Scott Horton and James Tim dissect nuclear risks in Hotter Than the Sun, critiquing sabotaged 1986 treaties and Biden's reckless Ukraine policy that forces Russian escalation. They condemn illegal interventions like Kosovo and Libya, contrast Kissinger's realpolitik with current cronyism, and decry cable news' decline into Idiocracy-like brevity. Ultimately, the hosts argue that radical decentralization is essential to prevent state corruption and avert catastrophic nuclear winter. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Daniel Ellsberg's Nuclear Secrets00:06:54
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You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Tim.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Hope everybody out there is doing well.
And a big thank you to everybody who came out for Young Americans for Liberty Revolution 2022.
Had a great time out there.
Thanks to everyone who organized it and came out.
It is really inspiring to see a thousand very young people who are way into liberty stuff.
So makes me feel good about the world.
And I had a great time and hung out with some great people out there.
All right.
Welcome back to the show.
Our favorite person in the world, the great Scott Horton, author, podcaster, radio host.
He runs the Libertarian Institute.
He's the editor over at antiwar.com.
He's written some great books and he's got a brand new one out right now, Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
What's up, brother?
How are you?
Hey, I'm doing good, Dave.
How are you, man?
Very good.
Very good.
And I always enjoy our conversations, both on and off air.
Sometimes they bleed into each other in my memory, and I can't remember what we've talked about on the show or what we just talk about on the phone every day, but I'll try to not try to keep it separated here.
But we haven't talked yet about this new book that you just wrote, which is fantastic.
I highly recommend people go grab it.
And it's also, which I know is part of the reason why you put it out, very timely.
Although I think it was made even more timely recently with some of the China provocations, which we could get into in a second.
But for people who don't know, tell them a little bit about the book.
Yeah.
Well, it's called Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
And it's a collection of interviews that I did over the last, I don't know, 15 years or something, a little bit more than that.
And there's 34 of them on all different subjects about nuclear weapons.
So, in fact, just like with the other books, Time to End the War on Terrorism and Time to Get Out of Afghanistan, that's actually only like one page out of each of those books.
This is actually, you know, there's a little bit about, you know, how we could abolish nuclear weapons in the world and all that.
We can talk about that, but the book itself is really all about all aspects of nuclear weapons.
So, in the first part, is the risk of nuclear war between America and Russia, America and China, between India and Pakistan, and et cetera, like that.
Then, there's a whole section on the nuclear industrial complex, which is just as corrupt a racket as anything else in the country and government, the H-bomb machine.
And then is the rogue states.
So, that's Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and of course, Israel.
And, you know, the non-nuclear weapon, non-proliferation treaty states that have nuclear weapons there, or sorry, that were accused of having or do have.
So, North Korea and Israel do.
Iraq, of course, never did.
Syria never did.
They have one little nuclear reactor, but we cover that.
And actually, even that was pretty hyped up.
And then, of course, Iran, we debunk the hell out of the Iran story, you know, with Gareth Porter and stuff like that.
And then, let's see, I guess after that is Hiroshima Nagasaki, which yesterday was Hiroshima Day.
We're recording this on the 7th of August.
Yesterday is Hiroshima Day, August 6th, and the 9th is Nagasaki Day coming up here.
And a bunch of great interviews all about that.
And then at the end, is the activists who are working to abolish nuclear weapons, including Elizabeth McAllister, the nun who breaks into naval bases and goes and bangs on ICBMs with a hammer, pours blood on them, and then goes to prison.
Who's, you know, her and her husband, Phil Berrigan, were some of the great anti-war activists of the Vietnam era and then, you know, went forward from there to be new anti-nuclear weapons activists.
But there's some really great stuff in there, like especially the interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, who wrote, I mean, obviously, for people who don't know or too young, maybe he's the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the secret, real history of the Vietnam War that he wrote for Top Secret, that he wrote for the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
And he ended up leaking it to the newspapers.
And that really did help change the climate, help get him persecuted by Nixon and help end the Nixon administration and help end the Vietnam War.
And so huge character.
In fact, there's a great documentary about him.
For people who aren't familiar, the most dangerous man in America, Daniel Ellsberg, you can watch it on YouTube.
It's fantastic.
And his books are great.
But he recently wrote this book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And he had been in charge of reviewing the nuclear war plans and policies in the Kennedy administration, and then had worked at the RAND Corporation as an expert on all this stuff.
And so he goes through and explains a lot about nukes that that's really the best stuff in there.
The Doomsday Machine Confessions00:15:56
And so, yeah, that's it.
And then back to the title, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
We tell the story in there a couple of times of 1986 in Reichovic, Iceland, where Ronald Reagan, not Walter Mondale or, you know, Michael Dukakis, right?
It was Ronald freaking put him on Mount Rushmore Reagan, came one hair away from a treaty with the Soviets.
And now this is in 86, Dave.
The wall didn't start coming down till the end of 88, right?
So the Cold War was ending.
Gorbachev and Reagan were getting along and they were trying to end the Cold War.
But the Soviet Union was not falling apart and nobody thought that it was going to either.
That was just not the case at all in 86.
So, in other words, importantly, Reagan wasn't just dealing with red, white, and blue Russia or The Soviet Union in transition away from communism and dictatorship.
That's not what he was dealing with.
He was dealing with just the Soviet Union under the control of Gorbachev, not Andropov, yes, but still, that's who he was dealing with: the battle days, the Red Soviet Empire that rule half of Europe.
And he still was willing to make a deal with them.
And I'll explain how it would have worked in a second, but the tragedy is that the only reason that the deal got scotched was that the Russians insisted, well, you'll have to stop your anti-ballistic missile system that you're trying to build.
Now, people know about anti-ballistic missiles that we fire now, you know, that don't work and that, you know, it's all just a giant boondoggle anyway.
But in the 80s, they were pushing this Star Wars where what we're going to do is to Reagan, we're going to have lasers and missiles based on satellites in space.
And they are going to, especially with lasers, they're going to shoot down any incoming ICBMs from the Soviets.
And this is just total make-believe stuff, right?
I mean, it's 2022, and that's still a fantasy.
You're not doing that to think that they're going to do that in the 1980s.
They even showed like the graphics where they were like displaying how it's going to work.
And it's these like asteroid vector graphics with a little triangle shooting at things.
Oh, yeah, sure.
They're going to shoot down incoming nukes with lasers.
So the whole thing was a total hoax.
But Reagan was essentially bamboozled by his own administration.
And you won't be surprised to learn, Dave, led by the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness, Richard Pearl, who helped lie us into Iraq War II 20 years ago.
He was one of the ones, and there were three or four other guys on Reagan's staff who essentially made him said to him that he would be betraying the American people and his promise to the American people to build a missile shield to protect us if he signed this deal.
Well, if you sign the deal, you get rid of all the missiles anyway.
So who the hell needs a missile shield that would never work in a million years anyway?
The whole point was moot.
That was the whole point of the treaty: they were going to get rid of all the short-range, medium-range, and long-range missiles.
They were going to dismantle all of the nukes.
And now, how it would have worked was the deal would have been for America and the Soviet Union to reduce our nukes down to about 200 each.
And that would bring us to parity with Britain, France, and Israel, essentially.
You know, obviously now India and Pakistan are in the game, and North Korea are in the game.
India and Pakistan probably have about a couple hundred each, you know, India probably a few more.
North Korea, I guess estimates are a couple of dozen, maybe a few more than that, less than 100.
China is still, you know, two to 300 nukes.
So a deterrent, but nothing like the offensive force that America and Russia built up.
So the idea was we'd reduce down to 200 each, and then we would really lean on all of our friends and allies that we're all going to disarm together.
Let's see if we can get down to 100 each, and then let's see if we can get down to 50.
And then let's see from there.
So it wasn't supposed to be like, oh, yeah, and then Superman 4 comes and throws them all in the sun.
And then, you know, Scott Horton gets his magic wish and nukes were never invented or any of this kind of stuff.
It was just, first of all, let's see if we can get the numbers low enough that even if there is a war, we're not risking nuclear winter and the death of billions of people through famine and starvation.
Let's see if we can get below that threshold for even a worst case scenario.
America and Russia lose some cities, but humanity doesn't, you know, suffer that kind of absolutely catastrophic consequences from the change in the weather and that kind of thing.
And by the way, I know this from talking with people too.
And I guess I've been guilty of this too, or whatever, just from not thinking it through.
But if somebody says to you, nuclear winter, like, do you picture a blizzard or, you know, encroaching ice caps and glaciers and all this stuff?
And that sounds fantastic, but that's not the argument.
That never was the argument that then we're going to go into a little ice age.
Not really.
Comparatively, we're going to lose a few degrees, and that's enough to kill the crops.
So it's not a matter of you freezing in the dark.
It's a matter of starvation.
and famine for billions of people, crop failures in the major green producing nations of the world and total breakdown in terms of food distribution and all of that.
Look, you can already see what like a little bit of a hiccup in the in the production supply can do to in the supply chain there can do to like freak people out.
It's something to think about.
I will say, and one minor correction on that, just so you know, Iran is five years away from getting a nuclear weapon.
But the thing is that they're five years away in perpetuity.
So they're always five years away from getting a nuclear weapon, at least my whole life.
But in all seriousness, I, and I'm somewhat embarrassed about this, I was really bad on this issue for a long time.
Even after I was really good on pretty much everything else, I always kind of, without really thinking about it, just bought into the kind of mutually assured destruction idea.
And you go, well, you know, it's kind of on the surface.
It's easy to feel that way.
