Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:53 - Kiev Burning

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton discuss the latest Russian attack on Kiev, the state of the war in Ukraine, possible pathways to resolution, and more. Chapters: 0:36 Independence Day Talk and Opening Banter 1:47 Founding Fathers and Liberty 7:13 Sponsor Breaks and Patriotic Turns 9:16 America, Myth, and Patriotism 13:17 Star Wars and Bad Prequels 14:49 Quigley and World Empire 18:06 Weapons and the State 22:32 Nuclear Age and New Warfare 27:57 More Sponsors, Then Ukraine 29:55 Proposal Story and Anarcho-Communism 33:15 Russia’s Slow Grind in Ukraine 38:27 Elite Hatred of Russia 44:44 Desk Culture and Anti-Russia Bias 50:56 Escalation Risks and Nuclear Fear 57:14 Academy Ads and New Courses 1:00:07 More Ads and Book Promotions 1:02:30 Great Men and History 1:05:25 Voices, Drones, and Peterson 1:17:43 Ukraine Conscripts and War Reality 1:19:01 History Careers and Politics 1:20:21 Putin, Europe, and Dissent 1:23:21 Washington and Cincinnatus 1:24:12 Movies, EU Armies, and Wrap-Up (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Sponsors: Expat Money: Secure your international Plan B: ⁠https://expatmoney.com/provoked⁠ Agorist Tax Advice: Pick up a free copy of the brilliant Matthew Sercely's Agorist Tax Toolkit at: ⁠https://AgoristTaxAdvice.com/provoked⁠ Scott Horton Blend Coffee: ⁠https://moondoesartisancoffee.com/products/scott-horton-supreme-breakfast-blend⁠ 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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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, it is Thursday.

Provoked today. Thursday is interviews of me all day long day. Fridays, I do interviews. Thursdays is interviews of me. But now on Thursday night, since it's our new time, I interview Daryl Cooper every Thursday night. Hey man, how are you? Good, but I don't know if I like that format. I like listening to you talk more than I like listening to myself. Well, I like listening to me talk too, but I've been hearing me all damn day today, so I'm going to ask you stuff. So obviously we've got to talk about Ukraine and we got to talk about Iran and things, Israel and whatever.

But maybe we should start off talking about Independence Day since today is the actual Independence Day. They voted for independence on the second, right? They just approved the declaration on the- No, no. Quit trying to take my birthday July 4th away from me, okay? Okay. Well, no, I mean, you can have that too. That is Independence Day. But today is the day that they actually voted for the thing.

And anyway, like any comments on the causes which impel this separation or what, man? Oh man, that's a big topic. I should have prepared more for that, given the date. But, you know, there's how it said it, I have the declaration right there. I just can't read it from here. There's some very interesting work that's out there these days. Some of it's actually really old, but it's sort of resurfacing lately about the American Revolution that, you know, sort of tries to pull it out of its mythological context, you know,

of like guys who chop down cherry trees and stuff, fighting for freedom, and really just get down to what were the, interests of the people who pushed this thing. What is it they were really trying to do? And, you know, there's no doubt that they had in mind that this was an opportunity to refashion a society from scratch in a way that really was kind of unique in human history. I mean, they were trying to do that. And, you know, there was a lot of idealism involved and nobility. But, you know, also a lot of economic interests, you know, a lot of desire for expansion to the West and, you know, to gain land holdings in the West and these things.

And I think all of it's really interesting. And, you know, I like to think of the American Revolution sort of as a, I mean, it's really what it was. It's a civil war, right? It's a British civil war. And it was a, you know, it was a time when, you know, we think about it now because maybe because the French Revolution and Napoleon came so soon afterwards that, you know, they were really embarking on an experiment,

the kind of project that didn't have a whole lot of examples they could look too short of, you know, sort of going through the, you know, limited number of historical pieces we have on Rome and Greece and things. And yeah, I don't know. What about you? Sorry, I was not ready for that question. Yeah, I know.

We said we'd have been. We never planned a show. Oh, very good. But that's probably, we don't plan it well, which is good. Listen, I don't know, man. I learned all my libertarianism stuff from the founding fathers before I ever heard of Murray Rothbard or that.

I mean, I love Ron Paul and all that, but I'd read his weekly column and everything. But I've read a lot, especially like in high school and junior college years there, I've read a lot of, especially Jefferson, you know, notes on Virginia and whatever. There's a bunch of different things. Letters between him and Madison,

and letters between him and Adams over the years and all kinds of stuff. And there's just so many great quotables if you're a young anti-government extremist type. You know, it's almost like finding the Mises Institute. It's like, wow, they're real-ass adults who agree with me about this stuff, right? Well, here is Thomas Jefferson agrees with me about this stuff, you know?

And on a lot of stuff. And now it's funny because these are the guys who created the new regime, too. But I really like the stuff they said when they were overthrowing the old one. And there's so much quotable stuff there. And just, you know, if one of the things... How can he be fit to govern himself?

How can he be fit to govern someone else? Man, all of that, you know? One of the things I find so fascinating about that period is, I mean, when you try to compare it to, like, modern examples, just the collection, the concentration of really, like, world historical personalities and intellects, like in one place at the same time. I mean, just, it's really amazing that you had a collection of people like the founders.

And that's not just, like, I like reading books that are sort of, you know, critical in the academic sense of the revolutionary period. I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to just be some sort of a ra-ra chauvinist on this or something. It's just, I think it's objectively true. Oh, yeah, I agree. Guys, it's just amazing. Like, you'd be lucky if you get one of those guys in a generation. You know, and they had like two dozen of them in one place at the same.

They're just amazing. That was the JFK quote where he had assembled all these Nobel Prize winners or whoever. I think it was Nobel Prize winners to eat dinner. And he said there's never been such a collection of intellect at this table since Jefferson dined alone. And which is true, you know, I read, I was just, I was musing about this with Gareth Porter recently. There's a letter, I have a book of letters between Jefferson and Madison. and in one of those, he's stranded in France being the ambassador while they're doing the constitutional convention

and all of that stuff. He's over there. And he writes a letter home to Madison. He's like, oh, man, it sucks here. It's all cold and rainy and it bothers me. And I open my window and it's actually kind of cool. You know, the way they design this window, the air comes in, but the rain doesn't. And here's how I think they did it.

And then he goes on for like 17 pages of these like mathematics and all this geometry and just like, this is Isaac fucking Newton writing about how this window was designed to let the air in but keep the rain out. I'm like, wow, this guy's really smart, dude. You know what I mean? I always like, I like Washington, like letters Washington wrote like from the battlefield, you know, they're like in between bloody battles and he's writing letters back home. And it's like, hi, yeah, war's going all right. You know, lost some men yesterday. Really sad about that.

And then like 12 pages of micromanaging every detail of how. his house is being redesigned and stuff. Good times. All right, listen, this is what I was supposed to say at the beginning, so I'll say it now. Expat Money, they sponsor this show, and it's Michael Thorup, and he's a really good dude. I know him.

I met him, and I toured Mayan ruins with him, so that's how you know he's a good dude. Essentially, he's been an American expat all around the world for 25 years, and he's the expert on how to be an expat. And what you do is you go to expatmoney.com slash provoked. That's expatmoney.com slash provoked. You get a free copy of, oh, I didn't know about this one. What the hell is this?

Oh, I need to page up and set it down. This one here. Plan B, Residencies and Instant Citizenships. You will get this free. Just go to expatmoney.com slash provoked. And essentially, it's your plan B for protecting your neck, protecting your family, in case when the empire falls, it's worst case scenario. Or maybe you're just trying to beat the purchasing power parity problems we have here

in our falling empire. But anyway, so expatmoney.com, make sure we get our money's worth by adding slash provoked at the end of it there. And now, yeah, look, so also, hey, it's the 250th, and I'm a July 76 baby.

Not exactly born on the 4th, like you and Ron COVID, but, oh, no, you're on the 2nd. No, you're on the 4th. Yeah, that's rad. So, I ain't that. I'm July 13th. But I am 76, though.

So I'll be 50 in a couple of weeks. But that makes me like automatically patriotic. You know, I've always been raised with that Declaration of Independence sort of celebrations around the time of my birthday and things like that. And I have a little silver dollar from when I was born, the 76 silver dollar on it. So, yeah, like all that stuff, man. I got an American flag out front for all the neighbors. I just moved into a new house.

