Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:48 - A BIG Discussion of Current Events

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton get into the details of all the craziest current events! Chapters: 0:36 Welcome + Skateparks and Snowboards 4:15 Iran Talks and Mixed Signals 8:10 Trump, Netanyahu, and the War Trap 17:18 Iran’s Growing Advantage 24:47 The Uranium Question 31:51 Empire and Artificial Orders 42:18 Gaza’s Hidden Catastrophe 50:36 Tucker’s Gaza Interview 53:51 Zionism’s Shifting Base 56:47 Lebanon’s Escalation 1:01:05 Ukraine’s Widening War 1:06:27 Questions and Audience Mail 1:10:31 Putin’s War Options (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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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. Negotiate now. End this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is provoked.

All right, you guys, this is the show. Welcome, Marta Maude. How are you, sir? I'm good, man. How are you? I'm doing okay, man. I heard you were enjoying the nice cool weather in Tampa recently. It was a bit muggy for May, I would say. But yeah, I went there and I was doing the Danny Jones podcast.

And it was good, man. He's a very nice guy. And it turns out he had a mini ramp at his studio warehouse thing there. So I didn't bring my skateboard. He goes, you didn't bring your skateboard? I said, what, you got a mini ramp here? He goes, yeah, right in there. And then, okay, I know nobody cares, but this is the story.

It's a three foot, which is great for a little kid to learn on or whatever. But it's the kind of ramp that I get hurt on. I would rather skate a 10 foot or an 11 foot than a three foot. I'm like, oh, man. And then I don't have my board. I'm skating a stranger's board. But it was actually, I got used to the skate that he had, the extra board that he had real quick. And we had a great old session before and after the interview.

In fact, after the interview, we had a real good old session. and I had a lot of fun and I did not slam at all so it was rat I didn't scare me man like I used to snowboard all the time like oh yeah right I didn't know that for like five or like

for probably four or five years I would go like I lived right by I lived in Bozeman and I would go four or five times a week and sometimes for like half days you know after lunch or something but like I would go all the time I got pretty damn good I never got to the point where I felt comfortable

in a half pipe it just was always weird to me. Well, yeah, I have no experience on a snowboard, so I couldn't speak to that. But just looking at them on TV, the snowboard half pipes are huge, right? They're like 15-foot transitions. That's definitely walls. I'm sorry. Yeah, like the new guys are going 10 feet out. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know how. I can see how a snowboarder becomes a really good skateboarder. I don't know how a skateboarder could ever get in a snowboard half-pipe after riding. I didn't know a regular skateboard ramp. You know, it was interesting.

The last few years I've taken up skiing just because, like, I'm old and rickety. And so, you know, it's just something you can do. You don't see a lot of, like, 70-year-old snowboarders. You see plenty of 70-year-old skaters, you know, or skiers, rather. And so I switched over just for longevity purposes. And it was actually cool because I used to play ice hockey a lot. And, like, especially hockey blades, like, as opposed to figure skates. Like, it actually transfers over to skiing really well.

If you can ice skate on hockey skates, you can probably ski. You'll be a fast learner for sure. That's interesting. Yeah, man, I've always said, Austin needs a mountain. You just replace Georgetown and just put a big mountain. What's the population now? Oh, I don't know. Probably three quarters of a million if you include.

At a mountain if you wanted to jump up to like three million and crowd you even more. No, no, I don't want that. A mountain only no one else is invited as a friend for us. as long as we're picking up stuff. Anyway. So, yeah, that was cool, man. And I'd like to go back to Tampa because there's a legendary skate park there.

I just rightly assume that I would not have time to go, so I didn't even bring my board. But it was cool, man. I had a good time hanging out. It's, you know, the same interview with him is more or less what you hear me say on the other interviews when they ask about Iran stuff and whatever. Only in a slightly different order.

And, you know, with his questions, the way that he came out. at it, you know, I tried to address them and stuff. So it went pretty well. And we made friends and it seems like a good guy. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting challenge I've been finding where, you know, like if somebody asked me on to do an interview and if I've never been on or if maybe the last time I was on was six months ago or a year ago or something and they want to talk about Iran, I go on there and like, I give them my Iran spiel, right? They kind of ask similar questions to everybody else. I give the similar answers that I give everybody else because that's

what I think about those questions, et cetera. But like when we're doing this show, I keep finding myself at this point where it's like, man, like, we got to talk about like what's going on in Iran. But what's really going on in Iran is the administration here is just kind of bullshitting

the public nonstop. And you don't exactly really know what's going on. And you kind of get conflicting news every day. It's really hard to like kind of figure out how to talk about it. You know? And, you know, like I find myself like wanting to just kind of say things that I was probably saying a month ago or six weeks ago.

And that's not a very interesting show, though. Yeah. Well, you're right, though, that, I mean, what we have now is the kind of low-level, you know, ceasefire with somewhat violations and ongoing negotiations. But, you know, what's happened really more than anything is, you know, we all have this fatigue from the president saying this and that and the other thing all day, every day, changing his mind flip-flopping around, declaring victory, declaring at one point, remember the president, the new president of Iran is on his knees begging to sign the deal when they don't have a new

president, it's the same old guy. And, you know, just things like that where it's just, he's so all over the place. Nobody knows, you know, how seriously to take him on any given day, even just it was the other day. So we have a major agreement on the straight-over-moos. And the New York Times printed it like, well, it seems like this is a, they don't always, right? They were like, seems like this is maybe a more real one. And I think that's right. Didn't it seem like this was a more serious one? And then what happened was the Israelis escalated in Lebanon and, you know, made their demands that, you know, made their phone calls to Washington. And Trump, you know, ruined his own deal. It's like he's Barack Obama up there. It's completely ridiculous.

I remember he was really good for Brazil to help. And Brazil was like, we'll help. And then he was like, No. It's really weird because, like, going into any negotiation with Iran, you know what the Israelis are going to do. And so it's like, why even come to that, you know, to that point in the negotiations with them where it's being reported in the papers and stuff. When you know, unless you have sort of, yeah, the Israelis are going to do this, but this is how we're going to respond. And it's like every single time, it doesn't matter what they do. You know, they just have a reset button, a magic reset button. and they can hit. And, you know, like, I think Trita Carson really, really got it right. We, we talked about this point he made a while back, but, you know, right after the ceasefire,

he said that, you know, Iran had, by accepting the ceasefire, had actually, you know, lost some negotiating power for the simple reason that the chief thing Trump needed politically at that point and militarily for that matter was for the war to stop. That's what he needed. And once that happened, and now it's sort of, you know, is Iran going to start it up? Are they not? You know, they never really have before. So they're probably not going to. That Trump basically has what he wants at this point is, you know, something at least at a level that he can control. You know, he can deal with these tit for tat, you know, we strike you here, you strike us back, kind of things for the rest of his term. He doesn't care about that. But

he was on his way to like real humiliation and military. breakdown and and probably a serious loss of like long-term loss of a lot of our alliances over there in the Arab countries. And so he needed it to stop. Now it stopped. And it almost seems like he's comfortable just sort of dragging this current state out for. It's so messed up too, man, because, you know, like this is, he chose to like his entire four-year term is now, because he's going to, the Republicans are going to lose in November, and he's going to be a lame-up president for two years. Like, he decided to use the two years that he was going to have

to actually do things on this, and it just sucks, man. Yeah, it is. It's completely crazy. And, you know, this is why the John Birchers always said that, you know, the only way to destroy America is to try to claim the power and the ability to rule the whole world. And, of course, we can't do that. it's so obvious that, you know, we're destroying our own country because,

well, so many people have pointed out, right? But the president has much less power on domestic policy, but he can do things in foreign policy and no one can really stop himself. Presidents just end up doing that, you know what I mean? But it's always something horrible and destructive when they could, you know, make an effort to, at the very least, undo some of the very worst policies that we have in the country here. And then so, yeah.

