Scott Horton critiques the Trump administration's indefensible threats against Venezuela, exposing fentanyl precursors as Chinese rather than Venezuelan. He argues that pro-Israel figures like Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee dominate foreign policy, alienating the base and causing election losses despite economic struggles. The discussion highlights the lobby's influence over Hurricane Helene relief and immigration, while analyzing Ukraine's slow territorial losses under a potential Trump peace plan requiring capitulation. Ultimately, Horton suggests this geopolitical entanglement, fueled by neo-Nazi factions and Christian Zionists, remains an Achilles' heel for American interests. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Yo Kratom Sponsorship00:05:47
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All right, let's start today's show.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Got a good one for you guys today.
Quick reminder before we get started that I will, I always take December off of traveling on the road, but I will be back on the road in January.
I'll be at Helium in Philadelphia for a weekend there, and then I'll be out in Portland, Oregon, the libertarian bastion of Portland.
I'll be out there next.
But, you know, there's like a thousand sane people in Portland, and they all come out to my show.
So that'll be a lot of fun.
Looking forward to that.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all those ticket links.
All right.
For today's show, we have returning our most requested and most popular and guest of the show, the best foreign policy guy in the country, the great Scott Horton.
Of course, as all of you guys know, Scott is the author of just the best books that have been written about the terror wars, Fool's Errand and Enough Already.
The best book that's been written about the war in Ukraine and what caused it, Provoked.
And of course, he's, you know, he's the creator.
Well, okay, not the creator of antiwar.com, but he's been working at antiwar.com for decades now, which is really like the most important, you know, I mean, like, I really do think at this point that the two most important libertarian projects are probably antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute.
And he's very, very involved at antiwar.com and the founder of the Libertarian Institute.
And now, of course, he has the Scott Horton Academy, which is really just amazing.
I'm, I'm, I'm very much looking forward to taking the courses myself.
And I'm somebody who like lives in this space and talks about these ideas all the time.
But first of all, even some of the stuff that I do know, I could use a refresher in most of it.
And then there's all types of stuff that I don't know that I'm going to learn through these courses.
So very excited about that.
Scott, thank you so much for joining the show.
Absolutely.
Happy to be here, Dave.
How are you doing?
Good, man.
Good.
There's just a lot going on.
And I just a lot of stuff that I want to hear your take on.
And so, and some stuff that I have heard your take on on the phone, but I want my listeners to hear your take on.
But so let's start with Venezuela.
On my last episode, we were going over this political interview that Donald Trump did the other day.
And it really is, I don't know, did you see the politico interview where he's talking about the Venezuela stuff?
And the reporter lady there, she hit him with a few of the really obvious objections to, you know, like the percentage of drugs from Venezuela that even come into our country.
Isn't your own stated thing here more of a reason to go to war with Mexico or Colombia or something like that?
And then he had this really devastating, brilliant response, which was, well, a lot of drugs are coming in.
And, you know, anyways, it's just like the Donald Trump just, you know, it's like when he would say things, he's always done this.
They say thousands of Muslims were celebrating in the streets after 9-11.
And they'd go, sir, there is absolutely no evidence that that ever took place.
And he'd go, well, a lot of people say.
A lot of people say they were.
And you're just like, wait, what was that get out of jail free card?
It strikes me.
And I'll just kind of pass this to you to go in whatever direction you want.
But it just does strike me.
I remember saying at the beginning of the 12-day war that I couldn't believe how weak the propaganda campaign for it was.
Like at least with, you know, Saddam Hussein, you had a little bit of a story there.
The story was all lies, but at least like if those lies were true, well, then maybe you have some type of case that we can't let the next warning be in a mushroom cloud or whatever.
And now I'm shocked that this one is even weaker than that.
Like they don't even have a like 60% enrichment and no one's ever gone up that high before without breaking out or something.
There doesn't even seem to be a talking point.
And anyway, it's just kind of amazing that we're actually in this place where we're flirting with another war.
So what are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, you know, it's been easier and easier for him to do it.
Obama made up this bluff that Gaddafi was going to kill every last man, woman, and child in the city of Benghazi.
Imagine the city of Charlotte, North Carolina.
700,000 people wiped off the face of the earth.
That's what Gaddafi's about to do if we don't stop him.
And Ellie announced it in a press conference from Brazil.
He wasn't even in the country at the time.
And then by the time he ganged up with Saudi and UAE and Al-Qaeda against the Houthis in Yemen, you know what happened there?
The declaration of war was issued by Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the State Department, who put out a little press release.
She didn't even announce it with her face and voice on TV or anything.
She just put out a thing saying, oh, by the way, we're bombing Yemen now.
And so now I guess Trump has the America first armor that boy, if good old anti-war Donald Trump wants to do this, it must be necessary or some kind of thing like that.
It's supposed to be only Trump can go to China.
And only Trump, the so-called, you know, macho tough guy Republican can make peace everywhere, not can talk a good game about peace and therefore get away with starting another war.
Synthetic Drug Origins00:02:07
And you're right, it is a pale imitation.
I don't know if you saw, that's a little nostalgic for it, but also I got such resentment, Dave, it kind of canceled it out.
But I saw the clip of Jon Stewart on the daily show where they did a comparison and they show propaganda about Venezuela right now compared to the Iraq propaganda and where on Fox News, but like you're saying, such a pale shadow of an imitation.
It's pathetic.
They're going, oh, yeah, these, all that fentanyl coming from Venezuela.
That's a chemical weapon.
Yeah, every one of these boats that's coming, those are weapons of mass destruction.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Like, come on.
And this is all, everybody knows.
Military Regime Change00:16:03
They already said all this.
It's in the journal and whatever that all the East Coast stuff, that's just cocaine.
That just means rich people get to stay up later drinking.
That's all that means.
Nobody's dying of cocaine.
The hell out of here.
You know, like, I don't recommend you getting all the way strung out on it.
It can be bad for you.
But mostly it's just people who like having fun get to have fun into the like late morning hours, you know, kind of thing is basically what that drug is for.
Big deal.
And you want to talk about fentanyl.
Well, that's a whole different thing.
It's all synthetics coming from China, the precursors, and then it's mixed together and sold through Mexico.
And so what does that have to do with bombing Venezuela?
As you said, oh, well, you know, drugs are bad.
And Kay, that's his answer.
Like, oh, well, okay, well, it could be a pretext for war against somebody.
I don't know, whatever.
But you know, it's funny, because I was thinking about what you're saying because I did see you and Robbie on your last show there.
And you're talking about this, how they coined this phrase.
They tried to coin this phrase panicans, like people who are too alarmist about what bad thing might happen.
I mean, honestly, I have had, you know, this about me, that when I was younger, I was more willing to speculate about how horrible things were going to be.
And then a few different times that didn't pan out.
And so I stopped doing that, basically.
