Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:43 - Is the War Over? ...or Will It Escalate?

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton discuss the state of the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. They examine U.S.-Iran-Israel tensions, Trump's ceasefire claims, and Netanyahu's strategies, critiquing media influence, Trump's blunders, and Biden-Harris foreign policy too. Chapters: 0:38 Welcome 1:13 Personal Updates and Plans 2:13 Trump and Iran: The Ceasefire Announcement 10:24 Talking War and Strategies 14:57 Netanyahu's Political Games 21:40 Historical Context of the Conflict 30:13 The Role of Media in Perception 36:41 Analyzing the Boston Bombing 41:15 U.S. Relations with Russia 47:46 The Aftermath of the Cold War 51:19 Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy 58:06 Closing Remarks and Future Plans 1:16:47 Closing Thoughts on Torture and Media (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. Oh my God, it's Friday night.

We're live. We got Daryl Cooper. We're not airing a pre-recorded rerun. We will be taking your super chats. We are here with you because I'm traveling this weekend, of course, but just for one day tomorrow. And so we can do our show live. Hey, Daryl Cooper. How are you this evening?

Doing all right. Keeping busy. I'm sure you've been keeping busy lately. I see your bookshelves are still empty behind you, so you must be busy with that. That's right. Still have not finished moving, although we're getting. there. We're getting very close. Got all the new bookshelves put together

and everything, which is nice. I'm just not there. I'm here. I'm going to Dallas tomorrow to be interviewed on a guy's podcast. I'm not sure why I've got to be there in person for that, but I guess I'll go do that. And then the rest of the week, man, I'm focusing on getting all that done. So, anyway, that's my boring stuff.

Otherwise, oh, I'm speaking next weekend in Wisconsin, the Libertarian Party State Convention there in Wisconsin. So if anybody's interested in that, I'll be there. And then, yeah, I don't know. What's going on with you? I mean, I've been spending the first half of my days with my chainsaw out in my forest, jacking lumber, like it's going out of style. And second half of the day, I'm just reading books and writing stuff for the substack in the

next podcast, except for today. And the last few hours before we start this, just sort of catching up on things. Right on. Yeah, well, I've been trying to stay off Twitter, but paling. Mostly staying off of the mentions page, though. So that's saving me some time. Mostly. So let us talk about what's going on. Maybe we should have led with this so that people would pay attention to us. There's a ceasefire and a maybe deal that Donald Trump is announcing that Iran has capitulated on everything and they're going to give up everything and all their enrichment and whatever. And I know he's lying. And that can't possibly be true. So, and I even saw reports that their ships turning back, ships that were sailing like they thought they were going

get through the straight of Hormuz and then turned out, no, but I don't know why. And I don't know what it all means. What do you think? I mean, it seems like it could be one of two things, right? The first one is that, you know, Trump is trying to frame the issue so that, well, so actually, let me back up like one step, right? It seems like one of two options is out there. One is that the U.S. security establishment has realized and has managed to convince Donald Trump that we cannot repeat what just happened. We can't do another 40 days of that. We don't have the munitions. The global economy won't tolerate it. Our domestic economy and political situation won't tolerate it. But most of all, we just don't have the resources to do it. We exhausted years and years and

years of resources just to get through the last 40 days. So that can't be repeated. And maybe they prevailed upon him, you know, just to accept that we have accomplished what is possible to accomplish with military means. And, you know, that's going to mean, or that would mean accepting a deal that is probably inferior to the one Iran was offering before all this started and certainly inferior to the one that Trump was boasting about pursuing in the first couple of days of the war. And so he's trying to sort of prepare the information back. battle space, you know. That's one, that's one possibility and the hopeful possibility. The other possibility is he's just throwing all of this stuff out there so that when they don't do it,

which they never said they would, he can say, oh, they broke the agreement. And that's why we have to go back to war. And, you know, that's a, that's not meant for, you know, the heads of state of our allies or anybody who's paying attention politically or anything. It's meant for the Fox News audience and just sort of the general MAGA masses, which, you know, seems to be, at least for the last few months, all he cares about. So we'll see. Yo. I always do that. It seems real crucial, man, about how he keeps citing this CNN poll that said as he's at 100%. He obviously misunderstood that stupid thing in the first place. The way that they framed it was everybody who still likes Donald Trump, still likes Donald Trump.

It was a complete idiot. Well, do you notice? Did you notice? The important part is no one has told him since then. Sir, this is a real misunderstanding, and you should know that actually the polls do not have you at 100. In fact, you're looking like George W. Bush right now. People hate your guts right now.

Yeah, and, you know, I noticed that when the war first began, like in the first 48 hours or so, the polls that were coming out, they said, they said Trump vote, 2024 Trump voters. You know, what do they think of the war? That's what they were measuring. But then as the war dragged on

and got a little more ambiguous and then catastrophic in its outcome, the polls all changed to self-identified MAGA voters. Right. It's like, well, okay, it's just like you said. It's like people who like Trump like what Trump is doing. Okay, congratulations.

You got 100% on CNN. Like, you know, so yeah, yeah, it's just, it kind of shows you. you know, how silly it is, but, you know, you really just do wonder, you know, you, you, you, you wonder, like, Trump is, Trump is somebody, and this is something that's been commented on, like, going back to, into his, into his days as a real estate developer and reality TV shows and everything that I can't remember the name of the guy, like, the, the motivational kind of self-help author that was, like, his favorite book, like, for a, like, long time.

I know what you're talking about. It's basically like the secret or something, but it was like this older book from back in the back in the early 20th century or something. It was the power of positive thinking. Yeah. The whole of the author, let me look it up. Was basically, I think it was Norman something.

I want to say Norman. Norman Vince Peel. Yay, Peel. Okay, I don't feel too bad then. Yeah. And, you know, the whole gist of it, as far as I understand it, is really that you can speak reality into being. You know, you can think and speak reality into being.

And he seems, I mean, just throughout his entire career, like very taken with that idea and somebody who takes it very seriously. And, you know, it's, it's especially him, you know, coming, coming up in the age of mass media and really in a lot of ways being a creature of mass media. You know, that's something that really kind of was true in the 20th century. You know, there were the ability to put out a message and get people on board. You know, you had this, you had this interesting combination of like very, very concentrated sources of information that could be broadcast. And you combine that with what was still up until like the 70s, really, almost complete trust in the authorities and the government and all that. Like, you know, people knew that there were venal, corrupt politicians and so forth. But, you know, people in general, like when the system told you something, when the establishment told you something, people more or less figured, you know, it wasn't a complete lie at least.

You know, they didn't have the cynicism we have today. And so you combine those two things, the mass consolidation or concentration of information broadcasting with the high trust people had in the establishment. And, you know, if you got control of those outlets, you really could speak reality into being. It really didn't start to, you know, run up against the rocks of reality until the late 1960s. When Vietnam just got to a point where, like, no, you can't hide the fact that, you know, everybody has a friend that got sent over there and has no legs now. Like, that's just how it is. And then Watergate, too.

Yeah. Right, right. Watergate. Well, see, the other thing about both of those incident incidences, because they didn't totally break people's trust in the information ecosystem. Like, it broke their trust in the governing regime, Vietnam and Watergate, for sure. But what it did kind of, and there's polls that actually show this, it greatly increased their trust in television and network news specifically. Because the way they saw it was like it was Walter Cronkite who told us the truth about Vietnam when the government was lying. It was the network news outlets that told us about, you know, that we're covering Vietnam. We were Watergate. We were watching every night. And so they were like the truth tellers. And that sort of got us through the next couple of decades. And that's only really started to completely fall apart. I would say it started like the cracks probably started, you know, in like the Fox News, Bill O'Reilly days.

