Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Dave Decamp
Aired: 2025-09-04
Duration: 01:10:24


=== Why Antiwar.com Matters (05:54) ===

[00:00:07]  What's up?
[00:00:07]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:08]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:12]  I'm thrilled.
[00:00:13]  Oh, real quick before we start the show, getting on a plane tomorrow, Tacoma.
[00:00:17]  There are still some tickets available for at least a couple of the shows.
[00:00:19]  So, Tacoma and then Spokane with Robbie the Fire Bernstein, comicdavesmith.com.
[00:00:25]  If you want to go grab tickets and come on out, it's going to be a fun time.
[00:00:28]  This was a real fun run of shows last year.
[00:00:30]  Looking forward to doing it again.
[00:00:32]  And I'm also more immediately looking forward to this show because we have back with us once again, Dave DeCamp, who, you know, listeners of this show, I'm sure, know Dave DeCamp and have read him.
[00:00:44]  But if you happen to not, you really got to familiarize yourself with Dave.
[00:00:48]  His work over at antiwar.com is just invaluable to me personally.
[00:00:54]  You really are a big part of how I stay informed on what's going on in the world.
[00:00:59]  Every day, I'm reading your articles over there.
[00:01:02]  And of course, he also hosts the anti-war radio podcast, which is a great way to just catch up on what's going on in the world.
[00:01:09]  I know at all times the U.S. is involved in so many conflicts that it is hard to keep them all straight in your head.
[00:01:16]  But really, you know, everybody in our world just knows how important anti-war.com is.
[00:01:26]  It's really like just the most important project on the internet.
[00:01:30]  And it's something that you hear all types of people, even like, you know, it's run by a bunch of good Ron Paul libertarians, but all types of left-wingers and right-wingers, you will hear crediting anti-war with how they stay informed, anti-war.com, that is, with how they stay informed.
[00:01:48]  So thank you, Dave, for all the work you're doing over there.
[00:01:51]  And before we get into the meat of the show, it is the fundraiser time for anti-war.com.
[00:01:56]  So just as I was saying, how important a project this is, it can't continue unless good people like you help them to.
[00:02:04]  This isn't, you know, when you're in the business of promoting wars, you're going to get all types of think tanks and defense contractors and all types of people in DC are going to be throwing money your way.
[00:02:14]  But when you're in the business of exposing the war criminals, you got to rely on, you know, regular people to contribute.
[00:02:21]  So if you can, highest possible recommendation, if there's any organization you could contribute to, there's no better one than antiwar.com.
[00:02:31]  Well, thanks, Dave.
[00:02:32]  I really appreciate that intro.
[00:02:34]  That's very kind.
[00:02:35]  And yeah, if people could help us out, you know, antiwar.com, we're not like the biggest news site out there, but as you mentioned, a lot of kind of prominent people, including yourself, do read antiwar.com and rely on us and constantly cite us.
[00:02:48]  And the only way that we're able to do this work is from donations from our readers.
[00:02:53]  You know, we're kind of a David fighting against the Goliath of, you know, the military industrial complex and all the think tanks that get these huge grants from the weapons makers and foreign governments.
[00:03:04]  But, you know, we're constantly fighting against all those narratives and trying to provide people with news and viewpoints.
[00:03:10]  And again, as you mentioned, from all over the political spectrum, it is a libertarian-run site, but it's a single-issue kind of coalition project.
[00:03:19]  So if people could help us out, we really appreciate it.
[00:03:21]  Antiwar.com/slash donate for that.
[00:03:25]  Yeah, I remember that.
[00:03:26]  Like, that was one of the things that was always when I first found antiwar.com, which must have been like, I think like around 2009 or something like that.
[00:03:35]  But I remember that's what used to blow my mind is to just be like, hey, they got a Noam Chomsky article and a Pat Buchanan article right here next to each other.
[00:03:44]  And they're both making a lot of sense.
[00:03:46]  And like it was, it did a lot for me, not just to inform me about, you know, conflicts going on around the world, but to kind of like shatter that, you know, false paradigm that I had in my head of like left versus right that not to say left and right don't exist, but that it's not exactly the way they would tell you it is.
[00:04:05]  And, you know, the hacks in the middle will call that horseshoe theory or whatever, but really it's just people who are against mass murder campaigns who are making sense.
[00:04:15]  And you can come to that from a left wing or a right wing point of view and very easily from a libertarian point of view, because of course war is the health of the state.
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  And I'm glad you mentioned Chomsky and Buchanan because that really goes to show, you know, there's an interview Buchanan did back in 2017 and, you know, the reporter went to his house and said, oh, he starts his morning off reading all these newspapers and then going on antiwar.com and to check the news and a little brief description of us.
[00:04:41]  And then Chomsky, a couple years ago, you know, he did some seminar or something and he mentioned us.
[00:04:46]  So we emailed him and said, you know, he's like notorious, not notorious.
[00:04:50]  He's, he's known for answering his email.
[00:04:52]  So we emailed him and said, hey, could you write us a fundraiser letter?
[00:04:55]  And he said, yeah.
[00:04:55]  And he wrote us a really nice letter and made it very clear that he does read anti-war.com.
[00:05:00]  So not only do we like publish people from all over, people read us, prominent, influential people.
[00:05:08]  Yeah.
[00:05:08]  And this stuff, this stuff really is important because it's like, at least for me, you know, it's, it's, it's a real, you know, it's like a, it's something in my utility belt.
[00:05:21]  Or what was that?
[00:05:22]  Is that what Batman had?
[00:05:24]  But, you know, when I'm, it's the thing that where people, you know, look at, you know, me going and doing some debate or something like that.
[00:05:32]  And they'll be like, oh, yeah, Dave, you know, you got that guy or whatever.
[00:05:36]  But it's because I've got the information in my head and I've been armed by antiwar.com, you know, largely.
[00:05:43]  I mean, obviously with Scott Horton there being, you know, like kind of chief amongst the whole crew, but you're right there next to him.
[00:05:51]  And it's a big part of how, you know, it's like, if you're going into battle, it's like I'm coming over and Dave de Camp is just handing me an, you know, a new weapon to go into battle with.

=== The Forgotten War in Somalia (02:57) ===

[00:06:01]  So it certainly for me has been invaluable.
[00:06:03]  And I know for a lot of other people.
[00:06:05]  And the topic will try, you know, to cover a couple things today.
[00:06:11]  But the major topic that we wanted to talk about today was this piece that you just wrote over at antiwar.com, which was titled Trump Administration Shatters the Record for Annual U.S. Airstrikes in Somalia.
[00:06:27]  And of course, if you read the piece, you will see that he shattered his own record, which he set back in 2019.
[00:06:35]  And you had reached out to me about it and been like, and as soon as you did, I was like, yeah, this is really something we should talk about on the show because it is, it's something that the war in Somalia really is like the forgotten war.
[00:06:50]  And I think there's, you know, there's a number of reasons for that.
[00:06:54]  But there is something like even for my audience, I'm sure there's some people who like aren't even aware of what, like, what?
[00:07:02]  We're still bombing Somalia.
[00:07:04]  Like that, you know, like maybe just assumed like they knew that was one of the countries that I always list off that we're at war with, but you assume, isn't that over?
[00:07:11]  Wasn't that, aren't the terror wars kind of over?
[00:07:13]  I mean, people know we still have some troops in Iraq and we still have some troops in Syria, but like we're not really actively in terror wars anymore, are we?
[00:07:23]  And then in fact, you find out that we're shattering the record.
[00:07:27]  And I do think that, you know, I'm talking about my audience here.
[00:07:31]  If you were to just ask regular Americans, I really, I'd be interested to like see what the results of that polling would be.
[00:07:41]  But like just stop regular Americans.
[00:07:44]  Percentage of them even know that there's even tensions with Somalia.
[00:07:48]  Like, if I think if you stopped a random American on the street, the best you could hope for would be like they saw Blackhawk down and know that during the 90s there was something that went on there, and some of our helicopters went down.
[00:08:02]  I don't know how many of them even know that we've been at war there.
[00:08:06]  Um, but really, depending on how you measure all these things, you call it the longest war in American history.
[00:08:12]  Um, and it's a CIA-JSOC war, and so it doesn't, you know, it didn't get the attention that Iraq and Afghanistan did, and it wasn't quite as like, I don't know, it didn't have some of the sexy features of the other wars that made it stick in people's heads.
