Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:45 - Defeat at Oxford!

Episode Date: May 9, 2026

Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton discuss Scott's DEFEAT (say it ain't so!) in his Oxford Union debate on the Ukraine war... and more! Chapters: 0:36 Welcome and Travel Tales 3:21 Reflections on Oxford 7:58 The Debate Experience 9:26 Encountering Peter Hitchens 10:44 The Absurdity of War 23:59 Thoughts on Afghanistan 29:04 Bill Clinton's Controversies 37:38 The Cost of Cynicism 37:44 The Aftermath of Abu Ghraib 49:02 Analyzing Military Operations 1:05:43 Integrity in a Cynical World (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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Wayfair, every style, every home. 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.

Hey, Gerald, how you doing, man? Good. Hey, man, guess what? Since the last time I've seen you, I went and saw Willie Nelson down at the Whitewater amphitheater in San Marcos. It was badass. He's 94 years old. And he's more of a rapper than a singer now, I guess, in a way.

He sort of talks through his songs. But I remember like 10 years ago. It was like 10, maybe it was even 15 years ago, but he was on tour. His tour bus got stopped, and he and a bunch of guys got held by police because they had a ton of mushrooms on them. And I'm like, man, I hope when I'm 85 years old, I'm still like to tour in the country doing mushrooms. That's what's... Seriously. Yeah, he doesn't quit, man.

He just gets up there at Whiskey River. It's on. It's pretty good because I saw Bob Dylan back. when I was in college, like, so he was old as hell. I mean, and they literally... Played with Bob Dylan last Fourth of July here. Really? Dude, I don't know if he was sick or whatever.

Bob Dylan seemed like he was going to die the next day when I saw him. Like, it was not good. Well, you know what? The way when I saw him, I couldn't tell what he looked like because they had him in full silhouette the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. See, actually, Bob Dylan's kind of...

He did something similar to what you've done with the intro to this show, where from the very beginning, like he just kind of sings like this and so he's not going to get any worse like the actual singing. I love Bob Dylan. I got a book around here about Bob Dylan's lyrics by this Yale English literature professor

that compares him to a lot of great English poets. I like Bob Dylan, but he never tried to be a good singer. So that's actually a good strategy if you're going to do this for a really long time. Yeah, look, I mean, I come from Pirate Radio and my show has always been very informal. I mean, the interviews are always very subject matter-based because I'm trying to learn a thing or two.

So I can explain to you better, basically, is the reason for the interview show this all these years. But it's the whole time. But otherwise, yeah, like, if I wanted to, like, dress up in a suit and go to work at the office every day, I'd have done that. But I'm not trying to do that. I don't think you're built for that. I mean. They try to make me wear Edwardian tuxedo and bow tie,

but not really. I said, you don't want, I don't have to wear that, right? And they're, you know, you have to. Yeah. I just got home. I may be quite incoherent in tonight's show, actually, a little forewarning there,

just because I am a little bit jet lag. Not too bad, but I did fly to England and back where I'd done. Oh, yeah. You did it. You did a Oxford University. Huh? Nice.

Yeah. But I had a great old time, man. So I never been to Europe before. And I have to say, I don't think I'm ever going again because I can't sit still on an airplane not long, dude. I don't have the temperament for that. And it's one-way flight from Austin to London or not, you know, whatever. Got to go with flying.

Yeah, it's not a half hours there, nine and a half hours back. Nah. Nah, man, I fly a lot, but not that long in a row, dude. I can't do it because I can't really sleep sitting up in a chair like that or whatever. I want to sleep around a bunch of strangers anyway. The whole thing is all completely... Dude, when I used to work in the Middle East a lot...

I didn't watch Star Wars and or a little bit. When I used to work in the Middle East a lot, I would fly sometimes from, like, Qatar or Dubai, just sprayed flight to the East Coast. Brutal. Brutal, dude. No. One time I was on...

I can't remember who it was Emirates or Cotter's airline, but one of the two, it was like a late night, like red-eye flight. It was, you know, half full maybe one of those like double deck or just a big beast of a client 787s or whatever. And, you know, because I was always flying for work, I was like a double gold platinum superstar member of like all the airlines with my, you know. And they had some open first class, not seats, first class suites, rooms, bro, like a bed, a big screen TV, a fridge. and, you know, because I had a billion miles with their airline, they'd let me go ahead and be in it.

Oh, man, it, like, made me understand. Like, I've always thought, like, I don't need to be rich, you know? Like, as long as I got a dog and, like, a nice cat, and I can feed them, and my wife's nice to me and cooks me good dinners or whatever, oh, that's fine, you know, just get to the point where, you know, I always say that bullshit line about, we just, you know, forget, It's probably not true. Now they think about it,

now that I'm giving this example, but once you reach that point where you can go to, like, a medium restaurant and you don't have to worry about what things cost on the menu, extra money doesn't really make you happy. Go on a 16-hour flight in a Dubai, an Emirates airline first class suite, and you will disagree.

Like, if you look it up, it's like a $50,000 flight, and I'm like, who, what human, whatever, and then I did it, and I was like, oh, if I could afford a $100,000, every time. It's amazing. Yeah, well, if only you...

Wait, let's follow my mic. Steve, speaking. Right? Hold on. Somebody's scared from talking to Mike. I'm on my good mic. No, I don't know. Actually, now that you mentioned,

you do sound terrible. Are you on your good mic? I was actually just happy I could hear you at all because you logged on so close to the top of the hour and I couldn't hear you at first. Mike, I don't know why it read back to my crappy. Oh, yeah, see. That is more better.

Boom. Thank you, Adam is Rolling Stone. No wonder I lost at Oxford. I didn't use Oxford commas in my speech when I wrote it. That was how I sabotaged myself. Wait, so I got to tell you a story. So I don't go to the London there, and I get a cab from the airport to Pierce Morgan's studio, which was, I could see like the parliament and the old Bailey and all that stuff across the river while I was driving there.

It was pretty cool looking. old cool stuff to look at. And then it was really cool just driving around London. Had to take 125 lefts and rights to get to the place. You know what I mean? I get it.

It's an ancient city, you know? And then that was cool. And I went up there and beat up on some Zionist pig for a few minutes and had a good time and got to hang out with Piercemore a little bit. And I like that guy got to do the show in person or whatever.

He's been very generous with his gigantic audience and having me on there. So that was fun. And you should read the comments on that. on that episode, man. That's a little over the top, actually. People liked it.

But then I went to Oxford, which, oh, I took a train out there, so I got to see all in the countryside and whatever, which is, that was kind of nice to see. What were you wearing? You know? What'd you wear? For the debate.

Yeah. Okay, you did do the suit. That's good. Yeah, I didn't do a bunch of, I'm not dressing up like that. I'm not creating pictures and video of me wearing a tuxedo unless I'm like a, relations wedding or something.

Even then, it would have to be a real special one. But I can't think of a time that's ever happened in my life before. But anyways, so then this really nice lady named Izzy, she gave me a tour all around Oxford. And she showed me all the different colleges. There's, I think she said, 27 different colleges there that are part of it. So she showed me a bunch of them and all the different things that took me to the Christchurch thing.

