Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:28 - Christmas Special

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

In this episode, Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton delve into the poignant themes of the Christmas Truce of World War I, juxtaposing lighthearted holiday greetings with a profound exploration of humanity amidst warfare. Darryl recounts the extraordinary event in December 1914 when German and British soldiers emerged from their trenches to celebrate Christmas together, sharing stories of caroling and spontaneous soccer games that defied the brutal backdrop of conflict. As the discussion unfolds, they reflect on the deeper implications of this moment, illustrating how it highlights the futility of war and the manipulation by leaders that transformed comrades into enemies. Scott and Darryl engage in a historical analysis of how this act of collective dissent resonated throughout the remainder of the war, subsequently influencing global geopolitics, including the rise of fascism. They urge listeners to recognize the essential role of unity and dissent against militarism, drawing parallels to contemporary struggles for peace and justice. Closing with festive wishes, they underscore the importance of shared humanity and vigilance against the machinations of war, making this episode both thought-provoking and hopeful. 0:00 Intro 1:44 The Christmas Truce Explained 7:29 Stories of Humanity in War 10:38 The Reality Behind the Truce 12:57 Reflections on the War's Impact 17:03 Historical Context of the Truce 19:16 The Rise of Nationalism and Conflict 29:46 Aftermath and Ethnic Cleansing 37:24 The Suicide of Western Civilization 38:41 Economic Factors in the Wars 41:18 The Role of Ideologies 43:45 Lessons from History 46:41 Current Events and Reflections 1:01:52 Closing Thoughts on the Year (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, I'm provoked. Me and Darrow, we're going to talk Christmas stuff. 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 Darrell Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future.

This is provoked. Right, sure as hell it is provoked. I'm Scott Horton, and he's Daryl Cooper. How you doing there? Merry Christmas. Doing all right. Hi, Scott. Hello, everybody.

Merry Christmas to everybody, dude. I hope y'all had a good one. I sure as hell did. I spent a day driving up and down the river and back, which was not too bad. And I'll tell you what, Chris, Williams, if you're listening, we're going to do a big test of your Podsworth app because I could not get my good mic to talk to my phone because they're enemies. It's the Safari, well, according to Chad GPT, it's the Safari browser thing has a conflict

with my stupid sure mic. So I just had to use my regular ear pods. And so if the audio might treat a Parsi interview that I recorded out today on the boat comes out sounding great, well, then we'll know that it's Podsworth Media and the Podsworth Media app that gets all the credit for that. But we'll have to wait. But I interviewed Treat it today, co-founder of the Quincy Institute,

all about America's horrible Iran policy and whether we're going back to war this spring and that kind of thing. So you guys will have to sign up for the Scott Hurd. I never could pronounce my own last name right. The Scott Horton Show over at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton. Anyway, tonight we're going to talk about the Christmas truce. What the hell is the Christmas truce?

Dero Cooper? Well, the Christmas truce or the Christmas piece as it's sometimes known refers to an event that took place on the Western Front of World War I about five months into the First World War on Christmas. You know, the war started August

in early August, and by the time you get to Christmas, which is the time that those men, no matter which country they were fighting for, had been told by their leaders, you know, that they did, they'd been told that they'd be home by Christmas, that the war would be wrapped up

one way or another by then, And by the time Christmas came, getting your five months into a war that had killed and wounded about a million people already, you know, in the first few months. And so, you know, I like to put the entire event into a larger context, you know, of thinking about how if you go back to, let's say, May of 1914, you know, month before the Archduke, Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in, and the war starts or begins to pick up, I guess. People are just living in peace in Europe. And there had been no major war on the scale that, you know, we've come to think of as major in a hundred years. You know, they had had the Crimean War, which was sort of a hinterland war between Britain and France against the Russian Empire and defensive. It was an imperial war, but it was kind of far away.

and there were a lot of casualties and it was a difficult war, but it was experienced as kind of something, almost a colonial war. The Franco-Prussian war, which was fairly sharp and bloody, but it was something that was much more traditional in terms of, you know,

the progress of the thing where, you know, the main army of the French gets surrounded and cut off, and the war's over. You know, that's it. That's the war. And so this is like, this is what people had experienced. The biggest, longest, bloodiest war anybody knew of in the last

hundred years was the American Civil War, which killed maybe 650, 700,000 people in four years. And so now we're in World War I. Just a few months before, the continent had been at peace. People had been at their jobs, you know, all of the guys who were out there dying, who were out there in these flooded makeshift trenches that, you know, December 1914, these are not the trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front or that movie, 1917, where I have all the wooden infrastructure built in, and it's almost like, you know, these places have their own zip codes. They're like built into the landscape so firmly.

That's not what this was. This was a few months in. So people are adapting on the fly. They just dug these holes and they're just sitting in these muddy, you know, flooded holes hoping not to get killed, freezing their nuts off. And this was something that came as just an unbelievable shock to, you know, everybody involved. I mean, again, you know, I've mentioned this before when we've talked about my last episode of enemy, but it's really important to, like, think about the fact that, like, the Army back then was not something that you,

I mean, some people volunteered, but by and large, you know, this wasn't even like, Vietans. where you might get drafted. If you're a working class guy, like you've got a good chance of getting drafted, something like that. It was like if you can walk and you don't have some blindness

or hearing problem or heart problem that precludes you, you're going to war, period. You know, if you're within the age and you're healthy enough to do it, not in some critical industry. And so you went from an entire continent at peace to an entire generation of men

across the continent being thrown into this meat grinder that is just chewing them off at a rate that nobody had really ever even conceived of as something that was possible before, right? And so this is the state that these, these are the place these men are in as you get to that first Christmas. And now there's, you know, there's a lot of anecdote, a lot of probably apocryphal stuff surrounding what happened that day.

