Scott Horton and Dave Smith dissect Twitter's censorship of anti-war voices post-Musk acquisition, alleging government influence deranked sites like antiwar.com. They analyze the 2020 election's alleged FBI entrapment and Hunter Biden laptop forgery claims before debating January 6th as a protest or coup. The conversation shifts to Yemen's deadliest conflict, fueled by U.S. F-15s despite a Saudi-brokered ceasefire, urging listeners to call representatives via 833stopwar.com to pass a War Powers Resolution. Ultimately, the episode argues that private tech giants and foreign policy failures perpetuate war while silencing dissent. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Propaganda and Social Media00:15:04
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
Guys, I want to let you know about the problem series part one, new limited time offer t-shirt up at podcastmerch.com.
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very excited to have returning to the show my most frequent guest and my favorite person to talk to, the one and only Scott Horton.
How are you, brother?
How are you feeling?
I'm doing great.
My hair's falling out, but otherwise, I'm great, Dave.
Well, you know, somehow, unfortunately, wisdom about foreign policy does not regenerate hair.
But if we ever find a way to convert wisdom on foreign policy into regenerating hair, you're going to be fine, dude.
You're going to have a big old afro.
Of course, as you guys already know.
As you guys already know, Scott is from anti-war.com, the Libertarian Institute, author, podcaster.
He's written great books, Enough Already, Fool's Errand.
Got to check both of those out if you haven't already.
And I believe the Libertarian Institute has a pretty big thing going on right now.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, that's right.
So I'm the director of this thing.
It started out me and Sheldon Richmond and William Norman Grigg.
And then unfortunately, Will died.
But I've been building it up since then.
And we got a really great crew of people over there, including, of course, still Sheldon Richmond and Lori Calhoun and Jim Bovard are our big names.
And then we also got a really great group of podcasters and libertarians, Keith Knight and Kyle Anzalone and Patrick McFarlane.
And of course, our friend Tommy Salmons and a bunch of great writers, including our buddy Kim Robinson from Australia and all kinds of things every day.
Hunter Durances is our editor.
You might remember him from a lot of great articles he's written for the American Conservative Magazine and things like that.
And so it's just a great group of podcasters and writers and turning out constant libertarian content on virtually everything all the time.
I'm really proud of it.
And we're doing a fundraiser because it's funny, you know, for ideological capitalists, we're forced by essentially government taxation rules to run these things as nonprofits where we give everything away and ask for your donation at the door instead of charging a price for a service, which is how you think it might work.
But anyway, so that's how it is.
But we got great kickbacks for you too, including Institute books, not just mine, but Sheldon Richmond's books, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, which is as good a primer on libertarianism as anything you've ever read.
It's really great.
And then we've got, of course, Keith Knight's new book, The Voluntariist Handbook.
So you know how Michael Malice has had all these anarcho-communists and stuff in it.
This is all libertarian anarchists, selected writings in Keith's great book.
And of course, Will Griggs' last book, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, which, man, you want to get radicalized on the cops.
That thing will mess your brain up.
I'm telling you.
It's so great.
It's so great.
Yeah.
So it is.
It is absolutely.
And I'm the biggest Will Grigg fan of all.
And it's just absolutely him and his best.
So anyway, and we got shirts and books and whatever kickback thing.
So everybody go and donate and write it off on your taxes.
Yeah, if you guys care about this libertarian movement, as I know many people listening do, there's really very few causes that I could recommend higher.
This gets the absolute highest recommendation.
Please go support the Libertarian Institute.
They're doing incredible work.
All those guys are really just fantastic, really the cream of the crop of what we have to offer.
Oh, I left down Will Porter.
Oh, yeah, of course.
And I didn't say Connor Freeman either.
Yes.
Look, I just got holes in my brain.
It's not because any problem with them.
It's just how bad of a person I am.
But those guys are at the top of the list too.
But thank you very much for saying that, Dave.
It really is a great project.
And that's libertarianinstitute.org slash donate.
Yeah, these guys, it's we don't have too many weapons in this fight for those of us who believe in liberty versus these powerful, awful governments that occupy all of the world.
But this is a pretty great crew of guys.
So please go support them if you can.
All right.
So there's a lot of stuff going on right now.
And I want to try to talk to you about a bunch of it tonight.
So right before we start this podcast, maybe just like a little over an hour before, we got another dump of these Twitter files.
And I'm curious to get your perspective on this.
I might do a live stream tomorrow and talk a little bit more about them because I kind of got to like pour through.
First off, let me just say, I hate journalism through Twitter threads.
I really just wish they were doing this in a different way.
I just, whatever it might be, my own, the way my brain works, I do not like consuming information through a Twitter thread.
I'd so much rather just like an article be written about this, but whatever, that's my own little, you know, thing.
But I do notice there's in the second batch of the Twitter files and now in this third batch, it's kind of interesting to see the stuff that's being revealed.
I know you personally, Scott, are definitely no debate about it.
Somebody who has been shadow banned, you were like stuck at your follower count for forever.
And then as soon as Elon Musk took over, all of a sudden I noticed your follower count starts going up.
And it's like something was throttling that before he came in.
I've also had a similar thing.
Yeah, one of the jargons that he introduced today, the unwords, as he called them, had to do with the 12-hour ban.
I got one of those because I had said something, I don't remember what, I won't repeat it, about those cops in Uvalde and maybe what should happen to them.
The heroes?
Huh?
Those heroes?
Yeah, those guys.
And whatever it was that I said got me a 12-hour bump.
And then after that, that was it.
As you say, I was stuck at 63,000 and they would not.
And I can see every day, count goes up, count goes down.
Count goes up, count goes down.
And it makes me wonder about like which of my followers are getting kicked off in order to keep the count.
You know, is it only the new ones or is it like the old ones?
Anyway, and this has been going on for a very long time.
And that was my favorite tweet of Taibbi's tonight.
He said, I know people have a lot of questions.
We're just getting to it.
But he raised foreign policy, lab leak theory, and a few other things that like obviously are at the top of the agenda.
But, you know, go back, Dave, in 2014, man.
Well, 2011, you know, Twitter played a huge role in the Arab Spring and including, you know, U.S. and Saudi and Israel hijacking it for their own purposes and all of that.
And so they saw the potential power in that thing, you know, way back then.
And I think they did use it for their advantage as much as they could.
But then what happened, I think this must have been the turning point.
This is the tweet thread I'm waiting for is after 2014, what happened was there was a Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.
And people should watch Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen's great documentary.
It's called Killing Gaza, where they went there right after Yasun during it, which shows that war is just terrible.
War nothing.
It was slaughter, hand hunt by Israel, the poor people of the Gaza Strip.
And what happened was that was the first time that the American people in the opinion polls took the Palestinian side.
And the reason why was Twitter.
It was simple as that.
RT, man.
Simple as that.
And all of a sudden, instead of having, it was like the final end.
RT retweet, not Russia today, retweet.
And yeah, hashtag Gaza under attack.
And so it was like the last throws of Rather Jennings and Brokaw and their stranglehold finally, you know, took their death rattle.
And here decentralized social media was able to get the Palestinian side of the story out.
It was simple as that.
It's like the Palestinians, you know, produced some great propaganda.
All they were doing was showing what's going on out their window and then, you know, posting it on Twitter, this kind of thing.
And the polls show that Israel's, you know, and this is the first time ever that the poll, it was a huge shift in the opinion of the American people and how they interpreted that attack to be.
And I think that must have been when all red alerts went out that, hey, we can use Twitter to, you know, push our agendas, but we got to be able to police that thing too and control it and prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
Did you ever see?
So our mutual friend and brilliant economist, Bob Murphy, he made a video that I think is like back in 2013 or something like that.
I got to go find this thing, man.
I've referenced it before, but it was so like prophetic.
And so he made a video that was like him almost doing like a mock thing where he was pretending that he was an advisor to the powers that be.
Like he's like, he's like, if he got to get in the room at Bilderberg or wherever, you know what I mean?
And just like talk to him.
He like starts it off and he goes, hey, first of all, I just want to congratulate you guys.
Like great job.
You guys have done an incredible job at controlling humanity.
I mean, look, you've got like the education system controlled.
