Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/31/25 Brad Pearce on Somalia, Romania, Georgia, USAID and more

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Scott is joined by Brad Pearce to discuss some of the recent developments around the world that he’s following and writing about. They start with what’s happening in Somalia and how the Trump administration will likely affect the dynamics in that region. They then move on to Yemen, where Trump’s first term was defined by continuing Obama’s support for the Saudi war on the Houthis, and his second term has—so far—been defined by a continuation of Biden’s policy of direct strikes on the Houthis. They also discuss Romania, the revelations about USAID and Washington’s meddling in the country of Georgia.  Discussed on the show: “Will Donald Trump Make Somaliland Great Again?” (The Wayward Rabbler) Broken Camel Bells: Somalia: Age of Terrorism 2006-2022 by Abukar Abdo Arman “Yemeni Civil War Unleashes a Plague of Locusts” (Antiwar.com) Brad Pearce is a writer focused on international relations and politics. He writes at The Wayward Rabbler. Follow him on Twitter @WaywardRabbler This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i got brad pierce he's the wayward rabler on twitter and on substack and he writes for us but not often enough at the libertarian institute welcome back to the show how you doing man oh i'm doing great thank you for having me back on very happy to have you here you write such smart stuff let's start with somalia here um they're in the news because there are some reports in the israeli press that maybe this is where donald trump is going to cleanse

the Palestinians to but you have a piece here about uh question whether Donald trump will make Somalia land Somaliland i know that i don't know why i said it wrong Somaliland great again so maybe let's start with that what's the difference between somalia and Somaliland and maybe even throw in a punt land or two land or two there and help us understand also maybe the importance of Somalia to the American Empire as well. Okay. So, yeah, what the thing that Trump said, that's after my article was published, but yet it's very strange that the three places they would say are Portland, Somaliland, and Morocco of, you know, all the places in the world. So basically when the state

of Somalia collapsed, Somaliland had been in revolt for around 10 years. There was a genocide against the clan there, known as the Isaac Genocide. And so they declared independence at the time in 1991. Later, and I believe in 1997 or 98, Puntland declared internal autonomy unilaterally, but without saying it's, you know, an internationally independent country. And both of those areas have been a lot better than the main Mogadishu part of Somalia. So in short, for the last, you know, 33, 34 years now, Somaliland has been a de facto independent state that's, it's very poor, and it still, you know, has general problems with corruption, low levels of educational attainment and that sort of thing.

But, you know, they really haven't had terrorism. They haven't had piracy. They are one of the only legitimately functioning democracies in Africa that has, you know, regular transitions of power after peaceful elections. And this whole time, they've been lobbying for international recognition. And they kind of attached their star to the Republicans, some of the top Africa people that are more supposedly on the realist side of things are big supporters of Somaliland. And so they really think that they have their chance with Donald Trump. And Somaliland has one of the best ports in Africa, whereas Somalia, under the Mogadishu government, has really never been successful. it's a black hole of American resources.

It remains violent and riddled with terrorists and piracy. So the belief is that Donald Trump may end the failed one Somalia policy, they call it, which means almost the exact opposite of the one China policy, by the way, and will recognize Somaliland, basically in return for being able to put an American naval base there. Yeah. So now I have a section on Somalia in my book where we talk about, really the war since 2001, but especially since 2006, when W. Bush backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia, which is what turned the Islamic courts union into the al-Shabaab insurgency and all

this. But all that has taken place to the south of our story here. Is that correct? Yes, it's under the Mogadishu government. So if you can imagine what Somalia looks like, it's kind of a, you know, like two lines that go into each other at an angle, like a 45 degree angle or whatever. Yeah, it's a seven. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a seven, perfect. So Somalia, Somaliland is the northern coast of that. And historically, if you look at a map from the imperial era, it was British Somaliland, whereas what we call Somalia was Italian Somaliland. I see. So when I read that in your article, I had that switch.

So the U.K., the formerly U.K. part was the South, the part that's been America's longest work, quite frankly, W. Bush sent, the Joint Special Operations Command. The Italian part is the South, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. I switched it again. Yeah. forgive me um and this is where yeah america's longs war uh bush sent joc and ciae there in december 2001 so now that afghanistan's over simole very poorly overall uh you know for the most part we have managed to keep what you would call a light footprint but uh it's it's just a black hole of

corruption um you know like two thirds of people in their parliament are dual citizens and they're in cliques uh you know for their country they have dual citizenship with the top two or the UK and the U.S. And so they go there to serve in the parliament as like the way someone else would join the Peace Corps or something and do, you know, little tours of duty in their home country and then come back and, you know, beg whatever country they're from to continue supporting the black hole of waste that is the Mogadishu government. Yeah. Well, you know, tell me what you think about this. You obviously from this article, it's a, the waywardrabler.com is the substack here. You have so much deep knowledge of Somali society.

