Jan. 12, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's important for all of us to know that at the end of the day, you know, if they were to choose to activate some of their sleeper cells in places like Los Angeles, because they are here, or in places like in Michigan, etc., then it's game over. | ||
| They know that the United States, either alone or with a coalition, will go into Tehran and will be there within, you know, 12 to 24 hours. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report, and I'm Dave Rubin, and here's a quick reminder that the Rubin Report community is here. | ||
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| And now, more importantly, joining me today is a former CIA ops officer, a political analyst, and a national security expert, Brian Dean Wright. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Pleasure, brother. | ||
| I had you on here about four years ago. | ||
| It's like 18 studios ago. | ||
| Feels like 27 lives ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| We got a lot to do. | ||
| And you've become an alt-right gay Nazi, which, congratulations, very exciting. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| No, I'm honored. | ||
| I do wonder though, at the clan meetings, do you and your husband wear the rainbow hats? | ||
| Well, they make you wear the rainbow hat as a game. | ||
| Well, incredible. | ||
| Great, great development for you and your family. | ||
| Little did you know four years ago when we sat down that so much was going to happen. | ||
| Yeah, here we are. | ||
| All right, I'm really glad to have you here for many reasons. | ||
| Before we get into Iran, before we get into the deep state, before we get into the split of the Democrats, the rise of the socialists, and the whole thing, former CIA ops, just give me a little recap of what got you into it, what does that actually mean, and then we'll take it away on current events. | ||
| So, back in the early 2000s, just before 9-11, I was interested in national security, and State Department and CIA were both options. | ||
| I decided that after looking at each, the CIA made the most sense for me. | ||
| It was a little bit more cowboy, which, coming from farming ranch in the western part of this country, it fit me better. | ||
| So I applied, moved forward through the application process, took a couple of years, Ended up working in what they call the Clandestine Service Trainee Program, was there for a couple years and then sent out into the field. | ||
| So what was it like being in the field as a CIA guy? | ||
| You know, just after 9-11 it was an incredibly difficult and challenging time. | ||
| We didn't know how many more threats were going to be actualized, how many more people were going to be killed. | ||
| And so it became a very intense time to be in the intelligence community. | ||
| But it was also thrilling. | ||
| At a very young age, I was 24, 25, and you're out in the field doing incredible stuff, meeting with the bad guys who are good for you. | ||
| And it was an incredible opportunity. | ||
| What you were doing every day helped ensure that people back home didn't die. | ||
| How do you figure out which bad guys are good for you? | ||
| Oh, dear. | ||
| Is that a question you can answer? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, there's a vetting process, right? | ||
| You first start with what do you need to know in a particular part of the world on a particular issue, right? | ||
| So, once you do that, you go through a target analysis and you figure out who has the information in that organization or that piece of knowledge that you need. | ||
| And then you target that individual and then you approach them in some capacity and then you build a relationship and you not only ensure that they are who you thought that they were to be, you then make sure that they're compatible in terms of living a clandestine life with you as an intelligence officer. | ||
| So that is a very long process, or it can be, but in those early days we were recruiting people to be informants for us with not a lot of scrutiny because we just had so little information and the threat was so profound and it was so Immediate. | ||
| All right, so we could do CIA 101 the whole time here, and for people that want that, we'll link to our old interview, because I wanna catch up, because we hadn't had you on in a while, and when we booked this, this was before this Iran World War III thing happened. | ||
| Oh, it's happening. | ||
| Well, apparently, if you listen to Rose McGowan on Twitter, not only that, but World War IV has also begun. | ||
| There's a lot of wars coming up. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Well, that's exactly why I wanted to start with this, because it seems to me that If you're paying attention to social media, as it does to most things, we've ramped everything up to crazy levels beyond imagination. | ||
| It is so hard to find sort of clear, sane, non-extremist voices in the midst of all this. | ||
| I consider you one of those people. | ||
| So can you talk to me about what's going on with Iran, and are we in World War III? | ||
| We are not, and we are not. | ||
| We're not in World War III? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| All right, well, now we have the quote for this interview. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| So, to understand what's happening, I think you have to step back and ask yourself the question, you know, what does Iran want ultimately, right? | ||
| In general, what this regime wants is both stability and survival, more than anything else. | ||
| So, whatever it does, in terms of international affairs, domestic affairs, it's all designed to make sure that the regime continues. | ||
| So they have red lines. | ||
| They have red lines internally in terms of how far they will let the populace go in terms of demanding certain things. | ||
| And then abroad, you know, they'll push as far as they can knowing full well that the United States and the West and Israel at some point will say that's a bridge too far and they will pound the living hell out of Tehran. | ||
| So they're always poking the bear. | ||
| They're always challenging that red line. | ||
| So, it's important for all of us to know that at the end of the day, you know, if they were to choose to activate some of their sleeper cells in places like Los Angeles, because they are here, or in places like in Michigan, etc., then it's game over. | ||
| They know that the United States, either alone or with a coalition, will go into Tehran and will be there within, you know, 12 to 24 hours. | ||
| Okay, so let's pause there for a moment because that was a bit of knowledge. | ||
| So Iran basically has sleeper cells in Western cities. | ||
| You just said Los Angeles. | ||
| We're in Los Angeles, Michigan, I'm sure in European cities. | ||
| So if we know these things exist, what are we doing to actually disrupt these cells? | ||
| So both the FBI and the CIA have long known that Hezbollah and Iran have operated these sleeper cells. | ||
| And so they've kept a pretty good pulse on these folks. | ||
| But the issue is, do you know about all of them? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Because you have to be perfect 100% of the time, and they only have to be perfect or executable once, right, to implement something horrific in the U.S. | ||
| homeland. | ||
| So, we have a good pulse of what they're doing, and where they are, who they are, but do we know all of them? | ||
| I can almost assure you that the answer is no. | ||
| So as they sort of push what that red line is, we've had a policy of what, maybe the last 10 or 15 years, or at least the Obama policy, we kind of let them do what they wanted to do, right? | ||
| And so now Trump has kind of flipped this thing on his head. | ||
| So what do you make about the strike and what is Trump doing here? | ||
| So the Supreme Leader never saw this attack coming. | ||
| He had buffaloed, as I say, or my family says, our ranch in Oregon, right? | ||
| They buffaloed Bush and Obama for many, many years, that we had certain red lines that we didn't want to start this World War III. | ||
| So we allowed them, that is the Iranians, to do all kinds of poor, terrible, horrific activities throughout the Middle East and indeed the world. | ||
| We would give them enough leash to attack us through this Soleimani and the Quds Force and Hezbollah and whatnot. | ||
| What were our red lines, actually? | ||
| What would have been the thing that would have changed the equation on our side? | ||
| Well, that really is the question. | ||
| I don't think any of us really knew, certainly inside the intelligence community, because we had the infamous Obama red line in Syria that, of course, You know, we just erased that one and moved to somewhere different. | ||
| So I don't think that the Iranian leadership ever quite knew where the United States would, the switch would flip, other than an attack in the homeland. | ||
| Certainly they learned that after the 9-11 attacks. | ||
| When we immediately went to Afghanistan, we started making noise elsewhere. | ||
| I think most of this is public knowledge, but the Iranian government very quietly reached out and said, look, you know, We will stay on the good boy list, you know, just don't invade. | ||
| So the upshot is that they know that we will hit a point where we say enough. | ||
| And I don't think that they thought Soleimani would be, in all of his shenanigans, would be it. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| Right, so what do you make of what Trump did here? | ||
| Because it's like, if you listen to the critics, it's like, oh, Trump doesn't know what he's doing, there's no plan for after, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And I'm starting to think, if this guy doesn't know what he's doing and he has no plans, what does that say about the experts? | ||
| Because he keeps one up in the experts. | ||
| So what's going on here? | ||
