Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:40 - Understanding the Enemy

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

Darryl gives an update on the Martyr Made podcast and introduces Episode 2 of "Enemy: The Germans' War," which reexamines World War II through the lens of the German experience, aiming to foster empathy for the normal citizens labeled as the enemy, lumped in with their leaders, and highlight often-ignored human narratives. Scott and Darryl address the complexities of discussing this charged topic and its relevance today, especially in light of ongoing geopolitical tensions and military interventions. Considering the implications of U.S. military actions in Iran, Scott and Darryl stress the moral responsibility of warfare and the psychological toll it takes on soldiers and society. They encourage listeners to engage with these challenging themes and advocate for a more humane approach to decisions about war. Chapters: 0:35 Welcome 2:39 Martyr Made podcast update: Episode 2 of "Enemy: The Germans' War" 11:30 Understanding History and Human Nature 13:28 Modern Conflicts and Dehumanization 18:41 The Diplomatic History of War 21:52 Promoting the Martyr Maid Podcast 24:03 Coffee and Current Events 24:46 The War in Iran 33:10 Consequences of Military Actions 39:13 The Cost of War 47:09 Political Dilemmas and Morality 53:29 The Reckoning of Actions 59:15 Reflections on Violence and Identity 1:10:11 Closing Thoughts (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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. Negotiate now. End this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is provoked. All right, God dang it's the show.

I'm me. He's him. Scott and Darrell. Welcome to our show. It's provoked. We're not live. We're faking it. I am, at the time you're watching this on Friday night, I am in New Jersey doing a podcast,

and then I am on my way to Minnesota? Yeah. Then I'm on my way to Minnesota to do libertarian things to give a speech at the Minnesota Libertarian Party. So it'll be too late by the time you hear this to catch me there because I'll have given my speech like at a day. hour ago or something. Whatever. Anyway, so, but we're recording this on Thursday. So if our facts are a little bit out of date, then like, I don't know, that's okay. But anyway, happy to see you,

Darrell. How are you, man? Better than you. It sounds like if you're going to have to fight through those airports for the guys. You know what, though, man, is I fly so much. I spend so much damn money on that card that I got pretty good status on American Airlines. And I didn't even know this, dude, I get to, not in every airport, but in some airports, I get to just get right to the front of even the pre-check line. Like a loss. So I'm feeling pretty good about that. We'll see how it goes. I probably shouldn't be taunting the universe with how good things have been going for me at airports lately.

Talk. Back when I used to work for the government, I would just, I mean, I would fly so much that same thing. I mean, on like three different airlines, I was double platinum quite. or droopal, you know, just whatever status. And one time I was flying back on a nonstop from Dubai to LaGuard, no, or anyway, to the U.S. And then it was a late night flight and they had an open spot and they put me on one of those like $50,000 first class like cubicle rooms with your own bed and everything. And that was pretty cool. I'm glad I got to do that before Dubai Airlines goes out of existence altogether.

That's nice. Yeah, I can't imagine what could be going wrong in their business model this year, but... Emmer, it's... If we talk about horrors of war now, let's talk about horrors of war then. You have finally produced episode two of your new podcast series, The Germans. Speaking of traveling around the country, that's what I'll be listening to. I got about, I think I'm about an hour into it before I had to stop the other day, but it's a good four-hour-long episode of Enemy, the Germans War.

So remind us what the podcast series is about and tell us at least a little bit about episode two here. Oh, and also where they can find it. So it's a way, you know, exactly kind of what it sounds like, enemy, the Germans war. I'm trying to tell the story of the Second World War from the perspective of the enemy. You know, this is something that, you know, really like throughout history, it's so funny, you go back and when you read like the history of say all the empires that rise and fall in mesopotamia and like you know in the in the Levant and everything it's always like you read this story of you know this this empire that's rising and overcomes all enemies and conquers

all the world and washes its weapons in the sea and then that's it they they get defeated and their defeat gets written about by whoever just wipe them out and then it's just a repeat, you hear about these people's great victory, move on. So like, you know, we have just sort of by the nature of how we tell history, you know, the victors in every conflict, obviously, are able to shape the narrative afterwards and because of the political expediencies and just the psychological necessities that, you know, sort of follow on, especially a particularly bloody and difficult conflict, you know, they, they tend not to treat the other side as really like fully human. And this is something that, you know, again, pervades throughout history. It's not unique

to the Second World War. It's one of the reasons people then and thousands of years later now like the Iliad so much, you know, is you have this story that's written by the Greeks, about the Greeks, but their enemies, the Trojans, are heroes in the story, you know, and like they treat them like human beings who are fighting for their city, just like, you know, the Greeks are fighting. And so I just try to take a very human look at who the Germans were, what they had been through starting with the First World War, and I'm going to carry it up through the Weimar years and the rise of the national socialists and, you know, the lead up to and the conduct of the Second World War and really kind of frame it in terms of, you know, what the, how things, how things felt and looked to those people then. and what it is that they thought they were doing and why, you know, and try to make that accessible to somebody 80 years later now looking back on it after really a lifetime of only ever hearing one side of the story.

Well, you know, I know you know if you were doing this about Vietnam or if you were doing this about World War I or about Korea or Panama or Rock War I. or even the Iran war going on right now, maybe. That would be one thing. But this is Hitler and Tojo. In the Second World War, the epitome of evil, and that makes us the epitome of good in confronting their evil, not just mechanized war power, but the most insidious kind.

There's a lot of really great arguments to that. But then naturally flows from that, of course, is that, oh, but geez, Daryl, why this war and this enemy to focus on telling that side of that story of all the stories to be told, boo-hoo, you might say. I mean, the answer to that question is just turn on Fox News right now or go to the Daily Wire.

Any of these websites that are just frothing at the mouth over the war against Iran, you see it again and again. I saw somebody compare, you know, say that this was Nazi Germany all over again that we're fighting. You know, another, maybe it was, another, I think it was a government official today, said that Trump's fighting to prevent another

Holocaust, you know. And so this is our touchstone for every conflict that we've really had ever since then, because it is sort of the founding, the founding, like, sacrificial event of the current power structure and world order. And, you know, one of the reasons that that level of extreme binary dehumanization takes place, especially in certain wars more than others, ones that really do work themselves into like our national self-understanding and so forth, is that, again, just same as this war. Like, you know, we were in the middle of negotiations with Iran, and we met on Friday. We shook hands and said, okay, and really shake hands.

It was a mediator. Shook hands with the mediator and said, all right, we'll meet again on Monday. and on Saturday we assassinated their head of state and half their government. And, you know, you made the point, oh, and by the way, while we were doing that, we killed 170 or 180 little girls at a girls' school with the Tomahawk missile. You made the point in a great tweet that I think maybe you mentioned, I mentioned last week, that just imagine if like at Pearl Harbor they had accidentally fine, whatever, but like this is a sneak attack that they had plenty of time to plan for.