[00:08:29]  But man, how bad for like how bad for the collective soul of a nation?
[00:08:35]  Not that I actually believe that exists, but there's something really disturbing about the fact that you could be the citizen of a country that's at war that you don't even know about it.
[00:08:47]  I just find something so profoundly disturbing about that, whether you would ever support a war or be against the war, the idea that you're fighting one that most of your people don't even know about is just dark.

=== Casualties of the Terror Wars (14:02) ===

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[00:10:27]  Yeah, and this isn't just a drone strike here and there.
[00:10:30]  I mean, this is heavy airstrikes that the U.S. is launching in Somalia now.
[00:10:34]  So, I mean, one of the reasons why nobody knows is because there's literally zero coverage of this air war in U.S. media.
[00:10:42]  I'm literally the only, as far as I'm aware, person in American media, you know, writing articles who's covering this regularly.
[00:10:52]  Once in a while, you'll see a story from like one of the military focus sites, like Stars and Stripes, had one recently that's like, oh, we're sure launching a lot of airstrikes in Somalia.
[00:11:02]  Um, but I've been covering uh, you know, the day-to-day basically, and the information is extremely limited.
[00:11:10]  Um, so I've basically been working with what AFRICOM, U.S. Africa Command, tells me, and they do not share many details.
[00:11:16]  So, we really don't know what's happening on the ground.
[00:11:18]  But just to get into the numbers first, so when I wrote that article last week, it was after the U.S. was involved in a two-week campaign against an ISIS affiliate in Puntland, northeastern Somalia.
[00:11:31]  And during that two-week battle, the U.S. launched nine airstrikes.
[00:11:34]  So, again, this is not just a drone strike here and there.
[00:11:38]  So, you know, they didn't specify the number.
[00:11:40]  So, I asked AFRICOM how many strikes did you launch in that time?
[00:11:43]  And they told me nine.
[00:11:44]  And that brought up the total annual number of U.S. airstrikes in 2025 to 68, breaking the record that Trump set in 2019 at 63.
[00:11:57]  And now, Biden did continue this drone war, but it was like a dozen, maybe a year.
[00:12:03]  He did send troops back there.
[00:12:06]  I'll get into some of the more of the background in a minute, but just to kind of get into the numbers.
[00:12:11]  And over the weekend, there were more U.S. airstrikes against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia.
[00:12:15]  So the number stands right now at 71 in September.
[00:12:20]  I think there's a good chance if the rate continues that we're going to get close to 100 U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, as you said, in a war that I would guess more than 90% of Americans aren't aware of.
[00:12:31]  You know, I would be curious to see what a poll would find.
[00:12:34]  But again, and the reason why is because there is nothing, there's no coverage about it.
[00:12:40]  And even as you said, like among our people, a lot of people are not aware that this goes on.
[00:12:46]  And they might think, oh, you know, like they launch a drone strike once in a while, kind of like in Syria.
[00:12:51]  Once in a while, the U.S. bombs an ISIS guy, even though they're supporting the Al-Qaeda guy that just took over the country.
[00:12:57]  But, you know, this is significant battles that the U.S. is involved in.
[00:13:04]  And this is something we saw from the first Trump administration.
[00:13:09]  When he first came in, he loosened the rules of engagement to allow more airstrikes.
[00:13:13]  And airstrikes kind of ramped up in all of the different conflict zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and Somalia, and Yemen as well.
[00:13:20]  And a lot of those winded down towards the end of his administration.
[00:13:24]  But Somalia, you know, they really kept at it.
[00:13:27]  And then Biden came in.
[00:13:29]  At the end of the first Trump administration, he pulled a few hundred U.S. troops out of Somalia that Trump sent there in the first place when he first came in.
[00:13:36]  Biden comes in, he sends the troops back, continues the drone war, but at a lower level, and he reimposes some restrictions on drone strikes and counterterrorism operations.
[00:13:46]  So Trump comes in again this year and loosens those rules again and expands the authorization for airstrikes.
[00:13:53]  Essentially, what it allows is lower-level U.S. military commanders to call in airstrikes without getting approval from the White House outside of areas they don't consider combat zones.
[00:14:03]  And right now, the only two areas that are technically combat zones for the U.S., the only two countries, is Iraq and Syria.
[00:14:10]  So by loosening those rules, they've just really ramped up the bombing to this level.
[00:14:17]  And for the real, the historical background on this, I would recommend everybody go to antiwar.com or open up your copy of Enough Already, the book by Scott Horton.
[00:14:28]  But if you go to antiwar.com, we published, I believe it was the whole chapter on Somalia and just search anti-war.
[00:14:34]  Sorry, search at antiwar.com, Scott Horton, Somalia, and it's the first thing that comes up to read the background.
[00:14:40]  You know, you mentioned Black Hawk Down.
[00:14:42]  I mean, you know, the Battle of Mogadishu, as they called it, which many people are aware of, but this current war really started after 9-11 and the start of the terror wars.
[00:14:52]  The U.S. was, the CIA was backing these warlords in Somalia, the same people they fought against in Black Hawk Down.
[00:15:00]  Yeah.
[00:15:01]  Yeah, that's an important detail.
[00:15:03]  Like it was the same group.
[00:15:04]  And I think some of the kids of the guys who shot down our choppers were the ones who we started backing.
[00:15:10]  And George W. Bush, who everyone knows for his wisdom and foreign policy.
[00:15:15]  And that, but can we just real quick, just to interject before you get in there?
[00:15:18]  Because in that middle time period there, or, you know, like what a lot of people, I think some people still remember that, you know, I got in this argument, by the way, just literally just came into my mind.
[00:15:32]  I can't remember the guy's name, but he was a pretty big like Twitter account, like a conservative guy.
[00:15:37]  You could go, if you like, go search my Twitter history, you could probably find this where I was like arguing with this guy.
[00:15:42]  And he hit me.
[00:15:44]  It started with him hitting me with the old line that people used to say to libertarians, oh, you're such a libertarian, go live in Somalia.
[00:15:52]  And then I like, was like, oh, actually, Somalia was doing a lot better until George W. Bush launched a war there.
[00:15:58]  And then he responded and he went, no one launched a war in Somalia.
[00:16:02]  Like this guy was like a professional political commentator having a public feud with someone and was so confident that he would have heard about this if it existed that he just publicly went, there's no such thing there.
[00:16:14]  But anyway, this was, so Somalia was a communist country.
[00:16:19]  And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they basically devolved into like warring tribes and none of them really could take over.
[00:16:28]  None of them had enough juice.
[00:16:29]  So they did live without a state for several years there where it was, you know, not, I wouldn't call it a libertarian society, but it was an anarchist society.
[00:16:40]  And this became the punchline to like, you know, oh, you're an AMCAP, go live in Somalia.
[00:16:46]  But actually, when you look back at it, Somalia was doing the best it had ever done in this time period.
[00:16:52]  And it was the standard of living was raising at a faster rate than any country in sub-Saharan Africa.
[00:16:56]  That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it was much better until 9-11.
[00:17:00]  And then at the end of 2001, George W. Bush sent JSOC in there.
[00:17:05]  And this is what destroyed the whole country.
[00:17:07]  So just to make this very petty point, but to all of the people who ever like in your face, libertarian, go live in Somalia, it's like, yeah, actually, George W. Bush ruined that too.
[00:17:17]  It would have been better.
[00:17:18]  So anyway, I'm sorry.
[00:17:19]  Take off.
[00:17:20]  Yeah.
[00:17:20]  And you could also, you could, you could look at Somaliland in the north, kind of the northwest, that has basically been an autonomous country since the 1990s.
[00:17:30]  And there hasn't been war there.
[00:17:31]  And they've done, you know, relatively well compared to the rest of Somalia.
[00:17:37]  But yeah, so, you know, as Scott lays out in the article, you know, the U.S. starts backing these warlords again.
[00:17:45]  Not again.
[00:17:46]  They start backing the same warlords that they fought against.
[00:17:49]  And in 2006, a group called the Islamic Courts Union took power in Mogadishu from these CIA-backed warlords.
[00:17:57]  And they were in power very briefly.
[00:17:59]  Ethiopia invaded.
[00:18:00]  The U.S. backed this Ethiopian invasion.
[00:18:02]  There's reports that U.S. gunships were giving them air support.
[00:18:06]  And they ousted the Islamic Courts Union.
[00:18:09]  And then al-Shabaab is the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union.