and history going back here i wonder what you think about al-shab and you know what your recommendation would be for for how to solve this insurgency because america i guess just won't go home as long as they're there yeah you know i i mean there's not a really a good solution to it uh i mean i did read a really interesting book last year called uh broken camel bells by a man named abou bakar arman i hope i didn't get that wrong anyway you know it was talking about how kind of the problem with the Islamic courts union is that you know any legal system requires judges being like wise and responsible people but as they spread out through the countryside and everything

you had all of these you know like young people that got put in the position that were doing crazy things like banning watching sports or whatever but he was saying that you know Islam is the only thing holding Somalia together at this point when it's when it's so broken so like I don't really know how you how you get rid of terrorism but strangely, like it might be the case that recognizing that there's such a thing as like moderate Islamism is the only direction that you can go to kind of incorporate the elements into society that can be. But I would say nothing that we've done has worked and no one has any plan

to fix Somalia that is anything besides just continuing to waste money that goes to corruption. Yeah. I mean, that was my reading of it too, was that the Islamic Court's Union actually was fine and really they were a reaction to american support for the warlords in the first place it was even more decentralized than that before the ICU came together and that even then as you say like i mean in fact in my reading like the the rumors about them banning female employment and banning um movies and stuff these were embellished it was like all that had happened was kids were skipping school and going to the movies so they closed down the movie theater in the daytime you know this kind of thing that like was in other words

Not a story of Talibanian Islamist excess at all, but just the kind of thing that you would expect people to do maybe in any old town, you know? Well, a big part of it was just that it was decentralized. So you're trying to put someone in charge of every region. So then you do end up with some really extremist, like 30-year-old that makes a crazy ruling in one spot. But it wasn't, you know, their central thing. But, yeah, I mean, al-Shabaab was the most radical elements of that that wouldn't conform to anything else they were doing. And, you know, then has had this long-running terrorist insurgency. that once again is not really anywhere near being solved.

And a lot of that is actually up in Puntland, even though that area is somewhat calmer and better, you know, ran better. Well, you know, so there was this scholar from the Council on Foreign Relations named Bronwyn Bruton, who had written a couple of good studies about this back when, and she cited an example from, and I don't know, maybe people would think that this is too long ago to be a real precedent. But it sounds right to me, essentially, where in the... the 1990s there had been some groups of bin Ladenite-type extremists who had popped their head up

and maybe even made some inroads. But then the older men around killed them and they went away. And so, you know, the variable that mixes it all up, of course, is the American presence, especially, but the foreign presence overall, if you just allow the problems to work themselves out, those extremists 30-olds, like you're saying, they either get killed or they get five years older and smartened up anyway, you know? Yeah, well, that's the Al Jolani thing, I guess. Like, oh, he was just a terrorist when he was in his 20s. Now he's the president of Syria.

Yeah, right. Yeah, seriously. And you know what? If they can do it in Syria and his guys are still like total mass murderers, you know what I mean? If they can look the other way in Syria, why not Somalia after all this time? Yeah, so anyway, though, so what's interesting is that, you know, it appears in many ways that being detached from the international system is the only thing. thing that has made Somaliland work.

There's a really interesting author that he's a professor at Georgetown University named Ken Apollo who writes an Africanist perspective substack. And he was talking about how just all the ways once, if Somaliland gets connected to the international system, and I mean, they're kind of trying to shut down U.S. aid. But, you know, you'll get all of these, this money coming in and corruption and weird trinity projects and this and that. And then most importantly, because Somaliland's unrecognized, it relies on. on the actual consent of the government for legitimacy,

whereas basically every other state in Africa relies on international recognition for legitimacy and, you know, then has no reason to care how their people are doing. So that's one of the curious things about this is it's not, all the Somaliland activists have got really set on this idea that, you know, they want and need international recognition. It's actually much less obvious than international recognition will improve Somaliland in any way. though um what's in my my stance here is that Somaliland is an independent country and we should

recognize it as one simply because it's true and it would be one less fiction in our you know it's the whole like revenge of the reality based community thing it would be one less fiction in our ridiculous global empire sure um and yeah in principle i guess if it wasn't the american empire really doing anything except changing a line on a page that'd be one thing but as you were saying before this is all tied up in larger policies like as you say in your piece here china has a base in jibouti and this is all about control the horn of africa and the gates of the sea of aden and the red sea there right yeah exactly i mean and i i would say it needs to be emphasized that one of the only genuinely good things about the post-world war two order is that

there is general freedom of navigation that you know the anglo-americans have more or less enforced and in a less hypocritical fashion than they do most things have been relatively genuine about that and so it is bad for the world if you know you can't protect shipping in that crucial sea lane I would also just say in general

the Africa policy is in shambles and it's pretty much a lost cause the only way if you want to look at it from a grand strategy perspective recognizing Somaliland and setting up there it's kind of one of the only ways to salvage what has been salvage salvageable in a way that deals with the general global interest of you know protecting commercial shipping and a few other things like that it also gives us a a fallback area for everything in the middle east going to hell which it more or less is already so that's another thing to think about yeah um so and of course i mean the piracy is one thing but al-shabab is another and now that you're going to build a giant military base or i don't know how giant but they're going to build a

a military base there in Somalian land in the north then they're going to use it to escalate against the sound in fact what actually appears they would mostly use it to escalate against the Houthis in Yemen hey why not both

yeah well no exactly why not both but I mean I the concern I mean Trump bombed him the other day and said it was ISIS yeah that was in Portland and I have to say that I'm pretty sure that was done to reassure the Mogadishu government who is hiring new lobbyists and they're hiring new lobbyists probably with money that we gave them in the first place to

you know try to get the U.S. to not make the certain it's really a strange thing so Somalis are kind of the only true nation in Africa that uh well like nation state in Africa in the same way that you might have in Europe or something like that and so from the time it was founded in 1960 they were really like irredentist about you know having all of the Somalis under one one country and they're very you know uninterested in respecting international borders because there's a lot of Somalis and well Djibouti is French Somaliland or it was and then there's Somalis in Ethiopia and in Kenya and so everyone in the horn has always kind of been against the Mogadishu government because of this and so they despite the fact that it's completely unrealistic for them to take over Somaliland in any way

There really is still a very strong current that, you know, Somalia is the government of all Somalis everywhere and that the ultimate long-term goal is to have them all unified in one state. And that is part of why there's so much resistance to Somaliland independence despite the fact that they have not controlled it for over three decades and are not likely to at any point in the future. Yeah. Well, and then, so you mentioned the Houthis, Ansar, Allah, they're called, the group that has controlled. Sena, the capital of Yemen, for now 10 years. And as listeners to this show know, America bombed them, starting in March 2015 and all the way through the first year of Biden and into the very beginning of the second year of Biden. They finally knocked it off and signed a peace treaty. That was really America backing Saudi and UAE in their air war, which achieved nothing.

