Fourth Reich Archaeology - #101 - Phoenix Rising pt. 1 w/ Douglas Valentine

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

This week we are honored and humbled to be joined by the legendary Douglas Valentine, author of such noided classics as “The Phoenix Program” - the quintessential work on the CIA’s mass surveillance and assassination program in Vietnam; “Strength of the Wolf” and “Strength of the Pack” - chronicling deep-state involvement in global drug trafficking through control of the drug-enforcement apparatus; and his memoir “Pisces Moon,” which ties together history, personal narrative, and Debordian political insights on how the present reflects the past.Our conversation is both wide-ranging and succinct, and we hope will be only the first of several. You can find links to buy all of Doug’s books (which you should!) here: https://www.douglasvalentine.com/Follow Doug on Twitter @ dougvalentine77Check out Kat Lê, the DJ responsible for the Vietnamese music interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPt1VaAVPNo&list=RDGPt1VaAVPNo&start_radio=1The other song featured is from the great Chilean songster, Victor Jara - his ode to Ho Chi Minh and the people of Vietnam, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz.”

The following passage is from Douglas Valentine's book, Pice's Moon. Mass psychosis has changed America forever. As the eminent journalist and author Seymour Hirsch said to me, Trump has sucked the air out of rationality. Up is down. Pulling off such a monumental scam was not, however, a genius thing for Trump to do. He didn't have to invent the Great Replacement Theory, which white Christians already believed, nor did he have to reinvent himself.

He simply progressed from gangster capitalism and celebrity culture to politics, where representations long ago replaced everything that once was directly lived. But Trump, in his megalomania, did unleash a monster, a perfect storm of military propaganda and white supremacy for underlying the spectacle of illusions that bolsters, fantasies of militant white supremacy is a network of CIA and military bases that enables the U.S. government to respond instantly to its manufactured threats anywhere on the planet or in its starry skies. Nations that cannot be ideologically assimilated are openly subjected to sabotage, subversion,

and strangling economic sanctions. And as the USA integrates and aims the Western world's financial, military, security, and media services against a new world order led by China, Iran, and Russia, Cy War has become the dominant X-factor in the culture war that consumes the U.S. Again, this is nothing new. The mechanisms of transforming the profane, like Trump, into the sacred, began with the first creation myths and became ingrained in human souls and minds with the subsequent vast array of historical epics and religious texts commissioned by patriarchal ruling classes to preserve their dominant status. Religious leaders, military and security professionals, and their admin harness the archetypal power of those myths to build empires, and now the U.S.

empire, by waging a ubiquitous psychological warfare campaign abroad, has created at home an armed and vinglorious white supremacist political movement rooted in self-righteous religiosity that seeks to destroy the vestiges of liberal American democracy. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science, I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one.

For example, we're to CIA. Now, he has a mom. I'm afraid of we never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pro Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a guy. This is a global. This is Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Don. Dick is tunneling his way into the deep underground military base, known by the acronym Dumb, beneath the White House ballroom that is currently under construction. And we wish him the best in that endeavor.

First off, listener, thank you so much for tuning in. We have an amazing episode for you today, an interview with a real living legend. Before I tee that up, I would like to thank you for listening. Thank you for spreading the word about our project to your acquaintances, friends, loved ones, family members, colleagues, classmates, professors, students, and all the rest of it. We depend on you to get the word out because, as we get into in this episode, any effort to interrupt or to contradict what the integrated spectrums, is forcing into the consciousness of the masses, well, it's not going to get that signal boost. It's not going to get that official establishment support. So we've got to do it ourselves, and we so appreciate you for helping us in that endeavor.

You can do so by liking, by subscribing, by rating, reviewing, commenting on. And if you are so inclined, supporting financially this project at patreon.com, slash Fourth Reich Archaeology. Like I said, today we have a living legend on the pod. It's Douglas Valentine. We've referred to him many, many times throughout this podcast, and his work really is essential to an understanding of the Fourth Reich, of the entire subject matter of this podcast. So for those of you who don't know, Douglas Valentine is an author of several books

and articles and essays and indeed poetry on the CIA and the broader national security state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it. He's perhaps best known for his definitive and masterful 1990 book, The Phoenix Program, about the CIA's massive surveillance and a assassination program of the same name in Vietnam that killed somewhere between 25 to 40,000 people. Of course, the Phoenix program was replicated throughout the rest of the global south countries that became targets of the U.S. Empire, and Doug's work gets into that as well. His other books deal with some of the themes that come out of Vietnam, namely the involvement of security state and the CIA in drug trafficking. And those books include the strength of the wolf and the strength of the pack.