This is their initiative, their plan, their thing. And they just happened to, you know, misidentify a little girl's school and kill a couple hundred little American girls, you know, that that would still be on page one of every history of that event. And so. And FDR. That was what I left out of that thing. Right.

So then. And FDR, who also was the Pope of America too. And do it when we had just met on Friday and we had another negotiation scheduled on Sunday. And they did that. And so if you're going to do that, if you're going to do something like that, boy, you better be fighting Satan himself and his legions of demons because if it's anything less than that, I mean, how can you possibly justify your own conduct? And that's really like where the dehumanization of the Germans became so extreme because,

you know, the only thing arguably worse than what we did, the Allies did in the Second World War, was what the other side did, like ever. Like, you know, the only thing worse, like almost ever, certainly in like modern European Western history that anybody's ever done was, you know, what the other side did. And so it's like if we're going to completely just firebomb entire cities, wiping out civilian populations when we know all the fighting age men are at the front

and it's just nothing but women and children and old people and invalids, you know, we're going to bomb a city like Dresden into complete, ashes when we know that it's packed full of not just women and children from Dresden, but from all over Germany who had gone there as refugees because their cities had been wiped out and they all kind of had this hope that Dresden has no military value. It's a cultural city. Maybe they won't bomb Dresden. We knew all that. And we wiped it out anyway like a month before the war was over, if even, yeah, it was like barely a month. And so if you're going to do things like that, then drop a couple atomic bombs. Oh, an ally with Stalin to do it all, by the way,

you really, you better not have been fighting human beings. You better have been fighting the devil himself. And so, you know, that, it almost, that, that, that almost imposes itself as a necessity. And it's become, unfortunately, you know, not something that we haul out in to, to sort of justify and get ourselves psychologically past our conduct in, you know, a massive World War, that, you know, was a war of annihilation in many parts of the world where it was fought and certainly a war to determine who was going to rule the world for the next century or so. I mean, it's a major, huge historical event of the type that I don't think we'll probably see again for a thousand years. Just it was a very unique, you know, historical period where something like that was

possible. And, you know, so something like that epoch-epical happens. And you, you know, come out with this sort of mythologized version of events and of the enemy and, you know, and whatnot. It's at least sort of understandable in some sense. But we just haul that out now, that same methodology. We just haul it out any time we want to go knock over a country that is infinitely weaker than us poses no threat to us whatsoever. And where the stakes are literally just, does a pipeline get to go through here or does Russia get to put a pipeline through there? or just petty stakes, you know, who paid off the president, you know, during the campaign, things like that. And so I think that de, not, not, again, I don't want to, anybody to get the mistaken impression that I'm going into this to justify the Germans in any sense.

I want to demystify the Germans, you know, and look at it as, look at them as human beings. You know, we know in the 1920s the Germans were normal people. And we know in the 1950s the Germans were normal people. You know, in the 1950s, the Germans were normal people again. They didn't, like, all of a sudden just become demons for 20 years and then, you know, become human again. Like, these are the same people. And so just trying to understand them on their own terms, you know, and try to understand

how it's possible that a people that we look at is just the bane of all humanity, you know, the great enemy of mankind, how they could have in all sincerity, whether it's valid or not, you know, a separate question. and I'll deal with it, but with that question. But from their perspective, really felt like they were the ones under seats. They were the ones under attack. And just like, again, just to take it up to today, just like the Iranians do. You know, to the Iranians, it is, and to, I mean, I would say to any thinking person,

it's just completely self-evident that they were the ones who were attacked in a war of aggression, you know, in a war that I would argue probably had less. Bessus Bely, then Germany had to go into Poland, you know, just a complete war, forget a war of choice, just a war of whim. And they look at it as just this absolutely perfidious, awful thing that is being done to them. And you turn on American television or, you know, go to neocon websites and stuff or a lot of people on social media. And you would think that they had attacked us. Like they had sent their fleet over and bombed Washington, D.C. or something. You know, that's really like the way people act sometimes.

And so, yeah, it's one of those things that has made itself relevant again now, but it's been again and again and again, you know, over the course of the last century. Yeah, and, you know, there's so much there. I mean, on the smaller level, I'm really interested in hearing all the diplomatic history and all the potential off-ramps from the great cataclysm as it came out. Because, you know, I was born in 70s, it. So when I learned all this stuff, it happened a long time ago, back when everything was still in black and white. And since it all happened before I was born, that means it was all inevitable.

And not even really worth learning about other than as a curiosity or something. But then I guess I'm just very curious about the diplomatic history and how it went and how it could have gone. You know, I know that you've read literally 100 times as many books about this, as I have, but like, I was fascinated by human smoke, for example, by Nicholas Baker, where, and I know you've told me before that he's imperfect there and he gets some of those things wrong, but... It's a great book, yeah, yeah, and there's just so much in there that goes to show that, like, oh, wow, it didn't necessarily really have to be this way at all, you know, despite whatever

criticisms, very valid ones that one might have against the Nazis, that really just like as I think Buchanan puts it in his book, Churchill, that just it was almost inevitable. Maybe I guess Pat doesn't say it's inevitable. It seemed to me inevitable that they'd have gone to war against the communist. This is just matter and anti-matter. But it seems to me pretty clear that it was not inevitable that they were going to go to war against all the Western democracies,

you know, France and Belgium and Denmark and then, you know, Greece and whatever, whatever take all the Western Europe the way that they did before attacking, Assobe, it seemed more like it was England's fault for the bad hand that they played, the bad way they played the hand that they had. But anyway, I'm very interested in that, but I'm also interested in, like you're saying, the whole kind of macro sort of long-term take where, you know, George Washington and them dressed funny. Their generation was so long ago now.

It's too hard to relate to. And even, you know, Abraham Lincoln or whatever, like all that is just the 19th century might as well have been the ninth century. But in our era, you know, it's really Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Ike Eisenhower. These are the founders of the American Empire. They're the modern founding fathers. And World War II is the modern revolutionary war sort of, you know, rebirth of whatever America was into the new imperial thing that it became in the aftermath of that war, especially in the, you know, rise of the empire to contain communism and the rest of that.

but so I'm really interested in that part of the mythology too about well you know how good it made the American Empire because of how bad they were like you're saying about how it justifies everything that they've done since everything is Munich and everyone is Hitler and that's why we always have to fight and with no self-awareness in Washington that actually they're a lot more like the Germans pick and fights than or maybe like the English pick and fights than they are, you know, the defenders of the innocent victims here,

the way that they always like to pretend. So, you know, I think there's got to be a way to, as you say, demystify it without like, you know, humanizing Hitler and his henchmen in such a way as, like, to amount to some apologia for them or whatever, which is, again, I know, as you just said, I did it with Jenny Jones, you know?

