Scott Horton joins Dave Smith to critique neoconservative dominance, arguing that while Israel exerts significant influence, it lacks total control over the U.S. government as evidenced by past diplomatic shifts. They analyze how social media dismantled traditional propaganda monopolies, uniting figures like Tucker Carlson and liberals against Gaza's civilian slaughter, thereby complicating strict left-right divides. The discussion highlights the necessity of leftist pressure to restrain unconditional liberal support for Israel and advocates for a "Democratic Republican" party focused on liberty versus power, concluding that grassroots activism remains vital to counter elite election interference and restore substantive foreign policy debate. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Part of the Problem00:09:25
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, and we are thrilled to be joined, as we always are, by the great Scott Horton.
It's just hard.
It's hard for me to overstate how just important a figure, you know, Scott has been to like our entire, you know, the whole libertarian non-interventionist movement.
I don't know where we would be without this guy who, of course, wrote the best book on the terror wars called Enough Already and the best book on the war in Ukraine called Provoked.
Also, his, I mean, if you, if you want to really understand American foreign policy, there's no better resource.
I mean, go the Scott Horton show has over 6,000 interviews.
They're all up for free.
You can check out all of them.
I, from time to time do go back and listen to some of the old ones, particularly the Pat Buchanan and the Ron Paul interviews were always just so good.
And it's really so interesting how literally just, I think a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to one of the Pat Buchanan ones.
And, you know, it's in 2011 or whatever.
And you're talking about the latest thing, but so much of the conversation is like completely relevant to today still.
And it's still so interesting.
And then, of course, you're talking about the conflict and you're kind of seeing, oh, yeah, this is how it all played out since then.
And anyway, I highly recommend checking that out.
And of course, I just want to make sure to, before we get started, to plug a couple other things, because I'm not sure.
I can't remember if last time we were on the show, we promoted that you and Daryl Cooper are now doing your own podcast together, also called Provoked.
We did.
I think we did mention it, but now it's out and there's several episodes and it's just really fun in its groove.
It's such a great show.
And then, of course, you have the Academy.
I don't know if that is up and running yet or is that to be out soon?
Almost.
First of all, thanks, man.
And yeah, it's the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom.
It's my own little Liberty classroom Tom Woods set up for me here.
And but yeah, so it's me doing two big courses on the Middle East and the new Cold War with Russia.
And then I got great James Bovard on 40 years of investigative journalism on all kinds of things.
Ramsey Barud on Israel-Palestine.
Bill Bupert on how America lost every war since 1945.
CJ Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived.
And we're talking like eight hour courses on Woodrow Wilson, eight hour courses on all these things or longer, better.
Mine are much longer.
And then Tom Woods has brought on a new guy.
I forgot the guy's name, but I don't know much about it yet, but it's going to be about the history of Christianity and sort of the newfangled invention of premillennialist dispensationalism, the Darbyite, you know, Christian Zionism invented in the late 19th century there.
And so we're going to learn a hell of a lot about that too.
And so if people go to scotthortonacademy.com and you watch a cool little video that Dan Smott's made to get you excited and then put your email address in there and you'll be the first to know.
And I really hope that we're going to have the first courses that will go up this month.
Yeah, it's, it's, I was, I was really excited about this when you, when you first told me you were doing it, because it's just like for a few reasons.
I mean, it's just, it's a great tool to like for people who love your stuff and, you know, watch, say, like they always love when you're on my podcast or Tom's podcast or whatever, or, you know, they know you from Tucker or they know you from Lex or whatever it might be.
It's just like, you're like, hey, you want to do the deep dive now and really learn your shit.
This is like, you have this tool.
And then particularly, I just think for like any, for the younger people out there who are maybe like in our broader world and maybe aspiring to be people themselves who host shows or do other things or something.
It's like, oh, dude, this is the perfect like boot camp for our team of like, dude, just get through this shit and you'll really know your shit, like on a next, next level.
I mean, you could listen to one Scott Horton podcast and probably be above 90% of the general public, but this is like where you could really, really know what you're talking about, which is, you know, important, especially now, you know, me and you, Scott, we've been, it's kind of interesting.
We're like on this, you know, professional, you know, journey together in a lot of ways.
And me and you have been good friends now for a long time.
And we're both, you know, we're both much bigger than we ever were before, just more followers, more people listening.
And we're doing shows with bigger and bigger audiences.
And it's just, you know, you kind of, I was thinking about this earlier today that, you know, it really is, you know, you go back a bit further in this libertarian business than me by, I guess, about 10 years further.
You were like in the in the mid 90s and I was like in the mid 2000s.
But it is kind of crazy that we're just in this position now.
And I guess me and you kind of, you know, rising a little bit and how known we are as part of it too, that you take a step back and you do look now and you're like, wow, there is just like, there is a really large coalition of non-interventionist right-wing arty types in the country today.
It's really unlike anything that we've ever seen before.
Like this, our stuff is winning.
At least the minds, certainly not any of the minds in power, but our like our arguments are kind of winning and having their day and being heard more than ever before.
I mean, you know, the more I listen to, I've been listening to like Tucker Carlson just had a bunch of like great podcasts in a row, where it's like between you and then having Daryl back on.
And he had Sagar and Jetty on, who was great.
And then he had John Mearsheimer on, who was great.
And you're like, you're just listening to them.
And they're like, dude, there's like no distance between us almost at this point.
I'm sure we could find some finer points, but like there's, it's, they're so with us.
And anyway, so I guess I'm rambling all of this to go.
I know you just recorded how long was your podcast with Lex Friedman the other day?
And it's just kind of cool that it seems like it seems like these ideas are starting to really take hold like we've never seen before.
Yeah.
Well, it was 10 hours.
In fact, I got up today and started looking at my email and some neuron went off and said, oh, you know what?
You never answered his question about the Iran war.
Because I said, wait, hold that thought.
We got to talk about Somalia.
And then from there, we did the Cold War stuff and we never went back to the Iran war.
So you saw, hell, well, what do you want to do, man?
I mean, we did have the debate with Dubowitz there that we already talked about a lot of that, but like, I guess we could record a little more.
I said, all right, I'm on my way over there, man.
I'll see a little while.
So I went and we recorded another 40 minutes today that we're going to punch into the middle of the interview.
Jeez, wow.
Almost 11.
But so we did all of enough already, essentially, and every tangent in the war.
Like with Tucker, it was like, okay, I got three hours max here.
Like, I already pushing it there.
I got to like stay on track.
Lex Friedman was like, no track.
Let's take every tangent.
Dude, let's go on whatever we want to talk about, dude.
Who's Jalala Dean Hakani?
Let's just, whatever.
That's a bad example.
That wasn't one.
But let's just take what no, no time limit, right?
The YouTube time limit is 12 hours.
Let's just, and I told him, hey, I'm down for whatever, man.
I'll talk about whatever.
So we just went all the way through it and took every tangent and went down every cul-de-sac and then came back again.
And it was cool.
It's like, oh man, it's almost one in the morning.
Probably about quitting time.
And so, yes, longest interview probably either of us have ever done on either end, you know, there.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Oh, you know, I saw he tweeted.
It's his longest one yet.
And he's known for having like real long form shows.
Like he's, he's even compared.
Like Rogan almost never does like five, six hour shows.
He's done a few of those before.
And this was a bit never a 10 hour one or 10 hours.
We're really running out of time.
We gave relatively short shrift to the Cold War with Russia.
Criticizing Charlie Kirk's Debate Style00:03:19
You know, we didn't really do like Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, like all the way through the way I might have liked to.
So you get, but I did say at the end that I was like, all right, if anybody listened to all 10 hours of this, you probably want to sign up for the Scott Horton Academy.
If I was able to keep your attention this long, then yeah.
And I'm not sure how people are going to react to it.
They're either going to, you know, on Twitter, people are just L-M-A-O or whatever.
But I don't know if they're going to think, well, this is, this guy is just a blowhard who likes hearing himself talk and that's why it's so long.
Or if they're going to be like, wow, Lex is interested and I'm interested as long as he is.
And I mean, we are talking about substantive stuff most of the time.
He asked me about myself a little bit in the middle, but mostly we're just talking about the things.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
The book's long too, but people are reading it cover to cover and having a good time with it.
You know what I mean?
I'm getting those.
Like, man, I didn't think I could do it, but I actually knocked this thing out in a week.
No problem.
So.
Yeah, dude.
I mean, I think, you know, one of the things, the reason why I kind of brought the two points up that I did leading into it is that it did, it did just feel to me like there's, I don't know.
I'm just again, you know, there's some polling data that really backs this up too, but I have kind of, I know this is a somewhat anti-scientific sounding thing to say, but I have kind of found over the last few years that just like what I observe in the country and the trends is a better, you know, like predictor than these, these polls even are at times.
Like it was so easy to see in 2024 that like Trump is leading big, even though all the polls were saying, oh, it's like dead even.
You're like, no, it's not.
I don't know.
I don't.
And then we find out that they, the, the private Biden campaign polls had him like losing like every electoral vote, you know.
But it's, you know, I've been talking about this a lot on the show, like going to the Charlie Kirk event when I went to Turning Point USA and I'm going so hard against Israel and against Trump and like a huge faction of the crowd is completely on my side.
Like not like a super majority, but certainly like twice as many people are cheering as are booing, you know?
And this is at Charlie Kirk's event.
You know what I'm saying?
Like this is not at Ron Paul's event.
And then you see like all of these things, like, you know, you see Piers Morgan, how he went from being like an Israel supporter to like the most hardcore critic now, just exposing them every day.
He had me on last week, too.
He let me debate Wesley Clark for the third time.
Yeah, yeah, it was great.
It was really, that was actually very good.
And yeah, but so there's just right, like there's a thing where now you have this show with Piers Morgan.
It's like getting like huge, huge numbers on YouTube.
And every day it seems like now it's just, it's, it's the Zionists are getting shredded show.
And then it's like, you know, even, and I guess the thing with Lex, it just, and I really am not, I'm not saying this to criticize Lex.
The same way I'm not saying it to criticize Piers Morgan.
I'm just saying that like the way it went down where like you get on the show and have this contentious debate where Lex kind of seems to be kind of, look, I want to be as charitable as I can here, but kind of seems to be putting his finger on the scales a little bit and not in your favor.
Nuclear Threats and Shifting Narratives00:13:18
And then you were a little not happy about the way.
And like the response is like to immediately have you back and now do this crazy long episode.
And I just see a lot of these things.
Like all I'm saying is that it just seems like, dude, the people have shifted so much on this issue that now everybody's kind of got to deal with this new market demand of like, no, no, no, you don't get to just like shut down the anti-war voices.
And, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
I think we have better arguments and we've been winning the arguments.
I think also just what's happening is so horrible.
But also, it's just like, I don't know, the Warhawks have been wrong about everything for 25 years.
And like, you know, blatantly for 25 years.
And they were wrong before that many times.
