James Smith and Tucker Carlson dissect Pat Buchanan's "Suicide of a Superpower," arguing that government overreach, open borders, and unnecessary wars drive American decline. They critique the media's shift from intelligent discourse to venomous neoliberalism, citing Joe Scarborough's transformation and Rachel Maddow's earlier analysis of the military-industrial complex. The conversation highlights CIA cables validating Russia's red lines on NATO expansion, Julian Assange's imprisonment, and the Project for the New American Century's geopolitical planning. Ultimately, they predict an inevitable radical transformation of the United States by November 2024 as deep state interests discard Biden for Gavin Newsom, signaling a fundamental break in the nation's political trajectory. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Churchill's Buried Culture00:11:16
Fill her up.
You're listening to the gas digital.
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.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Ooh, I am excited for this one.
I finally got him.
My white whale.
I finally trapped him here on the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, needs no introduction.
The man, the myth, the legend, Tucker Carlson, how are you, Sarah?
James, what do you mean, man?
I texted you all the time.
You never mentioned it till yesterday.
I was like, of course.
I was working up the courage little by little to ask you on my show.
Will you text me to like say like a nice thing?
Like, hey, I really liked you on this.
And then I feel like kind of being a jerk if I'm like, oh, can you do something for me?
I was totally honored.
Are you kidding?
No, I love it.
Well, thank you for coming on.
I was thinking a little bit about this since we set this up yesterday.
And then I had this weird moment this morning.
I was just in my office and I looked, I glanced at my bookshelf and there's this book that I really love.
I'm sure you've read it.
It was by Pat Buchanan called Suicide of a Superpower.
I love all Pat Buchanan's books, but this one was very good.
And I completely forgot this.
But the subtitle of the book, do you remember it?
It was Will America Survive to 2025.
And I was like, man, he really said that.
And now sitting here in the end of 2023, I'm like, 50-50, 50-50 shot.
We make it.
If that.
I mean, it's just profit without honor, you know, as always.
There's really no crime that carries a greater penalty than being right ahead of time.
I mean, those are the guy, you know, the people who are like forever, you know, predicting some crazy DAO spike or gold at 300 an ounce or whatever, like they're, they're totally fine.
Nobody remembers Jim Kramer recommending, you know, many years of bad stock picks.
Totally fine.
But the guy who calls the big picture correctly two decades out, you know, he's relegated to his rec room and can never be seen in public again.
It's just so perfect.
And if you haven't read the book, it's not just that he's predicting like the decline of America.
It's that he's specifically saying that we're bankrupting ourselves.
We're destroying our currency.
We have de facto open borders, which are changing the makeup of the nation.
And, you know, that we fight wars all over the world that are completely unnecessary to fight in.
So it's not just that he called like the collapse.
It's that he specifically laid out the main driving forces for it.
No, it's totally true.
And, and, and did it in a kind of, I mean, I knew Pat well because I worked with him for years.
And, you know, he was always being denounced as a hater and hating this group or that group.
And in fact, I never, I never smelled that on him.
And I've got a pretty keen nose for, you know, sublimated, suppressed rage.
I never felt that on him.
He was a cheerful guy and he explained his points in ways that were basically impossible to refute.
And that's why they just dismissed him.
Well, he said the one, the thing, because I remember he was always labeled an anti-Semite.
And I'm Jewish, you know, and so like I remember like asking at one point, you know, because I really liked a few of his books.
I was like, so where's the anti-Semitic stuff?
Like, where, cause I've never, I haven't gotten to any of that.
Like, and usually people who hate the Jews are quite happy to tell you that they hate the Jews, you know, like it's not, it's like, they want to tell you.
Like, you're like, how's the weather?
And they're like, the Jews control the weather, you know, and you're like, all right, I wasn't trying to.
And they're making it rain.
Yeah, like, I wasn't, wasn't trying to go down that path, but okay.
And then the evidence I was shown was that he one time during the initial the first Iraq war, the Persian Gulf War in the 90s, he said, he said, nobody wants a war in Iraq other than some weapons companies and the Israel lobby.
And they went, see, he's anti-Semitic.
And you're like, but that's that's just objectively true.
Like these were people who were lobbying for, I mean, like, how is that?
That makes you a hater.
But anyway, it's a that that's exactly right.
And by the way, you know, 30 years later, it's like there's kind of no denying that.
And you can argue whether it was a good idea or not or whatever.
I think there are two sides to every argument personally, but that's not a very controversial thing to say.
I think what really wrote him out of Washington, where he literally couldn't work in DC anymore, was when he criticized Winston Churchill.
And that was completely baffling to me.
Again, Churchill is a complicated person.
I personally think there are lots of things to admire about Churchill, but you can't say he helped his country.
I was in London two weeks ago.
Like that, they didn't win the war in any meaningful way.
Like he wrecked the country.
So I'm not English.
So, you know, it's not my country.
But I think it's fair to point that out.
And for some reason, that was the red line.
You know, you couldn't criticize Winston Churchill.
He's not even American.
Like, what?
Well, you can piss all over Thomas Jefferson.
You're totally fine.
Criticize Winston Churchill and like, oh, you're some sort of Nazi or something.
And I think Pat partly didn't like him because Pat is a bit of an Irish nationalist.
Maybe that was it or whatever his motive.
But like, that seemed like a fair topic of historical inquiry and analysis to me, but no.
Well, I would even go a step further than, I mean, I think people to some degree have been trained to like perceive it.
Any type of thought about World War II that is not just the conventional thought means like, well, you must be a Holocaust denier or something.
But by the way, if you read Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, the whole thesis of the book is that the Holocaust happened during the war.
And if we could have avoided the war, maybe we could have avoided the Holocaust.
So there's like the thesis is destroyed if you don't believe in the Holocaust.
So like it does, that doesn't make any sense.
But you get that a lot with Israel as well.
Any criticism of the Israeli government, people are trained to assume that must mean you're saying you hate Jewish people.
But when you're talking about World War II, you're talking about the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.
The biggest mass murder campaign in history all around.
I mean, like the tens of millions of people died.
And the idea that we can never examine that and question, man, was there any way we could have avoided this?
Was Danzig really worth all of these people dying?
You know, like, it's just, this is insanity.
Well, there are three things about the war that I think, you know, I've always had kind of conventional views about everything.
I'm hardly a radical or like a true free thinker or anything like that.
But there are three questions no one's ever answered in my mind.
One, so Churchill committed his country and then we followed to war in Europe in defense of Poland.
Fine.
Okay.
That was his view.
But then he handed Poland over to Stalin.
We're going to where we're going to wreck our country.
We're going to, you know, join this war where tens of millions will die because the territorial integrity, the sovereignty of Poland is that important.
And then you just blithely hand it over to Joseph Stalin.
Huh?
Like, can someone explain that to me?
Second, it's clear there was foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.
It's just absolutely clear.
It's like not in dispute.
The Senate actually had an inquiry into it during the war and kind of concluded that, yeah, we sort of knew.
And then it was buried because there was a war on.
What was that?
Like, why aren't we talking about that?
And the third thing that I've never gotten over is that the war kind of ended American culture and Western culture.
Like we haven't produced meaningful art at scale since 1945.
Like everything we produced in architecture, visual arts, music is a little different.
I think we have created innovative music in that time, but certainly in the visual arts and architecture, it's just been pure shit since 1945, really 1945.
Like something changed on a very basic level in Western culture.
And like, what is that?
I thought we won.
Like, why would it destroy our creative impulse?
