Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:25 - The Afghan & Real Estate Bubbles

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Scott & Darryl discuss how close we are to the imminent collapse of the real estate market bubble, how a recent report revealed the complete failure and total waste of U.S. nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, the Trump administration bombing suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers, and more. (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠) 👉 Subscribe for more honest, unfiltered conversations that push past the noise. 🔹 No safe spaces. 🔹 No corporate filters. 🔹 Just raw, informed, and fearless conversation. Provoked show website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://provoked.show⁠⁠⁠⁠ Darryl's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@martyrmade⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://subscribe.martyrmade.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@scotthortonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthortonacademy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://antiwar.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org/books⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.scotthortonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://streamyard.com/pal/d/4904399580430336

Tonight, is Darrow Cooper going to drone strike my motorboat? All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. Negotiate now. End this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is provoked.

All right, you cooks. Welcome to the show. I'm Scott. He's Darrell. How you doing, Darrell? Good, man. How are you? I'm doing good.

Here's our proper layout there with our captions. We got a nice layer of snow over the landscape here, and I just got done eating a big-ass moose burger, so I'm in a good mood. A moose burger. Yeah. Well, I'm a bit high on a big bowl of spaghetti myself right now, so I don't know if I'm as messed up as all that. What's moose taste like? I've seen a moose for. Very similar to beef. All right. Yeah. And this was Roadkill? Or you went out? No, my buddy shot it, hunted it. Yeah. We just got 300 pounds of elk in the mail. The bull I killed in Colorado. So we had to go buy another freezer and it filled that whole thing up. And we've been trying to give that stuff away. So my wife and I aren't going to eat that in the next three years.

Had to go buy another freezer. Man, that sounds nice. It's funny because up here where everybody hunts, this time of year, it's like freezer season. You go to Home Depot or wherever, it's just freezers wall to wall, and everybody knows what they're for when you buy them. Very nice. All right, good times. Well, speaking of hunting things, the government's been blowing up a bunch of people lately,

and you started a big fight with all us cool ass libertarians over on the X thing. So I guess we've got to start with that. Some guy that I don't know said something that seemed reasonable. And you got mad and he was... Oh, I was not mad. I was certainly not mad. No, no. Well, you know what I mean.

Yeah. In context. He says, what, the guy's just selling drugs? What's the problem being a drug businessman anyway? And then you said... Well, no, but then what else did he say? That's why I reposted it. He said what they're doing is a much more honorable profession than anybody working for the government,

and that includes cops, military, and firemen. That's why I said, Scott, Dave, Tom, somebody, one of you libertarians got to come pick up your boy. He's been on the sauce again. It's making you guys look bad. It really is immoral to be a tax parasite of any description. He is right on that line. But, no, it's in your house is on fire. it's uh yeah you know the volunteer firefighters i don't know um i miss that part but no um of course

we need to legalize drugs and when it comes to these boats off the coast of venezuela the worst they're accused of by the regime i don't know about the white house but the permanent regime says that they smuggle cocaine out of there well why so rich people can stay up late and drink longer and i'm supposed to go to war over cocaine are you kidding me like of all the thinnest most ridiculous, stupid-ass pretexts for war. This is some Tom Clancy, Harrison Ford bullshit from the 1990s. We haven't got our war on terrorism going yet, so we're going to pretend that our foreign policy is based around cocaine smuggling.

Get the hell. And back then, of course, it was just on the heels of the Republicans being the biggest cocaine dealers in the history of all of the universe. But anyway, here is still just as stupid as a pretext. But I wonder what you really think. You said something about, you know, hey, they're pirates, so go ahead and sap them. That's the closest, that's the closest analog, I think. You know, not that they are, they're obviously not technically pirates.

I'm just saying, like, you know, this isn't exactly a law enforcement operation, nor is it like an act of... Isn't it, though, like, doesn't the Coast Guard just intercept these people? And as Rand Paul said, like 20% of the time, they're actually innocent and are mistaken for drug. If we feel innocent people, obviously, that's a problem. And if that ever happens, we need to mop that up. Well, that's why you send Coast Guard guys to arrest them and then charge them with crimes instead of killing them first and then figuring out later who it was that you kill them

and what they may have been doing out there. I'm okay with the Coast Guard VBSS team doing the executions in person. That's cool. Okay, if I'm cocaine on the boat, you just throw them overboard. You got to make sure you got to definitely catch them right-handed, though. No, I mean, look, I was kind of tongue-in-cheek and basing. the libertarians there. I don't know. We're fun to get in fights with.

You know, I don't, I'm very confused about what's going on with the whole Venezuela situation. The best read that I have won it, I mean, first of all, let me just say, like, most Americans, for some reason, just going back to, like, when Richard Nixon said that nobody gives this shit about Latin America, most Americans know more about Russia and Israel and Palestine and a lot of places in Africa than they do about anywhere in Latin America. And I'm kind of guilty of that to some degree too. And so, you know, Venezuela, like the history of it, like, I don't really have a lot of that context, right? Like, as far as, you know, the, like, I have a rough outline of, like, who Maduro's base is and, you know, why Chavez was supported by the people that he was supported by and so forth.

But not enough to, like, you know, make pronouncements on it. And so when I watch it, like, the best explanation I can think of for what's going on over there. And this is, again, like, not a good reason to. kill people but like um it's just that rubio being a florida you know cuban floridian um has a bug up his ass about cuba and of course venezuela and that trump basically told him you could be secretary of state and do what you want down in venezuela short of taking us to war and back me on all my other plays you know and go out and defend everything else you i said the only thing i could think of that's going on because he really kind of nowhere yeah i think you're right and so i had a theory that i don't

like anymore, but look, it was just a hypothesis. I didn't ever declare it was so. In fact, when I posted a tweet about it, I got really bad reaction. I said something about my completely half-ass theory based on very little data is this. Discuss. That was the tweet. And people said to me, if you really believe that, then I now hate you. Whatever. Like, okay, I don't know what to tell you people. Seriously. But what it was was that Chevron has maintained good relations with Venezuela this whole time. And there was an article in the American conservative by Harrison Berger, who I like very much in his right to protect there, which is one of the most important publications on the planet, which I, you know, is all of the best people are the editors and staff of there. I put a lot

of stock on what they say. And they had a piece about, hey, do you really think it's a coincidence then that Exxon has really been supporting, I'm almost sure it was the Center for Science and International Security. There's so many of those damn think tanks up there. I'm pretty sure it was that one. And that these guys had just put out a big study saying it's time to go and regime change Venezuela. So I said, hey, maybe this is a little bit of Exxon elbow

and their competition in Chevron out of the way. But a friend actually sent me a private message instead of castigating me in public has an absolute idiot and moron and said, actually, that's really not it. Because at these prices, Venezuelan oil sucks. It has to be,

it's very heavy, filthy, sulfur-ridden crude that has to be refined in severe process that's very expensive. And oil is pretty low right now, relatively speaking. And as far as I know,

our Gulf refineries are the closest ones that Venezuela could use to refine that stuff as far as far as well. Yeah. And Chevrolet, Chevron and Sitko and Exxon all have available of resources. I looked into this a little bit. They all have the facilities capable of refining the heavy crude now.

It used to be the Cokes had their facility in Corpus Christi was the only one, but I guess they've expanded since then around the Gulf. So there is that. Then my friend also said, Exxon and a Chevron don't play like that. They work together on things. They mostly stay out of problems, right? They don't, and they don't fight like this. So that's not what it is.

So this is, okay, fine. And then, well, it ain't the drugs. It's definitely not the drugs. Let's agree on that. It's definitely not the drugs. So now, I want to know more about this, Daryl, and I know you've heard of this, maybe you know more about it than me already, is the Isaac Accords that are supposed to be the Latin American collier to the Abraham Accords, where all of Latin America now makes

new trade deals and normalizes beyond what they already have, I guess, relationship. with Israel. And, you know, clearly the new suck-up lady who got the Peace Prize, who wants to eat Murchato, I think is her name, who wants to be installed there, she's explicitly sucking up to the Israelis and all of that. So now whether that's just good politics, like the Turks like to run around with the Israelis in Washington, because it's good to have them around because they're helpful. They have the juice right already.

So I don't know, like, what, how many wheels on the car are actually based on that. You know what I mean? But then there's what you just said. And this is, I interviewed Brad Pierce today, the wayward Ravler, who's a great writer who writes for the Institute as well. And he wrote about the Florida man occupied government and how that's what it is.

You just have these guys in the Cuban influence, and especially through Marco Rubio, it's all very right-wing and anti-communist. And God bless them all for that, but it's all very interventionist. And I guess part of the idea is the key is, If you get rid of Venezuela, then they stop subsidizing Cuba with cheap oil and whatever loans or whatever other favors. And that makes it easier for Cuba to eventually fall, at least in Rubio and his friend's mind, whether that's really true or not.

And based on the opinions of a lot of expats who we all know you're not supposed to listen to because they lie and believe lies. So I think you're right. Like that's by process of elimination, that's what it is. It's an ideological bent that now's our chance to get rid of these guys once and for all. But then one more thing is, just to set you up here, is you just made very explicit and important reference to. Just don't let it turn into a war, right? You want to get a regime change down there, figure out a coup or something. They tried that last time.