| Yeah, so I think he did it the right thing, right? | ||
| So I have friends who work in Special Forces community, and they were all universally thrilled at what happened. | ||
| Soleimani has so much blood on his hands, has maimed and killed more people, not just Americans, but Iraqis and others. | ||
| So the man earned his death. | ||
| The question is, so what comes next? | ||
| And I think people could rightfully and should be asking that question, right? | ||
| And is this going to cause World War III? | ||
| Some of that is hyperbole, but some of it's appropriate to at least ask. | ||
| So the answer is no. | ||
| We're not going to be going into World War III. | ||
| The only thing that would change that calculus would be whether Moscow and Beijing suddenly started moving troops into and or backed Iran, basically wanted to use them as some sort of forcing function in this incident to create World War III. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Precisely, I mean, something grandiose like that, now suddenly we're looking at a very different prospect | ||
| of conflict on a global level if Russia and China moved into Iran, right? | ||
| So they have a degree of relationship, but I'm talking about physical assets into Iran | ||
| to make clear that this is the equivalent of that World War I assassination | ||
| of the prince in Sarajevo, right? | ||
| That people keep talking about. | ||
| But just to be clear, that's a pretty far off crazy thing, | ||
| although if you're just listening to the pundits these days, it's like anything's on the table, | ||
| like the Martians are landing and you know. | ||
| In the intelligence community, we talk about low, medium, and high degrees of confidence that something could happen. | ||
| I think that most of us would say that we have a high degree of confidence that it is extraordinarily unlikely that Russia and China would ever get involved in this kind of conflict. | ||
| One, because Russia's economy is the size of Italy. | ||
| They have a lot of internal struggles themselves. | ||
| And China, fundamentally, President Xi is concerned about making sure that his stability of his country remains the most important priority, and then they continue to grow economically because of the number of people in that country, they need to have continued economic growth. | ||
| So that is their focus and their goal, and that's why they want stability. | ||
| So for them to step into this conflict and create some sort of horrific outcome like World War III, it's just extraordinarily unlikely, right? | ||
| In terms of degrees of confidence, I would say we have high degree of confidence that's not going to happen. | ||
| So the question is, what will Iran do next? | ||
| So you're going to see, and folks are talking about this, absolutely a degree of pushback, whether it's from the cyber attacks, the usage of Hezbollah, they're already talking about it, that is the Iranian leadership talking about targeting military How do we send that message beyond bombs and killing people? | ||
| throughout the Middle East in particular. | ||
| We expect that, the administration expected that, the Pentagon, when they authorized the strike, | ||
| expected that. | ||
| That's why you're seeing this flood of personnel, a lot of my friends, going into the Middle East right now. | ||
| And that is to make the price of any kind of retribution or any kind of attack by Iran, | ||
| the price will go up dramatically. | ||
| How do we send that message beyond bombs and killing people? | ||
| Like, do we actually go on the ground and talk to contacts and say, "Guys, okay, | ||
| "you saw what we did. | ||
| We know you're planning to do a couple things here and there, but, you know, do we really give the hint, like, well, I guess Trump sort of did it with this tweet, right? | ||
| His tweet about 52 sites that we've got. | ||
| I mean, is that really how it works? | ||
| Like, we get down there and talk to them about that sort of thing? | ||
| Well, I think that the talking that was done... Like, your house is on a list, basically. | ||
| Well, I think the talking that was done was a missile going into Soleimani's head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I think the Trump administration very wisely has said, look, we have tried diplomacy with these clowns and they've continually lied to us about, say, their nuclear program. | ||
| If you recall, in January of 2017, Israel did an incredible operation where they went into Tehran. | ||
| They grabbed a bunch of nuclear material that I should say, you know, documentary based material from this warehouse in Tehran, took it back to Israel that basically showed that Iran was playing a game. | ||
| They wanted to make sure that they held on to their nuclear program and the ability to move forward very, very quickly. | ||
| So there's no real intention by the regime to give up that nuclear capability. | ||
| What do you make of sort of the set of people that think that just because you sign something it has meaning? | ||
| So like the Iran nuclear deal, just any deal, the Paris Climate Accords, like we sign something and that inherently means that it's real. | ||
| But that's really not how the world works, is it? | ||
| If you have a document, an agreement, a treaty that is signed, it is only as effective as the parties engaged or involved intend to carry it forward, right? | ||
| Particularly with some degree of hammer if people fall short. | ||
| I mean, this is what we've experienced with Russia and some of the START treaties, etc., right? | ||
| They were constantly cheating because they believed that the United States wouldn't respond in any kind of intense or retaliatory way, whether it be sanctions, you know, beyond what we've already done to something more kinetic, right? | ||
| The military's, right? | ||
| So everybody who signs any kind of document is always sitting back and making the calculus. | ||
| We're asking, can we push this further? | ||
| Can we do more? | ||
| Can we sneak, right? | ||
| North Korea with this nuclear program is a great example of doing exactly that. | ||
| And it's gotten away with lying to the world and continuing to march forward irrespective of the silly sanctions that we apply. | ||
| And that's what you were talking about earlier, about you just keep pushing the red line, because if you know the guy on the other side isn't ever going to push back, you can move that thing pretty significantly. | ||
| But I think it's important, and I think you and I have spoken about previously, we hear a lot right now in the media, folks are talking about, you know, get us out of the Middle East, get us out of Iran and Iraq and all these places, we shouldn't be there. | ||
| And that's true, we shouldn't be there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why are we there, right? | ||
| You're giving me a lot of my good libertarian side, right? | ||
| So let's have that conversation. | ||
| So it's good that we killed Soleimani, that the government in Iran is bad, but why the hell are we there to begin with, right? | ||
| We are there because Iran and Iraq and the Middle East have oil, right? | ||
| All these countries have oil. | ||
| The global economy is built on oil. | ||
| So it's great the United States has become a net exporter of oil, super. | ||
| But the rest of the world continues to be net importers. | ||
| So as long as these folks, whether it be Iran or Iraq, either control the oil or through the Strait of Hormuz, they control the ability of that oil to get to market, we are stuck in the sandbox, right? | ||
| So if we want to change this conversation, if we want to basically make the Middle East the equivalent of what, you know, happened in the 90s in Rwanda where the Houthis were killing each other, if we want to let the Sunnis and the Shias slaughter each other and really the world doesn't care, then we have to remove The impetus for us to be there in the first place is why do we care? | ||
| We have to change our energy policy. | ||
| So if you're angry about the fact that we're in the Middle East and we have troops there, then you have to be on board with changing our energy policy. | ||
| So what do you make of the argument? | ||
| So you can do it two ways. | ||
| So the libertarian argument is just get the hell out of there. | ||
| These aren't our wars. | ||
| These are sectarian conflicts. | ||
| Existed forever, they're gonna last longer than we're ever gonna exist. | ||
| That's one side of it. | ||
| The other side is, well, you broke it, you fix it, sort of. | ||
| So it's like, Iraq, we actually were turning it around. | ||
| Regardless of whether you thought it was a good idea to go in or not, weapons of mass destruction, the rest of it, they were having free and fair elections, basically, and then we just left. | ||
| We announced the date. | ||
| Obama said, we're getting out on this day. | ||
| We left, and then it fell apart. | ||
| How do we negotiate that? | ||
| So you have to step back and ask the question, from a foreign policy perspective, why the hell are we involved in the world? | ||
| What is our ultimate goal? | ||
| And most smart people will say that we want the world to be more democratic. | ||
| Because the more democratic the world is, the less likely that the nations who are democracies will get involved in conflict and war, right? | ||
| So this is sort of foreign policy 101. | ||
| So the question is, how do you move nations from being autocratic or anything less than a full democracy to some shade or variation of a healthy democracy? | ||
| President Bush's idea, the neoconservative belief, was we could do it via the barrel of a gun. | ||
| Well, oops, that didn't work out. | ||
| Not only did they view us ultimately as outsiders invading the nation, but they weren't really ready for a true commitment to democracy, which requires a degree of education of the people to understand what their obligations are. | ||
| But that's what I'm saying. | ||