You go, well, look, the only time nuclear weapons were ever used, you know, again, not tested, but used against civilians was when only one country had nuclear weapons.
And as soon as one more country got them, they were never used again.
And so that must mean that basically, you know, America doesn't really go to war with nuclear armed countries.
We only go to these proxy wars with them.
So maybe, you know, this would be this massive deterrent if everybody had nukes or more people had nukes and they'll never be used.
The problem with that, and you really set me straight on this years ago, not on the podcast, just talking off air, is that you're like, well, yeah, but that's if you ignore all the times we almost went to nuclear war and destroyed all of humanity, which really, I mean, like there have been several times where we were dangerously close to that.
And now you even look at just the recklessness of the Biden administration with this war in Ukraine with Russia.
And you're like, yeah, no, I mean, it's a risky game to play that really relies on a few men in high up positions who are all, you know, government agents.
So in other words, sociopaths, we're just kind of relying on them to not destroy all of humanity, which is really not a good position to be in.
Yeah.
I'm telling you, man, it's unimaginable, but that doesn't make it impossible.
And, you know, it's really easy to see, frankly, if you're just willing to honestly consider it.
That, well, as you just said, we're talking about government employees here.
The first thing we know about government programs is you don't get to decide how they're run.
And you don't get to have your magic wish the way you think it should be.
It is what it is.
They get, you know, a grant of permission from us and then they take the ball and run with it however they want.
And so the thing of it is that, well, first of all, just to make ourselves very clear here, one bomb, even a little bitty one, even what they would now call a tactical nuclear weapon, 10 or 15 kilotons.
That's what they dropped on Nagasaki, killed 75,000 people.
And that was a weird one because it was in this valley and all that.
Hiroshima was 150, 200,000 with a 10 kiloton bomb.
Okay.
That's a little bitty nuke.
Wiped that, you know, and yes, it was the city itself was made of wood and paper, but it's still it completely obliterated it, completely obliterated.
A modern nuclear bomb would wipe whoever's listening to this town completely off the face of the earth, right?
If you live in a major city, if they hit Austin, Texas, where I'm from, with a one megaton nuke, which is, you know, or even, you know, in the in the high tens of kilotons, you're talking, for people who are familiar, like from Breaker Lane to Stasney would be destroyed.
We would just be gone.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed in an instant.
And then a lot more people, you know, baked to death slowly and radiation sickness and all the rest of that.
So you're talking about just an absolutely unmitigated horror show.
If a nuke ever goes off anywhere, even a single one anywhere.
This is just, it's, you know, beyond imagination, the level of destruction that these things can bring, just a single one.
So that's what we're talking about.
Now, and then we're talking about government agents who are in charge of it.
And if the idea in the mind of, you know, for you or for your audience or whatever, is that it's just unthinkable that a man would go so far and be so bold as to pull the trigger on such a machine.
Well, they'd done it before.
And as you said, yeah, well, they didn't have a nuclear deterrent facing them down.
But look at the mindset of Harry Truman and of Burns.
I always forget Burns' first name, the Secretary of State, and Stimpson, the Secretary of War.
And their idea was like, yeah, let's hit them Japs with that thing, man.
Let's do it.
We'll show them.
And that's it.
Right?
The same way you, if you were at war, you might talk about shooting somebody with a howitzer.
Yeah, we'll show them.
We'll blast them with some artillery.
Only we're talking about one shell takes out a whole city.
And they talk about it the same way.
It's just a bomb.
And then, so in the mind of some Pakistani colonel, you're supposed to just be assured and sleep well at night that like, no, that Pakistani colonel would never be so careless as to get into a nuclear war.
Well, he might.
And in fact, the Pakistani military, at least for a time, I don't know if it's like this now, but there was a time where they announced that they had devolved control and decision making over the nuclear weapons to colonels in the battlefield, not generals back at headquarters.
But if you see an India, if you think you see an Indian armored column coming, go ahead and lob an A-bomb at it.
It was the authority they already had.
And we got a border dispute between India and China right now in the Himalayas.
And the Americans are training with the Indians just a few miles away from the disputed border right now.
I was on anti-war.com yesterday, speaking of the recklessness of the Biden administration.
So the idea, I mean, even they call it, Dave, the nuclear taboo.
Yeah, well, taboos can be broken in, especially, and when you're talking about, and here's the other thing about it really is when you're talking about nukes, it's a use them or lose them situation.
So there's essentially no plan for a limited nuclear war.
Once they start going off, it's very, very hard to ramp that down.
Imagine you're the president and China nukes Long Beach in retaliation for something your predecessor did.
I don't know.
Now, what do you do?
Nothing?
Right?
All the political pressure in the world's coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
You better nuke something, right?
And then, and anybody but you, they're going to hit Shanghai and Beijing, right?
They're going to go for massive civilian populations and then China's going to launch everything they've got.
And then we're going to launch everything we've got.
And then the Russians will threaten us that we better stop or else they're going to jump in, right?
This in total nightmare scenario, that kind of thing could break out.
You could have a fight like that.
You know, anyway, like you're saying, we talk about it like it's this magic wish cure-all situation that, look, as long as everybody has nukes, no one will invade.
Hey, look, North Korea, we haven't attacked North Korea, have we?
Have we been nuclear deterred by North Korea?
Damn right, we have.
There's no question about that.
Does mutually assured destruction work?
Of course it works.
Does that mean it's foolproof?
It'll always work.
And you can just count on that forever and ever.
That'll be our policy for the next 75 years on the planet Earth.
All the major powers hold H-bombs to each other's head and keep the peace that way.
And then for another 100 years after that and another couple of hundred years after that, that's how humanity is going to get along.
Well, you know, you would think, right, like that even if that was your argument, that you like, let's, let's just say hypothetically, you were making the argument to say, look, the idea that we're ever going to actually get this deal signed and reduce the number of nuclear weapons or eventually eliminate the number of nuclear weapons is too far-fetched.
We have to just accept that like all these people have nukes and we got to make sure that, you know, nobody is ever pushed to use them.
I could almost swallow that.
You know, like, like the, okay, it's a plausible, you know, good faith argument to have.
Sure.
But then to just have the leaders who would be in theory making this argument just be so reckless with how they literally attempt to provoke and poke at every like like all of these nuclear armed powers.
I mean, the idea that like Joe Biden, however you feel about the war in Ukraine, even if you're the most anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine, you know, Ukraine is this great democracy or whatever they tell us, a wonderful democracy that barred its political opposition, whatever.
Okay, fine.
But even if that's true, you know, for him to just like announce that we're here to overthrow Vladimir Putin, hey, you have a government that's known for regime change wars, that when they say they're going to have a regime change, oftentimes that means business.
That means you're going to end up like Muamar Qaddafi.
Like, now think about that.
Would, okay, yeah, does, does the idea of starting a nuclear war, you know, and destroying all of humanity, does that deter like any normal person, maybe even a not normal person?
Sure.
But what if that person starts thinking that they may end up like Qaddafi being sodomized with a golden gun in the middle of the street by a pack of wild people?
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
Well, wouldn't you at least go like, well, don't do that.
Don't like start telling them, like, shouldn't there always at least you would think be working towards some type of gentleman agreement, gentlemen's agreement that it's like, look, we all, we all agree not to do this, right?
Because it seems like they're almost determined to put Putin in a situation where his only play is nuclear weapons, which kind of he's said several times.
He's been basically like, you're putting me in a position where I have no other play.
War With Russia Escalates00:09:52
There's now a war on my border, whether no matter who you think is justified in the war.
I'm not, we're not saying Putin's justified in the war.
He's not, although he was provoked, but I'm just saying there's a war on his border right now.
And the most powerful military in the world who is arming the people he's fighting a war with on his border are saying the goal is to overthrow him.
Like public, now I know that they'll walk back and go, no, that's not the official position of the government.
That's just what our commander in chief has said three times.
But that's kind of a distinction without a difference.
Yeah, seriously.
And in fact, you know, they had a thing where it was so funny.
I think it was in the New York Times.
They said, yeah, Biden, he chastised Austin and Blinken for saying that our deliberate goal is to weaken Russia here and said that he didn't want them to say that anymore.
And they got in trouble for that.
And then, like, I don't know, a week later in the post, they had another story where they were like, yeah, but we were just saying that.
You know, we needed to put out a thing saying that at the time, but we didn't really mean that.
What we meant was what we said the first time, of course, you know, and this kind of thing.
So it's just, yeah, and they've.
Certainly off the record said numerous times that, yes, the goal is to weaken the Russian government to the point where it falls.
You just have to pretend that they don't have H-bombs.
You just have to pretend that there's not a risk of nuclear war.
That, you know what?
After Baghdadi took over Mosul, we decided we needed to have regime change against the Islamic State, Dave.
You know, yeah, well, ultimately, what are they going to do about it, right?
America's going to team up with Iran again and kick their ass, right?
And that's how that went down.
Nobody thought that Mosul could hit back in a way, you know, that the Islamic State could hit back at us with anything worse than machine gun attacks or something like that.
Machine gun attacks in France, not even here, you know.
We're talking about Russia.
They got 6,000 nukes right now.
You know, what do we, you can't do that.
You can't treat them like they're nothing but ISIS, like they have no more legitimate interests than ISIS.
And here's an anecdote for you like that.
On the PBS News Hour, which is just as bad propaganda as the corporate TV, but just slightly smarter propaganda, but just as bad.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, as propaganda, yeah, just as bad, but for higher brow people, I guess.
Right, right.
And so they had John Mearsheimer on from the University of Chicago, best guy we've got on our side in terms of, you know, telling the truth about what's going on in this story.
