Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:35 - Another War for Israel

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton speak with Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the complex geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East, focusing on Iran's role in U.S. foreign policy under the Trump administration. Parsi discusses the potential for conflict, Trump's unpredictable decision-making, and Israel's influence on U.S. actions. They explore the implications of military pressures on Iran and the internal challenges the regime faces. Parsi calls for a nuanced public discourse to better understand these intricate relationships and their consequences. 0:38 Another War for Israel? 1:24 Bacevich and His Insights 4:23 Trump and Potential War with Iran 9:33 Iran's Calculated Risks 12:48 The Complexities of Iranian Strategy 18:10 Iranian Protest Movements and Internal Dynamics 25:09 The Future of Iran's Leadership 28:52 The Role of External Powers 34:20 The Consequences of War 39:02 The Dynamics of U.S.-Iran Relations 46:26 The Paranoia of an Endangered Nation 51:03 The Reality of Military Conflict 56:34 The Justifications for War 1:03:36 The Influence of the Israel Lobby 1:14:27 The Changing Landscape of American Support for Israel 1:21:14 The Psychological Impact of Persecution 1:29:21 Conclusion and Reflections (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Provoked show site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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

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

Man, I'm all full of cornucer. I'm ready to go. Hey, man, how are you? Doing all right. Doing all right on this fine Friday evening. We're not at war yet, so I'll count that as a blessing. That's good. Yes, emphasis on yet.

Tonight, as I said, the question is, are we going to war for the Lakud again? And to help us answer that is the great Trita Parsi. Now, Trita was the, I think the founder, and for a long time ran the National Iranian-American Council and then he's the co-founder with Andrew Bacevic and Eli Clifton of the Great Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. And he wrote, well, one of my very favorite books about the Middle East, a treacherous alliance, the secret history of America, Israel, and Iran, which covers basically everything up to, and I think including Iraq War II. So good, man.

Just the key to understand is so much about the Middle East. And he's written some other great books, too, including a single roll of the dice and losing an enemy, which were about the negotiations over the Iran deal that the nuclear deal that we used to have until we didn't have it anymore. So, welcome, treat it to the show. Sir, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you guys doing? Doing all right. I echo Scott's assessment of your book. I read it a long time ago at his urging. It's outstanding. So I've been following your work for a long time. I'm really looking forward to this. Thank you for everything. Thanks so much, man. And you know, Scott is

responsible for at least half my book sales. So I'm eternally grateful. I hope that's true. And it really is, you know what it is, and by the way, you know, I was going to say this if I had remember to do a little bookkeeping at the beginning of the show that I wanted to thank Matt Gates for having me on his show today. And then I was going to muse something funny about I'm doing Bill O'Reilly's show on Monday, which in a way is a dream come true, right?

Oh, so are you? Oh, really? So, yeah, it's on. Boy, so, isn't that funny? And, well, it sure brings back memories, but I was going to say, I was even considering kind of daydreaming a little bit about how I might recommend your book

to him and his audience. Because there's such a great pitch that I have for it, which is that the book, Tretorous Alliance, again, that is everybody in the audience on your Amazon.com page right now, the book is not really written from the point of view of the stupid news cycle at all. Like, you could have a president

come and go and things change somewhat, but usually the big strategic changes happen in the middle of presidencies, rather than, you know, when one is handed off to the other. And so the book is told from the point of view, and it was your PhD thing before it was your full book, and it's told from the point of view of American,

Israeli, and Iranian strategists at the highest level of military and intelligence services and think tanks and universities and whatever, but the very highest level people in the long-term strategic planning. And, of course, the poor Iranians, Rockies are stuck in the middle of the whole damn thing. But it's just, it's really incredible to see the way it all works and played out over

decades, but from the point of view, far above the shouting Bill O'Reilly's of what's really going on here, you know what I mean, behind the scenes. One of my favorite anecdotes you talk about in there is, I guess, in the 1980s, when the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini would be vowing to destroy Israel. And that same day, he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel. and all that bluster is really just cover for this treacherous alliance. So it goes to show like the real deep politics behind all this stuff, really insightful. Thanks so much, man.

Appreciate it. All right. Anyway, well, we ought to talk about the news and whether Trump is going to bomb Iran. Can I just say at the beginning here, I actually have a good feeling. I got a couple of indications of the Trump climbing down here. One is that the Brits say you can't fly from here. And that's pretty bad, man, if the Brits won't come with you on a war here. And they're not even talking about it.

Man, not at all. And even forbidding us from flying out of there from Airstrip 1. I mean, that's a big deal. And then secondly, the New York Times, and I guess I have it here to show, don't I? The New York Times ran this story, guys, that says, Iran says, I don't know, but Iran says the U.S. has not asked it to stop enriching uranium. In other words, Trump climbing way, way down here, if that's true. So I guess what do you think of that?

Everybody is on the edge of their seat waiting to decide whether the president, not the Congress, is going to declare war and start another aggressive war against Iran. Look, I don't think it's looking particularly great, but I am not one of those who would think that war is inevitable because, first of all, it's Trump. Trump can change his mind last minute. In fact, he can change his mind after ordering this strike, as he did in 2018. He had ordered strikes after the Iranians had shot down an American drone. And incidentally, it was really interesting.

I don't know if you all remember that episode. There was this American drone that had gotten into Iranian air territory. And the Iranians shot it down. And Bolton was pushing very hard to get Trump to attack. And when he left the White House that evening, Trump had agreed to attack. And then when he's home, he finds out that Trump apparently had ordered the attack, but then told him just to come back. order them back.

And he said it was a devastating moment for him. Well, he also turned out that about a month or two before that, Bolton had changed the rules of engagement and allowed American spy planes to go into Iranian air territory. He wanted this. He wanted an American drone to get shot down in order to be able to get to cause his belly. But anyway, my point here is that with Trump, you never know. He can change his mind. Things are not necessarily looking particularly good.

There's some news coming out just right now. that is kind of confirming what the Iranian foreign minister said this morning on meeting Morning Joe, which is what the New York Times story is based on, that they're considering some sort of a very, very symbolic level of enrichment and that perhaps there is a way out. Perhaps there is, but I've got to tell you, what I heard of what happened and Geneva was essentially that the U.S. I came in and said, you've got to give up the entire program, nothing can be left. And we're not going to offer you any sanctions relief. What we're offering you is to not bomb you

and that we will not impose any new sanctions. And obviously, that is not an offer that the Iranians could accept. These sanctions that are currently hurting them are hurting them really badly. The only leverage they have to get rid of these sanctions is to use the nuclear leverage in through some sort of a deal. They're not going to give up that leverage in order to just keep the status quo. The status quo is spagulated.

There's no way they can survive the status. that is called. They need to get sanctions for me. So if the option that the Wall Street Journal put forward in their piece yesterday, which is he's going to bomb them until the deal, this deal is unacceptable to that. War is actually more, offers them a greater chance of getting out of this situation than accepting that deal. In fact, and I'm sorry, Daryl, I'm going to let you get in here in just a sec, but on that question, that Wall Street Journal story here, this reflects, obviously, Trump's concern that this thing could spin out of control. But then so somebody has served him up a plan that says,

what we'll do is we'll bomb them X amount and then we'll tell them, you better not fight back or we'll get really mad and really bomb you more. But we're going to bomb you only to this limited extent to get you to give in and sign the deal. So, yeah, that doesn't sound like it'll work. That sounds like a path to plan B and full war. Exactly. Because the way the Iranians will see it is, okay, if they agree to this six months from now, Bibi Netanyahu will make another visit to the White House.

And then after that, Trump is going to come back with some new demands and it's going to be on missiles or something else. And this is going to go on until Iran has given up all of its deterrence capabilities. And once it's defenseless, guess what? That's when the Israelis will bomb them. The only reason why the Israelis are not bombing them right now is because they're missiles actually has proven to be a very effective deterrent. Give that up and the Israelis will bomb you.

So this kind of idea that they would just go along with limited strikes in a gradual way until they eventually capitulate, the logical conclusion for them is a complete defeat. Then they're actually better off fighting back in their calculation, even though, of course, they're much weaker than the U.S., in order to see if striking back may actually get Trump to change his mind. They don't have to win the war. They just need to destroy or get close to destroying Trump's presidency before they lose the.

You mentioned them not being able to survive the status quo if it goes on. And I wonder and maybe fear, especially if we're not offering to relax sanctions or anything for any of their concessions, if maybe this is the game theoretical, correct, rational decision for Iran is that standing, on Miss Hill and fighting on it is their best move. You know, if they really feel like, yeah, okay, like if the offer really is take these, you know, things off the board, stop the enriching down to a certain amount, have inspections, all these things,

whatever the concessions are, and the only reward is we're not going to kill you, then the status quo, as you said, is just going to strangle them out over time anyway. Exactly. It's a slow death. And that's why it's the only point. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, at a certain point, you know, your options narrow down to fighting or cut in your own throat. And it seems like the position we're trying to put them in.