[00:18:13]  And their first recorded, first claimed attack was in 2007.
[00:18:17]  And it was against Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu.
[00:18:22]  And then essentially the African Union and the U.S. and the Europeans backed this new transitional government, which they made official in 2012.
[00:18:30]  And they've been fighting al-Shabaab ever since.
[00:18:34]  So it's been a failure.
[00:18:35]  It's been a complete disaster trying to prop up this very weak central government, which I don't even like calling it a central government.
[00:18:42]  Because if you actually look at the map of Somalia, they control very little territory in what they consider the internationally recognized borders.
[00:18:51]  And especially in recent years, they've really suffered some, they've lost a lot of territory to al-Shabaab.
[00:18:57]  And also there's an offshoot of al-Shabaab that turned into an ISIS affiliate that's up in Puntland, which also essentially acts as an autonomous region.
[00:19:08]  They recently withdrew from the federal system and cut ties with the U.S.-backed government.
[00:19:12]  And they've actually been, there's been some fighting between like the government-backed clans and puntland forces.
[00:19:17]  I mean, so the whole, you know, just U.S. intervention has been a disaster.
[00:19:23]  And there was a report in the New York Times back in April that, you know, the al-Shabaab's offensive was very successful, that they thought Mogadishu was next, that Mogadishu could fall to al-Shabaab.
[00:19:34]  And this was a meeting in the administration.
[00:19:37]  And apparently, State Department officials recommended actually evacuating the embassy in Mogadishu.
[00:19:42]  But there was another side led by Sebastian Gorka, who's Trump's National Security Council counterterrorism official that said, no, let's escalate.
[00:19:51]  Let's double down on propping up this government.
[00:19:54]  And he won the day.
[00:19:55]  And they've really escalated and ramped up these airstrikes.
[00:19:58]  And, you know, people ask me, are there civilian casualties?
[00:20:01]  I mean, the fact is we don't know.
[00:20:03]  AFRICOM doesn't share any information besides announcing a strike and saying how many they've launched.
[00:20:08]  And then the media, you know, it's tough to know what's happening on the ground in Somalia, but all kind of like the counterterrorism experts agree that there's no winning this war against al-Shabaab.
[00:20:20]  It's very similar to the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban.
[00:20:23]  A weak foreign installed government fighting against a Sunni insurgency.
[00:20:32]  And it's just, you know, we're just offsetting kind of the inevitable that eventually one day they're going to have to either negotiate with al-Shabaab or the government's just going to fall and they're going to walk into Mogadishu like the Taliban walked in to Kabul.
[00:20:44]  So, you know, it's probably going to go one way or another.
[00:20:47]  Yeah, there's something.
[00:20:49]  And this Afghanistan is a good comparison because there's something that is, you know, as disturbing as fighting wars of choice and wars of aggression already.
[00:21:01]  Like that's already pretty wrong.
[00:21:05]  But there is something about fighting them even after you know you can achieve your goals.
[00:21:11]  Like even after you know that, like, you know, like Donald Trump acknowledged in 2016 that Afghanistan was unwinnable.
[00:21:20]  We still fought the war for another five years.
[00:21:23]  And you're like, well, what are you doing at this point?
[00:21:25]  I mean, it's one thing to maybe come up with some justification for fighting a war if you think you can achieve whatever the end is, maybe.
[00:21:34]  But when you know you can't to continue it, seems just totally indefensible.
[00:21:40]  And on top of that, I mean, I, I, you know, when you're, you're saying we don't know, you know, like exactly what the civilian, you know, um, death toll is, but we do, like in the broader scheme of the war, right?
[00:21:55]  We know there was this massive famine that hit, what was that in 2010 or 2011?
[00:22:00]  And the famine, you know, there was a, like, it was like the, the entire region was affected, but only in Somalia did you see people dying and they were dying of like the hundred by the hundreds of thousands at that point, like hundreds of thousands of people starving to death.
[00:22:15]  And all because like, you know, their food distribution and supply chains were all messed up because of the war.
[00:22:20]  So these are essentially casualties of the war.
[00:22:23]  And so what you've got here is a war where at least hundreds of thousands of people have died of a result of it.
[00:22:30]  You know, you can't win the thing.
[00:22:32]  It's still continuing.
[00:22:33]  And the average American has no idea it's going on.
[00:22:36]  It seems pretty indefensible on every level.
[00:22:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:42]  And, you know, if you remember in the first Trump administration, you know, as you said, you know, fighting an unwinnable war, he really ramped up the airstrikes in Afghanistan.
[00:22:53]  I mean, to levels that we didn't see since the like initial invasion.
[00:22:57]  And what did that do?
[00:22:58]  You know, like, what did that achieve?

=== No Oversight, More Atrocities (15:31) ===

[00:23:01]  Nothing.
[00:23:02]  And so it's going to be the same thing with these airstrikes that we're seeing against al-Shabaab.
[00:23:08]  And again, very heavy, like week-long battles.
[00:23:10]  And, you know, like they recently retook one village.
[00:23:13]  But I mean, al-Shabaab has been, you know, they recently took a lot of territory.
[00:23:17]  So, you know, they might claw some back, but it's not like a sustainable thing here that's happening.
[00:23:23]  The African Union, apparently, you know, they have troops there that are fighting as well, but they seem like they don't want anything to do with this war anymore.
[00:23:32]  And there was reports that the U.S. was going to cut funding to the African Union mission there.
[00:23:36]  I don't know if that's actually happened, but they continue the airstrikes and they continue funding the Danab, which is a special military unit of the Somali military that's funded and trained by the U.S.
[00:23:48]  Yeah, so it just goes on.
[00:23:50]  And there's just no, you know, what's the end goal?
[00:23:53]  There's no debate here.
[00:23:54]  Nobody's even talking about it because nobody's aware of it.
[00:23:57]  And that's really what I'm trying to do, like writing these articles, like a headline, like Trump shatters the record for U.S. airstrikes in Somalia.
[00:24:04]  Doesn't that seem like a significant story?
[00:24:06]  Like, you know, and it doesn't really get much attention, you know, because sometimes other media outlets like pick up our stuff.
[00:24:14]  But this Somalia thing, man, it's just like, it just goes on and people just kind of shrug their shoulders.
[00:24:20]  And I think one thing you mentioned earlier, like it's not really like sexy.
[00:24:24]  It doesn't fit in with a lot of the narrative about what's happening in the Middle East.
[00:24:28]  You know, a lot of people say, oh, it's about Yemen and the Houthis because Somalia is on the Gulf of Aden, and that's really more northeastern Somalia.
[00:24:37]  But the U.S. has a base in Djibouti.
[00:24:40]  I mean, look at Djibouti on the map.
[00:24:41]  You can't really get closer to the Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen than that.
[00:24:45]  You know, I just don't really think that that's what this is about.
[00:24:48]  This is kind of just a holdover of these terror wars.
[00:24:50]  The machine is just kind of feeding the beast that is the military-industrial complex, and nobody's complaining about it.
[00:24:59]  So it just goes on.
[00:25:01]  And when we talk about the civilian casualties, there's no oversight.
[00:25:04]  So the Pentagon and African, they don't have to answer any questions because there's just no attention or oversight on this war at all.
[00:25:12]  So that makes me think there probably are some bad things happening on the ground with these airstrikes.
[00:25:18]  Yeah, well, I guess it's a reasonable assumption to think that when there's absolutely no oversight, there will be more, you know, atrocities committed than there would otherwise be if there was some type of oversight.
[00:25:35]  And it really is like, and I'm not trying to like, I'll put myself in this category too.
[00:25:40]  Like, it's crazy that I could maybe have listeners who don't even know that this thing is going on, or at least not really be aware of like the scope of it.
[00:25:51]  But it really is a crazy comment on kind of like the entire broader anti-war movement that there's just not more pressure put on this thing.
[00:26:02]  And I will say, like, I, you know, I hate playing this card because it does get totally overused all the time.
[00:26:09]  But it is kind of interesting where like, you know, like, even like a lot of the lefties who have like woken up over Israel-Gaza and kind of rejoined us in this anti-war place where we've been the whole time.
[00:26:23]  And they'll talk about like the racial component of it a lot, that there's like a whole lot of European looking people in Israel and a whole lot of brown people in Palestine.
[00:26:32]  And there's this kind of racism that goes along with it.
[00:26:34]  But then for whatever reason, when it's just the just objectively speaking, out of all the terror wars, the darkest skin target that we're going at, it does seem like there's just like doesn't seem to work up as much sympathy.