You know, it was something where, just for everybody who's never heard of it before, you know, basically what happened was up and down the lines on the western front from northern Switzerland to the English Channel at different places and for in some places for long, long stretches of the line. You had people on the German side, soldiers on the German side and soldiers on the British and French side coming up mostly British, not as much the French, but mostly British, but coming up out of their trenches and celebrating Christmas together. And this was not something that the rulers kind of came together and said, hey, wouldn't it be nice? You know, for our guys if we just took the day off

or something. Right. That the officers and the NCOs of the various armies were threatening to shoot people for. And these guys still came up out of their trenches. And the way you have like, you know, there are certain stories of there are certain stories

of how some of these incidents started where you know, the British would be over on the other side they're, you know, sharing like the king. The of all the major countries, they sent their troops care packages. And so they have extra cigarettes and wine and things like that. And they're kind of having a day. And they hear over on the other side,

they start hearing a song that they all know, but it's being sung in a different, in a different language, silent night. And you know, you got to remember, sometimes these trenches were like 40, 50 feet away from each other. You know, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were 500,000 yards. In a lot of places, they were like 40 yards, you know, like very close. And so, You could, they've been shouting at each other for weeks, you know, for months. They've been in their trenches and, hey, Jerry, you know, hey, Kraut, like just yelling at each other back and forth, taunting each other, talking to each other. And now all of a sudden those same people, they start to see on the German side, they start to put up, you know, little makeshift Christmas trees or some of them are even putting their rifles and sticking their bayonets and wrapping some, you know, putting some candles on them and things like that just to light them up. And then they start hearing silent night being some.

And there's this really touching story, again, maybe apocryphal. I think it actually made it into that French movie that's about the Christmas truce. But whether it's apocryphal or not, it's, you know, it's worth remembering is real sometimes. That's the case, I think, is the Germans were singing Silent Night and they were across no man's land from a group of Scottish soldiers in the British Army who started playing their bagpipes to accompany them. And that was sort of the trigger that sort of got these guys to see. that, you know, poke their head up above the trench, which was a death sentence for the last several months and not get shot. And then actually venture on up. The first, I'd love to know the

first brave guy that decided, you know, I'll be the one to take the beach here and, like, pop my head up and try to start this thing. But then it spread. It started spreading, you know, up and down the line. You've got all these stories of them meeting in no man's land, exchanging gifts, playing soccer with each other, singing with each other, playing. You know, they had musical instruments. Some of them had brought along. They were playing together in like mixed bands and stuff. The whole time, the officers and the NCOs are going insane, you know.

So it's like that we got to figure out some way to stop this unbelievably beautiful, like, act of humanity that's taking place here, you know? And, yeah. And so that's what the Christmas truce is. it lasted for just that. Well, actually, supposedly in a few places, it lasted for a couple days.

And so, yeah, it's remembered. And if you watch that French movie I talked about, it is remembered sort of in pop culture as like this, as like a symbol of humanity persisting, even in the darkest of circumstances. And, you know,

I, yeah, there's definitely some of that. There's like a certain beauty to that part of it. But I think we have to really keep in, mind like what was what the circumstances were here you know that this is an entire generation of young men who were thrown to their deaths and to their destruction um by by corrupt decadent leaders in europe the ruling classes of europe were were really not worthy of their crowns or their positions any longer and hadn't been for a long time and they threw these men into this situation thoughtlessly and um you know the as beautiful as it might have been that night it didn't

in the war. Yeah. You know? And a lot of these guys, by the way, this is something a lot of people don't know about the Christmas truth.

So a lot of people who were part of it, they had an idea that maybe it kind of would. Not that like it was going to be this weird, like, you know, spontaneous, just, you know, kind of embracing of the enemy and now the war's over, but that, you know,

all of their leaders had told them, you guys would be home by Christmas. Everybody had promised their soldiers that. And now it's Christmas and there's a million people, dead or wounded, and a decisive victory looks further away than it did, you know, when the war first started. But, you know, decisive victory, that's not really something that, you know,

European wars hadn't been fought to annihilation in a really, really long time, like centuries. You know, they had been limited wars that ended with negotiated surrenders by one side or another in dignified ways. And so these guys had some reason to hope that, yeah, they said we'd be done by Christmas and they meant that there'd be a decisive victory by then. That's not going to happen. we could still end this thing by Christmas. Like, what is this whole thing really over?

Like, what are the stakes, really, that we're playing for here? So work it out. Sit down. Like, and if we come out of our trenches and they see, like, up and down the lines, you know, people from both sides, guys from both sides are celebrating Christmas together. It'd be like a reminder of our common European humanity or common Christian humanity. And that maybe, you know, that would sort of provide an impetus to the ruling class is to get themselves together and try to find a way out of this mess.

Unfortunately, you know, it didn't do that. And for the rest of the war, Christmas would come and go without anything like this because, you know, the officers and the NCOs were on watch on both sides, making sure that it didn't. Yeah, paths of glory and shoot you right in the head for trying to quit. So, yeah, and I guess there was no Christmas truce of 1915, 16, and then I guess the war finally ended

right before Christmas in 1917 I guess I didn't realize I knew it was that bad but I'd have to I really owe it to at least me if not other people to go back and really do a lot of rereading about World War I and World War II and how they all played out

I'm not surprised necessarily but I didn't know that a million people had been killed in the first four months and that's just because it was probably about 5 years ago yeah yeah I'm sorry he did the casualties yeah and that's on both fronts, but that's essentially the machine guns, the Gatlin guns and so forth have been

invented in time for the Civil War, but sort of just barely. Now this is full automatic machine guns, you know, everywhere, which not like automatic rifles, but still whatever placed guns and just tearing guys to shreds where you have guys dying tens, 20, 30,000 people dying in a day in these massive wars. Yeah, in that early part of the war, the Battle of the Frontiers, there was a day in September, I believe it was late August, early September, the French lost 27,000 killed in one day. And it's like when you go back to the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, the ones that we named ships after later on, you know, I mean, they're pale in comparison to that. And that turned out to be nothing.

You know, that turned out to be just one of many, many, many, many, many, of the worst days that these countries would suffer over the course of this just unbelievably pointless war. You know, that really, you know, it's one of those things where, like, you can look back at World War I. It's kind of similar to like when I think about the leaders of, in the United States during the world wars,

whether Woodrow Wilson, FDR. Look at Woodrow Wilson. Now we got the course, you know, that CJ did the worst person in the history of, and like you can make that case absolutely based on, you know, the case that he makes. It's very compelling. But I do wonder sometimes if, like, you know, the world was just changing.

