]  Again, it was this giant spear, which in fact, I didn't talk about this with McGregor, but I'm pretty sure he was the one who came up with the plan for how to do it when they invaded from Kuwait in 2003.
[01:20:43]  And it was essentially, we take our 3rd Infantry Division and our Marine Corps, and we race them at full speed and they smash the hell out of anyone in their way.
[01:20:51]  But it's this focused kind of force.
[01:20:54]  The Russians invaded kind of from all around eastern Ukraine and were just way too divided.
[01:21:01]  And possibly for PR reasons, they didn't send in the Air Force to soften up all the targets first, as the Americans did in both Iraq wars.
[01:21:11]  And possibly like they believed that they'd be greeted as liberators in the east of the country, at least.
[01:21:17]  And so we don't want to piss people off too much by doing, you know, bombing more than we have to and this kind of thing, try to keep it minimal, which of course didn't work.
[01:21:24]  Nobody likes being invaded, even like pro-Russian, you know, and Russian ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.
[01:21:29]  I mean, they want to be invaded and conquered by the Russians.
[01:21:33]  So that's for backfired.
[01:21:35]  But so McGregor said, like, yeah, they did, you know, certainly take some losses because of that strategy of being spread too thin in too many different directions.
[01:21:45]  But now they focus their strategy.
[01:21:46]  And he said, as a consequence of the failure of the negotiations, they've announced that they are going to Transnistria.
[01:21:56]  Now, I don't know if you have a map on the wall in front of you here, Dave, but on the far western side of Ukraine, there's it's Poland and then Romania and then Moldova.
[01:22:09]  But there's this little strip of land on the border of Ukraine and Moldova called Transnistria, and which I guess means beyond the Dnieper River.
[01:22:21]  Maybe it's a different river.
[01:22:22]  Anyway, so it's right there on the border.
[01:22:25]  This is essentially a breakaway province of Moldova that is loyal to Russia and is protected, so-called, by Russian peacekeepers there.
[01:22:34]  It's like a 15-mile-wide strip of land on the border there.
[01:22:37]  It's the west bank of whichever river.
[01:22:40]  My map isn't good enough here.
[01:22:43]  But anyway, so it's a pretty easy argument for the Russians to say, oh, no, the Russians in Transnistria are threatened.
[01:22:51]  And so we're going there.
[01:22:52]  And that's indeed what a Russian general said last week.
[01:22:55]  Now, the problem is it's going to take them a while to get there.
[01:22:58]  But according to McGregor, it's a long, tough slog, but they're going.
[01:23:02]  So you can picture essentially this belt region all across southern Ukraine.
[01:23:08]  McGregor says he believes the Russian objective now will be to leave Ukraine a landlocked country, that where the Ukrainians are Ukrainians or are Ukrainian, he's not going.
[01:23:19]  But in the southern part where they're all Russia and this all goes back to little Russia under Catherine the Great and all that from back then, that, yeah, they're going to reestablish all of that.
[01:23:31]  So they're going to means that they're going to take the city of Odessa.
[01:23:35]  So they're going to take essentially like a sizable portion of the east and south of Ukraine and incorporate that into Russia.
[01:23:43]  Exactly right.
[01:23:45]  Yeah.
[01:23:46]  And I mean, I have to say, dude, that I don't know the difference.
[01:23:54]  It's too hard for me to tell.
[01:23:55]  And I don't know exactly the difference that the weapons the Americans are bringing in makes.
[01:24:00]  McGregor seemed to play all that down.
[01:24:02]  He goes, oh, the Germans, so the Poles or the Germans, I think it was the Poles delivered 50 tanks to the Ukrainians.
[01:24:11]  And McGregor is the hero of the great tank battle of Iraq War I, by the way.
[01:24:15]  So he knows exactly what the hell he's talking about when he says this.
[01:24:18]  Right.
[01:24:18]  He goes, you don't just jump in a tank and start driving it.
[01:24:22]  I mean, these guys have to be trained severely for weeks and weeks and weeks how to be a tank crew and run a tank effectively.