Exactly. And this is why, you know, part of the disconnect here is that Trump really seems to think, convinced by the Israelis that the Iranians are so weak, they have no choice but to capitulate. And the Iranians don't view themselves like that at all. Clearly, they're in a weaker position than they were two years ago. But they're actually very convinced that their missile. capability managed to get the Israelis to essentially ask for a ceasefire after nine days. Compared that to the way that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza for two years, you had to drag them to a ceasefire. And even when they agreed to it, they immediately violated it because it was no cost. Or with Lebanon, for instance, but with Iran after nine days, they wanted a ceasefire, why is that? The key thing is they were actually hurting as well.

So to think that after the Iranians being left with the impression that, yes, they took a lot a hit, but they actually managed to inflict a lot of costs on these rates, that they would then from their go and say, okay, let's capitulate even though it's going to lead to a complete defeat defeat down the road. It doesn't make any sense. So they think that if they strike back and they do what the Houthis did, the Houthis struck them. And Trump, after seven and eight weeks, kind of gave up and said, well, no, this is not worth it. I don't want to have an endless war. And he even actually praised the Houthis has said that they're a tough bunch of nuts. So the Iranians think that perhaps if they do that, that actually offers them a better chance to get a

out of this situation than to concede either to this capitalization of or to have this gradual bombing campaign by the United States. The area where I think they're committing potential mistake, however, is that we've never been in a situation in which Trump was the president and 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 American soldiers got killed in combat. The best example we have is during Trump won, I believe a handful of American. soldiers got killed in Nigeria or Mali and no one even knew that they were there. But it wasn't like an active combat.

And so we never had that situation with Trump as president or with that type of the numbers that may be inflicted by the Iranians on the U.S. if they take down an American ship, for instance. We don't know the psychology of Trump in that scenario. We don't know if he's going to back down or if he's actually going to go completely nuclear. So I think the Iranians are at the same time taking a huge risk and much lower risk moved by them would be for them to agree to have a senior Iranian official talk directly to Trump himself rather than this negotiation through Whitkoff and Kushner, not to say that they're not doing what

the president wants, but the idea of having the Ivanias just speaking directly to Trump, I think could potentially be a game changer, perhaps the most effective de-escalatory card. Unfortunately, the Iranians are not playing that card. They're not willing to do it. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, from the Iranian standpoint, really, they just have to survive a war. And by any measure, including our own, I think you'd have to call that an Iranian victory if they did. So they're continued, I mean, you see some of the, some of the talks and the tweets that the Ayatollah puts out. And at least his public expression is one of extreme confidence, you know, almost a bring it on kind of attitude. which maybe it's blust or maybe it's not. But I have to imagine that with a guy like Trump in office, they have to know that baiting him like that, you know, could result in conflict.

And so, you know, it really comes down to if all they have to do is survive, how much confidence do they have in the stability of their own regime? And it seems like after putting down the latest protests and insurgencies, they seem very confident that they can hold things together. Yeah, although I got to tell you what they've done. eternally with the thousands that they have killed, this is not a tenable situation either. Right now, the country is just in shock

has not been able to process this fully. But this is not something that I think enables them to ever to go back to the old status quo or the old normal. And that was a very problematic normal in the first place. So I do think that they are in a tight situation. The difference, however, is that the Israelis are selling Trump the idea

that they're so weak, You just have to push them a little bit and they fall. Whereas no, they're cornered, they're weaker, they're having problems internally, but they still have a lot of a capability of inflicting damage on the US if the US attacks. And as a result, their best shot actually is to prove to Trump that they will strike back

and they will hurt Trump. They will hurt his presidency. They will kill Americans. And I think what we've seen in the last couple of weeks is a double game in which on the one hand they're showing, they're trying to signal that they're open to a deal, but on the other hand, completely ready for war. And from the Israeli standpoint,

actually would be quite good if the U.S. got into a war that actually became quite bloody because they just want this enmity between Iran and Israel to be as longstanding as possible because this is one of the strongest potential countries in the region that really has challenged Israel's aspirations for regional hegemia. And for the Israelis to manage to essentially eliminate Iran

from the geopolitical chess. by either having the U.S. go into a full-scale war with Iran or for the U.S. bombing campaign to collapse the Iranian state so that Iran, you know, collapses into civil war, et cetera. That would be a perfect situation for the Israelis. In addition to the fact that if you have secessionist movements, which you likely will have with the Kurds, the Balooch, potentially the Azeris, that would then embroil other Israeli rivals,

such as Turkey. Turkey would have a huge problem if there is this. ongoing secessionist movement of Kurds trying to break free from Iran, et cetera, using Iraqi territory, opposing a threat to Turkey. This would be the perfect thing for the Israelis to try to weaken Turkey out there now increasingly getting embroiled into a rivalry with Turkey as well. Very good point there. And you know, the Wall Street Journal speaking, which they have a big thing about how they know,

and of course the Secretary of State, Rubio said this in front of the Senate, that they have no one to install in power to replace the Ayatollah, unlike they compared it to the Iranian Revolution, where when the Ayatollah got back from France, it was, you know, he was widely acclaimed and agreed to be the leader. You know, there was nothing like this for the, to reinstall the Shah who was being overthrown or his son in his place. They even bring up the Mujahideenic cult, Kami Terra cult,

say, yeah, they don't have any popular support. So essentially they understand that there's really, they have no options as far as replacing the regime, even if they rolled in and took Tehran. They don't have anyone to install in power anyway. So they know they're barking up the wrong tree in the first place here. They just kind of, in a way, only really rhetorically let themselves get painted into a corner in saying no enrichment allowed.

When there's a huge space between some enrichment and a nuclear weapons program, And we could safely compromise there, just as Obama did 11 years ago. Absolutely. Absolutely. You're totally right. And I think, again, he goes back to something we've discussed on your show before, Scott, which is once Trump agrees to the premise of the Israeli arguments, then he has right there cornered himself and he will be more easily pushed into taking actions that absolutely

do not serve U.S. interest. So once he starts talking about how the missiles are oppressed, you know, he starts talking about how the missiles are a problem. Suddenly he's just boxed himself in and he's now in for another pressure campaign in which he has to go to war because now we're getting that narrative out there that the missiles are a problem. That are America's problem. If they're Israel's problem, absolutely. But that is for Israel to handle. It is not America's problem. It's only became America's problem because Trump foolishly accepted Israeli premise and started using their talking points. It seems like the lack of an alternative center of authority that either can be imported or empowered from within the country,

you know, almost makes it so that if the Israeli and the pro-attack Iran party in the United States really get their way, like the victory condition, most likely, the most likely victory condition is just a total collapse of civil society into civil war and just destruction. And it seems to me, as you said, that suits the Israelis just fine, because not only does it take Iran off the board, it occupies everybody else in the region with all kinds of problems for the foreseeable future that Israel's, you know, insulated from by distance. And so all of a sudden, Turkey's dealing with a refugee crisis coming in from the east and so forth. And so it's a double win for them. But from our standpoint, I don't think even even the pro attack Iran people in the U.S.

government would consider that a good scenario to have. I mean, we've got other allies in the region. Obviously, you know, they don't have, they don't swing as big of a stick as Israel does, but they've all been asking us from what I understand, from what the reporting says, not to do this because they understand that the consequences are going to fall on them. And by the way, regional instability, particularly when it comes to Iran, 90 million people, huge refugee flows, impact on the oil market, that ultimately comes back to the U.S. as well. So even though the regional states will pay the highest price next to the Iranian people, the United States is not insulated from the consequences of that,

just as much as the United States was not insulated from the consequences of the instability in Afghanistan, the instability in Iraq, with thousands of Americans killed, I think ultimately is a factor that brought Trump to power because of the matter in which the American people just lost faith in the American ruling elite as a result of Iraq and the lies there and as a result of the financial crisis more than anything else. Yeah, which is, yeah, from the sanctions. All right, before we let you go, I want to ask you one last thing here, which is, could you please give us your assessment of the protest movement as far as, you know,

how it broke out and what was behind that and especially the armed insurgent groups? I think, again, sorry, I just read the Wall Street Journal all the time. And they had a thing in there where it was just like Seymour Hirsch reported back in 2007, CIA backing P. Jack, I guess they dropped the J for some reason. But the Iranian branch of the Kurdish PKK commies. at YPG we call them in Syria and the same guys who are just getting beat by the new Syrian al-Qaeda regime recently

right and how they are a big part of the groups being back to there to disrupt the place and they were the ones chanting death to the Ayatollah and this and that but I know there have been Ladenites in Balukistan and there are Ziri's and I don't know what

all armed groups but when you say there were thousands killed my understanding was those weren't just massacres of broadways full of people, those were running battles with essentially insurgent groups attacking government targets. But I don't know exactly. I do know that the numbers were embellished beyond belief. And so that kind of actually was self, was, you know, counterproductive for the propagandists there. They embellished the numbers so big that everybody just forgot about it. But

it obviously was huge and important. So can you tell us what you think about all that? Yeah, I mean, And when it comes to the numbers, at a minimum, it seems to have been about 7,000 killed. And, you know, over the course of two, three days, that is a massive number. Yes, some people have been embellishing it and taking it up to 50, 60, 70,000. To a certain extent, it seems to have been pushed by people who wanted to make it look as it was more than the deaths of Gaza in order to put Israelis in a better light. But, you know, 7,000 is a huge amount of people being killed. Now, were they all protesters, you know, they were, you know, even the U.S.

governments acknowledged that there were a large number of police that also were killed. Now, here's what I think how you had some completely legitimate indigenous protest, partly triggered, though, of course, because of the manner in which the Treasury had been pushing to collapse the Iranian currency. Now, a lot of people go out and protest because of their anger towards the repression of the government, et cetera, and are not connected in any way, shape, of form to any of these different groups that were trained by outside places and who were armed. But those groups were a much smaller number.