And al-Qaeda on the ground, as we documented numerous times, fighting that same coalition. aQAP and then but the hoot these i don't know if it cost them anything they're just as much in charge in saunas they were and of course they participated in uh the recent slaughter in um israel against the palestinians sticking up for the palestinians fire missiles at israel and firing missiles at american warships in the red sea and so and america's hitting them back now backing Saudi and UAE didn't do the trick for eight years do you foresee a regime change war an attempted regime change war against Ansarala in the Trump years or maybe just more punitive strikes or this kind of thing I would say I would say probably more punitive

strikes you know if they if they were to set up in in Somaliland it gives them a better ability to patrol the sea lane and that sort of thing but it it is pretty incredible the tenacity of the hooties over there and how how little has been accomplished against them despite the act absolutely brutal and you know anti-humanitarian war that's been ran against them and how much money was spent by the Saudis and by UAE how many munitions have been dropped so i don't i don't really see anyone displacing them yeah it doesn't seem like it um and war is the health of the state unless you lose and they have been benefiting from the war against them this whole time.

I haven't talked to him in a little while, but there's a Yemeni reporter I talked to from Sana'a who made it clear to me. Listen, I'm not a Houthi. I'm not as 80, and I'm not from the north. But we're all Houthis now.

This is our security force. He said, this is like if George Bush is from Texas, is just one state out of 50 in the Union, but when he's the president and America's attacked, everybody supports him. USA, United, right? Like that's in it.

Same thing in Yemen, of course. And so their regime has broader and broader support every time a Western explosive goes off in their land. Well, and you know, another way that that destabilized the region that almost no one talks about is that both sides of the Sudanese civil war fought there as mercenaries with the SAF fighting for the Saudis and the RSF were employed by the UAE. so like both sides of that war got a bunch of combat experience fighting in Yemen before they turned on each other in Sudan. Oh man, you know what? I mean, unless you named Peru or something like that, this is a war that, you know, I just mean Latin American controversies. I don't know what the hell is going on in Peru. I just mean I'm the worst on Latin America and I'm pretty bad on Sudan.

So it's been a while since the last time I talked with a real expert, it was the nomads versus the farmers out there. and all the Democrats were calling it a genocide and saying we should pull out of Iraq and invade Sudan instead. I don't know if I've covered it at all since then. It's been a while. I mean, I had a guy who was a friend of mine who's a relief pilot who'd been there many times over the years and he explained how everybody embellishes the story

because they don't understand it. What it really was was the nomads versus the farmers and as the Sahara Desert encroaches, the nomads have less and less territory to to tread on other than some guy's field let their camels eat his tomatoes and now you have militias at war and that was the basis of the last you know the big george cloney genocide of the last era there well that's i mean it honestly it's um i don't know there's the arguments about how universal you should look at moral principles or whatever yeah you know the concept of genocide

was came up with because of like the industrial scale at which the the germans did it i'm not really convinced that it's productive to look at raiders on camelback torching a village that way like this is like you know 5,000 year old warfare basically that's just my view yeah no I mean I was sort of you know satirizing

their PR at the time was they were saying that it was that was in other words the yeah the fact that it was nomads versus farmers is what made it not a genocide like in the PR that's what I was kind of trying to say although I didn't say it very clearly but I agree exactly I mean

And on a similar subject, it's just worth mentioning, you know, that Somaliland is very much a camel culture as well. So this is one of their disputes, you know, one thing that if we're going to recognize them, it is important that you don't get a situation like South Sudan where it, you know, falls into a civil war or regional war, like right away. And, you know, they do have some disputes with Ethiopia about where they graze. And then they do have other clans there that are not acceptable. their rule currently. So I would say that as much as it makes sense to recognize the government in Hargisa, just because, once again, it is a real government. It collects taxes. It pays its own, you know, its own civil employees and military. It regulates things. You know, it does everything a government does. There are several issues to be worked out. So I do think that it would be prudent if, you know,

they actually do this in terms of starting negotiations in a proper and responsible sense instead of just doing a big Donald Trump, like waking up one day and saying, hey, Somalilands the 50th state in Africa. Yeah. Well, I think you're more likely to get that. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, with the... I will say, though, his two main people that he has on Africa, they have their problems,

Peter Fam and Tibornejee, but they do actually know what they're talking about, whereas there's a really bad tendency for America to just send kind of a random black person because they feel like the optics are better. So you get someone that is either totally incompetent, like General Langley, or someone who's been the AFRICOM commander under Biden, I guess I'm not sure if he still is, or someone that otherwise just doesn't happen to know anything about Africa, and they come in and they have no idea what's going on.