You know, once you had a right-wing network, quote-unquote, the partisanship of all networks sort of became very obvious, you know? Like, you could have like five liberal networks, and it doesn't seem partisan unless you're, you know, really into that stuff because they're just, that's how TV is. But once you got the other side of it, then the partisanship of all sides, all the networks was very clear. And so it started to deteriorate then.

And then, of course, today, I mean, it's just, you know, Nobody believes anything except for the people that they believe are part of their tribe. And that's really all there is to it. Yeah. So now back to the war for a second. So I had an interesting talk about Treata Parsi yesterday on the show. And he made a point about how Trump walks away now. You know, the more he walks away, the better.

And if he does, at least that much could be a win. because he's really getting what he wants, which is to end the war. And even though he's not really achieving all of his stated goals, they were all idiot goals in the first place. He was never going to be able to achieve anyway. So it makes no difference to him.

It's only better to end it sooner than later before things get worse. But the Iranians are not getting all their war guarantees, all their security guarantees and all of their promises that they wanted to have in order to end the war. you know, remember we feared that he might try to back out and they might just keep hitting Israel

and keep hitting bases in the Middle East and whatever anyway to teach him a lesson that he better not do that again kind of thing. And so the fact that they haven't taken that really gives him an extra couple of cards to play here. The only problem being is he's not willing to disengage that much. And then, of course, the other obvious wrinkle is the great Satan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his, you know,

obvious willingness to sabotage anything that Trump wants to do in America's national interest to roll back the war, to limit it at all. And I saw Dave DeKamp from anti-war.com was tweeting tonight that there were, I believe, missile strikes and artillery strikes into southern Lebanon from the Israelis, only, you know, whatever, within an hour or two hours of Trump, you know, declaring in very firm language, today on his Twitter that, I believe the word was, he forbids the Israelis from bombing Lebanon

anymore. Enough is enough, he said, and then they just kept bombing them anyway. Sure, Netanyahu had a good laugh at that. I'm sure he did. But, you know, as you pointed out last week, the Iranians are in no position to abandon Hezbollah. They can't, even if they wanted to. So as long as the Israelis are going to keep, and they're saying, listen, we own all the territory that we have, you know, destroyed and put our troops on and whatever our, you know, whatever they call it, their security zone or their quarantine zone or whatever in southern Lebanon, they say, we're not leaving one inch of that. Although I don't know, by the way, how far their troops have actually been able to move on foot into southern Lebanon.

I've seen reports of Hezbollah putting up a hell of a resistance there, although I don't know, you know, exactly how thorough that is and on how many fronts or what. But that's a pretty wild card, man. Israel versus Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Netanyahu does not want to quit. And of course, this sounds so trivial that we don't give it enough credence at all, Daryl Cooper, but it is obviously crucial to all of this, that this is how Netanyahu stays out of jail is by not just staying prime minister, but staying at war so we can stay prime minister at war so we can not go to jail

because he's an outright abject guilty felon. For anyone who didn't watch the BB files, you know, over their VPN somehow on the Pirate Bay or whatever, you can watch it on the Tucker Carlson network now. And all it is is Shimbabit footage. Their FBI, National Police interrogation footage of Netanyahu and his cronies, just busting him absolutely dead to rights on their corruption, including Miriam Adelson, talking about the pressure she's under to keep Sarah Netanyahu happy with jewelry and perfume and whatever. So that's a crucial part of this, is that as long as there's a state of emergency,

over there, he doesn't have to go to jail. Yeah, I mean, that seems obviously part of it. You know, at a certain point, you have to wonder, and we haven't found this place yet, but there is a certain point where Israelis are going to want, you know, are going to want to bail out of this. And the thing is they have a very easy way to do it, which is just to pin everything on this one guy

that everybody, you know, everybody except his hardcore coalition people hate anyway. You know, he's not particularly popular. He's a, you know, I mean, they could like, they could send, they could literally vote him out, send him to jail, blame him for everything and really like start the rehabilitation tour, like the next day. Hey, fun with me, man. Yeah, yeah. It's the same way I feel about like with Trump saying, you know, we, like I made a, I made a comment today that, you know, Biden is probably, well, assuming that, you know, he could.

and, you know, see outside his four walls and know what's going on. He's probably watching the Trump administration now talk about this great victory. He probably feels really stupid for not just saying that Afghanistan was this smashing success, and we once and for all defeated the Taliban

when all other previous presidents failed. He should have just done that, apparently, because that's apparently a thing. And so Bush could have been like, Mission accomplished, like, oh, no, actually, no, mission accomplished. You heard me. This day, just say it.

And, I mean, it's really like, it's crazy, man, when you really look at the, I mean, there's a, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I can be, you know, that I can make comments that are based on emotion, bias, false information, confirmation, bias, just any number of things that can cause me to say something stupid or wrong, 100%. The number of people out there, though, who are, are, willing to just completely like latch themselves on to defending a narrative that requires them to take like opposing positions from day to day to day, you know, to go out there and pretend that getting the straight of Hormuz open, I'm sorry, the straight of Iran, as President Trump called it, getting the straight of Iran open is this huge, like Greenwald had the best

tweet about it today. he was like, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the Strait of Hormuz would be open for oil transport. Like, who would have ever thought? Like, it's just so ridiculous, you know? And yet there are, like, you understand why Trump does it. You understand why his administration will say something like that. I just don't get these people.

Some of whom I've, like, met in person, and I know they're real and not just box you something. I know. I watch them do it. I'm like, dude, you're not getting paid. Nobody. Like, what are you getting out of this? I just don't know.

I had a tweet like that about Will Chamberlain that. It was like a quote tweet. I can verify that this is a real person. I've met him in real life. And so he's not a robot. He's the worst offender, but, you know, he's somebody who is like, there's different types, right? There's like your Mark Levine watching Fox News kind of boomer poster who he's just,

he doesn't even remember what he said yesterday. All he knows is this is what he's saying. in a day, you know. Somebody like Will Chamberlain is much, much more cynical. Like, they understand, this is why you can never catch them. You can never like get them where, you know, make them feel ashamed that they're saying the opposite thing that they did last week or whatever. It's just, none of that ever works and nobody should ever try it. Because they understand that their job is to say whatever it takes to get you through the current news cycle into the next phase of the conflict and into the next phase and into the next phase until

we're all so enmeshed and enough of our property's been damaged and guys have been killed and stuff that now we're just in it. And when you say to them, well, but wait, you said all these opposite things. Like, they're just like, yeah, well, it worked. I mean, there's just, there's no shame there.

They totally understand. I mean, in fact, you know, I don't know if anyone could find this anymore because it was on that Tim Poole show that got canceled and whatever, the tenant media thing, where we debated this for Palestine. It wasn't until the end of the thing that he finally just admitted that he wasn't looking for any solution whatsoever.

His whole point was the entire British mandate belongs to the Jews. And the Palestinians, they can just get effed and beat it. That's it. So at the end of the thing, it was like, oh, yeah. No, you didn't think I was even putting up a pretense of trying to come up with some sort of fair and equitable long-term solution to the problem of these people's dispossession or anything like that. Screw them.

Let them all die. Oh, okay. Now I get it. Jeez, I wish he just said that in the first place. And we'd have had a lot clearer debate the whole time. Yeah, you see this, like this sort of process and action whenever I've had this conversation slash debate with several people on different areas of the spectrum. When I try to pin them down on when they say that, you know, this land is a Jewish state that it's promised to the Jews, like whatever, you know, you'll hear that from A. You'll hear it from religious Jews.