They needed large-scale protests at night in order to be able to operate in the manner that they did. And that's what happened on January 8 and 9. And so a lot of people who went out on protest had no idea who these people are. They were just out there protesting. They got killed by the government. And they were innocent because they had nothing to do with those other. armed groups. And by the way, that P.A.K. group that you mentioned, they were trained by the United

States in 2014 to target ISIS after ISIS had taken Mosul. They were a Kurdish group. It's not clear whether the U.S. government understood that this actually was an Iranian Kurdish group and not an Iraqi Kurdish group, but they were trained together with the Iraqi Kurds in order to take on ISIS. So these are U.S. trained fighters. And they very early started using violence, you know, already end of December when the protests began. And that's why you had some of the most violent exchanges taking place in those Kurdish areas. Now, I've spoken to people who were on the ground at the time,

who have gone to almost all protests in the past. And this time around, they said that they just saw something they had never seen before. People dressed in black who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. They were moving very fast, putting this building on fire, moving to the next building, starting off incidentally by taking out a lot of fire trucks so that the fire fighters would have huge difficulty

putting out the fires that they later on and lit up. And also noting that in the past during protests, if anyone started using violence, other protesters intervened and try to maintain a nonviolent discipline for the protest. This time around, he himself said, I didn't have the guts to intervene, and no one else did either,

because we didn't know who these people were. We felt as threatened by them as we were by the riot police or the besieged militia, who actually were shooting round fires against people. So I think the country is still trying to process exactly what happened. But, you know, this neat story that this was just, everything was peaceful and all the violence just came from one side is a little bit simplistic. The other side of the story that this is all, you know, CIA or all Mossad is also false

in my assessment because there were a very large number of people who went out and they're not all working for them assault. They're just angry at the terror. terrible situation that the ordinary Iranian person is experiencing. I know we've already kept you a little bit longer than we said we would, but I wonder if I could ask you one more question because you're the only one I would want to answer it. Actually, I'm going to throw two out there and you can pick one or both. If real conflict does break out, what should we expect from groups like, I know Hezbollah has obviously been damaged, but they're

still, you know, they're still constituted as a force. Iraqi Hezbollah. And we, What can we expect from people like Ayatollah Sistani and some of the other Shiite religious clerics? And then the second question I had is, what are the chances in Iran of some kind of, you know, the Ayatollah passes away when his time comes and they decide not to replace him? And they sort of have a not secular government, but a reform, an internal reform that happens kind of naturally and peacefully, becomes more of a sort of nationalist nation state instead of a hub of revolution. So go ahead. So on the first question, Sistani, I think, will do everything he can to stay out of this and keep Iraq out of this.

However, if the United States kills the Supreme Leader of Iran, then that will put a tremendous amount of pressure on Sistani to do something and perhaps do something quite radical. Because the Supreme Leader at the end of the day is not just a de facto head of state. He's also a religious figure in the world of Shiasism. And that means that he has a following Lebanon in Iraq, in Bahra, in Pakistan. And a lot of other senior Ayatollah, such asistan, it will be under tremendous pressure to take some action against the United States. Exactly what that may be, we don't know. But we know that when he ordered all Shia Muslims in Iraq to start fighting ISIS,

that had a huge impact. So there is a discipline there. And I think the Trump administration has, at least in the calculation of potentially going after a community, they're essentially accepting that risk. but perhaps not fully understanding how dangerous that risk may be. On the second question, remind me quickly, it was... Just the possibility of some kind of...

So I think the U.S. government has come to the conclusion that they're not going to be able to find someone within the current Iranian system that is willing to oust the Supreme Leader. There was some speculation that they thought perhaps they can replicate Venezuela in Iran. That's not going to happen. But if he passes and naturally, then there's plenty of possibilities there.

I think they've already made up their mind who the successor is. But there can definitely be some shaking up of the system, and they can definitely be a scenario in which some of the very, what's the word I don't want to use, obstinate decisions he has made, may be reviewed and may be rescinded. First of all, the thought that he issued against nuclear weapons dies with him, essentially. So that's one thing, but also I think he is right now the biggest obstacle for the U.S.

and Yvonne talking directly to each other. That could change. There's probably going to be some effort to be able to renegotiate the social contract between the government and society because it is completely broken. And perhaps it is not fixable. I don't believe it is particularly fixable under him, but under a new one, perhaps there is a chance for that. There will obviously be those who hope that much more than that just happens. But I think it's become very clear.

These outside exiled groups that are hoping that Trump will pick them to be installed in Iran, there's a very low likelihood of that working because none of them have the ability of getting the security apparatus in Iran, the security establishment, to defect to their side. The security establishment is not going to jump to the side of Rezavalevi. I think Rezavalee. I think Rezavalee knows this. That's why I don't even see him trying. they're going to keep power to themselves, most likely.

And I don't see any major factor that I could really take that away from. Certainly not some of these exile groups. There are internal opposition figures that may have an ability to do things. But right now, they're under so much pressure precisely because the state is on the country, is essentially on the verge of war because the threats that Trump has made. All right. Well, we already kept you over time. So thanks very much, man.

We'll let you go. Really appreciate you coming. Really appreciate you. Thank you so much. You guys got me at all? Yeah. I was like, all right. All right. Darrell, my computer is messing up, man. So you host the show for a minute, and I'm going to restart this thing. Oh, okay. So, you know, I guess my thinking on, well, there's a few things. Like, since you're not going to be on your computer is going to be shutting down, I'll go ahead and throw something out there that probably I shouldn't, which is, it seems like a logical conclusion for any country in the Middle East to come from is that it's not a good.

idea to have Kurds in your country. I mean, I know people who've worked with the Kurds and like them a lot, but I mean, it just seems like they're the go-to group anytime the Western Alliance or anybody else needs to unsettle your country or overthrow your government. You know, the possibility of peaceful reform in Iran is, yeah, well, it's certainly, it's certainly off the table as long as they're under threat from the United States and Israel the way they are. And it makes you wonder if you know, the pressure that we're applying is what's keeping their boundaries in place and holding the thing together right now. And, you know, I think the fundamental thing that the Iranian regime has to deal with from an internal perspective, leaving aside the, you know, the ongoing threats from the

outside, is that they've got to look around the region, see Hezbollah has been, you know, it's hard to say until they get to a conflict, how capable they are, but certainly they've been damaged. Their reputation has been damaged for sure. You know, you've still got the Houthis there, but Iran has been sort of bottled up and, you know, bankrupted. They have to look out at the region and know. The people have to know. The government has to know, I would think, that the revolution, you know, the revolution is over. You know, this was 47 years, almost 50 years ago. At a certain point, you're not the revolutionaries anymore, you're the regime, you're, you know, the establishment. And if, you know, leading the, if the goal, the revolutionary goal of uniting the Islamic world,

the cast out the Zionist interloper and all these things, it's just clearly off the table, it's something that is just not happening. They've, all of their work over the last several decades has just been rolled back in a relatively short period of time, you know, Assad being gone, Hezbollah, obviously, like, that they have to be looking around and realize the revolution is over. And then the people, a lot of the people anyway, are probably asking themselves, well, if the revolution is over, then what are we doing here? Why are we still under this repressive government that just invites hostility from all these people?

Like, why are we still doing this if the revolution is over? And I think that's the fundamental problem that the Iranian government, the revolutionary government there, has to deal with internally, is how to convince their people that they should continue to put up with this government when their reason for existing, the reason for the revolution,

you know, the source of their legitimacy has just evaporated in the last few years. Yeah. Well, the second half, at least, that was well said. You should have heard the first half, you know, that was blazing.