Both of the, Peter Fam has not actually been appointed to a position yet, but it's believed he'll be the top Africa envoy. And to Bornege is the undersecretary for management at the State Department, whatever that means and both of them really do deeply know and understand the situation so we have that going for us yeah um man um i want to ask you one more thing that you didn't write about in here sorry but it's very interesting to me and i nobody ever talks about this but you know so much about this stuff where'd you go to college at washington state university i have a degree in american literature okay the rest this is you're just read all day like me only better

um okay uh yeah no this is such great stuff but i wonder if you know the story about the locust plague that was uh the result of america's war in yemen and that ended up devastating the horn of africa there in what i guess the very late obama years and further effects of that on all of this chaos you mentioned how the murks fighting in the war in yemen blew back into Sudan there i'm sure there must have been all kinds of consequences from the giant locust plague which Do you know the story about... I remember that happening. I mean, there are periodic locust plagues anyway,

but I don't remember how that's related to Yemen. Was it just like the fields not getting planted or something? Yeah, no, it was worse than that. It was... The article, everybody, is by Hunter Morgan at anti-war.com. And what happened was there was a program at the University of Sana'a where the graduate students would go out every spring and they would murder the crickets.

They would, like, mask. them in large numbers and when they and it was like a constant upkeep they would do every year and when they were unable to do that because i said crickets grasshoppers whatever um no no no because it's the grasshoppers because what happens is and they finally figured out what causes grasshoppers to turn into locust it's when they're so close together they're so like overburdened in population that all of their warm like bees the males back legs rubbing against each other causes the chemical change that makes them convert into locust. So what they would do is they would call them basically every year. But due to the war, the college was canceled. Graduate students

are not there and the program to go out and kill all the grasshoppers was canceled. And so for one or two or three years in a row, whatever it was, the grasshopper population was allowed to get insanely out of control and that ended up turning into the giant locust plague that then crossed the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa and decimated crops. That's really interesting. The instability of decolonization in Africa caused a lot of things like that. Like, for example, when IDMN expelled the Indians from Uganda, they controlled most a lot of the agricultural land, especially the big plantations, and they were clearing all of this undergrowth,

which was where the insect that causes, I don't remember which parasite it is. Africa has a lot of really bad parasites. but one of the main ones like snail fever or something like that it just came back with a vengeance because it was the Indian plantation owners that had actually been doing the work of clearing all of this brush like that in between their plantations and once it grew back which is a massive parasite outbreak crazy what a world all right listen let's switch continents for a minute I know we barely

touched on this awesome article that you wrote about Somalia but I'm going to reread it later I read it too long ago before this interview, sorry. But I want to ask you about Romania, because this is such a huge story. And I know you wrote about it quite a few weeks ago now. There's been some recent developments, which I'm sure you're up on as well. But this is some pretty historical big deal stuff, man, this thing in Romania, even though people might shrug and say, what the hell do I care about what's going on in Romania? But it seems like, well, our government's involved in everything always, right? Yeah, you know, on a professional level, I love.

I loved that because I was having trouble thinking of what to write about, and that just fell in my lap, which deals with so many things that I brought talk about. Basically, what happened is this guy, Grogescu, Kalandragescu, who's somewhat of a crackpot, but I mean, he has a PhD, so I don't know. Anyway, he's allegedly anti-science into all these conspiracy theories. If you know how to read the media, you could tell that a lot of these things were intentional media misrepresentations combined with mistranslations or whatever. like one was him saying that he knows from being at the UN that they're really um like lizard aliens or whatever and it's like okay that's that's like a joke about a common conspiracy theory or you know any number of things like that or that he believed that uh oh the the particles in in like soda bottles control your mind or something like i think i think you was seeing that like microplastics kind of make

you dim-witted not you know anyway so they made this big deal about it and then they came up with this whole thing that's like oh he got really popular on ticot which is really popular in Romania and you know we believe that this was backed by the Russians they had no evidence of this it turned out later actually that it was one of the mainstream political parties in Romania that that made the payments that they were talking about because they thought that if they could promote him they would like throw the election or whatever and then in reality it got him you know too powerful anyway so he would have gone to the next round and they straight just canceled the election on absolutely spurious grounds okay we're slow down slow down slow down

So this is essentially just like 2016, right? What Clinton's did with Trump. So this is, and in fact, I like bringing this up too, that not in the very last election of 24, but in 22 in the midterms. The Democrats did this and it worked. This is a common strategy. They did it and it worked very well in 22. And it's what they called we have from the Podesta emails in the case of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. others what they called the Pied Piper strategy. And it makes sense. If you, and Donald Trump is an

anomaly, of course, but in the general scheme of things, the more moderate candidate wins the general election in the fall. So what the Democrats do is they would donate to and support the wildest pro-Trump candidates in order that their more moderate candidate would beat them in the fall. And it did work. It works all the time. And this. is one of the ways that they tried to rig the election for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was they thought that Donald Trump, being a wild man, he'll be so easy to beat. Easier. But the thing is, cheaters never win and that, well, sometimes they do.

