Dave Smith and Tucker Carlson expose how neoconservatives—from Iraq’s $2T disaster to NATO’s Ukraine provocation—pushed endless wars while evading accountability, with Trump’s arms shipments to Ukraine framed as a "disprove collusion" ploy. They dissect Russiagate as a deep-state coup attempt and critique libertarians’ co-optation by D.C., like the Mises Caucus hijacking the 2024 Libertarian Convention for Trump/RFK Jr. alliances. Smith’s shift from hedonism to faith mirrors his rejection of boomer-driven decline—divorce, debt, and wars—while Carlson links media attacks on dissent (e.g., Nicholas Wade) to a "swarm" silencing truth. Both argue U.S. interventionism, from Churchill’s betrayals to Hiroshima, stems from a "warfare state" fueled by lies, yet see hope in platforms like Rogan’s bypassing propaganda. The takeaway: systemic corruption thrives when principles collapse, but resilience in family and authenticity may yet dismantle the machine. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, it's a little weird for me because you're a libertarian, and in fact, you could even wind up on a libertarian ticket at some point, if not this cycle.
No, but I'm just saying it could happen, right?
So you're literally a libertarian.
But for some reason, we have the same instincts on almost everything, I would say.
There are a lot of people in...
Conservative media, who I always have felt like I had a lot in common with, and now I don't.
And it's not because I've gotten liberal.
I've gotten way less liberal.
I see them as way more liberal.
So what happened to conservative media?
Not all of them.
I have a million friends in it.
But a lot of the big names seem very liberal to me.
But that's also, I think there's something like the nature of conservatism or the conservative movement in America has always just been to lose.
It's like built into them.
Like every generation just loses and then moves on to the next thing to lose.
I like the, the old, right.
The, um, you know, Robert Taft, right.
Right.
They, uh, they were largely in opposition to the new deal.
That was, they were fighting back against the SDR is new deal.
We're in opposition to that.
And then, you know, you cut forward 20 years and it's...
FDR Democrats are the new Republicans, right?
Ronald Reagan.
Exactly.
Nobody would dare question the New Deal.
And then, of course, there was a movement pushing back against the great society.
Yes.
And now, of course, entitlements are like no one would ever dare question Medicare.
Look, just recently, I saw Donald Trump, who's not a traditional conservative, but he did the most traditional conservative thing when he said, when we get in there again, we are going to fix Obamacare.
And I'm like, okay, right, right, right.
So that's where we're at now, right?
It's no more repeal.
You don't even hear Republicans talk about it anymore, right?
So it's always like the next round of big government increases, the next round of centralized power in D.C. They will put up a little fight.
They will lose.
They will then a few years later accept this as something that is consensus amongst all of us.
But you see, we're against...
Whatever the next thing is, you know, transing the kids or, you know, student loan bailouts.
We're against that now, you know, but they'll lose and then eventually accept that.
And as far as the, you know, the point about libertarians, there are kind of like, there are these moments, and I know you experienced this a lot when you were on your Fox show, there are these moments where there's like a storm, where there's something like a white hot issue, you know?
And it becomes very easy later after that passes to be on the right side of that.
Everyone's on the right side of Iraq.
You know what I mean?
John McCain wrote in his memoir that Iraq was a mistake.
So even John McCain could admit many years later.
But the thing is, that doesn't really matter as much as if you were opposed to it when it was happening.
Because in 2002, if you were like, hey, I don't think he has weapons of mass destruction, everybody knew that, well, that just means you're a queer, basically.
And you hate your country, and you're weak, and you're...
And so, you know, there's little things.
You know the example I like to use a lot?
Because I remember you broadcasting through this, so you'll remember it well.
But it was when Donald Trump announced that he was going to pull out of Syria.
Man, I remember growing up in La Jolla in the 70s hearing about the Houthis and my father said, I just want you to grow strong and resolute so we can fight the Houthi hordes.
Your one purpose in life is to get strong enough to take on these Houthis when the day comes, and it will, where the These Houthis challenge our freedom.
You must be prepared.
Right, it's so ridiculous.
But like, look, I remember, so you, it was either in, it might have been April or May of 2020, but I remember you covering on your show, and I also covered this on my podcast at the time, got to a smaller audience, but you covering the lab leak.
Because already, it's not that we had a conclusive case that you could take to court, but there were big pieces of information that were really narrative-shattering.
The bats weren't close enough to where the wet markets were.
Somehow it's more racist to think that the Chinese had a lab than to think they were biting bat heads off or something.
It's so bizarre.
By the way, now, as I say this to you now, this is not controversial at all.
This isn't a white hot issue.
It was then, but it's not now.
And so a lot of just what, back to your original point about the libertarians who failed on the job.
A lot of it simply comes down to be a matter of courage.
It's just a matter of like, hey, when the issue that might make everyone hate you and all of the powerful people call you the worst names, which naturally human beings have a tendency to not want that.
We don't want to be ostracized.
You don't want to be called these names.
Some people just kind of have this personality trait.
And this isn't like whether you're on the left or right.
But then my thing is just that I do think, and I think this is something I've benefited from.
I know this because I hear this back from my audience a lot, that it's like, oh, when you were right on those issues, when it really mattered, you kind of gain credibility.
And I also think that like, you know, let's say there's like, I don't know, like a right wing or conservative commentator who's...
Telling you how you have to feel about the new storm right now.
It's like, well, just tell me, how did you do on the last three storms?
You know, like, were you telling dopes to get the vaccine?
Were you telling everyone to be socially distanced?
Or were you, like, on the right side of that?
Where were you on Ukraine?
You know, were you saying that, like, oh, you know, like, they can win!
Or whatever the story is.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's...
I do watch a lot of people who got everything consistently wrong.
It's the same way as the neoconservatives, right?
I mean, I hate them so much.
It's hard to speak about them with any type of sense of fairness.
But how do you...
Listen, let's just say you got six wars wrong.
And you were wrong about every single one.
Let's just say you were for the war in Iraq and then you were for regime change in Afghanistan against the Taliban who did not attack us.
And then you were for overthrowing Gaddafi and then you were for overthrowing Assad and then you were for backing the Saudi war in Yemen and all these things and it's just nothing but disaster.
Every one of them.
Okay.
But then you're going to come out and confidently be like, and I'm for this next war.
And let me tell you why you have to be too.
And you don't have like enough just You don't feel humiliated enough that you couldn't come out.
Even if you were for this, you'd be like, man, I really think we should fight this war, but I can't come out and say we should fight this war because the last six times I said it, it was nothing but a disaster.
But the same people who were like, you see, Tucker, when we overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will sweep the region.
And you see, we're going to be greeted as liberators.
We won't be fighting off a 20-year insurgency, you see.
And I would also, maybe this is me adding my libertarian bent to this, but I would also say that in the...
Private sector, and I mean not like the crony connected to government private sector, but like in true business, you also don't get away with that stuff.
You can't just fail over and over again and then move up.
This only happens either in the government or in companies that are essentially the government, but live off no big government contracts or something like that.
But yeah, and it's the major problem is that...
Look, at least there are problems with free markets.
It's made up of human beings, so there's always problems.
But there's at least a cleansing mechanism.
There's profit and loss.
If you lose too much, you go out of business.