And here's where Henry the 8 hit out. during the Protestant Reformation when the Catholics were trying to kill him during the Civil War. And this was like his castle, it was all full of secret passages and the hiding places and stuff for him. And took me to all the massive libraries and the halls of paintings of all the great graduates of Oxford and whatever kind of thing. It was really cool, man. They had books that were like the history of every county in England going back for, I don't know, however many centuries, many, you know, longer than you might think. You know what I mean? Really cool stuff like that.

So, and then I didn't wait, and I'll tell you the good news first, which is I got to make friends with Peter Hitchens. And I've always really been very fond of him because he's an anti-war right winger of sorts. And good enough for me, man. And, you know, I despise his brother. I didn't tell him that. But I did not like Christopher Hitchens because I mostly, well, actually, I did kind of like him in the 90s because he did that documentary about what a evil bastard Henry Kissinger was. But then he went from Trotskyite to right winger, even though he wasn't really from commentary magazine

and part of that set. But he was a Trotskyite turned Warhol to support the invasion of Iraq, so fuck him. But his brother was always really good on that stuff. And I got to meet him, pal around with him. He was on my team. So the way it was four on four. It was one student on each side.

And then on my side, it was me. And then Jan something, I'm sorry. I don't know how to memorize it and say his name, say and memorize his name, I guess, in that order. but the former Prime Minister of Slovakia and Peter Hitchens versus a student, a Ukrainian lady, the former editor, or no, a current editor of the Telegraph,

and Daniel Freed, the sanctions monger from the National Security Council. So, we totally lost because the lady, well, first of all, it was funny, Daryl, I might have even mentioned this to you last week, maybe. I probably did because it's the only thing I thought about it. That the premise of the debate was so absurd that I thought it was not even fair

how badly we were going to win. Because the premise of the debate was, this house would prefer to go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. Or I guess let Ukraine lose is what they mean by that. And so I thought, well, that's the most ridiculous thing in the world. Like, what are you talking about? But I didn't have it in my head right that like, no, dude,

this is a room full of liberal college kids and this is, you know, they're good on Palestine, but they're bad on Ukraine, just like here. And so the whole room was all biased against me in the first place, which is fine, whatever. But then the lady that went first, she was just all rhetoric and emotion about the poor little Ukrainians

and the principle of standing against injustice and whatever. But she didn't say anything about the war, who was winning and who was on what territory and at what cost, the risk of further war, or any kind of substantive thing. It was all just like stand for bravery or whatever. And then I went up there and they didn't get my jokes.

And they didn't like me at all, man. I bombed. You know, I start off with a 1984 reference because I'm like, certainly they've all read Orwell, right? But like maybe he's considered to be a right-winger now. I don't know if they had ever. Because I called it Airstrip 1 that they didn't seem know what I was talking about. And then anyway, whatever.

And then my other guy was, Oh, the telegraph guy said what basic Republican talk of points, I guess. And then on my side, the prime minister of Slovakia, he was a nice guy, but he was like 70, and he just read this script real quietly and had a real thick accent. Nobody could understand him. He was really quiet. And he was just like talking about that one time that a bunch of people you've never heard of did things, they had no idea what he's talking about.

And so I could tell people weren't even listening to him anymore. So he was like kind of a net, nothing maybe for our side. And then Peter Hitchens, he was great, and said a lot of things I wish I had had time to say in my thing, and was a better rhetoritian than me or whatever, what do you call that? But it wasn't enough, man. And then, oh, and Daniel Fried got up there, and at least he acknowledged that, no, there is a risk of nuclear war here. But, hey, man, we were always willing to go to nuclear war over Denmark. So why shouldn't we be able to nuclear war?

There was a chancellor of West Germany back in the day who, when this topic came up, he had like kind of a semi-famous quote that America, when it came down to it, was not going to trade Detroit for Dusseldorf, like that they would let it happen rather than... That was what I said. I said, listen, and I got news for you Lithuania, because I gave the example, I said, NATO membership is a terrible moral hazard, and I gave a quote of a Lithuanian defense official saying that they closed the Swalwaukee corridor to prevent Russian shipments

from going between Belarus and Kaliningrad. And they said, well, we wouldn't think of doing this or you didn't say that. He says, but we don't fear retaliation from the Russians because they know we're members of NATO. If we weren't members of NATO, then we probably wouldn't do it. So he's like hiding blatantly saying,

we're hiding behind America's nuclear skirt here, basically, and taunting the Russian Federation. It squeaked little Lithuania. That couldn't do a damn thing about it if the Russians came. And it would be 100% dependent on us, they're willing to pick that fight. That's what a war guarantee is. It's a license to a foreign nation to get you into a war. And I said, and I got news for you, Lithuania.

We're not coming for you either. Forget your NATO membership doesn't mean anything. We're not. America wants nothing to do with this. And I wish I had said, Joe Biden was the most anti- Russia Hawk present that we've had since the Cold War. And he said explicitly, we're not putting troops in Ukraine. That would mean World War III.

The end of all European civilization and American civilization forever. Well, the loss of all of our major cities. So, you know, all of our major libraries and museums and churches and everything. Even if by some miracle, it didn't come to that. the idea that modern Westerners have the stomach for even the casualties that Russia and Ukraine have suffered over the last few years, totally ridiculous. Like, the annoying thing about these kind of arguments with the kind of people that you were talking to is that it's all just abstract. Like that student, the girl, like, would we rather, what do you mean we rather go to war? Nobody you know is going to go to war if you go to war with Russia unless it does escalate to, like, nuclear weapons.

I mean, like, you're talking about should people that I've never met who are from a completely different social class than me that I'll never know or ever run into afterwards, should they go fight the Russians so that I can feel better about holding my position on Ukraine. Like, that's really what you're talking about, you know? I mean, at least give like, you know. And you know what, Darrow?

They just scoffed at the mention of nukes. Like the whole room. I'm like, guys, I said, we can't go. See, I made another joke they didn't get. Haven't you seen threads, which is the English version of the day after, where it shows Maggie Thatcher gets England into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union,

jumps into war on America's side, in a war with the Soviet Union, and England gets nuked, and they all fucking die. It was destroyed. Everything they built for a thousand years is gone. And as I joked in there, you'll be burning Empire Strikes Back action figures for cooking fuel,

which is something that happens in that movie, which I thought was hilarious, because I'm a big Star Wars Dorker. I'm going to guess that's another reference they didn't get. Another reference they didn't get. Well, actually, I knew they wouldn't get that, but I thought maybe if they watch threads in the future, they'll be like, oh, the Empire Strikes Back action figures he was talking about.

I don't know. I was trying to be a little levity, you know? I don't know. I just think, like it's... They didn't like me, man. That kind of stuff, these discussions are so... Like, they're always in the abstract, and it's so obnoxious because, I mean, just, like,

you just said, like, they just scoffed at the idea of... nuclear weapons potentially coming into play. Like, it's not real to the people who, and I mean, it's not as if these are people sitting around the bar, you know, sitting around the Cheers bar debating this issue. Like, these people are going to go into public policy and, like, you know, be members of parliament. They're at Oxford, you know? Yeah. And like, so they're actually going to be involved in these decisions that the consequences of which are just completely, like, imaginary to them. Like, they can't even, they can't even fathom it. It's like when, you know, if you go back to like the 1960s, the anti-war movement before the draft opened up to be able to pull college kids in,

the exemptions got pulled, and the anti-war movement really, really exploded on the college campuses. But there was a movement after that, and it was large, and it was energetic. And give them some credit for that, that, like, they were exempted from the draft, and they were still getting out there protesting it. And, like, you know, some people. And, like, it's just, yeah, I just think, like, you know, back when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened, Jocko and I did an unraveling about the whole thing. And we didn't really focus much on just the things that happened on the ground, whatever.