| If we had stayed longer, and I'm not saying we should have, but had we stayed longer once they had some elections, had we stayed longer to build some institutions and that sort of thing, it's almost like it could have worked. | ||
| There were signs that it could have worked. | ||
| But what is the ultimate benefit for the American people to go on a nation build in a place like Iraq or any nation, right? | ||
| So we have to ask ourselves the questions as there are hundreds and hundreds of nations around the world, many of which are not democratic. | ||
| Why are we going to get involved in that one? | ||
| And one of the things that I actually think that President Trump does correctly, perhaps | ||
| in his New York braggadocious way, is he says, "Well, what are they giving us? | ||
| What do we get in exchange?" | ||
| And that's actually a good and important thing to ask, right? | ||
| Because we shouldn't be going into Zimbabwe and trying to correct all the ills of Mugabe | ||
| and all his shenanigans, right? | ||
| Because what are they giving us? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| We would invest our time and treasure into a place like Zimbabwe and we'd be getting very little to nothing in return other than a commitment to the world and to ourselves and the Zimbabwean people that we're creating a democracy there. | ||
| And more democracy means less global war, right? | ||
| So we have to rack and stack or prioritize where we're involved in the world. | ||
| So, rocking around, the reason that we want to be there, why we give two bits about the place, is because of this commitment, not only just to democracy, but because they have something we need. | ||
| They have, not just we, but the global economy. | ||
| So if you were to withdraw, right, and just completely let the place go and be as it is, you better have a backup in terms of a global energy policy that doesn't require that stuff, because if that price of oil quadruples or goes up by 10, 20 percent, or times whatever number it might be, and you start having global recessions and depressions, now we understand the cost of our inaction, right? | ||
| So there is a cost to just completely pulling out. | ||
| Are you kind of surprised that Trump seems to understand all this? | ||
| No. | ||
| In a weird way? | ||
| I have had concerns about his temperament. | ||
| I have... By the way, wait, we should pause for a moment and say you are a lifelong Democrat. | ||
| Yeah, here we are. | ||
| I know the feeling, my friend. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| I don't know what that means anymore. | ||
| What does it even mean to be a Democrat anymore? | ||
| We'll get to that in a second, because you wrote a great piece. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a disaster. | |
| You wrote a great piece on foxnews.com about the split of the Democrats, and I've been screaming about this for years. | ||
| But why do you think Trump gets this? | ||
| He's not a politician. | ||
| He wasn't a foreign policy guy. | ||
| If you asked him five years ago to put his finger on a map, who knows what he would have found? | ||
| What is it about him that you think understands this? | ||
| Or is he listening to better generals than the guys before we're listening to? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Well, a couple things. | ||
| How do we diagnose why President Trump is the way that he is, and indeed that he's effective? | ||
| I think we could probably have a three-hour program on that. | ||
| But the upshot is, I think the American people recognize that something was important in that man, that he could serve an important role. | ||
| And that is the fact that he's basically a walking human firecracker, right? | ||
| And he went to Washington to just blow stuff up, because most of us were sick and tired of the way that Washington was working. | ||
| And we might talk about, all right, can we have him a little bit more presidential? | ||
| Well, when you elect a firecracker, you're gonna get what you get, right? | ||
| So what I think that he is doing well is he's asking really important questions that Washington has always assumed that we've asked and answered. | ||
| Like, well, of course we're going to be absolutely committed to NATO at all times. | ||
| Well, wait a minute. | ||
| These a-holes aren't contributing their dues. | ||
| So what, are we going to continue to pay for it? | ||
| Like, go ask yourself. | ||
| I mean, that's basically Trump's attitude. | ||
| It's like, yeah. | ||
| That's exactly what should be happening, right? | ||
| There should be nothing so sacred on the table that we can't ask a question as to, well, why are we doing it that way? | ||
| So I think that that is a good thing that the president is bringing to the table. | ||
| And I think that he is bringing that outsider's perspective and asking really good questions that might seem to be crazy to the New York and Washington elite. | ||
| But actually, I think most people in middle America are like, yeah, we agree with you. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| All right, so with that in mind, so Trump comes in basically as the firecracker to throw the chessboard up, the whole thing. | ||
| The administrative state, or the deep state, or maybe you have a different phrase for it. | ||
| This idea of a constant group of people that stay no matter what administration comes and goes. | ||
| Can you just explain a little bit about what that actually is? | ||
| Lord have mercy. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| So folks who get those jobs, you are there for 20, 25, 30 years. | ||
| And it's true that you outlast all administrations. | ||
| So what are these jobs? | ||
| Let's really do the most base level here, because this is the type of thing you hear deep state and everyone online. | ||
| You're either a conspiracy theorist or an Alex Jones guy. | ||
| Give me something. | ||
| What are these people actually doing? | ||
| Let's take the CIA. | ||
| Someone like me who went in as an operations officer, so somebody who basically goes out in the field and recruits spies and steals secrets, you have a tremendous amount of power, a tremendous number of tools to read people's emails, listen to people's phone calls, you can call up surveillance teams. | ||
| You have a lot of power to do or accomplish the mission. | ||
| And through that, some people have this mistaken belief that they are now anointed to make decisions writ large in terms of foreign policy. | ||
| That is, they are the ones that have the knowledge to decide what the nation should or shouldn't do on a particular issue instead of simply informing A policymaker to say, here's what I know to be true, here's what I think we ought to do, but here are a slew of different options, and you make the choice or the call, because you're a representative of the people, and I am simply a tool. | ||
| So basically, they sort of have access to all of this information, and then after years of it, you start thinking you're bigger than the people that are coming and going. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So one of the most infamous spies, Aldrich Ames, worked for the CIA, but indeed worked for the Russians secretly, was eventually found out, led to over 100 individuals' assets being killed. | ||
| When he was asked why he did it, he said, I know what's best for the nation's foreign policy, and I'm going to act on that. | ||
| So that degree of hubris, you go in loving your country, embracing the flag, you're there, the CIA, for the right reasons, but now suddenly you've come to this belief that you are anointed, that you are somehow the guardian of the republic, beyond the defensive nature that the people, your government, has anointed on you to actually do good things to support the Constitution and support policymakers. | ||
| Now you think that you're actually a king or a queen behind the scenes and you will move the levers of power and you will decide who gets briefed on what pieces of information or you don't brief certain pieces of information. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| So I worked an issue that I can't talk a ton about but an Asia-related concern And what we were briefing the White House was that what we as a CIA were doing in terms of our covert action operations were incredibly successful. | ||
| But I actually knew that that wasn't true. | ||
| So I sat down with the analysts and I said, help me understand why you all make this judgment. | ||
| They're like, we don't make that judgment. | ||
| We don't believe that's true. | ||
| So I collated all this information. | ||
| I presented it to our, what we call the seventh floor. | ||
| And I said, you know, sirs, what we are presenting to the White House as effective isn't. | ||
| And they said, well, you know, the song and dance, and then they said, look, why don't you breathe that downtown, right? | ||
| Knowing that I had absolutely no ability to do that, right? | ||
| So they just sort of, it took an issue that they knew would be problematic for the agency, for themselves. | ||
| They lied about it to the NSC and to the White House, and they decided what was best for America's foreign policy as it relates to that particular country and that particular issue around weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| So it's a tiny little example of how the deep state can decide what a nation should or shouldn't do. | ||
| The rubric that I think has been crossed, that kind of stuff is more typical Washington. | ||
| What hasn't happened, certainly in my lifetime or my recollection, is a guy like Brennan and Clapper deciding that a politician or someone running this one, President Trump in this case, candidate Trump in this case, was not good enough to assume the presidency. | ||
| So they were doing things to kneecap his administration before, or I should say his election, his ability to become an elected official. | ||
| Yeah, can you explain a little bit about what these guys were doing? | ||