You got the money controlled.
You got the propaganda controlled.
You are really killing it.
But let me tell you, you got a problem.
And here's the problem.
And the problem is this social media thing.
And the thing with social media is that it's not just that somebody can like point out how you're lying to them, but then other people can see that you're lying to them.
And then other people can see how many people agree with that person that you're lying to them.
And like they can see that, wow, 200,000 people liked this point about how you were lying to them.
And you really got to nip this thing in the bud.
And it's kind of like, it's really interesting that he's, and it's so like, I don't even think he possibly could have imagined how precise what he was saying was.
I remember these like little moments.
So I remember there was one thing.
There was like a protest in China.
I can't remember what year this was.
What was it?
The Michael Brown and Ferguson thing.
What was that?
2013?
I think.
24.
Okay.
So there was a protest in China and they were saying, hands up, don't shoot in the thing.
Now, however you feel about what exactly happened in that altercation with the cop, like any of that, that's not even the point of what I'm saying.
I just remember watching that and going, wow.
So there could be these protesters in China who are aware of a protest that went on in America and could kind of have this same like, yeah, fuck the police state.
Attitude and like this, you're like holy shit oh, and then no, and really powerful yeah, and in Ferguson, the Palestinians were tweeting to them, use milk to get the tear gas out of your eyes.
And yeah, like there was some stuff going down.
Oh, it must have been 2014.
Yeah, you're right, it was 14, because it was during this same time of the attack going on in Gaza, I think.
So there's just, there was just this thing kind of exploding up that you're like whoa, what's going on here?
And at first, if you remember, you know, in 2008 and in 2012, Obama was kind of um he, he was recognized and correctly so, to be like oh, he was the first presidential candidate who really like, used social media.
This is, this was a completely new thing.
Like it in 2004 and 2000 uh, that this was not even a thing that anyone thought about.
But all of a sudden, it was like oh okay, and everyone was kind of cool with it in the establishment like well, this is okay, an establishment politician can use it.
But it started almost kind of morphing into something else.
Of course, I think also a lot of um uh, Tea Party stuff, Occupy Wall Street stuff was, was spread on on social media it was.
There was just a lot going on.
I also remember one other thing that really uh stuck with me, and this was later.
This was maybe 2018 or 2019 when I just remember my is before I had my son, my wife and daughter were out and I was alone in my apartment in Manhattan at the time.
And I was I was just like kind of doing work, preparing for the podcast.
And I was watching.
I had like the cable news on the TV.
And then I was like looking at stuff on my phone and I had Twitter on my phone.
And I just saw all these fucking people showing live feed.
feeds of Notre Dame uh, Notre Dame burning and that there this fire had caught on this fucking you know historic, uh uh church in uh, France.
And it was like oh, look at this, this.
And I remember just looking at the television and looking at my phone and it was about at least four or five minutes before the tv caught up to where the phone was right and there was just something really I don't know.
There's something really powerful about that moment where I was like they've got you beat, like you cannot get me the news one, but yeah, like you can't get me the news as fast as they can.
Well look, I remember a friend saying to me, i'm glad you brought up Mike Brown, because I remember a friend who's very much a normal guy, you know, old skater friend of mine with a job, who said to me, hey man, what's going on with the cops killing, Killing people like this so much?
This is probably 2013 or 14.
Color-Coded Revolution Tactics00:06:42
And it was just because he was on Facebook and he was essentially just reflecting what everybody thought.
And this is before somebody came up with hashtag divide everybody by race and all this crap.
It was just, man, I was watching Facebook and they just blew this guy away.
Man, I was.
And so what happens is what?
Like each one of these would just be a local news story and would never be national news.
Tom Brokaw would never say, oh, the cops blew some guy away.
That's not going to make national news, but it'll make Facebook national news and it'll go around on Facebook and Twitter.
And so now you have cops killing people all the time and beating the crap out of them and making really shoddy excuses like, oh, he was reaching for his waistband.
And yeah, even though he had no shirt on and his pants were already below his butt and he clearly did not have a gun in his waistband, dude.
But anyway, and people just normal people started reacting really badly against that.
And what's going on with that?
And of course, like to bring us back up more to present day, the reactions to the lockdowns and the COVID restrictions.
Now we're getting into like Twitter's had 10 years of practice of censoring, figuring out who's allowed to say what when and all of that.
And that's what he's documenting here is how far they've gone into manipulating those things, you know?
I'd be interested to see what were their rules for people talking about protests versus riots versus looting versus accountability for cops versus a bunch of race baiting BS and all of that during all of that.
You know what I mean?
In fact, there's a famous Time magazine story about the network of Democrats who are working so hard to rig the game against Trump in the election that talked about how they would use social media to activate their mobs or to deactivate them, right?
Like that was part of the story was they were able to tell mobs to stay home and they would.
And then they were able to activate them again, you know, this kind of thing.
So what are the Torito rules for that when the Democrats are calling out people to not just protest, but to riot and this kind of thing?
Remember in the lead up to the election, and I did get this wrong.
And I guess partially just because they won, they rigged it better than he did.
It's like it's like an election in Afghanistan.
Like, who's going to steal the election better, Karzai or Ghani, right?
We're like, here, it's Donald Trump is trying to rig it in his own way.
And or at least is, you know, threatening that if he doesn't win, he's going to, you know, and he did try to figure out a way to rig the Electoral College or some other way to stay in power.
Well, at the same time, they were doing what amounted to like a color-coded revolution against him.
And they were talking about openly in the Washington Post and other places that if Donald Trump wins, we're not going to accept it.
We're going to call everybody out into the street.
Remember, Hillary Clinton said, no matter what, under any circumstances, Biden should not concede to Trump, no matter how bad it was.
I think in the Washington Post story or in the Atlantic, they had one that said that unless it's just an absolute landslide for Trump, where there's just nothing they can say about it, anything short of a total landslide.
They're going to go out in the streets.
They're going to do like the Orange Revolution in 2004 and just say that our exit polls say that our guy won and just stay out there and have the money to stay out there and try to protest until they could somehow bring him down.
That was what they were openly saying in the run-up to the thing.
So what were the Twitter rules for all of that?
You know, for, you know what I mean?
The way that if you compare the way that they're treating the right here and anything that Donald Trump says about this election being rigged, but people can go back and read that in the Atlantic and the Washington Post from the summer of 2020.
They were talking openly about it.
So.
Yeah, it's real.
It's you're allowed to deny elections if you're denying the right elections or even preemptively denying them.
But, you know, I gotta say, it does, there were a lot of similarities throughout 2020 to the way that color revolutions happen.
I'm not saying it's exactly what it was, but I think there were at least certainly some people who jumped on it and tried to kind of push it in that direction.
That there really was a lot of that.
And that's another thing that is very hard to exactly measure.
You know, like you kind of know, obviously, that there were these long-sustained riots throughout the summer of 2020, and that there was support from the corporate press for them.
There's no question about that.
I mean, there's the hilarious videos of like, you know, CNN contributors out there being like, you know, fiery, but mostly peaceful riots.
And like, giant fire line.
Yeah, huge building going on.
People are like winging bottom to top, winging bottles at their head.
And they're like, they're really cool out here.
You know, like, it's just so ridiculous.
And then you could look at all of the money that was put up to like bail people out, you know, right after they were coming and really, you know, powerful.
Even Kamala Harris, I think, had bragged about like raising money to bail people out who were like arrested for, you know, property crimes and things like that.
Uh, in the riots.
And you know, Washington Dc was like boarded up before the the election and not for january 6th.
You know they were boarded up for, if Trump were to win, how bad things were going to be, and at least you know it's.
You have to kind of wonder how many people I know, people i've talked to people who voted for Joe Biden, simply because they said they were like there's going to be riots if Donald Trump wins again and that's, that's a.
That's a weird form of kind of soft not even soft, I don't know like just strong arming people into almost being like, well look, here are your options.
Either this guy can win or there can be violence right well see, and Trump didn't know how to handle it either.
He goes yeah see, these riots, this is what Biden wants for America.
And everybody's like, well, you're the one in charge now while it's happening.
Right yeah, he actually said they ran commercials.
They ran one commercial where they showed all the riots and goes, this is Biden's America.