Everybody was talking about that stuff. We went like a little sort of a little deeper and more like behind how something like that could come to pass, right? Where one of the things I mentioned is that the president of Afghanistan at the time at the end, And he was a dude who was like a college professor and an author who had written a book literally called How to Fix Failed States. And I, you know, when I found that out, I didn't have time to read the book before we did the whole book, at least before we did the show. So I looked up a whole bunch of reviews on it because I just had a suspicion that, like,

I was going to go through all of the foreign policy, you know, journals, foreign affairs, foreign policy magazine, like all the national interest. And every one of them was just going to review it, like it was the most amazing thing they'd ever heard. And I was, and I just wanted to see what they said. Because this book, even the part that I got through, I mean, the examples he's using on the methods needed to fix failed states are like, you know, something that like the state government of Oregon did,

Singapore, like all of these places that are just objectively not failed states and have nothing to do with like the basic problems of how to ensure basic physical security for people or any of those kind of things. And I'm like, okay, but I'll bet you this guy, when he walked into somebody's office in the State Department and he presented his thesis and he started talking about global flows of information and capital and blah, blah, blah, they just, oh, their hearts were a flutter. They melted in their seats at this guy. He definitely has to be the next president of Afghanistan. How could anything go wrong? And it's just because these people live in worlds that are defined by just words and concepts

and have no real connection to like baseline reality, you know? I'm glad you brought up Afghanistan. I think it's a great example of this where a few different things that you're talking about or a couple of these that the unreality of the thing because of how far away it is. Yeah. Right. If the fighting was going on like in France and the question was, should Britain jump in the war right now, it would be a whole other thing.

Maybe it would be that much more important to do it, but it would be a whole other level of reality, that's for sure. Ukraine is far enough away even from England that it's still, you know, a bit abstract. And in Afghanistan, the worst consequences, I mean, everybody kind of knew it meant increase in the overall opiate supply

and the black markets in the world. That was for sure. But otherwise, you sure can't like smell the burning bodies from here, you know what I mean? What parts per million and all that? So, yeah. So it was, you could do like, if you're a Washington, D.C.,

what they called the Coindinistas, for example, who pushed for the Obama era surge, the whole thing was like playtime. It was like a science class without the teacher, and you just do your own experiments and just mess around, see, like, oh, you know what? I know what we can do. And they're just launching military missions hither and thither.

They didn't know what the fuck they're doing the whole time, man. Yeah. Yeah. And that leads to like a mentality that, you know, that judges success and failure according to criteria that have nothing to do with reality. You know what I mean? Like where... And so that's why it went on for 20 years. Yeah.

They look at it and they're like, well, we're checking all these boxes. We're meeting all of these like, you know, when we put up the spreadsheet at our weekly meeting, there's a whole bunch of green, you know. And they see that kind of stuff. and that means we're winning the war. That means everything's going great. That means we can leave and the Afghan army will hold up and it'll be great. And then all of a sudden reality crashes down on everybody and they're like, although I think I have to differ with you a little bit there.

My take on the situation then was that they were lying their asses off and they knew it, that they knew that there was no way. They were like praying that the Afghan army could last. But that whole thing about how we won, that was a pure like hollow excuse to withdraw. And they should not have done that, dude. They should have been honest and said, look, dude, we're leaving because we lost. The Taliban already rules like 75% of the country in the daytime and 95% at night. And we just lost this war.

That's it. So the Afghan army is a joke. And the Afghan national government cannot stand without us. So we're going to pull out all of our equipment. and we're going to pull out all of everybody who wants out of there or needs out of there or whatever that we've got to take, and we're going. And then, and it just admitted it.

By pretending that the reason we get to leave is because we won, they completely botched the timelines. What really happened? They kicked the can down the road from leaving in May to leaving in September. The Taliban didn't delay their takeover the country. We had our decent interval to leave, as they called it in Vietnam.

We were supposed to be out in May. then they would have sacked Kabul, you know, probably in August. And then, or yeah, I guess July, August. And then, but we'd have been out of there for a couple of months at least. And so, I mean, that's definitely lying to themselves. They were just lying to us. Yeah, that's definitely possible. I guess I only, like, from my experience in the DOD,

I can see it being possible also that, you know, people who were there focusing on, like, who are there, with the Afghan army officers, like, training them and stuff. They knew their bosses had some idea. The bosses above them had a very limited idea. And as you worked up, like, because I've seen that, like, in action, right? Where I used to go out 8, 10, 11 months a year sometimes, and I would be deployed with strike groups.

You know, every cruiser, destroyer, other than the last four or five that have hit the water that you see over in the Middle East right now or deploy. I've been on all of a bunch of times, right? And I would be assigned to strike groups and they would fly me around to different ones that needed training or technical assistance or whatever. And so I spent a lot of time out there with all kinds of different crews, you know, good crews, bad crews, just the average ones like deployed in hot zones out in the middle of the Atlantic, like steaming across doing nothing, right? So all different kinds of scenarios. And I had a good idea of like the state of the fleets, at least their combat systems. like the training levels, all the things that were going on with these ships.

And so I would get back and we would have like one of our, you know, the technical director and the CEO of the installation that I worked on would have a, you know, their town halls or whatever. And they, in totally good faith, like I still believe this. I don't think that they were, I think they wanted the truth. They would ask for people to, you know, at the end of the whole thing, like just do you have any questions? you have any comments, do you have, blah, blah, blah, and I would raise my hand every time. And as soon as I raise my hand, my boss, his supervisor, everybody on just went, oh, God. Like, they were, and it was because, and I told him, I was like, look, I've been out here.

And I can tell you, like, in this way, this way, like, readiness is not up to a standard that you want a war kicking off and, like, expecting these ships be able to defend themselves or the carrier. Like, I'm, and here's all the reasons why. And I did that a few times. And when town halls or CEO technical director meetings would come up after, they would literally find other things for me to do to, like, send me off on another assignment so that I couldn't come. And it's like, you know, probably something like that. I could see something like that happening.

How's, how's the, you know, the training of the Afghan army going? Oh, sorry, you're, you know, a lieutenant that's really, really bad. Oh, okay, well, I got to go tell the colonel something. He's not going to want to hear that. Colonel, there are some holes, you know, that we've got to fill. there are some shortcomings that we got to make up. The colonel's got to go talk to the general, and he certainly isn't, you know what I mean?

And by the time it gets up to the president, it's like, oh, look at this chart, sir. Everything's actually pretty good. We have full faith, you know, that I can see that happening 100%. Yeah. You know, that's the more benign version of October 7th, too, which I think is plausible. That just no one was telling Netanyahu that like,

hey, man, I'm sorry, that game of yours that you were playing is over, dude. You better wake up, buddy, it's too late because nobody talks to him like that and that's what it would have taken. And so it was like, okay, I guess we're just wearing around. I was quite to imagine in Israel because they are, you know, they've always had to be so much, you know, more plugged into reality because they were closer to it. But, you know, I could see it with like the current Netanyahu government where, you know, it is like that.