But in this case, it blew up in their face. But you're saying that this is the same thing that we're talking about here. The ruling party. They didn't even let the second round election happen. They did the first round and he made it through and then they just canceled it entirely. Wait, wait, wait, wait, go back a step. the ruling party they supported a campaign to boost this guy and then he was going to it was a ruling party was one of the mainstream parties one of the mainstream parties i see okay and then he was doing so well he did i'm sorry you said he did win the first round or he was going to

or what uh i believe he i believe he did win the first round regardless he was going to the second round and so they didn't allow the second round to happen well and then they said it was vladimir putin who rigged the whole thing through Chinese control of TikTok, right? Yeah, basically. And then, you know, it's crazy because all of their examples were like all of these other times that you and I know was just like the mainstream media and political parties lying. So their whole excuse like, oh, this is like in Moldova and in Trump and everything and

in Brexit. And it's like, but you made all of those up. Like you're just, you're listing a bunch of other lies as your justification here. Amazing. And then. It was really something. Okay. so then did it turn out that the russians had anything to do with this at all not that i've seen

proven um you know there there was no meaningful connection uh and it's once again it's the same thing as um you know fico in slovakia or georgian dream in georgia or whatever where it's like it's just the person that's saying like i don't want to get us all killed over ukraine we need to find a way to live together basically and they're like oh you know only a russian stud would not want to die in nuclear war basically it's ridiculous And they're especially worried, though, because there's this huge NATO base. Well, it's huge military base. It's supposed to be opening in Romania.

It should be emphasized that unlike Romstein in Germany, which it would be bigger than it, then it would actually be a Romanian-owned base, not like a U.S. owned base, you know, but it would still be, like, NATO's largest base on, you know, on the eastern flank overlooking the Black Sea and all of this. So they're, you know, really not having any of it with this, you know, with this guy taking power. and of course he's like a he's kind of like an anti-vaxxer and all this other stuff like that so they they went through you know it's the whole gamut of just absolutely everything that we we have heard before uh it was really it's honestly quite comical yeah but it's such an important and stark

example of exactly what they mean by democracy democracy means you do what america wants you to do it does not mean the people of your country get to vote for the people who want to implement the policies that they want to see implemented that doesn't have a campaign to do it means like you filthy peasants can decide the value added tax on canned borsh but you know you have nothing to do with uh what foreign policy we have yeah absolutely it's really incredible and then so am i right this is like they said this is the first time anybody's canceled the democratic election in the european union in the post-cold war era right uh that i know of and once again this was done to huge applause they were going on and on about how this uh you know romanian

saved democracy or you know Romania's judiciary saved democracy or whatever it's it's an absolute farce and then by their judiciary they mean people who are propped up by Western NGOs trained up by the American Bar Association or whatever in the first place right so that's what's been coming out as well that you know of course there's all these U.S. connections to all of it and everything else and so many of them yeah they're always you know Western educated they've all these very specific ideas and it's also once again it's so funny because they're big things like oh he's like so anti-science and it's like okay well this guy is a professional scientist okay he is kind of weird but you know i i just don't know uh if more education is going to make him who you want him to be

because he already has a phd yeah and look i mean i'm sorry but i'm so sick and tired of hearing people who all day long that's all they ever do is cite democracy as their excuse for any corruption any violence any war any coup anything and then as soon as people start winning elections that they don't like. Well, look, democracy and populism are entirely different things. And if the people of this country... I saw the one just yesterday saying that, no, these institutions are what make up democracy. Like, that's what difference is from dictatorship. That's like, dude, like, the strongest institution in norm enforcing institution of all time was the Catholic church in medieval Europe. So what are you talking about? The strongest institution in America is

the Pentagon. Is that our democracy? You know? Um, yeah. And, yeah, they just don't mean it. Democracy means when, it doesn't just mean when America gets what it wants. Democracy is when the Democrats win. Otherwise, they'll frame you for treason and they'll do whatever they want. Yeah, no, it means very specifically the rule of this. I mean, I often call them a pantsuit mafia, but of this, this NGO class that they're talking about with USAID right now. It means just this very specific type of managerial state where you have elections that are primarily ceremonial.

It's like the liturgy of government. We really learned this in the first Trump term when they kept breathlessly freaking out about just tiny little changes to traditions that were never a law before that we had never even heard of. You can call them Pharisees or mandarin depending on what is your preference,

but it's exactly that. All they care about is technique and method. They don't care about results. And all they care about is that they're in charge of how it's done and that they have access to the temple revenues to be distributed. They have no interest in, your freedom, in your well-being, in actual democracy, you know, in the people deciding and

ruling. It's just very much ruling by this horrible, pathetic and incompetent elite that we have shamefully let control us for far too long. Man, so well said. And all I have to add to that is I hope people are having fun like me reading The New York Times this week. It's just great. It's all tears and all just what else could you call it? Self-centeredness on the part of all suppose it as they call themselves civil servants and they really act like of course the national government is a jobs program and that they deserve to live off of the taxpayers forever no matter what their job description is no matter who they are how dare anyone disrupt our status quo they wonder well it's especially bad because we overproduced people with master's degrees that are

like completely useless and have no other career skills than than doing this sort of thing so it's going to be I mean whether if we manage to actually get this under control and keep it under control we're going to be dealing with these people for like the rest of our lives that are like I don't know it's like people that are made obsolete by a new technology and you never get them to retrain so they're like on the dole forever like they're the problem is they're so they think what they're doing is so important they have such a high opinion of their education you'll never you know retrain them I keep joking that maybe Mao was on to something and we need to send these people to pick fruit to you know replace the illegal immigrants to try to build their character back up That sounds perfectly fair to me. Yeah, seriously. I'm really not joking. I think we should do it. Yeah. Or at the very least, just tell them, listen, you're not getting one dime of welfare.

The agricultural fields are that way. Get walking. Right. You know, learn to code. Learn to mine. Do something. Learn to pig apples. Yeah.

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And they have great wholesale deals for all you restaurant tours and Quickey Mart managers out there as well. They're now doing online commercial sales to coffee houses, coffee trailers, restaurants, and bakeries. So help support this show. Drink anti-war coffee. Click the link in the margin at Scott Horton.org or just go to Scott Horton.org. slash coffee. Seriously, buy some. And thanks. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault

3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them.

