Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:8 Hidden Price of Empire - Endless War Is Changing Who We Are

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

What happens to a country that fights war after war, year after year? The price goes far beyond the money spent and the lives lost overseas. In this candid and unflinching conversation, Scott Horton and Daryl Cooper dig into the less visible ways America’s global military machine eats away at our economy, our politics, and even our national character. Scott begins with the financial side of the story. He explains how the government’s control over interest rates creates fake boom-and-bust cycles that hammer working Americans while keeping the war machine running. “They tax what they can, then they borrow more, and then they print the rest,” he says. This, he argues, quietly shifts wealth upward while ordinary people bear the pain through inflation and instability. Federal Reserve policy and military spending feed into each other, creating a loop where war looks “affordable” on paper, but its real costs are hidden. Daryl takes the discussion into darker territory: the spiritual and psychological toll of perpetual war. Drawing on his time in the military, he describes how two decades of nonstop conflict have dulled our ability to feel outrage at atrocities. From Abu Ghraib to Gaza, repeated exposure to violence has numbed the nation’s conscience. “You’re a different kind of person once you’re inured to that kind of thing,” Daryl says. “And it’s not an improvement.” That numbness, he warns, reaches well beyond the battlefield—affecting civilians, too. They also walk through striking examples from history and current events. Declassified documents on Russiagate reveal how manufactured narratives can shape public opinion for years. Scott revisits the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pointing out that top American generals—Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, and even Curtis LeMay—believed the bomb was unnecessary and immoral. For many, learning that challenges a lifetime of accepted history, sparking deeper questions about what else we’ve been told. This is more than a discussion about foreign policy. It’s a reckoning with what decades of war have done to us as a nation. The most dangerous cost may not be measured in dollars or body counts—it might be losing the ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right. All right. Well, welcome to the show. I'm Scott. Scott Horton, that is, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org, etc. And he is Daryl Cooper Martyrmaid podcast at martyade.com and at substack.com slash martyade, right? Subscribe.martermade.com. They tell me that gets around Elon's, you know, throttling. I don't know if it's true. But, yeah, mine is Scott Horton's show.com is my substack. So they tell me it's more professional that way. Yes, it looks much better. That used to be. my website URL before I got Scott Horton.org.

So now I'm using it again. Anyway, so hey, if you are a Daryl Cooper substack subscriber, then you ought to subscribe to my substack too. That's what you all agree. Yeah, you should just kick over to Scott's actually, because as I'm finishing up this next episode of the history podcast, I've been neglecting the hell out of you guys. And so I apologize for that. But if you want to kick over to Scott, at least until I'm done, you should do so.

That's true. I got at least a couple of interviews every week. I'm putting up there now. and sometimes when I remember interviews of me. So, you know, let's start about talking about that verse, man. What is this podcast that you're doing and how close are you to drop in that official first chapter of it? I'm in the final writing phase now. So I think, you know, my goal is to get this done by the first week of September.

And whenever I set myself deadlines like that, all I'm doing is, you know, preparing myself. for public embarrassment, but I'm going to say it here. I think I can get it done. You know, you were talking about some of the projects you've got on the burners right now that is just kind of forcing you to just push everything else aside and just buckle down and focus. And that's kind of the mode I'm in now. Like other than this podcast, honestly, like I barely get out of my chair with my laptop and my books. It's just all I've been doing. And I'm sort of really, really just focused on that to until, and I'm going to be until it's finished. Like, I have this thing, and you're probably the same way, actually, knowing what I know about you, that, like, I'm either obsessive or I'm kind of just doing other things.

Like, I just, I really am not one of those dudes who can just sort of like, oh, put aside like two hours in the morning and then like four hours in the afternoon and kind of get this done bit by bit. I just, I don't know why I just can't, I just can't work like that. Like, I have to push everything aside and just get laser focused and kind of let it become my whole world for a while. And that's the mode I'm in now. So, yeah. Well, that is how I am except I don't ever turn that off. I don't have periods of screwing around either. Very occasionally, I'll hold a gun to my own head and force myself to go skate with the boys,

like every few months or something, possibly take the boat out or something. But actually not, you know, I'll go months at a time without ever doing anything but work. Because I just got too much to do. And I take on huge projects at a time that are just, I'm completely. completely ridiculous for doing so, but I can't help it because I keep thinking of things. So I'm almost done, speaking of which, I'm working on the Academy, the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. And that's like Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, only it's me.

And it's at Scott Horton Academy.com to sign up if people want to get on the email list to find out first and watch a little promo video we got there. It'll definitely be next month. It's definitely not going to be this month. But it'll definitely be next month that we're going to go ahead and launch the thing. And it's me doing gigantic courses. I forget how long, but many tens of hours on the Middle East and the Cold War with Russia, the new one. And then it's the great James Beauvard on 40 years of investigative journalism on everything in the world from stealing documents from the World Bank to the Waco massacre and everything else.

And the guy's just the most accomplished and most important libertarian journalist ever, Jim Bovart, from the Institute and also from the Needs. York Post, of course. And then we got William Bupert on how America lost every war since 1945 and C.J. Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson was the worst person who ever lived. And then we've got this preacher. I forgot his name. He's not a preacher. He's a scholar. A Lutheran religious scholar is going to be debunking Christian Zionism and dispensationalist, pre-millennialist. Hold on. I have to jump in real quick, man. Valerie. Everybody knows that Winston Churchill is the worst person that ever lived. Come on. You're in so much trouble, dude. Oh, my God. You know, he was, he helped sink the Lusitania. It's true. Colin Simpson wrote that book.

I'm stoked about this project because, you know, I've always actually going back years, even before you and I were like, like, really buds. Like, you know, I would listen to your work and something like this is going to be. be just 10 times better for it when you know like something jumps off like um you know i'm like a lot of people who were like educated layman on given issues like around the world right where um i read a few books i read all the shah's men i read you know a handful of books the twilight wars etc about iran right so when the iran thing jumps off you think i have all this sort of knowledge just sitting there about everything that's going on but really what it is is like i read those books and unless I'm doing a podcast on it or something like I come away with it where

I remember the vibe of the book and I remember like sort of the general themes and lessons that I took from it but then the details just kind of fade out of my memory over time you know and so later on like I'll have this general I'll have the same feeling about the situation that I gain from that book or those books

but the details are all gone and so when something jumps off I would always go back and just revisit some of your interviews and your stuff just to kind of get myself back up to speed it's super useful for that and if you're doing like 10 hour courses and stuff it's going to be great yeah you know i guess uh i'm reminded of something from uh junior college i took a speech class and i wouldn't be able to tell you the percentages but he showed on the board where you remember this per you know on average whatever through the studies you remember this percentage of what you hear you remember this percentage of what you see

remember this percentage of what like somebody explains to you remember this percentage of what you read you remember this percentage of what you teach somebody else right and that's of course the highest score and that's of course my job is i read gareth porter and i go oh my god did you guys see gareth porter today well here's what he figured out knew it all along didn't you and we go through it and so i get you know the reinforce my own head and then of course my job is interviewing everybody who writes all of the stuff that i like to read so then i get to ask them all the follow-up questions that i want and all those things so when i read one of those books i then spend an hour with the guy that wrote it and i get to go so at that one part where you wrote about this

what about the other thing there and then so i'm like getting a chance to develop first i learn this but now i want to learn a little bit more based from that so that gives me a better chance to really like you know retain yeah something or another from each whole thing you know it's so true and it actually doesn't it doesn't even just increase retention it um it actually helps you develop your own and refine your own thinking you know like like i notice in my jiu jitsu classes for example like um you know i'm a i'm just a middle belt but every once i'm high enough that if the coach is sick or something and you can't come in that day i can teach the white belts their arm bars and their basic stuff and you would think that that's just kind of going through the motions for somebody

who's been doing it for many years like i am but that's not the case like even having to show them even the most basic stuff makes you realize like oh you know what i'm actually kind of sloppy about this. So I, you know, but I can't be now because I'm teaching it. So I have to clean that up. And it helps a lot. I mean, and, you know, the, like, the version of that in, like, daily life is, you know, my wife will ask me a question about something going on in the world that's in the news. And from, you know, five minutes or so, I get possessed by the ghost of Scott Horton. I just sort of, like, speak words that I've heard you say before. But then eventually, like, after doing that enough times like those become my words and i can sort of say them uh you know

in my own vernacular and with my own added added parts to it so yeah yeah fun so what else you're working on you're working on a book that stuff you know um yeah so now once the academy's done i will uh finish the audiobook i had to put that on hold because essentially tom woods has brought this new opportunity to me on a silver platter to do and so and you know help to make it happen so i have to do this i have all these other guys as part of the academy with me and everything and so this has got to be my top priority and then as soon as i got that in the bag and out there of course got to do everything i can to promote it and then i got to knock out the end of the audiobook i'm still not done with the audio book i've produced all

of bush senior and bill clinton which is three sections on my substack there scott horton show com and um it's like i forgot if it's nine or 12 hours it's longer than the audio book of enough already is just the first two chapters of the audio book of provoked um so i still have quite a lot to do there except man once i'm done with this academy thing i'm just so determined to knock the audio book out that i'm just i will i am going to if i just got to get myself a drug habit and stay up for 72 hours i'm going to finish that damn thing i mean after that because after that your schedule's clear you're all done right you just get to hang out and enjoy the sunset now then i got to relaunch more again the scott horton show interview show which i have been back to

doing at least two interviews a week lately including some real good ones i talked with um matt taibi last week yeah i listened to that was good got who else somebody good who his name was escaping me off my memory um but so i've been i've been doing a bunch of that and um but i got to make that a YouTube show like this is, once I can finally get my act together and get that going. And then, it looks like I'm going to write another book. My idea originally was, oh, I know what I'll do. And I kind of got, like, excited and out ahead of myself, I guess, a little bit. And so I texted Tucker Carlson.

