BTC Sessions - Scott Horton Reveals: Israel's Deadly Trap Luring Trump into Iran War

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 048: Trump Iran War Risks, Netanyahu Regime Change Plots & Middle East Blowback Terrorism | Scott HortonWhat if Trump's Iran war temptations trigger World War 3, echoing U.S. foreign policy disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria—fueling Middle East blowback terrorism, skyrocketing inflation, and endless regime change chaos? In this explosive interview on BTC Sessions, anti-war legend Scott Horton exposes how Israel Netanyahu's strategies have trapped America in perpetual conflicts, risking catastrophic escalation with Iran. From CIA coups in the 1950s to Trump's aircraft carrier moves amid Iranian protests, Scott uncovers hidden U.S. meddling that birthed enemies like Osama bin Laden and ISIS. He warns of Trump's "greatness" lure leading to assassinations, invasions, and economic collapse, while Bitcoin emerges as the ultimate shield—limiting the state's inflationary war machine and empowering individuals against fiat-fueled blowback. Scott ties U.S. foreign policy Iran failures to inflation crises, showing how regime change blowback breeds terrorism and drains trillions. If you're stacking sats in a Bitcoin-only world, this is your wake-up call to endless wars, Netanyahu's influence, and why Bitcoin fixes this—don't miss the history lesson that could save your freedom!About Scott HortonWebsite: https://scotthorton.org/Books: Fool’s Errand, Enough Already, Provoked (available on Amazon or libertarianinstitute.org)X: @scotthortonshowLibertarian Institute: https://libertarianinstitute.org/Scott Horton Academy: https://scotthortonacademy.com/Chapters:00:00:00 Teaser & Intro00:01:22 Welcome & Iran Tensions00:01:49 War Differences & Netanyahu Strategy00:02:13 Accords & Allies Weakening00:06:00 Trump Lures & Regime Views00:12:13 Overthrow Risks & Israel Role00:16:11 U.S.-Iran History & Reagan Arms00:21:01 Containment & Sanctions Lies00:33:45 Protests & Bitcoin Inflation Role00:40:41 Regime Risks & Gaza Plans00:44:55 Gaza Goals & Blowback Basics00:52:04 Terrorism Policy & War Effects00:57:05 U.S. Attacks & Bin Laden Risks01:03:08 Massacres, 9/11 & Domestic Blowback01:05:15 Desperation & Religion Suicide Stats01:09:14 Provocation Strategy & Escalation Risks01:12:44 Trump Temptations & Bitcoin Solution01:15:26 Inflation Fail & Domestic Priorities01:19:23 Anti-War Narratives & Arguments01:27:01 Wrap Up & Scott's ResourcesPrevious Episode:Mentor Sessions Ep. 047: Human Hacking Bitcoin Wallets, Deadly Social Engineering Scams & Nuclear Breaches | Christopher Hadnagy: https://youtu.be/R43ULh5FeoM⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit bitcoinmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#ScottHorton #BTCSessions #USForeignPolicy #Iran #Israel #Netanyahu #TrumpIranWar #RegimeChange #MiddleEast #Blowback #Terrorism #Bitcoin #Inflation #BitcoinPodcast #AntiWar #BTC

Everything's coming up Netanyahu right now. And this is Kudei Gra. He hopes convince Trump that this is the macho thing to do. This is the big one. That's the way they spin it. And if we could just kill the Ayatollah, then it'll be a brand new day for humanity. I could see them pushing that to him. We couldn't normalize relations with Iran 35 years ago.

Unlike Venezuela, I think you'd have like the worst case kind of consequences. Every time we drop a bomb, we're playing with fire. Is the only way out of this to limit the state's ability and is the only way to do that, Bitcoin. The dollar is bailing and people are looking for shelters anywhere they can. That's Scott Horton, the anti-war powerhouse, who's dissected every U.S. foreign policy disaster from the Ukraine to Iraq to Afghanistan in his best-selling books like Fools Errind, Enough Already, and Provoked.

Scott's the director of the Libertarian Institute and founder of the Scott Horton Academy. In this episode, Scott reveals how Israel's shifting strategies have trapped the U.S. in endless Middle East conflicts now risking in catastrophic. war with Iran. He uncovers the hidden history of U.S. meddling since the 1950s showing how CIA coups and sanctions created the very enemies now threatening us. And Scott warns that Trump's temptations for greatness could lead to assassinations, invasions, and regime changes doing the U.S. to more failed wars and economic collapse. Scott, thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure you're very, very busy these days, but let's jump right into it. It's been about five or six months since the

summer 12-day war with Iran. Tensions are heating up again. America has moved in military and aircraft carriers. And there are probably some bitcoinsers after who've seen 20 years of American intervention and saying, hey, should we really be doing this? But can you explain to us why this time is different and how does it benefit Israel? You know, why this time is different. That's a good way to frame it. I think there's a couple of things really going on. The first one, is they never had compliant and acquiescent a president as Donald J. Trump in their corner, not even W. Bush. And W. Bush, after all, had already bitten off Iraq at their behest at the time.

And so Iran was just to bridge too far for back then. So that's one part of it. You also, the other major thing is, I guess, that I would say to take into the equation here, is the position that Israel is in now compared to where they were then. So if you go back to Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations at the end of September, 2003, he basically, this is just a couple of weeks before October the 7th, and in fact, probably he had a lot to do with provoking October the 7th as far as the choice of Hamas to go ahead sooner than later. And part of that was, you know,

Nanyahu likes to have a visual aid, a cartoon bomb or whatever. In this case, he held up a map of the new Middle East. And now, first of all, Gaza and the West Bank are all one color with Israel, greater Israel, right? Yep. Which is the point. And then there's a big red arrow, I think it was, across all the Sunni Arab kingdoms. there in the GCC. And the phrase, a new Middle East,

he's actually, that was an inside joke. He was mocking Shimon Peres, would use that phrase when he picked up where Yitzhak Rabin had left off after a Netanyahu fan assassinated him in 1995. And the idea was, instead of having the strategy of the periphery where Israel would back further away states

to keep their closer states attention divided, he would go ahead and make friends with the closer states and orient them against the further states. So they alienated Iran, but went to make peace with Arafat. Problem is, a Lakud guy shot him in the back and killed him. And so then it was Perez that took up the mantle from there. It didn't last very long. And Netanyahu came in in 96 and dismantled the whole thing.

It's been all, you know, the end of the two-state solutions since then. Such as it ever was, not to over-exaggerate what Rabin was attempting to accomplish. but in the scheme of things, yeah. So anyway, the point being that Shimon Perez said, look, this is the new Middle East. We're going to make a deal with Arafat, and then we'll be able to make a deal with Jordan and with Syria and with the Saudis and other kings and emirs and whatever,

and it'll be fine. But they're not going to make a deal with us until we settle with the Palestinians, so let's do that. So what was happening in 23 there with Netanyahu's speech? He was mocking Shimon Peres. and he was saying, look, I got the Abraham Accords. I got all my deals with the Sunni kings, and I didn't have to give the Palestinians anything.

And in fact, he says, he sort of directly addresses the Palestinians. He blames them holding peace hostage, which is, of course, you know, turning the frame upside down. But what he's really saying is nobody's coming for you. You lost. You're not getting citizenship in a single state. and you're not getting independence. You know, live under totalitarianism in your occupied territories until we figure out how to get rid of you once and for all. But that's it.

You're beaten. And ha, ha, I got away with it. I got the American people to bribe these Sunni kingdoms to go ahead and make peace with them or, you know, normalized relations anyway, even without giving you that deal. So then that results, I believe that has a lot to do with the timing of the October 7th attack. And the aftermath of that. And the aftermath of that is not the complete destruction, obviously, but the severe weakening of Hamas as a force in Gaza, the severe crippling also of Hezbollah and southern Lebanon,

where, you know, that vaunted missile capability that threatened northern Israel, the Israelis smashed it before they got that many off. And maybe Nasrallah decided to hold some in reserve rather than launching everything they had or whatever. The Israeli sure bombed the hell out of it and did not have to suffer too bad of retaliation from Hezbollah's rockets and missiles there. And then they killed Nusserala, Hezbollah's, you know, charismatic leader and all that. And through their air campaign and through the pager attack, severely decimated,

or I don't know, decimated, severely set back as Bala's power by some double digit percent. I don't know, but a lot. Then al-Qaeda, with help from Israel and Turkey in the United States, finally succeeded in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which severely weakened that was, as David Wormster and Richard Pearl put it. This was the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region, the arch of Iranian power in the region. And, of course, famously, W. Bush at Israel's behest added Baghdad to Tehran's side of the ledger. So they were even more desperate than ever than to take Damascus out of there, which they did. So this is another severe weakening of Iran's, you know, alliance of power in the region. The Houthis are able to launch drones and rockets, but they have no land force to field anywhere,

to threaten Israel with or anything like that. So in other words, everything's coming up Netanyahu right now. And this is Kudegra. and he has to deal with why old Barack Obama, he can just, he hopes, convince Trump that this is the macho thing to do, man. This is the big one. And, you know, as Michael Ladeen always put it, the terror masters, none of our other problems in the region would exist except for the mean old Ayatollah.

