Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/2/24 John Robb on Al Qaeda, Israel, China and the Future of America

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Scott had John Robb on the show to discuss a number of articles he wrote recently on a variety of topics. They talk about Scott’s concern about a terrorist attack in the United States, the antisemitism bill, how the current tensions with China came about, the global effects of so-called packetized media and more. Discussed on the show: “Zero-Day Wars” (Global Guerillas) “The American Way?” (Global Guerillas) “Packetized Media” (Global Guerillas) “The Anti-Israel Swarm” (Global Guerillas) “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” (Time) Technopoly by Neil Postman John Robb is a former special operator who now writes the Global Guerrillas Report which examines the world at the intersection of war, technology and politics. Follow him on Twitter @johnrobb 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've got john rob. He writes the global guerrillas report on substack at substack.com slash john rob and well you've heard him on the show before. He's got all this really interesting stuff to stay. about network science and the Twitter swarms and communications nowadays and what all it has to do with American foreign policy and all of these great things it's really great to have you back on the show and oh it's also it's John rob dot substack.com works for you too for global guerrillas welcome back John how are you doing? how you doing scott doing good uh i'm doing real good look man mostly i want to ask you about your

latest three articles but first i want to ask you about al qaeda and isis because i know you wrote about a lot about this in um what's now the old days of iraq war two and i don't know about your coverage of iraq war three versus the caliphate and all of that stuff uh i tuned into you later than that but anyway i know that you know i read your book on a rock war two um so but see my thing is is I'm terrified of these guys and I don't mean personally like they're gonna kill me because I'm not anywhere near a big target

but I think that they still are motivated to attack the United States and I talked with you about this before and you were like come on Scott Al Qaeda works for us again and I'm like yeah I know that but I mean they worked for Bill Clinton and in fact even W Bush had the Delta Force training

the KLA who were invading Macedonia in August of 2001 I mean they were still you know So Eric Margulies saw American sanctioned training camps for Uyghurs in Afghanistan under the Taliban in July 2001. And they still turn on us and bid us on September 11th anyway. I know everybody's the truth there, but I'm not. And in fact, I think the truthers are like the limited hangout because it shuts down all the questions of who these guys are and why they hate us so much and why they might be willing to knock our towers down some more.

And it's not just that they hate us, but it's that the strategy is that they have to be. bog us down and bleed us to bankruptcy and force us out the long way and the hard way so we stay out so that then they can wage their local revolutions. And it seems like Obama and Trump bombing the caliphate that Obama built for them, you know, ending in 2017-18 there, that just proves Wahiri right, that you can't build your caliphate until you get rid of the Americans. And you can't get rid of the Americans until you get them into such a catastrophic cluster F of a war over there that they finally really quit intervening. And so that's why, and then also you do have the hatred part two and the reinforcement of the reason why they would want to get rid of us

in America's support for Israel right now for one horrible example. And even though I know they fight them a lot, they still are the Americans, are still the reason why the Shiites are so much more powerful in the region now as well. And so, and you see ISIS K and whatever still, and whatever remnants of ISIS and al-Qaeda, they're still out there. The Turks still protect them in the Idlib province. They just attacked Iran and Russia. And why wouldn't they attack the United States? Well, okay. The only reason they exist is right now is that we've wiped out all of the strongmen that typically destroyed them. I mean, like Saddam Hussein killed you. Haddhatties, ate them for breakfast, and Assad did the same.

And, you know, we're preventing the development and any strongmen that would actually counter them. Are they a threat to us? Potentially, I mean, you know, we left the border open, let 10 million people in, unvetted. Millions of them never even interacted with a border agent, an unknown entry, unknown packages that they were bringing in, you know, people from all over the world, it's not Mexicans or even Central American solely, it's people from everywhere. And that the U.S. is now vulnerable because of that, I mean, extremely vulnerable. And it's not just from these groups, it's from anyone

who sees a benefit in attacking the United States or getting it bogged down in internal turmoil. trying to respond to it. So, you know, that's my take on. I'm not really truly worried about them in particular. I mean, we have, we're a lot more alert to potential avenues attack from those groups than we ever have been. I wrote a report not long ago called Zero Day Wars. It's a concept of actually using infiltration and technological. logical leverage to take out an enemy before the war even starts so effectively you win or you

tie them up in a way that they can't respond to whatever you're doing um you know and and my worry right now is more on the china front well hold that thought for a second but so on al Qaeda what you're saying is that the actual al Qaeda and ISIS observation and hunting apparatus that they've built over the years is effective enough that they're just poned by the NSA. The same reason America was able to warn Iran and Russia about the impending attacks is the same reason you think that essentially America's security forces will stop them from getting into the country and doing another attack here. Is that what you're saying?