But like there's, you know, and it's funny, even like with the Iran thing, they try to jump on us.
Oh, you guys were alarmists.
See, it wasn't that big of a deal.
But it'll be people who are like, dude, you're sitting on 25 years of being catastrophically wrong about everything, you know?
And I don't know.
It just feels like there's a major shift going on.
Look, Doug McGregor says time wins more arguments than reason.
And so the fact of the matter is that like, who could deny you should have all been anti-war.com this whole time, dude?
What can you say?
You know what I mean?
And like on, even on the Iran thing, you know, people talk real big, but most of them don't know the first thing about it.
And if you zoom in on the situation, you see that it's entirely unresolved.
And just as we always said, you shouldn't bomb them because now they're more likely to make a nuke.
And you're not going to be able to achieve, you're not going to be able to certainly prevent that without a regime change.
And you're not going to be able to do a regime change without escalating the war far beyond what anyone is willing to do.
In other words, sending in the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Infantry Division and taking the country over.
Nobody wants to do that.
Nobody's considering doing that.
Well, but you can't have a regime change from the air and you can't make the Ayatollah give up enrichment just by threatening him and bombing him.
So he's still saying, I'm still going to enrich.
So now that Trump has bought Israel's definition of a nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program and we have to prevent it from existing at all.
That means that we're just at halftime right now.
The war's not over at all.
The entire issue is unresolved.
It could have been unresolved at the table, but Donald Trump let Israel drag us into war.
People say it was the 12-day war.
Well, you know, it's like somebody asked some Chinese, somebody about like, hey, so is the French Revolution good or bad for world history?
And he's like, well, we'll see.
One day we'll know for sure.
You know what I mean?
Like, you got to have a little bit of a longer time horizon to examine these things on.
That was just, you know, a month and a half ago.
We don't know what the results are going to be yet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you would think particularly in, you know, fairly recent memory, maybe not anymore because things move so fast.
Like, it's like, I don't know, you just, you guys were spiking the football on mission accomplished.
You were spiking the football on Gaddafi after he died.
You were spiking the football on how good, how strong the Afghan army that we were building was.
You know, you're like, it's like after a while, you're like, yeah, I don't know if you quite yet get to say, look, perfect.
This ended really good.
And, and all that seems to, at least so far, all that seems to have happened to me in the 12-day war is that like some like some Iranians got killed, some Israelis got killed, absolutely nothing was accomplished, and there was no threat to begin with.
It was all done on false pretenses anyway.
So, like, even if it does just end at that, like, what the, I don't know.
It's just so like, uh, it's such a weird, even mind state to just be like, well, if it does, if it doesn't end in a catastrophe where hundreds of thousands of people die, then hey, that's a win.
Like, what?
My best interpretation here is that they set the program back a bit.
But yeah, yeah.
And they, they swear, and I'm not taking their word for it.
They swear they're still not breaking out for a nuke and that the old rules still apply.
But they also say they're never going to end enrichment.
As you've pointed out many times, well, we're all just lucky that the Ayatollah fired only 14 missiles and called ahead of time and warned us to please shoot them down and essentially deliberately missed firing at the corner of a base in Qatar kind of thing as a symbolic retaliation only when it didn't have to be that way.
A certain point in desperation, they very well could start launching thousands of missiles at our bases over there.
And what are all the pro-Israel hawks going to say then?
Oh, yeah.
See, that's why we had to do this is because that's the kind of danger they always represented, you know, after we start losing a bunch of sailors and airmen over there in Bahrain and Qatar.
So yeah, that situation, I mean, well, and also, and one of the things that I thought was really interesting, even in this little 12-day war, even just saying it was just a 12-day war, it was amazing how quickly, like the narrative and the justification would change like day to day to day.
Like literally, like even leading up to it, it was like one day Trump was like, you know, we can negotiate on enrichment levels.
And then all the hawks freaked out about it.
And then he posts like, there can be no enrichment, you know, and then you're like, oh, what?
So we're not going to do a deal.
Then he's like, we're still negotiating and blah, blah, blah.
Then Israel attacks.
Then he says we were in on the, you know, then all the Warhawks one day were going literally one day, 24 hours before they weren't.
They were going, oh, no one's dragging America into war.
Israel can handle its business on its own.
We just want America to get out of the way and let Israel do it.
And then after the Israeli strikes, all the hawks were out on their shows and on social media saying Israel has just completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program.
And then 24 hours later, it was like, well, yeah, we only need a few bunker busters.
I mean, like, that's it.
You know what I mean?
And you just know, like, it'd be so easy for them, as you were just describing, to just change one more time, you know, and then the next day, just be like, oh, yeah, regime change, you know?
And they were kind of going for it.
I mean, the Washington Post had that story.
The Israelis sent those messages to all those military officials there telling them, we're going to kill your families if you don't turn on the regime right now and overthrow it, which didn't work.
And they were tweeting out pictures of, I think it was the defense minister or maybe deputy defense minister or something palling around with the son of the shah.
Like they're going to parachute the monarch back in there and he's just going to cast a magic spell over these people.
Where I think probably what's more likely is what Mir Shamir told Tuckers, they want to wreck Iran.
Like I says to that Israel lobby girl on the Piers Morgan show before, she goes, oh, well, you know, they'll just fix it.
The new Iran will be great or whatever.
No, the new Iran will be probably well armed by foreigners, a giant faction fight with Azeris and Kurds and Sunni Arabs and Shiite Persians and Baluki bin Ladenite suicide bombers and God knows what over there, dude, which is, I'm sure, what Israel prefers.
Remember, I think we've talked about this before, although I'm sure it's been a while.
It's the Oded Yannan plan.
I was explaining this to Alex.
Yeah.
So this is.
Before the clean break.
This is an earlier version of the same sort of thing and it's from 1982, and Oded Yinan was an advisor to Ariel Sharon and he wrote this thing where the the whole.
It's funny because it's a hysterical screen like.
If you read it, you're like holy crap, this guy's freaking out, and it's like the.
The premise of the whole thing is that it's obvious that Soviet communism is going to conquer the entire planet, like any day now, and Israel is going to be all alone out there.
Right, this is just a handful of years before the Soviet Union ceases to exist entirely, but Soviet communism is going to rule the entire world.
Poor little Israel is going to be all alone, surrounded by these enemy Arab states, and so they only really have one choice, which is to smash them into as many small pieces they can, as many warring tribal factions, so that basically, instead of just have an angry Arab with an ak-47 over his head is basically the biggest threat that they'll confront.
I apologize, let me just interject for a second just, and I want you to get to this because this is really fascinating stuff, but there's just for uh, like again, because we got like younger people who listen to the show.
Just like so, if people don't know, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, that was what Israel used as their justification to the West for why you had to support them.
Like this was the entire argument.
And in, in fact, the same way that you see now where people go.
Um, you know like uh uh, Talker Carlson is funded by Qatar.
Or you know like, try to make connections, the whole and you can watch young uh interviews of Benjamin Netanyahu I think he was going by his real name back then um, where he's talking about how the PLO is just a proxy for the Soviet Union, America and that's the justification.
And just like all it's funny because just like I mean look, it's not it's, it's nothing unique about Israel.
It's like it's the same thing NATO did.
It's the same thing the entire military Industrial complex and the whole.
You know like neoconservatives and just republican establishment in general did, but they all just use the Soviet Union as the excuse for why you got to do this thing until it went away.
And then they just came up with another excuse, which you know ended up being Iran and radical Islamic Islam.
Yeah right, but but like it's so funny, it's like so back in that time.
It's funny because, even as you, it's like the similar thing, like where they build up the nuclear threats of say, Saddam or, or the Mullahs and Iran or whatever, but back then they were building up the threat of the Soviet Union in order to justify the same shit, and you could just see in hindsight how full of shit they're.
Just like they're full of shit every time.
You know it's like every time they're just full of.
When you say they, I mean who was team B?
Right, it was the neoconservatives that they created this group to do a reassessment of the Cia's uh estimations of Soviet military power, and where They came up with there's an entire fleet of brand new super high-tech, completely silent Soviet nuclear submarines.
And the more we can't find them anywhere, the more it proves how silent they are and how many of them there are out there.
Dude, you can't, I know it sounds like you're making this shit up, dude.
I've literally read, I don't know if you remember this, but this was when me and you first, when we hung out, we had like met a couple times and we had podcasts a few times, but me and you first hung out like a bunch was on that Tom Woods cruise.
And I remember literally I just started talking to you about Team B.
And then you were like, oh, you know your shit, dude.
You've been reading about this.
And then we had like a whole conversation about this like the first night.
But it is, dude, it was literally like this is literally in like government CIA reports where they would literally use, you can't make up how insane this is that the evidence that Russia had these new high-tech, undetectable subs was look, we can't detect them.
Look at it right here.
And this was literally the argument that they made, always just a justification about always just exaggerating, blatantly, you know, clearly like intentionally dishonestly, exaggerating the threat to try to justify more militarism, higher defense budgets, like just the same thing over.
And it is, it's funny.
It's fun to look back at the old ones because it's so, it's even so much more obvious how full of shit the same people always are.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Right.
It's like watching old movie tone news with all the trumpets and stuff versus pretty hamhanded.
Yeah, Andrew Coburn, the great Andrew Coburn, wrote a book called The Threat that came out in 1981 about how the Soviet Union's military was so overblown and how their tanks didn't work.
They had no gasoline.
Defending Andrew Coburn's Old Claims00:15:37
Their soldiers had no boots, no ammo.
The tanks that they had at the time would cut your arm off half the time when you tried to reload the thing and whatever.
It was just, they had no morale.
Everybody's just sitting around smoking Victory Brand cigarettes and drinking vodka and doing nothing.
And I saw Mearsheimer said on Tucker that he kind of got himself in a little bit of trouble in that era because he also went on a tour of Eastern Europe and said that the Soviet military in Eastern Europe is far less than it's cracked up to be and that kind of thing.
And so that was the real estimation of what was going on at that time.
And I mean, you can get the book from Coburn.
In an 81 saying this is all just, you know nonsense, paper mache army over there and then.
But Robert Gates and the CIA they were so busy lying about how the Soviet Union was 12 feet tall that they completely missed it, that the Soviet Union was falling apart and like that was like at the time they were famous for, like the Central Intelligence Agency had no idea that their primary enemy was in the middle of ceasing to exist, completely disintegrating, where they're not a damn thing left,
and they were the last ones to know.
It's it's, it's so.
It's not even just that, it's their prime enemy, it's that again, up until that point the, the um intelligence State, as we know it, is 40 years old.
Um, you know what I mean.
It's and and its entire raison d'etre is this, like the entire justification for it existing is to know what the hell is going on with the Soviets.