I know. The numbers went way up after I logged off there, man. Yeah. No, look, I think what sucks, man, this is all. often the case, Darrell, right, is that there are so many problems with so many countries in the world, and we would love to point our fingers at them and tell them how they could be doing it better,

but the problem is our government is the worst thing about all these places. I mean, when he, I'm not sure if he addressed this, I might have spaced up for a second, but, I mean, the most important factor behind the entire economic crisis in Iran is the U.S. Treasury Department and are massive sanctions and it's almost a full embargo, basically, on Iran at this point, just absolutely strangling them. So, you know, obviously they have a corrupt regime just as everybody does. There may, there's may be somewhere on the sliding scale.

But the more you put, you know, restrictions on open market trade, the more trade just takes place in the black market, which just means the most powerful gangsters, in this case, the IRGC, end up running all the black market stuff. This is something that Trita has written about in the past. Well, whatever Iranian oil is getting,

sold, who do you think selling it and who do you think gets to keep all the money? So, you know, it could be that we strangle them so bad the regime finally falls, or it could be we strangle them so bad that everyone else is weakened relative to the regime and the regime is then just strengthened, which was the case with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. They kept the sanctions regime against him. And it just was a war against the people of Iraq, not against him. He was fine, as they would often point out while pursuing the same policy anyway. Yeah, you know, it's, if we really are going to them and not offering anything other than we're not going to bomb you today, like, that's our offer, you know, give us your wallet or we'll shoot you, you know, that's a mugging. That's not a negotiation. And if we're really not offering sanctions relief or anything like that, then really, I mean, what we're telling, if what we're telling them is you make these concessions and we won't bomb you, but we're still, I mean, we're still going to try to do. destroy your economy. We're still going to color revolution you every time we can build up

like a sufficient network. And we're just going to keep trying to overthrow your country, make these concessions anyway, and it won't happen today. It'll happen tomorrow. You know, that to me, like, is, that's just that, that's essentially going into a negotiation with the attitude of Austria, you know, toward the Serbs in 1914, where the decisions been made. Like, we're going to, we're going to kick your ass. And we're going to go through the motions of sort of making a list of demands and so forth, but we know you're not going to accept them because you can't accept them. I mean, even the nuclear stuff, if it's not accompanied by a climb down from the sanctions regime or any real positive concessions from our side,

then all that does is further erode the legitimacy of the regime and push them even further toward an overthrow of some kind, you know, collapse of some kind. And so that's just, that to me, is not a real offer. It's something that you, you know, you bring into a quote-unquote negotiation when you don't want it to work, you know? And, you know, one question I have, and I should have asked Trita this, actually, but I'd like your opinion on it, is I do wonder, you know, there's been the rumors and a few reports in the press about Chinese intelligence sharing and, you know, right at this like very critical moment where it's seeming like stuff could kick off any day now. The Russians are running live fire exercises with the Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz there,

which, you know, just pray that something doesn't kick off and we end up hitting a Russian ship by mistake or something. But I wonder how do those two countries, you know, do they look at a, like, let's just say, you know, whatever, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the government in Iran. and they're taken, you know, some general who's a nice liberal who was educated at Dartmouth or something takes over and he's in charge now. But there are allies and they're not going to, there israel's ally and, you know, they're not going to be dealing with Russia and China in the same way they are now. Like I wonder how they, how much of a threat they see that as and how committed they are to doing at least what they can short of war and within their capabilities to keep Iran from, from, from, facing that and especially the Russians is since you know since that's not a very likely outcome of any conflict to say the least the most likely outcome and I would say like the overwhelmingly likely outcome if we were to prolong this and really push it hard and we were to achieve our goals of

of taking out this government is that the place would collapse into Syria times 10 and so for Russia that's a huge problem I mean you've got refugees into the caucuses, like, who knows? Like, that's a real huge problem for them. And I just wonder how committed they are to supporting the regime if it does come to blows. Well, I don't think, I don't know. I guess I shouldn't be, you know, too skeptical. They could, especially if they really see an opportunity to hurt us back after what we'd

done to them in Ukraine, you know, maybe. overall I would have bet against Russia being willing to well fighting for them is one thing but helping them with a hell of a lot of support is something else you know so they could they certainly could and although you know even that live fire exercise and the straight of horror moves there I mean that seems more like they decided to call Trump's bluff

same with Chairman Shee publishing all those pictures of American military bases over there and offering I guess I'm not sure how the subscription works, but I read about Iran switched over to Chinese GPS over the American kind, which they spoofed and screwed them last time on some of their stuff. So that could be read as Putin and Xi telling Trump, come on, man, you know what I mean?

Just don't do it. Not so much like we're vowing to really back them. Yeah. I would bet on the Chinese being more cautious than the Russians overall. Yeah, because they just, I mean, Russia and Ukraine, us in Iraq, us in Iran, the Chinese benefit from being a spectator to all that. Except that Russia's an exporter and so is Iran. And so China really has a friend and need relationship with Iran where Russia does not so much. They get some drones and that kind of thing. But they don't really have a situation of dependence with Iran, the way China is maybe more relying on them. But they tend to also be much more cautious about stuff. like that and have a much longer term outlook.

Yeah, and, you know, Russia really also doesn't have much of a concern about us escalating against them just because we've already done that, like short of sending American troops, you know, to air drop into Moscow or something. I mean, we've done everything else. So they don't have a concern about that. Whereas China, they might have some concerns about ways we could. Also, the thing is, too, we're a couple steps ahead. a discussion here, I mean, where we're now in like week five or month five of a launch,

run out, terrible conflict that's gone all wrong. You know, I'm not trying to encourage the war party here. However, it's still, I guess, worth noting, you know, that it might be easier than we would suspect, you know, last June, the Ayatollah, even in the middle of the war, said, I don't want to fight, man, please quit hitting me, basically. And, you know, At the end, he fired 14 missiles and he called ahead and said him firing 14 missiles, which was the same number of bombs that we dropped on the military bases there, on the nuclear facilities there. And I'm firing him at this base in Qatar, shoot him down.

And Trump even gave him credit for calling ahead and warning about the missiles. So this is purely symbolic, just enough to say face and say, like, look, I'm not a pacifist. But at the same time, he does know. And Trita alluded to this. Comani... Pardon me. Comini knows that Trump is local. And quite seriously, unlike if it was Barack Obama sitting in that same chair, for example,

if we got into a war here and the Iranians started raining missiles down on our troops in Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar. I mean, we have our fifth fleet at Bahrain, the Al-U-D Air Base, Central Command headquarters, and British Air Force headquarters as well there. at the air base in Qatar, if they are to start destroying that and killing our troops in large numbers, they and I think you and I,

and our audience should anticipate that Trump would have a very emotional reaction one way or the other. And at that point, rather than realizing his folly, I think we should bet that any president in his same position would double down.

And in his case, that could mean drop, you know, send the B-52s to carpet bomb Tehran, or worse. And so the Ayatollah, you know, they say, oh, these Shiites, they just live to be martyrs. Well, maybe that's true

if a certain line gets crossed that they're willing to go that far and let their entire nation be completely destroyed. Maybe I'm repeating myself from last week, but I could see the Ayatollah deciding what the hell to not take his whole ship down with him.

If America is that determined even to kill him. I mean, all states, you should best, on them identifying themselves with their entire country and saying, no, you can't destroy me or else what will happen to everybody else? But really, if you know you're dealing with Donald Trump and he's armed the teeth with H-bombs, then that you could just lose. And instead of, like, fighting back hard and losing much worse anyway, you know what I mean? I could see them maybe

doing the conservative thing. And I'm not trying to encourage the Warhawks to bet on that. I don't think they watch this show. But I think that, you know, the concern that, And we heard some of this last June, and there always certainly was this risk, but it seems like there's also a real chance. Oh, I'm sorry, a risk that they would just unleash everything they got, that they know that, you know, if we go after them, that this is the only deterrent they have, is that we will launch all of our medium-range missiles and then start making more for the next round. That's their only real deterrent they have.

What does it mean to call their bluff if they don't respond? You know what I mean? So people assume the worst. but I could see how maybe Trump could fish his wish here and do some more limited bombing runs, claim to destroy some missile stocks and some more nuclear facilities and some IRGC targets, and then get away with it.