And I was like, hey, man, you and me should write a book together. And we'll just outline it. And then I'll do the hard part. I'll write the thing. And then we just put your name on it with Scott Horton at the bottom. I don't care, you know, and like put that thing. and then he like kind of didn't answer and then he's like ah i'm real busy you know okay what the hell i'm i'm way out over my skis here okay never mind me but then i thought you know what i already

outlined the thing and i already know exactly what i want the book to be so hell what is it so it's going to be america first the rights turned to peace and um it's going to be about how screwed up everything is and why it's all the worst fault and the empire's fault and how that's step one and set in america right again is giving up on the neocon dream of global hegemony and being a normal country in a normal time like even jean kirk patrick said we could be back in 1990 and um so that's going to be the thrust of the thing and it already writes itself i just you know i jotted down the outline in five minutes um which is sort of like the other books too like they're already basically fully conceived in my brain i just got to do this log um but i got myself a

co-author Hunter Dorentzis from the Institute is going to write it with me. And he's a great expert and historian on the old right too and knows all about the old anti-war right before the neocons came and ruined everything. And so he's going to be a good podna to have on this one. And I think he's already like raring to go and pretty excited about it too. So what do you think? I mean, if you had to sort of like, if you had to sort of elevator pitch like the right wing critique of of the empire and like the right wing anti-war position and i and i asked that just because

i mean it's kind of crazy since anti-war position was really like it was it was the conservative right-wing position for a long long long time but it's been uh sort of you know it's been it's been out of the republican party and out of the right for so long that i think a lot of people have trouble even articulating the right-wing anti-war position so what is it you see developing republic not empire it's as simple as that you cannot have george washington's constitution and a world empire and just look at us you know imagine somehow having a global empire centralized in washington dc but not having a domestic empire centralized in washington dc it's impossible right um and you know a huge part of it is just having a government powerful enough to force us to pay to

fund the thing and so we just um and and you look at the debt they just officially crossed 37 trillion dollars it said um i think it was uh brian mclinchie i just wrote this great piece at stark reality is about 37 trillion that's nothing compared to all the other unfunded liabilities of the national government and all this is like over a hundred trillion dollars is just some whatever it was i'm sorry don't quote me on that part but it was at least very high tens of trillions and just this country's completely bankrupt. The stewards of American power have run this country into the ground. The empire

costs as much or more as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid every year. And all three of those are now outpaced by spending on interest on the national debt. I mean, that's kind of a Rubicon, isn't it? I mean... It is

absolutely just insane. You look at that line chart and it's somebody's got to call halt to the thing and then even worse than this and this is it's kind of invisible until you are shown it once and then you'll always see it for the rest of your life that boom bust cycle in the economy that you've always lived with every 10 years all of a sudden everybody stopped spending money and everything sucks and the average guy doesn't know why right we've all lived through that over and over again our whole lifetime's long and the reason why there's only one answer for

this and there's only one group of people who know the answer and are right about this and everybody else is stupid and wrong i'm sorry it's just true okay it's the austrian school economists ludwig von meeses particularly back a hundred years ago wrote the theory of money and credit and what it's about is how what they call the business cycle where we have this boom and bust is not caused by business it's not caused by free markets it's not caused by mistakes and bad investments because freedom is stupid and messy and unworkable. It's because the government communist commissars control the currency. One half of every transaction is the government money.

And of course, the government has essentially, I mean this very loosely, a conspiracy of interest with the banks who are members of the Federal Reserve system with the government, where the banks promise to always buy government debt. and then the government licenses the banks to print money out of nothing and to make new loans of new credit and bank credit expansion into the economy. And so you always have, in the boom times, the government and the banks working together to create way more new money than there is new wealth to be represented by it, which leads, just think of it this way, the government is holding down interest rates

by pouring in new money or by just literally holding them down. then if you are an entrepreneur that interest rate signals to you that there are X amount of resources of capital investments saved up for you to borrow and invest in your business right but in a free market that interest rate would fluctuate freely and you would know it would be an accurate signal of just how much whether maybe now you should be saving because you'll be collecting on that high interest rate rather than maybe you should be borrowing. But when they hold the interest rate artificially low, now you, the businessman, take out loans that you otherwise would not because you're being misled into thinking that there are more

available resources for investment than there actually are. And so this is what Mises called the cluster of errors. You can have a bad businessman make a bad bet. You could have a thunderstorm destroy the orange crop. You could have all kinds of things happen. But what causes a whole nation of businessmen to all make a bunch of stupid bad bets in the same direction at the same time government intervention in the monetary system that's the answer artificial bank credit expansion read what has government done to our money in the case against the fed by murray and rothbard it's also it's chapter 14 no no it's chapter 11 of for a new liberty by murray Rothbard just explains this so perfectly. And so this is why you think about what they call

the good times. Think about all the times in your life, Darrell, that you watched on TV and they were going, man, it's great economic times now. Stock markets roaring. Everybody's happy. And you're going, oh my God, are you kidding? Prices of everything are up. Cost of living is up. Price of rent is up. Price of groceries is up. Price of fuel is up. Think of the bush years, for example, where you didn't have widespread price inflation on everything. But on your basic cost, a living energy food and housing right and they go oh this is the good times this is the boom times and you're getting completely screwed unless you're the guy who is you know selling these things that are being artificially boosted right otherwise it's at the expense of everybody else

and then what happens the correction which is what the absolute catastrophe right the great recession the massive correction where all the bad loans are either called in or marked off and all of the marginal businesses that never should have been invested in but and only were invested in because of the artificially low interest rates, sending those false economic signals to entrepreneurs, all those businesses wiped out.

I saw a line chart today where the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population of the country went from one and a half trillion to like 275 billion in the crash of 08 and 09, right? Right. That's the correction from the artificial fake prosperity of the inflationary boom times. And then they do it to us again and again. And last sentence here. And all of this is to make big government seem cheap. Right. If they just raise your taxes, you'd call a halt or at some point revolt. So they tax what they can. And then they borrow more and then they print the rest. And so then. When you're sitting in the unemployment line staring at your shoes, wasting time, unable to provide for your people, that's your cost of killing all those Yemenis. That's you later paying the price in your wasted life for the sins that the government previously committed on your credit card. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally. And, you know, I try to get, I try to get like left-wing people interested in the Federal Reserve. and it's really hard to do. But one of the hooks that I have that works occasionally is to point out to them that this boom-bust cycle you're talking about, it just leads to like more and more consolidation of capital, which is like the left-wing boogeyman, right? Because who can ride out the busts? It's, you know, the same companies that wrote out COVID, like the companies that, you know,

all of your mom-and-pop restaurants got closed and now there's more Applebee's on every corner than there ever were before. That's the whole economy. And then you just think about how, you know, the interest rates being artificially low. It just, it just, how do I put it? It like skews the risk profile of the whole country in like a very bad direction. Because, you know, if you think of like something like CalPERS, the California pension system for the public employees, it's something, it's like $2 trillion, something insane like, you know, fund. And just to meet, you know, the California pension, state employee pension,

it's not as if like the current employees pay in and that's the fund for that year that pays out the current people or anything. It's a big sovereign wealth fund that has to meet a certain mark every year in order to meet its obligations to all the people it's got to pay. It's got to make something like seven or eight percent every year. Well, you know, when you can get five or six percent on a government bond or something else, it's like really safe, then, you know, you can dabble in other things to make up that other two or three percent. that you've got to make to meet your obligations. When they slam interest rates down to two percent, one and a half, one, zero percent, they look around and they're like, we've got to make seven or eight percent or seven to eight percent or we cannot pay out the pensions we owe to these people. So what's paying seven to eight percent? Well, not government bonds, not AAA rated corporate

bonds, not really anything. We got to go all the way down to like, you know, whatever, Greek sovereign debt and mortgage-backed securities. And obviously, like the, the big One is just you have all these huge funds that used to be primarily bond funds that are just piled into the stock market because it's just the only place that you can actually make the returns you require, you know? And it goes for everybody, right? That goes for grandma. She can't save money in a just savings account or a CD down there where inflation is

going to whip her interest rate and just destroy her money. She's got to make a bet somewhere and goes for everybody. Of course, is regular Joe's who have no business whatsoever betting on the stock market into the stock market. Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, the, you know, there's also a, and maybe, you know, I kind of think I like to talk about this, like, even more broadly in terms of, in the context of the book you're writing, about how the empire is harming people, like, directly. Because people can think the empire is destructive, it's bad. I don't like killing people. I don't like all these wars. But in terms of like the mechanism by which all of that rebounds back on you and now, you know,