But now I kind of err the other way where I'm like, nah, they're not really going to go that far, are they?
And then they do the stupid thing that, man, I really didn't think they were going to go that far.
Whatever it is.
There's been a few of those.
Well, a couple anyway, where it really is worse than I think.
But we're all in this position now where on one hand, this is terribly dangerous.
Like if we really go to war with Venezuela, the consequences could be, I mean, we could be counting this out for decades, what happens as a result of this and the different alliances that we got to, you know, that shift and change and whatever we, whoever we got to overthrow the government of Colombia to now or whatever, however it pans out from there, all the refugee crisis, as you and Robbie were talking about yesterday, that's sure to come from it.
And, you know, whatever.
On the other hand, it's so silly and stupid and crazy that, come on, they're not really going to invade Venezuela.
They're not, or even attack them with airpower.
I mean, hell, but at the same time, like, look, they're flying fighter bombers into the Gulf there, like right in, you know, at the 12-mile line or maybe even inside the 12-mile line of Venezuela last night.
They are threatening war.
They had a giant thing in the New York Times, I guess, three, four weeks ago about here, Trump's different options for attempting regime change there.
He could try to put in special operations forces or he could try drone strikes or he could just try pressure and this and that.
And meanwhile, like we don't even have any specific demands.
What are the demands?
Trump said, this is four or five weeks ago.
Now it's on video in the Oval Office.
He said, he, that is Maduro, he offered everything.
This is where he used the big F word.
He knows not to F with the United States of America.
And everybody quoted the second part.
What was the first part?
The first part was he offered everything.
He offered everything.
Then what are we talking about?
He offered everything but stepping down from power.
Is that it?
But otherwise, he's willing to make any concession that he could possibly think of to the United States.
The idea that Trump could start a war over that, it seems too crazy to even waste time on now, right?
Like I feel a little foolish.
What if in a month from now, nothing happens?
And then look at how alarmed I was.
But like, on the other hand, they are threatening war and the consequences could be devastating.
So you square it for me.
I don't know what to do.
Yeah.
Like, what are we, I know it's like, we're not supposed to take him at his word.
Like it's, he said that he said the quote you're talking about.
He said, we were offered everything and he turned it down.
So then what can you conclude from that other than you want a war?
If you were offered everything, then why don't we accept everything, right?
The only reason is because you want to, and then you're making these military moves and the commander in chief is saying his days are numbered.
That sounds a lot like talking about regime change.
And yes, obviously, Donald Trump says everything.
And so you can only react so much.
But like at the same time, when you're actually making these steps and you're making military moves and saying this, now you're a guy with a gun saying he's going to shoot someone.
Kind of got to take that seriously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And while he's attacking boats off of their, you know, off of their country.
And look, like, I'm sorry, you know, people could go with this panikin thing all they want to, but like, has yeah, you know, we really have had a real problem in this country over the last 25 years with people being way too concerned about launching a stupid war and really thinking through all the catastrophic potential outcomes from that.
Oh, no, wait.
We've had the opposite problem.
So like, yeah, I don't know in the face.
And it does, I got to say, man, I said this during the Iran war and I'm saying it during this one too.
It really is like supporting this thing is substantially worse than supporting Iraq.
Or, you know, because it's like, because now we have the example of that to look back on.
Like even those wars, Iraq and Afghanistan were, look, they were never justified, but there was a much more reasonable claim at the time that the like, like even like the seven countries in five years, clean break type of thinking, like you could kind of see it from being the perspective of the unipolar moment in the 90s.
And we have all this power and we'll be able to get away with all of this.
But at this point, with $38 trillion in debt with seven catastrophic regime changes in the last 25 years, it's so much worse the way people say it.
Like it's like right, like you haven't even thought through the possibility that maybe this could go bad.
Maybe it won't go the way that you're envisioning it.
It's just, it's, it's indefensible at this point.
Remember what happened when the Navy, I think, well, it was disputed, but I presume them guilty.
They flew a drone into Iranian airspace and got it shot down.
And they were trying to goad Trump into launching the war then.
I'm pretty sure, or it may have been after Soleimani and the strike on Soleimani in Iraq.
And then there was the tit for Tat Back.
I forget exactly which occasion it was, but it was an unmanned drone that went down in Iranian airspace.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, the other incident was after they killed Soleimani and then there was the tit for tap back.
Right, right.
One was in 2019, the other was in 2020 here.
Anyway, but the point being is that Douglas McGregor, the former U.S. Army colonel, went on the Tucker Carlson show and said into the camera, Mr. President, I know you know better than to do this.
This will destroy your presidency.
Just like Vietnam destroyed Lyndon Johnson's presidency and Iraq destroyed George W. Bush's presidency.
Don't think this will be one and done and fun and good.
It won't be.
It'll be bad.
Don't do it.
And, you know, in this case, let's go ahead and talk about Iran just for a second here in parentheses.
That's not over yet.
They did not obliterate Iran's nuclear program.
The Ayatoll has not given up his enrichment program.
All he has to do really is rebuild his conversion facility so that he can transform uranium to gas and then back to metal again.
Otherwise, I'm pretty sure Natan's is still operational.
Certainly parts of it are.
And they can build new centrifuge facilities and they have domestic supplies of uranium.
And so that did not obliterate their nuclear program.
It set it back for sure.
But that's not over.
And if they really mean to solve that problem, that could lead to a much worse war.
So McGregor is still not proven wrong about that, even after the June war of this year.
But in the case of Venezuela, I mean, man, this is a country bigger than Iraq.
And it has, you know, I'm not saying this guy's the most popular leader in the world, but people tend to rally around the flag when they're attacked.
And I do, you know, I couldn't find this again.
I did look for it for a little while and I couldn't find it, but I swear to you that I saw, and maybe I could try to ask Max Blumenthal about this because I'm virtually certain that he tweeted this at the time.
When they were trying to do the Juan Guaido coup in the first Trump term, there was this massive turnout of protesters at the presidential palace.
And it was at least half a million people.
It might have been a million.
It was a huge mass of people.
And it was drone footage of flying over the crowds.
And it was huge.
And they were all there in support of the president to protect him, to rally around him.
And it's essentially, it's like the poor Indians versus the rich, white or Spanish type.
And that's oversimplifying it by far, but that's a lot to do with it.
And so the Indians, especially, are like, no, we rally around the leader, certainly before giving into a foreign power.
And if you put your shoe on the other foot, if you're an American listening to this or anywhere else in the world listening to this, imagine a foreign power coming to save you from your leader.
You would shoot them, right?
You'll look at a leader later.
I know I'm using an example that you've used before, but like to even think about it like this, like if we actually caught, let's say, whatever, like Chinese, you know, special forces or something like that, like attempting a violent coup, like they had, you know, like different units that were going to storm the White House and take out, and it was Joe Biden's presidency.
