True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 246: Deep State 102
Aired: 2022-08-24
Duration: 01:29:58


=== What's Up With White Women? (10:54) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey Liz, actually, you know what?
[00:00:01]  Never mind.
[00:00:03]  Hey, Google, what's up with women?
[00:00:05]  According to Google Books, as a white woman, ask yourself, are you upholding or fighting racism?
[00:00:11]  What's up with white women is a practical guide for white women who are interested in becoming more effective in their cross-cultural, anti-racist practices.
[00:00:20]  Dot dot dot.
[00:00:22]  Could you imagine going over to someone's house and you're like looking through their fucking books and there's just what's up with white women?
[00:00:28]  Dot, dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot.
[00:00:55]  Hey, Liz.
[00:00:56]  Yes, Maris.
[00:00:58]  Okay, cool.
[00:00:59]  So she can do it good, but you can't.
[00:01:00]  Wait, was I supposed to just not say anything?
[00:01:02]  No, you pause for like five seconds while you look it up and then you didn't ask me anything.
[00:01:08]  Look, I fried your mainframe.
[00:01:10]  Hey, fucked up.
[00:01:11]  Don't put it on me.
[00:01:12]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:12]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:13]  Hey, everybody.
[00:01:14]  My name is B. Race Belden.
[00:01:19]  The cool cherry popping daddy.
[00:01:22]  Oh, now you're embracing it.
[00:01:24]  No, I'm actually a non-rockabilly cherry-popping daddy.
[00:01:26]  Oh, my God.
[00:01:27]  In four months, you're going to be like, so now that I'm super into rockabilly.
[00:01:31]  I'm not super into rockabilly.
[00:01:32]  And of course, we are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:36]  And we, of course, have Skizo on the stand-up bass.
[00:01:42]  We have Mr. Monkey Bone.
[00:01:43]  He's playing that slide guitar.
[00:01:47]  And then, of course, we have, hey, Google.
[00:01:50]  What's Psychobilly?
[00:01:52]  According to Wikipedia, Psychobilly is a rock music fusion genre that mixes elements of rockabilly and punk rock.
[00:01:59]  It's been defined as loud, frantic, rockabilly music.
[00:02:02]  It has also been said that it takes the traditional.
[00:02:06]  Okay.
[00:02:07]  Wow.
[00:02:07]  That was takes the traditional and does what?
[00:02:10]  I have.
[00:02:10]  She just stops.
[00:02:13]  Hey, Google.
[00:02:14]  Wait, hold on.
[00:02:15]  Hey, Google.
[00:02:16]  What's Monkey Bones IMDb rating?
[00:02:20]  Sorry.
[00:02:21]  I don't have any information about that.
[00:02:22]  Shut the fuck up.
[00:02:23]  Don't fucking defy me like that.
[00:02:25]  Hey, Liz, what's Monkey Bones IMDb rating?
[00:02:28]  Extremely not as high as it should be, as we know.
[00:02:32]  Answer.
[00:02:33]  Monkey Bone.
[00:02:34]  Here's a vibe.
[00:02:36]  We do.
[00:02:37]  We do be knowing that.
[00:02:38]  We do know that.
[00:02:40]  Real quick.
[00:02:41]  I think there was another question you wanted to ask, Google.
[00:02:44]  That's interesting that you said real quick because this shall be anything but.
[00:02:51]  Okay, this is going to take some finessing.
[00:02:53]  Oh my God.
[00:02:54]  Even when a robot says this information, it's the slowest world.
[00:02:58]  Hey, Google, what's happening on November 3rd, 2022 at the Union Transfer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?
[00:03:07]  Sorry, I don't have any information.
[00:03:08]  Okay, so on 11-3, 2022, Truanon is doing their Year of the Smile show at the Union Transfer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
[00:03:17]  Tickets still available.
[00:03:19]  Well, there's still a few people.
[00:03:21]  You don't have to say it like a Google.
[00:03:23]  Okay.
[00:03:25]  Hey, Google.
[00:03:26]  On November 16th, 2022, who is playing at the Terrogram Ballroom in Los Angeles?
[00:03:34]  Sorry, I don't understand.
[00:03:36]  Well, it seems like a lot of other people don't understand either because we still have tickets available.
[00:03:41]  On the 16th of November, 2022, we are playing our second show at the Terrogram Ballroom.
[00:03:49]  Moving on.
[00:03:50]  Hey, Google.
[00:03:51]  This is your last shot.
[00:03:53]  Do you understand me?
[00:03:54]  Sorry, I don't understand.
[00:03:57]  You paid $2,000 for this, dude?
[00:04:00]  Hey, Google.
[00:04:02]  What is happening at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on November 26th?
[00:04:08]  According to Wikipedia, the Great American Music Hall.
[00:04:11]  No, no, stop, stop, stop.
[00:04:12]  San Francisco, California.
[00:04:14]  It is located on O'Farrell Street in the Tenderlawn neighborhood on the same block as the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater.
[00:04:22]  Hey, Google, who is playing at the Great American Music Hall on November 26th?
[00:04:28]  On the website, greatmusichall.com, they say Truan at Great American Music Hall.
[00:04:35]  Yes!
[00:04:36]  Wait, wait, hey, Google.
[00:04:38]  What's Truanon?
[00:04:43]  It doesn't understand the way you talk.
[00:04:45]  It doesn't understand you.
[00:04:47]  Wait.
[00:04:48]  It just didn't even acknowledge that.
[00:04:50]  Try it again.
[00:04:52]  Hey, Google.
[00:04:55]  What's Truanon?
[00:05:00]  Wow.
[00:05:02]  Check this out.
[00:05:03]  Hey, Google, what's Truanon?
[00:05:06]  According to NASA, astronauts living aboard the International Space Station grow up to 3% taller while living in microgravity.
[00:05:14]  What does it think that I asked?
[00:05:16]  Hey, Google, what's true Anon?
[00:05:18]  Here is some information about True Anon.
[00:05:20]  True Anon is a podcast about your enemies made by your friends.
[00:05:24]  Join unlicensed private investigators Liz Franczak, Brace Belden, and Young Chomsky for a show that will drive you insane.
[00:05:32]  That's pretty good, although that's not how you say my name.
[00:05:36]  Hey, hey, no, no, no.
[00:05:39]  Hey, Google.
[00:05:41]  Don't make it.
[00:05:42]  It doesn't understand you.
[00:05:44]  It doesn't understand me.
[00:05:44]  I don't know what to do with that.
[00:05:46]  Hey, Google.
[00:05:48]  How would you say that Liz talks?
[00:05:51]  Sorry, I don't have any information about that.
[00:05:54]  Hey, Google, I don't know that either.
[00:05:56]  But I do know one thing.
[00:05:58]  Liz and I have a special guest in the studio who we've had locked in the bathroom this entire time because we say we've been fumigating the rest of the house.
[00:06:06]  Now we're going to reveal to him that there was never any gas to begin with and that those two days he spent in there, well, they could have been spent elsewhere.
[00:06:13]  That's right, baby.
[00:06:14]  Pitter-patter-pitter-patter of a little baby's feet.
[00:06:16]  Here comes Aaron Goode.
[00:06:18]  This isn't funny.
[00:06:28]  It is funny.
[00:06:29]  Sorry, I'm just, oh, I'm so tired.
[00:06:32]  Oh.
[00:06:33]  Oh, I can't remember even what we're talking about today.
[00:06:37]  What's your name?
[00:06:38]  Aaron Good.
[00:06:40]  And all right, I'm not even going to get into this.
[00:06:43]  Hey, Google, what is American Exception?
[00:06:46]  According to Google Books, American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of U.S. democracy.
[00:06:52]  In particular, how we can understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich.
[00:07:04]  Dot, dot, dot.
[00:07:06]  And it's precisely within that dot dot dot that we will be exploring today, spelunking in those ellipses, as it were.
[00:07:14]  We have with us live in the studio, monitored by every single, we have Amazon here, we have Google here, we have Siri here.
[00:07:23]  Every single kind of cyber woman who is encased in a container that looks like a beets pill is hanging from our walls like so many deer heads on a hunting lodge's wooden walls.
[00:07:37]  Aaron, welcome to the studio.
[00:07:39]  Hey, it's great to be here again.
[00:07:41]  Hi, Aaron.
[00:07:42]  This is the first time we met in person.
[00:07:45]  I know we were supposed to get together and I was going to give you that poster and then I sent you on that errand to Peter Del Scott's house.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, that was cool, Aaron, though.
[00:07:53]  You came up empty-handed, but you got to meet Peter, but now we're finally here together.
[00:07:56]  It's very cool.
[00:07:58]  I will say one thing is different than every other time we've met.
[00:08:02]  First of all, you're taller than I assumed you were.
[00:08:06]  You're taller than I assumed you were.
[00:08:09]  What you do is similar to what they do in debates, where they're saying, like, oh, he's such a good debater.
[00:08:14]  Our guy's got to work it out for him.
[00:08:16]  You make it sound like you're going to be the guy from Willow, and you're shorter than average, but you're not as short as people think.
[00:08:22]  You know what's funny?
[00:08:23]  Someone recently contacted us and they were like trying to, you know, they were saying like, oh, hey, I want to come on the show.
[00:08:30]  I have blah, blah, blah, whatever.
[00:08:32]  And they're like, if it makes it makes any difference, I'm the same height as Brace.
[00:08:36]  And I want it to be like, what height do you think Brace is?
[00:08:40]  It's crazy.
[00:08:41]  I have no idea.
[00:08:42]  People think you're like 5'4.
[00:08:44]  People think I've met people and they've been like, are you braced?
[00:08:47]  Because you always say it on the podcast, but I don't think people get that you're and also, Aaron, to be clear, I'm actually two inches taller than average.
[00:08:53]  There is, I am actually.
[00:08:55]  It's average.
[00:08:56]  5'2 No, I'm not revealing my real height on the podcast.
[00:09:02]  Never reveal your true power level.
[00:09:04]  I want to make it clear though, Aaron is seven foot two.
[00:09:07]  But what is different this time than about the other 55 times that Aaron has been on this show is you hear that?
[00:09:17]  That's the sound of a hardcover book that I'm hitting with three of my knuckles, the other two encased around a jewel.
[00:09:22]  Aaron, your book is out.
[00:09:24]  And it's literally on all of our laps right now.
[00:09:26]  Are you, how do you feel?
[00:09:29]  It's been very cool for me to get this out.
[00:09:31]  It would have been cool regardless, but the fact that I got Casey Moore to do the artwork or the graphic design and Abby Martin's artwork makes it extra special.
[00:09:40]  And there's Oliver's blurb on the front.
[00:09:42]  So it really, it means more than I can really say.
[00:09:45]  It was more than 10 years of my life.
[00:09:47]  And in a way, I sort of recovered from the disappointment of the Obama campaign that I worked on.
[00:09:52]  And then I just was like, you know what?
[00:09:53]  This is not the way that it's going to get done.
[00:09:55]  I really got to understand what kind of system we're living in.
[00:09:57]  And this represents the outcome of more than a decade of work, really.
[00:10:01]  So it's very, I'm very happy to have it out.
[00:10:04]  And there's an audiobook version and it has a British guy.
[00:10:08]  Oh, wait, there is an audiobook version?
[00:10:10]  Yeah.
[00:10:10]  So some and I listened to it for the, I really had to ask me to read it.
[00:10:15]  I would have been so good at it.
[00:10:16]  You would have been good.
[00:10:17]  I agree.
[00:10:18]  The British guy adds a different element to it because I had not really listened to it until yesterday on the drive up here.
[00:10:24]  It's been out for a couple months, but I've just had other things to do.
[00:10:26]  And I'm pretty familiar with the material.
[00:10:28]  But I listened to it again and it was really funny that I heard him say in one part, the chapter of it, it's like, chapter seven, Empire Strikes Back, harder.
[00:10:38]  The rise and fall of Tricky Dick.
[00:10:41]  And so hearing him read these things is like, it was really wonderful.
[00:10:44]  He, as a Brit, had a hard time with some of the anti-British stuff in here.
[00:10:49]  I think British people understand the idea of an establishment that is top-down.