He's, you know, considered the dean of the realist school of foreign policy in the United States, him and his buddy Stephen Walt from Harvard there.
And so they bring him on, which great, you know, they deserve credit for at least bringing Mearsheimer on.
But he's on there and he's debating Evelyn Farkas from the Obama government, who's an insane Russia hawk and who has said in the past, wrote an article in Defense News saying we need to prepare for war with Russia and this kind of thing, real hawk late.
So in the interview, they agree, everybody agrees.
The newscaster lays it out and everybody agrees that one, Russia's official doctrine is that they would never use nuclear weapons in any kind of first strike or anything like that, unless they felt that the survival of their threat of their state was threatened.
Then premise two, they could consider a loss in Ukraine to be a threat to the existence of their state.
And then premise three, yes, we're pouring in all these weapons and doing all this training and the CIA is passing on intelligence.
We're doing everything we can to make sure that Russia loses this war in Ukraine.
And then, so the question is, geez, are we risking nuclear war here?
So John Mearsheimer says, yes, we are.
This is completely bananas.
And he said, this would be like if we were in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but Kennedy refused to talk to Khrushchev.
Are you kidding me?
You can't, this is just, you know, if he had any hair, he'd have been pulling it out, right?
So then, I know I'm one to talk.
So then it's Farkas' turn.
And Farkas says, well, you know, I don't know.
It's fine.
Look, man, if they're going to use nukes, I'm sure that they'll like signal us in some way that they're going to before they do.
Well, have you listened to anything Putin's been saying?
That's the thing is Putin himself, including in his original declaration of war, but also sinned.
His foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, his most trusted advisor and spokesman, his head of the National Security Council, the former president there for a little while, Dmitry Medvedev.
And I forget the guy's name who's the secretary or defense minister and the deputy defense minister.
They have all warned that this could go nuclear.
And they're not saying like, we might nuke you.
They're going, you know what?
This thing could get out of hand.
This thing could escalate.
You're putting us in a position where essentially, what are they saying, Dave?
They're saying they acknowledge the fact that we cannot get in a war with America that will not turn into a nuclear war.
There is no such thing as a conventional war.
And so we are absolutely, you know, co-belligerence, legally speaking, we are co-belligerents in this war.
We have CIA on the ground helping coordinate, passing intelligence, obviously blatantly pouring in billions of dollars worth of weapons and all these things.
And they're saying, look, this is a risk of a nuclear war.
That's the signal that Evelyn Farkas is looking for, or I guess she's saying something much more explicit.
Like, if you don't stop by Tuesday, then we'll use a nuke or something like that.
But I just, I don't, I'm a real wing nut here, I know, but I don't think we should let it get that far.
I think that the seven warnings that we've heard already should be enough.
Or is it, in fact, somebody told me as much, many more than that.
Someone was counting them up and said it was, you know, in the door, in the dozens.
God, I can't speak today.
In the dozens of threats from the Russian leadership that this could go nuclear.
So the Americans, you know, look, they got their asses kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You know, they think they know what they're doing.
They don't know what they're doing.
They think there's nothing.
Well, look, to be fair, right, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like to be fair about these situations, they do know what they're doing when it comes to destroying shit.
When it comes to destroying shit, our military is very, very good at that.
I mean, we had no, it's not like that we had any real trouble defeating the Iraqi government.
We had no trouble, you know, slaughtering a whole bunch of people in Afghanistan.
That part we're pretty good at.
It's like the kind of like planning, you know, and nation building a country is where we, you know, where we can't possibly win because that just can't really be done, except for under very, you know, particular circumstances.
But you almost.
Well, I mean, that included though, losing two insurgents with landmines and rifles.
Yes.
Yes, but that was in, but that was not in the fuck shit up phase.
That was in the trying to prop up a government phase.
Yeah.
You know, so I'm just saying that it's like, when it comes to our military strength, to our economic strength, we are so much stronger than Russia.
Russia is a country, you know, their GDP.
I mean, these charts change sometimes, but I think their GDP was smaller than Italy.
It was like on par with Brazil.
I mean, they're a tiny economy compared to ours.
Our military force and technology and all of this shit in a non-nuclear war, we do have a huge advantage over them.
But that just makes the risk that much more.
It's like if you're like a seven foot, 300 pound dude and you're challenging a five foot guy with a gun to a fist fight.
It's like, well, he's got no option to fist fight you.
The only option he has is to pull out that gun.
So it actually just makes it even more risky to even like threaten with any of these other type of actions because it's like you're putting that person in a position.
Again, this isn't a justification of one side or the other.
I hate all governments, but clearly you could say you're putting this little guy with a gun in a position where his only play here is to pull out the gun.
Like, that's essentially all they have.
And so, luckily, though, I mean, we're talking about a war on their border, though.
So, if we had to meet him in the middle somewhere, that is true.
In France, that'd be a different question.
You know, very true.
They could hold the line all the way there, but they do have, they would have a significant, I mean, imagine they have a lot of people.
Yeah, imagine Biden trying to like, you know, send our army in there by rail across Europe and, you know, beach landings, Marines, and the ASOFC and all of this.
No way.
I mean, it just can't be done.
So, I want to hope that they're not even fantasizing about that.
I mean, Biden has been, to his credit, very clear that we are just absolutely not doing that.
But then again, as much as I appreciate it for my own reasons, by saying no matter what happens, we are not going to get in there and finish this job and make sure the Russians lose.
Well, he's signaling to them that you know what?
You better not, but go right ahead.
And which, of course, is consistent with their plan that, like, yeah, we want to bleed them to bankruptcy and waken them and hurt them and replicate Afghanistan and all this.
They think they're being clever, but we saw it so bizarre.
Biden Rejects Beach Landings00:02:20
Right, right.
And that clearly is the goal.
And that has been stated by several like top officials.
But it's um, it's interesting that it's like, right, it's like, it's so important.
The most important thing in the world is to defend democracy in Ukraine.
And also, we won't do it.
You know, it's like such a funny little like message that they try to like get away with saying.
Um, so there is kind of like in some ways this tacit admission that, oh, yeah, we know we can't fight a war with Russia.
We know that's not actually an option.
So we're right up to this level where it's like, but really, is that fighting a war?
I mean, it's kind of, you're kind of at war with Russia.
And then you got people like Max Boot saying we are at war with Russia and all of this.
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So I want to just to transition to this because I think it all kind of like comes together in this weird way.
Power Corrupting American Empire00:14:40
But the other thing that's going on here are that, as you mentioned with the on the border there of China, in the story that was just written in anti-war.com.
But we're also provoking China at the same time.
And there was just recently this trip where Nancy Pelosi, very high-profile trip where Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan.
The entire Chinese government was furious about this.
It seems to be completely unclear the reasoning behind this and how just reckless and sloppy the whole thing seems.
You know, I was talking to some like a group of people.
It was like, I think it was like Clint Russell and Michael Heiss and a few other people there at Young Americans for Liberty's revolution event.
And we were talking about this.
And I was like, all right, well, it seems to me that like, okay, so like the Ron Paul foreign policy would be like, you know, kind of the founder's vision, stay out of entangling alliances.
You never go to war unless you're, you know, attacked or threatened to be attacked.
You only go to war to defend your own country, which is like the most noble and beautiful foreign policy.
Then there's like the Kissinger foreign policy, which is like the world is a geopolitical stage and human beings are just kind of pawns on a chessboard and you try to pit everyone against each other, you know, to maximize your own dominance, then, which is kind of almost what Trump was at least in some way attempting to do, which is why I think he got the blessing of Henry Kissinger and why Kissinger recently came out completely against this America's role in the war in Ukraine.
So the idea there would be something like, you know, you befriend either Russia or China.
And so Trump's big thing was like, I'm a China hawk, so I'm going to befriend Russia and we're going to try to, we'll have an alliance with them and pit them against each other.
That's Miranda's view, by the way.
Mir Scheimer is exactly in that same school.
And that's his same opinion too, which is Russia to bounce against China.
Which is, we should, we could talk about this a little bit because I also think this is a very flawed view.
However, it's less insane.
All of these things are less insane than what seems to be the Biden foreign policy.
And I understand Biden probably is not the one making any of these decisions at this point, but the Biden foreign policy seems to be: no, no, no, here's what we do.
We provoke both of these nuclear armed powers.
We drive them into each other's arms and we just say, fuck it.
Yeah.
I mean, like, what, what is this?
Like, Iran, too.
I mean, they're, yeah, like, so there you go.
Yeah, they're, they're really, and of course, that's increasing the relationship between uh Iran and Russia.
Putin just got back from there.
You know, we're shaking hands with Ayatollah and forging closer ties than before in the exact same manner that you're talking about here.
And look, I mean, what's going on here?
You know, having Biden as this insane, senile old coot, you know, being in the one in the chair here is like, it's really symbolic and fitting kind of for the age, too, right?
Like, that's what we have is this decrepit old empire where, you know what?
If it had not been W. Bush, or in fact, never even mind that.
If it had not been Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, but it just been W. Bush and Colin Powell driving the car together for eight years, none of this would have happened.
None of this would be this way at all.
And I'm not giving much credit to Colin Powell because he did lie into Rock War II, and he's a war criminal, burned health or such a thing and all that.
But this was not his policy, and he advised against it, although he went along with it.
But North Korea would not have nukes.
I can't imagine his Russia policy would be anything like Tick Cheney's Russia policy was and the expansionism of in NATO all the way in the Baltics and threatening to bring in Ukraine and all of that stuff.