To be a bit redundant about it, Ron Paul is the hero that we needed, but Donald Trump is the hero that we deserved. And so we got it, you know, right in the face. But there's a, there was a quote. That's what he is, dude. He's just Rudy Giuliani. If Rudy Giuliani was the president,

then you wouldn't be surprised by any of this shit. And that's all he is. He was never, Dr. Paul. He was always, you know, the federal prosecutor from New York. Yeah, that's true. 9-11 yeah what else

going on in the world I've been distracted oh I was on the Matt Gates show today that was fun we're talking

about this stuff but I like that guy and he's also I like that he is a big fan of the great Dave DeCamp

our news editor at antiwar dot com and interviews him all the time so it's cool and then also today in today's

episode on the Joe Rogan show he debated Harlan is it Reynolds or Wilson I'm sorry Harlan, the funniest hell comedian, who I really like.

But they got into it about Iran a little bit. And Rogan says, nah, that's not really true because Scott Horton was on here and explained why that ain't really true. Talking about the Iranian nuclear program, which is, after all, you know, the bottom line excuse or the war. Trump just repeated either today or yesterday made these wild climes. No, they were on the verge of a nuclear weapon. They were going to have one in two weeks.

And then they were going to use it against everybody in the Middle East, you know, the one that they were going to have, which was going to be, what, a uranium gun type, you know, Hiroshima bomb 10 kilotons max, that they're going to deliver what in a civilian airliner? Dude, there was a clip going around. I'm pretty sure it was super recent of Victorian Newland. And she was talking about Iran and nuclear weapons. And she said something.

I can't remember the exact quote. But like, it was like, you know, if Iran gets them, then other countries in the region might get them. Saudi Arabia might get them. Turkey might get them. Israel might get them. And she said it in a way of like,

she doesn't seem like she's making this up. Like, what the hell's going on here? That's exactly what I said in my 22 days ago. She didn't seem to be lying when she said it. Could she really be that ignorant? My God. There's no one way. So did you watch the debate of her in Pompeo

versus Mearsheimer and Walt? I saw a couple of clips from it. Was it from that? Yeah, maybe it was, yeah, it was from that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we talked about it last week, you know. Maybe I just put up a screenshot and talked about one or two

aspects. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. But whatever, bottom line is, not that you would be shocked or surprised, but whatever, your bias would be confirmed that Newland and Pompeo are real lightweights. I mean, both of them probably bring, you know, as sound of arguments as you could get for a hawkish foreign policy. Although, in fact, she was against the Iran war, as is her husband, Robert Kagan. And she was, you know, I saw Mearsheimer explain on breaking points that she even opposed leaving the JCPOA. She said, no, we should improve it

because she was at least realistic about the situation instead of just a propagandist about it. Like actually, this is not that bad of a damn deal. We should just try to let these sunsets and things like that. Pompeo was taken the more, you know, the harder stance against, you know, for the war and against Iran. But anyway, you would not be impressed. It's just the same old crap.

If you saw them on Fox News, just blathering their thing about, well, they're bad guys. And you got to stop bad guys before the bad guys get to be worse guys. And everybody's Hitler and everybody else is Chamberlain. And yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if I was not too impressive, dude. If I was trying to steal man the war party's argument in the Middle East from an American perspective, like the best way I could frame it, like if I was trying to sell it to me is, and, you know, this comes down to the fact that, you know, you can't trust this promise

when it's made, but is that, look, we have, our presence, our overwhelming presence, like it or not, in the region for the last several decades, has created a regional order that if we just pull out is going to just lead to mass chaos in death, like, because there are parties that are sort of throwing their weight around that they don't have because we're their ally, there's countries that should have armies that have no functional arm. Like, all, it's just, it's, it's an unnatural order. And so what we need to do is we've got an alliance structure over there. We've got countries that more or less can kind of work together, get along, even if not officially from Egypt, Saudi, Israel, that sort of access Jordan. And we're familiar with them. We can call them on the

phone and they pick up, you know, we need to make sure that these countries can work together well and that they are militarily strong and that their enemies like know it. And then we can, give us the ability to pull out. Obviously, like, you know, if a president came and made that argument, it would just be a cover for, you know, a longer war. But that, like, that's one way that, like, it could be sold in a way that we have to do this in order for us to get out.

But, you know. Yeah, I agree with that. That you, yeah, you could say, look, we set the table very poorly and especially recently. So it would be a bad time for America. and power and influence to leave now. But yeah, but that's why you should have left before. Yeah.

If we left before, it would not have been in a way where all this power defaults into Iran's hands. I mean, I really think, sorry from being redundant from this show, I did say this one time somewhere, that, you know, if he were joshing around, you can make the case that Netanyahu has been an Iranian spy this whole time. You know, all he does is bark about it, but all he does is help, you know, grant them power, kick them up in power over and over again. Remember, you know, even on Iraq War II, Sharon and his government did support it, but it was Netanyahu and his men who were, you know,

the neoconservatives in America, they were the ones who had really bought into this clean break doctrine and wanted to get it done. It worked so hard to get it done. Netanyahu too. He even believed in the pipeline to Haifa and the whole, you know, Chalabi sales job there. And so that was what resulted in Iran becoming so much more empowered in Iraq War II. And then, of course, it was his policy like, well, to reverse that, he supported and participated in the backing of the bin Ladenites in Syria, which ended up leading to the rise of the ISIS caliphate, which then, you know, Obama fought, you know, he did, but then also fought Iraq War 3 to destroy them, which again put America directly on the side of the Shiite Iraqi government

and in direct alliance with Iran and Iranian supported militias of very very, very much. stripes all across the, you know, Shiite South for war against ISIS. And so that's two big ones. And then now convince Trump to do this. It's funny, man, you think about Netanyahu, he's almost like gambling and going crazy here a little bit. Think of how certain he must have had to be, Carol, in his own head to decide to like, man, at all costs, I have got to convince Trump to attack Iran. And I just know, like, Like somehow by the end of it, man, it'll work out. I just know that like whatever happens, somehow, I don't know, but it'll be great.

And then Israel will be the dominant power and Iran won't be our regional rival anymore. We'll just put the monarch in there. Like he's daydreaming, right? He sounds like he's just, you know, David Wormser on Ahmed Chalabi's crack pipe. Only without the last 25 years of experience to show how naive all this stuff is. And then now look what he's done. Now he's cost America's entire regional order, which was their greatest, you know, guarantor of their security.

And now just completely shown, as you showed, as you will, you revealed one week after the war on this show, they're like, oh, our bases are getting hit. Our bluff is being called in the biggest way since the fall of the Soviet Union right now. This in like losing to the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgents. this is, you know, going up against a lower tier state and losing. Yeah, yeah. It's one that all of the actual rival powers that we have, you know, like they watched us lose in Afghanistan,

and China didn't look at that and say, well, this tells us a lot about how they would fare and enable war around Thailand. It had nothing to do with that, you know. But this, I mean, you know, this is really like removed the veil and sort of exposed us in a way that really, I mean, honestly, nothing else has. Even if you go back to like Vietnam or something, none of those really showed like the limits of our military's ability

to kick any other militaries at. Like they just showed that there are certain things that military is not very good at. You know what I mean? And if you try to make them do those things, then it's going to be really bloody and really ugly and messy and probably not work. But this, you know, this is different. I mean, this shows that we, I mean, look, I have no doubt that, like, that if we went full World War II and had Chevy and Ford start churning out tanks and, you know, plane parts and, you know, drafting 16 million men into the army, we could overrun Iran, fine, whatever. But, like, politics is a part of warfare, you know, and the fact that's just the fact that that's completely impossible and not on the table.

I mean, you know, because I say that because I've seen people kind of trying to cope by saying. like, well, we could if we really, really wanted to. It's like, well, yeah, but the political situation, the fact that we don't really, really, really want to is part of the equation, you know, which means we can't. And, like, that's like saying, you know, I could beat this guy in a fight if I was super motivated to go train like Rocky and, you know, whatever.