I mean, he's got a government in place now that's a bunch of people who are, fully ideologically aligned or to the right of him who are who are not really yeah i could see that under this government in the past it would have been hard to imagine yeah and which i don't mean to dismiss the other possibility i don't really know i don't like to assume the worst because usually it's not quite the worst but yeah i don't know sometimes it is so i don't want to dismiss the possibility because you know there are people who've done some work where they i mean we certainly know, even from what they've admitted through Ronenbergman and others of how much prior knowledge they had. So, you know, we're not an official narrative. Yes, it's a couple clicks

worse, you know? Yeah, they're not above it. It's not beyond them. And so, you know, that's, it's certainly a possibility. Like, did they, did that happen? I don't know, but would they do it? Absolutely. You know, that reminds me of when Ron Brown was killed in that plane crash in Bosnia in 1995, the Commerce Secretary. And it was like, oh, Bill Clinton murdered his own Commerce Secretary. And there was like the, I have on tape here somewhere on VHS,

the doctor's saying, well, he did seem to have a hole in his head, although, I don't know. He wasn't a plane crash. But the line on talk radio, Raleigh James was the radio host on KilbJ at that time. And her line was like,

I just like how everybody just assumes Bill Clinton did it. Like, what does that say? about the President of the United States and the people of the country that the Commerce Secretary dies in a plane crash. People immediately assumed that the president had him assassinated and the plane crashed over it and like what?

Like the assassin jumped out the door or whatever? That's every's first assumption because we know Bill Clinton is a rapist and a murderer. We know that that's of course what he would do is murder some guy who got in his way. That's what he had to do. Yeah, we're talking about Bill Clinton,

the mad bomber, the sociopathic throat slitting, face-biting rapist killer. So what wouldn't he do? And that was earlier in his presidency, right? That was in his first term. That might have even been a 94 or something. I mean, other presidents, it would have been like a lot harder to, you know,

maybe to imagine for most of them. But when it's like your 14th or 15th person you've had killed, I mean, it's possible, you know what I mean? And by the way, I know it sounds crazy to call him a face-biting rapist, but his victim is on Twitter, and she's huge. Juanita Broderick.

A. Tennis Nut is her handle on there. And she's a very pro-Trump kind of Republican. She certainly ain't a Democrat. I mean, even Democrat. She told that story. She told it credibly, man. She's not a part of it. She's a port as it now deep into the future.

Back then, she absolutely was not. And she was only, let me just say real quick. She only told her story. She actually lied in the same deposition that, or same set of depositions that Bill Clinton lied in originally in the Paula Jones civil lawsuit where she was subpoenaed to come, and she perjured herself there and said nothing ever happened.

But then when it became the federal grand jury investigation, her son was a lawyer and told her, listen. You can't lie to a federal grand jury matter what. So she told them the truth. And then she told the story to NBC, and it was totally credible. Anyone can watch her interview with Lisa Myers, and she talked to the Wall Street Journal,

and they published all about it. And she sued for no money at all, but just for her FBI file, but no damages whatsoever and did nothing to, like, seek publicity or any of that. So she didn't become a public person, really, until Twitter. I mean... I mean...

By the standards of Me Too, Bill Clinton should not be, like, publicly shamed and driven from public life. He should be in prison. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? He had a witness. Contemporaneous witness. Tanya, something or rather, like, found her in her immediate victim's

state with her torn pantyhosen or bleeding swollen face and whatever like yeah yeah he's savagely bitter on the faces he raped her he and you know and that he's the president of course he did that's a president what i mean that does like it really does like you know like i've had times in my life where my moral code has oscillated right better sometimes worse other times there's never been and i could never imagine like a situation where i would be capable of doing anything like that. And that's pretty much everybody I know that that's the case. Like I couldn't even imagine them doing it. And so when you have a type, like a personality, a pathological personality that could do something like, you know, sexually assault one of your female like underlings,

bite her lip, make her bleed, like leave her crying in the corner and then, and then just go off and go about your day. Like, you can't just think of it in terms of like, oh, this dude disrespects women. He's distraised. Or he's like, no, no, no. This is a deeply pathological personality that is capable of all kinds of heinous stuff. You know, 100% you have to take that into account. Yep. Yep.

And you know what, too? NBC buried that interview. Lisa Myers interviewed her when the Senate trial was still going on or maybe even during the impeachment in the House. And then they buried the damn interview and didn't air it. And it was like, you know, there were 100 reporters begging to interview her. and the one that she trusted was Lisa Myers from NBC, and then they still didn't run the damn thing

until after he was acquitted. And a bunch of the centers that did vote to convict, they said that was the evidence that made them vote to convict on the perjury charges. Because it wasn't the perjury charges. It was they read her transcript of her testimony to the grand jury. And they were like, all right, we're getting rid of this guy.

And which, by the way, if they had just done the right thing, then Al Gore would have been the president, and that would have been very bad for a lot of reasons, but we would not have done in Rock War II. In fact, I bet September 11th wouldn't have happened either because he was terrified of Al-Qaeda and very interested in that subject and wanted to do everything he could

to prevent something like that from everything. And we definitely would not have done in Rock War II, Afghanistan, Syria, all that, like, whatever. He would have been, you know, at Israel's bidding to a degree, but Joe Lieberman ain't Dick Cheney, all right? Like, it's just not the same. and history would have been so much different.

The whole goddamn third millennium start off just like shit because of George W. Bush. And it just did not have to be that way. And he would have been the incumbent president and he would have beat Bush by four states or whatever and it would have been fine. It would have been terrible.

But it would have been so much less worse, dude. So much less worse than Bush and Cheney, torturing people to death, invading Somalia, kicking off the longest war in American history in Somalia in December, that we're still fighting to this day. Look at news.antiwar.com.

We're bombing Somalia almost every day. Dave DeCamp is the only guy who writes about it. He just is following the DOD press releases. They admit it. It's not secret. This is the war. We killed a bunch of guys today. And they put it out on scentcom.com or whatever the hell.

Dave's the only one he writes about it. And never mind how a Rock War II kicked off Libya, Syria, and the Caliphate and all of the rest. There's this process where, like, you know, like this process of degradation. that a society undergoes when it starts to attach itself to people or other countries or causes or whatever that force them to, that forces the people to defend indefensible things, right?

Like, when we, when Bill Clinton was president, and you have this guy who's like literally got a credible rape accusation against him, you know, at least want to corrupt, you know, family even before they're well-known. own. But, you know, we're in a very partisan environment. You got to, you got to fight for your guy and like, whatever. But now you're not defending a guy's policies or whatever. You're defending off like a guy's rape accusation. You know, you're talking crap about like the 18 year old intern who, you know, he was, he was taking advantage of, well, who knows, maybe anyway, that's a

longer story. But like, and as you start to do that, just like as we've done with the war on terror and especially like our just attachment at the hip to Israel. It just puts people in a position where you have to continually defend worse and worse things. And that has a bad effect on you, you know, on how you look at the world and see things. I mean, think about like you mentioned torture during the Iraq war. Like the horrible thing is not that we were in a war and torture happened.