[01:24:30]  And they just don't have that.
[01:24:31]  They just don't have enough men.
[01:24:33]  They don't have enough experienced men.
[01:24:35]  You don't just drop off a howitzer and start firing it.
[01:24:38]  You have to be trained on how to use a howitzer.
[01:24:41]  So how effective all this is going to be is very much in doubt.
[01:24:45]  In fact, the Russians just blasted a warehouse full of these weapons with missiles the other day, five, six days ago, which I guess is fine for the Americans.
[01:24:55]  They're just getting rid of inventories and replenishing them is mostly what they care about here, I guess.
[01:25:01]  But McGregor didn't seem to think that increased American arms were going to be much more effective than they already have been.
[01:25:07]  I think the javelin missiles seem to be moderately effective against Russian armor, but they can seem to adapt to that.
[01:25:14]  And I don't know how long it's supposed to take, but he said it'll be a slow slog grind all the way across southern Ukraine.
[01:25:24]  And I says, well, they don't even have all the Donbass yet.
[01:25:27]  Okay, so they'll finish taking all the Donbass.
[01:25:29]  And then it'll be a slow, long slog all the way across the south of Ukraine.
[01:25:33]  And don't tell Larissa I said this because she's from Odessa and she's terrified what's going to happen to Odessa.
[01:25:38]  And I'm pretty damn worried about it too.
[01:25:42]  You know, it's a pretty big city.
[01:25:45]  And I don't know how easy it'll be to take.
[01:25:47]  I don't know like how that battle's going to play out.
[01:25:50]  Maybe they can drive right by it.
[01:25:52]  Just lay siege to the thing somehow, take it over without blasting it.
[01:25:55]  I don't know what's going to happen, but um, but and then if they do that, Dave, I mean, if they take all of southern Ukraine and all uh you know to the Transnistria and all of that, I mean, what does that mean for the future of American and Russian relations now?
[01:26:12]  I mean, for all of our wasted breath on how America was picking this fight for through the years, and I got the damned archives at scotthorton.org/slash archives to prove it.
[01:26:25]  Um, now that this has happened, I mean, he is wearing the devil costume that they have created for him to the nth degree now, and and and from the Russian point of view.
[01:26:42]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:26:43]  I think McGregor seemed to think that like these talks that are now off, but that was it.
[01:26:49]  You know, now there's not talks, now there's just war, and this is just going to keep escalating.
[01:26:55]  And, you know, I'm not predicting this, I'm not trying to be too alarmist about it.
[01:27:02]  I don't see like a direct, like obvious path to war between NATO and Russia here, other than probably a miscalculation on one side or the other about what the other side would do if we did this.
[01:27:16]  Right.
[01:27:16]  Maybe Putin's cabinet decides, you know what, we need to start smashing arms depots inside Poland.
[01:27:22]  As long as we just stick to the arms depots only and we don't send in men or anything, but we just hit them with missiles, maybe we should do that.
[01:27:29]  Or maybe they, you know, kill Americans training Ukrainian forces in Poland.
[01:27:39]  Or, I mean, there are Brits training them on using the howitzers or whatever it was.
[01:27:45]  I'm sorry, I forgot what it was.
[01:27:46]  Brits were training them on in Kiev.
[01:27:50]  How about the Russians kill a bunch of Americans on a or Brits on an official military mission inside the country or something like this?
[01:27:58]  Like we're and frankly, like you know, I'm writing a book about this now.
[01:28:05]  I've been doing a bunch of research on the different lawyers' takes on what makes us a co-belligerent or not.
[01:28:11]  And in fact, even David Sanger in the New York Times said, oh, these arms transfers make us a co-belligerent, period.
[01:28:21]  Like that's just, that was David Sanger reporting to you a fact.
[01:28:25]  Like he wasn't even saying, I talked to a lawyer and the lawyer told me this.
[01:28:28]  He was just saying there is essentially no denying the fact that America and our NATO allies are now co-belligerents in this war.