It's like, yeah, but you're not, so he'll kick your ass. Right. Yeah, and which, you know, at the date that we're doing this show, at the end of May here, it's already proven that for all that tough talk about coring all the Marines and the 82nd Airborne and the Special Operations Command in there to seize these islands and to try to seize the uranium and all that. They weren't able to do that. And I know that there are theories, possibly credible ones. I'm not an expert on this topic at all, but we have discussed in part the theories that that that was the mission that ended up being framed

later as a rescue mission from a shootdown that they were trying to get some uranium there. But if that is true, then, well, they still weren't able to get it. And it was a very limited attempt with, you know, less than 50 guys or less than 100 guys, certainly. So not much of an effort, not like the absolute catastrophic, you know, Hollywood movie situation that you would have had to attempt to really finish the job and get that job done, which, as we discussed at the time, it'd be, you know, it's a self-licking defeat there in the sense of trying to bring in enough force protection for the force required to get the job done, Now you're just bringing on a much bigger battle against, you know, Iranian forces.

Now you're not sneaking in. Now you're invading in a way that all of your guys, including your new force protection, are open. Now they need force protection. And on down the line, right? So somebody talked Trump out of that. The Secretary of the Army or somebody told them, well, sir, you know, the problem with that is a lot of guys will get shot.

A lot of guys will get, you know, a mortar blow up in their face, and then you're going to have to deal with that. And he decided very well might not work. thank goodness he wanted to call it at 13 he was afraid to lose any more than that yeah i mean sorry that's right isn't it darrell 13 or was it 14 i think it's 13 still i think it's 13 forgive me everybody if i screwed that up i don't think um you know i i always thought that retrieving the uranium i mean even leaving aside the fact that i don't think we know for sure exactly where all of it is but say we do know that it's all in one place you know in isfahan or something you know that

in one of those collapsed mountains. I mean, I don't think there's any way to get in there and retrieve that really without taking and actually holding that territory. Because it would take time, man, like to dig out those collapsed tunnel entrances. I mean, we'd have to bring in heavy equipment. Like, it would be like a serious job. There wouldn't just be a bunch of Delta and seals in there. You'd have like a bunch of CBs doing construction work and stuff and excavation work.

And like, you know, to do that while you're under drone and artillery, whatever else kind of fire, like, at the time. It's just, you know, very possibly in an area where there's a lot of hostile civilians and stuff, you know? Like, it's just population of Isfahan and all their pitchforks and torches for that matter. Yeah. Yeah. And the same, I didn't, I was surprised, actually. I didn't, I don't know why. I guess I was just surprised because I didn't know, but I think I remember that the island that they kept fussing over and pretending like they were going to take. There's like 50,000 people that live on that island. It's, It's like, okay, well, you're going to drop, like, what, a couple hundred special forces onto this island, and there's 50,000 people who are probably angry that you're there.

Like, what are you going to do when they come at you with a machete? You're just going to gun them all down? Like, now it's a very, very tough situation unless you, like, when you're clearly from the beginning, like, reluctant to, in the extreme to get into an actual war, you know? And so all those things, like, I think were probably illusions from the jump. And, you know, it was just purely the job of the Joint Chiefs and the secretaries to just explain that to Trump. And because, you know, the thing is, I'll bet you the same, you know, like his reasoning, I think, you know, is a lot of people have their various explanations for why he would listen to Netanyahu over his own advisors, his highest level advisors. and there's probably a lot of personal reasons for it and other things.

But I mean, one of the ones that is not personal and, you know, from some standpoint, I guess, makes some sense is, well, that's great. But, you know, Israel is more embedded in the region than we are. They have better information than we do. And so I'm going to go with what Netanyahu says. That's a bad thing to do to your advisors. But, like, you can at least understand that. And you know that like with Isfahan, like seizing the uranium, any of this stuff, you know,

Netanyahu's in his ear saying, do it, boss. This is going to be, you know, this is, you can do this. Don't worry about it. Like, we've, we've game this out. Here's how it's going to work. Because Netanyahu knows that, who cares if it works? The point is, you want to get a bunch of force recon guys in there getting chopped up by the Iranians. So now Trump has to send the Rangers in to back them up.

And now they're getting attacked. And now you have to, like, that's what, that's what Netanyahu wants. He just wants to escalate by any means necessary. So if a bunch of Americans get wiped out, now Trump feels like, he has to go in and avenge them to like save his ego, then that's a huge victory for Netanyahu. You know, it's like, totally on calculus. Yeah.

Well, and as we were just discussing, we're kind of switched our two things out of order in our discussion here. They're in a very difficult position now. I don't know that they're really going to make nukes, but it's symbolic of the same damn thing anyway. Remember that time story where after last June, Netanyahu said, oh, well, you know, now they're definitely, going to make nukes now that we attack them. So guess you better definitely attack them.

Then you got to finish the job and get all the way through. Otherwise, you know, you can't just stop short of Baghdad, so to speak, in this case, Tehran. And then he said the same thing after the failure of this war, after the first few days or first week or two of this war, when their goals were not accomplished and the regime did not fall, Netanyahu again told Trump, well, man, but now we've really put their back against the wall. So now they're certain to make nukes. So now we definitely have to finish the job. We have to continue to eskly. So whether or not nukes, same point from our discussion before.

Iranian power has been vastly increased by this. Just like the last few interventions that Netanyahu was in on here, as I was delineating as I am so often want to do, that he has empowered Iran and their Shiite allies over and over. Of course, they did get rid of Assad and Damascus and put al-Qaeda in there. So that's a big win for the American and Israel. Israeli column against the Iranians, but that was only at the end of 2024. For most of this time, they had empowered Iran in Syria as well.

It made Syrian has more dependent on Iran than ever before for 15 year, extra years there. But anyway, but then if you're in Nanyahu's position and you're not you, but you're him, I mean, you know, what do you do now? Because I don't, you know, a mission to get the uranium and then now we got a sunk cost fallacy and we have to keep escalating to regime change from there. It doesn't look to me like that script's playing out. I think that ship already sailed. I mean, I guess they could try it.

I know Netanyahu is still pushing that narrative. And Trump is too. You know, it seemed like all his leaks and statements about the negotiations, you know, center oftentimes on the fate of the uranium and who's going to get it and what it means. In fact, I have this thing here. Let me share it. God, I'd hate to read the whole thing to you here, but it does say,

which will now be lifted, the naval blockade, which will now be lifted, and we'll start the process of heading home, but then he says the nuclear dust, that means the partially enriched uranium there, will be unearthed by the United States, which it is agreed is the only country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so. So that's not clear whether he's saying China's going to help us dig it up.

It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like he's just saying, only they or we could. I guess. I don't know. He just took an aside to flatter. Chairman She may be there. In close coordination in conjunction with Iran,

the Islamic Republic of Iran, he deigns to deem it. That work? Plus the IAEA and destroyed. It won't be diluted down and turn into fuel rods. It'll be destroyed, he says, and then blah, blah, blah. But anyway, he says things like this all the time.

I don't know what to make of it. know if you know what to make of it, but it seems like, you know, I don't know. Like a simple interpretation would just be, come on, he's nothing but jerking our chain. This guy had a ground dog day meme there. And like, come on, he says this every day. And then we're trying to be criminologists and figure out, like, is there any part of this that's really meaningful? They both have so many stipulations to their demands, as we've discussed in the past here. It would be very difficult for them to climb down.

As you said earlier, you know, the treat of Parsi solution. and just walk away is really the best one. But of course, that does leave Iran in a, you know, very enhanced position over there, which as we've discussed, it's sort of too late to do anything about. But from the president's point of view, geez, he still has all this power.

He really can't do anything about it. You know what I mean? Entirely, he can't see it that way, right? It leaves the, you know, if we did that, it leaves the open question of, as far as I know, Iran's terms are still that we get out of the region. And so are we really going to abandon our base in Bahrain?