[00:26:49]  And I, you know, look, I'm not like saying like that's the entirety of it.
[00:26:52]  There's, there's other factors as well, but there is something to like, I don't know.
[00:26:57]  I've just, you know, I've spent, I don't know about you, Dave, but for the last 15 years, I've been lectured by the left about like internalized bigotry and stuff like this.
[00:27:05]  And like, it is kind of wild that even all the anti-war leftists, like I just never literally, our camp were the only people I've ever heard talk about Somalia.
[00:27:15]  I just, you know, I'm sure there are some others who I don't know of, but not the prominent ones for sure.
[00:27:20]  It simply just doesn't come up.
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[00:28:32]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:28:34]  Yeah, I mean, I'll give credit to Misty Winston, who had me on the Jimmy Door show when she was guest hosting the other day to talk about it.
[00:28:40]  And Jimmy Dore, I've seen people have sent me, he's been covering like my articles of it.
[00:28:45]  So, you know, but that's great.
[00:28:47]  You know, he's kind of an outlier.
[00:28:49]  Yeah.
[00:28:50]  But yeah, you're right.
[00:28:51]  I mean, you think about all the criticism of Trump right now and like he's breaking records for dropping bombs on a on a country in Africa.
[00:29:00]  Like, don't you think the liberal, the left, the liberals, or whoever would be on that?
[00:29:05]  Like, that would be something they'd be at least looking at and saying, hmm, what's going on here?
[00:29:10]  You know, a lot of the narrative, like, it kind of works on people.
[00:29:13]  Like, you know, because I tweet about this a lot.
[00:29:16]  I say, oh, you know, we broke the records for bombs on Somalia.
[00:29:18]  And I'll see people like, well, we're not bombing Somalia.
[00:29:22]  We're launching airstrikes in support of the government.
[00:29:25]  It's like, well, look at the map, see how much territory they control and how much support they have.
[00:29:31]  And literally, just two of the major, major regions pulled out of the federal government over like changes to the constitution.
[00:29:38]  So this is not viewed as a legitimate government by most people in Somalia.
[00:29:44]  But that narrative seems to work.
[00:29:46]  And then the other one is, you know, oh, well, we're just killing ISIS guys in the one bombing.
[00:29:51]  It actually is two wars now because it's in punt land where the U.S. is backing local forces against ISIS and then al-Shabaab in the South.
[00:29:58]  And people say, oh, we're just killing terrorists.
[00:30:01]  And it's like, okay, so you're just going to take their word for it.
[00:30:04]  I mean, it's literally like making the argument of, why should we leave Afghanistan?
[00:30:08]  Like, we're just killing terrorists.
[00:30:10]  We're just killing the Taliban.
[00:30:12]  It's just a smaller scale.
[00:30:13]  So it doesn't for that for a number of reasons.
[00:30:18]  I don't think it's attention.
[00:30:19]  I think that's one of it is just it is small compared to Afghanistan.
[00:30:22]  But it's still raging.
[00:30:24]  Well, it's also like, you know, you just, we, we have to go off the information that we have.
[00:30:29]  And I know like there were a couple like big studies that were done during the Obama's massive drone bombing campaign in Pakistan.
[00:30:38]  I remember there was one that I think came up with like 96% of the people killed by the drone bombings weren't the intended target.
[00:30:46]  And that's not even getting into like whether they had the right target or not, because they're that is quite often it's it's not a given that just because you're on the U.S. kill list that you are actually the bad guy.
[00:30:57]  Of course, like one of the major ways that the DC determines who's supposed to be on that list is to pay locals to give them names of terrorists.
[00:31:09]  And obviously we could all see like the incentive problems with that is that then they're incentivized to give you as many names as they can.
[00:31:16]  But, you know, yeah, if you're telling me that the one that we know about 96% of the time you were getting civilians, my guess is you didn't turn around to be batting a thousand in Somalia and you're probably killing a lot of innocent people there too.
[00:31:32]  Yeah.
[00:31:32]  And this is different because that, you know, those kill lists, like, you know, they claim that they're like targeted, that they're targeting specific people.
[00:31:40]  And that has happened in Somalia, like in a few of the strikes.
[00:31:42]  But for the most part, it's the government forces on the ground calling in airstrikes from the U.S.
[00:31:49]  So, you know, they have no idea.
[00:31:51]  I think it's, they probably have no idea what they're really bombing.
[00:31:54]  And then when it comes to the ISIS, you know, it's in a very rural part of the mountain, like a mountain range.
[00:31:59]  They're bombing caves.
[00:32:02]  Once in a while, they put out videos of the strike and it's just, you know, you can't tell what's going on down there.
[00:32:07]  And it's like, you know, we just really have no idea.
[00:32:10]  And who, and who are these forces in Puntland that we're backing, you know, and, you know, there's just no conversation about it.
[00:32:18]  We're just, yeah, we're going to help them with airstrikes and everything.
[00:32:22]  You wonder if like, you know, with as loose as the supposed justifications are for so many U.S. wars or U.S.-backed wars, you do kind of feel like, you know, if you asked Joe Biden why we needed to keep arming Ukraine, he would have had an answer for you, you know, and it wouldn't have been good or compelling to us, but he'd have had something.
[00:32:49]  Or if you ask Donald Trump why we need to, you know, bomb Iran, he'll say we can't let them go nuclear.
[00:32:58]  And I just wonder, like, if Donald Trump was just asked about this, does he even have a thing prepared?
[00:33:05]  Like, would he even have anything?
[00:33:07]  If somebody, like, if you were in the White House press corps and you were able to say, Mr. President, you just broke the record for strikes in a year in Somalia.
[00:33:17]  Like, why are you doing this?
[00:33:19]  I really don't think he'd even have a reason.
[00:33:23]  Like, it's not even like there's been ever a stated reason of why we have to do this.
[00:33:29]  Yeah, no, we haven't heard anything from like the officials.
[00:33:32]  You know, when they launched the first airstrikes that this administration launched in Somalia was against the ISIS affiliate and they were like huge airstrikes.
[00:33:40]  And Trump like posted a video of it on True Social and said, we killed this amount of terrorists or whatever.
[00:33:46]  But since then, I mean, we, you know, they don't even discuss it.
[00:33:50]  And, you know, when I wrote the story that they broke the record, someone, I mentioned it to somebody and he said, oh, I bet Trump's happy that he broke the record.
[00:33:57]  And my response was, I bet he doesn't even know.
[00:34:00]  Like, I bet there's a good chance he has no idea that he's launched more airstrikes in Somalia in a single year than any other president, including himself in history, you know?
[00:34:12]  So, yeah, and it is really, it does say, I think it is like, it does say something about our country and kind of the way, you know, living in the empire, you know?
[00:34:24]  And this might be a good segue.
[00:34:27]  I mean, the U.S. military just blew a boat out of the water in the Caribbean, claiming that it was carrying drugs.
[00:34:35]  And actually, they did something similar in Somalia a few months ago.
[00:34:38]  They bombed a boat and claimed it was smuggling weapons.
[00:34:41]  And I remember thinking, like, how could you know that?
[00:34:43]  How could you know everybody on the boat is even aware that they're smuggling weapons?
[00:34:47]  Like, how could you really know that?
[00:34:49]  And they're probably just relying on like whoever their allies are, whatever they tell them about that boat.
[00:34:56]  And now we see we see it.
[00:34:58]  I mean, this is a precedent has been set now.
[00:35:02]  If you want to get into this, by this U.S., I believe it was an airstrike.
[00:35:06]  It hasn't been confirmed.
[00:35:08]  Maybe a drone or something.
[00:35:10]  The U.S. bombing a boat, claiming that it's carrying drugs and killing, according to President Trump, 11 people, which he calls terrorists.
[00:35:16]  I mean, I think we really just kind of crossed a line here.
[00:35:21]  And it is very concerning.
[00:35:23]  Yeah, there is something so disturbing about like, and even just seeing the reaction, at least from what I've seen of it, is like, yeah, that's all you got to do is say like they had drugs on the boat.
[00:35:33]  And then everyone's like, yeah, great job.
[00:35:37]  Killed some drug dealers or some terrorists and prevented drugs from coming in.