The right wingers in this country who don't believe that he legitimately won the election, the right-wingers who believe the election of 2020 was stolen from Donald Trump would still pick up their guns because fuck the idea that any foreigner is going to sort that out for us, even if we have a problem, right?
Like, and so you see, and I've been told this by many different Iranians who I've spoken to personally, where they're just like, look, man, there are, it's, cause, cause they'll say things like, they'll be like, look, you know, the Israelis or whoever will say, look, the, the, the Iranian people don't like the mullahs.
They're oppressed by the mullahs or something like that.
And the Iranians will tell you, yeah, there's some truth to that claim.
There's truth to claim that people resent their own government, right?
Everybody resents their own government.
But man, they will side with them so quickly over an outside force who they already know has a history of intervening in their own country, in the region for nefarious reasons.
So it's just, all this stuff is kind of obvious.
Yep.
So then what are the choices?
Let's say, I mean, look at how when they started Iraq War II, they got, they thought intelligence from Chalabi in the exiles that they knew where Saddam Hussein was at the Doha Farm.
Wasn't that what it was called?
The Doha Farm?
Something like that.
Ah, hell, I forgot the name of the farm, Dave.
It was 22 years ago, 23.
Leave me alone.
But anyway, they missed and they killed some kids and Saddam got away and they didn't catch him for a year and a half.
And that was how they started that war was, oh, we know we're going to do this decapitation strike and we're going to get Saddam on the first night.
Nope.
And so like, what are the chances?
They could do it, right?
I mean, if they got a sniper in place, if they have a drone in place, maybe they could zap Maduro and then say, okay, everybody, well, he's dead.
So now what are we going to do?
We're sending our diplomats to come and help, you know, forge your transition for you or whatever.
Maybe they could do that.
I don't know what would happen in the aftermath of something like that, but that's within the realm of possibility.
They just get a good one off and get him.
But actually like trying to launch an air war, destroy his military forces or, you know, target his presidential guard or whatever, something more specific like that.
And then what, try to rally the rest of the military against him.
None of this stuff makes sense.
Putting even the Delta Force or Navy SEALs on the ground to get him in the most like Hollywood type repel down the helicopter rope in the middle of the night type of thing and go in there and get him in like a surgical way without a bunch of casualties on either side, but just the absolute minimum and get him seems to me totally out of the question.
Right.
And then there does remain the possibility that they could bribe some general with enough money to get him to just take control.
But they tried that before and it didn't work.
And I actually need to really go back because I did pay close attention to this at the time, but I haven't thought a lot about it or read a lot about it since then.
There were the two different attempts.
There was the Juan Guaido coup and then there was what Justin Raimondo in one of his last articles at antiwar.com before he died called the Chef Boy RD coup, where they were trying to come in from, I guess, Colombia across that bridge.
And then they had the whole pretext, the firing on that truck and all that.
And anyway, the stuff just fell flat.
And I think in both cases, they thought, especially in the case of the Juan Guaido coup, they thought they had some generals lined up to take over.
And then, oh, yeah, once it all goes down, John Bolton promised Trump.
Once it all goes down, these generals are going to swing into action and take over the government.
Didn't happen.
And so there's just no reason in the world to think that Marco Rubio is going to work this out and make this work well for the United States of America.
The very best thing we could possibly do is call this off.
And it's just, you know, when you see that, you know, he said Marco Rubio, he was in an interview recently where he started talking about the Iranian connection to Venezuela, which essentially, from what I understand, is just that they treat Iran like a regular country and don't have a sanctions regime against them is the extent of it.
Or is he trying to make some case about their own echoes of Iraq?
More echoes of Iraq there.
There's no problem for Israel because they're friends with somebody that Israel doesn't like.
So go to war, America, for that.
Again, I mean, how right, Hezbollah and he made a connection to Hezbollah and Iran.
Like, okay, who does that sound like a problem for?
And it's just, look, it's one more, you know, one of the major points that I was making on my show yesterday.
And I really didn't like, I liked Tim Poole.
And I know you were all of us, like me and you both were cool with him.
We'd both been on his show several times.
I wasn't on his show a few weeks ago.
Yeah, he's been nothing but cool to all of us.
But like, there was this thing, he, it really did like kind of offend me when he was going off on this rant about how Candace Owens will be the reason that we lose the midterms in 26.
And it's like, no, dude, like, I'm sorry, but you are staring here at like truly a political dynamic that I've never seen before in my life.
Donald Trump, in the greatest political comeback in American political history by far, comes back to win this election.
He takes back the culture, takes the popular vote, takes every swing state, and the Democrats are left utterly defeated.
And there is a reason why the Republicans are about to lose the midterms in 2026.
And it ain't because of Candace Owens' YouTube channel.
Like, I'm sorry, that's not it.
This is a distraction from the real thing.
And the real thing is here, it's so obvious, right?
Just at the very least, Marco Rubio is what he's always been.
He has a neocon-ish foreign policy, right?
I'm not saying he was actually a card-carrying member of the neoconservatives, but he is that guy who always was a never Trumper, always was a war hawk, and he has a boner for this regime change in Venezuela, right?
And so, what you have one more example of is that Donald Trump is siding with the never Trumpers over his own base.
And how many times in a row can you do that before his base starts to get a little upset about that?
Netanyahu Approval Ratings00:06:36
That's why he's losing.
That's why he had record high approval ratings when he came in.
And he's back down in the toilet now.
His approval ratings are right around where George W. Bush's was after two disastrous wars and the economy crashed.
That's what Donald Trump's sitting at now.
And that's because of Candace Owens?
I don't think so, man.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, the part I saw, Tim Poole was saying what the reason it's her fault is because she's targeting Turning Point and sort of, in a sense, blaming them for what happened to Charlie, which is undermining them.
And they are such a powerful force for the right.
And the thing is, that's true, but they're going to be severely weakened without their charismatic leader in the first place.
And then, secondly, this is the crisis that Kirk was facing before he was killed was good luck shoveling this shit, man.
No one's going to believe this anymore.
No one's listening anymore, trying to get people, trying to somehow get them back on board for where they're already lost on Zionism.
It's just never going to happen.
And so that was, and it is.
It's the absolute and has been all along the main, there are, there are some others, but the main, you know, flaw in Donald Trump's whole thing, right?
It's his Achilles heel in the entire program.
How are you going to be America first when you're Israel instead?
You can't have it both ways.
And from the very end, look, no matter who you are, you can ask Barack Obama or Joe Biden about this.
No matter who you are, ask Bill Clinton.
Benjamin Netanyahu's got some demands every morning.
Remember, this is the one time I felt sorry for Barack Obama was in he was caught on a hot microphone talking with Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France.
And he says, you think you hate him?
I got to deal with him every day.
I mean, imagine that.