And if it wasn't him, it would be another guy. Like, this was going. Oh, yeah, it's where things were headed, you know. Yeah, Wilson was the Obama of that era compared to TR, who was the W. Bush, you know, or whatever, who was demanding that America could get into the war earlier. And so Wilson held out for a while before betraying everyone that he promised and getting us into the war. You know, I will say, bring up Theodore Roosevelt. I mean, there is, like, there's one thing to be said for the wars back then,

and this war in particular. You know, yeah, you could say they're the Obama, you know, the TR's, the George W. Bush or whatever. T.R. son was killed over there, you know, and you go across Europe, the sons of these ruling houses across Europe were slaughtered in those trenches, you know? Yeah. Like, they put their money where their mouths were, at least, you know, even if their mouth ran. in a really stupid place. Come on, Darrow.

Everybody knows that at least George Bush made his daughters join the army and become nurses and serve in Kuwait in Germany where they took care of the dead and wounded, you know? Oh, wait, no, that did not happen at all. Sorry. I was thinking of, I was just being funny. Hey, not that funny.

Listen, I have on the screen here, the Christmas truce of World War I by the great and late, William Norman Grigg, my great friend and co-founder with me and Sheldon Richmond of the Libertarian Institute. We have his full archive of everything he wrote for anyone other than there's some old John Birch stuff that's lost, although we were able to save some of the stuff that he had done at the New American, but in fact, I know a guy who's got all that stuff digitized. I guess we could

figure out. Anyway, but we have everything else that he ever did and all of his audio and everything, you can find the Wilgrig archive at the Institute there. But anyway, this is his great piece on World War I. And then I wanted to show you this. We do this every year at anti-war.com. We being Mr. Eric Garris here.

Here's anti-war.com in dark reader mode. And you can see our picture story is World War I's Christmas truce when fighting pause for the holiday. And then we have a whole section here below the picture story of a whole series of great articles all about it.

And here he's got forgotten Paul McCartney music video from 39 years ago reminds us of the Christmas truce. How do you like that? We're not going to play that and get the copyright strike, but everyone can find that. A letter from a British soldier on the Christmas truce of World War and then voices of the First World War, their Christmas truce, this is all quotes. I read up on a bunch of this stuff. And by the way, you know, if you do anti-war.com past, if you just, you know, put in any old date and then look at the URL here, you can change that date to whatever you want over the last 30 years.

So look at Christmas for years past and you'll see different collections of articles about the Christmas truce there. We've got lots of great stuff for you. And then including this 2021 article by David Stockman, who you guys might know as a brilliant genius, the former budget director for Ronald Reagan before he resigned and discussed. But he's good on a lot of things. So, in case y'all are interested in that. more readings on the Christmas truce there and yeah you know I really am uh go ahead go ahead well I was

going to say like you one of the things that I was really trying to get across in the series I did on the American labor movement a couple episodes of which are still to come after I'm done with World War II but one of the things I was trying to get across is knowing I have like not exclusively by any means but um you know a large audience of conservative and right-wing people have kind of been trained by the 20th century when this is a perfectly appropriate attitude to have to not like organized labor, you know,

which again, in 2025 is a totally understandable position to take. But to show them that, like, you know, these things weren't always like this. You know, there was a time where like these were just guys who were swinging wrenches in the daytime and trying not to get shot by Pinkertons at night while they were, you know, like, that things were different. There's people in our past, in our history that you probably are, you know, inclined to kind

of just pass over, you know, with, you know, just sort of to ignore them or even to think of them with just sort of some reflex of contempt because of what you associate with them that honestly should be some of our heroes, people like Mother Jones, you know. And this is a, one of the things that you read about in all of these stories of the Christmas truce is up and down the line. And again, most of these were French and British soldiers. So it kind of really does show you the internationalist element of it is a lot of them started singing the Marseille, the French revolutionary song, you know, kind of became like the official or unofficial, rather national anthem of like the Red Revolution, the Workers Revolution across

Europe. And they were getting together and singing that. And the bands were playing it and everything. And it was the song of the international socialist movement, basically. And we think about that today, especially again on the right, and we say, oh, you know, just that's, maybe this Christmas truce thing wasn't so great after all or something. The thing I would ask people to like really try to keep in mind is that at the time, you know, as societies across Europe are going through these unbelievably rapid changes, you know, industrialization is driving people out of their traditional lives in the countryside into these overcrowded cities where they're scraping and looking for work, you know, just trying to survive as they're

packed into tenement houses like masses and masses of people. Populations are exploding. It's not enough housing for people and just the societies are really struggling to cope with all the technological, all of these kind of things are happening so fast. And you have this like this new class of people that really didn't exist before, you know, which most, which in Europe at the time meant most people, this the working class, you know. And you can include like a lot of of what we think of as the middle class, is the working class back then. They were like, the point is that they, they relied on wages, you know, from a job in order to be able to put food in their kids' mouths. You know, they weren't proprietors, they weren't farmers, they

weren't capitalists, you know, in the sense of owners of capital or anything like that. And, you know, you had only a few ideologies or movements that were really kind of trying to define like who these people were and what their place in society ought to be. And, you know, eventually, um, you know, you, you, you have nationalism to compete with international socialism. Um, but nationalism was looked at very much at the time still as like a bourgeois movement. You know, this was something that like the middle and upper middle classes, the business classes were really into for reasons it had to do with their class interests. Oh, we should just go real quick, Darry that you're talking about before

the commies took over Moscow. That was in October of 1917. So there is no example of what is the commie red flag USSR. There's also that. Yeah. Okay. So go ahead. I want to put that in time there. Yeah. Just that, um, you know, this was a time where you had all of these people who, um, had been isolated in their own countries kind of as these transitions are taking place, coming into contact with their class counterparts and sometimes their ethnic counterparts. And sometimes their ethnic counterparts on opposite sides of the line. You know, you go over to like the, go over to the east. And, you know, Poland hadn't existed in a couple centuries because it had been partitioned by the Russian Empire, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just split into three pieces.

