Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:26 - Hezbollah in Latin America???

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton reflect on the nefarious motives behind the US-backed coups in Venezuela and Iran as they dismantle the neocon agenda while providing highlights from the wild history of American imperialism. They address how far Hezbollah's network of support has grown and why. They also survey the foreign policy blunders that resulted in the very avoidable war in Ukraine, the Biden administration's heavy involvement in it, many missed opportunities for peace deals, and the insane nuclear brinkmanship of many US, NATO, and EU officials. This episode also features some righteous anger directed at the IRS, updates on the Martyr Made podcast, and discussion of the Libertarian Institute's new release, Empire of Lies, by Charles Goyette. 00:00 Introduction and Catch-Up 02:33 New Book Release: Empire of Lies, by Charles Goyette 10:00 Venezuela and US Foreign Policy 18:20 Hezbollah's Global Criminal Network... including Latin America? 33:22 NATO and Ukraine Conflict 42:41 Negotiations and Missed Opportunities 45:07 The Reality of Military Strategies 52:17 The IRS: A Personal Vendetta 55:56 Martyr Made Updates 01:15:23 Neoconservatives and Foreign Policy 01:18:01 Final Thoughts and Announcements (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, we're going to talk about things. 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. It's the show. All right, welcome back to it. Hey, Daryl, how you doing, man? What's up? I'm good, brother. How are you? I'm doing good, man.

I actually didn't work today. Well, a little bit this morning. But then I literally took the boat out and drove it around on top of the river, which I haven't done since, I think, like June or something. But so I did, and it was good. I had a good time, and I ate some beef fajitas. and now I'm ready to talk about stuff.

It's been raining here for about 10 years, so I haven't been getting outside too much. That sucks, man. Well, listen, I'm glad you joined me here. For everyone who don't know, he's the great Daryl Cooper, he's the host of the Martyr-made podcast, and he's done a bunch of really good ones.

You need to go check out the archives. Right now he's working on Enemy, the Germans War, about World War II, and part one is already done, and I think you mentioned to me earlier, you are really getting a lot of work done on part two. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I had a decent portion of it done before I started just because a lot of what's going to go into it was supposed to go into part one, but it got too long. And so, yeah, this will be a lot shorter turnaround than

people are used to. Okay. Well, that's good. I know people get really anticipationy about your episodes when they come out and things like that. They get angry at you for writing a tweet. What are you doing tweeting? When you could be recording a podcast right now, Cooper, they say. So that's great. Can't wait to hear it. Part one, of course, was fantastic, all about World War I, all quiet on the Western Front kind of point of view of the war from the German side

going on there and what it meant to the principles in World War II later on and all of that. So, yeah, really good stuff. And then me, well, I'm the director of the Scott Horton Academy and the Libertarian Institute and the editorial director of anti-war.com and the host of the Scott Horton show, which is also here on the YouTube's, go like and subscribe and comment for the algorithm slash Scott Horton's show over there. I just published.

Episode 6,199 is Dr. Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute, and episode 6,200 will be coming soon. That's Bob Murphy I recorded yesterday. Both of them, Austria economists from the Mises Institute and good buddies of mine. And really smart guys and I'm no economist,

but I'm really interested in that stuff and I like asking those guys' questions. They're really smart. there's that show and then oh i wrote some books and then yeah that's about it i think that's the list the academy is what matters now but we'll talk about more about that in a moment but i'll tell you one thing here man before we get to the news i got to show you here as you may know mr cooper one of my jobs at the libertarian institute is i'm a publisher and i have published 19 books now five of my own but this is our very latest one it just hit late yesterday it's by my good friend charles goyette

It's called the Empire of, no, not the, just Empire of Lies. And I can't read the subtitle here, fragments from the memory hole. And let me talk to you about this thing for just a minute, man. It's so cool. Okay, first of all, Charles used to do anti-war radio with me on anti-war.com back in 2007 through like 10 era or so where anti-war radio is basically just me and him posting the interviews from our radio shows. and he was a conservative, you know, libertarian Ron Paul type

radio host out of Phoenix, Arizona, who got fired for being good on a Rock War II. And because he was an anti-war.com, Ron Paul kind of guy. And so then he was on Air America with the Democrats there for a little while. And anyway, just a great, a real AM radio guy. And a good friend of mine. And then so here's what I love about this book.

First of all, I just thought the dude was retired, Daryl. I didn't know what the hell happened to him. And I kind of always had meant to catch up with him. I don't know, but he wasn't retired. He was writing for investment newsletters for small, private, you know, funded outlets, right, out of my reach.

But he's been with us this whole time, just in his little corner. Well, so guess what? Here's the punchline. I'm going somewhere with this, God dang it. This book, Empire Lies, by my good friend Charles Goyette, who I hadn't really spoken to in a very long time.

It is exactly the combination of enough already and provoked in 300 pages. and you know how I'm always complaining that I'm not really smart enough to write a book very well so it ends up just being a really long timeline of a bunch of stuff that happened in a row and I just kind of do it chronologically

and I know that if I was smarter I could do it like a marble cake instead of a layer cake if that makes sense well that's what he did instead of writing chronologically he took it by subject matter and he talks he does the whole book of enough already and provoked

and it's all in there okay not quite but almost all in there And what's so great about it, dude, is he has not read my books. He has not read enough already. He has not read Provoked. He has not been listening to my show. He is not under the influence of my whatever, you want to call it, for the last 10 years. He wrote this entirely separately, but just from like a twin brother point of view kind of thing.

Only he's about 20 years older than me. And it's just fantastic, dude. It's what a really smart guy would have written instead of enough already in Fool's Hair. pardon me enough already and provoked and it's just really great and i'll give you one example okay where i say something like all high moralistic on my high horse and i say you know if they hadn't lied and put the cobar towers attack on iran instead of blame it on assan bin laden and they had told the truth and we could have had a real discussion about the danger of these guys they just killed 19 airmen who were their station at da ron to bomb iraq from these bases in saudi and these bin ladnites

who kind of worked for us in the British, they're already turning on us because we got these bases in Saudi. And that whole lesson was lost. That conversation didn't really happen because they blamed it on the Ayatollah, who attacked us from across the Gulf for no reason, apparently,

by way of Saudi Shiite Hezbollah, which is such a bunch of crap. And Gareth Porter wrote a five-part series all about this for IPS News debunking it. Michael Schoyer has come out totally debunking it, and there's a great documentary about John O'Neill the head of the FBI counterterrorism unit that totally debunks it. It was bin Laden

and colleague Sheikh Mohammed who did it. Oh, and Abd al-Bari Atwan from Al-Quds al-Arabi also debunked it. Okay, it was bin Laden that did that, and they blamed it on a run. So I get all moralistic and I go, see, they should have told the truth and then the thing. Well, he does the exact same thing, Darrow said, guess what? About Flight 800, which happened, guess what? A month later. And this is in the early summer of 96.

Yeah, bam, Cobar goes off, and then Blam, They shoot down Flight 800 with a surface to air Stinger missile, almost certainly. And then what they do? They just blamed it on, well, there was a limited hangout that said the Navy shot it down on a test range. And then they just ended up blaming it on a spark in the center fuel tank, just exploded and blew the whole front half of the 747 off. And I swear to you, the YouTube algorithm continues to show me over and over again. They want me to watch this with purely a straight face.

Like, they push this is totally just straight news. Here's the CIA cartoon of the front of the 747 just falls off. And then the back, instead of essentially stopping and falling like a brick, shoot straight up into the air with the loss of the weight of the front of the plane. And that's what you thought you saw when you saw a streak of fire and smoke up from the horizon to hit the plane and then it exploded. Uh-huh. That might be a little bit out of sequence, but whatever.

And this is a, they, I remember at the time when they put it out on CNN in 96 watching it. It was a CIA cartoon. That's how you know you can believe it. This cartoon was made on computers by the CIA. And so, okay. And it was completely ridiculous. And so Charles, I guess, had really covered that in depth at the time and really knew better about it. So he goes on and does his exact same thing.

