Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:30 - The Wars Abroad & the War at Home

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Scott & Darryl discuss the shooting of a citizen in her car by ICE agents in Minneapolis on January 7, Trump's unilateral military strike on Venezuela on January 3, including the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, Trump saying, "We're going to run the country" of Venezuela indefinitely going forward, and escalating protests across Iran: will they lead to revolution? **** Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton examine the simultaneous conflicts unfolding domestically and internationally. They tackle pressing issues surrounding law enforcement, immigration policies, and military actions, emphasizing how political allegiance shapes narratives and moral perspectives. The conversation begins with a stark analysis of the recent ICE shooting in Minneapolis, showcasing the polarized reactions from both the left and right. Darryl shares his dismay at how human lives are often devalued in the name of political narratives, stressing the exacerbation of societal unrest stemming from such incidents. He critiques the militarization of policing in America, likening police actions to soldiers in combat rather than community protectors. Transitioning to international affairs, Scott and Darryl shed light on U.S. interventionist policies in Venezuela, scrutinizing the broader implications for all the normal people affected by such geopolitical maneuvers of their governments. They draw parallels between domestic and foreign conflicts, highlighting the troubling trend of dehumanization as a means of justifying violence from both sides of the political spectrum. As the episode unfolds, they confront the desensitization to violence within contemporary discourse, urging listeners to recognize the essential humanity behind the statistics and political debates. The dialogue culminates in a poignant reminder of the impact of violence on individuals, advocating for genuine compassion and reflection amidst a increasingly fractured political landscape. This thought-provoking episode serves as both a critique and a call to action for unity and empathy in the face of ongoing societal divisions. 0:00 Intro 1:00 The Wars Abroad and The War at Home 18:14 The Minneapolis Shooting Incident 25:56 The Militarization of Law Enforcement 40:40 The Impact of Dehumanization 51:57 The Venezuela Situation 1:06:29 The Threat of War with Iran (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, historian Darryl Cooper analyzes current events. 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.

All right, Friday night. Time for the show. I'm Scott Horton. He is Darrell Cooper. I'm from the Academy and the Institute and the Anti-Warra.com and the show and those things. And he is, of course, the great American historian and podcaster,

Martyrmaid. Subscribe.martermade.com to find all of his great, very, very long-form historical studies of wide and varied and important subjects. Welcome. How are you, Darrell? Oh, I've been better. You know, it's been a pretty black-pilling week, man. I'm trying to keep my head up.

But how about you? Crazy times, man. I'll tell you, I guess, you know, we titled this one, The War is Abroad and the War at Home. These are also usually always kind of very intertwined. And or whatever, they're always going on at the same time anyway. So, you know, we could start with Venezuela, but I guess

let's start with the hot news, really, is this shooting in Minneapolis. And, see, I already blew it, but I was going to tell a hilarious joke about how, oh my God, Darrow Cooper has gone from Hitlerian to Marxist because you're not immediately jumping to the side of this cop that shot the lady in the face three times

when that's what you're supposed to do because don't you know you're a right winger? And then that's just as simple as it gets. And I was just Josh and out. It's funny how many people take took this so literally and got mad at me for it. But I put out a tweet that said, look, the objective fact is that if you lean left,

then the ice cop murdered the lady. And if you lean right, then she had it coming. And that's just how it works. And I actually had a lot of people respond that, oh, yeah, well, I'm right wing and I'm against it. I didn't see anyone left wing say that she deserved to be shot or that it was a good shoot or whatever. Anyway, so, but I was trying to be provocative there.

and, you know, the joke being that so much of this, way more than I could have ever really believed, Daryl, that like Obi-Wan Kenobi really was right, that so many of the truths we cling to depends so greatly on our own point of view. And so if you're looking to find where that was a justified shoot, you can, and if opposite, vice versa, obviously it's on the line.

In my opinion, both of them were screwing up pretty bad in the situation, but I'm very interested to hear what you think about the whole thing. And hell, and the reaction to it all. Yeah, so, you know, I went through this same battle with a lot of the same people after the Sonia Massey shooting, that old crazy woman, I don't know what was going on with her. She was on drugs or kind of just having an episode or something with the boiling water. And, you know, I was very, very much, you know,

I was just straight up cold-blooded murder as far as I'm concerned. And so I did battle with a lot of these same people who were trying to defend those cops. And, you know, in this situation, I mean, look, like, I've got law enforcement friends who I don't think we've probably come across one. Few of them didn't like the Massey shooting. But most of them, they're usually sympathetic to the law enforcement side, partly because they were there and those are their friends. And partly because, you know, they do understand the thing that the public doesn't understand, which is that, you know, it can be a harrowing job. and it's very dangerous and it's very sort of, you know, and so they have that mentality.

And I could have those conversations about like the technicalities of like, well, he was technically right here when she went forward and blah, blah, blah, whatever her intent. And those, that's fine. Like, my real, I just want us to step back a little bit for a second and just think about like the scenario overall. And think about like, why do we have dudes kid it out like they're about to invade Fallujah, walking through and rolling through like suburbs in America, really like looking for a fight.

I mean, that's really like this woman, they didn't force her to come there, obviously, but they definitely deliberately escalated that situation when it did not need to be escalated, you know? And like if I'm their supervisor, or if I'm a local police chief and one of my cops discharges his weapon in the middle of a suburb, Like as kids are getting dropped off or picked up, whichever it was,

one it was from school, they're going to get back to the office. I'm going to be like, boy, you better have a, you better have a good reason for why your finger was on that trigger in this place at that time. It better be good. And then you watch that video and it's not good, you know? Even if you think, like, you know, she just, whatever the intent was happening, like her car was moving toward him and he was in danger and therefore he shot. fine, whatever, let a jury decide that as far as I'm concerned.

I just don't like how comfortable we all of a sudden are and have been getting more and more comfortable for a long time with like these paramilitary units just stomping through U.S. neighborhoods, pushing around U.S. citizens and all this kind of stuff. And this is coming from somebody who's as much of an immigration hawk as you're going to find. Like I support deportations. I support all that stuff. Anything you can do, you know, to slow the tide down and reverse some of the illegal

immigration that's come over the years. I'm 100% for all of that. Like anybody who follows me knows that. But the idea that you can't do any of that without having these bullies just stomping around like they're again like they're in the military

in an enemy country is just ridiculous and it's going to lead to more of these situations. I mean it's just it's inevitable. I like I saw another one where thankfully nothing happened but like you know this no doubt like annoying liberal protest lady who I would want to claw my ears out if I had to listen to her talk

about her politics probably fine she like goes and she's you know talk she's trying to she's yelling or I don't know if she was even yelling but she's like at a protest and she's about like three feet four feet from an ice officer like saying something to him and the dude just draws his loaded weapon and like puts it right in her face and she backs away and he puts it away I'm like what the hell what's going on here, dude? You're like, but here's the thing. Real police, like actual, just sort of local police who are not exactly like known for their super high standards of training and recruiting and all that all the time. They don't usually do stuff like that. Like, you don't see them just like putting a gun right in the face of a protester who's not

threatening them or doing anything. You just don't see that kind of stuff. You have these ice people, I don't know if it's because they, they are like, you know, like, like, like, like, like because they of the increase in the mission under the Trump administration, I mean, they've got like recruiting bonuses, tens of thousands of dollars, which tells me like they're trying to just get anybody they can into the ranks to like go out and do the mission, which is what Trump promised. And that's fine as far as it goes. But you can, I think you can start to see like that the level, the standards, you know,

and the level of behavior. And then when you, when you couple that with the kind of rhetoric that's coming out of You know, a lot of people who are currently, like, in power, but then also just people on TV turn on Fox News or just anywhere else, or not anywhere else, I guess, but like conservative news channels, the pro-Trump news channels. And it's become very clear of the last week that they don't really even care what happened. Like, they really don't care what happened.