The same way he got away with Solomah, the same way he got away with the war last June. Because really, if you're the Ayatollah, what are you going to do about it, dude? Seriously, you know, you could escalate it, but you can't control the escalation from your side, you know? Yeah, I mean, we have the nuclear option that they don't have. But, you know, if they're not thinking that that's a realistic, a realistic possibility that we would nuke them or have Israel nuke them for shooting some conventional missiles at us, if they really don't take that threat particularly seriously, then, you know, again, I think it's worth, I mean, look, when you accept the job, when they kill the last head of the IRGC and you're the next man up and you're, you're the next man up.

take that job, you are, you know that you were marked for death. And there's a good chance you're going to die violently at some point in the relatively immediate, you know, future. If you take that job, especially, you know, at a time like this in the last year. And so, you know, I would think at least at the top levels, these people who know they're marked for death, who a lot of them will get killed on the first volley, probably. They have to probably know that. And it has to be, I assume, sort of baked into their idiot. and the way that they see themselves and their role, you know, in the country. I mean, and then also, I mean, again, like if we, assuming we don't H-bomb Tehran or something,

I keep coming back to the fact that all Iran has to do is hold it together and shoot back. And unless we're going to send troops in there, maybe they'll run out of missiles and we'll keep bombing them. But if they can hold it together, because there is no alternative power center in the country, if they can just hold it together, then eventually we're going to get bored with that too, and we're not going to send troops in there. And if that's the case, they can wait it out.

And it'll suck and it'll be terrible for the Iranian people and the government officials themselves and everything, but they will have outlasted the great Satan. They will have given a black eye to the revolutionary enemy. And even, you know, to the extent that they do entertain the possibility of us resorting to nuclear weapons. I wonder, I don't have any insight

until like, you know, obviously the worldview or the ideas of the regime officials, but, you know, that's a, in a way, it's a huge loss for Iran, but in a way, like, it's a, you know, it's a massive loss for the U.S. Israel axis. I mean, if we go and do something like that, if we just, You know, if we roll up to them, we start a fight. We start shooting at them and they shoot back, which they warned us they would do all along after going through negotiations and all these things after we sneak attack them before. if we attack them again, when they're clearly signaling that they don't want to fight us, and we attack them again, and we get upset that they're shooting back and we bust out nukes, I mean, it's not going to come back on us right away, you know,

the Russian China aren't going to, you know, destroy Seattle or anything the next day. But over the long term, I mean, I think that is like a date you could put on the epitaph of the U.S.-led Western Alliance. So what I keep picturing, though, is not so much dropping atom bombs, which Trump could get that upset. But I keep picturing the B-52s from Vietnam, just carpet bombing, just pouring dumb bombs out their bellies. You know what I mean? The way that they did through, you know, the northern... They better do a good job with the air defense suppression before they do that, man. B-52s are not that hard to shoot down, you know, and if you really got to fly over the city.

And, you know, Tehran, it's not as if it's a coastal city. You've got to fly over a lot of territory to get there. And, you know, it's, that's one thing I'm very curious about is, you know, last time, it's hard to say how the Iranian air defense performed just because they were caught so off guard and were thrown into such chaos early on during that, like, initial massive wave of strikes. Just their command and control system got degraded so badly that there was a period of time that nobody really knew what was going on. How much of the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

of their air defense network was due to that, as opposed to the actual technical capabilities of the system. I mean, like, I know that supposedly Russia had delivered a few S-400 systems to them since last June. I don't know if that's true 100%, but it's been reported. But they got S-300s and a lot of others that while they're not shoot down B-2s, they're not going to shoot down probably F-35s, they'll shoot down Tomahawks, no problem. I mean, those things are flying school buses, basically. and a lot of the other conventional stuff that's not ballistic missiles coming from Israel, they will be able to handle a lot of the cruise missile things.

And when you remember a few weeks ago, when we shot down an Iranian drone that was getting too close to our aircraft carrier, I think that, you know, that's sort of looked at as like, yeah, we got there, you know, they got close to us and we showed them. I don't really look at it that way. I mean, the carrier was about 8 or 900 kilometers

off the coast of Iran at that point. And, you know, that was Iran saying that we can find you. We know where you are. You're 900 miles or 900 kilometers away, and our drones know where you are. We can find you. And, you know, maybe that's because the Chinese and the Russians are helping them with intelligence or something. Whatever the reason, that, I guarantee you, the people in that strike group, you know, the naval officers in charge of that strike, that's how they saw it. They saw it as, oh, they know where we are.

We're 900 miles away and they know where we are. Yeah, that's a good point. there. Oh, this was something that I had read to was that the Chinese radars that they had given them were specially made to defeat stealth. Like they're a higher tech version of the old-fashioned long-wave radar. I don't buy any of the hype about that 35. I don't know how stealthy. It may or may not be, but it seems like it's been... I mean, if you go by the numbers, it's pretty stealthy. You know, the radar cross-section that it presents to a standard radar is pretty small. I mean, It's not the most stealth aircraft we have, obviously.

But, you know, yeah, again, it's one of those things that, like, we don't really know. Just look at Ukraine and Russia. You know, when that war kicked off, anybody who thought they had any idea how modern warfare worked, just every single one of them was wrong. Everybody was wrong because nobody knew. And, you know, the Russians had to find out the hard way. The Ukrainians are finding out the hard way. And maybe both sides in a conflict like this, we may look at it and say, you know,

know, the F-35 should be invisible. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Like, it hasn't really done a whole lot of time in combat against an opponent that has advanced air defense system. So, um, fly it in the rain, dude. Yeah. They've cleaned that up.

A few hundred million dollars later, they clean that up. Oh, yeah, I'm sure it's fine. Listen, we got a couple other things to talk about. And then we want to take some super chats and things from the crowd. Good old crowd. man, they love us. We love them back. But I want to ask you about this because I did see this in the comments before we got started here. And I wasn't sure if the guy was being sarcastic or not. I don't think maybe, I don't know. He says, the Iranians hate us. They chant death to America.

And like maybe, okay, whatever, that's simplistic. But I guess it's true. I don't know how long, how often they actually still do that. They do that every Friday afternoon still or whatever. I don't know. But I know you've addressed this before. I forgot the origin story. Whether it was a cad that you got in where the guy explained to you or where it was about, you know, where you found that death to America is just the same way that we use the F word, F this and F that just means you don't like it. It doesn't really mean we want to set America on fire, you know, in any literal way. Yeah, it's something that, you know, if you go to the Middle East, you will hear death to many things that are not even things you can kill sometimes, you know,

like you stub your toe on a curb and it's death to that curb, you know. It's, yeah, it is kind of like that. And I mean, look, there probably are a lot of Iranians who would like to see America dead for sure. I mean, we've been in a long-running conflict with them and that's what happens. But it is, yeah, it's a figure of speech that. I mean, what are you going to say?

Like, if we have a craft, Trump has a crowd of MAGA supporters who are all saying, F Iran. F Iran. Are we, you know, is Iranian state media probably going to report that Trump's mob is calling for the sexual assault of Iran, you know? Yeah. Like, so yeah, I mean, I don't, they can, yeah, I don't take it that seriously. And even if they are serious, like, let them chant. I don't really care about that. Like, they're not a threat to us. They can't do anything to us. And that's the bottom line. And, like, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who was, you know,

he's a right-wing guy, friend of mine and everything, and he was trying to explain to me, like, every reason for us to go in there that is not Israel wants us to, right? That there's this big game behind the scenes involving China and Russia, blah, blah, blah, all these pieces being moved around the chessboard. I'm like, look, look, fun mental exercise. You've got, oh, I know, right? It's like, forget Sudoku.

Just tell me something like that. Tell me, like, you're, just explain to me how the U.S. is taking any action at all in the Middle East or the peripheral regions without it being at the Israelis command like go test that's an IQ test right there if you can come up with a good answer you're a brilliant guy but you know I kept coming back and our when we were discussing it to the point that like look turkey doesn't want us to do it turkey's a NATO member Saudi Arabia doesn't want us to do it Potter doesn't want us to do it Egypt doesn't want us to do it. UK China certainly doesn't want us to do it neither does any of South

East Asia, many of whom are our allies and get most of their oil and natural gas from the Middle East. And the Russians, obviously, we've got these ongoing negotiations over Ukraine or whatever's happening. They definitely don't want us to do it. And so it's like, if everybody on the planet is asking you, begging you not to do something, and one country is asking you to do something, and your own voters don't want you to do it. There was a, I can't remember if it was Gallup or one of them came out just last week that showed 40% of, only 40% of Republicans think we should strike Iran. And it was like, it was like 22% or something overall,

just like a dismal number. Like, nobody wants this except for the Israel first crowd in the United States. That's it. They're the only ones. And Israel is the only country in the world that wants it. And so you have to, you have to then ask the question, if you're Donald Trump, like how can he not, when Benjamin Netanyahu comes over for his for his biweekly fallatio session with Trump,

how is it that Trump cannot tell him like, look, man, like, I'd love to help you, but I've got literally every other country in the world and a strong majority of my own party's voters that do not want this to happen. Like, that seems like something he could bring up. But the fact that he's, I mean, there's just, as far as I can tell, there's very little if any, separation between Israeli policy and the way Trump is at least approaching. Now, I've heard from people from behind the scenes

that Trump does not want to do this, that he's being pushed and he's not really like, you know, yeah, theoretically you think the president's in control, but he's just really not. And I don't know necessarily what that means as far as how that functions behind the scenes. I mean, unless you're threatening to kill the guy and his family or something, like,

how do you keep him from just ordering the ships to turn around? I don't know. but I've heard that from people, and maybe it's true. You know, it's just he, I can't imagine as, as old as Trump is, as arrogant and blustering as he is and everything, that he has to know that the chance of real catastrophe here that will completely destroy not only his presidency, but whatever legacy he thinks he's trying to build for himself

or rebuild for himself, It could just be completely destroyed in order to do something that only one country and only one specific little faction of voters in your own country want you to do. And you ask yourself, well, then what is it that they've got that's, you know, what's, you know, I don't want to say what they've got over him because I don't, you know, you people, you hear people say that. And look, I don't blame people for saying that, you know, they've got the Epstein tapes with Trump or just whatever, something. I don't blame people for thinking that because otherwise it's like, well, what is it? Why would he ignore literally everybody else and do what these people want at the risk of his own presidency, the risk of his own legacy, everything like that? And, you know, none of the answers are particularly good and a lot of them are really bad. So it's just, it's tough to answer.