| So let's just start with the dossier. | ||
| You've had tweets deleted over this. | ||
| I mean, Twitter tried to boot you and ban you because you started, as a former CIA guy, you started talking about what Brennan was up to, what these guys were doing, and they were going to boot you off Twitter. | ||
| And then eventually there was enough of an outcry. | ||
| I tried to help as much as I could to get you back on there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, all right, if we just look at the dossier, we knew for a considerable amount of time that this information was unvetted and uncorroborated. | ||
| It was internet rumor, I think, is what was in the IG report, right? | ||
| So it was well known that this was garbage, but yet it was utilized by the FBI to continue surveillance of a Trump campaign official. | ||
| So this is before the election, this dossier, which is basically an internet rumor, is now used so the CIA can use spying techniques. | ||
| Let me just tell you how absolutely crazy this was. | ||
| I'm just trying to dumb it down, yeah. | ||
| We had a foreign spy that was hired by a domestic political opponent inject this garbage into the system, which, if you work in the intelligence field, you know that any Russian sources are oftentimes controlled by Vladimir Putin, the SVR, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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So, unless you really vet the information... You mean they're smart enough to have double agents? | |
| Oh, amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| He's Russian. | ||
| We're pumping this fake garbage that we haven't vetted into the political system. | ||
| We're using it for surveillance purposes. | ||
| And now, and here's the kicker, in early January of 2017, they, Clapper and Comey and Brennan, leaked this dossier. | ||
| to the press, which had already been circulated out there, but giving it their stamp of, we know it exists, and we're going to brief this, right? | ||
| So they briefed it to President-elect Trump. | ||
| And the very act of doing that and saying, hey, you should be aware that this exists, suddenly gave the hook for the press to run with this story that we have a Russian agent sitting in the White House, the FBI, the CIA, you know, they believed enough in this document to brief it. | ||
| And then, of course, The fire was set. | ||
| The brush fire took off. | ||
| The hysteria was launched. | ||
| But what's amazing is the next number of days and the next couple of weeks, every one of those bastards, Comey and Clapper, Brennan, all of them said, oh, but the dossier, we don't believe it. | ||
| It's just rumors. | ||
| Well, then why'd you brief it? | ||
| Why'd you spread it around Washington? | ||
| Because you knew. | ||
| That it would cause a brush fire. | ||
| You knew it would set this nation on fire, and you knew that the Trump presidency would likely never recover from it. | ||
| And in fact, John Brennan told a crowd here in Los Angeles that President Trump would no longer be in office, an interview he gave, by the end of 2018. | ||
| He told a bunch of these Hollywood elites, don't worry about it, Trump's going to be gone by the end of 2018. | ||
| Thank God John Brennan was gone, and now he's under criminal investigation by AG Barr. | ||
| So that was my next question. | ||
| How nervous should Clapper and Brennan and Comey be? | ||
| I mean, Clapper is the guy who lied under oath when they asked him about, are we, you know, doing mass surveillance on people, on our own citizens, and what was it, not wittingly? | ||
| That he said as he was scratching the top of his head, which you ever see that episode of Seinfeld? | ||
| You know, when you're lying, the higher up on your face that you scratch tells you if it's a big lie or not. | ||
| I mean, he's literally going, not wittingly. | ||
| Right, right, yeah, and all of a sudden his nose starts growing. | ||
| Yeah, but then becomes a CNN analyst on this and suffers no ramifications for lying under oath. | ||
| How much trouble do you think these guys really are in? | ||
| I think they're in a lot, and I think that they know it. | ||
| And I am, as an American, forget my party affiliation, forget having worked in the CIA, although that's a part of my anger because I know what they've done to the intelligence community. | ||
| They have now made the American people reasonably concerned about a degree of politicization that they weren't aware of. | ||
| or that they thought would be impossible. | ||
| So they have really sullied, not only the reputation, but the ability of the FBI and the CIA | ||
| to go out and do the good work that they need to do. | ||
| We do in fact need an FBI and a CIA to do the good work that they do. | ||
| But it's reasonable for an American to step back and say, "Maybe we shouldn't have these guys | ||
| "'cause they're so highly politicized." | ||
| So I think that Brennan and Comey and Clapper and that whole cabal that was involved | ||
| in these shenanigans in 2016 should be very worried. | ||
| John Durham, a very, very smart man, and I think AG Barr is playing a long game on this one. | ||
| I think he's letting Comey go on some of the smaller stuff. | ||
| I mean, he's hitting him hard in some areas, and the IG has called him a dangerous man, a man who's had a dangerous precedent for the 30-plus thousand former and current FBI employees. | ||
| And I think you're going to find the same thing with Clapper and Brennan. | ||
| This is all over. | ||
| So if these guys did so much bad stuff, what do you make of the fact that they don't shut up? | ||
| What do you make of the fact that Comey wrote the book, which nobody bought the book. | ||
| He teaches ethics! | ||
| Comey teaches ethics! | ||
| What is happening in this world? | ||
| Or look at Brennan's Twitter feed. | ||
| It's just like, wait a minute, you were the head of the CIA. | ||
| I don't think you should be, you're basically attacking one of the institutions, the office of the presidency. | ||
| Now I get it, Trump attacks everybody too, so there's nobody that's totally clean here. | ||
| But you look at Brennan's Twitter feed and it's like, what are you doing? | ||
| But I guess they feel that they'll never be caught. | ||
| Well, here's I think what's happening. | ||
| You have Comey, Clapper and Brennan, they're all contributors, they go to these fancy functions here in Los Angeles, they belong to these institutes, they go on Twitter, and they're all echoing the same talking points, which is Basically, Trump is a Russian traitor, or he's all but, and we have to get this guy out of the office of the presidency. | ||
| And we, as former CIA, FBI, ODNI, you know, whatever three or four letter agency they were a part of, we are the defenders of the country. | ||
| We are the defenders of the nation. | ||
| So that's literally what you were saying about the state before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they are spinning this over and over and over again to continue this high boil of hysteria so that people believe that the Brennans and the Comeys and the Clappers are actually good guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| They're creating their hysterical base so that when H.E. | ||
| Barr and Durham come out with this report, mark my words, that you will have the MSNBCs and the Rachel Maddows from the top of the roof screaming, well, but it's partisan and it's not true and this is just a, this is a witch hunt against them and they will deny facts. | ||
| So it's coming. | ||
| So they're preparing the battlefield very wisely, although horrifically, they're trying to save their own skin. | ||
| And so they're prepping the battlefield with all of these hysterical tweets so that they can find a way, at least in the public sphere, to push back to save their skin. | ||
| All right, so I wanna get to the media portion of that because you've talked a lot about how they leak things to the media and the rest of that, but before we get to that, how pissed are these guys at Mueller for the report? | ||
| I mean, they obviously didn't think this was gonna be the outcome and it was all gonna just be nonsense and make Rachel Maddow look like a complete raiding lunatic. | ||
| Right, so no collusion. | ||
| That was a surprise for the Democratic Party, wasn't it, for the left? | ||
| That was a slam dunk, right? | ||
| That was supposed to be a very clear case of a president being, you know, a Russian agent, and he wasn't. | ||
| Look, it was appropriate. | ||
| It seemed like nonsense. | ||
| Like, what I kept saying from the beginning was, if this is all true, wouldn't every Democrat be saying, we're in World War III now? | ||
| Like, let's really take this thing to its conclusion. | ||
| If it's really true that, in effect, Russia basically installed the President of the United States, I mean, that's as big a crime as you could possibly get. | ||
| So congratulations, we're in World War III. | ||
| They're worried about the new World War III, but we're in it already. | ||
| So I think that many of us, to include myself at the very beginning, were concerned about the connections, not just the dossier-related garbage, because that was silly, but some of the rest of it. | ||
| And it's like my position, I think a lot of us at the very beginning said, look, Let Bob Mueller do a fair job within a short period of time to address this issue. | ||
| Because what I knew working in the intelligence community is if we had any information, any intelligence, significant or human, in other words, phone calls, emails, if we had any kind of sources from human beings, multiple individuals throughout the world, in Moscow, etc., who could all corroborate the same thing, Then we need to know that, and let's put that forward. | ||
| But very quickly, that information should be brought to the table, and we would be ejecting the man from the White House within the first few months of his presidency. | ||