Yeah. I did it with both the Zionists and the Palestinians, the series I did on them. I did it as best I could with the guys who carried out the Milai massacre, you know? Like all of these are human beings, which is not to see. Wait, you did a whole thing on Mili? I did a single episode on it. Oh, man, I suck at this. I didn't even know that. I can't wait to listen to that, man. Wow. It's like, you know, to say that these are human beings is not to say that they're just like you and me. It's to say that they were at one point,

just like you and me. And so what happened? You know, what happened? That's really the interesting question because then it really lets you see that this is something that can and has happened to a lot of people, you know, under the right circumstances, under the right pressure. One of the points I certainly make when I get to this part in the story, and I've made on other podcasts before, is that, you know, in 1920, you had Winston Churchill write this article called Zionism versus Bolshevism. And it is like, dude, it is, I mean, it could have come from the pen of like Alfred Rosenberg. It's like literally the Jews are at the center of every upheaval and, you know, revolution since the French revolution.

I've read quotes from that. I've read quotes from that. It's really like you almost can't believe that like it's Winston Churchill. You want to read it to somebody as like as if it's from Hitler and then be like, oh, by the way, that's Churchill because it kind of sounds like that. And he's going through, he talks about how that, you know, in post-World War I, all of the revolutions in West Central and Eastern Europe, that those were all Jewish revolutions that had done these things, and that the Bolshevik revolution itself was a Jewish takeover of the Russian Empire. And so this is Winston Churchill talking. And one of the points that I, that I've made before is like, if you take that article, you take that mentality, right? Assume you believe what's in there, and I assume he did or he wouldn't have written it, and take it out of, Britain, which had just won the war, they're not in any danger of any kind of communist revolution. The Soviet Union isn't just over there across like a flat plane building their tanks and stuff. Like you're on an island, you have the most powerful navy, you're a relatively stable,

secure place. He can write those things and it can be something that exists sort of almost abstractly for him. The people in central and eastern Europe, if you were to take that same mentality that Churchill exhibits in that essay and that article and put it over into one of the states that was just defeated in the First World War, that just sacrificed, you know, 20% of their military age males for what turned out to be nothing, watched their whole society disintegrate, and the Soviet Union is right over there. You know, they are killing millions of people, like almost within visual range of your country. And, you know, you put it in that high pressure situation, that same mentality transferred into like that much more high pressure

situation. And what you can get is somebody like Adolf Hitler. And, you know, I just, which is not to say that's a good place to end up. Obviously, it's not. Most of my podcast and podcast series are about how people end up in very, very bad places. But, you know, it is important to understand that we're all vulnerable to ending up in those places under the right circumstances. maybe not individually, but in groups, you know, when we revert to sort of the average of our behaviors, you know, in large groups, we tend to respond to incentives and punishments, you know, very similarly over time. All right. So how do people sign up and listen to the Martyr Made podcast?

Just search for the Martyr Made podcast on, I don't know, YouTube, I think I got it on there, Spotify, Apple Music, all those things. I've got a substack, which I publish all my podcasts there, plus a lot of other, you know, a lot of other essays and interviews and things that I do. And I published the history podcast there early as well, and that is subscribe. Dot martyrmaid.com. And so if you like to, if you do like the podcast, then you want to support it, then that is how you do it. It's just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. So please do.

That's how I buy my cats their food. Very nice. Hey, as long as you're over at substack, mine is Scott Horton's show.com, and I'm very shabbily trying to copy you and slowly I'm publishing the excerpts of the, or not the excerpts of the chapters of the audiobook of my book provoked. And so I already have the H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton sections up. The rest is all recorded. Some of it edited, most of it not. But like, yeah, it's sort of done. So Scott Hordashow.com if you want to hear the Eastern Europe stuff. But anyway, subscribe.mortemate.com, that's the substack. And it's just fantastic stuff. And you know, you mentioned fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem,

which is the real big hit that most people know you from. But then also the wild mining commies of West Virginia and the suicidal commies of Guiana. slash San Francisco and the commies of Eastern Europe, the inhumans, is how it's called?

No, that's the name of the book that Jack Posobic wrote based on my podcast without crediting me. The podcast is called the anti-humans. The anti-humans,

that's right. Sorry. He should give you a good slap on the back and good thanks for writing that book for. I'm honestly just kidding. I don't have any idea

that's true. I'm just messing around. Did you read it? No. I'm reading a book by Jack Pesobit. Come on. Ah, well, he probably stole your title, dude. But anyway, I mean, communists do suck, so it makes sense that y'all would come up with that same kind of line. Yeah, you would like yours. He did come up with it, like, just over a year after my podcast came out. That's pretty cool how that happens.

Good ideas, you know, come to people through their eyes and ears. Anyways, it's about them dirty commies, torture people to death and stuff. It's really gruesome and horrible and gross and everyone will really like it. And anyway, yeah, so cool. Let's talk about coffee. If you drink coffee in the morning like you all do, you should all buy it from me. And by me, I mean Mundo's artisan coffee, Phil Pepin is the guy. And he's my coffee dealer.

He sends me giant packages of coffee. in the mail that I get to drink for free because I, well, sort of for the cost of saying this to you. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatran. It tastes just like me.

And it's wonderful. And you get to stick it to the war party over at Starbucks whose coffee sucks anyway and they support Israel. And so I'll support this show. Drink that coffee. Now let's talk about the war in Iran. What do you think about the war in Iran?

Well, it's one of those instances where it kind of sucks to be. vindicated, but, you know, it's, I mean, it looks very much like probably in the next couple days, maybe by the time people are listening to this, that will have put ground troops in, whether that is, nobody really exactly knows. We've got a lot of forces in place now, mostly special operations and some Marines that are about to get there, but a small force, not an invasion force, but a force that usually doesn't get deployed like this unless they're going to do something, you know. And when you look back at the beginning of the war, I mean,

I don't care what anybody says. Like there's no, there's absolutely no chance that this was part of the plan, you know, nobody was expecting a month into the war. None of the people who were, who were planning this, this whole thing, were expecting that a month into the war, we'd be surging thousands of troops. I just read today that they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're wanting to call another 10,000 over into the region. You know, you listen to knowledgeable military guys talk about it. Again, I'm a Navy guy, so ground operations are obviously not my specialty, but you listen to a lot of the guys who do have their experience on that side of things.