You know, they just completely, they just set everything off on the wrong foot, just like crazy, as far as, you know, the way things are playing out here.
So possibly, like if you just had like in the alternate timeline in the in the 2020s, America still has a lot of power and influence.
You know, it'd probably be waning in some ways just in comparison to the other states because they're getting richer.
But W. Bush just blew America's entire wad on the terror war.
Him and Obama too and Trump too.
I mean, they just 20 years of war, 10 trillion wasted.
And the opportunity cost.
in terms of America's influence in, you know, setting the world order, as they call it.
It's just, there's nothing you can do, right?
It's like that Willie Nelson song.
It's just too late.
You can't do nothing about that now.
And that's what you did.
You hired Dum Dum to run the thing.
And this is what happened.
He wrecked the car, man.
So, but even, you know, according to that old crank, Charles Krauhammer, it always from the first place, he recognized back in 1991, this is our unipolar moment that we have, you know, essentially we have the world order, less the Soviet Union, but we have the United Nations Charter and the rule, the international rule of law left over from after World War II, right?
And but then America, you can't have a world government without a world army.
And then America, NATO, is the world army, self-appointed, by the way.
But then, so what does that look like in practice?
In practice, that's the American empire.
And they do nothing but lie and cheat and steal and kill and take every advantage.
So they call it the liberal rules-based international order, but they break the law all the time.
And they lie to justify it all the time.
And everybody can see it.
So whatever was good about the international order, like, hey, let's all meet in New York and talk about things instead of just killing each other.
And in fact, sign a treaty where everybody promises mutual respect for each other's borders and that where borders are in the wrong place, which is virtually everywhere in the old world, that we've got to figure this out by negotiation instead of by killing each other.
And that, and now they outlawed once and for all after Hitler, the transfer of populations by force across sovereign borders.
So, you know, and this is what Rothbard says in War and Foreign Policy, or it's, I guess, in chapter 14 of For a New Liberties, the foreign policy chapter, where he goes, oh, yeah, if Bumblestan and Ruritania get into a border dispute now under the UN Charter, it's everybody's business, read America's business to go in there and solve the thing.
And I agree with him, right?
Like, I think that's the fatal flaw in the UN Charter is that it doesn't work at all unless America is the self-appointed world government to enforce it.
But then, again, it's not a rules-based world order at all.
It's just America's a crooked cop and you can't have a rule of law with a crooked cop doing all the enforcing, you know?
So they just blew it, man.
This is every advantage.
And now what's happening is, you know, Russia in its own way, I mean, they do have, you're right about their economy is not what it was, you know, relatively speaking.
But they do have their petroleum exporters, right?
They have revenue in perpetuity.
They're not going anywhere as far as that goes.
China is getting more and more powerful.
India is getting richer slower because they're slower to adopt capitalism.
But you mentioned Brazil.
They're getting more and more powerful.
And the European Union, at different times anyway, is willing to throw their own weight around and not be quite as acquiescent to America's wishes, such as on the terror war, for example, or invading Iraq, which France and Britain refused to participate in.
I mean, pardon me, France and Germany.
Not Britain.
Yeah, not Britain.
I didn't mean to say that.
But then, so what's happening then is the Americans are like having this panic attack, right?
That their world empire is falling, where they overreached, you know, their, you know, tide is pulling back out and you have these other powers rising.
And so you have what, you know, what everyone knew, what even Charles Krauthammer knew way back 30 years ago.
what would be this multipolar world where these other countries get wealthy and powerful enough to throw their own weight around.
So the contest was, you know, can we create this global system of international treaty governance, blah, blah, blah, in a way that's acceptable to these powers, that everyone will work within it.
In other words, China, Russia, and the EU and the US and everyone will stay within the UN and the World Trade Organization and the international banking system and whatever like that, right?
But then look what they're doing.
They're wrecking all that in their like desperate attempt to cling to it all.
And they're essentially, in fact, at this point, I think they decided that they would rather have Russia out than in.
And that especially if they're going to be friends with Germany and they're going to build this close friendship with Germany, that that's unacceptable to the Americans.
If the Germans are friends with the Russians, then why do they need us?
They need us to keep the Russians out, right?
So I think the Americans have just decided, like what you said is, it's obviously a stupid decision from a lot of points of view, but I don't think it was an accident.
I think that they decided that like they would go ahead and, you know, essentially give up on bringing Russia into the European system and all of that.
They would just have to share too much power with them.
They'd rather kick them all the way the hell out and fine, just go and do business with China and India and Iran and whoever else instead.
And we got the vast majority of global GDP on our side.
So screw you is the idea.
And, you know, John McCain used to talk about the alliance of democracies and this kind of thing.
And Biden is pushing more, more of that kind of framing that it's, you know, America and the democracies versus these autocracies.
Just never mind all the monarchies and dictatorships on America's side and the thing.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so I just want to drill down a little bit more.
No, I mean, it's all important and really great.
And I think that's exactly it.
It's like, you know, this is kind of why, in a way, this is an aside, not where I wanted to go, but it's kind of why, as we've talked about many times before, it's the reason why libertarians like me and you favor decentralization and radical decentralization at that.
It's not because like philosophically speaking, libertarianism is a universal value.
It's we believe in liberty for all people.
And that's not just all people in Texas or New York or New Jersey or America or North America.
It's all people in the world.
However, you can recognize from more of a logistic, like strategic standpoint that it just has to be locally enforced.
That's just the only way this can possibly work because the more and more power you build up for someone to be there to, you know, even in the name of protecting liberty, it's just too much power to concentrate in one group's hands.
And that does not end up working out well.
So it's kind of, it makes sense in a way that, you know, in this unipolar moment where the goal would have been to kind of take advantage of this moment to use it for what's best for the future, it's just power is too corrupting and too tempting.
And instead, you just try to bully everyone around.
But anyway, I want to get back to the China thing in a bit here.
I thought one thing I thought was really interesting.
So me and you both have been within kind of like the, you know, not that we're right wingers, but we're certainly considered right wingers by left wingers and progressives.
And we're kind of in this, you know, like a space like where, look, there's a, there's definitely a lot more people who listen to this show who voted for Trump than voted for Biden.
You know what I mean?
Like we are, my audience is much more likely to be to see the evils of Hillary Clinton as being worse than the evils of, say, like, you know, the populist right or something like that.
And so within that framework, we're kind of the ones, if we do have any influence on kind of like the nationalist populist right-wingers, that we're trying to tell them they're wrong to be hawks on China.
That there's like, this is one of the fatal flaws of this like populist.
They have other things too, like the protectionism stuff, which is just so stupid.
But the China stuff is just like the most insane, which I guess is related to the protectionist stuff.
But I thought one thing I thought was really interesting is I saw Tucker Carlson the other day was just railing against Nancy Pelosi for how stupid this visit to Taiwan was.
Yeah, Trump attacked her too.
Yeah.
He's going, what are you doing?
I mean, this might lead to China invading Taiwan because they're so worried that you're siding with them.
It's kind of hard to not see that for a second and go, yeah, dude, get it?
You get it now?
Yes, that's right.
Reckless anti-China rhetoric is not helpful.
It doesn't mean you like the government of China, but like, what exactly is the plan?
What's the point of all of this?
But again, I will at least, I want to give him credit for that, that he at least is like, look, this, this shouldn't be like done without some like, what, what is the plan here?
What are you doing?
Do you have any sense of like what the plan was?
Clearly, like, this isn't just Nancy Pelosi going rogue.
Like, she had the blessing of the administration.
So why?
What are they saying?
And like, again, you said reluctantly.
I mean, they made it clear they did not want her to go.
This was just their idea or anything like that.
Well, but again, just to say, as you said, like the symbolic nature of it, just like you said with Biden, like imagine in this very tense situation, you're like, ah, but don't worry, we're sending check notes.
Nancy Pelosi, right?
Like that's who we've got to send into this.
Like, I mean, this is, it really makes you like, like, the idea, you know, have you ever seen those video clips of where Brzezinski is talking to like the Mujahideen guys or something like that?
And even these, look, say what you will about Zabignu Brzezinski is not that impressive of a guy, but it's like a million times better than like what Nancy Pelosi will say.
He at least like gets up there with them and he's like, you know, God wants you to win and blah, blah, blah, or whatever.
And she's just like, what are you doing?
This senile old woman is the one guy.
So anyway, go ahead.
Keeping Country Free From Radicals00:11:36
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, no, I mean, look, that was my original objection too.
It was like, look, I mean, nobody even thinks for a moment that this lady is an expert on anything or actually even cares about anything.
So, you know, Taiwan has always been a big passion of Nancy Pelosi, you know, right?
What was the key?
And the key was, and I'm going to interview the guy tomorrow, the great Ben Freeman at the Quincy Institute is like the expert on foreign government lobbying.
And no one would be surprised to hear that it was Tom Dashel and Dick Gephardt, the former Democratic senators, are now lobbyists for the right-wing China lobby, what we used to call the China lobby, the Taiwan lobby.
And they were the ones who arranged this whole thing.
It had nothing to do with the government's policy at all.
This is not what the military wanted.
It's not what the CIA wanted.
It's not what the White House wanted.
This was, you know, their thing.
And now, like, exactly what anyone got out of it, I'm not sure.
I want to know more.
I guess it's probably some characters in Taiwan benefiting at the expense of other characters in Taiwan, right?
And but the rest of the world's like held hostage by these kind of the whims of people we've never heard of before, you know?
So, yeah, I mean, apparently that was what was behind it was just, you know, the American democratic process that is just some like low-level cronyism.