| And when that didn't happen, it became very clear to me, and I think most reasonable intelligence officials, or former officials, that there was nothing there. | ||
| that this was now getting into a political exercise. | ||
| And I think that the report showed that, that there certainly was no collusion. | ||
| Now, the issue of, did he try to obstruct? | ||
| Well, boy, I think you can take a step back and say, look, if I were a newly elected president, | ||
| and I knew that I was being smeared by a bunch of former FBI and CIA people in the media | ||
| saying I was a Russian agent, I know that's not true. | ||
| Damn right I'm gonna try to shut down that investigation because I know it's garbage. | ||
| Most reasonable people would want to say forget it. | ||
| That's garbage. | ||
| I know what you're trying to do. | ||
| You're trying to politicize my ability to do this work as President of the United States. | ||
| You're trying to make sure that I can't do what the American people elected me to do. | ||
| Especially, literally, you were elected on draining the swamp. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| So that's sort of the core thing here. | ||
| So the obstruction piece, I think, is a political loser. | ||
| I also think that the essence of the argument's garbage as well. | ||
| But the Democratic Party has clung to that, and now that they see that that wasn't working out, and Bob Mueller, bless his heart, if you recall, when he testified that he just- Poor guy. | ||
| Yeah, he was sad. | ||
| I actually felt bad for him. | ||
| He was just way over his head. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He has a little bit of the Biden sort of like, are you even all there kind of thing. | ||
| I mean, a good man. | ||
| I think he worked hard for his country, but he was way over his skis doing something he shouldn't have. | ||
| He should have stayed in retirement land. | ||
| All right, so the other piece of this, which you've sort of been hitting on here, is the media portion and how all of these leaks It's every day you open up the New York Times or CNN or MSNBC and they're reporting on stuff that's supposed to be behind closed doors. | ||
| There are secret congressional meetings about things, but somehow MSNBC and the New York Times has all of Schiff's talking points and the rest of it. | ||
| How does this game actually get played? | ||
| Is it as obviously ridiculous and just so blatant as it seems? | ||
| Could it be that blatant? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Look, most of the leaking, when you work in Washington, you find out very quickly that most of the leaking occurs either by the White House, interestingly enough, or by the senior levels of the various departments and agencies. | ||
| It's rarely that lower or working level individual, right? | ||
| It's the people who, again, like Aldrich Ames, have decided that they know what's best for the country, so they're going to act on it. | ||
| They're going to leak things to try to push the media narrative in one direction or another based on whatever they want. | ||
| where their goals are, their personal goals. | ||
| We saw that with Comey. | ||
| We know he leaked to the New York Times via a cutout to try to push for an independent counsel, and he got it. | ||
| So it's not as though the tactic doesn't work, it does work. | ||
| So that's frightening. | ||
| That should frighten all of us. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So both sides do it, but what we have seen over the past three years is a group of individuals from the FBI, from the CIA, who are leaking pieces of information to kneecap a duly elected president so that they can put the people in power that they choose, irrespective of party, whether it's a never-Trumper or whether it's one of these more traditional moderate Democrat, what the hell that means these days. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, it's not really irrespective of party, right? | ||
| Because you mean a never-Trumper or some other Democrat. | ||
| Sure, but I mean, historically, the leaks have come from both sides of the aisle to the media because of their own personal desire to shape policy, right? | ||
| We're just seeing it on steroids now. | ||
| The amount of leaking, the ferociousness of the impact of those leaks, right? | ||
| It's not just we like this or we don't like this. | ||
| It's, you know, Trump is a traitor or he's going to launch this in World War III. | ||
| It's that absurdity, it's that hysteria that was kicked off in 2016 and hasn't stopped. | ||
| Do you think that's partly just because we're just watching institutions crumble across the board, and so they're all sort of in their death throes, so you just throw out everything? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, we're watching our media institutions crumble, our political institutions are crumbling, we're exposing information, conversations like this weren't really being had five years ago. | ||
| So as it all becomes more obvious, the ways it can lash out become crazier. | ||
| As the curtain is pulled back on the Wizard of Oz, does he not get a little bit more panicked about people understanding he's like 4'2", you know, 250 pounds? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that that could explain a lot because, again, at some level when you start looking at, for instance, let's just take the media, right? | ||
| So it's long been known that the media focuses on one particular party and benefiting that, | ||
| and it's a Democratic Party. | ||
| Which, by the way, when you get like 95% of your political funds, or that is the media supports you, | ||
| like from their political donations, it's incredible that the Republican Party even exists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, when you have that degree of an avalanche of support in your nation's media, | ||
| the fact that another party exists is really incredible, or it means that Democrats are stupid. | ||
| Reminder, I'm looking at a lifelong Democrat. | ||
| I just wanna say that again. | ||
| So look, in the last 10 to 15 years, forget that, five years. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get to that. | ||
| Yeah, it's changed so much. - We're gonna get to that. | ||
| But yeah, no, I think you're right to say that the media is recognizing that we're all pulling off the mask and seeing who they are. | ||
| And that is horrifying to them, because the moment that we start questioning their authority to tell us what's right and wrong, and we start to say, you know what, actually, you've given to the other political party, you used to work for that other organization or entity that is now against Trump. | ||
| We now know that you're biased, and that's fine, right? | ||
| You and I both have an opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| We both go on TV and talk about things and our opinions. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But let's be candid about who we are and what we believe in, and let's not pass it as news, because this is not news. | ||
| It's just an opinion, right? | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| The former editor of the New York Times gave this fantastic interview where she talked about her students. | ||
| She left the New York Times now. | ||
| I believe it's at Yale or one of these fancy Ivies. | ||
| And she works with students who want to become journalists. | ||
| And she said one of the frustrations that she has is that they all want to report on their own opinions of what's happening in the world, right, and not the news. | ||
| And it's like, well, amen. | ||
| We have been walking down this road for 15 plus years where everybody in the world... Right, why not admit it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So let's have an honest conversation that the Walter Cronkites are gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's now a circus, and everybody's got a different performer that they prefer, and that's bad. | ||
| And we should acknowledge that that's bad, and we should, I think, as a country, and at some point, when does journalism ring its own bell and say, we've gone too far, let's see if we can do something different? | ||
| So when you read the paper that was formerly the New York Times, are there phrases that you can see are obvious tells when it's complete nonsense? | ||
| Beyond just unnamed source or source on Capitol Hill. | ||
|
unidentified
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You mean other than just picking it up and it's saying New York Times and putting it back down? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And by the way, as I always say every time I knock the New York Times, I would prefer this not be the case. | ||
| Amen! | ||
| Everyone, everyone does it. | ||
| The people that I find that are railing against it the most are the people that don't want this to be the most. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So you're saying, just don't be totally horrible. | ||
| I come from the middle of nowhere in Eastern rural Oregon. | ||
| The way that I was able to get into the CIA was that I went to the Washington Post and the New York Times, and I read it every single day back in the late 90s and early 2000s. | ||
| I took notes on each story. | ||
| I built my knowledge and understanding of the world based on their reporting. | ||
| So there was a time when I was a big fan, and I appreciated what they were doing for me, for the world, for the country, spreading what was actually happening. | ||
| And we've lost that as a great lady. | ||
| And the Washington Post has gone even more bananas and bonkers. | ||
| It's horrible for the republic because democracies need that voice to challenge people in power. | ||
| So do you think we're more than anything else, I'm putting all the political stuff aside, putting deep state aside, putting the parties aside, that we're really more in an information war at this point than anything else. | ||