And you're like, no, this is your America.
That's not the way to handle this dude.
Yeah, he never knew how to handle anything.
I mean and and look, i'm no defender of Donald Trump.
Hunter Biden Laptop Hoax00:03:16
I never was.
I never liked the guy, ever since I was a little kid, and I didn't support him for president.
I did root for him to defeat Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and I rooted for him to beat Joe Biden, but that wasn't really rooting for him, that was rooting against.
Yeah, because they are them.
And I don't mean that in the pronoun sense, I just mean that you know the powers that be versus this one kook who somehow was rich enough and arrogant enough to make himself the president on his first try.
And look, look who he was up against.
As Norm McDonald said, people hated Hillary Clinton so much, they voted for somebody they hated even more than her, just to rub it in, let her know.
So, but so I, you know, and look, same thing with Russia.
I mean, to have the FBI and the CIA intervene in American elections like this, it's just completely crazy.
And oh, and like this, I should say, in 2020, you have the dual October surprise whammy of October, where the first thing that happens is the FBI launches their own October surprise, which is the entrapment of these idiots on the kidnap and murder Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of the Democrat lady, governor of Michigan.
That came out in October 8th.
And that thing was completely fake.
And they had, you know, some of the guys got acquitted, some got a hung jury.
I guess they got a couple of convictions, but still the whole thing, as we know, there were 10 FBI informants out of 12 people involved in the plot.
And one of them, I mean, if you look into the details of the story, I mean, one of them was like a borderline homeless guy who was like, he was basically saying in all of the documented like, you know, transcripts, he was basically saying, well, I don't actually want to do anything like this.
Like, what do you mean we're going to kidnap the governor?
I mean, it's like, it's the most like blatant entrapment scheme ever.
And yeah, that was a real and the thing, the important point about that is not just that it was an FBI sting entrapment case.
It was like, what was the purpose of this?
It was to smear, it was to smear, number one, the Trump supporters and also those who would dare to resist lockdown governors as being like, oh, these are the really dangerous people.
These are the really horrible ones, you know, right in October where you wouldn't have time to think about it and you would just be like, oh, this might just influence me to vote for the other party.
Yep.
And then at the same time, the FBI is going around and telling Twitter and Facebook and everybody else that look out for Russian disinformation coming this way.
And then the CIA claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow forged by the Russians, although they never explained that.
It was an obvious hoax from the very beginning.
And then they use that to completely crush the Republicans' October surprise that they had in store for Hunter Biden, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop and that they had in store for Joe, and which even today, you know, to this day, of course, the center left liberals on this are just horrible.
They remind me of Bush Republicans and they're just obstinance and obtuseness.
You know, they go, oh, yeah, oh, you just want to talk about hunters, dick pics, and this kind of thing.
Like, yeah, that's not all that was on there.
Big Business Influence Crushed00:03:10
And there are all these emails back and forth about him doing business in foreign countries with, you know, major firms tied to, for example, the Chinese government, which you can't really have a major firm in China that's not directly tied to the Chinese government one way or the other there.
And then, and, you know, who knows the depths of it?
You know, Peter Van Buren wrote a great write-up of the thing for the American conservative back about half a year ago or whatever.
But, you know, 10% from the big guy comes from that.
And this guy, Bobolinski, says that one of the business partners, and this very authenticated now by everyone, all the major media now admit that that means Joe Biden and that he gets this kickback from this deal with.
Now, the Republicans now try to pretend that that means that Joe Biden is completely compromised by the Chinese, like Bill Clinton or something, but that's not true.
I'll tell you about Bill Clinton if you want, but that's not true.
Joe Biden's been an absolute horrible hawk on China in every way.
He's worse than Trump on China.
So don't give me that crap.
Like he's somehow bought off by the PLA.
But that doesn't mean he ain't corrupt.
That doesn't mean that doesn't mean he wasn't making money from them.
Yeah.
And even maybe making them promises that he ended up breaking.
Who knows?
But all of that absolutely was worth investigating.
And for them to crush that, for them to be able to crush that.
I mean, same thing with the COVID thing.
I remember thinking that, like, look, at the end of the day, you're going to have what a thousand different little Facebook groups of doctors talking to each other about what treatments work best and this kind of thing.
And like, oh, no, you're not either.
And somehow in the United States of America, someone was able to decide, no, you're not either, and turned all of that off.
That no, actually, what every doctor is going to do is what the CDC says.
And they're going to, and you're not going to solve this.
You're not going to figure out which, which is brewer treatments work among however many what millions of decentralized doctors there are out there in America that could just discuss these things among themselves and come up with the best answers that they could, especially, you know, right at first when they're trying to ameliorate the onset of the thing.
And, you know, same with the lockdowns.
I thought, man, they can't get away with the lockdowns for more than a couple of weeks.
Not even that best.
It's just a couple of weeks.
And anything more than that, business isn't going to stand for it.
There's not.
And you're talking about a million businesses in America that have to somehow shut down.
That's not going to work.
And then, stupid Horton, man, they're just going to print $10 trillion and give that out and bail out their friends among the firms and make the rest eat shit.
That's what they're going to do.
And yeah, well, it's also, and it was also how good it turned out to be for big business.
Yeah.
You know, which is really what runs things.
And it was a disaster for small and mid-sized businesses, but really, small and mid-sized businesses do not have too much influence with the government.
And who does have influence is big business and they were doing great.
And so it just, that just didn't happen.
But yeah, with the social media stuff, it does seem like there's this kind of almost like escalation from the stuff we were talking about in like 2013, 2014.
Popular Vote Repudiation00:05:56
But really, in 2016, it all kind of like comes to a head when actually Donald Trump somehow in an election with, you know, if people are being honest, this is, this is something that I've, you know, been thinking about more and more lately, especially after the midterm elections of 2022.
That, you know, look, there is, I think there are a lot of people like us who are like completely woken up to how corrupt the corporate press and the government and all of our major institutions are.
And then you see kind of like this awakening of a lot of people and you're like, yeah, everyone's waking up to how corrupt this whole thing is.
But that's not exactly right.
You know, like, that's not exactly right.
The truth is more like Donald Trump, the fact that he even had a chance to win represents that there was a big repudiation of the establishment.
But the truth is that like that election could have happened 10 times and Donald Trump maybe only wins once.
You know, like a lot of things had to just go right.
And he still did lose the popular vote by quite a lot.
Like the truth is that in this country, whether we like it or not, there's actually substantially more people against what Donald Trump represented than were for it.
You know, millions more on the other side.
The Republicans have not won the popular vote in quite a while.
And that's, you know what I mean?
That's what was the last time the Republicans won the popular vote?
04.
So 2004, but that's a long time ago.
Yeah.
That's fucking 18 years ago, 2004.
You know what I mean?
Like that's a lot.
So I'm just saying it's been that.
It's been almost two decades since the Republicans won the popular vote.
And in this midterm, they're pretty sure they did not.
But regardless, that, but even still, Donald Trump somehow pulls this thing off and wins.
And then there's this real reaction of like, whoa, he and he won it through Twitter.
Like, that's how he won the election is that he was able to completely drive the narrative of every single news day through his Twitter account.
And then you saw a crazy crackdown.
And it's just, this has just been the reality of the situation since then is that now it's like everyone has to, everyone knows that you could be banned for any little thing that you tweet.
You know, I've had it a lot over the last few years, but before the Elon Musk era of Twitter, where they would do that thing, you know, when you tweet something and then they go, this really isn't the way people normally tweet.
Are you sure you want to send this tweet?
And it's, it's a really brilliant, almost intimidation tactic where they'll go like, hey, so you got, you know, like, you got a little following here.
You want to keep that or you want to rephrase this?
It's a perfect delay.
Forget, we're watching you before it even gets posted.
We're seeing it first.
Yep.
It's really, it's like, it's, it's deeper than anything Orwell could have even like dreamed up.
You know, like that they are going like this kind of like, hey, you could say this if you want to, but just so you know, you might lose your ability to fucking talk to your audience after you say this.
And look, I mean, the thread tonight is they kicked the sitting president of the United States of America off.
And Taibbi is explaining basically the prelude to that and how they were trying to set up the rules for January 6th and all this or in the lead up to it.