Are we going to abandon our base in Kaan? Like that is hard to imagine the DOD or anybody swallowing. And yet Iran, every time a deal gets talked about, that is one of their firm demands. And if they're like really harsh on that, I mean, this is probably going to go on a while, maybe even at a low level. But just simply because, you know,

it's not even that, we can't live without those things. It's that nobody can stand being the guy on watch when we admit we lost them. I mean, nobody wants that. Exactly. Just like Vietnam or Afghanistan, we're like, no, you get out there and do it. And this one's more even, like, it's even more sustainable in a way just because, you know, the, look, here's a dirty secret about the Navy. You know, we would have like two billion dollar destroyers doing a full.

six-month deployment, running around off the coast of the Horn of Africa, like chasing around Dows with Somali suspected pirates in them, okay? Like a $2 billion warship that we have doing that. Why? Because they didn't really have another mission. You know what I mean? I just didn't really have another mission. And so, like, right now, like, you know,

we've got enough cruisers and destroyers that are usually putting around the Middle East anyway, but doing freedom of navigation stuff or whatever, that they can maintain a blockade or half blockade or on-off blockade like pretty much like as long as they want because they're not doing anything else really anyway. But, you know, I just, at this point, it really does seem like, you know, like with Iraq, for example, right, when you got up to the time of the surge, say what you want about, you know, the surge and the Bush doctor and all that kind of stuff. I know from people who sat in the meetings with the president,

with Secretary of Defense, somebody working as an aide for one of the heads of one of the, anyway, that Bush thought it was going to work. He wanted to go in, he thought it was going to change things, it was going to win the war, and it was going to actually turn things around, get all that stuff. In Afghanistan, they probably, like some people at least,

probably believe something like that too with the surge there and like that if we just, you know, hang on long enough, we can, you know, institutionalize the army enough. There's some people probably believe that. With this, it's like nobody can possibly believe that any of the goals set out at the beginning of this war are achievable. There's just, there's no road to that. And, you know, the interesting thing,

you would circle back on what you're talking about a minute ago. Like, one of the problems with empire, and this is not just the U.S. Empire, although we've scaled it up to a new level. If you look at like the old colonial empire, right? All the countries that France and Britain used to run, you notice like in the 20th century, all went completely to shit and said people just started killing each other and like civil wars everywhere, Pakistan, India, you know, all the end. And the reason is because an empire does not

want the most powerful player in a region to be their proxy because that most powerful player in the region doesn't really need them. And so they can't really be. controlled. What they need is preferably a disliked minority, like, you know, the Alawites in Syria, the Sunnis in Iraq, et cetera, and you want them in charge because they're not going to do, they're going to be loyal to you all day long, because if they're not, the people around them are probably going to throw them out of power and do worse. And so what that means is when you do leave, you have this whole political order set up that is just completely dependent on outside power to exist. And we've done. We've done. We've

done that on like a larger geopolitical level, not just a head of state in a country and he's from a minority that, you know, we can control over the majority. We've done it where countries now are throwing their weight around regions that they simply don't have the weight of their own to do. And we've done that all over the world where, you know, like we talk about Iran. Like we've done all these things to make Iran like, you know, one of the most powerful players in the region. Iran should be one of the most powerful players in the region. You know, it's got 95 million people. They churn out something like 10,000 engineering graduates every.

It should be, you know? It's like, that's the natural order. Turkey and Iran should be calling most of the shots in that region. Egypt, if they ever got their act together, maybe. But like, you know, that would be nature taking its course and things kind of correcting back to the natural state of things. And everywhere around the world, though, there's an unnatural state of things. that is completely dependent on, you know, our outside power keeping it that way.

And that just continually justifies our presence everywhere. And it evokes these realistic sometimes horror stories of what will happen if we leave. And it just becomes the self-looking ice cream cone like, you know, by definition. Yep. We can't, we can't leave now. We built a house of cards. It'll fall. Yeah, exactly.

And yeah, look, I mean, with Afghanistan, it did take, 20 years before a combination of Trump and Biden agreed that we really need to just go ahead and leave that war. Not that we came home from there, just pivoted to Ukraine and wherever else. But, you know, Ukraine is hard to admit it in this case, I guess. And even then they didn't admit it. Even then they claim that we're leaving because we won and everything's great.

So now we can leave. Was their excuse to leave? It's going to be pretty difficult under these circumstances to say that, you know. The Ukraine and just the general situation with Russia's, you know, kind of another example of this. Like Ukraine by itself, or if it was Ukraine and like a unified, like, stronger, sort of more independent actor, Europe, counterbalancing Russia and the borderlands between them kind of being like a competing sphere of influence, Ukraine would have had to accept that reality and could not have gone off the rails into this like extremist anti-Russia. position that they'd been in. They would have just had to accommodate the fact that there's this

gigantic country here and we have to kind of deal with them. And it's, you know, the outside influence, primarily ours, you know, obviously like a lot of the Europeans provide a lot of the, you know, the sort of emotional, like the motivation for it and some of the money, but it's our power that really like matters. You know, it's sort of, same thing we've done with Israel. It's just caused them, you know, it's allowed the most extreme people in the, you know, their political environment to say with, you know, some amount of convincing success that we can do this. We can actually do this because the U.S. has our back because Europe has our back. And so it's, you know, actually, it's this, you know, this everything kind of been getting

trouble going back to this. It's not too dissimilar from like Poland before the Second World War, where, you know, Germany, their position to, you know, France and Britain and the rest of the world was Poland's way over here. Like, what does it have to do with you? This is between us and the Soviet Union. What happens here? We're going to decide. We're not telling you what you can do in Singapore, Britain.

Like, you know, so you're not going to tell us what we in the Soviet Union are going to do here on our borderlands. That was their position. And, you know, because in the polls would have had to accommodate that. The polls, like, if they did not have the guarantee of war from the Western states, would have had to just accept the reality of their situation and cut a deal with Germany that, you know, that could have been made, that would not have been, you know, so damaging to the Polish state that it wouldn't have continued an independent way.

And, but they just, they couldn't do it. The fact that they had all that outside influence allowed the ego, you know, to really, like, kind of drive things. Like, no, we're not doing that. We're not compromising, period. We don't have to. And, you know, it's just, it's a bad influence all the way. because eventually, you know, what always happens is you run up on that point where, you know,

one side decides that, just like in World War II, that like, yeah, they're saying that they'll intervene for this, but they won't. And then they do. And now you're at war. And, you know, it's just, I just think that it would be best if the world order, just like in politics, even in domestically in a country. Like it should reflect sort of the natural hierarchy and the natural advantages of the people and countries like in question, right? Like the fact that Turkey is where it is,

that it controls the Dardanelles and access to the Black Sea, that it straddles Europe and the Middle East, that it has the population, it has. Turkey is a great power, like, you know, in the maybe not in global terms, but like they just are. And any, like, in Iran's the same way. And any sort of geopolitical plan that you have to make that not be the case is like you're fighting against gravity.

And that's not to say that you can't win for a while, but really the only way to do it is just to create so much chaos. I mean, again, go back to that the same example. Same thing with Germany in Europe. You know, Germany gets super powerful. World War I happens. It gets decimated. They get, you know, the Versailles Treaty takes them down 10 notches. within 15 years.

They're the most powerful country in Europe again. They go in there flat in every single one of their cities, kill all their men, you know, take over the country. And by like the mid-50s, it's the biggest economy in Europe. And now Germany pretty much is the EU and like is Europe. It's just because that's the natural order. It's the biggest country. It's a very sophisticated kind, all this kind of things.

And you can keep trying to fight that, you know, using violence. But, you know, the tide generally tends to come back in. Well, look, I mean, what you're talking about in economic terms is just a simple moral hazard. You know, in 1990, I'm bluffing. I think it was 94. Alan Greenspan bailed out this investment firm on Wall Street. And it was called, everybody called, somebody coined the phrase, I don't know, the Greenspan put. Yeah.

And that meant essentially if you made a bunch of bad loans, but you've, got powerful friends, then don't worry about it. The central bank will create new money and bail your sorry ass out. And so that's just a huge incentive to banks to go ahead and make bad loans because the feds got your back. And then that also translates in the macro sense to the overall economy. In an inflationary economy, this is really what causes what they call the business cycle, which is really the government inflationary currency cycle, where all the new money makes it seem like there's all this new wealth that has been saved up as investment capital to go into new projects. But that's not really true because it ain't real wealth. It's just a bunch, well,

not just, but it includes a bunch of just new money far beyond representing whatever new wealth has been created. So then that leads people to begin projects that ultimately are unsustainable. But then that transfers to government programs across the board, including the Pentagon, where those inflationary dollars, for example, prop up the military of Ukraine, the military of Afghanistan before that, to, you know, fight with power and authority that they otherwise would not have.