And obviously, a big part of it is the monetary part. But then I wonder, too, and I don't know if you're going to cover this in the book. I would love it if you did. You know, I've been thinking, because I've been thinking a lot about this lately. So this episode I'm working on right now, first real episode of the World War II series, it's about the end of the First World War and the revolutions in eastern and central Europe that happened right afterwards. And my starting point, and I critique it a bit. But my starting point is George Mosse's brutalization thesis where, you know, he takes this idea that, you know, you had, you had all these guys. You know, this was one of the first wars that, you know, you didn't have, like, professional armies. These weren't mercenary armies that were going out there, professional soldiers that were going and fighting in the trenches. These were just whole generations of men piling into those trenches. School teachers, office clerks, you know, just, you know, just, you know,

normal people, right? And they go into the trenches and they experience this horrific situation, like just horrific beyond anybody's imagining, you know. You got to, you know, it's all everybody knows war is terrifying. Bullets are coming at you. You might die. Maybe you do get wounded. Maybe somebody you know dies. But, you know, the trenches were like this environment where, you know, you can't put your hand up above the top. it'll get shot by a sniper. And so that means that when your buddy dies, you can't go up top side and bury him somewhere. And so you bury him in the floor of the trenches. But then after a while, the floor underneath you of trenches is just all bodies. And there's nowhere to

bury anybody anymore. And so your buddy, for the last four days now, is just sitting in the corner of it. They're dead, decomposing with rats eating his face. And this is like what these normal 19-year-olds who were working in an office yesterday, like this is what they were experiencing for years, you know? And then after that, you know, they get done with this experience if they manage to survive and they go back to Germany or they go back to, you know, whatever country they were from, if they were from one of the defeated countries. And their countries in the midst of a revolution where artillery pieces are being rolled out on the streets of Berlin and blowing up people in buildings because there's communists in there. There's, you know, right-wing

militias in that one, machine gun battles on the street, people, you know, just kids being killed. And so going through this, like, you know, you're 18 years old in 1914. You're 22, 23 years old when the war ends. Another two or three years of just total chaos on the streets of Berlin and all the German cities, but all of Central and Eastern Europe, really. And then 1923, of course, you have the hyperinflation in Germany, and that spread a lot, like, throughout Central and Eastern Europe as well. And so you just, like, have these people who the first six, seven years of their adulthood is just total chaos. And, like, the idea that, like, life is something that's sacred, that we need to, like, really value and take seriously, and that it's not something that you just

throw away in a cavalier manner. That's not the world these guys were introduced into, you know? And then these guys or the ones who were a bit younger and sometimes they were even like more radical than anybody else because they felt that like we just missed out, you know, if you were 17 years old when the war ended and you didn't participate, like you probably got lucky, but then after it's over still, you know, you're working in an office and there's 10 guys and eight of them were in the war and two you weren't. And you're, you know, there's a certain sense of shame and need to compensate that comes with that. But those were all the guys

who were filling up the ranks of the Vermathe and the Vafin SS in the Second World War. And so that's like a really important thing to just understand. It's not like a way of making an excuse for anybody. It's just like understanding how this kind of world developed. And it's a long way of approaching

like my question here is like you know, obviously like we have these boutique specialized volunteer force armies now. Most people, you know, like the military's really become like a caste system where you either know 20 people who are in the military or you know nobody who is in the military, you know, and like it's families. It's like your dad, three, your uncles, your grandpa, et cetera, was in, or just nobody in your family is served. Like it's really like a segregated thing.

And so you have a lot of people who are totally isolated from the experience now. And even the people who aren't, who are sort of in that part of society that provides the soldiers, you know, even then, it's just our armies are so much smaller and these things are so much more contained in terms of the actual operations. It's just not too many people with direct experience. But because of the spread of media, you know, especially just the, you know, high definition, you know, 4K, HD, just on your phone all the time, uncut live footage, if you want to see that. Like, people are still. seeing all these things all the time and they're in addition to that it's you know not just

the witnessing violence and things but you know there's something I really feel like there's something corrupting to our souls corrosive to our to our spirits as individuals and as a society of living in a society living at a time when you're at war you know and it's something that like almost like when a war starts, you're kind of on a countdown because like from that point when it starts, your soul starts getting eaten away a little bit. And if it goes on for too long, then you start having real consequences to that. And this is something that we recognize even in the force. Like we have, you know, there were a lot of disciplinary problems that were coming up in the SEAL teams, for example. In the first 10 years of the Iraq war, very, very, very

few, like very well behaved for the most part. And, you know, I mean, given a situation, but like, we started to see more and more disciplinary things, including things in the field that were happening. Hey, there's a new book out, real quick, there's a new book out about Delta at Fort Bragg and their litany of murders and drug dealing and crime and prostitution. One of the things that they, that they sort of came, like a conclusion they came to about all that is like, these guys have just been at war for too long. Like, you, you can send people out to, you know, on a few tours to do something, but then you got to take them off the line, man, and, like, get them out of that mentality and, like, bring them back into the fold of regular society. And, you know,

like, I think I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, and I'll cut it over to you after this, but, you know, I feel like I think back to when Abu Ghraib was publicized in 2004 and how, you know, you had your people just like people defended Lieutenant Callie, you know, there were those people out there who, you know, tried to downplay it, but for the most part, people saw those pictures and they were like, what the hell are we doing? Like, this is crazy. And it wasn't just what are we doing to these people. It was, what are we doing to our people? You know, because these are just a bunch of National Guard kids from like Maryland or something like that who like, and now we send them over there into this environment and this is what they're doing. What are we doing

to our own people? And I worry and I think like, you know, that if something like that were to happen today. And maybe it is happening. I mean, it's happening 10 times worse in Gaza. People see it every day. And people, they feel, I just, they feel nothing, you know, compared to, I mean, not everybody, obviously, but like the level of outrage and horror that, you know, you should feel at the, at the, at the idea that our weapons are enforcing a blockade that's leading to that child starving that you're looking at in a picture right now and that, that we're doing something to contribute to that it should horrify people and it just doesn't you know eventually people get inured to all that it is it's just your basic desensitization is the same as anything i still remember

the first time i saw grand theft auto which was in like what oh six or something and the guy killed a hooker and then he tracks her blood across the street and i remember going whoa man oh my god now that's crossing a line in a video game that i just hadn't thought of that you know i don't know what the hell. It's just R-rated. It ain't that bad, but I was a little shocked. You know what I mean? I guess that makes me an old fuddy-duddy right. But, of course, that's nothing now. Like, whatever. That was just, you know, a very first blush there kind of thing. But then, yeah, I mean, look at what it took for them to lie us into Iraq. And then by 2011, Obama was like, yeah, Libya, some lie, whatever. And then launched a war in Libya.

Nobody even cared. That's so true. I heard somebody the other day in another podcast talking about. And I get their point, but like they were talking about how the Iraq war, like today, like now that the internet is the way it is and everybody's on social media and there's some open forms for information to get out there and everything that they couldn't pull that off today. And my response to it is they wouldn't have to pull it off today. Yeah, they just walk around. Just like they don't even bother lying to us anymore, you know? Yeah. They called out Trump.

