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Jan. 5, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:43
DEATH TO EMPIRE! Dave Smith and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain here with my good friend, comic Dave Smith.
Thanks for taking the time today.
We have, you know, I always like to go to the opposite well, and for the anti-war screed, it's always great to go to the comic, and thanks for taking the time today.
Do you want to just mention to people what you're up to these days and how and where to find you?
Oh, I'm still doing the same thing, part of the Problem Podcast.
You can get it at Gas Digital Network or iTunes, Google, any of that stuff.
I'm working on the next hour special, so I'm touring around.
You can find my stuff, follow me on Twitter, at Comic Dave Smith.
Thanks for having me.
Great to be back.
Thanks for having my invitation to burst out from the birthday cake, but I'm sure it just got spam binned.
Now, I have been, of course, following you for a while, and your rants are the stuff of legend, and I thought, you know, I did a whole livestream yesterday about this whole endless war stuff that's going on at the moment, and, you know, I'm not sure we're quite on the brink of falling into the fiery pit of World War III, but it does sort of feel like things are heating up, and I guess I wanted a little bit more than two days of the new decade to enjoy some peace dividend, And have you been following it?
I know you have.
And what are your thoughts on what's been going on recently in Iraq?
Well, yeah, I've been following it pretty carefully.
And I agree with your assessment.
I watched your live stream from last night, and I thought you were spot on, as usual.
And sure, it doesn't seem like we're definitely about to go into a world war or a hot war with Iran.
But The possibilities are very dangerous.
Of course, I know you've done very in-depth videos and podcasts on this stuff before, but World War I started, you know, with a political assassination.
And right now you have a situation where this is something kind of unprecedented.
This was one of the highest ranking members of the Iranian government who was just assassinated by the Americans.
An act of war, if ever there was one, and certainly if You know, if Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence were assassinated by the Iranians, nobody here would be questioning whether or not that was an act of war.
You have a situation in Syria where the countries that have been involved, either directly in the country or sending in weapons on one side or the other, have been the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel Turkey on one side on the other side you have Assad I'm sorry Assad's army the Syrian government you have Russia Iran there's a lot of players I might have forgotten some there's a lot of players involved here and
And it's not that crazy that these things could get out of control.
So the fear of a hot war, a real war, a world war is very, very real and terrifying.
So it's worth talking about.
You know, and it's funny, too, because I feel I've never really been addicted to anything, but I have sort of understood that addiction is kind of a lifelong thing and you can remove yourself from the stimuli, But it's still going to come up like an old ache or a war wound or something because I grew up on a steady diet of pro-war propaganda in England with the great glorious Battle of Britain and England's finest hour and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, it's funny because I've now been a voluntarist, anarchist, libertarian for many, many decades and very skeptical of war as another giant government program, war as the health of the state and all that.
But oh man, Dave, I gotta tell you, when it's like, yeah, we got some!
We nuked the bad guy!
And there's part of me of this like sky-fire column of God's finger of justice doom on the evildoers and so on.
And it's like, Well, I haven't had a drink in thirty years.
I watched one beer commercial and I'm like salivating like Niagara down my drippy middle-aged chin.
And it feels weird to have that level of deep propaganda where I find myself positively responding to the hammer of the gods justice scenario, even though I know that's not really what's going on.
And it's like, dammit, oh my god, it's like I can't unlearn this first language.
Well, when I had that at my worst was right after 9-11, where I was like a couple miles away from the towers when Al Qaeda hit us on 9-11.
And when George W. Bush came to New York and said, I just want you to know I hear you, Washington hears you, and pretty soon the guys who knock these towers down, they're going to hear you too.
I mean, I was like, let's go get him.
You messed with the wrong guys.
And you know, like that you messed with the most powerful military ever and we're going to destroy you.
And I was all gung-ho and ready to go.
And this is before I really knew anything really of the, you know, of libertarianism or anti-war, you know, the anti-war history.
But I think what people need to understand is Well look, I would say it this way, starting with the philosophical and then into what's really going on here.
Number one, and I think you made this point very well on your live stream last night, you are not your government.
You are not your government.
In the same way that Justin Trudeau does not represent Stefan Molyneux and no sane person would ever think, oh yeah, that's same thing, those guys, you are not your government.
The United States of America's federal government is, is it's not a democracy and it's damn sure not a republic.
Um, and, and if it was a democracy, you know what, I think we would have a wall built by now.
We would have had, you know, a whole that we'd be out of all of these wars because that's what the American people vote for every time they get a chance to, um, what our government is in actuality is There's the democratically elected leaders who are kind of the show of it, and then there is the deep state.
And this is what, you know, Donald Trump has been up against for the last three years.
There is the CIA, which is where all of this stuff really started for Donald Trump, the investigation, what got thrown over to the FBI, what led to the Mueller investigation.
You had John Brennan, the former director of the CIA.
He was coming out two weeks before the Mueller investigation telling you you were gonna see indictments.
You were gonna see Donald Trump and his family hauled off to jail.
You were gonna see them all arrested over a conspiracy with the Russians that he knew.
He knew was not true because he knew the whole steel report was bogus more than anybody else because Carter Page was a CIA source while he was the director of the CIA.