He's the one behind it all. Even he's behind Osama bin Laden and all the Sunni extremism in the region too and whatever. That's the way they spin it. And if we could just kill the Ayatollah, then it'll be a brand new day for humanity and everything will go on better than before. And I could see them pushing that to him and I could see him, you know, potentially buying it. I mean, he's got to have some reservations because that's what they said about the last three

or four of these and it did not work. And so he's got to have some skepticism there. But the thing is he did allow, first of all, in the nuclear deal, he allowed the Israelis to frame the thing their way to him. that look, were Iran to have a nuclear program at all? Is the same as them making nuclear weapons intolerable? Got to attack them now. Even though Netanyahu admitted, well, I mean, there's still a couple of years away.

In other words, they weren't even trying to make nukes. And he admitted they weren't even trying to make nukes to prep air on Fox News. And then, but had Trump go ahead and bomb them anyway on that basis. And then, you know, now they dumped it down to them having these mid-range missiles that can hit Israel, none that can hit the United States or any of our other important allies. and not that they threaten any of our other allies either. And then they even dumped it down to so-called protesters getting hurt, which I'm sure some probably did.

But then again, there are armed groups of men lighting arson fires and shooting people. And all this going on at the same time too, which probably most of the casualties are between those guys and the government forces that they were fighting. But then Trump can say, straight out of Victoria Newland lecturing Yanukovych right or or Barack Obama

threatening Omar Gaddafi that you better not harm one hair on the head of people trying to overthrow your government or we will intervene on their behalf against you and which is just amazing that he's willing to adopt that frame but

apparently he is and then as he put it to the New York Times the only thing that limits the president is his own morality in his own mind. There is, as Al Gore would say, no controlling legal authority. He is the world emperor.

I guess the Senate can remove him, but otherwise he can do anything he wants. And as we know, I mean, that really is true. The president has had the power to launch a nuclear war against any state in the world,

you know, ever since at least the Eisenhower years, you know, if not Truman, to just go ahead and initiate a nuclear war destroy any city he wishes. So, I don't know. Once you got the license to do, that, then yeah, maybe you do have the license to do all these other things, too. That's the way

there, that he certainly sees it. And look at what's going on with the Greenland thing, right? This is about making Trump important in history. This is about self-aggrandizement. America already has a run of Greenland. We're going to have all the bases we want in the world there. We have a treaty where we recognize Denmark's sovereignty over it and everything, whatever, and throw all that in the garbage, you know, like all presidents do break their predecessors' treaties and deals, apparently. But it's that same kind of thinking that worries me the most. That you know what? What if we just did a big clean suite? We had the Delta Forest Nab Maduro. Maybe we just kill, you know, whoever's the administrator in charge there in Cuba right now. We drop a couple

of thousand pound bomb on the Ayatollah. And then we invite Kim Jong-Long. to have some talks. You know, like, I don't know. I could see them deciding to go ahead and, because, you know, it's all language, right? We'll make a clean sweep of it, boss, right? Like, picture, what's your nightmare of, like, what is Rubio telling this guy right now?

Look at how easy Venezuela was. We could do that again. And we're not going to go in there and pluck the Ayatollah out of there. But we could drop a bomb on his head. And maybe we'll parachute the Shah Rezapalavi's son and see what he can do. You know what I mean? It's got to be better than the current situation, sir.

Right? And why should America have to continue to suffer the independence of Iran when we could change that? And so, you know, I'm really worried about it because I think if they do that, unlike Venezuela, I think you'd have like the worst case kind of consequences. I mean, either one, you'd have just a brand new group of Shiite clerics would come and declare themselves the new Islamic

Republic leadership and nothing would change the constitution and the form of the government would not change at all. Or if they just keep bombing them until that's no longer viable, then you just have a civil war with foreign back mercenaries going around suicide bombing everybody and God knows what. Right, which it seems like Israel would probably like. You covered a lot here and I do want to kind of get this maybe. No, no, no, no. We love having you want. You're a wealth of knowledge, but I do want to try to get this straight for our listeners' minds just to kind of go over a few of the points. that you mentioned, you talked about the change in strategy among Israeli leadership and how in the old in times, it used to be, hey, let's try to make peace with the Palestinians,

figure that out. And then the surrounding Arab countries, surrounding Muslim countries, would be more likely to make peace with us because that has been kind of the thing for a long time. Hey, our problem with you is you are ethnically cleansing this whole bunch of people, these Palestinians, and we're trying to help them. And until this gets resolved, we're not going to have peace with you. And then Netanyahu turned it around after, I think, I think it was, was it Richard Pearl who wrote the memo, was a strategy for securing the realm. Was that? Yes, I think, I think David Wormser, his colleague or his, you know, protege was the principal author of the thing.

But Pearl signed off on it and they both also, he also signed off. I believe on, well, Wormsler just wrote coping with crumbling states. And then he also wrote a book called Tierney's ally, which Pearl wrote the forward to. And Pearl was the mentor. So same difference. Yes, sir. Same. Okay.

And so the base. clean break. And you can read it at my website, by the way, if you just type my name in and a clean break, you can read. Right. And I've seen this. You've talked about it. Our mutual friend Dave Smith has talked about it. But the basic gist of it was Netanyahu and his ally said, well, forget about trying to make peace of the Palestinians. Let's buy off these surrounding states, make peace with them. And now the Palestinians have nowhere to go. Oh, wait. Hang on. Sorry. Oh, you're sorry. I'm confusing. You're right. Sorry. Sorry. Go ahead. It is let's take out these governments, which was the Wesley Clark seven governments in five years, the seven countries

in five years, forgive me. No problem. Yeah. The deal you're referring to is the Abraham Accords, which comes later, of course, but that's the step of going ahead and bribing the GCC states, basically, attempting to get Saudi, but they did get Bahrain and UAE and then also add Sudan and Morocco, essentially were bribed into normalizing relations with Israel in the first Trump term. Right.

And Egypt has been bribed for decades. that's right uh okay so it was and jordan too since 94 right and so it's taking out these other countries which include iraq sudan libya syria and uh the couple others and of course the big coup d'agra is getting iran that's the cherry on top uh and the others are hasbala in southern lebanon and somalia which they created the islamist problem in somalia and they've been fighting it ever since right so at the beginning you know i was kind of i would even say half joking but kind of, I kind of believe a lot of this does revolve around what Israel wants, Israel gets with the U.S. And please, this is just my personal opinion. This is not necessarily represent Ben or the BTC Sessions Channel.

And Nathan, you feel free to push back on me at any time. But it does seem like that's what we're doing here with Iran, because there are so many governments in the world that do bad things that treat their citizens poorly, obviously. There are other governments that pose different threats of different people. And yet we are focused on Iran coincidentally, because that's the one place that Israel deems a threat to them. And here we are again, everything that we've asked them to do with nuclear program before they've agreed to. They have no interest in or even ability to come and launch an attack on the United States. And yet here we are. The main thing seems to be Israel, but where am I getting this wrong? Please tell me, Scott. No, you're completely right. That's exactly

what it is. Go back in time for a minute here, okay? People are still upset, maybe rightfully about the hostage crisis in 1979. But, and I think maybe people know this, but they just don't think it through a little bit. America supported the rise of Mohamed Mossadegh, who was slightly left of center to be the prime minister of Iran after World War II. And then they decided they didn't like him anymore. So they called him a commie and they overthrew him and they reinstalled the Shah Reza Palavi. And he ruled with the iron fist for 25 years until he was overthrown in a popular revolution

which the Americans actually supported. They knew that he was dying of cancer, and so they threw him under the bus, and they brought back the Ayatollah from Iran. He had been in exile in Iraq and then in Paris, France. And they sent him home. The French did that as a favor to Jimmy Carter's government because the CIA and the State Department said, guess what?

They said, we know the Ayatollah Khomeini. He's a decent guy. He helped us agitate in protest back in 1953. He was one of these groups of conservative, players who helped us overthrow Mossadegh. So we can work with him. And William Sullivan called him the Iranian Gandhi.

Well, you might think a little harder about that. Wait, what was Gandhi famous for exactly? Okay, the nonviolent thing, but what else? All right, he threw the empire off the subcontinent. Okay, that might be relevant. But anyway, so they supported, they brought him home, and they supported the Ayatollah's takeover and inheriting of the revolution in 79.

and the Israelis also were perfectly happy to have the Ayatollah in power there. They didn't care about that. He kept the, he didn't overthrow the entire regime. He just absorbed it. But the overall intelligence apparatus stayed under his firm control. And they kept their relations with the Americans and the Israelis. And the Americans, in fact, warned the new Ayatollah's regime against threats from the new coup d'etat dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just taken power, and threats from the Soviet

Union that they might invade, which was embellished, but anyway, they were trying to get the Iranians on their side, I think. And it stayed like that until the hostage crisis was 10 months later. The revolution was in February of 79. The hostage crisis wasn't until November. So people always conflate all that. Oh, that Muslims, they just hate us. They just hate us. No, no, no, no, no. Everything was fine until David Rockefeller convinced Jimmy Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment. And the people, there believed that that meant the Americans are going to nurse him back to health and reinstall him in power in a counter revolution. I can't imagine why they would believe that.