So I got to make sure that the neighbors know that I got a, a nice box full of firecrackers for everybody to celebrate with and everything. Torture our poor animals with on Saturday. And then, yeah, also, see, the thing is this, man, is everything is so comy and so, like, deconstructionist and whatever. I don't really know what postmodernism actually means, but I think it's when, like, people pretend that things don't mean things anymore or whatever. And, like, I get it.

You should deconstruct things because a lot of things are bullshit, and you shouldn't believe in them. On the other hand, it's bad to be so cynical that you don't see the good in things. And, you know, I admit I only got a partway into it before I had to get back to work on other stuff. But there's this really great series by Murray Rothbar, this collection of books, five-part series called Conceived in Liberty. And they actually published Part 5 recently because one guy was like, oh, I can read this handwriting where the others were like, well, I don't know what to do with this.

But one guy was like, oh, yeah, no problem. It was, I believe, Jonathan Newman maybe, over at Mises. And so they just published volume five of Rothbard's history of the founding of the United States of America. And I started reading, it's all about Jamestown and this and that. And of course, it's Rothbard. And so it's all, you know, whatever, the title is, conceived in liberty. So it's, you know, playing up all those parts of it. But really good stuff.

And I mean one day to figure out how to stop time and catch up and spend a summer reading all that stuff, like very carefully and all that. but there's so much good in the founding of this country and in the country as it has been this whole time too. And I really hate the way the government calls itself the country because then it means that the country is guilty of all the stupid, horrible things that the government did, which is not really true. And there's been millions and millions and millions of people

who've lived here this whole time. You know, relatively free and great lives and high standards of living and had the satisfaction of being able to take care of their people and all these things over a couple centuries here. and like, I'm pretty damn good. There's a bunch of slop like this. There was a Wall Street Journal article, I guess, I clicked on it. So now the computer god, like, sent me a thousand different versions of this on YouTube,

where it's Europeans here for the soccer games, tripping out over Buckees and... I love that whole genre, dude. I'm so here for that genre. And the thing is that, like, no, they're right, dude. America is badass. I saw a thing where they were, like, freaking out because... This was a couple years ago.

was on Google Earth, there's this one spaghetti and meatballs highway interchange in Houston that if you overlay, it's the size of an entire city in Italy. It's just this one spaghetti and meatballs highway interchange.

And they just can't get their head around that, but I'm like, yeah, dude, I'm from Texas. And I got Texas patriotism, you know, before and deeper than my American patriotism either, even. But anyway, so I am a patriot and I like all the good stuff and ignore all the bad stuff. It's like watching the Star Wars prequels, man.

You got to get the good out of it that you can. You know what I mean? This is our country. I am going to incur your wrath here, but I have only seen the first Star Wars prequel. Oh, that's okay, man. Don't worry about it. And listen, for that matter, for you and for everybody else,

listen, if you're going to watch Star Wars, don't watch any of the new stuff. You got to go on the Pirate Bay and get the De-specialized edition or the silver screen. I saw Rogue One. That was good. Rogue One was good. But I'm just saying all this stuff

they took the original Star Wars movies and George Lucas tinkered with them all. Virtually all those changes are negative to the story. Virtually all those changes detract from the real original-ass versions that came out. And you can get high-quality versions of the original-ass versions.

They're called the despecialized versions. You can find them on them. And in fact, if you're interested in the prequel's at all, there's the anti-chease edits of the prequel where they cut out as much of the crap as they could to try to make, you know, the story of the fall of the Republic still, like, somehow presentable. If nothing else, the prequels did give us that ever-fruitful meme

with young Anakin doing the face with Natalie Portman. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a good one. Well, dictatorship, huh? My favorite one of those that I've ever seen was that Anakin says, and sorry, Grandma, I'm going to curse right here, but I have to, I'm quoting something. Anakin says, our politicians are fucking children.

And she says, I know they're so immature, right? They're so immature, right? Yeah. Terrible stuff. And then what's like you to say about the Fourth of July thing? Man, there was one more thing on my mind there. I want to say about America and the Fourth of July. I can't think of what it is, though.

It's the one war in American history that I've, prove of. I used to like War of 1812, but then I learned more about it, and that was just an evil aggressive war to seize Canada. I shouldn't have done it. There's no such thing as an evil war against Britain. Come on. And then, let's see, what was the other thing?

About the 4th of July, and something tells me something over my shoulder's going to remind me what it was. Oh, I was going to mention something about what you were saying there. I think it's Charles Austin Beard, an economic interpretation of the Constitution. I have that somewhere. which is pretty good.

I was going to say something about Jefferson? I mentioned the Rothbart thing. Oh, no, man. Abort. Oh, I know what it was, man. See, I just needed to wonder for a little while longer, Cooper. And it is over on my shoulder here.

It's just not on the Founding Father section. It's a row below. Tragedy and Hope. A history of the world in our time by Carol Quigley. It's sort of the conspiracy cook. Bible because he was Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown University and also John Basil Utley's professor. And so, and he admits a lot of true things about the Rockefeller World Empire sort of establishment and how they run things and all that. The book came out in 1966.

And it has a lot of cool stuff in there, particularly on page 950 is the great quote about, you know, the only reason to let there be Republicans and Democrats, these two parties, one to supposedly represent the conservatives and the other liberals. It's just so the American, people can throw those rascals out every eight or even four years if necessary without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy. Dude, that was like, that was like a Goodwill hunting style page pull right there. Respect. I've, yeah, I read Quigley. But listen, so you show you read the Anglo-American establishment. I was going to say that, yeah. I read that too. But so this is just from the preface or the forward, I think, from tragedy and hope. And he wrote a whole, you know, textbook called the

evolution of civilizations that I haven't read. So he has this theory, and in fact, a mutual friend of ours, I think you know this guy. Well, anyway, I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But, yeah, no, Pat McGeehan from West Virginia, from the House of Representatives there, who he led to defend the guard efforts all those years. Pat McGeehan, he's really smart, man.

He's, you know, real historian type like you. And he was saying that this is all bullshit and whatever. but it seemed smart to me the way Quigley says in the forward. In fact, this is even the title of the book, Tragedy and Hope. People always think of him as just like a Rockefeller World Empire guy and the evil bad guy and whatever, which, okay, whatever he's in on it. But the title of the book means the tragedy is that all civilizations come and go. They rise and fall.

And the worst thing that happens to major powers is they become world empires. and then they kill themselves through over-expansion. And he talks about how the West has been really lucky to be able to reinvent itself over and over again from ancient Greece to Rome to Christendom and then through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the rise of America and all of these things where the West somehow is still the West,

even though it's gone through all of these major changes and all that. But that ultimately there's nothing magical about it and it could die. And the danger is that we, We embrace world empire. That was what he called it. If we embrace world empire, the next step is death. It's murder, suicide.

So that that's the tragedy. But the hope is that we'll read his history book, and we'll learn from it, that you should be conservative and you should be careful and you should preserve your limited republic and not embrace empire because embracing empire, it feels good at first. But ultimately, it leads to certain death. And so that's what the tragedy and hope is even about in the title, by the way. Makes him sound much more of like a bircher, the kind of guy who would quote him. But anyway, he also, he says in that forward that it's just coincidental, basically,

that at the time that the ships were good enough to get Europeans across the ocean to settle North America was right at the time that muskets were good enough and cheap enough that the average schmuck could have one, or at least the average town militia could have some. And that was enough to tilt the balance of power. And he kind of traces the rise and fall of liberty just through weaponry and says that when the average guy had access to approximately the same type of sword technology, they were relatively free. And then when some jerk invented the saddle, then that created the special world.