And when it comes to the fact that they're collapsing, not only do they miss it, but they like there, I remember um there's, you know like uh dude, there were like the Neocons who were attacking Reagen when he was talking about like detente with the Russians in in the late 80s, and um, it was like 88 89, like around that time, and they're attacking him because he just guaranteed another, you know, you know, reign of dominance for the Soviet Union.
And you're like dude yeah, like chamberlain at Munich, Norman Pot Horritz called Ronald Reagen chamberlain at Munich three, three years before the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
I know, it's literally, it's unbelievable, it's.
It's well, it goes to show who the neocons are.
And, by the way, I was just trolling through youtube and I saw some random uh girl had a youtube video about what is a Neocon anyway, and then she's reading Pat Buchanan's book where The Right went wrong, and i'm like, all right well, I don't even have to watch the rest of this.
I know she's on the right track and whoever that is, that's a whole new audience.
That's being like who the hell is Leon Trotsky and what's that got to do with the Republican Party?
And i'm confused.
You know, catch up everybody, catch up dude, it really is.
By the way, it is um, there is I.
I I gotta say there's something that i'm at least on, you know, on the war front, which really is the most important thing for so many different reasons.
You know, it's just the most important thing about government.
It's always banking and war and those two things are so goddamn interconnected and related and that's, you know, the a big part of it too.
By the way, I even got to talk about Austrian business cycle theory with Lex for a minute there.
Oh, that's great for ruining everything.
That's awesome.
It really is such an important message to drive home, especially these days.
But i've just never, you know so like okay, on the on the Austrian economics front, like on that stuff you're talking about, I don't feel like oh, i'm tremendously encouraged, everyone's waking up.
The younger people really understand this.
Like we still got our work cut out for us there and we real.
But man, on the foreign policy front, especially with young people, it does Just dude, there's like, there's something cool about kind of being, you know, in the as I was getting at at the beginning, just being in the camp that we've been in in this game for a while now and seeing the fact that, like, dude, you know, it's like people like, like, Mitt Romney wrote books, you know what I mean?
But like, no one is reading the idea, like the idea that you would have heard a young person go, yeah, I've just been passing around Mitt Romney's book, dude.
And yo, you got to read this, but like, of course not.
But you do see Pat Buchanan out there, and there's something cool.
This kind of like, uh, you know, like you're the Douglas McGregor quote that you mentioned, but it's just like, oh, these days, it's like, yeah, it does seem like these ideas really are winning out and getting more traction, particularly amongst like the young right-wingers.
I really see that, you know, by the way, I don't know if I told you this that they reviewed Provoked in Parameters, which is the journal of the Army War College.
That's awesome, dude.
And they said it was the at least last I heard, it was the second most downloaded book review they ever did after Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.
Wow.
Big deal.
So that means that's the U.S. Army officer corps is who reads that journal, dude.
You know, I mean, it's just like, yeah, we just never had things like this happening before.
And I do have to say, like, even, you know, I said particularly the right wingers, but I do also think that, you know, this for whatever reason, and there's several of them, but this war in Gaza really did shake the anti-war left back into existence to some degree, at least, after many years of being kind of lulled to sleep.
And I think there are a lot of reasons for that.
I think the anyway, whatever, we can get into that some other time.
But it just does seem like kind of going forward, you know, I was thinking a lot about this kind of as much of a like ridiculous shit show as this debate that I did last night was that thing was wild, man.
Yeah, you know, look, I don't know if, you know, I don't know.
I was thinking, maybe I'll, I'll do a little like, um, I'll, I'll record some thoughts on that at some point and get into it a little bit more.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
But there was something about it.
What I thought was kind of what was just interesting to me about it afterward.
And then hold that thought.
You know, it was funny was Lex told me, he goes, Yeah, did you see the debate with Dave?
Or I asked him, yeah, he goes, Yeah, I watched it last night as I was going to sleep.
Dave Smith, watching Dave Smith always calms me.
So he was, he was like chill and watching that debate last night.
Whereas I've watched it this morning going, oh man, oh, well, I was uh, it was a lullaby to Mr. Friedman, that debate.
Yeah, well, that's interesting.
Um, but I, you know, it was, I don't know, it was, it was a weird experience.
And then seeing, you know, it was like one of these, you know, seeing the reaction today.
I mean, it's just, it's exactly what you know, you would kind of expect it.
Oh, yeah, the comment section was brutal, dude.
Oh, just, you know, and it's, it's interesting.
I've just, I've been in a lot of these debates now where that ends up being the result.
Like the comment section is just like, oh my God, not just like, it's not just like, oh, you beat this guy in a debate.
It's like, yo, this guy just like, I'll never look at him the same type shit.
And, and look, again, this wasn't anything I did.
It was just what he brought to the debate.
And, and, you know, maybe I could have handled it differently or something.
I don't ever know what the right move is there.
But the thing I've been thinking about today off it was just kind of, there's like a few things that were interesting takeaways to me from the whole thing.
One of them was that it's just crazy that like this guy who was at the New York Times for a decade has to come through me and he's picking the fight with me to try to gain relevance.
And then he's got to just come take this spanking from me.
Like, it's just so weird.
I don't know.
It's just a strange situation.
And then on top of that, what was very interesting to me was that, so he essentially, and, you know, Scott, you, you know the ends of this more than some people who may not, but, you know, we were doing a whole thing in the Libertarian Party for years where I was kind of planning on running, you know, on the LP ticket.
And we, I did a lot of debates in that time and we were kind of prepped and ready for like, like, the point I'm just making is like, I've spent years of my life knowing that like there's, it's very plausible.
There'll be a scenario where a mainstream media person is saying, hey, how about this connection with you?
Blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, and I've always just kind of, me and you have talked about this for a year.
Like you just flip that around on them.
Who the fuck are you to be outraged about me, motherfucker?
Look at the track record you guys have.
And so here I am, right?
So this was one of my major takeaways from it.
It was kind of the first time I ever got to do that to someone from the New York Times.
Right.
Like, you know, like, like, I, I, there were people, you know, like Cuomo didn't come at me like that.
Like he didn't come at me with like, oh, you talked to Christopher Cantwell or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like he, he came at me with other things.
So I didn't, but it was just crazy that I got to do that to him.
And he just had no response for it.
Like I just sat there and went, you know, I just went, you know, who is your best friend at the New York Times?
Was it Judith Miller?
You want to talk about how she got a million people killed?
What's your point?
I spoke with Richard Spencer once.
You worked with Judith Miller.
And then he goes, I'm not here to defend Judith Miller.
And you're like, of course not.
Who could?
Like, she can't defend herself.
The paper apologized for Judith Miller.
Obviously, like you can't defend you.
And there's, so that was really interesting to me.
And then the other thing that was interesting was just like that he could, he goes, look, I'm not going to defend the government of Israel.
And you're just like, wow, so that's where we're at.
You have to come take a spanking by me and you have to come on and go, yeah, I can't, I can't defend the New York Times.
I can't defend Israel.
I don't know.
It's just like too, because, cause at this point, how the fuck could anyone?
He didn't even pretend.
He couldn't even pretend to try to put up an argument.
All he had on you was like that you made a joke.
You just wanted to replay the joke that was obviously like everyone could understand the underlying premises of the joke.
You're on the line with a white nationalist.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the kind of thing he would think.
Get it?
Party har har.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Dave, I'm so offended.
Well, I mean, that's what the, you know, they'll say.
No, he makes a great avatar for the times.
Like, look, this is how it should have always been, Dave.
What you're talking about is it should have always been us versus these guys.
And we'd have whooped him back then, too.
You know, I mean, the few chances that I had to go on TV back like 10 years ago when I lived in LA, I always kicked the guy's ass.
Whenever we were on the Kennedy show, it would always be you or me or Spike Cohen or whatever other libertarian versus a Republican and a Democrat.
And we always won.
Every time.
You know, so literally back then, I remember it was literally, because it was almost like, you know, it'd be like, I forget exactly the rotation, but like every week it would meet one episode would be me, one episode would be you.
One episode would be Spike Cohen.
Like every week, that's what he did.
And every time I wasn't on the show, I would just like be on my phone and, you know, like you'd get the, you know, you'd see the video and I'd be like, oh, let me go watch Spike Cohen kick everybody's ass.
Let me go watch Scott kick everybody's ass.
It's just all every single time.
Like there's no, and, and it is, yeah, you know, I, you know, I remember back in the, you know, me and you are both going to Ron Paul's birthday party here in a few days.
And I do, I remember back then, that was kind of the thing where they would black him out so much and the media wouldn't cover him.
And they'd only give him like, you know, some of those debates, he got like six minutes of speaking time total.
There were a couple where he got like nothing, but they'd give him like a few minutes.
But in those few minutes, he just fucked everybody up.
Yep.
And, you know, I really do like.
Social media was the way it is now.
He to won, man.
I mean, we're just, he was on MySpace.
Everybody changed their MySpace picture to Ron in 08.
That was where we were then.
So it's just providing.
It's the greatest tragedy in the goddamn world that Ron Paul can't just be the age he was in 2008 and 2025.
Because, dude, the landscape today, man, of having like Rogan and Tucker and I mean, dude, he would go on a massive, you know, it would be Rogan, Tucker, Candace, Theo Vaughn, Patrick Bett David, all these guys, just go around and just destroy everybody.
It really, I don't see how it's possible he wouldn't have won into this environment.
I'm mad that the economy crashed in September of 08.
Yes.
September of 07.
Because, man, if it had collapsed in September of 07, he'd have been elected because he is the only one who could explain the boom and bust.
And they're the only one.
It literally crashed like three weeks after he finally dropped out of the race.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
But I'll tell you, from, dude, from my perspective, but you got to understand from my perspective too, what was so, it was such an amazing time to come into libertarianism because literally I got introduced to Ron Paul at the Giuliani moment.
So this is late 2007.
And then I got really interested in him.
Oh, that was, I'm sorry, that's right.
It was, it was early 2007.
And then I got really, really interested in him through, you know, the presidential campaign.
And I was really like, get like dove into the rabbit hole of becoming who I am today.
And so then when the economy crashed, it was like, no, no way, dude.
Oh, they were totally right about every, you know, it was like this great, like kind of like shot of confirmation of like, oh, no, this really is, you're on to some good shit here.
But it is just, you know, look, we've always said this.
And this is, you know, it's like when you have the truth on your side, you want free speech and you don't, you don't care about censoring other people because you're like, whoa, no, let them talk.
Let them talk more.
But another, you know, I was even saying the other day, I stood up.
I don't know who they are.
I've never been back, but I stood up for those Nelf boys guys a little bit because people were giving them a lot of shit.
Like you shouldn't even have platformed Benjamin Netanyahu if you're going to give him a softball interview.
But I was even like, I was like, hey, dude, there's nothing wrong with that, actually.
Let them talk.
It's better.
More talking than less talking is always better.
You never know what interesting soundbite you might get out of a guy.
Sometimes they're more likely to reveal something in a friendly environment.
Like there's use, there's use in all of these things.