But that's the real question is whether he's going to let Rubio lead us into catastrophe here, right? I don't think that'll happen. I mean, they'd have to be crazy to try something like that. You know, I hope that there are enough people around Trump who can tell him about the Bay of Pigs and how we found out after it was all over that all of the anti-Castro Cubans lived in Florida now. They want to in Cuba. And I wonder if that's the case in Venezuela, you know, like we have this idea. Some people have this idea that, you know, basically the entire place is a giant gulag that Maduro is keeping the people in. And if we can just, you know, push the thing over a little bit, the people will do the rest.

where we heard that one before, you know? And so I'm just not so sure about that. I mean, you know, these Latin American countries, I feel like, you know, our foreign policy has been so unfocused down there for such a long time. And to the extent that we were focused on it, you know, you had like, you have drug stuff, obviously. And then you had anti-communist stuff during the Cold War. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, I've read a few books about the narco wars down there back in the day. And one of the things that comes through and like all of them is how, you know, the DEA, all of these agencies are like single purpose built machines, you know. So you put the DEA in a country, like it's there to interdict drugs or do whatever their

particular mission is. And that's all these guys know is who are the dealers, where are the trade networks, all that kind of stuff. And they don't know anything about the communist militias out in the, you know, jungle or anything like that. They would go and try to get help from, you know, the DOD, go talk to the ambassador, have the DOD come in and help us with X, Y, or Z. And the DOD's like, what, are they communists? And then, no, we don't care who they are, what's going on or whatever. So, in other words, just very broken up. And I feel like, you know, with that being our very limited focus on the region for so long, I just don't think we have a good understanding of it in our government, you know, and the understanding that we think we have is coming from these

really hardcore ideologues like Rubio and, you know, the people around him. And so, I mean, that right there by itself should be like the biggest, you know, push to like caution, you know, just the fact that we probably don't really understand what's going on down there. Like, whatever, whatever happened to that Wong Guaido dude. You remember him? Yeah, of course, he completely discredited himself by calling for intervention against his own country. Yeah, and then didn't the new woman, she did that like, like within a week after getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And I love to, to your point earlier, and I don't think this is why we're messing with Venezuela.

But, you know, she said that her first act as the head of government of Venezuela would be to move the Venezuelan embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. And I said, now, hey, you know what? Say what you want about this whole situation. That woman knows how to get things done in Washington. Exactly right. She's playing those cards, right? There was a funny thing of her, a video of her. Her lipstick is all smeared.

She just looks all wild-eyed and crazy. And it was funny, man. It was like satirical, only not satirical. It reminded me of like a Paul Verhoven thing, like Robocop or something, right? where she's going, yeah, and if you invade my country and put me in power, there's all this oil and all these minerals, and you can have it all, $1.7 trillion, and it'll be all yours and all this. And she's just, wow, what a pitch.

Just, man, you sure you want to just put that on YouTube or whatever? That wasn't supposed to be like a private message to somebody. Just bananas. It's so over the top, you know. Don't you think, like, real quick. Like, don't you think that, like, it seems like the strategy is to try to just put enough pressure on the regime that some general or whoever, you know, in, and with enough juice there in Venezuela, just turns to the other guys and says, look, we just, we got to arrest this guy, like, take him out of power, whatever it is, send him in exile. And then we got to reach out and just reset, you know, hit the reset button with the Americans. This is not working.

So just to put pressure so that somebody from down below puts a bullet behind the guy's ear or just takes him out in another way. It seems like that's the strategy. It seems like also they've called our bluff on that. And in the fact that over all of this time, you know, not just this year, not just this administration or even going back into the Chavez days, the fact that that has not happened yet should make us question. Like, you know, the generals are clear. Like, I've heard, and I don't know, again, how much, I don't have, like, a lot of the real hard detail on this. But from what I understand, the arrangement over there is basically that the military gets to control the oil industry. And so the generals have a stake in the current regime, like a real deep stake.

If that's true, that's what I read somewhere. It was a while back. So, like, don't take that to the bank or go post it on Twitter or anything. But if that's the case, I mean, that's how you keep those guys on side. You know, a $50 million bounty is not going to change their minds at the military. is controlling the oil industry and their whole operation basically is dependent on keeping the guy who's there in power, you know? Yeah.

Well, look, don't anybody forget that Donald Trump himself said that his president Trump said three, four weeks ago, that Maduro offered everything. He offered everything. Total surrender. So for people who were young or were bad on this at the time, the story came out in like the fall, I'm going to guess September, October of 2003 in the New York Times by James Risen. So six months after the war started.

I said, hey, by the way, Saddam offered to surrender unconditionally to Richard Pearl. He sent a businessman, an emissary or a diplomat. to meet with Richard Pearl in London. Oh, great. So, of course, Pearl just buried it and didn't do anything with it. He offered everything. But we only found that out six months later. Here, our current day, W. Bush, has announced, Saddam has surrendered unconditionally.

We're still going to go to war anyway. So to me, like, no, that's it. You can't do that, man. You can't say the other guy already quit, but we're still going to attack him. You just can't. You can't. there's got to be a limit. There's got to be somewhere on this stuff, man.

It just makes you wonder like what the end game is, you know, because I saw that too, that he basically said, look, guarantee I'm not going to get shot or put into a supermax prison for the rest of my life and I'll go into exile, fine, like whatever. I mean, if that's the case, and we turn that down,

it makes you wonder what the end game is. Well, you know what? Maybe everything there was hyperbole because I wouldn't even think of that necessarily included stepping down. But every other thing as far as giving in to America's will on obviously resources would be a huge one. But foreign investment and whatever other rules of the game, I mean, that's, you know, it's like Yanukovych saying, fine, I'll fire my prime minister. And you can just hire my whole new government for me. And I'll just sit here and watch them work and do nothing, you know, which wasn't good enough for them then either.

Remember, they went ahead and overthrew him anyway. So now, and look, this is. in the most important part of this, but it really is worth discussing. And right-wingers, you don't, it's okay. You won't automatically, like, become a libertarian and get libertarian free market couties all over you if you accept that drug prohibition doesn't work. It's completely crazy. And in fact, I learned in Tucker Carlson's morning email that today is the anniversary of the end of prohibition. Utah finally ratified the 21st Amendment that repealed the 18th. And because prohibition was an absolute catastrophe. It did nothing but expand criminality. It made

liquors harder in every way. And it birthed a massive federal police Gestapo that then turned into the drug warriors as soon as they were done with the, and ATF and the rest as soon as they were done with the drugs. And it never did work. And they've had a full-scale war on opiates for now 90 years, really since the Roosevelt years. And they never accomplished. really anything with it. And the same for cocaine, I guess, later. But no one has ever even claimed, I don't think, other than just on a newspaper headline.

But like in any actual study that the DEA ever succeeded in reducing the supply of cocaine to the United States in any measurable or meaningful way. For all their PR stunts on all their piles of cocaine, for all the people they shoot and kill, and boats they sink and the rest. It makes no difference whatsoever to the price or availability of cocaine

to the actual cocaine market in America, which is always an elite market. You think the cocaine users of San Francisco or New York City or Washington, D.C. Ever ran out of cocaine, ever in your whole lifetime? No, the whole thing is stupid and wrong. You ought to just be able to go and get it at Walgreens. And no, that's not good.

And it shouldn't be encouraged. In fact, I've known a couple of coke heads in my life, and it was very bad for them. And they should not have let it become their primary objective in life to become a cocaine addict. But still, it's up to them. They're grown-ass men. And it wasn't the law that ever stopped them, even when one of them went to jail for a while, came out, was still on drugs. He gave it up later when he wanted to, when he decided to, not because they made him.

And so all this does is just spread criminality. It creates black markets and gangsterism and territorial violence and all of this stuff. And then meanwhile, I don't even know of these kids. I'm too old. I don't know their names. There were a couple of young pro skaters in San Francisco earlier this year who both took a bump off a key. Just a little bump, not a line, a little bump of cocaine, but it was spiked with fentanyl. And they died, both of them, two young pro skateboarders dropped dead from cocaine.

because it had poison in it when if they just bought it from Walgreens then you would say those young skaters should not be doing cocaine don't party so hard young man you might regret it when you turn 40 or something instead they're dead

because they bought cocaine from some guy at the bar and I actually have a friend who bought a pill he thought was Xanax from a friend at the bar but it turned out had fentanyl in it and it killed him they saved his life and then he ended up dying later anyway but still it was because it was

a black market Xanax. Why can't a grown-ass man go to Walgreens and buy a Xanax? Because the national government says that you can't. And so you have to go to the black market and die. It's so stupid. All of this is so stupid. It's beneath any intelligent human being with IQ over 120 something to think that, yeah, no, this is going to work one day.

All we need is for the national government to kill more people, to crack down harder and think that we're on. the path toward any progress whatsoever, when, sorry, just to wrap this up, any grown adult ought to be able to go to Walgreens, buy the drugs, and you can have all the propaganda campaigns against opiates and for treatment as you can possibly muster. Don't be a dope head. You really want to get hooked on heroin. You know what that does to people, and you know you could die from it. So don't. Call this number and we'll help you. You can just do that, right? Just like legalizing pot as they have done doesn't mean you have to glamorize it and doesn't mean you have to

recommend that it's best use for everyone all the time or whatever it's just better than locking people up over it better than getting in shootouts over it so you know i get it and i see on twitter oh libertarians sure love drugs a lot that's what everybody says huh you and drugs uh libertarians smoke wheat okay yeah maybe that's why we're able to sit still and think this through a little bit better than you guys, you know? Maybe. I mean, one of the other effects of Prohibition, this was true during alcohol prohibition as well.

Like, you couldn't get a beer in the U.S. during, unless you went to some dude's house and he, like, brooded himself or something, you couldn't get beer in the U.S. because nobody was going to risk their ass getting thrown in prison to smuggle, you know, a boat full of beer across the Great Lakes into Detroit or something.

It just wasn't worth it. So basically, as soon as prohibition happened, the only thing you had out there was high alcohol content drinks because it was the only thing concentrated enough to make it worth their while. And that's something that's happened actually during the drug war also is if you, you know, they've looked at like the concentration of the active chemicals in the heroin, cocaine, these, like all of these things back then compared to now. I mean, it's just, it's astronomically stronger now and you can't find any of the weaker stuff. It doesn't exist because, again, nobody's going to risk their ass. to bring something that's not going to fetch top dollar. So that also makes it more dangerous. I mean, look, I'm very, you know, me, I'm a law and order guy.

I don't like the fact that places that, you know, I used to walk around, like nice walk around neighborhoods with used bookstores and quirky cafes that you bring a date to for the, you know, on the first date or whatever, that like you've got to step over people on the sidewalk now who are just blitzed out on. on fentanyl or heroin or whatever else. And that lack of enforcement in the cities on that stuff, you know, there's a very visual sort of indication of how that's going.