And it's like the same song over and over. They look at it and like, what are we, what exactly could the mission be for like this force? Like, you know, yeah, like, Delta's really cool. Navy SEALs are really cool. Rangers are really badass, you know, and all that. But to just be like, well, so if we take all of them, why, that's like the Avengers, and we'll just drop them in somewhere and good things will happen. Like, you know, they're still just guys with guns, you know, just like the other side, you know,

are guys with guns. And, like, you're going to drop them into a place. They're still going to run into just the lunations. limitations when it comes to just the size of their force and the type of equipment and capabilities they have. And so you look at it and you say, well, you know, what is it we would expect a force of, you know, I think there's 2,500 Marines that are about to arrive, another 2,500 that are on the way. That's, you know, probably 1,200 to 1,200 actual riflemen in each of those. So let's say 2,000 to 2,400 riflemen, the rest are, you know, support

personnel, they do maintenance on the aircraft, et cetera, et cetera. And so 2,500 shooters, sending over the, at least some element of the 80-second airborne, not exactly sure how many are in place right now, but they sent over their command post to forward deploy and kind of prepare the battlefield, sending over a lot of our spec ops and stuff. But really, what you're talking about. I mean, let's say they sent the entire 80-second airborne division. So that's, I don't know how many guys they've got available right now, but 16 to 18,000 probably, that we're talking about like 20,000 guys, right? This, that sounds like a lot. And if you're talking about invading Venezuela, it is a lot. When you look at the geography of Iran, when you look at the difficulty

that we're going to have staging those guys and their equipment, especially given the fact that, you know, the Iranians seem to be getting heads up from Russian and or Chinese intelligence about our movements, you know, you're pretty limited as far as where and how those guys can be deployed. You know, there's a lot of talk about them taking various islands in or just outside the Gulf. There's, you know, I think what I think is completely ridiculous talk of them going to the base, the nuclear site where we think their enriched uranium is, but this is a place that's collapsed because, you know, we bombed it last year and they haven't really like had a chance to go in there

and open the doors back up and excavate the whole site. And so I guess, you know, the idea of us dropping in Delta Force with, you know, a ranger battalion to run interference for them while we, I don't know, like, air drop in some bulldozers and excavation equipment to, like, dig the place out. And, like, that's a, that sounds ridiculous to me. But you run into the, you run into the issue with any of these missions that, you know, the size and the type of forces that we're putting over there, these are not sustainment forces. These aren't occupation forces. These are strike forces. They're forces that can establish, you know, beachheads kind of thing, like they can

establish a site, but the expectation would be that there would be some follow-on force to come in behind them. If not, I mean, you've got this small force is going to be extremely isolated, that you've got to start answering questions about, like, how are we going to get these guys food and water? How are we going to replenish their ammunition? How are we going to get air defenses and other things into that site with them so that, you know, they're protected against drone swarms and all these other things we're seeing. And, you know, it all very much just sort of reeks of desperation to me. Like, what it's, what it seems to me like, what it seems to me is that we had this idea in mind, at least our political leadership. I highly doubt the military guys thought this. Like,

I have it on good authority that, that the Joint Chiefs were not particularly saying when about, about this whole operation going in. But the political leadership seemed to have this idea, that we'd hit them so hard and so fast with our overwhelming air power that it would just, you know, it would scramble their whole command and control system and the government would just sort of disintegrate of its own, under its own weight.

And now that that is not happened and it's becoming very clear that that's not going to happen and we've already thrown our best punch, our best kick and our best body slam that we've got, it seems to me like they're looking for some sort of like, you know, like, like, like, deus ex machina to come in and like, this is going to fix it.

All right, this thing here that we'll do. This is going to solve everything. We'll take this island and then we'll be able to go to them and be like, we got your island. If you want this back, you better declare a ceasefire, whatever it is. Like they're looking for some kind of like magical way out. And, you know, I will say, well, the guys who, you know, are not your political generals and, you know, your civilian leadership and stuff, the guys who are operational planners, and certainly the guys who are the actual, actual shooters,

these guys are no joke, and they're smart, and they're very capable, and they understand all of the things I'm saying right now, better than I do. And I would not underestimate their ability to get something done. But if they are being sent in to do something that is not feasible because the political leadership feels a political, you know, impulse to do it, like compulsion to do it,

there are also guys who will say, Roger that, and they'll go do their best, you know? And if that means that, you know, they get killed or captured, like these guys are hardcore, they're warriors, they'll do what they're asked to do, you know, and you just hope that that's not the situation these guys are being fed into. You know, man, they couldn't possibly do that

because this too stupid and horrible and wrong has failed me for as an outlook lately, you know, I don't like to be alarmist because if I'm an alarmist and then something doesn't happen, then I look stupid. Like, remember when I thought

that they were going to nab the president of Venezuela like a week early? God, I'll never live that down. So, you know, an attacking Iran at all, as I said to you on this show, come on, I told it doesn't want to fight.

And the consequences are so obvious and so almost predetermined as far as all our bases getting hit and the gates of Vermeuse is straight. Vormuz, what are the same damn thing. Getting closed off and all of this stuff. And then, yeah, and they did it anyway. And then here, it's like, come on, Darrell, they're not going to do

like a whole big giant Gallipoli where they just pour our guys in and then our guys just get rocketed in artillery to death and they're trapped and all died like some crazy thing. Like, there's no way that they're going to, somebody will stop somebody will say, yeah, but the thing of it is, Mr. President, I'm not sure Mr. Rubio explained this to you or not, but all of our guys are going to get killed.

You know, like, I don't know. You mentioned the thing, especially, and who knows about the island? I mean, I know they have, like, you know, a very rough coastline there. That was what happened at Gallipoli, right? They got stuck at the bottom of the bluff, and they got nailed.

Like, this very well could happen in a not exact parallel, but pretty close, kind of figuredish sense. And then the thing is, about going in and seizing the nuclear material from Isfahan. I mean, I know you're a Navy guy, but I don't think you need to be, have ever been in the service to know that you're talking about a massive ground force just for the force protection for the massive ground force that you put in there to somehow go with what?

Now they've got to create an airstrip so you can fly in C-130s full of bulldozers and backhose and try to dig down to wherever you think they might have stuck. some canisters of uranium hexafluoride that they could have just driven away in 60 different trucks in 60 different directions. And then somehow get out of there again. Just the thing sounds like the siege of Dienbinfu

and all the guys get wasted, man. And so whatever, talk me out of worrying about it because it's too stupid to happen. The problem is that I know that two or three days before the war, the Wall Street Journal had a leak from the chairman of the joint chief saying, I told Donald Trump he better not do this for the following list of reasons, and mostly because they have more missiles than we can intercept.

And that was before the war. They publicly leaked that and he did it anyway. I mean, I would love to give you good news on that. But again, I'm the same as you. Like, I constantly make the same mistake. I did it in 2022 before Russia moved on Ukraine. I said, what? this sounds crazy.