And we would risk provoking a nuclear-armed power over like just some like someone's getting a sweet crony deal.
And look, so let me address too about the fear of China and this and that and the other thing.
So people say, you know, it's a dangerous world out there, but it's not a dangerous world to us.
Yeah, it might be a dangerous world to Taiwan.
You know, the fact of the matter is.
And look, I know a lot of people, they just don't know this because nobody ever teaches this stuff.
I noticed this when I was just a kid.
You know, my dad would watch Tom Broco when I was a kid.
And they never would explain the backstory of anything.
They would always just say, you know, this guy's ahead in the race versus that guy.
But they never said what one guy believed versus the other guy.
Or they never said, like, oh, there's some bombing.
There's things going on in Beirut today.
They never go, see, here's what happened, right?
And then explain what the hell is going on.
They never explain, right?
So I've had people, for example, on Twitter say to me, come on, Taiwan has been our ally since World War II.
Like, no, actually, that ain't right.
Actually, it's been five decades.
That's right.
50 years, as in half of a century since Nixon told the Taiwanese, sorry, guys, us getting along with Beijing is more important to us than protecting you or sticking up for you.
And so, tough.
Goodbye.
And he went over there with Henry Kissinger and he shook hands with Mao Seitong and he split China away from the Soviet Union, which one made it kind of okay that we lost the Vietnam War because what the hell?
The Chikoms are our friends now anyway.
So who cares about the domino effect, even though it was the Americans that kicked over the domino in Cambodia and led to the rise of Pol Pot and communist, you know, horror slavery there, not the Chinese.
But anyway, and it, you know, he split the Chinese away from the Soviets.
And so then, you know, there were all kinds of benefits there.
Like they gave us Russian MiGs to train on and provided ammo for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s, you know, and all of that kind of thing.
So, you know, it literally was half a century ago that they and the final, you know, whatever, proclamation, whatever came during Jimmy Carter.
But it was, you know, Nixon and Kissinger started it and then threw Ford and Carter and they finally announced the Shanghai Communique and all of that.
And basically, we have a policy.
You hear this phrase in terms of Israel's nuclear weapons.
Everybody knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, but Israel will never declare, or at least so far, has not declared, yes, we are a nuclear weapon state.
So they leave this like pretended ambiguity there, which doesn't really make much difference in that case.
But anyway, that's the term.
So they have the same thing here: strategic ambiguity.
And what the Shanghai Communique says is that America recognizes that China and Taiwan are one country and that Taiwan belongs to China, but we would prefer to see them reunited peacefully someday.
And we are not promising to defend Taiwan from violent attack.
But we are heavily implying that we really, really, really mean it when we say that we would really prefer that this be settled peacefully someday and not through violent force.
So it's not quite a threat that we would or a guarantee to the Taiwanese that we would back them in war.
That's one of the things that prevents the Taiwanese from declaring independence.
Because if they knew that we had their back, they might just give the big middle finger to Beijing and say, what are you going to do about it?
We got our bigger brother here to protect us, right?
So that's why the Americans don't give them that level of guarantee.
And then, but the Chinese still are supposed to understand that, yeah, we might go to war with you, so don't try it, right?
And in fact, um, Gareth Porter had this great piece about they had what was called a policy of dual deterrence.
We tell the Chinese, man, you guys better not attack Taiwan.
We really got some angry admirals out there who might go nuts and don't, you know, we're holding them back, but don't piss us off, right?
At the same time, telling the Taiwanese, you pipe down.
Don't you, you know, you keep your radicals in check and don't you start talking about independence and get yourself in a fight?
Because we might not come and help you, especially if you pick a fight without checking with us first and you just go and do something stupid like declare independence, which we know will provoke an attack, right?
So, you know, that's the status quo.
And yet, a bunch of people want to disrupt that when that's been holding for 50 years.
It ain't perfect, but you know what?
Taiwan doesn't belong to us.
You know, it's not really our position to decide this issue anyway, right?
But again, we're operating under the theory that America is just enforcing the rules-based international order.
But again, we already said that this is a civil dispute within one nation state.
So, you know, well, it's right.
And the idea that, like, it's, look, I really do, as I've said before, I root for liberty for all people.
I root for the Cubans to, you know, be liberated.
And I root for Taiwan and I root for the Chinese people and I root for everybody.
It's horrible that people in Ukraine are dying.
It's horrible that people, you know, like it's all awful.
However, you can also recognize the idea that the United States of America's federal government is going to go like spread liberty to all of these different areas.
Like we don't have a free country here.
Right.
Like we have, we have, you know, like people who are in, you know, thrown in jail for years awaiting trial here.
We have people who serve decade-long sentences for drugs or guns.
I mean, not using guns, I mean, for, you know, for having guns.
We have more and more now with these progressive prosecutors.
We have people going to jail for self-defense and protecting their property.
I mean, like, it's a, we're, we had lockdowns.
We have like, I mean, the idea, it's like, okay, hey, so if you believe in this project, you know, in the same sense, it's like, if you were like, I'm going to clean up my whole neighborhood, but like your room is a mess.
You'd be like, hey, start with your room.
Start with your room.
Then maybe I'll start buying that you could go like actually do this.
So it's not a matter of like not caring about what's going on in any of these other areas.
It's just like a recognition that it always just leads to more disaster.
And for these, you know, especially for the more right-winger types who really are into this kind of like, you know, we have to be tough on China.
Number one, I would say that you, they really got to read Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill Hitler and the Unnecessary War.
Just understand what a disaster these war packs and war guarantees turn out to be.
It actually ends up being a huge kind of like facilitator of much bigger conflicts that end up with the results being way worse than they would have been otherwise.
It doesn't save anybody.
The other thing I would say is that, look, once you accept that since we can't even keep our own country free, we're certainly not going to be able to free everybody throughout the rest of the world.
Once you kind of accept just the realistic factual reality of that, then you go like, well, what really is working against our own freedom?
I mean, a lot of the right-wingers will be very big on what communists have done to subvert our own institutions, which is not like without any truth to it.
I mean, certainly like it is true that while his, you know, like while Joe McCarthy's trials in the Senate might have been ridiculous and he certainly accused some people who were not communists at all, and the House actually was quite a bit worse than Joe McCarthy was with this stuff with the House trials.
It is true that there were really communist infiltrators.
And it is true that the Chinese Communist Party has been caught.
You know, what was it?
The one with Eric Swalwell was the one who had a girlfriend.
Yeah, who had said, but again, what ends up happening with these things in almost every example is that you even have infiltrators who are trying to corrupt our institutions, which should be abolished to begin with.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like these institutions that never should exist anyway, if we were going to be a free country.
So instead of fighting office.
Right, exactly.
Yes, but really, I mean, like all of these things like should, or at least if he, if it existed, should have so much less power that it wouldn't even be worth attempting to corrupt to begin with.
So it's like the mission here has to be to keep our country free.
And then on top of that, it's not just that there are like, say, I don't know, even if it's blatantly communist like infiltrators or just more genuinely like socialist people.
The fact that we create, as you point out all the time, the fact that we have this empire that costs trillions of dollars a year or it costs a trillion dollars a year, trillions of dollars, you know, in my lifetime, that, you know, robs so much wealth from the American people also just is, you know, leaves us looking like just, you know, blood-soaked monsters that the government is.
This also has the tendency to drive more and more people to the socialist left because it destroys our own economy.
And so the battle to be fought here is not over, oh, the threat that is China.
And if you do think China's a threat, well, the answer to that is to keep our country as free as possible, which also leads to us being as rich as possible, which would be the best deterrent against whatever level of threat you do think China is.
Capital Driving Wars History00:02:26
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
And look, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I was so thrilled when I finally, you know, belatedly got on the internet and started really paying close attention to the libertarian movement.
So I guess I always thought that libertarians were all a bunch of kind of milquetoast types, blue pill types.
And then I found antiwar.com and lurockwell.com.
And here Lou Rockwell is preaching, and he's a hardcore dude.
Whatever it is he's saying is hardcore.
So here he is, you know, a thousand percent for the globalization of capitalism and trade and human interaction.
And then, but when it comes to the American government, he's as isolationist as he could possibly be, even if you take like the pejorative sense of that term or whatever, in terms of the U.S. government, he wants it doing nothing nowhere, ever, ever.
But then, you know, because it gets in the way of human interaction.
And that's what we need is to be getting along.
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From Death Camp To Civilization00:03:51
I was actually, I preferred like more like the John Bircher, you know, Patriot militia guys, because at least they cared about the Branch Davidians.
But they always had all this right-wing China, you know, anti-China stuff.
So when I found these hardcore libertarians at the Mises Institute, I was like, oh, great, man.
You know, like if you're not going to be able to do that.
Yeah, we care about the Branch Davidians too, but we also understand economics.
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah, like if you ever read Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy, it's Murray Rothbard's history of the 20th century wars and the role of capital in getting us into them all.
But it doesn't have any kooky stuff in it because it's Rothbard.
It's perfect.
It doesn't have any of the kind of, you know, oh, go, brother, here we go again with sort of the more like kooky conspiracy stuff.
Instead, it's just, you know, it's as good as it could be, as well written as it could be.
I urge everyone to read that too.
In fact, the later version has, I think, a foreword by Anthony Gregory and an afterword by Justin Raimondo.
And just you can't beat it.
Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy.
So when I first started reading, you know, these guys was like, oh, great.
It's, it's, they're just like the right-wingers on like the good conspiracy stuff, the true conspiracy stuff, right?
But without the kookiness and then without the right-wing kind of hobby horses like hatred of China.