| It's not even information, it's really the delivery system of the information war than anything else. | ||
| I mean, you're talking to a guy who put out two tweets, expressed a simple political opinion, no inflammatory language. | ||
| Can you just remind me what the tweets were exactly? | ||
| Because it's kind of, you're a former CIA ops guy, I think you've proven here this half hour, whatever it is, that you know what you're talking about. | ||
| And here, the two tweets that you put out. | ||
| So both of them basically had to do with President Trump or Democrats being crazy. | ||
| And one was taking a headline from the Washington Post, which was silly person flim flam. | ||
| Didn't matter what the hell the headline was. | ||
| I was just commenting on the fact that it was silly. | ||
| And that was enough. | ||
| To get me banned for whatever number of days, right? | ||
| The other was a thread talking about the president and, you know, what we are, this whole impeachment silliness and how absurd it is and it was a relatively short thread and it was banned. | ||
| Again, simply taking a snippet from the IG report and commenting on that section of the report. | ||
| That was enough. | ||
| So, that to me, and I know that you have been banging this drum for a long time, is incredibly frightening that we now have a handful of entities from Silicon Valley that are really publishers deciding who gets to say whatever they want them to say. | ||
| And if it goes too far, either as a corporate policy or as a one-off, whatever number of employees decide that's bad, they're going to throw a little sand in the gears. | ||
| They may not ban you completely, they may, but they may just throw some sand in the gears and have you blocked for a week or two or whatever when you want to share something at a very important time in the nation's politics. | ||
| Iran issue, right? | ||
| So we're gonna throw some sand in your gears. | ||
| We're gonna stop you from tweeting or stop you from sharing something on Facebook. | ||
| That's what they're doing now. | ||
| That's what they've done to me. | ||
| Does it feel like the whole game is designed to just make us crazier right now? | ||
| Like every time you read any of it, like once you start seeing this stuff, right? | ||
| You have your little red pill moment. | ||
| You start seeing this stuff. | ||
| You don't want to see it, right? | ||
| You want to put the ocean back in the cup. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And it just doesn't fit. | ||
| Well, I think that this has been a long time coming. | ||
| So what's interesting is MIT did this brilliant study in the late 90s when some of our economic trade policies were changing. | ||
| China went to the WTO. | ||
| We had Mexico and Canada and NAFTA. | ||
| And a lot of the communities that were being impacted negatively by these economic changes were starting to elect people to Congress and Senate who were increasingly more inflammatory, increasingly further on the left and further on the right. | ||
| And what you now see, that created a marketplace for people and media to be even more loud and bombastic and crazy because people were angry and so they were able to tap into that marketplace, right? | ||
| So I think that the things that you're seeing in America's media right now are really reflective of a country that's deeply unsettled. | ||
| It doesn't mean that we don't celebrate the progress here in this country, because economically, I don't think you can make an argument, and you've had people in this program that made it very clear that we are benefiting profoundly from our wonderful economic system, imperfect as it is, our wonderful republic, imperfect as it is, but there's clearly a sickness that is being reflected in our media that is really, at the end of the day, it reflects our own brokenness, our own anger, because we're responding in such a visceral way, we're giving those people ratings. | ||
| All right, so let's go to our woe-is-me-beat-up lefty guys here for a second, because as you're saying that, I'm reminded of when I used to be on The Young Turks, and I was a big lefty, that I'd be on air with the host, and they'd be screaming like crazy people about something. | ||
| There's no video of me ever screaming about anything like this, but they'd be screaming something, and then we'd cut to break, and then they'd be completely fine again, like completely fine. | ||
| Then we'd come back, and people are screaming, or crying, or yelling, or pounding their fists. | ||
| And I remember thinking, like, this is just all theater to me. | ||
| Like, this is not theater to me. | ||
| We're having the same exact conversation right now that we were having before the cameras started and everything else, but we've been sort of primed that everything is sort of theater right now. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like we can get any of this back. | ||
| Like, is that now where we're at, like, that it won't come back? | ||
| So when I'm talking about with the cup and the ocean, it's like, we now need different institutions. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people trying to hang on to the old institutions. | ||
| I see this with a lot of my last remaining sane lefty friends, like they really want, the New York Times will come back, the Democratic Party will come back, but they ain't coming back, guys. | ||
| If there's any hope, it's President Trump wins in 2020. | ||
| And the Democratic Party. | ||
| And the death blow is so cataclysmic. | ||
| It would have to be an overwhelming loss, both the House, the Senate, and the presidency. | ||
| You know, we would be talking about like a 1984 election with Mondale, an '88 election | ||
| with Dukakis. | ||
| But, you know, let's not forget that stupid tends to be very resilient. | ||
| And so you're seeing a lot of that coming out of places like New York with Ocasio-Cortez, | ||
| We're getting a lot of very crazy individuals who are very now powerful within the Democratic Party. | ||
| We're absolutely reshaping it. | ||
| You would need to have a progressive nominated for the 2020 election lose against President Trump. | ||
| So they have to have their Corbyn basically? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I see that as... I mean, how crazy, though, for two guys that are basically lifelong Democrats. | ||
| And I can't call myself part of the left anymore, but... I'm hanging on by, like, my fingernails. | ||
| Yeah, I know, but a lot of my good, last liberal friends are trying. | ||
| Like, I get it, and it's just like... For me, the ship has sailed. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| But you wrote a piece in Fox News. | ||
|
unidentified
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Drop off a life raft for those of us who are paddling behind you. | |
| I'm gonna keep the life raft out there, but not much longer, you know what I mean? | ||
| I gotta go now! | ||
|
unidentified
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Make them jump! | |
| Well, I feel like I've been screaming about this for so long that now it's weird, because you know how your frustrations change over time, and it's like, I used to be really frustrated with the right, and then for these last couple years I've been frustrated with the left. | ||
| Now I'm like really frustrated at my last remaining lefty friends that just refuse to see reality. | ||
| Because it's like, come on, guys. | ||
| How much more destruction do you want these people to sow? | ||
| How much further down the socialist path do you want to go? | ||
| But you wrote a piece about this in Fox News. | ||
| Do you think there's any chance? | ||
| Who are the remaining Democrats that would make someone like you say you're a Democrat? | ||
| Forget the people, although you're welcome to tell me some. | ||
| What are the democratic policies that actually make any sense anymore? | ||
| So if you look at, if you believe Gallup polling, so about 15% of Democrats are conservative Democrats, or identify as conservative Democrats. | ||
| 35% say they're moderate, and 50% say liberal progressive. | ||
| So there is clearly a split within the party. | ||
| I think what you're seeing now, In places like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Nevada and some of that polling, Biden's still got the poll position. | ||
| But clearly, if you look at Bernie Sanders and to some lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren, that wing of the party's strong. | ||
| Uh, and so what happens in this primary season, I think will set the temperature and the direction for the party for many, many years to come. | ||
| And that's why you're seeing people like Ocasio-Cortez just yesterday saying in an interview that she can't believe that she and Biden are both part of the same party. | ||
| Well, Because that was the plan all along. | ||
| She's not a Democrat. | ||
| Bernie Sanders isn't a Democrat. | ||
| They're Democratic Socialists, which of course, as you have, they're going to drop the Democrat part at some point, right? | ||
| Although, North Korea has called themselves the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. | ||
| So there is a branding exercise there, right? | ||
| There's some chutzpah happening right now within the socialist wing of the party, basically saying that they are the party. | ||
| So that fight's gonna continue in 2020. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| My personal hope, and I hate to say this, but my personal hope is that we elect some crazy progressive, elect Bernie Sanders, right? | ||
| Then the American people will have a very clear distinction Of whom they should choose. | ||
| What should the future of the country look like? | ||
| Is it the Bernie Sanders and the Green New Deals and the free, you know, everything that nobody can pay for, right? | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| Plus all the racism and the intersectional stuff. | ||
| Yes, the diversity Olympics stuff. | ||
| So is that who we want to become? | ||