And, you know, there was, you know, Greenwald always quotes, I think the former president of Brazil or no, it's not.
It's somebody else.
I forget.
But it's a former, or it's a president somewhere in Latin America left this president saying, this is just terrifying to think that Twitter could do this to a sitting head of state.
And the fact that it's the president of the United States of America, which is, you would think he would be the guy directing Twitter to do this to somebody else.
And if they can do it to him, then nobody's safe.
And it's such an important method of communication.
And to be able to pick and choose, to have this company be able to pick and choose which presidents of which United States are able to communicate with people, you know, not just even a candidate.
I mean, imagine the balls of doing that to a major party candidate or even a minor party candidate.
But to do that to the sitting president of the United States is completely bananas.
And as they show in the thread here tonight, this guy, Yoel Roth, who is in charge of all this stuff for Twitter, was essentially acting as an agent of the FBI and the intelligence directorate.
You know, I mean, he was meeting with the director of national intelligence, their office, along with the FBI.
And, you know, on a constant and Department of Homeland Security on a constant basis.
If people missed it, by the way, Ken Klippenstein did a piece for the intercept about what, three or four weeks ago about the Department of Homeland Security and their role in, you know, in all of social media and all of the, you know, kind of semi-enforcement outsourcing things they can't do to these other people.
And, you know, Greenwald and I was on Judge Napolitano's show and he verified that this is true too from his legal experience.
But Greenwald constantly points out that the Supreme Court has ruled that, for example, the government cannot tell a lie private bookstore what books to not sell because And or, or even like lean on them, like, you know, you're going to have a problem with us for some other reason if you don't, or that kind of thing.
Private Company Free Speech00:02:58
Right.
They don't have the power to censor.
They don't have, um, it's it's uh the courts have ruled there's no loophole around that where they get to make a private uh entity censor for them.
And so that's already settled.
It just hasn't been settled in the case of Smith versus Twitter yet, right?
But has it been has it been settled to the degree?
So, so I understand it's been settled because this is like a legal question that I have, which I don't know if you have the answer to, or maybe Judge Napolitano's the guy to ask about this.
But like, okay, I understand that they can't tell a private entity that they can't, you know, publish a book.
But if they just go, if the government just goes, What's going on with Scott Horton's book?
you know, and then that private bookstore pulls your book.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, that's almost like the gap where it's like, is that because what's happening basically is that it's in the same way.
The analogy I used was almost like a guy, you know, in an alleyway who kind of like shows you a gun under his belt and then goes, Hey, how about you lend me some money?
And like, okay, I think like he's robbing you, but he's not exactly saying I'm robbing you.
I think the um, I think the case law, I don't, I don't know the details, yeah, but I'd be willing to bet that no, they account for that.
Yeah, I hope so.
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Let's get back into the show.
For people who aren't familiar, in a previous life, Greenwald was a civil liberties lawyer in New York.
Inciting Violence on Twitter00:06:43
Yeah.
He defended, you know, Bill of Rights cases.
That was his thing was defending, you know, First Amendment and Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment type trials or questions in court.
So he's a real expert on this stuff.
And I think he has said it's unequivocal in the case of bookstores, et cetera, but it just has not been tried here.
But the precedent, obviously, same thing.
It just has not been made to hold here.
But, you know, to if you go back to Taibbi's thread tonight, I mean, he, the way that he describes the police agencies and the intelligence services and their interactions with Twitter here and their, you know, their constant sort of, you know, I don't know exactly how you want to characterize their relationship with this guy, Roth, and him making sure that their will is being carried out here.
You can see it's all there.
And Taibi talks about, quotes them saying that I guess from a upcoming bit, another thread upcoming, but like a slight preview of it, that they congratulate themselves for being congratulated by, quote, our partners in Washington for our good job in kicking Trump off of there.
So this is while he's the sitting president, his own government is who are supposedly loyal to the chief executive of the departments that they work for are congratulating Twitter for kicking him off of there.
It's so, it's so funny, even as like all the accusations against Trump are that he's some type of fascist authoritarian.
And you're like, man, for a fascist authoritarian, he really does not have control of his own government.
Like for Democrats, they're sure fascist totalitarian secret police going around, you know, acting in ways that we would escape.
I mean, any of these stories about the presidential, the presidential secession in Iran would be an excuse to bomb him.
You know what I mean?
John Bolton would be up there talking about that's why the Ayatollah has to go, you know?
Well, that's always a weird thing about even under Elon Musk's rule in Twitter.
I've made this comment a few podcasts back, but it is pretty funny that you're not the one thing that everyone will agree is that you're not allowed to incite violence on Twitter.
That's like even under free speech Twitter, you can incite violence unless, of course, it's a government program for violence, in which case you can totally incite violence.
You could totally support any government war that you want to.
Like that's to, you could say, hey, you know, we should declare our, you know, we should invoke Article 5 and fucking go bomb, you know, Russia tomorrow.
That's totally fine.
Or an eric missile that's being, you know, blamed on somebody else.
Right, right.
But there was, so there's something like so just, I don't know, like so, so profoundly interesting about all of this.
One of the things that I find really interesting that I, I will say I find somewhat vindicating is that this Yoel Roth guy, we were playing clips of him the other day.
And what's so interesting is that, so this guy who was like, oh man, I forget the title that he had there where he was, you know, the head of Twitter trust and safety something or other.
And he's when he talks to the public, it's all just pure woke language.
It's just like, oh, well, we're just so concerned about the hateful content and what's coming out and how this could cause violence against the LGBT community, all of this.
Meanwhile, he's meeting with the FBI and the director of national security and like all this stuff.
And it's like, oh, no, no, no, this has nothing to do with what's really going on here.
This is all just a cover to like, this is your excuse for why you have to go ban people.
And, you know, he talks about like after January 6th, there was this deep, you know, like fear in Twitter employees about what we really should do.
We have, we're so scared about, you know, just the fact that this could incite more violence and all of this.
And meanwhile, none of that's what's actually going on.
What's going on is like this kind of deep political game where, you know, the look, I don't know exactly all of the details of what happened with January 6th, but I do know that there's a lot of, let's just say the Ray, Ray Epps, is that his name?
That situation is always kind of stunk to me.
The cops who are pulling barricades aside and inviting people in, that's always kind of stung to me.
And then they just go, this is the perfect opportunity to shut Donald Trump the fuck up and we'll never hear from him again as long as we get him off Twitter.
Although that didn't work completely, but that does seem to be like, it does seem like all of that kind of happened in one through line.
Yeah.
On the other hand, he called for people to show up that day to try to protest to stop the Congress from counting those votes.
Yeah, that was pretty stupid.
No, no authority whatsoever for the vice president to do that.
Although, by the way, you know, the liberals say, oh, see, that's a coup d'état.
It was an insurrection and all this.
And yet, like, all indications are that all Trump meant when he, even when he says, go down there and fight, that still just means stand there and chant and protest.
No one would imagine that that means take the Capitol or that that's what he meant by that.
It was like, go up there and string up pants or any of this thing.
He was just saying go and protest and try to get them to, I guess, be intimidated by the public outside and the numbers of them and say, geez, maybe we should, you know, kick these votes back to the states to be recertified or whatever it was.
But they call that a coup.
But worst case scenario, it goes to the House of Representatives.
We're not talking about the Secretary of Defense and some four-star generals saying the election results are canceled or this, that, the other thing.
We're talking about maybe Donald Trump going outside the process to prevent the Electoral College from being able to complete their voting being counted or whatever.
But again, worst case scenario, the House votes.
It's the ones with ultimate authority.
The thing that's so crazy about it is that it's like in either scenario, let's just say Donald Trump meant give him the most charitable interpretation and fight is just like, you know, a political, you know, kind of euphemism like, you know, go fight and protest and be outside.
And then, and then the worst, you know, the least charitable interpretation, which is fight really meant something else, like go inside or something.
Google Search Suppression00:14:24
Either one, but I'm just saying, either one.
What's the plan here?
Like you explain to me how this could possibly work.
Like, what could it do?
Either way, even if you stormed, if you stormed in and put a gun to Mike Pence's head and said, you do not certify that election, he's going to go, okay, I won't certify the election.