And I think that's what worries people. If we were to just open the floodgates, do people really have? I mean, alcohol is one thing. Obviously, some people don't have the ability to control themselves with that. But I think people worry, and there is something to worry about, is that if we just threw the gates open and said, oxycontin, fentanyl, Xanax, whatever it is. You can go down $9.99 at Walgreens

that if enough people would be able to resist that over the course of their lives, you know what I mean? Because you could resist it for five, ten years and then go through about a depression and decide you're going to go grab some opiates and now you're hooked on that. I mean, it's just you need like one stumble

to like start going down that rabbit hole. And then once you start down it, you know, you get the thing that all addicts have, which is, you know, not just, oh, like, you know, I'm loopy or I enjoy that. It's really that, like, okay, you know all that gnawing anxiety at the core of your stomach that keeps you up at night at 2 a.m. Like, you know, what?

There's actually a button you can press, and that just goes away. And once you know that, you can't ever forget that, you know? And that's what keeps people, like, going down that road. And I just wonder, like, in our society where we're already having, like, record suicides, record just you know deaths of despair of all kinds um i do wonder what what the uh yeah what the outcome would be now the on the other hand you know i'm answering myself right now my own like sort of question um i got into a discussion with a buddy of mine about uh legalization of prostitution and you know i told him look i'm when we were talking about this actually it was

when i was doing my series on the labor wars so i had just done the battle of blair mountain and all this other kind of stuff. And I said, look, man, like, the stuff I'm reading about, like, what capitalism did to minors and, like, everybody else, I'm not sure I want to, like, have them involved in prostitution. You know, I don't want to, like, go down to Van Nuys, and there's just giant warehouses with cubicles set up

and thousands of women in there that you can go bang for, like, $4.99 or something. I'm not sure I want to see that, you know? And, but he came back with the obvious thing to say, which is, like, Isn't anything better than what we're doing right now where you have just like some violent psychopathic pimp with a stable of girls that he beats the shit out of and sexually abuses and like all that that's the way we do it now? Like isn't anything better than that? And I have to say, touche, you know, I mean, you make a great point about, you know, if somebody, you know, the dealer has no incentive to like not cut your drugs, your Coke with rat poison. because like, oh, okay, he's down one customer.

Whoopty-do. How's he ever going to get rid of all that cocaine? Like, that's not a problem, you know, whereas, you know, Procter & Gamble or whoever else if they were manufacturing it, they have a real, you know, like a real incentive to avoid the class action lawsuit that would come if they were actually poisoning people.

And look, bare bones, too. It's a lot harder to overdose on heroin that it is fentanyl. And right now, you go to the black market. It's hard to know whether, your heroin has fentanyl in it or not. So you have people accidentally overdosing. So the question is, do you prefer that your brother is a junkie or a dead junkie?

And that's the compared to what that we're talking about here. And then when it comes to people having drug problems, you know, I think we know. On rare occasions, there I'm sure are anecdotes where you lock a guy in prison and he goes ahead and kicks and gets clean in there and realizes he needs to turn his life around or whatever. But not mostly. That's not, you know, as Bill Hicks said in 1989, sick people don't get healed in jail? What are you talking about?

Somebody's addicted to heroin. You need to, the drug czar, if we're going to have a drug czar, should be an addict in recovery. Who knows how to deal with this and can help other people? And if you just look at it, if you stop associating a view like that with liberalism, right? But you just look at it as just your own self as a person. Doesn't that make more sense that instead of beating up drug ethics and throwing them in jail that you figure out a better way, you know? Yeah, and not to mention the fact that like all of the follow on social effects, you know, like the fact that when you go into, I mean, this happened back during Prohibition too. You know, when if you go back to the 1910s, it's really interesting because you had this first generation.

of like the Irish gangsters were kind of fading into the background by that point because they were kind of getting assimilated. They'd come long enough back. And you had, but yet a lot of new Jewish and Italian immigrants. And they, the organized crime network started sprouting up in like the late 18, early 1900s. But then around like the 1910s, it started to peter out. Like that first generation who was kind of involved in small time hustles and gambling in their neighborhoods, prostitution, whatever, their kids weren't really following in their footsteps. And most of them didn't. want them to, and there wasn't that much of an incentive to do it anyway, because it was sort of small-time neighborhood stuff. Then comes Prohibition. And you have, I mean, I was reading that Al Capone in, or no, no, no, not Al Capone. The Joe Kennedy. Racketeer, uh, Leapty Bookhalter, like the godfather of labor racketeering. That dude made $600 million one year in, or no, I'm sorry, you know, it came out to $600 million in today's money. So in today's money, he made $600 million. And so it's like, okay, you have like a, you created a situation where, you know, people can, you go back and look at like the corruption on the police forces back then, for example.

And these guys could go to a beat cop and tell him, look, we will pay you. 10 times your annual salary, all you have to do is look the other way and give us a call if anybody's looking at X, Y, and C, and see, that's all you got to do. You're not moving anything for us. You're not killing anybody for us. That's all you got to do. Look the other way and warn us if anything's coming, and we will pay you 10 times your annual salary or will kill you or, you know, you'll be a problem for us. And if you don't do it, by the way, somebody else will. And, you know, and so, like, you introduce like that level of incentive. You're going to corrupt your process just unbelievable, you know, make it inevitable. Absolutely. And you look at it today,

you go in and you look in any of the inner cities. And you find that like, okay, the shops are all owned by people who live outside the neighborhood. And the only like real serious economy, the only people who look to be really be doing well in the, in the neighborhood, are the dealers. And so every kid looks up to them. Everybody kind of has to like, you know, when you when you read about the new school guys don't really do this so much because the drug war has just changed the nature of the game so much. But like you go back to the 70s when there were still some of these like Frank Lucas types out there. And, you know, these guys would, you know, people look at it as like they're buying their neighborhood's loyalty by, you know, handing out Thanksgiving turkeys

and like all this other kind of stuff. And yeah, you could look at it that way. I guess it is that. But there was a reason that they did that. You know, they were the only ones in the neighborhood who really could, who had the resources to do anything like that. And so they, you know, they use that to, like, drive up their prestige in the community so that people wouldn't turn on them. I mean, this is another thing, actually, too. It's just the nature of the drug game now. If you go back then, you had these guys who were like godfather types, 50-year-old guys, like running the heroin trade in Harlem. You know what I mean? Like, you had guys who had been doing it for a long time, came up through the process, and they've been running it for a long time. Nowadays, like, it's just,

you know, now that you can get 20 years, you know, for a trafficking offense, I mean, everybody flips on each other immediately. The money is so high. They're like, all of the, all of the big players, those Frank Lucas types, those guys don't exist anymore. Like the whole thing is broken up into a little like just, you know, this dealer owns a couple corners. He kind of like expands his territory, gets up to the point where law enforcement or another banger, like, takes notice of him. And it's eight months in, he's dead. And then the next kid comes up. And they're all just a bunch of psychopathic 18, 19 year olds who grew up in this shit, you know? And so, like, even that, like, you know, the drug war sort of removed

what organization there was to the drug trade, which, you know, again, it's not like these guys back in the day were, like, wonderful people. But they at least had some sort of, like, forethought about like I have, you know, because these guys would take their money. They would go buy like apartment buildings. They go buy businesses, corner stores and stuff like that in the neighborhood. And that's what they would do with it. The kids today, like a lot of them, they're making huge wads of cash, but they're only 16 years old. They can't go buy anything. And so they buy a $400 pair of shoes and like some rims for their car or whatever. And like it's created that whole culture, you know, because it's gotten younger and younger and younger. And so, yeah,

look, the drug war is a disaster. It's completely failed. It, has made a bad situation even worse. I do understand on one level, you know, like, like I'm familiar with the argument that like the whole thing, the drug war was started up just so that they'd have a reason to go after the Black Panthers and the hippies and all that. And that was probably in there somewhere knowing Nixon. I am sympathetic to, you know, you have these like 60-year-olds, you know,

in the government and just regular people back in like 1970. And they're looking around at the cities that have just completely fallen apart in the last 10 years. And you've got just, you know, junkies wandering around, like capturing and literally barbecuing people's cats around Hayd Ashbury and stuff. And they're looking at this like, we got to do something. Like we got to do some. This is crazy, you know, especially coming from a place where like they weren't used to this. They never seen anything like this. And so I get it. But yeah, after 50 years, man, we should be able to look back and and pile the lessons on top of the lessons from prohibition and just understand that, you know,

the effects of building up super, super well-funded black markets, that the follow-on effects from that are worse than anything that's going to come from legalizing drugs, 100%. Totally right. All right. Let's talk about something else. My coffee dealer, Phil Pepin, he runs a company called Moondos Artisan Coffee. get it. They hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports Zionism and the war party and killing kids. So instead, they're Moondos artisan coffees. They support peace. And they support me and my show, my other show, really, whatever it's called. Scott Horton's show, brand coffee flavored something.

Ethiopian and Sumatra mix. It's really dang good coffee. And it's their best selling coffee that they have at Moondos Artisan coffees. And Phil contacts me all the time and tells me about all the four-star reviews coming in and all the nice comments and all the reorders and everything. going really great. So all you do, though, is you just go to my website, scothorton.org slash coffee, and it'll take you right there. And you can follow the link there. There's a link in the right-hand margin and a QR code and all that. But you can just type in, scothorton.org slash coffee, it'll take you right there and get you some good old coffee to drink. And then also I got to talk about Matt Sere Saly, libertarian, anti-government tax advisor. Now, Daryl, I mean this in all sincerity, not like a Sunday morning infomercial thing,

but just between you and me, I don't know if it's possible, but do you hate the IRS as much as I do? Because I hate it so, so much. I wouldn't presume to say that I hate them as much as you do, but I'm not a fan. Yeah. Well, you're a kind gentleman.

You don't really hate anyone. I do, though. I hate the IRS. Oh, I hate them so much. And quite frankly, I hate them on behalf of all their other innocent victims in line in front of me. I'm back of the line.

And yes, I hate them for what they'd done to me. But I hate them for what they'd done to everybody else first, worse. It just ain't right. Income taxation is full communism. It's Bolshevism and it's got to go. And anybody who supports it is scum and should be kicked out of your family. Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. Matt, seriously, will help you stay out of the tax man's crosshairs.

