Blowback - S1 Bonus - "Shock Corridor feat. Naomi Klein"

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Author Naomi Klein joins us to discuss the American exploitation-fest in Iraq, her own experience coming up during the Bush years, the rehabilitation of the Bush administration, and its continuities with the Trump gang.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vice President Joe Biden. So thank you both President Bush and Mrs. Bush for your ongoing commitment to honor and support the brave men and women who serve in the United States military, who is without fear of contradiction, the finest fighting force in the history of the world. That is not hyperbole. It's the finest, fine thing for you. Mr. President, very serious note, it's my honor to present you both with the National Constitution Center 2016 Liberty Medal.

You both deserve. Freedom of Discussion Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is our final bonus episode. We have got an interview with author, activist, public intellectual, Naomi Klein. And it was a really great conversation.

We talked with Naomi about the different modes of exploitation and plunder that took place during the Iraq war. We talked about Naomi's own experiences sort of coming up in the Bush years as a writer and a left-wing thinker. Obviously, for those familiar with her book, The Shock Doctrine, much of her analysis in that book is based on the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. And finally, we discussed the rehabilitation of the Bush administration, why that might be going on right now. What's the deal with that? So it was a really good chat, and let's let her rip. Naomi, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Happy to be with you. So to kick things off, I guess I'd first ask, you were one of the most popular and visible left-wing intellectuals during the Bush era. What was it like coming up in that Iraq war decade, that this world that the Bush administration was created? or perhaps destroying. Was it a similar apocalyptic flavor to our current moment?

I think it was pretty different in lots of ways. I kind of cut my teeth as a journalist writing about the early days of the so-called anti-globalization movement or the alter globalization movement. So in my 20s, I was writing about sweatshops and resistance to corporate trade deals. And then my first book, No Logo, came out in 2000. And I was kind of swept up in this global movement that came to world attention in Seattle. I point this out just because the lens with which I saw the Iraq invasion and occupation was really informed by my own focus on economic justice issues. and trade and I was writing more about the economic side of the war than I was on the military

side of it. But yeah, in terms of the mood, in some ways I think it was clear because liberals were so embedded in the project of invading Iraq. The moment we're in now, which is sort of casting Trump as this extreme outlier who has nothing to do with the American story. That was very much not the tone and the landscape in those years. The neoliberal economic project was deeply bipartisan. The first sort of big protests against corporate free trade were during the Clinton era. And so I guess in some ways it was clearer than it is now. politically on the left, that there was a left, and it wasn't the Democratic Party, if you

will. And that's, and that's, I think, why there was, you know, clear support for third party candidates, you know, in the Nader run. And, and then, of course, there was a big, big debate about Nader's run in 2004, because of the urgency of getting rid of Bush, which we didn't succeed in Right. Now, your hit book, The Shock Doctrine, comes out in 2007, in the latter half of the Bush era. And for those who are not familiar with the thesis of the shock doctrine, to put it very briefly, I guess you could say it would be that capital and the governments at its disposal use national and international crises to take advantage of chaos and disarray to implement policies conducive to looting and thieving and plunder by the upper classes. And of course, there's fewer better examples of this, especially in the 21st century, than the Iraq War. But it also connects specifically to a theme in our show and the title of our show, the misleading title of our show, maybe, blowback, because we like to think of blowback as an algorithm for disaster capitalism.

You know, it looks like bad stuff comes back to haunt us, but really this creates new opportunities to do nasty things all over again that make a lot of people money. Do you think that blowback is an expression of the shock doctrine in that way? Well, the thesis for the shock doctrine was very much forged in my reporting on the invasion and occupation of Iraq because it was so naked in the, you know, even in the way the, the invasion was branded as a shock and awe attack, right? That it was, it was, um, the military strategy was just this very crass, like, we shall overwhelm you with our, um, with our weaponry and you will just fall down in sheer awe of our force. That was, that was the military strategy, right, for the invasion. And then it was followed

immediately thereafter with an economic shock strategy. And that also was completely naked. And I write about this in the shock doctrine, but also in my reporting for Harper's. I wrote a piece called Baghdad Year Zero. And in that piece, talked about how the CPA under Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority, brought in a bunch of Eastern European crooks, essentially,

who had sold off their own countries to the oligarchs from Poland, from Russia, and brought them in in in flag jackets and helmets to the Green Zone to lecture Iraqi appointees about the need to go even faster in Iraq with their economic shock therapy than they had, you know, that they had done in the former Soviet Union and saying, you know, you just can't give people a chance to think or resist. So it was this sort of overwhelm the census idea. And so, yeah, I mean, this was an attempt at the strategy that I describe in the shock doctrine. It didn't work, right?