[01:28:36]  And, you know, this isn't Vietnam, which was what, like 3,000 miles away from Russia, all the way across China from Russia, you know?
[01:28:47]  Right.
[01:28:48]  This is right on Russia's border.

=== The Nuclear First Strike Strategy (04:40) ===

[01:28:50]  We're fighting this proxy war.
[01:28:52]  And there have been attacks by the Ukrainians inside Russian border, inside the Russian borders already on oil facilities and military facilities there.
[01:29:02]  So, yes, this thing could escalate.
[01:29:04]  And I have to tell you, this is somewhere where I really disagree with McGregor, and he must know much more about this than me.
[01:29:11]  But from our last interview, he seems to think that we could somehow fight a conventional war with Russia and leave it at that.
[01:29:18]  I don't think so.
[01:29:20]  And in fact, I think it's such a danger because you go, so is Russia really just going to accept that we are just going to fuck them up?
[01:29:29]  Because that's what's going to happen.
[01:29:30]  And it can be a lot of people.
[01:29:31]  I mean, maybe, right?
[01:29:31]  Like, are they just going to accept?
[01:29:33]  We're talking about again.
[01:29:34]  We're talking about right on their borders, not ours.
[01:29:36]  Right.
[01:29:36]  So, like, if it was just we got to meet them out in the middle of the ocean somewhere, or we got to meet them in Canada or whatever, you know, they crossed the North Pole.
[01:29:44]  We got to meet them on neutral ground.
[01:29:46]  That's one thing, but we got to fight them right on their border.
[01:29:50]  How do we get?
[01:29:51]  We're going to sail all our tanks up the Black Sea through the Bosporus Strait, or we're just going to send them all in by train through Germany and Poland and into Ukraine.
[01:30:02]  And Russia's just going to let that happen without expanding the war to our NATO allies before our arms even get there.
[01:30:08]  Yeah.
[01:30:08]  Yeah.
[01:30:09]  I mean, how the hell is America supposed to feel an army in eastern Ukraine?
[01:30:14]  Like the whole thing is nuts.
[01:30:15]  I mean, but anyway, my point just is: I don't think that we could fight them at all.
[01:30:21]  I don't think you can have American jets shoot down more than one or two MiGs or vice versa without us going to nuclear war.
[01:30:27]  I mean, especially when you're talking about a border war right on their border.
[01:30:32]  And neither side, Dave, forswear first-use nuclear weapons.
[01:30:36]  You know, America, you know, Obama said we will only ever use first-strike nukes against a nuclear weapon state or Iran, which is not a nuclear weapon state.
[01:30:47]  Right.
[01:30:48]  But then Trump took that back and was like, dude, we'll use a nuclear first strike against anybody we feel like.
[01:30:52]  And Biden has left it at that.
[01:30:54]  And in fact, I think he was going to revise it.
[01:30:58]  And then, under pressure from the Russia hawks, he did not revise it.
[01:31:02]  And then that was like the revision itself was like he took back his promise to revise it, became the issue itself.
[01:31:09]  That we are, it's in our strategy to use a nuclear first strike against Russia or China in a war.
[01:31:15]  And then the Russians have said that they would never use nukes in a first strike unless the existence of the state was threatened.
[01:31:23]  But that can mean a lot of things.
[01:31:25]  It's not that hard to argue, you know, from their perspective that the existence of their state is threatened if there's involvement in a war on their border.
[01:31:33]  We certainly would make that argument.
[01:31:35]  That's right.
[01:31:35]  I mean, in other words, it doesn't have to be tanks rolling to Moscow.
[01:31:39]  Right.
[01:31:39]  It could still be just, geez, if we lose in Ukraine, our entire reputation as the Russian security force could be in danger.
[01:31:47]  Right.
[01:31:48]  We could get overthrown.
[01:31:49]  We could, our stability could be threatened.
[01:31:52]  So we got to use a nuke to make sure we win this war to make sure that we stay the government in Moscow.
[01:31:57]  Yeah.