I still, you get elected president of the United States in like a month, what, six weeks before the election, Benjamin Netanyahu becomes the prime minister of Israel again, and he's going to be riding your back for your entire eight years.
You know, like, oh man, that would suck so bad.
I can't believe it.
It's hard to even imagine.
And so Donald Trump comes in and he goes, yeah, I got this whole agenda.
And Netanyahu says, me first.
Right.
He's, he's on his way for his fifth or is it his sixth meeting with Donald Trump this year is scheduled for the end of the month.
So, um, and Donald Trump, what can he do?
He has to put everything else aside and do what this guy says instead.
And so, you know, the, there's, you know, Horton's law says a politician can always be counted on to keep all of his bad promises and break all of his good ones.
And I would say the exception here is that Trump has actually kept his promises about the border and that some of the trans stuff in federal policy and stuff like that, de-wocifying stuff.
That's all well and good, but he's leaving.
This is a guy who, in order to wage that spectacular comeback that you talk about, that historical comeback, he had to make a lot of promises, really big ones, including, no, really, I swear I'm going to care more about the people of this country than the government of Israel for one.
And not that he ever put it exactly that way, but he meant over anyone else is what he had promised.
And people can just see, you know, remember it was in the summer of 24 in the lead up to the election was when that hurricane came and hit North Carolina.
Of all the ridiculous things, a hurricane comes and parks of the mountains and floods all those valleys and kills so many people.
I don't know, 2,000 people or 1,000 something people killed, people still missing and, you know, mud 500 feet thick and whatever.
Gone.
Totally devastating.
And the whole narrative about DC was, well, screw you guys.
We hate you.
We don't care what happens to you.
And because we got our own, you know, list of Democratic Party priorities and they don't include helping a bunch of people who we figure is going to go vote for Trump anyway.
And just totally neglected them.
They were so open about it.
In fact, in In Provoked, at the end of Provoked, I linked to this great article.
I have a footnote for this really great article about the open disdain in Washington for the people of North Carolina during that time.
And then the idea was, there's even that guy everybody follows on Twitter, Matthew something.
Like the whole idea was Trump's going to come and turn this around.
Like, nope, Trump don't care about you either.
And why?
Israel instead.
That's it.
It's the key to everything.
And look, yes, it's true that George W. Bush wanted to go to Iraq, but it was the Israel lobby led by the neoconservative movement that made it happen.
He could have never done it without them.
And their whole agenda was Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda against Saddam Hussein.
The same guy who now says Iran is the greatest threat in the world is the same guy who got Saddam Hussein out of the way for them and put their best friends from the Dawah Party and Supreme Islamic Council in power there.
Now he agrees with Sharon and is more of an Iran hawk.
Thanks a lot.
And the same guy this whole time, remember the clean break was written for him in 1996.
And so, yeah, just there's an alternate universe out there somewhere where H.W. Bush won the election of 1992 by telling the Israelis to shut the hell up and go away and face them down and won.
And by the way, this goes to that point.
You've echoed this a couple of times.
It's very important, a point that that guy, Stephen Crowder, made, that when Israel first is everything, that means APAC will finance the worst Democrats that you hate the most, who are against every other thing that you care about, right-wingers, but they'll support them as long as they support Israel.
Well, isn't this the greatest case in point?
H.W. Bush got screwed by the Israel lobby because Bill Clinton outflanked him on the right on settlements in the West Bank and Bush's pressure on Israel to deal with the Palestinians and create a Palestinian state,
which, you know, Clinton actually went on to try to do Oslo after getting elected anyway, but that's how he won the election was getting the Israel lobby on board, promising them that he wouldn't screw them the way that Bush Sr. had.
So William Jefferson Clinton is the Israel lobby's fault.
And even Bush Sr. himself said that.
Clinton Israel Lobby00:02:42
And you can find this at mondoweiss.net.
Just type in Mondo Weiss and H.W. Bush blames Israel for Clinton loss.
And you can see where he made this statement.
I think it was at Texas A ⁇ M Universities where he and some of his people had talked about this, that that was really the cause of that.
So I was going to say no Israel lobby intervention in 92, no waco.
But then again, it was H.W. Bush's men who did Ruby Ridge and they were the ones who set up the whole waco thing in the first place.
The raid happened when Clinton had only been in power for a month and a week.
So he might as well have gone ahead and finished them off the same way Bill did.
But anyway, there's a lot of other things about Bill Clinton.
And not that I would have been like Murray Rothbard and endorsed H.W. Bush.
But remember what Murray Rothbard said in his endorsement of H.W. Bush in the LA Times, Dave?
He goes, yeah, he might have attacked Iraq and all this stuff, but at least he hates Yitzhak Shamir.
At least he's trying to stand up to the Israel lobby on something.
That was what Rothbard said.
That was his reasoning.
Well, and also because Bill is going to bring Hillary and the cultural left with him.
And so there's that too.
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Well, I mean, the example that I just, you know, I've probably repeated this a bunch of times on the show, but I just cannot get over it because it's just one.
And there's like a thousand examples like this, but this one is like, just, it's just blood boiling.
Pro-Israel Administration00:15:55
But dude, the vote while JD Vance was in Israel to annex the West Bank.
The fact that you have the most pro-Israel administration in American history, which is really saying something considering, like, like, even like, as you're labeling this here, right?
Like even Bill Clinton, right?
Even you said he went on to do Oslo.
Yeah.
And then he totally threw the Palestinians under the bus and protected the Israelis the whole time.
And as they said, it was basically two Israel's meeting with the Palestinians or whatever there.
And even H.W. Bush, right?
He'll launch a war for like, but now you have Donald Trump and he goes, I'll give you everything you guys need.
You know, the 4 billion a year you're getting, we'll give you way more than that.
We'll back you your entire destruction of Gaza.
We'll protect you from Iranian missiles.
We'll bomb Iran for you.
We'll bomb Yemen for you.
We'll do all of this for you.
My one ask is that you don't formally annex the West Bank, which you've already annexed.
Like just don't formalize it is the one ask.
And then they go, while JD Vance is in Israel, we're letting you know like just intentionally to like there's no other point to something like that other than to just let you know who the boss is.
Sorry, we're just letting you know we won't even, we won't even grant you that most minor of ask.
Just imagine this, dude.
A country who gets more unconditional support from a superpower than any country's ever gotten from a superpower.
They did it again last week.
They did it again last week.
They held a vote in the Knesset over just rubber stamping Trump's peace plan.
And guess who killed it?
The Likud boycotted the vote.
Dave?
Yeah, it's unbelievable, man.
You would think I would keep talking, but I don't know what else to say after that.
Well, that's why, look, man, look, this is why, like, to your point, right?
This dynamic was already going on at turning point, right?
This is why, this is why that, and I say, say whatever you will about Candace Owens and where maybe, like, I haven't been keeping up with her.