I mean, it's relatively effective. I mean, it's not full proof, obviously, but I'm of, I'm of the mind that, I'm of the mind that all of our intervention and interactions with the Middle East over the last 25 years have been a massively negative return on investment, both in national security and in terms of socioeconomic progress. And we're kind of reaping that right now in terms of their internal dissension. I mean, we're fighting Middle Eastern political battles on the streets of America right now. um spending you know billions um and uh it's a it's something that we could do without

you know we got pulled in and uh you know we continue to make mistake to continue to be there yeah uh best approach would be to focus on trade well i certainly agree with that you know but now so on the specific question of the bin ladenites i mean from my perspective and you're Of course, free to disagree with this in Charlie, but it seems to me like maybe even underestimated at the time. It really was a win when they killed bin Laden because he was able to really get so many different aspects or different sects of jihadi groups to respect him and follow his wishes, whereas Zawahri wasn't, I don't know if he thinks Zwhalari's really dead or not. They say they got him in that one strike. I don't know if we've really heard from him since then, but it seems like with bin Laden out of the picture that makes it hard. for them to coordinate attacking way over here or or even you know stay committed to that doctrine

that it's the far enemy that's got to be taken out first and all of that kind of thing oh yeah i mean the only reason 9-11 was so successful it was that they weren't even on the radar you know there was this apparatus that we built this trillion dollar year apparatus for national security did even have them on a radar as a serious threat well kind of but we Yeah, it's very similar to the way Israel treated Hamas. You know, it's a sense of superiority and invulnerability and infallibility and that they're so far above this kind of weak, unintelligent, uninnovative, beaten-down enemy that they would ever be able to attack them successfully. Right. And that's why they didn't have a plan for an attack from.

Gaza and they didn't have any of the planning any of the preparation any kind of the serious defense set up and then it was all elbows and assholes when they finally did it and they were just spraying everywhere so it's like you got to you got to respect the enemy you got to you know get over yourself and and focus on it and I think to a large extent we did that with with al-Qaeda and they are a focus and they do get attention so um you know that's that's a big change from 9-11 yeah i know there's a great quote from i forgot the guy's name it's in the weekly standard and he's citing a high-level special operations officer saying that the joint staff they had it was a cliche that they would say in the 1990s at the pentagon that

terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower. Right. You know, what are they going to do? Set off a truck bomb in Africa somewhere? Who cares? Right. Blow up, but not sink, a ship in Port and Aden, whatever. You know, they blow it off.

So that definitely makes sense. And I know there's so many anecdotes and now great reporting out of Israel about the way that they treated Hamas. They acted like, these are basically the Crips, right? They're basically a street gang. And basically, we can just kick their ass any time. And I know, oh, our mutual friend, Daryl Cooper, has talked about when he was over there, you know, he's a missile defense guy. And he was over there working with the Israelis a lot of times as a, I don't know, in the Navy or after when he was a contractor or whatever. But anyway, he spent some time in Israel dealing with their defense people.

And they would say, now Hezbollah, those guys are dangerous. They're like a real army now. And we got to really worry about them. But Hamas, come on. And then so they had that attitude as superior. that you're talking about where maybe only because they had the two to compare and they had that binary and and so they just one of them has to be the loser compared to the other so that was the way you know net and yahoo said we control the height of the flame not a problem right we got to

so all right so that brings us to what's going on here oh and this is the other reason i'm so paranoid about the al Qaeda there though is bin laden said america supports Israel and look at what Israel's doing in Lebanon right now. They just killed 106 women and children in a shelter in Kana. And Mohammed Atta and Ramsey bin al-Shib said yeah, you're right. I think we're going to volunteer for your Special Forces Battalion now,

Mr. Bin Laden. And this is the Kana massacre times a thousand now or whatever hundreds. I'm not good at math life, but you know what I mean? This is a lot of Kana maskers in a row here. And we expect, as Ron Paul said, we think we can just go around the world, blowing things up

and act like we're not putting ourselves in danger like there's no come up into this then we do that out of our own peril we we're not taking into account the potential consequences of this we think we have this magical impunity but we don't right so somebody's going crazy over what's happening over there right now and you know I'm not trying to encourage them I'm just saying I'm I'm afraid of them you know there people and look at the last 10 years of especially during the Obama years and I know the FBI framed up a lot of you know, fake ones, but there's some real terrorist attacks in this country, you know, not on the order of September 11th, but still, you know, San Bernardino and Orlando and a couple of

attempts in New York, that guy Zazi from Denver tried to blow up the subway. That was not a FBI put-up job. That was a real one. You know what I mean? We could have some things like that still. And then that really raises a bunch of questions about what does the government do then? What happens to the rest of us then right any any terrorist attack uh particularly connected to this war would result in many more crackdowns you know patriarch patriot act you know times 10 i mean we caught a little bit of that yesterday when congress passed the uh um censorship bill related to anti-semitism can you talk a little bit more about that oh so uh yeah a bunch of uh congressmen who had you know given full support and loyalty to that uh israel

is focused on uh combating antisemitism in the united states and they what they did is they set up a system where they would censor anything according to whatever this outsourced non-governmental entity defines as anti-semitism which is you know phrases which is words, which is concepts, which is political speech, something that can change on an ongoing basis. And they passed it. So hopefully it doesn't get through the Senate. But I mean, it's definitely an anti-free speech bill. You know, it's like, you know, you can't criticize Israel. It is just a, it's just a non-starter. Yeah. It's amazing, right? Just codifying that crazy hyperbole that if you criticize Israel, that's just code for you really hate the Jews, which is the stupidest thing and nobody takes seriously.