Like, this shit-lib bitch deserved to get shot because of who she was and because she decided to go there. And that is, you know, the beginning and end of it for a huge number, of these people. Not everybody, not the law enforcement guys I know who always want to get real technical about like what he was seeing from his perspective, whatever, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. Like I, when I first posted about it, I was like ambiguous about like, ambivalent rather about whether the shooting was like legally justifiable. Like I, you know, in the first tweet I put out about it that got everybody so upset. Like I said that like, you know,

legally justifiable or not because it might be, I mean, like, you know, whatever, I don't know exactly what the training protocols are, like any of that. So this was not like some kind of a Sonia Massey shooting where they walk into this woman's house and start screaming at her and shoot her for literally no reason. It wasn't that. But, you know, if you look again at the entirety of the situation,

it is impossible to conclude that they did not create an escalate a situation when it was totally unnecessary, you know? And that part of the, And I don't know how you feel about this, but like, my feeling of it is like, the fact that it happened is not the thing that has really gotten me black pilled this week. Like I look at it as like, you know, look, I mean, you've got this big nationwide push to go around and round people up from their neighborhoods. You know, these people aren't living in illegal immigrant enclaves most of the time. They're distributed around with the citizenry.

And so you got to go through like American citizens, you know, neighborhoods and stuff, looking for these people, doing all this kind of stuff. So you got dudes with guns rolling around doing this and people who want to protest and who don't like it. Like that, it's not surprising to me that something happened. Like that somebody got shot. Like whatever. That's not surprising given like just the scale of the operation, all that.

But man, it's been the way people have been talking about it ever since. You know, it's like, it's, well, you know what, I mean, this is. really the only way to put it. It's like the Israeliification of like the American right. That's really what it is. They're talking like Israelis and they and they justify all of it like right down the line with the same exact rhetoric, the same exact logic and thinking that you hear come out of like IDF spokesman about the Palestinians. I mean it's the exact same. And yeah, it's it's clarifying and it's a little disheartening. But at the same time, honestly, it's a little bit liberating because, you know, you get, I just kind of shed

my last illusion that I have like aside in this political battle in this country. I really don't. And I don't want anything to do with any of these people. And if anybody's listening, I know there's a, you know, probably a libertarian audience and everything, so I don't have to worry about it too much. But if anybody's listening for any other reason and, uh, you know, you think it's, you think it's cool or funny or just like whatever when just some woman who, you know, was picking up or dropping off her kid or whatever and decides to kind of be an annoyance to ice for a few minutes, that she gets shot in the head in a situation like that, then unfollow me, stop listening to my podcast, just piss off.

I don't want to be associated with people like that anymore because it's just, it's really disgusting. It's every bit as bad as what the left was doing after Charlie Kirk's murder. 100%, right down the line. And, you know, Charlie Kirk's murder wasn't being like, I mean, you had like Jesse Waters on Fox News coming out, like, right after everything had happened, like the body wasn't even cold. And he's coming out talking about how, you know, just making sure to point out that she was

like a divorced lesbian, blah, blah, blah, basically all these like things that, you know, is telling you that forget about what happened, but this is who she is and why you shouldn't care that she got shot. Like, that's really like what a lot of the rhetoric coming out of like the right wing media and a lot of people online and even people on the administration to a degree has really been about, not to justify the issue, not to break it. down frame by frame or talk about what the officers training protocols were or anything, but just to dehumanize this woman and say that she's somebody you shouldn't care about that she

got shot, you know, and I just don't want to be a part of that. Yeah, I feel you. You know, I'm used to this because I've been, you know, very anti-government. Guy challenged me today on Twitter when I made a remark about Waco and said, you know, most of the right supported Waco at the time. They were all cool with it, you know? And somebody said, Oh, yeah, right. I think you just make stuff up. What do you know about it? How old were you?

I know a lot about it. I was 16, and I was good on Waco from the very beginning, and I've been like this ever since then, and really I was kind of like this before that, but especially since Waco. And I still remember the very first images I saw of the raid on the every 28th, long, you know, before the fire, which was six weeks later.

And so, yeah, no, I have been at this a very long time, and I remember very well how, you know, I think I've explained this before that. To me, at the time, libertarianism was Reason Magazine, and they didn't care about the branch of idiots, they didn't care about Gulf War illness, they didn't care about the ongoing sanctions and blockade against Iraq or anything that mattered to me at all.

But all my right-wing friends did, including all the militia guys and patriots and conspiracy cooks, like they were really good on everything that mattered to me. So even though Harry Brown and Ron Paul were great on everything, I basically spent in the 90s paling around with right-wingers, even though I was never really cultural, culturally that right wing, at least they cared about the branch of idiots.

That's what mattered to me was that they were anti-government, you know? And I don't mean the right. I mean the crook right, the fringe right in Austin at the time, the militia movement, the patriot movement, the conspiracy theory movement.

And that was who I decided to associate with because they cared about, you know, what I cared about. And then, boy, come 1998, oh man, it turns out we love government, Darrow. You know what the problem is Bill Clinton's cheating on his wife. Didn't I ever tell you that man is of low moral character?

Blah, blah, blah. And for the rest of his presidency, the only problem with the American, imperial state, domestic and foreign, is that Bill Clinton is not a good man. And boy, just wait till Ronald Reagan's son, sorry, George Bush's son comes, and then, boy, are we going to love government again,

and they all came to worship the golden calf. And it didn't matter how many lies he told. It didn't matter. you know, lying them straight into a war. We get attacked by the guy with the beard, and then he invades the country run by the guy with the mustache. And they all supported it, and they all damned people like me

and everybody else who knew better than them, called us gay and communist and anti-American and pro-terrorists. You love terrorism, boy, because that's the only way I can explain to myself why you don't agree with me that we have to attack Iraq as revenge for 9-11. It must be that you love terrorism. And it's just, yeah, exactly, because their guy was in power.

And then when were they anti-war again? When Barack Obama was the commander-in-chief and wanted to lead them into Syria. And they said, no way, not me. I'm anti-war now. And I was like, yay, good. And I've been trying to be a good influence on the right as best as I can that, you know, all this interventionism is very, very bad. But then when it's their guy doing it, then, you know, it just becomes, you know, whatever.