Pressuring Republicans on Anti-War Focus00:13:05
But I will say, to the point I was making before, it was pretty goddamn interesting.
Did you see that, dude?
Did you follow that at all?
There was evidently only on the on the smallest thing I saw where somebody else was talking about them.
I forget who, and they just played the clip where they're arguing about, do you like McDonald's or Burger King cheeseburgers better?
And it's just like, oh, man.
Well, this week, really, geez.
Well, let me tell you, let me, if you didn't know this, let me change that attitude that you had about that with a different piece of information.
What's interesting.
So these guys are like, they're like a huge podcast for like, you know, like 20-something year old dudes, I think.
But yeah, me too, but they're not for us.
You know what I mean?
They're for young people, but like there's, but they're huge.
And their audience was up in arms over it, dude.
They had to like apologize.
I mean, he said, I'm not apologizing, but made an apology video.
Then they had to have like they had Bassam Youssef on to like to scold them for being so soft on them.
And then they're, it's like the thing I was saying before where now the market pressure from your audience is like, yo, dude, you better make up for that.
What are you doing?
And now they got to go have like hardcore critics of Israel come on to come fuck it.
You know, it's like, there's just, so even that part of it was to me like, and, and, you know, like the entire, if, if the plan for Netanyahu was to go on the Nelk boys and win over the young bros, it's like, dude, that did not happen at all.
Hey, man, there's the new poll said that 50% of Republicans are opposed to Israel.
Now, like on overall, just approval or disapproval, you know, and it was much higher.
I'm sorry, I forget the numbers, much higher for under 49.
You know, people, I just crossed the line.
No, I'm still on, I'm still, I'm not 50.
I'm, I'm still through 49 here.
Through 49, not up to 49.
There you go.
There you go.
Oh, yeah.
No, we're, we're, we're better than, than uh by far the majority, right?
Way better than the majority.
It's 50% when you include all the baby boomers too.
And so, and on the Democratic side, it's like 73%.
Never mind leftists who are unanimous.
Okay.
But, but among liberals and moderates and sort of barely left of centerists, it's just, and this is what, you know, I've always said about, you know, the left-wing anti-war movie.
Say whatever you want about these people and their potential agriculture policy, if they were ever to seize control of the apparatus of power in Washington or whatever.
We need the leftists to be the pressure on the liberals to stop being so, to stop being so damn bad on everything and on the very worst things, especially like torturing people to death and launching wars and bailing out banks.
And the liberals, if it was up to them, they would just be nothing but devils.
And so the leftists are actually better than them on a few things.
And so we need that for what it's worth.
There are a lot of things that leftists are much worse than liberals on.
And so, of course, we got to be careful too.
But in terms of like some liberal Democrat congresswoman out in California somewhere, does she have to deal with leftists screaming at her for supporting Israel all day or doesn't she?
And the answer is she has to, right?
Like if there's not left-wing pressure against her, she will vote to give Israel every last cent of wealth in California if necessary, right?
Like Nancy Pelosi said, if America fell and Washington, D.C. burnt to the ground, the Capitol building burnt to the ground, the very last thing standing forever would still be our support for Israel.
You know, well, that's only true when leftists are quiet, right?
If people, if the pressure from the left on the liberals is strong enough, they can't act that way.
They just can't.
And it's come to a head on the left.
Coming to a head on the right.
And then where are the Israelis gonna go?
Russia, you know.
China yeah, I think that's you know.
And the Chinese want them, you know.
And they're, what are they good for other than stealing American technology right, really.
So it's you know.
And there's also well look, and I, I will say there's also just something.
Um, you know, there's something about, you know, anti-war leftists that, as much as we may disagree with them on a lot of other things, it's like when they're standing up for that, they're just standing up for something that's right and they're against something that's wrong, and and it's hard to not admire when someone's doing that, I don't know, you know, no matter how much you disagree with them.
And you know I will say this isn't like a completely well thought out argument.
I'm kind of just speaking off the top of my head here, but I do kind of feel like there is a little bit something to like, you know, you want the left being focused on anti-war because, you know, then they can't ruin your society as much and they have less, they have less energy to put into that and I, you know, I really do think there is something about how, like you know um, my buddy, Kurt Metzger, uh was like such a incredibly funny comedian dude.
He's so funny someday man oh dude uh almost, you know he lives in Austin.
Dude i'll, i'm gonna be out there in a couple.
Yeah, i'm gonna be out there in a couple weeks.
We'll all go to dinner or something like that.
If he, if he's in, if he's in town you know he travels too, but he'll, if he's in town, we'll definitely all link up.
Um, but uh yeah, he had that bit about uh, such a great bit, but he was like you know, say what you will about Vladimir Putin, but he sure did cure Covid right, it was his bit about that.
And you know, it's like, say what you will about Benjamin Netanyahu, but he sure did cure Wokeism.
And you know, so many people say that like the fall of wokeism was Donald Trump getting elected again and like that is true, i'm not like downplaying, like that is true, and there was just a large rejection of it and and and there were like the boycotts, I really think, from a couple years ago, of like Target and BUD Light.
I think that really did start to like i'm not saying that there were a lot of factors involved in this, but there's just no question that this was like a major, major factor, like and I will give I, I really do think.
By the way, I think the um, a lot of the Zionist hawks get this a little bit wrong and they make it like their own self-serving narrative where they'll say something like they'll be like the reason the left is Anti-semitic is because they see Jews as like the European white ones, and they see everything as oppressor versus oppressed, and so they really just hate Jewish people or something like that.
I, I think I, I will say this, I think there is some truth to the fact that in this war it's much more easy to paint who is the oppressor versus the oppressed, and one of them sure does look a lot more European and one of them looks a lot more brown, and I do think that made it easier for the left to kind of recognize what's going on, you know, and and to feel comfortable.
But you know because, like there's no question, like there were wars that they just didn't care about me and you have known this, you know there's like there's like Iraq war up until Gaza, Me and you were still being anti-war, and there sure was a whole lot of gap there, where the anti-war leftists were just not up in arms in big numbers like this, So there was something about this one.
But at the same time, it's like once those leftists started protesting the babies fucking being slaughtered in Gaza, there was just, it was impossible to create the same type of outrage about like someone called a dude in a dress, a dude in a dress.
Like it just, it just really did.
It broke that whole thing, that whole thing up.
And I do think that that's something that sane people should be happy about.
Like, what do you want your left wingers doing?
You want them going around talking about how like that man in a dress isn't a perv, flat him near your eight-year-old.
Or you want them saying, hey, government, stop blowing up babies.
I prefer the latter.
Yeah, definitely.
And the thing is, too, is it's showing where there's so many because especially because of what Israel is doing is just so horrific, deliberately treating civilians the way that they are.
So then you have so many right-wingers, as you're saying, people like Tucker Carlson, of course, Candace Owens and others are just absolutely as opposed to this as they can be.
And you have good liberals and progressives and leftists who agree with that, who because it's so horrific, it's really a very high priority of theirs right now.
And they go, wow, Tucker Carlson ain't so bad.
I see the comments.
I never thought I'd like Candace Owens, but I do now.
It says some leftist, right?
I remember her from back when she disagreed with me about something, but boy, she sure is a powerful ally.
And so then, but that helps kill woke too, because it destroys the whole narrative of the right wing being just the evil white supremacist system.
Yes, that's such a good point.
Leaders of the right actually really got soul here, man.
You can't deny it.
And that's right.
That's such a good point.
And also it's not because even more specifically to drill down, what they always try to scare you with is the extreme right wing.
You know, they always go, look at these extreme right-wingers and now just know that's everybody.
You know, like, look at Richard Spencer and that's also Donald Trump.
And so, but now when you're a good anti-war leftist, you look around, you go, the extreme right wing is Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the people who are actually really great on this issue that you put so much importance on.
And then it just makes you start to realize that like, which is a really important realization that the problem isn't left right in the way you think.
It's like it's this center part here that's all attached to the establishment.
That's really the problem.
And, you know, while there are many, you know, conflicting views amongst far leftists and far right wingers, it actually, you know, whatever.
It just, obviously our prescription would be like, yeah, but liberty solves just about 90% of this.
And then it's just, you go about your way, you go about your way.
And that's that.
And by the way, too, for liberals and conservatives, we don't have to work together.
We can just all do the same thing at the same time.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
If you're too worried about getting cooties on you, it doesn't matter.
You just do the same thing as us and do it as hard as you can.
And we'll see you there.
You know what I mean?
And get it done that way.
So it doesn't even have to be that broad of a coalition.
It just has to be the loosest broad network where it is.
And this is what I've always said.
You know, like if you watch my old speech about where after the, after the primary campaign in 12, I gave that speech where I said, Dr. Paul, you should keep running, but you should make Dennis Kucinich your running mate.
And you should make a new political party called the Democratic Republicans.
And then you should demand that Obama fire Joe Biden and replace him on the ticket with Mitt Romney.
And then they'll be the war party of taxes, tyranny, and death.
And we'll be the party, the Democratic Republicans, the party of the American people.
And then we'll finally have a two-party system in this country and people can make their choice.
That's the real realignment that we need.
And Kucinich is bad on plenty of things and disagreed with Ron on plenty of things.
But could anybody deny that that would have been a much, first of all, a better race to run with such starker options and just such a different divide in the way that we're splitting the opposing parties?
And then that their presidency, the Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich presidency wouldn't have been superior to Obama too.
And then the coming of Trump and reaction to that, I think we could have done better, you know?
And then that's the realignment that we need is the people versus the power.
It's obvious, right?
You don't have to be a commie to think like that.
You just be an American.
That's why the slogan, the 99% was so great.
If they had put some of their weirder left-wing stuff away and actually tried literally to represent the 99% as best they could, maybe even the 99.9%, then that could have, you know, obviously gone a lot further.
But that's the whole thing is because it really is the same problem here as it is all around the world.
Too few people with way too much power.
And of course, as the libertarians always argue, this is why we end up being anarchists is because you're not going to talk us out of private ownership of the means of production.
But then as long as you have a state, the wealthiest of those owners are going to use that state, you know, for their own advantage in such a way that it requires everybody else to have to come together against them in this way.
And so that sucks.
That's why we shouldn't have a state at all.
It's not just in the Fed, it's in the Congress that created the Fed, you know?
Right.
Right.
Well, look, I mean, there's the state probably isn't being ended or withering away anytime soon.
But man, it is like, I do.
And, you know, I've been talking about this.
Nation States Relying on Propaganda00:05:30
This has been a major theme of mine for a while now on the podcast, but it does seem like we're living through some crazy experiment where nation states, powerful modern nation states have always relied on propaganda and controlling, you know, the narrative, controlling the discourse, controlling the flow of information.
You know, as we know, right, Scott, like it's, it's not a coincidence that this is, you know, more kind of basic libertarian anarchist insight stuff, but it's not a coincidence that like of all the things that governments can monopolize, and you could think of anything, you know, they could make shoe factories or they could make, you know, telescopes or whatever.