They go, look, man, your director of national intelligence is not standing by your claims. that Iran is making nukes. He goes, I don't care. I'll do whatever I want anyway. Okay. Thanks for letting us know. Nobody considered for a moment going to Congress and getting an authorization to go to war or any of this,

which, you know, so much the better for that one, probably we want to call that one as short as possible, although that's probably still just step one of that war. I hate to, I don't want to go down that trail now if you don't want to, but that ain't over yet. And, and yeah, as far as, yes okay so on abu grave i mean i still remember just because this is how my brain works is like i know where i was at airport boulevard and two 90 listening to 550 a m radio driving my cab i guess

it would have been or maybe my little pickup truck and listening to the absolute outrage on conservative talk radio from san antonio um about these pictures and to quote this is not who we are we insist that no we're better than this this is george washington's country man this is a christian country we don't go around torturing people what in the world somebody's got to go to prison what is the what is the truth behind this what in the hell is going on and then darrell that was over by friday and by friday george bush said first of all we don't torture second of all yes of course we do and you love it you support me you support america you support this war you're a patriot then you must i demand you must back me up on this you're damn right we do

enhanced interrogations to get what we need out of these terrors to prevent them from nukeing american cities when and the american people the audience and the hosts on 550 a m radio in san ntonia went all right fine i guess we do torture people after all that was that week dude never mind all the rest you know you know a lot of people um i find they still to this day have a a total like a big misunderstanding about what happened at abu grid and like the real story is way worse than the one that most people think because most people what most people think is that you had this unit of psychopaths that like went off the reservation and did all this stuff that you know that that we're all horrified by and embarrassed by but we got rid of them and we dealt with

And like, you know, that, I mean, for everybody out there who doesn't know the whole story, like, that's not what was going on at all. Like, that National Guard unit showed up and all that stuff was already going on. And you got to remember, these are a bunch of, these are a bunch of people who never been to war. Some of them were like, you know, been in the Guard for a while. I think one of the main guys was prior service, but he'd never seen combat. Most of them were just young youngsters who were in the National Guard, thought they were going to get college money, you know, and now we're at war and you're in Iraq. And they put you in this prison. And you get there and the CIA is there. They got their interrogators and everything. And, you know, there's this weird thing in the military where it's embarrassing, honestly, for those of us who are veterans, but it's just, it's true. We're like, you know, you could have like, I swear to God, you could have like an admiral or a general, you know, in a room. And if like a low-level CIA guy walks in, they just cowtow.

They're like, oh, wow, yes, sir, yes, anything we can do. They treat them like they're above, like everybody in the military. It's just a weird thing that I don't really understand. But you go there, you have these CIA guys, and they tell you that, you know, we're going to interrogate these guys. And I know you guys are just military police who are sent here to be guards, but part of your job is going to be conditioning these people before they are sent to us to be interrogated. And what does that mean? Well, here, let us show you. And it's all the stuff that they went to jail for.

Like, that's the stuff they were told to do, you know, for the most part. I mean, you know, like that even that picture, that famous picture of the guy in the hood standing up with his arms spread like a scarecrow and everything, you know, that picture, like, it's just like, I mean, it's just such a crazy thing to even think about. But the girl who took that picture, she was, you know, part of the guard unit who got in trouble for all this, the girl who took that picture, she walked by and there was, that guy was standing on that on that crate naked in a, in a freezing room, like, show. shivering, his teeth were chattering, and she went and got that shroud and everything to cover him, like, and then took the picture, and she was kind of taking pictures of everything that was going on. And, like, you know, so when you, you know, when you realize that this was not just a group of psychopaths who, like, lost their minds, this was a group of regular Americans that we put into an absolutely just an unforgivable situation. We put them into this situation

where they get there, and they've got their officers, their bosses, all these combat veterans who have been there done that that they kind of look up to CIA interrogators all telling them this is what you're supposed to do and what are they going to think they're going to think that well I thought the military and war and everything was this way but obviously I don't know what I'm talking about this is how it is you're right but then again Sam Provance refused to participate and blew the whistle and told the truth and handed this stuff over to military investigators because that was what his mama taught him was right so That just shines a very dark light on everybody else there who went along with that.

I don't care what your rank is. Like, you don't know that it's not okay to tie somebody up and then beat them up. Oh, yeah. No, I'm 100% with you. I mean, we, you know, I wish we would build statues of those people. You know, build a statue of the helicopter pilot at Mi Lai who, like, put his guns on American troops to make them stop doing what they were doing. In Fools, Aaron, or in, well, I have a better. torture chapter in fools errand i guess but in enough already i tried torture chapter yeah i do write

torture chapters sometimes um uh i did try to name all the whistleblowers ian fish back and sam provence and all those guys i'm sorry i can't remember them all right now but there were a lot of people who came forward and told the truth about bogram prison in afghanistan about guantanamo bay and about abu grabe and what they're doing in iraq there's a guy named tony luguranus um guy named Matthew Alexander. That was his pseudonym for Tony Camarino. He was the guy who got Zarqawi. How did he get Zarqawi by saying, hey, buddy, you want a cigarette?

Tell you what, man, why'd you tell me where Zarqawi is? Instead of torturing it out of the guy. And that's how they got Zarqawi in 06. Anyway, it is. It's a really ugly story. And by the way, the CIA murdered a guy named Al Jammadi there in Abu Ghraib. And it was the CIA that strung him up. It was not the National Guard.

And they hung him with his arms behind his back. back from the ceiling till it crushed his chest and suffocated him to death. And it was John Durham who investigated the origins of Rushagate was the same guy who let him off. Yeah. Anyway. You know, and it's like, well. Wait, before, hold that thought one second.

Let me just say, everyone knows that Daryl Cooper is beholden to no man other than his voluntary donors at his substack. But that is not true for me. my soul is owned by my coffee dealer Phil Pepin from Moondose artisan coffees.com and this is my Scott Horton Show blend. It is Ethiopian and Sumatran coffee all mixed together is why it tastes so dang good.

And if you go to Scott Horton.org, oh, there, more or better. You go to Scotthorton.org and the right-hand margin, there is a link there. Or if you just go to Scotthorton.org slash coffee, just type that in. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. You can get some of this, and then I get a little bit of a kickback

and also get to drink coffee in the morning and not, man, I'm telling you, the amount of money I save on coffee, I told this guy, you know, you want to advertise on my show? I don't want money. Just pay me in coffee, which is what he does. And I am so very grateful and thankful. And what? I have no choice. I'm completely addicted to this substance. So everyone type in Scott Horton.org slash coffee and buy some. And as long as I'm doing ads, I want to reiterate from last week. I have the real live version right here. It's the latest book from the Libertarian Institute. Creative chaos inside the CIA's covert war to topple the Syrian government by William Banwagon. And this guy is just the most fantastic writer and the bravest investigative journalist. He was kidnapped by al-Qaeda over there and survived. He went camping out with the Yazidis in Afghanistan, getting the true story of how the Kurdish, the Barzani clan, was back in al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS and all this stuff. And, man, he's just fantastic. again, a huge part of the reason that my chapter on Syria and Iraq War III in enough already

is so good is because I was able to borrow so heavily from this hero's work. And it's such an important book. I publish it. I owe it to this guy. Do everything I can to boost it. Again, it's brand new out on Amazon right now. Uh, the Kindle will be out very soon. I got my other guy working on it. Creative Chaos by the great William Van Wagon and the 17th book by the Libertarian Institute. Um, and so, yeah, there's my show. shameless, no need to be shameless, but my extremely proud plugs of the day there. So now say the brilliant thing you were going to say. Well, it's just, I guess, kind of my closing thought on that issue, because there's other things we want to talk about, is it, you know, and I think

this is a right-wing position, right? A conservative position that you can, like a conservative can understand that, like, if we go from being a society where we're not comfortable with kids being exposed to pornography, let's say, right? But then now they are exposed to it. You can tell a right-wing person that, and they'll be cognizant of the fact that, like, we're suffering from something there. Like, we lost something, and that's not a, this is not a good thing for us or our society. Like, it's just, there's just something that we lost. And similarly, like, with this stuff, like, a society and us as individual, we as individuals, are better when we see something like Abu Ghraib, when we see something like Gaza, and we are horrified by it,

then if we're not, you know, it's just you're a different kind of person, like, once you're inured to that kind of thing. And it's not, and it's not an improvement, you know, and that's to me is, you know, like, I mean, I could talk about the economic stuff and the monetary stuff all day, but the, like, to me, the real, the real catastrophe of the global war on terror is just what it's done to us kind of psychologically and spiritually and how it's corrupt political all that darrell look man i mean you're a tough guy you're a veteran i mean the the obvious counter argument to what you just said is like no we have to go kick ass dude we can't let people mess with us and them radical islams represent a danger to us and so your job sir is killing them

dude what are you talking about all this wimp stuff about leaving the world alone when it's so dangerous out there and i don't say that to be like silly but like that is the devil's argument position that is the george w bush position is all tough guys unite to go and do tough guy stuff and so all wimps and weanies you can stay home but the the the real men have to go and do the tough job that they know needs doing. So you're telling me you don't believe in that because I know you used to. Yeah, I think a lot of veterans

don't, of the war on terror, don't believe in that anymore. You know, they look back. And it's not that, I mean, you can do this even with somebody like, like, Jocko, and don't take what I'm saying as like me telling you his position. I'm not putting words in his mouth, but just from knowing the guy well, like, even somebody like him,

just he's a G.I. Joe action figure, team America dude, right? Even people like him, they look back and they look and they say, you know, like I had to give a folded flag to the mothers of some of my guys. And when I look back on it, I don't know what it was for. Like, I don't know why we had to go, like what anybody got out of that. And worse, like, they're even looking back at it and saying, you know, even if we would have won, even if we would have won, if things would have gone the way that George Bush Donald Rumssel promised us, even then, I don't really see what we're getting out of this. You know, what did any of it do for us, even if it all worked out? It just seems like, you know,

it's this churn. It's just the mowing the lawn thing that, you know, the Israelis talk about, where you're almost going out and doing it. I actually heard somebody make this argument explicitly that keeping Afghanistan, keeping that war going was a good thing simply because it kept our military sharp. You have these guys, the Taliban types and the postunes who they, you know, they're warriors. They want to fight. Great. We have a place. We can cycle our frontline troops through. They can get some experience. And then, and I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. Like, it's depressing to hear like somebody that in general that I actually like and respect. He's a good guy like in general. But like to hear him say that, I just like, I wanted to bang my head against a war, you know?

severe rationalizations there you know it is it's really sad and i agree with you that like it absolutely has corrupted the spirit of the country um you've said this before in a way i'm like me it sounds smaltzy and sentimental and i don't like it but on the other hand like yeah no it really is a real ass thing that like the long-term history books from now are going to have us as such bastards god the yemen war nobody even knows or cares about about, but man, they killed 300,000 people minimum for, you talk about nothing. And that war's as sinful as Iraq War II in every way. And what's going on in Gaza now, you got upset as hell about Trump bomb in Iran for a minute.