That is a horrible thing. But, you know, there have been a lot of wars where, we get our hands on a captive or whatever side gets their hands on a captive and the guys, you know, the guys torture him. That is something that people who are under the stress of war sometimes do. Terrible. But when we legalized it, when we like drew up an entire legal infrastructure to make it, to make it okay, that's when we went way, way, way overboard.

Like we went way off the rails because it's like, you know, we would have like propaganda shows like 24, right? That was like totally just existed just to train Americans to understand that under the circumstances of like global terror and everything, we, the government sometimes has to do whatever the hell it wants and nothing matters. There are no rules and that's okay. That's actually cool. Like, but, you know, because the thing that they would always say, right, well, what if there was like a nuke about to go off in downtown Manhattan and, you know, the CIA's got this guy and he knows, but he knows where it is, but he's not going to tell. What if they tortured him and they saved the whole city? It's like, okay, we have a whole, we already have a whole legal setup for that.

It's called arrest that guy, the CIA guy who tortured him, put him on trial, let 12 of his peers hear the story, and they will decide that, you know, under the circumstances, we're going to let this guy go. We have a whole system for that already, you know, for people to judge things like to go out and make it legal. I mean, it's just, things like that have just steadily deteriorated, like the political discourse and just the general morality of our culture, you know, and things that would have absolutely shocked us and shaken us to our core, that government would feel the need to cover up and deny vehemently

and, like, you know, all these things, like, we just take for granted now as, like, normal. Nobody even flinches. And that's not good, because, again, just like Bill Clinton being a crazy person who would rape a woman like that is not restricted just to his treatment of women, but to just, you know, all kinds of, like, areas of his life. It's similar with us. Like, you start out getting yourself and your society into a place

where, you know, these snuff films coming in on at Gaza or the West Bank, like, just don't even raise an eyebrow with you anymore. That's going to affect a whole, whole range of, you know, how you behave. Sorry, man, I always do that. I was burping earlier and I was sparing everyone by muting my microphone and then I left it off. But yeah, no, I remember when this happened. As you know, I was, I am, I guess I was, real talk radio head back then. And I used to love especially 5.50 a.m. down in San Antonio, Carl Wigglesworth and all those guys.

And what happened was when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and broke, they freaked out. They were like, we do not do this. George Washington outlawed this in 1775 and blah, blah, blah, blah, no way. This is un-American. That was like on Tuesday. By Friday, it was like, well, what are we going to do? Impeach and remove the president and put him in prison and all of his men for this? We're not going to do that.

So I guess we're just going to go ahead then. Okay. Well, so this is a thing we accept now. It was like by the end of the week, by the end of the week. and just that was what you gotta do and that was what it was because Bush, he got caught and he goes, look, it's not torture,

but then also, yes, you're damn right it is, but we have to. And all good, true patriotic Americans want to fight terrorism accept that. And that includes you right.

And I guess like, you know, I guess it does, like there were people back, you know, in the 70s and even just like later on an ensuing decades who defended Cali,

you know, after Meilai. and yeah, that's always going to exist. But, you know, now it's like there's a little bit more of an insidious thing where, you know, those people were maybe like a certain type, you know, a certain segment of person who would defend Callie and, you know, say, well, we put our boys in this situation. You got to let them finish a job or whatever it is. Like there was a segment.

But what you just described, you know, this thing where like it happens, it comes out, there's this big fur. I mean, think furor. I don't know. I don't want to get in trouble for saying fewer, but. You've been reading a lot of German history lately. It's all right. It's like, oh, wow. Like, you know, this guy got exiled to Russia,

you know, is under threat for the rest of his life, for getting his stuff out, and now it's out there. And all this stuff's still going on. Like, everybody, like, got outraged for a while, and maybe they're still outraged, but it's still happening and everybody's used to it now. And that weird process of, like, you know, things being exposed, all the movies, like in the 80s and 90s that were, you know,

conspiracy theory movies or you think of the X-Files or something, all of these things where, like, the whole thing is we have to get the information out to the public. We need to find the proof and get it out to the people. It turns out that you can do that and it doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Right. Yeah, me and Will Greg used to joke about that. There's a Tom Clancy movie with Harrison Ford as the heroic CIA guy who marches up at the movie

ends with him marching up Capitol Hill with an arm full of documents. And it's like, dun, dun, and then the credits roll. Because you know that, well, Congress is going to do the right thing and hold all the bad guys accountable. Of course they are. You don't even have to show that part. It's so taken for granted that everybody

knows that the system works, dude. And even if the president is a murderous cocaine dealer, well, Johnny's CIA agent is going to go march up the hill and Congress is going to take appropriate action and everything's going to turn out fine. I mean, because there was this mentality. It's not like people thought politicians were virtuous back then.

You know, lawyers and politicians being terrible people has been like the meme going way back before memes were a thing. Like, it's not like they trusted politicians in that way. It's just that they, people still believe they lived in a society where like, yeah, these can be terrible people. But if you can prove it, if you can get your case out there and nobody can deny it and this is what it is, well, then it doesn't matter if they're terrible people. Like, you have to act, right? And it just turns out that, no, you don't. Like, you don't actually, you can just pretend that, you know, Bill Clinton's not a rapist until, you know, 2016 comes along. And everybody's calling you hypocrites when you're attacking Donald Trump

for sexual assault allegations. They're calling you hypocrites because you defended Bill Clinton all those days. Now you have to kind of maybe walk it back and say, you know, maybe he actually did do some of that. Like, you could just do that. I mean, it's like, I've commented on this show before that, like, I'll bet Biden after the Afghanistan withdrawal and all the criticism he took. I'll bet Bush, like, after Iraq war.

Like, they're just kicking themselves watching Trump, realizing that, like, oh, wait, I could have just said mission accomplished and then just kept going with that no matter what happened. Yeah, I know. I've been thinking about W. Bush a little bit lately, too, man, about what he thinks about this. Like, either he's going, well, good thing I didn't go to Iran, because that's what it would have looked like.

Or like, oh, man, I could have gone ahead and done this same stupid shit. That would have been fun. No, word. Because we would have put ground troops in, man. It could have been killed that he didn't get a chance to get killed, you know? If he had done it, that would have turned into a big ground war, though. No doubt about it.

Well, yeah, when we had tens of thousands of troops and over 100,000 troops in Iraq, you know, at one point there in 2007 and all that. So, or not at one point, at a few different points. All them would have been up for grabs. By the way, not to brag and boast about this or whatever, but it's worth pointing out for some other reasons too, probably besides bragging and boasting, that like critics were pointing this out way back then.

That's why we didn't do it this whole time. There have been a lot of people in Tel Aviv and Washington who've wanted to bomb Iran and then a lot of other people told them no. And the reasons why are reasons that you can find where I explain this at anti-war.com in 2005. I mean, never mind reading Romando, but read my stuff from 2005. I say, who's behind the coming war with Iran? And I say these could be the consequences.

And then there's a symposium I did with the late, great, the late, great Reese Ehrlich, rest in peace, my friend, that we did at Riverside, at the University of California, Riverside, where it was me and him versus neocon, and there's a student kid, he was okay, but it was a horrible neocon in Greenfield or something like that, and it was me and Reese Air, like, beating the crap out of him for a little while. Well, I was doing more of the beating the crap, but Reese was great, too.