And like, if people want to say she's way out over her skis on this theory or that theory, then like, fine, maybe she is.
But her investigating did reveal that text message that they all lied through their teeth about.
And I'll tell you, I kind of defend it just on that because that wasn't really interesting revelation because it's not just that the wording of it was so interesting that Charlie Kirk actually said, I have no choice but to abandon supporting Israel.
And I think there's a lot to that sentence.
The dynamic was clearly that.
He had, there was no, dude, like you're saying, after the, if you don't have a controlled propaganda apparatus anymore, and you don't, because now all these kids are getting their news from sources like us and a bunch of others on the internet now.
Just what we just said right there.
Once you know that, how are you going to put that away?
Who the hell is going to argue the other side and win that argument and convince you, you're more likely to convince 20-year-olds to go back on dial-up, Scott.
It ain't happening.
We've got a superior product here and they're all aware of it.
And so that dynamic was here, whether Charlie got killed or not.
That dynamic is here no matter what.
And the fact that Donald Trump is sold out to that side and spit in the faces of everybody who's opened their eyes to this shit, that's death for him politically.
And look, they just had this giant thing where they brought a thousand Protestant ministers to Israel to read in their marching orders and tell them to go home.
And I just think, like, I don't know exactly what's going to happen.
There are a lot of communities out in the countryside where maybe people just really are still living in previous times where they're just not going to know.
They're not going to see kind of what's going on here.
But boy, for anybody on Twitter, you just see right there what's going on there.
If your minister starts off with this on Sunday morning, well, you know what's behind that.
And you might just ask him how many pieces of silver he got.
I forgot if I mentioned this on your show before, but it's so much fun to talk about was where Candace Owens, people had provided her these clips of different ministers warning their congregations, don't you go listening to Tucker Carson or Candace Owen?
They're very bad people and they hate Jews and they stay away from them.
And the thing is like, wow, you really don't even know who Tucker Carlson is.
And then, but so the deal was like, obviously, either someone just totally disconnected wrote their talking points for them.
You have all these different ministers saying the same thing.
So someone who really doesn't know what they're talking about wrote those talking points or somebody who thought it was funny to go ahead and put typos in both names just to get these guys busted.
Like is a Candace Owens fan or whatever and went ahead and did it that way and sabotaged them.
And then somebody leaked an email.
She showed the email where they said, here, Mr. Minister, we know you love Israel and we just wish that you'd make a strong statement against Tucker and Candace.
And we'd love to donate some Bitcoin to your ministry.
And then like, here it is, Tucker Carson and Candace Owen.
They got it.
Here's your Bitcoin.
And then here's clips of, I don't know, at least two or three.
I think she had three or four different ministers up there repeating these talking points.
Like, man, somebody, every, it's going to get around.
People's kids are going to see this on TikTok or whatever, right?
They're going to know.
They're like, hey, dad, you know what's going on here?
This guy's on the take, man.
This guy's not preaching us out of the Bible.
This guy's a businessman up there, right?
Like this, I think, and if you look at the polls, young evangelicals are moving away from Christian Zionism at record rates.
They already been lied to and betrayed about this.
And the more I learn about this, by the way, I learn about how you can have people who, in fact, I met a guy recently who said, oh, he considers himself to be absolutely a pre-millennialist dispensationalist, but still not a Christian Zionist of any kind.
Whereas you have Christian Zionists who aren't like that.
And then you have Christian Zionists who are led by John Hagee and the Cornerstone Church and all that.
And the idea being that born-again Christians have to support Israel in order to force Jesus to come back sooner and bring on the end of the world.
And they have recently, I think just this last year, succeeded in breeding a pure red heifer, which it's funny.
There's an old Justin Ramondo article from like 2001, beware the red heifer about how they were trying to do this, but the bulls kept coming out or the cows kept coming out with a little tuft of white hair somewhere or something.
It has to be a pure red heifer.
Well, they did.
They genetically engineered in West Texas, or a West Texas rancher paid for it, a pure red heifer, and then they burnt its ashes and did the holy sacrament thingamajig that means that now that they can blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the third temple and try to bring on the apocalypse.
Like, so there's this whole tension there, of course, because from the Hageites point of view, when Jesus gets here, there's only going to be a small number of Jews who accept him as the savior even the second time.
And all the rest of them are going to be sent straight to hell.
And so the Zionist Jews have made their alliance based on the fact that that's ridiculous, but at least we get your money and your Republican Party support.
But they only take it with the greatest of contempt for people that they help bankroll the ministers and as we see here, help provide talking points for the ministers who propagate these beliefs on the American people.
And one more thing on this is I just saw, there was a short little documentary, thingamajig on this on Twitter that I saw last week, where they showed the Zionist group leaders going around in Kentucky and going and meeting with these small local Protestant churches, I don't know, Pentecostals or whoever they are, and trying very hard to get them and taking their money, like gleefully taking their money from the poorest people way out in the sticks who absolutely can't afford it and under the threat of religious penalty.
That this is, it says in the Bible, you have to do this, just like your 10% that you tied to your church, you have to donate to Israel too, or your soul is at risk.
Your nation is at risk.
God will curse the United States of America forever if you don't give me the money you can't afford, welfare recipient.
And it's the most exploitative stick, dude.
It's sick.
It's the most evil lie you could tell in support of the most evil atrocity.
I think that, you know, there's something to that.
Look, like, let's just say, you know, one of the things that I think is funny about this race.
So Mike, like if you were just like allies with a country, right?
And you just found out that the country was doing this, they were having a meeting of pastors to set to go back and then, you know what I mean, like do propaganda on behalf of that regime.
Like that would be intolerable enough.
But the added layer there is that it's Mike Huckabee who is in name the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Like it would be intolerable if he was the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., but at least that would be like, okay, he's representing the country he claims to represent.
I think the thing that everybody's seen here that you just can't put away is like, you know, this guy is the Israeli ambassador.
He's not the U.S. ambassador.
This is very obvious.
And he's the first to tell you.
And, you know, I was talking about this with Tom Woods the other day, our mutual dear friend and great libertarian leader.
And so, you know, he was now Tom is a is a Catholic and a historian.
And, you know, I'm just me.
So I was like, I brought this up because I thought like, oh, this would be interesting for him because he's, you know, knows a lot more about this stuff than me.
But, you know.
He like he had expressed.
So Tom's got a lot of, you know, a lot of Tom's audience at this point, I think is because, well, first off, he was like the best guy in the country railing against the lockdowns.
And then he's got all these types of different business ventures and stuff.
So he gets like different people from that who aren't necessarily out of the Rothbardian tradition or something like that.
And he said he's even had a few, you know, like Jewish supporters who were like, you know, you know, I don't know, maybe thinks me and you are like anti-Semitic or something or objected to some of the episodes that we've been on.