Yeah. All right, man. I want to say ha-ha to Mike Huckabee real quick. Everyone should go watch the Tucker interview. I admit, I got a little bit bored after a while, just hearing the same old kind of thing. But it's nice to know, whenever the war party sends their best guys up against our guys,

they lose. And, you know, I went a long time doing my little radio show without really, whenever I had the bad guys on, they would threaten to call the cops on the radio station. So I stopped the interview on the bad guys. So I kind of went years without talking,

without really going up against the bad guys. And then I debated this kind of junior ranked neocon named Harvey Kushner at Texas A&M in 2008 before the election. And I destroyed them. And then I realized it like, oh, yeah, no, it's like this. Anybody with a basic anti-war.com education could destroy any representative of the war party, no matter who they said. I whipped a general, a three- or a four-star general on Pierce Morgan again the other day. This is a nice enough guy, but like, yeah, he couldn't put up a real answer for why we need. need to be doing this stuff. And same for Mike Huckabee. And Tucker's just running circles around him as

far as the theological discussion. I guess that's why I was a little bit bored. It's because I don't really have a dog in that fight exactly, but it was just nice to see Huckabee not able to really defend his position there. I don't know if you've had a chance to see it. Yeah. I saw a couple clips of it, and they were as embarrassing as I expected them to be. I mean, it is amazing that Israel's the only country in the world that has two ambassadors to the United States and we don't have an ambassador to Israel because, I mean, that is obviously how he sees his job. You know, his job is to represent the interests of Israel to the United States. I think he would probably sign on the dotted line and say, yes, I affirm that statement. Like, literally, I think he would probably just admit it. And that by itself is

kind of amazing. I mean, we talk about like Iran being a theocracy. And yeah, like, we're not sort of a, We don't have some sort of theocratic government that's forcing all these religious policies down people's throats or whatever. But our foreign policy is literally being driven in part by a bunch of people who think that this group of people have a right to a piece of territory in the Middle East because this holy book says so. And our ambassador to that country is just a certified nut job. I mean, who he, I don't know if you saw the part of the interview. When Tucker was pressing him on the whole, you know, in the Bible, it says, I'll give you the land from the UFRA. to the Nile. And he's like, that's, that's a whole lot of land, you know, that's parts of Egypt. That's part of like, all he's, and how could he just says it would be fine if they took it all?

And I was, I saw like a little bit after that. I was a little disappointed that Tucker didn't press him in the direction of like, well, wait, you're the ambassador of the United States to Israel. And standing American policy is that the legitimate borders are the 1967 borders. So aren't you supposed to be representing that? You're saying they could, they should take the whole Middle least basically. He didn't follow up with that. I wish you would have. But yeah, it's amazing, man. I mean, it's, yeah, and it's frightening, honestly, because I know people out on those ships right now, you know, and I mean, shoot, if this was just a few years ago, if my subscribers hadn't decided to bail me out of the government job, I was in with the DOD, I'd be on one of those

ships right now, guaranteed, you know? And so I know, I know a lot of those people. I know, you know, the ones I don't know, I still know. You know, I've just been around the people, like, most of the ships that are over there, I think I was looking at the list of destroyers and cruisers that are over there right now. And there's only two of them that I haven't been on because they're recent construction since I, you know, since I stopped working there. But I've been to the rest of them. You know, I've spent months on some of them. I think the Michael Murphy's over there. I spent like five months on that ship on deployment, like getting to know those guys and, you know, working out with them, like just hanging out, playing cards, you know, in the evenings. And, you know, look, we're playing around with something where those guys could get killed in vast numbers in horrible ways. And we've just really gotten away from this. I mean, I know we've been away from it for a long time, but still, it is a little different when you're talking about a Vietnam or a potential Iran war than it is, you know, going into Venezuela or shooting missiles at Yemen or something like that. You're talking about a bunch of American kids. getting killed, you know, and voluntarily going into that when it is entirely at our initiative.

You know, there's nothing that Iran did to build this crisis to a point that, well, we just have no, I mean, it is entirely our choice. And, you know, war, I'm not a pacifist. I'm not an anti-war, just like, you know, doctrinaire guy, but war should be something that's a last resort. It's like, look, we tried everything else. We've given you every opportunity to, you know, settle this. and just, you know, we have to protect ourselves and our interests, you know, and fine, like, whatever. But, like, nobody's even making that kids. I haven't heard anybody from the Trump administration,

even their, you know, their influencer supporters and the people in conservative media who are pushing this way. I haven't heard a single one. Try to explain to the audience how this has anything to do with us and why any of it is our problem and why American kids should be getting killed from that. And look, I mean, it should be said to you that. Our interests is way too broad.

Self-defense, that's it. America's got no rights to start any war. Our government was created by this legal charter, the Constitution. It doesn't authorize them to build a world empire and start wars with countries, make demands that they better settle or else at some point, this, that. And at least if they are going to start an aggressive war, it should be, it has to be. The law is that only the U.S. Congress can legalize that. that state of war.

So this whole thing should not even be up for discussion. It's completely crazy. By the way, we got to do superchats and then get out of here. So these are, everyone you should know, these are the official agorist tax advice superchats. Matt Sersely, he is a, not just an accountant, not an accountant. He is a lawyer. And his job is making sure that your business,

in your life that you can get away with paying absolutely as little taxes as possible. This is not some technicalitarian gimmick or anything. It's just how to get smart, how to depreciate your assets, how to get out of paying these sons of bitches, every last nickel that you can get out of paying them. We are very grateful for his great support for this show. And that is at agoristtaxadvice.com. Matt Sersley, agoristtaxadvice.com.

and then here, man, get you some Scott Horton-flavored coffee. It's real good. I just lose my audio. I hope not. I got a audio error here. You can hear me all right, right? I got you.

Okay. All right. Yeah, hey, Scott Wharton brand coffee, man. It's the best-selling coffee at Moondos Artisan Coffies. Get it? They ate Starbucks

because Starbucks supports the war party, including in Israel. But Moondos Artisan coffees, they don't. They support peace. And this year's stuff, it's really good, and everybody keeps buying it

over and over and over again because of how good it is. What are you going to do? Can I keep drinking Folgers and Dunkin' Donuts coffee from H.E. be there when you could be having this. And now this here tab I want to show you is sort of our sponsor. It's Darryl Cooper's page. Mr. Martyrmaid himself right here.

This is subscribe.mortemate.com, and that's where you can get his great podcast history series here, and including he's working on Enemy, the Germans War. And I was going to show you, but I guess it's not here. It's somewhere else. The, what happened to the thing that came out in the email there

about the, all the cannibalism and everything. Yeah, the ancient enemy. Oh, that is it. Yeah. Where is it? I see. Oh, I got the names mixed up.

I got to change that. The ancient evil. Oh, you changed it. I see. The ancient evil. Yeah. My favorite is the audio version of the essay. Oh, I see.

And there, when you have, When I page down, it says the ancient enemy. I get it. Yeah, that's some crazy stuff, man. You guys should be reading Daryl Cooper, dude. He'll trip you out, bro. I mean it. I don't read that one before that.

Yeah. And then look, man, I'm not going to pull up a thing. I'll just tell you. The Scott Horton Academy, that's where you go to catch up on all of this stuff, man. You want to know as much as me about the Middle East and Eastern Europe and all these things. Go to the Scott Horton Academy and sign up for it. That's what you should do. Okay, now to the Super Chats.

I guess I should sort of start at the top and page down, Mr. Cooper. Let's see what we got here. Who used nukes? You Yankees. I saw that. Well, look, Harry Truman ain't you Yankees. He's just one really bad guy. But, okay, let's see here.