If they had told the truth that, look, man, we got Cobar Towers and you got Flight 800 right here in 96, We should have stopped right there. Instead, what happened? They buried it because Bill Clinton had his Democratic convention coming up. He was riding high on the Oklahoma City bombing, even though it was revenge for what he had done at Waco. And even though, of course, there was a big cover-up because a bunch of federal informants were involved in the plot, too.

As he said, the Oklahoma City bombing saved my presidency as the people of the country rallied around me and against the forces of hate and blah-de-blah. So he was riding on that. So he didn't want to let some al-Qaeda terrorism overseas ruined that narrative of what a great, you know, Obama he was for the society or whatever, a great uniter of the people, supposedly.

So anyway, that's my little soliloquy about how much I love Charles Goya and I love this book and I'm jealous and ashamed and it's just weird reading this awesome thing that was just sort of written. Like I wrote it in a parallel dimension where I'm smarter and know how to write or to damn. But anyway, there's that empire of lies. It's really good, dude.

It really is good. Everybody, go and buy it and get it for yourself. Make your wife or your husband or your whoever buy it for you for Christmas time here. Okay, but, and look, I got more ads, but let's talk some business here. Darrow Cooper, you showed this thing to me here. Oops, no, I don't want that. You showed this thing to me that was, I don't really like this guy because I remember him kind of claiming that, oh, I think it was. as soon as Biden was sworn in

that he was escalating the war in Iraq or something, but that wasn't true. It was just troops going back and forth from Iraq and Syria. I don't like it when people are kind of BS and about stuff. But anyway, so he did write this thing that does make a lot of sense. It's A-Mews on

X, on Twitter X here, and you sent this to me, and I actually saw this in your Twitter feed and read it or most of it last night. And it makes a lot of sense to me as far as, you know, I guess the preface here, Coup would be that We've all been sitting around wondering, what the hell are they doing in Venezuela? They're really going to take us to war in Venezuela?

And here's a plausible explanation for what they're doing. And again, that's at A-Mews, if people want to go and look at that. But take us through this here. You know, I thought it was interesting because he really does try to break down what the actual strategy might be, given the pieces on the board that we see moving around. And because it doesn't, I mean, it is hard to believe that, you know, we're going to land Marines in Venezuela and go fight a guerrilla war in the, you know, in the, excuse me, in the mountain jungles with Maduro's, you know, Chavista, like, supporters. And especially, like,

it just doesn't seem like that's something even Trump could really, I mean, he could do it, but like he'd lose a lot of support. He's already bleeding a lot of support. It doesn't seem like that's something that would be politically wise. And so what is it they're trying to do? And in that article, he goes through and kind of breaks down just the expenditures every month that Maduro's government. has. It breaks down how much of that revenue is coming in from oil and drug smuggling and really very few sources ultimately and how that money gets distributed and how the regime is really held together by just a series of layered cash payments to the different people who are responsible for administering it. And how quickly if we were to step in and start interdicting ships that we're bringing oil out in violation of our sanctions, the drugs, obviously, kind of goes to

the question you were asking last week about, like, since when does the U.S. government care about cocaine? Like, it's all the people in D.C. who are snorting it every weekend and all their rich friends. It's not, you know, killing 100,000 middle Americans every year or something like fentanyl is. So it's implausible that they care about it on the user side very much. But on the other side, the supply side, the money side, if it is part of, like, a larger overall strategy to just deprive the regime of funding and put them in a position where, I mean, I think this is the thesis he has, and I think it makes sense, is that the goal, and we said something like this last week, is basically to try to overthrow this regime

without actually firing a shot, with them just sort of recognizing that this is, we're checkmated. There's nothing we can do here. And the people around Chavez, his generals, all the people there, getting, you know, just enough of them to say to themselves and say to each other, like behind closed doors and finally on camera that this guy's got to go and we're going to change our policy. And, you know, this is obviously like, I would say this is like, you know, if I were to learn that this is what we're doing as opposed to ramping up to a potential hot war with Venezuela, then I would say like, you know, lesser of two evils wise. That's a good thing. It's a separate issue, whether we really ought to be meddling, you know, and trying to

overthrow governments even without firing shots in our own hemisphere. It's a kind of a separate question. But I thought it was very interesting for those reasons. He really did break it down in terms of numbers, in terms of how they get their revenue and what we would achieve by even, you know, when we boarded and took over that ship, you know, obviously it's just one ship. But what it did is sent a message to everybody out there who's thinking of going and, you know, driving a ship through our blockade that we're there. We're here and we're watching. And you might, yeah, you might get through this time, but we might get you next time, you know, and we got your buddy today. And so just to put that kind of, that kind of pressure overall on the supply system.

And it makes, yeah, it makes a lot more sense, you know. And in this, in that, not the Syria, especially, right, a year ago, they succeeded in strangling the Baathist regime out of existence. the bin Ladenice, more or less, walked right in and took over Damascus. So it reminds me, and you've mentioned this before, I'm pretty sure, but this is sort of the mythology and the ether, the sort of history of this, is that after Rock War I, even after Panama, the lesson was, oh, man, see, we could do whatever we want. And then they did it Rock War I, and they were like, see, we do whatever we want.

And then that attitude led to Rock War II and a lot worse, you know, well, and like similar. So I could see this. There's a real bad perverse lesson in overthrowing Syria. It's so much better when you can argue that, man, sanctions don't work. Sanctions just empower Saddam Hussein at the expense of his people. See? Right? But like in this case, they worked.

They did. You got to admit. All you had to do was put the country under a total economic stranglehold and it died. In fact, when you're talking to, you reminded me a Seymour Hersch this week has a piece about talking to Israeli sources and American intelligence sources about how Israel wants to bomb Iran against, again, this spring. Because, of course, they did not obliterate the nuclear program.

They only started a war. They did not finish one. And so they want to go back. It was part of it. But he talked to an American in there who says, oh, the Iranian regime is about to fall. And I can't tell you that that's wrong. Like, what the hell, man?

I don't know. I'm not a future, noer guy as much as a past nor do. But, you know, one of them is Tehran's out of water. They have had the severe drought and whatever, all their reservoirs are bare, and they don't know what in the hell they're going to do. And I've been reading that in a few different places, you know, over the last few weeks,

and I don't think they got any rain. Like, maybe it's changed or maybe it's going to, and I don't know how much rain it would take to save their ass now. They're talking about evacuating the capital city, man. Talking about evacuating Tehran. No drinking water for the people at all. Well, that could lead to the fall of your regime. And they also talked about how, hey,

you know, It's obvious, just on the face of it, that the Israelis killed a lot of regime leaders, military and intelligence officials, and I don't know about religious clerics or not, they certainly killed a lot of the most powerful, you know, technocrats who operate the government there. And it's not just self-evident that it's easy for all those positions to be filled by junior staffers who know what to do and can fill those roles and do them well. Well, and not only that, those are also the regime loyalists who were killed. And so now you're making a bunch of colonels into generals, and maybe those colonels are loyal. But it kind of introduces that element of instability and distrust into the regime, you know? Right. And so I guess my things are a human resources question.

Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And look, I mean, let's not kid ourselves. The Americans and the Israelis are listening to every word the Iranians are saying. So, you know, anyway, I guess my. point is, whether they're really right about that or not, that's the Americans talking now. I see, smart power, man, but we don't mean Hillary Clinton. We mean actually smart. Yeah, I mean that's what Donald Trump has kind of said ever since he walked down the escalator in

2015. He's kept talking about how these people running our foreign policy, he never said, if you listen to him, you know, a lot of us kind of projected onto him whatever we wanted to hear, but he never said like these people are inhumane, these people are barbaric, these people, You never said any of it. Maybe a little here and there. He was maybe the only one who ever talked about civilian casualties other than Dr. Ball. Yeah. But mostly it was that these people are stupid.