And I was, I was using the example of Kennedy in 1960.
Obviously, in 1960, there were much different cultural attitudes than there are today.
And, you know, like in 1960, a Catholic marrying a Protestant still would have been a very big deal in a lot of families.
And like, that's not the case really in America anymore.
But as you, as you, I'm sure, know, like, this was a major issue in the presidential election of 1960.
It was that Jack Kennedy was the first Catholic president.
And there was all types of like legitimate concern amongst people that he might feel a loyalty toward the Catholic church rather than to the United States of America.
And he had to address it in a speech and make it very clear that like, if there was a situation where the interests of the church diverged from the interests of the U.S. or if the Pope were to give him an order, that he would not follow it and that he would be loyal to the United States of America, which I don't know enough about Catholicism that like that might not be the right answer according to God, but it sure is the right answer according to the United States of America.
And I don't think it's unreasonable for that like same demand to be made of people like Mike Huckabee, like Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists alike, that like you just can't be a part of this government unless that is your loyalty, your only loyalty.
It's too, it's too apparent in people's faces.
Like, sorry, like all of them.
Like, I understand we've never had a Jewish president.
And so perhaps that's why that issue has never been forced quite like the same way it was with Jack Kennedy.
But like we have had a Jewish just about everything else.
You know what I mean, Scott?
Like we have had very powerful positions.
And I'm sorry, it's just very obvious for anyone to see.
It is undeniable.
You call this an anti-Semitic trope all you want to, but like Barry Weiss and Ben Shapiro and Alan Dershowitz and Mike Huckabee and their number one priority is Israel.
It's not the United States of America.
It is just so obvious in the same way that it would be, it would be like on the level of me arguing that your number one priority was war and peace.
Who's going to argue with me on that?
It's so self-evident by your body of work.
Yeah, it's true.
And look at Ted Cruz, one of the most powerful Republican presidents.
Pardon me, former presidential candidates and powerful senators.
He told Tucker Carlson in that interview that this is one of the reasons that he ran for the Senate.
Maybe the overriding reason he ran for the Senate in the first place was to represent the interests of Israel.
It's astounding to hear him just say that with no shame, no realization that like, oh, maybe I shouldn't put it quite like that or anything.
But like, yeah, no, that's exactly why.
He's in the middle of the debate and then and then two minutes later accuses Tucker of being obsessed with Israel.
Right.
But you couldn't believe the majority or pardon me, the minority leader of the Senate, very powerful Democratic senator for a very long time.
He has called himself in a speech.
He said he is a shomer, which I don't know whatever about the mythology, but this is like someone whose job it is to protect Israel.
And he said that he sees that as his most important duty as a member of the Senate.
And Nancy Pelosi say in a speech that if Washington, D.C. burned down, every last brick, all of it was completely destroyed, the absolute very last thing to go would be American support for Israel.
And this is just out of control, man.
And she's Catholic, by the way, and Ted Cruz is a Protestant and Charles Schumer is Jewish.
And so Zionism is the overriding factor here, not Judaism, you can see.
But yeah, it's completely bananas.
And again, and for anyone not familiar, the book is great, but you can, it started out as an article.
You can read it for free at antiwar.com.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mir Sheimer and Walt is about how Israel led us into Iraq War II.
And I might have written a book about that too, called Enough Already.
And you can read a hell of a lot.
Hell, a lot of people have written about it.
It's just, as I was saying, it's the Achilles heel in Donald Trump's program.
It's the Achilles heel in America's program overall.
No, it's look, it was the, it was a huge, huge factor of why the Democrats lost so badly in the 24 election.
You know, you just, you can't underestimate this.
And I know people could say that like, look, obviously, like the number one and number two issues were the economy and immigration.
And Joe Biden had an undeniably terrible track record on both of those.
And so you could quite possibly say that election was going to be lost over those issues.
But there's just no question that like the Democrats, especially when Donald Trump was running, they relied heavily on the energy of their left-wing activist class to be out protesting Donald Trump and to be making it difficult for him to hold an event anywhere, you know, and that like, and then during the 24 election, he's holding events at Madison Square Garden.
Mearsheimer Ukraine War00:17:13
There's not even a protest.
There's like a couple dozen protesters outside.
No one's even.
And why was that?
Because the lefties had spent the entire year protesting Genocide Joe.
That's what they were calling, you know, like they were protesting the left political party, broadly speaking, and their leader.
And that was, it was a huge albatross around their neck.
And, you know, yeah, I mean, I want to, you know, I want to pivot into Ukraine in a second here because there's, there's, I just want to make sure that we get to talk about that.
But there is like, I mean, the, you know, this, this whole dynamic of the is the level of Israeli influence over American politics is it certainly does just feel like that thing that like the cat's out of the bag and people know about this now.
And it's not just, it's not just that there's no way you're ever going to convince the people, you know, who have woken up to this that they're wrong because they see it for what it is.
But it also does seem like it's becoming like a very transparent integrity test for almost everybody who's a commentator in any of these spaces.
Like who's willing to just tell the truth right when you see it in front of you and who's not.
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Let's get back into the show.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's totally true.
And more and more people are, you know, I saw a thing yesterday where David Limbaugh, it's been a while since anybody paid any attention to Rush's little brother there, but okay, maybe older brother.
I don't know.
And he was saying, boy, this Tucker Carlson.
It's just, you know, he says he's innocent, but there's all this heat.
And why doesn't he just clear it up?
It seems like he would just clear it up.
And it's like, come on.
Tucker Carlson says every day that, oh, I don't hate Jews at all.
That would be crazy.
That doesn't even make any sense.
My objection is the Israeli government deliberately targeting and killing civilians.
That's immoral.
And also, I don't want to have to pay for it because it seems wrong to make me pay for it too.
And so that's my problem.
And then, but all these guys, like, that's really, this is the best they got.
I wonder if Frank Lunt's hold a focus group.
And they decide, okay, here's what we got to do.
We just have to pretend the last two years didn't happen at all.
We're just going to have that.
Man, Tucker just embraced anti-Semitism.
It's a mystery.
No one knows why.
He just hates Jews so much now.
And we'll just pretend that he has not addressed this in every episode, no matter the topic.
He's like interviewing a guy about ghosts.
And he's like, of course, we all love Jews.
It's just the government of Israel.
We object to about anything.
No, he bends over.
We don't know that.
We don't know that.
It's just a mystery, this terrible spread of anti-Semitism.
And I think, yeah, of course, there are some people who are that ignorant that that can work on them.
But what about everybody else?
That's completely stupid.
As the one lady said, her wits, the Obama speech writer, I'm talking to these people through a wall of dead children that they have seen with their eyes and registered with their long-term memories.
And I'm trying to tell them, no, no, no, it's all good, dude.