With government, the worse you do, the more funding you get.
If the kids can't read, we need a higher education budget.
But I would also point out that, look, there are, just like with every group, just like conservatives, there are different camps within libertarians.
So just to point out, the thing I said about the last five storms, if you go listen to what- Ron Paul was saying throughout the entire COVID regime, he was perfect.
Tom Woods, Lou Rockwell, Jeff Deist.
There's this group of libertarians who were great the entire time.
So the difference between, say, the Ron Paulian libertarians, which I would consider myself to be one of, and, say, the Cato or groups like that, is that the Cato types tend to...
Almost have this academic discussion of what it would be like in a free market, and then talk as if that's what we're living in right now.
Well, of course, and particularly, say, the same oligarch who's not only funding the Cato Institute, but is also funding the Republican Party in general.
And the party who consistently is growing the size of government every bit as much as the Democrats are.
I've noticed.
It's become a thing where if a Republican were to ever say, You know, say we need smaller government or like Nikki Haley was talking about smaller government.
You just roll your eye because it never means anything.
They've been talking about this forever.
There's never been one time and there's been several times in my life where the Republicans have controlled the Congress and the White House.
Not even drastic cuts, but yes, we'll have rich people pay less taxes.
There's never a cut in spending, because that's a cut in the power of the federal government, and they're not for that.
And so if the guys who are funding that are also funding this...
Libertarian Institute to write policy paper for recommendations that are never going to be implemented anyway.
It does raise some eyebrows.
I would say, look, to the bigger question of libertarians in the side, like I've heard you say before, the US federal government is the biggest, most powerful government in the history of the world by far.
There's not a close second.
It's a government that can snap its fingers and overthrow regimes anywhere in the world and does it regularly.
And so that is, look, as the country is kind of spinning out of control and everything has just gotten more and more corrupt, that's directly related to the fact that DC has gotten more and more powerful.
And this is, to me, like I've been saying this for a while.
It's not my original thought.
This is something Hans-Hermann Hoppe said back in the 90s where he basically said that libertarians need to learn a conservative lesson and conservatives need to learn a libertarian And what he meant by that was that libertarians basically need to learn that, okay, just because we might believe that the government ought to not bash someone over the head and lock them in a cage for doing something, doesn't mean we have to celebrate it.
You don't have to celebrate degeneracy.
You don't have to be on the side of that.
In fact, a functioning society needs good family values, and that's just a fact.
We don't believe that should be enforced at the point of a gun, but that doesn't mean even if you think, say, whatever, you think prostitution should be legal, you could still have a feeling that it's horrible and represents a tragedy on all sides.
And so that's like kind of the conservative lesson that libertarians need to learn.
I think a lot of libertarians in the Ron Paul kind of school did learn that.
And the lesson that I would say that conservatives or Trumpian populist types need to learn is that if Donald Trump's going to say drain the swamp, it's like, okay, but what does that mean?
Like, what does that look like?
How do you actually drain the swamp?
And it's really actually very simple.
It means cut government spending.
As long as Washington, D.C. is the most powerful organization in the history of the world, and they're spending over $6 trillion a year, that is by definition a swamp.
That's why more millionaires live in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. than anywhere else in the world.
They don't make anything except weapons, you know what I mean, that are purchased by the government.
Well, no, and it's literally, not only are they not creating, but they're parasitic by nature.
They're taking Americans' money.
And I think this is kind of the central source of why the country is spinning out of control and why we're so incredibly corrupt at every level is because There is this parasitic force in Washington, D.C. that's grown bigger and bigger and more powerful.
And it was the moment when the Democratic Party subverted the so-called business community, which was always a kind of counterbalance against this, because the idea was the government makes it actually harder for people to conduct business.
It stifles free markets and we're against that.
So the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable were always sort of pushing back against the growth of government.
Bill Clinton changed that.
And he changed that by declaring a ceasefire between the Democratic Party and the rich.
And he did it during the tech boom.
I'll never forget this.
Democrats were always saying, and I thought, you know, I didn't agree with him, but I sort of thought it was important for the purpose of balance to have this.
They would say they were suspicious of people with too much money.
That's too much power.
Like, what about the value of labor?
You got the value of capital, the value of labor.
They're kind of in conflict with one another, and we're on the side of labor.
All of a sudden, Bill Clinton's like, no, there's nothing wrong with being, you know, making a billion dollars at 32 for creating an app, you know, running Webvan or E-Toys or Pets.com.
He did it for the purpose of fundraising, and all of a sudden the Democratic Party became far richer than the Republican Party, and all the formerly Republican leafy suburbs around the country, you know, Greenwich, Connecticut, and McLean, Virginia, they all went left, actually.
It was brilliant and evil, but its effect was to completely wreck the country because there was no counterbalance against power.
At all.
So once the government, you know, the people with the nuclear weapons and business, the people with the largest bank accounts are aligned, that leaves everybody else like, who's defending them?
That's why the bus driver wears a uniform and your airline pilots have their stupid outfits and your stewardesses are dressed up like they are because it says a lot about their role in your society.
And rich people used to spend a lot of money on clothes.
And the whole point of that was to say, we're rich.
We're in a separate class.
And that comes with tons of advantages, but it also comes with obligations.
Noblesse oblige was a thing.
And all of a sudden in the 90s, you notice the richest people in America start dressing.
You know, and like t-shirts and hoodies and like, what's the message of that?
And the message of that is we're just like you, which is another way of saying we have no obligation to anyone but ourselves, actually.
We don't owe you anything.
And it comes out of this mindset that they do have, and I know them, of course, well, so I know that they feel this way, that we're the richest because...
We came up through this credentialing system that we claim is a meritocracy and we won.
Well, this is why I was thinking about that, because I think it's such a good point, because there is something kind of counterintuitive to it, where you'd be like, oh, but if they're dressing like the people, then maybe they'd feel more connected to the people.
But in fact, it's actually the opposite, because it is, it reminds me in a way, this is what I was thinking about literally last night in my hotel, I was thinking about you making this comment, and it was reminding me of when the lockdowns first started, and There were all the celebrities would come on and be like, we're all in this together.
And you're like, Ellen DeGeneres, you're in a mansion.
You're not in the same situation.
There's a guy out there who's got three kids and makes 60K a year, and he was just deemed non-essential.
And he is like...
Terrified about the future of how he's going to support his family.
And Ellen's sitting here, and her message is, we're all in the same boat, man.
You know?
Like, we're all in the same.
I know.
One of my servants got COVID and couldn't come in today, so I only had a team of five, you know?
And you're like...
So, in a sense, you're like, while the message is, we're all in this together...
And that kind of superficially sounds like a nice message.
It's actually the worst message.
A much better message would be to acknowledge that I'm not in the situation that you're in at all.
I mean, he never really said anything, but it would still be beautiful.
Yes!
I remember in his acceptance speech in 2008 at the DNC, we had this whole line where he was like, he was like, I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.
The men and women who have fought for this country have been Republicans and Democrats and independents, but they fought together and died together, not defending a red America or a blue America, the United States of America.
And then it's like, oh, I mean, he didn't really say anything there, but it was beautifully put.
I mean, I guess he ended the war in Iraq eventually and then reinvaded the country because the ISIS fighters he was arming invaded the country.
But...