Yeah, and I always ask the same series of questions to try to get a consistent answer. And I say, okay, you know, we know from genetic testing that, you know, Ashkenazi Jews have less DNA in common with ancient inhabitants of the Levant than Palestinian Christians and about the same as Palestinian Muslims do. So if, you know, the ownership of this land by the Jews is genetically inherited, well, then the Palestinians have more right to it than Ashkenazi Jews do certainly. You can argue about Mizrahim, but like, Ashkenazis were the original Zionists, obviously, and still are the power structure largely in the country. So if it's genetic, like, explain that. And then tell me, how is it?

because the official position, the legal position of the state of Israel, is that Ivanka Trump, by virtue of her conversion to Judaism, has more right to some Palestinians' house whose ancestors have only ever lived there going back. It could be thousands of years because, you know, there's this idea. One of the things that informs a lot of the sort of pop history that gives people their idea of what happened and in why things were the way they were when the Zionists started coming back is there's this idea that during the Roman Jewish wars in the first and early second century when Jerusalem was destroyed and there were a series of these conflicts. There's this idea that

like the Romans won the Barcoqa revolt. That was the last and fine, you know, that was the final time the Jews rose up. And they just drove every Jew out of the, the, the Roman, region. Like, there's just every single one of them, they got driven out. And that's why 2,000 years later, like, they're all in Poland and Spain, wherever else, like, they're not, they're not over here, because the Romans drove them all out. There's absolutely no contemporary evidence for anything like that happened. You know, certainly the Romans killed and enslaved, a lot of the combatants in their families who were in Jerusalem itself. But what really happened was the agricultural population, the people who lived out in the countryside, which was the majority of the population

in that region, you know, they stayed right where they were. You know, there's no, there's no like contemporaneous records of masses of refugees that are like going into neighboring states looking for a place to live. There's no, by the way, very well, obviously in, in your great podcast about it, but Sheldon Richmond's book coming to Palestine has really great coverage of this fact. Yeah. And like, you know, and what happened was, you know, the people who, the majority of the population, the people who weren't in Jerusalem, maybe, you know, who were involved in the revolt itself or the people kind of associated with them, they stayed where they were. And people in the other towns and cities who were urbanites,

a lot of them just left, you know, when during the time of Christ, like, you know, in the earliest part of the first millennium, AD, there were already more Jews, living in diaspora in places like Babylon, Alexandria, those two especially, but all over the, you know, the Greek and Roman world, there were more living outside of Palestine and there were living in Palestine. So they were already like a, and not like 51%, it was like 70 or 80%. So, you know, they were already a widely spread out diaspora people. And Jerusalem, it got destroyed because it was the center of, you know, the uprising and the resistance afterwards. I mean, the Romans, you know, they, they did what they do when you try to throw off the yoke of their power.

But, you know, the majority of the population who was there, which, you know, again, is not the majority of the majority of the Jewish population in the world because the majority of the Jewish population in the world lived in other parts of the empire or in Parthia, Parthian Empire. But the majority of the population that was there at the time of the revolt in Palestine, they stayed where they were. And then over the centuries, they converted to Christianity. Christianity in Islam, you know?

And the ones who didn't, a lot of them, they just left because this was no longer a Jewish homeland. So they went and they had. The conversation that Tucker had with Ambassador Huckabee was, and Tucker was just running circles around him, sitting still, trying to get him to explain either the religious and or ethnic basis for these supernatural property rights. And how can you have it both ways in all of these contradictory ways? where...

Yeah, and you can never do it. Everybody made fun of Huckabee for that, but I've never heard a better answer from people who are way smarter than him. Because they're just... The talking point for each question, even though if you ask them all in the proper order, like a lawyer, like Tucker did there,

it's really... You trap him into a bunch of logical contradictions about where these, you know, mysterious... I mean, think about how crazy it is that somebody who has... absolutely no blood running through their veins that is, you know, a descendant of like the ancient Jews. Like there's absolutely just a full-blooded Norwegian or something who converts to Judaism can immigrate and become a citizen of Israel.

But somebody who all of their ancestors were 100% Jewish, but is Muslim or Christian, because they just thought that was the right religion or whatever, that they don't have that right. Yeah. And the reason they converted to Islam was so they wouldn't have to pay taxes. That was the deal. If you're still Jewish or Christian,

you have to pay a higher tax rate and you get a break if you convert. And so it was simple as that. That was how they did. They didn't put a sword to everybody's neck. They just gave them a tax cut. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, it was a... Because the same thing happened a lot

in a lot of Christian countries as well. Which, by the way, a tax is a sword at the neck. Don't get me wrong. But you see what I mean. It wasn't just conquest. Yeah, but, you know, you got a... You have to think about it, though, in terms of like they didn't have nation states back then. Sure.

And so the way they demarcated, like, who is a, what we would call a citizen today of the polity, you know, it was based around religion. And so there were, you know, there were different rules governing the different groups. That's how all empires worked, you know, really up until the modern age. But yeah, you saw the same thing happen with a lot of Jews in Christian countries as well is a lot of them just converted just because it was made life. easier. Sure. You know, like, a lot of people like to talk about, you know, this is one of my favorite things to get into fights with my right-wing friends about, like, my hard-right friends.

Everybody loves to point to that nation of Islam book that came out in the 1990s about Jews running the slave trade. And I always tell them it's not true. And they always argue with me. And their argument, all the people that they start listing, they're all a bunch of conversos. And they're like, oh, these were Jews who converted to Christianity or their kids or whatever. And I'm like, okay, far be it from me to, like, you know. unless you have good, really solid evidence of it to doubt anybody's conversion.

But the thing is, like, a lot of these people who did it, like, some of them were false conversions. And that's why you got the Inquisition and stuff. Some of them were sincere conversions. And a lot of those people got caught up and a lot of the atrocities that came afterwards when they didn't deserve it. But a huge number of those people, and this just makes sense, if you think about human nature, they were just people, they weren't that serious about Judaism in the first place. And they were like, what do I got to do? Yeah, okay, I'm a Christian, cool.

And they just went about their lives as business people. Like, it was never a big part of their identity or life, you know. That's what a huge number of those were. And it's like, that's just, you know, this is just, you got to remember, like, not everybody out there. I mean, even in the Muslim world today, everybody thinks of like, you know, because it's in the news, everybody thinks of Iran is like, just a bunch of fanatics. Or even like, if you were to go to Afghanistan, dude, like, go to the Taliban and all of their, like the post-en population out there,

you think surely, like, every one of them is just a fanatic, right? It's like, no, not really. You know, there's a lot of people who... They say the things that they have to say when, like, the guys are around, you know, who care about that stuff or whatever. Let's focus here, because the point being that the Zion

has claimed to that land is a bunch of crap. You have people who are from there who have property rights because they inherited that property from their father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father. And then you have a bunch of foreign and who say that plain old natural property rights, as understood in the West since at least Locke,

but really before, that those are null and void, because they have magical supernatural property rights, which say that anyone from anywhere else has a higher claim as long as they claim to believe in the Jewish religion and the people there. And they must be displaced. And that's what they mean when they say,

does the Jewish state, does Israel have a right to exist? exist? I mean, do they have a right then to expel everyone else with violent force as though they are the ones trespassing? And the answer to that is absolutely not. That's stupid. What are you talking about? That's like if I kick in your house and then I claim you're the one trespassing and then kick you out. It's pretty obvious what's going on there. So that's the bottom line here is that none of this makes sense. I mean, you have Ethiopian Jews and you have Moroccan Jews and Lithuanian and Polish and Ukrainian and Russian and Hungarian and Romanian and German Jews who and Brooklyn Jews

who all have the right to live in Palestine. Palestinians don't though, right? That's anyone can tell you that that's stupid and wrong. You'd have to have ingested 15 ridiculous public relations slogans in a row to somehow not see right through that crap. You know? Yeah. And when you push them, when you, when you, you push them far enough, they always come back to, you know, hey, the North America used to belong to the Native Americans, now you got it, write a conquest, baby. And it's like, okay, fine, I can't

argue with that, like in terms of, you know, just the logic of it. But hold that thought when the tables turn. That's all I ask. Just hold that thought. And don't come running to anybody else for sympathy, you know, when you die by the sword that you live by. Man, you want to see something Cool. I'm a total twin. Check it out. Actually, I'm not. I'm Skater Scott. I'm meat. And there's me doing a giant slaw bear down at the local skate park where the total twins met me. And it's in the new magazine of the Total Twins magazine. If you're not familiar, this is really great educational propaganda for young libertarian and right-wing kids so that your kids don't have to be raised commie in America. And they have these great kind of booklet length books all about central banking and

property rights and, you know, the kid's version of the road to surfdom and all these great things. And then they have more serious, like, textbook-sized books on American history. It's, you know, mostly like elementary school through, like, junior high school. And I guess in high school age stuff, too, as well, on different years. Anyway, this is a new thing. And the way that you get it is, you just go to tautiltwins.com slash free magazine. That's pretty good, right? Totaltwins.com slash free magazine.