In the middle of, yeah, but what am I going to do with all these pictures of dead kids in my head?
What a tough dilemma.
At least she recognizes the problem.
Right, right.
It's all this Holocaust.
It's all this Holocaust education.
I did want to say, oh, just one, sorry, this one final thing, because this slipped my mind before, but before we move on to Ukraine and do a few minutes on that, I thought this was interesting.
Now, I have not seen this whole thing, but I saw a clip of it where I guess Piers Morgan had he had Mearsheimer on one of the authors of the article and book, The Israel Lobby.
And then he had Alan Dershwitz on like right afterward.
And I guess he had asked John Mearsheimer about some of these new Jeffrey Epstein revelations or the emails that came out where Alan Dershwitz and Jeffrey Epstein were coordinating to smear John Mearsheimer and Waltz for writing the Israel lobby.
And by the way, this really pretty clearly blew up a lot of the bullshit that Alan Derschwitz had previously been saying, where he's like, yeah, I was his lawyer, but whatever.
We have a legal system.
Even really horrible people still deserve representation.
It's like, you're a little bit more than just his lawyer.
If you are also coordinating on smearing people who are critical of Israel, then okay, that changes things a lot.
From a little girl too, you know.
But one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting, and I guess this is kind of part of the disconnect.
You know, actually, even when I was thinking back on it, like, this is probably a point I should have like hammered out more when I was did Coleman Hughes show.
But there is this weird thing where like, okay, so if you read now, Coleman had told me that he read the Israel lobby and found it unconvincing, which is just kind of hard for me to believe.
But then also, what almost seemed like he hadn't read the book was that every time he talked about the Israel lobby, he's talking about APAC.
And there are people who do that.
They make it interchangeable, like that's the lobby.
But that's not how John Mearsheimer is defining the lobby.
John Mearsheimer is describing, I think his exact words, were like a decentralized group of different people and interests.
Yes, right, different organizations that have as their number one priority Israeli interests.
And so now, Alan Dirt, I haven't watched the whole thing, but Alan Dershowitz at one point, John Mearsheimer referred to him as the Israel lobby.
He goes, well, look, Alan Dershowitz is a member of the Israel lobby.
And Alan Dershowitz, of course, referred to the neoconservatives as a, I think it was a core constituency of the Israel lobby.
This is the phraseology he used.
Now, Alan Dershowitz goes, I'm not a lobby.
I'm not a lobbyist.
What are you talking about?
And so I just thought there was something kind of interesting because, okay, so like if you object to the word Israel lobby or something like that, it's like, well, what do you want to call it, man?
Because you got to call it something.
I mean, look, if there was a group of people in very influential positions in, let's say, in our federal government, in DC think tanks, in the corporate media, and they were, you know, like, let's say like 70 or 80% of them were from Sweden.
And then the other 30% had a deep religious, devoted view that Sweden must be supported at all costs.
Otherwise, Jesus can't come back or something like this.
And then they had all in their own words talked about how profoundly deep their commitment to Sweden is.
And they believed that Sweden was the cradle of Western civilization and it was the greatest thing.
And they went to Sweden all the time and they kissed a wall at Sweden and they always advocated on their behalf.
Like, and then they fought seven war or they were supported seven wars around Sweden, you know, all with like at a certain point, like, can we talk about the role that Sweden plays in this?
I mean, then it doesn't mean I hate all Swedes and it doesn't mean, you know what I'm saying?
But like, call it something, man.
They, they used to call it the Swedish lobby and then that was determined to be too racist.
So now it's just the Sweden lobby.
You can't even call it the Sweden lobby anymore, man.
Which I, which, as Mearsheimer argues, is a better term for it.
It's a better term for it, the Israel lobby than the Jewish lobby, because it really is more a representation of Israeli interests than Jewish interests.
And, you know, that was always their sleight of hand in the first place was to try to conflate Zionist Judaism overall.
Right, right.
So why we shouldn't fall into that?
But like, anyway, I guess it just, I don't even know if there's anything to add to that, but it just seemed to me so self-evidently.
Like, it's like, again, this is, this is Scott Horton claiming that he's not most animated by wars, but that's not the issue that he focuses on the most.
It's like, yep, dude, but all of your what we can see what you focus on, what you can't, like, this is so obvious to everyone and the same as that.
So call it whatever you call it.
That thing, all the people like that are who sold the war in Iraq.
However you want to say that.
All right, let's, because I do have a heart out in about 10 minutes.
Let's let's spend at least a little bit of time on the latest in Ukraine.
So obviously now Donald Trump seeming to, he seeming to be back on really pushing this peace plan.
Obviously, he was kind of giving Zelensky shit for claiming that he had not read it, that Donald Trump was informed that Zelensky hadn't read the latest updated version.
After that, Zelensky came out and straight up said no territory can be surrendered.
So seeming to be an indication that he's just not ready to stop the war.
You're the guy who wrote the book on it.
I've read your book several times.
I think I got a pretty good grasp of like the whole history that led up to this.
But what is your impression of where it stands right now?
Well, it sucks, man, that what's happened is the Russians are winning, but slowly.
And so they had no real reason to stop unless Trump could give them a real good reason to stop, such as on one hand, a bunch of carrots like normalization, economic and political and business and everything else going forward with the West and with the United States.
And on the other hand, essentially capitulation by the Ukrainians to Russian goals, which he can't really do.
The only way that Trump can really force Ukraine to give in is to just make them lose by truly calling off all support because he can't convince them otherwise.
And so, and there are various reasons for that, but let's just stick to Trump and Russia from him.
Trump wants the war to end.
He wants Putin to end it for him essentially as a favor.
Like, I want this war to end now, not later.
And Putin is saying, okay, well, look, my guys are on a roll, a slow roll, but they're rolling and they're taking territory and they're winning and they're going to win.
So give me a good reason to quit.
And Trump can't come up with a good enough one, not one that he can get Kiev to sign on to.
And there are various reasons for that, including that if you look at the battle maps, the Russians control all of Luhansk.
They only control three quarters of Donetsk.
Now, by the way, they've taken or they are in the middle of taking Provost, Provrosk, and some of these other cities like right around there.
And again, they're making progress.
They still have quite a bit of territory inside Donetsk to take.
And at this rate, if we assume the same rate, which is not a safe assumption, but I'm saying for sake of argument, we assume the same rate.
It'll be quite a while, months and months, maybe longer, before they're finished taking Donetsk.
Well, that's when they say the Donbass.
That's what they mean, is these two oblasts, Luhansk and Donetsk.
Then on top of that, they've taken about one-third of Zaprozha and Kherson.
This is the Azov coast, the land between the Crimean Peninsula and Russia proper there.
And this is the so-called land bridge from the Donbass to Crimea and the guarantee of fresh water from the Dnieper River to the Crimean Peninsula.