But the Republicans do, and they want to make that the law, that if you criticize, like, the seizure of the Golan Heights, that means that you burn Torah's or something. I don't know. Darrell's right, though, it is about the money in many instances. I mean, the reason why they're pushing this is the money is good. And there's, you know, billionaires behind it. And if they, you know, move in that direction, they're going to get a lot of. lot of financing and you know it's uh they've had to split the the financial world financing for a long time so it's not it wasn't the golden goose that it once was before clinton and um

clinton started cozying up to the bankers on the democratic side and and then uh that soaked a lot of the funding away so you know a lot of financiers like to be socially liberal um but they wanted the uh protections on on taxation and everything else from that allowed them to make as much money as they could and so um when clinton promised that they flocked to him and they flocked to obama and they flocked to so the republicans i've seen a declining coffers as a result and you know amplified then by trump and um this is a way to get back some money and politics runs on money yeah yeah makes sense i mean they got all those evangelical voters, but they're not rich, most of them.

Yeah, yeah. And there's big money being thrown around. And so, you know, they put their hand out and they will go over the top, even if it won't pass or even if it won't get accepted. But, you know, they pledge that support, push those agendas. Yeah, it's a pretty corrupt process that we have. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've always had a thing, you know, there's a thing in fourth generation warfare about primary loyalty. It's a loyalty. It's this idea that when a state is in decline, the loyalty they used to have to the state, which used to be first and foremost of any large group that you have loyalty to or any identity that you have loyalty to starts dropping in importance and that you increasingly you find your citizens pledging loyalty to, you know, foreign states, foreign causes, a different idea. identities based on race, ethnicity, in our case, even orientation, those loyalties to those identities become primary in their life. And they fight for them at the expense of national

well-being and good. So we're kind of in that phase right now. A lot of people have subordinated their loyalty to the country. And the good part of, you know, that loyalty was that we tried to do things that were for the general benefit and for the good of the United States. And that if we did the right thing, that we all prosper and benefit from it. And that's being thrown away. Yeah. Well, so you remind me of William S. Lynde, when he wrote about Fourth Generation Warfare,

he said this is, you know, the current paradigm. is Brave New World versus Jihadi Stan. And you could see how Brave New World is a tough sell because it sucks. Right. What happened was they stopped. They changed, as you wrote in this great article, The American Way,

they changed the American way to some stupid horrible thing that everybody hates. And so no wonder it's lost all its credibility. Yeah, Bill Lynn's an old friend of mine. Oh, yeah. He's a very, very sharp guy. Yeah, he is, absolutely. So talk about, you know, you have this great article.

You said the U.S.-led rules-based international order is dead. And not just that it's dying and seen how old Biden is grasping its straws to hold it up, but it's over. They completely blew it in the last 20 years. That's what you're saying here? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we spent all these years, you know, from visionary, brilliant people in the post-World War II environment. building this international system that allowed us to cobble together free states and free minds in a way that wasn't overly burdensome.

You know, we weren't required to send militaries everywhere, only on, you know, flashpoints where it was, you know, naked aggression coming from the communist world. And it worked. And a lot of that had to do, well, there's a variety of different things. There's trade, and there's also this moral component, you know, preventing genocide and preventing war crimes and preventing abuses by nation states, limiting what states can do. And that allowed the whole system to kind of run on its own, and it had a credibility that it was better to be inside the system than outside the system. And that, you know, U.S., increasingly in the post-Cold War environment, started to access. selfishly.

And in a system that has a moral component, if you act selfishly too many times that it degrades your ability to manage it and guarantee that system, the ability of that system to operate effectively. People don't see it as a fair system. And recently, the thing that really hit it and it really, really damaged it, was all the work that the U.S. was doing to try to degrade the enforcement of genocide in ICJ, taking away funding from UNRWA, even though it was like based on, you know, tiny rumors or unsubstantiated rumors, demanded from the Israelis.

And then, you know, now going after the ICC and threatening it when it's trying to put, you know, war crimes warrants out for Netanyahu and his team. So we're acting for our own needs in a selfish way to attack the system that we spent 70 years building and that at this point, I think on a global level that we've discredited our moral status, or the value. of the system and our participation in that system as a guarantor of it. So what that means is when you're not seen as a trusted participant in the system is that everything that we're going to do from now on will be harder.