But then, I think essentially what happened, and it was around Obama's re-election campaign, this is where things really went off the rails in this country, was that he got in there and continued and expanded all the worst of the Bush policies.
I'm sure you've looked at this before, but where there's these nexus charts, and you can chart out how many times all the woke terms are used, transgenderism, all that.
And it's all right around 2012. It's all of a sudden like, you know...
Systemic racism goes from being mentioned this many times throughout history to shooting the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Like people lost like 40% of American wealth was lost.
And you know, you can imagine, especially now like having kids, you know, at the time I didn't have kids and I was young.
I was like, whatever, you know, bad economy.
Oh, that sucks.
But you can appreciate now like, oh, what that would be like if you just lost 40% of your net worth and you got little kids, like how destabilizing that is.
And Obama's solution to this, right?
The Obama recovery.
Okay, it was record high government spending and record low interest rates.
This was the solution.
This is how we're going to save the economy.
We're going to bring interest rates down to zero, and we're going to bring government spending higher than it's ever been before at that time.
So you can say on paper there's a little bit of a recovery here, but what really happens in that environment?
You know, it's like all the politically connected people in Washington, D.C., they make more money, and the speculators have a field day because now everybody in Wall Street's making more money because you have to invest now, right?
Because you're losing money if you just save.
And so this ultimately is what built.
Then they throw the culture war in there to, like you said, fight amongst yourselves.
And the result of that was Donald Trump.
The result of all of that was the condition for Trump.
And so just like every other price, there's information given in these prices.
So if steel becomes very, very cheap, that gives information to a businessman that like, hey...
We're producing a lot of steel very easily now.
If you wanted to do a project that requires a lot of steel, now's the time to do it because we're producing steel.
Now, that works when you have real prices because, oh, there's a big production of steel.
But if the government just came in and said, you know, we have price controls and we insist that the price of steel is very, very cheap, what's going to happen is people are going to start building projects with steel and then realize we're out of steel.
So what happens when you make interest rates zero for a decade, it's a signal for people to, say, borrow money when they wouldn't have otherwise borrowed.
Like, maybe you wouldn't borrow if rates were 8% or 9%, but at zero, this is a good time to borrow this money.
But again, it's a fake signal.
We're borrowing all this money and building things.
This is all I think that you're missing in that, because I think you're completely right in your critique of that.
But, okay, so...
If we were, let's say, to fix that disparity, there's basically two ways we could do that.
One would be to raise capital gains taxes up to 30%, okay?
So the result of that would be that I guess we would disincentivize certain types of investment, maybe the government.
Let's say it works out perfectly and we are able, you know, like the people on Wall Street don't have an army of tax lawyers and accountants who can get them out of this stuff as they always end up doing.
So then DC gets more money.
So then the corrupt, most powerful government in the world gets a little bit more money.
They will then leverage that to borrow three times as much and just sell us with more debt.
It's just, the answer there is to just like, you know, it's unbelievable to me that particularly people like Bernie Sanders types will say, That they care so much about working people and they want to do whatever they can to help these working people and yet the biggest bill For working people is their federal income taxes.
And I mean, the IRS, I mean, I know stories from good friends of mine.
They are ruthless.
I mean, they go back 20 years and ruin people.
And this isn't just like, it's like people kind of have this idea that there's like economic issues over here and social issues over here as if they're different, but they're really not.
I mean, you go back 20 years on somebody and say, you know, a guy who's making 30 grand a year and they go back and maybe it's only just like.
You know, a few thousand dollars a year that he owes, but they go back 20 years on you, and you owe three grand a year, and so now you owe $60,000.
Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly talk about it a lot.
I think that there's...
It's not...
It's not in anybody's interest, I guess.
It's not in any partisan interest to really talk about that, because both parties are totally complicit.
And so no matter who, people, because we live in this weird two-party system, and everybody becomes partisans, especially in an election year, and they're all just trying to kind of get their guy over, and no one's really...
I mean, there are Trump supporters who like to talk about the inflation under Obama.
I don't really want to talk about it too much because it all started with the money that was being printed in 2020 that Donald Trump was championing the whole time.
And smearing Thomas Massey for daring to say, hey, we should have a vote on this before we spend more money than we've ever spent when we're broker than we've ever been.
And Trump, of course, bragging that it was the...
The biggest bill?
You know, because it's so Trump.
He goes, it's the biggest.
He goes, a lot of other people have spending bills.
Mine's the biggest spending bill, you know?
And like, look, I'm not trying to, you know, there are, Trump is like the most entertaining character and he's hated by all of the right people and a lot of his instincts are correct and he was also framed for treason by his own intelligence agencies and so there's a lot of Donald Trump that I... I can sympathize with and relate to his supporters.
But the truth is that it was such a disaster.
To lock down the economy and to say we're just going to print our way out of this was such a disaster.
And also, he was like a Raytheon lobbyist who was like, what are you doing over here?
What's the point if we're going to have a third party in putting that guy up?
And then, during 2020, the people who were running the Libertarian Party...
Completely failed and didn't oppose the lockdowns and then started like virtue signaling during the Black Lives Matter riots about how we must be anti-racist.
So now, to what you said, Angela McArdle pulled this off to her great credit that she's got Donald Trump coming and speaking at the Libertarian National Convention.
In Washington, D.C. That was a decision made by the old guard.
We would not have had our convention in Washington, D.C. Do you know where it is in D.C.? Yeah, it's at some hotel.
I'd have to look it up.
Yeah, it's at some hotel in D.C. But anyway, I mean, RFK just challenged Donald Trump to debate him there, which I don't think is going to happen, but would be very interesting if it did happen.
And so it is, at least to me, it kind of represents the Libertarian Party, who is this third party, trying to engage In relevance of some sort and trying to at least...
Look, obviously, we're not in a position.
We're not going to win the White House or even win any Senate seats or anything like that.
But I do think the Libertarian Party could effectively be used to put pressure, particularly on the Republicans, to be better and to not run awful neocons and run better candidates.
I certainly...
I prefer the kind of America first strain of Republicans to the neoconservative strain.
And I think right now there is, well, I mean, there's kind of been a civil war in the right half of America since Donald Trump came onto the scene.
But I don't even know if you'd call it a civil war because Donald Trump just won so dominantly.
You know, it's not like the Republicans were split between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump or something.
No, like it was 95 to 5%.
But particularly, and I know you've talked about this a lot since, The war in Israel, or I should say the war in Gaza, or I don't even know if I should say the war, the attack of Gaza, whatever you call it.
I don't know if you can call it a war when one side doesn't have a military, but whatever you call that.
Since that, you've seen this kind of divide grow where I think largely neoconservatism had been rejected by the voters, the Republican voters.
But when Israel came up, it's a little bit different.
I mean, it's like everybody in the Republican Party is completely on board with the idea that wars, non-essential wars make America better or something.
What's so wild to me about it is just after the 20 years of terror wars.
That have just been such a complete disaster that America would still be entering these conflicts that are very clearly wars of choice.
I mean, I know they can make an argument like they were making the argument that Putin, if he takes Ukraine, is going to take Poland and then is going to take, which is nothing he's ever said.
There's not one thing Putin's ever said that you could point to.
In fact, when you interviewed him, he explicitly said, if Poland attacks us, that's the only scenario.