[00:35:41]  And there's something where like, look, as horrific as the war in Iraq was under George W. Bush, there was almost in a weird way something calm, you know, just to like your concern with your fellow countrymen that like they had to lie to you and tell you that Saddam Hussein was in on 9-11 and had nuclear weapons and he was going to hand them off to the terrorists who were going to use them to nuke Kansas and then at least put,
[00:36:09]  you know, your uncle in a position where he was like, well, we can't live with that, you know, and so, okay, there's at least like some, but this thing where there are people who literally didn't even know there was a thing, didn't even know there was a conflict or anything that we were supposed to be mad about.
[00:36:29]  Don't even, it's not as if like Venezuela, like what threat are you saying they pose to the United States of America, aside from the fact that a bunch of poor people from there want to come here after the country has been destroyed by socialism and U.S. interference?
[00:36:46]  And that they'll just root for this, just root for it.
[00:36:50]  Like even without like any real story having been told to them or any propaganda that would even like as ridiculous as the idea that Saddam Hussein posed some eminent threat to the United States of America is at least they did convince people that.
[00:37:06]  Whereas in this case, it's just people cheering on something that they know poses no real threat to America, where real people died.
[00:37:14]  And then again, it's just this, take the government's word for it.
[00:37:17]  Well, he says they were terrorists dealing drugs.
[00:37:20]  Okay, we're for it.
[00:37:21]  It is, it's depressing that this works on people.
[00:37:24]  Yeah, it is.
[00:37:25]  And, you know, another plug here for anti-war.com, I mean, that's kind of the purpose of following us is that when these wars do start, like, you know, you know, we've been kind of following the buildup and we can call out the lies in real time very easily.
[00:37:39]  Same thing happened with the bombing campaign against the Houthis.
[00:37:41]  That was the last time I was on your show.
[00:37:43]  We talked about that.
[00:37:44]  It was very clear it was going to fail.
[00:37:46]  They were lying to us about why they were doing it.
[00:37:48]  And they slaughtered a whole bunch of civilians in that one, more than 250.
[00:37:53]  And then they ended it and said, oh, you know, it was a success.
[00:37:56]  It's like, what?
[00:37:57]  They basically gave up on trying to get the Houthis to stop targeting Israel.
[00:38:01]  That's what really happened.
[00:38:02]  But the whole narrative, but anyway, that's kind of another story.
[00:38:06]  But when it comes to this Venezuela thing, you're right.
[00:38:08]  You know, I've seen this and like people say, oh, this is what I voted for.
[00:38:13]  And I've also seen people, you know, MAGA people, like quote tweet someone criticizing it and be like, oh, I can't believe this many people are defending narco-terrorists.
[00:38:23]  And it's like, that's a term that you just heard for the first time, probably.
[00:38:26]  But so there's a lot of, like, we're really being, they're, they're, they're lying to us, which isn't a surprise.

=== Regime Change and Drug Flow (05:34) ===

[00:38:33]  And in a lot of different ways, like, there's just so much coming at us with this whole Venezuela thing.
[00:38:39]  I'm struggling to figure out where to like start here.
[00:38:42]  But I would go back to the first Trump administration.
[00:38:45]  They declared the election in Venezuela illegitimate and they stopped recognizing Maduro as the president.
[00:38:53]  And they declared that Juan Guaido was the interim president and they essentially tried to install him in a failed coup, that this was John Bolton's policy.
[00:39:00]  Marco Rubio as a senator was really in support of this.
[00:39:05]  And Rubio and other like Cuban Americans, especially, you know, in Miami, Florida, you know, they really agitate for this to continue the blockade on Cuba, which is really a relic of the Cold War that hasn't achieved anything.
[00:39:18]  But that goes on because they have a lot of political influence and they're also very anti-Venezuela and anti-the government and anti-the government in Nicaragua.
[00:39:28]  I think John Bolton called those three countries the troika of tyranny when he was in the first Trump administration.
[00:39:35]  So anyway, so they imposed really heavy sanctions, which essentially amounted to an economic blockade and made the migrant situation much worse.
[00:39:43]  A lot more people fled Venezuela after that.
[00:39:47]  I think it was in 2019 or maybe 2020, Bill Barr, then attorney general, this is when the narco-terrorist thing first really started, indicted Maduro and like top Venezuelan government officials claiming that they're narco-terrorists.
[00:40:00]  And the allegation is over cocaine.
[00:40:03]  But if you actually look at the numbers, like the vast, vast majority of cocaine that comes into the U.S. first is produced in Colombia and also goes through the Western Pacific.
[00:40:12]  It doesn't go through the Caribbean.
[00:40:13]  A small amount does, but it's nothing compared to the other parts.
[00:40:16]  So it's clearly, you know, this whole indictment is about regime change.
[00:40:21]  It's not about stopping the flow of drugs.
[00:40:24]  Yeah, I mean, so just the fact that the reality of like the drugs, you know, where the drugs actually flow, because this is specifically about cocaine.
[00:40:31]  That's what these allegations go back to.
[00:40:34]  You know, when you actually look at that, the data there, it's clear that this isn't about stopping the flow of drugs to the U.S.
[00:40:41]  This is about regime change.
[00:40:43]  And the fact that you have Marco Rubio involved in this in 2019, when they tried to do the regime change against Maduro, Rubio tweeted a picture of Gaddafi, the before and after, you know, a picture of him right as he was being brutally murdered.
[00:40:59]  So that's the guy who's really running the show here.
[00:41:02]  So I think it's important to understand that like, I think there is a legitimate, like I understand the sentiment among people.
[00:41:07]  You know, I come from a place that was ravaged by opiates and then heroin and fentanyl.
[00:41:13]  I know a lot of people who died because of that.
[00:41:15]  And like, I get the sentiment that like, yeah, we should go after these people flooding our country with those drugs.
[00:41:21]  But the demand is still going to be there and the drugs are going to find their way in.
[00:41:26]  And but the fact is, is that Trump and really it's a lot of this, so much of this is Rubio.
[00:41:34]  They're taking advantage of that legitimate sentiment from the MAGA base and using it for this regime change effort, which is clearly what this is because they also like increased the bounty on Maduro to $50 million.
[00:41:48]  They deployed all these warships.
[00:41:50]  I mean, there's an armada of U.S. Navy warships in the southern Caribbean.
[00:41:54]  And instead of like stopping a boat to check if it had drugs on it, they blew it out of the water and killed 11 people.
[00:42:01]  I mean, it's just, it's just the whole thing is really nuts.
[00:42:05]  And they claim that Maduro is the leader of a cartel, the Cartel de los Soles, or the Cartel of the Suns, which doesn't actually exist.
[00:42:15]  So that is a label that has been used for kind of an alleged network of Venezuelan government and military officials who they say are involved in drug trafficking.
[00:42:26]  But there's no group that calls itself the Cartel of the Suns, yet they declared it a terrorist organization and said Maduro is its leader.
[00:42:33]  And now they're saying that they're bombing so-called terrorists carrying drugs.
[00:42:37]  So it's clear that this is like they're marching towards some sort of regime change effort here.
[00:42:42]  We don't know exactly what they're going to do.
[00:42:45]  But, you know, the drugs, if fentanyl and everything is what they're trying to solve, this is not, this has really nothing to do with it.
[00:42:55]  And also Trump claimed that these were members of Trend de Aragua, which is a Venezuelan gang that has been active in the U.S. in the past couple years, according to law enforcement.
[00:43:09]  And they claim Maduro is their leader, like the leader of that gang, too, which there's just no evidence for that.
[00:43:13]  There was even a U.S. intelligence document that came out that said, you know, it's unlikely that Maduro and the top government officials direct or they like they view this gang as a threat.
[00:43:25]  And this is, there's just so many, there's just so much lying and misrepresenting things going on here.
[00:43:33]  So for the people saying, oh, you know, who even think we should take military action against cartels, they need to understand that that's not why this is happening.
[00:43:40]  This has nothing to do with that, really.
[00:43:42]  This current deployment in the Caribbean and blowing up this boat and whoever, whatever else is next here.
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=== Lies About Terrorism and Drugs (11:13) ===

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[00:45:02]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:45:04]  Yeah, it's amazing how much they will just lie about these things.
[00:45:09]  You know, I was thinking, I didn't get a chance to make this point, but I was thinking I was on Piers Morgan's show earlier today and they were, you know, they were talking about this, the military parade that they just had over in China and kind of like a broader conversation about like the unipolar moment being over and stuff, which is a very interesting, you know, topic.