Is that a whole book just on this topic, actually? I've got around here somewhere. It's really interesting. It's an unfinished, unpublished book that, came out after he died. I believe it's called weapons systems and systems of government, something like that. It's been a while since I read it. But it's a whole book on this topic you're talking about. I was so, like, I read Tragedy and Hope and Anglo-American establishment, like way back when I was on my sort of, you know, post-Spangler, like big history theory phase. And,

and I got interested in just that topic, the relation of weapons technology with systems, of government. And then I found out he had a whole book on it. And he goes through like all of that stuff. And part of it is that, yeah, the average dude has access to the same weaponry as, you know, an aristocrat or whatever your equivalent is at the time. But it's also that, you know, he talks about how it's not just military technology or weaponry itself. It's weapon systems in like a very large sense, right? So for like like military structures itself. So if you have a if you have a world where battlefield is dominated by bronze chariots that only, you know, basically the big landowners can afford and keep the horses, just whatever. And these things are so dominant on the battlefield that they can

just run over your infantry army, no problem. Then you're going to have a super concentrated power structure in a very aristocratic society as opposed to if you look at, you know, like ancient Athens, for example, where the phalanx was, you know, the primary weapon. system or war fighting system, you need every citizen. You know, you need every guy to stand his ground, hold his shield up, to guard his neighbor. And people start to understand that, yeah, they actually, I'm necessary for this whole project to work. And like, it builds up people's sense of where they sit in their society. And I don't think it's really a big coincidence either that as we, in the modern era, started to move into, you know,

you know, an era where, like, mass conscription armies became the norm. If you wanted to compete at the highest level, you had to be able to put five or six million men in the field and keep them there, you know, for years. And when you do that, though, and you saw this, like a million examples of this, you know, guys came back from World War I. And they had a different sense of their relationship to their country. Right. And, you know, and so you saw these collapse of the empires, these democratic movements and things. And, you know, it's interesting to think about, like, in the modern. age here where, you know, we, we went through this process in the modern era where, you know,

mass conscription armies first became, you know, became sort of the necessary warfighting system if you were going to, you know, compete at the high level. And the only institution on Earth that could do that were gigantic nation states, basically. The nation state became the apex predator institution on the whole planet, because they were the only. only ones who could actually field large armies. And then as you moved in, got to like World War II and to the early Cold War, you got to this part where, okay, yeah, you start to be able to put mass conscription armies out there, but you got to have carrier fleets.

You got to have, you got to be able to pump out a thousand aircraft, 10,000 aircraft, you know, a month or a year to stay in a war. And now you're at a point where that institution, like the nation-state structure, had become, had like maximized its efficiency, basically. It, like, reached its zenith in terms of just the path of that structure. And, like, you know,

nation state, again, is something we kind of take for granted, but it really isn't. And, you know, when you get into the Cold War, where nuclear weapons become a thing, then it becomes kind of very interesting, right? Because you have this shift from, you know, there's still a lot of wars,

there's still bad wars even, you know, millions of people, people being killed and everything. But in terms of great powers, you don't have that. And there was this, because it was basically impossible for great powers to go to war with each other, there was a shift where, like, a huge part of the direct conflict between great powers started taking place in the information warfare, you know, area. And, you know, it became, I mean, really, like, between the U.S. and the Soviets,

propaganda warfare was really, like, the primary, that, in economic warfare, I guess you could say, but they kind of play off of each other. And it's really interesting today, right, where you get to a point where maybe the Gulf War would be like the perfect example of like you just, it's, it looked like in 1991, like, you know, if you could put stealth bombers in the air and if you could field these super high tech, super expensive systems and be able to do that, then you were just going to be completely untouchable. That's what it looked like in 1991. I think that's what people still thought in 2001 and 2003.

But as we've gotten up into the 2010s, and especially, you know, since Ukraine and the war with Iran started and everything, is you really start to see now, you know, a shift back to a place where, you know, small groups, even individuals can have the destructive power of like, you know, states back in the day. I mean, they can cause serious, serious problems with whether it's drones or explosives, you know, these type of things. And so it's going to be very interesting to see how that affects, you know, just sort of the way we're ruled, you know, if you take this theory seriously. Right. So, yeah, so what he's saying there in Tragedy and Hope is that the era of America's founding was the era of the Muske.

And that so the guys on saddles had lost their advantage because, now you could reach out and touch them at range. And so now things were sort of power was spread out in that way that you say as it ebbs and flows. It was ebbing at that time right when they were overthrowing the government and writing the constitution and justifying it all with an ideology of liberty that they could back up with arms that they had that made the townsmen basically as powerful as any state. The state was them. As we know in the foundation, the tradition of the foundation of this country, the military was the militia.

and the militia was the men. Yeah, right? And it made the townspin with a musket equal to, you know, the cavalry aristocrat, horse rider guy, but also what it did is it made it possible to train a soldier in a very short period of time. Like in the old days, warfighting was a vocation. I mean, you had to be, you know, knights trained to fight nonstop,

like from the time they were children. and you had professional armies that, you know, mercenary armies and others. I mean, they're like, you know, we've dug up skeletons of English longbowmen. And these guys would train so much that, like, their skeletons were literally like warped and shaped by how much they would be pulling, drawing these bowstrings back. And that took, it took a huge amount of time to be able to do that. You know, I remember in one of Dan Carlin's series on the Fall of the Roman Republic, he, he, he, is talking about their, you know, the military side of things. And he said that a Roman slinger, you know, like a slings, like throw a stone with a whatever,

that they had to be able to hit a man-sized target at 195 yards consistently in order to be accepted. I'm like, that's two football fields away. They had to be able to hit a man-sized target. That is crazy. That takes a lot of time. I mean, it's not something you can do when there's smartphones in the world, you know. and like once you had muskets and then obviously like you know more advanced guns later

it made it so that you could train up a soldier in eight weeks and send them out into the field and that made it a lot easier to stand up larger armies it always trips me out watching those old like you know the days of the British red coat and even the civil war where the style of fighting like it just it seems so stupid and so ridiculous like you would never want to be in that war

where you're literally just standing in a line and like hoping you're not the guy who gets it you know and and you're like how could this ever have worked but then you think back and man like you know if you go to the 1500s like Spanish infantry was basically invincible like if they showed up at your doorstep it was over it was just they for a long time like the Spanish infantry was just it was basically invincible and the British red coat man like there was like there was a good 70 or 80 years or so that if dudes in red jackets showed up in your country, it was a rap. I mean, it is just nobody could stop them.

And yeah, I would not want to be in a war like that, though. All right, here's some more business. expat money again, expatmoney.com slash provoked to get your free plan B, a guide there, expatmoney.com slash provoked. And Matt Sersely, he is a tax lawyer for you, small business folk out there and high-saried employees trying to find a way to protect your assets from the man so he doesn't

tax, but he hasn't already inflated away from you. Hang on to every last cent that you possibly can with the help over your new lawyer, Matt Sersley's at agoristaxadvice.com and we talk about doing slash Scott or provoked or whatever. Tell him me and Daryl sent you.

Matt Sersley at agoristaxadvice.com and I'll go ahead and throw in one more here real quick. Moondos, artisan coffees. these are not children, by the way. Boy, did I get an angry email from Phil. As soon as that came out of my mouth, I was like, what the hell is the matter with me?

This is a sponsor. So I'm sorry, Phil. We should have cut that out. Well, the show's life. I told him you were just joshing around, man. And in fact, he wrote to me and very thoughtfully about how he actually does investigate. They have like the wholesale roasters and the specialty roasters

or the specialty coffee harvesters, they're kind of separate. And he has actually looked very deeply into who's doing his coffee growing and harvesting there in Indonesia and Sumatra and whatever, these other places, in order to be very careful and make very sure of that

because he would not want to share in any kind of responsibility. So you can just forget all that. It's all good. Mundo's artisan coffees. And all you do, go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it's free for me,

as long as you people keep buying it. it's Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it's really good and it helps wake me up in the morning and it'll work very well for you too. All right. So enough business. Now to other business. Let's talk about the wars. Well, hold on before we jump into that. Did you, let's talk about something just a smaller thing real quick. Do you see that couple on the Empire State Building? I did briefly. Yeah. What was the flag? Anything good? I have no idea. I probably don't want to know. They're probably some gay-ass anarchist commie types or something that I would hate and they hate me. I don't care. I am unironically

100% supportive of them. Do not put me on whatever jury tries them. I will let them off just for being cool. That's got to be the coolest thing that ever happened on the New York City skyline since 74 when they put up that high wire between the Twin Towers covertly and people went to work one day

and they were like, what the hell is that? It was pretty cool. So he proposed to her up. there too. And it's like on helicopter camera, dude, that's awesome. I don't care. So let them go, hire them, you know, maybe put them like in a, I don't know, some kind of special unit or something where they can go, you know, Spider-Man. But yeah, actually, that reminds me speaking of the proposal. Yeah, we need to get up there, man. Holy shit. Absolutely.