At the top levels of the American government, as well as at NATO, his issue was Ukrainian entry into NATO. That was always his issue.
And we kept pushing that and kept pushing that, and that's what got him to react.
And even the head of NATO himself, Strosenberg, whatever, said that Vladimir Putin said that if you just signed a deal, put it in writing, that Ukraine won't join NATO, I won't invade.
But is there a single news story even now that doesn't describe, reflexively describe, almost like it's like a block text in the computer program, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine?
It was a totally organic uprising made on revolution.
Victoria Nuland happened to be in the middle of handing out sandwiches.
Don't let that...
You know, like John McCain and they were going there a lot.
And like...
Yeah, sure, it was Soros-backed NGOs that were funded, but whatever.
It was a totally organic movement.
And so, yeah, no, it was a series of provocations, very unnecessary ones, and not just ones that libertarian doves like me or something like that were against, but George Kennan.
The Cold Warrior, right?
Of course.
The founder of the containment strategy.
What he said, which is a great piece with him and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, and I think it was in 1999, he laid it out right there when we first started the first round of NATO expansion.
And he said the people advocating this expansion are going to keep advocating it until there's a Russian response.
And then when there's that response, they'll say, see, this is why we were right to expand NATO. But that's all wrong.
I mean, he was, you know, he was there when the government, when Yanukovych was overthrown, but he wouldn't send the weapons in.
And then Trump ultimately did.
And I think, you know, I think my, you know, like that was the big scandal about Ukraine gate, right?
Was that Donald Trump kind of did this.
You know, kind of like a very Trumpian, kind of gray area thing where he's like, you know, I'd really like you to investigate the Bidens.
Maybe you don't get these weapons if you don't investigate the Bidens.
Now, the reason why that was so ridiculous to impeach him over was because it was totally legitimate to want to investigate what the Bidens were doing in there.
Of course.
Very corrupt involvement in Ukraine.
But that being said, what no one ever talked about in the story was that Trump caved.
Didn't get the Biden investigation and gave them the weapons.
That was the other reason why the impeachment was so ridiculous because there's no quid pro quo when you don't get anything for anything.
You know what I mean?
You could argue it was an attempted quid pro quo.
You know what I mean?
But he never got anything.
But he sent the weapons in.
And I do think part of this, and this was the really effective, the way that the intelligence agencies really won, was that, because a lot of people would look at it like, okay, so The Russiagate was an attempted deep state coup.
And essentially it was, I mean, Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 Minutes that they debated at the Justice Department invoking the 25th Amendment.
And then they ultimately settled on a special prosecutor.
You know, I mean, like they were trying to overthrow the guy.
But so on the surface, you could say, oh, it failed.
It failed.
But, you know, in another sense...
Donald Trump explicitly ran in 2016 on detente with Russia.
Let's work with Russia.
Let's work together to kill the terrorists.
We all don't like terrorists.
Who cares about overthrowing Assad?
That's not in our national interest.
Who cares?
So let's be friends with Russia.
Let's get along with them.
And then, when you're being called a Russian spy every day on the news, and then when he went to Helsinki and said, you know, I believe Putin.
You know, I don't...
I don't think he interfered in the 2016 elections.
By the way, there's still never been a shred of evidence presented that he did.
They've got like one company that they claim had Russian IP addresses because no one can fake an IP address.
You know, it's like the most ridiculous claimant who was once at a party with Putin or something like that.
They have nothing.
And so Trump just said, yeah, I agree with him.
And they were like, so you don't trust your intelligence?
You know, everyone was freaking out so much that it got to a point where he couldn't have made a deal with Russia because if he had, That would have just been proof, right?
Like, imagine in that environment, when Trump-Russia collusion was being said all day long, if Donald Trump had made some deal with Russia.
Well, and that happened on a bunch of different issues, unfortunately.
But the problem, I would say, at this point is...
The desire to go to war with Russia has been pretty much the animating thought in our foreign policy establishment for over 20 years.
So now we actually have a hot war with Russia.
We are conducting a war against Russia using our proxy Ukraine, totally destroyed Ukraine in the process.
We're losing that war.
So Ukraine's not going to win.
I don't see how we Ukraine.
It's impossible.
So what happens?
When that becomes really obvious that all we've achieved is destroyed this country and killed a million of its young men.
And like, how does the State Department and the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute and Joe Scarborough and the whole sort of blob, like how do they respond to that?
I mean, I'm sure, I mean, I think basically it's over and I don't think anyone even, I mean, this latest round of funding is just, it's an election year and Biden's trying to kick the can to not.
I mean, we have no idea where all this money has been going, but we know Ukraine is a totally trustworthy government.
You know, there's no corruption there.
But I think, look, I'm sure they will attempt to spin it in some way where if Zelensky still controls, like, the western portion of Ukraine, they'll be like, He didn't lose the whole country and Putin would have been in Poland if we hadn't fought this war.
Of course, it would all be completely ridiculous.
We could have avoided this war by just...
By just saying we're not going to admit Ukraine into NATO and putting that in writing, we could have avoided this war.
This is not according to me.
According to the head of NATO, we could have avoided this war by doing that.
And whatever the number is, and who knows, you never know in the fog of war.
I mean, it's not until they really test the excess mortality rate.
The incredibly dark irony of it is that all the people cheering on Ukraine have just, as John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path.
And that's what we did.
You act like you're cheering them on, but you're leaving them to their demise.
And it didn't need to happen.
It's terrible.
And I'm not absolving Putin of responsibility.
He was certainly put, backed into a corner, but there had to be another answer other than this.
Well, the thing is, it decreases the chances that Russia uses them, so there's that.
I mean, you know, there's...
Joe Biden always pretended that the war in Ukraine was a must-win, you know, like that we couldn't allow Vladimir Putin to win the war, but that's all just an act.
It doesn't...
It's not...
I'm just saying, however you feel about it, it's not actually vital to U.S. survival.
Whether Russia controls Ukraine or not.
That's absurd.
But Vladimir Putin really believed it was a must-win.
And that actually is a much more reasonable case.
That you can't lose a war on your border.
That's a proxy war.
Even in the Cold War, we never fought in Vietnam, but that's not on Russia's border.
You know what I mean?
This is a whole different game.
And so to me, the real fear from the very beginning was not that Vladimir Putin might win.
The real fear was that, well, what if the West wins?
Like, what if Vladimir Putin is humiliated right on his border and feels that his death is imminent?
Because that's the time.
time when nukes might fly.
And so in that sense, you know, it's quite possibly the better outcome.
I mean, no nuclear war is always the better outcome.
Actually, amazingly, you were told to carry a gun.
It was so out of control when I was there that journalists and NGO workers, or I don't know, certainly me, you had to go get a certification from the state department.
I still have my badge.
It's hanging in my office right there.
You qualified with this.
It was an AK-47.
Well, I actually had an AK-47 already, not fully automatic, but just in my range.
I knew how to operate it.
But yeah, you're required to carry it.
That's how out of control it was.
And then a buddy of mine got killed there.
A journalist was killed there.
A guy called Mike Kelly was a really great guy.
And the bottom line was, we're not good at colonialism because we don't have the self-confidence.
We're not sort of bringing Christianity and civilization.
There's no clearly defined goal for this.