| And if it's not, then you have to vote for the other guy, because you only have two choices. | ||
| But do you think there's any mechanism, and this is the thought that I've really been stuck on for the last couple months, like is there any mechanism that liberals have, I mean good liberals, right, so like an old school Democrat has, to fight off the bad thing? | ||
| Because we're just watching all of them be pinned one at a time, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like Biden was brought in to be the straight shooter and the decent guy and the old school Democrat, now he's telling you you can pick which prison you want to go to depending on which gender you identify as. | ||
| And learn how to code, coal miners. | ||
| He literally, I mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Not learn how to code coal miners, and then his other thing the other day about... So much for Western PA Joe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But oh, I thought you were going to say, because he had this other thing the other day about, you know, basically he said we're a European culture, not some culture that's been imported from Africa, and it's like, I thought that's what... | ||
| But he was brought in to be the, and that's what I'm saying, like there's no mechanism for a decent Democrat anymore. | ||
| There's no vehicle for it anymore. | ||
| No, there's not, right? | ||
| Because at some level you would hope that the media or people within, you know, the Washington Post, New York Times and the CNNs and MSNBCs, that they would have Some of the more sensible voices and calling out the people like Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders saying they're not real Democrats. | ||
| Let's talk about their strategy document from 2012 that talks about Marx and Lenin and taking over the economy. | ||
| Like, let's talk about who they are versus the Joy Behar's view of like, she's super awesome, you know, and Rachel Maddow like, boy, she's an impressive gal. | ||
| Like, what is happening? | ||
| Like, I don't care that she can dance really Fun on a roof in Boston, like that stupid viral video. | ||
| That's not important. | ||
| The fact that she wants to encourage the United States government to take over the means of production in this country via socialism... Problematic, would you say? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Right? | ||
| And let's pass the New Green Deal, which we could never afford, and oh, by the way, isn't actually going to be effective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| So let's slaughter all the cows because of the cow farts. | ||
| Okay, super. | ||
| You are aware that China and India, their combined CO2 and methane emissions would far and do far eclipse everything that the United States and European Union could ever do in terms of their horrific pollution. | ||
| So you can kill the cows you want, but until you address the India and China problem, this is silly. | ||
| This is a silly conversation. | ||
| And the only reasonable people in this conversation right now, shockingly enough, Our Republicans! | ||
| It's the dang Crenshaws who are like, yeah, look, CO2 and methane, it's real. | ||
| Like, it's happening, and we need to focus on R&D-related issues that scrub the stuff out of the environment, and that's what we need to be doing, versus knocking down every house and rebuilding it, killing all the farting cows. | ||
| Like, if you're gonna kill farting people, what about Swalwell? | ||
| He goes on TV and farts, like, what about that guy? | ||
| Yeah, that was the biggest fart of 2019. | ||
| That was an amazing series of flatulence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He lifted. | ||
| Right, he actually got up. | ||
| No, no, no, he said it was, they said it was a cup. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That Chris Matthews moved his cup on the table. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I use that excuse too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, all right. | ||
| If they go down that road and then, okay, now Bernie, let's just say it's Bernie, right? | ||
| Because that's the easier answer here. | ||
| Bernie ends up getting crushed. | ||
| And then we have round two of Trump. | ||
| You think there's a chance they actually recalibrate and look in the mirror and do it? | ||
| Because they've had, I mean, Trump's president now. | ||
| At every moment, and this is where my frustration lies, where there have been every moment when those roadblocks have come of like, guys, let's take the look, they always just plow right through, and I sense that that's exactly what they're gonna do. | ||
| I sense that's what they're gonna do in the UK now. | ||
| It doesn't stop. | ||
| It doesn't stop. | ||
| The question is, are we at the point Where leftism is so broken that we double down? | ||
| So we have our Mondale moment and we're just going to go with Dukakis? | ||
| Or are we at the Bill Clinton 92 moment where the powers that be in the Democratic Party say, okay, we dipped our toes in the crazy waters, let's do something different now? | ||
| And I think that we are more at our 84 moment, and I think that we're going to double down on stupid because I think that the fever is too strong. | ||
| Look, Tom Perez of the DNC said that Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the party. | ||
| Barack Obama endorsed her during her election. | ||
| He's now endorsed Medicare for All. | ||
| I mean, this is a man who at the same time also talks about, you know, we need to not go too far to the left. | ||
| Well, then why the holy hell are you endorsing socialists? | ||
| He plays it both sides. | ||
| Every other reason comes out with something that sounds, you know, oh, we shouldn't judge people by the color of their skin, and then women should rule the world, and it's like, come on, man, pick a side. | ||
| So we are in the middle of a silly season, and it's not just, why is this important, right? | ||
| So this conversation about where is the left today, why should we really care? | ||
| The people who are watching this who are Republicans or Libertarians, and they're like, yeah, that's great, you asshole. | ||
| Well, they keep emailing me and they keep saying, Dave, stop giving them the hints. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But here's what I would say to them, and this is what I would say to any of us who are tired of the left's silliness, but, well, we'll just all vote for Trump. | ||
| We are not China with one party. | ||
| We are not North Korea with one dear leader. | ||
| A republic, a true democracy, requires vibrant parties to combat each other, to fight with each other rhetorically, to provide different solutions to problems. | ||
| So you need a vibrant political class to have these conversations because at the end of the day, this is so important because who else is going to lead humanity for the next number of years, for the next century? | ||
| It's not going to be China. | ||
| It's not going to be Russia, and God forbid if either of those two nations are leading humanity. | ||
| So is that the irony here, that when people want us to pull out of everything, and I get that my libertarian side really feels that, and why are we giving all these countries money? | ||
| And if you told me right now we were going to cut foreign aid 25% across the board, I'd probably be for it. | ||
| I don't know all of the ramifications of all of those things, and I'm sure that would... You're talking about foreign aid too. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's talk about it then. | ||
| So that part of me really exists, but then it's like, it's not just that we'd pull back and then things would just keep operating. | ||
| It's like, well, somebody's gonna step in. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And who do we want to step into, as imperfect as we are? | ||
| And it would rather it be us? | ||
| It's just our sort of Faustian bargain with the universe or something? | ||
| Well, so, look, from a foreign policy perspective, you know, people talk about, what's our strategy? | ||
| Well, we want to create more democracies. | ||
| And then we want to try to stop or slow down or bog down the parties who would stop us, humanity, from reaching that point of greater liberty. | ||
| Because that is ultimately the goal. | ||
| And we are the torchbearers of that legacy. | ||
| It's our responsibility, so. | ||
| When you say that, you hit on this earlier, but when you say that, the idea that we're giving them more liberty and we want more democracies, because democracies don't get into wars with each other. | ||
| It's not purely like, I think when people say that, you want to spread democracy, there's somehow it means this sort of financial thing or capitalist thing, but it actually is, I mean this is, I don't know if you read Virtue and Nationalism by Jérôme Harzoni, it's like strong nations actually, strong democratic nations, that's what actually brings peace. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And this has been, again, Foreign Policy 101, this has been a profound goal of most United States presidents and their administrations. | ||
| So yes, we have to be involved and engaged in different parts of the world where it suits our interests, particularly whether it be economic and so forth. | ||
| And again, this is the Trumps, like, what are we getting? | ||
| Give us your oil stuff, right? | ||
| He's using crass language, but the request is fair. | ||
| But in places where China or Russia don't represent the future of humanity in the way that I think you and I would want all of us to be, like they're underwriting corrupt regimes all over the world, certainly China, definitely in places like Africa. | ||
| What can we do to slow down their reach and their power? | ||
| Because that is important. | ||
| Without committing a ton of our resources, our people, and our treasure to that, right? | ||