Because it assumed a level of idiocy on the part of Iraqis that just didn't pan out, Right? I mean, a lot of the Iraqi exiles that they appointed were like, I'm sorry, I read the Guardian. Like, I've been in exile for years. I actually know what happened in Russia and what a crook these guys are. What crooks these guys are, they brought in to lecture us, right? And so, I mean, nothing went according to plan. But the, but I think to your point around blowback, the whole thing was rigged in a, in a, you know, like heads, heads we win, you know, tails you lose kind of way, in the sense that you had these three layers of pillage built in to the invasion of Iraq. One was kind of, you know, the way I understood at the time was like,

there was like the old school colonial pillage of just like, take the oil, right? And that was there. That was present from day one, and that was always a big part of the agenda, and that's why they protected the oil ministry and let everything else burn and so on, right? then there was this this kind of newfangled neoliberal idea which was

which Paul Bremer was in charge of overseeing for his relatively short time in Iraq right which was we're going to turn Iraq into a free market utopia that's going to benefit American business so Bremer immediately comes in Baghdad's still on fire by his own account

and passes this flurry of laws that are greeted in the business press as a, I think the economist called it a capitalist dream. It was the wish list of the flat taxes, immediate privatization of Iraq state-owned industries. Foreign investors can come in by 100% of Iraqi assets, take all their profits out. So it was a straight-up attack on an Arab nationalism, and it was like the IMF on steroids, what they were trying to do. None of the ideas were new.

They were straight out of the kind of Chicago school handbook, but no country had ever tried to impose them all at once. And so the ideologues in the Bush administration were like, this is our lab, we're going to do it all. We don't have a local government to negotiate with, so we can just do it all at once in a way that you couldn't even do under Pinochet because Pinochet was Chilean. This was just Paul Bremer doing it.

you know, by decree. But then there was this third level of pillage, which was the self-pillage that was the war itself, right? So this was the most privatized war in history. You had this outrageous slagre corruption, you know, best epitomized by the Halliburton contract, right? Where Dick Cheney goes from being CEO of Halliburton to vice president. the major, you know, architect of the invasion,

and they hand his former company a massive no-bid contract to run the invasion itself, right? Like, they're building the, they're building the green zone. They're building the U.S. bases. Yep. And then you have a very high ratio of contractor soldiers to American soldiers. And it just gets more contractors, the worse it gets and more allies pull out. They're replaced by contractors from companies like Blackwater, but many other companies as well. And so what that means is that when the neoliberal pillage fails and even the old school colonial pillage fails, right?

Like you don't get the oil. You don't open up Iraq for McDonald's and, you know, Sheraton hotels because the resistance rises up and you have the blowback that I think you guys are exploring, right? There's still huge opportunities for profit in the occupation itself, in the military, in the war itself, in the occupation. So, yeah, they've kind of rigged it. So it's not to say that I think they wanted Iraq to, it's not that they wanted to inspire resistance. I really do believe they were as stupid as they seemed in that they imagined this cakewalk. But they also had this fail save, which is that, okay, if. it all goes to hell, we still are going to all get rich. Right. I think that's a really important

thing to remember and distress when trying to figure out who benefited from the dismantling of Iraq or indeed any country like this. It's not a monolithic empire or array of capitalists. Just even within the Bush administration, you know, from this show, we talked about how there were rivals and certain cells were against each other ostensibly on the Bush administration. You know, the same mission. In the same way, you can look at industries that wanted even more chaos and more bloodshed. Obviously, the defense contractors and companies like that, but the oil companies, they actually at a certain point probably would have liked less of that stuff because it got in the way of putting down their roots and it was an obstacle. But of course, at the end of the

day, these are all basically playing on the same team against Iraq as the alien versus Predator movie said whoever wins, we lose. And there's one thing that you bring up that I think we talk a little bit about during the regular series run of our show that I think is sort of interesting, which is the way that this rise in private military contracting coincides with sort of a like a policy shift or at least like a political shift in the thinking of the Republicans in power at that time. Like, you know, right before, like the day before the planes hit the Twitter,