[01:31:57]  I mean, this is a chain of reasoning that any government employee would do.
[01:32:00]  There's no question.
[01:32:02]  Look, I mean, obviously, we all hope.
[01:32:03]  We got to wrap up here, but I obviously all hope that it doesn't come to something like that, you know, for the sake of humanity.
[01:32:10]  But it is really, when you just even look at the prospect, it's really hard to not think about just how reckless, you know, the even just the stuff, forget even like the obvious, like expanding NATO and the coup in Ukraine and stuff like this.
[01:32:22]  But looking at just the rhetoric out of the intelligence agencies blaming Russia for everything, accusing them of war crimes in Afghanistan that were completely made up, the rhetoric of Joe Biden just talking about regime change so casually.
[01:32:34]  It's really as if the thing that's so stunning and alarming is that it's like these people have no sense of the gravity of what's at risk in this situation.
[01:32:45]  And yeah, I guess anyway, we'll have to wrap it here, but man, let's hope that you and Colonel McGregor are wrong and that negotiations do start taking place.
[01:32:58]  But yeah, I'm not super optimistic about it myself.
[01:33:01]  Yeah, one last note here.
[01:33:02]  Sure.
[01:33:03]  The leader of the opposition in Belarus announced that Anthony Blinken has promised them a bunch of money and new technology to help them overthrow the government in Belarus, which is the most important foreign government to Russia, besides Ukraine, of course.
[01:33:19]  Yeah.
[01:33:19]  And if your goal, if your goal was to provoke a nuclear war, this would be a good first step.
[01:33:25]  Yep.
[01:33:25]  Well, absolutely right.
[01:33:27]  All right, dude.
[01:33:27]  Well, it's always a pleasure talking to you.
[01:33:29]  And I always learn a lot.

=== Wrapping Up and New Book (01:44) ===

[01:33:31]  I know my audience does too.
[01:33:32]  So thank you so much.
[01:33:33]  And just let people know where they can find you.
[01:33:36]  Yeah, man.
[01:33:36]  I got 5,700 interviews going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
[01:33:42]  And that's iTunes and Stitcher and Spotify and all of those things.
[01:33:46]  YouTube.com/slash Scott Horton show.
[01:33:48]  And then I'm director of the Libertarian Institute.
[01:33:51]  That's libertarianinstitute.org, editorial director of antiwar.com, which is the most important project on the internet.
[01:33:58]  I'm not taking credit for all the work everybody else does there.
[01:34:00]  I'm just trying to direct your eyeballs.
[01:34:01]  Antiwar.com, all the best writers, all the worst news in the world for you every day.
[01:34:06]  And I wrote the books, Fool's Eren, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
[01:34:12]  And both of those are also available in audiobook.
[01:34:14]  And right now, I'm working on a new book about the background to the Russia-Ukraine war.
[01:34:21]  And I'll go ahead and announce it now on your show, Dave, that I'm writing it with Daryl Cooper, host of the Martyr Made podcast and co-host of Jocko Willink's Unraveling podcast.
[01:34:33]  And he did, I did a two-hour speech and he did a two-hour podcast where we both said the same thing, only he already knew all this stuff from all different sources and had all his own different stuff to say.
[01:34:43]  And I said, man, I'm taking your chocolate and putting in my peanut butter and we're making, I'm making you a co-author, my thing.
[01:34:49]  So I went and copied and pasted his speech into my book and the places where it goes into my speech.
[01:34:56]  And then now we're just adding to it and adding to it and adding to it.
[01:34:58]  And we're in a hurry and it'll be out in a couple of months.
[01:35:01]  Okay.
[01:35:01]  Well, I can't wait to read that.
[01:35:03]  And maybe we could bring both of you guys on when the book comes out and we could do a whole thing promoting the book.
[01:35:09]  All right.
[01:35:10]  Thank you so much for your time.
[01:35:11]  Always a pleasure.
[01:35:12]  Thanks, everybody, for listening.
[01:35:14]  Catch you next time.
[01:35:15]  Peace.