Like what are they going to get out of this that they can't get, you know, just through applying pressure in different ways? Like, I just, this sounds like such a threshold crossing escalation. But, and I said the same thing before this. Well, I had a feeling we were going to attack Iran this time, especially by the end. But just because it's, you know, it's lower cost than like for Russia invading Ukraine or something. but I think the lesson of both of those events to me is again, you don't move this amount of equipment

this many, this much forces into place and forward deploy them like this unless you intend to use them. I don't know. And 75th Rangers and everything. This is like the worst part too, is if anything really goes, if anything goes really wrong. And I don't want to, like, this could sound bad. I value the life of every American servicemen equally,

like in terms of the human being, right? But because of like the infatuation, the sort of action movie Fox News, like idea of military operations that this administration seems to have where, you know, these Delta guys and the Rangers and all that are like going to fix everything, man, if anything really does, like really goes bad,

if those guys do get isolated and captured or wiped out or anything goes really bad, you're talking about like a huge chunk of our elite forces in our military, you know, like a huge, probably the biggest concentration of them in like a given like small area, operational area that we've had in a long time. And especially one where, you know, they're not going to have, I mean, the Rangers are, look, the Rangers are awesome. The Marines are awesome. They can definitely, I mean, hold their own for, for a while against just about anything. But, you know, this is the thing. It's like the, the, the question,

should I keep coming back to, and I keep hearing guys with, you know, actual ground combat knowledge coming back to, it's like, look, we can saturate the sky with F-18s and F-35s and F-22s and drones, and we have ISR over the whole battlefield, and they, why, they can't even, like, you know, move from, to go to the outhouse to take a dump without us seeing them and shooting them. It's like, all right, fine. So now our guys can take the island or, you know, it just, established control of some area of the coastline or something like that. Fantastic. But then what?

You know, those planes got to land. You're not going to saturate the sky with airplanes, you know, sort of guarding this force forever, you know, that's just not, it's not something that's feasible. And, you know, you have to answer the question of like, okay, they did that and the Iranians are still shooting missiles. You know, okay, we took the island. Now the Iranians are flattening Dubai and Abu Dhabi. and they're lighting up the oil fields in Saudi Arabia

and they're firing a bunch of missiles at the Israeli power plants and stuff. Well, okay, now what? Like, what are they supposed to accomplish that is going to provide some magical key to ending this conflict? I just don't get it. And if we do get into a really bad scenario

where they get their hands on, you know, a significant number of our elite troops alive, we're going to end up crawling away from this war humiliated. And like to the point that it's going to, that it would, it would just, it would change the way world politics is structured from now on. I mean,

we may already be at a point like that. But yeah, again, the idea, like there's two things. Like the thing I would hope is that, and this is coming from somebody who 100% things were the bad guys in this war,

like the villains, that if this were a movie, I would 100% be rooting against us. You know, I'd be rooting for us to lose if I was watching this war movie that's going on right now, like in a film. But I'm an American, and so I don't want to see any American, like, servicemen get hurt.

And when I, you know, I, so I would like to think that there's some grand plan here, that there's just this, you know, you don't understand how good, how squared away these guys are. And they've got a grand plan. They're going to do this thing and surprise everybody and all the naysayers are wrong and everything.

But when you just look at how the events unfolded since the beginning of this war and the rhetoric that's been coming out about what our goals are and what level of commitment it's going to take to do it and how long it's going to take and the fact that we're doing things like scrambling air defense systems and, you know, marine expeditionary units from what are supposed to be critical. strategic areas in the Indo-Pacific, you know, the fact that we're doing all this kind of, it really makes it look like we're just developing all this on the fly. Like we're just, you know, what we thought was going to happen today didn't happen, make a new plan for tomorrow. And we're just rolling through like that. And when we're talking about now putting a bunch of Americans into real deal harm's way, you know, where they're going to be the Russians in the Russia-Ukraine war now. And in doing that, like, yeah, I just, you hope for the best, but I don't feel very good about it. Yeah, and look, you know more about this than me for sure, but I know that this is a

thing where, depending on the general and depending on the question, they're just going to say, yes, sir, they're not going to object and say, permission to speak freely, sir, you've lost your goddamn mind. We can't. They just say, me and my Marines, we can do anything. thing, sir, god dang it. You point and we'll shoot. And that's the job, after all. This is a man who has the authority to launch a hydrogen bomb at any city on the planet that he

feels like, and no one can stop it. And that's, you know, so you know, the thing about, yeah, can do the diffusion of responsibility there. Trump doesn't have to worry about the consequences of making this happen or even figuring out how to make it happen. But he can give the order

to a guy who's not in charge of deciding if, but only how. and on down the chain. And so whatever, it's a government program. I can see it going really bad. Yeah, I mean, you know, and it's tough. Like, I don't, like, I see a lot of people who are really upset at Tulsi Gabbard for not following Joe Kent out of the government yet and things.

And like, I have some disappointment on that front, but that's mostly emotional. You know, I understand the dilemma, and it really is a dilemma, you know, that general, who could say, I'm not. not doing this, this is stupid, he could do that and resign his commission. You know, he could retire. He said, I'm not doing this. Find somebody else or whatever. But that's what he knows. If the decision's been made and it's up to you to either carry it out or resign, a lot of these guys are going to look at it is like, well, if they're going to go anyway, you know, I don't trust anyone more than I trust myself to oversee this thing, you know, and these guys are going to be on the line.

like I'm going to be abandoning them basically if I, if I, you know, stick to my principles and resign or whatever. That's, you know, it sounds like self-justification and rationalization, like from one perspective, but that's a real moral dilemma, man. Like, that's really tough. And I don't end-devil, Darth Sidious, explain, all who have power are afraid to lose it. They all know that they know better than the next guy.

And if it wasn't them, things would be worse. Yeah. You know, hear that. I've read that. and heard that from government employees of all descriptions at all levels. And especially military guys, you know, where it's, you know, you and your same seven guys you've been going out on missions with, you're not going to leave them and quit and go home

while they still have to go out there without you. What if you found out that Jimmy got shot in the back when you were supposed to have his back and you were going? I've heard people from lowest level enlisted guys have the exact same dilemma and I could see Tulsi Gabbard I could imagine her whispering that like you boys have

no idea what the tide I'm holding back here. You know what I mean? And justifying what she's doing in that way. I forgot the way Joe Kent answered. I know that this was a question that I was very distracted at the time I was trying to watch it.