Both of these are essential resources on the government involvement in the drug trade and the true nature of the so-called war on drugs. and he also has published a collection of essays under the title CIA as Organized Crime, pretty much what it sounds like. And he has a couple of books that are told from a more personal angle. So the first of those is his very first book called The Hotel Tacloban about his father's experience as a prisoner of war of the Japanese during World War II. And that book, actually, as he talks about in this interview, ingratiated him to the foot soldiers of empire because he has this family connection

to the military life, to struggle, and to the sacrifice that the warriors in the Cold War felt, in some respects, that they were continuing. And his most recent book is his memoir titled Pice's Moon, the Dark Arts of Empire. And that recounts the ways in which the Phoenix program book was suppressed, denigrated, and trashed, really, by the establishment on behalf of the CIA for committing the crime of exposing official crimes. the first crime, of course, is not a real crime. It is the exercise of that first amendment that we were told guaranteed us the right to free speech. And the second crime, of course, was the real crime,

the mass murder of civilians in Vietnam, the trafficking of drugs and the use of drugs as a weapon against the people. but those crimes, of course, not only go unpunished, they go unprosecuted, they are officially covered up by the organs of state, by the media, and by the entire integrated spectacle. So like I said, we've definitely mentioned Doug's work on the show many times, and it is our honor and our privilege to have him on as a guest, as anyone familiarly. with Doug's work knows he has performed an invaluable service to the historical record itself by excavating and preserving the testimonies of many people involved in this imperial project that the United States has launched since World War II, the project that we have referred

to as the Fourth Reich. and he's in that process sat down with killers, with drug dealers, with real spooks, and somehow he's lived to tell the tale not only with a plumb, but with grace and with kindness and with a fortitude of spirit that is all too rare. So without any further ado, let's get digging. What was the primary purpose of the CIA, as you viewed it, was it an intelligence gathering agency, or was it an agency that was primarily involved in covert operations?

They were both part of the CIA's mandate in Vietnam. The agency performed covert action, covert operations very well when the operations were held to a limited size and were of limited objective. When they got big, like the Phoenix program, they got out of hand, and innocent people died as a result. The CIA is not an intelligence agency. It's a corporate action agency, covert action being overthrowing or supporting foreign government. Another part of covert action is disinformation. And the American people, in my estimation, are the primary target audience of the agency's disinformation operation.

And I view Vietnam, the entire Vietnam War was brought to us and sold to us by agency disinformation operations. Pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast. and that's a totally false propaganda, including the thousand books that were published, several hundred in English,

sponsored by the CIA, give some money to a writer, on the subject of Vietnam, and the history of Vietnam, and the history of Marxism, and supporting the domino theory, et cetera. The Chinese is the place, with a no one explosion,

manipulation of the press, which you have explained, in which you believe still goes on to a degree. Do you think another war such as Vietnam could be sold to the American people? Not nearly so easily. I think it could be done, but it would take a more sustained effort,

more across-the-board effort. I think there's a lot of skepticism out there. It would be very difficult to sell, but it could be done. We are absolutely thrilled to be joined on the podcast by the legendary Douglas Valentine, author of several incredible books that really, listener, you must read to be fully informed about the topics

that we're talking about here that I have discussed in the intro to this episode. And without any further ado, welcome, Douglas, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. Oh, you're very welcome, Thank you for inviting me. Absolutely.

Well, first, I wanted to start out, you know, there's a lot that we have to talk about. I'm sure that we could fill hours upon hours, but really, you know, wanted to start out jumping off from your book, your memoir, Paises Moon, which details your travels in Southeast Asia, details your experience. both writing and especially in the aftermath of writing your book, The Phoenix Program, really the sort of quintessential resource on that CIA operation in Vietnam. And, you know, without belaboring and summarizing the entire thing, the listener should just get the book and read it. I wanted to ask you about what it was like, being in the room with some of these operatives. You interviewed, you know, everybody from Tony Pesepny, who was apparently the

inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now to Lucien Koneen, the famous drug trafficking CIA agent. What is that like and, you know, reflect a little bit on how that impacts the way that you tell these stories? Well, basically it was fun for me. I got to be in the presence of these guys who did a lot of important things in terms of the intelligence, the CIA operations around the world, and they were talking to me and telling me about it. So it was exciting to be able to be in their presence and have them confided in me. And I enjoyed doing that, and I'm pretty sure I projected that, that I was interested in what they were saying, and that I understood it. And so they responded very positively to me. I also looked like a CIA officer. You know, I'm very waspy, and I was in very good physical

condition. And some of them even said to me, I would say to me, you know, who's your case, officer who sent you here to talk and stuff like that. So it was kind of like being undercover and pretending to be one of them and gaining their confidence so that they would tell me their secrets and I

enjoyed doing that. And the things I heard I was able to use in my books to break stories. It was original research. So I was very satisfied to be able to get this new information and claim credit for it, you know, that I went in and I talked to these guys and they told me new things about what happened in Vietnam and other places, including the war on drugs, and that I was able to write about it. So basically, it was fun, although oftentimes in reflection, afterwards, I would be,

sort of stunned that I had in a way befriended these people given that the things they had done were so terrible. And I would think to myself, you know, well,

you know, this is going to have a residual effect upon your dog. You know, at some point this is going to become normal to you to hear these stories. And you really have to be sure. that you don't let it become okay, that you start thinking that just because these guys

were liked you and they told you things that it meant the things they were doing were okay and that they were actually okay good guys because basically they were overly aggressive people who thought that they could manipulate foreign populations into doing, things that weren't to the advantage of those populations. Yeah, and when it came time to set the story down in the book, the Phoenix program,

I would say any reader of that book would view it as a fair representation that does not pull punches out of any sense of friendship to your sources. And as a result, you know, as you discuss in Pisces, there were efforts to control the narrative around the book that were deployed against you and against the book and the larger picture of official establishment efforts to rewrite the history in a more self-justifying way. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. I was not, I'm not a journalist. I was not, I didn't go to the Columbia School of journalism or anything like that.

My father told me a story about his World War II adventures. I wrote a book about it. It got published, so I was a published author. I would sometimes send this book to the guys I wanted to talk to to CIA people, and they liked the story. My father was a soldier, and they thought I would understand what it means to be a soldier if they read the book. Plus, they would recommend me. to other people and the recommendations were enough to get me in the door. But I was not an establishment journalist.

An establishment journalists know that you don't reveal the flaws of the people that you're interviewing for books like this. You don't actually tell the truth because you want them to be sources for you, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road. You want to go back to them over and over and over again and be able to plug them for information because that's what journalists do. They cultivate sources. But I was not cultivating these people as sources.

I was going in basically once or twice to see them to get the information that would incriminate them and would incriminate the CIA in war crimes. And I was pretending to be their friend, but I wasn't. And so they trusted me, and they told me all their secrets, including the bad stuff, and that's what got published, and that was considered a betrayal. So I knew, you know, I knew while I was writing the book, I mean, I always thought it would be the last book I would ever write, that the CIA would be so mad at me for actually revealing everything.

everything that they actually said and not playing by the rules of, you know, like the Jeremy Scaill intercept rules or the New York Times rules where you don't really get into the personalities of these people. You don't really tell about who they are and what they are and the dirty deeds that they've done because next week you've got to publish another issue of the intercept in New York time. So you have to have good relations with these people. So it's just understood that you're not going to say anything that's going to get them in trouble or damage their reputations.

But I wasn't playing by that game, those rules. And everybody thought I was. And so when I got smeared, you know, I thought, well, this is what's going to happen. This was, you know, what was going to happen. But it still hurts. And it did destroy my career when, you know, when they finally went after me. And I didn't expect that they would come after me so hard and would actually destroy my career as a writer. And, you know, so that got me mad.

And I decided, well, maybe someday I'll be able to write another book and I'll do the same thing to them all over again. And it took 15 years, but I did it. But that's what happened. I kind of hustled the hustlers. And I constantly talked about in the book, the Phoenix program, the role that the media played in covering up the crimes of the CIA and Vietnam. So, you know, in particular, I went after the New York Times. So when the book came out, the New York Times gave it a terrible review.

And it basically, I remember Peter Dale, Scott called me up and said, you'll never get another book published in America then. You know, that's how it works. If you go out and you actually tell the truth about these secret services, then your career gets destroyed. If you tell the truth about what Israel is doing, you'll never get a movie made in Hollywood.