So they knew this guy wasn't a Russian agent.
They knew Donald Trump was not involved in a conspiracy.
What is the simple answer here?
They're lying to you.
They are lying to you.
And they've been lying to you about every last one of these wars.
You know, you can go way back, but just in the post 9-11 wars, they lied to us about Iraq.
We just found out from the Afghanistan papers.
They lied to us about the war in Afghanistan.
They lied about Muammar Gaddafi.
They lied about Bashar al-Assad.
Go look at the whistleblower stuff that just came out this last year, these chemical attacks that never took place.
They are lying, and they've been lying to you about Iran this entire time.
And I would just say one other thing, that what happens is, If you are on the right wing, or let's just say not left wing, to be more accurate, if you're not left wing, and you are against the empire, you are not allowed in polite society.
That's the way these things work, and it's worked that way for a long time.
And that's, by the way, that's what we are.
We're not a democracy, we're not a republic, we are an empire.
And if you're against the empire, kind of, but you're on the left, And you're ridiculous.
You can kind of be allowed in.
Like Michael Moore could be, you know, if you're like a fat communist hypocrite, you could be allowed in as the voice of, I kind of oppose the empire.
That Rose McGowan lady or someone like that, that can be allowed in.
More serious people on the left who are against the empire don't get, you know, allowed in either.
But right-wingers who oppose the empire are always branded as racist.
All of them.
Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, if it's you, if it's me, we all hear this term racist.
Now it's moved to like white nationalist or because racist wasn't working as well.
But that's you get.
And what what is Trump's crime really?
What was his crime really?
Is it that he's racist?
Is that is that why the CIA hates Donald Trump?
Is that why the people who will who will blow up brown babies and starve them to death I hate Donald Trump because he's racist.
What Donald Trump did, that was the reason why the CIA was out to get him from the beginning, is that he opposed the empire.
That was his crime.
He opposed the empire.
And anybody else who does that will be demonized.
These are all wars based off lies.
They've been lying to you about Iran for decades.
My entire life they've been lying about Iran.
And what they don't want Is somebody who is not a left-winger crazy person who's telling you we should not be an empire.
Those people aren't allowed in.
Oh yeah, I mean you're not going to see Noam Chomsky on CNN anytime soon and he's actually talked about this quite explicitly because he's a, you know, a lot I disagree with him but his analysis, the left-wing analysis of empire is usually spot-on and really can't be allowed and you know that's a funny thing.
I've really been thinking lately, Dave, just about how our sort of instinctual tribal natures have not adjusted to the nation-state.
And it really struck me when you were talking about your government is not you.
Because, you know, when we were tribes of 30 to 50 people, you know, maybe a hundred people, yeah, you were kind of identified with the whole community.
And an attack upon your leaders was definitely going to be an attack upon you.
Everything was local.
Spears were in your face.
Swords were in your face.
Arrows were raining down from above.
And so your tribe kind of was you and our identification with this Collective hive mind made a lot more sense when we were in smaller tribes, but you end up being a piece of tax livestock on a geographical tax farm.
It's a little tough to recognize just how infinitely far your leaders are from your own interests.
You know, and I was talking about this five trillion dollars been spent on the war on terror while terrorism has massively escalated and skyrocketed worldwide.
Five trillion dollars.
You know, there are junkies who'll kill you for 20 bucks.
And you've got to think about $5 trillion has been spent and the opposite of the goal has been achieved.
It's a government program that's kind of inevitable.
What will people do for $5 trillion?
Will they call you a racist?
Well, of course they will, right?
Because, you know, you and I are racist because we just want fewer brown people to be bombed into oblivion.
You know, it's literally, if people had listened to us, right, I mean, hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions, of non-whites would be alive and breathing and enjoying their lives and enjoying their families and enjoying their places of worship and all kinds of things, which would make me a much happier person.
But they care about the $5 trillion, and they also care about – I think that there is this overarching sadism that goes on, this power of life and death that corrupts people that you can – and I'm not talking about Trump here because we can sort of get to that, but I'm talking about the general military-industrial complex – You know, I can't imagine what it's like to wake up in the morning and know you can push a button and destroy people like that is a level of power.
That is so staggering.
You know, those of us trying to hang on by the skin of our teeth to social media.
I can't imagine having that kind of power.
And what it might do to someone to have that kind of power.
And even more terrifying, who would want it?
Yeah, well, and also, I mean, like, you do, you can kind of, like, when you mentioned with the social media stuff, you can kind of gauge it through, like, a little bit of what you have, like, the fact that you have, you know, have, like, millions and millions of downloads on your show.
You get a little bit of a feeling from that, like, oh, I really have, like, a big influence in a lot of people's lives, and that feels really nice, you know, especially if you're really proud of something you did.
So, like, just multiply that by, you know, a billion.
And you see it when Hillary Clinton's going, we came, we saw he's dead and bursts out into laughter right after, like she is drunk on her own power.
And I absolutely agree with you.
That's a major force.
Now, to what you were talking about with people, you know, the mentality that you're kind of attacking my tribe or it's an attack on me and my people.
Well, another thing that facilitates that or accelerates that feeling is that for a lot of these left wing crazy people, they are doing that.
They are telling you that America is terrible.