But Daniel Davis interviewed Joe Kent and Daniel Davis, a lot of people don't know. Daniel Davis deep dive on YouTube there. He's not to, just to Army Colonel. He's the great whistleblower of 2012. We told the truth that David Petraeus was a damn liar and the Afghan war was a total failure. We should get out now and not later. They should have listened to him then. But I interviewed, I saw him interviewing Joe Kent,

which if you missed it, guys, I interviewed Joe Ken. I got the second interview after Tucker. That came out last week. But I think it was actually Danny's first question to him was what made you decide in the dilemma between trying stay and make things less worse versus come out and tell the truth, how did you decide to, you know what I mean? Because that was his same experience in a way, right? He's having to decide whether to just speak truth to power up the chain of command or go ahead and bring Brinks and write it in the Armed Forces Journal as he did then. So, and I'm sorry, I don't recall what Kent said about that, but that clearly is an important dilemma that people in power find themselves in.

And, you know, that's the whole thing about, that's why a lot of libertarians, you know, really issue participating in power at all because they're compromises start racking up pretty quick, right? That's why Lou Rockwell made the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, so that Washington, D.C. couldn't get to them, and they couldn't get to Washington, D.C. We don't want to have influence in Washington.

Then we'll start being influential in Washington, start tailoring what we have to say. to the ears that we're speaking to. And it's especially... It's especially tough when, you know, again, Tulsi and Joe Kent are perfect examples of this where, like, again, I could totally see Tulsi

in her position looking at it. It's like, yeah, he's not listening to me, but at least I'm in the room, I can get these views to him. Who knows, you know, if he puts Lindsey Graham in as the DNI because I resigned or something, then there's going to be nobody in his ear saying these things.

And I get all that, and that's totally true. And again, I do not envy these people's position. But, you know, when you look at somebody like Kent, and I think this probably factored into his decision-making to some degree, and Tulsi must be struggling with this as well. Because I know Tulsi's not, she's not full of shit, dude. Like she believes the stuff that she said, you know, before she kind of went dark on this, that it's not just that, you know, you're a part of this thing that you think is

destructive and bad, it's that you were like sort of like some of the mascots for like selling this thing, in a way, not for selling the war, but for getting people to vote for Trump who didn't want war. They're like, he's got Tulsi. He's got Joe Kent. He's not going to go start a stupid war with Iran. Are you kidding me? And so at that point, like they become tools of this thing in a way that some other just sort of like general or apparatchik or, you know, or something like that is not, you know, because it really did help. There's a lot of libertarians that voted for Trump this time of last. Yeah.

And, you know, again, you can't blame, you know, as much as a lot of us might regret our vote for Trump, and I certainly do. I mean, when you think about the context of the time, like, it's not as if the political system was giving us a lot of, like, wonderful options to choose from. People were desperate. And he did have Tulsi. He did have Joe Kent. He had these people that, like, gave us some sense that, you know,

that this really was going to be different. And turns out it was different, but in a completely different direction. Yeah. Look, man, I can't blame anyone for voting for the guy. I rooted for him to win. The Democrats had to be not just stopped,

but even crushed, and they're already burnt to the ground and the ashes salted and then sulfuric acid dumped on him. No fate is too good for the Democrats. So I cannot begrudge anyone who really supported him against them. But you had to kind of be willfully naive to say,

like, oh, I don't know if this guy's much of a Zionist or something. You know what I mean? Like, he clearly in his first term was completely in the pocket of Sheldon Adelson and Benjamin Netanyahu and do whatever they said. Now it's the wife, which she had hijacked him in the first place. She's the Israeli here. Spending his Chai Com gambling fortune, subsidizing the Christian conservative Republican Party of

America and telling them all what to think and who to go. It's completely nuts and it's been like this with him. But whatever, it's true that he talked a real good game and he did bring some people who are much less worse with him. And then, yeah, Joe Kent is like, hey, I'm not going to be part of this and quit because there wasn't no point in trying to stay in and fix it from the inside from his point of view. He'd be better off going on Daniel Davis's show and explaining why people need to do everything they can publicly now to try to urge the president against sending in ground troops.

It's not inevitable that he's going to do this. It really could be, you know, well, we're recording this on Thursday night, but how about we get organized on Friday? Everybody call the White House tip line, comment line, and just let the phone ring off the hook all day. For the love of God, no ground troops. And at the very least, that's like the heat of the question right now. never mind ending the war entirely.

We'll do that on Monday. But you know what I mean? Like just this kind of pressure can really be meaningful. If people call their congressmen and senators, I know it sounds so stupid like some schoolhouse rock crap. I'm not like trying to sell you the spirit of democracy here. But I am saying that I do know from activists I've talked to over the years who actually are willing, like the Quakers and others,

but really are willing to spend their time on Capitol Hill, that it matters if the senator's phone is ringing off. hook or whether it's not. And it matters whether people are madder than hell or whether they're not or whether opinion is divided or whether it's not. And they get really worried about stuff like that. Maybe more than you would think that they even need to even bother. They do. So I would encourage people like especially anyone who's political at all, you're a member of the party at all, your dad is, is somebody knows somebody who's a judge or whatever, like whatever, man, anybody who's got whatever, you know, small avenue

of political influence in any of these parties at any level, like let the consensus ring through the society. We do not want to do this. We can stop right now and, you know, turn back in 10 minutes, but we can stop this from happening.

And especially when, like you're saying, I mean, and I admit, I've been very busy today interviewing and being interviewed. I haven't seen all the latest, but I have seen some right wingers and quite a few, like pro war, I mean, and I mean, I admit, I've been. I've been, war, I mean, you know, Hawks, supporting this stuff.

I haven't seen anyone, and I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I sure not have not seen anyone saying, listen, guys, this Karg Island idea is a really great one. Here's how it's going to work, and here's why we don't need to worry about this turning into the MBN Fu and whatever. I haven't seen that. I've only seen people who are like, holy crap, are you really going to try to drop the 82nd airborne on this island right offshore of Iran and this way? hey, what?

And so, you know, like you said, maybe there's some secret master plan, but it's not obvious even to people who really are, you know, this is their job before, to really know about these things, at least that I've seen. So I don't know if you've seen different than that, but I think there's every reason for people to panic

and stomp their foot and say, listen, man, not only is this not what we voted for, but we're really pissed off, and we demand that you stop this and not escalate any further. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like on this particular topic, like the Israel topic and anything related to it, man, they just do not seem to care. I mean, look at the polls.

Like every poll, Trump is like, he's lower than Biden ever was. You know, his handling of Iran specifically is underwater by like 30 something points. Like, I mean, it's, you know, even like Fox News polls show them, you know, they always love to show the ones of like, self-identified MAGA Republicans, you know, or 90% in favor, 100% in favor or whatever. But if, you know, his actual approval polls, even Fox News polls have him in the 30s, like in the 30s, you know, and these are the same polls that just a few months ago, like literally in January, had him at or above break even. And so you just see that kind of collapse as this has gone on. I mean, they either are just not sensitive to it or, you know, the, you know, he's in this trap now, right?