As so many tweets and your mentions and mine say, like, whose side are you on? You're with the Democrats? You know, like on Venezuela to change subject to that real quick, Rand Paul said, look, I'm always against presidents starting wars. Whether it's Obama or Biden or Trump or anybody else, I always say, only Congress can get us into a war. And then the replies are,

you're siding with the Democrats against our leader. And it doesn't matter, you know, exactly the topic. It's just a matter of kind of whose side you're on. And I see this with the cops. You know, I got a big problem with cops shooting people. always have in Austin, right around the turn of the century, there's a whole rash of unarmed guys that were killed by cops. And it was such a big deal at the time. And I understand why to so many people, it's a black and white issue in terms of morality and in terms of like just right and left and

whose side you're on. And a lot of times, even it's a racial thing because it's a white cop and a black guy and questionable circumstances and these kinds of things. And I can just see over and over again the way this plays out is whose side you're on. And there have been times, and all the even say recently, like in the last few months, where I saw a headline and it's a cop shoots a guy and I'm like, hey, good shot. That dude had it coming, man. I saw one, a guy comes out of the store holding a lady hostage gun to her head or maybe a knife to her throat. And the cop shoots him right in the head, point blank range, blows him away at risk to the lady, but good shot. He didn't let the guy get away, whatever, judgment call in the time. That guy

was an absolute immediate threat to this woman's innocent life. Totally cool with that. You know what I mean? I got no problem with that. But I can see where when it's on the line, it's just a matter of whose side that you're on. And like, well, here, let me play this clip real quick, Daryl. And everybody's seeing this. This is the latest clip.

I saw one guy even remark. I thought quite astutely that, interesting, that more, better footage comes out. And still, everybody just doubles down on what they see and what they believe about it. But I'm going to play this real quick. And then I wanted to at least have one or two comments. the two. This is the beginning.

We don't change our plates every morning, just so you know. It'll be the same plate when you come talk to us later. That's fine. You have citizen, former, you guys, you want to come out of? You want to come at us? I said go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead. Out of the car.

Get out of the bunch of car. Get out of the car. Oh! All right. And then, of course, there is other, you know, There is other, you know, third person point of view there that anybody can go on the Twitter and see. But one thing about that that I noticed, and I didn't notice it at first. In fact, you know, someone asked me, well, what do you see here?

And I jotted down some things. I don't know. And I didn't even notice this at first. And I noticed, I have noticed also a lot of other people not noticing this. And I don't know whether they're deliberately omitting it or they're not noticing it. But did you see there that she cranks the wheel to the left and backs up? in order to crank her hood to the right in order to try to clear

to get between him and the truck that's to her right. So she first backs up and then turns to the right, she backs up to the left and then forward to the right. So she's clearly not trying to kill the guy. She's trying to get around him, trying to get away, which she shouldn't have done. As soon

as that guy says, you're detained out of the car, she should have thrown it in park and turned off the key. I mean, anyone could tell you that, don't be stupid. She was not trying to kill the guy and the fact that people say, oh, she hit him, but yeah, like in the sense that he put his hand on the hood and jump back, but he didn't even fall down. And here I want to show you this, too, because I have it right here, this thing. So I admit everyone that I did get this from the

Washington Post. So whatever, I hate them too, you know, but the first shot, you can see he's clear of the tires right here. That's where the first shot is. And for the second and third shot, forget about it. Somebody saying, you know, he had to do this what to stop her. He did not even fall down. He's already clear. He did, in fact, scoot out of the way. And so because she was cranking the wheel to the right. And she did if you watched the video again, she she pulled back to the left, like you're doing a three point turnaround kind of thing. She pulled back into the left and then forward to the right. She was trying to go between him and the truck that was to her right. And so, yeah, I'm sure she would. If you watch how the whole scenario played out,

You know, she was there in the middle of the road, and that first vehicle is coming, and she waves them over to, like, go around her, and her wheels are turned to the left. She wants to go left. Right. There's a car coming. So. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm sorry. Go. And so she waves them past, and they go around her, and she starts to roll forward, and then stops because there's another truck coming, and this is the ice truck I got out of, and then she waves them on and says, go. And instead, they get out of the car. And so I, she says, she, she's obviously trying to leave. I mean, and the people in any, you know, you have like literally, like people in the administration coming out before any of the facts are known, like whatsoever, just calling this, this American citizen a domestic terrorist. She tried to murder him with his vehicle. I just tune people like that out. It's so stupid.

It's so stupid, like, that I'm not even going to address it. You know what I mean? Like, the idea that you will watch that video and come to the conclusion that she was trying to ram that guy is just like we've seen people like during the Floyd riots where there's a line of police cars and an SUV comes barreling in and like drives through and we know what that looks like it doesn't look like this and it's just uh you know yeah like the thing is I wouldn't I don't have a problem with like the very few at this point people on the right who are immigration hawks along with me who you know they say look it sucks you know nobody wants to see something

like that. But did anybody really think that you were going to be able to carry out like the scale of operations that we're all supposedly in support of without these incidents happening, especially when there's protesters? Like this is just, you have to be able to have the determination to push through this stuff and, you know, and keep up the policy. I'm fine with all that. But man, you go through Twitter, go through like, you know, any of the posts that that I put up where, again, like, I'm not even out there calling this guy, murderer, saying that this woman was like, that this was illegally unjustified, shoot necessary,

anything like that. My comment threads are nothing but F this B, she had it coming. I'm happy she's dead. And it's like, there are my mentions telling on you, hey, Scott, your buddy Daryl's gone full communist, retard, whatever, whatever. And I'm like, hey, I don't know, man.

I'm with him on this one. And look, the way you put it in your original tweet was, this is a case of can, not has to. 100%. This is exactly what I've been arguing about this whole time. You know, for a very long time, long before all this Black Lives Matter trendiness and whatever. I did hashtag sovereign immunity and hashtag qualified immunity back years and years ago,

long before all any of the Mike Brown stuff. And, you know, God, I wish William Norman Green was here. Former editor of the John Birch Society's magazine became, you know, the greatest expert and defender of people's rights. on stuff like this. And if he was here, I know he'd be with us and doing a great job.

But it always was that for a person, a regular citizen, you better be able to show that, okay, it was reasonable that you were in fear for your life. But in actual interpretation in court, what that means is you better show that you had no choice

and that if the judge, the jury, were in your situation, they would have also had no choice but to do what you did. And that's maybe not literally the law, but in practice, that's how that works. But if you're a cop, it's, oh, he can. It was over the line in pencil that says

that you can shoot a guy in this situation. I remember after a Mike Brown thing, there was a guy who had been a Ferguson police officer wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post. Sorry, again, the Post, but you got to read the enemy. But anyway, he was a former, Ferguson cop. And he said, you know, here's an example. We got a guy in a house domestic situation.

He's in a room by himself with a knife. And we know he's got a knife. His family says he's in there with a knife. We tell him, come out with a knife and put your hands on top of your head and come out and surrender what you think. And then he doesn't. And then what do they do? They go into the room where they know he's in there with a knife and then they go, oh my God, he's got a knife. And they shoot him dead because they can because they're hunting men. And they're, and they're This is their chance to kill somebody. And people try to play that down like, oh, that's not true, but yet is to. It's the same reason why American and Australian Special Forces guys went and murdered prisoners

in Afghanistan. You don't go all the way to a war zone and not get wet. You don't go over there to stand around and not get a chance to fight. And it's the same thing here. And, you know, you talk about the militarization. This has been going on since the war on drugs. Talk about the Waco masker. Why were they able to get the National Guard to give them human,

helicopters and M-16s to raid the branch of dividends with because they pretended it was a meth lab in there. They pretended that there was a nexus to drugs. And since Ronald Reagan, especially since Nixon, really good, especially Reagan, they had been militarizing. And they have the Department of Defense and the Homeland Security 1033 program to give all so-called surplus military equipment

to counties and cities across the country. There was a report back, I don't know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago called militarizing Mayberry about how every sheriff's department has to have an armored personnel carrier. And in many cases, now MRAPs, the giant, you know, IED-resistant V-Hull, you know, massive armored personnel carriers, full militarized SWAT gear and training for everyone, regardless of whether it's necessary or not.