America is to blame for everything.
You are.
You know, it's your white privilege or the reason why Africa is bad at all is because white people made it bad.
The reason why any minority fails in America is because white people did that to them.
Like they do feed into that.
But then there's other serious people who aren't saying that.
There's people like yourself, like I said before, This isn't some lefty.
This isn't some crazy person.
These are serious people who are saying, no, listen, I'm not telling you that the nation, right, forget the state, the nation of America is bad.
I love the nation of America.
I love the country.
I hate the government.
It's a different thing.
And if you have a conflict between, like you were addressing this on your live stream the other day.
It's not to say that Iran treats their people well or okay.
They don't.
It's horrible.
It's not to say that the average IQ in Iran is the exact same as the average IQ in America.
It's not.
It's not that their culture is as good as ours.
None of those things are true.
But it's like if you had two guys who got into a fight at a bar and one of them walked over and just punched the other guy at the bar and then a fight breaks out and that's how the fight started.
And you were to say, well, yeah, but you know, like a cop comes and they're trying to solve the crime.
And you were to say, yeah, but the guy who threw the first punch, you know, he's really nice to his wife and his kids.
And this other guy who got punched, he's pretty crappy to his wife, never goes to his kids baseball game, you know, is really bad.
Wouldn't you be like, yeah, but that's not really the issue here.
The issue with this event at the bar, this fight is who was the aggressor?
That's the issue.
And if you're talking about foreign policy between the United States and Iran, the question is, who is the aggressor?
And that is obviously the United States of America's federal government.
And it's not just, you know, like your local representative.
It is the deep state.
It is the CIA.
It is the same people who have been trying to unseat the duly elected president for the last two years.
Even before he was elected, they were trying to take down his candidacy.
Those are the people, they are the aggressors in this situation.
From overthrowing the elected government in 1953, all the way to present day, they have been the aggressors in this situation.
I said to one person on Twitter the other day, they were arguing with me about whether or not they're the aggressors, and it's as simple as, you know, the example we've all used a million times, just put the shoe on the other foot.
Just tell me that Iran overthrew a democratically elected government here and propped up a dictator, and then when we take our country back, they invade Canada, And Mexico.
And then they lie for years, saying we have weapons that we don't have, that, you know, my entire life, since the late 80s, I remember, you know, they're three years away from the nuke.
So it was all lies.
And then they're saying, and by the way, that was the justification for invading Canada.
It was that we had these weapons that they didn't have either.
And now they're saying we have them.
I mean, come on, who's the aggressor here?
And it's the United States of America's federal government.
Those are the aggressors.
That's what matters in this conflict.
Well, and the basic fact when people say it's an attack, an attack on an embassy is an act of war.
It's like, okay, I mean, I get that justification, I understand that, you know, but the question is why is there such a giant expensive embassy there?
Because America invaded Iraq.
Now, one contractor got killed, some people got wounded, that's very bad, and my heart goes out to the family members and all of that.
Bob, we're talking hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and that's direct deaths, indirect deaths from the destruction of the medical system, the destruction of the sewage and clean water system, the destruction of the general infrastructure that keeps us alive.
I mean, you have a power outage and it's like, oh my god, I can't recharge my tablet, it's the end of the world, I might lose 50 bucks worth of groceries.
How about you have your entire electrical grid knocked out for years?
How about you can't get clean water?
How about you're wandering through the rubble where radioactive weapons have been used that is corrupting your very DNA to the point where you give kids genetic problems for generations?
I mean, we're not just talking Agent Orange in Vietnam, but we're talking about the depleted weapons that have been used in Fallujah and other places.
And that view from outside the empire It's really not transmitted to people inside the empire.
I mean, the government is really two-faced.
The government at home is restrained by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to a large degree.
My God, do you see the true face of the government when it's out there wandering the interstellar amorality of international conflicts.
That's where the mask comes off.
And I think it's also partly a warning to Americans.
It's like, yeah, you know, you can have some freedoms because they're kind of productive.
They generate revenue for us when you can choose your own jobs and all that.
But, you know, what we did to Fallujah?
That's what we're capable of.
So maybe you want to stay in line a little bit there, people?
Yeah.
Oh, no, absolutely.
I mean, it's like if somebody was a You know, if there was somebody who you knew was, like, abusing children, would you trust them to babysit your kid?
I mean, if they're just like, well, no, we don't treat your kid that way.
We only treat other people's kids that way.
I think I would go, no, you know what?
If you've ever abused a child in your life, you're not getting anywhere near my kid.
And that is, you know, they may not, and to be fair, they do abuse many people, you know, within our own government.
They're just not as bad because they can't get away with it.
But you know, there's, what is it, 50,000 SWAT raids a year, many of them don't end up finding anything.
If you're that person who was in that home when a SWAT team burst in and shot your dog and traumatized your kid, that's pretty damn totalitarian for that person.
But yeah, of course, look, and the other thing is that, I'm not spinning some leftist fairy tale, like everything in the Middle East would be wonderful if it wasn't for America intervening.
I'm not suggesting that at all.
But it has unquestionably made the situation worse than it would have been.
And all of this is a result, like all government programs, we're cleaning up the mess of the last intervention.