You know, I mean, there's just a lot of things that that conventional rules that conventional society play by. And those rules are exemplified by the media. The media does not, as the media between what happens and what we think is happening, they're the ones that are responsible for controlling the perceptions. And so they have the critical role, along with the secret services, of shaping everybody's perceptions. And if you go and you violate those rules,

and you actually tell what really is going on, then they won't want you be part of the media anymore. They won't let your books get published. They won't make a movie out of your book or a TV show. You won't appear on Amy Goodman. You won't appear on, you won't get a good review in the nation. All these left, right, middle news organizations all play by the same rules. And all have the same rule.

even if they come out of from different perspectives, there are certain rules that you can't violate. So in revealing the, for example, Dan Ellsberg's relationship to the CIA, everybody on the left decided, well, man, you're out. You'll never get published by the left, you know, and by actually revealing all the secrets of the CIA, the right just clamped down on me and went after me.

You know, so it was a lose-lose situation, and I had the minor satisfaction of walking away with my integrity intact and having smacked the harked the hornet's nest and at least gotten the truth out there. But it's not the way you want to go if you want to become a university professor or a media host, you know, or a reporter for. a journalist for any kind of magazine that's in business. You know, I disrupted the business model. Yeah, and I would note for the listener, if they haven't yet read Pice's Moon, the journalist that wrote that New York Times hit piece on the Phoenix program was none other than Morley Safer, who later went on to great fame and acclaim as a host of 60 Minutes. at which maybe we'll talk a little bit about the media landscape of today

and what has become of or is becoming of that program and its network owner a little bit later on because there's much to say there the way that things have ramped up to overdrive even more so. And that's a good example of how the tables have turned. You know, I mean, there was a time when Morley Safer thought he was this decider, you know, that up him with the secret services. And he was.

I didn't find out for 25 years after he wrote that review. He gave a safer gave a speech at a meeting between State Department employees who had been in Vietnam and correspondence. It was, you know, a correspondence and the State Department people got together to throw themselves a little party 25 years after the war. In 2015, it was 40 years after the war. And at this convention, he said, well, one day at 1970, William Colby came up to me and said, can you disappear for a couple of days? And Sabre said, well, I looked at it and I said, what do you mean, man? And he said, well, no, don't bring any video with you, just you by yourself.

And I'm going to show you all the secret operations and installations of the CIA and Vietnam. And Morley Safer said, sure, I'll do it. And the quid pro quo was that Morley was never able to talk about it. And he waited 40 years to reveal that he had been one of William Colby's Asians. in Vietnam back in 1970. And so when it came time to do a hit piece on me for the New York Times, who did Colley go to? I'm Morley Safer. Well, during the years you were out there, what kind of cooperation did you receive from the military?

And did it change over the years? Well, the cooperation up until the post-tech period was wonderful to the extent that we couldn't cover that war without the military. You could practically summon up your own helicopter. You could get all over the country. You could get dropped into the thick battle, which all of us did. although there was always pretty much routinely they were telling the best in the facts and I don't particularly condemn them it's very often the job of people who speak for the government to fudge the truth where it became more important than an adversary relationship between the giving the correspondent and a stubborn official is when they were actively spreading on truth There were officers in the embassy, CIA officers, high-ranking officers, who met with the press regularly.

It shared information with them, gave them information, and got information from them, and then periodically would put some story into that that would be false, but also in other cases very valuable to the journalist. So even hard-nosed journalists who would never willfully cooperate with the CIA would consider it a useful source. A village massacre in Vietnam was not all that unusual if you're a Vietnamese villager. villager and I don't mean to suggest that and there I mili was not the norm as far of the American people were concerned but there were plenty of milas I'm sure

committed mainly by the other side and by South Vietnamese students so the death and destruction by foreigners or friendlies in the Vietnamese countryside was something that the Vietnamese people had lived with her Certainly the most of the life of any person alive back in the late 60s. What kind of censorship could we visualize for the future with all the sense of communication? No, I think censorship's gone up the window. And you don't think that the old pattern of ever existing?

It's all changing. And I think on balance probably in certain ways for the better, more openness. Generally speaking, I guess all of this stuff has to make a positive difference. Some of the illusions of the past continue, and one of those illusions is what the Vietnam War was all about. The Supreme Court decided that every government worker in a position of trust, whether in the CI, State Department, National Security Council, as an implicit obligation to submit what he says or rights about his work to the government for censorship. If he doesn't, he is liable to monetary penalties, forfeiture of all of his profits,

and all of the profits from decent and ever my profits were forfeited to the government. And he is subject to a lifelong gag order, which means that he must continue to submit his statements to the government for approval. And even if there are no secrets involved. Novels, screenplays, all are submitted. Everything. Everything. Not to the CIA, to the U.S. government for censorship. And again, anybody in the government is under the same regime of censorship.