And, you know, I read a thing, I can't remember what it was anymore about when Deng Xiaoping came to Texas in like 1981 or something.
And then all these guys were like heckling him and booing at him and whatever.
And I was just like, look, I mean, you're right.
The guy's flag is red with yellow stars.
And he came from a regime.
He had worked for Mao Cedung.
You know, he came from a regime that had helped to starve 30 or 40 million people there.
But what the hell was he doing in Houston?
What had happened was that Mao had died and Dang came back from the concentration camp, or I guess had him like at a work camp out in the field somewhere out in the countryside.
They brought Deng back.
And this was like the rise of the right wing of the Communist Party in the gang, the days of the Gang of Four and the true Maoist communist, the Marxist economics or whatever they were trying to do over there.
All that was over.
To get rich is glorious, Deng declared.
And said, and this is a very entrepreneurial society and culture going back thousands of years, of course.
So essentially, he just legalized you owning the property that you really did own anyway and keeping your profits when you trade in your property.
Wow.
And just legalized, essentially, right?
He didn't force capitalism.
He just legalized it, allowed it, right?
And it took a while, but like really, it really kicked in by like the early 1990s.
And then, you know, in the space of 10 years, you saw the between 1990 and 2000, you saw the greatest increase in standard of living and the most people that had ever happened anywhere.
And the old cliche, like you have to eat every last morsel of that because there's starving kids in China.
That wasn't true anymore.
They're not China's going to take over the world.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, because they listened to Milton Friedman, who was like, listen, man, you need markets, dumb-dumb.
Oh, yeah, markets.
That makes sense.
So, you know, in other words, this isn't Maoism.
This is what came after that.
And, you know, back to Rockwell.
He wrote a piece in, I'm going to say 07 or something like that, 06, 07.
And it was when there was a big controversy over there with some toys with lead paint.
And there was like some tainted toothpaste.
And then, but so the right-wingers, though, were like going nuts over this.
And Rockwell was like, get off of your high horse, man.
Markets Versus Maoism Debate00:03:21
You don't know what you're talking about.
Oh, the article is called From Death Camp to Civilization.
And it's about how here's the greatest civilization in human history.
And then these commies raised it completely to the ground, reduced these people.
No shit.
I mean, for real, reduce these people to absolute caveman status, to cannibalism, to just the absolute horror show, people starving to death by the tens of millions, okay, under Mao and his wife and these goons.
So, and he said, oh, yeah, now they're like painting toy airplanes with some lead paint on them.
Like, hey, I'm going to need you to cut these people some slack here a little bit.
Like, yes, what happened there is bad, and there was an oversight that obviously it's got to be corrected somehow and this kind of thing.
But let's not hear you sit here and demonize the Chinese when it was the worst regime quantifiably ever.
Or if you insist it's a tie with Hitler and Stalin and Tamer Lane and Genghis Khan, right?
Of the worst, most violent forces that ever existed in the face of the earth, right?
I'm sure I'm leaving out a couple from ancient history.
I'm not as good on the old stuff.
But anyway, right up there with the worst regimes that had just could even be imagined.
And then, so yeah, this is progress.
This is real progress.
And then at the same time, though, in terms of their threat to the United States, there's just not one.
Because as much progress as there's been, there hasn't been that much.
And what they have in their naval force is what, you know, our military has their own jargon for it.
They call it A2AD or ADA.
Yeah, yeah, A2AD.
Anti-access area denial, right?
So in other words, a defensive naval force to keep us out.
That's all.
That's what it's for.
It's they're not building an archipelago of bases around the planet like the United States trying to challenge our dominance on the seven seas and all of that.
They're not doing that.
They have, you know, what, two bases, one in Djibouti, right there, you know, at the gates of the Red Sea, just over the hill from an American base, by the way.
And I forget, maybe there's one in West Africa somewhere.
And then that's it.
And they're not currently threatening Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or Thailand or Bhutan or I'm leaving out some here.
Afghanistan.
Who did I skip?
Oh, Nepal, India.
Well, yeah, there's problems with India, although I think the Indians are probably the more aggressive ones in that case.
But then Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and then, of course, their border with Russia, Japan, Korea.
They're not threatening any of these countries.
They don't have to dispute with any of these countries.
They have to deal with all of these countries.
But no one thinks, no one thinks that, oh yeah, China is on a project to march west and conquer Eurasia or march north.
Yeah, it's Siberia.
China Threatening Eurasia? No00:12:25
It's one of the things that I see.
And I got to say, I really like watching Tucker Carlson's show.
I think he's by far the best like Fox News host.
It's not Kennedy is the best, but he's by far the best on Fox News.
She's on the business.
By far the best, such an improvement over Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Just more interesting and thoughtful and better on so many really important issues.
But I'll see this all the time.
He's really like the only cable news show I watch really anymore, except little embarrassing clips here or there to make fun of on the show, but from like MSNBC or some shit.
But it'll just be this like assertion all the time that it's like, well, America's decline means China takes over the world and it's going to be ugly when China takes over the world.
And you're like, what exactly do you mean by takes over the world?
I mean, like, does anyone really think that as the point you've made many times that if we're going broke with our empire, that China is possibly in a position with us existing to just be like take over the world and impose their will on us?
And how exactly?
Like, how exactly would that work?
And what it always ends up being is like, oh, well, they've got Joe Biden in their pocket or something like that.
It's like, oh, well, they've, oh, so in other words, they could take us over through our own gigantic government.
So even if that's true, which is not true, but even if it were true, you'd go like, okay, well, then the answer to that is like that Joe Biden shouldn't have so much power.
Then the answer to that would be like, so stop.
I will also say that, you know, I remember Ron Paul saying this once.
And there's always really, I really liked this.
This was back in when I first fell in love with libertarianism.
This was one of the really early things that I watched.
So if you remember after the Giuliani moment with Ron Paul, he had a meeting.
He had a press conference the next day where he presented Rudy Giuliani with a reading list, which was phenomenal.
And then Bill Maher had him on his show.
And it was this really unbelievable moment.
It's because Ron Paul just killed in front of this very like, you know, liberal crowd.
Because at the time, they were good on some of this important stuff, not now.
But so he goes at one point, he goes, look, I have no problem with this theoretical idea that we should spread liberty throughout the world.
It's like, I think we should spread liberty throughout the world, just not at the point of a gun.
Like just not that way.
And it's interesting when you look at, you know, if you think about like, say, the sanctions regimes that we've had against all these different countries that work very well at starving and punishing people.
But what's their track record of leading to overthrowing governments?
Like, look at Cuba.
Oh, through South Walls alone?
Nothing.
I mean, through, look at Cuba or Iran or look at Yemen.
We've been, we've had Yemen under a total blockade and been bombing the crap out of them for seven years.
And so for government's not about to fall.
Exactly.
And as many people have pointed out, in many ways, it kind of solidifies support for their government.
It legitimizes them in a sense.
Well, of course, our government must exist because this government is trying to starve us.
So we need to, and like, so what's the opposite of that?
You know, like, what's what's the opposite of that approach?
Well, the opposite of that approach would be complete free trade with a country, right?
Like complete free trade.
And then let's say, just even hypothetically, take it a level further.
Let's say we had a completely limited, like really, okay, not anarcho-capitalism, but like the best version of a minarchist government that we ever could have.
What would the message of that be to China?
The message would be like, hey, look, we're no threat to you.
We're not going to come fight a war with you, but we are telling you through example, Chinese people, that your government's completely illegitimate.
Look, they have absolutely no right.
They have absolutely no right.
We would be exporting the idea that this type of government is completely illegitimate rather than exporting the idea that your government is 100% legitimate because we would probably incinerate your women and children if it wasn't for this one thing stopping us, which is your country's nuclear threat.
And look, man, I mean, it's just for me inescapable.
The fact that Ron Paul ran for president in the year 1988.
Harry Brown ran in 96 and 2000.
In other words, it could have been Ron in 88 and 92 and Brown in 96 and 2000.
And our whole bridge to the 21st century, as Bill Clinton called it, could have been paved by libertarians.
And we could have seen the end of the Cold War on Ron Paul's watch and the abolition of NATO and, you know, probably not total, but severe demobilization and demilitarization.
And then, you know, especially good old Ron, it would have been glorious watching him repeal things.
But then when Harry Brown comes, he had this thing, man.
It was the Statue of Liberty speech.
It was essentially the same thing he always said.
But he would just go off.
And, you know, you could tell he really believed this stuff about, you know, the pyramid is not finished yet.
You know, we're working on perfecting our own society here is what that's supposed to symbolize, right?
Is the union is unfinished work.
And so, but we really believe in this stuff.
And you know what your problem is, foreigners, is you don't believe in liberty enough.
And you're not trying as hard as we are to get this right.
And then it's just all about the Bill of Rights and all about freedom.
And only the thing is, is it's beautiful because it's coming from Harry Brown.
And so it's not a bunch of crap written by some hack speech writer who doesn't even know what the words mean and out of the mouth of some Bill Clinton, you know, scumbag president who, or, or any of these guys.
It's a guy who really meant every word of it and just, you know, said it very well.
And so, I mean, this is the reason this probably, you know, in a way, it's like half the reason why I hate the Bushes and the Clintons and all of these people so much, right?
It's not just for what they did, Dave.
It's the opportunity costs.
Right.
And it's what you just said.
They could have spent 30 years practicing what they preach about freedom and liberty and mutual respect for other people and their right to live first and foremost.