But he's been Joe Biden helping Netanyahu slaughter these poor Palestinians day in and day out for months now, deliberately starving him. They asked Trump about it. He goes, yeah, I think he should finish the job, dude. He's as bad as he can be on it. And it'll be a miracle if they're not carpet bomb in Ramallah and Janine. I mean, they've already killed 10,000 people in Janine or something, whatever it was, thousands. It'll be a miracle.

They're not just carpet bombing the population centers of the West Bank and ethnically cleansing them the exact same way they're doing to Gaza now by the end of Trump's term. And it doesn't it feel a little bit like, oh, well, whatever. I mean, we inherited that from Biden. It's just this thing that's going on. And you know how those Israelis are. And like, I don't know. I mean, people are, I shouldn't say that. People are getting more and more outraged about it.

But there is like, I know you can relate. There's a feeling of helplessness here too where we know that Trump doesn't care what we think about this. He's going to do whatever they say. It almost feels like, you know, thinking about Netanyahu recently saying that the next phase now is that the IDF's going to move in and take the remainder of Gaza and occupy the rest of it. And, you know, it almost seems like, you know, if you look at polls, right, of just Americans opinions of Israel, like, the change over the last two years has just been unbelievable.

Like, I never would have predicted it, even if you would have told me all the terrible things that happened, they were going to happen in Gaza. I wouldn't have believed it would be like this, where, you know, you have even Republicans under 50, I mean, are a majority, like, critical of Israel now rather than favorable. That I think, you know, it almost seems like they're looking at these numbers and realizing that this, this, this, you know, American, you know, American, evangelical Christianity, Ted Cruz, like, you know, Jesus wants us to send bombs to Netanyahu to kill Palestinians, like that that's something that is like a boomer, you know, 65 and older kind of fading out. And if you look at like the younger you go, the further away from that

you get. And it's almost like they're seeing that. And they're like, guys, we got like 10 years to finish this. We got to get rid of these people, finish this job, build our greater Israel now. and look yeah okay they'll complain they'll hate us in 10 years we'll you know we'll we'll make it up to him you know well well after nettingyahu's dead we'll have a bunch of think pieces about how you know he really was kind of a tyrant just like they have bill clinton now that now that they want to go after trump or whatever for like uh you know um any of the like sexual assault allegations of course now they have to be like yeah bill bill clinton probably did rape when yeah right guys that's a And they'll have those kind of things and try to, and that, it really does look like they're just sort of sprinting for the finish line right now.

Yeah. By the way, I want to mention, and for the audience who maybe aren't familiar, especially like, you know, obviously my people know, but for your folk who may be unfamiliar, read anti-war.com every day, man. And hell, the Libertarian Institute, don't let me sell my own first thing short, you know, the great Kyle Anselone and all of our great writers at the Institute are doing such great. work on this. We just published a great one by Jeremy Hamm and the other day. But, you know, Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com is on top of this news. And it's in the top headlines every single day, how many people they kill over there. And it's, I used to say it was like Waco every day, but it's really, you know, about a Waco and a half or more every day. It's about 120 something. It seems to be about the average. I'm not keeping that close a track. But it seems to be more than 100

Palestinians slaughtered every single day, day in, day out. And again, this is an Indian reservation this is a ghetto within israel i don't care what you call it they annexed this territory back in 67 and so um this is the equivalent of bombing an indian reservation out in arizona or bombing a black ghetto in baltimore or in uh chicago or something like that and just slaughtering people by the high tens of thousands in this way and it's i i urge people really if if you're not that familiar go and just look at X. Put Gaza and in your X search and just look at the images coming out of there and the video coming out of there. You will identify very quickly the level of cruelty that is being inflicted upon these people. It is really bad. And it is on us. This is the Joe Biden Netanyahu

War, the Donald Trump Netanyahu War, the U.S. Israeli War against, I mean, you can't call it a war at all, as Bill Hicks said, a war is when two armies are fighting. It's just a canned hunt. It's a turkey shoot, man, fish in a barrel, just a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign, a genocidal campaign against the women and children and the civilian population of the strip. In May, Netanyahu himself, not just his advisors, but Netanyahu himself said in May, we have destroyed all their homes, so they have no home to come back to so that now they can choose to voluntarily emigrate. And that's it. The headlines are constantly, If we can't ship them to Somalia, we'll ship them to Libya.

If we can't ship them to Libya, we'll ship them to Indonesia. We can ship them to Indonesia. The new one this week was maybe we can send them to South Sudan, where the CIA broke South Sudan off from Sudan. That was on Wesley Clark's list, after all, remember, well, the neocons list that Clark told us about, I mean to say, but the famous Clark list. And so maybe we'll move them there. I mean, they are openly declaring their genocidal intent on a regular basis.

I have one right here, which is Bezal Smotrich. In the Times of Israel, there's a right-wing paper in Israel. Smotrish says he'll okay, 3,000 more homes east of Jerusalem, quote, burying the idea of a Palestinian state forever. And which, of course, that ship sailed a hell of a long time ago. But they keep reiterating that. This is the same guy Smotrich, who before October the 7th was the one, and I got my Israeli-American friend translated the Hebrew for me,

know, custom order, as long as you, as well as you can read the subtitles. And the video is still on X of Bezalil Smotrich saying, in this game of de-legitimization, Hamas is an asset. And the Palestinian authority is a liability. See, because it's all about trying to paint the Palestinians as terrorists to the international community and to the liberals in Tel Aviv. And so as long as we can say, oh, look, Hamas, then Hamas is an asset. That's why we want to keep them there, right? So call it Obama-style treason, right, against their own people. But as Netanyahu put it repeatedly, and again, we have him on tape now, so they can't deny it anymore, we control the height of the flame. Yeah, we deliberately, not the Palestinian people have elected Hamas. Likud has

boasted Hamas on the Palestinian people. And yes, you're right. They are. They are. are dangerous terrorists but don't worry we control the height of the flame we know what we're doing but we need are no one to talk to certificate to show the u.s congress to show the europeans to show the televive liberals you don't expect us to negotiate with these people do you as the most cynical plan in the world and they openly admit it and brag and boast about it's as simple as that you want to talk about material support for terrorism you want to talk about who's responsible for hamas it's literally the prime minister of israel and his men are more responsible by far for hummus Moss's so-called rule, subcontract rule in the Gaza Strip than any Palestinian, you know,

as far as choosing them to to have power over the civilian population there. And you hear, they bragged about it. Yeah. And, you know, what's interesting is like, you can go back. Like, if you, if you go read up on, you know, go ask Grock or just look up on Google, what is the, like, what are the pieces of evidence that people use to, um, attribute the deliberate intent of genocide to the Germans during the Second World War, for example. And like you look at it, and there's like a, there's a few things that are like,

you know, you have to sort of, you have like this, the Wancy conference with some second and third level officials who said, you know, and it's, and it's notes of some that somebody took and then somebody else transcribed of this conference that somebody there said, this is what Hitler wants. In other words, and this is not a way to try to delegitimize any of that. It's just way to say like you they have to go look they really have to like dig through archives to find little things where there's inferences and um you know same thing with with with the turks during the armenian genocide there's there's a fair amount there i mean there's some pretty incriminating statements but like to go find like just these these there's not like the flood of government

officials who are coming out and just announcing their intent to do what they're doing they're trying to hide it and all that and that's true for virtually all of the genocides of the 20s a century, you know? And in this one, I mean, I just, it's hard to imagine any other scenario where you've got the finance minister, the defense minister, the entire cabinet of this, of a government, just openly announcing their plans and as they're doing it, you know, and to have people just, I mean, still kind of just want to deny it, want to want to make excuses for it or rationalize it. It's dumbfounding, honestly. like yeah it's and it's depressing it's depressing yeah you know it's funny because and i understand