Even if they killed Mike Pence, you go, okay, the fucking military is going to be in there in a few minutes.
You're all going to be fucking what happened to you.
You're all going to be either killed or locked in a hole for the next few years to figure out.
And then they'd certify the election right after you were done.
Like it's just, it just like it makes no, and that's a comment on Trump.
Like there was just no plan, you know, it happened there.
Anyway, one thing, because I want to, I want to switch gears and talk about other issues, some foreign policy stuff.
But I do want to say that just with all of this stuff that's coming out about Twitter, one of the things that I, what I've always cared about from like our perspective in the liberty movement about all of this stuff.
And one of the reasons why I've hated tech censorship, even before it was so clear how much government involvement, you know, there was in it, which I thought was pretty clear from the beginning.
But even aside from that, is, you know, it always seemed like to me, even from back in the, in the Ron Paul days, that the internet was our big weapon that we had.
Obviously, we couldn't get through all of the gatekeepers in the traditional corporate media.
They had long decided to keep our people out.
But then when Ron Paul was coming up, even if they'd only give him two minutes on the debate stages, he could have a really awesome two minutes up there.
And then the money bombs could come in online.
And then all the people could share his stuff on YouTube.
And then all the people could share his stuff like all over the place.
Really, that in his campaigns, it wasn't so much like Twitter and stuff like that was pretty new, but YouTube was really where Ron Paul blew up.
And I've felt for a long time that, like, look, however you feel about Alex Jones, however you feel about whoever, you know, some alt-right guy or whoever else is getting kicked off of these sites, you're like, are you really, are you okay with the precedent of like these dissident voices being silenced when our only hope is that our dissident voices will be able to be amplified on the internet and be able to, you know, somehow reach a lot of people.
And I just think that like that's it's a re any anyone who is opposed to the regime should be very concerned about voices that are opposed to the regime being stifled in these new platforms.
Like this is kind of humanity's best hope and we should really be against this.
This is why it always drove me crazy when I'd hear libertarians making the like, well, it's a private company.
They can do whatever they want type arguments.
Like, yeah, I mean, obviously, as the evidence has shown, it's not exactly just a private company doing whatever they want.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
It's the government interfering with these private companies.
But even if it was just a private company, you know, like you're not just supposed to complain that these terms of service suck.
Yeah.
You can't say that.
It's a private company.
Well, okay, fine.
Yeah.
These terms of service are terrible.
What do you mean?
You get to, you know, these kooks from the Atlantic Council, this must have been who it was, anonymously gave a list to the Washington Post of people that they claimed were spreading Russian propaganda, proper not.
And they're still on, you know, Twitter tweeting out anti-Russian propaganda constantly.
And then we know Google took their word for it and immediately just deranked everybody on that list.
And so, you know, along with the so-called alt-light and alt-right and whoever that they were banning in the name of Trumpianism and whatever during that time, they also went after a bunch of anti-war leftists and they went after anti-war.com.
And I don't know the exact, you know, where Twitter fell into that, but I sure know that it hurt everybody on that list when it came to Facebook and Google.
And, you know, one of the groups on that list was the Trotskyites at the World Socialist website.
But they did a real deep dive on the data because they saw immediately that their traffic just took a dive from incoming Google hits.
And you got to figure you Google Trotsky, obviously, you're going to get Irving Crystal, but also you're going to get the World Socialist website, right?
But instead, they're on the third page of results for Trotsky.
Come on.
And so that was what set them off.
And then they did a deep dive and they showed how this was happening to all these other groups too, and including, you know, Truth Out and Truth Dig that were just, you know, progressives, like one click to the left of the Democrats, good on stuff, principled guys, good foreign policy coverage and this and that kind of thing, but by no means like bomb throwing communist radicals talking about, you know, overthrowing America and some kind of horrible thing that somehow you might think could be justified to be censored or whatever.
We're talking about essentially run of the middle, but decent progressives getting completely crushed.
And then, of course, at antiwar.com, we're the world's greatest heroes.
What the hell could we possibly have done to deserve to be deranked by Google?
And especially when you look at our 10 zillion pages of written text with every keyword in the world and it ain't some SEO scam, right?
This is anti-war.com has been publishing since 1995.
And we've, you know, there was a time where you search anything foreign policy, you're going to get anti-war.com on the first page.
And I don't know exactly how it is now.
I haven't tested it lately, but that was with the Russiagate hoax.
That was in the name of the Russiagate hoax, the giant scam that never happened, where Russia rigged the election in some kind of soft coup to install Donald Trump in 2016.
That never happened.
That after three years of lying, the FBI and CIA finally admitted never happened.
And, you know, all that stuck to this day.
So, you know, I want to see all of that.
You know, we got the Twitter files.
Let's see the Google file.
This is why Julian Assange is sitting in prison, you understand, because if he wasn't, we'd have the Google files.
We'd have the Facebook files that show how they do this to all of us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, and I mean, Twitter, the Twitter files being released, I think that's part of the value in them that everybody kind of knows without knowing that obviously this is happening on all these other, you know, sites as well.
And so we kind of obviously were just kind of left to wonder because we don't know the exact details.
But yeah, there's no question that equally shady shit is happening on Google, on Facebook.
Google, they're the kings of the universe.
Yeah.
Google is everything.
I mean, Google, you know, people say Kleenex for tissue, or at least in Texas, we say Cokes when we just mean any brand of soda, whatever you're talking about, get the Cokes.
You know what I mean?
That's the same kind of thing with the ubiquity of Google as everyone on Earth's major, or at least in the West, our major search tool for whatever we are looking for.
No, it's the same thing.
You say, you say you Googled it.
Right.
Just means you looked it up.
Yeah, that means you did a search online.
You know, it became their brand name, took that whole, that whole thing over.
And, you know, a few years back, this would have been probably in 2015 in the lead up to that election.
There was a researcher.
I think he was an American at a university in Australia or something.
My brain works right at all.
Anyway, so he did this study.
And, you know, social science is not really science.
Okay.
It ain't, you can't really do double blindness and that, but you can kind of bluff and do your best and repeat your tests and see if you get the same results.
So there's some things to be learned from it.
And essentially what he found was that, you know, people Google things like what's the weather today or what day of the week is it?
Or, you know, how far is it from here to Dallas or whatever, this kind of thing.
And so they're conditioned to accept the first results as just the facts.
Like, this is what's true is, you know, whether it's raining outside or not.
I don't know, the weather report's not a very good example.
But anyway, when people are looking up just basic things that are true or false, they come to just rely on Twitter or on pardon me on Google to tell them exactly what's what.
So then when they Google candidates, the ranking order of the candidates in whatever race, those results, essentially subconsciously was his hypothesis that he later seemed to prove was correct or show was correct, was that if you say presidential candidates and the top few results Are all Hillary Clinton?
Your brain essentially takes it, even though you know there's other people in the race or whatever.
On a subconscious level, you take that to mean what time, you know, whether it's what's true, like what time is it?
Um, uh, and so she's the candidate.
And what he did was he had essentially, you know, had his engineers make a fake Google page where they could manipulate the results.
And what they did was they had university students and whoever else participate in the trials, and they would just have people Google candidates for different things and they would measure, you know, who are you voting for and then you know, skew and correct and see how much the results on their Google page seem to influence the answer of who it was that they were interested in as candidates.
And then they did it, you know, again, I'm saying it's not hard science, it's just social science, but they did it with enough people, you know, in a broad enough study that they could tell that, yeah, when we turn the dial for more Trump results, we get more Trump results out of the humans doing the searching.
And when we turn the dial back the other way and we show them more Hillary, they go more Hillary.
And it wasn't just those two, it was different candidates in different races.
And they just showed him this is people are very impressionable.
So this kind of manipulation, even just a subtle little bit about just the order of search results, never mind being banished to the third page where you might as well be there.
Well, and there, there's, and there's examples, you know, if you, by the way, if they think that they think Russians, you know, uh, buying a few Facebook ads at some outcome in the election, imagine what Google turning up or down your search.
And of course, we know that Tulsi Gabbard, after her two Democratic debate appearances, was the most Googled person on that debate stage.