And balls, too, man. Like, that takes some balls to New York. It's really high up there. Now you want me to climb all the way up to the antenna on the tippy top? Forget it. One time when I was in Big Sur, which is this nice little beach redwood area in central California, I was hiking on this one beach, beautiful, beautiful beach where they have literally a waterfall that comes down off a cliff and lands on the beach, really cool place. And this guy comes over and he asks me to record something with his phone because he's about to propose to his girlfriend. He kind of like does it on the sign. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got you, I got you.

And so he goes and I hit the button and I'm going. And about halfway through after she's already said yes and stuff, I realized that I missed the button. And so I hit it. And then afterwards, dude, I feel so cowardly about this, but I don't care. I was like, here's your phone. Congratulations, my man. And I was gone.

That dude never saw him again. Oh, hey, someone in the chat was asking about anarcho-communism, so I'll just show this real quick. It's a Murray Rothbard article, the death wish of the anarcho-communist. The bottom line is there's only two kinds of property, dude. Private property and public property. So if you abolish private property, then what do you got? The state. It's communism.

There's no anarcho. What about the commons, dude? the commons weren't like state run necessarily. Like English commons like in the villages before the enclosure acts, you know, you'd have your little plot of land for your garden, but, you know, you don't have enough land to graze all of your, your animals and stuff. And so the village shares a big plot of land. It all worked out perfectly, perfectly well.

Sounds tragic to me. I don't know. I'm not convinced. But anyway, there are people that call themselves anarcho-sendicalists. Nome Chomsky and people like that call themselves anarcho-comis of some kind or another. It's a it's an ethos

you know, Donny, but it's stupid. It's just Marxism. And then, oh, look, we got to talk about the war. Let's talk about the war. So old Russia been bombing the hell out of Kiev and I thought somebody in the chat room made a good point that like, I don't know, man, this kind

of smacks of desperation on the part of the Russians here. Oh, I didn't hit add to the thing. they're bombing the crap out of Kiev. They're moving so slowly. And I know that both sides say that, well, it's a war of attrition. We're just chewing up the other side. We're not trying to move fast.

And so, like, we said we were trying to move fast. I think that also, I'm not sure, but that kind of sounds like a cope too. Like, I mean, obviously the Russian strategy or their strategic goals here are to take territory. And they're taking it real slow. And it's been four and a half years. they still don't have all of Donetsk, and they still have so much more to go. And at the same time, there's all this propaganda

about how the Ukrainians are turning the tide and kicking their ass, and they've finally unlocked the secret key to drone technology that's going to just undo everything that's happened so far, which is such a bunch of crap. And so, and I'm not sure what's even the point of that. Like, is there another appropriation coming up that they needed to build up a little bit of hype for something? Otherwise, it's...

I don't know. The tone is definitely shifted over the last month, month and a half. I mean, you see all these pro-Ukraine accounts and media personalities who have shifted from, you know, shifted back, I should say, to this like, you know, maximalist vision of Ukrainian victory that, you know, the thing about a war of attrition like this, like when you have two bordering states fighting over a piece of land that is on their frontier is, you fight a war of attrition, just like, in World War I, like what you're, like, what you're really going for at that point is like state collapse, like a war of attrition in that sense, you know, is something where you're trying to bring the other side's whole society, its economy, its political system, you know, drive it to the point that it comes apart. And I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem very likely that either

of those things are going to happen on either side in the near term. But then also, man, imagine just for either side for that to happen would be just such a complete and total disaster, you know, and I don't know, it's hard. I understand the person who said it smacks a desperation. Like I could kind of see that. I think also, I think the Russians are, you know, it doesn't necessarily smack of desperation

in the sense of like, you know, they're on their last legs. And so they're trying to, you know, do a battle of the bulge kind of thing. But it does maybe in the sense that, you know, they're just there like, what the like look the Russians did not bargain for this war this is not the war that they thought they were getting I mean this has been much harder much longer no question about any of that and they're

in this place now where you know probably two years ago three years ago they were thinking all right we're just going to have to settle in we're going to have to do this for a while you know kill a few hundred thousand Ukrainians and eventually like bring them to their senses and getting to the point now I'm just realizing that we might be in this for like the really long haul. Like these guys, they just, they keep throwing meat at us. The West seems intent on just, you know, continuing to arm them and send them in here. And, you know, it's, you always hear from people that, that the stiffest opposition to Putin, you know, within the power structure over there is from the right, is from people who think he's too soft and too accommodating to the, the West and worries too much about how Russia is seen by the West and all that and that they need

to just take the gloves off. That's what you read. I don't know if that's true. It makes sense to me. You know, it's very, it's pretty rare when you have a war like this one where it is like a, you know, this isn't a foreign adventure on the other side of an ocean or something. This is a border war where your sort of generational enemy NATO is like clearly, you know, driving. the tank. And, you know, to have a war like that, to have his opposition be from the side that thinks they need to back down and, you know, and give back their gains, it seems very unlikely. It's just hard to understand exactly what the goal is here. You know, I, other than, you know, maybe it's just like Dan Crenshaw said, like a lot of these guys have said, is it's just,

we get to trade dollars that we print, you know, anyway, for Russian bodies. Sounds like a good deal to me. You know, that's, that's like what came out of Dan Crenshaw's mouth. And a collection of quotes like that in the book. Oh, man. Bang for the buck. We've ever got Lindsey Graham, but 10 more, you know. I mean, so maybe it's just, you know, we're going to, we've kind of accepted. We're going to throw a few hundred billion a year to just tie the Russians up, you know, and just do some damage to them, you know, try to arm their political system if we can.

It's really hard for me to understand. And I've tried. to figure this out. And I know you, I mean, you gave, you put some meat on this bone in the book, like a little bit, but you didn't drill down like super specific on it. It's like, what is the just absolutely homicidal attitude that Western elites have toward Russia? Like, where does that come from? I just don't get it. Like, there are, especially like, you go to like Britain. Britain is like, I mean, they're like a mad dog when it comes to Russia. They're political class at these. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I get it back in the day. Like, you know, the McKinder Doctrine

and all this kind of stuff, but you're not an empire anymore. Like, I think it's very shallow, dude. I think it's just, you know, this is a different topic, but it's the same damn thing, basically. I interviewed a State Department guy named Wayne White one time, and he was talking about, we were

discussing, this is like in 07 when Bush might go to war against him, actually. And we were discussing about Iran and why makes no sense for America to fight against Iran when the enemy is the bin Ladenites and the Iranians could be our strategic allies or at least we can leave them the hell alone, you know, this kind of. And he's like, listen, man, people are just still mad about the hostage crisis, right? Like the state department is just

full of people who they just don't like Iran, okay? Iran's the great Satan. That's it. And so it's the same thing with Russia. Russia's, and I wish, well, and maybe there are other reasons more complicated than this, but I don't really think so, man. You know, also, I guess one that Mearsheimer really highlighted, and in real time too, I think this is really correct, was that when they seized Crimea

in reaction to the coup of 14, that then the foreign policy establishment had to come up with this story of why this happened and how it wasn't their fault. It was because Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to be evil. And so that

was what happened and that was when history started was when he stole Crimea. And and that it was essentially just an alibi. I mean, if you listen to the phone call, the famous phone call of Newland and Piat, she's saying, and they both say, we got to glue it, we got to stick it,

we got to make it sale, we got to midwife it, we got to get this thing done before Putin can react and torpedo it. We got to get the thing. And then what happened, it wasn't easy. Actually, it completely blew up in their face

and they lost Crimea within it. three weeks of that phone call or four weeks of that phone call and Crimea was gone. Right. So they thought that they were smart and they were pulling it off. They didn't pull it off. It led to this horrific reaction. And so then they went, oh, well, yeah, because what happened was that Putin, why he got drunk and got real angry and did a mean thing or some excuse, you know. In 22, Condoleez-Rice, I think famously or I hope famously said that he knew.

must have a mental illness because this is not the Vladimir Putin I know. And it's like, you're such a damn liar. Yes, it is too. It's exactly the same guy and we all know. Yeah, it's the same guy from that cable she got from the ambassador

in 2008. Exactly. Just driving it to a T. That's right. And it's the same guy's been in power this whole time and he's doing exactly what you were warned lady that he would do. And I remember this because I went on Fox News at the time on Kennedy show. And I said, of course, Connolly

Rice says that now he's mentally ill. It's because it's her fault. Personally, she's the one who caused this to happen. So, of course, she says it's everybody else but her, but everybody here ought to know better. The real history is

she shouldn't have done that. And she was told in no uncertain terms by the entire staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, most famously, and the Niet means NET memo. But, you know, Fiona for all of her later hypocrisy on this issue. She was the head of the Russia desk on the National Security Council at the time

or right there with Daniel Freed on the Russia desk. And she told the New York Times, and I guess believably so, that she told George W. Bush, don't you do this? The entire NSC is against it. The entire CIA and intelligence community is against it. And there's a reason that Angela Merkel is trying to stop you. It's because it's a bad idea. And then Bush goes, I can handle Angela Merkel.