And this is, you know, you could blame a lot of people for this, but really the current situation, if we're going to start, you know, somewhat recently, This is George W. Bush's fault.
That's who's to be blamed for this.
George W. Bush and the neocons in their crazy foreign policy when they decided after 9-11 that these, you know, these Sunni radicals had attacked us and therefore we were going to use this as an excuse to overthrow every secular dictator we could get our hands on in the Middle East.
And we overthrew Saddam Hussein based off lies.
Everybody knows that at this point, all based off lies started this war that, as you were saying, killed so many people and handed Iranian influence in the region right to Iran.
It was a gift to Iran.
All the predictions about how, you know, the democracy would sweep the region or they would embrace Jeffersonian, you know, Republicanism.
This was all craziness.
And we put the Shiite government, by the way, all these people that we're fighting right now, we fought the Iraq war for them.
We gave them the government.
Okay.
And then around 2006, 2007, They started what was dubbed the redirect, where they basically decided, you know, we've really given Iran all this influence in the region, and Iran is the enemy of some of our allies, you know, who we have to fight these wars for.
And so we've got to now redirect and switch back to trying to stomp out the Shiite influence in the region.
And this was why we went after Bashar al-Assad.
It had nothing to do with him killing his own people.
That was in response to the start of that civil war.
And the most important detail to all of this is that, you know, what Barack Obama did, and Barack Obama just picked up the ball from George W. Bush and continued these horrible policies, what Barack Obama did was treason.
He committed treason.
That term gets thrown around a lot.
You know, like John Brennan said, Donald Trump committed treason by speaking to Vladimir Putin and criticizing the CIA, because it really shows you who works for who in that equation.
And then to be fair, also, what I'm more sympathetic with, what a lot of people have accused the deep state of treason in trying to, you know, what we've had for the last three years has been an attempted deep state coup against the duly elected president.
And while I sympathize with them, and it is certainly wrong and a crime against the country to do that, it is not technically, by the letter of the law, treason.
But what Barack Obama and John Brennan did in Syria was treason with a capital T. They knowingly armed Al Qaeda in order to put pressure on Assad.
So they knowingly armed Al-Qaeda and when they became ISIS.
This is how they got their weapons.
This is how they rose up.
The worst of the worst.
And we supported them for strategic reasons.
And you can actually hear John Kerry on a secret tape being recorded talking about this stuff.
So that's what we did.
And this was all to put pressure on Iran.
And now, then they went into Iraq and Obama had to go back into Iraq to fight ISIS because they didn't really follow the plan.
And they started killing a bunch of journalists and stuff in Iraq.
And then we were fighting on the side of the Shiites again.
So just this recently, we were fighting a war on the side of these people who were now killing over there.
It's so, the foreign policy, you couldn't even put this in a novel, because they would be like, this is too ridiculous and confusing, that you're fighting on both sides of this conflict, just killing people and making the situation worse.
Well, it's a funny thing.
So I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy between art and life.
So I did a show not too long ago on crime and punishment.
I know this sounds like a real non sequitur, but I'll loop back and we'll get there.
And I've been watching, I'm a big fan of Reese Witherspoon because, you know, like forehead to forehead, it's just the way we communicate.
And she's on a show called Big Little Lies, and you know, spoiler alert, there's a crime and these women are, and they feel guilty, and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment feels guilty, and there's a guy, I played Macbeth when I was younger, who kills a king and can't sleep because he feels guilty, and that's sort of how things work in novels.
It's this big, you know, boy, you know, you'll sleep no more, and your relationships will be destroyed, right?
And this capacity to feel guilt at wrongdoing, to feel bad, to have a conscience, to have empathy, to have self-reflection and so on.
My God!
What a load of bullshit fiction that is for the elites.
You know, I couldn't help but be struck, the two little stories pop in about George Bush the Younger, right?
So one is, he loves, he's on some Air Force one and he's showing people, here are the paintings I did, I got them on my iPad, you know, and look at these lovely little paintings that I, like, Okay, it's great that you're painting things, but you really painted the Middle East with the blood of the innocent, you know?
I mean, there are oopsies like, oh man, you know, I had a bit of echo on my live stream, and then there's oopsies like, holy shit, I killed half a million people, and there's nothing.
And what is it, more recently, Ellen DeGeneres was like at some sports event, and she took a selfie with George Bush, you know, just smiling, she made up a little selfie, isn't that cute?
Like that weird thing at the Hollywood Oscars, right?
And he's not showing up as Macbeth.
He's not like, oh man, I can't sleep.
I can't believe I started this war.
You know, it's cost, you know, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
It's destabilized the region and it's based on a lie.
And like, there's, hey, I'm at a ball game.
Take me out.
I'll take a hot dog and beer.
And it's like, holy shit, these people.
are not like us.
Like, holy shit are these people not like us.
Like, foreign to any realm of human decency and empathy.
Strangers in a strange land, aliens among us, you name it.
And they're the ones who have the power, and we're the ones who have to give them money.
And it's like, I think when people get that, you gotta be skeptical of everything.
Well, and no, you're absolutely right.
I mean, look, this is a system where sociopaths rise up to the top.
Like, not exaggerating, murderous sociopaths.
And why do you think Bernie Sanders is not allowed in?