Each of those three empires got a large population of Poles, Jews in Russia and Austria, Ukrainians, a lot of others, Racinians. And so all of these empires, these are multinational, multi-ethnic empires, they conscripted their people into these mass armies. And so you've got like sloths, Poles, being conscripted into the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires and made to go fight each other, right? And so these kind of things really like forced people, they forced the question of loyalty and forced the question of identity, like, to the foreground in a way that it really hadn't been for a long time for that class of people.

You had all of a sudden, you know, something beyond just class unity across borders that people were thinking about is like, you know, what it is that we should identify and define ourselves by. And, and it led later to a lot of the, if you think about it now, like this, today we think of like the Zionists as one of these like few nationalist movements, nationalist groups that like they really don't think of themselves as having like national boundaries. They don't think of themselves as having even like citizenship, like being a citizen of Israel is not really what makes you a member of their society. You know, you could be a Jew in Brooklyn, and you're part of the crew because that's, it's, it's sort of a Volkish movement in that old German sense. And back then, you know, you had Germans living in the Baltic states. You had Germans living in Poland. You had Germans living in Russia throughout Russia over by the Volga region. And there was a kind of a question of like, well, these are Russian Germans.

Yeah, they're ethnic Germans, but, you know, are they like a Mexican-American? That's not a Mexican. You're, you know, we can, we can, here in America, we'll get a guy named, Eisenhower and have them lead our army to go conquer German. You know what I mean? Like, whereas back then, like, these questions were kind of open. Like, you know, are these people Russian? Are they Germans because they're German ethnically, you know? Same with the polls and all these groups. It just forced all these questions kind of to the foreground in a way that people had not been thinking about them as much before. And after the war, as all these empires started

to fall apart, huge amount of the violence and chaos that ensued in Central and Eastern Europe was really like these questions that had arisen as a result of this being hashed out like in real time, you know? Yeah, well, and you know, I'm so ignorant about this stuff, but I read the great book, Wilson's War, by James Powell, where, you know, he talks about really the aftermath of the war and how Woodrow Wilson's intervention

is really what allowed for Lenin and Trotsky to seize power in Russia by prolonging the war by bribing Kerenzky, to stay in the war after the original revolution in March of 17. And then, of course, how the reparations and the stripping of all the territories, and the humiliation of Germany with the war reparations and everything that helped lead to the rise of the Nazi party. And, of course, they smashed the Ottoman Empire, which turned the Middle East over to the British and the French.

And so then from there goes World War II and World Communism and the American World Empire and Zionism and all of the rest of so much of the problems. So it's a really great read. for that reason. It was also a conflict that really, even though we don't think of it this way, we think of World War I as being a much cleaner war than World War II because it was,

you know, there wasn't as much just targeted massacre of civilians, things like that. That's definitely true. But it did like, it went out of the total numbers killed. What were the total numbers killed and wounded, Dina?

Killed and wounded total, like about 40 million. That's if you're counting civilians as well. well, and I think that counts the Spanish flu, but about 20 million, like, battle casualties. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. And then the Russian Empire, I mean, or the Russian Civil War afterward, you're talking another six to ten million killed. And the initial communism before Lenin tried to do the new economic policy, and then the secondary communism, when Stalin came and did the whole of DeMora and all of that. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, one of the thing, you know,

We think of the First World War as like a much cleaner war because it was, but it really did go a long way toward normalizing things that would really come to full fruition in the Second World War, and not just the Armenian genocide and what was going on down there. You know, just after the war, for example, you know, all of these countries that had previously been part of the German Reich that got split off by the Treaty of Versailles, you end up with millions of Germans in countries now that are varying degrees of hostile to. them, you know, either because, I mean, everybody knows, like, if you're living in East Prussia, which is now Poland, and you're German, which is almost everybody who lived there, they all know everybody who runs that government, all the polls there who were very defensive of their new nationalist project, obviously, they know you don't want to be part of Poland. They know you want to be part of Germany again. So you have this large group of people over here that the national government does not trust. And you have, like, varying degrees of persecution of all

these different groups and not just against the Germans. You know, Poles and Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians, Russians and Poles, like all these different groups that are moving out in the chaos immediately after the war before the Treaty of Versailles been hammered out. And everybody kind of knows what, you know, the major allies are going to apportion to them as their new countries. You know, they're trying to create realities on the ground. Go militarily conquer this place. And then, yeah, the people in Versailles are eventually going to have to look at this and just be like, what are we going to go kick them out? No, okay, it's yours, you know, just establish the reality. on the ground. And so this was happening. You got massacres, pogroms going on all across Eastern Europe during this period. You know, the Poles and the Ukrainians going after each other was probably the nastiest particular one. The Poles and the Russians had to retreat out of Belarus and back into Poland. They were murdering and burning villages as they like went back. And then the Russians did the same or the Soviets did the same thing as they came into Poland. Really, really ugly stuff. And the thing that, you know, carried over into the post-war period and over into the Second World War was this idea that, you know, again, it's hard for kind of, it's kind of hard for us to really put our minds in this space today because it's just very foreign to us. But, you know, you had like the Austro-Hungarian Empire with just like spoke a couple dozen languages, you know, in their parliament. They spoke a bunch of languages. You know, these were really complex, like multi-ethnic creations. And if you were

like loyal to the emperor, you might be, you know, there was like budding ethno-national. that was starting to crop up. I mean, that was a big part of, like, what caused a dissolution of these empires during the war. But still, there were a lot of people of all ethnicities who thought, you know, actually the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a pretty solid thing to be a part of. You know, it wasn't like everybody wanted their own little state that,

you know, and wanted independence from this. And as time went on, like, you get toward the end of the war, especially in the months and maybe two, three years after the First World War, as you got all of these populations that are being ethnic, cleansed from these territories, you know, Poles kicking out the Germans, Russians kicking out the Germans, or them fleeing because they're being persecuted and their properties being seized. And this being looked at kind of like as, even by the allies, it's like not even really something that's that unfortunate, you know. The British encouraged the Greeks to go attack the new state

