Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:52 - Neocons Lose Another War

Episode Date: June 27, 2026

Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton discuss the Trump administration's attempts to save face while withdrawing from the Iran war without accomplishing any of their original goals and actually losing ground in several areas. Chapters: 0:36 Show Kickoff and Roadmap 3:59 Trump, Senators, and War Powers 7:49 Netanyahu, Vance, and the Split 25:54 Neocons and the Iran Deal 46:31 Ukraine’s Desperate Escalation 1:01:55 Syria, ISIS, and Israel's Shadow War 1:04:06 Listener Q&A + Wrap-Up (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

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, it's the show. Now on our new night for the, what, third?

week. No. Yeah. Thursday, me and Darrow Cooper. We talk about Iran, mostly, and other things. Welcome, Mr. Cooper. How are you tonight? I'm good, brother.

How are you? Did you happen to see in the chat, someone answered our question for us in detail. Telestai Mark. Tettelisai Mark. I'm sorry, buddy. That's a tough one. He said, Godspeed descends. We were discussing for everybody out there.

What Godspeed, what that term comes from. And he says, it descends from the original God's spell, the gospel. It came in time to mean, God speed thee on thy way in a more general sense. So thank you, sir. Hey, that was what you said, then. Basically, yeah, I'm always right. Well, that's your John Weeks for it. I give up.

The hell does that mean? Now, I'm kind of bummed because last week it was letting me detach your video where I could float it around and put it right next to the camera. but now it's not letting me do that, but I don't know why. Are we recording? No, we're live, man. I just like to drag your head where it's sort of pseudo-eye contact here while I'm looking at you in the camera. I got you. Well, let's see.

We should probably get rock and rolling. No, we are going. Everybody loves us anyway. Look, we got news to talk about it. Sponsored by expat money. Now, expat money is run by a guy named Mikkel Thorough, And he's a really good guy, and how I know is I actually toured Mayan ruins with him in Guatemala. No, in Mexico.

It was cool. I was on a Tom Woods cruise, and so was he. And he's a great guy, man, and we spent some time in him. And he's been an expat for about 25 years, and he'll just help you figure out how to set up residency in other countries, how to invest in property in other countries, even get citizenship in other countries if you need to and find ways to protect your neck and make backup plans for no matter what, or make money. Maybe you just want to go for the cost of living or what. And all you got to do here is you see, you just sign up for the email list.

And then once you do, you will get a free copy of Plan B, Residencies, and Instant Citizenship. This free special report for getting started on this stuff. And of course, they do their big expat money summit every October too. But we'll talk more about that later. Anyway, brought to you by them. So, yes, and the things that we're going to discuss tonight include Ukraine, but let's put that off. We have Washington Post, relevant subject right there, just where it's

coming from. U.S. intelligence warns Israel is likely to undermine Iran peace deal, officials say. An official estimate by the CIA, their prediction of what's going to happen here. They were tasked with looking into that, and this is what they assessed in their estimate, sir. Then this U.N. report about the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the occupied territories has come out. and I'm afraid that I never did find a chance to read through this thing, but I wanted to at least point out that it exists. And, you know, if you read anti-war.com regularly, then you already know what's in there.

It's in the news all the time, but they're collecting it all in one place for you. We also have, oh, I should still have it on this, shouldn't I? Senate votes to check Trump's war powers. That's a first. There have been war powers votes on Yemen before, and I think that's all. But those were concurrent resolutions,

which are the kind that the president can veto if he feels like it. And this time is not. This is a joint resolution in a way that the language says, he shall obey if they pass it this way. And none of these tricks about, oh, you need a filibuster 60 votes in the Senate or any of that either. Bare majority, it passed. And Trump's on that.

On the Republican side. Well, it was Susan Collins actually voted for it, which was surprising. There's Rand Paul, and then there's a guy who, I want to say he's from out in Colorado that I just read something else attacking him for being so pro-war and pro-Zinist. So maybe he was just making an anti-Trump point of some kind, or maybe that was wrong. But I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name. I think he's from out in Colorado or something. But Trump had announced all, there were four of them.

Oh, here it is. It's Cassidy, is who I'm saying. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Indiana is the guy who he broke with the Republicans and voted with Rand Paul on this, but then I was reading a thing attacking him as being, you know, totally pro-Zionist and pro-war, so I don't know. But he did the right thing here for whatever reason. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.

And then Trump denounced them on Twitter and said it was aid and comfort to the enemy. And he kind of has a point that it, you know, undermines his position in negotiations, but he shouldn't have started this war. But he's saying, oh, man, now you're just telling the Iranians that you're forbidding my freedom of action right when I'm trying to get out of the thing and it's already over.

That sucks. He kind of has a point about that, but whatever, it's actually good for, even if it hurts his negotiating position a little, it is good that now it's the law that he absolutely must seek an authorization before going back to strikes over there or he would be in violation of not just the constant,

but the statute of the law there. Go ahead. Well, he's in two negotiations sort of right now, right? One being with the Iranians and the other one being with the Israelis, trying to figure out how to get them just to go along with our program here. And on one hand, I could see that this war powers resolution might actually strengthen his hand with the Israelis, even as it weakens it, you know, with the Iranians. He can go to the Israelis and say, look, man, you can't. can't, like, just drag me back into this, okay?

Like, you see the war power. I just, it's out of my hands now. And so, you know, maybe that's a good sign on that side of it. I'm interested in that first story, the Washington Post story, which is sort of the CIA's official outlet. And, you know, a story like that comes out. I mean, it's one of those classic stories. There's a lot of them like this where the story is not the story.

You know, the story is, Israelis are going to undermine the peace process, like, Udoi, you know, whatever. The story is that the intelligence community wants this out there. Right. And so... Post, their main organ for stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And that's really interesting.

I mean, it just... It does go to show you that, you know, I mean, it could just be that there's a split, and this is one faction, but usually the Washington Post doesn't go with minority positions, you know, coming from out of the intelligence agencies. I mean, and so they're, you know, they're putting this out there because they want to put the Israelis on notice,

and, you know, I even, I wonder if it was straight from the intelligence community itself, like the deep dark halls of Langley or whatever, or if this is something that the administration directed, you know, somebody to league. So, yeah, very interesting. You know, we talk a lot of... Let me ask you, I'm very interested in your take on the potential and or what you know about or what you think or speculate about the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu now. how much of the division between them is kind of gentleman's agreement to play politics

and or, you know, to what degree you think there's a real sort of struggle over what's to be done here? Well, did you see that story or maybe it's just a, you know, being shared around on Twitter. It was just like a clip from the book written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Yes. Trump yelling at BB on the phone, BB. Now I'm doing it. You got me doing it. It's your fault.