And then somebody posted today, my first time I ever was on TV, I think, doing one of these. It was on RT, which I don't do RT anymore for various reasons, but I was on RT. And I remember that day, I was living in L.A. And it was really hot. And I, for some stupid reason, wore my suit all the way there. and I was like really sick and I looked just terrible. Like I should have washed my face in the water fountain or anything before I went on. I looked absolutely like I'm dying at cancer or something in the damn footage.

But in the footage, I'm going, look, man, the Boucher reactor is a light water reactor. It produces plutonium waste that's so heavily polluted with other isotopes that makes it almost impossible to transform into weapons fuel. And the Russians are taken out of the country anyway. Ron's a member of the NPT. They've got a safeguards agreement with the IA. EA who are monitoring and safeguarding all of the nuclear material and verifying its non-diversion to military purposes. We already know that. And Barack Obama is just a liar, dude, when he's saying this stuff, it's not true. And here's what is true. And by the way, a war with Iran would be a disaster.

And it would mean, I said, I don't know if they could hit American ships in the Gulf, but I know that they could hit tankers. And I know that they can close the straight of Hormuz. And that could lead to oil at $200 a barrel and the complete destruction and breakdown of the division of labor and the global economy and an absolute global catastrophe over it, over nothing, over a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist. And that's from, I can't remember anymore what month, I think, in the summer of 2010. And like, dude, all I was doing was paying attention to the news, dude. I'm not, I don't, I've never worked the Pentagon.

I don't know nothing about that stuff, dude. All I know is, I realize. lot. I interview the people who write the stuff I read. Yeah. I mean, it's a good thing. I think that Bob Gates was in his secretary of defense during a lot of that time. That's true. Well, it was very bad for various reasons, too. Afghanistan and Iraq, he absolutely ruined. Iran. And he started Libya too, man. He did not resign over Libya. He opposed it and then he clicked his heels and did it anyway. That's true. Well, you're right, though, that he was a restraining it when it came to Iran, and so was Admiral Fallon, who was the chairman of the commander of

Central Command at the time. Yeah, he's one of the unsung heroes of that whole era, Fallon, for sure. You know, it's, right? So maybe we delayed it, like a little bit, had anything to do with it being delayed this whole time, but then it didn't matter anyway, because Donald Trump just does whatever he wants anyway, dude. I saw some guy call this, oh, no, what? Oh, it's the guy Seth Hart that wrote the book about the corruption at Fort Bragg, which I have not had a chance to read yet, by the way, I'm afraid. But I saw him call the Operation, Oops, I shot myself in the dick.

Like, just this absolute idiot war, man. Dude, don't give Pete Hegseth any ideas. He would probably think that was cool and named something after it. Yeah, no doubt. I can't believe that guy's the Secretary of Defense. I was joking about that with that guy at Oxford the other day. at the party. We were talking about

what a cartoon character he is. Trump got him from Fox News. He's like, I like that guy. That was what, you know, made him like John Bolton back before. It was like, John Bolton goes on Fox News and he speaks in declarative sentences. No, I like that.

You know, go, okay. Yeah, it's a... No hedging there. Here's what we should do. All right. You know what we should do? We should take some questions before we go. We're already at almost an hour

just sitting here and BSing. Let's see here. Oxford debate can't find it anywhere. It is not posted yet, but it will be. There is a channel on the YouTube zero that have it. Let's see. There's a super chance. What's the rescue Isfahan?

Oh, okay. Now, Derek Cooper, I know you have things to say about this due to specific knowledge. What do you all make of the F-15 WSO rescue near Isfahan? The public details of that operation do not seem to add up. And I believe that you said that it was what they said it was to some degree or another there or not.

To some degree, like my, we don't know. That person's right. There are a lot of things. Let me suggest here to set up, Darrell, that the opposing hypothesis, I believe there's only one major one that I've seen, was that it was a failed attempt

to go and seize some of that uranium. Yeah. So I think there's, there's a, couple ways that you could interpret what happened, right? And the things that don't make sense to start off with that, like the person's talking about, are just as an example, like you don't have several hundred special forces guys from multiple agencies going in for a rescue operation of a single pilot, you know, with just all of the resources that they had. That doesn't,

like, it's not how you would normally do something like that. The best guess that I have is, because there's some people that go all the way, maximalist like conspiracy theory interpretation, which is that there was no pilot. Where is he? We haven't seen him interviewed or anything like that. They just told us that there was one. And actually, we were never looking for a pilot. What we were doing was, you know, using that as a cover, maybe a diversion of some kind so that we could, we could try to raid the nuke material at Isfahan. That's possible. I think more likely is that, you know, the pilot went down in that region. and we had this group of people, this group of guys in Intel people who had been studying the area, preparing for a possible raid on the Isfahan nuke site,

and they were the ones who were available at the time to go do it, and so they were sent to do it. The other possible option is those two theses get combined, you know, is that this happens, we've got these guys who are going in there anyway, let's go do that. That'll actually make it easier for us to go get that pilot if the Iranians are focusing on, you know, what's going on one way or the other.

Like any of those things are possible, but the person is completely right that, like the resources that we brought to bear, just they really don't make a whole lot of sense in terms of like a standard extraction. Even one that is like kind of far into the country and, you know, might take some time. I mean, it just, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it just, that's something that's normally that you'd normally try to accomplish with stealth, get in and out. It's not something you're going to go in and establish a position and hold territory while an operation is carried out. You know, we don't know all of the inner specifics of it. Like I talked to Jocko about it right as it was going on, going over all this stuff.

Excuse me. And he said like, you know, that yeah, a lot of this stuff would be totally non-standard, not something you would expect to see. But, you know, I could see why they would. do that if X, Y, and Z were the case. So who knows, you know, anything is possible. But, yeah, the person's right. I mean, it's a very, very, it's a very strange scenario, especially when you look at what happened, like, immediately after that, it was very clear right after that

that we were looking for a way out. It was like, okay, we blew our wad on that, and that is not, you know, that's sort of, that magic pill that was going to get Trump out of the war and save face for everybody involved. Yeah, look, we got some canvas with everyone. Yeah, and we now we just have to sort of, we have to find a way to bail. I mean, it seems like to eat, well, whatever, that's too long

of a subject. This guy says, I hope you donated to Massey's Money Bomb. I did the last time around. I have a short cameo in this great documentary about Massey that, that Dan Smots did, the great Dan Smots. He's the best video editor in the business. He's in business, by the way, look him up, Dan Smots.

but he did this great documentary about Massey and there's a little bit of me in that and certainly hope that he does well this guy says I can't believe he hasn't been to Europe well I'll have you know that I work for non-profits for peanuts man I you know this was a business expense for me to go and do this thing but yeah I can't afford to go travel the world

what is he talking about man dude we've got a country the size of a continent we don't need to go travel Seriously. And I have been to like 48 states. I went through the list and I'm virtually certain I've been to all but Alaska and Hawaii now. I have been to Canada and Mexico, if you count those. Thank you, everybody, for the nice comments on here. And whatever was this insane?