Yeah. And so they, and in fact, you know, the the embassy was where the previous coup had been launched from in 53. So that was, and I'm not justifying it, but I'm saying that is what actually happened. Right. And then, but here's the point, though, it didn't bother the Israelis at all. The Israelis kept their relationship with the Ayatollahs regime all the way through 1990. and the Reagan administration, as we all know, had this kind of secret relationship going on, playing a double game with Iran, almost through their entire and possibly all the way through

the entire Reagan administration and including not really switching sides, but playing both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, mostly backing Saddam Hussein, but also selling missiles to the Ayatollah through Israel, using Israel as the cutout to sell them weapons. And now why were they doing?

doing that because the Israelis were already selling weapons anyway. And the Americans were back in Saddam and they were supporting Israel and supporting Iran's side of the war to bleed them both. And they were doing that. And when Saddam would start pulling ahead, they would pull back support for him and tell the Israelis to increase support for Iran. And when Iran started pulling ahead, they would tell the Israelis to pull back on support and they would start increasing support for Saddam Hussein. They did this for 10 years. It's pretty ugly, nine years. But meanwhile, so anyway, point being, Ronald Reagan sold missiles, not W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan sold missiles to the mean old Ayatollah in 1984, 1985, just one and two years after the Beirut bombing in 1983,

where this sort of proto-Hazbala group, backed by Iran, blew up the Marine barracks there. Within a couple of years, Ronald Reagan is selling missiles. Hey, business is business. And so he was able to get over that moral quandary right then and there, basically. Then in 1993, sorry again with the long answer, but then Bush seniors out, Bill Clinton comes in. And Bill Clinton has the idea that he wants to consider at least normalizing relations with Saddam Hussein and with Iran under the new Ayatollah Khamini. the old one, Khomeini, died in 1989. And so Clinton thought maybe I can normalize relations with both.

The Israelis objected under Yitzhak Rabin. So first of all, why? Again, the Israelis had a policy, the strategy of the periphery that said, we want to be friends with Turkey, with Iran, and with Ethiopia, in order to divide Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. attention away from us, right? Make them all have to face at least half their forces, the other direction from where we are.

And Rabin said, no, we're going to reverse that. We're going to make friends with the Arab states, including Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, but we've got to have an enemy somewhere, and of course he can't just be called weak. He's got to be a hawk on something, so he decided to turn on Iran. And I really recommend people read Trita Parsy's great book,

Treacherous Alliance that shows us that it wasn't any particular thing the Iranians had done to piss off the Israelis. They simply had a change of strategy, which necessitated this like 180-degree turn in their policy. And in Parsy's book, he talks about how here the Clinton people are considering trying to normalize relations with Iraq and Iran. And the Israelis are saying, they come to them and say, no, wait a minute, we don't want you to negotiate with Iran.

and normalize with Iran. We hate them now, and we insist that you continue to be against them. And the Clinton people started busting out laughing because they were like, yeah, but last week you were telling us we should normalize relations with Iran

because they're your good friends, literally last week. And now you've, and so they just thought it was funny because there was actually nothing that had changed on the ground. And Iran did start sponsoring Hamas, but after that in 1995,

it was the Israelis who had turned on them first, and then they worked to make sure, that they were excluded from Madrid and other things. But so now Clinton also made the mistake of announcing or sort of just leaking or, you know, I don't know exactly how it came out, but it was sort of like a trial balloon kind of a thing maybe that, well, we might normalize relations with Iraq. He shouldn't have done that, man. He should have done like the Nixon Kissinger, Fate Accompli.

We did it. We shook hands with Mao and we got a deal and no one can take it back kind of thing like that. because by leaking it, all the knives came out. And what happened was it wasn't the Israelis. It was the Kuwaitis who drummed up this fake, which everyone believes in this to this day, for God knows what reason. I don't know. This completely fake plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb in Kuwait in 1993.

And all it was was a whiskey smuggling ring that got blown out of proportion. And Seymour Hirsch wrote an article about it and the Boston Globe wrote an article about it. and is obvious a bunch, obviously a bunch of crap. But the Israeli agent Martin Indick, who had worked for Yitzhak Shamir, even though they say he's more of a Democrat type, but he had worked for the Lekudnik Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir previously. He came to work for Bill Clinton as his Israel advisor, and he insisted on Rabin's behalf,

insisted on the policy, what they called dual containment. And dual containment, essentially the idea was that Iraq is two beaten up from Iraq War I to be able to successfully balance against Iran. So now America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. Now at this time, this was not the consensus in Washington at all. They thought, well, look, the mean old Ayatollah is dead. We have this guy, Rafsanjani, is the new president and wants to suck up to us. And now's our opportunity to normalize relations with Iran.

And I think crucially, Zabignan Brizinski, who had been the national security advisor during the Iranian Revolution in 79, I mean, if Jimmy Carter had egg all over his face from that revolution and the failed rescue mission of the hostages and all of that, well, then so does Zabigni Brizenskyi had just as much. That was his failure. And everybody knew, you know, the Secretary of State was not in charge. Brzezinski ran foreign policy under Carter. And this was his disgrace. And yet by 1993, he said, we should make a deal with Iran. Business is business. What are you going to do?

Have feelings about it? Here's what we should do. And then he went under the guise of representing oil companies, but it was the policy first. What we want to do is screw the Russians. And that was Brzynski's more important priority, believe me. We want to stick straws in the Caspian Basin, and we want to funnel those hydrocarbons out of there by hook or by crook or anyway.

But through Russia, let's go through Iran. That's the shortest. route and then we'll have a terminal on the Persian Gulf. And who agreed with him was Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State. Both of these are Rockefeller guys. Haig was Kissinger's protege, Kissinger was Nelson Rockefeller's guy. And Brazensky, of course, was David Rockefeller's guy. So obviously this is their oil interest in, you know, being taken into account here. But it's also a matter grand strategy. That look, man, the Iranian revolution, that was 14 years ago. Let's go ahead and get back to work here.

And so here, Brzezinski and Hague, again, this is Ronald Reagan, secretary of state. When Reagan got shot, Hague is the one that went, I am in the chair and all of that stuff. Like, this guy is no, you know, Walter Mondale. Why does he want to do this? Because it's, first of all, for his own pockets, probably, but also because this is a matter of strategy. So, and then, you know, maybe more famously, I'm not sure. But I think also crucially, this was the same. position as held by then CEO of Halliburton Dick Chady, who publicly denounced Bill Clinton's

sanctions against Iran over and over again. And so we ought to be sucking that oil out of the Caspian Basin and transporting it across Iran. And he even got in some hot water over this because he complained about the policy in a speech in Australia. And you're just never supposed to complain about American foreign policy while you're standing on foreign soil. That's a big kind of faux paw or whatever.

So that became a little mini scandal that he would criticize him. Never mind the policy, but just that he, where he complained about it. Tell that to Lindsay Graham. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It all depends on whose policy you're complaining on behalf of,

right? And so then this is what happened, right? You just answered it. The Israelis vetoed it. That's who vetoed it. Who could stop? This is the Rockefeller's And the leading lights of America's foreign policy, gray-beard establishment, want this policy who could stop them? It was the Israelis, the Labor Party in this case. And because they just essentially vetoed the policy and see, they had another out, which was the BTC pipeline, which, as you may know, stands for Baku, Tablisi, Jain, Turk.

Bitcoin. So this is where the, oh, that too. So this is where that, that Caspian oil goes due. west across Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, and does not have to go through Iran or Russia. So that was their solution to this problem. And the oil company said, fine, but you got to build the pipeline because it's going to be three times as far as the one we wanted to build across Iran.

So you got to subsidize that, Uncle Sam, who did. So anyway, point being that, man, we couldn't normalize relations with Iran 35 years ago. Thank you for getting back to that. years ago. We didn't have to have this problem with them at all. Ronald Reagan sold the missiles in 1984. 1985. This is just a year, two years after Beirut.

Okay? And they have to lie and they go, well, Iran killed 600 Americans in Iraq War II. Well, that's just a damned lie. No, they did not either. And if you actually want to zoom in on what the accusation is in specificity at all, what they're talking about is Iraqi Shiites killed five. Americans in Iraq War II. But that's only because America, which fought that entire war on their behalf,

losing 4,000 guys fighting the Sunni insurgency for the Shiites, when on behalf of Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives, David Petraeus entered in a conspiracy with them to target the Shiites, to try to drum up resistance among the Shiites, so that they could then blame their resistance on Iran as a pretext for war with Iran in the spring of 2007. Every single one of those roadside bombs that was set off by a Shiite Iraqi on Shiite territory in Iraq against American soldiers during that, all of those bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis. And all of the claims about Iranian interference there notwithstanding, they never proved that any of that stuff came from Iran.