I did. I did not once accidentally. Cosely Trump was shouting at him on the phone, telling him, you know, everybody hates you. Even the two, like, all the Jews in America hate you. Even the two Jews on this phone call with us hate you. And that was Kushner and Witkoff. And kind of going off on it like that.

I mean, look, I'll say this. Like, I don't think that Trump and Netanyahu's relationship is going to break down to a degree where they aren't on the same, working off the same page, unless the big Jewish donors sort of make a collective decision that Netanyahu has become a liability and he's got to move on. And then Trump, you know, might throw him under the bus. But, you know, Trump is like the ultimate transactional player, right?

And so if he will not break with BB because Bibi, will not break with Netanyahu because Netanyahu does something he doesn't like or refuses to go he will do that when he senses that Netanyahu is weak and when he senses that Netanyahu is weak that's when he'll start to turn on him and the fact that he's doing it very obliquely

and indirectly you know there's these leaks coming out about these supposed spats that they have but then you have you know you do have like Vance going out saying some things that you know, they wouldn't get anybody's dander up who watches the Provoked podcast or anything, but from like an insider beltway position, like, you know, somebody in his position

saying the things that Vance has been saying about the U.S. Israeli relationship, you know, that's just not something that you would ever hear. And then when Trump was asked about it, after all of the Hawks have been going after Vance, kind of trying to, you know, they don't want to go after Trump directly, at least yet. You know, they still think there's a chance

to pull him back in. And so they're going after Vance to make it seem like, you know, he's the one that's causing this and driving a wedge. But then Trump comes out publicly and like fully backs him. He says, you know, I thought he was fantastic on the press conference this morning, et cetera. And so when Trump's saying stuff like that and saying it in the teeth of all of this criticism, like coming at Vance from all of these same people, you know, and I look at my ultimate barometer, which is always the Twitter timelines of people like Mark Levin

and they, unless they're just putting on an Oscar-worthy performance are not happy, which means I'm very happy. Yeah. Well, and yeah, I could see what they have to be upset about. You know, they did not get any of what they want here. And I hate to do this, man. I know this is last week's show. It's just sitting here speculating.

I speculating about what the deal may be, how far they could get, and what might happen and what kind of thing. So, but that's all I'm interested in, right? That's all I can think about, right? So what's really happening in Switzerland? How far are they going to get? How far have they agreed in advance that they're going to get? Look, at the end of the day, you and I both know that we're going to settle on 3.6%,

but you're going to keep the kilograms under X or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, how much of that has already been? I mean, the thing is you have like the Kennedy Cuban missile crisis like option, right, which is like, we're going to remove our missiles from Turkey, but I can't do this right now for political reasons, but I'll do it. And soon enough after this blows over. And the Soviets could take that from Kennedy and his, you know,

the channels through whom he was communicating and take that seriously. Problem we have is that the Iranians cannot take anything like that seriously. How could they possibly? And, you know, it really does seem like the position we're in now is that the Iranians are fueling their oats. And, you know, they feel like, it seems like their position toward us right now is, you know, let's go make a deal in Switzerland. Every time that you, you know, send another missile here, another drone here, every time you do anything at all, like anything happens in Lebanon, then the deal get, you know, the wall gets 10 feet tall. I mean, it's just, it seems like that's where they're at. Like, let's make a deal, but every time anything happens,

we're taking one more step forward and we're not taking any steps back. And they seem to be, you know, like gambling. You know, it's probably an informed gambling decision, I suppose, but just they seem to be gambling that we just do not have the political and military wherewithal to escalate to a degree that's going to force them to buckle. And, I mean, they can only be reinforced in that view by the war power. authorization, you know, being passed by the Senate. So, so the House had already passed it, is this thing like law now? Okay, wow. Oh, they did it. Yep. That's good, man. I mean,

you know, again, like, if you take this all, like, as a piece, right, where you've got leaks coming to the Washington Post from the intelligence community, essentially official leaks from the intelligence community talking about how the Israelis are undermining things. And then all of a sudden a few senators switch their votes, and now there's a war power authorization. You do wonder if the consensus is shifting. And it's no longer just a Vance kind of Trump thing, whether they're trying to push it through,

that maybe the consensus is shifting. Whether that's because they understand the predicament we're in, or whether it's because they want to gear up for something else, which is very possible. It's hard to say. but it does seem like things are shifting, like sort of in the bowels of the ship, you know? I hope so, yeah, I really should be reading like the UPI wire.

I don't know if they have anything. Who's reporting good scoops out of the Pentagon and how the joint staff feel about this right now and all that? We got the CIA lab into the post. What's the, I haven't read anything, and I tried. Well, did you see the report? I think this was from Vance talking. I think he announced that CENTCOM and the IRGC are in direct communication to, like, you know,

find ways to de-escalate things militarily. And, like, that was when Levin was flipping out about earlier. And again, from their perspective, I get it. But that's a very interesting move, man. And what it does is, like, you know, Iran, the Iranian regime is not the Taliban, you know, where, like, if you're from Afghanistan and you're fighting into U.S. UFC, you can't even wear your country's flag out because we just don't recognize it. It's not like that. But ever since 1979, it's kind of been like that. It's like, yeah, okay, like, you know,

it would take a war to dislodge you, but we don't, it's a matter of time, a, you know, and until that matter of time runs out, we're not going to take you really seriously as the governor, as the government of Iran, like, you know, and treat you like a, like an equal state, you know, And, I mean, this is one, like, it wouldn't be one thing, you know, setting up direct talks with the Iranian army or, you know, or something. But the IRGC directly, I mean, that's a pretty strong signal that if nothing else, what Iran has gotten out of this is a seat at the table of nations, you know. And they, you know, they got it the hard way. A lot of fire and blood on their side. But, you know, and who knows, I mean, like, you know, it was.

it's hard to say. Like, you think about like, it looked like Assad had won the war in Syria, you know, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Aid apparatus is a persistent bitch, you know, and so there may be a longer term plan or something, but yeah, I don't know. I, I think that, I think that there seems to be an emerging consensus that we got to get out of this now. And, you know, the, if we could do it, I mean, look, you want to talk about, like, the, you know, look at the Russians. The smart thing for the Russians to do back in like March or April of 2022 when Boris Johnson scuttled the deal that they were working out with the Ukrainians is to just be like, all right, fine, we're back.