=== Extra-Legal Movements: Exceptionism Explained (11:16) ===

[00:10:54]  And so he could be of two minds.
[00:10:56]  He could be anywhere on the map.
[00:10:57]  I have no idea.
[00:10:58]  You use them as an example in your, one of the very first chapters you use, The Brits.
[00:11:04]  I will say, I like listening to audiobooks with a British narrator because often when I go to sleep, I can't just fall asleep because I have too many nightmares.
[00:11:11]  You need a British person.
[00:11:13]  I read a book until I get so sleepy that I put it down three times or it falls out of my hand three times.
[00:11:18]  And then I put on an audiobook, oftentimes John LeCarre, and I go to sleep.
[00:11:23]  Well, you got to have a British person.
[00:11:24]  I have to John LeCar.
[00:11:26]  That would be very weird to have like a southern act to do like John LeCare.
[00:11:31]  Don't smile.
[00:11:31]  His wife was just getting, she was getting her darier slapped by several of his friends.
[00:11:38]  I love how in this moment also all the words of the book change.
[00:11:41]  Like the writing changes.
[00:11:42]  Yeah, yeah, it becomes southern.
[00:11:44]  The title of the book is America Exception, Empire and the Deep State.
[00:11:50]  And it is just, it is about that America Exception that we'd like to talk to you about today.
[00:11:56]  It's very good.
[00:11:57]  It's the heart of it.
[00:11:57]  It wasn't just a catchy title.
[00:12:00]  Yeah, that's also the name of your podcast, by the way.
[00:12:03]  American Exception.
[00:12:04]  You like that plug.
[00:12:05]  But so why don't we start with that?
[00:12:08]  What do you mean?
[00:12:08]  You have this concept in the book, exceptionism.
[00:12:11]  It's not just the American exception, but this concept of exceptionism that you've coined.
[00:12:18]  Let's talk about that.
[00:12:18]  What is that?
[00:12:19]  Right.
[00:12:20]  Well, this is something in political science that is understood and theorized about to varying degrees.
[00:12:27]  And it is most famously articulated by Carl Schmidt, who was a famously or infamously became a Nazi.
[00:12:34]  And it formed the basis of the, you know, the legal regime of the Nazis, which was that if there is a state of emergency, you must empower the state to protect the state.
[00:12:45]  And that is, the state of emergency means the state must operate in a realm of legal exception.
[00:12:52]  And so his dictum, or what Schmidt's famous for saying is sovereign is he who decides the exception.
[00:12:59]  And a corollary of that is that sovereign is he also who decides when a normal situation prevails, okay, when it is not the exception.
[00:13:08]  Well, for Germany, they were really afraid of a communist revolution, and so they empowered a certain group of plucky individuals, you know, the Nazis, to deal with this problem.
[00:13:18]  And this is the rest is, you know, the rest is history.
[00:13:21]  In the U.S., this thinking about emergency gets turned into a permanent situation that's not really acknowledged.
[00:13:31]  It's not acknowledged that the U.S. operates as though it were in a perpetual state of emergency, but it does.
[00:13:37]  The intelligence agencies, the military, the security state, the national security state acts without really legal restraint in the most fundamental ways.
[00:13:49]  We know enough about this to know that it's like there's plenty of evidence that this has happened that's come out in the church committee report or Iran-Contra or Watergate investigations, but we don't, we never really get a full accounting of it because of state secrecy.
[00:14:05]  So this idea of the interminable state of exception is what I call exceptionism.
[00:14:12]  And it is an enormous power vested in the hands of the regime that prevails.
[00:14:18]  And it's not just some sort of sideshow of like funny business that, oh boy, they shouldn't do that or the security guys went a little too far, but whatever.
[00:14:27]  We're still a democracy.
[00:14:28]  It's actually intervened in domestic politics with the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.
[00:14:34]  It touches on many areas there.
[00:14:36]  And it really is something that you have to have in an empire.
[00:14:40]  If you're going to pretend to be a democracy, you can't really run an empire as a democracy with the rule of law and transparency because you're trying to plunder the rest of the world and they're going to stand up to that in different ways.
[00:14:53]  And so you've got to find ways to crush that.
[00:14:56]  And you can't go around saying that you're doing that.
[00:14:57]  So you have to do parapolitics, what Peter Dell Scott calls parapolitics.
[00:15:02]  Things in politics and actions that obscure the responsibility of who actually did it.
[00:15:07]  And that's been what we have to deal with, or that is what we have to deal with with this regime.
[00:15:11]  And we have to understand this as we think about ways to confront this regime or as we watch this empire kind of crumble.
[00:15:18]  That this is a dangerous regime.
[00:15:20]  And a dangerous aspect of it is that it can act lawlessly and it's intertwined with organized crime.
[00:15:26]  So you can perpetrate all sorts of criminal mischief to further imperialism.
[00:15:32]  And this is not a small thing.
[00:15:34]  It's something that's very important.
[00:15:36]  And so, but it's also because it's so delegitimizing, it's ignored by political science and historians by and large.
[00:15:42]  And I thought I wanted to remedy that.
[00:15:46]  Yeah, it's interesting because I think there's like a kind of a two-fold or like a double movement, right?
[00:15:51]  Because there's the state of exception where what you said, you know, Schmidt, I think other people may have heard that term from Gambin too.
[00:15:58]  And there was kind of like a resurfacing of some of his stuff on this with like a lot of the COVID policies.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:07]  And so there's this idea that that means then that people, like, and by people in the state, I'm talking everyone from like low-level bureaucrats to like the Dick Cheneys, of which there are like three, you know what I mean, of that kind of stature, right?
[00:16:20]  That they're kind of just like running around, like just saying, well, we can just do what we want because it's the, we're in a state of exception.
[00:16:26]  That's not exactly how it works, right?
[00:16:27]  So there's kind of like a two thing that there's this, yes, there is a kind of sovereign executive or centralized, we can talk about what that means and how that's changed kind of throughout the history of the US, like power that gets to set the rules of what's exception, what's exceptional and what's not exceptional, right?
[00:16:47]  But then there's also this kind of movement by the state, kind of like a gesture of the state, through which like something that is outside the legal realm or the juridicial realm, something that's extra-legal, not illegal, but extra-legal, then becomes legal as the state has like expanded its own kind of purview.
[00:17:09]  Like what I'm thinking of specifically, it's like you have a quote from, I think it's Wolfwitz, I think it's Wolfwitz, who says, like, this is not a direct quote, but you'll know it when I say it.
[00:17:23]  Wolfwitz says something like, we needed WMDs because we needed something to give the bureaucrats or something to that effect.
[00:17:30]  That was what we settled on.
[00:17:31]  What we settled on.
[00:17:32]  Okay, right.
[00:17:32]  So the idea of them being that if it wasn't WMDs, it could have been something else.
[00:17:37]  And we had a kind of array of things we were choosing from, which would have served the requirement for expanding like the legal justification for the war.
[00:17:49]  And so in that movement of expanding the legal justification, the state expands its own kind of purview, right?
[00:17:55]  And so that's the way in which something that's extra-legal becomes legal.
[00:18:00]  Does that make sense?
[00:18:01]  Yes, they find different ways to legitimize the vast amounts of prerogative power that they give themselves.
[00:18:08]  Well, they do it with various pretexts.
[00:18:10]  It was anti-communism for a long time.
[00:18:11]  that it became anti-terrorism.
[00:18:13]  Now it seems to be, you don't know that they necessarily need a reason for it now, but of course, great power competition is the new mannequin.
[00:18:21]  I think they're still working it out a little bit.
[00:18:23]  Yeah.
[00:18:24]  Things come and go.
[00:18:25]  But this is kind of, you trace through the book, like how this has taken shape over kind of, I don't know, the American century, right?
[00:18:33]  You kind of like start back in, you know, right in World War II, right when the kind of great treatise on like what this idea of the American century could be and how this, you know, state, this state of exception, exceptionism, kind of came, kind of came into its own over the next hundred years.
[00:18:56]  Right.
[00:18:56]  And this was planned by people at the height of the most progressive administration that the U.S. has ever had, which to me is instructive because the FDR administration, they empower with the State Department sanction, the War and Peace Studies Project, which is carried out by the Council on Foreign Relations.
[00:19:18]  And their vice president at the time, if you look at their report, it says Vice President Alan Dulles.
[00:19:23]  He's like one of the top three guys at the top there.
[00:19:27]  Always got to have him in there.
[00:19:29]  He's there.
[00:19:29]  And I think Alan Dulles, in a way, is the real face of the American empire when it comes down to it, which is the face of, which is the exception, which is corporate power with a democratic veneer.
[00:19:41]  And that they were able to plan U.S. entry into the war in the post-war world.
[00:19:45]  We don't have the entire study declassified.
[00:19:48]  There are still two studies.
[00:19:49]  As I understand it, there's two volumes or one, maybe one volume that's together that covers sovereignty and security.
[00:19:56]  And that one was written by Alan Dulles himself.
[00:19:58]  And Peter Del Scott and others believe that that actually called or talked about the need for some kind of intelligence agency to manage global affairs and such.
[00:20:09]  And these guys decide that we're going to go for empire at that point.
[00:20:13]  And it's related to capitalism.
[00:20:16]  These are corporate forces.
[00:20:17]  It's oligarchy in action, which is really a good way to describe empire in general in all places and times.
[00:20:24]  The difference with the U.S. is that the U.S., A, doesn't claim it's an empire.
[00:20:30]  And B, has more power than any empire that has existed in human history.
[00:20:36]  That's why C. Wright Mills called the power elite in the 1950s commanders of power unrivaled in human history, masters of organized irresponsibility.
[00:20:49]  And I think that that's a paraphrase, but that's basically what he said, and it's pretty apt.
[00:20:53]  So with the state of exception, I think it's broadly understood in like Nazi Germany as, I mean, something that I learned very early on when sort of learning about the events that occurred in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s is that much of what Nazi Germany did was technically legal, right?
[00:21:10]  But at the core of that, it's like the state can actually do whatever it wants and like whatever it needs to not only preserve itself, but to fulfill the aims of, in that case, very much unelected, well, Hitler aside, unelected controllers of the government.
[00:21:25]  And you see this in America, I think it's there has to be like these obscure layers between that and like, you know, what people actually perceive as going on, right?
[00:21:36]  And I think what a lot of people, you know, WMDs, but also in the aftermath of 9-11, I think that is sort of the most recognizable, like real, like, we are in a state of exception here.
[00:21:46]  I mean, obviously it's essentially a permanent state of exception, but like that was sort of, there's certain spikes when a lot more activity occurs.
[00:21:56]  And especially in the years after 9-11, I would say in about the decade after 9-11, especially domestically, a lot of things happened that would sort of be unthinkable, I think, to much of the general public a decade before.
[00:22:09]  Exactly.