We're doing this the stupid person's way. Why are we doing this? This wouldn't happen if I was there. We do this the smart way. He didn't say we wouldn't do it. He said we do it the smart way. And so he talks about like, you know, if I was in office in 2022, there'd never be a Ukraine-Russia war.

And I think what he's thinking is not that, you know, he would have thrown the gates open to Russia or just, you know, sort of appeased Putin or whatever, but that he would, would have done it in this super smart way that, you know, now he's locked into this situation of trying to solve this problem when a hot war has already started. And it's a very different question than what he's trying to do in a place like Venezuela. You know, and it's actually interesting because there are some connections like there are some connections to like multiple degrees sort of between like the drug angle in Venezuela that actually leads back to a lot of places in Middle East and Africa and Europe, but into Russia as well. If you remember back

in 2014. Well, actually, so back in 2008, there was a DEA task force that was set up, top secret set up in this top secret facility in Chantilly, Virginia. They were working with like 30 other foreign and U.S. security agencies. And their focus, their assignment was to like map out the transnational criminal syndicate that Hezbollah was running in Latin America and West Africa. And this was after the DEA had come with a bunch of evidence that we don't know what the evidence was. You know, there's an old Politico article about it that just says after they amassed evidence that this was the case, that they had like moved on from being just this regional militia to being like to running this multi-billion dollar international criminal syndicate. And, you know, for people who don't know, there are 15 million Lebanese in the diaspora in Latin America.

Half of them are in Brazil, but there are 400,000 in Venezuela. I think there's 2 million in Argentina, all through Latin America. There's a ton of Lebanese. And in West Africa, there's a ton of Lebanese as well. I think now it's down to maybe like a quarter million, 300,000, but it used to be a lot more. And their presence there goes way, way, way back. It was actually a lot of Arabs primarily from the Levant that were running the slave trade in West Africa, like back in those days. And so it goes way, way, way back.

They're very deeply embedded as like a, you know, a sort of commercial minority in the same way that like Jews and overseas Chinese and stuff are in different zones of the world, like the Lebanese kind of play that role, played that role and continue to play that role in Latin America and West Africa. Like Carlos Slim, I think is still the, I think he's still the richest man in Mexico, one of the richest men in the world. His name's like Carlos Suleiman or something. He's a Lebanese, he's a Lebanese Mexican. And so anyway, this is like, that's sort of the, the basis of this transnational criminal

network that the DEA was alleging. And so they start up in 2008 and they run this for years. For eight years, I think the investigation lasted. And the big expose that came out in Politico was about how a bunch of people, dozens of people had come and leaked government documents and they had gone not on the record with their names, but anonymously gone on the record to Politico, all people who were involved with this investigation directly, who were complaining that the thing had essentially been just blocked, obstacles thrown up, and then finally just shut down. by the Obama administration because he didn't want to piss off Iran because he was trying to get the JCPOA through. And so the biggest headline that this task force sort of had was in 2014. You might remember this. People might remember this. It was kind of obscure at the time, but if you were paying attention in Prague in 2014, I believe in, I want to say January, Anyway, early 2014, this Lebanese Ukrainian weapons dealer named Ali Fayyad was set up by some undercover DEA agents in Prague trying to sell them a bunch of anti-aircraft missiles for their terrorist organizations, all this other stuff. And so he gets indicted in New York for conspiring to kill U.S. government officials for trafficking drugs, trafficking weapons, trying to acquire.

and traffic anti-aircraft systems, money laundering, the whole nine yards. And they set him up in a sting and they arrest him. And he goes to jail in Prague, though. And from that point on, the DEA and the rest of the task force and the other security services involved are like begging the Obama administration to please like extradate, get this guy extradite. Like get him over here. We got to get him over here. He's indicted on trying to kill U.S. government officials. Bring him over. And they just, in the article, they talk about how the people were complaining like they just refused. Like the Obama administration was just just not interested. They just didn't want to do it. And people who were, you know, I guess explaining the administration's point of view to Politico came

out and said, well, yeah, you know, there was some desire to not antagonize Iran and their allies like in the midst of these negotiations. But no, it wasn't like for political reasons. So we shut this down or anything. Well, in 2015, February 2015, so a year after this guy was arrested, he's been sitting in a Prague jail, his half-brother in Lebanon and several other Hezbollah-related guys. I don't know if they were members or just related dudes, but they kidnapped five checks in Lebanon. And from that point on, the checks just shut down any discussion of sending the guy back because he was being used as a pawn in negotiations to get their people back. And that's what eventually happened. And so he got sent back.

And like I said, he was Ukrainian. and supposedly he was one of Russia's main conduits for getting Russia heavy weaponry to Hezbollah and other organizations that, you know, he dealt with. And so, oh, and one of the, one of the main bases of operations that he, and this is in 2016 Politico's writing, it has nothing to do with, like, the stuff that's going on now. One of the main bases of operations in Latin America that he was operating out of was in Venezuela. And so it's like, you know, if you do, you have these, like, these large networks that are interconnected in various ways. And, you know, sometimes the interconnections are temporary and they come and go and they're conditional, all these things,

but they exist as networks. And, you know, it really does seem like the Trump administration is trying to sort of apply a general pressure to all of these nodes in the network at the same time. But doing it in a way that he hopes, at least, is short of us having to send the third ID into that country to let go enforce our will. You know, it's the... You know what? Anytime you talk about Lebanese Shiites, then automatically this leads back to a Zionist motive for the intervention as well,

at least a partial one. I don't know if you could convince Rubio that there's a difference between Florida's national interests and Israel's national interests. You know, they all want the same thing. Yeah, in that respect, for sure. When you were talking to, you were talking to somebody about Venezuela, recently about the Florida man occupied government. Yeah, Brad Pitt was like, that's, that's pretty dead on.

Yeah. He's the sharp one, man. You'll like him. The Wayward Rabbler, we call him. He calls himself. Somebody named him that. Hey, here's a little bit of business we got to do for a second here, an ad for the night. This is my academy.

I know it's a funny looking picture of me, but time to smash the neocons. This is the academy, and we have gift subscriptions. You can give them to your friends and family for Christmas. It's a 30-hour course by me on the Middle East stuff. It's James Bovard on Waco, the Drug Wars, the TSA, and 40 years of investigative journalism. Ramsey Baroud on a Palestinian take on Israel Palestine, which you guys will really love. He's so good. And Bill Bupert on how we lost every war since 1945.

And now we've added Adam Francisco, like a 8, 10-hour course, maybe more 11, 12-hour course, on the entire history of Christianity and Judaism and what he calls the Christian view of Israel. this whole time. And the guy's a Lutheran scholar from Concordia University. And it's just fantastic. It's the most I ever learned about Christianity in my life probably are in a very long time. Anyway, very good stuff. And we're adding courses all time. My Russia course, my Cold War course, part one is about to come out. We've got C.J. Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived is also just about to come out. And then we'll have my part two of my Cold War course and many more. We're already working on producing many courses. Eventually,

we'll have Gerald Cooper teach a great course for us, too, once he's done with this Germany podcast. Maybe we'll wrangle one there. So that's the Academy. And you know what, go ahead and use Dave Smith's promo code, everybody, POTP. Just go to Scott Horton Academy.com slash POTP. And you'll get 20% off a lifetime subscription or 10% off of a yearly subscription. And I think you'll think it's worth it because I'm getting nothing but positive feedback. And I got high school and college teachers and professors want to make a deal to teach this stuff to their class. I got homeschool families doing it. I got all kinds of great stuff.

Great reaction from the thing so far. It's been a real success. So check it out, scoffordacademy.com slash POTP and get you a discount there. And then, you know what, man, I'm new at this, but I'm getting okay. I shouldn't have deleted that. Let me reopen close to.

I'm getting better sort of at sharing screens here on the stream yard. I want to show you this one is really important to me. And to everybody, if you're not familiar, this is it. This is anti-war.com. And yes, I know we need a new front page. I remember when this page was brand new in 2004. Harley is working on it right now. It's coming out soon.