We're backing up, putting up a hard defensive line keeping Crimea, and we're not going to do this anymore. And if we could pull that off, whatever the political cost or the national prestige, whatever, if we could actually go into this thing and have, look, I mean, again, we talked about this last week, I know a lot of people are totally not on board with this, and I totally understand why. But if the administration does back out of this, then look, you've got to give them some credit. And I understand it's like completely their fault that we're in this situation. But there are very, very, very few politicians, I mean, recently, ever, ever.

that could be in this situation where everybody looks at this war that we started as pretty much a loss in being like, yeah, whatever, we're walking away. This is like bad money after good. And so, yeah, I hope it happens. And I will give them credit for it if it does. Yeah. Well, look, we played the clips and joked about it last week where he's like, hey, everybody's got missiles and nuclear programs. What's the big deal? So you can just go ahead and flip-flop on the thing. I meant to do that. Everybody knows I meant to do that. It was the best war ever. and we don't even have to cheer. He doesn't care.

It's just, you know, whether he just has the space to frame it that way and like, whatever, I do agree that it's the only way to get out of it, right? Same thing even with Afghanistan. And it led to bad consequences, in fact.

They could not say, we're leaving Afghanistan because we lost. And the only way to win would be to like triple the war as it was at its height. And even then, we just lose, but it would take us 20 more years to lose again. And so that's why we're leaving, because we suck.

And it's their country. And so what are you going to do, huh? They couldn't say that. So instead they go, oh, we won. And that's why we get to leave, which led to unfortunate consequences, such as them leaving all that military equipment with the Afghan National Army that was about to cease to exist

and handed all over the Taliban, for one example. And the panicked, you know, fleeing at the end and all that. But it's same thing here. Like, we just cannot reasonably expect them to say, yeah, we totally suck and we blew it. Like, if anybody could say that with a straight face and not care, it would be Donald Trump. But I don't think we even expect any politician to frame it like that. They have to say that it's good. Well, whatever.

Just as long as nobody believes them. But if that's what they have to say to get out of there, then fine. You know what I mean? Yeah, and you hope that the Iranians would, you know, would let that slide somewhat, you know, give us a little bit of an out, recognize how our political system works in the modern media environment,

and just, you know, give them an out. Like the problem with that is that if you really think about it, like all of their demands, they're all, all they really basically amount to is you got to treat us like a real country. You have our money. Give it back. Yeah. You're sanctioning our oil. Stop doing that.

You were blockading the strait. Don't do that. Like, these are all just sort of, you've got to treat us like a real country. And so it's hard for them to walk a lot of that back. I mean, the only one that I could really, that goes beyond that framing is, you know, that they want us out of the region. You know, but even then, they could say, well, yeah, we meant like all of this forward deployed year that, you know, you have that, that makes like a mass attack possible, like happen in February.

But your bases and stuff, you know, that's a different story. We weren't talking about that, you know. Maybe they could do that. But at the same time, like, I am really firm in my belief at this point. Just from talking to people watching this play out, I am pretty firm in my belief that we, we're stopping right now, not because it's a bad idea to keep going, but because we cannot keep going. We can't. We don't have the resources and we don't have the, you know, the sort of economic cushion to be able to do it.

And we just have to stop. and the Iranians see that. You know, you just hope, even if that is the case now, you know, you hope that the Iranians would give us a dignified way out just because why make it so that six more administrations are going to have a grudge? You know what I mean? Like just, yeah, but on the other hand, I mean, they may be looking at it and just saying, like, you know, yeah, we won this round, but Israel controls their government.

Everybody knows that. And they'll be back. and so we have to take what we can now, take advantage of this. It's possible, but I think it would be... All these militarists on all sides say the same thing, that the other guys only understand one thing, force. And so that's why we got to go ahead

and do the terrible, stupid, counterproductive thing we got to do. So, you know, on the other side of, hey, let's not rub their noses in it, is, no, we've got to teach them a lesson. You know? And also, I mean, look. Don't push your luck is really where we're at. Yeah, I mean, that's true.

And when you think about like how this war started, you know, just the dastardly way that we started this war and the fact that we blew up a girl's school, bunch of civilian infrastructure, like, you know, more people I believe have been killed in Lebanon by the Israelis and those are mostly all civilians have been killed in Lebanon than have been killed in Iran, which, you know, that's an interesting thing in itself. I think that really shows, like, what the game was here. I think that the more of this goes on, the more I think that from the Israeli side, and I don't think they told Trump this, I think that their plan was hopefully, you know, we top all the

regime in Iran, hopefully we degrade their military to the point they have to tap out. Those are all, like, hopefully. but what they really wanted was for us to tie up Iran while they took over southern Lebanon. But, you know, that's not working out either because we didn't do as well against the Iranians as everybody expected us to. And the Israelis, while they're, you know, they're standing on Lebanese territory, they are taking casualties down there. And it's not going as smoothly as they would have hoped either. So the more it really does look to me a lot like that, though. You know, what do you think about that?

That was a primary purpose of the war with Iran. Yeah. Because as soon as we got into it, the Israelis just kind of bailed and went and focused on Lebanon. And after that, you know, after the first week or two. And once, you know, once we had them all tied up and we were really into the war, they just shifted all their focus over to Lebanon. And it just seemed a little, you know. That was a surprise in Washington or whether that was always part of the agreement.

Yeah, I wonder too. But I think that, I mean, there may have been some people in Washington that were in on it. But I think with Trump, you know, you're not going to sell him on a war like this because Israel wants to go in, you know, take southern Lebanon. The way to sell this war to him is you're going to do what, you know, all these presidents before you couldn't do. You're going to be the one. And, you know, they're not, if you take out the Iranian regime, why they might hate you or whatever, but you're going to have a bust in the White House for another 200 years. You know what I mean? And that's how you sell Trump on anything.

And so I imagine they focused on the nukes and the death to America and Iranians are crazy and evil and all that. But, yeah. Well, listen, I'm going to go back to something that you said before. Oh, sorry. This is the Matt Sersley anti-IrS tax lawyer, agaristtaxadvice.com, hate neocons, part of the show. This is the part of the show. Sponsored by Matt Sersley, where we criticize neoconservatives. basically what it is is he's a lawyer not an accountant

and if you own a small business or if you make a lot of money as a professional or something you need to protect your neck from the IRS then this will help you do that no gimmicks you got to obey the law but you'll make sure that you only pay but you absolutely have to and not a penny more go and talk to your new lawyer

at Matt Serselyes at agoristaxadvice.com and so now is the make fun of neocons sponsored by Matt Sersely, part of the show. Guess who wrote this headline here? Well, who knows who wrote the headline? But guess who wrote this article in The Washington Post? Democracy Dies in Darkness is the Washington Post's slogan there.