One of the victims of the Vietnam War was the First Amendment. And my case was one of the cases that came out of the Vietnam. I'm morely safer. I think sets of ships went up the window. Like the Godfather, you know. Someday I'm going to ask you to do a favor for me, you know. I do this favor for you today, but somewhere down the line, I ask you to do a favor for me. So Colby asked safer to do it.

And safer was like every other Vietnam more correspondent. He was beholden to the CIA for stories. And the quid pro quo is that you don't tell who gave it a story. And that's the same thing that's going on today, everywhere with every major story that's going on, is that somebody on the inside is leaking it, and they're telling their version of the story to the media. And the quid pro quo is because the media is in business and in competition with other media, that they get to break this story today. just today, because in 24 hours, there'll be a new story, and everybody will have forgotten

about your story today, but at least you get to grab the headlines for today, or maybe even two or three days if you're really lucky, but every day they're computing for new stories. And the people who are leaking these stories to them know that they can do that. And it used to be a more effective way of leaking information until social media came along. And Donald Trump, and Donald Trump realized that he could do an end run around the entire media and just post his messages on X on Twitter to begin with, and that he didn't even have to leak to the media anymore. And it was at that point in 2016 that the Morley Saferers of the West. world started losing their influence. Because now all of a sudden, politicians could go around the

media and tell their message directly to people without having to do that. And it culminated when Maptavey went before Congress and said the Democrats controlled Twitter, you got to get the Twitter out of the hands of the Democrats and give it to Elon. on Musk. And that began the Republican buyout of every media outlet on the world. And now that they, like you said about safer, now Barry Weiss is in. And she's basically in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. And she'll just do anything that they say and only will do programs that come from

their leaks, you know, from their sources. And everybody else, any liberal or left or non-compatible story is out the window. And it all started with Trump going on Twitter in 2016, the decline. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly right. And, you know, I am hearing you describe this phenomenon, and I'm reminded of a scholar or theorist for which we both share in admiration and that our listeners are very familiar with, Guy de Beau, and the Society of the Spectacle and the notion of the spectacle serving the establishment as this way to induce what you've referred to in other interviews as a mass psychosis and as a concept that we have also invoked to describe just how, distracted and ill-informed people are to the point where really literacy is at a troubling low.

I don't mean the ability to read words on a page, but the ability to understand really anything that's going on thanks to this almost seemingly infinite proliferation of images and concepts that conceal what's really going on. Yeah, that just, you know, that's exactly what. what I would have said, you know, and of course, understanding that Guy DeBoard committed suicide in the late 80s. I mean, he was saying all this stuff before there was social media. And it was just television and the movies, you know, and kind of rudimentary media that the world was dealing with compared to the, and even at that time, 40 years ago.

He said it was integrated and all persuasive. Okay, so it's not only still integrated and all pervasive, now it's become absolutely dominant. And as it becomes more and more dominant, the effect is that people become illiterate. They become unable to think. They become unable to make critical analysis. 40 years ago, 50 years ago,

the board, you know, was putting forth ways to subvert this problem. You know, they were called the situationists, you know, and they were trying to subvert all this media spectacle. And, you know, of course, the media just portrayed them as cooks. You know, and it in itself became, it was a sort of, what happened to them is what happened to me with Phoenix. If you dare to go out and tell the truth about the media,

it's kind of like pushing garbage against the tide because the only way that message gets out is through the media. And so as much as you try to subvert the media, the media is still there interpreting whatever you say. And as soon as you start going against the spectacle, the spectacle consumes you and misinterpreters. and people lose the meaning anyway. So, you know, the subsequent question is, what can you do about?

Well, you can't do anything about it. You know, I mean, you can try and fit in between the spaces. And the great thing to do, you know, is to read books. Actually, read books and, you know, discuss books with people in groups in groups. in groups, you know, classical literature, go back to the beginning, but actually learn to read and get away from social media.

My big, after I published my last book, Pisces Moon, I promised myself I would get off social media. Well, you know, I'm as addicted to all the, is stimulation from social media as anybody else? You know, as a writer, I depend on it. That's how I promote myself. I don't have a literary agent.