But anyway, you can see there at the top. Celebrate anti-war.com's 30th birthday. December 9th, the 1995 was when Eric Garris founded Anti-War.com. It took him a few years to get Justin Ramondo interested in the thing. But Justin really started writing in 99. But Eric was, there's, they're a way back machine snapshots of the thing going back to, I think, at least 96, where Eric was doing all the N.I interventionist news there, two great libertarian heroes of a previous generation. Eric's still around. And I'm the editorial director there. I've been paling around with these guys since 2003. And so, happy anniversary to Eric and to Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzalon and Angela Keaton and all the great staff there at antiwar.com. Donate if he got money. Help keep us going. I mean, for my money, even though I'm a recipient of a tiny little bit of it, it's the most important project on the Internet.

And we got all the top news, all the top viewpoints. We got my show, but also we have Dave DeCamps, Anti-War News podcast. And it's just the best. And Eric, don't sleep. He just works. It's been like this every day for 30 years, literally 30 years. And so there you go. That's your first stop in the morning, everybody.

You want the bad news. And you know what, too? I'll go ahead and say this about the deal. If you read anti-war.com all the time, you will get to know this stuff, and you'll be good on it instead of all lost and confused and believe in a bunch of crap, too. Maybe learning about foreign policy seems like a pretty tall order

to even begin, but that's it, dude. Look at anti-war.com with your breakfast any morning and then ruminate on your way to work, man. Yeah, that is how the world works all right. I know it sucks, but check it out. It's just the best of the best stuff. And that's it. So happy anniversary, especially to Eric, and pour one out for Justin.

All you guys drinking malt liquor tonight, pour one on the curb for our boys. Alan Bach as well, the great Alan Bach, our hero. So, all right, here. More news, man. I want to show you this, Daryl. I don't know if you got a chance to see this, but it's hilarious, fun. I just got to click a few things. I don't have to click that anymore.

I just got to click this now. Look this. Click this. So I think since you've read Provoked, do you know about these guys? and you may know about them anyway, but everyone meet Vovon and Lexus. They are Russian pranksters. They have a radio show, or it used to be a radio show.

Maybe it's just a podcast on Rumble now. I think it was a radio show. And they catch Western leaders saying the most horrible things, and then they go, ha, ha, ha, and publish it online later and make fun of them. And they've got, for example, the former president of Ukraine, Poroshenko, talking about how the Minsk deals, were just a ruse to bide time and build up the army for future fighting later and this and that kind of W. Bush saying, come on, James Baker's promises not to expand NATO. Let me tell you something.

James Baker was the Secretary of State during my father. That was a long time ago. All right. And like, there's a bunch like that. Well, this one is Amanda Sloat. And who is Amanda Sloat? Well, she is some horrible person from the Joe Biden State Department. Now, this is edited, and you will notice where it's edited. These guys are pranksters, and they're clearly partisans. And so take it for face value for what it is. But she still does say what she says in the unedited part. And what she says is that I'm right about everything.

The war was completely avoidable, and they went ahead anyway. In White House, at that time, at that period, what was Biden's position, if you remember? I mean, look, the NATO question has always been difficult. You know, I mean, we had some conversations even before the war started about what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, fine, you know,

we won't go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion, which at that point, it may, well have done. I was uncomfortable with the idea of the U.S. pushing Ukraine not to do that and sort of implicitly giving Russia some sort of sphere of influence or veto power on that. You know, there is certainly a question almost three years on now. You know, would that have been better to do before the war started? Would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life.

What was Biden's position at that moment? Yeah, to test my memory. But I don't think Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then, to tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO. So my question is, could we avoid such a situation or we made a mistake somewhere? Yeah, you know, I mean, I guess if you want to do an alternative version of history, you know, one option would have just been trained to say in January 2020, fine, you know, we won't go into NATO, we'll stay neutral. Ukraine could have made a deal, I guess, in, in what, March, April of 2022, around the time of the Istanbul talks. You know, I know then there were differing views between our country.

military around the counteroffensive, you know, I think during the Biden administration, that had been the big hope of, you know, Ukraine getting back territory and being able to negotiate a better deal. That didn't go as anybody wanted it to, and I think there's different arguments in the U.S. and in Ukraine about why that didn't work out. What? Dude, so, man, I could go on, but also. spare you, but, Daryl, this is very unhappy. It makes me think of this debate I've been having in my own mind for a while now. And people have been actually mentioning it in the comments today, saying that we should

pull out of NATO, you know, and because it's an anachronistic, all these other kind of things. And maybe it is all those things. There's a part of me that says it would be stupid to pull out of NATO simply because, you know, the circumstances that allowed us to put that alliance together were like, something that come along once every thousand years. And to have an alliance, a military alliance that ties that many countries together and is that overwhelmingly powerful if they decided to move in concert, that's something that you don't just throw away casually. And so my position, and I haven't really spoken much about this publicly because I just am sort of batting it around

my head has been that we should stay in, but like radically scale it down. Basically, have it be a think tank and like a series of conferences and other things so that it's there if we need to stand it up again, we can. But, you know, we still have all those connections, all of those interagency relationships, all those things so that if we needed to scale it up again, we could in short order. On the other hand, like, she's getting right at the heart of my own criticism of that position, which is when you're involved with an organization like that, it has a way of like pulling you in a direction that it wants, you know, because it has its own built-in incentives. And whatever your

intentions are, it just wants to do what it's built to do. And it's going to drag you along kicking and screaming if it can, you know. And this is just a perfect example of that. I mean, it's something that nobody really thinks, nobody really thinks that NATO is going to be necessary. Like, yeah, okay, they fought with us, quote unquote, in Afghanistan and all that. Fine. We didn't need them to, right? We could have done that on our own. with, you know, whatever, with the British and the Aussies or something. But nobody really believes that NATO is going to, like, have to really flex its full capabilities. Like, any time in the next, I don't know, 100 years, 200 years, like, nobody really foresees that.

And yet, and so in that sense, it is, like, totally anachronistic. It has no real place in terms of its declared mission. And yet, because it exists and because of what it's sort of internal, incentives are, Ukraine is destroyed now. And she just laid it out pretty perfectly. That's why it's destroyed. Ukraine is destroyed because of that issue, period. And again, it's something you've been saying. It's something Mearsheimer and I, a lot of people have said. And the Russians have said, I mean, the Russians have said this over and over and over, going back to 2014, going back before that. Just, you know, just sign something that says you're not going to turn this country whose border is

400 miles from Moscow on a frontier with no natural. barriers that we've been invaded in from like to apocalyptic effect twice in the last hundred years just tell us that you're not going to do that just sign something show us something and our refusal to do that you know it's like it's really puzzling if you just look at it from a standpoint of you know just a regular person's reason and logic right but that's assuming that like you give a shit if Ukraine gets destroyed you know and half the population a male fighting age population gets killed or wounded. It just assumes you care about that.

And because all of us do, you know, it's just, you know, I think the people who are making decisions at that high of a level, like they almost, it's almost as if they get off on not taking that kind of thing into consideration. It's like, well, yeah, you know, as a private citizen, I care about millions of people being killed and wounded. Yeah. But, you know, I'm the Secretary General of NATO.

You know, I'm the president of Poland. I'm the vice president of the United States now. I have to make hard decisions, you know, and sometimes you've got to have the steely-eyed, you know, hard-headed will to just get in there and do what needs to. Like, I think they really get off on that a lot of them, you know. And I'll tell you, it's one of the things that I liked about Trump. And still to, I mean, relative to a lot of his predecessors still like about him,

just in the, you know, I remember in John Bolton's book, he has that passage about when we, when Iran shot down one of our drones, and how it was decided. It was like they finally got Trump to go along. All right, we're going to hit all these Iranian anti-air bases and missile batteries and stuff. Finally, we finally got him to go along with it. And so John Bolton just goes home to jerk off

and, you know, change his clothes and he's on it. You know what? I got to stop talking like that real quick. I got to call on my- monetize our show, man. Dude, I got to, that's worse than that. I got a call from my grandma this week and said, I watched one of our shows and heard me cursing.