Every treaty that we try to cut, every military adventure that we try to get on or mount, you know, allies won't show up. We saw a little bit of that in the Red Sea lately. I mean, you know, recently is that, you know, we sent the Navy out to protect merchant ships, not traveling to the U.S., but traveling to the rest of the countries in Europe and other places,

and that nobody wanted to come with us or participate with us, no one had any interest. And that, you know, It's increasingly just the U.S. alone. And that lack of participation and willingness to work with us will then increasingly become opposition to us. Is that when we try to do something, lots of different nations and lots of different groups will try to stop us from succeeding. And it'd be like, for instance, like contested trade, how much work would it be? for China to give groups like the hooties drones capable of taking out and restricting

trade flows to the U.S. or trade flows to U.S. allies. It's not hard at all. Or U.S. warships transiting areas, they have to go through in very aggressive formations in order to avoid being damaged by drone swarms. So, yeah, no, it's a U.S. international system, I mean, it is done. It's over. And, you know, our policies, unfortunately, are still focused. It's still kind of based on this assumption that it's still there,

that when the U.S. starts criticizing Russia for chemical weapons use or China for U.GARs, that it has some weight anymore, and for the rest of the world it has zero no weight no we don't have any moral standing to make that claim i mean we attack the very institutions that we're supposed to um protect us in this so um there we are well i don't want to get too far into china because that's such a whole other subject and i got all these other things to uh ask you about but one thing that i know that you've mentioned uh a few different times is this theory that well if we bring them into the WTO and we teach them about property rights and

freedom in the market that that'll translate into more of a democratic system over there and this and that but that oops that didn't really work we just made a real powerful sort of dictatorship but with Milton Friedman type economics that work a lot better than their previous system for example you know but it seems to me like that analysis usually doesn't mention and it seems relevant to me that it was George W. Bush's fault. that instead of being Ron Paul up there and leading the world by example and being a good friend to China and and a real showcase of how self-government works for the rest of the planet in the post-Cold War era and blame Clinton too but W. Bush has sworn in January 01. It's kind of symbolic to start off the millennium with this thing. And then what's he do? He says freedom and democracy. And then he goes and he kills a couple of million people and sets the world on fire. It tells a million lies and breaks every law. It tortures people to death and just absolutely humiliated the Statue of Liberty. And the whole concept of, you know,

he took the principles we really do believe in. And he just used him like his crass sloganeering for a marketing campaign for an aggressive war. And in great part for Israel as well, which when you come to the self-destruction part, who's going to protect Israel after our empire falls because we did what they wanted us to do. You know what I mean? It's another part of this. But China might have been, you know, much more willing to listen if we weren't the most obvious blood-soaked hypocrites in the world over here preaching all of this stuff about constitutional law, you know? Yeah. I mean, as you point out, the decline has been in process for a while, at least in terms of the international system and the like.

Iraq war was the kickoff of the steep ramp down to where we're at now. And my critique of that, you know, when Clinton and Gore testified and pushed China's inclusion in the WTO and then left, which I always like kind of ironic for Gore to push China into the WTO, because that's the reason why the climate crisis is even viable. It went from 150 years to 130 kind of timeline because of China's inclusion. But yeah, what happened was because we were involved in the Middle East and focused on the Middle East, those dead-end politics and those negative ROI engagements, we didn't see that we were becoming dependent.

on China. They didn't make any move to kind of, you know, cap Chinese trades at reasonable levels. And that like we did with Japan and Baker went over to Japan said, here's the level we're going to accept. It's going to allow our auto industry to rebound rather than going out of business and make it work. And they did. And we could have done the same thing with China, but we didn't do it with China because we're focused on the Middle East instead. We dropped the ball and became dependent. Yeah. Well, I mean, even then, the protectionism is a band-aid on the problem,

which is caused by regulation and taxation, where these companies wouldn't want to go overseas anyway if the U.S. government didn't have their boot on their neck, where they're like, hey, we'd be freer in Kami, China. And that's why they leave. I mean, I know labor's cheaper over there. But they also just have a lot more ability to go into business and run it the way they want. Yeah, no, I mean, even if it is a bandit, it's putting a cap on trade with China and limiting certain areas of industrial production would have given us some breathing room to recover and potentially mount a serious comeback in those areas.

I mean, the auto industry is an example of doing that with Japan. Japan was crushing. I mean, absolutely killing them in the 90s. And that rather than going out of business, it gave them a chance to retool and rethink their business. So, you know, China came so quick and it expanded so quickly into our system. You know, by the late aughts, they were going from town to town buying all the machine shops and taking all the equipment and just shipping it off to China. I mean, it was, it was, you know, when they had, you know, when they had, you know, state sponsorship and state funding and incentives and mercantile system at their back, they were operating at speeds much faster than ours.