But it did.
And why is there not a serious inquiry into that?
I don't understand.
I mean it.
I don't understand.
There's a, there's this old Adams quote.
And man, I'm going to butcher it, but he said, it's something like, if we, if we go around the world searching for wars, we'll become the dictrus of the world, but we will lose our own soul.
That's right.
And there's something about that, right?
Like happening right away.
Like, okay, here's the trade.
It's like this, here's the trade, you know, empire for your soul.
And that's, that's kind of the deal.
And then that's after World War II springs up the whole, what we know as the national security apparatus today, the creation of the CIA and kind of this whole.
But it's also, it does, it does affect us on the level of our souls.
I mean, you, you should not commit violence except in extraordinary circumstances related to your self-defense.
And that's true in your own home.
Your wife pisses you off.
You shouldn't punch her in the face.
That's grotesque.
It's a crime.
And the idea that you sort of wave away civilian casualties or even military casualties as no big deal or the cost of doing business or something we should celebrate is disgusting.
And I don't care.
Look, I hated Osama bin Laden.
He killed 3,000 of my countrymen, including someone I know.
But when he was killed, it's like, I'm glad the threat is gone, but I'm not going to celebrate the shooting of another person.
And I don't care because not because he didn't deserve to die.
He did deserve to die, but because celebrating people getting shot is bad for me.
And if you have an entire country that's like, oh, yeah, we, you know, burned down this city and that's great.
No, no, no.
You should never celebrate violence or you will become a monster.
It's super simple.
And every, I mean, that's all through the Old Testament, by the way.
Everyone's like, oh, the Old Testament's so violent.
Really?
David, who committed a lot of violence, spends all this time talking about, oh man, violence is bad.
People who commit violence know how bad it is.
Talk to someone who shot someone else in war.
They're very against violence for a reason.
And when we're celebrating it nationally as a culture, I think we've really lost something important.
100%, man.
And there's really something, particularly for conservatives to learn there.
This is one of the reasons why I think you're such an important figure.
You know, there were these guys like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan who kind of called everything right and still lost the power struggle to the neocons.
And maybe that's because, you know, those type of people grab power more.
But there's something about this relationship between our culture and war.
And it's like, look, when for conservatives who care so much about American, you know, like the history of American culture, when did, when was the first time you really lost it all?
Well, it's during Vietnam, right?
That's when you have this huge countercultural movement like come up.
And it's very easy for that to gain a foothold when you're off celebrating, killing a whole bunch of people.
And then like, who are you to have the moral high ground in a situation?
And just look at the last 20 years.
I mean, why is it that just culturally, not just control of the institutions, but culturally, the left has just won every single battle.
It's like, well, you know what?
Personal Gold Standard00:02:50
I don't know.
20 years ago, the evangelical Christians in this country went all in on we got to kill a million Iraqis for nonsense.
And so they completely lost their ability to tell you, oh, this gender stuff is nonsense.
It's like, who are you?
Abortion is wrong.
I completely agree.
And but this is all a legacy of a previous period.
And I, I, what my, so my kids are readers and I said to one of them once, hey, um, find me 10 great post-war novels, like really great novels.
Like, I don't know, it doesn't need to be Anna Karenina, but like 70% of Anna Karenina in the most powerful, dynamic country in the history of the world, our country, since 1945.
Find 10 good ones.
How about two good ones?
There aren't any.
Find 10 great post-war buildings.
Like something inside us dies.
Our creative impulse, which is our life force, I mean, that's what that is.
Creativity is life.
Something died when we began celebrating violence at scale.
I mean, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monetary Metals.
We love this company.
We are thrilled to have them on board.
If you want to start earning a yield in gold paid in gold, you got to check out monetary metals.
Monetary metals is offering a real solution to the inflation issue and the constant currency debasement by paying interest on gold paid in gold.
They are revolutionizing the finance space by letting you opt out of the dollar interest rates completely.
Libertarians constantly talk about ending the Fed, but have never had a realistic vehicle for doing it.
And now you can.
Now you can opt out of the Fed system completely by having your gold earn income denominated in ounces every month.
The interest rates from monetary metals are all denominated in gold and aren't affected by the actions of the Federal Reserve.
While owning gold has protected your wealth until monetary metals, there's been no way to grow it.
Now with monetary metals, you can grow your wealth in ounces every month and see your wealth compound in an interest rate that's set in a free market by gold owners and gold borrowers.
Monetary metals lets you get on a sound money standard and makes it profitable to decrease and makes it profitable to decrease your exposure to the actions of the Fed.
This means no more worrying about dollar interest rate swings or how much the dollar loses value over time.
Now you can get your own personal gold standard and end the Fed's grip on your savings one ounce of gold at a time.
Would you rather earn 5% on a dollar or 5% on gold?
If the answer is obvious, then head over to monetary-metals.com and see how you can start earning a yield on gold paid in gold.
If you want to learn more, go to monetary-metals.com/slash P-O-T-P.
That's monetary-metals.com slash P-O-T-P.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Twitter Out of Control00:16:03
One of the things that was very interesting to me and is the role you've kind of played in this.
I mean, the role you obviously a feedback loop too.
So it's like there's this big realignment.
There's been a big kind of transformation in our country over the last few years.
Obviously, the most stark example of it is, say, looking at, say, 2004, the Republican presidential ticket versus Donald Trump in 2016, standing up there and telling Jeb Bush, your brother lied us into war in South Carolina at the Republican primary and then winning, dominating the next day at the poll, at the voting.
And, you know, you've been a big part of this where it was kind of shocking for a while that the 8 p.m. hour at Fox News and the top rated show in all of cable news was the most anti-war voice in the corporate media.
And this, for someone like me, like I'm 40.
And so I was like a young adult during the night, and I lived in New York City during 9-11 and, you know, the, you know, the war on terror years.
I think for sometimes like younger guys, they don't kind of appreciate how crazy of a transformation that was.
And so it's kind of interesting that I think Donald Trump and you, I would say, are probably the two biggest figures that kind of gave the right half of America permission to re-examine some of this stuff.
Like it's not making you Michael Moore anymore to do it.
You could just be kind of like Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump, you know?
Well, I think the slur was, and it was rooted in truth probably, is if you were against American military, the projection of American military force, you were against America.
You didn't have self-confidence.
You were personally probably a pussy, but you also didn't believe in your country or its ideals or its foreign projects.
And I mean, I certainly may, trust me, I employed that slur on TV.
I mean, I was in TV since I was in my mid-20s.
So I had a lot of years of repeating these.
Uh, these slogans which were completely false, and I just wasn't self-aware enough to know that what I was doing.
But the point is, 20 years ago this week, weirdly I went to Iraq in the winter of 2003, and I won't be boring, but i'll just say in one sentence that completely changed my view of everything, because it turned out what I had been claiming espousing, hoping for was all totally false, and so that set off a chain reaction in my head and by the time I got back to Washington where I lived, my views had completely changed.
I mean, it was incho it.
At that point I wasn't exactly sure what I believed, but I know what I didn't believe, which was everything I had been saying, and I said this out loud and immediately lost, you know, an awful lot of friends who took it much more seriously than I thought they would and who were not interested in in intellectual inquiry or thinking really at all.
Um, they were very lockstep stalinists and I didn't know that.
I don't know how i'd been living among these people, some of whom were very bright um, but I just didn't get it, and some of them truly hated me and to this day hate me, just because I reassessed on the basis of evidence.
Now maybe i'm wrong.