Tower, Don Rumsfeld was, you know, holding a press conference to talk about like, you know, like multi, like a trillion dollar accounting fraud at the Pentagon and need to cut costs. And it feels like part of what you're describing in addition to getting all those guys rich became this kind of very satisfying answer, at least to them, of course, not for anybody else, obviously, but it became a satisfying answer of how do we wage war on the cheap? You know, Rumsfeld's favorite line about like, you know, light footprint army and mobilization and a reliance and, special forces, which then has, you know, the further consequence of making an already incredibly opaque, massive, unaccountable branch of the American government, the military, even more opaque and unaccountable. Yeah, I think it was even more corrupt than that, though, because I don't think that it was about waging war on the cheap. It was incredibly expensive to outsource the whole thing to for-profit companies. There was so much waste in it. It was just, I think, ideal, like, I mean, I always kind of use the word ideology in air quotes with these guys because I think their whole ideology is a cover story for greed and self-enrichment, right? And so if you look at

who some of the key players were, they have deep ties to the sectors that are part of this disaster capitalism complex. Obviously Cheney as somebody who comes directly from Halliburton, a company that already had these contracts building army bases, but also securing, you know, doing oil service work. Then you had all the people from the oil industry like Condi Rice, who had a, you know, Chevron Tanker named after her and Bush himself. But even somebody like Paul Bremer, I mean, this is, he started an insurance company that was selling their,

counterterrorism services after 9-11. And Rumsfeld as well, coming from Gilead, he had a special interest in profiting from pandemics. So, I think, these are people who have spent a lot of time thinking about how to profit from various forms of chaos, whether terrorism or war or disease, you know, that's who they are. So it wasn't cheap. I guess that's the only thing I really want to push back on.

It was a complete boondoggle and built to be for U.S. taxpayers. They treated the government like their personal ATM. Right. They did an absolutely terrible job. But when it came to the shareholders of these companies, you know, they did very, very well by them. Right. And I think that part of the – you're totally right. And I think that, you know, a way that I would like maybe tweak it a little is that like part of the pitch about how they get away with all of these, like, destructive. expensive, excessive things is by claiming that they're on the cheap and that there is some purpose.

But as you say, that really is just a cover story. Right. There is an ideological cover story about how privatizing anything will make it more efficient. You know, that government is always the problem, not the solution. And I think what was significant about the Bush administration is that this process that really accelerates in earnest under Reagan and continued through the Bush administration, is that this process that really accelerates in earnest under Reagan and continued through the Clinton era, you know, the way I talked about it at the time was, you know, the government, you picture the government as this octopus, and over this 40-year period, various arms of the state are being lopped off and turned into profit centers, right?

Healthcare, education, roads, bridges. But by the time the Bush guys got there, all that was sort of left was the body, right? Like running the... government itself. And that's what they went after, right? And it was things like cutting checks for people on welfare. And that was outsourced to Lockheed Martin, you know. It was the absolute core. And of course, the military itself. And that was Rumsfeld's mission. You know, he came in as the, you know, he was greeted in the business press at the time before 9-11 as this, the CEO who was going to run the Pentagon like a business. And it was part of his mission. And it was part of his mission from day one to outsource everything that he possibly could, and then they outsource the

whole war. Yep. And one thing we note, it's funny actually now, given his most infamous role as the defense secretary during the Iraq years, I think we all remember Rumsfeld, although the purpose of the show is to remember more. We all kind of remember Rumsfeld as this bureaucrat, like the kind of king bureaucrat. But as you point out, at the time, he was a business guy. And his flavor was more of this Gilead, cost-cutting, hard-minded captain of industry. And he successfully slipped into the bureaucrat role, but only through that reputation. And if I may insert something,