Can't wait to see you at the Wisconsin Convention. I guess that is me. Okay, good. I will see you there. That sounds good. Is he telling you, like, he's going to give you a figurative hug, like he's going to be at the back of the auditorium and sort of giving you a figurative hug,

or is he threatening to come up from behind you and seize you? God, I hope it's more of like a frontal kind of thing where I have a chance to defend myself. But, yeah, no, I have a bunch of events coming up, man. I have all March. I'm going to New Hampshire. I'm going to Nebraska. I'm doing West Virginia and Montana and Pennsylvania.

God dang. So, yeah. Oh, and did I say Kansas? Holy crap. No, that's not me. That's somebody else is in Kansas. Anyway, a bunch of Libertarian Party state conventions. I'll be speaking at them.

So we'll see you there. Very good. And then, let's see what we got here. This guy says, I don't know the most powerful country in human existence become the bitch of a country the size of Rhode Island. It's not just bribery. It has to be more.

You know what? I mean, the simple answer to that, and thank you very much for your comment and your dollars, is, yeah, they do, they lie cheat and steal. Read Big Israel by Grant F. Smith and or, of course, you know, the Israel lobby by Mir Shimer and Walt.

And what they explain there, especially, I guess, the Israel lobbies take, is that they play the game of democracy very well. And it's just money. You know, with money, you can have an office building full of receptionists and secretaries and lawyers. And with receptionists and secretaries and lawyers, you can get work done, man. You organize people, organized donations, organize, you know, groups all working toward the same goal at the same time. And in the Zionist movement, it's very top down.

Look, this is what we're doing this year. The policy is this. This is what the Israeli government wants. This is what the Israeli lobby in Washington has decided they want. and everybody's donating, and you're not going to not donate. You are too, and we all are, and this is what we're doing, and it's just, it's no different than, you know, your mom doing the March of Dimes telephone tree or whatever, raising money for whatever cause, but it's just hugely organized because it's so highly financed,

and it builds on, it sounds like compounding interest, right, compounding political influence. They built up over all of this time where they have this system wired, where if you want to say you're just considering you're going to run in the primary as a Republican or a Democrat in your district. An A-BAC guy is going to come right to you and say, sign here. And this really happens.

Come and sign on the dotted line. You support all our A-PAC positions or we'll make sure and support the other guy against you. And if you beat him, then we'll see you in the fall. And if you win then, then we'll see you in two years, bow. And that's it. They make a vendetta and they hold it. And then, yes, they also will compromise people,

and bribe them and all kinds of dirty tricks too. But the dirty tricks and the lawbreaking and all of that stuff is really the extra to really, the umph to really get the whole thing done. But the overall job is really not different than the tobacco lobby or whoever else, you know, the banking system or agribusiness or whoever has interest in Washington, man. That's the game, dude. It's a corrupt evil empire.

And Washington is imperial court. We say, you know, Zionist lobby. And, you know, it is that. But really over the years, I mean, it's just the larger set network of Jewish organizations in general, not just the United States, but across Western countries. Because pretty much all of them are working in lockstep with the Zionist lobby at this point. So it is really not any difference, you know, really between them.

There's a few, like, you know, ultra-Orthodox groups and stuff that are anti-Zionists or something. But for the most part, your religious groups. your charity groups, all of them are pro-Zinists. They all work together. They all support each other. They've got the ADL, this massively funded organization with ties into the FBI and every local police department in the country that, I mean, just think about it.

Like you have an ethnic group slash political movement that has this massively funded organization whose entire job it is to go out and identify and attack their enemies. and that's considered something that's so legitimate that the FBI and all local police departments, everybody else, like, gets training from these people. And so, you know, when you look back at the history of Jews even before they got into the United States, go back into Eastern Europe, into the Russian Empire, there's a reason that when, you know, all the revolutions kick off over there from Germany all the way across over to Russia, you just see Jews everywhere, you know, or the early Bolshev, except.

70% of the first communist government in Russia was Jewish representatives, you know, and Lenin's inner circle, half of it, you know, was Jewish. So the 12 people who sat down to vote to set up the Soviet government. You know, seven of them were Jews out of 12 people, and Jews were 2, 3% of the Russian Empire's population at that point, you know. And the reason for that, people want to get all protocols of the elders of Zion on it or something. it's that this group of people has been hyper organized in a way that nobody else has for a long, long, long time. And so whenever anything like that comes up, they're able to mobilize and take advantage in ways that other groups just are not able to compete with. And when you add to that, you know, the fact that we, you know, we won World War II and set up an empire sort of on the basis

that we won World War II defeated the great Satan, the great evil thing. And the great evil thing, you know, for all of the terrible things that they did, the thing everybody identifies it with in the West is the Holocaust, obviously. And so, you know, it gives, it's given, you know, Jews in general and Zionist definitely sort of moral cover that, you know, that they wouldn't, that other groups just would not enjoy, you know.

In other words, like, if there were a group of, if there was a panel of six people on CNN or Fox News and they were up there all telling, us why we have to go to war with Azerbaijan. And we notice that, well, wait, all six of those people are Armenians. And you point that out, people are going to say, oh, yeah, hey, they are Armenians. That probably has something to do with it. We should take that into account. You can't do that with Jews. You can have six Jews on that panel telling you we got to go attack Iran. And if you point that out, you're going to get in trouble, you know. And so they have that moral cover.

And then the final part of it is just go watch that interview with Huckabee, man. You know, younger people, the type of people probably watch in this show and stuff, you know, a lot of them, like, they might not know a lot of these people. I've known a lot of these people back in the day. A lot of them are older now. They're starting to pass from the scene. But go watch that. He doesn't care what the politics of any of this is. It is his religious duty to not just support, but to do anything he can.

to empower the state of Israel. And to serve Jews in general, Jews outside of the state of Israel. He really believes that. People think, oh, he must be getting paid. How could he must be taken? He's not taking any bribes. People like that do not have to be bribed. He really believes, you know, and so you take all of those factors, the fact that

they're already hyper-organized, the fact that they've got all of their billionaires and millionaires on board with the program. The fact that they have, I mean, they've got an organization. called the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that all they do is get like a couple hundred heads of all the big Jewish organizations, all the ones you've heard of and a lot of them you haven't, together twice a year, just to make sure like, okay, you know, Tucker Carlson's starting to speak out against this.

We need you, you, you, you, and you to start a campaign against him. Now, we want to make sure that, you know, you guys aren't overlapping your spending with these other groups over here. We don't want, like, that is an incredibly well-organization. organized machine that nobody else can match, you know. And so you take that, you add the Holocaust moral cover, and then you put the cherry on top of, you know, having basically a whole generation, you know, an aging generation, thankfully, of Christian Zionists who just simply do not care. Like, put it this way. Like if this is a fact, I promise you this is a fact. And anybody out there

who knows people like this will tell you the same thing. If Israel on October 8, or even today, just decided to H-bomb Gaza, they would not, they'd be fine with it. They would be fine with it. Whatever they do is right, and that's the end of the story for people like Huckabee, and there's a lot of those people,

unfortunately. And so, yeah, that's how. That's how they got to control the world's most powerful empire. Yeah. Well, listen, man, so on that note, if I can bind it,

I'd like to show you this really cool article. Here it is. So this came out, this week. He must be familiar with this writer, John B. Judas. He wrote the book on how the Israel lobby got trying to recognize Israel. Yeah, yeah, Israel. Yep, Truman, yeah.

And he's also the author. You know how I first found out about him is he wrote an article about the neo-conservatives in 1995 called From Trotskyism to Anachronism. And it was about how, now that we don't have the Soviet Union, who needs neocons? And which is great because it's six years before September 11th and the neocons, you know, season high to their power and all of that. But it's a really great piece about them. Anyway, so John Judas, here's the thing that he done wrote here, man.

It's at, let me take down our logo so that you can see it well here. This is at Nodas. Notice? Perspectives. The coming conservative turn against Israel goes much deeper than you realize. It's not just about politics. It's also about theology. And it's going to have a massive impact on Zionism, U.S.

foreign policy and even the place of Jews in America. And it's a very thoughtful piece. I think you'll get a lot out of it, everybody. And what he's saying here is that a lot of what you're talking about and for the reasons that you're talking about is just obsolete. The American right is turning hard against Israel because, one, the things they do and the lies they tell and the constant insults to our intelligence and integrity and everything else, but also because evangelical Christians, as evangelical as they still may be, don't believe

in this pre-millennialist dispensationalist stuff anymore, and even some of them now are becoming post-millennialists, which for those not too familiar, and that means that they're supposed to make earth as close to heaven as possible first for Jesus to come and rule over it, rather than Jesus comes and it's the end of the world and a giant war and then the thousand years of everything great begins kind of deal. So and or they're just kind of dropping it all together and why, Derek? Because the rapture never did happen, man. The millennium done came and went. The whole terror war in the Middle East came and went and none of the magic happened. And people just, you know, like you can't help but probably feel jaded when you got your theology from them left behind books at Walmart.