of Turkey after the war and in a totally separate war. And the Greeks went into Turkey. It was very ugly they were a lot of atrocities carried out against the muslim populations things like that and then as the turks pushed them back into greece huge amounts atrocities like against the christian populations in what was turkey at the time and in greece when they pushed them back and then afterwards the settlement that they came up with and this was totally endorsed by all the allies is you know hundreds of thousands i think a million uh a million turks or greeks in turkey got four forcibly relocated back to Greece and a bunch of Muslims got forcibly relocated back to Turkey, just a huge population exchange. It was not volunteer. And this was something that was just looked at

as like, well, yeah, this is like what happens, you know? And it really put this, it really put this huge emphasis on like your ethnicity, your race in the, in like the old 19th, early 20th century sense of the word, you know, where there's a British race and a German race and things like that. Like your race was really who you are. And that this was something that was recognized by literally everybody, including, like, the victorious, you know, democratic states. I mean, this was really the, this was really the, you know, this is something that I think a lot of people have a lot of trouble with today was that, you know, Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. What's he talking about? He's talking about ethno-nationalism. That's what he's talking about, you know. Well, the problem here is, as you're describing, is you have these ethnicities who have been all spread around over the millennia, you know, or over the centuries, you know, however far back in antiquity you want to go, which means that then you have to have these massive ethnic cleansing campaigns all over the place to, or you have just, in fact, people stuck on the wrong side of the line all over the place, wherever they came in and drew all the new borders. And, of course, that was the precipitating cause or event, at least, let's say. We'll go ahead and say Hitler's will was the cause, but the dispute was over the German city of Danzig

and whether the German state was going to have access to it or whether the polls were going to, you know, let them have that corridor or not. That was the dispute. Yeah, well, and the territory that Hitler was like initially interested in when they were still in a negotiating phase trying to get that done. and what he, you know, when he invaded, the way he looked at it, and this is in their discussions, their writings. And again, you can look back and say it's all a cynical sort of self-justification, but I mean, I don't really think so. I think that people, there's still people, and they think about things the way people do. They looked at it as like this territory that's in dispute here that you're calling like sacred Polish territory was literally majority German until like 20

years ago when you drove everybody out. And, you know, the same with like, when you look down at like the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. You know, you have three million Germans living there as a super majority, had been living there for centuries. Just the stroke of a pen in Versailles cuts that whole section off from Germany and gives it to this new state, this new very weird state of Czechoslovakia, which is, in and of itself, is like a bi-ethnic state that's dominated by the Czechs. The Slovaks initially didn't even really want to be a part of it.

The Czechs invaded Slovakia. and then very, very strange, like, even to begin with. But then you got these three million Germans living up on the border of Germany who are not happy about the fact that they're no longer German citizens, you know? And when the Czech government starts forming up, you know, they look at these people as a potential fifth column because they probably are, you know what I mean? Like, again, like in a fifth column is like a little bit different when you're talking about, like, say, like maybe a group of immigrants that comes into the.

country and they're traders for the old country or something, but like a fifth column is a little bit different when like three months ago they used to be part of that country and you just redrew the line. It's a little bit different, you know? And so they saw them that way. They didn't trust them. When the German population there, they weren't armed, they weren't organized for any kind of military conflict after the war. So they just came out into the streets and protested. And the Czech sent the army up there, a huge, like the core of which was built out of this Czech Legion, which had been over in the Russian Civil War, just fighting an insanely brutal war over there, where they had taken over half of Siberia and kind of fought their way back to Europe, very hardcore people

who were just over there fighting the Russian Civil War, the way the Russian Civil War was being fought by everybody else, very brutal. And they sent the army up there and massacred, you know, unarmed German protesters by the hundreds of them. And so these are the territories that when you get up to 1939 and Hitler is like saying, we want this back, we want this back, you know, these are all things that like were so fresh in people's memory, you know, and after the First World War, when all of these things are taking place, you know, there are literally just camps across Germany, refugee camps for, you know, well over a million Germans that were flooding back in from Russia, from Poland, from all these other countries that were coming in who had had all their property

taken from them and just thrown out a lot of them, um, show. going up with nothing and they're just there for months and months at a time sometimes in refugee camps scattered all across Germany. And the German public is calling on the new government, you know, the new Weimar government that's formed up that like, look what's happening to the Germans in Poland. You've got to do something about this. And the Weimar government, they couldn't do anything about it. They're in no position to. They didn't have the resources. They just, they couldn't. They couldn't do anything about it. But it really hurt the legitimacy of that government, like at an early stage in its life. And, um, and later on,

you know, it's one of the reasons why when Hitler started really speaking up for and then acting on behalf of the Germans over the border in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, one of the reasons that it was so, it was so popular in Germany, you know, as it was looked at as like, as sort of erasing, as redeeming this shameful period after the First World War when all these things were happening to German people in these other countries and their government couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it. And so a lot of these things, like all of these seeds are planted, all the seeds, seeds of the Second World War are planted in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Yeah. All right. So, no, I don't know who coined the phrase, uh, Daryl, but I think Pat Buchanan calls the First and Second World War both the great civil war of the West and even really the suicide of Western civilization, even in the first. I think John's Nolte, I think, was the first one to really talk about it in those terms. Yeah. It's the exact way to think about it. yeah whatever it's a metaphor and this kind of thing but it was like um i think the way pat put it was you know the um the suicide was in the first world war the second world war and everything after

that is just the death rose kind of thing but there was western civilization died during this thing and um and one thing that james powell talks about also in that book i think it's just the prologue to james powell's book again it's uh called wilson's war on Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder created Hitler, Lenin, or whatever, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union World War II or something like that. Anyway, he talks about in the beginning how it was two giant trade blocks.