=== Anti Democratic Conduits (15:01) ===

[00:22:10]  They were.
[00:22:11]  It did seem like a change to some people.
[00:22:13]  The Cold War was never, because the Cold War was actually largely accepted by the mainstream media on its own terms as a war between an implacable foe.
[00:22:24]  Not that only radicals really looked at it as imperialism.
[00:22:28]  So for that minority of people, they were the ones, I'm thinking of Peter Dale Scott here because he wrote so much about the events of the 1970s and the 1960s.
[00:22:42]  And this small group of people actually could trace it to earlier events.
[00:22:46]  I mean, Peter, I think, is the person who most popularized, not popularized, but he is responsible for putting it and reminding everyone that the Halloween massacre, which moved the U.S., you know, the Ford administration pretty far to the right of Nixon afterwards, after Watergate, that that was orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld.
[00:23:05]  And they, and Cheney, as I write in American Exception, Cheney was involved in trying to keep people from learning more about the crimes of the CIA during the church committee and pike committee investigations.
[00:23:16]  And then in the 90s, he worked on secret emergency powers under Clinton, and Clinton probably didn't even know these things were going on.
[00:23:23]  And then all these things are put into effect after 9-11.
[00:23:28]  And so then it becomes clear that there's this huge national security complex empowered to do all kinds of things.
[00:23:37]  And when it comes down to it, we don't even know what they're empowered to do.
[00:23:40]  There's states of emergency that have been ratified or renewed every year.
[00:23:44]  And these, we don't even know what powers the federal government has asserted for itself.
[00:23:48]  If you're a congressman, you're not allowed to know because Peter DeFasio tried to find out and he was told that we can't tell you that.
[00:23:55]  Yeah, it's even just like things that, I mean, this sounds so absurd on its face, but like, okay, with the Trump, you know, Trump getting hit up by the FBI or whatever a couple weeks ago, which is interesting.
[00:24:09]  You know, Trump in his like defense of that says, well, I had those documents because I'm able to just like the president can just declassify whatever he wants.
[00:24:17]  And I had passed that executive order, which sounds so absurd, right?
[00:24:20]  The president can just pass an executive order, which just means he signs a piece of paper that says that I can just have the power to declassify whatever I want so that anything that comes across his desk is then declassified, right?
[00:24:31]  Which is just such a like, I don't know, MC Escher of like, you know, of like, you know, kind of legal justification of just like having someone sign off on whatever, you know what I'm saying?
[00:24:41]  But that has existed since I think, I think Bush was after 9-11 in the justification of the state of exception, right?
[00:24:49]  Was the first to kind of push that forward.
[00:24:51]  And then Obama later had the same kind of executive thing.
[00:24:55]  And so it's just, it kind of then normalizes itself, right?
[00:24:58]  And so the state of, that's the whole idea is that the state of exception, it doesn't even have to continue as a kind of high-level hysteria.
[00:25:07]  It's that once, you know, once it's sort of established, it then has just now set the new kind of parameters for the state until another is established and another is established and it just kind of grows and grows from there.
[00:25:21]  Yeah, these are very complicated issues when you get down to it because on the one hand, you would think, what, Trump can declassify things without any permission as president?
[00:25:29]  And that on the that might seem alarming to us because I think a lot of us think that to the degree to the degree that Trump is empowered to do anything, it's not really great.
[00:25:39]  But the bigger, think about the alternative, which would be that the classification, the state secrecy apparatus is totally in the hands of unelected spooks.
[00:25:49]  I mean, that's kind of the alternative.
[00:25:51]  That's something that comes up in Watergate, 1971, a year before the Watergate break-in.
[00:25:57]  Nixon's trying to get Richard Helms to tell him about what the CIA knows about the Kennedy assassination.
[00:26:02]  He's saying, you know, it might come up again.
[00:26:03]  And if it does, I want to protect the dirty chicks department.
[00:26:06]  I mean, he makes this, you can hear this on tape.
[00:26:08]  This really wasn't well known until I published it in my book.
[00:26:11]  And then Jefferson Morley also published it in his book.
[00:26:14]  I got it from his blog initially.
[00:26:16]  Yeah.
[00:26:17]  So props to Morley for putting that out there.
[00:26:19]  Gotta love bloggers.
[00:26:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:22]  Shout out to old school bloggers.
[00:26:23]  I mean, it's big, I'm thinking about putting a blog.
[00:26:26]  Going to put one on the website to sort of act as a, as an alternative to the, the twitter thread, kind of thing.
[00:26:32]  Yeah yeah yeah, and i'm hoping maybe it can be a more.
[00:26:35]  But for your blog post you have to use the thread emoji just to like kind of get people acclimated.
[00:26:41]  Absolutely not, that would be a weird new thing for people to do.
[00:26:44]  They can be adapted, you can take one from the other, but the, the bigger issue is this issue of secrecy.
[00:26:48]  Yeah, it needs to be thought out.
[00:26:50]  Like if, and Nixon in that arg, in that discussion with Helms he, he says like you know, this is how is this really supposed to work?
[00:26:57]  I mean, the next, the next president comes in and doesn't even really know what the, what the government was doing beforehand.
[00:27:02]  Like this doesn't make sense, and these are all Nixon's actually pretty reasonable there uh, and so it's.
[00:27:09]  It's.
[00:27:10]  It's a fascinating thing to think about.
[00:27:11]  Who should be in control of this, this kind of secrecy, because I, I feel like this is a the key to the secrecy overriding secrecy is a major uh component of uh exceptionism and the way that we've been governed and it's uh we.
[00:27:25]  There needs to be a bigger debate about it.
[00:27:27]  Well, I mean, that's that's sort of a thread that runs through this whole thing is right is that there's, like these politicians that come and go.
[00:27:34]  Sometimes they come and go by democratic means, sometimes they come by democratic means and leave, you know, dead um.
[00:27:41]  But there is this like huge layer of unelected unaccountable really, bureaucrats whose job it seems like all right.
[00:27:49]  You know, you occasionally have this guy, maybe not a um, not a captain necessarily, but or a captain but not the navigator of the ship, if we're using that as sort of a metaphor.
[00:27:59]  But all the crewmen, all the people you know in the in the engine room, all the people who are, you know, are piloting the thing.
[00:28:05]  They are not necessarily um, loyal to the administration or or democratically accountable to anybody.
[00:28:13]  Their, their job is to actually keep a permanent presence and keep this ship sailing, no matter what, and a lot of those people think it should sail in a certain direction.
[00:28:22]  If the president disagrees with them, any politician disagrees with them, there can be some uh, some pretty serious consequences.
[00:28:30]  This is true.
[00:28:31]  This is why Alan Dulles uh sort of spat under his breath uh, toward the end of his life that oh, that little Kennedy.
[00:28:37]  He thought he was a god um and, and this is, you know the, this is the way that they would think of people who would want to redirect policy.
[00:28:45]  Uh there's, because this is um, the they have different interests.
[00:28:50]  One of the big fictions or myths of our system is the independent, whatever, whatever.
[00:28:55]  And whenever you hear that, it usually is indicative of high fuckery in some way or another.
[00:29:01]  The Supreme Court, independent, really?
[00:29:04]  No.
[00:29:05]  Independent is more or less code for subservient to the establishment.
[00:29:09]  I mean, think of the parliamentarian, the Federal Reserve, the judicial system.
[00:29:16]  These are all like made by appointment.
[00:29:18]  They're given enormous power.
[00:29:20]  And when you look at the way that they actually operate, they serve the top of the political economic hierarchy of our society.
[00:29:29]  And this is another aspect of it.
[00:29:32]  This is anti-democratic power, anti-democratic dynamics that are animating the regime.
[00:29:41]  I think it might help some of our listeners, too, to hear about some examples of that, that you have in mind, had in mind when you're writing this book.
[00:30:02]  Well, some of these puzzles of why the U.S. operates in this way and why presidents do things that are detrimental to them, it requires a resort to an explanation of the power structure in the United States.
[00:30:19]  And C. Wright Mills, writing about this in the early 1950s, did a brilliant job pointing out the interrelations between Wall Street and the military institutions and the political class,
[00:30:32]  and that it was all becoming sort of this really interlocked and coherent coordinated system of corporate power, military power, and political power working in concert to advance the interests and the fortunes of the wealthiest politically active Americans.
[00:30:53]  And so with that in mind, you think of what have they done over the years where they're asserting this kind of power.
[00:31:03]  The red scares immediately after World War II, especially ramping up in 1949 with the fall of the nationalists in China and the Soviets getting the bomb.
[00:31:14]  You see them going after people in these show trials, right?
[00:31:18]  McCarthyism, which was really Hooverism.
[00:31:21]  I mean, it was really J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that was behind this for McCarthy.
[00:31:26]  You have the purges of the State Department in those early days of people who were not, you know.
[00:31:31]  China hands.
[00:31:32]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:31:33]  There was no good, there were no good East Asia people.
[00:31:35]  And the situation in China was understood to be hopeless because the KMT were corrupt and the communists had the people on their side.
[00:31:42]  But they freak out over this saying we lost China, we lost China.
[00:31:46]  What this really means is we can't exploit China like the Western powers have been doing for the last 150 years, 200 years at that point.
[00:31:55]  And so they established these things early in the post-war world with the National Security Act of 1947, creates a CIA.
[00:32:04]  Wall Street lawyer Clark Clifford pens the one little tiny phrase that says, CIA will from time to time do some things related to the national security as assigned by the National Security Council.
[00:32:17]  Which is basically that's it.
[00:32:19]  It's a paraphrase, but that's what it says.
[00:32:20]  It sounds pretty boring.
[00:32:21]  We'll do some things that the National Security Council tells them to from time to time.
[00:32:25]  Okay.
[00:32:26]  Well, you know, that ends up meaning mind control programs, sexual blackmail operations, which you guys know a lot about, overthrowing governments, assassination techniques.
[00:32:37]  Yeah, bureaucrats love a like two-line memo that can then legal memo that can be, that is like so broad and banal sounding that it can just be interpreted as basically like a blanket cover for pretty much everything and anything right.
[00:32:51]  And these guys like Clark a hot tip to any of our uh memo writers out there, aspiring deep state, uh, we know, write broad memos, we know they're listening vague, punchy but vague term, vague things that are in legalese.
[00:33:07]  And this Clip Clifford is an interesting guy because he he's later one of the people who tells LBJ, UH in 1968 no, you cannot really try to escalate this Vietnam War for further the, the financial situation is too bad.
[00:33:22]  He gives him the talking to and then later Clark Clifford helps to organize Bccci, UH in the in the uh late 70s, you know, in the 80s.
[00:33:32]  He's connected to that whole thing.
[00:33:33]  He's just this guy that pops up as a deep statesman.
[00:33:36]  BCCI real quick for our listeners because yeah, this is BCCI emerges in the 70s in the wake of the collapse of like other illicit CIA conduits, but essentially after World War Ii.
[00:33:48]  There are all of these different mechanisms set up to allow for covert operations to be carried out.
[00:33:55]  And it's because it's apparent that this is kind of a problem.
[00:33:58]  In 1956 they write uh Eisenhower tasks two Wall Street guys named Bruce and Lovet Uh to write about the CIA, and they say they're kind of out of control and these operations are not known by anyone.
[00:34:11]  They're not known by subsequent directors and subsequent presidents.
[00:34:14]  They seem to have, they're really irresponsible and it's really undermining official U.S. policy in different ways.
[00:34:20]  They don't do anything about it.
[00:34:22]  But one of the things that they had done was establish conduits of funding.
[00:34:27]  Some of them are just banks, you know, like Castlebank in the Bahamas, which was incorporated by Paul Helliwell.
[00:34:34]  a corporate lawyer centered down in Florida who also did a lot of work for Walt Disney to set up their empire down there.
[00:34:39]  He was the guy who keeps appearing in these, creating these proprietaries.
[00:34:43]  They established the heroin connection even before they're all there before the CIA really has authorization to do it.
[00:34:49]  People from like the World Commerce Corporation, which included William Donovan, you know, the guy that ran the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA, William Stevenson, Rockefeller and DuPont money went into that and it helped to establish, reestablish the drug connection in Southeast Asia before really the before the CIA really got involved with it.
[00:35:12]  And similarly, these kind of entities like the Seven Sisters Oil Company, they really were the origin point of the coup that overthrew Mossadegh in 1953.
[00:35:23]  They had an embargo.
[00:35:25]  They controlled the world oil supply and they basically put an embargo on Iranian oil, which is like statecraft.
[00:35:30]  And when the Seven Sisters were asked to produce their documents for an antitrust investigation under Hoover, or sorry, under Truman, they said that the lawyer, a Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer, said, you know, this is the kind of thing the Kremlin would love to get their hands on.
[00:35:46]  We can't give you that.
[00:35:47]  They say that to the government.
[00:35:49]  This is the deep state at this point.
[00:35:51]  This is corporate power.
[00:35:53]  It's the power of oligarchy.
[00:35:55]  And this was in 56, right?
[00:35:57]  It's in the 50s.
[00:35:58]  No, when that happened, that was towards the end of the Truman administration.
[00:36:03]  And then Eisenhower comes in on a wash of oil cash, really brings Eisenhower into office.
[00:36:09]  And then at that point, that investigation is transferred to John Foster Dulles' State Department.
[00:36:14]  And it's a civil suit and it's settled.
[00:36:16]  Of course, John Foster Dulles was a Sullivan and Cromwell guy anyway.
[00:36:19]  So they create, we don't know even the amount of money that they have available to them.
[00:36:25]  They procured a lot of access funds to set up things like the World Anti-Communist Leagues and offshoots connected to other intelligence agencies.
[00:36:36]  I mean, and these things run.
[00:36:39]  Right.
[00:36:40]  I mean, it's a strange, that's a very strange case.
[00:36:43]  You have two basically components of the U.S. anti-common communist international para-fascism organization involved in the Abe assassination.
[00:36:52]  That's Abe's party itself, which was essentially a CIA asset created with stolen war loot, like $175 million that they got from Yoshio Kodama.
[00:37:03]  And also the KCIA is very intertwined with the Mooney church.
[00:37:08]  And it was some Mooney-related assassination.