Which is a little bit better than the New York Times slogan. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. But anyway, in the Washington Post, somebody wrote opinion, the Iran deal comes with a familiar false promise. Bad actors tend to betray agreements without consequences. That's hilarious. Man, these people... Yes, he wrote it. Trivia question.

Use the force. I don't know. It's not Richard Pearl. Yeah. Just hit me, I don't know. I thought it was Vance. When that picture came up. Oh, yeah, that's one.

I get it, Douglas Fife. Yeah, that fits. Douglas Fife. So we always pick on Wormser, especially, because he's the brains who wrote the clean break and coping with crumbling states and tyranny's ally, endorsed, of course, by his boss, Richard Pearl. But then in third place there, Douglas J. Fythe, who under the W. Bush administration, under Paul Wolfowitz, became the deputy secretary of defense for policy.

And he was the guy under Douglas Fythe was Bill Lutie and Abrams Schultzky. And these are the guys what lied us into Iraq War II with the Office of Special Plans. and the policy counterterrorism evaluation group. And under Shulski and Ludi were all the Michaels, Ledeen and Rubin and Maloof and Makovsky. And of course, there was Harold Road in the Office of Net Assessment. And anyway, all these guys in Douglas J. Feith was he was the boss of the OSP. He was over Shulski and Lutie at OSP under the policy shop.

And these were the guys who lied us into Iraq War II. and Douglas Fythe was known for one having Israeli officers barge right into his office. In fact, let me show you as long as I'm showing things here. This would be Karen. You guys are familiar with her if you watch Kyle Anzalone's show for one, you know, about Karen Katowski and her articles and her great podcasting stuff. And she is, oh, this one is at the American. conservative and it's called in, no, not in Rumsfeld's shop, it's open door policy. It's called open door policy fight. Okay, it's going to come right up. Oh, it did come right up.

Open door policy by the very nice and wonderful Karen Katowski. And Darrell, you may be very familiar with Karen's story. Karen was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. and she was assigned to the Near East South Asia desk, which was adjacent to the Iraq desk. But then they expanded the Iraq desk, and they renamed it the Office of Special Plans. And Bill Lutie, who I mentioned, who worked for Douglas Fyth and with Abrams Shulski

in the Office of Special Plans, he wore two hats, and he was also her boss. She had a unique view directly into what was going on with the Office of Special Plans, and she started writing a non-executive. anonymous articles for David Hackworth, who I know you know, all about David Hackworth. She started writing for his site, which was called Soldiers for the Truth. And they were written anonymously at first.

And then she, you know, was the source for a lot of important news articles at that time. And then she came out and started writing under her own name for Lou Rockwell.com. And as soon as she retired in 2000 and would have been early 03, I guess. She got out of there as fast as she could and started writing for LRC. and then she wrote a series for the American Conservative magazine. The first one is called In Rumsfeld's Shop. And then the second one is called, God, I always forget the second one,

but it's right there in my brain. I can feel it. It's right near in Rumsfeld's Shop. In Rumsfeld's Shop, something, something, an open-door policy. An open-door policy is the big one, because this is the one where she's asked to go and escort some Israeli military officers

to Douglas Fights office. They just push her right out of the way and they lead the way, storming down the halls of the Pentagon and barge right into Fythe's office like they own the place and leave her stand and they're like, wow, what the hell is going on here? She had never seen such a thing, and she tells that story in open-door policy.

Well, Karen, if it seems like they're acting as if they own the place, conscientious objector, that's the second one. These are the three here, you can see. Yeah, so, yeah, Douglas Fyne, and I'll tell you this, too, way back in the day Lauren, this is way back when he was first kind of coming out and these

topics were fresh relatively. I interviewed Colin Powell's chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. And Wilkerson, you know, told me and, you know, we all know who these neocons were in the neocon network in the vice president's office and the rest of the

W. Bush government here. And he said, listen, out of all of those neocons. He said two of them, he believes, were actual agents of influence for Israel. I mean, they all were sort of de facto. Yeah. He thought two of them, what's that mean they were taking paychecks? I mean. We're working under explicit direction of Israeli government handlers, telling them what to, you know. And he named Douglas Fythe and David Wormser. He didn't even say Pearl. He said, fight and worms, or he thought were, like, working directly for the Israelis. There was this, a funny story.

There was a guy named something Nelson. I can't remember his first name. But he had this thing called the Nelson Report, which was this real, like, sort of low circulation, high-level insider newspaper, newsletter thing in Washington, D.C. And Jim Loeb reported on it one time. Had a story about, you know, who knows the sourcing. whatever. The Nelson report had it, that they do this report, and Rumsfeld can't be there that day. So Douglas Fythe is filling in for Rumsfeld. And so then when he gives the Pentagon side of the story, when they had their big discussion, Condoleezza Rice, who's then, this is in the first term, so she's

National Security Advisor. She says to Fythe, okay, Doug, let me tell you, when we want Israel's point of view, we'll just call the embassy. It's expensive. So of all the needs, Neocons of Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl. Wilkerson at that time told me that he identified these two Wormser and Fythe as the ones who were working directly for the Israelis at the time. Yeah, you know, it's like, how was the Secretary of State, by the way, at the time, ladies and gentlemen, the guy staff? You know, they all are de facto agents. The interesting thing is, I was thinking about this earlier. Like it seems impossible that these people could ever be held accountable. But, you know, I think back to, and maybe it would take, you know, the Israelis doing something that fundamentally changes our relationship like Stalin did after the war. But, you know, back during the 1930s, I mean, you had literally, not literally, but virtually the entire sort of intelligentsia in the U.S., the sort of just the whole liberal,

consensus, right, under the New Deal regime, that was, if not sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the sense of thinking we should be giving them aid in comfort or anything, at least looking at them as sort of fumbling their way in the right

direction, right? And with our, you know, with our help, you know, maybe they'll stop killing millions of people and with their help, maybe we'll learn how to do a little central planning kind of thing. It was like, it was really like a consensus among you know, the people who would have, who pushed Russiagate, you know, or today who want us to, you know, have a war with Russia or whatever. Like that class of people, there was a ton of sympathy for the Soviet Union. And so eventually when you had guys like Alger Hiss get arrested and tried and convicted for working for the Soviets, you know, his to his dying day, he never copped to being a spy.

because in his mind he was not a spy. Just like Douglas Fythe does not think he's a spy. He thinks he's a liaison, a sort of back channel that, you know, a sort of unofficial diplomat without, you know, what do they call him? Anyway, it doesn't matter. Portfolio. And so, like, you know, they thought that back then. A lot of these people who were working for the Soviet Union

didn't think of themselves as spies. They looked at themselves as back channels and liaisons. and a lot of these people today could be held. Again, it's not going to be a thing where all of those people you mentioned could be held accountable, but there could be some trophy scalps. You know, they could find a couple

who did take something or, you know, the problem with it, the thing that's going to make it really difficult is you'd have to find a few Gentiles to throw into the mix just so that it's not rounding up and prosecuting a bunch of Jews because that'll never happen.