It's not.
Why is the DNC cheating?
And he gets kind of the Ron Paul treatment on TV where they'll be like, well, the poll has Joe Biden in first place and Elizabeth Warren in third.
And you're like, wait, who was second in that poll?
Why wasn't Bernie Sanders?
Well, it's not Bernie Sanders isn't.
There's none of his policies that are really like that out of the statist mainstream.
I mean, I know he calls himself a socialist, so.
So what he believes in Medicare for all and the Republicans believe in Medicare for old and poor.
Okay, so he wants it a little bit bigger than they do.
It's not really such a contrast as they would, you know, make it out to be.
The problem with Bernie Sanders is that he's not a killer.
And I think they're not sure that he would be a killer.
And this was the problem with Ron Paul, too.
They know he's not going to pass through repealing entitlement programs.
That's the problem with him.
He's clearly not a killer.
He's not going to go on board with mass killing campaigns.
He might actually have a conscience about that stuff.
And as I said before, the problem with Donald Trump, and he comes at it because Trump is such a unique Figure he comes at it from a different point of view what i think donald trump sees is and this is what he always ran on is he comes at it like from this instinctual business man point of view and donald trump has never been somebody who you're like well he's obviously.
A really, really deep thinker who's read all of the, you know, like, who really has read all of the briefings and understands and has read, like, philosophy and really has read... No, he's an instinctual guy.
We can generalize that to pretty much anybody with a reality TV show or, you know, a game show, which is like The Apprentice.
Anybody, you know, no offense to the Kardashians, but, you know, we're not going to put them up, Praetorian scholar ranks.
No, but what Donald Trump does have is like these genius level instincts, like it's really he's an incredible human being.
I mean, look, just, you know, is a guy who was, you know, became the most famous real estate developer ever ran a billion dollar business, wrote one of the most popular books ever had the number one show on television.
Then dipped his toe into politics for the first time ever and became president of the United States of America.
It's like, there's something about this guy.
It's so funny when anti-Trump left-wingers are just like, you stupid.
You know, it's like, just dismiss him with that.
It's like, did you, did you listen to that track record?
I mean, there's something going on here.
And what Donald Trump saw immediately.
Was he just goes, what the, his version of the point that you were making on your last show because empire is a losing business.
This is, this is bad business.
We're spending trillions of dollars over there and it's just make killing people and making the situation worse.
I got a business idea.
If you just took over a company and saw that you'd go, yeah, we're cutting that program.
This program doesn't make any sense.
So that's simple.
Oh, what is, he looks at NATO and he goes, wait, so we're, you know, 20 plus trillion in debt and we're subsidizing the defense of rich countries.
No.
No, we shouldn't be doing that.
That's stupid.
This is stupid business.
So he just very instinctually grasps these things.
But what is, again, the crime is not that he's separating children from their families.
John Brennan doesn't care about separating children from their families, okay?
He's separated hundreds of thousands of them from their families.
The crime is that he is questioning the empire, and you're not allowed to do that.
That's the whole business of being in an empire.
You can never question whether we're a... And by the way, has anyone ever given a good answer of why we have to subsidize the defense of rich countries in Europe?
No, there is no answer.
There's no answer!
Or why U.S.
commandos are in 75% of the world's countries and why there are 800 military bases and why the fuck, excuse my French, why the fuck is America still in Germany and Japan more than 70 years after the end of World War II?
Because of the Benjamins and because of the power.
Right.
And it only, once you understand that it's an empire, everything starts to make sense.
Then you understand it.
And then you start to even realize that their language is, in some way, correct.
Like, it's almost like if you, you know when people say, and I mean correct from their flawed perspective, but it's like if people, if you granted that the state Uh, owned all of us.
If you, if you granted like, like from some first acquisition of property or something like that, that the state owned the entire country, well, then they're really not as criminal an organization as you would think of.
Like if, if you grant that we're slaves and they're rulers, well then from that perspective, well, sure then.
Okay.
So yeah, you get, they get to charge us rent for being here, but you know, of course that's, that's granting something I don't want to, but if you grant the empire.
Then all of a sudden, what they're saying clicks.
It's like they say Iran is a threat.
Well, any normal human being, you'd be like, Iran?
How could you argue that Iran is a threat to the United States of America?
I mean, I remember Ron Paul in the presidential debates used to say this.
He's like, you know, we're talking about, they'd be like, well, what if Iran nuked us tomorrow?
Then what would you do?
And he goes, you know, you're talking about a weapon that they don't have with an air force that doesn't have the capability to deliver the weapon, even if they had the weapon.
So like, what are we talking about here?
The idea to any normal person that Iran is a threat to the United States of America is crazy.
But they are, in some ways, a threat to the empire.
They're a threat to our ability to have complete control of that region, in the same way Russia is a threat, in the same way Hezbollah is a threat to Israel's ability to occupy southern Lebanon.
I mean, they are actually a threat to Israel's ability to occupy southern Lebanon.
They ran them out of there.
So no, they're not a real threat to anything else, but if you look at things from that angle, That's where it makes sense to all of these elite sociopaths.
So it's like, yeah, you're not allowed to be a threat.
Well, there is also the hornet's nest argument as well, that when you have a panicked population, they'll hand over their rights in return for an illusory security.