And then this one is all about blowback. It's called 100 years of blowback. And what happens is the Tullull Twins go to the skate park and they meet me and I explain to them about how the war in Iran is all Dwight Eisenhower's fault. And that's why we live in a domestic police state here, of course. And we have, and then there's a bunch of other great little side things and whatever. And it's really great stuff. And you get it for free. And all you got to do is go to Tultztwins.com slash free magazine.

And you didn't even see, I don't know what podcast I must have talked about this on, but he even got it right. My first skateboard was a pink and white gator. And so luckily they took his name off it because he's a murderer spit. But really cool gator graphics. And there I am doing a big slob air. And so I think that's rad. And now I need to learn slob air. I don't even think I can do a slob air.

Can I? I can do a mute error. But anyway, so man, isn't that cool? I'm a dang tuggle twin, I'm a cartoon. Who needs the Simpsons, dude? When you can be in the Tuttle twin? Yeah. So, and then also I want to change the subject to this other thing,

which is this really great lady named Michelle McPhee. And that name might ring a bell if you ever read my book, Provoked, which this show is sort of kind of named after, provoked how Washington started the new coal with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. You can see on the shelf there behind me maybe. Well, Michelle McPhee, I rely on her very heavily in my chapter on the Boston bombing, which happened 13 years ago, two days ago. And I did a great interview with her today, great because of her part in it,

where we just went through that whole crazy convoluted story of Tamer Lane Zornayev and his idiot younger brother, Jokar, who's now sitting on death row, who killed three people, two young women and a little boy at the Boston Marathon attack in 2013. And he was a Chechen terrorist. And I guess the bottom line is that the FSB had their eyes on them and warned the Americans about them.

And then perhaps they were working together the... and the FSB and used him as an informant, sent him there to Dagestan to help identify a couple of guys that the Russians wanted to kill and who they did kill. And then he came home and they didn't keep their eyes on him the feds and they let him get away with doing this terrible attack. And I'm not saying it was one of those sting operations that went awry. It's not one of those. But there's a lot of dirty stuff about it that I don't like and I don't claim to understand it completely. But she wrote two great books about it, mayhem and maximum harm. And so, as I reread my chapter about it this morning, I thought, man, I really should have had a couple of paragraphs there about what the hell

do I think is even the point. But I think at least part of it was because the Americans didn't want to pay attention to warnings from the Russians that they refused to really follow up. You know, they use the guy as an informant apparently against some drug dealers and then against these terrorists. I'm not exactly sure, but apparently against these terrorists in Dagestan. But they didn't take the warnings of who he was seriously enough. And of course, then I don't know if you remember this, Darrow, but there's the Graham Fuller angle. Where Graham Fuller, who was one of the architects of even post-Afghanistan,

U.S. support for the Mujahideen in, you know, the Caucasus, and I guess probably in the Balkans as well, but definitely in the Caucasus. his daughter married their uncle. And then there was even a question of like, apparently two visas for the same guy, the older brother, but with two different names.

And the question of like, how did these people even get into the country in the first place? And what role the CIA may have played in allowing them into the country in the first place? And it's a big ugly mess. And anyway, so I interviewed her today for the Scott Horton Show, and that's going to be out on my substack,

Scott Horton Show.com and then on YouTube and all the other podcatchers and everything the day after that. So if people are interested in that, it's still one that, you know, there are so many side stories to it, like the totalitarian lockdown. You know, Jim Bovar posted pictures of the SWAT teams pointing their rifles at citizens looking at their windows. When they're looking, it's a one manhunt for one 21 year old. You know what I mean? And they're treating the whole like three towns, Boston, Cambridge and Watertown all like it's the scene of

a massive Al-Qaeda invasion or some kind of thing, where there could be a terrorist anywhere and accosting anyone who went outside and shutting down all business and all events and everything and it was pretty crazy. So anyway, if you're interested in that kind of stuff,

I do a show like that. Yes, he does. You know, Watertown, Watertown, Massachusetts. This is a, just a total segue, but I don't know if there still is, but there was a big Armenian community there back in the day. And that's actually where Operation Nemesis,

which was the operation of Armenian radicals after the First World War put together a team of people and hunted down and killed all of the Turkish officials who were in charge during the Armenian genocide. They killed them in Berlin. They killed them in Baku, like hunted them, down all over the world. And that was actually hatched and run out of Watertown, Massachusetts. Interesting, man. You never know what you get. I don't know a whole lot about like Boston bombing.

It's one of those that just sort of slipped through my attention span, I guess, over the years. You know, it's a, it's, those early years of the, you know, were, we're very interesting, like the interaction between the Russia and United States when it came to that, right? Because, you know, you kind of saw right after 9-11, like the Russians and the Chinese were like sort of very, very, very vocally, like, supportive of us, like, and whatever we wanted to do. And it was partly because both of them had problems with some Muslim insurgents that they were hoping we'd call off our support for them. Yeah. Well, yeah, right. That, I mean, that's one of the, dude, that's one of the things that, like, I was talking to my wife the other day about how, you know, when you go to other

countries. Like we as Americans, like we just, most people, like, we don't understand, like, how absolutely terrifying we are to a lot of other countries. Like, the, like, we think of ourselves just a place that exists and we live here and sometimes our politicians do some things that happen, whatever. Like, I mean, we, when you really sit down and think about the fact that we have completely destroyed, like half a dozen countries in the last 25 years. several of them just kind of on a whim. Like we just sort of just decided to destroy your country completely to the point where it's still in just total chaos.

And like, you know, the, I really can never get past the fact that, you know, that the Best Law and School Massacre in Russia was carried out by a group, you know, that I don't know if we were still funding them at the time. I haven't seen any evidence that we are, but that just a couple years before we were like arming training funding because it was besyev's group right and like i just you know i i i i try to get people who are you know maybe not like not completely in agreement with me or with us on this stuff but who were open to it to just try to like put themselves in the position of the russians like think think if like we found out that like chinese

intelligence was arming, funding, training, the people who did 9-11. And then that happens. And we're expected to just sort of move off of it. Like, it's like, okay, like, just move on. Like, that was three years ago. Like, this is, I mean, we would never get over that. It would be something we'd be angry about 100 years from now. And, you know, we don't have that kind of mentality. Like, it's almost because another thing my wife and I were talking about, I think, was the same conversation. She was, you know, she was saying that we were talking about Vietnam because we'd watched a documentary on it and the Vietnam War. And she said, it's amazing that, like, these people allow us to visit their country or talk to us at all. And I say, you know,

it really is. And I've been there a couple of times. And, like, it's almost as if, like, the impression I get is that they're looking at us. And, like, they're like, these people don't even remember what they did to us. Yeah, which is mostly true, right? Yeah. It really is. Like, we don't even, we barely remember what we did to those people. And we kind of expect everybody else around the world to be like that too, but they're not.