World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org, or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. I want to ask you about Georgia, but as long as we're talking about these people, I wonder, you know, what is your assessment of the upset at USAID? I mean, they're saying 10,000 people are fired and it is over for this thing. What if a listener to this show didn't really understand about USA? Could you draw a picture of its spider's web?

what it means to the people of America, the world, the empire? Well, so this website date or Republican just did actually make a tool that will show you, you know, an actual literal web of how their financing works. But in short, you know, people have this idea that it's like providing antibiotics to people or, you know, anti-parasidics or whatever and, you know, giving food in famines or whatever. In reality, you know, they give this aid constantly and it used to, you know, it undermines economies because like you're basically dumping agricultural products on this. Think about when we talk about China's price dumping apple juice or something and people get so angry. Like we do this to the

whole developing world and call it, you know, charity, which now they're kind of admitting that it's not charity. It's soft power. But, you know, it's not just that. It's all this weird stuff like teaching the Macedonians about sodomy. They spent money on that. You know, they didn't learn that from Alexander the Great, I guess. Or, you know, any number of things like that, that's so bizarre to fighting intersex phobia in Poland and all this stuff about gender equality. One of the funniest examples that I've heard is Christina Pusha, who's like in communications for Ronda Santis, used to work in Georgia for Salkeshwali and his post-presidency. She said he knew someone there that got U.S. aid money for like gender equality and education

and he used it to send his own daughters to private school in the United States. So at least two girls in Georgia did did better. You know, there's also rampant sexual abuse. because, like, well, you give a bunch of money to, like, third world chieftains to do whatever stupid thing. What do you think is going to happen? It's all very straightforward. Mike Binns pointed out that you don't hear any foreign governments talking about how bad this will be. If you look at any article, it's only people running NGOs and only U.S. aid employees.

There's not, I have not seen a single president of a country that says, like, oh, hey, you know, we rely on this. Our people are going to starve or anything. It's basically the U.S. forces you to have it in your country that will color revolution. if you try to get rid of them and then they just use it to undermine your state and destroy democracy basically it's extremely nefarious it is not that much of the budget in terms of spending the issue is that it has a really nefarious impact on the world and on our own country because even you get them though they'll try to interfere in our politics like you know 90% of ukraine media being u.s aid funded how much of that did they spend being anti-donald

trump or whatever plenty of it sure and you look at the scandal rightfully people react immediately that when the government is behind the scenes financing the api reuters wall street journal politico i saw people kind of trying to play down the politico thing i understand some of that is just them buying subscriptions for their their people like you know the government does need to have newspapers to breed so i don't know how serious that is like it should be audited but the thing i read so they were paying the SEC having a subscription to the wall street journal you know yeah i mean the thing that i read was saying that they were paying exorbitant prices for their politico's subscriptions where it looked much more like a subsidy

you know this kind of did and so but you think about that reaction um but like right up until this i mean i just published a book that has all this and i've been you know in a lot of discussions and debates and interviews over the time and whatever and and people have argued with me that Look, so what if America, American government organizations like USA and NED and IRA and ND and even then the associated NGOs, who cares if they pay and pour all these millions of dollars into independent media in these Eastern European countries? These poor schmucks, they're stuck with only state media. They need independent media. So we give them all this money. and they people have argued this with me for months now in a row with a straight face and then but when it comes to this USA thing breaks out and we find out that our government is spending any money on our own media at all subsidizing our own media at all we go hey wait a minute you can't put your thumb on the scale like that but imagine you're some poor country like Georgia or Ukraine and you have the Americans coming from across the sea with tens of millions of dollars hundreds of millions of dollars and set up all

all different media organizations, a whole ecosystem and echo chamber of media organizations to push a foreign line in your country. Man, if anybody treated us like we treat them, there'd be a freak out over here. Yeah, so you want to know something really funny. And I have this on a tweet. I continue to put up in the episode description if you want. But the, um, this open caucus media, caucuses media out of Georgia, it says on their website, we're completely independent.

People often accuse us of being in the pay of, you know, the Americans or George stores or whoever else, we're completely independent. If you go to their own website, the same website where they say this, it tells you that over two-thirds of their funding is combined is from the U.S. government and Open Society's foundations. Yeah. And they say directly there, we're not beholden to anyone, the specific people who fund us we're not beholden to.

It's crazy. I know. And I beat a dead horse when it comes to the citations on these issues in my book about, especially in Ukraine, but in all the color code of revolution type situations, how much they brag and boast about how much they intervene. Yeah, we live in unsubtle times. Yeah. Well, so talk about Georgia.