But they, they always, you know, had a monopoly or not always, but modern nation states all have a monopoly on like children's education and public radio, radio waves and television stations and post offices, which, you know, don't seem like a big one now, but was a really, really big form of communication for many years.
It's like, it's not a coincidence that they've always tried to monopolize like who controls the information.
And it does seem like really in a profoundly new way, we're just like now they're running with that entire apparatus being broken.
And the question now is like, can you do that?
Can you have government minus propaganda?
Can you, what can, you know, like what Donald Trump, like there really was something.
And this is another thing that I think was really fascinating about the 12-day war, if we want to call it that for now with all the caveats that we made earlier in the show, is that you saw that, like, I've just never seen a thing where a president was flirting with a policy where you just saw right away, you go, oh, if he does this, he's going to lose like such a huge percentage of his base over this.
Like, you know, there just never was a situation where George W. Bush was flirting with doing something and you went, dude, if he does this, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are going to flame him tomorrow.
Like there just never was a situation where if Obama did something, Rachel Maddow was going to take him to task the next day.
Yet with Donald Trump, he was in that situation.
And the Epstein thing, the Epstein thing is a good example of this too.
It's like, this is just, there's something so new about this.
Even the other day, I was, I was making a big deal out of some of these polls where you're like, Donald Trump has fallen to his lowest approval rating that people hate his handling of the Epstein thing.
They hate him on all these things.
And then the Democrats who are down in the dumps haven't gained one point from all that.
Not one person has gone, oh, screw you guys.
We're going over here.
They all wait.
No, obviously.
We still remember.
It's like, this is just so new in a lot of ways.
I don't know.
It's very interesting.
And it's a crisis.
I mean, that's what you're talking about for them.
Yeah.
And I was, I was just showing a friend of mine, the old documentary.
I don't know if you've ever seen the documentary.
I'm sure you've read the book, but Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Great book.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And so there's a documentary about this too.
And it's, you know, mostly a documentary about the propaganda model and the point of the book, but it's also a documentary about Noam Chomsky himself and his life and his career and all this stuff.
It's really great.
Came out in, I'm going to say 93, 94.
So like the internet is just brand new and it's not as relevant at all.
You know, it's not, in fact, it may have even come out earlier than that.
So it's all just about the New York Times and about the major TV networks and the way that they handle their propaganda and as compared to radio and whatever and this kind of thing.
There's so much insightful stuff in there, but just the point being what you're talking about is, yeah, no, it really is a revolution.
And I don't think it really even hit.
I mean, the internet did a lot.
Anti-war.com was important and all kinds of things mattered a lot.
But the first time that I ever could really directly relate the difference made was in the slaughter in Gaza in 2014, because that was the one, it was the first time that the polls showed that the American people overall sided with the Palestinians over the Israelis.
And it was just because of Twitter and Facebook, hashtag Gaza under attack.
And people could just see women and children being blown to bits by the Israelis, you know, hiding safe behind their walls and whatever.
And that was just unheard of that that narrative would go.
Again, like you were just saying, we're like, I don't know if the Jews are whiter.
They're our friends.
We're on the Israeli side.
What's the problem?
You know what I mean?
And then in this case, all of a sudden, the American people, by and large, siding with the Palestinians.
And it was simply because of 3G retweets, man.
That was it.
They can take a picture, upload it, and then people got a hashtag and a retweet and it gets out there and that was enough and it was broken.
And then you can see how, you know, the global engagement center and the all the Twitter censorship and all that really escalated after that because they realize, you know, they like these social media platforms.
They like pushing free speech in countries they want to overthrow because a lot of times those are sort of gray democracies with a lot of censorship themselves.
So if they can get everybody using onion routers and having and improving free speech technology and methods in those countries, it makes it easier to do a color code of revolution and overthrow the thing, right?
But for the same reason that they want to censor us so that we can't have control over our own society when that was supposed to be the point over here in the first place.
And the point of overthrowing those governments, they claim is to make them good, free, self-governing democracies like our own.
And so you're right, though, man, it's coming to a head.
Smearing Models in Gray Democracies00:02:39
I keep saying it every day that other than Trump himself, Tucker Carlson is the most important man in America because he's no longer on Fox News.
Now he's on the internet.
Now he's free.
And now what the hell are they going to do with that guy?
You know what I mean?
And I'm not trying to any bad ideas, but I'm just saying, like, for them, it's a crisis.
Candace Owens going on and saying, listen, I would rather saw off my own foot than ever support Israel again.
I saw her today.
I'm going to be your enemy for the rest of my life.
How do you like that?
And that's a paraphrase.
But what are, in fact, they are going to do with this charismatic woman who is going to be around, you know?
Well, there was something, you know, it's, and again, not to make this all about me.
It's just that, you know, I'm, I'm living life as me.
So I do think about that from time to time.
But there's, this was another thing that I was just thinking about about the debate.
I did last night where, and I think this is, it's a, it's a more, it's a broader theme of what you're talking about.
Now that kind of goes hand in hand, where it's like, okay, so like one of the things that stuck out to me about the debate with Alex Berenson, which again, like, I'm not trying to sit here and say, hey, I won a debate last night.
I, I, maybe I'm guilty of doing that sometimes, but like, I mean, it really was ridiculous.
Like he, he was, he was like on the level of like some of the like libertarian guys with no following who I used to debate, who you'd be like, oh, you just come on that you can't do that in a debate.
Um, but it was kind of like this kind of fascinating thing where Alex Berenson, first of all, he telegraphed to me that this is what he was going to do in the debate, um, which, you know, just doesn't seem wise, especially if you're going to use such cheap tactics, then at least the point of it would be to try to surprise the guy with it.
You know what I mean?
And not like he posted about like how I had interviewed Christopher Camp.
Well, and he was digging up into me.
And then he went, he posted a thing on Twitter where he goes, this is going to go so bad for Dave.
He's never been confronted by a real reporter who's actually dug into him.
Like he actually thought that like that old model smear thing was going to work.
Like I'm going to do this.
And then the crowd response is going to be like, yeah, you took him down.
Oh my God.
He made an off-color joke 10 years ago.
You got like, it's like, there's so right.
They're so trapped in this old model that they have this inability to like adapt and to recognize that like, oh, read the room.
The Failure of Internet Smear Tactics00:03:31
That's not that.
This is going to make everyone laugh at you.
This is not going to make, this isn't going to work.
And so the old model was like, I'm going to ruin your fucking life.
Like, you know, in one way or the other, like that was the old model.
It's like, I will smear you.
You will be dropped by your publisher.
You will be fired from this company.
You will be removed from the conversation and I will ruin your life for doing this.
And this, this was effective for years and years.
And this happened to like so many good people got ruined like this and really effectively taken out of the national conversation.
And now that that doesn't work anymore, like this, like Alex Baronson doing that to me, objectively speaking, has zero effect on me.
It was just a fun night of watching popcorn for all of my fans.
Nothing more than that.
And now I move on with everything I'm doing the same.
Like it's just like, I don't know, we're in the new model now.
And Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson like me.
So suck a dick.
Like there's nothing you can do with any of this.
And, but so now it's not just that it doesn't work anymore, but as you were alluding to with Candace Owens, it just has the effect of you sitting there going like, hey, that guy just tried to ruin my life.
I mean, like, yeah, it missed.
Like the bullet missed me and didn't hit, but like, dude, you just took a shot at my head.
Well, now, now I'm, now we're at war.
Now I'm going to ruin you.
You know what I mean?
And so it's just like, it's like, not only does it not work anymore, but it went from like water on a fire to like water on an electric fire where you're like, ah, shit, no, dude, you're just spreading this like way, way, way further.
It's just fascinating to watch.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's exciting, man.
It's really great.
This is sort of, you know, going back to the dawn of the internet.
This is what Timothy Leary was, you know, had in mind.
It's like, you'll have this equality of information spread throughout the world.
And then that will do the same thing to the power.
It will dilute the power to the people, away from the center and out to the people because they'll be the ones with the information.
So it's a long time coming.
And of course, as Snowden showed and Bamford before him, that, you know, it's and all the great whistleblowers before him.
It's a double-edged sword.
I mean, the whole thing was created to enslave us in the first place, but I think we're doing a pretty good job of using it back against them.
And, and, you know, life is like skateboarding, man.
Generations come real fast.
Things change real quick.
You have brand new people coming in who, you know, I think you mentioned this to me before.
You'll be flipping through YouTube and find some channel where some guy has a million followers or two and you never heard of him before, but he's great and he's doing his own thing out there in some other corner of society you didn't know about.
Buckley, Museums, and Cancel Culture00:10:33
But like, good for him, man.
It's looks like he's doing a good job too, kind of thing.
And it's just more and more of that going on everywhere.
You know, all I ever hoped for, like when I was doing radio and first starting out in radio in the late 1990s, was I just, my, my biggest ambition, I guess, would be that I would have the show that comes on after Rush Limbaugh in the afternoon in a city somewhere.
Right.
Right.
That would be the most effect I could ever have.
And that would be just enough, essentially, just like with doing pirate radio in South Austin is just enough to get this off my chest, but not ever really imagining that it would change anything or have any effect on anything, really, because why nobody really thinks that.
That's, you know, delusions of grandeur to think that you go from driving a cab to talking where anybody can actually hear you.
You know what I mean?
So yeah, this is better than I ever hoped for, I guess, at this point.
Yeah.
Well, it's also, you know, we, I guess, you know, whatever.
It's, it's, you know, there's a lot of obviously like factors coming together to create this, this whole moment, but there is something to where there, you know, there was, and we've talked about this before, um, you know, as well, but there was like, say, for example, with like the neoconservatives.
And, you know, few people know the history of this better than you, but there was kind of like the first, there's just no question that like the first generation neoconservatives were like objectively more impressive than the second generation, Like, just in terms of like thinkers, like in terms of being people, in terms of like, like all of them, like Irving Crystal is more impressive than Bill Crystal, and Norman Podhoritz is more impressive than John Podhorus.
Yeah, like by a lot.
Like, like Norman Podhoritz had some bad politics, but like, I read a couple of his books, and they were interesting books.
Like, he wasn't astonishing.
Just like literally, just like a like this fat little weirdo.
Like, I mean, and then there were, you know, again, like, when, say, like, when I was like a little kid, the media that my mom would have been watching, even on like TV news, would have been like Firing Line with William F. Buckley, or maybe like Crossfire with Pat Buchanan and Kinsley and some of these guys.
These were like, these were intelligent people, whatever you think of them.
Like, this wasn't, this wasn't Sean Hannity and Stephen Colbert.
Like, it was, it's just, it got, and, and somewhere around like the 90s and around the time of kind of the, the, you know, um, well, Fox News was a big part of it, but the unipolar moment was a big part of it.
And the kind of um phony prosperity of the 90s was a part of it.