Right. Yeah, like the quintessential shot from Iraq War II was a profile view of an infantry man firing his rifle at. You never get to see what. You know, that's the point of view of the whole thing, right? Yeah. And speaking of Besland, I mean, There are a few different points in the book where this is said and repeated, particularly the Kosovo War of 1999 is a big one.

But also is the Bezlan attack and W. Bush's response, which was, we like these terrorists and we don't want, you shouldn't go to war against them, you should take it easy, you should respect some civil processes and this and that. And I have two different sources. One of them is George Friedman from Stratford, wrote about, this. And I can't remember who the other one was. Oh, I bet it was Ben Aris from then from the London Telegraph who now runs B&E in Telanus. Decent Russia reporter. I'm pretty sure he was the second source for this. And they both were at the, God dang it, man. It's going to come to me

in a second, the name of the conference where it's an annual conference that the Russians hold every year. And Putin came into the room and it was just like a couple of days after Beslin had ended. And he's just fuming mad. He like can't contain his rage essentially at being lectured by George W. Bush about how you need to deal, you know, negotiate with these terrorists. And this is at a time when America is slaughtering people by the hundreds of thousands from Nigeria to the Philippines, right? And everywhere in between in the name of a couple of Saudis hiding out in the Nangahar province, sent some friends to hijack a few planes in one big day. And we're willing to wage unmitigated violence against populations

that had absolutely nothing within even a daydream site of that attack on our country. And yet here we're talking about a massacre of school children on the first day of school and their families on the first day of school. And W. Bush is lecturing Putin and he just reacted at a rage. And then what they said at the time was this was the, break. This was the end of the new friendship. Because even after all the screwing of Yeltsin that Bill Clinton did, well, what the hell? Yeltsin was gone. And, you know, Putin came in in 2000. W. Bush came in in 2001. So, like, hell, let's have a clean break. And let's see if we can get

along. Fresh start. Let bygones be bygones. It's a new century, new millennium, everything, two new presidents. So, you know, screw the Kosovo war. Forget about that. Let's move forward. Let's see if we can work this out. But within five years, it was no. no way we're going to you know constantly pick fights with them over their relationship with the other countries of eastern europe and we're going to still side with the bin ladenites in chichnia after september 11 and even after they've been the vanguard or the worst of the sunni insurgency in our war in iraq which was you know really getting going at that time yeah like is my best recollection is that

we know that we were working with some of those Chesh and militias, including Bessayev, up to like 2003 or four. And Bessalon, I think, was in 2006. I don't know. That's just what I think we know.

But it's really crazy when you think... I think what I have from Colonel, what's his name that wrote the book about it, was that it was after Beslan was when America called off the support. Really? So, that's... Or it might have been the earlier theater attack in Moscow. Okay.

Yeah. Like, I mean, so I was going to say like, I'd have to go back. You can do back to like. I had two chapters on this, two separate chapters in the Clinton and Bush, W. Bush sections and provoked. Go back to like the days when the Chechens were starting to rebel and there was a counterinsurgency going on in the, you know, the second Chechen war. We shouldn't have been funding those militias.

You know, these are a bunch of. Bin Laden Knights, as you said. But at least you could, like, say, well, this is a geopolitical move we're making. This thing going on. We want to encourage this uprising, and that's why we're doing X, Y, and Z. Somebody could come up with a logical, like, reason why they're doing it. Yeah, we're preventing a pipeline from going through there. Right.

But then, when you get past that, like, the touching war is over. Like, it's done. Like, it's not coming back. It's over. And we're still doing that. And then you realize, like, oh, we're just trying to create chaos. Like, that's it.

We're just trying to create chaos, get people killed, get things blown up and just chaos. That's it. That's the goal. And a lot of U.S. foreign policy, I think, does not make sense unless you understand it. That's very often the goal. It's just to create chaos in a place where,

in this instance, you know, we didn't want a pipeline getting built through that was going to compete with some of our projects. Especially when we need to be stabilizing Russia. This is the case, right? We can never let them get ahead. I don't know if I ever told you this anecdote. Sorry for him repeating myself, man.

But when I debated Eli Lake, which it was a tie, but if you took out all the Ukrainians in the audience, I destroyed him. But anyway, when I debated Eli Lake, it was at, I think, a Princeton writer, some fancy place up there in the Northeast. I can't remember. No, it wasn't at Princeton.

It was at, whatever, Dartmouth or something. Anyway, so after the thing, we're eating dinner at like this four-star restaurant in this extremely fancy hotel. where the likes of me don't belong. And it was a hilarious scene because it's Gene Epstein and Eli Lake and they're just screaming at each other.

And at one point I had to say to the restaurant like, it's okay, everybody, we just got a couple of juice over here because they're just screaming each other at the top of their lungs or whatever. You know, it was a funny scene. But Gene Epstein of the Soho Forum, my very dear friend and wonderful guy,

he told this story about how Jude Wuniski. Are you familiar with Jude Wyniski, Darrell? No. Okay, so he was from Polyconomics. He was like a monetarist, which is like, I think is synonymous with the Chicago school, but maybe I'm oversimplifying that a little bit, but they're not exactly Austrians,

but they're pretty damn fiscal, conservative, libertarian, free marketish type dudes, right? Hayekians, if not, not even Hayekians, but like, Friedmanites, if not Rothbardians, okay? but he had been a neoconservative. I think he'd even been a try and then had moved right with the lot of them and become a Reaganite and this kind of thing

had been friends with all those guys. And in fact, he even took the blame for introducing Richard Pearl to Dick Cheney. Sorry about that, guys, he said. So now, but then at the end of the Cold War, Jude had sided with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell and all of the paleo conservatives

against the Iraq War, the first Iraq War, and against the New World Order under H.W. Bush and all of that stuff. And so he had become a neocon turned paleocon. And so anyway, just so you know, he was a de-sky. I interviewed him once or twice. I used to be on a mailing list with him and Pappy Cannon and Gordon Prather and Paul Craig Roberts, which was fun.

But dang old. So Gene told the story about how Jude had told him the story of how he had tried to convince Paul Wolfowitz. who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy under H.W. Bush, that you know what we need to do, Paul Wolfowitz? We need to convince the Russians to adopt a gold standard. They can't. We're trying to give them whatever shock therapy, this and that,

and transplant free market economics over there. But as long as they're printing money all day, it's going to be really bad. And again, this guy's not an Austrian, but still, he's, you know, as far as monetarism, he's for restraint in monetary. policy. And he's saying, and in fact, one of the real fatal flaws in the entire shock therapy was that they still had a communist running the central bank. And he would not stop printing money no matter what all through the 90s. It was a huge part of the problem in the entire thing.

But anyway, so Jude is telling Wolfowitz, this is what we need to do is we need to convince them to adopt hard money so they have a sound basis for a real capitalist economy. And Wolf which told him, no, fuck them. We hate them. We hate Russia. We don't want to help them. We don't want to be kind to them and help them up. They are our rivals, and we are going to keep them down as long and best we can, or at least that was his intention. And you can see, right, like we have this mythology from the Second World War that

after the war, we rebuilt Germany and Japan and made them our friends, and they've been our friends ever since, which proves that we know how to do this a lot better than the British and the French do and that kind of thing. But of course, we occupied and controlled West Germany and Japan, and we had Joe Stalin's Soviet Union to hold over their head and say, don't you prefer us to them? And so that's an entirely different situation, having Eisenhower and MacArthur parked in your capital city versus not. And so at the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a lot of Americans said, yes, this is our chance to be their friend again. But the national security state type said, well, we don't really control Moscow.

we have as much influence over their drunken president and his cronies as we can. But we don't have a military occupation there truly dictating to them. And so why would we want to be good friends to them? Why? Because that would entail empowering them, helping them to get rich, helping them to get back on their feet, at which point that just means that they're a strategic rival of ours again sooner. And so it's better to kick them while they're down.