=== Mooney's Assassination Scheme (03:38) ===

[00:37:11]  I think one of the first directors of it was a Mooney.
[00:37:14]  Right.
[00:37:15]  That's probably right.
[00:37:16]  I should go back and look at all of these because they get complicated when you start to look at the particulars.
[00:37:22]  But the pattern emerges.
[00:37:24]  And on top of the illicit funds that they are, the access funds that they required to run all sorts of mischief around the world, you have the fact that they collaborate with organized crime.
[00:37:34]  And so they become self-sustaining in different ways.
[00:37:38]  I mean, the drug trade inevitably flows into the Western financial system, but it also allows for the funding of paramilitary operations.
[00:37:48]  This is famous with the Contras, with the Mujahideen, with the Hmong tribesmen in Laos, the dirty war in Laos that the U.S. fought.
[00:37:57]  And so we don't really know what kind of power they're using or the exact ways they're doing it.
[00:38:03]  They have a lot of money to do whatever they want.
[00:38:05]  And this Epstein, you guys have covered the Epstein thing.
[00:38:08]  I had followed Nick Bryant for years beforehand.
[00:38:13]  Like right when I started to look into this, he was one of those interview guests that I thought, oh, yeah, he's interesting.
[00:38:17]  So when this stuff broke, that's immediately what I thought of.
[00:38:21]  And then as more details come out, it kind of becomes.
[00:38:23]  I'm a gawker writer, Nick Bryant.
[00:38:25]  Right.
[00:38:27]  I'm sure that's how he would like to think.
[00:38:29]  First and foremost.
[00:38:30]  Oh, no, he's not.
[00:38:32]  Shout out to Nick.
[00:38:33]  I thought, yeah, he's a fantastic guy.
[00:38:35]  Well, that's like you're like how Google characterizes you when we asked our Google bot overlord to describe Brace.
[00:38:42]  And they mentioned some other funny details.
[00:38:43]  That's all right.
[00:38:44]  Yeah, that's a real nickname, bad boy.
[00:38:47]  So not only do they have these, the stolen loot, for example, who knows how much, and gold, when you think of the price of gold now, dude, that's worth mind-blowing.
[00:38:58]  The drug revenues, additionally, the outsourcing of these things to foreign intelligence agencies, like people, certain kinds of people, we know who they are.
[00:39:06]  They really get excited about Epstein's connections to Israel.
[00:39:10]  And it kind of becomes like a borderline.
[00:39:13]  Oh, there it's the, you know, it's the Jews again, which is not the way to think about it.
[00:39:18]  They outsource things to the British or to Israel intelligence, their satellite, it makes them more deniable.
[00:39:24]  And so it makes sense to outsource these things to other intelligence agencies that are subordinated to the empire.
[00:39:32]  Saudi Arabia.
[00:39:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:33]  I love it.
[00:39:34]  Exactly.
[00:39:35]  Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda, jihadi operations and Syria.
[00:39:38]  They send all those guys into Syria.
[00:39:39]  They don't just pop up out of nowhere with like a giant caravan of new Toyotas and stuff.
[00:39:44]  Like somebody's got to pay for that.
[00:39:46]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  And somebody's got to talk to them too.
[00:39:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:39:49]  I mean, that's really the extraordinary thing that you really see ramping up in the 1970s, right?
[00:39:58]  It's just like this, these sort of evil, like, I don't know, combines of like intelligence agencies, bankers, uh, you know, politicians, sort of tinpot dictators, kind of all coming together.
[00:40:10]  And there's all of this just like endless slush funds and cash and hidden bank accounts.
[00:40:15]  And like, that's, that's really something, I mean, even the most basic, like sort of cursory knowledge of like CIA activities during the Cold War and after, of course, too, but especially during the 1970s and 80s, it's just like it all, so much of it revolves around what is essentially would be thought of as like mafia activity, right?
[00:40:34]  Selling drugs, guns for hire, mercenaries, and all this stuff going into like Swiss bank accounts or really more often not offshore bank accounts, like somewhere in the Caribbean.
[00:40:47]  Also, utility cartels.