And he's not like, oh, here's how to cheat and get away with it. And you end up getting in trouble. No, this is how to do it right. So you pay them only what you absolutely have to, but you do pay them that, and then you go about your business, and he will help you do that right. And his website is agoristtax advisor, agoristaxevisor.com, and people have heard him advertised on the Tomwood show and all that. And he's supporting this show and my other show as well. And I'm just out from under the IRS and getting back to business myself right now after years of dealing with their absolute disgraceful lies.

and despicable practices but so I know everybody else is basically in the same position you got to do absolutely the best you can to avoid the worst of what these people can dish out and so Matt seriously is who you look into their agorist tax advisor is it oh man

advisor advice agoristaxadvice.com also buy my books and sign up for my academy check it out Scott Horton Academy shirt now I don't know I know you I saw your notebooks I know you signed up for the lifetime subscription there, Daryl, but did you realize that? We've added our newest course, Adam Francisco, on debunking Christian Zionism. It's called the Christian view of Israel and Judaism by this great biblical scholar

from Concordia University, a Lutheran scholar, Adam Francisco. And I don't know if you've had a chance to dig into it yet, but it is. No, it's on my list. I'm looking forward to it for sure. Oh, you're going to love it, man. It is right up your alley. I promise it is so good. And, you know, the reviews are coming in.

I mean, my Middle East course is 30 hours long. It's taking people a little while here. But I got a great email today from a guy said he's watching. I got a couple messages today. One saying that he's watching Ramsey Baroud and he's just so floored with what he didn't know and like how dare he have ever considered himself informed until now. And now he's watching Ramsey Baroud explain Palestine from a Palestinian's point of view. And he's just, oh, my God.

And then another guy on Twitter said the same thing, only he talked about what he was raised to believe in Temple. In other words, he's Jewish and this is what he was, this is so contrary to what he was taught in school. And he can tell that what they did was they lied by omission, right? He knows that Ramsey Baroud ain't bluffing about this stuff. And he just remembers a big blank space in his education where what Ramsey Baroud is describing actually took place. And so I knew it's going to be great. I mean, it's the same as my show I've done for 20 years, Daryl, is I'm not the greatest broadcaster. I admit that.

I don't care about that. I got a great taste in guests. And same thing here with this Academy. I got a bunch of really good dudes to teach these courses. So everybody's going to love it. Scott Horton Academy.com and get it for your friends for Christmas and whatever. It's rad. And I think that's all I got to say about business, at least for now.

So now let's talk about, let's talk about Afghanistan. So the new Cigar Report came out. That's the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. And they actually have one more year to go in their mandate. I'm not sure why, but they're still reporting. And this is what they're calling their final report on the absolute and abject failure of the reconstruction project in Afghanistan. Right off the bat, they say they put it, I have it here, $145 billion, which I think has got to be the lowest low ball. I don't know what they're not counting in that, but they must not be counting.

I guess that's officially what the State Department spent or something. But adjusted for inflation, it's far more than they spent on the Marshall Plan. And they have absolutely nothing to show for it. And I admit that I did not have time to dig through the report that much because I actually got caught up reading the new national security strategy. But I would just point out the table of contents here for you. And this is surely worth a read for people who are interested in the Afghan war. cigar has done a really great job on this stuff um so they talk about who got the most money

what was saved what was wasted what was left behind um major findings of the different audits of the money investigating outright theft of taxpayer dollars and um and what all including their efforts led to the failure um of the war in afghanistan and that's the kind of thing that cigar has been really good on that you don't really get a lot of Darrow is that this didn't all happen despite our best efforts, but oftentimes because of our best efforts and that what our government was doing to intervene there, not just militarily, but with the State Department weanies and through the NGOs and all of that on the ground, is there actually distorting power factions like crazy with all that money? And in many cases, there's a whole book by a guy

named Douglas Wissing about how virtually all this aid money is going through the Taliban. They're taking like 70% off the top and leaving 30 for the rest, just for the window dressing of it all, or whatever the numbers were. It's called Funding an Enemy by Douglas Wissing. A whole book, just on how American money was going to back the Taliban against our guys the whole time in the war. And it's just the whole war is like that. And the only reason, I mean, maybe they would have gotten away with it anyway, but they got away with it especially because it was on the other side of Iran from here, man. It was on the other side of

Iran from even Iraq. It might as well have been on the far side of Mars. So it was like they could just steal what they want, get away with what they want. And they were able to stay we were forced out of Iraq by 2011. They stayed in Afghanistan, 10 more years after that. You know?

The thing that is very, one of the things I remember, let me pull this up actually, yeah. You got it? Yeah, there we go. Back when the withdrawal was happening and we were chased out of there with our tails between our legs, I was reading a lot about it because we did an unraveling episode on the whole thing. And one of my favorite things that I came across was the book that the Afghan president at the time, I can't remember his name now. But he'd written a book.

There you gosh, Afghani. He had written a book, How to Fix Failed States. Okay. And so I was curious. And I went and I looked for reviews of the book. I didn't have time to read the whole thing before we did the episode, but I read it now. And I went and looked for reviews. And yeah, I found one in Publishers Weekly. And Publishers Weekly is they're pretty, like, they do anonymous reviews. And so, like, they can be pretty harsh even on like popular books and stuff. They'll say what they really think. And they wrote, and I quote, the authors do a fine job in emphasizing the centrality of, a strong accountable state in addressing poverty and underdevelopment. Unfortunately, their analysis suffers from its heavy reliance on management theory. Abstractions, such as the power of networks, flows of information in capital, webs of value creation, and business school truisms underlying a sound management system as an effective supply chain management.

Litter their turdid discussion. Fixated on new economy conceits, they say little about the crucial task, of quelling violence and lawlessness. Instead, they dwell on globalization-oriented development strategies drawn from Ireland, Singapore, Oregon, and other regions that are not failed states. Fatuously, they even likened Sudan's travails to those of troubled conglomerate Tycho International. And so then I went and read the review in Foreign Policy Magazine, in Foreign Affairs

Magazine, and all in the national interest. Oh, they loved it. They thought it was amazing. And you know that when this guy walked in to the office of whoever he was talking to at the State Department or whatever, you know they just fell over themselves, their hearts beating out of their chest. Oh, he's perfect. And it's like, like, a lot of times, like, I'm just, I'm blown away by the insane incompetence of these people. Like, you know, and we almost like, when you talk to one of these people, like, if you take that person in the State Department office who fell out of her chair,

like fainting like it was Paul McCartney when she met this idiot. And you talk to her, you know, you get her out of her office and you're like, oh, this is a smart person, you know, she has an IQ of 115, she got whatever, 1250 on her SATs, and she's a smart girl. It's not like an idiot in the sense of like having no mental faculties, but it's more like being in a cult. You know, these people aren't even aware of other viewpoints than their own and they get into this mode where they meet a guy that is just saying the most,

retarded things you can imagine. I mean, we're talking about Afghanistan. And he's talking about the power of networks and flows of information and capital and shit. Like, they should have just, but the fact that they didn't, it really tells you how insular, you know, the foreign policy war is. And, you know, the Afghanistan withdrawal is just, or just the whole Afghanistan adventure. In a way is almost a better illustration of all of that, of all of the failures of our foreign. policy elite, even than like Iraq is. Because in Iraq, you can really, like, to a large degree, put that down, not entirely, but to a large degree. You can put that down to, like,

a very tight-knit cabal of people who got themselves into positions to maneuver us into that war. You know, like, Afghanistan was nothing like that. Like, this was not something where just some tiny little click really had it out for Afghanistan, wanted to get them out. This was just something we kind of got into and then we're like, well, we're here, we can't very well leave because things are still messed up. So I guess we'll stay. But the next president deal with them, we just did that for 20 years, you know, and we're lucky. I'll tell you what, we're lucky we got off with only 20 years. You know, I mean, it's like, look, the withdrawal was handled absolutely horribly, like in a million different ways, you know, we murdered that family on the way out. Obviously, a bunch of our people

got killed by a suicide bomber that they had been tracking and watching for two days and nobody would let us interdict them. And so there's a lot of obvious, like, just the whole thing was a disaster. But on the other hand, you have to give whoever was making the decisions in the Biden administration, I assume it wasn't him, at least some credit for biting the bullet and just saying whatever happens, we're getting out of you. And thank God for that. Because, I mean, if he had stayed just because he didn't want to deal with the fallout. I don't think Trump's getting us out. We'd be talking about this in 2028, dude.

Well, the irony of the thing is, Trump's signed the deal to get us out by May 1st of 21. Yeah. And you're right to be suspicious that he would have tried to change that deal and kick the can down the road himself if he could have. But that we know was Biden's major flaw. Was he kicked the can down the road for four months? Yeah.

Well, the Taliban did not. So our guys would have left on the first day of fighting season instead of on the last day when the Taliban's walking in and taking over the whole country while our guys are scaddling out the door. It wasn't just the suicide bomber at the Kabul airport, but it was all the last three, four weeks, five weeks of the thing. As a Taliban is still conquering the country on their own timeline, when we're supposed to have already skedaddled and then we could have that decent interval where nobody's looking when they walk into Kabul.

But Biden absolutely screwed that up. You're right, though, that it was still, and I said, I got in trouble, so I said on Fox News at the time, that this withdrawal from Afghanistan, as catastrophic as it was, is still the best thing that Trump or Biden ever did in their lives.