And then when the interest rates go up, their power and influence crashes, just like everything else. And it's all part of the same system. It's not, you know, the crash doesn't always come in a direct correlation there. but, you know, certainly the, it's more than a metaphor, right? That is, in fact, you know, those, those, you know, the Afghan National Army and the Ukrainian

army are essentially, you know, these big firms that are being propped up by American inflation. Without that, they, as you're saying, they would have to make entirely different business decisions about how to move forward and what strength they have to carry on with, etc. So same principle at work and always ends up leading to a terrible correction in the end. So artificial prosperity, very real bust. Happens all the time. Central banking and war.

We're in central banking. And in both cases, the economic and the geopolitical, it's almost never the people at the top paying the price. No, of course not. All right. So listen, I want to talk about Ukraine and European stuff for a minute here before we go to questions. I saw Russia with hammering Kiev a couple days ago. Yeah, but hold that thought real quick, because as long as we're still somewhat near

in proximity to our discussion of the war in Iran, I want to throw in a little bit about Gaza and how they're still killing about 100 people a week, I guess it is, compared to 100 a day before the so-called ceasefire of last October. I don't know if it's even 100 a week, but it's certainly tens and tens every week at the minimum. including I saw some really bad footage of and still pictures of dead kids, you know, out of Gaza

just a day before yesterday. And I guess because of the ceasefire, it's really been, and because of the war in Iran, it's really been moved to the back burner what's happening to those people. But Netanyang gave a speech where he said, listen, we're going ahead and we're closing in. We're now, we're already, we said 50, now we're at 60, but we're moving to control 70% We're taking 70% of the Gaza Strip. So whatever that yellow line was is way behind him now. We're going to take 70% of the strip. And Jesus, I'm sorry, I guess I should have this clip

queued up for you there, Darrell. But anyway, the crowd says, no, 100. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. But we're going to just go to 70 for now. Everybody will be fine. As they continue their project of what is absolutely a genocide, I would like to stipulate because I don't want to be misunderstood. And I've said this before, but it's worth repeating, you know.

when you see the absolute desolation of the Gaza Strip, much of that was done after the people had been forced to leave. So it's not like they killed, you know, 500,000 or, you know, more people in the air raids in a full Dresden, you know, fire bombing campaign. That didn't happen in that short of amount of time. And in many cases, they bombed them and bombed them and bombed them until they fled. And they ordered them to leave.

and then they would come in with dynamite and or just air strikes and destroy everything and level their towns. So, you know, I don't want people to think that I'm being misleading and overstating. You know, they say the violent deaths in there are officially in like 80,000, not much higher than that. Now, if you take the excess death rate and whatever, I don't think anybody's been able to really measure that for sure yet. But when we take the overall number of people who died who otherwise would not have, it's going to be quite a bit higher than that. It's usually every other war. I mean, that is how we measure it in war, usually.

You can look up anywhere. It'll tell you combat casualties, but then the number that everybody knows for a given war is usually all cause excess death. Right. And so, anyway, on my train of thought there was, though, but it's still a genocide. Okay, let's say, forget all the excess deaths

and say it's still only just 80,000 is somehow the magic cap on as high as the number can be. still the complete destruction of their towns in that way that counts the point of it is that it's not just a quantity of people massacred the point is is how israel's going about it and hell there's stated intentions and how they're going about it which is to destroy a people and I always hated that word even when I was a little kid in public school I remember saying a people I don't like that but I get what you mean if you're talking about the Pueblo or whatever in this case you're not talking about the Palestinians, and they're trying to completely raise this ancient society there

and destroy everything that they have, all their homes, all their businesses, all of their government buildings, so therefore all their public records of all their family histories and their land ownership and all of their mosques and their churches and everything just completely decimating it. And as the, I'm sorry, forget if it was the finance minister or the national security minister again said the other day to complete or was it Netanyahu himself said to complete the plan of the voluntary emigration of the Palestinian people in other words just to unrelentingly torture these people until they finally either just lay down and die or give up and flee to i don't know where the sinai or go drown themselves in the ocean or what but that's what they're doing and they say it

over and over again and that's genocide and we should absolutely not be a part of this. It's insane that this is still going on. And it's insane that people are like cowed out of using that term. Like, what's the good of it then? We got to wait till all six million Palestinians are dead and then we get to call it a genocide. Because like then the magic terminology kicks in after it's all too late to stop it. And this whole thing is insane. I mean, dude, we count Holocaust victims. You know, like we literally count if like Jewish partisan casualties in battle. Like, because, you know, this was going on,

so these people were forced to go out into the forest and join one of these partisan groups to survive, and they got killed as a result. We count them. I mean, that's like, if we're going to count anything like that, then yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially when, man, like, you know,

we've never had this much evidence of just brazen, needless mass killing, like ever, in any war like ever. I forget eyewitnesses or anything like that. Digging up mass graves and having to figure out like how exactly these people died and the circumstances. I mean, we've just got video after video after video of things that, you know, I mean, just snuff films, you know?

Soldier made snuff films from like hundreds, thousands of them. And it's gotten to the point where people are so inundated by it that they're numb to it. And it's... Backing in the people. Ah. This argument. And look, the way I look at the genocide question is like, you know, are we having a legal argument?

Because if we are, then, I mean, it's hard to take seriously because international law doesn't really seem to exist anymore. If we're having a definitional argument, like just sort of how we should use the term in order to like maintain its legitimacy and its force, then that's fine. That's an English major argument, I guess. For me, it's just just look at what, just look at the pictures of that city, watch the videos, hear the testimony of these people using food food aid trucks to like draw in starving women and children and open up on them with tanks. Like you call that whatever the hell you want. That country, that country is like, it's, look, I'll be, I'll try to be careful here.

That country has, has lost its right to exist. And that does not mean that I advocate somebody going in there and nuking it. That's not what I'm saying. But in terms of like the question, does Israel have a right to exist? If it did, it doesn't anymore. It just doesn't. I mean, there's just, there's no way you can have it. You know, it's so, and that doesn't even mean necessarily that like the people who live there can't live there.

But like this state, that's what I mean by when I say Israel. I'm talking about the state that's there. There's no coming back from this. There's no like reform from this kind of thing. you can reform from things that you denied and hid from your public and got caught doing or whatever. You can't come back from like a total public and whole of government like embrace of this kind of madness and atrocity.

I mean, I don't think of the sense though as far as using the term genocide. The reason that there's such a word is because it's a thing and it's different than wide-scale maskers. it's different from war casualties. It's different from totalitarianism. It's different from, you know, it's its own. It's an intent to make a mass, you know, group of people, a nation, maybe lowercase in type,

a nation of people no longer a thing. And that's what they're doing. And along with every cruelty that you describe. But I think if, you know. If Milosevic was still alive, he'd be looking around like, how, man. The Red Jack Massacre where 35 fighters were dumped in a ditch and a, you know, that was good enough to start a war then.

You know, okay, so I want to show you this. Speaking of old excuses for war, so this is Tucker's great interview with this guy, Dr. Nick Maynard of Oxford University. Have you had a chance to see this? Is this a new one? Yeah, it came out the other night. I guess last night. think so, the night before last maybe.

Yeah, it was the night before last. And what it is, man, is it's really good. Tucker has a fantastic monologue at the beginning, as he always does. No teleprompter required. And then he interviewed, it's really worth watching. And then on top of that is this interview with this guy. He's a doctor. He's an abdominal surgeon specialty doctor.