=== Drug Enforcement Fallout (14:50) ===

[00:40:50]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:54]  Any opportunity with lots of money, it becomes an avenue for this.
[00:40:58]  Think about Fetchula Gulen, who I do often.
[00:41:01]  And his charter school empire.
[00:41:03]  I mean, that's that they just figure out this is an area where there's a bunch of money.
[00:41:07]  Let's sort of make the educational system kind of like the military industrial complex, like Lockheed used to pay bribes to everyone, and that was a CIA operation.
[00:41:15]  Now it's with charter schools, or it has been.
[00:41:17]  I don't know how much they're still doing that sort of thing, but it's anything that has a lot of money is an opportunity for intelligence agencies to get involved and manipulate things.
[00:41:46]  so it's funny you bring up the 70s actually because that is something i wanted to hone in on which is you spend a great deal of time in the book talking about tricky dick nixon and And we actually have never really, we've never really talked about Watergate or Nixon.
[00:42:04]  And this is not an episode about Watergate.
[00:42:06]  We're not going to do that.
[00:42:07]  But Nixon is such a fascinating figure.
[00:42:10]  And I think that like something that you do really well in the book is you do like you a very holistic approach to Nixon and his administration and kind of when he came in and the rise and fall of Nixon is very much a kind of you know little hinge point in the expanding American empire and the consolidation of the security state.
[00:42:39]  But like Nixon is like, I don't know, you've seen this online, right?
[00:42:42]  I feel like there's like, there's like a type of guy.
[00:42:45]  Yeah, that wants to lionize him.
[00:42:48]  Yeah, where it's like people fall into this weird trap where they're like, oh, because the CIA was after, or, you know, sections of the CIA, not even the CIA, sections of the security state.
[00:42:57]  I want to be as accurate as possible, right?
[00:43:00]  Like, we're after Nixon.
[00:43:01]  That means he's like incredibly based.
[00:43:04]  Or, you know, and people kind of fall into this weird thing with Trump as well, which is really kind of annoying.
[00:43:10]  A good heuristic for that is if you see a grown adult talking about things that are based in cringe, you can just be like, I don't need that.
[00:43:19]  You know, there's nothing I actually need to gain from you.
[00:43:21]  Yeah, I don't think that many of them are grown adults.
[00:43:24]  Won't have Bryce to push around anymore.
[00:43:26]  That's what I do.
[00:43:27]  Whenever Liz and Young Chowsky leave me, I sit alone in the studio, I start my tape recorder.
[00:43:33]  And I say, I won't have Brace to push around anymore.
[00:43:37]  But you don't turn off my tape recorder, which has been going the whole time.
[00:43:40]  That's why, yeah, that's why.
[00:43:41]  So Liz hears me say all of my invectives against him.
[00:43:45]  But go on.
[00:43:46]  Anyway, let's talk about Nixon.
[00:43:47]  Let's talk about Watergate just a little bit.
[00:43:49]  Nixon, Aaron, is he based or is he cringe?
[00:43:52]  Based or cringe?
[00:43:54]  I think that he occupies, he transcends baseness and cringeness, really.
[00:43:59]  Oh, he's the resolution of the dialectic.
[00:44:02]  In a way.
[00:44:04]  I hate when you guys resolve the dialectic.
[00:44:06]  His fate is instructive.
[00:44:08]  And it's the, in a way, I don't think, my book does not talk about vibes.
[00:44:15]  No, no, this is not a vibe-centric book.
[00:44:18]  Right.
[00:44:18]  I am not really trying to hash out the vibes so much.
[00:44:22]  With that caveat, I would say that if you watch Oliver Stone's Nixon, it kind of captures the vibe of Nixon in a particular way, which is that he is caught up in forces bigger than himself.
[00:44:37]  He knows it, though.
[00:44:38]  And he knows it, and he is struggling against it.
[00:44:42]  There are forces, I think, in a one way to think about this.
[00:44:46]  I mean, I have a weird kind of monastic existence.
[00:44:49]  I work on the podcast and stuff, and I ride my mountain bike around.
[00:44:53]  I ride around in the woods and ponder Watergate.
[00:44:56]  Sometimes it's a nasty existence, you're saying?
[00:44:58]  No, a monastic.
[00:44:59]  I was going to say you should see what I lead.
[00:45:01]  No, no, no.
[00:45:02]  It's mostly.
[00:45:03]  Can you imagine if someone is like, I lead a nasty existence?
[00:45:06]  Like, I was by the creek the other day.
[00:45:09]  Yeah.
[00:45:10]  I found a dead deer.
[00:45:12]  It smelled terrible.
[00:45:14]  So, so I think I've been thinking about these things a lot.
[00:45:18]  This is just a longer way of me saying, I've been thinking about Nixon a lot.
[00:45:21]  It's true.
[00:45:22]  I have been.
[00:45:23]  Men of a certain age do be thinking about Nixon a lot.
[00:45:26]  I mean, he was out of office before I was born.
[00:45:28]  So I'm not trying to rehabilitate him.
[00:45:33]  It's more that he's an interesting character.
[00:45:35]  I've come to realize more, and nothing I say here is not derived from stuff that's in the book, but what was happening then with the changes in the monetary system and the economic system was going to take a while to work out.
[00:45:49]  And it was going to require a time of turmoil and sort of political failure for presidents.
[00:45:55]  Like Ford and Carter both are presiding over times where the oil prices are out of their control, but they're under somebody's control.
[00:46:03]  The interest rates are jacked way up.
[00:46:06]  The security services are, you know, under Nixon had been leaking all of this stuff.
[00:46:11]  There was still fallout from that.
[00:46:13]  Yeah, the rent's too damn high, et cetera.
[00:46:15]  And so Nixon really went for the Holy Grail.
[00:46:19]  Part of what brought him down was he went for the Holy Grail.
[00:46:22]  He went for the exception.
[00:46:23]  He wanted to centralize things that were very important to the regime, and he wanted to put them more firmly under White House control.
[00:46:34]  And he has a good sense of what happens.
[00:46:36]  So wait, when you say that, can you explain to our listeners exactly what you mean?
[00:46:39]  Like, what did he want to centralize?
[00:46:42]  This, for example, the drug enforcement agency around Nixon himself, and this is where the contradictions are very hard to wrap your mind around.
[00:46:51]  And I can't explain everything perfectly, but I would point out that Nixon was backed initially by forces connected to the China lobby along with Wall Street aligned forces.
[00:47:02]  They enlisted.
[00:47:03]  They gave him money.
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:04]  And they enlist him to run against this actually New Deal progressive guy, one of the better guys that the U.S.'s Congress has ever produced, Jerry Voorhees, who at one point wanted to nationalize the Fed.
[00:47:15]  He went after standard oil for like illegal drilling practices.
[00:47:18]  And so they just red-baited, they financed Nixon, who red-baited this guy and got into Congress that way.
[00:47:24]  And then he became an anti-communist hatchet man.
[00:47:26]  Hanging out with Sinanon.
[00:47:29]  And he was just famous for this.
[00:47:32]  Like Eisenhower could be the kindly, grandfatherly character with Nixon as the kind of hatchet man.
[00:47:38]  But when he, he was actually more of a liberal in some ways.
[00:47:43]  He wanted to, he wanted domestic prosperity.
[00:47:46]  And he had, I mean, I heard Peter Del Scott say years ago in some interview, he said Nixon was perhaps the last president to have a Christian compassion for the poor or something to that effect.
[00:47:59]  And I think that he would probably include Carter with that in a little bit, but Carter similarly falls victim to these same forces.
[00:48:07]  But Nixon went, so Nixon's connected to the China lobby.
[00:48:11]  But I don't, it's hard to say how aware he is of the actual, you don't probably want somebody like Nixon to be totally aware of the drug financing angles that are the basis of some of these groups' power.
[00:48:24]  So I don't know exactly what he thought about that, but he did try to, as these things were being exposed in the early 70s by people like Peter Dell Scott and Al McCoy, he wanted to restructure the drug, the drug agencies, the drug enforcement agencies.
[00:48:37]  And he brought in people like Hunt, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy, who had been connected to drug enforcement aspects of the past, to do this.
[00:48:45]  My thing, if I can interject really quick, if there's one thing to learn from, well, that, as Nixon terms it, that whole Bay of Pigs thing, but also just like the 60s and the 70s in general, is if you have a guy with a one, like his first name is a letter and then a period, and then it's a middle name and last name that you say out loud, his ass is going to betray you.
[00:49:11]  There is like, that is the mark of a betrayer.
[00:49:14]  If it's like B. Robert Belden or something, if that was my name, Liz, you'd be in handcuffs.
[00:49:19]  I, man, B. Robert Belden.
[00:49:22]  B. Robert Belden.
[00:49:23]  I didn't forget, you know, it wasn't until Google Lady said it.
[00:49:26]  I forgot that your middle name is Robert.
[00:49:28]  It's weird.
[00:49:29]  I don't know.
[00:49:30]  It is.
[00:49:30]  It's quite formal for a name like Brace.
[00:49:32]  Yeah.
[00:49:33]  I used to tell people my real name is Gretchen.
[00:49:35]  But anyways, we did a whole episode about it.
[00:49:37]  We didn't do a whole episode about that.
[00:49:39]  But anyways, Aaron, I mean, yeah, Nixon really gets these guys.
[00:49:43]  And what it seems to me, because I'm no expert on Watergate, right?
[00:49:47]  But from what I have always understood, it's like Nixon tried to kind of get these guys on side, but they were really not working for him.
[00:49:56]  No, they were not.
[00:49:57]  And this was so the drug enforcement agency, after some different changes, they eventually settle on what becomes the DEA that grows out of this.
[00:50:06]  But Nixon wanted to get rid of the B, the Bureau for Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, replace it with this new agency.
[00:50:11]  And he had these other spooks in it who had been connected to some of the shadier parts of the CIA in the past, especially somebody like Hunt, who had established like the Latin American branch of the Anti-Communist League and been involved in other things like that and knew lots of Cubans who are also post-Bay of Pigs, involved in the drug traffic and so on.
[00:50:29]  And additionally, he wanted to reform the CIA and make intelligence, the intelligence estimates part of it more under the control of the presidency because he wanted the intelligence estimates to match what policy was to some degree, right?
[00:50:42]  For better or for worse, he wanted that.
[00:50:44]  So he tried to fire Helms.
[00:50:46]  But Helms, one way to think about what happens is, okay, the plumbers get arrested in July or June of 1972.
[00:50:55]  Hold on.
[00:50:56]  I'm going to have you back up because we have a whole like sect of listeners that I like to call Prezumer.
[00:51:04]  And they're little four to six year olds.
[00:51:06]  Little baby birds.
[00:51:09]  And we also have Zelennials, and they're equally of simple minds.
[00:51:15]  And we have Belgians.
[00:51:18]  We don't really know what to do with those yet.
[00:51:19]  No.
[00:51:20]  Let's, can we go through when we say Watergate?
[00:51:24]  Like, I want to just like paint a little, like, kind of not, it's again, it's not 101.
[00:51:29]  We don't have to go into all the details, but like, what happened that we're talking about?
[00:51:32]  Because it's not one, but two break-ins.
[00:51:35]  Well, perhaps three.
[00:51:36]  There was another one before where they didn't really get very far, but yes.
[00:51:40]  But yes, can we just back up and say, like, kind of what happens?
[00:51:43]  The Watergate is the hotel where the Democratic National Committee headquarters were located.
[00:51:48]  And then one night, these guys get arrested, and they are a combustible group of people, people like E. Howard Hunt, James McCord, and some Cubans.
[00:51:59]  Yeah.
[00:51:59]  And a guy named Lou Russell is also connected to this.
[00:52:02]  And they are doing work for the special unit that Nixon had set up.
[00:52:09]  His administration had, the plumbers, and they were doing things very similar, kind of indistinguishable from what FBI and CIA had been doing for a long time, but they were more under, Nixon was putting this stuff under the control of the White House.
[00:52:23]  So the White House starts getting into operations.
[00:52:26]  And this is to many people, they think this is problematic because, hey, the president shouldn't be involved in these kind of things.
[00:52:32]  Right.
[00:52:33]  But which is on its face reasonable to say.
[00:52:36]  However, these things were already being done by the national security state.
[00:52:41]  And so when Nixon famously, what brings Nixon down related to this Watergate business is very shortly after it happened, he said something in the White House about, let's get the CIA to ask the FBI to cover this up and say it's related to national security.
[00:52:56]  And Nixon doesn't actually know why they're in the DNC at all.
[00:52:59]  He thinks it's some sort of bungled thing that's gone wrong.
[00:53:02]  And so his response to it is, well, let's just say it's national security.
[00:53:05]  I mean, you deal with human money.
[00:53:06]  You uncover, if you peel back that E. Howard Hunt scab, you uncover all sorts of nasty business.
[00:53:11]  Just that is true.
[00:53:12]  Yeah.
[00:53:12]  Let's just tell the CIA to approach the FBI and say, don't investigate this anymore.
[00:53:17]  And that's the smoking gun tape.
[00:53:19]  That's what the crime that brings down a president, which in when you start to think of the crimes that I document in my pretty well-footnoted book.
[00:53:30]  And it's an extremely footnoted book.
[00:53:32]  Yeah, I appreciate that.
[00:53:33]  If you're picking this up and you're in the middle of the day, by the way, it's actually, it's not footnotes.
[00:53:36]  It's endnotes.
[00:53:37]  It's endnotes.
[00:53:37]  Yeah, I did go through a lot of them.
[00:53:38]  And I'm going to say, if you're like picking this up and you're like, oh my God, there's like 400 pages.
[00:53:42]  How can I read this?
[00:53:43]  Don't worry.
[00:53:43]  100 of them are endnotes.
[00:53:46]  I love endnotes.
[00:53:47]  No, me too.
[00:53:47]  That's how, yeah.
[00:53:48]  Yeah, you always got to read the citations.
[00:53:50]  Right.
[00:53:50]  If I had my way, they would be footnotes, but nobody does that anymore.
[00:53:53]  No one does it.
[00:53:55]  I miss when half the page is like an extended footnote.
[00:53:58]  Bollman style.
[00:53:59]  Good use of page.
[00:54:01]  Hogan's, if you get a 1984 copy of Jim Hogan's Secret Agenda, which is the best, still the best book on Watergate, the footnotes are there and it kicks ass that way.
[00:54:09]  Yeah.
[00:54:10]  Okay, so Watergate.
[00:54:11]  Let's get back to it.
[00:54:11]  Yeah.
[00:54:13]  Right.
[00:54:13]  So Nixon, what Nixon did was so pedestrian in terms of what the national security state had been doing, but very little was known by the American public at that time.
[00:54:23]  And what really gives the game away about it, well, there's a number of things, but when you look at what the plumbers were doing, they were supposedly failing at all these things, like the break into Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.
[00:54:36]  But as Jim Hogan points out, it's another explanation for it is they had such contact with the CIA at the time, ongoing connections to up to Richard Helms, that they probably were instead of giving the actual haul from some of these operations, like the Ellsberg break-in, instead of giving that to the office of the presidency, they were sending it to the CIA.
[00:54:58]  And so they were operating more in line.
[00:55:01]  They were probably more loyal to Helms or other people in the intelligence community at the time.
[00:55:06]  And so when they get arrested, I believe that they wanted, that McCord wanted to sabotage that and get arrested.
[00:55:14]  He's a very shrewd person and a person who had been charged with the most sensitive things in the past, like covering up the Frank Olson assassination, maybe even organizing the Frank Olson assassination.
[00:55:25]  But at any rate, when it kind of goes, there's a little bit of a problem because of the way that it unfolded in how the guy gets tossed out of a window, right?
[00:55:33]  You don't want to do that.
[00:55:34]  And so they send McCord in as the fixer to do exactly what Nixon would have wanted him to do during this time.