Sorry, and that just goes to show like what horrible guys they are and the other decisions they've made. But that, it absolutely had to end. And, you know, I had a funny story about Ashraf Ghani and books, too, which is that the other Scott Horton, who is a law professor from Columbia University and writes for Harper's Magazine, well, he was advising Ashraf Ghani to International Human Rights Lawyer. And when my book, Fools Aaron, came out in 2017, he was summoned into Ghani's office who greeted him with a copy of my book and said, what is the meaning? of this. And the other scholar had to say, it's not me. It's this kid, you know, with the problem. Always causing me problems. So I'm proud of that one. And then, of course, I was totally

right. And look, what's the book? We all know about the book. The Afghanistan Papers came out a year and a half after my book. And it proved that I was right about everything. And I was kind of pissed off that, oh, Craig, what's his name from The Washington Post? Did not say that, like, hey, there are others who beat me to this punch, like not on this specific cache of interviews that he got, but whatever. And then what were the Afghanistan papers? It was interviews that the principals gave or very, you know, highly involved people gave to Cigar, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. Most of them blabbing, believing this is going to stay off the record for other, uh, forever, others more guarded. Um, but basically all of them admitting that just like in

Vietnam, they knew they could never win the war. They were just going to make it somebody else's problem. They're in country to get their ticket punch and get back out again and the rest of that. It is a work. In some ways, it's even stupider than Vietnam because like, after Vietnam. That's one reason. But also like the idea that, you know, at least in Vietnam, it was all Vietnamese people. And you could at least like, you could at least tell yourselves that you were, you know, you would come into the country at the request of the UN recognized central government and all that kind of stuff. In Afghanistan, we went in there and thought it was going to be a good idea to just completely disempower the posthune majority and put a coalition of various minority groups,

like in the government, every one of which knew that there was no way they're keeping the postunes down forever. They're coming back. And like, doesn't matter how long the Americans put it off, they're coming back. So let's steal everything we can. Well, it's not nailed down because what's the point? You know, this isn't going anywhere. And they knew that from the beginning. everybody that worked for us knew that from the beginning. And it was just, yeah, I mean, everybody in the comments and who's watching this right now, I assume has read your book on Afghanistan, so they don't need to hear not talk too much about it. But yes, they haven't.

Shame, shame, shame. Well, look, I mean, and there's new news out, too, about a new whistleblower on the SAS, talking about them taking people out and murder. And it's the same thing. You know, we had American green berets and rangers. who committed war crimes at various times as documented in the book. We've had Australian Special Forces guys

who also took prisoners, you know, away and then murdered them. Same thing here, new whistleblower on the SAS, special air services there in Great Britain for their war crimes in Afghanistan. And as we've talked about before, installing child rapists and drug dealers and throat slitting murderers to be the police, chief and the mayor and the governor of the state having soldiers who who can't stand the thought

of going home without having killed a man so they kill an innocent man a captive they line them up put them up against a tree and shoot them so that they have will have gotten uh you know their their bullets wedded or whatever thing whatever right of passage that they need over there I mean it's which is like the Mujahideen or something it's crazy and then the idea that we're going to somehow turn those people into our loyal, friendly, obedient sock puppets after treating them in that way for so long. It's just unbelievable. I mean, imagine a foreign army in your town. And then not only that, they take a child rapist and make him the police chief and protect him with their soldiers and his power. Not only do they call him police chief,

they make him the police chief. Right. Yeah. Imagine how mad we would be and how, violent we would be in response to that. Yeah, it's one of the reasons that when you talk about somebody like that quote-unquote opposition leader of Venezuela saying, you know, she's basically calling for the Americans to militarily go into her own country, I have absolute, like the level of contempt I have for people like that could literally not be any higher. Like my answer to that is, I don't care if Stalin was in charge of the United States. And my whole family was in a gulag.

if a freaking Chinese soldier or anybody else, like step foot on America, I'm doing everything I can to kill every one of them that comes across. I don't just don't understand how people can think any other way. It's like that part of Red Dawn where he's about to execute the Russian, you know, Patrick Swayze is.

And, you know, he's like, what? How does this make us any different than them? Because we live here. Because we fucking live here, dude. You know, my friend made me take that out. that line was in fools errand and somebody said take it out they won't understand and i was like all right every american should be able to understand that man i should have left it in all right and honestly like that that that instinctual understanding that most americans especially american

conservatives have um like it should be it should you know you would think that that would be enough to inoculate us against the impulse to go into a lot of these stupid asses wars just by invoking red dawn and being like just imagine it was you like doesn't matter why the Russians are there who cares you live here these are guys with guns who are coming into your town like

how is an American gonna deal with that and just explain to people in that way usually makes some kind of a dent but you know it's interesting like the the really crappy thing about this like I was livid

uh during the Israel-Iran war earlier in the year just by how I saw so many people who know they'll tell you they'll go on for hours how stupid Iraq was how terrible they lied us into that way absolutely I can't believe we did that oh Afghanistan I can't believe they kept us there for 20 years they knew all along but don't know kill the Iranians get them get them and I'm like the duo and you people are so easy it's just so disheartening to see that I know it is oh you're on the side of the drug dealers I can't believe it.

Hey, by the way, Daryl, did I show you? My new mic plate. This is provoked on it. Provoked. Hey, we didn't get to, we have to because we're already coming up on an hour and we got some questions. But how about BB Netanyahu, vindicating your boy? Churchill, one of the cheap villains of the Second World War, baby.

Oh, man. Churchill of stupendous atrocities, I believe, was his quote. So, yeah, if you want, you have a problem with me, take it up with Mr. Netanyahu, okay? So, first of all, I think that there is an Iron Law of the Universe that says, when Darryl Cooper and Benjamin Netanyahu concur, there can be no daylight, there can be no disagreement with the common interest in discovering this same truth. At the same time, I have to say, man, this is far worse than if Jocko threw Churchill onto the bus. I'm a horton.

I'll throw him under the bus. But Benjamin Net and Yahoo throwing Winston Churchill under the bus, oh, man, really? People are watching. And why do he say that? He only said it to justify killing Palestinians. Yeah. You got to love how the rhetoric is coming so far.

like the rhetoric has come so full circle that they're not even saying how dare you compare us to the Nazis anymore now they're saying we're not as bad as the allies the allies are way worse than us yeah they started out going well if you can do Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo then we can do Gaza

Gaza City and Rafa and now they're going well look we're pretty bad but we're not as bad as that at least which by the way they passed all the geneva conventions and signed the u.n. charter after world war two to outlaw exactly what they themselves had done at hamburg and dresden in tokyo and so we're not doing that anymore um but you know uh the law don't apply to the Israelis as long as they're protected by the americans i guess is the bottom line there um okay so look uh we should do some chats uh let me just say real quick that

people need to subscribe to your substack, which is subscribe. Dot, martyrmaid.com, which is where they get your great long form podcasts, including, I don't know if you saw, I tagged you anything, you probably saw it, where this young lady said that she went to Israel on a trip and they tried to get her to change your citizenship and join the army and all these things. It was such kind of high-pressure campaign. She decided to look into it, and she looked into it and looked into it, and then she found the Martyr-made podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.

And she says, you can tell this poor guy, he tries so hard to stay neutral, but you just can't. The story in neutral. The Israelis are the aggressors, and what they're doing, it ain't right. And she, like, you really got through to this lady, and she made a video about it. And I know she's one of very many. And then the new podcast series is called Enemy, the Germans War, World War II, from Germany's perspective, not from the Nazi party's perspective, you cooks, from Germany's perspective. and it's so good already episode one is so good

and I really hate World War I and in a way that I'm very interested in it and so I learned so much I really need to go back and listen to that again it's what four hours is the first episode there yeah which by the way four hour long podcast on an obscure topic like trench warfare

I just passed a million downloads on that thing wow yeah not bad it's like a month and a half or something pretty good very good um very good man okay so um and i got a substack too it's just scott horton show com is my substack and if you wanted to listen to the audio book of provoked i'm posting the pieces of it there i only have um three parts which is bush senior and bill clinton one and two that's like nine or 12 hours or something worth the length of a long audio book already just for the first part of the book there so that'll get you all started and then i have

finished recording all of W. Bush, all of Obama, and most of Trump on UkraineGate or something. So I'm really, now that the Academy is sort of kind of out of the way, I'm trying really hard to get back to the audio book for you guys. So that's all at my substack. So look at that. And then I wanted to mention, too, as long as we're on YouTube here, everybody sign up for the Scott Horton Show YouTube. It's just Scott Horton Show. I did five interviews today. Brant Burleson, remember that guy that said I ran SciOps on American,

Protestant churches for the Israeli consulate that we published at the Institute. I interviewed him. Really great interview there. He's redeemed. Dave DeCamp on all the wars course from anti-war.com. And I already mentioned Brad Pierce, the way we're Rabler. We talked about Venezuela and also about Sudan and the UAE's war in Sudan. And then William Van Wagonin, he wrote this new thing at the cradle.

Did you see it about the jihadis in Syria abducting the Alawi women and enslaving them under so-called marriages, right? And Jalani's government, just as Donald Trump is rewarding him, is going along and covering it up and all of that. And then I also interviewed an Afghan who had me on his show last week, and his name is Sengar Paiqar. And he had a lot to say about what's going on in Afghanistan, the history of the war there. and the recent fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan and their new relations with India and all that. So you've got to be really nerdy like me to get into it, but that's there.

And then importantly, and I know we wanted to talk about this, I don't know if you want to now, or we won't want to put it off, but I talked with Mark Thornton, the economist from the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Austrian Economics, a master of Necessian business cycle theory, which is the most important thing

that everyone in the world needs to know about, which is that inflationary money hasn't just caused endlessly rising prices, which it does, but it also causes this horrific boom and bust cycle that they call the business cycle, which is really the government's inflationary money cycle that leads to

so many dislocations and so much grief. And the blame gets cast by the masses on capitalism, quote unquote, when really our Kami government controls half of every transaction. The value

of the money. They control the interest rates. They control how much bank credit is allowed to be expanded or contracted and buy up bad debt with new money they print out of nothing. And they just ruin economic life for people. Just when you think you're all right again, they pull the rug out from India over and over and over again. And Mark Thornton is just the best on this. And we had a really great conversation on the show today. So that's five interviews I did today. That's my usual. I used to do sometimes even 10 interviews every Friday or something like that. So I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with the Scott Horton show. If people want to check that out, that's where I keep my 6,000-something interviews.

And then we did, you know, as long as you brought up Netanyahu and him vindicating you, did you want to get into the boom-buss stuff at all? Or do you want to get into the, we also had the Hasbara, the collapse of the Hasbara regime was also. Let's go down the Econ route. We can talk about that any time. Okay, let's do it. So business cycle theory says this.