Where, okay, so his polls are down in the 30s, those are not going to recover if he calls this thing off tomorrow. And we get, you know, we go crawling back with our tail between our legs and end this thing. It might make you and me happy. And we might look at it and say, you know, this was a stupid idea and this guy sucks. But, man, you kind of got to respect his courage for like, pulling the trigger on that and like getting us out of there. We might say that, but it's not going to help them in the polls. In fact, it's probably going to make things worse.

It's just going to make it look worse. And so that's how you get these guys in these situations where they just double down and double down, double down, you know, because it seems like they're only way out of it. I will say that I don't know if you've been busy. So you probably didn't see it was a video today. Lindsay Graham was at an event in South Carolina. It looked like some small town. I don't know where it was.

The crowd there, he got up on stage and they just booed. the hell out of them for like six minutes straight his own state. So I don't know how many South Carolina listeners we've got. I don't know what goes on out there. I know you guys are like, I mean, you were like the hyper-confederate like hardcore conservative like state

that like sets the example for everybody else. What are you guys doing? What are you guys doing? You just get rid of Lindsey Graham. You know, they have a couple of contenders in the primers this time. I don't know how they're doing in the polls, but he is the John Federman

of the Republican Party right now. I don't know if you saw his negatives are through the roof, dude. They're done with his sorry ass as well. And yeah, Lindsey Graham is just an absolute embarrassment. I've always wanted, and of course I never got my act together to do this, I always want to kind of organize an effort in the week before election day to have people from around the country all call, talk radio stations in South Carolina and tell them, look, we're begging you, please.

Would you get rid of this guy? You know, I'm primary dabby. Would you please get rid of this guy, man? Why does it have to be him? You understand what an absolute mockery he's making of your state and our country. And here are all these people who are here. Phone calls coming in from all 50s to all other 49 states. And would you please call this off with the Lindsey Graham already?

John McCain's dead. Joe Lieberman's dead. Enough, Lindsey Graham. Please. All right. Well. Damn to me. Oh, you know, just a couple more things before we get out of here.

You've been busy, so you might not have seen. I saw on there today. I haven't seen like 100% confirmation of this, but the sources that I saw seemed like, you know, I think they were mainstream, and the sources that they were citing seemed credible enough that we're from aircraft. We've been dropping anti-tank and anti-personnel mines

throughout, like, different parts of Iran outside some of their cities. No, I didn't see that. Yeah. And it's like supposedly like we're hoping to hit some of their missile launchers when they wheel them out or whatever. But we're dropping them from aircraft. I mean, these are like, if that's, if we're really doing that, man, like in a war that we just kind of decided we felt like doing because Benjamin Netanyahu said jump and we jumped into it with them. And we sneak attack them and assassinated half their government when we did it in the middle of negotiations and things aren't going the way we want them to. so now we're dropping landmines

around their country from the air. Man, it makes you like, it makes you ashamed to be, like, associated with it in any way. I mean, just, it's, I hope it's not true. It seemed like it was true from the source, but, like, man, how awful. And then the other thing is, you know,

you're really starting to see a lot of confirmed, confirmed cases of really extraordinary war crime war crimes coming out of what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon and in Gaza. And in the West Bank. And in the West Bank. Yeah, I don't want to neglect them. You know, the most recent one, there was this one-year-old child that they were torturing by putting out cigarette butts on its legs and putting a nail, like, shoving it through

his foot in order to get his father to talk. And, you know, Tucker made this point in his recent podcast with Jim Webb in his opening monologue is that, you know, this all seems like consequence free now, but people are going to have to answer for this stuff, man. Like, you know, the people who ran cover for this and the people, it's all this stuff is going to come out. I'll tell you what's going to happen in the open. Millions are going to get killed in terrorist attacks. That's who's going to be held accountable as people who didn't do it. Yeah, I mean, but, dude, the Israelis have gone, like, I don't want to get too far off on a tangent.

We've got to get out of here. But man, like, it has become very, very clear that that society, which is not to say every individual in the society, but the society as a whole has really gone rotten in ways that are hard to imagine it coming back from. I mean, like... Pretty ugly, man.

Because, you know, you can have, like, individual people who in individual contexts are perfectly good human beings, you know, But groups of people can get into sort of a group psychosis state where they self, you know, they reinforce like certain themes within the group and police the boundaries of what the group thinks and keep everybody like in this tightening spiral of insanity. And man, like it's just, you know, like you're seeing like a crystal knocked come out of the West Bank on live stream. like every other week at this point. That's what I was just going to say is,

it sounds like where this conversation started about the Germans and their mindset, you know? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's nationalism, and then there's all the way to the right till you get to Hitlerian national socialism at war. Yeah, and, you know, the Germans, you know,

in 1938, when Crystal knocked happened, they were very sensitive to the fact that, like, this was a diplomatic disaster. Like, you know, there were people who were like, there was a lot of, like, internecine, like, fighting afterwards about why would you do this? It's a stupid thing to do. Look at what this effect this is having on us, you know, abroad. And even within the society, like, this was something that, like, within a lot of the, like, the big cities, people were very outraged by it. And you can read

about that in human smoke. There was, you know, when it happened, there was an American. I can't remember it might have been William Shire, who was there reporting on it. He said that, like, the general feeling among all the people that he talked to, which granted was probably like liberal Berliners or whatever. But it was like a general sense of outrage. This stuff is getting like live streamed every day, torturing, raping, burning buildings with people inside them, killing children on camera, just executing children with their mothers. And this is getting released all the time.

They don't even bother trying to say that that's not real anymore. You know, they just, they left that in the past a long time ago. It sounds seen so quaint now back in the opening months of the Gaza assault. when they were like, no, we didn't hit that hospital. That wasn't us. How dare you. Yeah, remember that. It's like, oh, they've bombed every single hospital in Gaza now.

And they do the same in Iran, too. Yeah. And it's like, they've just left behind any attempt to deflect or deny. And they're just sort of owning it and walking proudly with it. And I hope the wrong people don't get caught up when the reckoning for all this comes. Let's put it that way. Yeah. It's sick, man.

You know, it's funny, I used to say about the war in Yemen, which killed like 300,000 people that Obama started in 2015 with Saudi Arabia and UAE, which is a war of decimation and starvation against those people, total blockade and the rest of that. And I may be even wrong about this. But somewhere at least, this is going down in history as a thing that, quote, unquote, we did.