I mean, you couldn't get the Patriot Act without 9-11, you couldn't get the mass surveillance without the War on Terror and so on.
And so you say, oh, the big danger is, what was it, Condoleezza Rice said, we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud like Saddam Hussein had any capacity to nuke an American city or would.
But the reality is, and I talked about this recently, just in terms of the blowback potential is absolutely staggering.
You cannot have over 170 million foreigners visiting the US every year, importing a million people from all over the world, very little vetting going on of any kind, and be constantly out there provoking everyone.
Because sure, I mean Iran cannot fly a fat boy style bomb over an American city, but you poke that hornet's nest enough and there are six million different ways from Sunday that they can make the life in America extraordinarily difficult and very short for a lot of people.
And I'm not even going to go into the details, everybody knows that.
But then, of course, so then what happens if there's going to be some blowback, as there will be, inevitably, what's going to happen?
Well, oh my gosh, they got through!
Sorry about your rights, but, you know, we're gonna have to shave them back just a little bit, or maybe a whole lot, just to keep you safe.
And it's like, well, You're the guys who kind of put us in danger by provoking this hornet's nest, and you're the guys who keep obeying what the terrorists want.
I mean, the 9-11 terrorists are very clear, as I've talked about before, very clear about what they wanted.
They wanted to draw the U.S.
into a Middle Eastern conflict so they could get access to American troops and harm them, and they also wanted to bleed the Treasury dry and destroy the Empire.
Uh, fiscally, which they're certainly on the route to doing, so maybe if you guys didn't do exactly what the enemies wanted on a continual basis, that would be a pretty good start, because they gave you a menu of everything they wanted to cook, and you slapped on a chef recipe and said, let's go!
Let's get to town, let's do exactly what they want, because it's not about protection, it's about power, and it's about sadism.
Yeah, look, there's so many good points that you just made there.
You're absolutely right.
And the thing is that they take it as, of course, we're doing exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted to provoke us into.
That's what all of this is.
And the justification, the reason why we can never leave Afghanistan is that, well, I mean, the lesson of 9-11, from their perspective, is that if you're not in Afghanistan, that's where they're going to plot the next 9-11.
As if there's something magical about Afghanistan that you can just plot attacks there so that that's where they'll go.
But the lesson of 9-11 was none of that.
They didn't even plot 9-11 in Afghanistan.
They plotted it in Germany and they got in through visas.
It was an immigration issue from the very beginning.
And so you're absolutely right.
Of course, the entire flooding of migrants into Europe is all because of these wars.
It's all because we destabilize these regions.
I mean, it doesn't help that there's like a problem with radical Islam and it doesn't help that there's a welfare state in Europe.
But both of those things existed long before any of these these huge migrant crisis happened.
It's when we destabilize the region, particularly as you've done great work on overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi.
But so this is so all of this was was is very, very related.
And the other thing that you were talking about before and I just thought about mentioning, which is really there's two clips that I've played several times on my podcast, which is When you're talking about the, you know, the lying us into the war in Iraq or the mushroom cloud line.
So there's really fascinating moments when politicians are honest.
Doesn't happen very often, but there's a few, there was this one moment that I recommend people go check out where Chuck Todd was on Rachel, I'm sorry, not Chuck Todd.
Chuck Schumer was on Rachel Maddow's show.
And he's going through his, this is right before Trump got into office.
It was when he was president elect January, 2017.
And they're, they're going, he's going through his rehearsed, you know, scripted political talking points.
You know, you can't be president by tweet and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then Rachel Maddow goes off script and she goes, you know, Donald Trump just tweeted this.
I hate to put you on the spot, but he just tweeted something and it was criticizing the intelligence agencies.
And, and Chuck Schumer has an honest moment and he goes, wow.
You know, I mean, if he's going to criticize the intelligence agencies, let me tell you, they have six ways till Sunday to screw you over.
And that basically describes the entire Trump presidency, and take it right there from the top Democrat in the Senate.
And the other moment that I wanted to just mention quickly, which I played on my podcast the other day, was very recently, Nancy Pelosi was being asked about the impeachment of Donald Trump.
And she said, someone asked her, well, why didn't you impeach George W. Bush, but you are impeaching Donald Trump?
So Nancy Pelosi starts talking, and she's trying to prove How obviously this impeachment really means something.
And she says, she goes, um, she goes, look, there were a lot of people who were pushing me to impeach George W. Bush.
And let me tell you something.
I was on the intelligence committee.
So I saw the intelligence.
I knew Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction and they were lying to the people, but you know, I didn't think it was the right time, blah, blah.
But the point she's trying to make is like, I didn't even impeach that guy.
So, you know, when I impeach, it really means this is a worthwhile impeachment.
But of course, what she just said, without thinking about it, is that lying us into war, this mushroom-clad business, was all lies.
And lying us into a war where hundreds of thousands are killed, millions are displaced, trillions are spent, and thousands of our own, you know, the bravest men in our society are just, you know, either wounded or killed, that's not impeachable.
But yet, if a CIA agent decides to be a whistleblower, that is an impeachable offense.
And I think that tells you everything you need to know.