And I have in my book, and I collected this all at the time, because I've been doing this a very long time. I have solid seven or eight reports from American journalists in Iraq, embedded with American military forces who found those bomb factories in Iraqi Shia,stan, where they're making the bombs themselves. They got made in Haditha written all over them, whatever. And when they claimed they were going to prove it, they never did prove it. And Stephen Hadley admitted they didn't have the proof, the national security advisor, admitted they didn't have the proof.

The whole thing, that entire thing was a hoax. It was 500 Americans were killed fighting Iraqi Shiites, and they were killed by Iraqi Shiites because America was trying to drum up an excuse to attack Iran, which ultimately W. Bush balked that and told the Israelis and Dick Cheney no and to stuff it. But, you know, very late in that spring. Coin Kite has been in the game for years creating hands down the best and most secure hardware when it comes to securing your Bitcoin. The cold card Q is an absolute powerhouse.

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Scott, there's so much that you covered. And even I, as interested as I am in this, have trouble keeping a lot of the parties straight and the map in my head. So I can only imagine some of our listeners might have even more difficulty than I do. Although I love you bringing this all. Rewind. Rewind. Rewind. Go back a couple times.

You'll catch up again and again. I have so many other questions. I'd love to get to you. But in case Nathan had anything you wanted to jump in with, please don't let me stop you. Nathan, did you have anything? I do want to get some clarification on because I'm curious, Scott, your thoughts on the, current protests going on Iran. This very much feels to me like confessions of an economic hitman. This seems like another color revolution, especially with it starting in a bizarre and starting

from the currency kind of collapsing there as well. So I wanted to get your sense. Is that kind of witness, what we're witnessing here? Do you think this is something to like back to like 1953 where we're trying to basically overthrow the regime without actually having boots on the ground? And do you think it's even possible or could be successful at this point? Yes. And I don't know, but I tend to doubt it. You know, the fact, First of all, you know, one of the worst things that undermine Joe Biden and Donald Trump right now and the Ayatollah economy and his entire regime as well is price inflation. And, you know, it's always a monetary phenomenon, but in this case you have government printing

presses figuratively and literally combined with a massive economic sanctions regime against Iran waged by the United States crippling sanctions, even far beyond the way it was under Obama's sanctions, which Trump only increased and increased. And then despite what people may assume, Joe Biden did not go back to the Obama deal or anything like that. Joe Biden kept Barack, pardon me, Donald Trump's full-scale economic war, which by the way, even under the Obama deal, he barely gave any of the sanctions relief that was promised in there in the first place. Almost all the sanctions relief, sanctions regime, at least from a America stayed on Iran during all that time anyway.

But anyway, point being that their economy is wrecked. And they had, you know, 40% inflation just in the last year. So will that get people out in the street to riot because they cannot be their family? Absolutely. If I may, Scott, let me just jump in with this one quick point for our Bitcoiners, just so you know the context of the inflation and they're the Iranian real. It currently costs $3,909,585,0.42 to buy one Bitcoin. I really hope some of them found Bitcoin before this happened.

Yeah, or any kind of asset. You know, because you think about people, most people, they don't understand inflation. They, you know, have their real stuffed under the mattress or whatever, and then it just gets turned to dust through price inflation like this. So this is a huge problem. But the thing is, I mean, think about, and it's not a one-to-one comparison, but just think about all the protests that we have in the United States of America, including massive ones like the No King protests that they had and all that.

Does anyone think that the real point of those people is to bring down the government of the United States of America and replace it with a new regime? In their wildest dreams, they wish that it would make Donald Trump step down in favor of his vice president, because that's how it works around here. So the fact that people are engaging in massive protests around the country against inflation, against whatever other problems that they have, including a severe lack of fresh water. They've had a real drought, which has led to severe water rationing in the capital city of millions. These are real stresses on their society right now.

It doesn't mean everybody wants to see the Ayatollah hanged. It doesn't mean everybody wants to see the monarchists parachuted in by the fucking Israelis in the United States to come and take over their country, you know. And there's no reason that people should assume that. In fact, I had a short email exchange this morning with a guy named, you know what, it's on the tip of my tone. You know what? Let me pull it up.

It's just right here, in it? Antiwar.com. It's on the blog. Yes, here. It's Noah Carl. And you can follow him on Twitter too. He's a very interesting guy, apparently. I was just clicking on stuff this morning.

on the antiwar.com blog, which is just antiwar.com slash blog, do Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime like in the claims? And then he goes through and he has all kinds of polling data from different places and including Pew and Gallup and all of the usual acceptable suspects. And she'll say, no, the people of Iran do not want to overthrow the government there. Even the ones that wish they didn't have an Ayatollah, it doesn't mean they want to completely disband their entire parliament, judiciary and whatever, and start over again. again, that kind of thing, some whole new regime there. Maybe they want a different Ayatollah.

And the thing is for people who, and boy, I'm not in favor of any theocracy anywhere. I sure wouldn't want to be ruled by a theocrat. But I can imagine how essentially any proud man from anywhere in the world would prefer his own theocrat to a foreign fact anything. because independence comes first. If no matter, think of how like Hillary Clinton becomes president and declares martial law and whatever, whatever. Well, that's our problem. That sucks.

But we will be damn before we let anyone come to help save us from our own regime here because by definition, they're worse. Independence first. And so how could an Iranian prefer the Ayatollah? I don't know. You've seen what America did. did Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Somalia and Syria lately? Maybe. Especially Syria with the, well, and especially Iraq.

But just all the headchoppings and suicide bombings and all of this. And, you know, I'm not an anthropologist and a sociologist and I'm not an expert on Iranian society. I imagine that you do not have to be a Shiite Persian to be an Iranian patriot. I think that that would be a vast oversimplification and maybe a lot of wishful thinking on the war party's side in America and Israel, that everyone there is just, you know, chomping at the bit to overthrow these guys.

But you do have substantial minorities and as we've seen in the past, and even it was, I predicted it on the Twitter, somebody asked, and I says, oh, I don't know, I bet America's probably back in the P-Jack. And then the next day it was in, was it, I forget if it was Reuters or the Wall Street Journal. It was the Wall Street Journal.

Had I think about, oh, yeah, they dropped the J, but now it's just the PAK or something. But it's the PKK. It's the Iranian version of the Turkish commies, the same ones we call the YPG who are getting creamed by al-Q in other American back forces in Syria right now. But Pijack is essentially the Kurdish brand of the, pardon me, the Iranian brand of the Kurdish PKK. And then you have in the past at least American and Israeli support for Jandala, which is no different than just another bin Ladenite group. And really like on the ISIS level of major suicide bombings and head shoppings and, you know, severe war crimes and that kind of thing.

So and then hell, we've already seen over the years how willing the Mujahideen E. Calk communist terrorist cult and now monarchist forces are to resort immediately. to violence too. So if there is a regime change there, I mean, it could tear that country apart. We could be looking at, you know, like it was in the Syrian Civil War there, so-called Civil War,

foreign mercenary infiltrated and invaded and backed Civil War there. So, you know, I don't know. You know, the problem is, this is what I'm really afraid of, and I'll show up after this, is that I think, oh, I guess I said this earlier, I think after Maduro,

that if you were the guy in the chair pulling that trigger and it worked that well and nobody got killed on our side and they were able to do that in like straight out of the TV movie, you know, Afghan night raid against some peasant kind of way and they were able to get a head of state that way that you could see how like Ben Shapiro said, yay, now we've beaten Iraq syndrome, right? Remember Vietnam syndrome was the mental illness of your. parents and grandparents for not wanting to do that anymore after the disaster of Vietnam. And then they, after Rock War I, George Bush Sr. said, by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome

once and for all. And now we've proven we can do this again. That was really one of the major reasons. Even Brent Scowcroft, verified. This was one of the reasons they wanted to do the war. So they thought it would be quick and easy. And especially after Panama. They did Panama. And that was over with minimal American casualties anyway in a couple of weeks. And so they They thought, man, we could do that again. That was a big part of how we got into Iraq War I. Of course, we've been bomb in Iraq for 35 years ever since then. You know, the anniversary is the other day.

Yeah, I wanted to ask God. That was the one thing that really jumped out of me. That was really disappointing. Again, it could just be like my algorithm what I was being fed after Venezuela. But how quickly the public sentiment seemed to turn towards favoring the interventionism. It was kind of like, it reminded me of like post-9-11, like, hoorah, American, we're going to go and get them. And I'm curious your sense on if the public does actually have the appellation for maybe more military action in Iran.