And we're bad at it.
And the armed forces is not designed to do that.
And the effect was super obvious.
It was chaos.
And the one thing I cannot deal with, and I hate, and I think all people hate instinctively, is chaos.
People can handle repression.
They live under repressive regimes.
You know, all through history they have.
They can't handle chaos.
And we brought chaos to Iraq.
And I just thought, this is the opposite of what a great power should be doing.
This is disgusting.
And I saw really, really clearly that it would never get better.
And I'll just add one more thing to this, which I've never forgotten.
We went into the green zone one night and had dinner with some generals.
I did.
And I'd always sort of liked my dad was in the military.
I sort of respected the military.
I didn't realize how corrupt and disgusting and feminized the officer class was and politicized.
Just repulsive people, actually, at the flag officer level.
So we're sitting at dinner, and this general is telling me about, oh, I saw something really touching today.
I saw we had this female officer.
And she was killed.
Her legs were blown off by an IED. And her husband was there.
And he, you know, they've got three kids back in Virginia, but he held her hand as she died of this ultimate sacrifice for America.
And I was like, what?
You're like celebrating this?
A girl got killed?
A mother?
I thought we fought wars to protect mothers and children.
First of all, if you're sending girls to fight your wars, you're disgusting.
If you're sending women to protect you, if there's a home invasion at your house at 3 in the morning, and you're like, honey, I dealt with the last one.
Go defend us.
I hope that she leaves you.
And she will, by the way.
So if you're sending women to defend you, It's not a civilization worth defending.
Well, the thing that's almost more dark and horrible than just that is when you add on the fact that this was a small group of people who wanted this war going back into the 90s and that they used 9-11 as the excuse.
To, you know what I mean?
Be like, oh yeah, now we can go get our bonus war.
Oh, look at this.
Right now, we've got a blank check from the American people, which they did, that you tell us, you say the word terrorist in point, and we will support you bombing the crap out of them.
And so I was there and it was like maybe the fall of 2002. And they'd been talking about this Invader Rock stuff, but I didn't take it seriously because I thought it was so crazy.
It was like a non sequitur.
It was like...
It was just not connected in any sense to 9-11, obviously.
And guys like, you know, paid liars like Steve Hayes or someone would write these books like, Al-Qaeda did it!
And I worked with Steve Hayes and I was so embarrassed by that.
It's like, he's dumb, so he didn't know.
But I just felt, I was like, this whole thing was like so nuts.
So I never thought we were going to invade Iraq.
I never thought that.
And I show up and I'm, whatever, like having a cigarette on the lawn outside where all the sticks are, all the stand-up guys, the TV cameras are.
And I run into Mike Allen.
He's an old friend of mine, former Washington Post reporter, now runs Axios, a really nice person, and has this clarity of vision that I don't have because he isn't caught in the weeds on shit.
And I said, we're not really going to invade Iraq.
He goes, of course we are.
And I said, how do you know that?
He goes, well, because all the machinery is moving in that direction.
It's going to happen.
I was like, that can't really happen.
He goes, oh, no, that's going to happen.
He wasn't endorsing it.
He could just see that if everyone starts talking about something, they will convince themselves that it's true and it will happen.
Like, we should remember that.
Don't overthink things.
If something really obvious is happening, it's happening.
So this was written in 1996, and it was not written to Bill Clinton.
It was not written to Bob Dole, who was running for president that year.
It was written to Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just become the prime minister of Israel.
And the clean break...
The strategy was a break from this whole peace process nonsense that Yitzhak Rabin and them had...
Agreed to.
And basically it was like, well, look, it was the beginning laying down of what the Netanyahu doctrine was ultimately to be, which has culminated in a wild success, as you know.
And so basically the idea was like, well, look, forget all of this peace process where you focus on land exchanges and whose land belongs to who.
That's all kind of lame.
And so what really you should do is reach out to the broader Arab world.
Kind of make arrangements with them so you don't have to go through this peace process.
And that starts with overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
And that's our first step here.
And then there's several other steps, but it's outlined why we want Saddam Hussein overthrown.
And so then this was for Israel's interests.
We wanted this war in 1996. Now, by the way, there's other things.
I'm not saying Israel is 100% pulling the strings of the American government.
I think a big part of the reason why the war ended up happening was also because George W. Bush had a personal beef against Saddam Hussein and tried to have his father killed.
But these neoconservatives then, as soon as 9-11, in the Project for a New American Century, when they talked about how they wanted to fight wars on multiple fronts, they explicitly said they probably wouldn't be able to do that unless there was another Pearl Harbor.
Now, the 9-11 truthers, the Alex Jones guys, for a while, they would hang on that as evidence that, you know, whatever, Cheney did 9-11 or something like that were elements within our government.
I think they're overplaying their hand there.
I don't actually think that.
But it certainly is evidence that they recognize what it was once it happened.
I think you should always be suspicious of any government explanation for anything.
That should always be your starting point.
I'm not saying you should jump to a conclusion about what happened.
By the way, this is my worldview that has served me very well.
I basically...
My podcast kind of took off, and a big part of that is Joe Rogan and stuff like that, but I've just kind of been consistently right on the biggest issues.
I have a good track record now.
I was in real time calling out how obviously Trump was not a Russian agent, and in real time I was saying the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and in real time I was against lockdowns from the very beginning, and it's all because I operate from a worldview of recognizing the government as essentially a criminal gang.
And that's part of the reason why they don't like the mafia because you're a competing gang.
You're not allowed to be the gang.
We're the gang.
And so when you look at things through that frame, yes, they're all a bunch of liars and they're power brokers.
And so, yeah, I don't trust anything they say.
I try to just go off what I know.
So we don't know exactly what happened on 9-11.
We do know at this point that there was pretty high-level Saudi involvement and that the Saudis have – that the government knew that and had no interest in punishing those people and, in fact, still wanted to continue doing business with them.
We do know that we were comfortable enough fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen.
So it didn't seem like al-Qaeda – fighting al-Qaeda wasn't really the motivating force.
And like I said, we know that this group of neocons who hijacked the federal government wanted these wars and after 9-11 used that opportunity to get them.
They used that opportunity.
But anyway, so the point I was making about not being an expert but being able to shatter this narrative, it's like...
Wait, so do you, just to be clear though, do you think it's possible that people within the US government were aware this was going to happen before it did?
I'm not drawing a bigger conclusion, but you're like, who are these people?
And these are people who are like, you know, Bohemian Grove is real.
They're doing really weird stuff there.
Jeffrey Epstein was real.
There was a pedophile ring that a lot of the most powerful people were connected to, at least knew about, and didn't feel like blowing the whistle on it.
These are people who are comfortable making decisions where babies will die.
Mass slaughter will happen and they can sleep at night.
And like, I'm not saying like a situation where either our babies are going to die or their babies are going to die and there's a horrible decision, but I have to make this.
A decision where like, no, we're choosing this to happen and they're kind of okay with that.
And you kind of wake up to like, so when you say like, is it possible that they'd kill Americans or be complicit in that?
Like, yeah, of course.
Of course that's possible.
I don't have enough evidence to like prove that that's the case, but I can prove.
That they wanted these wars, and then when the opportunity to get them came, they lied through their fucking teeth in order to sell the wars.