And so then by the time we get to all this vast new ice force brought out for this, you know, immigration thing, this kind of mindset and paramilitary type mindset has existed in policing for a generation now. There's nothing unique about that old Norman Rockwell police officer kind of image. That thing is just over. And so they're already basically,

you know, paramilitary force by when they're even created. And then I think this is a big key, and I don't have any proof of this, but it seems to me very likely the answer to your question about why they're cracking skulls the way that they are and acting so aggressively is because they're actually very narrowly focused on just felons, and they've already Trump announced

from the very beginning that illegal immigrants can stay if they're working in hotels or in agriculture. Yeah, in other words, they can stay. He's only going after, he's not going after the tens of millions of the mass migrants of everybody that Joe Biden let in and that Obama let in and all that when the border's wide open. He's not telling them they got to leave. He's not denaturalizing citizens and putting them on planes.

He's only going after the felons. And that's tens of thousands. That's not millions of people. That's, you know, maybe low hundreds of thousands, max or something. And that's all they're doing. So they're making a big show of it in order to satisfy their base that they're actually doing something. When the last thing in the world they're going to do is actually get rid of all that cheap labor. Because that's what this is about.

Half of it is a conspiracy to import Democrat voters and bribe them with welfare and all that. The other half is big business wants, you know, to relieve upward pressure on wages. And these are inflationary times, my friend. And they need those illegal immigrants for those jobs because Americans will charge too much to do them. And it's a huge part of it. And again, you start with inflationary money and then trace the economic and political and social consequences, you know, for 100 miles in every direction. It's the heart of everything that's wrong with the society.

God damn corrupt money system. But anyway, you said something that was like, it was about one half of something that I saw a clip of Nick Fuente saying the other day of this was before this shooting happened, like right before it happened. But he was talking about these ice raids and how these things are, you know,

we talk about security theater at airports and stuff post 9-11. This is, you know, he put it very well. He said, this is just performative cruelty to make you feel like something's being done to people you don't like. That's right. But nothing's actually being done.

They're not doing all the things that we wanted them to do, like, when we elected them. But they're doing this, and that, you know, it tickles your jimmies, and so you like it. And, you know, I just think like, and I know this is a freaking pipe dream post-drug war, post-9-11, and now and everything. I get it. I'm, you know, it just, I'm talking about a fantasy. But, like, you know, we have this, like, very strange mentality when it comes to police now where, you know, certain things have been normalized that even though it's kind of been like that for a while. was not normalized for like the average person in terms of how they how they, you really had to, like, they had to really go out of their way to demonize the branch of Vidians and show them to be

these Jim Jones, psycho freaks that like, if we don't stop them, why, you know, just, they really had to like, downtown wake. Yeah, and like, yeah, exactly. And like, you know, and sort of similar to how, you know, I made the point I think in one of our earlier episodes about just watching all the stuff that's going down like weekly, daily in Gaza and the West Bank and everything. How, you know, back in 2004, when Abu Ghraib came out, it's like, you know, you had like, um, like, yeah, we did it. So like, you can say that like, that's a dark, you know, the fact that that we committed that crime was, was, you know, sort of a dark chapter. But normal people, most people were genuinely horrified by that. They saw those pictures and they didn't, they were like, the question they were asking was not even

what, you know, what are we doing to those people? They were thinking, what are we doing to our own people that, like, that's come to this, you know? What are we sending them over there, like some 19-year-old to go participate in? And that's the right question. And nowadays, like, you know, again, to talk about that example, like, people watching Abu Ghraib every other day, you know, live stream from Gaza, nobody cares.

And it's just like with this, like, you should have, like, to have the mentality that, like, you're going to take a guy or a girl, and say, we're going to give you a gun. And you're allowed to go into our neighborhoods, into our houses, if you determine it's necessary. You're allowed to stop us when we're driving. And you're allowed to demand information, demand searches, or whatever. And you're even allowed to kill people if it comes down to it. You're allowed to kill us with this gun.

We're giving you if it comes down to it. Then, man, if you don't have that almost like as a sort of nightly, you know, like, sacred order of like warrior monks or something. I mean, you're just, you're going to get what we got now. And we just, you know, people don't hold the police to any standards anymore. You know, it's just like you go, it's like you said. Like partially it's, I mean, it's a different way of looking at what you said, I guess. You said like it depends on which way you lean, you lean politically. It's like the flip side of that is it depends on who got killed. Like that's really what it comes down for a lot of people, you know? And like, uh, whom? That's what, how Stalin is. That's what, how Stalin

put it, right? Or Lenin? Yeah. Yeah. Who or whom? Exactly. And like, it's, yeah, it's very disheartening, man. And it's like, our, you know what, you know what happened is, well, there's a couple things. So like, back in, I don't know, 0405 when I was still in the military, I was down San Diego station. And my roommate and I, one of our friends, would always bother us to, he wanted us to go out to this bar

on like a Friday night with him or whatever because it was a karaoke place and he wanted to do he did karaoke down there he wanted us to come and like watch him do karaoke whatever I'm not a bar guy my roommate was in a bar guy but he just kept pestering us so we're like all right fine let's free can go to the bar and so I'm in like basketball shorts

and you know a hoodie and flip flops or something so is my roommate and we go down there and we get there and it is like just a complete sausage fest of dudes in like black misfit shirts, black boots, like spiked belts, you know, and all that kind of stuff. We stand out like sore thumbs. And so, and we don't really want to be there in the first place. And so me and my roommate, we go kind of post up at this table kind of near the bar. I'm not drinking

because I'm the designated driver. My buddies, my roommate's not drinking because, you know, he had recently, they found a blood clot behind his eyes. So they had him on this blood thinner medication that was like made alcohol just a non-starter. And so we're sitting over there. drinking, you know, sparkling water or whatever, watching us go on. And my buddy is, you know, he, oh, yes. So the guy who brought us, he had brought along another guy that we didn't know. He was this Marine from Pendleton. It was maybe like 5-6, 5-7, but like 220, muscled up, you know,

shaved head tribal tattoo, kind of due mid-2000s, you know, Pendleton Marine. And the whole way to the bar, it's, man, I hope somebody's, start some shit today. Like I could kick somebody's ass. I would love to kick somebody's. I hope somebody starts some shit, you know. And he's still talking like this when we get to the bar. And so we get there and we're hoping that my buddy does is karaoke in the first half hour and we can get the hell out of there or whatever. But it doesn't turn out that way. And it's 12 o'clock. And it's 1 a.m. And it's 1.30.m. He still hasn't gone. Everybody's in there getting hammered. And because this is a big sausage fast at a place like this, like you're starting the tension is starting to rise. A fight kind of starts

kick off over here, some pushing and shoving over there, and like it's starting to just, and my buddy, who brought us there, who's this big gorilla, like, vaguely Samoan-looking dude with just this completely, like, unprofessionally fixed, jagged scar, like, across his face from, like, an early life dog attack, 230-pound, big dude. But the sweetest, nicest, most friendly guy, would never heard a fly that you've ever seen. but he's afraid that if this, you know, if fights jump off and things get all crazy in here, that he's not going to get his chance to do karaoke

because they're going to shut the place down. And so he's going around and putting himself between, like everybody that starts pushing some, hey, guys, like, let's chill, man, we're all friends, doing that whole routine, you know? And he's doing this all night, and it gets to the point where he has pissed off everybody in the bar. And all of them, like, people are literally going up on stage to sing,

and they're pointing over at our little group, and talking mad smack, insulting us, like, oh, threatening us, all this kind of stuff from the stage, right? And so we're like, all right. So at about 1.30, we start to realize, like, he's still so far down the list. He's not going to even get to do his song.