And they suspended her advertisements.
Like you couldn't be directed toward her campaign page the day after the debates.
And she sued Google.
I think she wasn't able to prove anything in that case.
Sounds like some Soviet shit in there.
Yeah.
I mean, it's to think that they could do that.
It's better.
It's more effective.
It's better than the Soviet shit was.
And Hillary Clinton called her a traitor while she's a lieutenant colonel in the Hawaiian National Guard.
Like, really?
She's a traitor.
Boy, I best, I think we better call for an internal military investigation to check on her ties to Russia.
If there's a national security threat here, not the candidate.
She's a currently serving officer, Ms. Clinton.
Better make a specific accusation there if you're making it.
But nope, just, you know, just amazing.
Hillary Clinton, you know, for whatever you might say about Tulsi Gabbard, whatever, and there are some critiques that people have of her that are legitimate, but you know, Hillary Clinton lies the country into a war.
Tulsi Gabbard enlists to go serve in that war.
And then Hillary Clinton has the nerve to call her the traitor.
You know, like just, wow, who's the traitor there?
And the other thing, Hillary said, somebody asked her, how could you do this?
And she said, Bush gave me $20 billion for New York.
Right.
I had to.
Money.
I did it for money.
She said, okay, sorry, go ahead, Dave.
Yeah.
No, look, I want to, I want to transition.
I want to talk about a couple other things foreign policy related, but I do just think it is worth really the last thing I really want to point out about this that I hope people understand because even people who are like, I know a lot of times some of the people who get booted or get kicked, you know, get banned or, you know, get demonetized or any of this stuff.
Sometimes they really are people who you're kind of like, yeah, that guy deserved it.
He had it coming and or he was saying horrible things.
But also notice that it's almost always while that's happening, and while the big cases are those people, they also get all of the anti-war activists.
Like that's always the trend.
In the same sense that when, if you remember, there was that FBI.
Peter Van Buren.
I mean, he is one of our best guys from the State Department and a great tweeter, a hellraiser on there.
And they kicked him off.
You know what he did?
There's this bitch ass man named Jonathan Katz.
And Peter Van Buren said, I hope a MAGA guy eats your face because he was watching a zombie movie at the time.
And the guy was saying, wan, wan, wan, the MAGA guys.
And Van Buren goes, oh, please, I hope a MAGA guy eats your face.
And then Jonathan Katz, this bitch ass man, turned Donald Trump into the Twitter thought police, blocked and reported.
Um, um, um, I'm telling on you for saying that to me.
And, and then they took that opportunity to pretend to believe that this was some threat against this bitch ass.
Yeah.
And then of course, uh, of course, the great Daniel McAdams got kicked off of Twitter over nothing, calling Sean Hannity retarded or something like that, which is a demonstrable fact.
Like you just can't even argue with, you can't argue with the logic of it.
Ceasefire Negotiations Blocked00:14:59
But this was always even back, if you remember when there was like the IRS scandal under Obama, where they said they were targeting conservative groups.
But then what wasn't mentioned in that is that they also targeted a whole bunch of anti-war leftist groups.
Like it's always, they always kind of conveniently get anyone who's a thorn in the regime's side.
So if you want to be a thorn in the regime, don't support them removing anyone who's a thorn in the regime's side.
It always comes back to get you too.
Okay, I want to, because we talked about this a little longer than I anticipated.
I want to get to a couple other things.
So number one, Yemen.
Let's talk a little bit about this.
Obviously, Yemen is something that you've been talking about a lot for many years now, something I've talked about a lot to as many big audiences as I could talk about it in front of.
It's really been the worst thing in the world over the last seven, eight years.
It's although I will granted over the last year, the situation in Ukraine has seemed to have more danger associated with it.
But the actual worst thing in the world that's happening has been this war in Yemen.
But there are some positives over the last year.
There was like, it does seem like things got a lot better.
There was a real ceasefire for a while there.
The blockade seems to have been eased quite a bit.
And now we have these war powers resolutions coming up.
So like fill people in what's going on with the latest in Yemen.
Yeah, so that's exactly right.
I mean, as Ukraine has gotten much worse and something around 100,000 people have been killed in that.
I don't know, maybe less than that, but thousands of civilians.
As that's happened, the war in Yemen has been winding down almost over the same time period.
What happened was last March, the Houthi government regime in Sana'a, the enemy in the Yemen war.
They scored another very lucky hit on an oil refinery outside of Riyadh.
And somebody in a white robe, I don't know who, came to Mohammed bin Solomon and said, all right, young man, wrap this thing up.
We've had enough of this.
So the Saudis have been trying to climb down since then.
Right.
So, you know, it's the money.
So the Saudis and the UAE, they brokered this ceasefire deal with the Houthis and it held.
It was a two-month deal that held through September, right?
It went lasted maybe into the beginning of October.
So almost five months for a two-month ceasefire.
That's pretty good.
And then ever since it expired, it's still held, in fact.
And so there's been some fighting here and there, violations here and there.
I don't want to imply otherwise.
But at the same time, the Saudis have not returned to airstrikes.
The UAE as well has not returned to airstrikes.
And the Houthis have not done any strikes across the border into Saudi Arabia.
And the port at Hodeida, the all-important port at Hodeda on the Red Sea, is still open.
And the Sana airport is still open for at least limited flights to Jordan and back and a couple of things.
So the situation is 10,000 times better than it was a year ago.
I'm happy to tell you.
It's been a few weeks since I talked to him, but I have a reporter friend in Yemen, Nasser Arabi.
You probably heard me interview him before.
And, you know, when I interviewed him the last couple of times, he's like, glory days are here, man.
It's great.
The war is over.
Everybody's happy and it's going to be fine and they're going to work it out.
And it's going to be hard, but it's winding down.
We are on the way to solving it.
So, but like I say, the ceasefire did break down.
And the Houthis are making demands.
And we went through him on the show.
He explained on the show, they're all within reasonable bounds.
They're not asking for a giant welfare payment from Americans or anything like that.
They're just saying they want the essentially the stolen and moved central bank to pay the salaries of the people in the north.
And they want to see, you know, sieges around this town lifted and this kind of deal.
So in other words, all battlefield stuff, all like tactical level stuff that could totally be accommodated to accommodate both sides.
But so the problem is, though, is we are dealing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Bonesaw over there.
And these Houthis, as the New York Times would say, if the cop killed them while they were unarmed, they're no angels either.
And so, you know, could this thing get much worse?
Again, yes, I think it could.
And, you know, Biden ran on, I'm going to end that Yemen war.
He said that a year before he was inaugurated.
Then when he was inaugurated, a couple of weeks later, he said, I'm living up to that.
I'm calling off all support for the war.
But then he didn't.
And that was a lie.
And about two months later, Admiral Kirby, the spokesman at the Pentagon, admitted that, nah, we're still doing all the maintenance and resupply and the rest.
They keep selling them weapons.
Congress just approved more weapons the other day.
Or they voted down a thing trying to stop it or whatever it was.
But endlessly, they supply the weapons there.
And so, and by the way, the aid, and this is what makes it America's war, Dave, is that ever since Obama gave the green light for this in 2015, we give them the all the weapons, all the bombs and all the planes.
It's like three-fourths F-15s and American bombs, and one-fourth British typhoons and British bombs.
But and the French have some marginal role in there as well.
They're making some money in there as well.
But it's mostly Americans and British planes and bombs.
And then it's our military and civilian specialists on the ground who do all the care and feeding and the logistics.
So all the maintenance and then all of just even air traffic control and everything, taking, you know, flying the jets in and out of there.
I mean, it's princelings flying them, but it's, you know, Americans essentially running the whole thing, organizing the whole thing.
And then our intelligence helping pick targets and our Navy enforcing the blockade.
So, and this is, and of course, then, you know, diplomatically on the UN Security Council, America rules.
And there's this funny thing.
I never heard of this before until this war, Dave.
Because Britain used to own Yemen, you know, back when they stole it, that means that Britain is the pinholder for Yemen on the UN Security Council.
And what that means is I didn't know that.
That's it.
Yes, they're the pinholder.
That means that only Britain can issue a new resolution on what should be done in Yemen.
Wow.