I always leave open that possibility, but I mean, why would you be anyway, whatever?
So that for me for like 20 years nobody I didn't have any, didn't feel like anyone agreed with me, but Trump made it possible to make the case.
Hey, this isn't good for us.
I'm against foreign adventurism.
I'm against the Neocon program because I love America, I live here, my kids live here.
I don't want to wreck it.
He made that case.
No one had ever done that before and um, and I mean that was the moment.
You're right, it was that South Carolina debate and all the dumb people on tv, political reporters, the dumbest of all reporters, because it's the easiest reporting.
You just like recite poll numbers and cliches.
They were all in.
I was on the set when that happened.
They're like, oh well, you know, he just lost South Carolina.
The checks notes.
South Carolina is the highest percentage of military veterans of any state and they're going to hate this.
And it turns out to be, of course, the mirror image.
Military veterans who'd had their lives destroyed or at least put on hold by these totally pointless wars were the most on Trump side.
And that's when they decided we better spy on this guy and wreck his life and that's never ended.
I remember because I was a big, big Ron Paul Uh supporter.
So I remember in 2008 and in 2012 and anybody can go look this up Ron Paul in the Republican primaries got more money from active duty military members than every other candidate combined.
I remember at the time being like how is this not the biggest news story in America?
How is everybody?
And so they just ignore this.
But this is almost where, you see, like the atrophy in the corporate media is that?
So they ignore this story because they get some cognitive dissonance out of it.
So then they're totally unprepared when it's Donald Trump up there and I remember there's great compilations of this stuff If you don't know what Tucker's talking about, if you're listening, where everybody, everybody was like, Well, I'm Mr. Expert, and that's it.
He's done.
Because if there's one thing you can't do is go to South Carolina and the Republican primary, and they're just all wrong, it's a big part of thinking.
But not just wrong.
I mean, as someone who's been wrong a lot, I allow for people to be wrong, but wrong with the most kind of like hand-waving dismissiveness toward anyone.
Oh, well, if there's exactly as you said, if there's one thing you can't, everybody knows, you know what I mean?
You can't swim for 30 minutes after you eat.
Oh, shut up.
You don't know anything.
You're retarded.
How did you get on TP?
Well, it is.
I know you've like you've made these uh like analogies before, and you talked about this in your book, uh, Ship of Fools, which is really great.
Um, but where it's kind of like, it's almost like, so right now, I like, as I do, right?
Okay, so right now I'm like, I have a really great marriage, and me and my wife really love each other, everything's really good.
And then tomorrow, I find out not only that she's had uh like cheated on me, but she's had a years-long affair or something like that.
She's actually a dude, yeah, yeah, something huge, you know what I mean?
Something like, you know, put yourself in Barack Obama's shoes.
Imagine what this must be like.
I'm sorry, kidding.
No, there's no proof on that one, but there's some questionable photos anyway.
Uh, but like, and and okay, yeah, like you made this point, like, yeah, okay, you'd be angry at first, you'd blame her, but at some point, you think you'd go like, Hey, this is this was the most important thing in my identity to know this, and I was completely wrong.
Let's examine this, and that just has never come.
Well, it's the key to growth and happy.
I mean, not only is it the key to rational politics, it's the key to growth and happiness, right?
To contentment and calmness to a happy life.
I mean, the one thing, there's so many things I've never learned-not eat Oreos, you know what I mean?
Like they're like getting enough sleep.
I mean, there's all kinds of lessons I will never learn.
But the one lesson I did learn a number of years ago is blame yourself first.
I blame myself first.
I really try, I don't want to, but I make myself like I fucked up.
How did I do that?
It's my fault.
And I just almost say it out loud, or I say it to my wife just to force myself to do it to like look inside a little bit.
And I'm not, you know, a self-flagellator by any means.
I'm the opposite of a self-flagellator.
You know, I'm expulsive, not retentive in Freudian terms.
But if you go through the, if you force yourself to go through the exercise of an after-action report in your own head, how did I get this wrong?
I get this wrong.
You know, they lied to me.
Sure.
Why did I believe that?
If you make yourself do that, you become way happier, more balanced, and much wiser.
Yeah, it's something I try to work on a lot too.
And what ends up happening, and this part of it is kind of rough, is then it becomes almost involuntary.
Like once you start making yourself do it, then you can't stop doing it.
And in the short run, that can be a little bit annoying because I'll be that way.
Even if me and my wife are just like arguing and I find myself just like digging into my position, I just get that little voice now in my head that's like, okay, you know, you were wrong about this, right?
Exactly.
And then I'm like, damn, that little voice.
Well, you might want to wait till tomorrow to admit that.
I mean, strategies involved.
At some point, if you were wrong, you are morally bound and bound by your own self-respect, your own dignity to admit it.
You can't pretend you weren't wrong when you were.
And if you do, you are totally diminished as a person and you become weaker, paradoxically.
You're doing that so you can appear strong.
But if you keep doing it, you become like any of these neocon husks you see on TV who are clearly just barely hanging on to the lies they themselves no longer believe.
Like it's just bad for you, right?
Yeah, it's you, it's like you, you make this exchange for a temporary avoidance of feeling bad at the cost of wisdom.
Yes.
You can never develop wisdom unless you have that.
And so that quality, and I'll tell you, it's weird because, you know, you learn about people, even if you don't know them super well when you watch their shows and you learn.
But I think that's part of what you have been able to bring to the table over the last like several years, really through the whole Tucker Carlson tonight run and now your show on Twitter or X, excuse me.
It's going to take me years to get it.
We call it X, Dave.
Yes, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to, I messed up.
Still not my favorite.
Just a single letter.
I like a lot of what Elon Musk has done.
Changing it to X was the second worst besides his trip to Israel.
Are you pronouncing that correctly?
Or is it or is it?
Is it more tricky?
I mean, like, what is how do you pronounce it?
I was counting on Twitter to be the one non-Chinese social media company.
So I hope it's not.
I hope that's not it.
But there was what one of the things you do on your show that I really like, I try to do this too, because I do a show about the news, you know, and one of the things I try to do as best as possible, which is challenging in today's environment, is to zoom out as much as you can.
Cause it's like every day there's a new crazy thing.
But then one day there's a crazy thing and you go like, no, wait, this is not just a crazy thing.
This is one of the biggest stories in American history.
Like this isn't just some crazy thing.
This is like, like, you know, like the three letter agencies tried to frame the sitting president for treason.
That's a really big deal.
That's up there with like top five stories in American history, right?
But I got to say, I think one of them has got to be you and this show you're doing on X.
And forget, look, I love it.
I never miss an episode of it.
But regardless of that, the fact is that the biggest show host in cable news gets fired and then has to move online and is bigger by orders of magnitude.
Like that's a really big deal.
That just represents it's a better medium.
I mean, we used to say in TV, like I, I was on a couple different or several different channels, cable channels, broadcast channels, and like my ratings would vary dramatically.
And the show, you know, maybe better or worse, depending, but like over 25 years, but it was, it's the venue matters a lot.
And it just turns out that people use social media and far fewer subscribe to cable news and consume their information sitting in their living room.
Like that, it was just so obvious.
And I'm such a late adapter because I'm not into tech at all.
You know, we don't have a TV in my house.
You know, we're not tech people at all.
We're book readers.
So I didn't, I only sensed it, but as soon as you make it easy for people to consume free, effectively, we've got a subscription service launching, but basically, you know, the meat of it is a lot of it is free and always will be.