And he's been to Gaza there operating on the casualties of the war there. And he just talks about all what he's seen and what he knows from like firsthand friends of his who told him no hearsay but just their direct experience, you know, eyewitness testimony to him. And he's very careful. He's obviously, he's a surgeon. And he just tells the utmost cruelties, many of which you and I already know about and have talked about, such as the targeting of specific body parts of even children by the Israeli snipers. So one day it's the abdomen. The next day it's the neck. And the next day it's the genitals and whatever, they're clearly having a contest for, you know,

contests for, you know, who they kill with their sniper rifles and whatever and how, or how they wound them, a signature, you know, type wounds and whatever. And people being tortured, people being forced, you know, on their knees with, you know, shackled and blindfolded for, as he says, 60 days at a time, mercilessly beaten around the clock, the worst torture state in the world for the Palestinian captives of the Israel. there's just nothing like it. I mean, they make the shy coms look like angels here and not because they are,

but simply because of the abject sadism and cruelty of these people. It's just sick what they do. And I really highly encourage people to watch that. And then, man, I had a segue there from there to what you just said, but now kind of got high and forgot. Do you remember what your point was right there

before I brought up this interview? No. Not well. I was just talking. You know, I'm going back on Tucker in July. Oh, great. I think we're going to do, I think we're just going to do a long episode, and it's going to be like a long, deep dive, short version of the Fear and Loathing series.

So just give everybody sort of the, you know, the story up to 1948 in the founding of the state, like in as much detail as I can cram it at three hours or so. So, and I'm prepping for that one and, like, really kind of, you know, trying to tighten it up and make sure that I just stay on, stay on message and hit the right points to carry it through because I don't want to get through that and then realize there's big important things I left out. So I'm pretty excited about that.

Excited to see Tucker again. I always go out in the summer. I don't like going out in the winter because I like going to Maine more than I like going to Florida. Yeah. I've only been on there the one time, but yeah, the spot in Maine is very nice. By the way, and this is, I think, crucial.

There's a new poll out. People can find it on Max Blumenthal's Twitter feed. I forget the name of the group, but they did a wide survey of American Jews, and they found that, I think it was a bare majority, or maybe it was just short of a majority of American Jews under the age of 35, aren't even Zionists. They're, as they put it, functionally anti-Zionists. They want a binational state with full citizenship and equal rights for everybody.

Forget this Jewish state business. It's virtually half of American Jews under 35. never mind the rest of all American liberals and whatever on that side. But, you know, for all these people, the pro-Israelis and the anti-Semites who love to conflate all these issues, I saw, you know, I posted a thing, Trash and Bernie Sanders today because he said he's against that. Equal rights, well, that would be anti-Israel, so no, I'm against that. And someone said, yeah, see, because he's a Jew, but no, it's because he's a Zionist.

That's the term you're looking for. There are plenty of Jews who completely. disagree with him on that and have for a very long time and he's too poor of a person to even get out in front of that parade at this point. I'm sorry, what? Did you see, I really haven't been on social media at all in a while, but I saw like a few things going around, Norman Finkelstein going after Tucker and stuff and like all the... Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald had a fantastic remarkable to that. yeah i'll have to watch it that was so disappointing i mean as engulf says he goes listen leftists have this thing where they have to pretend to monopolize all virtue if anyone to the right of them

seems to be expressing the same sentiment that they have about the same issue for the same moral reason then it's almost just like an allergy it's automatic they have to say well megan kelly's just realize that's where the money is now. Tucker Carlson really just hates Jews when they just, as Greenwell says, they just got accused of hating Jews this morning and had to say like, hey, that's not fair. I am not. I'm a leftist.

How could I possibly be a racist? I'm a civil rights type. How could you say that? And then later that day, they'll go, yeah, these right wingers, they don't mean it. They just hate Jews. And with no irony whatsoever and totally certain of themselves in a way that only leftists can be. And now just watch somebody's going to quote me. out of context saying I'm a leftist there.

I was paraphrasing them. But anyway, so yeah, Finkelstein, whatever, did. He's, I've seen him say that he's a communist, like unrepentant, not like some kind of democratic socialist or whatever, but he's a communist.

So, you don't want to take a guy like that so seriously, for Christ's sake, man, what? We got questions? One more thing. Lebanon, they're going, they're past the Latani River, they're going to the Zahari. River, if I'm saying it right, they're forcing an evacuation of Tyre, that's T-Y-R-E, this ancient city on the Mediterranean coast there. They're forcing an evacuation there. They're already

bombed the crap out of it. And, you know, they've been bombing Beirut and what, and I don't know if anybody knows where they think they're going to stop. But they are taking full advantage right now. You know, security zone nothing, man. And, you know, if you follow the Twitter feeds closely, you'll see the way the media just completely bends over backwards to soften the language. And, you know, the way they do for the cops, the cops firearm discharged and the bullet made its way into the car where it found the little girl's heart.

Yeah, the cop killed the kid. Yeah, thanks. Same thing here. We're like, Israel empties city. Or like, city demanded to be emptied as Lebanon is embroiled in common. conflict or whatever. And they don't mention Israel. They don't mention who's ordering who to flee, who's blowing up, whatever. You know what I mean? It's just all euphemisms and misdirection all the way down or just refusal to use proper nouns where they belong. There's a lady on Twitter named

Assad Rawl, I think it is, or something like that. And she just, you know, marks up the New York Times and Reuters in AP headlines, BBC headlines. So just what you're really trying to say in English is this and just showing the absolute tortured semantics that they're they use in order to avoid saying what is happening right in front of everybody. They're completely destroying, you know, at least half of Palestine or, you know, a solid third of Palestine. And they're taken so far like a third of Lebanon. And they've already seized, you know, what a good little sixth or something of southwestern Syria there and which Al-Qaeda has let them go ahead and have from Mount Hernon all the way down.

So everything's coming up, Netanyahu over there with American support. for the medium term anyway, short term anyway. Although as we discussed, he ain't getting his regime change yet. And then before we go to questions, let me just say, I know we're already at an hour, but what the hell? I just want to say real quick that I'm no sectarian. I've been getting along great with the Cato guys lately. And that doesn't mean everyone.

I know Tom Palmer is probably still associated with it somehow, and he's a bad dude up to no good. But the main foreign policy department there is my good buddy, Doug Bandow, Justin Logan, John Hoffman, and Brandon Buck, and I think John Glazer's over there somewhere, but I never see him. But anyway, I like John Glazer too, me and him go way back. And all those guys are just so good on all of this stuff, man, and hardcore on Israel. You might think that at Cato they'd pull their punches on the Israel lobby and their influence

in America, their role in pushing this war, not so. Cato has been absolutely fantastic in which for a child, a survivor of the libertarian civil wars like this is huge and very important to me to be able to brag about that that how great they are right now they were one of the few and i i obviously have my issues with you know that side of the libertarian movement but they were one of the few publications that reported on back during the second intifada is the Israelis taking control the Palestinian police stations to stream pornography into all the Palestinians houses you know that it got reported a few other places later but they were one of the first and one of the only ones for a while. Yeah. So Ted Carpenter got pushed out of there

and I think part of it was because of politics over Ukraine, but that's all right because now he writes for me at anti-war.com and the Libertarian Institute. So that's all right. Did you imagine if the Russians were on camera doing the stuff we've seen the Israelis doing for three years? Oh my gosh. We would be a nuclear war. I don't even know about a little. There has been some pretty brutal torture and horrible, you know, summary executions and bad things, but nothing. like on the scale of what's happened in Gaza. Especially and not of civilians. You don't see the kind of mass killing of civilians that you see in Gaza.

I mean, it's like, it's just different. And, you know, overall it is still thousands. So, but still not in the same way. You're right. And now, so speaking of which, and then we'll go to the questions, but it's worth pointing out here about the alleged change of fortunes, I think the map shows the same. the Russians are still moving forward slowly in most places.

The Ukrainians have made some small gains, but whatever, that they're claiming they had this whole propaganda campaign that they have really figured out the drones, and they're really getting the best of the Russians, and including even with attacks that include no troops to even die, only robots fighting against the Russians and kicking their asses and whatever. So this narrative is kind of taken off that they now have this renewed momentum, which is short to, and there may be some truth to, at least in some places, right?