They had free trade blocks, but they were separate from each other. And those were the blocks that became the Allied and Axis Powers. So it was very much like a dispute over, you know, access to coal resources on the other side of the line and that kind of thing, where if they had all joined their two separate trade packs into one big free trade pack, then war probably could have been avoided. But a huge part of the motive for the war was seizing each other's resources that they

couldn't just get on the market, you know, but these guys have coal and these guys have steel or, you know, iron and whatever it is that they needed. So, you know, it went to show that, I guess, because of these, intercontinental, more less, at least free trade packs. They were able, both sides were able to build up these giant militaries to fight each other with,

right? They were able to afford it to militarize to such a degree to hurt each other so bad. And then back to the story of the Christmas truce where the point is that they're singing the same song in a different dialect, man, right? Like these are people who

actually are the same. Their leaders are essentially in a conspiracy with each other to force these people to fight each other in the name of protecting themselves, which is, you know, the same thing you're talking about here, right? This is the whole point of the state. It claims to be a security force. It claims to be the protector of its people. That's what Putin is doing in far eastern Ukraine right now. He's claiming to be the protector of ethnic Russian people because he's the Muscovite state over there. And that's the way, you know, that's his so-called mandate of heaven or whatever to his holy writ to protect them.

Just the same as, you know, and I have this quote in my book, where Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident, says, well, how would America feel if America's empire fell and you lost everything west of the Mississippi River? And Mexico retook Texas in the southwest. But then they outlawed the Protestant religions, and they started persecuting the Anglos. And what do you think that the U.S.

government would do. Nothing. Presumably you would still have an Anglo-led government in Washington is what he's saying there, that they might tolerate the loss of Texas for a time. But if the Mexican government that retakes Texas starts really persecuting Protestant Anglos, well, they're going to claim to be our security force and come back down over here. You know, I forgot if his analogy went that far. Maybe it was just, how would you feel if you lost the southwest in this way? And no, I think he does talk about, and the Protestants were persecuted and all that.

people can find the quote in the book, but, um, you know, when people think about, like, the, the communist revolutions that kicked off afterwards, one of the things to keep in mind, it's really important first. So you made a very important point is to remember that every person who is called a communist or a socialist or an anarchist or whatever, all these, you know, scare words before 1917, they'd never seen it in practice. Okay. So these people weren't watching the Hall of DeMore and then, you know, covering it up in the New York Times or something. They'd never seen it. It was all in their heads. And like, you know, this was, I cut those people a little bit of slack, especially for this reason. And this is really important to remember.

At the time, nobody else except for the socialists, were really explaining to them what you were just saying, why these ruling classes are sending all of you millions to go die for something that, you know, again, you have the same religion, you sing the same songs in different dialects on the same holidays. Hey, the kings are all cousins. The kings are all cousins. And then, you know, doing it, like, people are gradually finding out, like, because they want the coal resources in the rural region or something like that. And so, you know, who's explaining this to the average worker, the average guy in the trench? The fact is, back then, it was really only the socialist. They were the only ones with like a story to tell.

And when the fascists, whether, you know, real fascists like Mussolini or just, you know, like the national socialists like Hitler, all these groups came out. That was like, one of the things I think of misconception a lot of people have is that like they think of as fascist and national socialist types as if these were like traditionalist movements, you know, conservative movements. They were not at all conservative movements. These were modernist revolutionary movements who had very little good. to say about the old regimes that were overthrown in World War I. They looked at it the way that the socialists and the communists did. Those are the people that threw us into this. And so we're not going back to that. No, you're not bringing back the Kaiser. You're not bringing back the emperor, you know, anything like that. Hell no. That was not the, you know, they were not looking backwards

in the sense. It was an alternative explanation of who it was that had driven you into those trenches. And, you know, some explanations were truer than others. And some, you know, had more destructive consequences than others, obviously. But that's really important just like to see the, to see the significance of like when things like that happen or in more modern times when we have this just 25 year run of disasters in the war on terror or you have something like the financial crisis that just destroys so many lives to look out there and be like, the average person is not going to go meditate in his room and like. come up with his own original explanation for what caused all of this. He's going to look at the available narratives that are being offered to him, and he's going to choose between the one that sounds the most plausible and maybe the one that serves his interest and his preconceptions the most,

whatever, but he's going to choose between available narratives. And so the importance of, like, providing people with explanations in a really compelling way that they can understand so that when these things happen, they can understand what's happening to them in a way that's not going to lead them down a destructive path is so important, you know. Absolutely. Well, that's what Libertarian Institute.org is about. And speaking of which here, also we got this, just like on my shirt, it's the Scott Horton Academy.

This is, oh, I need to take that provoked thingy down. The Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom is the sponsor of this show. And today, and for the rest of the year, at least, if you use, use the promo code Wormser or just go to Scott Hortonacademy.com slash Wormser. You'll save 20%. So our Christmas discount is over.

This is the day after Christmas here. Our Christmas 20 discount is over. But now David Wormser's all upset because me and Dave Smith did a show attacking him over there. I'm part of the problem. And, well, he's the ruiner of all things good. And so we trashed him and he's upset over there on the Twitter.

So Tom Wood says, monetize your enemy. promo code Wormser for 20% off. And by the way, I just added finally the part one of the Cold War course, Daryl. So I have my, of course, 30-hour course on the Terror Wars. But then part one of the Cold War course, H.W. Bush through Obama, is also about 30 hours. And in fact, I think the Terror Wars one is only 25.

but Bush senior through Obama is 31 hours long is part one of my course on the new Cold War and I'm getting so much great feedback people especially over the holidays are taking road trips and they're listening to Ramsey Baroud and his great presentation on Israel Palestine and all these other things and anyway I'm really excited about it getting lots of great feedback on the Cold War course as well as the Terror War course and all the rest Scottward Academy.com slash Wormser and save some money there and then I got to show you this too just scan that there QR code or go to