And then it turned out that, man, they were just jerking your chain because he's really. Israelis needed you to pay for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for them, man, that's all that was. They needed your little brother for that, you know? But then, so people resent that and people just drop it. But then without that, what does the American right have in common with Israel? And what need does America have? The American right, mostly, they're just American patriots and nationalists. And if they don't have a religious mandate to support Israel, they don't have any mandate to support Israel.

Where are they? They're a millstone around our neck, man. They are nothing but trouble for us. They do nothing for us. They don't even have any oil. The whole thing is contrary to American interests broadly defined. And so the American right is learning that. And the people on the right who still are Zionists are dropping dead of old age daily.

And that's the difference made. And people on the right under 50 are majority opposed to Israel now. And on the left, it's like super majorities. forget about it. But on the right, the tide has already turned. And especially where you have, and, you know, I'm not like part of this community or anything where I got my thumb on the pulse of it and all of that. But it's not just the old people, right. It's, you know, Generation X, people my age and your age types who maybe were raised on this stuff and are just dropping that aspect of it. Because it just can't be right that this is what Jesus wants is for us to support the Lakoud,

doing these horrible things to these poor helpless people. It just can't be right that this is the religion. You know, Christianity is either the Christianity that they sold you or it's this, but you can't have it both ways, you know what I mean? So that's the good news, man. It's going to take a while. It's, you know, it's not over yet, but the spell is broken, so to speak, you know. Yeah, and if I was the Israeli government and I was trying to think of the best way possible,

to make sure that that spell does break, I would probably flatten an entire city full of civilians, get the American government to start putting people in jail or deporting them for criticizing it. And then just very, very, very blatantly, brazenly, without even really a fig leaf of an excuse, drag America into a war with Iran. That's what I would do, you know?

And so maybe, who knows? Sometimes, look, that sounds crazy. Maybe they're doing, like one thing I learned, I read a lot of books on like paranoid psychology when I was doing the Jonestown series. And the people, you know, people, individuals and small groups, or just groups in general, who become convinced, and this is the case from Jonestown to the Third Reich to Israel today, that when you become convinced, maybe it's based on a little something, like a lot of times it actually is, you know. but for whatever reason, you become convinced that the whole world hates you and is out to get you.

You tend to find ways to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you behave in ways that attract hostility from others, and that just reinforces this idea you've got of yourself as this persecuted or oppressed group, and it just sort of spins out of control from there. And they become addicted. If people aren't angry at them, if nobody is hating on them and, like, all that,

then they almost feel left out, you know, like something's not going right. And so, you know, but yeah, when you have a nuclear-armed country with like a full-on paranoid narcissistic persecution complex like you do with Israel, you know, it's a very dangerous situation. I mean, it really is. Like, you can talk about Pakistan or whoever all you want. I think just by far and quite obviously, the most likely, if anybody's going to pull the trigger

on a nuclear weapon, Israel's obviously the most likely country to do it, you know, just because not because of, you know, they're crazier and everybody else, just irrational or because they, it's just because they're the only ones who would really feel entitled to do it, you know, like nobody else who has them, they might do it because they feel like they have to or the regime feels back to do a corner or whatever it is. They might do it, but they wouldn't do it feeling like they had like, you know, like a moral right to do this, you know, they just, and Israel does. Israelis do. You know, they have that kind of mentality about themselves. So.

Yep. It's true. And of course, you know, that's just amazing that we allowed that gangster regime to get nuclear weapons. Like what a, what a disaster that that was. I mean, it just, yeah, anyway, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, yeah. I mean, the more and more accepted narrative there is that the president who tried to stop them got a bullet in the head and that wasn't a coincidence there. although everybody's got their favorite J. FK theory, you pick one. But yeah, no, look, I mean, every government's point is you'd be in danger if it wasn't for us.

That's what it's all about, right? It's the war power. But in the case of Israel, it's that just turned up to the worst degree. I guess we may have talked about this before that documentary defamation where the guy goes out, the Israeli Jew goes out in search of anti-Semitism and he can't really find any. But in Israel, he describes. a situation where the country is basically like America was in 2002. Orange Alert every day.

You're in danger every day. You know, every housewife glued to the news to find out who's going to blow up and die next and whatever. And it's show of this, show of that, show a furniture sale every single day about just everything and pushing this narrative on them, which you would think would seem absurd to anyone who stopped to think about it for a minute. but they really do tell them that, look, everyone in the world who isn't Jewish, they only have one purpose for existing, and that is to try to kill every last one of us.

That's why they get up in the morning. That's why they have breakfast. That's why they fall in love and get married and have children so that one day they can do another Holocaust against us. That is their only thing they think about all day when they go to work at their various jobs is if they could only get their hands around the neck of every single last one of us. And so, boy, are we justified for sitting on this atom bomb stockpile.

And boy, are we justified for massacring our Indians and whatever we have to do to the people that, you know, stand in our way and whatever, because it's the whole world against us. We're, you know, an absolutely endangered species on its last leg. So imagine, I mean, I remember America in 2002. It sucked. But imagine if it was just stuck like that all. the time. That level of fear-mongering all the time. You know, drive people right out of their mind, dude. A whole different state of mind, you know? Yeah. And it's not just Israeli Jews. It's

diaspora Jews, too. I mean, I had somebody, common friend of ours, somebody we both know, tell me, and I've heard so many stories like this, that he was afraid to take showers for a while when he was a kid because of the stories his parents would tell. You know, and it's like, what are you doing? That's child abuse, you know? If you're, if you're traumatizing a kid intentionally sort of purposely retramatizing each generation in order to make. And like here's the thing. It's like with something terrible, like what happened in the 1940s happens, you expect there to be some trauma that's going to take generations to work out.

But if you go talk to an Armenian, you know, they don't like Turks. They don't like Azaries or whatever. But they don't see the Armenian genocide as like the culmination of mankind's eternal war against the Armenian people, which is the way Jews see the Holocaust. It's the way they see October 7th, you know, that this is not like, it has nothing to do with a sort of geopolitical dispute over land

between us and the Palestinians or whatever. No, no, no, no, no. First the Pharaoh tried it. Then the Assyrians tried it. Then the Babylonians, then the Romans and so on and so forth. And now it's Hamas. Like that's really the way they see it, you know. And not just the religious ones.

This is the really weird thing is you would think, okay, yeah, the religious ones see that. And the religious people here, you know, they think there's going to be a rapture, whatever it is. But it's not just that. It's like, I've talked to atheist Jews. In fact, I have a friend, still a friend,

full on atheist, like a Sam Harris tier atheist, right? Like he's not a hostile atheist, but like very, very set in his ways on it. Does not believe in the Jewish God, thinks the Bible is just a work of man and so forth, you know, fantasy book, whatever. And I was talking to him, we were having a conversation about anti-Semitism.

And he told me that, you know, anti-Semitism, he said that, you know, there's something that it just sleeps in the hearts of mankind, like in general. If Jews, he said, were to go set up, like, you know, and start migrating to China, China would become anti-Semitic. And I said, okay, fine, but like, wait a second. Like, are you telling me that if they moved, you know, if some Jews went and took up residence somewhere in the vicinity of some tribe in Papua, New Guinea or something, that they would become anti-Semitic, or they, or they, that it sleeps even in their heart, and he said, yes, even them. I was like, this is an atheist talking like this. You know, it's crazy. Like, it really is crazy paranoid thinking.

Yeah. You know, this stuff is all above my pay grade. Man, I'm a names of dates guy. You know, I don't know. But I did see a parable or whatever, some comment. I don't know who to credit for this, but somebody was saying this the other day about the Holocaust as the Christ myth itself, where the Jews are Jesus and Hitler is Satan and they're sacrificed and murdered in the Holocaust essentially.

And so it's like the scapegoat ceremony from Passover or whatever, but to Jews themselves writ large and putting themselves in the position of Jesus going through the ultimate torture and all of that kind of deal. And then so I don't know exactly what the conclusion from that is other than... The Bible has... Boy, are we special now or something, you know.

The Bible has a name for the entity that rises up and tries to pass itself off as the credit. Oh, that was the resurrection was Israel. That's the point. That was the part I left off is after the Holocaust. The resurrection was the creation of the state. Yeah. So, yeah, some might call blasphemy, but not me. I don't know, whatever, but I could see how it makes sense to some.

But we should get out of here so that this thing isn't so long that nobody watches it later. So, cool. See you next week. Thanks, everybody. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XN YouTube. And tune in next time for more Provoked.