I think this also feels a little bit like some of the amnesia that's related to the present moment, because obviously, you know, Condi Rice had also been on the board of Chevron prior to joining the George W. Bush White House. And it feels like there was a degree of conflict of interest and, you know, like, the kind of, you know, like, sort of revolving door culture that we associate with, like, the worst excesses of the, of the Trump administration, but that was, you know, just as effective and just as well greased, maybe not quite as well greased, but just, you know, a vet was similarly effective, you know, 10 years ago. More effective. More effective. More effective and more lucrative. You know, I mean, this is part of the frustration, I think, of this era is like, you know, we have not seen. I'm not, I want to, I think Trump is a crook. He is, he is incredibly dangerous president. We have

to get rid of him. So those are all the caveats. But that, but, but, but, but, but, but we have not seen the kind of looting of the public sphere under Trump. Yeah. That I know of. That's been reported. Then we saw right out in the open. Yeah. Under the Bush administration. Um, you know, I remember a a couple years ago, David Frum tweeted about how, you know, are we really, you know, losing, you know, American power over handbag patents and, you know, hotel contracts. It's just talking about the sort of self-dealing of the Trump kids. And, you know, I responded at the time, like, yeah, it was much more manly to do it over Halliburton contracts and Bechtel. You know, but we've, like, Those were $20 billion contracts.

This is peanuts what the Trump kids have done compared to that. So I think one of the differences is that the companies represented by the Bush cabinet were not, for the most part, brand-based companies. So that was part of it, right? Americans didn't really understand what Halliburton did or what Gilead did. And that's why the Cheney's and the Rumsfelds were able to kind of hold on to this aura that they were first and foremost government people, as opposed to business people, because these weren't direct to consumer companies for the most part.

And so I think the evolution, such as it is or devolution, when you come to Trump's first cabinet, it was just the kind of, these weren't naked direct-to-consumer corporate CEOs that he wanted to surround himself with, whether Rex Tillerson or his first choice for Labor Secretary, right, Andrew Pudzer, who owns fast food chains, he has the CEO of WWE in there, right? Linda McMahon, yeah. So these are companies that Americans understand. They buy products from them. And that was the difference. But in terms of just sheer efficiency. and like numerical value of what they were able to extract from American taxpayers.

I mean, Trump's got nothing on Bush. One thing I was kind of curious about was, you know, I think one of the things that in our show that we've tried to do is communicate for people what the sensation was like that, you know, like, how could America go to war? Like what was, you know, because for example, last year when the Trump administration tried all of these tricks to get us to, you know, like invade Venezuela or. or at least create the conditions for an invasion of Venezuela or advanced military action and the same in Iran and so on. And the popular support was like just not there. And obviously a huge chunk of that was informed by our experience in Iraq. But I think for a lot of people, it's sort of, especially the younger end of our audience now,

it's like a little bit difficult to kind of conjure what it was like in 2002 and 2003 in the early years of the war that would lead people to support what, you know, seemed to a lot of thinking people to be a pretty transparently, a war conducted on a pretty transparently false pretences. What was that sensation like? Like how did, I mean, at least as you observed it, like how did the American people, you know, end up co-signing such an obviously monstrously bad decision? There are a few factors. It had been how long, a year and a half since 9-11, the role of powerful liberal voices in legitimizing illegal invasion, torture. I think that there was a class of liberals, mostly American liberals, but also British liberals,

who had read a lot of Orwell and saw, this was their, this was, they had asked themselves, I think, as young, young men, almost all men, what would they do in a, you know, in their Orwell moment? And that being the sort of the Second World War fight against fascism, will you be a weak lefty and be against war, you know, or will you man up? Yeah. And I think maybe they had been waiting for that moment, their whole lives, their Orwell test, and they believed that this was their Orwell moment. And en masse, these very powerful liberal figures, you know, Michael Ignatyev, Christopher Hitchens, you know, obviously Thomas Friedman, Tony Blair, you know, more than a, more than a commentariat, like, member of the commentariat, you know, they all, but there were so many of them,

George Packer. I mean, they all wrote and argued versions of this same argument that this was, this was the moment where we had to show our toughness and resolve in standing up to fascism. And the whole Second World War frame was grafted onto this. And it made no sense. That's why I say it felt like they had been waiting for this their whole lives to play this role, to play act this. And I think it was a really, really big factor. That and I think

you know, equations around masculinity and the American psyche were, and this sort of the injured patriarch after 9-11 and the need to reassert a certain kind of

raw force power that was just deeply embedded in the Bush administration, in the way in which they were just looking for someone to hurt. And it had to be someone strong enough that it was worthy of their power, right? Afghanistan was not satisfying. It was too weak, right? It's not, it's not satisfying enough to beat the shit out of a really weak opponent. And that's how Afghanistan was sort of posited, like they were saying, we're going to bomb them back to the Stone Ages. And then it was like, they're already in the Stone. You know, like, it was just like, it wasn't seen as a worthy enough target