Well, that was the thing. They did investigate the penitial, and the gun neocons, and they got Larry Franklin, and all the rest of them got away. And the leaders of APEC, Rosen and Weissman got away. And Fythe, and, you know, this was in the Washington Post that, you know, because one of the pretexts for investigating was that Ahmed Chalabi had told the Iranians that the Americans had broken their codes. So then they started investigating Chalabee, but then that leads to who all were Chalabee's friends

in the Pentagon. and there was a bunch of them. Is Chalibis still alive? No. Yeah, okay. He died in like 2013 or something like that. That's good, maybe. But yeah, this was in the Washington Post at the FBI,

you know, the Franklin probe and the Chalaby probe kind of came together at the Pentagon and the FBI questioned all the neo-conservatives about, you know, whatever. But it never went anywhere. Third Franklin was the only one that got God. I don't think that Rosen or Weissman were. convicted. Maybe Rosen was. I think Weissman maybe turned on Rosen, but I don't remember anymore, but yeah, that was it. That was who got bused of all the Israeli spies. It was the, they all need to be rounded up.

Which, by the way, he just has the least Jewish last name of them all, I guess. I don't know. The Jews, we can deport to Israel and all the Gentiles can go to prison. That's how I feel about the neocons. They're all, I mean, at this point, You know, it's funny. Sort of like... Diro says that he knows what that word means. He's talking about 100 people, not 7,000, you know, like every conservative Jew in America or whatever.

Yeah, I'm talking about these specific people. The actual... Yeah, fight these people. Oh, times, you know. Yeah, and like, you know, it's funny. Like, Stalin would, you know, he said that the famous quote, what is it, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a...

statistic, which is another way of saying that crimes committed at the scale of like state action, like official state action, you remove the label crime essentially from it. And there's a bit of that with the treason that goes on with the neocons where it is treason, but they've so captured our government that they're really just executing our government policy at this point because they've captured it. It's like hard to disentangle. that, you know? Well, sure. I mean, look, George Bush and Dick Cheney hired those guys. Yeah. And, you know, I'm sorry if I'm being redundant. I've said this lately. I don't know if it was on this show or what, but the original guy who was up for Secretary of Defense was Dan Coates,

who was just a generic Republican senator from the Midwest. But then in his job interview, he screwed himself up and said, oh, missile defense, we don't want to do that. That's a stupid waste of money. And they were like, no, dude, that's the point. We're Republicans. I know what are we getting the hell out of here? Don't call us, we'll call you. And then never did. And then Cheney said, well, you know, my old mentor, Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense under Jerry Ford. I bet he'd do it. He's still around, you know. So he said, oh, okay. So that was how Rumsfeld got the job. And I don't know, I'd like to know the answer to this. And maybe this has been written. I bet Jim Lowe knows. I could try to ask him. But I think,

that Rumsfeld was already very tight with Wolfowitz. And one who picked Wolfowitz to be his deputy or if Cheney did, Cheney may have told him here, meet my friend Paul, but whatever, they got along just like peas and carrots over there, man. You know what I mean? Rumsfeld wanted to do what he wanted to do anyway. And so, you know, no denying, right? Everybody in the vice president's office has worked for Dick Cheney.

Scooter Libby wasn't telling Dick Cheney what to do. Dick Cheney was telling Scooter Libby what to do. to Libby was telling everybody else. You know, that was how that worked. So, you know, as, as Walton Mearsheimer put it, they didn't do the war. It was W. Bush who launched the war. But he couldn't have done it without them,

without the Israel lobby and without the vanguard of the Israel lobby, the neo-conservatives in the vice president of office, the National Security Council and State Pentagon. And boy, did they do it. And by the way, for people who are interested in this, and I hope you are, I have a Twitter thread that should be really easy to find where I say articles, there are a few different threads.

If I say 28, 28's a good, 28 articles about how the neoconservatives lied us into war. And then the list is much longer. It's like 35 when I was done thinking of them. It was just a ton of articles about the neoconservatives in the office of special plans and the whole neocon network and how it worked. And it's like 30 articles in a row about it all. And many of them, at least partially based on the testimonies of Karen Katowski, the great Pentagon whistleblower there.

And definitely worth the read. And then you'll totally have a handle on it. You read that. And it includes my favorite. I'm always recommending to people, how Ahmed Chalabi Khan, the neocons, about how these guys, yeah, they're stupid.

It doesn't mean that they're not premeditated murderers. It just means that they're really bad at their stupid premeditated murder jobs that they do all the time. And then, you know, speaking of Douglas Fythe, presently from the Washington Post here, his law partner, Mark Zell, represented settlers on the West Bank. And he's quoted in that article,

how on the Chalabi con, the neocons, saying, that Chalabi, he's a treacherous, spineless turncoat, why he stabbed us in the back. He promised us he was going to do all this stuff. And before he had one set of friends, and now he has another one, and even said he was going to build an oil pipeline, a hypha, when?

And that's a direct quote there, basically from Mark Zell, Douglas Fice, alter ego there, you know, complaining about how Chalabi fooled these guys and told them what they needed to hear to get America to get rid of Saddam Hussein for him and for his Iranian sponsors. And that does not detract from the Neocon's responsibility. It doesn't detract from Netanyahu's responsibility. Netanyahu bought this line of crap from Chalabi by way of worms or two. Yeah, they're going to build me an oil pipeline to Haifa. He was in on it. He believed in the clean break. A policy wasn't just written for him. He thought it was brilliant. And it wasn't.

These are the guys who screwed it all up. So now here's Douglas Fythe in the Washington Post saying, no, you can't quit now. This J.D. Vance guy is saying that we can deal with the Iranians, but you just can't because you know how they are. And I just think it's funny that Douglas Fythe, one, is allowed to speak publicly about his opinion about who you should kill or not or negotiate with or not or what have you. Tommy Franks, I meant to say this earlier, it would have been funnier. Tommy Franks back then

called them the stupidest effing guy on the face of the earth. Yeah. It's playing out how to do the invasion. And then, but also that this is who they're left with. This is what they got to do. They're scraping the absolute bottom

of the barrel. They go, who are we going to get to defend this? Somebody called Douglas Fythe over at the Hudson Institute. Maybe he'll write one for us. Or what was the last time they featured Douglas Weythe in the Washington Post or that he would have dared to write one. His name doesn't lead to a link to anything. He's at Hudson.