Because that's that, I agree. That's my biggest fear. Yeah. No, check. Just read anti-war.com every day. We at least got white pills for you on that, man. Super majorities of Americans are against this. And there are some, you know, very pro-Trump at all costs, you know,

talking heads out there who have to support whatever's going on. But overall, it's just hard to get people to switch that quickly. You know, W. Bush said, geez, I don't know. I think maybe we should have a humble foreign policy. and then we got kamikaze as hell, right? So forget that, right? But here Donald Trump ran on,

I hate interventionism more than anyone ever hated anything. And I bring peace everywhere I go because what a great peacemonger I am. And then he's supposed to be able to switch from that to, I am the great warlord, and I take what I won,

and the world bows at my feet. And then people are supposed to just, oh yeah i guess that's what i voted for that's what i thought i america first i guess what i meant by that was america acting just like a selfish bully knocking over other countries and stealing their stuff and no law applies to me that i guess it was w bush like second term w bush we were voting for in 1620 and 24 is that how y'all remember it apparently so you know and i mean that's the thing, man. After Venezuela, I can

just see Marco Rubio, the devil on his shoulder, telling him, we can do whatever we want now, boss. We'd take Greenland, we can knock off the head of Columbia if he don't fall in line. In fact, Trump got on the phone, threatened to kill him, then got on the phone with him and invited him to Washington. You know, but like,

yeah, this is I don't tell you while you're here. Just come hang out. Yeah, but the thing is, I had told him in giving in to that. Iran's not giving in to that kind of thing. So, And we got years to go. I'm really worried about it. I don't know what else to say.

It sucks. I want to ask quickly, then Gary, I'll get out of the way, I promise. I want to get your thoughts, too, on this whole idea. I was reading about the idea of the board of,

what is it, board of peace and kind of plans for Palestine, because it looks like the U.S. planning to, with a few other countries, kind of rebuild and take control over, of Gaza. I want to get kind of your thoughts on that

and how this might fit into what's going on with Iran right now as well, too. I don't think they're going to do that. Yeah, I'll show. Well, man, I really need to read a lot more about this particular subject. You need to read a lot more. Some more depth and nuance on this. But I have to tell you, I mean, the, what the, the Jared Kushner fantasy here of this new Jetsons, high tech, you know, whatever thing that they keep drawing cartoons of in the Wall Street Journal. That's just obviously in the first place, not meant for the Palestinians.

That's for the Palestinians to be killed and or cleansed right out of there and then rebuild the, entire strip for Israeli Jews to take over. And the thing is, good luck with that. They've not been able to destroy the Palestinian insurgency in two years of bombing. And they killed, you know, upwards of 100,000 people. I don't like some of these new higher-end estimates. I always go with more conservative numbers, but near 100,000 at least. And, you know, one thing that's misleading is the Israelis destroyed so much of the

buildings and the neighborhoods and the cities of Gaza. But most of that, and I ain't spinning for it, but I'm just saying it. The truth is, most of that happened after the people had already been evacuated out of there and forced out of there. Then they went in and blew everything up so they could never come home again. But this didn't all happen in a massive World War II style carpet bombing campaign where everywhere you see this rubble, there are definitely civilians in each and every one of these homes kind of thing.

It wasn't quite like that. So that's why the numbers are still less than 100,000, despite what you're seeing with your eyes there. And it could be higher because the numbers are, you know, counted names. And there are still another 10,000 missing or so, whatever it is. I don't know. But I'm seeing some estimates that seem way high to me. And I think that can be discrediting and unnecessary for people to reach for the biggest numbers. What happened already is an atrocity beyond belief for a captive population.

This isn't an enemy nation next door. This is an Indian reservation. These people were already whooped, you know, three generations ago. And so this is fish in a barrel, a canned hunt, a setting arson fire to quell a prison riot, right? This is mass murder is what they did there. And yet, sorry, all that to say, they didn't kill all the fighting age males and eliminate their rifles. And so now what? That's the thing. They didn't win. All the insurgency has to do is not lose, right? And they didn't lose. And so,

what armed force is going to replace them that they are going to allow to replace them? And so I don't know exactly what these people have in mind. And I can see, I'll tell you this, a year ago or so, there was a proposal by some of the Arab states that said, look, we know we can. can't disarm and completely, you know, marginalize Hezbollah. I mean, pardon me, Hamas. But here's what we'll do, though. We'll have them agree to just stand aside and let there be this other auxiliary police force that's set up under a new Palestinian authority backed up by the foreign governments,

the Arab foreign governments. And Hamas will agree to stay out of the way of this for a certain amount of time until some rebuilding can be done and that kind of thing. That to me sounded a lot more reasonable because they're not just going to cease to exist. They're just not. No insurgency in the world ever is going to give in like that. So, you know, it's worth pointing out that absolute deprivation that the Israelis are still inflicting on the people there.

They are withholding massive amounts of aid from getting in. And, you know, people are drowning and freezing in the wintertime there, babies especially, freezing to death. But the standard of living in the Gaza Strip is probably the lowest of any humans anywhere in the world right now. And with no real end in sight. So somebody's got to do something. And, you know, the Trump idea is to take American responsibility for seeing it through because only America can essentially hold the Israelis at bay while they try to get another group in there or something.

And then hopefully the Israelis wouldn't dare bomb Saudis while they're occupied. the place or Qataris or whoever, right? I mean, however they worked at. Got to preserve those Abraham Accords. So I don't know. Point being, the Israelis did not complete the cleansing of the strip and they did not complete the destruction of Hamas, which would have led to the complete cleansing of the strip there. So they're still stuck with two million Palestinians. What are they going to do? And on the strip, never mind in the West Bank. But so, So I see this as, you know, totally inconclusive, probably just a halfway point before the Israelis just start bombing again.

Because I just don't see, and whatever, I really could be missing something, but I just don't see a road forward for this self-appointed whatever group to accomplish anything. I mean, what Arab country is going to put their armed forces on the ground there just to get shot at by locals and or the Israelis? Israelis and when they're not going to be calling any shots at all, right? All of the actual conclusion is going to be made in Washington and Tel Avid. And so I don't know. I just don't know, man. Yeah. And this sounds similar to, you know, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. You know, they're basically just set up to do Israel's bidding and basically police force for them. But all the decisions on foreign affairs, you can get it out of the country, defense, that's all still with Israel. You mentioned that it wasn't this mass bombing that destroyed everything. A lot of them were

destroyed after the fact a lot of these homes, these buildings in Gaza. I've seen videos of, you know, Israelis coming in with bulldozers and just destroying these places. And Netanyahu went on, I guess in a closed door meeting recently. And he said in front of the defense committee, we're destroying more and more houses in Gaza and Palestinians accordingly have nowhere to return. quote, the only obvious result would be Gossens choosing to emigrate outside of the strip, but our main problem is finding countries to take them in. And that's been the whole goal from the beginning. You know, you need the land, but you don't want the people in it because then suddenly if you

have everybody in it and you give them equal rights, you no longer have a supermajority Jewish state and there goes the end of the Zionist project. And that's been the fundamental issue since the whole founding of Israel in 48. But I guess, you know, to the bigger point, you know, I see these, I've seen these images for two plus years and words don't do them justice of the dismembered children, the shaking children, some of which look like my son, freezing babies. I mean, I'll never be the same after seeing these. And yet, understandably, to some degree, we're all human. We're concerned about what happens in our own backyard. A lot of Americans and Canadians, America Jr., don't necessarily think about that

because it's not necessarily in our backyard. We only think of these things when we're threatened. And unfortunately, that does seem to happen a lot. I do want to touch on blowback because this is something, a term coined by the CIA. The CIA, not exactly a bunch of, you know, flower-wielding hippies, you know, talking about there are blowback factors every time we interfere in foreign nations, whether that's blowback in terms of changing the regime in foreign nations and having them less friendly to us or actual attacks on our soil on our people. I was listening to your great audio book.

Enough already. And I want to read you a quote that you quoted in the book. And, you know, again, this is not to justify anybody. It's just to try to understand. Even if you think our adversaries are the worst in human villains in the world, it's always best to try to understand, even from strategy purposes, what the motivations are with your adversary. So this is from Ahmed Mohammed al-Shumrani. I hope I pronounced that correctly, the Saudi Air Force lieutenant who killed three men in the 2019 shooting at the Florida Naval Station.

He wrote a quote on Twitter, I guess before he did it, quote, I'm not against you for being American. I don't hate you because your freedoms. I hate you because every day you are supporting, funding, and committing crimes not only against Muslims, but also humanity. I am against evil. And America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil. what I see from America is the supporting of Israel, which is invasion of Muslim countries. I see the invasion of many countries by its troops. I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAVs. Your decision makers, the politicians, the lobbyists, and the major corporations are the ones gaining from your foreign policy.

And you are the ones paying the price for it. So we see, you know, every four years, American presidents run on, I'm a non-interventionist. I'm the peace candidate. and then they get into office and do the exact opposite. And every four years we're convinced this time's going to be different. We're going to have somebody in here that's not going to meddle other people, not going to put American lives in jeopardy. Is there a way out of this? Because it seems all these politicians do whatever the promises up front, the end result is we just end up making more enemies that we then have to deal with

with bigger budgets and more American blood. Is there a way out of this? Or is this just, are we just destined to eventually? just collapses an empire and everything that goes along with that. Well, look, I mean, it doesn't have to be this way at all. So could we change it? Yeah, I mean, it's a matter of individual men making decisions. And so many of these could just go the other way.