And it's getting pretty heated in there at this point. And so me and my roommate were like, yo, we're leaving, and you're leaving too. Let's freaking go. And so we grab him and we grab this Marine, we go outside. But we get followed out by like 15, 20 of these guys. And their leader, whatever, the boldest one among them, I guess,

goes and just gets. like right up in my friend's face, the one who brought us there, and he's screaming at him, blah, blah, blah. And my buddy is an idiot. He's drunk and he's just not a fighty guy. And so he's got his hands up. Like, he's like, hey, man, you know, chill out. Like, what's going on, ball?

And this guy is just, these guys are clearly not walking away from this without a fight. Like, they're here to beat us up. And so I position myself kind of like, you know, they're here like face to face. And I position myself, like, right next to my buddy kind of within arm's reach of this guy to try to react anything he does, but that doesn't work. He goes like mid-sentence, you know, like he's going to say something and then just cocks back and just cracks my buddy, like right in the face and sends him flying back. He hits his head on the concrete and kind of gets knocked out and wobbled for a second.

I grabbed this guy, throw him down on the ground and like start hitting him. His people come around and start punching and kicking at me and stuff. And like a whole big thing happens. And, you know, there are four of us and 15 to 20 of them and we gave better than we got. So we got pretty lucky there. But afterwards, we were doing a sort of after-action debrief or whatever, you know, talking about what happened. My one buddy, the one who got hit, he was sort of out of the fight because by the time he got his act together, it was, you know, it was all over with. My roommate, the one with on blood thinner medication that, like the doctors are telling him that if you get any kind of a small cut anywhere in your body at all rushed to the hospital, he rushed into the fray and starts throwing punches.

is in there as soon as I got surrounded, this freaking Marine, and I love Marines, I know most you aren't like this, he, not only did he not participate after all crap he was talking, he like retreated back behind this line of bouncers from another bar to like, you know, keep his distance from it. And so afterwards, we're like, what the hell?

And he, his excuse was, well, you know, I had heard that in places like this, like sometimes those guys carry around AIDS-infected needles to stab people with during fights. needless to say that did not fly and he never showed his face around us again that's a long story to get around to my point of like the point of that that story is the marine man there are a ton of those guys like all over the online right now we're talking all this crap who when it comes down to people who have never seen blood in their lives who would piss their pants if they saw somebody

get shot in front of them. And it's just all this kind of overcompensation, you know, and you take that and you couple it with the fact that the online, like the social media environment, and we knew this like long before even like Trump was elected, people were already writing about this, how, you know, the way people talk to each other on there is just like road rage 24-7. Like you would never ever speak to a person in an elevator like that, no matter how angry you were at them, even if you weren't afraid of them physically. Like, you. you wouldn't talk to somebody like that, but in your car, they'll just say whatever, right? Because they're in this little weird bubble.

And online is just like that. It's just that's how all online discourse is, like on social media. And since so much of our politics now takes place in that environment, it's just made like our politics, like one big road rage, you know, fest. That's just all it is. and people operating from that mindset with just, you know, no sense of like the reality of the situation that they're talking about.

You know, they see this woman get shot. They see a Palestinian kid get blown up or whatever it is. And it's just, it might as well have been like, you know, a zombie from 28 days later that got shot. You know, it's just, it's completely dehumanized, completely distant, just something that takes place on screen content. And it's absolutely freaking poisonous

to our minds, to our souls, like, to our body politic for sure. And, you know, I just, I don't want to get all preachy about it, but I would just say to people, anybody out there who starts to, like, you just consider, consider the effect that, like, this will have on you, like, long term. Like, if you get, like, you don't want to get to a point where you can watch a woman get shot in the head for any regard. reason. I don't, like, even if she was running at the guy with a gun, if you see this woman

get shot in the head, you should still have like the, you should, you should have like, maybe you say, thank God he's all right, but you're like, man, like, what happened in her life that, like, got her to a point where like, this is how things went, you know, this is, this sucks, you know? And if you find yourself getting to a point, you can watch that and feel nothing or, you know, even worse, but a lot of people are at least maybe I think a lot of pretending, but like, where you feel like a, like a satisfaction from that, you just got to consider that that is real soul rot, and that is going to catch up with you.

And it feels good now when it's like a political thing or whatever, but it's going to bleed over into the rest of your life and the way you think and talk and feel about other things. And I just, you know, it's really, really difficult in this day and age to maintain any dignity and just any sense of like propriety and class and just to preserve yourself as like a, you know, it's just preserve your dignity at all and participate in politics in the state that it's in now.

It's really, really hard to do. And, you know, there's a great book by Matt Taibi called Hate, Inc. And it's about how, you know, they used to have to play it down the line, the newspapers, the TV, because they're trying to keep the broadest audience possible. And that meant, of course, very much the centrist establishment point of view and, you know, barely cross the right of the left ever.

but then Fox News really pioneered that actually we don't need the center, we just need the Republicans, we need old people to buy gold and we'll just focus on them. And that was really the model of Fox News beginning in the late 1990s there. And then that just became the model of all media,

where essentially every media hero is your only savior, the only one who can tell you the truth and save you from the evil enemy, the people, and whatever. It's like the prison planetification of all of media. You know what I mean? Where everybody is kind of making themselves their own little David Koresh, the only person that you can trust.

So see you back here, you know, next time tomorrow, whatever, for the same thing. And then it's always the enemy them. And you never even get, like the right wingers won't ever show you what the left wingers will say. They'll just tell you what the left wingers say. And vice versa, too. But you know what the right wingers are saying today? They're saying this and they're saying that. It's never really a direct quote.

And they never really show you what the other side is saying. They just characterize it for you and this kind of thing. And it's just, it's going completely well. And so you have these silos, right, where, you know, you have the people who know of and really appreciate what you and I do. And then you have the people who've never heard of us and never are going to either. You know what I mean? Won't have to ever, you know, confront this point of view because they won't ever be exposed to it. So it's a really good book.

And speaking of Matt Tjibi, just to wrap up this subject, I wanted to point out that he has a piece on his substack today. That's five different times where five different cases where a cop show. shot into a moving vehicle and the different standards and decisions and court takes and whatever. And of course, qualified immunity has a lot to do with it. But this has happened quite a few times before. And then he interviewed a cop, an expert for the thing who says that, you know, I guess essentially in virtually every department, they're trained to not stand in front of a car or behind one either,

but definitely not in front of one. And he was actually standing there like he's going to stop her. like she wouldn't dare to move as long as I'm standing here. But then now he puts himself in danger and now he gets to pull the gun. And everyone in my comments says, she moved. All of them start the clock at the point where she moved. None of them start the clock where this idiot cop stood in front of her.