Like, no, you stupid. This isn't about her. It's about why she disagrees with you about this. But Fiona Hill wasn't man enough to say, no, you stupid. The point is not about Germany. The point is about Russia. That's why Germany has a problem. Russia.

And so Hill and Rice absolutely failed to stop him. And so, yeah, of course, then they turn around and go, oh, yeah. That Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed. this morning. I'm sick of that. It's ridiculous. I mean, I could like, anybody else stand for it.

From a, you know, you have the types who think everything when it comes to, you know, war is about money and it's just about the, you know, military industrial complex getting paid and all that. And the problem I always have with that theory, not that there's not an element of that going on,

but there's a million different ways for the military industrial complex to make their money. Like, you don't have to go messing around with the largest nuclear power on the planet to do that. And, you know, part of it, I think maybe, you know, looking at it from that perspective, though, you know, you would say that, like, Russia is a country that is big enough and powerful enough to be a credible enemy, not powerful enough, short of their nuclear force, to be, like, a real threat, you know, militarily to, like, come at us. But credible

enough that we can continue to sell this conflict with them and everything and we're not like so tied in with them economically like China or they're not as big of an economy as China that you know we can actually afford to do this like we don't have a bunch of microchips

or rare earths or whatever that we need coming from Russia or something like we do with China and so I get it from that like angle but there's a and this goes back even to like right when after my on happened. I mean, this is not something that's developed over the last 12 years is there's

from so many of our officials, and especially ones in Europe, there's this like really visceral hatred of Russia. And, you know, like I know Bob Gates, he said in an interview, he was asked about our different approaches to Russia and China. And he said that one of the things that had happened is when we set up our China desk, just, you know, sort of collectively speaking at all the different agencies and everything. Because, you know, this is actually, I was fascinating. I was reading a book about Dulles, the Dulles brothers back in the day.

And they were talking about when they were standing up the OSS because the U.S. was, you know, going to go to war in Europe, that he was literally bringing in immigrants from Holland and stuff and like having them draw maps of like where the docs were and stuff because America was not an empire yet. We didn't have this sprawling intelligence network across the world. Like that's the level we were at. And so we had to like stand up all those desks.

You know, we just, we didn't have these preexisting networks. And so with China, you need people who speak Chinese. You need people who understand China. Who do we have who does that? Well, those missionaries kids mostly. And they love China. They thought China was great. They went there as missionaries.

The people were nice and kind. They had a good opinion. And that kind of became the culture. of the China desks, like across the government. The Russia desk, the Soviet desk, was stood up all by people who were, you know, run out by Stalin or were refugees from, you know, the Bolshevik revolution, or they were ethnic minorities, like a lot of Jews

from the very, very beginning, who just, you know, had a very bad experience in Russia and carried that animosity over and really saw the United States as a tool to carry on a war against this awful country. And the thing is, like, you know, when I was, when I was with the DoD, there was this one destroyer, one ship that I won't say which one it was, but it was just the nightmare ship. Nobody wanted to go there. Everything was always broken. Nobody knew anything. Everybody hated being at work every single day. Every sailor hated being at work every day. It was just awful. It was just terrible. And that ship started off with a, like when it was commissioned back in the early 2000s with a really bad chain of command. and just an apathetic crew and everything, the culture broke down.

We would come back like 10 years later, 12 years later, and you've got a completely different chain. I mean, it's been, you know, it's not just that there's a different chain of command. It's been turned over like three or four times at this point. You know, the people who are on the ship now are the replacements of the replacements of the replacements of the original people,

and the culture was still the same. And it's because, you know, you don't take everybody off the ship at once and send them packing and bring a new crew in, One guy leaves, another guy comes and takes his place, and he gets worked into the culture. And so it persists. And it really takes like a revolutionary sort of, you know, leader, like a really charismatic, effective leader to turn something like that around.

And you've seen this, I think, in, you know, in our diplomacy with regard to Russia and China, how that culture has just persisted over the long term. It started out bad. And then we continued to staff it with expats. Like people who exiles, you know, refugees, people who just had an axe to grind from the day one of taking, you know, the job. I mean, you saw, you wrote about this in the 90s. It was like, it's fascinating when you're going through all of the people who played like the major roles. And you're like, okay, so you've got Madeline Albright, you know, a Czech Jew who, you know, everybody knows what happened in Prague, you know, back in the Soviet days, like real negative feelings as far as that.

You had, even though I think, you know, he was a little more measured about it. Who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Salakashvili? Right. Right. And so you have a Georgian who, I think he was a Georgian who had been raised in Poland. So you like double whammy there. And so just across the board, it's like a bunch of Eastern Europeans or their kids who just hate Russia, like really viscerally.

And somehow, you know, maybe when there was, when we had like the Georgia, George Kennons in charge, you know, the old senior statesmen who were kind of just the old Carol Quigley Anglo establishment types who really like, you know, like ran the country at the highest level, that they were able to sort of control, you know, how far this went, you know, and the direction it took. But then once they were off the scene and got too old, they weren't replaced by serious people. And the fanatics, you know, just were able to run rampant. It seems like that's where we're at, you know? It's just, otherwise it's just impossible to explain.

Like the people who, the people in Russia look at Putin and say that Putin has just been so accommodating and blah, that is 100% true. Like if I was, if I was a Russian watching him, I'd be like, what are we doing? Like, why don't you just go over there and lick the President of the United States boots? Like, this is ridiculous. Trying again, and I'm not talking about like just since 2014. I'm especially talking about before that.

really, really obviously trying to, you know, make Russia a palatable friend to the West and just getting spit in the face, like over and over and over and over. And, you know, it makes no sense strategically. It makes no, you know, unless, you know, I guess like you could say strategically of, you know, if we're focused on maintaining American control of the European continent, we need Russia as an enemy because otherwise they're going to necessarily be a competitor for influence. in Europe, and we don't want that. We want there to be just a wall between Europe and Russia, but I just don't get it, man.

And I really hope, you know, that we don't, and this is something that's, I think, possible because of our media environment and the way that it just completely fails to prepare people for emerging events, you know, that were predictable in hindsight, but that is that we're going to, like, we could wake up one day and there has been a major escalation that we cannot go back from, you know,

and everybody's going to be like, what happened? It's like, well, go read provoked, first of all, and you'll understand what happened. But it's just, you know, I'm sort of dreading that day. And it doesn't mean it's like you're going to wake up to like, you know, every city in Russia and the U.S. being a smoking crater. But I mean, just, you know, stepping up to a, I mean, like, I was thinking about this the other day,

trying to game out. Like, what would happen if Russia, not nuclear or anything like that, but they hit a bunch of warehouses and processing stations, you know, transfer stations and stuff in Estonia and Latvia, you know, or in eastern Poland. They hit a bunch of like military targets, credible military, credibly military targets. But now they're attacking NATO countries directly.