But it also the neocons and Fox News, as you say, you know, which, you know, obviously were very linked, but they started like, they started celebrating these people as geniuses who just weren't particularly impressive.
You know, like, remember that everyone used to always say that, like, in the neocon circles, they'd always say that Charles Krauthammer was like this.
Yeah.
Like, they would always, yeah, well, they would speak of them like they were these geniuses.
And then you'd like read their stuff and you're like, they've never said anything interesting.
Like, these people are just not.
And it just got to this level where you're talking to someone like, I'm talking to Alex Berenson, and you're just like, yo, dude, you are like, you are so much less impressive than you think you are.
Same thing happening.
Did you see Alyssa Slotkin, the former CIA officer, turned Congresswoman?
Oh, yes, yes.
On Breaking Points?
On Breaking Points.
Oh, I shared it on Twitter.
It's so great.
Yeah, she's just some lady.
She has nothing.
Nothing like against her, but just if you measured her up against every other lady that lives in her neighborhood, she's no smarter than them.
She didn't know anything better about the world than them.
She talked about, I forgot exactly what she said, but talking about her time in the CIA, she sounded like, oh, wow, they really just hired some lady to be a CIA officer, I guess.
There's just nothing impressive there.
And these are supposed to be the elite cutting edge of our security forces here.
And this is not, she could be have any other job in your town and you wouldn't see her as out of place.
Just, you know, running whatever.
Well, that's like the thing, right?
It's like, even with, and I'm not, it's not even a comment on good or evil.
Like, it's like, I'm, I'm not, I regard Bill Buckley as being evil.
I'm just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Like Bill Buckley doing a talk show with Gore Vidal is like a heady conversation.
These are two people with IQs north of 135 who are discussing things.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just like, but now it's just like what permeates our society.
Like, it's, it's, and, and it's funny when people say this thing where like the biggest knock on me now, really since the Douglas Murray debate, and I've kind of been at a bit of a, you know, higher profile.
And the only knock like it seems like they have on me is you're just a comedian.
It's like, what does the comedian know about this?
And you're like, listen, buddy, I, I, I just can't explain it enough.
I know, I know.
I'm not making the argument that I'm up here.
I'm making the argument that they're down here.
Yes.
It's like, yes, I can go on.
Dude, I can go on a debate with fucking the number one show at CNN host Chris Cuomo or the number one British intellectual Douglas Murray.
And you're like, dude, these people are not smart.
I don't know what you guys are saying.
These are not like, it's not even a comment of good or evil.
That was the thing that was blown, I was blown away by Alex Berenson too.
Like it'd be like this thing, like, I'd be, you know, I'd be like, how's Daryl Cooper a Holocaust denier?
And he goes, well, the Holocaust Museum says so.
And I go, right, that's an appeal to authority fallacy, though, dude.
So you make the argument.
Like, why is he a haggard?
And you go, I just told you that the Holocaust Museum said so.
Dude, he put out, I know you made the comment when you were arguing with Noam, which was perfect.
It's like arguing with a drunk woman when you like, you disprove their thing and then they just say the same thing.
Dude, he put out a substack today and he goes, you know, the Holocaust Museum said that Darryl Cooper was a thing.
Like still just like, wait, you didn't hear the three times that I like you're repeating just a logical fallacy.
Like it's just, it's, it is pretty wild.
And I think a huge part of this is just that like the propagandists got so there was so much atrophy amongst the like the the propagandist class.
Yeah.
And look, it's just like with the anti-semite thing.
Like, Mr. Berenson, you really want to wear that out?
Making false accusations against people?
Because now when people call somebody an anti-semite, everybody goes, whatever.
Anyway, if he is or if he isn't, I'm still on his side against the person tattletailing and pointing their finger at him and calling him that because I'm just sick and tired of hearing people called that.
I don't even want to hear your evidence against the guy, whatever it is that you claim.
I don't believe you anyway.
I'm sick and tired.
So now we're going to do that with Holocaust deniers too and compare people who actually aren't, not even compare, falsely claim that people who aren't denying the Holocaust, in fact, are.
You're going to do that X many times before people just say, ah, I guess that thing never happened after all.
I guess we're all deniers now.
You know what I mean?
Like that's what it, not that that's what they're trying to do, but that's what they're sure to succeed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, Pee Wee Herman said, that's my name.
Don't wear it out.
You know what I mean?
You can't just, you know, do that repeatedly.
We see it right now, right?
Look at the, the, um, think of the power of the word racist.
That guy's a racist now compared to 15 or 20 years ago.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
Just gone.
Nobody cares.
Same thing with anti-Semite.
That guy's an anti-Semite.
Oh, why?
You say something good about Israel and you're a genocidal lunatic.
Piss off.
Nobody wants to hear it.
So now Berenson wants to do the same thing, you know, just like ratcheting it up to the next level.
You know, you got to find something to smear people with.
You're going to end up with nothing left to smear anybody with because there's nothing you can say about anybody that anyone's going to take seriously anymore when it comes to character assassination like that, you know, which whatever is for the good in the end anyway.
It always was kind of weird.
Like, oh, if people say this one thing, then nobody, everybody, you know, turn their back and never engage with them ever again or in any way kind of thing.
Like you can't stop it now, man.
With the internet, the way it is, whatever the argument is, it can't be too verboten to discuss.
Everybody's got to get in there and fight about it, you know?
Yeah.
And I think the new, like, you know, with, because it really is, it's hard to explain like how brand new this is.
It's not just as brand new as social media, which really is, you know, relatively speaking, a very brand new phenomenon.
Like it was like, you know, like Obama in 2008, I remember got a lot of credit for like his team effectively using Twitter and using social media.
But like, that's the first one.
That was the first presidential election.
It's only been a couple cycles that we've even had social media.
But then, you know, that freedom of Twitter was very short-lived.
You know, then, then, like, the censorship regime kind of rose up.
And it's really only been, you know, when I'm talking about like the cancel culture backfiring to the point now where, like, say, the guys like Tucker Carlson gets fired from Fox News, he's bigger than he ever was.
Our buddy Daryl Cooper is the center of a, you know, a cancellation campaign.
He's bigger than he ever was.
Rogan, they try to cancel, he's bigger than he ever was.
Another guy, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, like all these guys, Alex Jones, like they've all been, you know, kicked off of everything and they're bigger than that.
It just doesn't work anymore.
Like this just doesn't, it's, it's, at least as of right now, that ain't working.
And in that environment, which is very new, it does almost become this thing where it's like, yeah, you just sorry, like if somebody's here, they're here and you got to take on what they're saying or, or, you know, you can't.
But there's no, you can't just like, you can't do the thing where you just smear people out of, you know, out of existence or smear them out of the argument.
Tucker Carlson's Impact on Policy00:14:55
You know, it's, I do remember there was one that it was very simply, not that it's the most profound thing ever, but I do remember when Christopher Hitchens said this.
And, you know, Christopher Hitchens was, you know, pretty bad on a lot of issues.
But yeah, yeah, he was, although he did, he was good for saying a good thing every now and then.
He did have a great thing about how like Zionism was stupid.
And he actually was pretty, pretty incredibly, he was really, really good on Iraq War one and then went really, really bad on Iraq War II.
He hated Kissinger, so he loved Richard Pearl.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, it was bad.
But I will say, I did read that many years ago.
His book on Kissinger was very good.
But so, you know, anyway, yeah, well, he's anyway, but he said this one time, which was like a very great, you know, when he, when he was right, he was great at being right in that snotty British way.
But he said a thing where he was like, he goes, he was just talking about people being offended.
And he goes, he was like, the only reasonable response when someone tells you that they're offended is who cares?
And why did you ever presume that it mattered at all if you were offended?
And like, it was just like a great way to just like put it where it's just like, it really doesn't mean anything.
Like saying I'm offended is like great.
And like, that was really the point I was getting at with Alex the other day where you're just like, it's like, he's like, I'm offended.
And I'm like, I'm a hundred thousand times more offended.
Anyway, what do you got?
Yeah, I'm offended.
I'm offended that you didn't really say that.
No, but I mean, like, essentially, that was his point.
You know, I'm offended by what you're saying.
And it's like, it doesn't matter.
Like, I'm, I'm offended by your, you know, like fucking people at the New York Times.
It doesn't matter.
And this is just, you just can't call at this point, even if something is legitimately racist or fucking Jew hatey or whatever.
It's like, well, then you got to make the argument why they shouldn't be like that and why they're wrong.
You can't even just say, you're a bad person.
Go away.
Respond.
We're not doing that anymore, you know?
And again, only just because they wore it out, like if they hadn't, you know, spent the last few years calling people who don't hate Jews Jew haters, then people probably still take that seriously.
You know, you got to hold your fire and only, you know, shoot at your intended targets or otherwise you're all out of ammo.
How'd you like that?
That was a pretty good metaphor.
Yeah, no, it was very good.
And that's right.
And you, and, and like I was saying with the effect on Candace or me or whoever, it's like, yeah, and now you're just pissing people off.
It's not only are you losing people, but now you're the guy who just shot at them.
And it is like, you know, like, I, you know, I, I'm, you know, I did like, like, I lost my cool a bit, I guess, in that debate.
And I fucking, you know, I typically don't like call people faggots and stuff like that in a debate.
But there is something where it's like, I do, I don't know.
I mean, maybe this is me being crazy.
You know, me and you are kind of kindred spirits in the sense that we're always, you know, we say it all the time on the phone, but we're always pissed off teenagers to some degree, even though, you know, even though we're in the position of being right about all this stuff and like winning these debates and stuff.
But it is like, I don't know, I just can't like, you know, there's a certain point where you're like, look, dude, like, this is what I do.
This is my job.
This is how I support my family.
This is my livelihood.
And you really, when you call me a Holocaust denier and pin it to your social media, like it's, it is like you're like, I'm trying to ruin your little girl's life.
Like, that is kind of how I take that.
It's, it's not, that's not like, I think Dave is wrong.
I, I want to, I want to challenge him to a debate where I can eviscerate him on a topic or something like that.
It's like, you're trying to like, you're trying to smear me to ruin my career.
So like that my kids don't have the good life that I'm trying to give them and they have a shitty life.
And then it reminds me of little girls in first grade where they would tell like Susie would tell Sally to not be friends with Mindy anymore.
Yeah.
Like, don't be friends with her anymore because I don't like her.
Now you're not allowed to be friends.
And then they'd have a little fight over who's allowed to be friends with who and this kind of thing.
Like, we're grown men talking like that.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Listen, that Dave Smith, you don't want to go near him because I heard he was a Holocaust denier from Alex Barron.
You don't want to get your career all codified from them Smith cooties, not after what Berenson hung on him, you know, and like, and you're right that there was a time not long ago at all that that would have worked.
Well, maybe not in this particular circumstance, but where that really did work against people a lot more than it ever had any right to or probably could now.
Yeah, no, 100%.