Which, of course, the Americans tell the Brits what to do and they'll do whatever we say.
But still, like, what in the hell?
Like, it's a crazy thing, man.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, so the thing of it is this, Biden broke his promise and he's continued to support the war up until the ceasefire anyway.
And then it was the Saudis' decision to scale things back, not his.
Now, it is true that, you know, Anthony Blinken has been not absolutely the worst on this.
He seems to be like cooperating with negotiations there.
I don't really know the details there.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Americans are the sticking point, you know, in the, you know, an obstacle in the peace talks, if you told me they were.
But essentially what's happened now is through the power of just grassroots activism, we have again, war powers resolutions in Congress.
The first time we passed this, it was just the House in 2018.
Well, that's no good.
You need them both.
And in 2019, we did it again and Trump vetoed it.
And as we know now, and I know this report was from the New York Times, but they have firsthand statements from Trump's trade advisor, Pete Navarro, who talked about it was Raytheon, literally it was Raytheon that came to the Trump White House and said, you have to veto this war powers resolution trying to stop the war in Yemen because that's where we make our money as we eat the crushed up bones of these children for our daily bread.
And so Trump said, okay, good.
Money, that sounds good.
So they kept the war going.
But anyway, I don't think I don't think that Joe Biden could veto this.
I mean, he could, but I don't think he will.
Politically speaking, it wouldn't make sense for him to do it.
And even if he did, it would still be a huge deal if we get it through, you know, both houses of Congress pass it and force him to veto it.
And I know that sounds stupid, but I got an important example.
When they passed it and he and Trump vetoed it in 2019, the UAE pulled their main land army out and they immediately sent a representative to Tehran to start talking because, oh, geez, the Senate is mad at us.
And it didn't matter that it didn't work in, you know, legally that it didn't outlaw the war.
It caused UAE to back down terribly.
And it's true they kept their mercenary force on the ground there, including Al-Qaeda forces that they back there.
But compared to having their land army fighting in the war, it's a huge climb down.
So it's, you know, virtually guaranteed that if we get this thing passed, it'll have a great effect.
I doubt that Biden will veto it.
I think he will sign it.
And then that'll mean that he'll have to say to, he will have to say, it won't just be unconstitutional anymore.
It'll be illegal for him to continue the war.
And he'll have to tell the Saudis and the UAE, you better sign a peace deal and figure out a new way forward because Congress is now forbidding me from continuing to support this thing.
And Dave, I got to say, like, I don't know.
I'm sorry, all that rambling.
I know I'm boring.
And I know a lot of people don't know where Yemen is.
And they don't know that we've been killing them this whole time.
And they don't know how bad it is or why anybody should care.
But just trust me, that it's been really, really bad.
This war is just as bad as the Rock War II or the dirty war in Syria.
You got hundreds of thousands of people killed, including children from cholera by the thousands and thousands of times.
And it's just, it's a atrocity.
And look, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, we never had a war powers resolution to get behind to try to force them to stop, right?
Actually, that's not true.
On Libya, we did for just a minute.
There was a war powers resolution to try to make them stop, and it was killed by leadership in the House in 2011.
Nancy Pelosi killed it.
But they also wouldn't authorize it either.
You know, that was the thing.
But anyway, I mean, this is just a world historical opportunity for the American people.
Look, there are 350 million of us.
All we need is like three or 30,000 phone calls.
I'll take 30, please.
If I could get 30,000 phone calls, that would be great.
3,000 would also be great.
You know, and it's not too much to ask.
And now, here's the thing, too.
I'll tell you an anecdote.
I was talking to my buddy Hassan El-Tayeb, and I'm going, okay, now what are we going to do?
We got a lame-duck Congress.
We got 130 co-sponsors in the House, including a lot of Republicans.
But how do we get it called to the floor?
We got Nancy Pelosi.
And this guy, DeFazio, is the sponsor, but how can he get it voted on?
And I don't understand the procedures, Dave, but Hassan said that DeFazio has called the question, but it's still up to Pelosi, I guess, to let it actually be called and voted on.
And so that was our plan.
I'm going to spend December doing everything we can.
The first two weeks of December, doing everything we can to get people to call the House and get this thing voted on.
And I said, but I guess in the Senate, we're just doomed, right?
Nothing's going to happen.
And he goes, oh, I don't know.
And then the next day, Bernie Sanders says, I have the votes.
I'm calling the vote next week.
And we're going to pass this thing.
And Rand Paul told Politico he's going to vote for it.
It'd be better if he co-sponsored it, but whatever.
Now, Mike Lee, I tried to call his office and get a statement about whether he'll vote for it, but I know he'll vote for it, dude.
He's got to vote for it.
He was great on this before, and I'm pretty sure he'll vote for it.
And Menendez, who's the worst Democrat, is actually really pissed at the Saudis right now for going along with Putin on their oil refusing to slash oil production.
And so he's like at least on the fence.
And so it'd be nice if we had Menendez.
I'm not sure if they have him or not, but it looks like with a couple of Democrat votes, they need all the Democrat votes and a couple of Republicans would secure it, but they only need 50.
They don't need 60 votes filibuster proof.
They only need 50.
It's written in the War Powers Act, in the law itself.
They only need 50 votes and it doesn't have to go through any committee.
It can go straight to the floor.
Sanders is calling the vote on Tuesday.
So as we're recording this, it's Friday night.
By the time people hear this, we're going to have essentially one business day, one and a half maybe business days here on Monday and Tuesday to just absolutely flood the House and the Senate with phone calls and tell them we got to end this war.
And if people go to 833stopwar.com, it's a very simple little page.
At the top, it has some bullet points on the war so that you know what you're talking about.
And then you get down below and it has some talking points for what to say to your congressman.
And if you live in a Democrat district or you have a Democrat senator, you should approach it like this.
And if you live in a Republican district, have a Republican congressman or senator, you should approach it like that.
For example, I'm a Texan and in my county, my district, I have a Republican member of the House.
And of course, I've got Cornyn and Cruz as my senators, right?
Thousands of Calls to Congress00:11:40
So on my congressman and on Cruz, I emphasize that this is not the war on terrorism against Al-Qaeda.
There are dangerous al-Qaeda guys there.
This law doesn't touch that.
And I regret to inform you that it doesn't, Dave.
That'll have to be next.
Okay.
But it doesn't.
And they need to know that.
This is the war for Al-Qaeda.
And so as I put it, you know, my guy, John Carter, my congressman, and to Ted Cruz, I said, listen, you can still be a Ronald Reagan, tough guy, macho, Republican security hawk and vote for this bill.
In fact, you have to, because this war has got us on the wrong side of the damn terror war.
Yep.
So you got to vote for this resolution.
It's the right thing to do.
And you can, you know, couch it in a way.
And look who got us into it.
I told Ted Cruz's staffer and John Cornyn's staffer and whichever one it was.
They're like, whose fault is this?
It's Barack Obama's fault.
And who's continuing it right now?
Joe Biden.
Stick it to him, right?
Whatever.
Never mind who was president for four years.
Hold yada yada over that.
Yada, yada, yada.
But look, and this is Barack Obama's fault.
So undo it.
And, you know, it's, but look, it comes down to quantities.
It really does.
And I know from dealing with anti-war activists over the years, you know, I've lived in Austin.
I lived in LA for a little while.
I would never move to DC.
I don't have the personal experience here.
I'm not willing to do it.
But I know people, I've interviewed activists on my show for 20 years now, you know, about going to DC.
And I know that it does have an effect.
Now, like on the average day, if someone complains to me about government, this and that, and I say, well, Sony, you should call your congressman, then you should kick me in the shin.
That's stupid.
And who believes in that?
But if we're all doing it together, and we have a massive organized front of 100-something groups, most of them left and progressive groups, but a solid handful of libertarian and right-leaning groups, tax protester groups, and all kinds of things.
The Taxpayers Alliance of America, I think is one of them.
And of course, the National Libertarian Party and Young Americans for Liberty have a project, you know, on all of this.
If we're all doing this together and we can organize tens of thousands of calls, even just thousands of calls, like I'm not a utopian here.
If we can just make thousands of calls is enough that their phones are ringing off the hook.