Your viewership goes up.
And also, I think, you know, it's pretty obvious.
It's certainly obvious to you and your entire audience, but like media are controlled.
That's the whole point.
And as soon as people sense you're not controlled or less controlled or you're out of control, they want to watch, right?
I mean, why wouldn't they?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
But it does like what it represents is right, like a real losing of that control.
And for the first time, at least in my lifetime, that there isn't kind of this monopoly on the flow of information.
And of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter is a big part of that.
And he's going to be dealing with, is already dealing with tremendous forces trying to, you know, interfere with that.
But at least for now, it does seem like, yeah, there, the two guys I usually point to are you and Joe Rogan, but between you two guys and then a whole bunch of other guys like on smaller levels, but like a lot of them, it's like, yeah, there's a whole new generation of people who are consuming their information that is not controlled.
That doesn't mean it's correct all of the time.
I'm sure we all make our mistakes, but it's not controlled by the CIA.
You know, like there is that's exactly right.
And actually, I know you know this because we've talked about it offline, but if you were to say out loud in specific terms, the degree of control that that specific agency, and there are many other agencies, but that one specifically, CIA, had over our public conversation and over our politics, you'd sound like a complete freaking wacko.
Like you would, people wouldn't even believe you, and yet it would be absolutely true.
So, I guess what I'm saying is we understate the power.
And I'm speaking this from knowledge after 35 years in Washington, knowing a lot of people who work there and knowing a lot about it.
We understate the power of this intel agency with an unknown budget, unknown staff, unknown reach, unknown mission.
Like it's completely out of control, like much more than people understand.
It's completely out of control.
And it's also completely corrupt.
I was telling my wife at dinner actually two nights ago, um, with a bunch of relatives sitting there, we were thinking of four separate real estate transactions that we were personally party to or on the same street or next door to or whatever of CIA officers, current CIA officers who are paying millions of dollars for a very expensive real estate.
And my wife's like, oh, what about that one?
We sold our house once to a CIA officer for all this money.
It's like, and the question was like, where do they get all this money?
You're a federal employee.
Where'd you get $4 million or $12 million?
You know what I mean?
Like leaving aside the assassinations and the subversion of democracy, just the pure financial corruption of the CIA is like a mind-blowing story that the average person knows nothing about.
True.
Yeah.
And look, and this is one of the things that Trump, and in many ways, just to be clear here, I think Trump is almost like this like inspector gadget type political figure where I know that, you know, like he's just kind of walking around and things just all fall into place.
But one of the things that Trump kind of revealed, even to people like myself, who probably like, if I was taking a written test on this, would have gotten the answer right before Trump.
But to actually witness it and not just on like an intellectual level, but to watch it happening, is that you're like, they do not work for the president.
I mean, this is not something that that idea, and it's almost as if if we're talking about the federal government of the United States of America and we're still discussing it as if there are these three co-equal branches of government and the people elect the president and they elect the House of Representatives and they're, you're like, ah, that's not, that's not really the government we live under.
That, in fact, there's these whole other shadowy forces that are completely untied to that they don't, they oversee the politicians much more than the politicians oversee them, and that that's really who's kind of in charge.
And then it's like, okay, we're talking about a whole different thing.
I mean, I could I could bore you for hours, but I would.
You're absolutely 100 right, it makes a mockery of democracy um, and the defenders of democracy are the ones propping it up.
It's, it's also grotesque, but I would just say one thing, and that is that this I know this for a fact that the sitting president of the United States States, there have been, of course, 40 odd since the Second World War have routinely been left out of briefings on the two, the two big programs that I know about.
Shadowy Forces in Charge00:15:22
One is the UFO stuff, where there's a lot of evidence U.S. government has had direct contact, maybe even negotiations with whatever these forces are.
That's real, I think.
But I know for a fact that presidents have not been briefed on that.
One.
Two is the Kennedy assassination in which the CIA was implicated.
Not the whole CIA, but the operations directorate under Angleton of, yeah, had a role in that.
That's just true.
And I know for, again, for a fact that there have been a number of presidents.
Richard Nixon famously on tape asked the CIA director about that.
And he said, you know, I think the CIA was involved in killing John, quote.
And they did not respond.
They did not brief him.
And instead, they set in motion the wheels of Watergate, which had him out of office in less than a year.
So like, that's not a democracy.
That's an oligarchy by unelected spies.
And there's nothing scarier than that.
And by the way, last thing I'll say, if everyone talks about, you know, the famous Eisenhower retirement speech where in 1960, where he talks about the military-industrial conflicts, that's where that phrase comes from, that famous speech.
Last year, I was on a freaking treadmill trying to lose weight, perpetual mission of mine.
And I'm bored.
So I was like, I'm going to find that on YouTube.
I'd recommend to your listeners, watch that speech.
I think it's only like 30 minutes long.
Eisenhower wrote it himself.
Two things you'll notice.
One, it's written at the level of like postgraduate.
Like the average American had such a higher IQ was so much more literate in 1960 than now.
People wouldn't even understand what he was saying.
A, B, Eisenhower was like deeply distressed by the power of the Pentagon and the CIA and said so in public.
And he's like, their budgets are too big thanks to the Second World War.
And this is going to end democracy.
He said that on television in front of everybody.
It's totally worth watching.
And he was right.
And hands the country over to John F. Kennedy.
I mean, this is like for people, you know, like this is the next president that comes right in on the heels of that.
Right.
And then also, you know, this is something I remember you talking about this when you covered it because it's so like I was a kid.
I'm born in 1983.
It's like I grew up in the 80s and the 90s.
And at that point, the only thing you knew about Richard Nixon was like, yeah, he was the most corrupt president.
And it's like this tiny little detail that's left out that he was the most popular president.
He won 49 states.
He won by the biggest margin ever.
16 million votes in 1972.
Biggest margin ever recorded.
And he's gone shortly after that.
And they control the narrative so much that the narrative almost becomes like, yeah, you know, the people really didn't like him.
They really didn't like him so much.
We had to get him out of there.
Well, what's so crazy is that he was undone by this guy famously called Bob Woodward, who's still around, still writing books, still getting the participation of all of our leaders.
Who was Bob Woodward in 1973?
Was he a famous journalist?
He got the biggest story in the world was handed to him by Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post.
No, he was not a journalist.
He was a naval intel officer who'd been detailed to the White House, the Nixon White House.
That's a fact.
Look it up.
And yet somehow he winds up with this story that topples a president.
Hmm.
And his main source, who was the main source?
That was Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI who ran the COINTEL program.
This is not conspiracy stuff.
This is like on Wikipedia.
Yeah.
And whatever says it, it's crazy.
And by the way, who replaced Nixon?
Gerald Ford.
Unelected?
Who happened to be on the what?
Oh, the Warren Commission.
Nixon picked Ford?
Well, because they took out his VP, Spiro Agnew, on a tax charge.
And then Carl Albert, who was the Democratic leader in the house, said, you are picking Gerald Ford.
And he did.
It really is like, it's all, it's out of a movie, man.
And it does like, I get where it does sound like if people don't follow this stuff, it sounds like nutty conspiracy talk.
And it is conspiracy talk.
It is, it is a conspiracy.
It's just not a theory.
It's just like, no, this is all like documented.
And Bob Woodward, I mean, like, I know Bob Woodward pretty well.
I've lived right down the street from Bob Woodward in Georgetown as a kid.
And it's like, I'm not attacking him.
You know, he's a perfectly nice guy and he's not stupid, actually.