Look, General Wesley Clark, he said, as I'm sure you've seen, his Democracy Now!
interview, where he said that he saw the plans in late 2001, that it wasn't just that we were going into Iraq, but that we were also going to have regime change in Syria and several other countries.
But then, when they go to start the regime change in Syria, 2013 or whatever, Well, they started in 2012. But then they go, oh, we have to overthrow Assad because, you know, he's killing all of his own people.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You wanted to overthrow Assad over a decade ago.
Don't give me this bullshit that this is some new plan now.
So I do know that they will lie through their teeth to the American people.
Like this I know for certain, that they will lie through their teeth to the American people to get enough public support for mass slaughter campaigns because they want those campaigns for completely different reasons.
And again, like I said, This isn't speculation.
They wrote this in their own words.
One of the reasons they wanted to remake the Middle East in this way is because they thought it was in Israel's interest.
And that, to me, is just totally unacceptable as an American.
First off, you're lying to the people of this country, and you're doing something with a foreign country's interest in mind.
That's just so appalling that I think people should be like...
What's interesting is that so many people who talk about America First or whatever, they're fully on board with this.
They attack anyone who's not.
I had a thoroughly bizarre experience the other day, and maybe you can shed light on what it means because I don't fully understand it, but I was doing Rogan's podcast.
And at one point, I just blurted out for like 15 seconds something I thought about recently, which is the use of the nuclear bombs.
They have been used in August of 1945 against Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.
Complex topic.
A lot of it's not publicly well-known, okay?
But just the bottom-line fact that we dropped, particularly the bomb on Nagasaki, which was the Christian capital of Japan, by the way, that bomb was dropped on a church and killed, you know, three-quarters of the Christians in the city, which bothers me as a Christian.
But leaving even that aside, it killed civilians.
It wasn't dropped on a military base.
It was killed civilians.
And, like, I get why people did it, or maybe I don't get it, but...
I think 80 years later we can say not something to brag about incinerating civilians.
I don't care what the context is.
That's evil.
That's basically all I said.
Holy shit.
Did I get attacked from the right?
And I thought, and I don't even follow the attacks on me ever, but I kept getting texts from people.
I can't believe you said that or people are mad at you for saying that.
And I thought of all the dumb, cruel, untrue things I have said over 30 years of just talking in public.
A lot of which I regret and I hope I've apologized for every bad thing I've said, but I've said a lot of really things are impossible to defend.
So this is my kind of theory on it, is that you'll kind of notice, World War II, which is a long time ago at this point, generates...
This enormous, you know, you said the thing, I love when you said that, about how you could tell there's an infection because you touch it and people recoil.
But what's so weird about that is clearly the most important, and we talked about this last night, the most important thing in your life is your marriage and your children.
The lesson should be like, oh my God, we imposed Versailles on the Germans and insisted on humiliating them internationally and look at the backlash of this.
Whatever.
There's all this.
A lot of it comes down to entering World War I and World War II was really an extension of that.
By the way, there's so many ripple effects of this, too, because the whole situation with Israel-Palestine, this is also a result of the British Empire being defeated and being driven out.
I mean, there's lots of reasons why America was so successful as a country.
Part of the reason really was the brilliance of our founding fathers and the system that they created.
I mean, that's a huge part of it.
And there's like a, you know, it's like when they, George Washington's farewell address where he warns about entangling alliances.
And there was something really profound that they saw there.
And this idea, and this is a real problem with like, it's like, why would we even want Ukraine and NATO? Why do we want to make war guarantees for countries that we have neither the resources nor the political will?
To actually defend in the case of a war.
Nicely put!
First off, we're broke.
We're $34 trillion in debt.
We can't afford our own wars, let alone everybody else's.
It's so cartoonish.
We're borrowing money.
It's like if I was giving my sister money and my cousin's money and all of them, but I'm putting it on a credit card.
But so Rogan, it just started because there was something about, you know, just like the stars aligning, you know, in a very similar way to I heard you talk about, I think you were talking to me about how, look, there's something to the fact that say you get fired from Fox News and it happens to be at this point where Elon Musk bought.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing.
And everyone's there, and you're protected there.
They're not going to ban you.
And, you know, when Bill O'Reilly got fired from Fox News, there was nothing like that there.
Rogan happened to kind of, like, come up as this internet world was exploding, and he's just such an interesting guy, such a genuine guy, that his podcast just took off.
And he became kind of, like, in this situation where...
Anybody who kind of comes on, or if you come on and you do well, it's just like the biggest opportunity.
And he's such a genuinely generous person that I think he loves that.
I think that's his favorite thing of all of it.
Out of owning the comedy club, the podcast, everything he does, I see it in him.
What he really loves, what really makes him happy is that he gets to kind of bring all of his guys with him.
And I know a lot of friends who...
Joe has changed their lives.
It's the Johnny Carson thing.
I remember Jerry Seinfeld hearing him, I don't know him, but hearing him describe doing Carson.
And then your wife's like hobbling in the background, and you're like, yeah, I'm kidding.
Kind of.
But anyway, but it's this amazing, you know, it's like...
You know, it's like you're on drugs, basically.
Like, you're high when you first come out with a new baby.
You kind of can't believe it.
And you don't know what you're doing with the first one, you know, but you figure it out.
But anyway, he said Carson was like that.
Like, you go in a nobody.
And then you come out and you're a somebody.
And it's kind of like that with Rogan.
Like, it's just...
And there's all these similar dynamics.
Like, he'll kind of go...
You know, like, he'll go, like, two hours and 15 minutes with some people, and then he'll go, like, three and a half hours sometimes if he really likes the conversation, and you never know.
As you know, when you're in there, you have no idea how long you actually went for or whatever, but it's, and that, like, my experience with him was he heard me on a mutual friend of ours, Ari Shafir's podcast, who I love, also a hilarious comedian.
But there's something about being ideologically possessed that's very unpleasant.
You know what I mean?
Like, and there's something, one of the things that was great about your show on Fox News is that, like, you would, on many key issues, have a completely different opinion than everybody else at Fox News.
But then there's also, okay, so part of that price too, and this is what I was getting at, the thing that you and Rogan have in common, is that so many of those hosts, and I don't know all of them.
I've done a lot of shows at Fox News.
Met a lot of people over there.
And I did a lot of shows at CNN when I was working there.
And so I met a lot of those guys.
I've never...
I was one time in the MSNBC studios and just met a few of the people there.
But they're like...
So many of them are totally phony.
They're just not...
I mean, I've had things where...
Like, I've gone and grabbed beers with people after a show at Fox News.
Like, after doing Kennedy or doing Cutting Gold or something like that.
And at one time, there was a Green Beret.
I won't name him.
But he was at Green Beret who served a couple tours in Afghanistan.
And when we were on the show, he was talking about supporting the surge.
I think I can't remember.
It was years ago.
I think it was Trump's first surge.
And then we go out for beers afterward.
And he was like, listen, there is no army over there that we've been building up.
There's nothing.
They'll fold in a day.
And he goes, let me tell you.
And he would tell me about, like, the, you know, he goes, dude, we would give them, you know, like, some machine guns.
We'd go out on a mission, come back.
They used them to rob everybody in the village.
There's no Afghan army that we're building up.
The Taliban will run right through them.