[00:45:27]  And I, at one point, I was thinking to say, but there were, there wasn't really a good hawk on the panel for me to argue with, but it's just like the thing just came into my head.
[00:45:35]  It was just like, hey, remember when you guys were lying and saying that China was committing a genocide five years ago?
[00:45:42]  Remember that?
[00:45:43]  Remember, like this like came up for like a little bit.
[00:45:46]  I even remember like even in like, you know, different like circles of libertarians or something like they'd be like, oh, they denied the Uyghur genocide.
[00:45:58]  And it was all literally just that Mike Pompeo told you so.
[00:46:03]  Like Mike Pompeo just said it in 2020.
[00:46:07]  His one source was that Adrian Zenz, who just like no opinion either way, just objectively just got the numbers wrong, like just didn't carry a seven when he was supposed to and like got came to a completely wrong conclusion.
[00:46:20]  And now that's not even a thing that they even use, even when they're trying to ramp up, you know, be hawkish on China.
[00:46:26]  They don't even say that anymore.
[00:46:27]  It's just like they lie, they move on, then it's whatever, then they come up with another excuse for it.
[00:46:33]  But again, and this is to your point that you started with there, that it's like, this is where reading antiwar.com helps is that whenever there's a and and sorry.
[00:46:47]  And just in general, whenever there's, I apologize, I'm having some work done in the house.
[00:46:52]  And so if you hear some of that, I do apologize, guys.
[00:46:54]  But whenever there is, you know, these conflicts come up, they've almost always been going on for a while, but everybody's not paying attention to them.
[00:47:05]  You know, it's a big advantage if you're me and you interview Scott Horton all the time.
[00:47:09]  Scott Horton was talking about the Maidan Revolution on my podcast, like for years before Vladimir Putin invaded the country, but no one's really paying attention to that.
[00:47:17]  Then when Vladimir Putin invades, they all start spinning their propaganda.
[00:47:21]  And like, it's a big advantage if you're like, oh, I've actually been paying attention to this since before you just started lying.
[00:47:28]  And so what happens is that you realize that, like, even the way you just said it, it's like, look, there are, I'll say this, there's a lot of people of good faith. who really do just look around and see how many lives fentanyl has ruined or how many ruined lives, you know, then get more ruined by drug addiction and things like that.
[00:47:49]  And there's definitely some people who I think are good people, like Cubans who moved to America, people who really hate communism and like, because they understand firsthand how destructive and oppressive it is.
[00:48:04]  And so these people like get sucked into this, but you're like, look, if the goal here was really to keep fentanyl out of the United States of America, why are we picking on Venezuela?
[00:48:15]  Why does it happen to be the regime that you already wanted to overthrow now happens to be the target of this military strike?
[00:48:25]  Like, I'm sorry, it's just, it's like when they said they wanted to fight the war in Ukraine to protect democracy or something like that.
[00:48:32]  And you're like, wait a minute, if you're all about democracy, well, then why are you propping up the king of Jordan and the House of Saud and the like this just doesn't pass the basic smell test?
[00:48:42]  And so they manipulate people with this like, oh, protecting democracy, that does sound like a noble enough goal.
[00:48:48]  Hating communism, that sure does sound like a noble enough goal.
[00:48:51]  But again, also if you really hated communism, like at a certain point, wouldn't you go, we've run this playbook and it doesn't work.
[00:48:59]  Like we with Fidel Castro right here, a few miles off of our coast, we had the toughest sanctions, multiple assassination regime change attempts.
[00:49:09]  It only, it only made the people's support for that regime stronger.
[00:49:13]  And of course, this is a point that I think only like us libertarians, the non-interventionist libertarian types are really making.
[00:49:20]  Maybe there's some other people outside of this, but like, can't you, like, as an American almost understand that just think, think about how much right-wingers hated Joe Biden in this country.
[00:49:34]  Like, just, you know, like thought the man that most, the average right-winger in America thought that the election in 2020 was stolen, that Joe Biden was senile, that he was, you know, the other shadowy pedophiles were really running the government and Joe Biden was just their fake.
[00:49:51]  But like if the Chinese came in and tried to overthrow Joe Biden, those same right-wingers would have grabbed their guns and taken to the streets to defend him.
[00:50:00]  Because screw that.
[00:50:02]  You're not coming in here and telling us what we're allowed to do.
[00:50:05]  Like you don't get to just rule over us.
[00:50:07]  People like autonomy and sovereignty is something that matters to human beings.
[00:50:14]  And so of course, if you really cared about, if you really cared about, you know, people dying of drug deaths, you would just call off the drug war.
[00:50:21]  And if you really cared about, you know, Venezuela becoming more capitalist, then you would want to just trade with them.
[00:50:30]  It'd be the best move.
[00:50:31]  I feel like they never try that, but that's, that would be by far the best move.
[00:50:37]  Yeah, I mean, especially with Cuba, too.
[00:50:39]  Like you said, it's so close.
[00:50:41]  They've been under these sanctions since what, the 1960s?
[00:50:45]  Same government still there.
[00:50:47]  Like, what has it done?
[00:50:48]  Like, how can you justify continuing this policy?
[00:50:53]  And yeah, with the drug war, I mean, this is just like, you know, I saw one report in the New York Times today, U.S. officials saying, you know, this is, there's going to be more of these, these attacks on these boats or whatever.
[00:51:04]  You know, who knows what this could turn into?
[00:51:05]  There's talk of launching like drone strikes in Mexico.
[00:51:09]  But, you know, turning the drug war, like it's, they're combining the drug war and the war on terror.
[00:51:14]  I mean, that's like literally what they're doing.
[00:51:16]  Narco-terrorists is the new thing.
[00:51:18]  I mean, drug traffickers are not terrorists.
[00:51:21]  Like it's a different thing.
[00:51:23]  But because they have this, I guess, whole machine built up, you know, they're going to just try to use it against the drugs.
[00:51:32]  And I mean, and to be clear, you know, we don't really know exactly this boat that Trump bombed.
[00:51:40]  You know, there hasn't been any claims from the Venezuelan government that it like belonged to them or anything.
[00:51:46]  You know, interesting to see how they're going to react.
[00:51:49]  So we don't really know like what the next step is when it comes to the push for regime change or anything.
[00:51:53]  But it seems like I really think a big part of this was setting a precedent.
[00:51:58]  And they're trying to like kind of figure out what they're going to do with Venezuela.
[00:52:03]  Because I mean, Maduro says, you know, he's mobilized this big like pro-government militia that he claims that has millions of members.
[00:52:09]  And I like, I don't think the U.S. can do like an Oriaga, like Panama-style invasion and just take him out like that.
[00:52:16]  So I think that they actually are, you know, there was a report in Axios.
[00:52:19]  I think I might have sent it to you that said that like the Trump administration doesn't really know if this is like what they're going to do next here.
[00:52:28]  And you have some officials saying that they might do an invasion.
[00:52:30]  They might do a drone strike to take out Maduro.
[00:52:34]  So we don't know where this is headed, but either way, it's a it's a very dangerous direction.
[00:52:38]  And then there's the other side of it, like, you know, are they going to start doing this in Mexico?
[00:52:42]  You know, there's reports that they might start launching drone strikes in Mexico against the will of the Mexican government.
[00:52:48]  And I mean, where is this all going to lead?
[00:52:49]  The fact that they think they could just bomb away this problem.
[00:52:53]  I think, again, that also says a lot about the soul of our nation.
[00:52:57]  The fact that people think that, oh, our friends and family are dying of drug overdoses, you know, calling the military, calling the drone strikes.
[00:53:06]  Yeah.
[00:53:07]  Yeah.
[00:53:07]  I mean, it's kind of really sad to think about.
[00:53:09]  Yeah.
[00:53:10]  You know, I was, so on my, on my last, uh, yesterday on the show, I was, uh, which by the way, got us a copyright strike.
[00:53:18]  I guess I'm not allowed to use content from that Jubilee thing or whatever.
[00:53:23]  Well, keep that in mind going forward.
[00:53:25]  But there's, so I was, I was, you know, we were trashing this communists like girl who was just making this, you know, it's, she was just making an argument about how like the communist position is that we should live in post-scarcity.
[00:53:38]  And then we were mocking how ridiculous that is.
[00:53:40]  It's like, oh, is that your position?
[00:53:42]  All wants and needs should be met.
[00:53:44]  Hey, great.
[00:53:45]  That's my position too.
[00:53:46]  But like, whatever.