You know, that died when Phoenix died, the idea of me ever having a literary agent. I don't have publishers promoting my work, so I have to do it myself. So I'm kind of limited to social media. But I try to approach it as a Debordian situationist. You know, I mean, I try to do it in a subversive way.

The idea being that nowadays, you're not relevant unless you're subverted the spectacle. You know, that is the way to relevance nowadays. And the board, when he was alive, saw Noriega as the personification of the spectacle. Again, that's 40 years ago, 50 years ago. There's no question that Donald Trump is the personification of the spectacle. The board was very much talked about the role of architecture and the spectacle,

not just the media, but architecture. And there's nobody that's linked more closely to the mind-numbing qualities of modern architecture than Donald Trump and his building a ballroom on the grounds of the White House, which is... And don't forget also the UFC gigantic Thunderdome Octagon. Yeah, I mean, it's the whole notion of any dignity, not only how they subverting the media, but they're subverting values like the value of the dignity of statecraft. there once was, even if statecraft was a brutal thing behind the scenes and there was secret diplomacy that was going on, that was subverting countries, there was a certain amount of dignity to statecraft where it was supposed to be literate people who are getting together and speaking to each other politely and sending an example for polite society. Well, that is all just also gone down the tombs.

It is. It's now cage fighting. That's what it's descended to. So what do people aspire to when they want to have polite conversation on other people? When they want to have a behavior behave with dignity in social situations. Who do they look to at one time? And when I was being taught civic education in high school 60 years ago, we were told that the president and the government were set the example for how people should behave in society.

Talking with dignity and respect, and like John Kennedy sort of represented that to us. as this guy who, when he gave his, when he, inaugural address had Robert Frost, a poet there to read a poem. You know, now Donald Trump has a cage fighter. You know, he has McMahon, you know, the wrestler there, pushing people around, you know, celebrating aggression instead of Kennedy, who is celebrating intellectualism, liberalism. liberalism, open society, the potential of what people could become intellectually and in terms of

their character, like Martin Luther King would say, you know, how you could develop your character. Well, those values, the Kennedy King values, have been subverted as well by the spectacle. There is no more aspiration to be a dignified diplomat. You know, I mean, King Charlie invited Trump to Buckingham Palace, and Trump said it was the highest honor of my life. He didn't realize. I mean, it didn't even incur to him that King Charlie was inviting him as a representative of the American people. I mean, do you understand what I'm saying? The trouble is there to represent America and the American people, not himself.

Right. But now that's become, this is the value now is that everybody should be overly aggressive and just serving themselves. And this dispersion of any kind of social coherence has been accelerated by social media where everybody goes on and spews their own little, you know, two cents and point of view. And it all just goes into this big oyster stew. And nobody can distinguish what's real or what isn't real or what's been planted there by a secret service or what's there to control them or what's there to deliberate them anymore. And in the meantime, everybody's just floating around on this huge oyster stew.

Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because there does seem to be a pretty widespread, at least among people with a baseline literacy retaining, real distaste and recognition of how badly this process that you're describing is a full. affecting our society, the world around us. And people are seeming to get fed up and not trust any of the old mainstream outlets, not trust politicians. The approval rating for Trump is extremely low, approval rating for Congress. But the spectacle has its way of putting the spotlight on its favored voices. And now you see the anti-system. authority, entrusted in a CIA adjacent figure like Tucker Carlson.

Yeah, it doesn't matter what your approval rating is. It just matters that you're being talked about. Okay. I mean, that's how the spectacle works. And Tucker Carlson is, you know, he's another creature of the spectacle. You know, I call him tuckums. You know, I imagine when he was this little pampered little kid dressed like they dressed kids in the early 20th century, you know, boys were dressed in like little dresses and their mommy. Grandma would say, come over here, sit on my lap.

Tom's, come on, sit on my lap. You know, we're going to go, we're going to go have to go chase butterflies today and see if we can catch some butterflies. You know, I mean, a rich kid who had everything handed to him. and was a great proponent of Stop the Steel, which was a big lie. And he was also a proponent, Tucker Carlson, of the great replacement theory, which Glenn Greenwald is also a proponent of. And these people were just like tearing away Carlson and Greenwald through the, these big lies that the election had been stolen from Trump, which it wasn't,

and that the Democrats were organizing immigrants in order to displace white people from America, which they're not, you know, that it's not a liberal plot to displace Americans. And by simply perpetuating these big lies, they're tearing away on all the fabric of everything that's decent in America. And yet people still look to them as voices that are anti-establishment, you know, and that somehow they promote themselves as anti-establishment characters. But they're trying to overthrow the government from the right. You know, I mean, they're trying to subvert everything that's decent and liberal and open-minded

about society. But they're able to promote themselves as anti-establishment. establishment, especially by going after Israel. Well, I can tell you, there's a lot of people that are anti-genocide and what Israel is doing, how that's done to the Palestinians with America's help. But there's a lot of voices you can cite as authorities without citing Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, who also bring along with them these, these Kakomanie theory, big lie theories of the election was stolen and this great displacement theory.