to express that raw, masculine force. And Iraq was a better tableau on which to enact this sort of theater of force. Speaking of theater, one of the things that we're seeing in our current moment, one of the more grotesque and disturbing things, is the wholesale rehabilitation of George W. Bush and his administration by the press and liberal politicians. You know, you see the George W. Bush Foundation doing little COVID tearjerker videos or weighing in on Black Lives Matter or MSNBC talking about how, great he was, especially compared to Trump. And I thought about George J.B. Bush, and I thought about New York. I mean, New York City and New York State were not places where you could, you know, find a car full of, you know, George W. Bush voters. But I do not remember anyone ever blinking or flinching the entire duration of that city,

my hometown city now rebuilding after 9-11. And I just, there is no, you know, similar DNA that we've seen yet. Donald Trump and New York City's his hometown. Yes. I mean, I was thinking back to 9-11, Nicole, and I have no recollection of George Bush politicizing it in any way. By the way, the anchor in that MSNBC clip is Nicole Wallace of former Bush communications directors. So we're hiring Bush people to be on ostensibly liberal TV channels revising history. You know, and not just Bush. You've seen Rumsfeld go on the late shows. You've seen Colin Powell continue to be worshipped. You see Condi Rice, you know, write a book called Democracy and be consulted on an expert on

Russiagate and stuff like this. And get seriously floated as a possible running mate for job. Yes, yes, precisely. So what do you make of this? You know, what, what's the purpose of this? You know, this is why I've argued since the earliest days of the Trump administration that we needed to metabolize him not as a rupture, but as a series of continuities, which does not mean that he isn't different, because he is different. But there are so many threads that we can follow, obviously from before Bush, but let's just looking at Bush, right? And that whole era, there was that famous interview where Ron Susskind interviewed, I believe it was Karl Rove, and he told Ron Susskind that he was a member of the reality-based community,

but we in the Bush administration are making reality, right? And so the, you know, in understanding that they really believed that, that they really, and this is why I think the blowback thesis, I think you have to be a bit careful with that they didn't, they were covered if this all went haywire. But they really did believe that they were going to create this model free market utopia in Iraq. They were that dumb that they thought there wouldn't be a reaction. Now, they were covered if there was. But they actually believed that they were so smart, that they were just going to overwhelm Iraqis with their weaponry and with their fast-moving economic plans. And Iraqis were going to accept having their country sold out from under them in the aftermath of war. Because they saw themselves, you know, as artists of the real.

They were putting their hands in the rubble and making a country from whole. cloth. And so that kind of delusion, of course, leads to the uplifting of a reality star as the president. I mean, there is a straight line that goes from one to the other. Sure. And I think there are so many ways in which what we saw during the Iraq invasion, the refusal to count the bodies, remember, we had to fight so hard just to know how many people were dying, refusing to let the photographs of the coffins of U.S. soldiers be, you know, appear in the press, refusing to even let the public know how many Iraqis had died. All of this creates the context where you can have a Trump who just, you know,

won't look at the number of people, won't even admit that people are dying. the face of this pandemic won't, won't admit that thousands of people died in Puerto Rico as a result of his administration's actions after Hurricane Maria. There are these continuities, but I think that the role of the perpetual innocence, the perpetual now in the American narrative, that's not new, right? There's always the assumption of innocence. And that assumption of innocence is what allowed these powerful liberals to make the argument that this profoundly corrupt and evil administration. I say evil because they were throwing people into dark holes in Guantanamo Bay.

They were already known torturers when they invaded Iraq. They had already created illegal framework for themselves that allowed them to flout international law in so many ways and to abuse people and attack so-called liberalism on every front. They were the ones that then made these claims to American innocence that allowed them to tell a story that, sure, we don't believe in wars of aggression, but we believe in fighting for human rights and democracy in Iraq. And that is why we are supporting these monsters invading Iraq because we think they're going to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq. And that is the toxicity of the depths of this claim to innocence at the heart of the American

project, that, you know, you're always starting from scratch. You're always assumed to have the best of intentions. And it leads to very, very, very dangerous things. So we are now seeing it applied to the Trump administration, sorry, to the Bush administration. administration retroactively, right? But it's part of the same process that allowed for the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Yep. That's definitely the line on our show.