And they could have asked the other nations of the world, hey, let's, you know, enforce this post-World War II world order where we all promise not to attack each other and all of that together and without taking advantage, without being cynical, without backing, you know, suicide bombers to stop oil pipelines going through and all the madness, all the things that they've done in the last 30 years to just lie, cheat, and steal.
You know, I don't know how I didn't notice this at the time, Dave, but, or maybe I didn't forgot, but I only recently learned that it was just three weeks after they officially finished the last ceremony to bring Poland,
the Czech Republic, and Hungary into NATO in the spring of 1999 that they launched the aggressive war against Serbia to break off Kosovo, intervening in a civil war with no authorization from the UN whatsoever, with no authority, you know, as sovereign nation states to launch the war without a declaration of war from the Congress, intervening.
Not when, you know, in the case of Iraq and Kuwait, yeah, the Americans baited them into it and this and that, but at least on the surface of it, you have one sovereign nation invading another sovereign nation.
Well, this is a civil war.
And there's just no one pretended that they had the authority to do what they did.
They just did it anyway because they wanted to.
Just three weeks after bringing the first round of NATO expansion in and bringing, you know, especially Poland was a huge one to bring into what had been founded as an anti-Soviet alliance here.
And all in the name of, no, this is all defensive.
We're just spreading stability.
We're just spreading order.
We're just spreading the rules and the law and all this.
The first thing they do is break it.
Like a cop who runs a stop sign on his way to go blow some unarmed guy's head off and then, you know, take his two-week vacation and move on with his life, get promoted, move up to a different department, whatever.
And that's how the Americans are.
They break the law all the time.
W. Bush did the same thing with Iraq.
He couldn't get a UN resolution.
And so it couldn't get a declaration of war either.
He just got, at least he got a bogus authorization, unlike Clinton from Kosovo.
And then we just got this coalition of the willing to launch this aggressive war.
You know, you look at all the dirty wars too.
Barack Obama, you know, never mind, you know, all the horror show in Afghanistan and all that, but look at his dirty war in Libya and in Syria.
All that is completely illegal.
Never even mind the fact that they were backing bin Ladenite, you know, Mujahideen terrorists in the thing.
But even if they'd been backing the Shiite side or whatever, I still, the fact of their intervention there is all just absolutely, blatantly illegal.
And you got some help from that defensive alliance known as NATO in Libya, too.
That's the purely defensive alliance that no one should be concerned about.
I guess they were aggressed upon by Libya.
Sure.
Yeah, and Afghanistan too.
Look, as they said in the 90s, out of area or out of business, right?
In other words, it's a government program.
We have to find something to do.
And as I quote them in Fool's Erin talking about, yeah, our war in Afghanistan is a team building exercise for the NATO alliance.
The post-tune is they're just going to have to lay down and die.
They're, you know, this is what we're doing for our own reasons, that kind of thing.
And yeah, I mean, they've just absolutely abused their power in every way.
In fact, when Putin announced his declaration of war on February the 22nd and the 24th, there was kind of two different stages beginning there.
But I believe it was the, I guess it was the one from the 24th, where he essentially paraphrases and invokes Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
He invokes Clinton when he talks about we have to protect this ethnic minority from persecution and genocide.
Oh, no, first, just this ethnic minority needs, you know, to have their independence guaranteed.
And so we're going to break them off from the larger state.
Well, that's, you know, paraphrasing Bill Clinton on Kosovo.
And then he says, oh, Zelensky's threatening to get nuclear weapons, which he did say, oh, well, maybe we'll just get out of the Budapest memorandum, which, you know what?
They have no way in the world that they could make nukes without provoking a Russian invasion first.
And they know it.
So why did he even say that other than to give Putin an excuse, right?
It's not like they can just turn a key and make a nuke.
So, but anyway, so he invoked W. Bush.
He goes, Oh, look, they're making weapons of mass destruction.
And then he invoked Obama on Libya, R2P, the responsibility to protect.
There's a genocide going on in the Donbass, Putin claimed, which was obviously an overstated lie, just like Obama on Libya.
But he claimed it.
So there he's invoking, you know, not Trump, but the three presidents before him on their major excuses for their major violations of the law in launching these wars.
Although they did get a UN resolution on Libya because they suckered Putin's replacement or, you know, his stand-in of Dmitry Medvedev into supporting it.
But the resolution only said they could have a no-fly zone to protect Benghazi from Qaddafi's forces of genocidal mass rape and blah, blah, blah lies.
And then they went ahead and turned that into a nine-month-long regime change war against Tripoli and all the rest.
So, you know, essentially, I mean, think of what we're talking about.
We're talking about Bill Clinton and his ilk, right?
These people are just, they're the worst scum.
Bill Clinton Worst Scum00:15:23
And they're the people who have led America.
So, and look, I mean, this is just part of this is just my age, too, right?
Because I'm 14, 15 years old when the Soviet Union's falling apart.
It's the, we got 10 years left before the year 2000.
How's it going to be like?
What's it going to be?
And our president's a face-biting rapist, right?
Who burned a church full of little children and called it a suicide.
And for a measly, stinking small amount of cash, hired Chinese intelligence agents and put them in important positions in our government.
And, you know, the most important one was John Wong, who was the right-hand man of James Rioti, who was a Chinese national or ethnic Chinese, or I guess a Chinese national owned a bank in Indonesia and, you know, had provided just hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton's campaign.
And Clinton gave John Wong the authority in the commerce department, gave him a job at the commerce department with the authority to issue licenses for three-stage rocket technology transfers from Hughes Aircraft and the route to go and, and then, you know, and what they did, by the way, for people who remember back then, or people who don't, he had these two major names you really need to know in terms of Bill Clinton's corruption with the Chinese and John Wong and his boss,
James Rioti, right?
And then, so what'd they do?
All day long they went, Johnny Chung and Charlie Tree, Johnny Chung, and, you know, Chung and Tree.
Well, they were just some fundraiser guys who like had raised some illegal money, but there was no direct connection between them and Chinese intelligence.
There was no there there.
So that's all they ever talked about.
And then you might remember this one.
They went after a completely innocent Taiwanese national named Wenho Lee, who worked at, I forget if Sandia or Lawrence Livermore lab.
And they just Just trumped up this entire bogus case, Louis Free scum from the FBI.
Just trumped up this entire case against this innocent man, just so they could have somebody to point at and say, Oh, yeah, look, see, remember how you're angry about Chinese something, something?
Well, Johnny Chung and Charlie Tree and Wenho Lee, and never you mind James Riotti and John Wong.
And by the way, one more anecdote there was: it came out later in testimony at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency that when he was in the White House in the West Wing, sitting on the couch watching Waco burn, Bill Clinton was sitting there with James Riotti, his Chinese intelligence connection on TV, you know, watching Waco burn together.
Because, you know, the Branciavidians, they were Christians operating without a license, which is against the law in China and in Bill Clinton's America.
So that's who, you know, built our bridge to the 21st century, Dave, Bill Clinton.
And then he passed the baton to, and you know what?
This does argue for the simulation theory that all of this has just been invented to entertain me.
That they put the worst person that you could have possibly chosen to sit in the chair.
And it just coincidentally, the way the calendars work when you time it out since George Washington and all of that, that what happens is the new president takes office in the first month of the new millennium, right?
January of 2001.
Not just the new year, the new decade, the new century, the new millennium.
And who do you give it to?
This cross-eyed idiot, right?
This short-sighted, narrow-minded, cruel, deceitful little bastard, right?
This selfish little, I don't want to say that on your show.
I was going to say a really bad word.
This horrible, horrible, horrible person is with just, you know what?
How about this?
Wisdomless man to come and sit in that chair to run the world empire.
And then he just goddamn about ruined everything.
Well, he didn't get us into a nuclear war with Russia or China when he had a chance.
Well, and on the theme of kind of like living in this simulation, it really is what's kind of crazy to me.
And I don't know if I exactly understand what's going on here, but it is like you said, it is kind of like the perfect like representation of our crumbling empire when you see that now Joe Biden is the face of it, and that Nancy Pelosi is like the highest ranking member of the House of Representatives and just all of them.
Like how Kamala Harris, just all you see some of these video clips of her talking and you're like, lady, what are you forget being evil?
Because all of these people have been evil.
But, you know, even when you were talking about like going and opening up China, you know, there's something about like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Pat Buchanan going over there.
These are all people who we have our problems with.
Their policies were very bad.
Very evil things were done.
But like, okay, on a certain level, just like in IQ wise, you know, like, okay, there's some like thoughtful people who were going over there, however you feel about them.
To see like, dude, George W. Bush was like so, at the time, it was the joke was just how stupid and what a clown he was.
And seeing Biden today, I mean, it makes, I mean, he looks like the valedictorian compared to Joe Biden, who is like struggling to get a sentence out of his mouth.
Nancy Pelosi, it's like her dentures are falling out while she's talking and can't get the sentence out.
Just like, I mean, for as dumb as George W. Bush was, I don't remember him ever just going into like a like a paragraph that were just words, none of which made sense following the previous word.
And there's a, there's something.
So I mean, there were some bad ones, but it's, I don't know, it seems to me like a whole different level today.
And it's this, it's very bizarre to see.
You're like, well, I mean, if you take Biden from 20 years ago when he was helping W. Bush lie us into Iraq, you know, he always was kind of a dumbass.
Yes, no, there's no question.
But yeah, now he's so damn old.
He's just forget about it.
Yes, you're right.
There's something about that.
No question that that's their age.
But there is also something with that, not that it's related, but that is perfectly symbolic of like the rest of our culture.
You know, like, even if you go back and look at, say, in, I don't know, in the 80s, again, this is not a comment on how much I agree with these people or how evil or not evil they are.