There's people you can bring along who are a package of values, who incorporate values of decency and honesty and liberalism and trying to create a society like Kennedy and like Martin Luther King that encompasses everybody and tries to bring people up rather than pushing them down, you know, which is what is happening now, especially through the Department of Homeland Security and all the other instruments of state craft

that Trump has this tiny little hands on the lovers and is pulling the levers of, you know, these instruments of state craft of which the Department of Homeland Security has won, militaries, one, state departments, one. You know, all these things. All of what Trump does as he uses, his power over all these instruments of statecraft to accelerate this spectacle of that is slowly eroding any kind of positive values

and disintegrating every kind of cohesive value that may be left in the world, including literacy, so that the wolves of Wall Street can take over everything. The guy that he, yeah, the guy that he just. And his own family, too, can become, I think he wants to be the richest family in the history of the world. I mean, people don't even see the con, you know, but it is. It's like a mafia con. The board said 50 years ago, the mafia is not an outsider in the society. It's the model for all advanced commercial.

commercial enterprises. And that was, you know, this is what we're seeing right now is where organized crime is simply just burning down the store and selling off the property. I mean, the guy he, Trump just put in as the director of national intelligence. His name rhymes with Colt, Polt. Bill Polk is an equity guy who, who has a blight enterprise where they go around and they blight out parts of the city,

force everybody out of the city, and then rebuild it, gentrify it. You know, I mean, which is exactly what, you know, I mean, this is what Trump does too, you know. I mean, you displace all the poor people, then you deport them, and then you sell what's left to the very rich. and they continue just to consolidate capitalism.

And let's not forget the board was a socialist. You know, I mean, it was approaching all this from a socialist point of view. And you really can't lose that value and that approach either. And in the process of trying to withstand the spectacle that has engulfed all of us. Yeah. It's a question of values of helping each other. to uplift each other. Yeah.

That includes illegal alien, you know, includes Palestinians and Muslims, includes women who want to get abortions and want to have the power to determine, you know, their own life. Women who get abortions are uncontrollable. Right. You know, they can live their own life if they can get an abortion, you know. Well, good for them. Yeah.

Oh, go out. live your own life. And what you're saying echoes exactly what Jesus Christ said in the sermon on the Mount, you know, unto the least of my brothers. And yet these people masquerade under the guise of Christianity. The hypocrisy could not be any more transparent. I'll come back on and we can talk about religion if you want as the myth that shapes. I mean, seeing if you've closed off with Jesus, you know, I mean, who was there that day,

writing down his words? Right, right. Who was it morally safer? You know, it was morely safer there, writing down the words from the sermon of the mouth. You know, when God said, let there be light. I mean, who was there writing down the words? I mean, I remember asking that at the age of nine, asking my minister. Well, who heard God say, let there be light?

You know, and he looked at me and he said, just so you believe in Jesus and we'll get this over with, and you'll be determined and you're a Methodist. He said, don't go asking questions like that. You know, there's some big myths going on there with religion, too, that need to be exploded. Oh, absolutely. And the other aspect that I would love to explore is, you know, we talked about sort of the carrot side of the spectacle, but there's also the stick and the crackdown and the continuity. between the Phoenix program and DHS, the domestic Phoenix, that is...

Let's do that some other time. Okay. I got to go. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. Looking forward to the next one. All right.

Bye, bye. Bye. Well, listener, that does it for this week. We want to thank Doug Valentine once more for spending the time to talk with us. And I'm not sure if Doug knew this, but the very day. on which we were conducting our interview, the moon began its transit of Pisces. That's right.

We conducted our interview on a Pisces moon. Wasn't planned that way, but we'll let you make of it what you will. I'll take it as an auspicious sign of good things to come. Meanwhile, on behalf of Dick, I am Don, saying farewell, and keep on digging.