You know, and even when she's clearly trying to get between him and the truck, he's not, you know, one guy was saying, I had said, he jumped in front of her truck. Later turned out, he mozied his slow-ass way in front of her truck. meaning he had even, and they're calling me out for that. He didn't jump in front of track. Yeah, in fact, he had even more time to move out of the way than I had originally thought. But anyway, I thought that was important that here, actual cops are talking to Taibi and saying,

actually, we're trained to not do that. Why? Because it's completely stupid to do that. Put yourself in front of even a Honda pilot will break your bones, man. We'll give you an excuse to shoot a lady three times. That's what it will do. All right. By the way, like,

Oh, go ahead, go ahead. Before we wrap this particular topic up, like, you want to say, like, I was in public defending Kyle Rittenhouse, like, the day after the shooting that he was involved with. I was, I watched the whole Derek Chauvin trial. I said from day one that I thought he was getting railroaded,

and I still think that, whatever you think of, like, what happened there, the idea that that was second-degree murders, completely absurd, in my opinion. And I said that publicly long before it was freaking cool, and long before most conservatives were like brave enough to open their mouths about it. I try to call these things basically as I see them. You know, like I think that in those two cases, you know, the shooter was either justified in Rittenhouse's case or, you know, that Chauvin was acting accordance with his training and that he didn't get a fair trial.

But, you know, I see the Sonia Massey thing, and I think those cops murdered that woman. And I see this, and I don't say that the cop murdered the woman, but I see this. say that the cops, you know, through their attitude and their approach to the whole situation created and escalated a situation that didn't have to happen, you know? And yeah, apparently, you know, that makes me a commie. Although I did get one person who, uh, who, who, who they were dead serious too, because at first I wasn't sure. They were like, oh, of course the Nazi lover, you know, is siding with the violent terrorist who's attacking law enforcement in like the, I'm like, oh, yeah, the Nazi.

is obviously supporting the woman trying to obstruct the guy who's trying to throw the undesirables out of the country. Whatever. They're mad at you for a reason, and this is going to meld with that somehow. There's all one big thing. All right. Well, here, so let me tell everybody real quick about Matt Sersely. If you're trying to run a business and trying to not get completely hung out to dry,

you know, wrung out all the way dry, I guess, by the IRS. This is your guy. Tax planning and attorney for small business. businesses and high-income professionals. He's not an accountant. He is an attorney. And there's no gimmicks here. There's no special Irwin shift coat to not have to pay your taxes.

But this is how to pay only what you absolutely have to. And not a penny more. And all the actual legal ways to avoid taxes that you can do and all of those things. So he's a very anti-government guy just like you. And he wants to help you. That is Matt Sersley at Agarist. tax advice. And then also this next segment is brought to you by Moondos Artisan Coffee. Get yourself a shot of that QR code. We really get

emails all day long from all the repeat customers coming back and drinking this stuff. It's the best coffee. It really is so good. And I'm not just saying that because he sends me it by the truckload and drink it all day long. It's very good stuff. Scott Horton flavored coffee. If you like the taste of me in the morning. And then Scott Horton Academy. This is where you go to learn lots of stuff. Is Scott Horton slowed down so you can catch up?

That's what Tom Woods says. And it's all my courses on the terror wars and the Cold War in eastern Ukraine and everything. Man, the Boston bombing and Iran's nuclear program and everything in the whole world you ever want to know. Bill Clinton and George Bush's support for suicide bombers in Chechnya. Lots of great fun. Man, you just go and sign up for the Scott Horton. Academy of Scottwardacademy.com. So, okay, that's all the business.

Now, we got to talk about these warsmen. The Venezuela thing, we talked about this on the show numerous times. In fact, what, two weeks ago, the show was about how I felt like such a jackass for getting the day wrong and saying on Twitter, hey, everybody called the White House today when it wasn't going to be for like nine more days, Daryl, that they did the thing, whatever it was. I don't count good. But a point being that we had also talked about.

about the potentiality of how it would go down. And there was that big New York Times article that said, well, they might send in the infantry, or they might try to get a lucky drone strike or something, or they might send in a special operations team on a night raid to nab the guy. I'm pretty sure if you check the archives, we had raised that possibility on the show based on that New York Times reporting. And I hope, I think, I remember saying that that sounds actually plausible, right?

Like, these guys do know how to do a night raid going there and grab the guy. It was about as successful as a night raid like that could be. They got the president and his wife. But then it's not a regime change. It's just a president change. And it's so funny, again, we're just using our Twitter mentions as a foil all night here on the show. But in my Twitter mentions, it was, we had to do this because Maduro's a commie and we can't suffer commies. And then the next day, Trump announces that, yeah, we're keeping the vice president.

Welcome to the warm embrace of collectivism. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to keep the exact same regime in charge, only instead of the mustache, we're going to have this lady now. And she's going to do exactly as she's told her. She'll suffer a face worse than Maduro's. He threatened to kill the lady, Daryl.

And then so it looks like they're going forward with her trying to give in and please the White House as best as she can. What did you think is going to do? yeah in one of his interviews or press comments whatever it was he was answering questions he said that maduro has killed millions of people i'm like did he say that yes i'll say it to you he said it's like what are we even talking about man it's like look on one hand he was thinking of baroque obama probably maybe on one hand um you know like what it looks like to me like i'm sure like

you know whatever they'll make uh or it wasn't navy seals so maybe they won't make a movie about it this time, sorry, Jocko, but like, you know, they probably, they probably will. And it would be this zero dark, dirty like that, you know, really awesome like thing of how they pulled it off. I'm skeptical, honestly, that whole, whole idea. Like, it looks a lot to me, like, they cut a deal with his underlings to get him out of there. I mean, when you see those big old Chinook helicopters, like, you don't need air defense for that. And RPG will take one of those things out. And it's, like, damn near impossible to miss it. Like, when you see them just rolling right into the middle of Caracas with no resistance or anything like that.

I just find it, you know, the stand-down order or whatever might have not made it down to like every one of his bodyguards or something. So like there were shots fired and all that kind of thing. But it looks a lot to me like what probably happened with the Osama bin Laden thing too, you know, where he got, he probably got sold out and we walked in and did a prison execution base. Absolutely. you know and I know for a fact that Keani knew about that there was no surprise raid there yeah yeah exactly I'm absolutely welcome guess I can walk in who turned him over not a torture victim right yeah exactly and like um that's what I could be wrong that's definitely what it seems like to me here like and you know there's gonna be a big mythology built up around like just the raid and whatever but like uh you know it's just

it seems less like me so on one hand like when I hear that. I'm like, well, it's better than like a regime changed war. You know, if you listen to like General Zinney, who, I think he was, I think he was he was sent on back in late

90s. And he was like after the 1998 airstrikes that Clinton launched. You know, he wrote in his book about how we had like a lot of intelligence that Saddam was like executing some of his generals in like really high place like people who were his supporters, just all these signs that, like, those, after those strikes, like,

his regime was unstaked. Like, he, he was paranoid. He was killing people who were big and important and he felt threatened by. And that we could have found a way in Zinney's opinion, or maybe we could have found a way at least, to get him out of there without having to send in, like, you know, our infantry divisions, you know, find a general in there who, yeah, maybe he's a bathist like, you know, a guy who's, you know, a gnarly dude, but... And they did try that 95 and 96 to no avail. Well, but yeah, but his point was that after the airstrikes in 98, like that the regime was really unstable. And like, we might have been able to pull something like that off.