And I was like, oh, why didn't you just tell everybody that?
You know what I mean?
Like, why did you totally lie when we were on TV? And it's just, there's a lot of people who do that.
And you can smell that.
You can smell that on them, though.
Like, even if you don't know that, over time, People kind of know.
People kind of know, like, oh, these guys are...
And there is something, having watched you for a long time and now having met you, and this is Joe Rogan too, you are exactly the same person off camera that you are on camera.
I hope so.
Now, with both of you, there might be something you'd say off camera that you wouldn't say on camera, but there's nothing you're saying on camera that you don't believe.
I don't think you should, actually, because I have a lot of dumb opinions, too, that are just rooted in meanness or irritation or mocking people's appearances, which I have a weakness for.
I get your point, but I have no intention of stopping that.
But there is something that I think is part of what I love so much about Joe and I think part of why he has blown up and been so successful is that, you know, because people ask me all the time, they'll be like, what's Joe...
The idea that, like, no, like, kind of, there is this connection between, like, what she would call selfishness, which I don't think is the right word for it.
No.
But there is something between, like, success.
And humans are weird psychological creatures.
Sometimes you can have the desire to not succeed, to not outshine somebody else, you know?
But actually, you're doing a much better thing if you, like, succeed, if you're great at something, and then you're, like, an inspiration to others to be great also.
Do you find, I just, I've had this conversation, I ask everyone I have dinner with this question, which is, do you find in the midst of all of this sadness and chaos and decline, Rapid decline.
That your personal relationships are deeper and more fulfilling.
Because it, well, and it's just, you know, it's whatever your, you know, this is the thing that was kind of, I know you sent me when I tweeted something about this, but where like when you don't have God, whatever's next highest in line becomes, Yes.
And affect your God.
And there is something about, I did not have God or family, my own family.
You know, I had family members who I love, but I didn't have my own family.
And my whole life, I kind of, like, I was like a 90s kid.
I grew up in, I was born in 1983. I grew up in the 90s.
Nobody, and we did not have, you know, like all of the traditions that many previous.
Generations grew up with, like God, country, chivalry, these things.
You wear this uncomfortable outfit here because that's what's expected of you around other people when you go to church.
You strap on these boots.
It was like, no, we just grew up in blue jeans and sneakers.
And the point of life was kind of like to get through school to go play.
You know what I mean?
When I was a teenager, it was like to like...
smoke pot or, you know, like try to get laid or something.
You know what I mean?
Like it was all just kind of like revolved around what's fun.
And it wasn't until I got married and when we had my first kid and I found God also at that same time that I'd been living a totally different life where my life is kind of centered around this purpose that there's meaning to it.
And it's not really about me and whether I'm having fun.
Like I still like to have fun sometimes, but it's like what that's really not that important.
Like what's really important is that like I'm being a great husband to my wife.
I'm being a great father to my kids.
And ironically, to some degree, you just find much deeper happiness when you're not living just for happiness.
And I don't, obviously when you speak about a group that big, I'm painting with a broad brush.
There are exceptions to this rule.
Of course.
And I love my mother very much and she's a good person.
But as a generation, they just ruined everything.
And they're totally selfish.
Yes.
Jeff Dice, who I love this guy, he's so brilliant.
But he gave a speech about it and he was going through the things of all of the slogans of the baby boomers and how self-serving they all were.
It was like, don't trust anyone over 30 until they...
Got into their 30s, you know, and then it was like, and then like you watch it all the way through like COVID. It's like, we got to do everything we can to protect the baby of our generation.
Because the key to real happiness, I mean, there's different ways to measure happiness or, like, whatever.
Again, like, you know, there's someone training for a marathon, and there's someone sitting having a bag of potato chips, and in the moment, the guy having the bag of potato chips might be happier than the guy training for the marathon, but, like, ultimately, who's going to feel better about themselves is going to be, you know what I mean?
And also look, I mean that kind of the absence of having that feeling or the baby boomers kind of not Feeling that way.
It's kind of like, I mean, look what it's led to.
I mean, you know, it's very easy for, you know, say popular conservative, you know, pundits to kind of dunk on college kids and stuff like that, which is like fun.
I've enjoyed videos of where, you know, like Ben Shapiro is like destroying 19 year old in some college campus.
And, you know, it's like, you know, she's like, you know, some.
Trans kid or something like that and is like, well, I was born a boy, but why can't I live as a woman?
And he's like, why can't you live as a cat?
And it was like, ah!
And it's like, ah, the intellectual prowess of destroying this kid.
And like, yes, okay, that is stupid.
That kid was an idiot.
But you also kind of like...
Peel a little bit deeper, and you're like, so what was this kid's situation, really?
Look, it's true that this generation is in many ways softer and more privileged, and part of that's because they grew up with technological wealth that previous generations never had.
It's also partly because their parents never instilled values in them to care about more than just avocado toast, but the fact is that baby boomers could go to college and get a summer job.
And pay for their college, okay?
And then, if they didn't go to college, they could go to high school and then go wait online and get a job where you could support a wife and kids off of that job.
And that was the way of the world previously, that my grandfather worked in factories his whole life, and his wife didn't work.
And that was that.
And he owned a house, he sent kids to college, he had two cars, like they had a nice life.
And these kids today come out with six figures of debt.
And are getting a job at Starbucks.
And houses are going for like $600,000.
You know what I mean?
For that same humble house that my grandfather had.
And the baby boomers all got rich by the value of their house just going up.
They know how, I mean, they may be wrong, they may be confused, but they're actually pretty tough in a way, and they're pretty angry, and they sort of get what's going on, and I have deep sympathy for them.
Deep.
They've been completely screwed over by the people.
They don't have any power.
Even if you're a 19-year-old Columbia kid, I may not agree with your slogans or down with white people or whatever.
I mean, I'm sorry to blame society for the crimes of young people, but actually, society does deserve the blame, and the leaders of the society deserve the blame.
I mean, people started, they were like, wow, did that stall it in Mao Zedong?
And I'm like, okay, fine.
He was third.
But the point is, okay, there were like five ahead of him.
Okay, fine.
But I think...
Part of this is that, you know, a lot of the kind of conservatism, Inc.
people who criticized us for saying that, and they're kind of like, well, how would you, you know, this was the guy who was the most prominent member of the conservative movement.
And it's like, okay, and so, like, what exactly was conserved in his movement?
What, like, just explain, was it the Constitution?
Was it what?
Classical liberal values?
Was it religion?
Was it tradition?
Was it the definition of a woman?
Like, what exactly was the big conservative win here?
You know, like, I don't know, but, like, you lost everything.
You lost the United States of America.
And part of the reason, a major reason why, is because the whole National Review, like, takeover of the conservative movement was to drive out all of the...
Well, I think the fruits were a transformation of the right wing in America from being the old right, which was really, I mean, they were fairly isolationist, but certainly non-interventionist.
I mean, like, you know, Robert Taft was the one who didn't want us to be in NATO. I mean, this was like the old, and they were big on like...
Immigration controls, sound money, and not getting involved in wars.
These were the people who opposed World War I and World War II. They didn't want American involvement in these wars, right?
And the effect of Bill Buckley was to transform what became the conservative movement into being Cold Warriors.
That what we do is we go everywhere around the world looking for a war to fight.