I don't think they would ever have delacritized in the sense that everyone thinks would be the outcome is that, you know, fascism is a free market system. It's largely a free market system. It's a capitalist system. some restrictions on free market activities, but for the most part, it's a capitalist system, but it's run as a authoritarian regime. And China's kind of adopted that model. I think they're more fascists than anything else now. I see fascism not as the jack boots kind of thing that most people define fashion as is militaryism and that kind of stuff, or talking bad about

minorities or whatever is that fascism was a system of governance that solved the problem of how do you mobilize for total war with a capitalist economy you get the benefits of capitalist economy the efficiencies the decentralization of the capitalist economy allowing all these like corporate bureaucracies to do what normally would be done in the state and it ended but have the kind of cohesion necessary to mobilize quickly and focus effort. Where do you talk about China or America now? No, I mean, talking about China. I mean, China is basically a fascist system.

It's a system of governance. A mixed economy. A quasi-free market. Of course, fascism and the free market are polar opposites. but when you you know corporate capitalism it's a capitalist economy in the sense it is still capitalism it but it ain't the free market which has its own separate definition but but it's you know you do sound like you're describing the united states which is constantly at war and which uses these private companies to uh and bureaucracies to build the war machine that they use to prepare for war all

the time et cetera et cetera that was why i was joking that thought you'd change the subject on me there They're talking about our system. Robert Higgs calls our system a participatory fascism, which is, yeah, you can run for office, but you're not going to make it a free market, you know. Right, right. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute,

and they keep them running well. suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty classroom instead.

Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. Hold on just one sec.

We've got to make some money here. Man, Starbucks support for Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign is almost disgusting as their coffee. Don't you just hate them? You, me, and a lot of other people, too. It's time to boycott and divest from those genocidal blood-drinking traders at Starbucks. But you're still going to need your caffeine in the morning.

Well, you guys are going to love Moondos coffee. It's so good. And the price is right. Check out a massive variety of awesome tasting coffees at Moondoseartisancoffee.com. You'll be glad you did. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com. Okay, so on the orientation thing, I wanted to ask, you talk about George Washington and the farewell address. If you ask anybody in D.C. now, they would go, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All of that is obsolete. But I think your point is that you're, what is your point here? You're saying that the U.S. changed their strategic focus, obviously, after World War II, but then I guess the demarcation that you're really making here is with the end of the Cold War and what they decided to do with their power after that. Correct. Yeah. I mean, George and Washington's Farrow addresses pretty much the kind of the gold standard for U.S. national security policy for most of our history. And, you know, it boils down to focus on trade, not getting into entangling alliances intervention in foreign wars and foreign hatreds, many of which are ancient hatreds, started with the worry that the U.S. would get pulled into European conflicts by being too close to England or being too close to France or any one of those European powers that are endlessly at war destroying their wealth and their estate.

status. And that that restraint in acting did a couple of things. It allowed us to provide for the national offense on the cheap. We had the capacity to defend ourselves, but we didn't spend a ton of money on engaging in foreign conflicts. So we're always stocking up dollars as a result to, you know, recovering and prospering. The other one was that that restraint caused us to stay out of the big wars of the 20th century until the opportune moment, you know, when the participants were exhausted, like, you know, with Japan after it was exhausted in China, in Germany after it was exhausted in Russia, and that coming in late allowed the U.S. to exit World War II, far better.

than it did going in, I mean, despite the losses, but relative to everybody else. And we suspended it slightly with the Cold War, but we still approached it with the same general level of restraint. We adopted containment as Kenninster. We did try to roll back the Soviet Union or China or anyone, and what we did is contain them and let the inconsistencies in their systems cause them to, you know, implode. And that's what happened. And we didn't end up in a nuclear World War III as a result. And, you know, restraint is a powerful thing.

But after the Cold War ended, that mindset changed. There really wasn't a reason to keep this massive military machine and all those people who were working on national security strategy and all that other stuff in place anymore, funded anymore, and their expertise wasn't needed anymore. And then they found a new way to employ it. And you remember, I'm an Eisenhower worried about the or mentioned the military industrial complex in his farewell speech. And it was true was that, you know, Roosevelt came up with a way to act, to match the fascism and communism and its ability to mobilize for total war by making it profitable.

He said, companies will fall over themselves for the profit. And the problem was, is always turning that off. And we ran into that after the Cold War. It was impossible to turn it off. So we found ways to involve ourselves in conflicts all over the world, and particularly in the Middle East. and it strained us. It's not allowed us to cover financially.

We spent it. Countless trillions on it, driving ourselves deeper into debt. A third of our debt is likely due to just that, more than that. If you count the over expenditure on national defense, it's probably close to half of the national debt that we have right now is directly attributable to that. And it wasn't needed.

It just simply wasn't needed. And we're still not able to turn it off. Now we're invested at a societal level in conflicts that have nothing to do with us. Absolutely zero. So there we are. We should go back to Washington's advice. We're a country that's uniquely positioned with water on both sides and no natural enemies on the same continent and that we would even have to worry about in a real sense and that we should take advantage

of that the best way we could actually participate in the world is demonstrating how to prosper like we had you know we were the first place that you wire up every home with with electricity with phones washing and drying machines with the all the conveniences we have cars and everybody I mean, Ford produced more than half of the cars alone in the early teens of the 19th century. So it's like we democratized all of that. We put it into everybody's hands. And we showed the World War to go and how to move forward. And that's the most powerful thing that we could do.