And so, and I, when I read the book, I was like, wow, yeah, that would have been a much better idea. And when I see the, the Venezuela thing where that seems to be what has happened, you know, better than the alternative, better than like the deep actification or denomination or denotification, whatever, Venezuela. And, like, so far, anyway, imposing this ridiculous, like, outside regime with no popular purchase among the popular, like, with the people who live there that's just going to, like, reinstate, like, the old oligarchic model that, like, the people revolted against in the first place.

It's better than that. And if it works out, like, I haven't said too much really critically about the Venezuela thing, because if it works out, you know, whatever I have to say. about it is going to, it's really, it's going to fall on deaf years, like, among people who are like, and part of that is because, like, people are judging it. I'm not talking about, like, people watching this podcast. I'm talking about just normies, you know, who are kind of getting their news from the standard sources and kind of, you know, paying half attention. Like, everything is kind of perceived relatively. So they're seeing the Venezuela thing in the context of Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.

And what they're seeing is Trump pulled off the thing that all these other people promised to do and failed to do. Like he actually did it. And if the whole thing doesn't fall apart, which, you know, knock on wood, I hope it doesn't, then it's going to be really, really hard to say that that was not like a successful operation, regardless of how you feel about, like, U.S. imperialism and all that. That's kind of a separate issue. But in terms of talking to like normies who don't think about that kind of stuff, you know, they're just happy that we seem to have pulled off.

we got rid of a dictator and no Americans are dead. And we haven't like completely overturned and destroyed this society that we got involved with. It's only 30% of people support it. And, you know, regardless of how, you know, apparently quick and easy, the first stage of the thing was. But, no, I disagree. I think, and look, I'm not a philosopher.

I saw some guy in my comments that I need to read faux cult. Like, whatever, dude, like, whatever that is. Like, I can't, yeah, I don't. You want to sit here and argue. like the deepest Jeffersonian philosophy versus Carl Schmidt and the basis of law and constitutional order and the will to power and the sovereign exception and all this crap.

Like, what can I tell you, dude? I didn't really go to college. I dropped out of junior college after a couple of years. I had good grades, but it was, yeah, whatever. I don't really know about like all of that. But I know that the founders of this country and particularly James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution,

wanted it set up to where the president as the man, the person, the agency, most interested in having war, should not have the power to decide whether to get into one. Only the legislature should be able to do that. And so I'm pretty sure the Constitution even provides for, or at least it's implied in another section

that, of course, the president has the right to repel an attack. But to start a war, he has to go to the U.S. Congress and only they can give him authorization. to go to war. And people say, well, this wasn't a war where, well, it turned out to be quicker and easier so far than it looked, but it's absolutely an act of war to invade a nation with military force and kidnap their sovereign leader. Give me a break.

And contra to even your original tweet, which I think specified in a lot of the guys on the right in the last week, we're specifying the international law is a joke because there is no one world government except for the U.S. government. And, of course, it can break the law whenever it feels like it. And so they're international law. Well, that's just gay. That's like saying George Bush shouldn't go to Iraq unless he gets France and Russia and the baby blue United Nations to agree on a multilateral task force to go and do the thing or whatever.

But that's not what anyone was saying, right? What they were saying was on the most basic level. The UN Charter is a treaty. And by ratifying it, the U.S. government promised not to attack other sovereign nations. that's one of the major precepts of the UN Charter, and it's one where we will invade your country. If Iraq invades Kuwait, we reserve the right to invade Iraq, then,

to reverse that violation of the UN Charter and crossing of sovereign borders in that way. But we can do it. Why? Because we're lawless cops, right? We're the one world government, so we could break the law. We could shoot the lady right in the face.

You do whatever we want. And so you can say, like, okay, so that's true sovereign, power, I know, or in McIntyre is essentially saying, like, yeah, it is a living constitution, turns out, how do you like that, liberals? Turns out Donald Trump can start a war if he wants. If Barack Obama can, well, then of course, Donald Trump can as well, except that's not supposed to be the standard, whatever Barack Obama got away with. It was supposed to be the standard is the constitutional law. And Trump's oath to faithfully execute that law. It's the only, you know,

on that condition, he was allowed to sit in that chair in the first place call any of these shots. In his interview at the New York Times, he said, nothing limits me except my own will and my own morality is the only limit on my power. And it should be very easy to explain that, you know, what is it, what do you call somebody who breaks the law, a criminal? Even if he's a Republican and you voted Republican because Kamala Harris was such a homo or whatever, the president doesn't have the right to break the law. that's why we call him Mr. President,

not your highness, his royal majesty. Yeah, my tweet was like misunderstood, maybe partially my own fall. I don't know. Like, what I was really talking about was the messaging, you know, and how to, like, well, I was referring to that a bit too, right? Like, no one was saying, in the case of Iraq War II, a bunch of Democrats were saying,

you've got to get France and the United Nations to agree so that it's multilateral or way. Well, you know what I mean? Which is, I agree. Like, that is very. democratic sounding, very like whatever, you want to call it wimpy or feminine or a weak argument against American action, right? You're asking the French to agree or something like that.

But it ought to be able, it is the law that you're not allowed to just start a war. Yeah. Right? And the law is supposed to be important to conservatives, I thought. Yeah, I mean, you didn't think that, though. How, like, when was the last time you thought that? I don't know. Like, Tucker made this point.

But when Democrats were in power. When his, in his, in his, Tucker had an excellent. opening monologue and interview with Megan Kelly the other day. And in the monologue he's talking about like, you know, okay, we've maybe been on empire for a long time, but now we're going around and being like, we're invading this country and taking their oil. And like, we are an empire, like mask off.

Like, this is how we're operating now. And that, you know, the point he made is like, you can like that or not, but that's the reality that we're living in now. And there's not a whole lot of use crying over spilled milk. Like we need to, if this is how it's going to be, then we need to make sure that, you know, we try to put guardrails on this thing and try to make sure it's shaped in a way that, that serves the imperial core rather than, you know, he goes through this whole thing.

But like, Empire's hard to say. But his point, one of the points he made is that when you, and this is, again, this isn't start with Trump. This goes back a long time. If you look at empires throughout history, the legislature becomes less and less and less important as time goes on. Like, everything devolves to the executive, and we are 100% then. And it's just amplified by the fact that, like, you know, at least in the past, Congress had some sort of, like, you know, sense of territorialism when it came to their power, you know.

And now it's just a complete opposite, because the people that are in there are in there for completely different reasons, for the most part. And they're happy to not have to put their name on whatever it is that, like, the security apparatus. wants to do this week. They like keeping their options open so they can say I never voted for this. And, you know, I mean, they did that even with the Iraq war, like trying to make it seem like

voting for the authorization of the use of force was not voting for war. Like, my name's not on this. They love this. They don't want the responsibility. And, you know, it's, when you become an empire, yeah, there you go.

Like, that's just something that happens and this is where we're at. And like, we can not like that, but I'm not aware of, of any example in history where anything like that has been rolled back voluntarily, because we all decided it was bad idea collectively or something.

Well, I agree with that. Yeah. I mean, look, so this is the whole thing is, so this is by Justin Romando, this article, Rise of Empire, and he's talking about this book, Ex-America by Garrett Gorette, which is actually the reprint of the People's Potage.

And the People's Potage is made up of three sections. It's, the Revolution Was, is about FDR and the New Deals. overthrowing the Constitution, the revolution from within in the New Deal. And then is ex-America is the middle chapter about what America had become as a consequence of the New Deal and the World War. And then Rise of Empire is the third section. And what he talks about in here is how, and he's such a great writer, too, is why Justin Ramondo loved him so much.