As far as blowback, I mean, to go back to where we started our story, that phrase was coined by a CIA historian in a secret history of the Iran coup in 53. His name was Donald Wilbur. and it was published by the New York Times many years later, where he warns that all agents and officers should be wary of blowback coming down the line from operations such as this, because you're going to have consequences. And so blowback isn't just like a fancy way for saying consequences,

but it has a more particular meaning. It's long-term consequences of secret foreign policies. So that then when they come do, say a bunch of cooks, burning American flags and calling us the great Satan, for backing their military dictatorship over them for 25 years. The American people go, what's his problem? I guess Mohammed makes him hate goodness, which is, you know, I had a guy, I like this guy.

He's a good guy, man, he's fixing the air conditioner on my truck. And he gave me a whole lecture about, you know, Osama bin Laden and them only hate us because Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia at Israel's behest for eight years. And that's what caused September 11th in the first place. And I'm like, hell yeah, dude. Like, my air-conditioned repair man knows his shit. And then he said, but the Iranians, they just hate us.

They hate us. Because in his memory, like, that's where it starts. It's in 79. They just hate us. But then so, yeah, messing with them ended up getting us in a fight with Osama in them and whatever, whatever. But like, the thing is, no, man, this is all Harry Truman's fault. Everything is America's world empire.

So, yes, it's all blowback. And I'll tell you something very sorry. sad to say about that statement from the Pensacola attacker there that you quoted. You're the second guy to ever quote that. I'm the first. No one else ever did. Now, the only reason I was able to get that quote was because the New York Post went and put the guy's Twitter feed in Archive.

Dot. I.S. immediately. And thank God for that. But then they only quoted the part about I love Mohammed and they excluded all the rest of it. right? And so I'm the only person. I wrote an article at anti-war.com about, I can't remember the exact title, but Pensacola attacker

in my name and it'll come up. And where I saved that quote and then I quoted again in my book, you can't find that anywhere else in the world. And there are a lot of those like that. And where, you know, you have people who are, and there are all kinds of studies I cite in the book too where the people who are most likely to sign. know or bin Ladenite type groups are usually young guys

who don't know the first thing about Islam. And then more somebody knows about Islam, the more likely they are to say, ah, ah, you better not do that because the good Hadith says that you better not or else, right? So, you know, there's anybody can cherry pick,

but people who actually are educated in Islam tend to be more conservative rather than radical. Bin Laden's problem is, he is much more like a Lenin politically speaking, help bent on this world revolutionary kind of thing where we're just, you know, like Adam Beishophter, whatever, we'll just kill the Pope, that'll solve, we'll just, you know, we'll overthrow everybody in our way and remake the world the way we want.

But that's not how, I mean, take a look at, you can catalog them yourself. Every Muslim state in the world is run by conservative clerics, right? Not or, you know, emirs of whatever type, not revolutionaries. So the bin Ladenite appeal has always been very limited, even at the height of the Islamic State Caliphate. There were only a couple hundred thousand fighters, and most of those were just Iraqi conscripts who, you know, had no business really being in with the bin Ladenites particularly. But as we saw with a lot of these attacks in the United States, it just takes one guy or a few guys. You know, an airline pilot said to me, I was a cab driver. And an airline pilot told me after September 11th, that was a group of them in my car.

have American Airlines pilots. The secret of September 11th that nobody wants to really grapple with is that you and your five friends could do it. Anybody could do it. It ain't that hard, you know? And so that's the problem. And the planes, if you have some training on how to fly one of these planes, can you crash it into something?

Sure. And, you know, so, and America's just lousy with soft targets. I mean, imagine if they, on September 11th, had targeted nuclear reactors. I mean, where I'm from, and there are some nuclear reactors in Texas, but I've never seen them. The only nuclear reactors I've ever seen in my life is out the window of airplanes flying around in the Northeast. To me, they're almost like mythological. I see them on the Simpsons or whatever.

We don't have those here where I'm from. We have oil and water. But imagine somebody comicose a nuclear reactor with a 757 or whatever, what kind of damage that could cause. And look, and forget that. Forget like the most spectacular type of taxes they call them. But just look at the successful bin Ladenite attacks in this country since September 11. And there were a lot of FBI frame-up jobs, but there were a lot that were not FBI frame-up jobs, such as there was a guy who just got barely intercepted in time before he bombed the subway,

a guy from Denver named Ozzy, I was going to bomb the subway in New York City. There was the San Bernardino massacre, the Fort Hood massacre, the Orlando massacre, the guy that set off bombs at the marathon in Boston, another guy set off bombs at a marathon in New Jersey, in New York, where they went off on the sidewalks, but fortunately were timed badly, and no one was hurt in those.

But, and then Pensacola and Corpus Christi, naval stations, and I'm sorry, I'm blank, but there's been quite a few others where people have been massed machine gun to death and, or, you know,

blasted in severe mass casualty attacks. And any red-blooded man could, just think of easy soft targets in the United States of America that just cannot even really be defended at all, especially, oh, look at what happened New Year's a year ago in New Orleans. Now, everybody got distracted from this guy that, you know, did the Tesla suicide truck thing at the Trump Hotel in Vegas. And he wrote this weird email to Sean Ryan and all this stuff. So everybody got distracted with that.

Well, what happened in New Orleans was an American army vet joined Islam, you know, signed up with Islam and signed up with the Islamic State and drove his truck down Bourbon Street and killed, I think, 12 people and wounded a bunch. And then it was only lucky that at the end of the street, he crashed in a bunch of construction equipment. And then there just happened to be a bunch of cops right there. So he got out of the truck with a gun in his hand, I think, tried to shoot at them, and then they just blew him away. But that was just lucky. And imagine if he had just had three or four friends with him who had just sealed off a couple of entrances on the side streets to Bourbon Street. cops pinned down from there and then just let this guy drive his truck up and down or whatever

shoot people at random it could have been way worse with just a couple of more guys is my point there any ballgame any airport what about everybody on this side of the security line at the airport somebody goes in there with a tech nine right like easy and any of us can imagine that well what if you were actually a bin lad night terrorist actually determined to to do the worst, you could imagine quite a bit. And so this is essentially, in other words, I'm saying, as long as we're bringing people in from this part of the world, especially, but even while we have millions of Muslims in the United States of America

who have this at least potential solidarity with the victims of American foreign policy over there, every time we drop a bomb, we're playing with fire. And potentially enraging someone to the point of committing a terrorist attack against innocent civilians here. And in my book, enough already, I have a section, in fact, in my previous book, Fools Aaron as well, called Backdraft, where I say, look, if blowback is the long-term consequences

of secret foreign policy, then back draft is when our obvious overt foreign policies blow up right in our face. Like, say, you back al-Qaeda in Syria to the point that it blows up into the caliphate, and then you carpet bomb the caliphate. That will get you an Orlando massacre right there. It's like an equation.

And then what did the Orlando guy say on the phone to 911? Do you say that, oh, he was gay and upset? No. He said, you have to stop bombing the women and children in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan. You're killing women and children. You have to stop the air campaign over and over and over again. That's what he was ranting about. And they just lied.

It was completely fake that he was motivated by his own self-hatred of his homosexuality and his Muslim beliefs and whatever that was completely a limited hangout there. Not even limited. It was a total lie. And in fact, convinced a lot of gay people that, boy, I guess Islam really hates us instead of, man, I really shouldn't have voted for Barack Obama. You know, like what is going on? So anyway, yes, it's a huge danger. And then what happens if, oh, I left out Detroit.

I mean, the guy, the underpants bomber was recruited by real ass al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And he almost succeeded in blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Imagine a plane falling out of the sky on top of a city like that. And that was just bear. And by the way, they let him on the plane on purpose because they wanted to follow him and see who he went to talk to when they didn't realize he had a bomb in his pants at the time. Yeah, a state department official named Joseph Kennedy admitted that on the road that they led him on the plane. And I interviewed the lawyer who saw them let him on the plane in the Netherlands and was like, what the hell is going on here? They intervened.

They were going to keep him off the plane. They're like, ah, you don't have whatever credentials. and the Americans intervened to make sure he was allowed on the plane. And I don't think they knew he had a bomb, but he did. So anyway, yes, it's absolutely a danger. And in fact, what the hell? Go back to September 11th. In 1996, after Yitzhak Rabin was killed,

Shimon Peres, as part of this turning the strategy around now, we're instead of the strategy of the periphery, now we hate the Iranians. And so now he launched another attack against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon called grapes of verse. wrath. And the day that he did that, Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker September 11th and his buddy

Ramsey bin al-Shib, who helped to organize the thing and is in Guantanamo Bay to this day, they both signed their last will and testament, which was the equivalent of them, like joining the army, at least in spirit, saying that whatever it is, we're going to, we're determined now to not graduate as PhDs in engineering, but instead go fight the Holy War against the Israelis one way or the other.