=== Frank Olson Assassination (15:53) ===

[00:55:41]  That's sort of ironic, isn't it?
[00:55:43]  Play the CIA card, please.
[00:55:45]  And they did this for something that was much more spectacular than a break into the Democratic headquarters.
[00:55:50]  They dosed Frank Olson with acid because they wanted to interrogate him and figure out if he was a security risk and they were worried he was going to expose secrets about the biological warfare program in Korea.
[00:56:01]  That seems to be, I mean, all indications point to that.
[00:56:05]  And so this Olson guy, or not Olson, I'm sorry, McCord fellow is kind of the exception in action.
[00:56:11]  He was also a person who ran illegal, because the CIA is not supposed to operate domestically.
[00:56:18]  James McCord ran anti-Fair Play for Cuba committee actions during the early 60s.
[00:56:24]  So he's not a marginal character.
[00:56:27]  He's not a guy who doesn't follow the chain of command.
[00:56:30]  He's not as dumb as the person who made all those mistakes that led to the arrests in Watergate.
[00:56:36]  And he is a, he's a, it's July, the summer of 1972.
[00:56:40]  There's a presidential election.
[00:56:42]  Nixon wins it, but it's, it's, in a way, it's like he's a time bomb for Nixon.
[00:56:48]  And if Nixon is going to make any of these changes that they're worried about, then this time bomb can blow up.
[00:56:54]  And McCord says as much in this famous letter, or famous if you follow Watergate stuff, where he writes a letter to a guy who's connected to the, I believe it's a White House guy, Caulfield.
[00:57:03]  And it says, if Helms is fired and this is laid at the door of the CIA, every tree in the forest will fall.
[00:57:10]  It'll be a scorched desert.
[00:57:11]  You don't want to get a letter that says every tree in the forest.
[00:57:14]  It's like you don't write that on paper.
[00:57:16]  Well, I mean, it's, you know, plausible deniability.
[00:57:19]  It could be being literal.
[00:57:21]  You know, it's like they might clear cut all of Alexandria, Virginia.
[00:57:25]  Yeah, I mean, it is, it's pretty astounding because Watergate, it's like when growing up, there was those two sort of events that like that was like the big boomer events and both kind of like, you know, Vietnam related, right?
[00:57:39]  You got the JFK assassination, and then you have Watergate.
[00:57:42]  And those are two of the sort of like the earliest cultural touchstones that I can really remember even hearing about from the from the 60s and 70s, right?
[00:57:50]  Aside from the Vietnam War.
[00:57:52]  And the JFK assassination, I feel like the general public has a much better understanding of that, even if it's the incorrect understanding.
[00:58:02]  Like they understand essentially what happened.
[00:58:05]  And I think a lot more people probably have the more correct understanding of that than maybe with Watergate.
[00:58:09]  I think with Watergate, really the popular conception of it is, it's like there were these five guys who broke in.
[00:58:15]  I mean, I didn't even know they were Cuban until I got older.
[00:58:18]  It's like, or some of them were Cuban.
[00:58:20]  It's like these five guys like broke into this hotel room for the DNC to do.
[00:58:24]  And then it's kind of like some like really big ellipsoid.
[00:58:27]  It's like Google style.
[00:58:30]  And it's like, and then Nixon has to resign.
[00:58:34]  He has to do, I'm not a crook, and they ask to resign.
[00:58:36]  And so like, what, what it sort of gets glossed over in this major way, but I mean, what you're saying here is it's essentially a deep event.
[00:58:44]  Exactly.
[00:58:45]  And I'll give you guys a little bit of a scoop here, which I don't, I wouldn't.
[00:58:50]  I wouldn't think that it was a scoop exactly, but I had a conversation with Peter about it, Peter Dell Scott, because he did so much on Watergate over the years.
[00:58:57]  And it was, this is what I think happened partly.
[00:59:02]  This could help to explain some of these mysteries with Watergate.
[00:59:05]  And when I told him, when I told Peter this on the phone, he says, you should put this out there, write this down somewhere, because this is important and you should get it out there as soon as you can.
[00:59:16]  And so even though I make this argument in the book, maybe it's not as straightforward as it could be.
[00:59:21]  So I'll make it even more straightforward here.
[00:59:24]  The things that James McCord was doing and the personage of the plumbers was such dynamite when you that even so as Nixon says, you peel that scab back with Hunt and you'll reveal a whole lot of nasty business.
[00:59:39]  This is related to the Bay of Pigs thing, which we know means a reference to the JFK assassination.
[00:59:44]  And he was correct.
[00:59:46]  The plumbers were involved.
[00:59:48]  The people that they assembled in that group, along with money that they left, which was connected to like drug laundering banks, everything that they did touched on.
[00:59:58]  So much of it touched on the exception.
[01:00:00]  For example, the money gets into the drug, the money that was in sequentially ordered bills that was basically a super highway pointing to the identity of the culprits.
[01:00:12]  Very strange.
[01:00:13]  Bitcoin style.
[01:00:14]  And it's also related to drugs and organized crime and some of these banking interests, right?
[01:00:19]  Of these secret things that the government is doing.
[01:00:21]  Some of the people like Frank Sturgis were involved in the Kennedy assassination.
[01:00:25]  Sturgis, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, with other people in Florida, put stuff out linking the assassination to Fidel Castro and so on, like the original story.
[01:00:35]  That's why Peter Del Scott knew there was a connection right away.
[01:00:38]  He wrote an article in Ramparts very shortly afterwards.
[01:00:40]  I think the first really serious article about connections between Watergate and JFK, where he says, I was already studying this Frank Sturgis fellow when all of a sudden he gets arrested at the Watergate.
[01:00:51]  So you have that angle.
[01:00:52]  One of the things that they do inexplicably is they go up to the Federal Reserve when they're doing these burglaries.
[01:00:58]  They go to the Federal Reserve and they sign in there and they try to get in there.
[01:01:01]  So they're kind of leaving their imprint there as well.
[01:01:05]  I never understood.
[01:01:06]  It's like what?
[01:01:07]  They think they're going to steal all the gold at the Federal Reserve.
[01:01:10]  No one goes to the Federal Reserve for that.
[01:01:12]  It was like an excuse to be in that part of the building, but it was like also just happens to be one of the most sensitive parts and secretive parts of the U.S. regime.
[01:01:22]  The only way it makes sense is if you're trying to get caught.
[01:01:24]  What's that movie about the first reformed?
[01:01:27]  That's what I'm going to do to the Fed and the IRS.
[01:01:30]  Well, the hair shirt?
[01:01:32]  I actually never saw it.
[01:01:33]  Well, spoiler.
[01:01:34]  I'm going to make a movie about it.
[01:01:38]  But before that, he has the hair shirt.
[01:01:40]  I'm going in there and people are going to think I have a bomb around me, but it's actually just bars of gold.
[01:01:44]  Bars of gold that I'm refusing to pay.
[01:01:47]  Someone made this point recently, but it's funny.
[01:01:49]  Sorry, this is a total sidebar.
[01:01:50]  It's funny how people assume for whatever reason, because of the aesthetics of that film, that he's Catholic.
[01:01:57]  He's Jewish?
[01:01:58]  It says reformed in the title.
[01:02:00]  He's obviously not Catholic.
[01:02:02]  But he's just a little collar.
[01:02:04]  Oh my God.
[01:02:05]  I don't know.
[01:02:06]  Anyway, I just, it's just a little funny thing about the little Christ cucks.
[01:02:10]  Anyway.
[01:02:12]  Back to Watergate.
[01:02:13]  I'm sorry.
[01:02:13]  So that aspect of it, going up to the Federal Reserve, this is another red flag.
[01:02:17]  The money is a red flag.
[01:02:19]  The having people that were connected to the Kennedy assassination, like Sturgis, but also probably James McCord, who had to be in, to be aware of things related to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that would be explosive.
[01:02:31]  Also, McCord's connections to this ability, the state apparatus to assassinate American citizens without due process, that's the exception, right?
[01:02:40]  And they do that to Frank Olson.
[01:02:41]  So this McCord guy himself, very sensitive.
[01:02:44]  Additionally, the target that they get busted at is connected to this Columbia Plaza call girl ring, which seems pretty clearly to have been a kind of sexual blackmail operation, which is, as we know, as you guys have documented, is an ongoing thing.
[01:03:01]  There's this sex angle, and this is massive.
[01:03:07]  It's like you put together the most explosive group of people.
[01:03:11]  And when you think about McCord killing Olson, that is the exception in action, right?
[01:03:17]  As I said, this is a guy who knows that when you, and what it shows us is that not only are the objectives of fighting communism and maintaining U.S. primacy like considered sacrosanct things that must be protected by the government, but also in any way possible, right?
[01:03:35]  But also the protection of the exception itself, the secrecy, the protection of the covert operations apparatus of the United States government is itself a non-negotiable parameter.
[01:03:50]  And so by putting all of these guys in action, I think that McCord and whoever was planning this was intentionally triggering parts of the government that we are absolutely not privy to, that allow for actions to be taken to protect national security above all, and that Nixon himself and the administration's attempts to, if it was going to be exposed, what these guys were actually up to,
[01:04:17]  that it would have led to a huge scandal and would have really, I mean, it led to so many things related to the government, it could have brought down the government.
[01:04:26]  And that people, they did this, I think that they did this on purpose and it was a part of it to enable things like continuity of government or doomsday project operations to come in.
[01:04:39]  And one piece of evidence for this, or one thing that suggests that this is the case, because when you look at the amount of craziness involved in all these guys, it's not like you're playing, you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon trying to say, like, well, McCord was related to a guy who did some bad things.
[01:04:54]  It's like these guys were involved in all sorts of crazy business.
[01:04:57]  Fingers in the pie.
[01:04:58]  Yeah.
[01:04:59]  Yeah.
[01:05:00]  And so this aspect of it is explosive.
[01:05:05]  And when you, you know, A. Howard Hunt mentioned this in the 70s.
[01:05:09]  He said, there's a part of the government that's charged with killing spies even.
[01:05:12]  This is in the New York Times.
[01:05:14]  He says that.
[01:05:15]  And this is, like I said, what I was trying to get at earlier.
[01:05:20]  Deep throat, if you read Woodward's book, at one point he says, this whole thing is about, is coming to a head.
[01:05:26]  People are going to start dying soon.
[01:05:27]  I'm really scared.
[01:05:28]  Everybody's scared.
[01:05:29]  It's not really even, it's not about Watergate.
[01:05:31]  It's not even about the cover-up.
[01:05:33]  It's about the entire covert operations apparatus of the United States government, and it's spectacular.
[01:05:39]  And then right after that, people, a couple people die.
[01:05:42]  Lou Russell dies.
[01:05:44]  Another person who was actually going to stage a press conference for the Republicans that George Bush had organized, he dies, a guy named John Leon was going to reveal that there was a sex, there was some sort of sex operation connected in the, yeah, in the Watergate, and also that Lou Russell himself had been talking to John Leon.
[01:06:06]  Of course, he has a heart attack and thinks he was poisoned and then he dies soon afterwards.
[01:06:10]  But he was also going to reveal that Lou Russell had planted the bug that was discovered in September after the fact.
[01:06:16]  And Russell was working with James McCord.
[01:06:19]  So, why is McCord having his lieutenant plant this kind of evidence that implicates them in more serious crimes?
[01:06:29]  It's like, why would you go to the it's like if you were arrested for murder and then you have somebody working for you, go and plant like a knife there because they're like, there's a problem because they don't have a murder weapon.
[01:06:39]  So, then you go and give them one so that they can prove your guilt.
[01:06:42]  I mean, that doesn't make any sense at all.
[01:06:44]  And so, this is perhaps what happens in Watergate and why it happens the way that it did is that these people were very familiar with the bureaucratic netherworld that they had created that was endowed with all sorts of powers to with a license to kill, basically.
[01:07:03]  And that Nixon, because he was pursuing policies they did not like and was putting power more in the hands of the president, he had to go.
[01:07:13]  There's also another aspect which you talk about in the book that I think is really important.
[01:07:17]  And this kind of ties into what you were saying about how, like, the Kennedy assassination and Watergate are kind of this like boomer.
[01:07:23]  Like I would say World Trade Center one and two of the boomer.
[01:07:28]  Imaginary.
[01:07:29]  Imaginary, yes.
[01:07:30]  The word that we love so much.
[01:07:33]  And I think one part of the reason for that is that what comes after Watergate and Nixon's resignation is a slew of congressional committees and congressional hearings.
[01:07:44]  Now, so we, you know, you can't talk, yes, you got the church committee.
[01:07:48]  Take me to church.
[01:07:50]  Don't do it.
[01:07:50]  Don't do the song.
[01:07:51]  Don't make a note to put the song in.
[01:07:57]  You're too little tippy-tapping.
[01:07:59]  Overruled.
[01:07:59]  Take me to church.
[01:08:02]  He's not.
[01:08:04]  No, he does not determine the exception.
[01:08:06]  I determine the exception.
[01:08:08]  Actually, the producer does.
[01:08:09]  He's literally the podcast deep state.
[01:08:11]  Okay.
[01:08:12]  No, but my point being that the kind of okay, so you have these committees that come out of this, right?
[01:08:18]  And you have, okay, you mentioned the church committee.
[01:08:20]  At the same time, you have the first public screening of the Zapruder film, which starts a whole slew of interest into the Kennedy assassination.
[01:08:29]  But you also have the angle of Watergate, right?
[01:08:31]  Which is that we haven't talked about Woodward and Bernstein and Deep Throat and the media angle of this.
[01:08:37]  And you bring this up in the book.
[01:08:39]  Sorry, I'm being long-winded.
[01:08:40]  But I think this is really important about Watergate and understanding how much of Watergate was not what it seems, which is that Watergate, as opposed to the hearings on MK Ultra, the hearings on the CIA assassinations, the hearings on, you know, Kennedy's assassination, is like Watergate was pursued relentlessly by the media.
[01:09:04]  Very, very high profile.
[01:09:06]  A lot of people made big careers.
[01:09:09]  It was all over the papers.
[01:09:11]  There's tons of fucking movies about it, even though every, you know what I mean?
[01:09:15]  Not to the point just so that everyone thinks it was a thing about the, you know, a group of guys breaks in, dot, dot, dot, Nixon resigns, not just for that reason, but like there's something else going on there.
[01:09:26]  Like, what do you think that signifies as like with this event as opposed to basically any other?
[01:09:33]  Because at this point in American history, look, we look, journalist, we don't, we're not big fans of journalism, the, you know, and journalists, we'll say, not journalism, but journalists.
[01:09:43]  But the 70s, the late 60s, let's say mid, well, let me take that.
[01:09:48]  We'll say mid 60s to early 70s is when the crazy, let's say the journalist as, I don't know, like the journalist as journalist comes into its own, right?
[01:10:06]  They do their jobs for some reason.
[01:10:07]  But it really is, it's funny because it's kind of known as this like golden moment in journalism.
[01:10:13]  Yeah.
[01:10:13]  And yet to me, this is really when the figure of the journalist as asset comes into fruition.
[01:10:21]  I mean, I would say it really reaches its final form.
[01:10:23]  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I would, I would agree with that.
[01:10:26]  I think, especially in the popular consciousness, I would say that was a goal, I think, of the CIA.
[01:10:34]  No, absolutely.
[01:10:35]  I'm saying this kind of builds up into this.
[01:10:37]  But yeah, I mean, and you really have, I think it's crazy because I think it's crazy because I think it's this, that era produced some of like, you're talking about ramparts, like some of the actual best journalism probably of the past like 60 years.
[01:10:53]  But then also you had these like sort of celebrity figures like Woodward and Bernstein.
[01:10:57]  And, you know, especially Jermaine to bring that up because with the story of Watergate, especially the story of Deep Throat, that is like, that becomes the story too.
[01:11:10]  And that becomes like, they are fully in a way that like, I can't really think of in any other context of something happening this like in exactly this extreme, but like they become the story and they have the story and it's like their version rules.
[01:11:24]  Like that's who you make the movie about.
[01:11:26]  You don't make the movie necessarily even about Watergate.
[01:11:28]  You make the movie about these two journalists, specifically Woodward and Bernstein, investigating Watergate.
[01:11:33]  Right.
[01:11:33]  And it's made up largely.