Oh, the audience lost the Oxford debate, not you. Thank you. That's exactly right. Well, we'll see what you guys think when the video comes out. I don't know what I'm doing here. Page down that thing. I walked into a trap. You know what? It's my own stupid fault, man,

because I wrongly assumed that the question was so biased to my side that it would be like a route. I didn't even spend my time really arguing the case other than you know they got nukes, right? And then I just told a bunch of the background of different stuff that I thought was interesting. I mean, the thing is, though...

I could have made my case. I should have adapted. Once I saw the reaction she got, I should totally adapted my case and stated it way differently. Maybe, yeah. I don't know. But I will say,

you better remember that the audience. The audience that was there that day is not the audience. You're going to be like liberal Democrat types. I'm too stupid to plan this right. I just didn't. What am I stupid? I mean, the audience that was there that day is not the audience.

Like, you're going to, you know, 100,000 more people are going to see it once it hits YouTube. And that's the audience. And so just, you know, use people like that as a foil to get your point out.

Yeah. Yeah. Nukes. I remember in 98, when India and Pakistan started testing their atom bombs, threatening each other. And nobody cared because it was the last week of Seinfeld. So that was all anyone cared about that week.

But I cared about it. And I remember watching this clip of this Pakistani general telling the cameraman, hey, listen, cameraman, you tell those Indians, we're not afraid of their atom bombs. And I remember thinking, wow, like that's really a stupid thing to say.

Like, your fear of them or not really is not, what's at play here so much other than the effect it should have on preventing you from doing something that'll get you killed along with other people near you, but I guess you know, there's the theory

and reality of atomic weapons as far as like in people's heads. You know what I mean? People exaggerate the power of them sometimes as well. But I think it's just been too long since we did testing where people could see footage of

Southern Pacific atolls being completely obliterated by these hydrogen bombs. Never even mind the A-bombs, they set off in Nevada and all that. All right. These people saying things at us here. Was the correct estimate of Iranian damage and how much can they sustain this stupidity of U.S. attacking under Israel's instructions? So that is a great question. I'm glad that you asked it.

And thanks for the chipping in there, soup chat, man. What it is is this. There's a brand new story out that just came out. Darrell, maybe you can correct my sourcing if I screw up my footnote here, but it was, I'd want to say NBC, but then I think that that's not right. Let me get my head right here.

There's a Washington Post. It was the Washington Post, dude. No, no, no. Ah, shit. I'm sorry, man. I saw it on my Twitter on my phone at the airport in England earlier today or something, and I don't remember anymore where I saw it. But it was, it stuck out of me.

It was a government source said, so that we only had a single source for this part of it, But the point is this, the numbers were that they still have 70% of their missile launchers and 75% of their missiles, that they've been able to repair missiles that were damaged, they've been able to finish creating missiles that they were still manufacturing and are still going. So that's a pretty specific intelligence that they were claiming to cite there. It must have been the post, dude. Because they're not even going to talk like that to anybody that's at the post at times of the journal, probably.

It wasn't like Politico. It had to have been the post, man. I'm sorry if it wasn't the post. But I saw today. It was hugely high super duper majority estimates of they survived this completely, dude. Every bit of that, we obliterated all their stuff was complete, just blowing smoke, man, 100%. And, man, it's funny, man. You know, I'll tell you what, while I page through these super chats more,

tell me about what you think, Daryl, about how this is going to look. look, even a couple of years from now or five years from now, just how much of an absolute strategic, you know, own goal. I mean, it turns out to be. Like, it's, it's sort of weird and it's hard to know exactly how to feel about it because what I think is going to happen is it's going to accomplish something that you and I would have dreamed about, but see no way forward, plausible way forward to accomplish,

which is the empire's got to roll back now. I mean, there's just so much of our global power was based on the uncertainty of what the limits of that power were. And not only our physical military power, but our economic power, you know, our ability to bring countries to their knees through sanctions and so forth. All of that stuff, like, there's just no way, you know, there's no way anybody is going to look at us with the same trembling fear that they used to. I mean, if you're in a, you know, if you, if you're a Libya or in Iraq or whatever, like, especially, like, if you're a country that is like already, you know, you've got, you've got a boiling sort of ethnic or sectarian conflict going on at all times and the lids being kept on that by this oppressive government. Yeah, we might come in there and knock that over and your country will blow up and go to pieces. We still, like, retain that kind of power.

But real countries, you know, real countries with actual military. and bureaucratic governmental systems and all that, they're not going to look at us the same anymore. Like, people are not going to be as fearful of us. Allies are not going to be as confident in us. And so I really think that in five years, we'll look back and see this as the beginning of the end. I mean, again, America is not going to be some third world backwater

at any point. I mean, just we have too many natural advantages to ever get to that point. But, you know, we're going to be wealthy. We're going to be all, you know, probably the sous. are in of the Western Hemisphere, all those kind of things. But in terms of the global empire and this idea that we're responsible for what kind of weapons Iran has or what I think that's over. I think it's over.

And that's great. Bluff called, man. You know, as we talked about this before, man. Trump sure called the Ayatollah's bluff last June. You know, you always imply that maybe you'd make a nuke if I bombed you. I shouldn't bomb me if you don't make a nuke. and we had this standoff, but maybe I'll just bomb you

and I'll blow up your nuke stuff so bad that you can't make a nuke anyway. So how do you like that? And that really did kind of work. I know there's this new intelligence estimate that says that so much of their nuclear program has survived. I'm sorry, I don't know that's an intelligence estimate. This is just another new story.

I'm sorry, I'm behind on everything, guys. I've been traveling. But there was a new report that said much of their nuclear program survived. But I think they haven't done anything with it. Natanz and Fordo are, I mean, I guess they can dig. new tunnels down there, but Trump's already proven he's willing to drop bombs down

any new tunnel. I mean, you know, the case better than anybody else a million different times that Iran is not failing to build a nuclear weapon because they're afraid of

Sir Israel or whatever. That is not the reason. Like, they're not doing it because they're afraid of what we're going to do or, you know, because they don't have the capability to do it or any of these things. they're not doing it because they're simply choosing not to do it as a strategic, it's a strategic decision. They live in a region where they have Turkey, which is, you know, if it came down to it as a rival power, but otherwise, they're the big dog in that region. They have all the other

countries that, you know, the Arab countries, they're no, they're no challenge to Iran whatsoever. And Israel is far enough away that they can, like, do some, you know, air strikes, but they can retaliate with ballistic missiles and they're not going to get invaded by Israel. or anything. And so they are, they're the power, along with Turkey in the region. Why would they want to introduce a new factor that if, you know, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, if they decide they want to get nuclear weapons now, it's like, well, now you're kind of at military parity with them. And they're nowhere close to you right now. Why would you want to introduce that, you know? That's a very good point. I think it's also the case. I mean, never mind fear, but I think it's also

a rational calculation that if they really broke out toward a nuke, America would know it. And any president, including Barack Obama, and I think quite credibly, had sworn that he would absolutely not stop dropping bombs on wherever their Manhattan project is until everybody was dead. If they were really making a nuke, he would prevent them from getting that far at any cost. And they all agreed about that. And I think the Iranians believed them about that. that there's no point in breaking out toward a nuke, even if they did want one,

even if we do want one, because the Americans will start air war against us before we're done. It would take them months, at least. And so, you know, especially when... The conversion facilities offline, they could recreate it.