This is an extremely complicated one, especially for a lot of people. You know, they forget there's such a thing. We usually call it former Soviet Georgia. So everybody knows we're not talking about the land between Florida and South Carolina here. I bring this up. It's really important because, I don't know, it's meaningful to me. Now, a lot of times Americans have never heard of this other Georgia. all or they totally have forgotten about that they've ever heard of it before and so for example

when war broke out i'll let you describe it if you want when war broke out in 2008 people thought that russia was invading georgia and they were terrified about that their parents were in danger their families that america was going to have conscription and maybe nuclear war and it's like no no no no no wrong georgia dude and and because people just have no idea what's going on of the world. They think, as far as they know, Russia would invade our Georgia. Why not? But in this case, no, this was, it was America's war, but it was our border dispute seven, eight, nine thousand miles east of Washington, D.C. That was going on there. But people might see, the thing is, it's their virtue, Brad, to me, that Americans are so ignorant about former Soviet Georgia because they just figure that whatever's going on between the black and the Caspian Sea is just none of their business. right like prince caspian wasn't that a narnia book like this is this is far far far away from

us or our interests who cares but the thing is is like nah bill clinton made it our problem that's why and it still is we it's funny they in the georgia the um the NGO people that said are on and on about like oh our european destiny and this and that's like you are literally not in europe i don't know how to make this clearer to you that you are an asian country uh anyway yeah georgia i mean it's it's one of the most infested countries by the NGO class um i i mean i did the the math on it and i think a higher percentage of georgians are employed by foreign funded NGOs than americans are employed by walmart uh it's their main uh their main middle class is these these NGO people they're just beyond shameless uh

in terms of um oh everyone keeps accusing me of being a foreign show it's like where does your paycheck come from lady like i don't know what to tell you uh you know and So the Georgian Dream Party has done an absolutely remarkable job of managing the difficult situation that they've been put in and trying to get this under control. They really, I don't know if they've been reading Machiavelli or what, but they've been worried about, you know, delaying at the right time and moving forward at the right time. They are kind of under the control of an oligarch that is, you know, a domestic one, but they've just done a remarkable job at trying to get their country under control. And, you know, they also wanted to be closer to Georgia. What a lot of people don't understand is that people have this idea that they have these supposed European values, you know, whatever the hell that means. And that's what people care about so much.

But that's only a narrow class of, like, the ideological NGO people. The average person, you know, wants trade opportunities. They want their kid to be able to go to college wherever they want to be able to work and send money home or, you know, any number of things like that. And it's just simply to think it's better for them to be in the big trade. Union. And, you know, as that goes downhill, it's worthless. But after the invasion of Ukraine, it was basically demanded that Georgia put itself in a really dangerous position by, you know, being extremely hostile to Russia. The main advantage of them being in the EU would be as a waypoint for goods between the EU and Russia. You know, it's the main way they would profit from it. So, you know,

if they're supposed to be embargoing Russia, that doesn't really do anything for them to be in the EU and they keep, you know, demanding that they go in as a completely neutered, like bigger state, whereas they're trying to kind of hold to the view of the EU that is more held by Orban and FICO and people like that, where it is actually, you know, kind of a bunch of co-equal independent nations that don't, you know, have to go together on all of this folly and everything. So it's been a really big blow to the entire globalist NGO region. regime change, et cetera, class to be doing so badly in Georgia, because it's a very small country

that they have poured just absolutely immense resources in over a 30-year period to just try to, you know, buy up everything in the country and make some idiotic point about how you can shape a country and whatever you want, which, of course, this is always just a cover for opening the country to transnational Western capital and, you know, looting all of its industries. Yeah. And so is there any threat to the BTC pipeline? And it's regular operation there with the falling out of favor of American puppets? You know, I don't think so because they've, uh, that's a whole other really stupid thing because everyone that knows anything about this knows that Azerbaijan is just buying Russian

oil and reselling it for more money. And, you know, so like no one's actually boycotting Russia oil. It's just coming via Azerbaijan, which is incidentally ran by a more authoritarian leader than Russia is it is a worse human rights record than Russia right and it's aggressive to its neighbors you know so like it's not even any difference and a hereditary dictatorship yeah exactly it's crazy uh but you know it's um I don't know you know so much of the world that we live in and what we're told is is just absolutely fake so it's it's no surprise that this is all a farce but uh Georgia has want wants to be independent it's the same thing that

they're popular with the public because they're not going to get everyone killed they've seen what happened to ukraine they're not going to open a second front against russia to are just a nation of three million people that is right on russia's border and they already convinced sacherfili to fight them once in 2008 and they got absolutely trounced uh you know so they they're just trying to not get everyone killed and apparently this pledge is popular with the voters yeah so can we talk a little bit about Zorovichvili here? Sure. You pronounce that better than I ever do.

Well, who the hell is that? So it's this French woman whose family, she's from a Georgian nobility, but her family had been in Paris since 1921 or whatever. She was a career French foreign service officer. She studied at Columbia SEPA under Vresensky, though she didn't attain a degree from there, but regardless, she studied under Zivignau Vazinski. And she, uh, worked for France. Man, I didn't know that. I should have had you read my book and take notes on all the stuff that I left out. Yeah. Well, it's, and also incidentally, her daughter is, uh, has been in the White House press pool. Her daughter, uh, went to Columbia journalism school. Anyway, so she is a French woman. She doesn't, uh, in 2003 when Georgia Dream took over after what they called the bros revolution, the one that put Saakishvili in power. Uh, she had been, uh, in 2000. Uh, she had been. Uh, uh, in two thousand three. Uh, uh, she had been. France's ambassador to Georgia

and went directly from that position to being Georgia's foreign minister. So both countries agreed to just trade this French woman of Georgian heritage to be there. She didn't speak Georgian fluently until she lived there and she still doesn't speak Georgian all that great. She accidentally on the campaign trail said the great thing about Georgia is you can stick it in whatever you want and she was trying to say that you can dig anywhere and find like artifacts because like there's so much history.

but said something very sexual on accident. And she was originally with Georgia Dream, but then she just turned on them over time, especially with the invasion of Ukraine. I mean, ultimately her loyalty was to France is what happened. And which should have been obvious because she lived in France until she was like 50. She was a French citizen, not a Georgian citizen. And she completely turned on them.