=== Deep Throat's Legacy (05:32) ===

[01:11:35]  I mean, Woodward was connected to these right-wing anti-Nixon people very much so.
[01:11:41]  And I think he was kind of manipulated in a particular way.
[01:11:43]  It just doesn't make any sense that you would randomly be connected to these anti-Nixon right-wingers as a military intelligence guy.
[01:11:51]  And then you just, oh, I'm going to go into journalism.
[01:11:53]  Oh, and now, look, I'm breaking the story of the century and I've got all these high-level people talking to me.
[01:11:58]  So it's who Deep Throat is likely not just Mark Felt.
[01:12:01]  He's likely three pretty terrible guys.
[01:12:04]  Mark Felt was a terrible guy himself.
[01:12:06]  He did some of the worst Co-I-Telfro stuff.
[01:12:08]  He was like Mr. Black Bad guy.
[01:12:10]  Yeah.
[01:12:10]  Yeah.
[01:12:11]  You know, terrible guy.
[01:12:12]  But also other people were probably as deep throat.
[01:12:16]  Deep throat had to have been a composite.
[01:12:17]  Robert Bennett, who was connected to the Mullen Company and the Hughes Empire in different ways, goes on to become a senator.
[01:12:26]  And also Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff.
[01:12:31]  And when you look more at him, it's like he was not acting in the president's best interest at all.
[01:12:36]  He was really, and it makes it more interesting later on when Reagan is shot and then Alexander Haig says, I'm in charge here to George H.W. Bush, right?
[01:12:45]  A funny footnote on that.
[01:12:47]  But Haig, when you look at him and you look at these other guys, it was a palace coup of sorts.
[01:12:52]  And that's what Nixon thought.
[01:12:53]  Nixon would tell Frank Gannon, who was his like ghostwriter, he would tell for his memoirs, you know, he wrote his memoir.
[01:13:02]  It was called Dick.
[01:13:03]  No, it was actually called RN, but it could have been called Dick, I guess.
[01:13:08]  And he says, he told Nixon would get drunk sometimes, not as much as he did at the height of Watergate, but he would get drunk sometimes with Frank Gannon.
[01:13:16]  And he would tell him, Frank Gannon would be like, so what do you think was behind all this Watergate stuff?
[01:13:22]  And Nixon would say, well, it was the same people that got rid of Jack Kennedy.
[01:13:27]  And in that event, that helps to explain the journalist part that you're talking about.
[01:13:31]  It's like, think about these kind of journalists as a whole.
[01:13:35]  Why do they ignore this story about the Kennedy assassination?
[01:13:40]  And they don't explore it.
[01:13:41]  They rubber stamp the Warren Commission by and large.
[01:13:45]  But they really go after Nixon.
[01:13:48]  That is something that needs to be explained.
[01:13:51]  And furthermore, you have this issue of why the CIA, why all these investigations happen after Watergate.
[01:14:02]  If Watergate was just like, oh, Nixon broke the law, he got caught.
[01:14:05]  Well, it wasn't that.
[01:14:06]  It wasn't just that.
[01:14:06]  Nixon had his CIA director, the CIA director, James Schlesinger, discovered that the burglars were more connected to the CIA, the plumbers.
[01:14:15]  And so he said, give me everything you can on the ways you guys have violated your charter since the agency was created.
[01:14:22]  That's the family jewels file.
[01:14:24]  And parts of that get leaked to the press eventually.
[01:14:28]  And part this like sort of political warfare that's going on at the time, it's a battle of leaks and so on.
[01:14:34]  And this is why, this is why there's cracks in the establishment and light gets in after Watergate.
[01:14:43]  And that's why it's an oversimplification to say, oh, it was the CIA that got Nixon, or just it was the CIA that got Kennedy.
[01:14:52]  In both cases, you have people like McCone, who was running the CIA under Kennedy.
[01:14:56]  He doesn't seem to have been involved in that.
[01:14:58]  Or you have Schlesinger, who's running the CIA and trying to even dig up dirt on his own agency.
[01:15:03]  And he damages, brings the CIA to its lowest point ever.
[01:15:06]  It's like you've got to go back and look at the history of these organizations and these networks and how they relate to American power.
[01:15:14]  And I think ultimately what happens with Watergate is there's a coalition of your military intelligence people themselves, the right-wing social forces that are anti-detentes, neoconservatives, and the financial elites that don't like what Nixon is doing also.
[01:15:32]  And they joined forces with like Kennedy people, like Carmine Bellino was one of the people involved in prosecuting Watergate, and he's a loyal Kennedy guy.
[01:15:41]  And I think the Kennedy people were brought along for the ride because Nixon's a political enemy of the Kennedys.
[01:15:46]  And so Nixon really did not have enough of the establishment left behind him to stand up for this, to stand up to this.
[01:15:53]  And he could have had a good chance of, I mean, if this had gone to the Senate and all of these issues became exposed, it would have been the most explosive thing ever.
[01:16:01]  I think he was probably battered psychologically going through this.
[01:16:05]  Drunk too.
[01:16:06]  He was probably drinking a lot.
[01:16:08]  His health was failing.
[01:16:11]  And so this is it.
[01:16:14]  The media's role as crusaders at this point are because they're being enlisted in this political coup.
[01:16:20]  Yeah, totally.
[01:16:21]  And really, in reality, when they are putting this dirt out on Nixon, they're serving the same purpose that they're putting out by not putting all the dirt out in the decades leading up to Watergate.
[01:16:34]  The media is an arm of the establishment.
[01:16:37]  And I think realistically, some people got kind of excited by this and wanted to do a little bit more real journalism.
[01:16:44]  It did inspire people who thought they'd be the next Woodward and Bernstein.
[01:16:47]  But as we see with Iran-Contra, I mean, this is what Robert Perry was told when he was wanting to do water stories on Iran-Contra and drugs and these related issues.
[01:16:56]  He was told by people, hey, we don't really want another Watergate.
[01:17:00]  And that's kind of where we are today.
[01:17:02]  There hasn't been a scandal like Watergate because there hasn't been a need to expose something like that.

=== Media As An Arm Of The Establishment (02:18) ===

[01:17:08]  It's been the opposite.
[01:17:09]  They've been covering up like things like Epstein are so, they just sit there like a, I don't even know what the metaphor is, like a turd in the living room, where it's just like, we're just going to pretend that this did not happen.
[01:17:20]  An elephant, really.
[01:17:21]  Well, this person is like obviously very connected to like not only American, but international politics and finance.
[01:17:28]  I mean, basically, yeah, no, no government investigation, really, aside from like the very specifics about his death.
[01:17:35]  And of course, those two guys got charged, you know, the guards who were on duty, but like no real big investigation or anything like that.
[01:17:43]  Not even a congressional hearing.
[01:17:44]  No.
[01:17:45]  And there's no explanation for what they were, right?
[01:17:48]  I mean, you guys have covered this, study this more than me, but like with the Ghillain Maxwell thing, is there ever an explanation of like, we're trafficking people in order to fund, you know, to raise money through this?
[01:17:58]  It's like, they're not even, does anybody even try to say that the money is coming from this operation?
[01:18:03]  No, that's the funny thing.
[01:18:05]  It's like, it's sort of like for free.
[01:18:07]  Like, you're, it's like, they're the first pro bono.
[01:18:10]  Yeah, they're the first pro bono human traffickers.
[01:18:12]  Like, oh, no, you're like, we just, we had him just on the island.
[01:18:15]  He hung out.
[01:18:16]  Yeah, like, yeah, he had sex with a bunch of 15-year-old girls from, you know, Bratislava, but like he didn't pay us, you know, it's like, it's a friendship thing.
[01:18:25]  And so that's, that's sort of the really interesting about thing about it.
[01:18:28]  It's like, there isn't like she's sort of the first pimp who was doing it pro bono.
[01:18:34]  Right.
[01:18:35]  And, you know, related, related to that, you have the has that Denny Hastert thing that people just forget about.
[01:18:40]  This guy has no charisma whatsoever.
[01:18:43]  And yet he has been promoted to the number three position in terms of the succession to the presidency as the speaker of the house.
[01:18:49]  He's a troll of a man and totally corrupt man.
[01:18:52]  He's a daddy pedophile.
[01:18:54]  And that's the key to his success.
[01:18:57]  This is a twisted thing.
[01:18:59]  I think there's no way that you can actually look at Denny Hastert and not look at it honestly and not come to the conclusion that in terms of like what allowed him to be successful, being a disgusting pedophile was actually the key to his success.
[01:19:13]  Like that's why he's so controllable that way that he was able to rise to the position of the speaker of the house.
[01:19:19]  I mean, in Vanity Fair 2003, there's an article about how he was taking heroin cash for his campaigns and such.