This is me, says, figure this out, the theory of money and credit 100 years ago, 104 or five. And it basically says this. It says, the reason that you have these booms and busts, they couldn't really figure out what was causing the booms and bus. Karl Marx blamed the excesses of capitalism and this kind of thing. And that's the way you learned it in sixth grade or seventh grade

and when they teach you the story of the Great Depression, is that in the 1920s, there is the wild excesses of free market capital. capitalism got out of control and caused all these speculative bubbles in the stock market. And then the stock market crashed, and that led to the depression. And then we learned the lesson then that we needed the national government to intervene in the economy to smooth out the booms and busts, to create a central bank and to have all these regulations in order to prevent the capitalists from driving the whole economy off a cliff.

And it worked great. I said also it didn't work great. And that's why World War II really worked great to bring us out of the great. Great Depression. That's the way we all learn it in school. When the reality is, of course, the central bank was created in 1913 on the eve of World War I and was used to vast expand the money supply in order to pay for American participation in the First World War. And then in the 1920s, it was really the New York Fed operated as what's now the open market committee. They were really the bosses, the New York Fed. And they kept an inflationary policy

through the 20s right when there was a massive expansionary boom and prices should have been falling because productivity was going through the roof and there are all new inventions and automations and all kinds of things so prices should have been falling falling falling instead they were stable which was a disguise right for actual price inflation then the chairman of the fed was a guy named benjamin strong and he was the protege of the head of the bank of england a guy named Montague Norman, and he did a favor for Montague Norman, basically, by debasing the U.S. dollar in order to prop up the British pound, because the British pound had problems because they had debased it in order to fight their wars in South Africa. And so Benjamin Strong made a deal

with Montague Norman and inflated the money supply here, and that was what really led to the speculative bubbles from 27 through 29. And then that was the bubble that popped in 29, famously, all the guys jumping out the window and the giant stock market crashed. But then, as David Stockman, also an Austrian school economist, has instructed and shown that the whole damn depression was over before Franklin Roosevelt was ever inaugurated in March of 1933. Now, Herbert Hoover was no Ron Paul. He was a progressive, and he was an interventionist.

That's why it's called the Hoover Dam, not the FDR Dam, and all those public work projects and price floors on wages, right? When there's massive downward pressure on wages, he's saying it's illegal to pay anyone less than this. Well, then they're all fired. We won't pay them anything then. Right. Like all these idiot government interventions, that was Hoover before FDR even got there. But still, all the bad debts have been cleared and the economy was ready to rebound. And then the damn Democrats came in and just ruined everything with all their tinkering and all their intervention, all their massive increases in income taxation. And what Robert Higgs coined the term, I believe, regime uncertainty, where they made it, where anyone who did have

any money was afraid to invest in anything or move it anywhere for fear of what the government was going to do next because it was just one hairbrain scheme after another. And it was all, there's a great book called The New Deal or Raw Deal by Burton Folsom where he talks about how it was all spoils too. This had nothing to do with solving the Great Depression. It was just the Democrats printing money and going into debt to help their friends around the country. and the various democratic political machines and to stay in power. And then he declared himself essentially president for life,

the great dictator, Roosevelt, stayed for four terms and got us into the giant war. And, you know, we didn't get us into the war until the end of 41, beginning of 42. And so it had been almost a full decade of Great Depression economics. Well, more than that, but under Roosevelt. And then still then they give credit for the war

for bringing us out of the Depression when what really happened was the war ended. They were all under rationing during the war, all under scarcity. It was after the war ended, that then people came home. And yeah, some of the factories that the government had built

with all that debt during the war were then turned to productive uses. And also they forced the rest of the world to accept all our grain and all other agricultural products and other exports and stuff for a time. So that really helped with the rebound there. But anyway, point being

that your seventh grade teacher is just completely wrong. Mine was just completely wrong. free market capitalism caused the great depression. The government was necessary to fix it. And that's what everybody still believes. And that's why in 2008, when it was George W. Bush, not Ron Paul, but it was George W. Bush, who by the way, came after Clinton, who came after Bush and whatever, going back to Eisenhower and Truman and Roosevelt, no one ever got rid of the New Deal.

We had the new deal the whole time. We had the biggest national government of history of the solar system the whole time. But then when the crash of 08 happened, what did they do? They go, oh my God, the wild excesses of laissez-faire free market capitalism caused another crash. Apparently, Ron Paul's been the president for eight years, not George W. Bush. And so now, of course, we need a bunch of bailouts and we need more inflationary money, more stimulus, more artificially lowered interest rates and do the whole thing again in order to correct for the last thing. And so we're trapped in this cycle, and it's because we let our government control the money. And they took us off of the last vestiges of the gold standard.

So there's no limit on what they can do. And as I believe it was Henry Hazlitt that said that when it comes to inflation and all the problems that it causes society, not one man in 10,000 can identify the root cause, right? And so people just get mad. They blame the shop owner for raising prices. They blame the factory owner for downsizing. They blame the candy bar maker for adding

more wrapping and putting less chocolate in the thing and whatever it is, all the shrinkflation, all the everything, when everybody's just trying to cope with the central bank screwing us over, man. And, um, and that's it. Like, look, you don't have to agree with libertarians on nothing, but you have to agree with Mises about money. You just have to. Well, let me, okay, right. So let me start there and let me throw this at you because I, you know, uh, I, I had my libertarian phase. I read Atlas shrugged when I was 17 or so. Okay. That doesn't count. Yeah, well, that's, like, that got me started. That's the origin. story, right? I share with a lot of people, I think. And so it was like, until my mid-20s,

I was really obsessed with this stuff. I read Mises, I read Rothbar, I read all that stuff. I read the entire, you ever been to that website, the Frisian? I don't know if it's still up. It's this like, it's like this all like text HTML, just libertarian economics website. It's a great resource. And I read literally the entire thing. It must have been like 10,000 pages worth, like, if you were to put it on paper. So I was obsessed with this stuff for a while. And, Mises is obviously correct. Like, that's the thing that's stuck with me out of, like, when I came out of my libertarian phase is he's obviously right about all of this stuff.

The question I have is agreeing that we never should have started down this path is not the same thing necessarily as saying that, like, now we're here. Let's just pull that last block out of the Djanga Tower and see what happens. Like, I just worry, like, you know, we have a situation where, Like most libertarians, most people who are into Austrian school stuff and everything, they talk about the business cycle. 2008 comes. And the answer, one that, again, intellectually on some level I agree with, but their answer is,

you know, the melon answer, let them all fall, let it all, let the whole, let the free market sort it out. There's bubbles blown up, let them collapse. It's the only way to wash all this inefficiency out of the system, all this resource misallocation. You got to like get rid of it or we're never going to get out of this cycle. which is true. That said, you know, when you look at, like, it's not just the United States, like the entire world economy is based on the U.S. dollar, you know, and if we were to do something,

it was so disruptive, like if we were just to decide, you know what, we're going to, we're going to give the libertarian wet dream and we're going to cut the federal budget to half a trillion dollars, you know, whatever it is, like just essential functions. I don't think, anybody doubts that that would, at least in the short and intermediate term, lead to a massive contraction of the economy. That would make it much, I mean, you know, we're never going to pay back the debt that we've accumulated up to this point, like doing what we're doing now. We're certainly not going to pay it back then. So doing something like that seems like it would be just tantamount to a default on our debt, which would make every bank in the world insolvent,

every sovereign wealth fund in the world insolvent. Like this, I don't know if like, it's really hard to calculate like the downstream chaotic effects and how that would come back on us, you know? I mean, if you look at just the really disruptive kind of transformations that were taking place during the industrial revolution, like here in the United States, we had our labor wars in the late 18, early 1900s and stuff. But for the most part, we were insulated from like the worst of it because we didn't, we at least didn't have to worry about threatening neighbors on our borders, you know,

we didn't have to worry about, are we going to get invaded? We didn't have like, we had for the most part, you know, a labor shortage. They kept upward prices on wages for, you know, throughout most of that period of time. Over in places where they had more pressures during that period of transition, places like Russia, a lot of other places, they did not come out of it as unscathed as we did. Like, things can go really bad. If you, you just take your hands off the steering wheel and say, you know, we've got to just let this thing play out.

And so I don't know, like, how we would get out of it from where we are now. You know what I'm saying? Like, I think the choices are, well, look,

I mean, we're going to have a giant crash anyway. You have an artificial boom. You're going to have a real correction. You look at 2008, that's where we're headed. It's the same kind of thing. It'll be a little bit different,

just like 08 was different than the dot-com bust, and that was different than the Iraq War I, bust or whatever, but there's always something. And so the correction is coming. At that point, I think, well, going back to what you said about 08, they absolutely should have let them fail. Because the thing of it is, all the actual real assets that have any value, those are going to get distributed by bankruptcy court, right?

What happens with the bailouts is they just take money from working people and give it to people who are already wealthy so that they don't have to take any responsibility for bad bets that they made. And now it is true. And I remember putting this Tostring Economist in the aftermath of that crash. Look, we're all agreed that this is Alan Greenspan's fault. So, like, yes, even the worst bankers on Wall Street

who had to know what they were doing in making some of these bad bets on these mortgages and cutting them up and putting them in these new derivatives and selling them off to some other schmuck and all of this stuff on a game of musical chairs. Like, a lot of them knew what they were doing, but ultimately they were lower on the chain of events from what Alan Greenspan was doing

by holding the pedal to the floor with the artificially low interest rates, especially in the aftermath of September 11th, but even before that. And so, but the thing of it was, was what was the solution? By bailing them all out and keeping them whole

because it wasn't entirely their fault, all they did was just make the problem, you know, put the problem off and make it last. Now, Mark Thornton agreed with this. I didn't actually get to ask them this in detail, but I've talked about this with other economists before that basically the lockdowns of 2020

took the place of a massive crash. We were due for a recession anyway. And then the lockdowns took the place essentially of artificially high interest rates. If you think of Paul Volcker's term in late Carter, early Reagan, where Volker came in and raised interest rates through the roof to force the recession to beat inflation. and then start the business cycle over again.