all the incentives that people have to think the way they think and and how hard it is to admit you're wrong and all that kind of thing but then we see it all around us too where people say no i'm out i used to believe in this but now i just can't anymore and like what are they going to do they can sit there and beat themselves up over how embarrassed they are that they had to change their mind or they could just be good on it from now on you know i try very hard maybe i'm not really good at this i guess it'd be for others to judge but i would way rather eat crow now and say sorry i screwed that up and get my facts straight for tomorrow then sit here and pretend that i didn't screw up and then keep screwing up keep saying the same wrong thing just so i don't have to admit

that i got it wrong or something like no man i can't live that way and i just think you know like we talked about with the christianity thing we're like okay your minister says the bible is why we must support this sin but if you look at another page it says man you really should not be doing things like this so like i'm asking you to change your religion i'm just asking you like which part of your religion do you really think is apt here at or like applies to this situation you know what i mean i think you can just it's the kind of thing where you're like you'd be driving your truck down the street or taking a shower or something and it occurs to you that like ah actually that doesn't really sound right, does it? You know what I mean? Just get a little bit of different perspective,

smoke a joint in your garage and kind of space out and be like, huh, I remember thinking that, but I don't think I agree with that anymore. You know what I mean? Take a chance to shift your point of view for a minute and you might find, and you know what? Who cares what your Uncle Bob thinks or what your, you know, friend Jimbo thinks, or where you can change your mind about whatever you want? And I understand. And I'm the same way, too. Everybody's concerned about what other people think about what they think and blah blah that's how it works but so in a way like it's a race hurry up and get good on this yeah or you're going to be so embarrassed to change your mind that you won't be able to now's your time i hate i hate when i see people like pierz morgan when he

came around yeah yeah and you have all these people be like oh welcome to the party it's about time oh now you're doing i'm like would you guys just shut up and like take a win for once you know welcome people like that yeah give him a beer and let everybody else know you are also welcome to change your mind we're not going to shame you for getting it right now come on over yeah because like you're just putting them in a in a very difficult situation you have to give people an out and you know just think of yourself like you know you're not right on everything all the time there are times where like you're misinformed or you have the wrong biases at the beginning and you have to eat that it's just and regardless like the point

here is to get this stopped it's not to win the argument it's not to like you know score points on Twitter is to get this stopped, man. And, like, anybody that wants to get on the right side of that, it's just, you've got to welcome those people, you know? And I understand, like, you know, all the emotion that's tied up in it. And it's really, I mean, it's, I get it. It's frustrating. And, like, you know, when you see people who've been propagandists for the wrong

side of something that important for them to switch sides, it does, you know, I get it. It looks like they're sort of, you know, now that it's getting to the point where it's, seems like maybe the general like social mood on the issue starting to turn now they're trying to get in front who cares man who cares we got peers morgan with his giant show exposing this stuff every day now that is all i care about i don't care how he got there you know and um yeah i think we need to you know you have to you just you got to learn to think like that man take a win yeah yeah absolutely all right so um a couple things how much time we got Oh, we're already at an hour.

So let me change the subject here real quick to a couple of things before we've got to go. The first one is there's a new development in the Russiagate hoax that I wanted to talk about real quick here. This is from racket news, of course, the great Matt Taibi, who, again, I talked to him last week. If people want to listen to that, it's at Scott Horton Show.com. But this is now an email from December 22nd, 2016, it was after they've been tasked with Obama with coming up with this ICA to try to pretend. that the Russians intervened because they wanted to help Trump win and all that, which was released then seven days before Trump was inaugurated in January of 17. So here is the email from James Clapper that is to Michael Rogers, who is the head of the NSA,

who's having trouble getting on board here and raising his estimate of how much to believe in this crap. And then it is also to John Brennan and Jim Comey, right? head of NSA, head of CIA, head of FBI from the Director of National Intelligence, okay? And he says, understand your concern. Oh, he's answering Mike Rogers here who's saying, ah, geez, I don't know. My guys are not really committed to this stuff here. He says, understand your concern.

It is essential that we, CIA, NSA, FBI, ODNI, be on the same page and are all supportive of the report in the highest tradition of that's our story. and we're sticking to it. This evening, CIA has provided to the NIC the complete draft generated by the ad hoc fusion cell. We will facilitate as much mutual transparency as possible

as we complete the report, but more time is not negotiable. We may have to compromise on our normal modalities since we must do this on such a compressed schedule. This one project that has to be oh sorry pardon me this is one project that has to be a team sport in other words these are

orders directly from the d n i that nsa enough of you and your dissents now we are going with this thing and of course mike rogers clicked his heels like a good little national socialist and did what he was told instead of telling the truth to the people and we know that trump told him Mike Rogers, why don't you tell everybody I'm innocent? And they pretended to believe, aha, see, that's obstruction of justice. He was trying to get the National Security Agency Director to intervene and ruin the investigation. When, no, he wasn't. He knew that he was innocent.

And he knew that the NSA must know that. So he was saying, NSA Director, can't you, like, chime in here and tell them this isn't true? and they all oh no they all pretended this is the height of criminality i'm sorry mr president we're going to have to pretend to investigate you for two and a half more years here before we let you off the hook and it just wouldn't be proper for the national security agency to say anything before all that is complete and trump should have had all these never mind sorry go ahead yeah one of the i think back on that period you know i was thinking the other day after we had our conversation about this last week how if somebody's like 20 years old they were

12 and 12, like 11, 12 years old in 2016. And all this stuff was probably maybe just background noise. The adults were talking about it. Hey, I got a funny here. If you're a little younger out there, you have got to understand how insane the environment was surrounding Russiagate. I mean, you had Rachel Maddow, you had every channel, every day, every show, 24-7 on the cable news channels and everything

coming. And she's like, very solemnly looking into the camera and saying, I never thought I'd say this. I just, I never thought that this would happen in our country, that, but I have to just admit to myself, and I think we have to admit as a people that the president of the United States is working for Vladimir Putin. I mean, it was that, like, every day, all day, and it was just taken seriously. If you didn't, if you didn't take it.

Take it like Matt Taibi. Matt Taibi should be getting a Pulitzer Prize for his work on that. He has completely vindicated for everything. He was trashed. He was blacklisted everything. A respected journalist. I've been reading Taibi since the financial crisis, you know. And he's completely right on this thing.

And they try to punish him for it. And if this was a few years back, you know, before there could be a substack, before there could be some of these other open channels, they would have shut his ass down and closed him out. And thank God they can't do that now. They ran him out of the Rolling Stone. Yeah. Yeah, for being completely right, you know.

And what's crazy is it like, again, you'd think like in a just world, he'd be getting hired back to run like the Washington Bureau of the New York Times or something. But no, he's still got to just go publish his own stuff and whatever because they're angry that he was right and they were wrong, you know? I remember back when all this was going on. So I was like obsessed with this story from 2016 all the way up to maybe, I guess maybe the year after, probably like till 2019, right? So after the Mueller testimony disaster happened and then I just started to realize

that like, oh, nothing is going to, these people are not going to pay for this. And I just can't, I can't keep watching. So I'm going to lose my mind. And so. I was, but I was super obsessor, reading the blogs, listen to the podcast, and you would come across these things, and this is a lot of conservatives, a lot of Republicans. I mentioned last week that, like, the people who were pushing all these lies,

they really underestimated how engaged the MAGA people were with this story. They knew people who were, they knew who Danchenko was. They knew who Ms. Sued was, all these, like, obscure people. They knew all those people's names. They knew the whole story behind it because of the podcast and the blogs they were listening to. And there was, I remember coming across, you know, when the Carter Page thing came out. And they were trying to say, well, you know, just all the equivocations and excuse making and everything. And you mentioned last week how Carter Page was, he was an asset of the CIA.

He would go debrief the CIA every time he met with these guys. And so he, you know, he gets approached by these two Russians and, you know, they try to get him to do something or whatever. And he immediately goes to the CIA, tells them all about it. Well, the guy at the FBI who was a tap, he was like the liaison on the Carter Page case. The guy who signed off in March of 2016

on like basically closing the file on Carter page was John Carlin, who I think was the head of the counter, not counterintelligence. He was head of counterintelligence at the FBI. And then when they, They wanted to run a FISA warrant to track Carter Page and everybody around him, meaning the president, meaning everybody around the president, John Carlin, the guy who knew 100% that this was all above board. He signed, he was the case officer for Carter Page, like working all this.

He signed the FISA warrant, and then he quit the FBI two weeks later. And it's like when you see stuff like that or when you see like, uh, when Comey was being interviewed by Brett Baer, right? And this is like down the line a little bit. And he asked him about, you know, the Hillary Clinton having, you know, I can't remember the exact detail, about something like that. Oh, oh, oh, the Clinton campaign paying for the steel dossier. Yeah.