| And then it becomes sort of a strategic engagement or withdrawal from different parts of the world. | ||
| Because oftentimes as aid, really at the end of the day, we're paying people off to keep the Russians out, the Chinese out, to try to keep it a low boil. | ||
| but not encouraging corruption. | ||
| So that can be a very difficult thing to balance. | ||
| But I will tell you... | ||
| You're probably going to get a lot of corruption just as a result of it. | ||
| Correct. So you have to constantly keep a pulse on that. | ||
| So it's not easy to do this. | ||
| But I will tell you, I've seen these aid projects in places like, say, in Zambia, | ||
| where we're giving them all this money... | ||
| For instance, some of the tribes, we're giving them lots of money to build fish ponds. | ||
| And yet you've got all these other NGOs coming in and delivering food. | ||
| And so all the fish die and the ponds go dry. | ||
| It's like, well, of course, because you're giving people food. | ||
| They're not going to schlep out in this terrible heat and work. | ||
| Of course they're not. | ||
| So sometimes we do things that are silly with our aid. | ||
| But the broader point, the most important thing that we have to remember from a foreign policy perspective is we're trying to create more democracies. | ||
| That's going to be a long, ugly process. | ||
| It is not going to happen by the barrel of a gun, and it's not going to happen tomorrow. | ||
| So let's have some patience. | ||
| And then where we are engaged in the world, especially when it comes to our military, damn right there better be something that the American people are getting in return because it can't be this constant outlay. | ||
| And that's what I think you're seeing guys like Tucker Carlson and others be very reluctant about our continuing engagement in the Middle East. | ||
| Change your energy policy, make them irrelevant, and now you can march forward. | ||
| You know, it's interesting that you bring up Tucker there because, you know, I see this sort of split now where Trump, you know, did the strike in Iran and now suddenly Tucker said, well, this is gonna lead us to World War III, Trump's kind of just like everybody else, and I like Tucker very much, obviously, but I thought, while everyone's sort of jumping all over that, like, ah, see this horrible split that's occurred, and oh my god, to me it's like, this is great! | ||
| This is, what a great debate is happening on the right right now. | ||
| You know, can you do a strike? | ||
| Does that lead to World War III? | ||
| Like, what a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's like, where would that happen on the left these days without someone being just completely slaughtered in the crossfire? | ||
| Well, let's talk about what the Democratic Party's done in the last three or six months about this. | ||
| So, in terms of foreign engagement. | ||
| Like, so Trump wants to withdraw from Syria and, you know, he's an idiot. | ||
| Right, remember that conversation? | ||
| And now he's sending people into Iraq, and, well, now he's an idiot. | ||
| Well, what is it? | ||
| What do you guys want? | ||
| What is your strategy on the left? | ||
| I mean, I would love to hear that. | ||
| I mean, we know what Joe Biden likes to do with, in terms of some of his foreign policy stuff. | ||
| He's been wrong more times than he's been right, and he sends his kid and blesses his engagement with the corrupt Ukraine. | ||
| Oh, a guard can take a truckload of money. | ||
| Oh, can we just finish with that, actually? | ||
| That's the right way to finish. | ||
| I meant to get to it before when we did the Russia stuff. | ||
| So the Ukraine stuff, and impeachment, and everything else. | ||
| Is the basic takeaway here, beyond the obvious stuff that everyone sees on the headlines, like how insane it was that Hunter Biden's getting, what was it, 50 grand a month? | ||
| Sure, whatever the amount is, it's absurd. | ||
| 80 grand a month? | ||
| Something insane. | ||
| To work for an energy company he had no expertise in, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| His dad happened to be vice president, okay. | ||
| It seems that this all hinges on the idea that if Trump felt legitimately that there was corruption, which there clearly was, nobody's really debating whether something seriously corrupt was going on there. | ||
| Jake Tappers admitted this on his program. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Jake is like 50-50. | ||
| One day I'm like, Jake, you get it. | ||
| The next day he just does it again. | ||
| It's CNN. | ||
| It's a mind virus. | ||
| It seems that it all hinges on the idea that if Trump genuinely believed that there was corruption, and I think every sane person believes that there was corruption, then he had the, his authorization, or the obligation to actually do something about it. | ||
| Did I get this thing kind of right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And if you look at polling, I think some 40-some-odd percent of Democrats actually think that what the Bidens did was wrong and deserves a degree of scrutiny. | ||
| So you've got a good chunk of the party, darn near half, that think that. | ||
| And of course, Independents and Republicans are fully on board with that. | ||
| So that's the fundamental problem with this impeachment push. | ||
| is if the president, if there was nothing there, if the Bidens did absolutely nothing wrong, | ||
| then of course Trump would have been absolutely, horrifically wrong to ask them | ||
| to get involved in our politics or try to kneecap Biden or any other person. | ||
| But that's not the case. | ||
| We know unquestionably, just based on what we know from press reports and from, we now have testimony | ||
| by an Obama administration diplomat, that as early as 2015, they were raising the flag in Kiev | ||
| saying, "Hey, look, what the Biden kid's doing is undercutting our ability to fight corruption in Ukraine. | ||
| And they were told to basically shut the hell up. | ||
| What about that incredible video of Biden just admitting the whole thing? | ||
| Well, it's all a scam, right? | ||
| It's all a joke, it's all a scam, and this is when I wanna like, I wanna channel- They're like, it's so ridiculous, let's just put it out there. | ||
| Yeah, this is when I wanna channel my inner Trump, and then be like, it's a witch hunt, it's all a scam, you know? | ||
| Because it is, it's silly. | ||
| The Bidens did things that were inappropriate and wrong, and they should have been investigated, whether it be by the Ukrainians, whether it be by our Department of Justice, or both. | ||
| It's absolutely, enough is there for us to say that was wrong, and it should be investigated. | ||
| And the fact that the president's being called on the carpet for this and impeached over his demand to look into it, I think is absurd. | ||
| Put in a committee, investigate it at the end of the day, but to actually launch an impeachment and put this country through something that is just silly, it's absolutely, horrifically wrong of the Democratic Party. | ||
| And shame on Pelosi and Schumer and the legacy of the past five, ten years for what has happened under the progressive leadership. | ||
| I think you are going to look back and say, what a sorrowful time for this country. | ||
| Well, congratulations, because as a Democrat that thinks Trump has to be reelected to get this thing to reset, I'm pretty sure if you ever wanted to fire up the Trump base, you just did it with a partisan impeachment. | ||
| But what do you make of now the fact that they're not even sending this to the Senate? | ||
| So they do a completely partisan impeachment, right? | ||
| Completely partisan. | ||
| Trump is a Nazi guy, right? | ||
| I mean, he's Hitler, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So we were all living in Nazi- Hold on this. | ||
| No, right, let me- Let's hold on the paperwork. | ||
| We are living in Nazi Germany, the equivalent of modern day, right? | ||
| Putting kids in cages and Trump is Hitler, right? | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Let's sit back for a while. | ||
| Let's sit back on this impeachment stuff for just a little bit. | ||
| Let's think about this for a while. | ||
| Like, go to hell. | ||
| That's just absurd. | ||
| And it defies logic. | ||
| It defies reason. | ||
| If you're going to move forward, you better have the facts and then let the American people make the call. | ||
| Have you heard the crazy theory that she's gonna sit on it long enough, that Pelosi will sit on it long enough so that, assuming Trump gets reelected, but maybe something happens in the Senate more favorably to the Democrats, then you move on. | ||
| I mean, true insanity. | ||
| Well, if that's the strategy... Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I mean, if that's Pelosi's long game, I'll tell you what, I think she's gonna be disappointed come next November. | ||
| Because in doing that, she looks so flippin' absurd that most reasonable voters say, these folks aren't serious. | ||
| They're not being adults right now. | ||
| You can have differences with the administration, with Trump, in terms of his temperament, in terms of some of his policies, that's fine, make the case. | ||
| But this kind of stuff, either, if I may, shit or get off the pot. | ||
| Move the impeachment forward, and move them out of office, let the Senate judge, and if they don't, tough. | ||
| You've done your part, House, move on. | ||
| Now make the case of the American people. | ||
| I think you've proven why I consider you one of the few sane people on Twitter here, so I'm gonna tell the good people to follow you on Twitter. | ||
| It's Brian, B-R-Y-A-N, Dean, D-E-A-N, W-R-I-G-H-T. | ||
| Thanks for coming in. | ||
| We're gonna have to do this again. | ||
| Can't wait. | ||
| Once you move, once you officially are left, done, Democrat, Hang by some nails, brother. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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