But the idea that, you know, oh, he's just a shoe leather journalist.
No, he was a naval intel officer who somehow wound up as like his first, one of his very first stories at the Washington Post is Watergate.
Like, that's just so obviously bullshit that, like, that's just not how it works.
Not one person say that.
Not one person.
Why?
Right.
Right.
And, and it's such an interesting story that you're like, it kind of goes to show you, oh, that's why you would want to talk about this if you were just trying to get eyeballs on your show, but no one will touch it.
At least in the corporate media, nobody will touch it.
Why, though?
It's so look.
I mean, I'm 54.
My kids are grown, so I don't really care.
But like, I just think if you're in this business and you're not curious, the question is, why are you in this business?
Like, the whole point is curiosity.
Like, wow, tell me how that happened.
That's an amazing story.
Like, that's, that's why I do this.
That's why I got into this in the first place.
No one is interested in anything.
It's like bizarre.
It's like, well, shut up.
Everything you heard in fourth grade is true.
Shut up, racist.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is yokratom.com.
This is for those of you who are over the age of 21 and are responsible adults who enjoy Kratom.
If you don't know what Kratom is, don't worry about it.
But if you're already using it, go check out yokratom.com, home of the $60 Kilo, longtime sponsor of everything on the gas digital network.
This is lab-tested, quality Kratom.
It's delivered right to your door, and you're going to get it for the best price you will ever find on Kratom.
$60 for a kilo.
YoKratom.com, home of the $60 kilo.
All right, let's get back in the show.
Do you remember?
I'm blanking on her name.
Maybe you remember it, but it was the ABC reporter who she had the hot mic tape that leaked where she was talking about how she had the Epstein story broke years before and they told her to squash it because it might mess up the relationship with the royal family.
Yeah, what happened to her?
Do you know?
I don't remember.
I don't, I'm not sure where she is.
But that's Amy Roebuck.
It was Amy Roebach, who I worked with at another, you know, the cable arm of NBC News years ago.
I didn't know her very well, which is totally nice.
She says that on the air.
And I'm not a conspiracy net.
I've just, you know, everything I know I read in the Daily Mail.
I'm just, I'm just telling you.
And then like two or three years later, she gets bounced out of her job at ABC because she had an affair.
Now, I'm not endorsing affairs.
I'm not having one.
I'm against them.
However, if we were to fire everybody in television who's having an affair with a co-worker, no one would report for work.
Like that's not a fireable offense.
MSNBC might need to find a new morning show.
I'll say that much.
Well, exactly.
And like, just trust me, that's not a criterion for firing.
And yet, Amy Roebuck got fired for having an affair.
Huh?
That's kind of weird.
Right.
I forgot about that.
Fire Amy Roebuck since she got caught.
And by the way, they made her apologize for it.
They made her apologize.
And she like, she issues this hostage statement trying to keep her job.
Like, ah, when I said the Epstein stuff was real, I was just kidding.
It's like, what?
So bizarre.
But any, you know, there's something else you touched on that I was literally thinking about a lot.
I think about this a lot, but just this, it was a good example of it.
But when if you look at, you know, the farewell address by Eisenhower.
And that is one of the things you, if you just listen to old political speeches, I even listened to the first televised presidential debates, which were that same year between Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
They're just, you could tell, they're just talking to a smarter country.
There's no way you could talk like that to the American people today.
You'd be like, Yeah, that's good.
What are you going to get?
2% of the voting population with this.
You got to dumb it down.
And in some ways, by the way, this is why Donald Trump figured out how to hack modern politics because he's like, I'll take it to kindergarten.
How about that?
Like, I'll, it's totally right.
And the amount of lying that accumulates like barnacles on a ship about people and eras and all this stuff is remarkable.
And you notice it when you go back.
And so I actually made a practice of doing this.
Just like you, you read about some.
I'll give you a great example: Malcolm X.
I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was a kid.
I, you know, I don't know what I think of it.
I'm not, he hated whites.
I'm white.
I guess I'm against Malcolm X, but I didn't know much about him.
And a few years ago, again, running on the treadmill, I watched a Malcolm X speech from right before he was killed.
He was killed in 65 in Harlem, famously, right while giving a speech.
But this was like maybe a couple of months before.
Go watch a Malcolm X speech.
I'm not a Muslim.
I'm not a black Muslim.
I don't agree with everything he said.
But Malcolm X had two qualities that left me kind of shocked.
Really smart, like legit smart, not grading on a curb smart, like just smart.
And second, very funny.
Yeah.
And I have to say, like, you know, whatever you think of Martin Luther King, he's fine, I guess, but no sense of humor and like, honestly, not a genius, a plagiarist.
Malcolm X was like a legit smart guy, said, you know, a lot of things I disagreed with.
Again, as a white Christian, I'm not in favor of black Muslims.
However, it was not all crazy at all.
A lot of it was like great and super smart and super insightful.
And I finished that speech and I thought, wow, I guess I know why they killed him.
Right.
He hated white liberals too.
He had this great riff.
Yes.
Watch them.
He's like, you know, he's like, oh, whites are bad.
You're like, we're against whites here.
Okay, fine.
But the white liberals are scary because they're like, oh, I'm your friend.
He goes, they're liars.
And that's true.
Yeah.
He's, oh, he's great.
Him eviscerating white liberals is some of the best stuff ever.
And yeah, really, really great speech, great orator, and very smart guy.
And listen, but I'll tell you this, whatever this atrophy in like the intelligence of the American people, it's still, I think it's accelerating.
I mean, it's look.
And again, just like you said, I'll disclaimer as well.
I'm talking about people who I don't necessarily like.
Like I view Bill Buckley as one of like the great villains of the 20th century.
I think he ruined.
I couldn't agree more.
But he was a clearly very also CIA, by the way, but he was also a very intelligent guy and witty and was not speaking down to his audience.
And like a popular show, his firing language would be Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley arguing with each other.
I mean, what, you know, but look, even then, um, when I remember my mother and my stepfather, they used to love Crossfire.
This is before you came on.
They watched when you were there too.
But when I was a little kid, it was the Pat Buchanan and Kinsley.
Is that his name?
Michael Kinsley, who was Michael Kinsley.
The last really smart liberal in America.
And they were, they were on Kinsley's side.
Like they were liberals.
They were not on Pat Buchanan's side, but they certainly respected that Pat Buchanan was brilliant and like that it was an interesting conversation.
And you, and then even going to look, I mean, I remember I used to watch your show on MSNBC.
And when you, the lineup there on MSNBC, even though a lot of the same people were there, it was just so much smarter than it is today.
I know we've talked off air and you don't have TV or watch TV or anything, but man, you have no idea how dumb it is today.
I mean, it's just like, this is not that long ago.
This is like maybe 2006.
I'm talking about.
And the Rachel Maddow had not lost her mind yet.
And she was very intelligent.
In fact, Rachel Maddow, I believe right around that time, wrote a book about the military industrial complex, which was really good.
I'm blinking.
I own it.
I'm blanking on the name of it.
Drift, maybe, or something like that.
Anyway, but it was like about the George W. Bush administration.
So it was safe for a liberal to write a really great book about how, you know, like the military was lying us into all of these wars.
Scarborough's show was would have you on regularly and Pat Buchanan on regularly, and even like Ron Paul would be on regularly, and there would be just really interesting conversations.
And everyone didn't seem to hate each other as much.
You and Rachel Matta would have some one-on-one things where you'd argue, but it was kind of in the spirit of like, we like each other, but we disagree.