Grandma, I'm sorry. I'm trying to clean it up. I was a sailor, and you encourage me to go into the Navy, so it's partially your fault. But I love you, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to clean you up. But anyway, John Bolton was so excited about the drone. He's super excited, and he heads back to the White House, and by the time he gets there, Trump had changed his mind. And he says in the passage, like, everybody's like, he arrives and everybody's very dower and downcast, you know, eyes and, you know, all these kind of things. And it's like, what's wrong?

It's like, Trump changed his mind. It's like, what? Change his mind. He said, well, what do you mean? So he went and talked to him and he says, well, you know, I asked the generals how many people we were going to kill if we attacked all these missile batteries and stuff. And they told me about 150. And I just figured, you know, they shot one of our drones down.

I'm not going to kill 150 actual people over that. And Bolton put that passage in there as like a hit on Trump. Like, can you believe this guy, this was, this wind. the guy who's not willing to make the hard choices. And so they'd get off on thinking that way. You know, they really do. Well, you know, so Bobon and Alexis, they got her alone, and then this other guy joined the call.

And this is a separate video. You guys can find it. The guy's name is Eric Green, and he apparently is also a State Department guy or National Security Council official during Biden. And he said, you know, they had two principles that they were operating on. And the first one was, I actually forget,

But it was, I think, tried to negotiate, but it seemed pretty insincere. But then the second thing, as he put it, was this is like a guiding policy of the Biden team in early 22. Okay, ready? No regrets. No matter what happens, they agree beforehand that they will never wonder whether they should have done something different. They're going to do this. It's going to happen this way. and they like, what, shook hands on that.

That was a guiding principle, no regrets, no matter what happens. And then to hear her say, it's just, look, we all know this already. I wrote a whole book about it. You wrote and did a podcast right away as soon as the war started all about this, which people might remember Joe Rogan reading your thing about it on his show. I gave a speech on like March 2nd in Utah to the Libertarian Party that was two hours long where I explain all this. I think I called you in the podcast, yeah.

Yeah. But so just to reiterate that, like, yeah, they knew all along. It was the slowest motion train wreck in the world. They had a choice of whether to flip that switch or not, and they just refused. You know, I remember when I was writing the book about this stupid open-door policy and about how this is what really started the wars. They just simply refuse to just say explicitly and promise and put it in writing that they won't bring Ukraine into NATO, even though they will not bring Ukraine into NATO. If they're going to bring Ukraine into NATO, they'd be fighting for Ukraine right now.

But they're going to wait until they lose a fifth of their country or a fourth, and then they're going to let them join the military alliance and we got your back next time, we promise? No. And Biden said, to Putin, he said on December 30th, 21, look, man, we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO. No, not any time in the indefinite future, dude, 10 years out, more. So what's the big deal? And that, like, that was right. And yet, they were willing to get the Ukrainians, you know, hoisted essentially on the high, sacred principle of the open door policy, which says that any country can join NATO if they want to

and if NATO wants them to, and no other country read, Russia will have any country. any say in that. You heard the way she put it at, well, I was very reluctant to adopt a policy where Russia would have a sphere of influence and veto power over NATO's decisions. You see how they put that? Who at this table thinks that Putin gets to decide who's allowed to be in NATO or not? No one raises their hand. And they go, okay, then that's it. It's the sacred open-door policy. No third nation's interests will ever be taken into account as our high, sacred principle. we know it's going to cause a war imminently and yet. And you probably remember Darrow that when I quoted in the book,

where Ned Price, the State Department weenie, they asked him, Ryan Grimm, the great reporter Ryan Grimm, asked him, it was funny because all the women are a lot of braying for blood. Send more weapons, send more weapons. And Ryan Grim says, are you doing anything to negotiate to try to stop the fighting? And Ned Price says, listen, there are higher principles that state. here, such as that any nation may strike their gaze in any direction that they choose, and which, of course, is a total lie. We went to war with Yemen for seven years and killed 300,000

people because Shiites took over the capital city and their friends with Iran. Not their sock puppets. They're never Hezbollah. They're never their 51st state the way Hezbollah was. Still bond them, kill 300,000 people because the wrong group of people sees power. Solomon Islands said we might feel like cozying up to China. This is in 22 during the start of the Ukraine war. Solomon Islands goes, well, we might cozy up to China. And Joe Biden goes, listen, I'll kill every last one of you first. That's a paraphrase.

But no, you will not cozy up to China. You belong to the United States and Australia because, just like in the Empire Strikes Back, we got the power because we can kill you. That's it. And you have to obey why. because we say so. Does the Solomon Islands have the sacred right to direct their gaze,

to cast their gaze toward whichever military alliance they so choose? No, of course not. Of course not. We drop an H-bomb on them before we let the Chinese build a base on the Solomon Islands. End the story.

And everybody knows that. And then, yeah, and then don't let me trail off on a tangent before we talk about how. And then she says, yeah, and also we could have had a deal at Istanbul. But we didn't want to do a deal at Istanbul either. And they,

Vovon and Alexis set her up, right? Yeah, we could have had a deal and ended the war then. And she says, yeah, but she skips them the faint of September 22. But she says, yeah, we just put all our hopes in the offensive of 23, the counteroffensive, which, huh, didn't work.

And it's like, man, come on. This really is a lot like at Rock War II. We're like, I'm just reliving this stuff. just the recent history backed. I remember saying on the show, hey, look, everybody, the chairman of the Joint CESA staff says that the winter offensive

that was supposed to take place in the winter of 22, the end of 22, is not going to work. And you shouldn't try it. This is, you should quit now while you're only this far behind, he says. And they went, no, you don't know.

Anthony Blinken shouted down General Millie. And then the winter offensive became the spring offensive, and they didn't even launch it until the summer because the ground was just too muddy. It never did freeze, and then it rained all spring long, finally dried out in June, and then they made it all of a few square kilometers and got absolutely nowhere. And man, I'm sorry, but Danny Davis told you so, right? You know, the guy that was in, that fought the big tank battle in Iraq War I and was in Iraq War II in Afghanistan was the great whistleblower from the Afghan War of 2012. The whistleblower, the whistleblower. The

whistleblower of 2012, the Afghan War after the surge. And he just told us all along and so did all of his contemporaries and buddies and military experts. This is not going to work. Just take care of these people. I don't know. I don't know anything about

Amanda Sloat. Is it okay for me to just say that she doesn't seem that impressive of a thinker to me, right? Like she seems like, you know, I don't know, some lady who could have a podcast or whatever, but she really has that much weight in the decision making about whether we have a proxy war on Russia's border or not,

Darrell. It bothers me, man. Yeah, well, one of the things that has really become apparent in recent years is that, I mean, if you think about, like, the Cold War ended in 91. And so from about 91 until really, like, the last few years, I mean, maybe, like, you could say the last 10 years, the U.S. basically ruled the world. I mean, we could do whatever we could do whatever we we wanted, China and Russia were not built up and powerful enough yet or confident enough yet to really flex and stand up to us. And we just barged around the world doing absolutely whatever we wanted with no opposition, like the entire idea. You just said it. Like, you know, them being like the idea that any other power could have any say whatsoever and who joins a military alliance

with us. Why, that's crazy. And we developed that mentality over the course of the last 30 years George Kennan never would have said that. Nobody who had any experience in the Cold War ever would have said anything like that. But we're now at the point where the Cold War ended 34 years ago, which means that the people who had just started working at the State Department and CIA and all that went through their whole careers, became GS-15s and S-E-S-appointment employees, and, you know, they were running, those people are all retired now. And the entire workforce are a bunch of people who have grown up in this environment