Scotthorton.org slash coffee or just click go to Scotthorton.org and click the link there in the right hand margin of the page there and it'll take you there. And it's really good stuff, man. I have some right here. This bag only is this thin because I already drink

some of this stuff. But this is my prop bag. It tastes just like me. Scott Horton Show brand coffee and it's very wonderful. And I get little emails all day long from people buying this stuff, and I see the same names over and over and over again,

people buying it over and over and over again because of how wonderful it is. And we all got to drink coffee, so you might as well drink coffee that supports the anti-war party over here at the Provoked Show. And while I'm at it, too, I got to also share with you. Our great sponsor, Matt Sersely,

and he is the, he writes Agarist Tax Advice. And this is, as it says here, tax planning attorney for small. small businesses and high-income professionals. So if you're trying to do business, you're trying to avoid the taxman. Obviously, the IRS is the greatest enemy of any free person

trying to make a living in this world. And so there's no gimmicks here. This is not some trick where you get to file a zero return and not pay your taxes like Peter Schiff's dad or anything. He died in prison, by the way. No, this guy is a lawyer, and his job is making sure that you pay exactly what you owe and not one penny more than that.

to the scum at the IRS. And so it's the hero, Matt Sersley. I mean, if he's intervening in your life, you're going to consider him that, believe me. Matt Sersley, and he helps support this show because we're anti-war guys, and he's into that. So that's pretty good. And now so I think we should go ahead

take some questions from the crew before we wrap up the show today. I saw one guy was, I believe, referring to my oversimplification about, did I say Mexico taking back the southwest? Okay, just taking it. Yes, paper claims it was Indian territory. But anyway.

And by the way, analogy still stands, God dang it. You know, something I only learned like maybe two, three years ago because I just, it was something that I, like a lot of Americans, I guess, like the Mexican-American War is kind of this background thing in the 19th century. I didn't know Mexico started that war. That kind of changes like the whole, like, the whole, the whole argument you hear now about whose land that is

and whether it's stolen. Like, come on, man. They started the war. Did you know that? That Mexico started the war? Yes. Well, depending on if you accept the border

was the San Jacenno or the Rio Grande. I mean, the border of Texas is now the Rio Grande. At that time, the troops were on the Mexican side of the line deliberately provoking, getting shot at, which was the deal. That's why they called

Abraham Lincoln, Spotty Lincoln, because Lincoln went up there and gave a speech, talking about, now, exactly where were these men standing when they got shot at again? And they went, oh, listen to Abraham Lincoln going on and on about what it matters, which side of the line of soldiers were on where they got shot at. Old Spotty Lincoln, he's such a stickler for details. So, yes, it was highly disputed territory. And, you know, this is fun actually in Howard Zinn, in a people's history. is he has, is this Zachary Taylor?

I think his diaries about, boy, are we doing these people wrong, man, and all that in there. It's been a very long time since I read that. I'm pretty sure. That's who it was. Anyway, let's do some questions. Questions. This guy, he donates and he says he was at America Festival Ben Shapiro called out Daryl, but he did not get a chance to ask him about the Iraq War there.

Let me talk about the Wormsard thing for a second. See, people always blame Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz as well. They should, but see, Wormszer, and even to this day, believes, I mean, he was really the principal author of The Clean Break. And coping with Crumbling States, I think he's the only author of that. But the Clean Break, I mean, it has him and Pearl and Fythe on there. But he's really the guy, I believe, and whatever, Pearl agreed with him, but he wrote it. Anyway, their whole idea for the Iraq war was that the Jordanians would be dominant in Iraq and that the Hashmite king would be able to tell the Iraqi Shia what to do,

and then they would force Hezbollah stop being friends with Iran. They would become allies with Israel and build an oil pipeline to Haifa, become a nightmare for Iran and inspire revolutionary change against the Ayatollah's regime there. And all this was just an absolute crack pipe dream. and it's funny because the guy still insists that the Shiites have to do whatever the Hashemite might say, as Dave Smith said in the show, well, then how come King Abdullah

don't just tell them all to knock it off right now? They can just tell, hey, Hezbollah, you guys be nice to Israel, you have to do what I say, David Wormser said. But, no, that doesn't work. Anyway, oh, this guy asks a good question to you. why didn't the Christmas truce reoccur?

Or I guess here it would be a caller to that. Did they have any Easter trucees or any Halloween truces or any other kind of thing where like the soldiers themselves decided that they wanted to stop fighting and take a little holiday there, get along for a minute? Or this was just it. Yeah, this was it. I mean, the command was very much on guard for it in future years

and made sure it didn't happen. And a lot of the people who were sort of the main people who kicked it off at various points and they considered like most likely to maybe do it again, those people got sent to the front at the Somme at Verdun. They got sent out to the east so they weren't on the Western front, things like that. Yeah. Hey, this guy said he gave Scott Horton flavored coffee to all his, well, branded whatever, coffee to all of his family for Christmas.

That was cool of you. We're appreciative of that. Yeah, that movie Pass a Glory with Kirk Douglas. If people haven't seen that, that's a great one, man. This guy says, I look like Santa. Well, I should put on my Santa hat that my auntie made for me. This is a, I guess it is kind of a Christmas-y-read this shirt. So, yeah.

Here. I would like to offer you a can of soup. This guy says, I'm not sure I get the reference, although I am kind of hungry. Yeah. Nigeria. Donald Trump is bombing Nigeria, Daryl, and of course it occurred to me the same as everyone

that Bill Maher must be really relieved because we all know that the Christians of Nigeria have been utmost in his thoughts lately. and he has just been beset with concern for their fate. So Donald Trump says it's ISIS targets that he's hitting there in Nigeria. And we've had special operations forces, traipsing around Nigeria, especially during late Bush years. I don't really know about Obama times.

But now we've got drones. We've been bomb in Somalia at a higher rate than any time during previous Trump or Obama, or W. Bush, who of course started, but the drone were under him, you know, really cranked up under Obama. But it's been more than 117 times this year in the first year of Trump's second term that America has bombed, not just al-Shabaab,

but also supposedly Islamic state targets there as well. So now they're bomb in Nigeria. And it just occurred to me, Darrell, what do you think of my hypothesis, that this is just a public relations stunt for the Zionists? this just has bar because there's this whole narrative that oh yeah well how come you don't care about this that and the other thing everything in the world that set the gaza strip you know what i heard that there's fighting going on down there in uh nigeria somewhere how come i don't hear you

talking about nigeria all the time so now they've decided to embellish this issue and make a big thing out of it now to the degree that they're actually drone striking people to death over there in the name of this menace that they're really just pretending to care about because they're trying to change the subject from fundamentalist radical Jewish Zionism to fundamentalist radical bin Ladenai jihadi Islam. Is this something that's been done at the request of, or at least in cooperation with the Nigerian government? I don't know.