And even just since then, like, you can't fathom that happening today.
You can't fathom.
And it's weird.
I mean, I know that, you know, I worked there for four years.
And back when it was trying to like become conservative, or they didn't know what they were.
I mean, they would be anything that worked.
And in the end, Rachel worked a lot better than I did.
So they fired me and gave her my show.
And I always got along with her very well.
But like, and I, and I still have talked to her and get along with her great, but um, but Joe Scarborough, like something broke there.
And he's to me is like, I always liked Joe.
I people would always whisper at the company that he had murdered, you know, someone who worked for him.
I didn't have views on that, you know, but a lot of people thought that he did it.
I didn't know.
But I will tell you that I got along with him really, really well.
He was my fill-in guy when I was on vacation.
And like, I look up in like maybe an airport, you know, news stand and they're playing it.
And Joe Scarborough is like insane and like angry.
Now, maybe it's like his personal life.
I don't know what it is, but I think that brand of neoliberalism became highly venomous and hate-filled, not analytical at all.
No, nothing dispassionate or reasonable about it, but like completely like kill the other guy.
And I just never in my life thought Joe Scarborough, I mean, maybe he goes liberal, that's fine, but to go neoliberal and hate-filled, I was like blown away.
I still don't understand.
Here's a good example of this.
And I sent you these tweets, if you remember, but so Scarborough, he said something and I responded to him.
And then this kind of, I guess, because Rogan's show is so big that it just, this is so weird to me because I'm just in my own little world.
Like I'm just like, I just, I do stand-up comedy and I talk about the news.
And like, I don't know, these are the people on TV or whatever.
But so I said something to him because he was trashing Trump supporters.
And I just said something back to him about it being like elitist.
And he knew who I was.
So he goes, oh, so the guy who thinks that the U.S. provoked Putin into invading Iraq and we provoked Osama bin Laden into fighting into doing 9-11.
This is the guy who thinks I'm un-American for attacking Trump supporters.
And there was just this weird moment where, because when I first, like around that time, when you guys were on MSNBC together, is when I got into the Ron Paul movements, I was really into politics.
And so I loved everything that was even libertarian-ish.
So I'm just like, excuse me, Mr. Scarborough, but I read your book.
And in your book, you told me that you voted for Ron Paul.
So how outraged are you that I'm making the argument of blowback?
You told me you voted for Ron Paul for president of these United States of America.
So where did this come from that that is somehow now this like off-limits out of bounds opinion when that was the central message of Ron Paul's presidential campaigns was that the terrorism was blowback for American foreign policy in the Middle East?
The Ron Paul Connection00:02:16
It's not justifying it, of course, but to kind of understand that there's a relationship here.
Like Pat Buchanan said, terrorism is the price of empire.
And so anyway, it's just so you're like, dude, this is an act, or even maybe that was an act, but something here is an act.
I think, I mean, and by the way, it's also a non-sequitur.
It's like, okay, you know, I said something you disagree with years ago, but assess what I just said about something completely like, what does that have to do?
It's like, you know, I catch you stealing from me and you're like, well, you got drunk in college and sucked with a hooker.
It's like, well, okay, but from me, like, what?
But I think in Joe's case, and in the case of most people, like the hatred is really self-hatred, obviously.
You know, happy people are not, they may be annoyed.
You know what I mean?
They may make bad judgments.
They may even want revenge from time to time, but they're not angry because why would you be?
People who hate themselves are angry.
And I think Joe made a deal.
I mean, he got, you know, caught in that marriage.
I don't think that was the plan at all.
And he just kind of decided to make these accommodations and he's mad about him because Joe is actually not stupid, believe it or not.
Yeah.
Watch his show.
I hear that it's mindless.
But he's not mindless.
He's actually pretty quite smart, quite clever.
And I bet he just feels trapped.
You know, he's like 60 years old repeating like stupid talking points from the Biden White House.
Like you shoot yourself before you did that.
Yeah, sounds awful.
Well, I did get him back.
I did say in my response, I said, I said, well, if you disagree with me that U.S. foreign policy provoked Osama bin Laden, can you at least agree with me that your wife's dad shouldn't have bankrolled him?
You attacked Zabig.
And then, yeah, he stopped responding to me after that.
But by the way, how could you deny, you know, the 9-11 thing is I think you make an entirely fair case to the extent I understand it.
But I think the Ukraine thing is like not a close call.
We sent the vice president.
Biden sent Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference and said to Zelensky on camera, we want Ukraine to join NATO.
Well, I mean, what you're saying is Russia, please invade.
We're going to put missiles on your border.
She said this in public.
Like, what would be the other reason to say that other than to provoke a war?
Well, that's what that was the purpose and they did it.
Painting Life Portraits00:02:10
Yeah.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is paint your life.
If you are looking for a great gift to give this holiday season, I know a lot of you guys, you've given all the same things over and over.
You gave the earrings, you gave the necklace.
You're looking for that special gift.
I've got you covered.
Paint your life is what you got to check out.
Paint your life transforms your photos into a one-of-a-kind, beautiful hand-painted portrait by a professional artist.
You get a professional hand-painted portrait created from any photo for a sentimental holiday gift right from the heart.
Use their compilation service and upload multiple photos to create anything you imagine.
Put yourself in a location you've always wanted to go to or add a lost loved one to a special occasion to create the portrait of your dreams.
There's lots of options.
You can customize your experience with a payment plan that works for you.
As little as 10% down makes this a truly affordable gift.
They have a user-friendly platform that lets you order a custom-made hand-painted portrait in less than five minutes.
You'll get to approve every stage of the portrait process and request as many modifications as you'd like to ensure the portrait is painted just like you dreamed.
Get a hand-painted portrait in as little as two weeks.
The perfect holiday gift.
It's meaningful, personal, and heartwarming.
This is a gift that will, this is a gift that will touch the heart and make your loved ones holiday unforgettable.
This holiday season, you can give the most meaningful gift you have ever given from paintyourlife.com.
And there's no risk.
If you don't love the final painting, your money is refunded guaranteed.
And right now, for a limited time offer, you can get 20% off your painting.
That's right.
20% off and free shipping.
To get this special offer, text the word problem to 87204.
You just text the single word problem to 87204.
Again, problem to 87204.
Paint your life.
Celebrate the moments that matter most.
Message and data rates may apply.
C terms for detail.
One more time, text the word problem to 87204 for 20% off.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Did you ever see?
Um, did you ever read?
Dangerous Border Politics00:12:17
There was a, um, I'm sure you have read this, but there was a private cable that Julian Assange dumped from uh Burns, the current CIA director, who was at the time the ambassador to Russia.
This was in 2008, and he sent a private cable to Condoleezza Rice, who was at the time the Secretary of State.
And it's the, it's titled Net Means Nyet.
Exactly.
And the whole thing is about how Ukrainian entry to NATO is the brightest of red lines for everybody in Russia.
And they simply will not stand for this.
And look, again, it's not reasonable that Vladimir Putin invaded and killed all of these people, but it is totally reasonable to say you cannot expand your military alliance to our biggest next door neighbor.
We would never accept that.
And like, and we would totally invade.
I mean, you'd think like if, you know, the Soviet Union was still around and they said Mexico is a part of the war sub pack that America, the Washington, D.C. would just go, well, they made their decision.
We're just going to almost went to war over missiles in Cuba.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
No, you're totally right.