One other point that I think is important to think about is, like I said, I mean, I do think that Trump is a new, kind of, like, there are things about Trump that are new. We've never had a reality show completely unhinged reality show star. there, as a president, although, you know, the end of the Reagan administration, arguably, you know, you could argue that Reagan invented the reality show genre in lots of ways with his GE, you know, in his own home tabloes that he did for television, inviting the cameras into his home and staging this futuristic vision of what domestic life should be with Nancy had a side. I mean, that was an early reality show. Tonight we're going visiting at the Ronald Reagan's again in their new home

to see how their many wonderful electric servants are helping them, just as they'll help you, live better electrically. Oh, that's hot. Oh, it's not. Oh, but delicious. Everything's just right, isn't it a patty? Yeah. Well, it's the easiest meal to make. My electric servants do everything.

Well, that's part of living better electrically. And so I think, you know, this desire to escape in the... into a shinier, um, uh, uh, you know, Hollywood version of reality is,

runs very, very deep. And, and, and, and the thing about Bush is that he was just bad at it, right? I mean, he would dress up in flight suits and,

you know, clear, clear brush and pretend to be a, a cowboy, but he wasn't a good actor. He wasn't good at playing the part that he had cast himself in. People didn't believe him as a cowboy. They didn't believe him as a fighter pilot.

Trump is just better at playing a part. He has been playing the same part since the 1980s. It is a true skill of his as a performer. And so it is an evolution that learned, I think, from some of the mistakes of the Bush years. Get a better actor if you're going to do this. But I think, you know, another continuity that I think we need to be frank about is that there's no doubt that the most significant difference with the Trump administration is the openness of white supremacy.

And that is very, very important for us to acknowledge that and just how dangerous it is to have an administration filled with, you know, unabashed white supremacists and a president who is sending encouraging signals to white supremacists across the country. That is different. that was not something that Bush was doing in the same way. But the white supremacy built in to the Bush administration's response to 9-11 was so deep. And the profound racism in the entire framing of a war of civilizations and the unbelievable racism of refusing to count the civilian deaths in Iraq as if those lives mattered, not at all.

Yep. And the impact of having to utterly indoctrinate soldiers in a mentality that would allow them to participate in torture in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, or accept as collateral damage, or, you know, seeing any Iraqi that comes near their convoy as a potential threat. that has ramifications that we're still living with. Yeah. And we need to recognize the continuities of the white supremacy of American foreign policy

and how that manifests at home. And I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of the hashtag resistance is just the general lack of interest in foreign policy, right? Yeah. Although, honestly, you could probably go even a bit further, at least I would argue, because where there is interest on the part of the contemporary liberal or hashtag resistance person or Democrat loyalist, they are actively supportive of things like a coup in Venezuela or a coup in Bolivia or saber-rattling and being tough, quote-unquote, on Iran. Because ultimately, deep down, however much they want to say that the right or a bunch of lizard-brained cowboys or crooks or whatever,

they share all the same premises clearly about American Empire and power. They might want to go about it slightly differently, but they agree that we're a beacon of freedom or we used to be before Trump, blah, blah, blah, and that American global domination should be preserved and strengthened, in fact. And anyone who resists this is like Trump, an authoritarian crank, you know, whether it's a left-wing government in Venezuela or Bolivia or a right-wing government. in the case of Russia, for example. And then even when they're at their most passionate criticizing Trump, they're doing it through the lens of weird jingoistic stuff about how he's secretly a Manchurian candidate for Russia or China, some foreign, malevolent entity. And just good luck getting anything done as far as, you know, international solidarity or making the getting things straight, working with that type of mindset. But anyway, I'm rambling now.

Naomi, thank you so much for taking the time to come on our show. Well, it's my pleasure. Thanks for doing this little bit of popular education and dragging it out of the memory hole. Thanks. That's the goal. Hopefully we solve all the problems. Good. Well done.

Thanks again. It was great to talk to you again, Naomi. And please stay healthy and stay safe. You too. I was thinking back to 9-11, Nicole, and I have no recollection of George Bush politicizing it in any way. This person says, Ellen and George Bush together makes me have faith in America again. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, thank you for being here and sharing your members.

You really appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Man. Churchill Solitaire. Donald Rumsfeld, everybody. Thank you, sir. We have Hey Uh

Uh For we have