But that would seem to be a counter incentive to their wanting to seek a deal. But then also they've been hitting more and more refineries and things inside Russia. And they hit a school in Mughansk, which is some kind of nursing school, I believe it was, and killed some young female students. I don't know if they were teenagers or exactly their ages, but maybe 20-somethings. we're studying there and this caused a massive political reaction inside

Russia and they have been pummeling Kiev as you referenced a minute ago they've been hitting them with their hypersonic missiles and at least proclaiming and I'm not sure on all the very latest to the details but they at least proclaimed that they were widening their target set they were going to go ahead and hit

things that they had refrained from hitting previously or at least for a long time and then there have been I mean, not so veiled threats. I mean, there have been hyperbolic threats out of the Russian government previously during this war too, Daryl. Would they have said things that they did not end up

backing up, thank goodness? But I read a quote, and it wasn't from Ned Debtev. It was from Sergei Lavrov. It was somewhat veiled. He didn't say specifically, but he was pretty heavily implying that he was willing to hit European cities in NATO member states as punishment for their support for

Ukraine. Hasn't Ukraine been, they've been hitting Russian targets at least a couple times by overflying the Baltic states with their missiles, I think. That's the complaint, right? The NATO states are cooperating to a degree now that they're going to have to be made to pay, you know, supposedly. So I don't know if they're going to follow through on that or what kind of signals they're getting from Washington about that or what is really going on there, man. I'm going to try to catch up. I've been very busy. traveling and everything, but I'm going to try to catch up on all my reading and see what I can find out about that. But when I read that, you know, Lavrov typically is the more diplomatic diplomat

and they let Mievedev do all the junkyard dog barking, you know what I mean? That's oversimplifying it, but whatever. If it was him, I wouldn't mind as much, you know, but coming from Sergei Lavrov, I'm like, ah, geez, I don't know. That means that he and Putin had a discussion and agreed that he should go out there and say that whatever exactly they meant by it that's too much for me man right there i want man i can't i it's really hard to believe this war has gone on this long and there's just nobody in the world with the wherewith all to stop it to figure out how to negotiate an exit or or what let these people say face in whatever way they have to really sucks yeah okay so we got comments let me see if i can remember how to

detach the comment thingy. I don't know. You've got them on your end too, right? Can you read them? No, I, oh, let me get out of full screen here. Hold on. All right. Okay, let's see.

I got from the Nixter, 1212. For Daryl, would you ever do a show with Scott Ritter to discuss weapon systems? I don't know. I guess I would talk to most people that wanted to talk to me. I don't know much about Ritter, but, you know, we, yeah, probably, I guess. And that's all I see. This guy says lately Mearsheimer has been warning of Russian official openly calling for the use of a tactical nuke. What do we make of the recent escalations and how

Euros might react to it? Okay, so we kind of just covered that. As far as the nuke thing, I mean, there have been various threatening statements by the Russian officials, you know, since the start of this war about, you know, that it's a sliding scale. They're on it and they're being pushed toward feeling like they got no choice but to do that, which I think is obviously crazy. I mean, they could just quit instead

or, you know, declare victory where they are instead. But I think it is real danger. I don't think it's a high probability that it'll happen, but then it's an extremely high amount of damage if it does break out. Right? And if anybody starts using nukes at all, we'd be really lucky if they stay down at 10 or 15 kilotons and don't go up into the much higher ranges of, you know, strategic nukes. So I don't know. So this last, go ahead. Yeah, well, no, let's go ahead and do this one. Go ahead.

What do you think of a COVID-style Canada trucker shut down in D.C. The 200,000 American patriots who all want to bring the Epstein class to justice. I say you and him fight. I don't know. What do you think? I think that, yeah, I don't know, man. Like, on one hand, I say, I look at sort of physical confrontations like that as, you know, attacking their strongest point. You know, their strongest defend, like, that's their ground. Like, they, they want there to be a physical confrontation because they're really good at that. And they know how to handle it from a propaganda perspective, from just a, the confrontation itself.

on the other hand, I'm kind of at the point now where it's like, you know, what else besides, you know, just physically confronting these people is really going to bring about any change. And it's hard to imagine anything happening organically. I mean, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, if it happens, I'll wish you well. But I wouldn't necessarily expect the best. Ron the actuary. Or here, I got another one.

It says, this is a good question, actually. Or it's not really a question exactly. I guess there is one. But he says American tech companies want to make sure your children never have jobs. At what point does the country stop talking about Israel? I kind of get that. Like, yeah, I get it, man.

Like, I would like to stop talking about this. But, you know, we're in a shooting war with a fairly large country right now that we have basically lost conventionally because of Israel. It's really hard to stop talking about them, you know? But I feel you. Like I, you know, I would love to just be doing

provoked shows occasionally about stuff like this when it flares up and be talking about changes in the tech economy and whatnot. But, you know, this is where we're at right now. I mean, look, I mean, that's the whole point. That's the bottom line of this whole thing, man. Is an empire foreign policy dominates. We can never take a week off to get our shit together

as long as we're constantly in a state of international emergency here. Don't you know there's a war on? You want to roll back the FBI counterintelligence division now? You want to roll back the CIA and the NSA and all their capabilities now? You want to let the chikoms get ahead of us on AI. When we're in the middle of imploding, our empire is falling and we're desperately clamoring to hold it together. No way. Your town is going to have to give in to this new data center because it's an international conflict,

with stakes higher than you can understand, right? There's an NSC memo that says so. That's the whole point, man, is we can't be a limited republic. We cannot have a constitutional government and a free society of any kind, a free economy of any kind when we have a world empire.

I mean, that's what Anderil is, right? That's what Palantir is. It's... Oh, do you think he's moving to Argentina? Yeah? Oh, yeah, I did see that. Yeah, and Orrin McIntyre had a great point that how can these elites just run our country in the ground and not give a damn? Well, because they don't have to give a damn. They can just get up, pack up, and go wherever they want. They don't have to move one box, man. They go wherever they want.

Escape the consequences of all their terrible policies, no problem, you know? Hey, so this guy asked if I think Rogan texted Trump about what I told him. he's told them things before that he listened to. I guess I kind of doubt that, but he did cite me. As I said, he did cite me on the show today, so I did make an impression there with Joe, I don't know if it carried over or not. But, you know, I don't know.

Yo, read that Canadians question, man. He just dropped 500 Canadian dollars, which I think is like 47 cents, but that's okay. It's a lot of money to him. That sounds like a lot. Wait, put that one up there. What is it? You see it?

Yeah, let me see here. It says if nobody can stop the war, Ukraine war he's talking about, did Putin really have to start it? And what were Putin's other options if he wanted to avoid starting the war in the first place? I'll just say something real quick and then I'll let Scott take over on this one. But like, you know, I really do think that Putin had bad intelligence and had, you know, almost Trump-like expectations of what was going to happen when he sent that little

piddly-ass force into Ukraine back in February 22 because... That's a good way to put it, isn't it? You know, and like, because it's one of the things that, like, made people like me think that a war was not on the brink of happening at that moment because the forces that were amassed on the border.

I'm like, he can't invade Ukraine. But that, that's ridiculous. Like, it's not anywhere close to enough forces. And it wasn't. It wasn't meant for that. Now, you know, to give Putin his due on that. You know, he did

meet his expectation in the sense that by April Kiev was ready to make a deal with him that it was acceptable to Russia, but he didn't bank on Boris, you know, Boris Johnson's showing up and torpedoing it and the Ukrainians coming along with it, I guess.

But as far as other options, I'd like to hear you on that. Well, look, yeah, I say in the book that just, you know, really as you just said, you could compare it to the Iran war here. where, whether February the 27th or February the 21st, they're just sitting there. They didn't have to go.