And I've actually seen articles by him denying that he ever believed in Clean Break. He was just friends with those guys and they added his name to the paper. It's not my fault, he said. It said he was the head of the office of special plans, basically, or over it. It was under him. So, yeah, absolutely his fault, whether he believed in Wormsars' Claptrapery, his nonsense or not. But anyway, so there they go at the Washington Post. The guys who lied us into war with Iraq about why you cannot trust the Iranians to negotiate.

Derek Cook, but would they? Yeah, if you ever wonder if, I don't know which one is worse, like, pretends worse for the future, but like, do you ever wonder when they write something like that? The Iranians cannot be trusted to keep to a deal that they made. Like, is there any, are they sort of like, if you were to confront them sort of, you know, one-on-one behind closed doors and be like, I mean, you realize that's sort of the opposite situation, 180 degrees, right? They were the one. And they would be like, yeah, I know, you know, but I'm pushing this. Or are they like just, and I could see this too. Like, you know, that

they just really do believe it and they see it that way. And that's like somehow even scarier. I want to respond real quick. We got a little conversation going on started by, I think, Nathaniel, Nate Van Eel, talking about some hip-hop guys. Answer your question, yes, I have listened to Jedi Mind Tricks since 2000, 2001, probably, and technique probably about as long. And I actually know a guy who knows both of those guys, and I'm going to try and get a Mortal Technique on this show. That would be dope.

I bet you he's a Scott Horton fan. He should be if he's not. I've interviewed tech before. Okay, there you go. He's a third world comedy. You know how it is, but he, yeah, I love tech. Pretty common. Yeah, I like him, man. He's got some good stuff. And, you know, when that first came out,

when I first heard Revolutionary Volume 2, it was right on time in like 2004 when it really mattered. You know what I mean? When it was actual indefiance of the absolutely suffocating false consensus about the war at that time, it was badass, dude. The Jedi Mind Tricks I've heard before, but I never got into them. I think I actually have them in my folder somewhere, but I don't think I've really got into them.

But I do you have anything wrong, man. Final here. I remember that when I was first getting into Jedi Mind Tricks, there's this track on their album, Violent by Design, and Vinnie Paz is going through, he's the first verse in it. And there's this one part,

I'm listening to it for the first time, where he says, he said, I think, let me think, it's been a while, say her. He said, crystallized,

we keep it live. You can't see me. Banished Satanic verses, is like Ayatollah Kamini. I was like, oh, buy this album. I'm buying this album. This guy's good. All right, now it's time to sell him some coffee.

Listen here, you, Cooke. You've got to go to Mundo's Artisan Coffee. What you do, go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. That's how you do it. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. And then it'll take you and you'll get, it's Ethiopian mixed with Sumatra. It's got a big Scott Horton logo on it.

And it tastes just like me. And it's free. To me, as long as you people keep buying it. So you've got to keep buying it. It's really good, too, man. You won't go back to Dunkin' Donuts or Fulgers or none of that, Walgreens Coffee, no more after this. Moondos Artisan Coffee, you go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee.

All of those child slaves look so happy. Yeah, they're totally stoked with their labor. Hey, I got to wake up in the morning, and I got to stay awake around too. So leave me alone. Those kids can get back to work. but listen more importantly time is it we have a little bit of time

we got 10 minutes we got any questions I wanted to talk about Russia a little bit what now I wanted to talk about Russia a little bit like where you think hold that thought because I got one more thing here I wanted to say that some strange anonymous person donated a nice little

amount of money to the Libertarian Institute today and I don't know who it was and so there's definitely no strings attached and it wasn't that much that you could find my soul with it anyway or anything like that. But I just wanted to say thank you very much to whoever that anonymous donor is. Presumably, possibly they might consume the provoked podcast. I do with my buddy Darrell and everything, you know, so they might see this. And so thank you very sincerely on behalf of me and all of my guys.

That's what I'm going to do with your money is I'm going to turn it into overhead and pay my guys so that they can pay their bills and also write good things. and we will publish them at Libertarian Institute.org. So this is how it works. It's very strange libertarians. We don't charge prices. We all have 501c3s because, I mean, we got to avoid the taxmen as best we can.

But then that means we got to give away all our content. And then we just got to rely on the kindness of strangers to help us through. And so thank you, anonymous donor, on behalf of all of the guys and our great lady as well there at the Institute. A couple of great ladies, actually, now that I think about it, at Libertarian Institute. dot org slash donate so yeah and then then here's my setup for you talking about ukraine i read this in the independent this morning mr cooper putin is asking for peace talks it's time to kick him while he's

down by sam kiley putin is rattled and trump needs a win and the reason that trump the reason that uh putin trump netanyahu putin they're also interchangeable to me what can i say these guys look like. The reason that Putin is saying that he might be willing to talk is because his cities are getting hit. His refineries are getting bomb. There's been massive new sort of waves, I guess you would call them, of drone attacks inside Russia, including one that they said was 3,000 kilometers. So what's that? Like 2,000 miles east of the border there where they infiltrated drones deep into, you know, behind Russian lines there, hitting targets at will. And so this guy says that, yeah, he's weak.

We got him on the ropes. We need to hit him while he's down now and ruin his life. And then it's, I got to say, man, I'm sorry because I know you got all plenty of your own in here, but I'll just go ahead and ruin this for you. That he just says, now we defeat their army. Right now is the time to defeat them. Now is time to press our advantage. And then one, two, skip a few, 99, $99,100, and the Russians lose.

and turn around and go away. And that's it. And like, what? This is the crap that they're still shubling. This is what we got to suffer. You know, halfway through 2006, I can't believe how long this war has still gone on. And instead of saying, hey, man,

the Ukrainians have had some recent successes in some areas. And they've got a few good licks in and maybe now would be the time to bring the Russians to the table. they embellish their successes and say now's the time to definitely not talk and to keep the war going. The only thing that remains is making sure to keep the Americans on board.