But if you go and we're watching like the firing line with William F. Buckley and he was having some debate with Gore Vidal or something like that, there was just a level of intelligence.
And this was a popular show that was put on for the American people with the assumption that people would watch this and follow this conversation and find this like entertaining.
And then like to see, even from, like when I was a kid and like Crossfire would be on with Pat Buchanan and uh the, what was his name that?
Michael Something?
Uh, um Kinsley, was that his?
Yeah yeah yeah, right and okay, it'd be like a somewhat intelligent conversation.
But now, like you just go.
Like everything, even it's like tick tock is like girls like just shaking their ass into a camera and MSNBC is the dumbest you've ever.
Like forget even that they're lying.
It's just that it's so dumb.
Like this whole thing is like every it does.
It does feel like there is some type of idiocracy thing going on here.
Like are we in a simulation where everything is just so stupid today, like i'm an idiot and i'm smarter than all of these people.
Like i'm not supposed to be the guy I am.
Like I, i'm fully aware of that, but like what idiography?
Where he's like Mr Average and he wakes up in the future, yes, smartest guy out there.
Something's going on with that.
I'm not supposed to be able to go on to cable news shows and wreck everybody.
Like that's not supposed to be the way it works.
They should be embarrassing.
Does you totally do, by the way?
And yeah, I mean with Harris.
It is almost like a sitcom of like, okay look, I know she's stupid, but she's reading a teleprompter.
Her speech, just put something stupid.
This is what they need for her to say, yeah, we're just around in a circle like, we believe in things.
Things are the things that we believe in.
What are you talking about, dude?
And then she's reading that off of a teleprompter.
God jeez yeah, she can't come up with anything.
And look, even on the Kennedy Show, you know um uh, I guess i'm lucky because you know I have um being the editor of Anti-war.com.
I don't just get to do the panel, sometimes I do the one-on-one interviews with her too.
On that show um, which is, you know, the only cable tv news that i'm, you know, can do.
Basically, they didn't want to have me on um and and we'll be on there talking about something important.
But the format of the show is you got three and a half minutes, tops maybe four right, but then we got to go.
And you know Chomsky, I think it's in the documentary Of Manufacturing Consent, which is really good.
It's, you know, out of date now.
It's made in the late 90s or something like that.
But they talk about exactly what you're talking about in the um, the depth of the conversation, and they show um, I guess, through the years, the average length of a news clip and how it just goes down.
And they show, you know, some clips, or I don't know if they're showing whatever.
There's some examples of, um, you know, look, here's something that's going on in the world: the Israelis are bombing Beirut.
And the reason why is they say they're going after these guys, but they're killing those guys, and that's resulting in the thing and whatever.
And you can see, if you just see one clip from 1986 on any topic, basically, you're like, oh, wow, it's three, four, five times as long.
And the amount of time dedicated to commercials is much shorter.
And the segments are just much longer.
And you get essentially, I mean, you think about Garrett Utley, who used to host NBC News sometimes when it wasn't Tom Brokaw, all right?
You had like my hairline or worse and is just old and ugly and like was a broadcaster, right?
He was a journalist.
That's why he was an anchor is because he was a reporter, right?
Not because he was the prettiest girl from high school or whatever to sit up there and pretend that she knows what the hell is going on up here.
And then they just show how over the years, the length of time for discussion on TV news, just and they're mostly talking about the men.
The men on cable news, the men have plastic surgery and dye their hair.
Like, it's like the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
That's like, I like, I don't know why, man, I'm being sexist when I'm judging the men more, but it's like you're not even like the pressures of being a woman and you have to look good on camera.
You're like a newsman and you're 70 and you don't have a gray hair in your head.
And somehow this is supposed to look better.
Like this should look worse.
Like, what the fuck is going on with this shit?
It's so bizarre.
And, you know, and in fact, back to Chomsky for a second here.
So Chomsky says this is his propaganda model: is that in the amount of time that you have on a TV news segment, there's no time to dispute the premises.
Yeah.
There's only time to, as he puts it, fight vigorously within these very narrow goalposts of should we attack Iraq tomorrow or should we give inspectors more time and then attack them?
Fight.
And then they go out and have this fight between you know this very narrow thing.
And inflation says anything important.
We got to go to commercial.
Yep.
It's inflation completely Biden's fault or is it corporate greed?
Like go.
And then you have like no time to even go like, wait a minute.
What the fuck are we talking about here?
Like no.
Look, we brought the news hour earlier.
They never ever interview Noam Chomsky.
And Noam Chomsky's got his problems.
I know that.
Particularly over the last couple of years, man.
Particularly over the last couple of years.
But he's always had these kind of weird deviations sometimes where you're like, what?
He was for what?
But look, I mean, what can you say?
He doesn't have the same premises that we have as libertarians.
Yeah, yeah.
But, but what there's just no denying.
You cannot deny.
He's one of the most important public intellectuals in America over the last 60 years.
Yep.
For 60 years.
You know, he went over there with Fred Bronfman and these guys over to Vietnam to tell the true story of what was going on in Laos and Cambodia and all these things in the 60s still, maybe in the very early 70s.
I think in the maybe even 69.
And yet he can't get interviewed.
This guy who's written 75 books about American foreign policy, who was a professor of linguistics at MIT.
And then from there, he went and was teaching somewhere in Arizona or something like that, but still got, you know, a PhD 100 times over, if you could do it that way, right?
But he can't get five minutes or 10 minutes.
He can't get a segment or even participate in a panel type discussion.
Like I talked about.
No one's interested.
No one's interested in that.
They just do not want to hear.
To say, even though he's one of the great villains of the 20th century, I will say William F. Buckley on the firing line had Noam Chomsky on and had him on for the hour or whatever the show is.
And that's probably the last time, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You put him on Democracy Now or something like that.
But he's just never, ever, ever the expert guest interviewed by NPR News, by PBS, by ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox.
No, there's like you see these things now where it'll be like, fuck, I can't even remember the dude's name.
The newspapers either.
They don't call him and ask him for his opinion about anything either.
Professor Chomsky from MIT says this, that, the other thing ever.
I remember I saw like, it's like the best you could do on TV at least.
Like on the on podcast, on the internet, you can still find some like good shit like that.
You know what I mean?
Where people are doing stuff.
But I remember seeing, fuck, fuck, fuck, what's his name?
God damn it.
It's like Gladwell or something like that.
He's the CIA guy.
Malcolm Gladwell.
Malcolm Gladwell.
He's the CIA guy.
He's an MSNBC guy.
No, I'm not blanking somebody else.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm blanking.
But that name just sounded pretty bad.
Okay.
Anyway, but he was, they had him on Bill Maher's show.
They had him versus Ben Shapiro.
And he's like one of MSNBC's like big guys.
And he's was a CIA guy for a while.
He's like, he's so dumb.
It's insane.
Like the topic was over like critical race theory and like whether like, you know what I mean?
Like what how legitimate that is or not.
And like, you know, like Ben Shapiro starts quoting some of the like the, you know, the, you know, the, the, like influential like authors who like were influential over critical race theory and kind of put it together.
And he's like, well, look, the idea that you're going to say the meritocracy is all a part of blah, blah, blah, white supremacy.
Enough Already Book Review00:02:45
Well, that's ridiculous.
And in itself, that's kind of a white supremacist idea.
I mean, look, it's like, if you believe that a meritocracy could benefit anyone, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
And then this guy is his response is like, he goes, oh, so I guess you're just saying slavery never happened.
Well, I think it did happen.
And the crowd like goes nuts and they're like clapping.
And you're like, what the fuck is happening?
It really does feel like I was like, am I living through some fucking movie?
Like, what is this?
This can't possibly.
Anyway, it's all on the simulation theory of what's happening in the world.
All right.
I don't know.
This has gone in a direction I didn't exactly.
Yeah.
It's right.
But in a way, maybe that's the plan.
Because man, it is tempting.
It's like, I just want to mock that when I'd really rather be talking about all this other shit that actually matters.
All right.
Well, this has gone in a direction I didn't plan on it, but I do really, I did enjoy this conversation.
Well, I don't know.
I guess all of this.
I don't know.
We were talking about nuclear war, but that, you know, got a little bit depressing.
And so now we went off.
Yeah, we got all of it.
Anyway, the point is you need to go read Scott Horton's book and we need to stop provoking nuclear armed powers because this is the most insane thing in the history of the world.
Consensus.
There you go.
All right.
So at least we ended on that.
All right, Scott, where can people who aren't already following you?
As I must say, you're crazy if you're not already following Scott.
But where can people go follow your stuff?
And what do you got to plug?
All right.
Well, I guess first and foremost is scotthorton.org.
I got 5,700 something interviews going back to 2003 for you there.
I do about four or five a week, depending on traveling and stuff like that.
And so I'm on iTunes and Stitcher and Spotify and all that stuff for the show, Scott Horton show.
And then I'm on the radio in LA on Sunday mornings at nine o'clock on KPFK 90.7 FM.
And then I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com at antiwar.com, the most important project on the internet.
And I got four books.
Fool's Errand about Afghanistan, Enough Already, which is really the best I can do about anything and everything in the world right there.
That's the book, Enough Already.
And then also collections of interviews, The Great Ron Paul and the brand new one is Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
And all those are available at libertarianinstitute.org slash books or scotthorton.org slash books.
All right.
Definitely go check out all of that stuff, or at least as much of it as you can, because it's like a wealth of, it's a wealth of really, really important information that if you want to understand the world around you more, it's going to really help.