But we've lost the plot. Yeah. And it really is just a matter of special interests, right? I think of Andrew Coburn talked about how, you know, I'm putting words in his mouth here a little bit but basically the bankers and the oil men already had the Council on Foreign Relations

but Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Boeing and those guys they sort of needed their own eggheads to write the studies to justify their profiteering so they hired the Israel lobby and that's where we get the neo-conservative movement was like when Lockheed found Richard Pearl and they all came together

I guess they all worked for Scoop Jackson and like the idea was We get these neoconservatives to write the doctrines that justified the military budgets. And that was what is all about. So you can see, and this is, I don't know the, right, phraseology, you make it so great, so playing in your article here about where this isn't even, we're not even talking about, you know, the statesmen, the men in charge, the government officials looking through the eyes of the United States in its interest. They're not even trying. They really are off on, this is just like a lobby doing what they do. And I guess for the rest of us, good luck.

You know, hopefully your lobby can balance us out a little bit. But as far as we're concerned, we're here to sell as many H-bombs to the Pentagon as we can. We're here to sell as many planes and as many ships and as many subs. We do not foresee peace because we have peace and we wouldn't be able to sell subs. So here we got another study about why we got. to contain China or whatever it is, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, gearing up for a war with China, I mean, in order to keep this whole train going.

And it's not even really well thought out. I mean, when you conduct grand strategy, when you think about grand strategy, you have to think about where you want to end up. I mean, what's the end state? And does that end state that you're imagining match your strengths and weaknesses and the desires of, of who you are, and I don't think they even have anything in mind. It's kind of like the climate change folks. They never explain what they want the world to look like in a sustainable world. I mean, because if they did, it's a pretty dire world, you know, like you chew up, everyone

has equitable energy allocations and you chew up all your energy allocation just by running your air conditioning or your beefy PC or whatever it is. no one will accept that but they so they keep it vague they focus on the problem and um you know this is it's it's a it's a problem you know the cold war did something for us you know while it was going on is that uh in order to protect ourselves against encroachment from you know laterally through you know movements and socialist movements coming in is that um you know we've we had a focus on trying to do what's best for America and Americans. We had to, otherwise we wouldn't have made it through the conflict.

And that disappeared at the end of the Cold War. That need to focus on American progress and what's good for America wasn't needed anymore. And everyone started just grabbing pieces of the country, trying to, you know, loot it. I call it the hollow state. is you know everyone's just trying to grab a piece of it and make money off of it and coming up with ways to kind of exploit it and they're not loyal to the I mean it's like kind of a disloyal leadership of sorts it's like they have some loyalty to the United States but it's it's outdated and amorphous and but they are very motivated and loyal to all sorts of different causes and ideas and and identity And they use those to progress, to get elected, to generate funding to profit at the expense of all of us. Yeah, in that sense, Joe Biden is the perfect avatar for the decrepit, senile, old collapsing American empire in a way. It's almost like a comic book we're living in here with this guy.

But, you know, one thing that he has, he's not the most. Most arrogant guy, like on a personal level, he clearly is, but he's not the kind of guy who says, the big green machine can have its way in Afghanistan. We're going to do whatever we want. He was the one telling Obama, no, man, let's cut and run. And he actually did propose an escalation, but a very temporary one and focused on mythical Arabs in the country who didn't even exist, right? Ignore the Taliban, do anti-terrorism against al-Qaeda, which is made up at the time anyway. And, and. and then split after a year or two, whatever. So he's not the, you know, the very worse in that sense, although look at what he's done as president is, you know, and his Russia policy was always a whole different animal than his Afghan one. But anyway, point being, though, I was trying to make before I started rambling, John, was Joe Biden knows he's right.

He's got this self-righteousness of Washington, D.C., you know, personified in him. And he knows that if America didn't dominate Europe, for example, or Asia, I don't know what he thinks exactly about the Middle East, but certainly East Asia and certainly Europe, that Russia and China would, and that would mean world war and whatever, whatever. America has to hold the world together. Without us, it would all go to hell, John. What about that? It's just nuts. I mean, the damage over the last three years to the U.S. national security and status has been immeasurable. I mean, NATO expansion, like George Cannon, you know, pointed out in the 90s would eventually blow up in our faces as it got too close to Russia and started trying to recruit former Soviet states.