But right now, they can't take uranium hexafluor gas and turn it back into metal, and they can't take or, you know, refined yellow cake, and transform it into uranium hexafluoride gas. And so I should have said that in the other order, but you get it. They're stuck.

And both of their enrichment facility are temporary. So they could create a new one, but again, well, and they very well may, but I still agree with you that I think this war doesn't necessarily change their calculation about whether they want a nuke or not. I mean, the other thing, at the very least, it may change their math on how they think about it, but I think if you were them, the way you put it,

I agree that that would make the most sense for their point of view. Especially seems that they would agree with you, though, necessarily. They have a weapon of mass destruction that doesn't carry the stigma or the danger of nuclear weapons, which is we can shut down a huge chunk of the world's oil exporting industry anytime we want. And that is a massive, massive weapon at their disposal that obviously, as we've seen, does not carry the same. It's not, people don't like it. but it's not as if they nuke Tel Aviv.

People aren't reacting in that way, right? And it, you know, I just think, look, nuclear weapons, these are things that do not have, like, a real military application. You know, like, nuclear weapons in a war are not useful items, you know? Nuclear weapons are something to hold the civilian populations of enemy countries hostages to prevent them from doing things that would destroy it. It depends. I mean, you can use them to take out military bases.

and stuff. Well, sure, they're big bombs, but, like, I mean, you can use them for that. But, you know, like, strategic nuclear weapons, at least, which is what everybody's afraid of. You know, that's what everybody's really kind of talking about. Like, these are, these are weapons that exist to hold enemy civilian populations hostage. I mean, when you think, when you look at Israel, for example, like, you know, Israel doesn't have those in case it decides to, you know, go to war against Hezbollah and Lebanon

and things aren't really going as well as they'd hoped. So we're going to nuke Lebanon. That's not why they have. They have them to hold over everybody's head that if you guys ever like push too hard and, you know, push us to the brink, then we're going to kill all of you using these weapons. That's the only thing they're for, you know?

And like, is Iran, do they really think that if they had a couple nuclear weapons, that would stop the U.S. and Israel from launching conventional strikes against them? I mean, if anything, like, And unless they had like sufficient numbers of them and delivery devices that, you know, we could be sure that they were going to hit enough targets to cause real permanent damage to Israel, I don't really think that that would stop, you know, stop them at all. Like, I just, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like people, people think of nuclear weapons in terms that, in geopolitical terms that were applicable to the Cold War that don't really apply anymore.

I think. Yeah. All right. So this guy says, it's kind of a loaded question. I don't know. Can we explain how we keep our integrity after having every reason to be cynical?

Which, I don't know, man, about those terms necessarily. I would not claim to have a lot of integrity. I just doing my job. But, yeah, whether we're being naive, I guess that's the important part of the question. Look, my goal always has just been a place to go

where people can find the truth. If I thought that I was going to be able to change the course of how these things are playing out, then that would be, that's a, be a delusion in the first place that I could. And then secondly, I'd be all disappointed about how far short of my goal I fall all the time, even though, I mean, that is true that I would very much like to think that like, at least part of what we're doing, you know, plays into, you know, on the margin, a very, very thin margin. It does make some difference. But mostly, I just want to be like a place where y'all can show up to if you need to know what the hell's going on around here

and then for whatever that's worth and whoever you are maybe you are a four-star general out there listening to this and maybe you're just some guy but uh that's that's my thing so that makes it easy and as far as integrity i don't claim to have any more than the average psychopath quite honestly jda good shows he says thank you this is a long time front of the show i recognize your froto avatar dude thank you for coming around was correct estimate of arrainiian damage we already did that one. Oh, Libertarian Overwatch is in the thing. He says, Carl Cameron post 9-11 videos.

You know, I still remember, this is how old I am. When Carl Cameron did that four-part series, I saw him on Fox News, and I heard him on the Carl Wigglesworth show doing an in-depth interview about them all on 5.50 a.m. San Antonio. I doubt those audios exist anymore, but he went in much more in-depth with Carl Wigglesworth,

and I wish I could tell you anymore which extra assertions he made to Carl that he didn't make on Fox. But they were along the same lines anyway. For people who don't know, that's Carl Cameron from Fox News, his four-part series about the FBI arresting a bunch of Israeli spies

and surmising that they must have known the attack was coming and did not warn, or at least did not tell the FBI everything that they knew about the hijackers in the country. And if you want to read more into that, go read Ryan Dawson. he's definitely the best making that case. I'm not completely sold yet,

but I'm still opening him talking me into it, but there is a lot of weird ugliness there, man. And, you know, I used to do a lot of interviews about this back in the day, Christopher Ketchum and Phil Joraldi and others did a lot of journalism back, but it was so long ago. But if you searched my name and Christopher Ketchum and the 9-11 art students,

you know, you'll find some stuff there. Let's see. Putin outgoing call to Trump this week. China Summit. soon. When to Russia, China flex on Trump guarding the Iran war where he must choose self-preservation versus Israel's Netanyahu? Good question. I did see a thing, by the way, about there's a new railway from China, or not a new railway, but a massive increase in shipments from one train per week to several a day, I think they said, or maybe it was more specific, like seven a day

or something, but at the very least, daily new shipments by train from China to Iran, presumably of resupply of who knows what all. And which is funny, I saw a tweet like this, which is completely correct, that in the grand chessboard by Zabina Prasinski from 1997, where, you know, he describes America's battle for what he calls predominance in Eurasia. The great fear is that Russia

will mend fences with China instead of the West being successfully able to pull them west and they'll turn to China and Iran too and then you would have this extremely powerful nuclear weapons and oil resources access of power that could mount

a challenge to American primacy this is the worst thing that he could think of happening and then of course that's the history of our entire era is America making that happen And so, you know, and whatever, dude, everybody goes, oh, when you deny the agency of the other world rulers?

No, I don't, but I'm just saying, isn't it in the burden on the masters of the universe over here in the lone superpower to use their masterful diplomacy at their state department to corral and control these states and bend them to our will? Why are Russia, China, and Iran not all competing for who can suck up to America the best right now? It must be because Washington sucks at this. you know, sorry, but they have played their cards poorly. You know, it's like Robert Kagan lamenting that, yeah, we just don't have the power in Europe that we should have needed

to make Russia think twice about trying this. Oh, really? You think that might have anything to do with you and your brother Fred launching and then doubling two wars in the Middle East instead? Bob, maybe. not that I'm saying I would prefer the policy, but it gets pretty obvious at times how self-destructive these people are.

But as far as Russia and China flexing on Trump and forcing him to end the war, I don't know. You know what, man, I don't think that they would. In fact, go back to that China story, now it seemed to me to indicate that China's perfectly willing to play Joe Biden's role in Ukraine.

That, hey, look, America wants to try to, you know, get stuck in this thing. Let's give them their own Vietnam again, more. They love doing this stuff to themselves. So, you know, let them break their legs and teeth on the mountains of Iran instead of fighting on China's east coast, right? Somebody just threw out a very generous super chat wanting to know your opinion of Andor. I don't know what that is. and if you may answer that one,

then you're going to have to do it on your own because my wife's got dinner on the table. Oh man, you're going to have to go then. Well, are there any more super chats after that? I don't see you anymore. All right. Thanks, guys. Good night, Darrow. Y'all have it going.

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.