And by the way, that Burns memo, which I've read, he doesn't just rep from in my read of it, doesn't just report that this is the Russian position.
He validates it.
He's like, yeah, you get it.
Like that's a that's not a crazy position to have.
And I just was with Assange in prison in Belmarsh prison in London, like last week or two weeks ago.
And, you know, they're, they're torturing him to death, obviously.
And I'm thinking to myself, like, why would they, it's what they're doing to him so cruel.
Why would they do that?
And it's stuff like that.
It's the Burns memo because it really lay, if you knew what was really going on, these people would be on their way to prison.
And so they can't, you can't have Julian Assange's.
You can't have anyone who tells the truth because it's big a threat.
It's interesting, too, if you go back, if you read like all the stuff from a project for a new American century or a clean break or any of that, and you realize how much it's all like, they pretend it's not, but this was the plan all along.
This was the project for a new American century.
And, you know, 23 years into it, it's not.
You know, it's so funny.
I shared an office with PNAC, as we called them, when they wrote that memo, which is in 1998-ish.
And I worked at the Weekly Standard for Bill Crystal at the time.
And they, I'd come back from lunch or go out to the men's room and they would walk through the PNAC office.
And they were these kind of nerdy guys, totally nice to the extent I talked to them, but they'd be like banging away on their computers, like about a rock or something, a rock.
I didn't, you know, like, what is that?
And I remember we all made fun of them.
Like, oh, they've got some plans.
And the idea was they were like every other think tank in Washington that comes up with white papers that nobody reads and that certainly are never affected into policy.
We're wrong.
Well, it does sound kind of, you know, it's funny because I was, I've been, you know, just because all the stuff happening in Israel now, I've been kind of just going back and I'm pretty well read in it, but going back and reading like early Zionist writings.
And it's a kind of similar thing where you're like, and look, in a sense, you got to tip your hat to them on this.
And particularly with Israel, where, you know, as much as they may disagree with some of their, you know, policy toward the Palestinians and stuff, they did this thing that is just insane.
This was just like a few, a group of like radical young, like 20-something year old Jews in Eastern Europe who are like, hey, we're going to start a new country in our Bible's holy land.
And they did it.
Like, you would have, if you had walked through that office, if you had to go to the bathroom through like the Zionist office in like 18, in the late 1800s.
Oh, there's theater Herzl.
God that guy.
Sure, Theodore.
Yeah, you're going to go conquer Palestine where you've never been.
You've never been to Palestine, but yeah, you're about to go conquer it.
You're like, whoo, well, all right.
Maybe I should have taken that guy a little bit more seriously.
Is that true?
Did Herzl never actually go to the region?
He may have at some point gone, but when he first came up with Zionism, he had never been there.
So I don't know.
He may have gone later, but like when he's the earliest Zionist writings, he had never been there.
And almost none of them had.
There's like a couple.
There's like one of them who ended up going there.
I can't, I'm blaming on his name, but he was one of the first ones who went there.
And he was like, oh, yeah, no, this is sorry.
There's people there.
This isn't, this isn't going to work.
There's going to be a whole thing if we do it.
And it turns out it was.
It was a whole thing.
But anyway, so let me ask you just a little bit about this kind of latest conflict.
It seems like in the right, and when I say the right, I just mean broadly, like say the right half of America.
It seems like there's been this kind of split where 50% of the right stepped into a time machine and is now in 2002.
And then there seems to be the other half that I think you are kind of in, where you're still like, hey, but I thought we kind of learned some lessons over the last 20 years.
And I thought the whole America first movement was kind of about like, shouldn't our government be primarily concerned with what's best for our country?
Can we at least have a conversation maybe before we just give a blank check to level Gaza?
And what's this kind of been like for you?
We responded on the show to Ben Shapiro kind of really emotionally attacking you over saying like, hey, we have a lot of very serious problems here that don't seem to generate nearly as much concern amongst the political class.
Like, what have you thought about this dynamic and this kind of shift in the right in America?
Well, I mean, honestly, there are days when I've tried not to think about it because it's just too revealing.
I mean, it's really like walking in on your parents having sex.
You want to unsee it.
You know, like you shouldn't, there's some things you don't ever want to see.
And one of them is people revealing themselves to be totally false, just like deeply dishonest frauds.
And there's been a lot of that.
Look, so from, I would just, I mean, most of my opinions on most things are not very interesting.
And I have a million opinions on a million different countries because I've traveled so much over my life.
But one thing I've learned is like the closer you get to something, the less you realize you understand it, you know?
And so I really am trying to discipline myself to focus on the country that I live in and my children are living in, which is the U.S.
And so I just from day one, I'm like, you know, I've got all kinds of opinions about a whole suite of different issues and countries, but I want to, for the purposes of my job, like focus on this country.
Number one, we have freedom of speech.
It's guaranteed in our constitution.
It's the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
And anything that abridges that is not only unconstitutional, it's immoral.
And so we just have to stick to that no matter what.
I don't care if there's a war, a financial meltdown, or riots in the streets.
I get to say what I think because I'm a free man, not a slave.
Okay.
So anyone who is against that is transactionally my enemy.
Okay.
Number one.
Number two, I don't want to get into a war that doesn't benefit us.
We've done that a lot over the past 20 years.
I've covered all of those wars.
I think I can say with certainty we didn't benefit.
And by the way, those countries didn't benefit either for what it's worth.
And so I don't want to do it again.
Number three, we're not capable of winning a war in a meaningful sense with Iran.
If they closed the Straits of Wormuz, we would have a full financial meltdown.
Like we'd be poor, like in a day.
So the stakes are incredibly high, leaving aside the potential for nuclear conflict.
I don't want that.
And the fourth thing I want is the ability to like have a conversation about it.
For example, on the question of refugees, there are what, two and a half million people living in Gaza.
Obviously, a lot of people of Israel want them to leave.
I get it.
You know, whatever, that's their country.
But their argument is these people are too dangerous to live next to us.
Okay.
That's their view.
But then for people to argue that they should come here.
Wait, I thought you just told us they're too dangerous to live in the place they were born.
So they have to come to the United States.
What does that say about how you feel about the United States?
It tells me that you consider this country, my country, my children's country, a trash bin into which to throw your shit when you're done with it.
And I'm so offended by that attitude.
I can't even process.
Like it actually makes me red in the face mad.
It's so disrespectful to my country that I can barely deal with it.
And I have a lot of trouble speaking to, like people can have their views about, you know, is it justified to kill thousands of civilians?
Okay, I'm trying to stay out of it.
But nobody can justify that argument that these people are too disgusting and immoral and dangerous to live next to Israel, but they should live in the United States.
Fuck you.
You're making that argument.
And I'm 100% 100%.
One of the things that was really amazing to me was to see when I lost control.
It makes me so mad.
You're absolutely right.
My wife for something.
It's so, you don't even like America if you're making that argument.
Well, no, and like, and like you said, like, like you said, I mean, I have the same attitude.
Like my kids are growing up in this country.
So I don't like care about the future of this country.
I like care about it more than I've ever cared about anything else in the world.
That's the most important thing is where my kids are growing up.
Like what are they, what life are they going to have?
And it's not just, it's not like there's one or two people making this argument.
This is like the establishment of the Republican Party's position.
But Walter Journal wrote an op-ed saying that.
And I thought you were the conservative news.
I mean, obviously it's not.
It's a joke paper, but still, like I can't believe that some editor signed up.
Let's, here's an op-ed from foreigners who want to expel these people because they're too dangerous, telling us that we have an obligation to take in these people who are too dangerous.