And that would cause a reaction that would unwind all of the progress we made during the Cold War. So, yeah, so offering Ukraine-NATO membership, my theory is that he did it to punish Russia for interfering in the U.S. elections in 2016, which is pretty much non-existent, religious, you know, what we were producing ourselves in terms of messaging and getting Trump elected, and that they took the punishment to Russia, and it blew up on him. And then they didn't see the problems with Afghanistan, that it wasn't, you know, was completely bereft of any validity and that, you know, they tried to do a withdrawal and it turned into an evacuation, you know, demonstrating incompetence to the world. And then we get involved in Israel and with Israel in Gaza and then rather than constrain them when it was apparent after the second week that this was going sideways and going south for the good. of them and for us and for for the long-term viability of the country um we did nothing we just let them you know sink themselves um and that uh it just it Biden's just the damage he's done and this administration is done and then wrapping up conflict with China while all of this other stuff is going on, threatening them at the same time, their participation opposite us in any of these

conflicts would cause us to suffer even more damage. It's just nuts. So, no, it's all been a bad thing. You know, I don't, I never saw that Russia as a natural energy producer, exporter, or China as real threats in a military sense. China understands that real power in the 20th, late 20th century as well as the 21st is gain through, effective trade, strong companies and great products

and making people dependent on what you produce. And if you start using military power around the world, that that's the moment that you actually are losing around. And that your power is diminishing. It's not the highlight. It's not the apex. You know, that's been the case for 300 years. Once you start using military power as the means of actually acquiring, you know,

status, you're on the way out. So, yeah, no, I did, you know, in 2020, you could go to Russia and vacation. And, you know, or, or maybe. maybe 2019 before COVID or anything, but is that and then to turn them into the ultimate evil empire? No, that's not, just doesn't work. It's like because of the way the network works and the way it's reformed, reformatted or our thinking processes. We don't have any memory. And what happens is that we go through this period of chaos during any, you know, pulse or any kind of, you know, triggered event, and that when we come back out of that chaos,

out of that cacophony, is that we reset our thinking on the issue, and we forget the things that happened before. And we adopt this new reality. And it's, you know, it's a pretty unsettling time to see this, you know, see what's underway. Yeah. All right, well, that's a really great segue into your other articles here about the media and the Israel swarm. But first, I want to ask you about nukes here because, of course, America and China and Russia are all armed with hydrogen bombs, plenty of them. And they say that China's embarked on a whole new thing. They've gone from two to 300 to now. Some are saying they're at 600 or growing anyway. And America and Russia have, what, 1,500, 1,700 deployed each. But the idea.

is that mutually assured destruction basically is foolproof and magic and therefore there can never be a nuclear war but it seems like they forget the part about being deterred themselves by the other guys nukes they take it for granted that they could never nuke us so we can push them really far and I know you must have heard I don't have footnotes on me but I have some if anybody needs some where they have said over the last two years Well, geez, they haven't nuked us yet. Maybe we can go ahead and give them more tanks. Maybe we can go ahead and give them the longer range attack them missiles and this kind of thing.

We were afraid to push before, but now, eh, Putin, you know, he's a paper tiger. He's not going to do anything. And so they keep escalating and escalating. And I just wonder how foolproof do you think mad really is as a bluff as a way of protecting us? Or are you really concerned about nuclear war with these major powers? Oh, wow. Yeah, I was probably in the first week of Ukraine. I was one of the few people actually out there saying, wait a second, let's take this slowly like a nuclear power should.

And that we shouldn't push this towards a series of events that would cause a nuclear war. And people were attacking me like crazy. And, you know, the next few months as escalation continued and we went all the way up to kind of an embargo on Russia and bellicose rhetoric they called them like the ultimate evil and we're going to roll them back and all this other stuff is like, this is just nuts. This is, I mean, the people who led us through the Cold War were very constrained. I mean, even Kennedy had a lot of lessons that he learned the Cuban Missile Crisis. that, you know, you do not want to push an enemy into a corner and threaten their existence. Because if you did, you wouldn't like the outcome. But we lost that.

Part of that has to do with the way we think as a network, I call it a swarm. And it, that occurred after Russia invaded Ukraine. And Russia had already been made out to be this evil empire that intervened in our elections associated with Trump, absolutely evil. And this proved it, right? And that swarm that started out of the opposition from Trump went global. And swarms don't think in nuance. They don't think in normal terms.

They just look for maximal outcomes based on what I used to call it, plausible promise, this idea that Russia could be defeated and that no intermediary steps are allowed. and that swarms win often by escalating beyond what the opposition to do. It mobilizes everything against the enemy, overwhelms them. And that creeped into our policy, and Biden jumped in front of this parade with the swarm with a baton and started going, okay, I'll act like I'm leading this. But he was adopting their mindset and their rhetoric. And fortunately, there were enough people.

people inside the administration that, you know, had some idea of the potential consequences of what would happen. And they were able to, you know, constrain it, constrain our participation in Ukraine to a level that wouldn't trigger things. But it's not, it's not nearly enough. You know, we, we danced around nuclear war through the last couple of years with Ukraine. You know, letting Ukraine build as a non-alli ally, you know, build drones that hit deep inside of Russia and Moscow that look like cruise missiles. It could have been interpreted at any moment as a nuclear attack. And then the other previous time, we'd say, no, don't do that. But, you know, we've lost that kind of gray-haired wisdom that we used to have, the kind of the insight necessary to actually.

make those those kind of decisions so um now mad is not what he used to and and it also goes back to that Washington thing you know mad work because we were restrained in our approach we didn't want war we didn't want to roll back and make world safe for democracy we don't roll all all the dictatorships back or or intervene in everything or micromanaged everything that that we were restrained in our action luckily at the time also through Kennan's kind of insight into the way the Soviet Union worked

is that though it was an expansionary ideology it was still Russia and Russia is a paranoid defensive power at core at the cultural level and as long as we didn't roll them back from the gains that were kind of

forced on them by War II that we would not run into problems. So we were both constrained superpowers going through the Cold War and that it allowed us to exit it in a successful way. It wasn't magic, just based on the nature of the participants. Fortunately, I think China's in the same boat. So they are relatively restrained.