What we think? Well, you know, it's kind of alarming that this deep end of the war, when you listen to Ursula von der Leyen, a lot of the European leaders, even Mervs, talk about this. I mean, they are talking in terms of still dealing like a serious strategic defeat to Russia, to defeating their army, to driving them out. And, you know, you have to assume, I mean,

that their feeling, that their confidence is coming from these recent strikes that Iran, that Ukraine has managed to carry out, like, within Russian territory. I mean, and they are, they're significant, you know, they're hitting oil infrastructure, but also, I mean, there were some heavy strikes that they hit Moscow with. And, you know, the calculation seems to be that if we can, you know, hit targets in Russia that are sort of, you know, Russia's a huge country. It's not like you're going to blow up like all of their strategic sites or anything. But if we can just hit them enough, it looks bad. And people are going to start, the people who are who are questioning the war are going to start being louder.

And some people are going to start switching sides. And that somehow us sending drones and hitting Moscow, us sending drones over the Baltic states to hit oil installations, is somehow either going to make Putin see the light and just completely turn tail and show his belly to us or that he's going to get deposed by a nice liberal who's going to cut a deal with Ukraine and leave. It's just, it's completely delusion.

And the only thing I can really think of why they would be behaving this way and thinking this way at all is that they just do not at all. And I can't say that they have, you know, that they have their reasons for thinking this. But that any sort of supposed red line that the Russians had or say they have or whatever, just nobody takes any of that seriously. You're like, you can talk. You can send Lavrov out and make these grave statements about how if this keeps going, why the war could expand. But you won't do it. You know, you just won't do it.

You're scared or you're too prudent, whatever it is. And it reminds me of like a, you know what a lot of U.S. foreign policy actually reminds me of, but especially our relationship with Russia is you'll see like some, some relationships, right? where the, you have a husband and a wife, and the wife, or sometimes the husband, but like, often it's the wife, because they have, you know, different tools at their disposal for throwing their way around the relationship. They sort of establish this, this constant deterrent where I know that you're not going to, you know, smack me and throw me off the balcony. You're not going to do anything like that. And so I can just push as hard as I want, knowing that there's not going to be like any over-the-top repercussion.

And I'm just going to win every argument that way because you'll always be the one who backs down and says that, you know, the only place for this left to go is me throwing this chick off the balcony. And I'm not going to do that. So I guess she wins. And we're just sort of doing that. We're just, we're the guy who, you know, like, we're just, we act in ways that that assume that the other side is going to be rational. And we just push, we just push and push and push, understanding that, like, they understand the consequences of, you know, of a real war with Europe and the United States, even if it's not that they're afraid that they'll lose. Maybe Russia thinks they'll win. They just know that the consequences of it are so great that they just won't

do it. And so we can push as hard as we want, and Russia will be the rational one who, like, maneuvers around to avoid the big conflagration. And you do that. you do it and you do it and you start to think that the other side is never going to do anything, no matter what you do to them. And I don't know, man, when we're shooting like British Storm Shadow missiles, you know, deep into Russian territory now, you just wonder when, you know, the thing that I'm, I wouldn't even say worried about, almost expecting at this point,

is we're going to take Russia seriously once the missiles start landing in Poland and Germany and some other European places. Like it's just, it's going to get to that point where we're going to push them and push them and not take anything they say seriously. Even then, it will probably get worse, right? It won't be, uh-oh. Oh, it'll definitely get worse.

I just, you know, it's, it's almost as if, like, these people live in, you know, the thing, like, especially these European leaders, like, there could be real consequences for them. I mean, for us, if there's a nuclear war, or whatever, then obviously it's consequences for everybody. But even if it's not a nuclear war, if this thing expands out and the Russians feel like

they got to start striking European targets, I mean, that is, I mean, that's going to be, it's going to be really hard for them. And they're acting as if it's just not real. Like there is a 0% chance of it. It's not that they probably won't do it. They're just acting like it's not even a possibility. Well, I'm telling you, when I spoke at Oxford,

when I did that debate at Oxford, and I go, you know, they got nuclear weapons. can't fight Russia. They got nukes. They all scoffed at me. Now, what, whatever. Meaning, I guess I was kind of working this out on some other guys show I might be being redundant, but I think, Darrell, what it is is nuclear deterrence has changed. So the idea before was, we can't fight them because they got nukes. And if we got to a war with them, it could devolve very quickly into a nuclear war.

But now it's not that. Now, nuclear deterrence means we can do what ever we want to them, and they wouldn't dare resist because of nuclear deterrence. Because we got nukes and they dare not fight back. So now it's not a reason to never fight Russia. Now it's why we can fight Russia. And they wouldn't dare do anything about it. And like, I hear people talk like this. And it's really stupid. You know what I mean? And I do get the idea. Somebody got mad at me. It sounded probably arrogant or whatever. when on the Rogan show, I was explaining about nuclear stuff.

And he's like, I bet they're not even having this conversation in the White House about it. And I'm like, yeah, no. And somebody says, oh, yeah, like, oh, you know so much more. And then all these guys like on the cabinet or whatever, I was like, well, look, I think Rubio's probably been pretty thoroughly briefed on the stuff or whatever. But none of them really have an ax to grind like me, but they're really trying to discover and lay out an alternative narrative about the truth,

about the nuclear program when the diplomacy broke down and how and what they really do mean by enriching up to 60% and whatever. No, Rogan is right. Quite frankly, the discussions that we have on this show are the kind

that we really wish that they were having in the vice president's office on the National Security Council. Instead, it's like what I thought you were about to say a minute ago was like, geez, it's like they really believe their own bullshit. And they really just, the things that they tell us are really the things

that they think, wow, sit and listen to them, right? It's like we're talking about with Newland and Pompeo debating Walt and Mearsheimer. Like, wow, that really is the best you can do, huh lady? God dang, you know? Yeah, yeah. And part of it is they are when they're trying. Part of it is that there's really bad incentives like built into our sort of, you know, our media-dominated political system where, you know, I'll bet you that there are insiders,

maybe even like a guy like Mike Pompeo who among friends, you know, again behind that proverbial closed door, it's like, yeah, he knows we got to stop this war with Iran. He knows we can't keep going with it. You know, he knows that everything short of an invasion has been tried and we don't have like a lot of other military options left. But he's not going to say that. He's going to go out on TV and be like, why we're just on the cusp of winning and it's just this dastardly anti-Semite J.D. Vance and these other Israel haters or whatever that are saving the Iranian regime, like justice is about, he knows all that's not true, but he's going to go out and say it, because then he can go and say, hey, look, I was tough on them and I didn't lose the war. He lost the war because it, you know what I mean?