The president's role is ceremonial anyway, but they just changed to a full parliamentary system so the president's not direct elected anymore and so she uh basically this election that they claim was rigged which it absolutely was not she um said she was still the president that she was the only legitimate part of government and she said she wasn't going to evacuate once again her term expired one way or another this isn't like her losing a rigged election or anything her term expired she said she wasn't going to leave she ultimately did leave saying it didn't matter whether or not she was in the presidential mansion and then she got a job as the uh the henry kissinger chair at the john mccain institute

is what she is doing now so not subtle that's not a joke by the way she is now the henry kissinger chair or fellow henry kissinger fellow at the john mccain institute is the job she went to immediately after leaving uh the presidency in georgia that is so cool i wonder about i wonder about zolensky he's going to be at brookings I bet. That's my put. Let me write that down. I don't know. Maybe he'll go back into comedy. He's actually kind of a talented comedic actor. He's just a terrible

politician. Let me ask you this man. When she was doing this, was this just some idiot lady doing this or there was a scheme here where people were trying to figure out a way

to make this stick and keep her as far as I can tell they told her to take it as far as she possibly. could and that they would make sure she landed okay because she was they were saying like increasingly stupid things like oh these rural votes come in late and it's like well you have to vote in your hometown they were you know driving there later like oh this person was witnessed going to the polling station and being greeted so enthusiastically and it's well he lives in tbilisi hasn't been home in five years that was his uncle you know it was like all this nonsense like that that uh

they ultimately landed on thinking that the uh the sleeves covering your ballot didn't sufficiently cover up the mark or whatever things i mean it's people who don't understand what um election uh international election observers reports look like might have thought some of this was bad but um you know you kind of need to understand what they're saying like you know one of their complaints was that the the parliament wasn't gender balanced or whatever and it's okay well that's not democracy this is the that has nothing to do with whether or not the election was fair uh what gender balance you end up with after this or all of these other or another big one was like oh the georgian dream had so much more money than the opposition parties and it's like okay well yeah there's one ruling party and a coalition of 12 opposition parties of course they were the buy more media that's not an election being i mean it's arguably an election being unfair in a broader sense it is not an election being unfair in the sense anyone thinks of as an election being stolen you know so it was it was all this nonsense there were a handful of instances worth investigating as there is in truly any election in the world. There's going to be a handful of things, you know, done incorrectly at polling

stations of some double voting of this and that. Did they claim exit polls? Because that's the usual color-coded scam. Oh, yeah. They did that too. And, you know, they used the same firm that they used in Venezuela after the last one. I'm blanking on the name, but it's a very specific American firm that they use for this purpose that goes, yeah, they did the last one in Venezuela. They did others to, and yeah, they're going to go, like, the exit polls couldn't have possibly said this. And yeah, I wish I remember the firm's name it's the main one that does exit polls in the u.s too and does it in like a rock in any other country we want uh specific results in basically and so yeah they they pulled that as well but uh it was it was really laughable their their claims of fraud were absolute nonsense and

she just went within she just kept saying increasingly bizarre and humiliating things like it i there's no doubt in my mind that they told her to just go as far as she could and they would take care of her Yeah. I wonder what end they had in mind, though, with that, because as you're saying, she was really discrediting herself and probably crediting the other side as she spun out, right? I think they thought street protesters were going to overthrow them, but the Georgian police are actually pretty gentle and not very violent. And so they've done a good job of not making the situation more, you know, antagonistic than necessary. Yeah. There were instances of problems on both sides, but also of, you know, the protesters being violent against anyone. They didn't lie. or this and that. But the Georgian police tend have a tendency of using a soft hand in general. So that is part of what stopped it from spiraling out of control. How long did the protests last? How long did the protests last? Because she kept up this act

long after the people went home, right? Weeks. I want to say she was doing this six weeks or something after the election. I guess I don't have the exact number on me. But yeah, fortunately, she left the presidential mansion. Because that's the thing. She said it didn't matter if she was there. or not but it's like to the government it does matter you can't have someone squatting in the presidential mansion they would have had to send in like the police or the military to remove her if she did that's so funny that's like what they said donald trump was going to do right force the secret service to drag him out or something right exactly she ultimately decided against the

confrontation she said she had a big announcement the next day and then just walked out like oh i'm still the the legitimate president of georgia okay despite that my term expired but yeah it's ridiculous so then i guess we're beating around the bush here brad america has lost Georgia now, huh? The American USAID blob has lost Georgia. The Georgian people have nothing against us. Georgia Dream always wanted to be close to Europe.

They just didn't want to be completely controlled by foreign NGOs and everything. So yeah, I mean, like the U.S. aid class has lost Georgia. You know, if Donald Trump just sends a reasonable ambassador to them and says, hey, man, like we didn't have control. control over these people in our government, we want to improve our relations, they're going to stick their hand out and, you know, shake the guy's hand right there and say, okay, let's get to work. So it's not, it's not irreparable, but it's been lost in the sense that it's a like a satrap

of the NGO class. Yeah. Well, and which is not just that. I mean, that's the empire itself. That's its own little parallel state department, right? I mean, that's, yeah. As you said before, the dollar totals aren't that high, but don't let that fool you. This is. extremely influential influence all over the place, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, man, I should let you go.

It's already an hour. But I want to ask you about Ukraine next time. So keep writing great things, and I'll keep recommending people go and look at the waywardrabler.com. That's Brad Pierce's substack for you there. And you can find them from time to time at the Institute as well. Thanks, Brad. All right. Thank you so much.

Bye. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.