And one more point on this, and I'll shut up, I swear to God, is that Stroke Talbot, who ran Russia policy in the 90s for Bill Clinton, had asked rhetorically in like 2018 after the Civil War broke out, but before the worst war broke out in Ukraine. And he told the New York Times, he said, listen, you have to do what's in your country's interest

at the time. And if you don't, then you won't be in charge very long. But then he muses to himself and he says, but should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our national interest? than the one we had at the time, maybe. So in other words, should we have been thinking ahead that, is this going to lead to a war in Ukraine in the 2020s? And are we going to really regret getting us that close to a nuclear exchange

over something idiotic like this? Or should we be thinking about Polish votes and Lockheed dollars to get Bill Clinton reelected in 1996? And they chose the latter there when obviously, in hindsight, yeah, maybe we should have been thinking about the long-term interest of getting along with Russia. But you can see how in their mind at the time, they were all Paul Wolfowitz,

looking at it, like, why would we help Russia up back onto their feet when they're Russia? We don't want them on their feet. And then to me, this is just totally idiotic and myopic and short-sighted and crazy, but I understand it, you know? Yeah, and it's, I always imagine,

try to imagine what it's like for country like China or Putin's Russia or Iran right now to deal with our country, knowing that just so much of the way we deal with them is driven by very, very just petty, venal domestic politics. You know, that was one of the more, when I learned a lot about everything that happened in the 90s between us and Russia,

that was one of the more, you know, shocking parts about the whole thing is how actually a lot of the old hands in the national security state, Like, they didn't necessarily want to be Russia's best buddy or anything like that. But they were happy the Cold War was over and we needed to, you know, welcome them back into the, so you've got to think about it. Like, it's not as if Russia, the Russian Empire before the Soviet Union came into being was,

you know, this total outcast nation, you know, in the, it was part of the, it was part of the concert of Europe, you know. I mean, yeah, people looked at it as if it was a little more backwards, you know, a little oriental because of, you know, the broad scope of its empire and everything. but it was part of Europe and, you know, everybody looked at it that way. And it had been for a long time. And the Soviet Union, really in the broad scope of history, you know, and that exclusion from all that was really like the blip.

That was the blip. And so a lot of the old hands in the national security state were looking at it in a pretty reasonable and rational way. But it was, as you just, I think you just said it just now, like people were, especially after the 94 election when Gingrich and the Republicans like swept into power. after that they were holding, you know, like the Polish vote in Chicago over, you know, Bill Clinton's head. And the, you know, just the polls are, you know, to this day. I mean, polls tend to be like pretty anti-Russian.

And, you know, the, I, like, then you have the other element of it that also has to make diplomacy with this, like, very, very difficult, right? Where, I mean, just you see this again, like you look at Iran. When we send Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff to go talk to them, and they know the Iranians are not stupid people, and they have their own intelligence services, and they just have a television they can turn on. They understand that they're talking to two Israeli agents whose cover is that they work for the U.S. administration, you know.

And they have to sort of navigate that. It's got to be really difficult. And so, but this isn't something that, like, just started recently. And you go back to the Clinton years, the 1990s, I mean, so many of the people who were really ideologically driving things in the direction that they ended up going, you know, there's a lot of these people who had come from these central and eastern European countries to the United States and who had just a very, very negative opinion

about Russia, especially back then because there was sort of this, there was sort of this tendency to, you know, like, I made the point after, like, as the Jones Town cult started to come apart, like in its last days, you saw a lot of these people who were like, inner circle types who really built the whole thing for Jim Jones and ran it for him. And he couldn't have done any of what he did without them. But they kind of saw, like, at the last minute,

this thing's heading for a cliff. And so they bailed or things got difficult. you know, and so they bailed. And, you know, all of them, boy, they, they just, they were all victims of Jim Jones. You know, he just, he just brainwashed us, he threatened us, whatever it was. And it's like, almost all of those people are full of shit. Like, almost all of those people were true believers who bailed at the very end when things, you know, changed. And you saw a version of that when the Soviet Union started to come apart where you had all these countries that they had, like, entrenched communist,

of their own. It's not as if they were administered by Russia or something like that, especially a place like Poland or something. They had their, you know, doesn't necessarily me it was like a majority of the population or anything like that, but these were domestic communist movements that were running these countries. But

their way of sort of, kind of similar to what I said about Israel's way out of this whole mess they're in right now is just pin it all on Netanyahu. He made us to do it. It's all his fault. Let's just purge him. He's the scapegoat. They kind of did that with Russia. All of those other communist

countries, like, oh, it was all the Russians just doing all of this to us. And it's like, you know, obviously the Soviet Union was dominated by Russia. It's the biggest and most powerful country in the Union, but you know, it goes way, way, way too far to say that, you know, all of these countries were just victimized

by Russia, but it was their way of sort of dealing with the last, you know, 70 years and sort of progressing out of it. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to have some way of leaving the past, So oftentimes that's a line of bullshit and get that job done. All right.

So listen, we haven't done a live show in quite a few weeks here. So we need to take some super chats and all of that because obviously the people want to talk to us, especially you. But first, before that, we got to tell them real quick about Matt Sersley, the agorist tax advice lawyer so that he'll give us money. And also, it's sound advice. Listen, you're just trying to get by in the world. Maybe you got an extension.

It's past tax day today, but maybe on extension, you're trying to deal with these guys down at the IRS so you can help pay the interest on the national debt. Well, listen, there are no gimmicks. I saw Margaret Taylor Green was promoting this guy, Joe Bannister, pushing that, oh, you don't really have to pay income tax. Look, you should know that that's all a bunch of crap. But what you should do is you should get a lawyer

who will help you figure out how to depreciate your assets and pay as absolutely little as possible find every actual loophole, not bogus, you know, popular right-wing wives tales loopholes, technicalitarian loopholes, as an old friend used to call them. But no, instead you get you a good lawyer who's going to help you and your business get away with having to pay as absolutely little as you absolutely have to. And that is at agoristtaxadvice.com. And he really knows his stuff and we'll do great by you.

And then here's another thing that you really, need to know about, which is Scott Orton flavored coffee. Actually, no, it's some just, you know, branded. It's part Ethiopian and part Sumatran mix. It's really good. It's the best coffee. You know, I get it all the time. Phil Pepin is a great guy. He's my coffee dealer. And he keeps me awake all day when I drink this stuff. And it gets a ton of great reviews and tons of return customers. Everybody who buys it keeps drinking it because the Dunkin' Donuts, coffee from Walgreens just absolutely does not cut it. After you drink, Scott Horton brand coffee, just go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee.

That's Scott Horton.org slash coffee. And then you can drink what tastes a lot like me. And then just real quick here, let me tell you about the facts about Iran.com. This is just a couple of the classes of my courses from the Scott Horton Academy here. And these are deep backgrounds on America's relationship with Iran in case you want to know all for free for you there at the facts about Iran.com. So now let's get at them comments. Have you been looking at them here? I have not. I did, I've been obsessing over one that was a long time ago from Jim Bob's world. He said that I look like I'm getting ready for my first day of fourth grade in this shirt.

And it's been impossible to focus on anything else since he said it. That's funny. My life loves your fountain poster, by the way. She wanted to make sure I told you that at some point. She likes that movie? It's my favorite movie, dude. And guess what? Darren Aronovsky follows me on Twitter. I can only assume it's because somewhere he saw me being interviewed with that there, I have no idea.