[00:53:47]  And I kept calling it infantile.
[00:53:50]  And then I was thinking about this like last night as I was falling asleep.
[00:53:55]  But I was like, you know, so much of this stuff, it does, it comes down to almost like a God complex.
[00:54:01]  You know, it's like, it's not just that you're like, and this is true, like kind of across the board.
[00:54:06]  It's, it's not a coincidence, by the way, that the commies are always atheists.
[00:54:10]  And there's something about like when God is removed that then people, you know, it's like creates a vacuum and then people.
[00:54:20]  And this is, it's like a through line through like, look, all the crazy transgender stuff.
[00:54:25]  It's like, what is that?
[00:54:27]  You're saying you can play the role of God?
[00:54:30]  You can argue with biological reality?
[00:54:32]  Like, no, you can't.
[00:54:33]  What are you talking about?
[00:54:34]  And the idea that you can abolish scarcity.
[00:54:37]  What do you mean?
[00:54:38]  That's the condition of man.
[00:54:40]  I'm sorry.
[00:54:41]  That's above all of our pay grade.
[00:54:43]  That's somebody else's job to make that decision.
[00:54:46]  And it does seem like there's something about that with the, whether you're talking about the war on terrorism or the war on drugs.
[00:54:53]  And the idea that you think you have the power and the ability to dictate who puts what in their body or what government is in charge of what other group of people when the objective, look, it's Nancy Pelosi who was on record a couple of years ago saying, we're going to take all Ukrainian territory back from Vladimir Putin, including Crimea.
[00:55:14]  I mean, what is that other than like a disdain for the limits of reality?

=== Society's War on Cartels (15:02) ===

[00:55:21]  Like, no, you actually can't.
[00:55:23]  And if I tell you, like, I got these big trees in my yard, and if I go, I'm going to take one of them down with my fist.
[00:55:30]  And you go, I don't think you're going to be able to do that.
[00:55:33]  Like, the conversation isn't about whether it's right or wrong for me to knock down a tree with my fist.
[00:55:38]  The conversation is like, you do not have that ability.
[00:55:41]  You will shatter your hand before you knock down this tree.
[00:55:45]  And that does not seem to enter these conversations at all.
[00:55:49]  That it's like, we're just not, I think it was Harry Brown who came up with the line.
[00:55:52]  It's always my favorite line about the war on drugs.
[00:55:55]  But you go, look, the federal government can't even keep drugs out of federal prisons.
[00:56:01]  Like the area that you have on lockdown is still riddled with drugs because your own guards are smuggling them in and then, or visitors are smuggling them in or whatever.
[00:56:11]  And then like you have this nerve to think that you can, by what, blowing up ships, you're going to stop Americans from demanding drugs.
[00:56:22]  It's just so, it really is.
[00:56:24]  There's something that it's like a God complex of some sort.
[00:56:27]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, one that is very near and dear to my heart.
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[00:58:06]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:58:08]  Yeah, I mean, especially when we're talking about fentanyl, like it's such a small, like you need such a small amount.
[00:58:13]  Like they could smuggle that in in so many different ways.
[00:58:18]  And, you know, I like one thing I like that you always bring up in your debates with like Zionists and stuff is like, you know, the try to apply war to like a domestic situation.
[00:58:29]  Like if a killer had a shootout with the cops and ran into an apartment building, would anybody ever accept blowing the apartment building up?
[00:58:36]  Or if there was a hostage situation and they just, you know, dropped a bomb on everybody?
[00:58:41]  You know, none of us would ever accept that.
[00:58:43]  And I mean, that's a similar thing here.
[00:58:45]  Like they claim these people on a boat are carrying drugs.
[00:58:47]  What if they were like, you know, off the coat?
[00:58:50]  What if they're in the Long Island Sound or something?
[00:58:52]  Right.
[00:58:52]  And they and they claim that they had drugs.
[00:58:54]  Would anybody ever accept just blowing a boat out of the water and killing everybody on it because the government claimed that they were running drugs?
[00:59:02]  And a lot of the people who are actually the ones transporting the drugs, they're not like the narcos, they're not the cartel leaders.
[00:59:09]  A lot of them are just poor people just doing what they can to make money, or some of them are even forced into it.
[00:59:15]  Like, you know, so it's just, it's really immoral in a lot of different ways.
[00:59:19]  And I think it's good to try to put that in a domestic lens.
[00:59:23]  Like if someone was on your nearby lake in a boat and they said, oh, he's got cocaine, blow him up.
[00:59:29]  I mean, especially when you have an armada, you have eight warships in the area.
[00:59:35]  The whole thing is just crazy.
[00:59:36]  And what are they going to do like in Mexico in the border?
[00:59:38]  Like, are they going to start blowing up cars that they claim are coming from cartel labs or something?
[00:59:44]  You know, where's this?
[00:59:46]  Where's this going to go?
[00:59:47]  And it's like the idea that you think also that, you know, like, it's like people's brain just stops there.
[00:59:56]  Oh, we're going to, okay, so we're going to, we're going to label because this idea has been floated out and by um people who I even kind of like.
[01:00:04]  I mean, I like Favek Ramaswamy, but this was one of his just like absolute worst ideas on the campaign trail that we're going to declare that the drug cartels are terrorists.
[01:00:13]  So then we can start drone bombing the drug cartels.
[01:00:16]  It's like, okay, and then what?
[01:00:18]  Like play this, that's it.
[01:00:19]  That's the end of the story.
[01:00:21]  Now, now there's no more drug cartels and everything's good and there's no negative reaction that comes from that.
[01:00:26]  Like, how about the level of just like, like, how many innocent people are you going to kill while you're doing that?
[01:00:33]  How much hatred is that going to now engender from our neighbor to the south?
[01:00:37]  Anyone want to think about that for five minutes before we just declare war?
[01:00:42]  Like, gee, I mean, it's just, you know, I was thinking about this also earlier because, and I didn't get to say any of this stuff on Pierre.
[01:00:48]  So maybe I'll just say it now to you.
[01:00:50]  But there's, I was thinking about this because as people were talking about, you know, like kind of the collapse of the unipolar moment, which probably ended a while ago, but they're now, China had a parade.
[01:01:01]  And so now it's over.
[01:01:03]  But Trump could have win.
[01:01:04]  I think he was invited.
[01:01:06]  Yeah, well, that maybe that would have been a good idea.
[01:01:08]  Got to deal with people, even people you're not friends with.
[01:01:12]  But and he has already met with Putin and he's met with Kim Jong-un in the past and he's met with Xi in the past.
[01:01:17]  So like it wouldn't have been like inconceivable for him to do that.
[01:01:20]  But there was something.
[01:01:21]  So I was thinking about this.
[01:01:23]  And I've just heard this.
[01:01:24]  This is a little bit anecdotal, but I think this is right.
[01:01:27]  Is that right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that like the Russians kind of had a favorable view of America?
[01:01:37]  And that they were like, you know, look, if you think about it, you remember, you know, Metallica went to Moscow and they had like the big, you ever seen like the videos of that concert?
[01:01:47]  Yeah.
[01:01:47]  1991.
[01:01:48]  It's like, dude, they describe there's so many people, Dave.
[01:01:52]  They describe the amount of people there like you're talking about casualties from a huge war.
[01:01:56]  They go, it's believed that 500,000 to 1.2 million people were there.
[01:02:02]  Like they don't even know how many people that, and they're just loving it.
[01:02:05]  And that was the thing, right?
[01:02:06]  And I always love bringing up the King Crane Commission when they went to Syria and asked who they wanted to rule over them in a League of Nations mandate.
[01:02:16]  And they overwhelmingly picked the United States of America because before we started intervening in that part of the world, they had a favorable view of us.
[01:02:24]  And the same with the Russians.
[01:02:25]  It wasn't that they were going, Hey, you guys did such a good job with the Cold War or the war in Vietnam was really great that you guys fought that.
[01:02:33]  It had nothing to do with none of that.
[01:02:34]  They just saw our prosperity.
[01:02:36]  They loved our blue jeans and rock and roll music.
[01:02:39]  That's what they thought.
[01:02:40]  And so, I don't know, there's just this thing I've been thinking about that it's like, like the biggest lie ever told was George W. Bush and the neocons saying that they hate us for our freedom.
[01:02:50]  But the inverse of it is what's actually correct, that people loved us for our freedom.
[01:02:56]  That was actually the things they loved.