The lockdowns, and that was really what happened with the crash of 08, was Ben Bernacki started raising the federal funds rate, because, uh-oh, inflation's getting too hot now. We better cool it off, and then the bubble pops. And so we were already due for that with the lockdowns of 20, but then what they do after the lockdowns of 20, they created one-third of all the money they've ever created and mostly bailed out all the most powerful corporations first

at the expense of while they're forcing middle-class business, to close. They're keeping all the big guys whole. So you're saying like, I don't know if we can let the national government take their hand off of our national economic policy. What might become of us then? And I'm saying it can't be worse than letting big business control big government to use it as a weapon against the rest of us the way that they do, where we all got to be homeless and they all get a bailout. And by we all, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. are homeless in this country right now. I mean, it would have to be, I think, a long-term, like, controlled demolition, though.

You know, it's like there are- Coming anyway. So I guess the question is, what do we do after the next crash? Keep bailing about? No, I think we know the answer to that. The next crash, because you said it right, like basically what we did during the 2008 crisis was, you know, your kid ran up a million dollars in credit card debt. they can't pay it. And so the family estate took that on its books, right? And it's getting up close to

the point now where the family estate's not going to be able to meet its obligations. Like the next step up is the federal government. And then just national governments around the world becoming not creditworthy. And we're very quickly approaching that. And when we get to that point, you know, when we reach that point and it's not something that is sort of at least ostensibly part of a plan that we're putting in place to like, you know, a controlled demolition, it's going to be panic in the streets and it's going to be worse than anything that, that we would do if we did it on purpose, for sure. Like the disorderly collapse would be worse.

But that's why they cut the budget, though. I don't think it would cause a giant contraction to cut the budget. You fire all those government workers. All they do is destroy wealth. They regulate people and prevent other people from creating wealth. and they otherwise don't produce a damn thing when they all have hands and minds and can be put to good use and their restrictions on everybody else lifted

then mean all of that productivity in capital and human capital is available for productivity. So I think if you really just slash the empire, we might have just from that alone, we might have a severe contraction for a moment as there's a readjustment, but not for more than a little while. But, I mean, the level of cuts, the amount of cuts that we would have to put in place to start paying down the debt, I mean, I don't know, like, what's our annual budget now, like $4 trillion or something like, something just insane, you know?

And I think if you were to look at like just tax receipts, I mean, I think you're paying for Medicare, Social Security, and that's about it, right? Right. 5 trillion is tax receipts every year. Income tax receipts is only 5 trillion. So out of 7, I think, is the total. that they spend. Jesus. Yeah. And so, I mean, look, like, the thing is, like, I agree with you that all of this creates just a horribly imbalanced, inefficient economy with resource, malallocation, misallocations, like,

all over the place that only hurts us and drags us down, all that kind of stuff. And that if we could get through the period of disruption, that would, you know, be coming, like, if we detonated that whole thing. then things would be better, for sure. Like, I think that that is true. It's similar to, like, when, you know, I actually make this argument myself, so maybe I should be making it here.

But, you know, people talk about, like, I was talking to somebody about Japan's demographic issues. And they were saying, well, Japan's just going to have no choice but to, you know, open up the floodgates to, like, immigration from the rest of the world because they're just not having enough people to fund all of their pensions and all these other kind of things. There's not enough young working people.

And my answer to them was like, yeah, look, it'll probably suck, you know, like, as their pensions go bankrupt and, like, they're going to have to figure it out. But when it's all over and the dust settles, at least Japanese people will still have Japan, you know? And the question is if you can get through that disruptive cycle without collapsing into fascism or communism or what have you, you know? because I mean the thing is like the issue we one of the issues we have I think about like my wife's generation she's a little younger than I am right her her entire experience of the economy has just been that the whole thing is just like randomly people randomly get wiped out lose their homes whatever just every few years and there's no real predicting it like she gets out of college and the 2008 crisis happens they all go looking for her and her classmates go looking for work and

they're not only competing with each other, they're competing with like guys with 20 years of experience who just got laid off, you know, during the financial crisis. They start to get back on their feet around, you know, the late 2010s and COVID happens. And so like when you, when people feel that level of vulnerability, you know, and that level of randomness in their lives as they see it, and then when you add on top of that, the fact that, you know, our just our family and community structures and all the different little sinews like churches and local organizations and stuff have really just kind of disintegrated over the past 50 or 60 years that just adds to the feeling of like vulnerability that if something goes wrong here if anything goes wrong if I'm the one

who gets laid off I really don't know what I'm going to do you know and and I don't and like when you put people in that situation man they're going to vote for Bernie Sanders they're not going to vote for wrong point you know and that's like a really tough obstacle and I think it's a question that like libertarians have to like really confront you know oh yeah absolutely and yeah and we're we're the best to do it uh Bernie Sanders ain't going to get you in nothing but trouble but I understand that look I know real ass right wingers who voted for Bernie Sanders because somebody has to pay this bill now if if this person voted or Hillary Clinton in the primary was she going to actually somehow make health care affordable in the country no neither's

Sanders, but he's going to make the government pick up the tab overall. And, hey, if you got a sick old lady, then you got to do what you got to do, right? So this is why, as Mesa said, the middle of the road leads to socialism. The more they intervene, the higher prices get, the more people need them to pay their way. When it's their damn fault in the first. It also makes the population much easier to control politically. Sure. You know, I mean, you look it's something like COVID, with them closing public schools, closing churches. And if you were to go back and try that in the 30s or 40s or 50s, you would not have been able to get away with it. Like go, go, go tell the Catholics in like Hell's Kitchen that they can't go to Mass on Sundays in 1932.

Good luck with that. But today, it's like, dude, like, I can't lose my job. Like, I cannot lose my job. Like, I am fucked if that happens. Whereas back then, it just wasn't like that. that, you know? I mean, it was like there was just, there was more opportunity. There was less competition. Prices were lower relative to what people need. I mean, people would work, you know, we all know the anecdote kind of story, like just working for the summer to pay your college tuition, you know, paying five, 10 bucks a month for your portion of your health care and all that, you know, kind of thing. And so it was just, like, the stakes were just much lower for people a lot of the times, you know, whereas like today, the stakes for people just seem total. I mean,

There's a really good article that was going around last week. I sent it to Bob Murphy, because I was hoping that Bob Murphy, who's another Austrian economist, would do a review and comment on it. And this guy was, you know, he was no Austrian or he was maybe a center left liberal or something. He was just talking about, oh, it was the poverty line. Did you see this? It was the article about the poverty line was measured at $20,000. Dude, I just read that.

There's three times the cost of what it takes to feed your family. Yeah. And he goes, yeah, but child care then. first of all, it wasn't even necessary at all, or if it was, it only cost this much. And transportation for a car costs this much and gas costs this much. So your actual ability to go to work, this and that. Once you go through all of that, and this can't really be right, I'm not feeling this. But he says, according to that same calculation, if you adjust it, it's $100,000 a year is what it takes to really get by in a major city in America these days.

And to be able to pay all of these costs. And he goes and he shows and he breaks down, especially because of child care and how, you know, people will, their wife will get a job and make $50,000 a year and pay $36,000 a year in child care. But just because they really have to have that margin is just enough so that now they can pay their property taxes and live in a house instead of an apartment or whatever it is. It's absolutely necessary. But then at the cost of all that time actually mothering their child, which is, you know, priceless. but it becomes the necessity and all that. So the way that this guy calculated it, you can really see. And this is why, and it's the height of irony, it just murders me to hear Mam Dami

and all of these damn Democrats talking about, oh, the affordability crisis. Oh, they're going to lick price inflation for us, huh? We're going to, the socialists are going to give us hard money. No, they're just going to give us everything for free with government money. And where's the government get the money? They take it from us and keep a bunch for themselves and then give us a little bit of our own money back. Oh, wow, thank you so much, ma'am, Damme.

Now, and just Robbie Bernstein said this on the Dave Smith and Robbie Show part of the problem the other day about how, damn it, a year ago, everyone was calling it inflation. Now it's, oh, the affordability crisis, and so we're not talking about what it is. Inflation, which is caused by the government

expanding the money supply, you bastards. But anyway, listen, let's do some superchats and get the hell out of here. Um, uh, darn you, Daryl Cooper, because Palantir was the CIA thing and you had dinner with that guy. I did. So what the hell? Are you telling me, whoever that was, I didn't say that question, are you telling me you would not have gone to that dinner? You're full of shit.

You would have. It's, it was interesting. Like, you go there. If, like, if, if I were in, like, the 1930s and I had a chance to go to dinner with Stalin, I'd go. Like, who wouldn't want to sit in on, be a fly on the wall, anything like that? So, yeah. And also, it gave me a chance to go look Neil Ferguson directly in the eye, face-to-face, and give him a chance to talk the shit that he talked about me online. Oh, he looked at his shoes and shrugged and smiled and, like, wandered off like a beta chimp.

Oh, man, I humiliated that guy's wife in front of a giant auditorium of people one time. It was so funny. He's such a punk, dude. Hey, so William wonders, did Purdue care about opioid harm? And I'm not sure if that rhetorical type question is for you or for me and the point being that, well, we have prohibition and this massive scheduling of doctor prescriptions for opioids now. And yet Purdue was allowed to get away with killing all these people for money with their giant oxy cotton crisis, which was all under the color of legality and whatever until they reclamp back down on it. So maybe he's saying to you, well, under prohibition, the company's allowed. to operate in the market are still horrible bastards. Or maybe he's saying to me that if he legalized it even more,

then the companies are just going to ruthlessly exploit people and feed them as much drugs as they can. I wouldn't necessarily dispute that, but I would just say it would have to be up to everybody else to push back on that. Look, I've never done opiates in my life other than when I was in the hospital because I broke my jaw on a gigantic lean-to-tail in 1997

for just a minute I was on some memorabilia. Otherwise, I don't do that. And I'll tell you why. It ain't because they told me that drugs are immoral to use. They told me, and I'm pretty sure this was seventh grade health science class, that what happens is part of your brain and your brain stem controls your breathing and your heart rate. And opioids affect that. And so you will suffocate to death and die.

Your heart will stop. Your breathing will stop and you'll no longer exist. So you can smoke pot from now until next Thursday. And that's not going to happen to you. But if you take opioids, if you especially shoot them into your veins, you might die. So guess what? Don't do that. And that was a very convincing argument.