Maybe he's kind of the podcast. A friend or somebody pointed out to him, right, that this guy's got your movie in his background there. So then a buddy of mine, a good friend of mine who's a novelist, best new novelist out there right now. I haven't been as excited about like a new novelist as I am about him in a long time. author of two books. And this is not an ad. I'm just bragging sort of about something. King of Dogs is one of them.

And his newest book is Crowbar, which is a crazy book. He got contacted. This is like, this is not, this is a self-published book. I think it's his own print. Like, it's not some big,

you know, there's no marketing campaign. It doesn't exist. There's no reason anybody who doesn't, like, follow one of his buddies on Twitter or something, whatever have heard of it.

And he got contacted by Aronovsky's people just like a couple days ago asking if the TV and movie rights to Crowbar had been bought yet. And so I don't know if it's true, but I am just fantasizing that the way that he heard about it was through my Twitter account because I pushed that book all the time. If anybody out there is looking for new fiction, check it out. Andrew Edwards, King of Dogs, and Crowbar. I recommend starting with King of Dogs because Crowbar is pretty heavy. Wow, cool.

That was really cool. Yeah, man. All right. and tell your wife, not only that, I've got the fountain graphic novel, which Aeronovsky made when he was having trouble getting the funding and the green light to make the movie because he wanted to make it for a really long time. He said, screw it. I'll make the graphic novel for now. So I got that as well. I love that. I wonder if I can find that for the old lady there. I bet she'd like that. I better write it down, though, or I'm going to forget. Hey, listen,

a guy asks here, or he says a comment here, speaker of the Iranian parliament, is that these are all lies from Trump. I saw a couple of different reports like that, different foreign ministry people, parliamentarians, whatever. And then I saw just a rando Twitter reply, Daryl, that said, you know,

part of this could be the consequence of killing all the leadership because then that would naturally, without even knowing the details, that would naturally create different factions buying for power in the power vacuum from killing all the leaders. So you could have some people maybe negotiate,

at least on some of these points. Trump is clearly embellishing in his claims there. But you could have some people working on a deal and other groups doing everything they can to ruin that so as to ruin that group's credibility in order to take their place and that kind of thing. So, you know, one of the drawbacks of a decapitation strategy like this, as Trump said, they didn't just kill the Ayatollah.

He killed all kinds of leadership all across and the Israelis too. Massive assassination campaign across the top few levels there. Sure. And I mean, because you would have always had... Thank you, Mr. for that comment, by the way. You would have always had factions in terms of people with different opinions, you know, within the regime. But once you rip the lid off the leadership like that, you know, you don't have somebody with the wherewithal and the legitimacy to be the decider. And, you know, that could definitely be the case. Because I got to imagine that there are people within the Iranian regime right now who, you know, they don't want any more Iranians getting killed.

They want people to be able to go back to something like regular life. And there got to be a lot of hardliners in there who are like, look, there is no regular life until we solve this problem once and for all. It just doesn't exist. And so, and this is the best chance we're ever going to get to do it. And so let's push it and make that happen. I don't see how the hardliners don't win that argument under the circumstances. Yeah, seriously.

And of course, Trump is just, you know, It's so funny that like when the president of the United States says X, Y, and Z, and then the foreign minister or whatever, whoever it was of Iran comes out and says, no, he's lying and always believe the Iranian. Everybody believes the Iranian. Even like pro-Trump people are like, yeah. It's crazy. All right.

So here's one. It says, do you still think it's a good idea to leave NATO if it means war between Israel and Turkey? No. Hell yeah, dude. If it means war between Israel and Turkey, let me go. Oh, that'd be the best day. Dude, the IDF has been getting, they're getting embarrassed by Hezbollah for the second time and 20 years.

I would love nothing more than to see them pick a fight with Turkey. Turkey would not, they would send their kids to go conquer Israel. That would be the shortest, easiest fight you've seen in the Middle East in a long time. Please. Yeah. If we got to leave NATO to make that happen, let's go. Yeah, but the Israelis, if it really came down to it, they'd nuke Istanbul and... Pakistan really would hook Turkey up.

They'd give them a deterrent. I don't think that it would come to that. And I think the Israelis... How could they not know better? Or America would side with Israel against Turkey would be the problem, right? I guess I don't care if they fight. Yeah, good luck with that. I mean, I don't want to see any of that stuff.

The Turks can fight. And I'm not like a big fan of the Turks. I got an Armenian wife and Armenian in-laws. Like, it's not like I'm some Turkey stand, but like I have, I was in the military and the DoD long enough to work with them a bit and study them a bit. The Turks can hold up. The Turks are a real military that has, you know, like, like Western level training pipelines, equipment, everything. Like, yeah, no. You don't want to go straight from shooting babies in Gaza to fighting the Turkish army.

That would be a terrible idea for his reason. Fair enough. All right, so this guy asks, and yes, I do agree with you and disagree with, and we're just talking about making bets on the future here, so who knows? I'm not claiming to have a real good idea, but Robert Pape, we talked about this last week. Robert Pape from the University of Chicago, to him, this is purely academic. Iran will now not only seek, but will achieve a nuclear weapons capability, because their latent deterrent has proven to not be good enough,

and their missile deterrent has proven to not be good enough, and so they need nukes, and so they're going to get nukes. And then as I believe you and I agreed last week, well, there are other reasons for them to not get nukes, including that really maybe their missile deterrent has been proven to be quite effective and that any idiot smarter than Trump would not try to do what he just tried to do after this

and the absolute humiliation of America's conventional force and really the complete calling of America's bluff as the dominant power in the Gulf. That whole era is over there. now as a result of this. So maybe their missile deterrent is enough. And then also, as you pointed out last

week, they really do race to a bomb. Well, then so is Saudi and UAE and God, maybe even Kuwait and who knows who, and you don't want that. And they don't want that. And they're probably smart enough to think ahead that there are other consequences at stake here. And everyone's we can't do this

without America, and everybody knows that. And not just because they're afraid that, like, Saudis going to nuke them out of nowhere or something like that. They don't want it because right now, those countries are, they are not at parity with Iran by a long shot, as we see right now. Once everybody gets nukes, well, now you kind of are at parrity. And the fact that you can't just decide to start blowing up, you know, Kuwait's oil and gas infrastructure or whatever else, when the Americans decide to attack you again, getting that nuclear deterrent actually

takes away your straight of Hormuz deterrent and puts you in a more threatened position. Like, to me, it just doesn't make any sense for them to want one. You know, all that, all they would do is put themselves in a position. Like right now, Turkey and Iran are the most powerful countries in their region. And they don't want to fight each other anyway. We, they, they have shown enough deterrent capability to, just as you said, like, unless somebody is as completely owned by not just completely owned by Israel, because I don't expect that to change with presidents coming down the pipeline anytime soon,

but one who is completely owned by just a fanatical Netanyahu Lakud government, you know, because you need both of those things in place for something like this to happen. Which, by the way, this goes back to something you brought up a couple of times about Israel after Netanyahu, and this is actually, you know, at a bay, you could see both sides of it where people argue that,

you know, it would be bad to get rid of Netanyahu because he's such a lighting rod and helps people turn against Israel altogether, you know, the silver lining to his very, you know, dark nature. And that if they got rid of him, that would be a big sigh of relief to a lot of American liberal Jewish Zionists, for example, that like, oh, we can all go back to supporting Israel again because now everything's fine because good old Naftali Bennett, the cause of September 11th is in there instead now or whatever. And I think there is some truth to that, right?