Then a couple of days after that, Naftali Bennett Some say in a panic Some say not in a panic Called in an artillery strike And killed 106 women and children Hiding in a UN shelter And a couple of months after that

Osama bin Laden put out his first declaration of war It's called, guess what? Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places Right? In other words The Americans implementing Israel's dual containment policy in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq and at least enforce the sanctions regime against Iran. And in there, he goes on and on about the Kana mask. And says, we'll never forget

the images of the severed heads and arms and legs of the babies at Kana. And when Mohamed Atta and Ramsey bin al-Shib read that, they decided this was their path. They were going to go and join al-Qaeda. First of all, he's an Egyptian engineering student studying in Hamburg, Germany. Now, this Egyptian is going to go volunteer for a Saudi shake to take revenge against Americans on September 11th by the thousands as revenge for America helping Israel kill people in Lebanon. Right. And so that's why they told your dad, well, see, they hate us because we're free because they couldn't say that what it is is, you know how you hate Bill Clinton and his horrible violence? well, other people do too. And they're willing to kill you for what Bill Clinton did because they don't differentiate.

Just like Bill Clinton doesn't differentiate when he kills people, see. And so that was what happened was that Osama bin Laden adopted the morality of the Democrats and the Republicans and then murdered American civilians. And then the Americans pretended that that was the first day in the history of the universe and now they had license to do whatever they want to whoever they wanted, whether they had anything to do with September, London. not including kidnapping guys who actually were al-Qaeda guys and then torturing them into pointing the finger at Saddam Hussein so they could launch a war against Dura. Yeah. I mean, it's similar. I thought you were going to talk about, you know, Clinton and, you know, Timothy McVeigh, you know, who I guess did what he did because God and had nothing to do it all with Waco, Ruby Ridge, anything like that. Well, it's funny because even there, they admit that it was

blowback from Waco, but then they use it in order to essentially justify Waco and say, yes, see, this is what happens when the Branch Divideans get in their time machine and go forward in time two years and blow up a federal building is they get their damn house burned down. That's what they deserved. And that's how they spun that. They just essentially made it like, oh, you care about Waco? Well, what about Oklahoma City? Which was somehow in retrospect, the retroactive justification for the Waco maskers, how they play that.

But then even there, of course, the real stories that McVeigh had help and his friends, the neo-Nazi bank robbery ring, the Aryan Republican Army, they were all FBI informants and flipped state's witnesses and had otherwise compromised the feds. And so they had to cover it up and let them all go. And Larry Mackie, the federal prosecutor, admitted it that they let them all go. I guess the point being humans are going to human. If you see horrible things happening and you have no recourse of what can be done about it and just it's over and over. You see. children getting blown up in front of your eyes, even not your own children, but especially if your own children and you live under a system where you have no hope of escape, what do you think people are going to do? Humans are going to react in human ways. Yeah, I think Dave Smith, I think, has talked up before. Maybe you and him have talked about how if China took over America. And, you know, there are a lot of people like myself, I'm an atheist who might say, oh, well, you know, it seems the fundamentalist Christians are pretty well organized and might try to overthrow.

I'll jump on the back of that truck and say, you know, praise Jesus while I go try to do something because what choice do I have? So it seems religion is often used as a vehicle to get the change that you need, but the impetus comes from real world events, not necessarily some book. Yeah. And look, people get this cart horse thing mixed up so badly. I mean, Robert A. Paper at the University of Chicago went and crunched all the numbers and showed that the severe, like is that anyone who does a suicide bombing, his home country is occupied by foreign troops. That's like in 90-something percent of the cases. And so then before 2003, when America invaded Iraq, where there had never been a suicide

bombing before ever and touched off that war against the bin Ladenites there, before that, the suicide bombing capital of the world was in Sri Lanka, whereas the Tamil Tigers versus the, I always screw this up. I think it's the Kami Hindu atheist Tamils versus the Buddhist Sinhalese overlords, right? So no Mohammed anywhere around. And it's the Tamils were the biggest users of suicide attacks, including you can see footage of them killing Gandhi's wife,

I believe it is. Mahatma Gandhi's wife had become the president. of Iran and this girl comes up to meet her and it's a young woman, suicide bomber, blows her up. So, and Robert A. Pape, he wrote two books about this, dying to win and cutting the fuse, where he just shows all of this just with the math. Now, on the ground, does it matter if the older guy can tell the younger guy, don't worry, man, you're going to go to heaven immediately.

It's going to be awesome. God is going to love you so much and reward you so well and it's just going to be fine. And he's like, is that the crap that he tells him, like, part of it as he sends him out there to make it easier to get the guy to go ahead or whatever? Yeah, sure. But could you with just that line of crap get somebody to do a suicide attack? If you weren't in the middle of a war trying to, of one kind or another, trying to bend off the foreign enemy? No. And by the way, so this is, and I actually thought for a moment, this might be the quote that you read from enough already is one from James Bamford, where he says,

as bin Laden explained repeatedly over the years through the 90s that from their point of view, America was already at war with them through the Israelis and through our support of all of their local potentates and emirs and sultans and el presidentses and dictators and kings and whatever. So the idea was to provoke us into coming there so they could bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy and force us out the hard way the same way that we had helped them to do to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. But so, in other words, from their point of view on September 10th, they were already in the middle of a war with the United States. Even though America backed them in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, we were still occupying the Saudi Peninsula

and we're still helping the Israeli slaughter Palestinians and Lebanese. And so that didn't change anything. In fact, Ali Sufan, the former FBI agent in his book, The Black Banners, He says, the Chechen terrorists complain to bin Laden. The Americans have been so good to us. They backed us in Afghanistan and Bosnia and now here in Chechnya. And you want to attack them? And then bin Laden had to say, yeah, you guys just don't understand. Okay.

I got a bigger scheme. I'm working here while they were just fighting their own fight on the ground. But anyway, go ahead. No, no, no, no, go ahead. Nathan, I took a lot of the time. Did you have anything you wanted to jump in with? Yeah, I did want to get one more thing in quick just before we move to wrap up a little bit here. Scott, I just want to ask, just based on your experience and everything you're seeing right now, where do you put the risk of escalation in Iran? Like, do you think we're like, do you think that's all on the horizon or you think we're still like it's a ways up, but we have to pay attention?

You know what? I don't know how to measure it. I really suck up predicting the future. I'm much better at telling you what already happened. You know, Trump seemed to back down the other day and say, well, they're not really killing protesters anymore and whatever. well and then he said no you know they need a new leader in iran and he's sending aircraft carriers i mean maybe the idea is they just didn't have quite enough firepower in the region then and he's just delaying a week i really don't know i i can see you know i don't want to just say like megalomani or whatever because i know people who really favor trump are really touchy and i do not have trump derangement syndrome i am not a never trumper i know you supported him the previous three times. Well, I rooted for him. I did not vote for him, but I certainly rooted for him

against his enemies in the deep state and in the Democratic Party for sure. And I'm very, very sympathetic to the populist Trump voting right who are sick and tired of all of this stuff and are America firsters along the lines how I meet it and always have. So, you know, it ain't that. I don't, you know, whatever, a little disclaimer there. I don't want people to misunderstand. But I think that You know, look at the character of the guy that we're talking about. He's being tempted with capital G greatness here. If only he does these really, really big things. This is how they got W. Bush.

Man, this is the big piece by Fred Barnes and the Weekly Standard. National greatness. America needs a really, really big thing we can all do together. Something important, you know? And like, so here's a guy who knows he's going to be dead soon. He talks about it all the time. You know, I could die at any time. And then I wonder whether I'm going to go to heaven or not.

And all this. He keeps saying that. But then he's also like, okay, well, he probably wants to rename Greenland Trump land, you know, or at least, at least be remembered as the guy who expanded the empire in a way like, you know, Jefferson did and McKinley did. And whoever he renamed Mount McKinley. He wants that. Yeah. I'm sorry.

Teddy Roosevelt. I'm sure he has taken his mind as well. Yeah, they had renamed Mount McKinley, Mount McKinley. you know, homo or whatever modern age thing. And he went, no, man, no. And renamed it McKinley again. I know. Right?

So like this is the Gulf of America. And he means to leave a stamp. And, you know, I keep joking about this, but I think it's got to be relevant, dude, as stupid as this sounds. That, you know, Brazil is 12 times as large as Greenland? I didn't know that. Yeah.

On the map, on the map, Greenland's about the same size as Brazil. Correct. And now, I think Donald Trump, probably knows that. Everybody kind of knows that the map is distorted. But you know what? It doesn't even matter if he knows that. What he also knows is that it's a great optical illusion on every map everywhere, that Greenland is this huge piece of territory up there. And, you know, right now, like mine says, D.K. in parentheses after it, owned by Denmark. And he's like, yo, I can change the map of the world and make, like, Alaska is part of the United States.