And Comey looks at him and he goes, yeah, I'm not sure that that's, I just, I don't really have any information on that. It's like, but everybody knows. now that's public information you know and now we know we look back on emails and everything else he knew that like at the very very beginning and so you see that you're like if they're lying about something like that it's because they know they that they're wrong you know and uh it's just it's an incredible story i mean and i'm very happy that it's all come out and everything but man it is really hard to swallow that people are not going to get perp walk for this yeah well so i mean

they may. There is a grand jury now. And I'm not going to hold my breath for seeing high level justice and defense. I mean, pardon me, justice and CIA officials go to prison. But it could happen. And after all, if you come at the king, you better not miss. And they did, man. They swung and they miss. And then they tried to put them in prison again and again and again after that, too. And so, you know, he owes it to us to be committed to destroying his enemies. He better. and they deserve it and they broke the law it's not like he has to cheat and persecute them yeah exactly long in prison it's fine and so all they have to do is their job and these people are cooked so i'm not holding my breath because on that level it's not law at that level it's

politics of whether you're going to go that far whether you're not as we talked about before um but there ain't no question that they deserve it and by the way so speaking my interview with Taibi last week. See, this is, I'm so just over-promised on too many things. I still have not had a chance to read the newly declassified annex to the Durham report. I have had a chance to review almost all of the newly declassified House Committee investigation of the origin of the ICA. But the great Taibi went through and he did parse that.

newly declassified annexed to the Durham report with a fine-tooth comb. And he found where essentially it was like this. They said all 17 intelligence agencies agreed, right? Pretending that it was a national intelligence estimate from the National Intelligence Council, which would have included DIA and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and all these others, which of course were not included. That was not true at all. It was, and in fact, they did admit this at the time.

It's just the press all lied about it. At the time, they called it an ICA because it was not an NIE, right? So there was this made up kind of ad hoc intelligence report. And then I'm not sure exactly how quickly it came out that in Brennan's own words, this was a hand-picked group of people, but we were led to believe from the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. Well, then it turns out that, no, they were all from the CIA. And then it turns out that they, the CIA analysts objected,

to each and every single individual piece of so-called evidence or innuendo that was used to support that ICA and each and every time they were overruled by Brennan. And so that report was just written by Brennan. That was it. That was not the agreed upon conclusion of anyone except the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the guy that started the war in Ukraine too. That guy. And the guy who briefed Obama, the guy who briefed Obama the previous summer that Hillary Clinton

had an active program going to try to pin all this stuff on Donald Trump. I mean, it's just a cold consciousness of what he was doing. And who we know for a fact actually started the thing himself in December of 2015. And we know for a fact knew that Hillary Clinton was getting on board for what he was doing by March. So we had that report you're referring to as like from the summer. He briefed Obama in the summer. But we know that Brennan knew, I mean, it was his thing in the first place,

but we know for a fact that the CIA knew all about what the Russians knew about Hillary's plan to divert attention from her missing emails by saying that Donald Trump was in league with the Kremlin. And this is before any even rumor of the hacked and leaked DNC emails that didn't come until the summertime. So this is at the beginning of the year. It's a total frame-up job, and we don't know exactly when Obama first knew about. We know he knew at least by July, but we know that John Brennan, who originated the thing, also knew the other's role, particularly the Clinton administration's role. And we know also that the FBI knew all along too.

So that means that every single scrap of crap that was brought to the FBI, the entire spring and summer of 16, they all knew in advance to expect a deluge of crap from Clinton and her people trying to insinuate some kind of link between Trump and Russia. They all knew. They had all taken the inoculation and then they went ahead and pretended to be sick anyway. You know, that was the deal. Yeah, and Obama, I mean, you know, that analogy for this day and age, but you understand what I mean.

Like Obama played it fairly smart. I mean, he never, you notice he never came out. really talked about it. I don't know if he's ever talked about it, really. He was not one of the guys coming out and saying, this is very serious, you know, that blah, blah, blah, like you didn't give one of those speeches before or after he was in office. And it's almost as if he was taking his, he was doing the Pontius pilot thing, kind of washing his hands and saying, you guys, go ahead and do this. You got my blessing, but don't, no, don't drag me into this. This is your thing. But, you know, the thing that was so frustrating about it is that even back in 2016,

2017 like as all this stuff was going on it was so obvious to anybody who would just employ like a fraction of their common sense that this whole thing was ridiculous i remember when the uh the new york times published a story so it's just an insane thing you think about how stupid this is the new york times published a story where anonymous intelligence intelligence officials said that they had a source at the kremlin a human source at the kremlin who was in the room when Vladimir Putin gave the order to hack the servers and blah, blah, blah. And right then and there, I'm like, wait a second. Because this is not, they didn't put this information out there in order to like put some indictments down or anything. This is just purely to drive the news cycle for a week. So it's like, wait a second, you're telling me that you have an intelligence source that is in the room with Vladimir Putin when he's giving like the most sensitive order you can

imagine and you're burning that guy like just to like drive the news cycle for a week like it's like it's just so stupid that it doesn't even or when muller like um you know when muller uh put put those indictments out of um a bunch of the russian intelligence officials and everything and they talked about how like they we have been able to tell like which russians were at which computer do typing what doing what all these things so we know exactly and here's these indictments it's like okay so you you have this unbelievable intelligence source where high-level Russian intelligence officials, you're tracking them on their computers

as they're doing the most sensitive stuff they're doing. And you're going to burn that source for some indictments that are never going to go to court. They're in Russia. They're never going to be given up. Like, it's just so obviously BS. You know, and like when you couldn't get people who were like, you know,

I assume Rachel Maddow has an IQ over, you know, the average, and you just, a lot of these people do, you know, that they just, they're not incapable of understanding these things, you know, and that's just how you know that they were all lying. They were just, they were lying and not only lying, but like lying in a way that was like, you know, they were layering emotion on top of their lies to like sell it. Like it was just, it's so gross, man. Well, you know, and this is one of the new developments. in there too is that now it's clear

that Jim Comey when he made that announcement that okay the investigation and Hillary Clinton is over and we're not recommending prosecution and all of that that he did that because he was afraid that the FBI investigation

was leading to the Clinton plan to frame Trump because they were looking into the missing emails and that was leading right to how they were diverting from it and when Comey realized that uh-oh my own guy are going to figure out what's going on here that was when he announced the shutdown of the thing and then i'm trying to remember the exact the exact anecdote that triggered brennan to call the russians

and tell them you better knock off whatever you were doing which only exposed whatever intelligence asset they claimed to have had i forgot the exact anecdote there but you could see where it was this is in Taiibi's report you can see where it was essentially intended to prevent the lie from being debunked right they had sources coming in

that was what it was it was one of the sources that the CIA did rely on who told them that Putin was didn't care who won and he didn't trust either way he figured it was going to be bad either way but he figured that he could handle it and it wasn't that big of a deal and then Brennan burned that source

because he was debunk the lie. One of my favorites was when Glenn Simpson, the guy who ran, what is it, Fusion GPS, right, when he gave his closed door classified testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. And that night, Diane Feinstein drank too much cold medicine. That was their excuse. And she leaked it. She like published it and sent it out. So it was in the media everywhere the next day. And it's like everybody watching that who like was following the case knew exactly what happened. is that he went in there and gave some like pretty tight detail like in his story and they needed this out there so that everybody else could get on the same page so they didn't come in

telling different stories everybody knew that's what happened but they were like oh she uh she released this highly classified information because she drank to with cold medicine or didn't know that that's i mean all right you know from the from the i know i'll let us go i'm sorry chris our producer um we we always keep you longer than the hour but i remember too when they first formed the special counsel, right? And it's like, I'm not a lawyer, but I know something about, you know, I follow politics enough and have for a long time that I know how special counsels work, basically. You know, it's when there are political considerations that you need to let the public know

that this is an independent, legitimate investigation. It's not going to be influenced by all that. And so what is the, like, number one thing you do not do when you're setting up a special counsel where you don't take the investigators from the FBI who were already working that case and move them over to the special counsel the whole point of the special counsel is to separate those things and so when they start doing things like that like just there was just this drumbeat of things where you're like am i am i insane like i turn on every channel and even fox news republican senators on the senate intelligence committee everybody is like well this is just this is

very serious and you know we think maybe adam ship is going a little far but we have to take this very seriously and it's like they were all lying dude like all of them and this is what's crazy to me too is that these are the people now that trump is like cozying up to and like in hugging and jettisoning his base in favor of i don't get that at all you know but let's wrap this up because i'll keep going you know me i obviously i got my uh got my dander up now so we better shut it down dude i'm obsessed with russia gate i can't help it and just wait until i actually finally do get to lay my own eyeballs on that durham report annex i know there's so much in there there's new stuff coming out everybody read matt taibi racket dot news and uh iran mate is also doing very great stuff

on his substack and at the gray zone and whatever um but listen before we go um there's one important thing and maybe unimportant maybe we just end with something funny here i'm not exactly sure what it was but uh the important thing that i want to talk about was hiroshima nagasaki which we note um every august and um i have this tweet that i put out there you know had one of my guys tweet out for me um and it's i have a blog entry like this at the libertarian institute and at antiwar dot com anybody can find it really easy just put my name in there in your search and then search for who opposed nuking Japan and i've been collecting this list of names for a very long time and i i have this in

my book hotter than the sun um and i have all these quotes a bunch of hippies right just a yeah but a bunch of commies like macarthur and nimitz and um hap arnold and william lehy and well so in fact fun anecdote is tucker carlson got in big trouble for opposing nukeing japan on the Joe Rogan show. He's like, nuking a city, what the hell is that? And everyone was like, oh my God, you hate America so much. And he was like, geez, I don't know. All I said was, it seems weird to nuke a city, you know?