and been educated at their jobs in the environment of the U.S. can just do whatever it wants. There are no limits to our power. Like, yeah, doing an effective counterinsurgency in a way that the American people will tolerate is difficult. Like, it's a complex problem to solve, and we don't always solve them properly or whatever, but it's not a limitation on our power. Like our power, we can do whatever the hell we want. And even now, when we're finally at this point, where Russia and China are being like,

yeah, no, you can't. You can't. We're just refusing to adapt to that reality. Well, I'll take that back. It does seem like the Trump administration is a step in that direction. I should say that because it definitely is compared to Biden and everything, you know, and Obama before. So that's good. Again, just recognizing the fact that these other countries have interests that whether we consider them legitimate or not, they are able to impose costs on us. that we're not going to be willing to bear in order to defend those interests and protect those interests. So, like, just that is a great step in the right direction. And the way things have been going in Ukraine lately, talking about, like, with respect to the Trump administration's

rhetoric about it, it really does make me think that there is a lot, especially with Venezuela going on, it makes me think that there's more going on behind the scenes. Because, you know, it's interesting how Trump is out there saying, like, I mean, I think the peace deal that they put out there in public at this point, like, it calls on Ukraine to not only, forget about the territory it's lost but to give up territory it currently occupies right and like for that to be like part of the negotiation like what kind of a negotiation is that really it's just saying Russia you win we lose right it makes me wonder if there's some Cuban missile crisis behind the scenes turkey missiles like going on where you know you're going to Assad's going to fall and you're going to

let him fall and Maduro he's going to fall and you're going to let him fall and there's all these other pieces on the board that you're going to let us take in exchange for us just sort of tapping out and ending the suffering for both sides here in Ukraine. It seems to be like something like that could very well be going on. It keeps shipping on the weapons though. As long as Europe will keep paying for it, Trump keeps shipping them the weapons. And that means also, and I admit, I know it sounds stupid, but it is important to read the Post of Times in the journal every morning because that's who the government talks to. It doesn't mean what they're saying is true, but they do get important stories.

You have to do, of course, you're best to read through the lines all the time. But as far as I know, if we're still shipping them weapons, that means that they're still running the war from Germany. NATO is, American generals. Dude, did you see recently, I think it was just in the last week,

like Germany, I don't know if they floated the idea or if they actually passed some kind of a law or whatever that they're going to reintroduce conscription and start like remilitarizing Germany and stuff? Did you see that it's in the NDAA that Trump just saw, the trillion dollar NDAA has draft registration is automatic. No more signing up for selective service.

They're going to sign you up for you. Yeah. I don't know what they're thinking, man. God dang. Germany can the tone for fighting and losing a war in Russia by losing another war to Russia, I guess. So, all right. Now, we're going to take some super chats and things like that,

but first we've got to do some bidden this. And this is, we have to say thanks to our friend, Matt Sersely from agorist tax planning. Oh, I clicked on the wrong guy thing here. Where are you go? Oh, here he is. Tax planning attorney for small businesses and high income professionals.

Agarist tax advice. Now, the deal with Matt Sersely is, first of all, he's a brilliant genius. His entire thing is he hates the government at least as much as you do, and he wants to help you to get away with paying them as little tax as possible. He is not some kind of Irwin Schiff thing

where this is some gimmicky way to get out of paying your taxes and end up going to prison or something. No, no, he is a lawyer. And this is about how to stay within the rules and pay them only as much as you absolutely have to and otherwise tell them to screw off. I have had my own problems with the IRS.

Not that I did anything wrong. They just made up some giant number that they claim that I owe them. It was a lie. And they do that to everyone. all the time. They're monsters. They're the worst people in the world. And they are to be destroyed, but until they can be destroyed, they are to at least be a defendant against. You know, one thing, I've never really had much money, Daryl, but I used to be a cab driver for a long time. And man,

I heard some horror stories about the IRS, just absolutely destroying people. And it's not like, hey, man, you did drive drunk and crash into some guy or whatever. And the justice department or the justice system was so unfair to you over the line or whatever. But like, you're talking about people who never did anything wrong at all who told their lawyers and told their accountants. You pay through the nose, pay whatever I have to. I'm not trying to get away with anything. And then the government comes and ruins them anyway,

takes their lumber yard, takes their restaurant, destroys their lives. And I just heard about it over and over again. They're just monsters. I hate them. And so anyway, so does Matt Sersely. And he will save your ass from these guys. and we're all in this situation, every single one of us is in the situation

where we are the slaves of the national government's income taxation forces. So you need backup, you go to Matt Sersley, it's agoristtaxadvice.com and also we appreciate him supporting this show. So it is funny how like when you read in the Bible

that the Pharisees, one of the things they were like whispering to whip up the mob against Jesus is that he's having dinner with tax collectors that that's one of those things that 2,000 years later still resonates. Like,

it's kind of crazy. You trust this Christ guy? I don't know. There's no government agency that is more just universally hated than the IRS. Like I don't think there even could be.

I think that travels across time. Yeah, man. They're just monsters. I met a guy in my cab once. He had this thick Irish accent. He said he'd been in the country since the early 60s. and the reason he still had his thick Irish accent

is because almost as soon as he got here, he was like hanging out at Threadgills, hanging out at Armadillo World Headquarters with Janice Joplin and all the right wing hippies and all the left wing hippies and all the kind of awesome music scene and everything and just having a good old time and the IRS came to him and said,

give us $50,000. And we're talking in $60,000. And he goes, what? We don't owe you $50,000. And they said to him, we didn't say you owe us $50,000. We said, give us $50,000. and we're taking your mother's house.

And so he went in, became an import-export business guy, importing furniture from Asia or something. And he made his money and paid them their lousy stink of $50,000. And when I dropped them off, I still remember this. He lived in a giant red brick mansion, and his daughter was awesome. She had turned down a Rhodes scholarship because Cecil Rhodes was an evil slave owner. And anyway, and then he kept his accent as a protest and decided he would never truly be

an American, even though he lived here, he would never feel. truly is part of this society because of the way he was treated when he got here by these absolute ruthless gangsters he threatened to destroy his mother's life if he didn't pay them this extortion fee and that's just how they are, man. They're monsters, you. I hate them.

We're some of the super chats, pay up, dang it. Here's one. You guys should have a conversation with Juan says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard all that. All right, well, if you guys aren't going to pay, I'm going to read your comments. I'll tell you what I am going to do, though. I got tabs, man

I got tabs, man, I got tabs I'm going to show you I've got to figure what I'm doing here I'm not good at this, I need practice I am going to show you Martyr Maid's website dude you guys are going to like it Martyr Made substack

This is where you go and sign up for Darrell Cooper's podcast Subscribe.mortermade.com And man, he's got Jonestown on there He's got Mother Jones and the miners of West Virginia He's got, of course, Jeffrey Epstein and Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem

and all kinds of great stuff there, man. You guys are going to want to definitely check that out. And then, oh, I didn't put it up there, did I? There it is. Sorry, man, I'm looking at too many different tabs. There it is. Subscribe.mortemate.com. That's where you got to go.

That's what I was trying to say. And then I want to show you one more advertiser that we got that I think is really cool. If I click on the thing, man. I'm not sure about you guys but I'm pretty sure about you guys everybody loves Dr. Ron Paul as much as I do. You can see that behind me

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Now let me look at these comments. We'll do some super chats and get out of here. Scott, what's your thoughts on Carol Quigley's claim that the world's basically run by the Council on Foreign Relations? I would say that everyone should read Carol Quigley, the Anglo-American establishment and tragedy and hope, and especially page 950, and in fact, especially page 949,

And I would say that there's a lot of true history in there. And, oh, I lost you. What happened to you, Daryl? I said, my boy's wicked smart. Like, Goodwill hunting over here, like citing the page number. Oh, yeah. Well, I think it's 1425 or something was the other one. It's been a while.

But, yes, definitely page 950 has a great quote where he says that the only reason we let there be two parties is so the American people can throw those rascals out every four every eight or even four years if necessary without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy. And he says that's the Eastern establishment depending the American order from the new right that is the military industrial complex and grew up after World War II.