That's like they're not, they do not seem that far from doing that. Like it seems like that is maybe one or two small escalations away for them at this point. And I don't know if you can really, like, go back from that once it happens. Like, we may just have to, like, really fight this out. And that's scary because, you know, I don't want to get nuked. I think especially when all the attention is diverted to the Middle East and the whole thing is just kind of coasting and we're letting the European states

decide these policies for us. And they're all, you know, little brother talking tough with big brothers and standing them behind him kind of a moral hazard sort of situation going on. they should not be allowed to drive. You know what I mean? They want to serve a purpose in our European policy than maybe, but otherwise they should shut up, you know? But the Brits and the Poles especially are constantly causing trouble

and making things worse. The Brits are bragging about helping the Ukrainians develop new longer-range missiles because we can't give them longer-range missiles. Oh, but we can help them develop them. And then that's deniable enough. No hard feelings, right, Russia, you know, kind of thing. just trying to be too cute by half on all of this stuff. And I agree that it's not that we're on an inevitable path to nuclear war,

but we are risking it and we have increased the risk by whatever percentage. I don't know. You can't exactly quantify it, but people are just whistling past the graveyard on this stuff. You know, I saw a tweet. This was a tweet by, what's her name, Annie Jacobson that wrote the nuclear war scenario book. And she was saying, look, you people should be worried, you know, you act like this isn't a threat, but it really is. And, you know, for someone like her, she's sort of the quintessential New Yorker writer or something

like that. She's not the type of alarmist or crazy or like, you know what I mean? You can tell that she's like a little reticent to like really beat the drum loud and cause too much attention. But she's like, guys, you know, hello, over here. This is really dangerous. You know, William Perry, I don't think he's dead yet, maybe almost, but when he got old, he helped found Global Zero with Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and all these people who

spent a career in this. She said, you know what, man, they dedicate the last years of their lives to lobbying against nuclear weapons, or at least signing on to joint statements about it, where they didn't work hard enough on it. But, you know, William Perry was like, listen, man, this was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense. He's like, listen, you just don't understand the power of these machines to kill so many people in one shot in this way. I mean, you're talking about you could kill a major city with just one or two of these things. You know, make Houston uninhabitable with just a couple of H-bombs. It's unthinkable, man.

And, you know, the H-bombs, especially, they're in the high kilotons or low megaton range. I mean, these things, the strategic nuclear weapons, these are for wiping cities off the face of Earth with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed it. an instant in each of them. You know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those are what we now call battlefield nukes, tactical nuclear weapons, 10 and 15 kilotons. And they killed 100,000 and 75,000

in one shot each, you know. So, you know, there's an anecdote from Jack Kennedy talking with his staff of Cuba. And they said, well, he said, if we get in a nuclear war and we will be the estimated casualties if the Russians hit one city and the Air Force General says well sir we think it would be about 600,000

and Kennedy says 600,000 is what we lost in the Civil War and we haven't gotten over that in 100 years and that's the most optimistic vision of how a nuclear war could go one H bomb that's the Soviets demonstrating that they're willing to nuke a city don't make them nuke anymore

that's when we've already gotten to that point. And of course, at that point, everybody dies. At that point, it's use them or lose them. So anyway, I don't want to be the world's worst scaremonger about that, because again, I'm not predicting it, but it's the kind of thing. Samuel Cherop from Rand Corporation,

he's like, well, it's a low probability, high impact, consequence. Actually, you know, the thing to do, probably, is just to make a career out of predicting that it'll never happen, because if it does happen, is going to be around to say you were wrong.

So, like, I think I saw somewhere, like, on Pauley Market or one of those betting sites that, I don't know if it's still on there, seems pretty stupid, but, like, that they actually had on there, you could bet on whether Jesus was going to return this year. And I'm like, well, just obviously vet, bet, just say no. Because if he does, then whatever. Like, who cares?

It's all over with. Take your golden escalator up to heaven. All right, look, we should take a few super chats, but first let me tell you about the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. This is everything I know. And guess what? Just today, we finally uploaded the second half of the Cold War course. So now my terror war course and both halves of my Cold War course

and Ukraine War and everything is done there at Scott Hortonacademy.com. And look, there's me on the Joe Rogan show. So how do you like that for argument from authority? I was a guest on the Joe Rogan show, so I know what I'm talking about. And also Ron Paul likes me, obviously. And here I am saying things to Tucker Carlson. And here I am humiliating Bill Crystal.

So you know what you're getting. And then so here's my guys, man, the great Jim Bovard, Ramsey Baroud, Adam Francisco, and Bill Bupert. And then coming up, we are adding next week, we're adding the heroic Grant F. Smith, the author of Big Israel and about seven or nine more books about the Israel lobby in the United States.

And his course is going to be on the foundation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee by Isaiah Kennan was the guy's name, who was the Israeli agent who created the thing. And then so, of course, he goes all into JFK and RFK trying to register him as foreign agents and all of that stuff and everything.

It's the great Granof Smith. If you don't know from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, which is just a gigantic website full of PDF files from FOIA lawsuit. from Grant Smith just having these guys number for years. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and show you. I can't help it. Watch this, dude.

Check it out. These are all the books that Grant wrote about the Israel lobby in the United States of America, dude. That's our guy. All right. Israel. Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Palsy. And his new course is on the foundation of APEC.

So that is Scott Horton Academy.com. Sign up for it. Oh, yeah. Oh, you know what I should have done? I'll send a note to Harley right now and we'll make it promo code Independence Day. And then you'll save 10% off. How about that? Here, let me send a message to Harley right now so I don't forget.

Please make promo code Independence Day. All yeah. And that way we'll celebrate. And everybody, you get 10% off. You do the thing. you get the academy, you learn all the stuff. And I hope everybody's really excited. I put a lot of work into doing that Cold War course

and taking you through all of this stuff. So I hope people are stoked that finally the second half of that thing is available. I'm sorry it took so long. I had to move and do other things, but it's finally done. And I'm hard at work on the audiobook as well. If you're audiobook fans, very soon, the W. Bush chapter and the Obama chapters will be done for you there and so on. So anyway, now with that, let me just show them the Martyr Made podcast.

That's my man here, Martyr Made, Darryl Cooper, and his extremely long-form history podcast series is that he does, which you all will enjoy so very much. And here's my substack is Scottwardshow.com. This is my other show, my interview show. And here you can see, I interviewed Brandon Weikert, who is absolutely great. I think you'll like them.

Oh, and then this one, I don't know if you heard this story, man. Bud Cummins. I didn't ask him if he's related to the family that developed the diesel thing there for the... Right. But hey, man, the point is that, look, ATF murdered this guy. Brian Malinowski, and it was just like a Waco raid. Six o'clock in the morning, they raid his house, he's protecting his wife. He pulls out a gun to protect his wife, and they shoot him ahead and kill him.

And the thing is, he was the director of the local airport. and a gun collector. And what had happened was they had busted some criminals with guns that they had gotten from him. And then they just made up all this crap about how he's the kingpin and this gun smuggling ring and all this stuff, which is total crap, dude. He was just sold guns as a hobby at the gun shows like everybody else. And they murdered him. Did this just happen?

They killed him recently? No, this is in 24. And this guy, Bud Cummins, is his lawyer. And this guy Cummins is a former U.S. attorney and is representing the widow, suing them over it. Of course, there's no accountability whatsoever, you know, criminally. They haven't even had an official investigation, an official report of any kind. You know, the whole thing is just sick, but whatever. Anyway, if you sign up for the Scott Horton Show, a substack, that's also how you get the audiobook

when I put out audiobook sections coming soon. And then also here real quick is Liberty Stickers, since we were talking about Star Wars earlier. I'll show you that. LibertyStickers.com. Everybody else's stickers suck. And, okay, that's it for the ads. Buy my books and everybody else's books at Libertatian Institute.org slash books.

Now, Mr. Cooper, you want to take some super chats from these super people? Oh, yeah, let's do it. They're super donating to us. So here, let me rewind to the top and page down. Look for the colored ones. Here's a big yellow one. What's he say?

Shows Scott for getting Brandon, Wiker, on the Tom Woods bump. Yes. So I did. Tom Woods said to me, who should I interview about this? I said, you should get him on. Wisconsin said he was 76 years old.

I believe him. Hey! I always looked young from my age. What the hell happened? Great man theory of history, progressive movement, socialist history, social structures,

and collective forces and not as soon as disparate. Oh, well, that's interesting. So I guess he's putting the people do things history versus the tide of the course of events sort of way of looking at things. You know, saddle, shmattle. It was all because this one lord killed that king and, you know, led to the reformation of the

what you call. And I think it can be both. It is both. And both are always elements in any historical event, but, you know, it's a sliding scale. And sometimes it's more on one side. and sometimes it's more on the other. Like, if you go to, you know, look at like the Aztec and Inca empires, like that was, these are great civilizations, you know, in the classical sense,

that were destroyed because a bunch of badass Spaniards, like, went over there and destroyed them, you know? And it wasn't a necessity of history that that was going to happen or something. It was, you really required some remarkable personalities and very specific sort of confluence of forces for that to happen. And, you know, but then on the other hand, I mean, there's still an element of, you know, where Spanish and just Western European technology and need to expand over the Pacific due to the Ottomans, you know, closing down all of the supplies of sugar and other things

that were coming from the East and like all of these other things that are definitely involved, but you couldn't have got it done without some really, really remarkable individuals. Of course. Yep. I think that's right, man. It's all the big, you know, mixed things. This is, you know, like the leftist thing about the tabula rasa. We're like, everybody's born a blank slate.