It's just like there's every incentive for these people to do stuff like that. And it seems like, I mean, the only way to overcome that incentive structure is that the other countries, they have to, they have to make it real. You know, they, They have to make it real for our side. And yeah, because it's just not real right now. There's just, there's no way that, well, I mean, just the Ukraine thing in general. Like, I don't know how many people have been killed there, but it's probably like a million, you know, maybe more, maybe less. But when you talk about all the wounded and the fact that Ukraine, however it comes out of this is just going to be a borderline failed welfare state, just all this human misery.

It's just unbelievable that none of that seems to really register as something that's happening to real people, you know, as a result of us wanting to stick it to Putin kick him while he's down. It's like, dude, I just don't understand these people, you know. I know it is sick. I have a whole section on the book where I just collect those quotes where they go, man, we're getting such a great bang for our book. We're sending home Russians in body bags and no Americans are getting killed. And then like six times out of eight, they won't even mention that, well, you know, some Iranians are being killed. But heroically, though, or not, you know what I mean? They won't even mention Ukrainians at all.

The Russians' soldiers' lives have value to be destroyed. And our soldiers' lives have value to be preserved. The Ukrainians aren't even worth a mention, dude, on them. They can just be different in the thing. Like, it's unreal, dude, it is. It's totally sick. Now, look, you said we've got to take questions, and you're right. But first, I got to tell them about expat money again

because I agreed to, but also because I screwed up and I should have told you guys, when you go to expat money, you got to do slash provoked. That way you know that Daryl Cooper and me, Scott Horton, sent you. So go to expatmoney.com slash provoked. And then sign up for their email list and you get their free booklet there, learn how to protect your net with overseas investments

and the like expatmoney.com slash provoked. And then, hell, as long as we're doing a little bit of money making here. I got just what you need for the back of your truck, LibertyStickers.com. I own it again, and I threw away almost all of them. I kept about three pages worth and mostly anti-Israel stuff. See, in this great, you'll like this, dude, while anybody with kids who gets the joke. Swiper, no swiping with the evil Benjamin Netanyahu, the grand larcenist on the front there. And you know, whatever, man, it's Liberty stickers for the back in trucks. You can tell everybody in traffic how stupid and wrong they are about everything.

Now, so here's all the books I published. You see, these are the books I wrote. And these are the books I published at the Libertarian Institute. And there's a bunch of really great ones here. And I wish that you guys would all please go and check them out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And then, oh, one more thing and then questions. Hey, look, they killed the bin Ladenite in Syria with an air strike. They got our troops out of there. They actually did pull out of Syria there. What, a couple months ago? They finished. And then they killed a guy on the motorcycle. They say was a leader of the Islamic state, which would be, I guess, the bin Ladenites who are not in bed with the actual Islamic state that now rules Syria. Although, dude, did you see those

quotes from Al-Shara's interview like a week or so ago about, you know, the idea of Syria going into Lebanon and just sort of talking about the whole... Go ahead. Oh, bro. Like, here's what's crazy. Here's what's crazy is this former ISIS and al-Qaeda commander sounds infinitely more measured and sane than anybody on the U.S. or Israeli side about this issue.

I mean, he was really going to. He's like, look, yeah, we're happy to, you know, to help out in Lebanon any way we can. But, you know, going in there militarily is not going to solve anything. And however we do engage with Lebanon going forward, it's not going to be the kind of relationship with them that, you know, we had it under the Assad regime, you know, going back to, you know, Hafez. And just really like a sort of measured sane, like something that you would hope

to hear from any of our leaders and you never do. I was like, that's really saying something. The al-Qaeda ISIS guy is like the sanest dude in the room, the most mature guy in the room. Just proven, too, that I still was right about everything all along when I'm telling you, like, why? why Scott Horton? Why would Barack Obama support the Islamic State in Syria? Al-Qaeda in Syria

because they hate Hezbollah and that's what Israel wants. That's it. The enemy of my allies, enemy is my friend, even though they're my enemy. Even though that's who killed Americans in Iraq War II and that's who shed American blood from 1990 through 2001 and the rest. So, but yeah, anyway, it's treason.

That's why. Let's speak in of these questions. I got dinner on the table right now. Oh, really? Would you say do them or skip them? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, go ahead.

You pick. I haven't even... Okay. Well, I'll read this first one because it's not a question from Micah Clark, who I see in here a lot. What up, Micah? I'm subscribed to the Academy and I have Creative Chaos. Will Chamberlain and Ben Ferguson don't want this smoke.

Probably not. Let's go at the next one. Lowbrow Mikkasi. It's lowbrow. The Trump versus BB stuff seems like KFabe right out of Trump's wrestling days. Also, Darrell, ha, ha, ha, good call. He's recognizing my Rhodesian military shirt that I was wearing on Tom Wood's show. So good on you for knowing what was up.

Let's see, Richard Dams, Richard, my eyes are bad. Ricardo Dams, Richard O. Dams. What do you say? This is like, like, reading these names is like my version of you at the beginning of the show having your technical problems. He says, what do you think of reports saying Mossad was trying to murder the guys? I assume he's talking about the negotiators. And then Pakistan saying, we'll nuke you. Only China could do that. You know, I don't think that.

I miss it. You know, I don't think Pakistan's going around threatening to nuke anybody that cavalierly. Oh, no. Pakistan doesn't threaten to nuke Israel. No, no. I don't know. I don't who reported that, but that's, I'd have to see that, but that don't sound right. And then, oh, actually, that's pretty much what we got. We got Micah Clark again saying he just ordered some, I assume coffee. He's trying to figure out how to track the order. Oh, great. And then Valhalla sent us 1999 just to say, what's up? Cool, man. All right, well, listen, man, here's the deal, everybody. Go and subscribe to the Martyr Made podcast. He's got so much great stuff there. Mr. Cooper does. he would never, you know, brag like that,

but he does such great work, these long-form podcasts, Israel, Palestine, Jones Town, the miners of West Virginia, and blacks and Jews, and all kinds of things I ain't even mentioned because I forgot, but the latest is enemy.

World War II from the Germans' point of view, and Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are already up there, and it's something else. And also here's my substack, Scott Horton Show.com. If you sign up, you get all the interviews for my interview show a day early, without ads.

And then you'll also be getting the audiobook. The first two sections of the audio book are up there. The audiobook had provoked, H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, which is already like nine or 12 or something hours of audio right there, just the first two chapters. And I'm working on the rest. The rest is coming soon of the audiobook there. That's all at my substack, Scott Horton Show.com.

And then, oh, and the academy. Sign up for the academy, Scott Horton Academy.com. And that's it. Goodbye, Darrow Cooper. Thank you, sir. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on XN YouTube.

And tune in next time for more Provoked.