Greenland part of the United States. That's a big thing. and hopefully not as messy as Iraq War II. But it means my point being that that's the lines he's thinking on. A quick little snatch a grab down in Venezuela, maybe nice thump and get rid of the commies in Cuba, snatch a little Greenland, and then I don't know, maybe ice the Ayatollah. I could see him sort of falling for this as one big package of really good times

that, you know what I mean? He hadn't been able to end the war in Ukraine. he's got to be able to brag about something, you know. I don't know. I think there's something too that I think, you know, you can go to James Buchanan, public choice theory. People don't suddenly become angels just because they got elected to public office. And there's the idea I want to be remembered for something.

I want to have my name stamped on an airport or a train station, whatever. I certainly think there's something to that, you know, for every George Washington that willingly says, I want to step down and not do this anymore. And I want to just retire humbly. You have millions of others who would go. gladly take the power and the fame and everything else. I guess back to that question I had before, if there's any way out of this is, is the only way out of this to limit the state's ability to

do all these horrible things? And is the only way to do that Bitcoin. And I don't know. Does limiting the power of the state to print money out of thin air change any of this or reduce it at all? Or will the state and those with interested clause, in it just figure out some other way to get this stuff done. Well, you know, it's funny because Ron Paul always said, look, this thing is going to fall apart, but it isn't going to be because everybody listened to me and decided to roll it all back. It's going to be because the dollar breaks. People lose confidence in the currency is how all empires fall.

So I think it's very possible that the rise of Bitcoin in a way is that, you know, the part of the process of that in slow motion. The dollar is failing and people are looking for shelters anywhere they can. So, yes, I mean, let's hope it doesn't have to come to just total crack up boom where our soldiers are hitchhiking home from Germany because our government can't even get them on an airplane home, right? Like we don't want total collapse here. I think what you see in the, just like in Iran, what you see here with the inflation protest, people are just upset, man. I don't know if you saw it was a viral clip of Tim Dillon going, oh, Iran. Like people can't afford a place to live inside.

What about us? This is just enough of this, right? So you don't have to almost like Donald Trump on Afghanistan. He ain't Donald Trump really knows a lot about Afghanistan or he just knows that that's stupid. What are you going to do? Waste a bunch of money trying to remake this wild land of wild men. No. Stop that.

A waste of money. Whatever the number is. We shouldn't be doing that, you know? Well, that's kind of how everybody feels about all of this now. I saw a poll today just right before we went on. There's a solid majority of 55, 60% or something said that Donald Trump spending too much attention on foreign policy. 20% said not enough. But the majority of people are saying, like, what are you doing?

Why fill in the country instead of us? Which, you know, for me, is sort of a kiss of death. I really don't want these people's help. I really wish they would just go away. and leave us alone. But like, whatever, on the very basic sense, all other things being equal, we do have bridges and dams falling apart here. We do have, just on the basic level, lead pipes still.

I mean, I remember right before the election, I guess I have this in Provoked, at the end of Provoked. Right before the election, the Democrats announced a new $30 million policy or whatever to complete the removal of lead water. pipes in the United States of America. Wow. In the year 2024, they're going, you know, we're going to have to start looking at whether we are poisoning the American people with lead in their drinking water while we've been

busy perfecting Iraq to the tune of a couple of million deaths over there. Guys, we want to check at this whole lead thing. I'm hearing some bad things about it. Man. And so that's the one where, and I guess it cuts both ways, right, where like anybody's grandma can just tell you, like, I don't know why we're doing this anymore. We need that money here, you know what kind of thing. That same grandma can tell you after the next terrorist attack that, well, we just need to use nuclear weapons and kill all Muslims in the world. Because obviously we've tried everything and everything hasn't worked yet. So now we're down

to H-bombs, our last option. Or last, you know, option. to protect ourselves and we'll just have to go on humanity minus Muslims after we kill a billion of them and then and I I you know I feel kind of bad about picking on this old lady but I never say her name or anything but she's a sweet old lady that I know oh that was just an example like a fictional example no no no it's a real thing so I know she's my friend's mom my friend that I grew up with when I was young and I didn't know him for a while and I'm over hanging out of his house and there's a sweet little old mama, you know, and she's just some lady, man. She had an office job in a cubicle or whatever, man.

She's no one particular. And now she's a little old lady and she's so sweet to me. And we had the sweetest little conversation about how she's been the last 30 years anyway and all this stuff. And it was really great. And then I guess it's on the news in the background or somebody mentioned, I don't think it was me, that there was a terrorist attack in France, whether it was Charlie Hebdo or the Eagles of Death Medal or the niece truck attack or one of those.

The Jewish grocery store was another one. And she said, I guess we're just going to have to use the hydrogen bombs. We're just going to have to kill them all. And I said, well, what makes you say that? I said, well, we already tried everything else. We've been at this for decades. Nothing seems to work. So as far as she could possibly tell, W. Bush gave it his best effort to solve this problem

in every reasonable way that a man could think. of and then Barack Obama, the exact opposite, other guy also tried all of his best ideas too. And the problem keeps happening. So what are you going to do? Just let these people kill us, but we'll just have to kill all of them until the problem is solved. And the thing is my point being that, yes, she's stupid, but also that she's just an average citizen of North Austin, Texas, man. She's just an average kind of American who doesn't really know, who assumes a lot about

she's never heard a public choice theory. She assumes that Bush and Obama are doing their best to protect her, that everything that they would do would be centered around, I don't know, keeping bin Laden night terrorism down, right? I mean, what other priority could they possibly have? But it doesn't work. And they keep coming and they keep coming.

And so that to me is my real worry. You can have, like you're complaining earlier about, all of a sudden, all the America Firsters, all of a sudden they're all going ho about Venezuela and not all, but too many of them. But now imagine something really blew up and Americans were killed and they could somehow credibly blame that on Venezuela, how hawkish people would be. So I think, I don't know, man, it's a fool's errand itself.

But this is, to me, the most important thing is always to, you know, pardon my phrase, but inoculate people from these kind of narratives that you know what they're going to do, man. They're going to cause terrorist attacks against us. And then they're going to use that as an excuse to go W. Bush all over again. and don't you fault for it. And then, I mean, hell, I did try to warn them before September 11th, too. They didn't listen to me then. But, you know, if there's enough of us saying that, enough of us who the next time something big does blow up,

they rightfully, we all rightfully blame it on our previous, our government's previous policies that created the problem. Instead of letting them say, oh, see, I told you, it's them Islam. That's all it is. We got to fight radical Islam. them. It's a matter of competing narratives. And why do you think that they shovel such shit at us all the time? They lie to us all the time because it really matters

whether we believe them or not. If everybody goes, no, wait a minute, this is still all Bill Clinton's fault. Him and the rest of you scum that did this, obviously, then it should be harder to get us the next time, I hope. And it does kind of work, you know, on the market. Again, and look, I'm not taking any credit. Colonel McGregor has this right. He says time wins more arguments than reason.

On the other hand, those of us who've been right and reasonable this whole time, like have a bit of a track record about like, yeah, man, see, we shouldn't be doing this stuff. And so I think, you know, it's catching on. People understand it. Like, I mean, Tucker Carlson gets so much credit for this, too. They're just demonstrating. You don't have to be some kind of hippie to oppose this stuff.

Patty Can is not a hippie. And Ron Paul's not a hippie. And Tucker Carlson's not a hippie. So what's their problem? They're smart. They just know a lot about it. and know that this is wrong and it's and counterproductive on that we can't afford it and and and it that it's immoral and well they they just call get called anti-semitic something something

yeah it doesn't stick no i know it's been used so much you know money there there are people you know the war party has the money and they have the organization but they're just completely decimated in the argument out here in the world um and so i think you know the america firsters we really are winning um which means there's a crack up coming. The gap between what the people want and what the state is willing to deliver, you know,

there's going to be a big backlash, but more and more the argument is ours. So we at least got that going for us. I hope so, Scott. I can hear by my children running around and tipping over furniture that I think the time has come to wrap this as I think so. As I'm sure you've seen me yell at them previously on this podcast.

One quick thing that I do want to just say to wrap this up, you know, we've talked about a lot of different things, different religions, I hope ultimately nobody takes anything against anybody from this podcast. Peace be with everybody, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindus, or Aestrian, atheist, whatever. I wish nothing but peace and happiness for everybody. Nathan, unless you have anything to add, I'd love for Scott to finish up and tell us where we can all find his work. Yeah, Scott. I need you to tell me about the Scott Horton

Academy because that wasn't a thing the last time we spoke. And of course, the books, where can everybody go find those, find you, the works, anti-war.com, laid out for us. Cool. All right, well, the Scott Horton Academy is a lot like Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, only it's me and my guys and featuring courses on the war on terrorism and the new Cold War and a lot of other stuff. And essentially the point is, as Tom Woods says, is Scott Horton slowed down so you can catch up. And what we want to do, like the problem is that we got a lot of great anti-war people,

but they don't know quite as much as I do about it. But this is everybody's opportunity to get all the way caught up on the recent history of American intervention here so that we can all oppose them more and better together. And so that's all at Scott Horton Academy.com. And there's the Institute and all the rest, but you can find all that. You just go to my Twitter account at Scott Horton's show.

I have all my links in the bio there, including to the Academy. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to BTCsessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know, plus full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like.

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