So, in other words, the people who really loved America, not the idea, but the physical reality of America and her people.
The people who actually live here and their homes and their little towns and their dumb little jobs and all the stuff that makes up a civilization at scale, the people who cared about that somehow became anti-American?
And like, because it's, look, this was a really great country.
And I mean, there are still a lot of great things about it, but it's deteriorating.
And why, you know, why should we be for that?
And, you know, one of the crazy things about America is that there is kind of this...
I think the George double...
George W. Bush years in the war on terrorism was a revolution of sorts in the country.
I grew up a kid in the 90s.
We are not the same country as we were in the 1990s.
In the pre-war on terror, before the Patriot Act, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the TSA. I mean, the experience at an airport is a different thing.
We are a different country than we were before that.
I think COVID has changed everything.
But even before that, I mean, as you've talked about a lot, In the wake of World War II, the creation of the CIA. This was a revolution in the country where it changed who's running the government.
And we think of the position of President of the United States of America being the same position that Woodrow Wilson occupied or something like that.
And it's not.
It's a totally different position.
Donald Trump did not have the same job FDR had.
They were very, very different.
Not even close.
When people say, oh, you love America, it's like, yes, I love this country.
I don't like the direction the government's going in.
I mean, you know, dude, you celebrated mission accomplished.
And then we stayed in the war for 20 years.
You know, just a disaster and left the country.
And I mean, look, not only was it all completely unnecessary.
I mean, like we had like the special ops response to Al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan in late 2001. Totally justify that.
We had an opportunity to trap Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora in late 2001. And they, I believe, intentionally let him go so they could continue these wars.
Scott Horton wrote a book called Enough Already, which is like a masterpiece, a history of all the terror wars.
And it seems overwhelmingly likely that they already had their eye on Iraq and that they knew that if they captured Osama bin Laden, it'd be very difficult to sell another war.
Well, look, you can read through the details of it, but there were a bunch of...
They knew he was in Tora Bora, and they were requesting backup.
I remember that.
And they didn't give it to him.
It certainly seems to be what it looks like.
And then it was a decision that we're going to cobble.
Then it was a decision that we're going to...
Overthrow the Taliban and fight a regime change war there and then go fight the regime change war in Iraq.
And I mean, look, like you said, judge them by their fruit.
I mean, the results of George W. Bush's wars were there were trillions of dollars wasted, hundreds of thousands of people in these countries died, and our bravest young men blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands.
Okay, so, well, the first one was kind of what I was touching on before, that there is this, there is like a seismic shift in the way people are being exposed.
The part of the reason, and I know you've talked about this a lot, and I think explained it very well, but...
What you're seeing out of the establishment, what you see out of MSNBC when they talk about Donald Trump, or when they talk about you, for that matter, is not a ruling class that is confident that they have power.
They are like a cockroach that's trapped.
You know what I mean?
And there's a reason for that.
And there's a reason why they're so hysterical.
And it's because for the first time, certainly in my lifetime and well beyond that, the monopoly over the control of information has truly been broken.
And that you watch this during COVID, where, I mean, like, you and Joe Rogan had a huge impact on the nation during COVID. Because you were like the two biggest people with the biggest audiences.
Completely exposing how insane the whole narrative was and how insane all of the COVID restrictions were.
And eventually it got to a point where people just weren't taking it anymore.
They weren't listening to Fauci.
We never had anything like that before.
We never had someone like Joe Rogan or someone like you doing this show where in the run-up to, say, in 2002, the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was just no one like that who was blowing the whistle with...
Tens of millions of people listening to them and explaining how this is all lies.
We have that now.
And they're freaking out about that.
And this is really why all the attempts at tech censorship happened since 2016, because they've recognized that.
Like, oh, Donald Trump can tweet his way to the White House.
He doesn't even have to go through us.
So we better control Twitter and, you know, YouTube and Facebook and all of these, Google and all of this.
And even in their attempts to control it...
They've never been as good as they were at controlling when there were just three networks and just a few big newspapers.
And now, I think Elon Musk really threw a wrench in their plans by buying Twitter.
So I'm very encouraged about that.
I'm very encouraged about the fact that people have access to the truth in a way that they never did before.
I think ideas are powerful, and I think that all governments rely on propaganda.
And there's something in that that's really It's like, oh, they have to convince us before they can just do it.
Okay, there's two things that are seemingly contradictory, but they're not.
Number one, democracy is an illusion.
It doesn't really exist.
You don't really ever have democracy.
Of course not.
Oh, we get to vote in presidential elections.
Even assuming all the votes are counted in the right way or something like that, it's like, yeah, you get to vote when these two parties, these private entities, decide who the candidate is, and then you can pick between the two of them.
You know what I mean?
That's not really democracy.
But in another sense, there's always democracy.
And every nation, no matter how...
Whether they have free and fair elections or not, there has to at least be tacit acceptance by the people.
And if there's 500,000 people out in the streets screaming at a dictator about how they want policy X, that dictator is like, you know, I've been considering it and we will be implementing policy X. You know what I mean?
Because at the end of the day, there's way more of you than there are of him.
And so when you can spread ideas, we have a fighting shot, I think.
So that's very encouraging to me.
I think there's also been a huge move away from U.S. hegemony internationally, which is both very scary, but is also, I think, necessary.
I think that America spiraling as a country, I think, started with us getting off of the gold standard.
Once government could print as much money as they want to, they make people rich for just trading in paper or being politically connected, and you're not...
Earning anything to become rich and it's devastating.
And then I think the unipolar moment was the worst thing that ever happened to America.
So we got this privilege after World War II, right?
The Bretton Woods Agreement.
A lot of the stuff where you talk about our soul as a country being destroyed, it happened in large part as a result of that.
Because we didn't have to earn our place in the world anymore.
We could just export paper.
And of course, we immediately started cheating.
And this is why Nixon took us off the gold standard.
It's not that Nixon went off the gold standard.
It's that the French called his bluff.
We were saying, we'll exchange dollars for $35 an ounce.
And they went, okay, we'll take our gold.
And we were like, oh, wait, I'm sorry, what was that?
And they were like, no, no, no, I just saw you did this whole, like, you had this whole space program and you fought a war in Vietnam and you just started all these entitlement programs.
You know, it does seem like you've been printing a lot of money.
I think we'll take our gold.
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And then Nixon was like, this was an attack against the U.S. dollar.
And then it's like, okay, so what am I going to do for my family now?
Like, obviously, my kids and my wife are my responsibility, but then like, okay, I got a brother, I got a sister, I guess I got to hand them a bunch of money too.
You know, my brother's like just coming out of grad school.
It's like, am I going to hand him a huge and just take away all of his drive to go make it on his own now?
Am I going to give him nothing and be a brother who has a billion dollars and gives him nothing?
That's not an option either.
I don't know.
Things get way more complicated very quickly where you're like, no, actually, that's not the right answer.
And also, it's not as if I have the respect.
From my family now, like, oh my god, you're taking care of all of us.
They like grew up wanting to be part of the club and the only effect, you know, Teddy Roosevelt right there he he was Like an actual populist because he grew up in that world and he's like actually you all kind of suck and there's nothing that you have that I want You know what I mean?
I'd rather be in North Dakota hunting and that was his superpower.