And, you know, our government is our government, but it's sort of kind of our society, let them get away with it at least kind of thing. And they kill 300,000 people for no good reason. They took Al-Qaeda's side just because they don't like these guys because they're kind of friends with Iran and this crap. And, like, these are really bad moral stains. And you can only have so many of these things in a row before this is just,

you know, a level of corruption. How do we come back from? You know what I mean? that staring this deep into this abyss of American imperial enforcement over these last decades, you know? We're hard to argue the Republicans or the Democrats are any better than the Lakud and nothing. I mean, we've, we have really over the last 30 years, especially 25 years, we've really like normalized things that would not have been tolerated if they were out in the open

throughout most of our history, you know, even when you look at stuff like, you know, the Indian wars, the stuff that happened on the frontier, like, that stuff wasn't making, it wasn't on cable news every night, you know what I mean? Like people in Philadelphia were not getting daily updates on what was going on in Sand Creek, Colorado or something, you know, it wasn't like, the information ecosystem was different. And like, in the more modern era of mass media, like, until very recently, they felt the need at least to cover this stuff. up and they really just don't anymore. And, you know, I had a buddy who said, well, maybe that's better.

At least it's less hypocritical. It's like, no, it's not better. Like, that reflects a degradation in our, like, collective spirit, man. Like, it really does. When you no longer even have to lie to yourself about the horrors you're inflicting, it means you've, you know, fallen down to a point where, you know, it's not going to change your view of yourself, you know? Yeah, and look, I'm not trying to be like overly sentimental about it or whatever,

but it's just, you know, like Batman's lady princess and the thing that you are what you do. Yeah. And you can only do so much of this. You know, when I first started driving a cab, people seem to make such a big deal about how I am a cab driver. Not like, I'm a guy who I have a job where I drive a cab, but like this becomes my entire identity to people immediately. And then after a while, that actually became true. They're like, yeah, a lot of how I spend my time is driving this Crown Vic around in circles. So I guess I really am a cab driver, ain't I?

You know, it is true, right? Same thing here. They're like, yeah, you can only kill people so much before, like, yeah, you're guilty of murder. You know? Yeah. And it's, you know, the, like, the worst part about it to me, just being a veteran and having so many friends who are veterans are still active is I know, you know, and people who don't have a lot of exposure to military guys probably don't believe me if they're anti-war types. But it really is true.

Like most of these, these are like the best people. They're the best people we got. The people that are sending them off to do these things, they're not fit to tie their boots for them. You know, these are a lot of the best people that we've got who joined up for reasons that, you know, just kind of, if you step back and look at them, are noble reasons, you know, people who want to serve their country, who really do. believe that what they're doing is the thing that, you know, they're doing the thing that their whole social system from the time they were babies has told them, this is what a good person ought to do. And so they're going to do that. And, you know, the idea that their goodwill is going to be, is going to be squandered and wasted in just, not just in ways that make no sense or ways that,

you know, come, come to nothing, but in ways that are just completely dishonorable. And, and, and, and, and, in that because we have, you know, we've, we've, we've really, like, outsourced our, our own morality to this, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, genocidal garrison state, you know, parked in the Levant. And it's, it's, it's in the middle of, like, an 80-year blood feud with the Palestinians and a 3,000-year blood feud with the rest of humanity. We've outsourced our morality to them

and put our guys in a position where they're going to go kill people, maybe be killed for something that is just not worthy of them, you know? And that's just extremely upsetting to me. Yeah, I'm trying to pull up this quote if I can get the bulk of Provote

to load here. I can find this quote. A guy said to me, a veteran said to me that, you know, to accomplish the worst evil, you don't have to convince men to do evil. You convince them that they're doing good. And then he said, the best men I have ever met did the worst things I have ever seen. And because they were serving their flag and serving their country, trusted the adults in the room that they wouldn't send them on a mission unless, you know,

they needed to. And it was a great thing to do. I mean, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer types are extremely rare, you know, in order to get corn fed boys from Nebraska who are together in a group with their friends to let go out and do something terrible, you know, yeah, you've got to find a way to convince them they're doing something good and they've got to find a way to convince themselves, you know. And one of the things that I am seeing, certainly in the veteran community.

It's a little bit, you know, I think something that will come out a little bit later with the active duty guys because they're very just mission-oriented is because there was just so little effort put into trying to sell this and explain to people why we were doing it or anything like that.

Just really like, oh, it was just a disrespectful, like, you know, especially to the guys who were actually performing the missions, excuse me, like because there was so little effort to do that, it's got to be a lot tougher for people to rationalize at least to themselves, why what they're doing is actually good, you know? Yeah, it's tough, man. Like, yeah, yeah, I told people, I told somebody one time, you know,

when you think about like, you know, the Nuremberg trials or the whole thing that kind of came out of the Second World War, this idea that, you know, I was just following orders. It's not a valid defense of your actions. It's like, you know, somebody who was in that war who killed 100 civilians, right? That was not a guy who decided to murder somebody a hundred times. That was a guy who decided once that it's not up to me to question my officers. You know, my job as a soldier, this whole thing doesn't work if like every one of us

making our own decisions. And so I'm going to do what I'm ordered to do. You made that decision one time and now 100 civilians are dead. It wasn't like this struggle that you have each time. It's one decision and then you go forward with the consequences of that. And again, hopefully this resolves soon for a million different reasons. I mean, gosh, I'd love to get one of these weeks here soon, get somebody who's really good on either energy markets or just global economy to talk about, you know, what some of the downstream effects are going to be on that end of thing. I used to know a guy from oilprice.com. I can't think of his name,

but I used to interview him sometimes. So, yeah, hopefully it ends soon and hopefully, like, you know, all the economic stuff and all of the geopolitical stuff is obviously, like, in some sense, even more important, I guess. But, like, from a personal level,

I just hope it ends for any more Americans, but really, like, anybody more gets killed. I mean, because this is all for nothing, dude. Like, this is just one of those wars that like people are going to look back and they're going to be like, wait, why did you do that? Like, we can look at Vietnam and it's like,

well, that was not a good idea, but I get it. Like, okay, you were in the Cold War and you had this idea about the domino theory and all these kind of things in your head about what you had to do to stop communism or like after 9-11, it's like Afghanistan, okay, it wasn't the Taliban, it was al-Qaeda and blah, blah. It's just about smiting Amalek.

Yeah, I guaranteeing a greater Israel. He's smiting him. Amalek, and we don't even believe in that stuff over here. And like, yeah, it's crazy, man. And I just, I don't want to see American servicemen dishonor themselves or get themselves hurt or killed over some bullshit like this. I know. All right, listen, man, I'm three hours late for dinner here.

We got to go. I'm Scott Horton's show. He is martyr-made. Thank you, everybody. See you next week. This has been provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XN YouTube.

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