And then the next day, they went anyway. I mean, let me ask you about this. Because like this is they didn't have to. You know what I mean? Go ahead. Let me ask you about this. Because this is, you know, people will look and they'll say like that the Russians who were in eastern Ukraine, the ethnic Russians who were there,

who were being killed, being excluded like systematically, you know, ever since the Maidan coup and we're in a state of, you know, civil war and under military attack by Kiev, the Russians, you know, they look at those people and they have always, since the fall of the Soviet Union, have said that, like, these people are our concerns. The Russians in the Eastern Baltic states, like, those are, we're going to back out our troops and everything, and we're going to allow these countries to break away. But just to be on the record, we have concerns about what the fate of these people is going to be. And so they've always looked at them as somebody they were obligated to sort of look after. Other people would be like, well, there's an

invisible line in the sand right there between Russia and Ukraine. Those are totally different people. They have no right to intervene to protect them. I don't really buy that. Like, you know, if the Russians really felt, and whether Putin and like, you know, his government felt this way, I know a lot of Russian people, you know, felt that we have an obligation to step in and, like, protect our people here, you know? And just because they're on the other side of an imaginary border, clearly Kiev doesn't consider them real Ukrainians. And so what are they? Well, they're Russians. I sympathize with that, you know, like it would be hard for me. If the U.S. government, if there was a big coup and, you know, the new government was just radically, radically anti-Mexican

and started attacking the Mexicans in the Southwest militarily and stuff, and the Mexican government intervened to protect them, I wouldn't say that, like, like, you know, they had invaded America, unprovoked, just whatever. Like, I sympathized with that. And so I don't know how they would have stopped the mistreatment and the killing of, you know, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, short of military interventions. But maybe you have a theory on that. Yeah, I wrote about it in the book that, I mean, there are obvious options that they didn't

even try right up front. Like, for example, use and swear to use their views. on the UN Security Council to obstruct all business until they get their way. Right there would be a major card to play. Another one was, forget the West blowing it up. He could have, in fact, he did turn off Nord Stream 1 himself, Putin did, when he was angry in, I guess, October of 21. Well, he could have shut off Nord Stream 2 then himself too.

And said, listen, you guys are just going to freeze in the dark, man. I mean it this time. Instead, I guess his finance people told him, no, we need that revenue this winter in the lead up to the war or what the calculation there was. But if he wanted to play hardball, he could have just shut off the gas.

He could have declared the UN Security Council has closed for business until I get my way. And then his way was something that he had already demanded back in 2018, which was give me UN peacekeepers from a third disinterested country to stand on the gray zone and enforce the peace. They had a peace deal, the Minsk two peace deal,

since February of 2015. It was signed by our allies, the French and the Germans, and rubber stamped then by Obama and by the UN Security Council as the official peace deal to end the war. They're, you know, America and Israel and, America and Ukraine, the Poroshenko, and then later the Zelensky government worked to sabotage the implementation of the deal. But that essentially was Putin's main domain.

was implement the Minsk two deal. Now, you could say he just had given up on that already because he just thought that wasn't going to work, but he could have played harder hardball to make it happen. And in fact, he could have taken a country that's much closer to his own, like, say, Kazakhstan or something. I'm making that up on the fly, but somebody that he could get to agree,

even without a UN Security Council resolution, dress him up in green helmets, then fine, and march them in there to stand on the line. He could have as David Swanson is a left-wing ant-pist, and this does sound naive at first, but he said just send in unarmed Russian peacekeepers, just sending tens of thousands of troops, just with no guns, but just to stand there

and just to separate the two in a way that entirely shifts the burden onto Kiev. And you can even send civilians in there. And, you know, he said, yeah, this sounds like silly hippie shit, but look, this is how they force the Soviet troops out of the Baltics, the ultimately Russian Soviet troops, out of the Baltics was, I'm almost certain it was in Lithuania, where they had this massive mob of 100,000 people or something

singing songs as they unarmed and peacefully finally forced the Soviets out. And the Soviets had massacred some Lithuanians, what, like a year before that. But when it came down to, you know, the end of their rope, they were forced out peacefully by people singing songs. and marching them to the border and telling them don't come back. So if Putin was trying to, and I think he was, trying to end the ongoing so-called Civil War, which we know now for a fact was run by the CIA from the day it began.

You know, Zach Dorfman was the great reporter who covered this for Yahoo News, but then the New York Times pretended to get the scoop a year later and did that in-depth piece about the 14 CIA bases. They say 12, but then they say, oh, yeah, also there were two more. So that's 14 CIA bases in the country from the time that war began and all that. That was his concern, that and the expansion of NATO and the essential de facto integration of NATO playing harder hard ball, I think he could have gotten his way. And I think, and I say this in the book too, that one of the things that he really did to screw himself,

if he was trying to get, you know, Joe Biden to just give in to him, was that he kept being coy about it and saying, like, no, I'm not going to invade. You know, I sure want to have my way, but it's silly to say that I'm preparing to attack and all that. What he should have said was, you're damned right. I'm building up my forces because I'm ready to attack you, sign the damn treaty, or at least meet me in Geneva,

and negotiate seriously about this. And Biden wasn't serious. Biden said, look, we're not going to put these missiles in Ukraine. And you don't have to worry about that. And he says, well, let's put that in writing. And Biden says, okay, we can reach an agreement about that. And then he sent, like, the third or fourth stringer to, like, go and promise to set up a meeting and then never follow through and never even do it.

You know what I mean? So, you know, it was absolutely horrific diplomacy on the American side. I think, you know, probably 49 to 51. They probably didn't prefer war, but they were, like, almost just as happy to go. go ahead and have a war and inflict what they saw as a costly strategic defeat on Russia if they had one. So they were not, you know, being very good negotiating partners here. But Russia had a lot of cards to play besides simply invading the country the way they did. And then their plans sucked.

I mean, as Daniel Davis said at the time, they invaded from three directions and with not enough troops in any one column to get what they wanted. If they had all marched on Kiev, they would have been able to have their way. And instead, you know, they blew it. Now look at them. Four years of this, hundreds of thousands of killed. And I know that, well, whatever, I don't know. I always prefer the most conservative estimates from all sides. I know both sides play down their own numbers and play up the other sides.

I prefer more conservative estimates when it comes to that thing. But at the minimum, hundreds of thousands of guys have been killed on both sides of this thing. The entire east of the country has been completely destroyed. The, you know, population of Ukraine has been, you know, severely. a weekend in terms of people being forced to flee and all that. But the Russians have, you know, all of their own social consequences from this thing do. And then, of course, as I also say in the book, it's going to be a puring victory eventually, whether they go all the way to the river or whether they stop at the Donbass and the, you know,

Zaproja and Kersan are exactly where they end up drawing the line. They will have simply removed everyone in the country, whoever liked them, out of the country by drawing a new line around them and calling them Russians. So now they're going to be dealing with a much more right-wing, much more anti-Russian and nationalistic Ukraine on their border for the indefinite future, which only in self-licking ice cream cone terms means that they've just bought themselves decades more conflict here by doing this. This is an absolute idiot thing to do, and they should not have done it. And I'm not saying that your concerns aren't valid. The war had been going on for a long time. But I'm saying if he wanted to be creative, he could have figured out of it.

a way to force that issue. And instead, apparently he decided earlier in 2021 that screw it, we're going for it. And then he didn't want to change his mind, right? Like he's George W. Bush building up in Kuwait. He doesn't want to just say, oh, screw it. You know, you know, it's actually close up because I got to get going. But like, it's an example of what I was talking about earlier, where you have, you know, empires that create these artificial power structures as, you know, the Ukraine-Russia relationship has been because of U.S. and European backing. And that, goes until the other side, Russia in this case, looks at the board and says,

nah, they don't want any of this. They won't do it. And then they go do something stupid, and we do do it. Now you're four years in, you know? Yeah. All right, so listen, just real quick, one guy here says,

Alexander Mercoros from the Duran has my book on his shelf. I've noticed that. He's a very nice guy. I met him at an awards thing in Chicago one time, and he was very nice to me and said he really liked the book. got a lot out of it, which was very flattering, considering that he's really one of the foremost experts on this stuff,

and I have a lot of respect for him. So thanks for pointing that out, and thanks to Alex Mercoros for that. And then I guess that's it. There's one and two more in here, so guys, we better go with. Keep your eyes peel for the Danny Jones podcast. I'm on there,

and then if you're a regular consumer of the Matt Gates show, you find me on there as well. And then otherwise, I'll be around. And thank you very much for your time, Mardi-Made. It's been great, dude. Peace, guys. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm.

Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XNUt and YouTube. And tune in next time for more, Provoked.