So the story then is a questioner is that Quigley was right, but he wrote that book in 66 and the military industrial complex won. The new right won in alliance with the neoconservatives and the wasps that ran the CFR, their last big gasp was Vietnam, and they blew it. McGeorge Bundy, I mean, this is the skull and bones, you know, personified running that

war. And this was kind of their last big kind of thing that discredited the old Anglo-American establishment and the so-called liberal Eastern establishment they used to call it forever. And it's sort of been a free-for-all ever since then. Quigley, like Quigley's not right about everything, but he's really great to read for the same reason that like PBS Frontline is a great documentary to watch, not because they tell the truth about everything or they're right about everything, but it's like if you want to know what the people who are making decisions in Washington are actually the conversations they're having with each

other, this is them. And Quigley, I mean, he taught at Georgetown for all those years. He was, I think he taught Bill Clinton and John Bezal-Izle and a lot of people, you know, and so. He taught John Basilutley, who is a great guy, a great friend of the American conservative magazine in Antibor.com, who became like a paleo-com. a Buchananite-type paleo-com, but he had been with Voice of America. Do you know about John Basil Utley? His mother was Frida Utley,

the anti-communist writer. His father was murdered by Stalin. His mother and father were a communist who went to Russia, and then the father was murdered by Joe Stalin, and then the mother snapped out of it and got the boy out of there, and they went to England,

and then she wrote a China story and a bunch of really great stuff. I'm sorry, I forget all the titles off the top of my head, but she wrote six or seven really great books about communism back in the day, And then John Basil Lutley was her son. He was the publisher of the American conservative magazine for a while. Really great guy, wonderful guy.

And he, that's why, you know, I always call it world empire. The policy of world empire. That comes from Quigley. That comes from John Basil Lutley, you know, would always use that phrase. Not just the American Empire or whatever, but world empires. That was the way that he characterized it, like in an academic sense. As compared to the other kinds of empires, it's, you know, one that is truly, you know, across both oceans in both directions and all of that.

JDA 2001 says, get that audio book out. I know, man, I'm sorry. I'm way behind on that. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm done, as you probably know. I've published H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton chapters, and I have finished recording all of W. Bush,

all of Obama, and most of Trump. I'm on like Ukrainegate. And, but I had to put it all on hold for the academy this year. It just goes a giant kick in the ball. Sorry about that, but I am working on it. And I hope to have it done by New Year's, right? Like I have a little bit lighter plate of work in some regards for the rest of the year here. So I'm going to really try to buckle down and knock out the audiobook here.

Do you have any advice for young people want to work in foreign affairs, but don't want to get caught in the swamp of government? What a good question. Someone asked me that the other day in a Q&A thing that I did about a young lady wanted to go work for think tanks. And then she's like, God, geez, I didn't really realize that these think tanks are all just agenda-driven, more mongering, horribleness. want to do that. And then my best stupid advice was go join Cato, Justin Logan and Doug Bondo.

They're good guys. I mean, if you're going to be in Washington doing a think type thing, defense priorities, it's the Coke to Puss, right? It's Charles Koch, but like, look, he's the best right-wing oligarch in America, okay? Maybe, you know, him and Musk. But if you're choosing, picking and choosing among right-wing oligarchs, and the Libertarian Institute is not financed by the Cokes, by the way. We never have been.

We're not part of that group. We're down with Mises and anti-warococ. different faction. But Justin Logan, I have nothing but respect for him. John Hoffman is a good guy. I think John Glazer is still there. Doug Bondo is a wonderful guy. So, you know, if you want to participate, you know, Tom Palmer, watch out for that snake.

He's a very bad actor, but stick with Doug Bondo and those guys. You could do a lot worse than working with Cato or defense priorities. If you're, like, actually talking about a job in Washington, you know, commenting on these things, participating in these things. write for the American Conservative magazine, right for Quincy. In fact, there's another one. That's a great thing thing you could associate with

is the Quincy Institute. That's all good people over there. It's basically a merger between the American Conservative magazine and Jim Loeb's blog. This is all good dudes. All good dudes. Founded by Trita Parsi,

Eli Clifton, and Andrew Bacevich. Okay? He can't beat that, man. Any concerned about Ukraine blowback after being led into a wonderful? I want to say one more thing on that last question real quick. I would say, like, one thing I would

I would really push people to consider is that not all ways of working in the government are equal. I know guys who are working for the administration in various capacities right now. Younger dudes who they're in there and they

basically get shunted off to their own little workshop where they work on certain projects and certain things and they're not really part of like the big overall grind. They have a very specific like job or mission that they're focused on, things that they're trying to develop

and they report directly to somebody who actually cares about that. You know, there are ways to find your way into jobs like that. Like most of the guys I know, they're dudes who just, they just built relationships with people so that, because this is one of the things you really learn is the number of people that I know

who are now working in high positions in government and have connections that, like, you really wouldn't believe. Like, they wouldn't have believed it themselves just a few years ago. It was somebody who, you know, showed up to a conference because they were buddies with, you know, somebody who was a speaker and they go there and they make some other friends, they meet some more other people. And back, you know, like I'm thinking of one guy in particular that I know, he's, you know, back in, this must have been like 20, 2019 or so, I believe, 20, no, 2021, actually. It was more recent than that.

He was at this conference and he was just kind of a nobody. Nobody really knew who he was, but he was introducing himself to people and everything. Well, J.D. Vance was at that conference. And J.D. Vance at the time was not, you know, he was running for Senate, but he wasn't the vice president. And he was very much open to just sort of getting to know, quote unquote, ordinary people. And he just built a relationship with them, right from then and there. You know, just introduced himself, talk to him, asking some questions and sort of built a relationship over time. And now he's working in the administration in a high capacity responsibility. And so that kind of thing can happen. You just, you know, those type of things are for like outgoing people who, you know, aren't like me. Like, I go to conferences that I'm supposed to speak at, and I just kind of sit off by myself reading a book until somebody comes and talks to me and then I, you know, clam up and everything and my social anxiety kicks in. But if you're not that way, I mean, that's one way, one thing you can definitely do. The other thing I would say, obviously, this is a swamp of a different type, and I'm a little bit biased here. But, you know, if it's something that you can handle

like just, you know, in all the different ways you'd have to handle it, you know, the military is very different than the rest of the government. You know, it has its own culture. And if you We're not doing military recruitment on the show to night. I don't mind. No, no, no. This is not a libertarian anti-war podcast, my friend. You never should have invited me here if that's you wanted to be. No.

I'm just saying, look, don't you want people who think like you as officers in the military? No. No. I want officers to resign from the military. We don't need about 9. You're not ever going to have a shortage of

officers, bro. And the ones the more you get to resign, the more good ones you get to resign, they're just going to get replaced with ones you wouldn't want in there. I've heard a lot of stories of a lot of dudes who said, and then I decided to stay a little bit longer because I thought, well, at least if I'm in there, it'll be a little bit less worse than if I'm not, and then they're making a deal with the devil and end up, you know,

sometimes going too far when they shouldn't have. Anyways, so this guy says, when did I quit being or how did I quit being a New World Order Cook? I'll explain that real quick. You know, in the 90s, especially after Waco, there's obviously very giant and popular anti-government movement and a huge part of, essentially like the civilian side of the militia movement was the Patriot movement.