=== Ben's Good Memory Helps (05:02) ===

[01:19:26]  And then nothing comes of it.
[01:19:28]  They don't sue him for libel.
[01:19:29]  Why didn't they do that?
[01:19:31]  Well, it makes you also think, which we already kind of know that, like, these operations of like drug trafficking and financing of, you know, financial chicanery are intertwined with this sort of sexual corruption, sexual blackmail, et cetera.
[01:19:45]  Absolutely.
[01:19:46]  And we know, we know this about as well as we can know anything under these conditions.
[01:19:50]  Not just in America, too, in Europe, you know, in Asia, all over the world.
[01:19:53]  I mean, it's a really effective, it's how you keep the podcast going.
[01:19:58]  Yeah.
[01:19:58]  Yeah.
[01:20:00]  We've, I think we talked about this maybe at previous time you were on the show too.
[01:20:04]  I'm having vague memories.
[01:20:06]  It might have been someone else, but I feel like we must have talked about this at some point.
[01:20:11]  But I mean, it's a really effective spycraft, right?
[01:20:14]  And more than that, like, it's an effective way of like sort of solidifying like, well, you're in the club, you know?
[01:20:20]  And like the other thing too is like, yeah, if you're trying to like, if you're trying to control somebody having any kind of even just knowledge, but also, you know, photographs or something like that of them engaged in, you know, sexual acts with a child or an adult in some people's cases, it's like that, that there is like, you steer the ship for the rest of their life, you know?
[01:20:44]  And if someone like that gets into a position of power, you're fucking gold.
[01:20:49]  Right.
[01:20:50]  I mean, this is, it is very disturbing to think of in terms of the implications of it.
[01:20:56]  That basically you, I mean, imagine that you have to go through these different hierarchies and the political parties to advance and so on.
[01:21:04]  And if you demonstrate that you're incorruptible at an early point, then that's you're probably just going to find out that you just have all these setbacks and eventually change professions.
[01:21:13]  I mean, it would seem to be that that's how it works, which is not a meritocracy.
[01:21:16]  It's a demeritocracy.
[01:21:19]  But it's an emeritocracy.
[01:21:23]  Both of you are fired from this podcast.
[01:21:26]  Wait, I thought that was pretty good.
[01:21:27]  Isn't this the year of the pun?
[01:21:28]  Oh, no, it's the year of the like.
[01:21:29]  The year of the smile.
[01:21:31]  Aaron.
[01:21:31]  And I appreciate if you gave me one right now.
[01:21:34]  I'm smiling as I reflect on my puns.
[01:21:36]  Yeah, the smile.
[01:21:38]  These motherfuckers out there biking by the river, smiling, reflecting on puns.
[01:21:43]  Thinking about Watergate.
[01:21:45]  How do you like podcasting?
[01:21:46]  It is not here, I mean, in terms of you having your own podcast.
[01:21:52]  The fact that we're here in a room doing this and talking about this is so much better.
[01:21:56]  It's so much cooler.
[01:21:58]  But the podcasting, because I love the material that I'm doing and because I was already sort of doing it with teaching and having to prep these things all the time.
[01:22:07]  You've also got a pretty good memory, too.
[01:22:10]  That's helped me.
[01:22:12]  It made me able to get through college despite I did fuck all as an undergraduate and I still made it, got a degree.
[01:22:18]  And I think that I have a good memory and that's really, that's really helped me.
[01:22:21]  And it helps with the podcasting because there's so many details here.
[01:22:25]  And there's just the material.
[01:22:28]  There's so much material that you can talk about because this is the most powerful empire in human history.
[01:22:34]  And that means there are deep veins of really explosive, fascinating material that you can go into.
[01:22:40]  So that's been really fun.
[01:22:42]  I miss the classroom, just sort of like it's better to be here in person.
[01:22:46]  I miss teaching at high school and college.
[01:22:48]  But I'm happy that there's a way for me to be talking about these things for a living at all.
[01:22:54]  And so I'm really thankful for it.
[01:22:56]  And people like Ben Howard has been a huge help with me on this.
[01:23:00]  God, Ben.
[01:23:01]  Peter Del Scott has been very awesome to do all these.
[01:23:05]  A Godfather.
[01:23:06]  Right.
[01:23:07]  In so many ways an inspiration.
[01:23:10]  I've got Seamus, people that Seamus McGinnis doing stuff with me for the podcast.
[01:23:14]  Dana Chavaria, Casey Moore's artwork, Mike Lesiac doing the website.
[01:23:20]  People that have heard your shows because you guys have really presented this stuff to a lot of people because you have some ironic distance to it, which I think is helpful.
[01:23:30]  And people want to be working to address these things and raise consciousness about the political reality.
[01:23:38]  So it's been, that part is very rewarding.
[01:23:41]  And it's been a lot of fun.
[01:23:43]  And for you guys giving me a platform earlier, people contacted me over this and worked for me for very little money, sometimes for free, to try to help us on this project.
[01:23:53]  And it's just been, it's been a joy to put it all together.
[01:23:55]  I mean, honestly, we appreciate you giving us 75% of the royalties.
[01:23:59]  I was like, I wasn't expecting that.
[01:24:01]  And just like.
[01:24:01]  That's not true.
[01:24:02]  That's not true.
[01:24:04]  No, but no, I am.
[01:24:06]  This is this is thrilling because I feel like you've been coming on the show.
[01:24:09]  I feel like it's been two years, but I don't know when the first time you came on was actually early 2020 or early 2019, 2019.
[01:24:20]  Yeah, so it has been like two years that you've been coming on the show.
[01:24:23]  And this motherfucker has, this is a real book.
[01:24:26]  Yeah, it is a real book.
[01:24:27]  And it's real good.

=== Twins on the Podcast (02:35) ===

[01:24:28]  It's called American Exception.
[01:24:31]  Empire and the Deep State.
[01:24:32]  It's by Aaron Good.
[01:24:33]  We're going to link to it in the show notes.
[01:24:35]  And we're also going to link to the excellent podcast by the same name, American Exception.
[01:24:40]  Aaron, as always, it has been an absolute pleasure.
[01:24:44]  In fact, I would say it's been good to have you.
[01:24:48]  Did you just make a pun?
[01:24:50]  No, no, no, no.
[01:24:51]  That was just how I talk.
[01:24:52]  That's just how I talk.
[01:24:53]  I've heard those at different points in my life because of my last name.
[01:24:56]  And this is also a little triggering too.
[01:24:58]  So I'm going to, but I'm going to try to move past it.
[01:25:00]  And thank you guys so much.
[01:25:02]  It's really awesome to be here again on True and On and to be here in person is very cool.
[01:25:07]  And I like the stylish apartment of Young Chomsky as well.
[01:25:11]  He's lying.
[01:25:11]  We're in the studio.
[01:25:12]  This is actually a studio that's designed to look like an apartment.
[01:25:16]  Nathan Fielder stuff.
[01:25:18]  Hey Google Who's Mr. Fireworks?
[01:25:38]  On the website mrfireworks.com.au, they say directed by fourth generation pyrotechnicians Clinton and Shane Swanson.
[01:25:47]  Mr. Fireworks is one of the largest display organizers for all forms of pyrotechnics in Australia.
[01:25:52]  Oh, fuck is this?
[01:25:54]  Australia?
[01:25:55]  Oh my God.
[01:25:55]  You won't even ship records.
[01:25:57]  That's why you're so good at that accent.
[01:26:00]  Why'd you say?
[01:26:02]  Why'd you say you know, one thing I forgot to mention when Aaron was here is that my theory about Woodward and Bernstein and the way they captured the imagination is because they have little guy, big guy energy, which is just like unbeatable duo.
[01:26:18]  Hey, hey, TrueFam.
[01:26:20]  Can you give us in the comments?
[01:26:22]  What's better?
[01:26:23]  Fat guy, skinny guy or tall guy, short guy?
[01:26:26]  Yeah, for a duo.
[01:26:27]  That's a good question.
[01:26:28]  Well, because, yeah, Twins has both energies.
[01:26:32]  Yeah, I know.
[01:26:34]  That's what makes Twins one of the best movies ever is because it combines the two.
[01:26:38]  Same wit.
[01:26:39]  Well, no.
[01:26:40]  Dude, if one of the twins, if Danny DeVito was black and what's his name?
[01:26:48]  Adam Sandler?
[01:26:50]  Thank you.
[01:26:50]  David Spade.
[01:26:51]  Yeah.
[01:26:51]  Adam Sandler.
[01:26:53]  Didn't he hang out with Chris Farley?
[01:26:54]  That wasn't the duo.
[01:26:55]  I don't know.
[01:26:56]  I don't know.
[01:26:56]  Anyway, David Spade wasn't tall, so that doesn't count.
[01:26:59]  But that's fat guy, skinny guy option.
[01:27:00]  I love fat guy, skinny guy.
[01:27:02]  Especially when they're dressed nice.

=== Fat Guy, Skinny Guy Dynamics (02:53) ===

[01:27:04]  Very classic.
[01:27:04]  But it's actually, you know what?
[01:27:06]  I will say, you know who else has that?
[01:27:08]  Who's those fucking two magician motherfuckers?
[01:27:10]  Those little libertarian fellas.
[01:27:13]  Penn and Teller.
[01:27:14]  They actually, they really screw this up.
[01:27:17]  No, no, no.
[01:27:19]  Because now, look, they're not our cup of tea.
[01:27:21]  And I believe them to be quite dangerous.
[01:27:25]  However, they did capture, you know, the zeitgeist of a time and the imaginary.
[01:27:31]  They were quite popular.
[01:27:31]  Vegas show.
[01:27:34]  And you can't say otherwise.
[01:27:36]  Women say the most insane shit.
[01:27:40]  You'll be talking, you'll be talking to them one second and then they'll be like, yeah, Penn and Teller really captured the imaginary.
[01:27:46]  What the fuck are you talking about?
[01:27:48]  They did.
[01:27:48]  Penn and Teller captured the imaginary?
[01:27:50]  No, that was like such.
[01:27:52]  Look, when, look, we got to talk about Red Pill shit.
[01:27:56]  That was such a moment of like Fedora guy essence captured by Penn and Teller.
[01:28:04]  I'm sorry.
[01:28:04]  That was like mad, like skeptic, Fedora guy, libertarian, early internet energy right there.
[01:28:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that's true.
[01:28:15]  Women be right.
[01:28:17]  You know what?
[01:28:18]  The lesson of true.
[01:28:19]  They don't.
[01:28:20]  Well, they do be right.
[01:28:21]  They do.
[01:28:22]  They'd be right at the front of the Smacy's the moment it opens in the morning in order to go shopping.
[01:28:29]  Anyway, I'm Liz.
[01:28:31]  My name.
[01:28:34]  My name is Aaron Bad.
[01:28:38]  And I like the light state.
[01:28:42]  What?
[01:28:42]  Light state, only the, only the top, what would the light?
[01:28:46]  The racial thing?
[01:28:47]  The light state.
[01:28:50]  Yeah.
[01:28:51]  Yes.
[01:28:52]  But which race?
[01:28:52]  You'll never know.
[01:28:56]  And of course, we are joined by producer.
[01:29:01]  And his pompadour, six feet high.
[01:29:04]  His collar, sharper than a damn shrieking.
[01:29:08]  His pants, flared.
[01:29:10]  And his belt, it would make a professional wrestler blush.
[01:29:14]  That's right.
[01:29:15]  We have the actual rockabilly member of the show, Young Chomsky.
[01:29:20]  And the podcast is called True and On.
[01:29:24]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:29:25]  Bye-bye.
[01:29:55]  I can't feel romantic love, but I think you are wonderful.