So in no way they're giving that up, but then it was in the proposal.
And I'm not saying the Russians ever agreed to this, but the 28-point plan that was negotiated as a proposal, something to work off of by Witkoff.
And I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name that was a friend of the Kremlin, basically, an informal interlocutor to work on the thing.
They had an, and we talked about this before, I think they had floated this trial balloon a couple of times.
I think this first came from the White House, but then there was a time in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago where this apparently was floated by the Kremlin.
And then it appeared again in this proposal, the 28-point plan, was that the Russians might go ahead and climb down and draw the lines where they are in Zaprozha and Kherson, where they have their land bridge, they have their freshwater resources.
There are still major cities outside of their control in those two oblasts.
And Kherson is bisected by the river, about one-third on the western side of the river.
So it makes sense for the Russians to say, forget that.
You know what I mean?
You guys could keep that.
So in other words, if the Ukrainians, you know, really need for the Russians to compromise on something, I think that's it.
That's the best they're going to get is if that's even really possible at all.
And I'm not certain that it's possible at all, but that would, to me, be like a miracle if Vladimir Putin and his government officially in law annex these entire territories and claim to have officially incorporated them into the Russian Federation.
And then they're willing to climb down on that at all.
That would be to me the best that Kiev could possibly hope for.
Otherwise, they're just screwed.
And let me add that there's this piece in foreign affairs by a guy named Sergei Redchenko, who wrote a new book about the Soviets where he also just essentially takes the, you know, Michael McFaul, you know, Obama bot position on the new Cold War with Russia as well.
But he has this article in Foreign Affairs this week where he says there's still a chance to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
So he's not saying, Dave, there's still a chance for Ukraine to defeat Russia.
He's not saying that.
He's not saying there's a chance for Ukraine to turn this battle around and drive the Russian army out and reclaim Ukraine to 2014 or 1991 border.
No, he's saying if we get another 100,000 Ukrainians slaughtered, we could maybe land a black eye on Russia.
That's right.
We could get we could we could trade another 100,000 for another 50,000 of theirs and another X amount of billions of rubles and and drag just drag it out essentially at the Ukrainians expense.
And now, so it's it's funny, man, because today there's a piece on antiwar.com.
It says they got a quarter of a million deserters.
250,000 people have turned around and fled rather than fight because they don't see it as worth it.
And especially people, there are people from the far west of the country who are very ideological and really hate Russia.
But at the same time, that kind of means that they really hate the people of Donetsk too.
You know what?
You can have them.
You know what I mean?
That's kind of their attitude.
It's like they're really going to go die for the territorial integrity.
They were fighting a war against from 2014 to 2022.
Like the people that were their enemies are now the territory that they're supposed to fight and die for.
Yeah.
And I'm sure also just Scott just likes the fact that how could you not be demoralized at this point?
I mean, you know, you kind of need this like rah-rah energy to get soldiers to go to a war.
And I'm sure, you know, I don't know.
I just, I think about this and I do got to wrap up here in a second, but I remember, I know, I remember this being thrown at you in debates that you did about the war in Ukraine earlier in the conflict.
I remember this being thrown at me too, but that the first, for the first year of the thing or whatever, the talking point was, but Scott, the Ukrainians want to fight.
They want to fight.
And then you would have to retort with like, might that have something to do with the blank check that the West is giving Ukraine and the moral hazard there or whatever?
And then how it was inevitable they were going to lose.
And obviously in hindsight, we're completely right about the whole thing.
But it's like, so does that not, that doesn't mess with your calculation at all now?
Pro, you know, hawks on Ukraine that like, actually, you're, what you're looking at is a conscripted army where people are being forced into this meat grinder that cannot possibly achieve anything.
And there are, they're deserting by the hundreds of thousands, indicating that not all of them do want to fight.
Now do they?
And then, and one last point then to wrap up is, and people can read my last couple of articles with John Weeks at antiwar.com or about the Ukrainian Nazis.
And I have a lot about this in the book.
But Andrey Bilitsky is still the head of what's now called the 3rd Army Corps, which used to be the Azov Battalion.
Treason and Choice Theory00:03:19
And he's the author of the speech, Racial Social Nationalism, which by Andrew Biletsky, which you can read on the blog at antiwar.com.
You'll really get a kick out of it, everyone, I promise.
Sounds great.
And he and Dmitry Yarash and other neo-Nazis or just plain old Nazis in that country have threatened to murder President Zelensky and his predecessor, President Poroshenko, numerous times.
We'll shoot him in the head.
We'll hang him from a tree.
He'll die a slow and painful death.
Maybe he'll get fragged by a grenade over and over and over.
They have threatened to murder him if he would dare.
And this is before even the war and also after, if he would dare to compromise with the Russians, there's only one way to lose this war, and that's total defeat.
Giving in before you lost is treason to the men who've already died in this thing.
And you'll remember this from the days of Iraq War II.
We can't cut and run now or else the guys who already died in this thing will have died in vain.
So we have to complete the mission to honor their sacrifice.
It's the exact same thing that especially the radical right there push.
And so they'll kill him.
It's treason if he compromises on Donetsk.
And so you talk about public choice theory.
How about you're making a decision to survive long enough to retire to the Brookings Institute?
Some public choice theory there and then a real, like the worst type of version of a sunken cost fallacy in economics, like the idea that we got to keep doing it because we're so far in already, you know, which is, believe it or not, actually what General Wesley Clark said to you, right?
Essentially, Israel can't leave now or Hamas would be able to say what they want.
The logic of Wesley Clark and the Azov Battalion for you.
All right, Scott, you're the man.
Tell people where they can go to sign up for this academy, man, because it's so great.
There's so much you can learn from that.
Just a quick plug for the academy, and then we'll wrap up.
Yes, sir.
It's scotthortonacademy.com slash POTP.
Part of the problem, you get a discount.
So what we're doing is 20% off for the lifetime subscribers, 10% off for the yearly subscribers.
And just use the promo code P-O-T-P or just go to scotthortonacademy.com slash P-O-T-P.
Either way, it'll work and you get your discount.
And it's so far a long form course by me on the Middle East and then Ramsey Barud on Palestine, James Bovard on a bunch of stuff, Waco, Drug Wars, TSA, and all his investigative journalism.
Bill Bupert on how America Lost Every War Since 1945.
And Adam Francisco is our latest course that we've added on the entire history of Christians and Jews and the Christian take on Israel and Judaism today, debunking Christian Zionism, which is just absolutely fantastic.
I know people get so much out of it.
My Cold War course is coming up.
CJ Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived is coming up and many more great courses.
So I know, and I'm getting nothing but a positive response out of the whole thing.
Everybody loves it.
So please check it out.
It's scotthortonacademy.com slash P-O-T-P.
All right, dude.
As always, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Of course, we'll have you back on again real soon.