And not only that, but they're born such a blank slate that you can turn a boy into a girl. If you just call him Sally. You're like, geez, I don't think the slates come like completely blank. Like, I think there's got to be a little bit of nature in with that nurture. No, I don't know. Here's one for you, Mr. Cooper. They're all making fun of how old I am. This guy says, when you think Scott's an old man,

then you find out he's younger than you. What in the world, dude? Is it because I'm going so dang fall? It's not my fault. I'm going bald. I got too much testosterone, dude. Gerald, do you think your voice sounds weird on tape? I don't.

It sounds matter of fact to me. Your voice or his own? Yeah. Yeah, of course. I hate hearing my voice and seeing my face. Either one of those, I just, yeah, I absolutely hate. I used to be weirded out by my voice. Oh, I really sound like that, but now it sounds like me.

I just got used to doing radio all those years or whatever, you know, kind of. And also I'm incredibly handsome, so no problem with there. Should have seen you in your younger days, like back, you know, and how old are you back in the 40s? Yeah, back when I'm still in my 40s for another couple weeks, thank you very much. But, yeah. I mean back in the 40. I mean back in like the 1940s, bro.

Oh, yeah. And I used to be like five inches taller. If drones were available to the French resistance, there would have been an SS officer left in Occupy France. Oh, there would not have been. Yeah. Sounds right. A little argument about the future war and, oops,

and how drones were changing at all. Well, they better hope so because there also wouldn't have been a D-Day landing. Yeah, that's true. You know, somebody brought up on a show I was on the other day, boy, the next war in America is going to be crazy, man. Oh, it was somebody told me he went and bought a drone for a couple hundred bucks. And he was just, I guess, it occurred to him to like, this thing could carry a grenade.

And then, I mean, the possibilities are just endless, man. Yeah, we've seen people mount guns on them and put them on, you know, synchro servo systems that mirror the camera, I mean, and do it accurately. It's all possible. This guy says he couldn't do it, but yeah, you could if you were mad enough. That was your job, and their drone guy got your guy a minute ago, and so now it's on. Jordan Peterson, I think he's scum. I never was impressed by him whatsoever, and I read this hilarious thing by this communist

named Nathan Robinson, who writes this journal called Current Affairs. and he's very comy, but at least he hates Israel. But anyway, he wrote this article about Jordan Peterson and about what an absolute fraud he is and how he just uses all these big words and lots of italics to try to make just absolute idiot, basic truisms

seem like these profound breakthroughs of, you know, meaningful, whatever. And essentially all he's saying is like, you know, you should be generous, but don't be too generous, because then someone could take advantage of you, right? Which is like, yeah, your grandma could tell you that when you're seven or whatever, right? It was just a truism.

Yeah, but most of the things that your grandma could tell you when you were seven or... I mean, I think he was... I think Peterson was a man of his moment, like when he came out, for sure. There's just no denying the impact he had on a lot of people. And, you know, he... Probably his most famous, like, little one-liner or whatever is clean your room. and it's one of those things that, like you said, your grandma did tell you that.

And everybody knows it's better if you clean your room than if you don't. And if you have a habit of cleaning your room rather than not, whatever. But, you know, like a point he was kind of making with that, with that is very similar to, I guess, the, you know, the, you know, the Gaco's motto, discipline equals freedom. And it's sort of a, you know, it's sort of a paradox that if you restrict your, if you restrict your you know

just moment to moment freedom by disciplining yourself and forcing yourself to do unpleasant things like in the moment that that'll actually give you what people really like want when they say they want freedom which is agency the ability to go do something because you have a lot of people

I mean like the reason I think he blew up so powerfully when he did I don't think it was the tranny stuff I don't really think it was the political stuff in general I think people liked what he had to say about free speech because of what was going on at the time. But I think it was because, and we're, I don't even know if we're starting to see this now, but like, you know, there is a mental health crisis among people under, you know, 40, 50 years old or so in this country that is not forget about like the record suicide rates,

spiking levels of depression and anxiety and all these kind of things. that's all, like, the really acute stuff is all at record highs, and that's all, that's all definitely true. But among like, people who manage to keep it together, people who get, get up, they have a job that they're not going to get fired from. And, you know, if you look at their life, it seems like they've got their act together, but are just on the, on the edge of, like, losing their mind, you know, and feeling like it's all going to fall apart, like, at any moment. that is like an epidemic. And so, you know, he was really reaching those people.

You know, that was his audience, really. And I think he did help a lot of people by, you know, again, taking something that was really just sort of a simple truism, but getting them to treat it like it was profound in a way that drove their behavior, you know? Because I think where the clean the room came from, I think he was giving a lecture or talk or something. And he was talking about patience he would get into his,

practice who were just completely paralyzed in their life. They couldn't do anything. Like, they'd spill a milkshake on their kitchen floor and it would just stay there for months because they just could not gather the agency to like go clean it up, you know? And not because, not even because they're on their bed, you know, clutching their sheets, crying all day. They just, like, there's this sort of heaviness and apathy that just makes, that paralyzes them. And so he would, you know, instead of telling, you know, people, okay, here's how you're going to, you're to fix your life. Here's how you're going to go out and change all of these things about, you know, climb out of this pit your personality's falling into is we're just going to like

focus on you're going to keep your room clean. And once you can do that on a consistent basis, then we'll think about keeping your house clean. And then once you, you know, keep expanding out from there until you have like more and more of a zone of competency where you feel like, you know, you can do something in the world and you don't live in this. this sort of, you know, this fuzzy brain fog-dominated kind of life where, you know, it's like if you, like, you know, my wife's a really good cook. I know how to make a few dishes. I don't know how to cook in the sense that like if you show me a pantry full of just ingredients that I can whip something up. In fact, if you show me that pantry full of ingredients to me, I mean, it's just, you might as well

just show me a blank screen. Like, it's like, yeah, I know what paprika is, but I have no idea. how you use it. So it really is not even a real thing to me. I don't even have any idea what any of this is. It might as well just be like a bunch of shelves full of books in another language or something. But if you're competent in cooking, then you look at that and that has a lot of meaning to you. There's a bunch of things that are meaningful that you can actually go out and do things with. And so you have a totally different. It actually stimulates and activates your mind as opposed to me. When I look at it, my eyes glaze over and my brain goes sort of foggy. And I'm like, well, people go through their whole lives like that.

Because they look around. They don't feel competent at anything, you know. And this is the stuff he was speaking to. And, you know, it's very sad what's happened to him. I mean, you really saw, and I don't, look, I hate his Israel stuff and all of the, a lot of the political nonsense for sure. I think he's ridiculous on that. But, you know, I think that what you saw sort of in real time.

Like, I remember back in the day he would do these, like, just grainy. web cam sort of like interactions with his audience, you know, at night time, it's like dark and like the only light on his face is from the screen and it's all kind of creep. And dude, like on a routine basis, he would like break down crying over all these things, which, you know, it was endearing the first time. But then when it happens again and again and again, you realize, oh, this isn't just something he feels so strongly about like, this is kind of an unstable personality, like, on some level. Not like a crazy person, but somebody who's like, like, Like there's some really like uncontrollable emotion like right under the surface here.

And when you took that personality and you put it out into an environment where I mean, I mean, he had every media organization in the world trying to destroy him, trying to just really coming after him. You put it under that kind of pressure and he cracked, you know. And it's sad to watch that happen in real time. Well, I always thought he was an idiot because I never paid attention. to all that stuff, because I have a dad. So, like, I don't...

Okay, but that's exactly right, though. That's exactly right. And I know the people he was reaching. No, I get it. I get it. But I never pay the attention to that. And then the one thing I ever really saw of him is he was saying, don't pay attention to politics at all. Don't pay attention to anything outside of your own life.

Don't worry about all these other things. That's not your responsibility. Just clean your room. Just go get a job for a low hourly wage and do your little thing and whatever, and then that's it. And then the next thing I heard from him was, oh, no, you should have politics after all. Serve Israel.

Yeah, yeah. See, what happened was I got money. So now here I am doing an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben Shapiro sitting at the head of the table supervising. And now I'm here to tell you that, no, you do need to have politics after all, young man. Clean your room, get your act together, and go serve Israel. Go join the army and die for Israel. Grow up, have a son, and put your son in the army so your son can die for Israel.