Like, are you even kidding?
Yeah.
And like, and those are their two positions.
Like, personally, I don't, I have two different positions.
I think they're like, eh, they're kind of dangerous, but they can still be given their statehood over there.
And also, we have no obligation to take them in over here.
But regardless, totally fair, right?
If you're, but those positions at least can coexist.
But look, I remember, and this was stunning to me because I was politically radicalized or whatever during the George W. Bush administration.
And then to see when Donald Trump said in 2016 that we need to shut down Muslim immigration to the United States of America, you know, in his words, until we figure out what the hell is going on.
We need to have a moratorium.
He wouldn't use a big word like that, but something, you know, like that, we need to shut down Muslim immigration.
And every neocon establishment Republican went, this is Islamophobic.
And it's like after just years of every right-wing radio host in this country being perfectly fine with, you know, Obama's problem is he won't say radical Islam and radical Islam.
And they, when they're selling a war based on this like Islamophobia or whatever you want to call it, totally fine.
When you're saying, hey, maybe we should protect our own borders, you're a bigot now, all of a sudden for using that.
And you see it right again.
And now, to your point, they're doing them both simultaneously.
Like this is just, it's madness.
It is insane.
And I just feel, I guess, honor bound to make the point.
And I'm not sure it adds up to anything, but I'm just being honest.
There are a lot of Muslims that I happen to know and really like.
And obviously I hate extremists of all kinds.
I'm just not temperamentally an extremist.
And I don't like violence and I don't like radical change.
Okay.
So that's where I am.
But, you know, I know a lot of people, because I spent time over there in the Middle East who are like great people and they're Muslims, totally moderate, truly, like actually, in fact, I will say there's almost no one in the world more moderate than a moderate Muslim because there are a lot of radicals there.
So like they've thought through their.
And also, again, it's just personal preference, but like anybody who gets on his knees five times a day and admits that he's not God, you know, I'm kind of for that.
I'm just being honest.
You know, I don't, I don't believe in their God or whatever.
I'm not a Muslim.
I'm not going to become a Muslim.
But I like the acknowledgement that they're not ultimately in charge of the universe.
And I wish that our leaders would acknowledge that once in a while.
It'd be good for them.
Yeah, no, 100%.
And, you know, the last thing I'll say on the subject, which is just kind of my thing, is that like, I'm not even against.
So I'm like a pure libertarian.
I just believe in freedom and natural rights and all of that stuff.
That's like, that's all I believe in.
And I just hate government and the Federal Reserve and unnecessary wars and all of that.
Deep State vs Democracy00:04:09
That's all.
That's my position.
So I theoretically, I am totally for even like, I'm totally for being a snob criticizing the rest of the world for not being as free as they should be.
You know what I mean?
Like I'd be, I have no problem with any of that.
I hate all tyranny.
Yes.
But when the, when your government has expressly had a policy for decades of funding, arming, and promoting the most radical elements of Islam, you don't get to then sit up there and go, look at how barbaric and radical these Islamists are.
Yeah, it's just, it's insane.
All right.
Listen, I'm going to let you go, but I just before, before we do, because I'm spun me up, Dave.
Tucker, I would sit here and talk to you for 10 hours and then I just feel like there would be other people in the room.
I feel like you would do it, but then all of the other people in your house would be like, what is he doing?
He's going to spun up.
It's me.
I just want to ask you, because things are so crazy right now.
And I don't know if this has got to be probably the hardest presidential race to make predictions about because literally, I mean, the sitting president of the United States of America could die at any moment.
And I'm not being hyperbolic, could at any moment, a set of staircases could take him out.
You wouldn't sell him life insurance right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's certainly you could sell him it, but it would be at a very high premium.
High premium.
There's always a price, though.
You know, if you understand markets, there's always a price you can need at.
But Donald Trump is at war with the most powerful interests in the world.
Do you have like a feeling?
What do you think is going to happen over the next year if you had to guess politically?
Gosh, I mean, it's just opaque to me.
I know that it's very unlikely that we have a race between Trump and Biden.
I just refuse to believe that's going to happen.
The Democratic Party didn't want Biden in the first place.
They just didn't want Bernie Sanders because that iteration of Bernie Sanders, this more sincere one, before he became just a neoliberal robot, but really was kind of calling out the banks.
And that you can't do that, you know, if you're a Democrat running for president because the banks are your donors.
So they couldn't have Bernie Sanders.
He was the only candidate with organic support.
And so they tried to run Pete Buddhajudge and they were like, yeah, he's a robot and he's got a record of zero achievement.
He's got a horrible personality, but he's gay.
He's gay.
And of course, there's some questions to whether Pete Buttajudge actually is gay.
I noticed the case who worked for me are like, he's not really gay.
But, you know, I don't know.
I'm not making it.
The point is that the dogs would not eat that dog food.
Like no one actually liked Pete Buddhajudge.
Even the dude he's married to clearly doesn't like Pete Buttajudge and I understand why.
So they're just like, oh shit, you know, we could either get Trump re-elected or we went it with Bernie freaking Sanders, which is just as bad.
So they're like, oh, and they pick Biden and they throw him in.
And then, you know, the rest happened.
But at this point, with him losing in the swing states and head to heads against Trump, like there's no utility in having this guy.
He's embarrassing.
He's now 81.
And they're going to take him out.
I mean, I bet my house on it.
Look, I've been wrong a lot, and I could be wrong again, but I just don't see their motive in that.
Like, you know, all they care about is winning.
All they care about is accruing power.
And Biden is now in the way.
He was once useful.
Now he's not.
He will be discarded.
And that's what the regime does.
That's what the blob does.
The org does.
It doesn't care about the individual.
It's the opposite of your views.
You care about the individual.
How does it affect me, people I love?
Names and souls.
They don't care about names or souls or individuals.
They care about groups, the blacks, the Hispanics, the gays.
That's another way of saying we don't care about you.
You're just a voting block.
And so they definitely don't care about Joe Biden, trust me, at all.
And he will be disposed of into the dustbin of history.
And I won't mourn his departure.
But then it's like, who takes his place?
Obviously, it's Gavin Newsom.
He's like the most unrestrained, most evil, most sociopathic person in the whole party.
So of course he's going to rise to the top of it.
November Regime Shift00:01:24
Yeah.
And then what do you think it's him versus Trump?
Or do you think Trump, I see, I look at it and I go, Trump is basically at war with the deep state.
And if you're at war with the deep state, you should probably bet on the deep state.
You know, in general, that's been kind of true.
You know, Trump's bet is that, you know, tens of millions of people support him.
So it really is kind of a question about democracy.
Like, does it actually work?
Do people have any political power at all?
Right.
Allowed to have a voice in the process.
Do they, do they have a say?
And Trump's betting that they do.
I mean, I just, I just will say this.
I just keep arriving at the same kind of banal conclusion, which is this next 12 months, we're at the end of November 2023.
By the end of November 2024, it's going to be a different country.
And I, and I really feel that strongly.
I mean, of course, I hope I'm wrong.
I, as I said, I don't like radical change, but I think we're getting it for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I hate to agree with you, but I think you're right.
Dude, I enjoyed this so much, Tucker.
Thank you so much.
I did immensely.
All right.
Well, I'd love to do it again anytime.
Everybody, if you don't already, it seems almost ridiculous to plug.
It's like the biggest show in this world, but go check out Tucker's show on X.
It is just always phenomenal, always really thoughtful and really interesting.