Well, she was on the Intelligence Committee, which meant she knew what the intelligence agencies could do to you if they didn't like you so much.
And that really is the political education that people with, you know, one squinty eye on the process are getting as the result of Trump getting in.
You know, there's a lot that he's done that is positive, there's some he's done that is negative, but certainly, you know, as far as tackling immigration, as far as getting the wall done and all that, he's just fighting back against such a relentless series of attacks that people, I think, are getting a real sense of why things hadn't changed before.
You know, this guy who gave up billions of dollars and a huge amount of peace of mind and a graceful end to a long career to go and battle the deep state and try and get the will of the people imposed.
Boy, are people ever getting an education on what it's like to try and change a system that's dedicated to its own survival and perpetuation rather than serving any needs of the people.
Yeah, and I think he might be getting an education on it too.
I mean, I think Donald Trump, you know, I think he did, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't presume to think that he didn't understand how daunting this undertaking was, but I've seen certain, um, you know, press conferences of his where it seems like even he can't quite believe that they'd come at him with some of the stuff that they're coming at him with.
Like that, that he didn't quite realize what it was going to look like.
You know, when you say drain the swamp, And, you know, you oppose the empire and Donald Trump, like, let's not forget as a candidate, it's not just he didn't just like kind of hint at going in the right direction.
You know, what I was talking about before with Barack Obama and John Brennan committing treason.
They're treason.
Like, they should be tried and locked up for the rest of their life for arming hostile enemies of the United States of America.
Some of the only legitimate enemies that we have.
I mean, if there's any group that you'd be like, OK, well, that's fair to say a legitimate enemy of the American people.
It's Al Qaeda.
I mean, that's the one.
And they sided with them.
Well, Donald Trump in the campaign said And I know you remember this.
He said, they asked him about ISIS and he said, Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS.
And then they asked him to walk that back because there's no way you could possibly mean that.
And he said, I meant exactly what I said.
They created ISIS.
Now that was a shot to the deep state that it's like, we're at war.
And they took that seriously.
And that's why everything from the Russia investigation, the Mueller investigation and this impeachment, that's that's what this is all about.
And and I am somewhat sympathetic to Donald Trump, even though he's done a lot of things that I think are very bad, that he did.
All the good people who he put around him were systematically removed.
I mean, he did come in with some people.
He came in with Michael Flynn, who was good on Syria.
He came in with Bannon, who was good on Syria.
KT McFarlane was even good on Syria.
They're all gone.
I mean, they all got one by one systematically removed, and now he's got people around him who are leading him into this disaster.
Well, and where you take your half scraps of good news where you can, Assault is better than murder.
And, you know, half-starving is better than fully starving, and drone strikes are better than ground wars.
And I do see him as kind of holding back this tide of bloodlust that everybody else was just surfing and benefiting from in the past.
I think he is kind of doing that none shall pass Gandalf moment on the bridge with the demon of war circling and trying to get past.
And, you know, that's a tough thing.
And it's almost like Yeah, you know, like you let out a little bit of blood to save the body, so to speak, like you get a head injury and they gotta cut your skull to let your brain expand a little and it's almost like he'll give them this bloodlust vial of blood to the vampire.
satiation in order to ward off something worse.
Now, of course, everybody who's a purist, and I, as an abstract guy, I'm definitely a purist, but, you know, you've got to wade into the muck to some degree if you want to have, if you want to deal with real-world events.
I think he's giving them their taste without giving them the whole meal and hoping that that's going to satisfy them for the time being, and that is probably about as noble a thing as he can get at the moment.
Yeah, and you have to think with the Trump presidency, you have to look at what we've gotten, what we've gained from it.
And it's nothing to laugh at.
And it has nothing really to do with policy.
I mean, there's been a few policies that were good.
You know, like I like some of the deregulation in the energy sector was very, very important.
I think that the corporate tax cuts, I would have liked to see steeper individual tax cuts, but you know, they were good, better than what we had, and there's been some good.
But the real benefit of Trump being president was that he has exposed The corporate press in a way that nobody else in our lifetime ever has.
He has popularized the idea that there is a deep state.
He's kind of drawn them out of the shadows where they always operated.
We've never seen a president at war with the deep state like this before.
I mean, maybe Kennedy or something like that, but not in today's day, and so that in itself Can and he has so as Tucker Carlson has pointed out Donald Trump has started many of the most important conversations He's asking why why are we in these wars?
Why are we in NATO?
What's the point of all of this?
Why shouldn't we be friendly with Russia?
You know really really important questions, but I just I think You know, it goes back to the point that you've been making since the very beginning of Freedomain Radio, which is that the idea that you're going to infiltrate the mafia and turn it into a human rights organization is It's going to be really, really tough to do that.
And it's, you know, even as you see, it's the whole system is it doesn't even matter how many good people you elect.
Donald Trump will try to, you know, try to pass a fraction of his immigration policy.
It gets struck down by the courts.
He just murdered a high-level member of a foreign government without congressional approval.
No one's given him any—like, there's no legal pushback on that.
But if he tries to implement any of his policy that he was elected for, that will be struck down in the courts, or it'll be a battle for years.
Believe me, the eminent domain issues will be tied up in courts forever if he tries to, you know, actually complete building the wall.