And a big part of that was New World Order conspiracy stuff. And essentially that culture, I preferred them to the libertarians because as far as I knew, the libertarians, it was just Reason magazine. I didn't know about Lou Rockwell.com and anti-war.com and stuff then. And so when I read Reason, I was like, these guys suck. I would rather hang around with right-wing militia guys who, actually care about the branched divisions and what actually is important instead of a bunch of crap, you know? So I didn't, other than Dr. Paul and Harry Brown, I was a libertarian, but I really

didn't have anything to do with the libertary movement. I was telling around with right wingers during that era. And I read the New American magazine, which was written by a guy who later became my very good friend, William Norman Grigg, was the editor of the New American. And that was essentially that, yes, the Rockefeller World Empire, that the Council on Foreign Relations rules the world. And ultimately, as J. Edward Griffin, the author of Jekyll Island, would say that it's the grand design to build a one world government under the United Nations as the world federal government. And America is being overextended and driven into bankruptcy so that it can then be just another constituent part, like the USA joining the bricks, right, kind of thing. And is finally

the American, American hegemony is overspent and replaced by a true global hegemony where America is just another, you know, state and a federal union kind of thing. And so that argument, like there was a great book by a guy named New World Order by a guy named Guru Das. And he says, now look, sometimes you'll have a Ronald Reagan figure in there. And he's got to strike all patriotic type and can't be all building up the UN too much and stuff because that won't look right. But truly, the agenda continues in the background. And that's what they're really going for. And then what happened was Bush and Cheney came to power and took us to war with Iraq. And under my New World Order framework of that thing, that meant that the war would be, one, a regime change, but two,

it would be turned over to the UN, that that is what they're, they've identified their rogue states, Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea. They're going to overthrow each one of them and they're going to install a UN administered regime in its place. They're going to make whatever compromise with France and Russia that they have to, to get them to join into the war, too, to make it a baby blue flag war because that's the deal. And then guess what? They did not do that. And it was Colin Powell who demanded and Tony Blair demanded that they go to the UN at all. Did Cheney want to start the war in the summer of 2002? And Tony Blair was like, dude, I'll go to prison. We can't. We have to get a UN resolution. And Colin Powell, too, insisted that they do. So that was the only reason it even got

pushed off to March. They wanted to do a rolling start on a false flag operation that summer. Remember, it's in the Downing Street memo. Let's get a U.S. and let's get a U2 plane shot down, a U.N. U2 plane shot down, and then go in and use that for our rolling start, cost us belly and all that. So by the time, at least a few months before the war, a couple of months before the war, I finally was like, dude, this is just bullshit. I'm just married to this G. Edward Griffin, Grand Design, New World Order theory, but the reality is rather than Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney's sort of right-wing nationalism,

being window dressing for the real Bill Clinton-night New World Order plan, that it's actually the other way around, that this is the American Empire, and occasionally they bring in Democrats and put them in baby blue flag dresses and claim that it's for humanitarian purposes and to build up international law and multilateralism and all of that, when that's the window dressing to get the damn liberals to support the wars

that are ultimately for American supposed national interests, special interests that control the American Empire and that big Cheney's government. It's just not a one-world government thing. And in fact, I'll tell you this story, too, as long as I'm rambling. I met a guy at a Ron Paul Republican thing in 2002 before the war, but after September 11th.

And the guy said he loved Ron Paul at Sep for his foreign policy, which is crazy. He said his foreign policy was kill every Arab until they're all dead or every Muslim or whatever. But anyway, he said to me, I was going, well, Conno Lisa Rice is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

And he goes, that doesn't mean anything. He goes, let me tell you, I just spent a year with these guys. He goes, I know Carl Rove, and I met Dick Cheney a bunch of times. And I'm just telling you, you are wrong. Dick Cheney is not a one-worlder, dude. He's just not. UN Security Council, Brussels, France, Russia. No, dude.

That is not what he's about. And the thing is, of course, I was wrong all along. And as I write in the new book Provoked, none of this was ever true. right? Or it hadn't been true in many decades. By the time of the end of the Cold War, George Bush promised to bring the Soviet Union and then Russia into NATO, and Bill Clinton promised to bring Russia into NATO,

or at least hinted at it, but they never meant to do that. The whole point of NATO is to stick it to Russia. And if you're going to build a world federal government, that means an alliance with Moscow and their military integration into NATO as the one-world army of the North. Well, if we're not doing it,

that, then we're not doing that. And we're not. And if we're joining into a one world government with Vladimir Putin now, Daryl, you tell him, let him know, because I don't think he knows. So that's the deal. I quit being a New World Order coup because I was wrong that that stuff was right at all. It just wasn't right. It hadn't been right through the whole Bill Clinton years. It was not. And Strobe Talbot, look, this is why I thought I was right. Strobe Talbot wrote an article for Time magazine called The Birth of the World Nation, where he says we're building a one world government. and then Bill Clinton hired him to integrate Russia into NATO. But the thing is what I didn't understand then,

and I do know now from deeper research and documents and the rest, is that they were shining Russia on, and Strobe Talbot went from what he called himself, a woolly-headed one-worlder to essentially a Dick Cheney right-wing nationalist, that we're going to do what we're going to do, and the Russians are going to have to lump it if they don't like it. And so that's why I changed because I had been wrong, and then I got smarter.

And I grew out of it, right? I got older. It's one of the things that nowadays, like, neocon is just sort of used as a word that means somebody who likes war. When neocon, you know, is obviously a very specific thing. Like, Dick Cheney is not a neocon. Dick Cheney is a militarist. He's a, oh, you know, war monger, all these things. But neocons are like, he's a bunch, like, you've covered this before, a bunch of ex-Totskyites who, you know,

like, if you go back to the basic conflict between Trotsky and stuff, Stalin, like, they're differing views on the mission of the Soviet Union. You know, it really came down to Stalin's policy of socialism in one country. Like, the Trotskyites were internationalists before they were communists. The communism part, the economics of communism to the Trotskyites was really secondary. That's why so many of them just were able to switch over and become neo-conservatives in America, like just like that, because the economics were never important. What was important was erasing national boundaries, you know, mixing. of the peoples and cultures, just the internationalist part of it. And, you know, Trotsky wanted to use

the Soviet Union just as a base for the world revolution. Like, and that's it. You know, just from, it wasn't about trying to make Russia prosperous or to make the Soviet Union itself, you know, more prosperous for anything like that. Stalin, for all of his many, you know, faults, he did at least have the idea that, like, he was going to drag the Soviet Union into modernity and create a prosperous competitive society. Like, he did think that. in his own way. Trotsky was just not concerned with that. Trotsky was just interested in using the resources of the former Russian Empire to foment revolution around the world. And, you know, that's what really came down to. That's why the neocons just, you know, switched over so easily. And they are very

different from people like Dick Cheney. You know, obviously their interests have aligned since the war on terror started, but they have not always aligned. You know, people that Dick Cheney would consider is sort of ideological forerunners, you know, the people who were his mentors coming up, A lot of those people were touch and go with Israel. They weren't necessarily, you know, they weren't internationalists. That's right. And so, yeah, anyway, I don't want to be too pedantic about it. Neocons suck.

No, you should. Really, the takeaway. Yeah, it is. They do suck. And everybody should learn all about them. I mean, it's such a fascinating subject. Justin Romando, of course, was the very best on them. But there's a guy named John Judas who wrote an article called Trotsky.

Oh, it's called a neoconservatives, from Trotskyism to anachronism. And he wrote that in 1995, about now that the Soviet Union is going, nobody needs neocons anymore. If only that have been true. All right, we got to get out of here. Let me say one more time, everybody is so proud of the Libertarian Institute's 19th book, Empire of Lies by my good friend, the great Charles Goyette. I know you guys are going to love it so much. It is just fantastic.

And it is on sale now, Kindle and Paperback. We're working on the hardback coming soon kind of thing. And other than that, I guess I just want to say thank you, everybody, for all your support. And check out the Academy at Scott Hortonacademy.com. And we'll see you next week. Real quick. Oh, yeah, stop. Holt.

Pause. I see a couple people have asked about getting a subscription to the Martyrmaid substack. I've always told people that, you know, if five bucks is tough to come by, I understand, I've been there. Just send me an email, Martyrmaid at gmail.com, and let me know the email address that you want and I'll copy a subscription. And I want everybody to read it who wants to read it. Cool. Well, I'm far greater than that.

You're going to have to pay to join the Scott Horty Academy. But that's great, man. And thank you, Daryl. And we'll see you next week, bud. 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 X and YouTube. And tune in next time.

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