on the other hand, I don't think there's anyone in Israeli politics who is even within miles of as talented as Benjamin Netanyahu in terms of being able to press levers of power and control outcomes in Europe and the United States of America. Natali Bennett and all the King's horses and men can't do what Netanyahu is able to do through his sheer determination and Hutzpah in a way. and just, you know, his dictativeness over all of this time, the networks of influence that he's been able to cultivate over all this time. I just don't think that any prime minister in the medium-term future of Israel could have anything like the sway that he has over the West. Now, it could be worse. It could be Ben-Gavir, where it doesn't matter what America and Europe say,

he's just going to kill them all or do God knows what, you know what I mean? So, like, don't get me wrong, but, like, if it's a matter of a slightly less offensive, Prime Minister coming to power, one that helps to generate new apologia in American media for the new Netanyahuas Israel, then that would still be, I think, worth it in the loss of the next prime minister's actual ability to affect change. I mean, imagine Yer Lepid running around, commanding American presidents to obey his will and whatever the way Netanyahu does. Not a chance. Now, this guy paid $4.99, so let me say here. He asked, many people claim that Iran was in violation of their safeguards agreement, but I never understood that claim. Is there any truth to that? So here's what it is. Yes, there is some truth to it, but it's a misleading type thing. In the JCPOA nuclear deal of 2015, they actually agreed beforehand in the deal that if America leaves the deal, Iran is allowed to stop abiding by some aspects of the deal without leaving. the deal itself. It says that right in it. And so that was exactly what they did. After Trump

tore up the deal, they said, okay, well, we're going to stop abiding by stipulation, A, B, C, and D on the list here. But without tearing up the deal from their end and breaking their deal with the rest of the U.N. Security Council, that didn't happen until last June. And after the war last June, that was when Russia and China and Iran finally quit the JCPOA for their side of it. And I guess the British and the French, I'm not sure when they stopped going along. See, it's very important to note, again, what a kernel of truth that is, because what the JCPOA really did

was it just added additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements or subsidiary agreements to the already pre-existing safeguards agreement. So if they stopped going by some of the new additional stipulations they had agreed to, they stopped abiding by some of the additional protocols and subsidiary agreements,

well then that really doesn't matter because they were still within the basic safeguards agreement. All of their uranium was accounted for and had been, and the IAE had continued to be able to verify the non-diversion of their nuclear material to any military or other special purpose, as they put it. And so they would always say,

oh, well, you know, there are new allegations, almost always from the Israelis about we're concerned and suspicious about research here and research there and we think we found some molecules that need to be explained. And so you would have those little side quests, but they never went anywhere. It was always like, well, we got from the Pakistanis and it had some isotopes stuck to it still.

We did this bench test a long time ago, and you know about it already. So this is just results from that. They had this whole thing about a secret explosive chamber at Parchin that it turned out they were making nanodiamins for industry there and that the Russian expert that they had there to build the thing had no experience with nuclear materials whatsoever. His entire speciality was nanodiamins.

They were saying, yeah, but look at which university he went to. that's the same university where nuclear people also go. Yeah, anyway. And that's not the way with that kind of implosion chamber is not how you would be testing an implosion system for an atom bomb anyway. So the whole thing, you know, this is stuff like that. But by and large, the real answer is,

up until Israel and America started the war last June, IAEA inspections were essentially unbroken. And nuclear material was verified to not have been diverted. The negative had been proven and was being consistently disproven. or the negative was being consistently proven. And then once they launched the war, well, that was the disruption in the IAEA inspections.

And I don't believe they've been back since. So now, of course, you have the satellites watching like a hawk and probably spies in there, you know, watching very closely what's going on. And, you know, you might remember this right before the war, actually, Trump said, I'm pretty sure this wasn't a tweet. Pretty sure he said this. In my head, I got video of him talking.

I'm pretty sure he said this on. on camera that we saw what they were up to. They tried to restart. I believe he's referring to this site called Pickax Mountain, which is adjacent to Isfahan. And he's saying, we saw that they were trying to restart work on this new facility. And then I called them and I told them, don't you do it? I'll bomb you.

I can see what you're doing. And then they stopped. That was before the war. Now he says, oh, they were two weeks away. They were making nuclear bombs. I had to stop them in an emergency. But about two weeks before the war, he said that he saw them do the slightest bit of tunnel digging, and he made a phone call or had Rubio or whoever make a phone call and say,

hey, we're watching you, pal, don't even think about it. We already prove that we are willing to bomb you. We'll do it again. So just stop. You dig a tunnel. We'll drop a bomb down it. So don't. That's the reality of their nuclear program was it was a latent nuclear deterrent.

The 60% uranium was just a bargaining chip. the war party cries all day long 60%, 60%, 60%, but you can't really make a bomb out of it. Theoretically, you could, but not really. No one's ever made a bomb out of 60% uranium 235. Why do they stop at 60? That's the question. Why didn't they go to 90?

Because they weren't making weapons fuel. What they were saying was, look, man, you don't want us making weapons fuel, right? So let's get back to the table here. We're showing you, you know, you get nervous when we enriched to 3.6%. You get upset when we enrich up to 20. Stark Raven Mad when we enrich up to 60. Don't push us to nuclear weapons.

Let's just get back in the deal. That was the only purpose of enriching up to 60. And they did it in reaction to Israeli sabotage at the facility at Natanzon in April 2020. So for anyone who was actually well versed in this stuff, all the war parties' claims are just laughable. You know, I interviewed a guy the other day two weeks ago or three weeks ago on my show

from the American Federation of Nuclear Suclearnes. scientist, whichever it is, I forgot, the bulletin of the atomic scientist, who wrote an article where he had just interviewed all of the greatest nuclear experts on this. And he said, Iran wasn't anywhere close to a bomb. And nobody who actually is a nuclear walk believes that they were. Only liars claim that. Well, and I don't think the people in Israel and the United States who are like the war party propagandists, I don't think they believe that Iran was trying to race to a bomb. I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu ever believed what he was saying. Just like at the beginning of, like right before this war happened,

when the Omani foreign minister went on American television and laid out this deal that the Iranians were very, very close to being, you know, ready to sign on the dotted line for, far in excess of the JCPOA, far in excess of anything that is going to be on offer now. And then all of a sudden we start attacking, and you can't come to any other conclusion, except that we didn't attack them because a deal was impossible.

we attacked them because a deal was about to be made, or at least we were going to be put in a position where it was going to be very hard to say no to it. And so we had to attack now. Same thing like with the JCPOA. Like it wasn't that they thought it wasn't working and the Iranians were on the slide trying to do something. No, it said as long as the JCPO was in force

and we had eyes on the ground actually verifying that this was not happening, Netanyahu could not drag the United States into a war with Iran. And so it had to go. that's why it had to go, not because it was insufficient. I'm afraid so. And I got to get going, brother. I got to feed some animals for the sun goes down. Okay, cool, but wait, we got to take one more, which is,

hey, your torture episode in the Scott Horton Academy is very similar to the torture report movie. I don't think I have seen that movie. But if you want another factually accurate movie about torture, there's one called Taxi to the Dark Side, which is about the murder of Dillowar, the taxi driver in Afghanistan. And then there's a really great one about Omar Codder. Man, I'm sorry I can't remember the name. Oh, and you got to look up Andy Worthington and his documentary outside the law about Guantanamo Bay. And then, yeah, the rest of everything I'm thinking of on torture is pretty much all

written reports. I don't know, but I pretty much got to go to. But thank you, Stephen, for the question there. And yeah, everybody, check out Scott Wharton Academy.com if you want to learn about that. And that's it. So, chat, we didn't get to, but thank you, everybody, for tuning in and watching the show. And thank you, Darrell, for joining me, man. It's always a pleasure, and I had a good time. This has been Provoked with Darrell Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on X and YouTube. And tune in next time for more Provoked. Frozen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes.

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