It's just an unworkable system if you're from the perspective that what we're looking for here is limited government or no government or liberty in any sense.
That's not what it's there for.
Well, let's close off with – well said.
Let's close off with incentives because I've really been sort of Rubik's Cubing this in my brain over the last little while.
Just this horrible concentration of incentives for war – Obviously the state loves the war, military-industrial complex loves the war.
A lot of soldiers, of course, they didn't deploy in order to play Nintendo and do some knitting.
But the media, of course, it really struck me in 1953 when Theodore Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit Roosevelt, The first thing he did when he wanted to overthrow the elected or the legitimate head of the Iranian government was he began to work with the press.
He bribed the press, he got the press to start running all of this material.
And the press of course, the media, We've got Donald Trump, who got in, I think, to a large degree because of social media, opposing the deep state, opposing the media, fake news and all that, at the same time as you have alternative media or the unbought, unpaid-for media, the independent media, deconstructing the propaganda in real time.
So when the New York Times refers to a terrorist as an austere religious scholar, when they start defending the guy who was just drone struck and all that, who was a terrible guy, no question, That, to me, is really fascinating, that you have people who finally do represent the will of the people, which is the unbought, non-corporate media, at the same time as you have somebody in the White House.
It's like the battle of the high and the low combined against the middle, that you have those without power but who have Some voice.
You have those with power but who are opposed by the powerful.
And then you have the media in the middle trying to tip the balance towards the deep state and towards the empire and towards war.
And then you have those of us desperate on the fringes to keep these wolves from the sheep as best we can.
It's a really powerful mix of incentives.
And we have like wing integrity in a prayer, you know, facing this shaky de-platforming issue at every turn.
The media and the profit that they make off war and this relentless drive that they have to just deconstruct everything decently around the West, that to me is where the real battle still lives.
It's not even so much in politics.
I think the real battle is in media.
And that's something I'm very honored to be a part of.
I know you are as well.
How do you think that's going to play out, and what would you say to other media creators out there, you know, on the edges of the solar system, so to speak, who are trying to make themselves heard in this battle?
Well, it's a tough situation, and it's, you know, in hindsight, you know, it's not really that shocking that you see all of this big tech censorship, and then the really nefarious kind of, like, It's one thing when they just kind of ban people or de-platform them, but then there's the stuff that I know you've been dealing with that a lot of good people have been dealing with, where it's just kind of like, oh, all of a sudden your numbers just kind of freeze, or all of a sudden you're just kind of pushed down in the search.
I must be getting bad at this!
You know, somehow you have like, you know, your subscribers...
Either freeze or your subscribers are going up, but your view counts go down like these things that obviously don't make sense and you know, let you people search for you and can't find you.
They don't recommend your your stuff that we even though they've searched for you a lot.
It's it's um, you know, but if you look back at it, it's like well, yeah, this was the the elites Achilles heel.
That they lost their gatekeeper status to who was allowed in the conversation and who wasn't.
So of course they're going to go after that.
I mean, this is, look, you got to understand what we're up against and as you were getting at before, this is no joke.
These are people who are making, you know, there's hundreds of billions of dollars involved in the industry of killing children.
So what do you know about these people?
You know that they're willing to kill children and they're making hundreds of billions of dollars.
What do you think they're going to do if that's challenged?
They're not going to hesitate to fight back.
I mean, that's and that's what's going on.
And I don't know.
You know, I don't I don't know what the the answer is.
I know it's definitely not giving the government, you know, control over over what's being said.
Is there an argument that there should be rules against, you know, people being allowed to be banned?
Possibly.
You know, I mean, I don't know.
I don't know exactly what the answer is.
What I've found is you have to try to have as many, you know, have your stuff on as many platforms as you can.
Try to start your own thing in any way that you can.
But of course, the incentives, as you mentioned before, The incentives are all to find a way to shut all of this down, and they're doing a decent job of that, you know?
These guys are good.
There's a reason why they've been winning all this time, and we haven't.
These guys are good.
I mean, you look at, just to your point on incentives, you look at Meet the Press, and it's like, it's Meet the Press on NBC News, the longest running show on television, I believe, and they're like, brought to you by Boeing.
You think a lot of meet the press viewers are in the market for a 747 or a fighter jet or something?
It's like, no, they're cutting a check to meet the press.
And now we're going to hear from NBC News analyst John Brennan.
And he's going to tell you how the CIA is doing everything great.
And that's, you know, this is this is the game.
And I don't know.
Just keep speaking the truth to as many people as you can.
That's all I'm trying to do.
Well, thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
Quick shout-out as well, if you want to tell people where to find you on the Internet and how to consume your excellent material, and in particular, a Twitter account, because it's really, really lit.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
On Twitter, it's at ComicDaveSmith and GasDigitalNetwork.com.
You get all my stuff there.
That's kind of our platform that we're trying to do our own thing and prevent against the coming bannings, the next round of them.
And it's just always an honor to be on your show, Stefan.
Like I've said, I say almost every time I'm here, but I've personally gained so much from all the work you do, so it's really an honor to be here.
My pleasure.
A great pleasure to chat with you.
We'll do it again soon.
Happy New Year and give a kiss to your baby and thanks again for your time today.
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