Okay. Or is this just something we're saying get out of the way we're doing it? Because, I mean, those to me are like somewhat different. No, I don't think so. I don't think they're the same thing. but maybe both not good. But I mean, look, the fact is, like the idea, I do think it's a publicity stunt.

I don't know if it's for that reason, but I think, you know, Trump likes to say things that he knows appeal to a certain part of his base, you know, when he makes noises about the plight of the white South Africans or Christians in various places and here he's actually doing something about it. But it's, you know, you kind of alluded to it. If we really cared about the persecution

and killing of Christians, around the world, we'd be bombing Tel Aviv, so. Yeah. Well, and I'm not calling for that because they got nukes and other reasons, too. There's innocent people that live there. But yes, they are the world's worst human rights abusers by far. And, you know, I had missed this headline, Darrell, but there was a big story in October where a majority of American Jews, I believe it was 55%.

I'm going to shake your ground with this, but I'm pretty sure it was a bare majority of American Jews believed that the Israeli government was guilty of war crimes and was committing war crimes in the war in Gaza. This was in October, so I guess like just on the Eva, the alleged ceasefire, the ostensible ceasefire. And then 40 percent, 40 percent of American Jews say that the Israeli government is guilty of committing genocide. And that is in the Jewish telegraphic agency. and other major publications from October. And I had missed that, but somebody made reference to it in a video or whatever, and I went back and checked.

And I'm solid on the 40%. I'm sorry, I forget now on the bare majority on the war crimes, but whatever, 40% of American Jews. So I don't know exactly what, it's been a while since I read these surveys about what percentage of American Jews call themselves Zionists at all or identify with Israel at all. I know it used to be at least a majority, but it was far from unanimous. I mean, there's like what it was, I believe if you go back 10 years or something,

it's like a third of American Jews said that they didn't identify with Israel at all. It's just another country in the world somewhere. What do they care? They're Americans. They're from wherever they're from. You know what I mean? Whatever city they're from is where they're from, you know, like any other American. Yeah, I mean, that that attitude right there is something that design as propaganda machine has been waging war against for a long time.

I saw a poll just today, actually, which I assume it was from recently. I don't remember the date, but it was British Jews being polled. And it was something crazy, like 87% said that they considered anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitism. And that whole idea, because like the reverse version of that, like another way to say it from the opposite direction, is that the actions of the state of Israel are the collective responsibility of all Jews around the world. And so if you dislike one, you dislike the other, like, that's kind of what they're saying, you know, is they're associating those two things. And, you know, it's, I imagine that that number probably fluctuates, you know, if you were to poll American Jews, how much do you identify the state of Israel on October 8th, 2023, probably get a higher number than you'd get now, you know, or that you would have gotten 10 years ago. So circumstances play a role. But, I mean, you know, that, that idea, the thing that Israel represents, all Jews around the world, that in some, on some level, like, you know, the things that it does are on behalf of the Jews of the world. That's a very dangerous proposition for the Jews who do live

around the world. You know, you saw it in Australia. It's that idea that, you know, those jihadists in Australia who shot all those people at Bondi Beach, they were kind of just taking the Israeli government at its work, that they represent all Jews around the world. If Jews are in Australia, the war in Gaza, just like, you know, if you're there in Tel Aviv. And there's a sort of accepting the premise that the Israeli government puts out. And, you know, it's one that you'd like to see rejected, but, you know, it's a tough thing. The world order is realigning in, in unpredictable ways right now as the nation state starts to, you know, waver a little bit. And people are kind of trying to find new ways to self-identify, you know, as groups. And so, yeah, it's hard to say I was

going to shake out. Yeah, and man, I'm worried about the next economic crash. I was just looking at some numbers where the price to earning ratios and all this, and Warren Buffett is putting some huge percentage of his money in cash right now because he's waiting for everything to completely crash so he can buy it at rock-bottom prices and this kind of thing. I mean, because it's inflationary times. So if you're putting all your money in cash, you're worried about something.

Dude, you see it's in silver is it like $75 or something. Yeah. That's crazy. I remember back in like my, you know, my econ nerd days in the 2000s when I was reading just like these these crappy blog, like nerdy econ nerd blog spot blogs like, you know, in 2004, 2005 predicting the housing crisis and everything, you know, and waiting for that to happen. All these like silver bugs, gold bugs. And as it got up, I think the high back then was like $51 or something. And nobody could believe it. Those are like 1982 numbers. That's crazy. or whatever year it was in that Volker time. And now it's up to 75. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah, and congratulations to all the gold bugs and silver bugs

who've been saving this whole time. It's paid off. But yeah, and then when the next crash comes, I don't know, it might just be 2008 again where it sucks for a lot of people, but overall, fundamentally it's rinse and repeat, or it could be much worse than that. I mean, a lot of people are already feeling on edge,

and right now is the supposed good times before. The big correction comes. So I guess maybe that'll be a topic for another night. But I should let you go and I should let these people go, Darrow. We should. It's Christmas time and people are away from their family because we're so good. But we should let them go back to their family. I should let you go back to yours as well.

And so having Merry Christmas. Thanks for doing the show with me. It's been a great year. And I think we still got one more of these Fridays left in the year. No, January 2nd, I believe. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't think I'm good. What do I got here?

Oh, you're right. What do I know about things? So this is our last show for the year. Yeah, it's in 2026. Absolutely, man. Thank you, Daryl, and thank you, everybody. And now I just got to click the thing. Good night, y'all.

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 Ex and YouTube, and tune in next time for more Provoked.