Get up, clean your room, go to work in the morning, and pay your taxes so that Israel can kill children with your money. I'm Jordan Peterson, the great teacher of American responsibility from Canada. Like, fuck you, dude. Well, you know, it's eating him, dude. I think that he should eat meat meat. More and more and more and more pills. It was interesting because, you know, he was one of, and there's so many of these types, right, where, like, he rose to fame as, like,

a person who was dissenting against whatever was going on, you know, the tranny stuff, but free speech in general, whatever. And that's how he, like, came into the public eye and grew his audience. But then as his message sort of, like, and this was, you could see this actually, like, from the beginning, if you were paying attention to the right things, that what his message amounted to was just maintain the status quo and accept it. You know, it was, like, he would talk a lot about, like, dominance hierarchies versus competency hierarchies.

And there's a reason that the people who run the banks, run the banks, because they're so smart and they're just so great. And the people who are in power shouldn't be there because, gosh, if you got there, then you're amazing. And everybody should just sort of go along with that. And, like, you know, sort of similar to like, you know, hey, it's always funny to me. You know, who's that guy? It's like the skeptic guy.

Michael Shermer, you know what I'm talking about? I think he made like skeptic magazine. His whole thing is that we're going to be skeptical. And what his thing actually is is we're going to be skeptical of every theory that is not like the mainstream story of whatever. Yeah, exactly right. So boring stuff. This is what actually turned me off of libertarianism was that kind of attitude

among the Reason Magazine guys. I was like, well, apparently Ron Paul's the only libertarian with any courage. I'd rather hang out with the birchers and the militia guys because at least they care about the branch of idiots and stuff. Like I was saying before, it was later on that I found the Mises Institute and was like, oh, there's a whole building

full of these guys. I had no idea. Because it was exactly that kind of skeptic crap that turned me away from it. Anyway, all I need to know about Ukraine was watching the press gang footage yeah i mean that is a huge one i don't know like what percentage of their conscript army are literally kidnapped in that way but the ones who show up and stand on the line are slaves just the same and it's really important to make that distinction between a conscript army versus a volunteer army and people talk about well ukraine doesn't want

to quit fighting yet well their political leaders don't and their slave slave army that has no choice but to stay at the front and which by the way they have hundreds of thousands AWOL and there have been you know at least dozens have died in the river Tisla trying to escape across to Romania apparently it's some really rough waters people drown trying to get the hell out of the country hundreds of thousands AWOL according to AP so yeah it is really ugly hell of war over there man it's world war one but with drones and the tempo is less right the artillery and the machine gun fire. It ain't exactly World War I.

But other than that, it is. I mean, trenches and artillery and tank rounds and machine gun fire and just plus drones. And it really sucks for everybody over there for sure. This guy says, this may be silly, but any advice either of you have for one who wants to be a history professor. Graduated Seton Hall this past May,

thinking about law or history. What do you say, Coop? I mean, you know, it's extraordinarily competitive, obviously. You know, you go to any graduate level history class and any university in the country and you got 30 guys all vying for the one job that their professor has. And so it's tough. I would say in this day and age, just keep your options open, man. Like, you know, if you could, I mean, I'm not a history professor, obviously,

but I probably speak to more people about history than any professor has. has or does through his books or lectures or anything else. And there are a lot of ways to make that happen that don't involve sort of jumping through the hoops of getting a job in academia. There's a lot of ways to do that now. And if you're good at it and diligent at it to make it work for you. So as far as like if you're dead set on the university system, I mean, I would just say be prepared to play the game because you're going to have to. Yeah, better you than me, man. I went to college for a little while and decided to not go to school anymore.

Putin will be the last pro-Western, at least USA, president of Russia. The Euroleaders have tied their political future to a Russian threat. I don't know. I mean, probably right. I saw, I was on Kyle's show today, and he played a clip of Putin's recent speech. And I'm like, man, we should be thanking our lucky stars that we have. have someone who is so cool, calm and collected, apparently at all times. Like, the only time I've read about him actually being, like, visibly pissed off was after the Bezlan attack, when then George Bush, you know, took Bin Laden's side, basically. And he was madder than hell about that.

But otherwise, he's just like, even in the, in the worst part of this war, he's like, you know, we have some disagreements with our American partners. And that's why we need to work on expanding our dialogue and common understanding as we negotiate this dangerous world where we have mutual problems that need to be addressed. And I'm like, man, now that's my kind of psychopath, dude, where he just does not get

worked up at all, apparently, and is like everything is just business. And so, yeah, we should absolutely be thanking our lucky stars. I've got a guy like that in the Kremlin right now. I mean, you look at Miet Bedev, and I know Miedev, he plays this role

when he was president. he was not this way. But you look at him on the average day, he talks mad shit and even threatens nuclear war and gets really goddamn upset. And he'll probably beat the president again next after Putin when he finally dies in office whenever that'll be. But yeah, I don't know why we should expect

for the next Russian leader to be any more cool, calm and sane than Putin. Virtually any Russian man you put in there is going to be more of an emotional case than this guy. And boy, do they have a lot to be upset about, right? That's the implication here. You get a guy who ticks off easy. We could be in a lot of trouble, dude. And what was this thing? The Euro leaders have tied their political future to a Russian threat. I think, yeah, that's important, a huge incentive that they have to keep everything going. Well, it's also their do-it-all tool for crushing political dissent. Like what happened in Romania? You know, they were going to elect that EU

skeptic president and they said, oh, he's got, he's too close to Russia or he has the wrong and so they actually like banned him from the, banned him from the election. And that's just sort of the go-to move. Yeah. Somebody said I didn't pay enough for the bots tonight. First of all, I don't have any money? Second of all, don't we always usually have like right around 800 to a thousand live viewers? Yeah, I think so. I don't even know how to, I don't, I think maybe the numbers were a little higher when we were on Fridays, and they got to get used to our new showtime, that's all. Imagine paying bots to watch your live YouTube stream.

Goodness. I always thought the fact that George Washington, oh, I was supposed to put this on the screen. I always thought the fact George Washington had absolute power and willingly gave it up is a prideful thing. Only instance in history I know. Well, there's one more big one is Cincinnati, the Roman leader that Cincinnati is named after,

and that's who they call George Washington, the American Cincinnati. because the story of Cincinnati was that he was called up to fight the Visigas, I think it was, and he had retired from the Senate and was working on his farm, and they asked him to take charge of the Roman army, and he did, and he defeated the enemy, and then he resigned and went back to his farm. And I think even he did that twice. And so he was known as this guy who refused to hang on to power and didn't want it. And that was the precedent of George Washington, that Washington was following that he resigned his commission rather than attempting to hold on to power.

So, yeah, man. Let's see. Is that all on? Oh, here's a couple more. Darrell, I love all your recommendations. King of Dogs, Crowbar, fantastic. Got to say, recently watched The Fountain, and I don't know what on earth they was. That, by the way, Darrell, I was supposed to tell you this a long time ago is my wife's favorite movie.

Yeah. I was supposed to tell you that so that you could have that in common. Nice. We could be friends. They don't love me so much, so then you should have your movie in common too, you know. I'll tell you what, I'll write up a substack post or do a substack podcast about the fountain and why I like it so much. Okay. I remember it looking very fancy or something. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't care about stuff like that. They really believe they can build an EU army. Those people don't seem like they're rare you go. You know what? They're going to have to. if America would ever get the hell out of there,

but I don't think it would have to be much of one, right? It would just be, you get Britain, France, Germany, and Poland to all create an army that's just big enough that they don't break it up and fight, keep them all together, and then sign a new treaty with Russia, and then everybody's happy. Without us there, all their moral hazards gone, and everybody has to back down from all their idiot,

you know, high horse positions. I think we're done with the super chats here, buddy boy. I mean, they should, they could always solve, their demographic problems by arming their Muslim populations and sending them off to Ukraine. They would join the army, right? They still want to fight. Cause.

Solve a couple of problems at the same time there. Hey, here's a quote from Cincinnati. How come I have to keep teaching you this lesson, old republic? Is that a real quote? I don't know. All right. Happy Independence Day, everybody. Hope you had a good time.

This has been Provincial. with Darrell Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on X&Ut. And tune in next time for more, Provoked.