You know, it's, there's that, that is kind of, and I'll tell you, that is a part of the thing that I guess gets me kind of angry about it, which like I try to tell myself, I'll be like, all right, listen, like, whatever, it doesn't matter.
I know Alex Berenson has no impact on me, but I'm like, hey, dude, like only a little bit of time ago, this might have really had an impact and you would still be doing it.
Like you, you are doing this to hopefully in your mind, it does have that impact.
And that's what Dubowitz tried to do with me.
He didn't call me a Holocaust denier, but in that debate on Lex Friedman show, he tried to go, well, Scott Horton's worldview is that everything would be fine if it wasn't for the Jews.
I was like, oh, that's funny because we've been at this for four hours and I hadn't said that yet.
You know, and he had to come up with that and try to put those words in my mouth because that was the best shot he could take.
You know, he didn't have after four hours, it couldn't come up with anything I said that was wrong.
You know, right, right, exactly.
And it's, and it just, like you said, they went to the well too many times.
It's just too low of a trick at this point.
You just kind of can't pull it and it's backfiring.
But it's also just like, I don't know, I guess they're, you know, it's like all that, all that it ever required for that shit to not work was just for the other side to get a fair hearing too.
And just like, you know, whatever is like, you know, it's like, I, I, what was that?
Maybe it was one of your times on Piers Morgan, but like someone asked you, you're like, hey, which war in the last, you know, 25 years do you not blame on the Jews?
And you were like, I, I, I don't know what you say.
But you're like, I mean, you wrote a book on Afghanistan.
You, you've never, is anyone going to say you didn't, you didn't talk about Yemen enough or something like that, which like, those are two very important chapters in the terror wars that really had very little to do with like the Israeli lobby.
You know, provoked is this thick.
And the only role of Israel in there is Naftali Bennett, the guy who caused September 11th trying to stop the war right after it started doing shuttle diplomacy on behalf of the United States, which ultimately undermined him and made him not succeed.
But he was trying in good faith, by all indications that I've seen to do the right thing there.
That was his job as the head of a small state, allied with one and friends with the other, you know, and see if he could play middleman in there.
Right.
And so, man, I don't, I do blame a lot of our Russia policy on the neoconservatives, but that's not that everything that they do is in service of the Likuda in the largest sense of keeping the American empire active overseas at all costs, because as Brett Stevens says, isolationism is the biggest threat to Israel.
American isolationism is.
Right.
Not that that's why neoconservatives support American imperialism or anything.
You got to understand that would be anti-Semitic, Brett Stevens, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote in the New York Times.
Yeah, that's right.
Former editor of the Jerusalem Post.
They don't make it.
It's not that, you know, much of a secret, I guess.
But, right.
And like, but so even when they'll say things like that, it's like, look, I don't, I, I also, you know, one of the things that, um, this is one of the things that Josh Hammer argued during the debate again, speaking of just like unimpressive arguments, but when I was debating him, he argued, uh, he, he goes, you know, they asked me like about APAC or something like that.
And I was like, well, yeah, you know, APAC should be registered as a foreign lobby and that, you know, like they should, you know, none of you guys should support them.
They support woke progressive Democrats, even if they, you know, they're whatever, you know, as a turning point USA.
And then Josh speaks and he goes, Dave's going to sit here and tell you that the APAC is the all-controlling lobby that has full dominance over our government.
And yet the JCPOA got signed when APAC was against it.
I don't know, like, wait, that, first of all, I never said APAC was this all-controlling entity that had full control over the government, but like, really?
So your, your big ace up your sleeve is that you can point to one policy that APAC was against that got through that then APAC got their way on, by the way.
That was torn up.
Yeah.
Like literally Trump went to APAC to get their support when he was running for president.
And his opening line of his speech to APAC was, we're going to tear up the Iran deal on day one.
And like, anyway, it's just, it was, but the thing is, like, people try to caricature all this shit, but I've never, I don't actually think that Israel has full control of the United States government.
I mean, I think we would have overthrown the regime in Iran by now if they did.
Like, I think there's pretty, I think there's really no doubt that if Netanyahu had the full control of Donald Trump's presidency, we would have had a regime change in Iran.
It doesn't matter what it would have cost this country.
Netanyahu, if that's his decision, he'd absolutely go for it.
I don't think there's any way he wouldn't have America go do that.
Okay.
So like, yeah, they don't have full control.
They do have a lot of influence and we're going to discuss that.
And like, how much control is permissible when we're talking about a foreign nation state deciding our policy?
Yeah, exactly.
And the, you know, the idea that like, you know, people even like, when they, as the way you put it, when they phrase it, like, oh, like, if you're saying like, oh, if Israel just went away, then everything would be fine.
It's like, no, like, we have a giant military industrial complex.
We have a Federal Reserve.
We have an IRS and an ATF and a CIA.
We got a lot of problems over here.
It's like, yeah, someone, it happens to be that the neocons like hijacked American foreign policy, but like someone else could have hijacked it and done really bad things with it too.
It's just that like, hey, those are the ones who did.
And we're going to talk about that now.
If we're talking about how bad George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are, that doesn't imply that if it wasn't them, whoever the president was would be perfect.
It's just that like, no, they're the guys currently ruining everything.
And so, yes, let's get, let's talk about that.
You just can't shut this down once there's an open conversation.
Yep.
And look, more and more, I mean, I see it, you know, in your, in your debates and your appearances on these things, the comments all say, man, when something happens, I just say, man, I can't wait to find out what Dave Smith says about this.
Just because you've earned their respect and credibility over time.
They're like, hey, I hear a lot of people with a lot of opinions, but that Smith guy makes a hell of a lot of sense to me on a consistent basis.
That's what they say.
And it's just, what are you going to do?
This is with equal access to the market.
This is what the free market of ideas delivers is it turns out that actually, as you all often point out, Bill O'Reilly, when he got kicked off of Fox News, went away.
Tucker Carlson exploded.
Now, part of that maybe is the timing, but part of it also is that Bill O'Reilly was always being foisted on us.
Whereas Tucker Carlson really has something to offer.
And so, you know, that's the difference is between like AstroTurf and grassroots there.
Where I mean, Tucker does come from on high, but he's earned his support from down below by now, you know?
Well, it's no, but it's a, it's a testament to, look, the part of it is an age thing.
I think Tucker had a much younger audience.
I think Bill O'Reilly's audience was unlikely to figure out what a podcast or an internet show was, you know?
But they're also, but there is something to a passion factor.
Cause like, you know, I remember during the years of people who were like getting kicked off YouTube and Facebook and stuff, there were people who I liked who like I used to watch their YouTube channel and then they got kicked off.
And now they're like, oh, I'm doing my thing over here.
And I just never followed them over because like I liked them, but I didn't actually have the effort to like, let me go find their website and join up to that and now listen to them on a on a player that I'm not used to listening to.
And like, but if it's someone you loved, you know, like you're like, no, I'll go do whatever to go follow that.
So like, that's a big part of it for sure is just how much people, you know, how much closer to his audience Tucker Carlson was.
And I think part of that has to be right, just by the nature of it, that Bill O'Reilly may have been your favorite guy on Fox News, but he wasn't saying anything different than what Sean Hannity was going to say in the hour after him or than what whoever, you know, was the hour before him or really have anything.
Like, it's like every hour of Fox News was going to be Bill O'Reilly's opinions.
He just, he might say it in a little bit better of a way where you like it.
Whereas like Tucker Carlson, he leaves and now nobody's going to be saying what Tucker Carlson was saying at Fox News.
There's that just inherently, I think, makes you more valuable.
And then, you know, look, to your, to your point about people, you know, saying they go to me for this stuff or whatever, it's just, you know, you know, I, I've benefited a lot from just being lucky, being exposed to the right people, like, you know, no one higher on that list than you and learning a lot of really good shit from a lot of really good people.
But I do think, and this would be my message, you know, my message to like young people who like are want to get into the business of doing like what me and you do or any capacity in this world is it's like, look, man, like there's the same way that like Ron Paul and the people I admired had it, like what I have is I get, I have the benefit of a track record now.
And the more you kind of build, you know, when you're good on stuff, you just get the benefit of this track record.
Like, oh, he was the guy who got Russia Gate right and got COVID right and got Ukraine right and got this.
And you know what I mean?
And like after a while, you just, you build up credibility.
Like there's real, there's real value, long-term low tide preference value in sticking to the hardcore libertarian principles during these crazy times.
Like you do, it does age well.
And I think also that's, you know, I think that's obviously a huge part, as we were saying before, of you and anti-wars kind of, you know, the anti-war.com and all your shows and kind of your explosion is that, you know, you just get to a point where you're like, I don't know, man.
We got like three decades here of Scott Horton being right about all this stuff.
Building Credibility Over Ten Hours00:02:46
So now when the next thing comes up, I kind of want to hear what he has to say.
And I'm going to just start with the de facto, he's probably right about this again.
Yeah.
Well, and the fun part too, about especially, you know, kind of locking myself away to right provoked for a couple of years there is now there's so many people who've never heard of me before.
And then, but I have been doing this for this long.
Right.
Right.
They don't know why I know all this stuff if I'm brand new.
And you know what I mean?
They don't understand where this stuff has come from.
I saw someone on the in the comments on me and Daryl's show that said, oh, Scott Horton has a show too.
Yeah, I sure do, man.
You, you wouldn't know it.
I admit that.
You wouldn't know it, but I sure do.
Yeah.
But so, yeah.
So that's a little bit, you know, fun part of it too, where, you know, like on the going on Piers Morgan or whatever, where I'm old enough now.
I'm ready to take on General Clark or whoever you got, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think that, no, it is an interesting, you know, thing.
It's kind of like this, you know, this, this, you, you at an interesting time, like right when you and me and a lot of people were kind of like peaking or no, I don't know, peaking.
Hopefully we keep going much higher, but like at the time when we were like kind of coming up and really kind of hitting that, like breaking that wave where it's like, oh, you've hit this critical mass.
We're like, you're really a player in this world.
You buried your nose in writing this like gigantic book.
And then it's cool as you come out of that to be like, oh, this, this, you know, is a lot different than it was after your last previous books, where now you're getting on these like huge shows and so many more people are reading the thing and so many more people are hearing what you have to say.
It's just, again, listen, you know, you did this 10-hour podcast yesterday.
And most of the times when me and you talk, you know, we end up talking about, you know, I'm asking you questions about details and foreign policy conflicts and shit.
But I did think it would be fun today to just kind of like talk about all this stuff.
And, you know, I found myself just, I just kind of found myself thinking about a lot of this stuff about particularly you and me over, you know, with last night you doing this 10 hour podcast.
We're recording this one early, so it'll be in a few days.
But as we're recording it last night, Scott did this 10 hour podcast.
And I did this debate with this New York Times guy.
And I don't know, it's just interesting.
It's a real interesting moment on so many different, you know, fronts.