He was such a brilliant guy with the pros and all of that, that he says, and I'll end up ruining the quote here, since I'm not paging fast enough to find it, that he says that in the case of imperialism versus a Republican form of government, that there is eternal enmity and that one must forbid or it will destroy the other. In other words, if the republic does not forbid the rise of empire, then empire will destroy the republic. And that that was what had happened to us.

And he has all these great quips. He says the Constitution says the Congress of the power to declare war. That, therefore, was the one thing no president could do. By his own will, he could not declare war. And Congress could be trusted never to do it, but by the will of the people, or so they believed. And then he talks about, of course, how it really is Roosevelt who led the overthrow of all that. But I highly recommend when I went and did the Tucker Carlson show,

I brought him an original copy, original printing of the People's Potage by Garrett. And I highly recommend that people read this because, you know, FDR truly is the founder. I mean, never mind, I mentioned James Madison before. FDR is truly the creator of the modern American empire. And that's a hell of a lot of the reason of what's wrong with America today is we have this massive foreign empire that mandates a domestic empire as well as Keith Knight's book is called Domestic Imperialism.

And as Garrett Gress does in there, I think it's his second mark of empire, is that foreign policy dominates domestic policy. Because whatever your complaint is, don't you know there's a war on? It's a national emergency. And that means all the states must answer to the federal government. They must control the money supply. They must regulate big business. They must have a national industrial plan.

They must essentially create what William Matt Buckley called. a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Truman at the reins of it all, in the name of holding back the Soviet Union, and then now, of course, in the name of holding back whatever they don't like. Yeah, and it's ironic that a lot of the people who are cheering this on call themselves nationalists because, I mean, if we've learned one thing, like throughout history, you can have a nation or you can have an empire, you cannot have both. They are absolutely incompatible because once you're an empire,

the entire world has a stake in how your country's run, what you're doing, government does all those things. And you are just another subject. Like that has just happened in Rome. And those people, those Romans, they were infinitely more like sort of identity conscious of like who they were as the Romans and superior to the other people. They were infinitely more that way than we are today. And it got to them, you know, because it gets to everybody. You run an empire like that and it gets to every, it gets to everybody. And look what everybody knows. Look at what the argument is all day on Twitter. Who controls Washington, D.C.? Is it Israel or is it Qatar or is it London? Right? Nobody thinks it's the American people. We have nothing to do with it. It's an imperial court. And so, yeah,

as long as you're an empire, you're never going to have a limited republic. You cannot have it both ways. And I like, you support, like, the U.S. being an empire and you want, like, a, like an ethnically pure, like, you know, deportation policy. That's not happening. Those two things have never gone together, ever in history. And they're not going to go together now. You can pick one of the world. Invade the world, invite the world.

That's what they say, you know? Yeah, we don't even have time to get into the other war that is probably about to kick off. Maybe by next week it will have. Yeah. I mean, you mean Iran? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they are threatening.

There's huge riots going on. They've got 40-something percent inflation since the war and all the sanctions regime. so the massive inflation riots in the street. You got Kurds chanting for the return of the Shaw. You know, who knows what kind of CIA and Assad shenanigans in there. The Ayatollah's, you know, threatening to crack down, swear that he's not going anywhere. And Trump is threatening to kill him. If he kills any more protests, they've already killed like 40 or something supposedly is the number.

I don't know. But they've killed something in cracking down on the protests. And Trump is threatening of all the phony pretexts. pretext for war, can you imagine, threatening, you know, regime change in Iran? And then at the same time, he's threatening to start up the war against the cartels in Mexico. He's threatening to take Greenland, or at least bribe the people of Greenland to come to the United States and all of this. And then, of course, Cuba, by depriving, you know, Cuba of oil revenue, they were already musing out loud about, boy, if I was the Cubans or the Colombians, I'd be looking out. I don't know if you saw this. Trump threatened the leader of Colombia and then invited him to the White House.

So there's a left-leaning guy there. And so, you know, he's a... I just, you know... I have the way there, I guess. This is another one of those. I'm going to sound like you talking about international law here. But, like, it's really sad just how callous we've become in terms of, you know, I think the Venezuela thing, I said, like, 40 or 80 people or something got killed. like, you know, due to the U.S. action. And, you know, some of them were, whatever, Cuban bodyguards and stuff, but not all of them. Some civilians got killed.

I think an old lady I saw I read for sure was killed a little lady. And it's like, you know, we should have the attitude, whether you're religious or not or whatever, just as a human being. We should be like, man, like, that sucks. Like, we killed an 80-year-old woman. Like, we violently killed this woman. And you can bring the pictures of her in her coffin. And in some instances, you can look at it and you could say, look, man, Saddam was invading a country. We were trying to help, you know, push him out of that country.

He was invaded. Civilians got killed, et cetera, whatever. You don't have to agree with that example. But, like, you can make those cases. But they're not. No, nobody does anymore. They're like, what? Only 80 civilians got killed?

Nah. Nah. No big deal. None of it's any big deal. And it's not a surprise when it's been that way, just at an increasing clip for the last 25 years during the War on Terror, that people can watch a woman get live stream shot in the head and not only feel nothing, but like, you know, there's people in my comments going and having Grock, like, you know, make pictures of her dead in her car wearing a bikini and stuff. And it's like, this is, if you're associating with people who are doing stuff like that and even vaguely, like, placing yourself on the side of those people, you really lost something important about your. I mean, you can, you can have the resolve and determination. Oh, you know, let me, you know, one of the things, let me, we got to go prehistine. I know, but I told that whole long story about that Marine and stuff.

And I didn't actually make my, my real point with it, which was that I think one of the things that happens is that a lot of these people who talk this way and who dehumanize their opponents in this manner and all that, they do it because, like, they don't have the resolve to like push. through something like the hard things that need that are going to happen like if you're going to have a policy of deportation or whatever else they don't have like the heart to do it unless they get themselves like really worked up like these people are to be hated they're dehumanized there are our enemies they're trying to destroy our country and kill our kids and blah blah blah and that's the only way they can actually get themselves to go through with what needs to be done and my whole point through all of this has been that like, no, you can actually have like the quiet determination that is necessary to say that like it's a shame that this woman was killed and we should probably look at

the way we're conducting these operations to make sure nothing like this happens again because however you slice it, this is a dead American citizen in a suburb in Minneapolis and that's not good. But, you know, this is the next operation. Like we're still carrying out our immigration policy, But people just don't have the confidence to do that. They're like fighters. And there's even fighters in like the UFC, like the highest level who people know who they are that like they got to hate their opponent. They got to get angry before a fight.

They got to like talk a bunch of crap, try to get like something going between. Because like all it is like it's a cover for fear. You know, they're going in there and they have to get themselves worked up to go do their job, basically. And you don't have to be that way. You can actually do the things that are necessary, even if they're hard, even if they're sometimes go bad without turning yourself into something gross. Yep.

Yep, totally agree. And look, let's leave it at that. I'm going to remember to play the outro this week. Like I forgot last week. That was kind of stupid. But thanks for doing the show with me. Thanks to all the commenters and all that. I'm sorry I didn't really have chance to page through them all there.

But thank you, everybody, for hanging out with us again. And we'll see you next Friday. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us feed the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XN YouTube. And tune in next time for more Provoked.