[01:02:58]  And so this idea that like the way you're going to extinguish, you know, socialism in South America or even drug cartels or anything like that is to use the force of government to go over there and start killing a bunch of people or impoverish a bunch of people.
[01:03:15]  And what, no, that's, that's what, that's what engenders hatred.
[01:03:20]  That's what makes people hate you.
[01:03:21]  Statism makes people hate you and freedom makes people love you.
[01:03:25]  It's the exact opposite of what the neocons always said.
[01:03:29]  Yeah.
[01:03:30]  And when it comes to bombing the cartels, it's not like there's like a model of success to look at because essentially like what Vivek and others have said is like, oh, let's, you know, use this military machine we created for the terror wars against the cartels.
[01:03:42]  It's like as if there's a successful model to do this off of.
[01:03:47]  And then the other thing, you know, when we talk about sanctions in Venezuela, you know, I always remember when Biden was putting sanctions on Russia and one of his lines was, oh, we, we turned the ruble into rubble, even though that wasn't true.
[01:03:58]  The ruble bounced back pretty quick.
[01:04:00]  But imagine if you're in Russia and like, you know, all the Russian government has to do for their propaganda purposes is just like play that speech.
[01:04:09]  Biden like bragging that he destroyed the Russian economy.
[01:04:14]  You know, again, no matter what you think of your own government, if there's a foreign government saying that about your country, how are you going to respond?
[01:04:21]  And we saw a similar thing in Iran with the, you know, they had the rally around the flag moment.
[01:04:27]  And I saw even like U.S. funded NGOs who are always very anti-Iranian government were like very against the bombing campaign.
[01:04:35]  So it like made the regime stronger in a way.
[01:04:38]  And I think we see that with, we could see that with Venezuela because Maduro, you know, if you watch him, like his press conferences, he's always talking about the U.S. Empire is after him, this and that.
[01:04:47]  And now we've deployed seven warships, you know, to the Venezuelan coast.
[01:04:53]  And he's like, see, see what I've been talking about?
[01:04:56]  Like the propaganda points for the governments that we targeted, just, you know, we really helped them out with that.
[01:05:02]  Yeah, there's just so many things like just foolhardy about this.
[01:05:06]  And, you know, this idea, like you said, it's like people just want to wish away fentanyl, just say, you know, we got this military.
[01:05:13]  Why can't we use it against it?
[01:05:14]  But it's just like, it's just going to create more problems here.
[01:05:19]  And one thing, you know, Seth Harp, he just wrote the book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, which I need to read, but he was on Tucker recently.
[01:05:26]  And Tucker, who I think has supported the idea of military action against the cartels, asked him about it.
[01:05:33]  And one thing he said, you know, is that the cartels, like, it's not like how people picture them in movies or TV shows.
[01:05:39]  Like the network that gets the drugs into our country is like a network of corrupt officials and like in Mexico and in all of Latin America and the border people, you know, like it's a whole way.
[01:05:51]  It's not just like you could just target like a cartel leader and it's going to stop this.
[01:05:56]  I mean, I don't get how people can even think that.
[01:05:59]  Yeah.
[01:06:00]  Yeah.
[01:06:00]  And it's also just, you know, the stuff with drugs particularly.
[01:06:07]  And, you know, there's that one, you know, there's the famous rat study where they based, so like there was this initial study that like was totally was totally relied upon for all the drug, you know, all the war on drugs propaganda, all the just say no stuff.
[01:06:22]  And basically they took like a rat and they had like two water bottles and one was laced with cocaine and one was just water.
[01:06:29]  And the rat would taste cocaine and then just drink the cocaine until he killed himself.
[01:06:33]  And they were like, look, that's, you know, you get one taste and you're hooked and then you're going to kill yourself.
[01:06:39]  And that's why you have to just say no and we have to fight this whole war.
[01:06:42]  And then there was like one scientist who looked at that and he was like, well, let's do some variables with this because like this is a pretty miserable experience for this rat who's just living in a cage isolated by himself.
[01:06:53]  So let's like give him everything he wants.
[01:06:55]  So they built like this like a big like, you know, like like almost like a little amusement park for a rat with all these toys.
[01:07:03]  And they gave him other rats in there and they gave him sexual partners and all this stuff and then put the two water bottles in and none of them killed themselves with it.
[01:07:11]  They'd all just try the cocaine, have a little bit and then go back.
[01:07:14]  And just the point of it is that there's a deeper problem when people are ODing on drugs.
[01:07:19]  There's just like a much deeper problem.
[01:07:21]  It says something about what's going on with our society.
[01:07:23]  You know, I got little kids.
[01:07:24]  I know you do too.
[01:07:25]  There's you, the older the kids get, especially like, I mean, I've had so many examples of this before, but you meet, this is just the way it is, man.
[01:07:34]  Like you meet really nice people.
[01:07:37]  Like my daughter's best friends, her parents are like just really great people.
[01:07:41]  And their little girl's the sweetest little girl in the world.
[01:07:44]  And then the one who's a problem in her class is like, you know, they're kids.
[01:07:50]  Parents are a mess.
[01:07:51]  You know, it's like you just, you see, and like there's, there's just like these major problems that are much, much deeper than the substance.
[01:07:59]  And you would think that like, particularly right-wingers who really seem to get this when it comes to guns, you know what I mean?
[01:08:07]  That like, this is, this is goofy for you to blame the inanimate object.
[01:08:11]  The problem is the person behind it who's willing to.
[01:08:14]  It's like blowing up a Glock factory or something.
[01:08:16]  Yes.
[01:08:17]  Like this is just not, this is not serious.
[01:08:20]  This does not solve the problem.
[01:08:22]  And you would think, what are we going on?
[01:08:24]  50 years of fighting a war on drugs?
[01:08:27]  And now they're saying it's worse than ever.
[01:08:28]  It's like, well, I think that might be your answer right there.
[01:08:32]  Final word to you, Dave, and then let people know where they can go find your amazing work and support your stuff.
[01:08:38]  You know, one thing, I mean, just about the war on drugs, I just wanted to say, I remember when I was a kid, you know, I grew up, again, I grew up on Long Island and in the town I lived in, like drugs just like floated in there when I was like high school age.
[01:08:49]  And I remember when I was a kid, I smoked like cigar, like I would try to smoke tobacco, but I didn't touch cigarettes because I was like, oh, I'll get hooked in like a day.
[01:08:57]  And then I remember an older kid said, you won't get hooked.
[01:08:59]  That's not true.
[01:09:00]  And I started smoking cigarettes and I was like, I'm not addicted.
[01:09:02]  And I said, and basically my thought was, well, what else can I try?
[01:09:05]  You know, I guess everything they're telling me is a lie.
[01:09:07]  So it like led me on this path to like trying all these drugs.
[01:09:11]  And, you know, now I have kids and I'm very against drugs and everything.
[01:09:14]  I'm more Catholic than anything these days.
[01:09:16]  I had like a big reversion to my faith.
[01:09:18]  So I really do not like this stuff.
[01:09:20]  And one of my best friends is dead because of it.
[01:09:23]  So again, like I get the sentiment, but unfortunately, we can't just bomb this problem away.
[01:09:29]  So, but anyway, so that's it, I guess.
[01:09:32]  And go to antiwar.com slash donate if you could help us with our fundraiser.
[01:09:37]  As Dave Smith says, you know, he relies on us for a lot of things.
[01:09:41]  So if you appreciate him and our work and you can help us out, we really appreciate it.
[01:09:45]  That's, again, how we get by.
[01:09:46]  I really hate asking people for money, but it is necessary for what we do and what we want to continue to do.
[01:09:52]  And also check out my show.
[01:09:53]  If you're watching this on YouTube, go to anti-war news and subscribe.
[01:09:58]  I do like a daily show of all the news stories I write.
[01:10:00]  Yeah, it's an excellent show.
[01:10:03]  Your articles at anti-war.com are always excellent.
[01:10:05]  And yes, we'll make sure to put the link for the fundraiser in the show notes of the episode.
[01:10:10]  Dave DeCamp, as always, thank you so much, brother.
[01:10:12]  It's always great hearing from you.
[01:10:14]  Thank you to everybody for watching.
[01:10:15]  ComicdaveSmith.com.
[01:10:17]  I'm on the road for the rest of the year.
[01:10:19]  So come on out and see me and Robbie the Fire.
[01:10:22]  Hope to catch you then.
[01:10:23]  All right.
[01:10:24]  Peace.