I don't know. I really like Tucker in just the way he says stuff sometimes. It just seemed weird to me that we would do something. It's so horrible. I don't even know if that's a direct quote, but probably. Anyway, so he got in such trouble for that. So when I went and did his show, I brought him a print out, and I got a little folder and everything for him to put on his shelf and save for safe keeping in case he ever needs it like the full printout of my full collection of names here for who opposed new king japan

and of course it begins with dwight eisenhower and then is macarthur and nimitz uh as i said half arnold and william leahy and um even um oh the mad bomber uh curtis lemay um said it was completely unnecessary they all agreed it was completely unnecessary to use the adam bombs on the Japanese. Even Harry Truman had written in his diary as soon as Stalin declared war on Japan. He wrote Finney Japs. He knew that they were in the very last stages of surrendering. And it was not the atom bombs that got them to change their mind. It was the threat of occupation by the communists that got them to surrender to the Americans first. And so it was completely unnecessary. Truman lied from the beginning and claimed that he only knew military bases when he

new cities and including Nagasaki, which was the center of Christianity in Japan, and in fact, like dropped them right on the Catholic Church there. Fun anecdote, a bunch of the American Christian missionaries who were there, they survived just by jumping in a ditch. And it kind of showed how like, these are not really that effective battlefield weapons, but you can definitely kill a city full of civilians with them, you know? They're the Democrats. You know how they are.

And anyway, but the point being is this, man, and I think it is really important, especially for people who, you know, are already interested. of this and you like an important talking point or two. This is the kind of thing like we're talking about before about to really change people's mind and get them to admit that maybe things are a little different than they thought before is because just like when Tucker said that on Joe Rogan, people freak out, man. They have a real emotional exception to that because they know that true man would not have done that if he did not have to. And so as H.W. Bush put it, we would have one million men invading Japan. Now, they estimated we'd have lost like 30,000, and then later

that got embellished to 50,000. And then in the hands of cooks nowadays, it's always a million or more than a million Americans would have definitely died invading Japan because we're supposed to just assume that if two nukes did it, then full-scale invasion would not get a surrender until they got all the way to Kyoto and put the bayonet through the emperor's throat, right like sure anyway and then also as though by any measure it's a fair trade to nuke a city full of women and children whose men are all gone anyway and nuke a city full of women and children or you know people who are ill fit to fight elderly or crippled people or whatever the only men left um and kill all them in trade for GIs i mean they're conscripts after all but still like

that's not fair and the whole thing is just crazy and wrong and Admiral Leahy who was the four-star Admiral who was the chief of staff to Harry Truman tried to stop him and he said his religion that is Christianity forbid him from doing things like that

he couldn't stand it and it was just Truman and evil what's his name the Secretary of State I'm sorry Stimson was still No no

Simpson was the Secretary of War the skull and bones and then the Secretary of State was that asshole I'm sorry I always forget his name but they were the only three who were for it. The rest of the entire war cabinet was against it. All the leaders in the

Pacific were against it. And five-star general leader of United Nations forces in Europe, Dwight David Eisenhower, was against it. Herbert Hoover absolutely denounced it in the bitterest terms over and over again. And the two most important founding writers of the conservative movement in

the post-war era, Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver both. So this is an absolute moral abomination. You talk about like what we're doing to Yemen or what we're doing Gaza now, same thing here. Just because some Democrat commits some horrible war crime doesn't mean we have to all rally around it and identify

our own lives with it. It ain't right at all. And the fact that those men said so is really all you need to know. And you know what I mean? Because it could be that yes, we did have to do it, but that Eisenhower and MacArthur

and Nimitz and Arnold and Leahy and LeMay just didn't understand. understand that fact, right? They just, they just, that's impossible. They weren't hard enough to do the violent, difficult things that men have to do in war. Yeah, especially that whim of May. What did he know about doing anything?

The crazy thing about it, too, is like all of the necessity arguments are all based on the idea that it's just obvious that we had to demand an unconditional surrender. It's like, that's not, that's not been the European way of war for centuries. Like, that's not how we're emperor anyway. Yeah. Like everything starts with that. And like most of the time, like we didn't fight wars like that for for literally for centuries. People, if you would have like, you know, we win, you lose. We're going to exchange these territories and take, you know, this indemnity from you or whatever. But the idea that there will be no negotiated surrender. You will you will you will surrender unconditionally, which means if we want to let our army walk into your young girls bathrooms and do what they want, whatever. It's we're the boss. It is unconditionally. you have nothing to say. And the people who are demanding this of them have been just firebombing their civilians on Moss. I mean, like 100,000 people in one night in Tokyo and doing this over and over.

And they're like, we're going to unconditionally surrender to these people. Like, you know, you're putting them in a very difficult situation. They would have negotiated. There's a lot of evidence out there that they would have accepted a reasonable negotiated surrender that was not significantly different than the one that ended up happening in 1944. Gar Almerovitz is the best historian on that

for people who want to look into that. And by the way, Daryl, a guy sent me years ago, he made me give him his solemn promise that I would never share it with anyone. I have it here on my local computer. There's a photograph that his grandfather took of Hiroshima

with a panoramic view of the city from the middle of the city in like super high quality. I'll show it to you if you ever come visit here. But he made me promise never to share it with anyone or posted publicly anywhere but man it is something else to see um you know the devastation there and and then wait back to my real point was that man i gotten in real bitter arguments with people about this before we didn't need to nuke japan like

people will fist bite you for saying that people are really dedicated to how absolutely important and necessary and good that was to do that they believe that their whole life their dad taught them that their minister and their coach agree and that's it and they're not going to hear it from you but then you start rattling off all those names and you know what they say they say Eisenhower said that lay he said that Nimitz said that Nitz said that nitsa said that no no that can't be yes it's true all the pacific theater commanders said we didn't have to do this held ahead of the Army Air Corps said we don't have to do it. And then they say, oh, my God, I did not know. And I'm sorry I was about to kick your ass for saying that. Like that's, I've been in that

discussion a few times. People get upset. But then it's a hard landing, dude. Welcome to the real world where actually, I think you'd agree. I, Geisenhower and General MacArthur, if they can agree on this, they know better than you. You actually were wrong up until now when you've changed your mind in favor of them. Isn't that right? Welcome to reality, man. You've been living in Harry Truman's world. You know, sorry.

And, but then I like things like that because, well, look, if I got that one wrong, then, okay, I'm listening, right? You know what I mean? That's all I'm asking for, man. I don't need you to go ahead and just roll right over. But time to admit that, like, maybe things aren't so cut and dry is just I like flags a lot. and so shut up boy you know what i mean there's more to it and then to close i was just gonna ask you if it's really worth bringing up or what i i missed it because i'm not on x anymore i got too

many other jobs but you said that you got in a big fight with the libertarians this week so i kind was interested in what that was next week next week we're already at 90 minutes just tell me after the show no well it'll be a actually it's a good conversation i think okay it'll be it'll be an interesting thing to talk about so all right bet all right well that's been provoked Everybody go buy my books at amazon.com here this is then enough already about the middle east and provoked about the uh cold war with russia there i need to sell them so that i can make money and also i wrote them so that you would know all the things inside them and then of course extremely importantly william ban wagonin creative chaos this guy has put such hard work

into this i mean literally he was kidnapped by al qaeda in syria and that's not made up that's a real thing like this guy is a badass he's one of my best guys at the institute this book is brand new out and there is no believe me dude i read i don't know i read a lot of books about zero 10 or something about the syrian war and this is by far the best and the real story of why that whole damn thing was america and our allies ball etc dude you can't buy journalistic street cred like getting kidnapped by al-Qaeda that's exactly right and yeah old uh william bandwagon and he don't have to embellish. He speaks very softly. I'll go ahead and speak for him. He deserves the credit. He deserves the support and the read for his great journalism. So that's that, creative chaos.

And that's it for Provokedin. Thank you very much, Daryl. And it's good to be with you as always. And we'll see you next week. Later, everybody. You know? I'm going to be. You know, We're going to be able to be.