And I have made that argument to others before, too, that like, hey, that can make you stop breathing, you know. You need to breathe. Yeah, look what happened at George Floyd. Yeah, exactly. A little bit of a boot on the neck. Have you read, I think the author is named Sam Kinones, his book, Dreamland, about the opioid crisis. It's a great book. So I was listening to an interview with him one time.

And he was talking about, he was like working for the New York Times, I think it was at time, one of the major, major papers. And so he calls up this factory in China where supposedly like they're making fentanyl that comes to the United States. And he has like this whole like cover story. He thinks he's going to have to, like, infiltrate and find a way to get in. He just got to ask, can I come? They're like, yeah, come on over. And he's like, okay.

And so he gets there and he goes to the factory. And they're just like right there on Main Street in Shanghai or wherever the hell it was. And they're like, oh, yeah, so over there is where we make the fentanyl and da, da, da, da, da, da. Just laid the whole thing out for him knowing he was in New York Times Square. Like, that's how out in the open that is, right? And so, like, that, I mean, that by itself really puts the lie to the idea that this drugboat nonsense is really about the drugs. I mean, come on. You know, if something is happening like that out in the open, on a scale that dwarfs anything that's coming out of Venezuela, and,

you know, in service of distributing a drug that's infinitely worse for people than cocaine could ever be, you know, really kind of puts the light of that. But that just blew me away, like how out in the open it was. I mean, I, yeah, real quick, I want to say something about that. the last commenter also. I mean, look, my experience, going to that teal dinner, there was a bunch of other, like, people you've heard of who were there. And it was interesting to listen to all of them talk. All of them think we're going to war with China, like war, war with China.

Like, all these billionaires, all these people, they're 100% convinced we're going to war with China, like, in the next couple years, by the way. The, you know, I was there, I guess, I don't know how Teal heard about me. I mean, he got turned on to me to me somehow or another, and they were trying to get me to, like, come out and go to one of these dinners, like, for a long time, for a few years. And I finally went to this one. And, you know, I went there and went to the dinner and confronted Neil Ferguson and didn't go anywhere. And that was it. I think I went and hung out with you and Dave Smith, actually, after that, because I think it was on that same trip that we were there. So that was like the extent of it. And I talk about that in public, because it's whatever to me. But you got these people who are like, so, Daryl, you went to a teal dinner, huh? So you took $50 million in soldiers.

Yeah, look, man, like sometimes... It kind of gets under my skin when people, they draw the line between Teal and J.D. Vance, because Teal likes Vance. A lot of the tech guys, they all like Vance. That they take the fact that they get along and that they think the same on a lot of issues and automatically think that that means

like they're puppeteering somebody. And it's not always that. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, a lot of these tech guys, people just don't believe me when I say this. But, you know, they assume that like everything, if you're a billionaire and you're getting involved in politics at all in any way whatsoever,

it's because you're trying to steer the political system to favor your business and give you more money and for sure like that happens no doubt about it but a lot of times these guys do it for the same reason that you or I or anybody else would do it and a lot of these tech guys are like these half autistic dwebes who are hyper focused on like efficiency and things being done just the right way and all of that and they're looking at especially during the Biden administration with this guy dottering around like an old fool and they're just like we're this is great we can't watch this anymore and we're sort of like and they've been around long enough now

and they've been billionaires long enough. You know, if you're 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, it's a little bit hard to, like, walk into the White House and tell the president what he should start doing. And when you're 45 or whatever year old Mark Zuckerberg, you feel a little more comfortable doing it, you know? So a lot of these guys are just feeling their oats for the first time. And I mean, a lot of it really does have to do

with just them looking and being horrified at what they're watching, you know, the people who are running the government. And just really fearing, you know, whether, and this may have to do with their own, business interests but also like just again these are still americans most of them um you know they look at it and they're like china china is going to absolutely eat our lunch i mean they're really thing is nobody tried to buy you out at that dinner they just fed you know you know how you know they didn't you know how you know darrell is not a peter teal op is if i was like i would be

much better promoted like my promotion is so terrible like so amateur garbage It's trash, almost non-existent. Anybody who's, like, funded by networks, you know it immediately. They're pushed you in every YouTube algorithm. They're, like, brought to you immediately. So, no. Unfortunately, didn't give me any of those billions. All right.

Hey, let's knock some of these out. This guy donated very nicely and said, hey, volunteer firemen are awesome. They don't count as government employees. Word to the volunteer firemen. You guys are doing great. Other than that, he's looking forward to, to episode two of Enemy, he says, so get on it.

That's good. I'm paging down, I'm paging down. Daryl. Spotify says, I listened to 5,380 minutes of martyr made this year, and I switched to your substack at the start of enemy. So, wow, that's pretty good. But that reminds me of something important that I got to say, which is that my web guy, Harley, from Expand Designs,

informed me that over at Spotify, they are so pissed off at us, Daryl. And they accuse us, and maybe especially explicitly me, of censorship and censoring all the comments. I said, I've never logged into Spotify comments in my life. I have no control over that whatsoever. I've never seen any Spotify comments in my life. And I am assured that this is just an automatic thing. It's just that you cooks won't stop ranting about the Jews. And so, of course, you're on automatic censor.

But I would never censor you. I would publish all of your insane ravings. Of course, if it was up to me. So, but Harley said, there are people on there who were like, I can't believe I supported Scotland for all these years, and he'd betray me like this, like, ah, man, don't take it personal, bro. It's the computer god. I'm not in charge of that.

I'm just little old Francis E. Deck over here, babe. I'm just trying to get by. Something about Pat Buchanan. He was really right about everything, almost. Um, yeah. Antiwar.com slash Pat, if you really want to know how right he was. I used to be legalized drugs, but since COVID, I see what big farm is capable of. I don't think I want to make or let them sell meth and heroin, whether it's Venezuelans or Walgreens.

Happy to be wrong. I mean, yeah, understandable. The problem is with checks and balances, and as you were saying about all the zombies on the street, the tragedy of the commons. You have the government legalized camping and vagrancy outside at the same time they legalized being a junkie. Well, that's, in fact, one of the guys I really like at Reason Magazine is a guy named Zach Weissmuller, and he did a really good study about why Portland was such a disaster. They legalized drugs, but they also legalized total vagrancy and all that all at the same time.

And then also right as COVID hit and right as just, it was just the perfect storm of catastrophe. They really did not do it right. But he made a good argument that they might have if they had done it a bit differently. I mean, part of the problem, you're kind of describing, like you're kind of describing one of my main with the whole decriminalization thing in general, is that like if you had a right-wing libertarian government in charge who was going to legalize drugs but yoke up anybody that is, you know, lolling around on the sidewalk high on fentanyl and throw them in the paddy wagon,

I think a lot of people could deal with that. But what we're, you're not going to have like a full-on right-wing libertarian government. And so what you end up having is what you just said, okay, we legalize drugs. We did this libertarian thing. Oh, we're not going to arrest criminals or drugs. Are you kidding? Can't do that. Like, we're not even arresting people for shoplifting at Walgreens.

Like, come on. Now you can be a junkie on the sidewalk and you can steal whatever you want from the store. Yeah, God. All right. So this guy says, back to the green and blue attacks from Afghanistan. And one came home or two came home. We have two CIA Death Squad guys, one of whom shot a bunch of cops after. getting pulled over.

That video was suppressed, but it's now out. And then we have the assassination of the young lady from the National Guard in Washington and her buddy who is still in critical condition, but was able to give a thumbs up, I read. So he's living. So this guy asked, how many were killed in these green-on-blue attacks during the war? That is a good question. And now that you ask it, I don't think I know the answer to that.

I wrote a book about this, and I wrote a lot about the green-on-blower. I don't remember if I ever knew a total or an estimated total on those. I'm sorry. I do know that it was so pervasive. It was because they made it so clear that such a huge part of the policy is we got to build up this army, train up this army to replace us. So the Taliban said, all right, well, we'll just infiltrate guys into the army and shoot them up and just completely destroy confidence between the trainers and the trains. There's some of the stories I've heard from my buddies who were over they would talk about how their translator

that would go out with him. They would have to feed him like false information about where they were going and stuff because he would rat him out. They knew he was doing it. They couldn't get rid of him though. And they just had to operate like that all the time. Yeah, it was completely crazy.

And the fact that like that guy even made... Over 150, according to Gemini AI crap here. One of the... I can't remember where I read it. But anyway, they were talking about the evacuation in 2021 and how, you know, basically what happened, like the people that got on those planes was basically like we didn't,

it was so chaotic that we weren't able to like find and get our hands on like the actual like, you know, Kabul housewife who was working at a typist in our embassy or whatever. And we didn't know where to find her or like where her family, whatever. But Biden just sort of the Biden administration just kind of decided, well, we can't have all these planes just be empty. So just round people up, like anybody wants to go. And so you have these pictures from inside these evacuation planes. And it's like nothing but dudes aged 18 to 40. I'm like, are we these really the most vulnerable, the people that we need to be bringing over? Right. And so far we found out a few times a hard way, apparently not. Yeah. Well, it was 75,000 to 77,000 people that they brought over

here and I'm sorry I'm not sure how many of them but you know what I interviewed this great I was trying to reach him but I couldn't find I couldn't get a hold of them but this great Australian journalist named Andrew Quilty I had interviewed him repeatedly from Afghanistan back then about the CIA death squads and I did an interview with him right after the withdrawal about the importation of these death squads to the United States so you can go back and listen to that interview and I joke in there that soon these people will be our police they'll all get government jobs and that'll be who's pulling you over our, you know,

Taji Desquad veterans of the Afghan war. And so I'm sorry, I'll see if I can get that number for you, Roost 632 for next week. And I'm going to, I'll

be able to get a hold of Quilty by then, I'm pretty sure. And so, yeah, I don't care about that stuff. What do we got here? Page down a little bit more And I'm just tell Scott and Darrell They keep rocking it and sticking it to the man Agree

I don't know According to some of the commenters I am the man so Okay good Myself Yeah there you go Punch yourself in the black eye there Man

All right that's good We're good It's good to talk to you man This was fun Yeah Everyone sticking with us for this extra long episode Everybody

Yeah it was cool Everybody to go sign up for my academy and buy my books for your loved ones for Christmas. And we'll see you next week. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XN YouTube. And tune in next time for more Provoked.

Thank you.