And all day long, all on Monday, nobody can get any work done because the only thing anybody will talk about is Yemen.
Yemen, Yemen, Yemen.
Apparently, there's a big vote tomorrow and people are really pissed about this.
They're really into it.
You know, I remember, Dave, when you did that bit on the Joe Rogan show and you explained what was going on in the Yemen war to him, all of the comments.
And look, it's been my opinion that YouTube comments are like the lowest form of human communication possible.
Yes.
That's a general rule of thumb.
Yeah, it's really bad usually.
But these were just beautiful.
It was just beautiful because what people were saying was, what?
I didn't know about this.
And two, I'm so pissed and motivated.
Like, what are we doing?
Like, point me in a direction and tell me what the hell.
And look, I mean, this is all of our frustration.
We're up against the world empire.
And what good does our voice do, even on the margin?
Like, what good does it really do?
What can we actually do?
Well, here's something we can do.
Yeah.
Can all do together where we can see that we have succeeded before in getting this done.
Yeah, well, let me get more sponsors now than we had then.
Well, let me give, I'll give my quick pitch to this is why I really, really encourage everybody listening to go to 833stopwar.com and to make this call this Monday.
Okay.
And it's like this, because it's much bigger than just the idea of like even ending this war or putting pressure on your congressmen or senators.
It's like, okay, first of all, obviously, first and foremost, the war has just been the most horrific thing you could imagine.
I mean, it's, it's, you know, literally babies dying in the most brutal way possible.
You know, me and you have talked a bunch before, and I talked about it on Rogan and stuff, but it was the full blockade around the country over the last seven years has just been horrible.
I mean, literally the most vulnerable people in the poorest country in the Middle East dying in the most brutal conditions.
And this thing just has to be stopped.
On top of that, even if that's not motivating enough to you, there is a legitimate security concern to Americans that we have been fighting on the side of and strengthening al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
This is not a joke.
I mean, it's like, I'm never one of these people who like freak out about like the threat of terrorism and stuff.
But man, you definitely don't want to strengthen al-Qaeda.
This is really dangerous to the country.
And on top of that, as much as I despise in principle, the War Powers Act to begin with, I just hate it as a thing.
It's the best tool we have.
And that this could really send a message that it's like something to actually check the president's ability to feel like he can unilaterally conduct these wars.
This would be a huge, huge victory for the people who don't think that this one dictator of the military should be able to lead this country into wars that have done nothing but destroy the rest of the world and destroy our own country.
It's not that big of a thing that you need to do.
And it actually can make a real difference.
Just make a couple of phone calls, read a couple of these talking points.
If you listen to this show regularly, you probably got these points down already.
But go to the website 833stopwar.com.
Just to refresh on the talking points and go there.
It'll really make a difference.
I highly encourage people to do it.
Of course, the War Powers Act really is kind of bullshit because it's like it almost in a weird way, you know, it's like one of these things where it's like, it's like if you wrote a law that said like, you know, it's illegal to violate the Second Amendment for more than 90 days or something.
And you'd be like, but isn't it already illegal to violate the second amendment?
Like, why do you even need to do that?
So it basically the War Powers Act says that there's a time limit on how long the president can conduct an illegal war, which is bullshit.
It should already be illegal.
But this is if we were really to flex the War Powers Act right now, especially with all the other shit going on and how dangerous it all is, that would be a really powerful thing.
And what a great time it would be to send that message to the Biden administration that it's like, no, there is real pushback against this shit.
Yeah.
And a great victory for just people power in the country because there is no power faction behind us on this.
We don't have a single show host other than Kennedy lets me talk about it.
She let me talk about it last night, which I'm so grateful for.
But, you know, there's no other host on TV that rides this hobby horse, you know, Mehdi Hassan or whoever.
Nobody is the champion of this cause.
And so it's just, and there's no oil interests involved or anything like that on the side of the people of Yemen.
It's just a few Yemeni expats and then religious groups like the Quakers, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, FCNL.org for more info there.
And then a bunch of leftists and progressives and libertarians who just hate the empire and can't stand seeing what's going on here.
And it's been a major.
Well, it's been a major project of the new Libertarian Party as well.
And so it would be a great flex for us if we could have some role in like making this thing happen.
So that's one more thing that would be beneficial about this happening.
The least important, but still something that's worth thinking about.
And look, everybody, you know, I know it's cliche, but again, like, and I know it's an obscure topic mostly, but I'm only, I only need you for a day or two or three.
You know, we're going to get it through the Senate and then we're going to have to get it through the House.
I might be back to ask you to help us out next week, but then we're done.
It's like I'm asking you to change your life forever to become a Yemeni expert or a Yemeni activist or whatever.
I'm just saying like, here's one thing we could all do together to get this done.
And that's the model, not just for the LP, and it is the model for the LP.
You know, when we're not running elections, we can be an issue organization, but that's for everybody too.
Like, what if whatever in Ohio, they're trying to pass a red flag law that, well, we're all opposed to that across the country.
Let's all work together to stop them from passing that law.
And then, you know, here's a case where Ross Ulbricht is sitting in prison.
Let's all work together to free Ross.
Yeah.
Whatever it is.
Let's prove that we can work together, you know, to focus on these issues and actually move the margin and get something done here.
And look, I mean, I don't know.
What a horrible war and what a great opportunity to end it.
How could we turn it down?
We have to take this opportunity.
We have to try.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
I completely agree.
And of course, there is some, as you mentioned, there is some positive movement already in this conflict.
So this would really be something incredible, you know, with already there kind of being this situation where there's, there seems to not be the will to continue this war on the Saudis part.
The Houthis are ready to kind of like cut a deal and to then put pressure on the Biden administration.
It would just be like the perfect situation, you know, and who knows?
Who knows what else this could lead to?
You know, we just saw, and we got to wrap in a second, but we just saw, you know, the Saudis, at least seemingly, I guess this hasn't been confirmed, but I guess they seem to have brokered this deal between the Americans and the Russians to have this prisoner swap.
You know, I was saying on my last podcast, and I actually, I said this before I heard you on Kennedy, but I did have the same take as you.
I've been, you know, this is, I'm a good Hortonian because I did have the same take before I even heard you say this.
But I go, you know, this is actually really great.
This is really great.
And I don't care how bad of a fucking weapons dealer this guy was.
Putin's got plenty of weapons dealers.
He used to work for W. Bush anyway.
Yeah, like it doesn't, it's not like it changes like some drastic thing.
Oh, now he can deal weapons in a more efficient way.
The truth is, number one, no matter how many fucking, how hypocritical America is, because we got a bunch of people in our own prisons for the same crime.
Some, you know, WNBA player who didn't deserve to be locked up in a Russian prison is coming back home.
But much more importantly than that, at least there was a conversation between Blinken and Lavrov and that there was some type of like negotiation reached and like, okay, at least something, because man, if this thing goes in the worst possible way, you really want those two to be able to jump on the phone and like there to be some open line of communications.
So who knows what the ripple effects of this could be between.
And we will make Mohammed bin Salman the Secretary of State.
Yeah, maybe Lincoln can't do his job right.
We'll just have go over there and negotiate.
It may not be any worse.
Like, honestly, it might be an improvement in a week.
Lavrov's like, well, I can respect this guy at least.
Blinken Lavrov Talks00:01:06
Yeah, right.
It might actually be what gets the Russians' attention.
He goes, This guy's a strong man.
I like him.
But, you know, so anyway, so yeah, please go do your part on this.
I think it's a really great, a really great little experiment for all of us to try to throw our weight behind something.
All right.
We're going to have to wrap up there.
So one more time, Scott, the Libertarian Institute, the great Libertarian Institute, which you started up.
How can people go support you guys?
Just go check out libertarianinstitute.org slash donate and make sure to include your t-shirt size and pick out which book you want for your kickback there.
All right.
Hell yeah.
Thank you, Scott.
Always, always great when you come on.
We always appreciate your time.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
Don't forget, I will be out in Los Angeles, California for New Year's.
If you're in LA for New Year's and you want to come celebrate with me and the great Louis J. Gomez, we'll be at the comedy store returning to our traditional New Year's Eve shows there.
There's shows almost sold out.
So if you want to go grab tickets, go grab them now.