Something to celebrate, man.
You know, I mean, obviously, we're not in charge of the policy or anything, but, you know, I was told there's somebody in the vice president's office is a fan of mine and reads my books.
And I just thought, wow, you know, that was not the case in the Joe Fire Chain, George W. Bush years.
Reagan Approaches to Democracy00:10:46
That's right.
Right.
Right.
Sean Hanna and Scooter Libby and David Wormser and now whoever, you know, Scooter Libby never went like, did you hear Horton's take?
Yeah.
No, no, no, this is.
They weren't doing that then.
So it ain't, it ain't everything, but it's a little bit, man.
It's a little bit.
And, you know, I told Tucker Carlson, I was like, you know, the most important thing about you really is that you're the moral voice of the right.
Like there is no Billy Graham now.
Like the leader of the right is not Trump either.
It's Tucker Carlson.
And the most valuable thing about his approach to all of this is the way he just says, this is disgusting.
This is sickening.
What are we doing?
This is wrong.
I know it's wrong.
I was praying about it and God told me, no way.
That's not a quote, but just whatever.
He is afraid to do sin and he's trying to make up for his past transgressions and he's just so sincere about it.
There's, you know what I mean?
There's no gimmick.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's legitimately, you know, you know, working hard to try to, to make amends for past mistakes and all that.
And that just makes him such a great leader.
You think how many people supported these wars along with him who now can feel good about following him back the other way.
They're like, you know what?
If Tucker says we don't have to believe this crap anymore, maybe we really don't, you know, and that's, and then with the absolutely not, I will not stand for it, putting my foot down because of how disgusting and sinful the horrific, terrible things are, like the way that he takes that moral approach to the moral condemnation of it all just makes it, you know, complete.
You know, it just drives the point home so strongly that no, no question.
There's no going back for that.
It's not really a debate about policy.
It's a debate about whether we should be indulging in evil or not.
And the answer is no, you know, very simple.
No, that's right.
That's right.
And I will say, as much as, you know, look, I've been incredibly hard on him over the last couple months.
And I have a feeling that that is not going to stop anytime soon.
But there really is something about the effect of Donald Trump that he did in a way open this conversation that even he's not able to close now.
You know, he, you just, and, and, um, and I, I know we, Ron Paul played a huge role in this stuff too.
I would never downplay that, but we also being honest here, I mean, what Donald Trump did, it was just, you know, I remember when I don't know if you remember this exact moment, but this actually came up recently because now the Iran hawks started using this example again.
But Ron Paul used to make the point in the presidential debates, or at least he did this once in one of the Republican primary debates, where he said to the Republican audience, and it was a very smart, you know, strategic way to present this by Dr. Paul, where he goes, you know, in the 80s, Ronald Reagan sent the Marines into Lebanon and then he turned tail and ran.
And we came back home and he wrote in his memoirs that like he just underestimated the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics and that that's why he came home.
And there was something so powerful for your boomer Republican audience to go, oh, Ronald Reagan said that?
Oh, all right.
You know, like it's as soon as you just go, oh, all right.
All right, Ronald Reagan said that.
Now, that's only one thing that Ronald Reagan said in a sea of a lot of other things that Ronald Reagan said.
But like you still just, in a way, you give them permission.
Like I'm allowed to talk about, oh, I'm allowed to feel that way.
And I'm okay if Ronald Reagan.
And there is something about Donald Trump, like Donald Trump just said all these wars are stupid too many times that like it's not an out of bounds thing anymore to approach any right winger with like I mean across America I'm not talking about like you know like you know neo reactionary Reactionary Curtis Yarvonites or something.
I'm saying like your Fox News watching Umcall, you could approach them and be like, oh, these wars were stupid, right?
What are we spending money over there and everything's so expensive over here?
And, you know, and they're open to that.
And it's just, you know, obviously Tucker.
Yeah, there's just nobody who's played like a bigger role in that than him.
And it's really, it's, it's amazing.
Yeah.
And it is.
It's truly building consensus.
And look, we always were right.
It was just a matter of people didn't want to get Michael Moore's commie cooties on them.
Yeah.
Didn't want to, they didn't want anybody calling him a hippie.
And, you know, Ron Paul, he handed out hall passes to, I don't know, a couple of 10 million people at least.
But maybe he's just too gentle of a family doctor of a man.
You needed like only Nixon can go to China.
Only Ronald Reagan can go to Moscow.
You know, you need Donald Trump to say we're coming home from the Middle East.
Not that he's doing that, but I'm just saying he's and he certainly, you know, in his campaigns and his statements, like you're saying, has absolutely normalized those opinions that like, you know, this is an idiot thing to do.
Tough is tough, but stupid is stupid.
And we shouldn't be doing these kinds of things anymore.
And so like you're saying, pretty hard to walk that back.
Just like I say about Afghanistan, it's like, I think Donald Trump really knows a lot about Afghanistan.
It's just he took one look at it and said, this is a stupid waste of money.
You can't pacify these people.
I want to come home now.
Well, so he doesn't have a deep knowledge, but he's still right.
And now that he's that correct about it, how could you ever make him wrong again?
You're going to convince him now that, no, we can pacify these people, Mr. President.
They just need to get hit a little harder.
Like, no, dude, he's already decided correctly that that ain't going to work with anything short of H-bombs.
So forget it.
And so same with anything, you know.
But the thing is, it's got to get reinforced from out here in the country.
And it's worth making a call to action here, even, Dave, I think, that like people should be calling their congressmen and they should be calling the White House and even their state senators and whatever and letting people know the way that the consensus is going now.
You know, if there's like whatever, some old black and white movie where Carrie Grant says, you know, call your congressman, kid, and democracy will work for you or whatever.
Well, forget that.
Like I'm not saying that it all works great.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's something to believe in or have faith in or whatever.
But I am saying that it's worth a shot.
And it's important that their phones ring and that they know.
And I'll give you a great example.
That was just a couple of weeks ago.
I saw a congresswoman say, the phone is ringing off the hook and the only topic is Epstein.
People are pissed about this.
They want to know about this.
They want to know why we don't want to know about this.
And like, geez, I'm not sure I can go about my other business until we figure out what we're doing about this.
So either the phone keeps ringing or it stops.
And the phone, when it rings, it's either half the time, I want to stop supporting Israel.
And also, because I'm suspicious that they're behind this Epstein thing anyway, but also I want all the truth about Epstein or the phone ain't ringing at all, right?
Or it's all Epstein or it's all Gaza or it's neither or it's something else.
I knew a guy that worked at the state legislature in Texas.
He said, the only lobbyists who come up here who want anything are either businessmen who want a free handout or some public interest group that wants to restrict somebody else's freedom.
It's the only people up there, only people who participate at all, who care at all, until like occasionally you have a big thing that gets the phones ringing.
And so this is the kind of thing where when there's a war on, they have to know, like the just the water cooler talk in the office is, man, people are pissed about this.
Or people are really happy that we stopped doing that terrible thing that we were doing that we stopped or whatever.
They need positive reinforcement when they're doing the right thing and they need to be scolded when they're misbehaving.
Like Tom, like pictures just Donald Trump in that oval office, just kind of staring out the window, imagining America out there.
Like when he imagines us, are we pissed or are we happy?
Right.
If he's worried, oh man, they're all pissed off at me.
Well, at least that's something, right?
If he doesn't even have cause to worry about that, then we're not even in his conversation today, right?
He said, well, the Israelis are pissed.
That's who I have to keep happy, you know, rather than the Texans or the New Jerseyans.
Yep.
No, that's right.
And it should be pointed out that like, you know, they're the as much as they're, listen, there is, there are many pro and anti-democracy arguments.
And I am very sympathetic to a lot of critiques of democracy, but we do have a democratic process in this country.
And it is worth pointing out that the bad guys are really afraid of that.
They're very, like, they're very concerned about democracy, actually, you know, even though they're for that reason, right?
Yes.
Well, look, I mean, like, you could just look at the last few years.
I mean, what do you want to do?
The Democrats first?
The Democrats haven't had an honest primary at least since 2008.
I mean, I don't think there's been a real primary since then.
The 2016 was rigged.
2020 was rigged.
2024, they didn't even pretend to have one.
They just straight up just killed the whole process.
They blatantly interfered in the election in 2016.
They blatantly interfered in the election in 2020.
I guess there's some open questions about what type of interference there was in 2024 or exactly what different timeline we could have been living in with a slight centimeter difference of a turn by Donald Trump.
But just saying, like, it is worth noting that, yeah, the ruling elite are very concerned with propagandizing you and very worried about you having an honest chance.
And so we don't have that much leverage at our disposal, but it is leverage.
They do need to get reelected and they do worry about that.
And so if they think, oh my God, the voters are going to hate my guts if they do this.
It's at least a disincentive of, so again, like to your point, the question isn't, is this going to change the world?
The question is like, is this better than not doing it?
And yeah, it's a lot better than not doing it to, you know, take the 10 minutes to just make a phone call.
Launching the Libertarian Institute Stack00:02:04
Anyway, Scott, I do, I do got to wrap up on that, but I really did enjoy this.
Next time we're on, it'll be more back to more me asking you details about foreign policy conflicts and all that stuff.
But yeah, to remind people, anything particular else that you want to plug or tell people where they can come check out your stuff.
No, just my sub stack is ScottHortonshow.com.
You can get the first two sections of, or the first three sections are the first two chapters of the audio book of Provoked.
And it's already like 12 hours worth for just like the first third of the book.
So that's pretty good to get you started there.
I got to finish The Academy before I finish the audio book, but that's my sub stack.
And then otherwise, check out the Libertarian Institute.
I got a bunch of really great guys over there.
Great podcasts, great articles.
And we're about to publish Creative Chaos, which will be the most important book on the origins of the Syrian dirty war 15 years ago, which you're going to absolutely love by William Van Wagon.
And that's coming out any day now, probably tomorrow.
So really excited.
I can't wait to read that.
Yeah.
Libertarian Institute.org.
All right.
Awesome.
Well, Scott, as always, thank you so much.
Like I said before, I really don't know, not just me, man.
And like, obviously, look, you've had a tremendous influence over me.
I'm a total, you know, Hortonian when it comes to war and peace and most other things, to be honest too.
But yeah, dude, it's just cool.
It's cool to watch you getting your flowers the way you are here.
And I really can't wait for this Lex Friedman episode to come out.
I think it's going to blow a lot of people's minds and going to be really, really great.
So anyway, thanks so much for coming on.
I do, I just want to, by the way, to the audience, I'm on vacation this week with my family.
That's important in life.
And so this is, we pre-recorded this episode.
I will try, I'll get another episode or two out this week, but the schedule, bear with me, it might not be our regular schedule.
The following week, we'll be back to regular schedule.
So anyway, thank you guys very much.
See you Saturday in Houston, buddy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
See you Saturday at August 9th, Ron Paul's birthday.