They know that to increase their global power, they do that through trade. they might have lost the plot recently by ramping up their military forces but I don't think they're going to be quick to use nuclear weapons it's more likely

something you will see from the smaller countries that have it particularly like Israel well unless they decide they want to take Taiwan and Biden jumps in right because this is going to be my next thing was on the China question in nuclear war here's something I never hear

anyone say, John, never. Does anyone say, we can't fight a war with China over Taiwan? That could turn into a nuclear holocaust. It could become very likely a nuclear holocaust. That's how, again, deterrence means you stay home and deter people. It doesn't mean you wear it as a shield and start a war on somebody else's island, 7,000 miles away from your main naval base. Yeah, no, the whole Taiwan defense thing is, I think what we'd end up doing, particularly since we've already kind of acceded the point that Taiwan is part of China, even though we had put caveats on it, is that and the realities that we don't have the naval force necessary to actually pull off anything meaningful, particularly in transport. Jones Act and other things

have destroyed our ability to produce any ships, is that if China does go for Taiwan and it may be even prompted by this worry that the U.S. is supplying them with weapons that will make it increasingly hard for them to take it in the future, kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, is that we won't be able to do anything about it. The smart people would say, you know, we don't have any means to actually defend Taiwan. The old days, they used to think, okay, we'd sail a carrier group through Taiwan Strait. And if the Chinese dare to attack it, then that would, you know, lead to a nuclear showdown, where we had to predominance of nuclear weapons.

But that's increasingly not the case. trying to get hit us now in force so demonstrated by their space program as well as the increase the number of nuclear weapons that they have so um that strategy you know using a sacrificial fleet uh as they kind of reason to make a nuclear threat credible um you know it doesn't work in this current context you know i don't i don't think we you know it's not it's not like china is this like vast expanding power that's going to take over you know all of southeast asia with their military if they did that you know they'd be on the way out um but um the same thing with russia is you know focused on his uh neighbors and and that were tightly connected to it

is that um we don't have a threat like that like this expansionary ideology that we have to contend with. You know, we have nation states that are really focused on domestic problems, domestic needs, to have some trigger points. And so we should be working on ways to navigate around that rather than, you know, force a confrontation. Yeah. Hey, guys, did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director, so yeah. 13 of them now, including my four. We published five more. in 2023. Lori Calhoun and Tom Woods books about the COVID regime,

Joe Solis Mullin on the fake China threat, Jim Bovard's latest last rights, and our managing editor Keith Knight's domestic imperialism. And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thank you.

Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts, brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some at least into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-9760.

That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-r-rbi.co. That's r-r-rbi.co. You'll be glad you did. It seems like another real problem, again, with Biden personifying the whole U.S. federal government, the whole national security establishment here, is they really, as best they can anyway,

in that very, like, 1984 sense, They really believe their own BS that history started when Russia invaded Crimea. And we deny that we backed the coup on the maiden. And we're going with that. We're sticking with that. We don't want to have any discussion about February. We're talking about March. And that's it.

And ever since then, we've been defending Europe from Russian aggression. And when Meersheimer says, come on, you guys made that up after your coup blew up in the loss of Crimea. he's the only one on that stature who can say that and they refuse to accept that or listen to that it doesn't make it into any of the tales of the story of the origin of the war that you know what the Obama government with Victoria Newland drive and they kind of went overboard a little bit and the thing with the what happened there they won't know it started with NATO expansion and you could see it in the 90s when when Kenan wrote his op-ed you know it was clear that NATO expansion you know and then the policy came out of the blow I mean, it was a hallway conversation between Clinton and some human rights workers that led to the policy. It wasn't reviewed. Big minds didn't get a chance to kind of look at the downsides of it. What are you referring to there? Because, no, it was H.W. Bush and them who decided on NATO expansion in 1992.

That was Clinton. No, it was before him. The Bush government was, I'm writing a book about this right now. The Bush government had already decided we're going to fool him with this partnership. for peace stuff while we really work on NATO expansion in the background. That was why when Kenan and all those guys opposed it, they were years too late. It was already done. He's already in motion. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's still, the critiques are still correct, though. Oh, yeah, totally right. And I used to like to blame Clinton, but it really was Bush even before him.

But not, not that that absolves Clinton for what he did, because what he did was he continued that same and same policy and over the wishes of, you know, people, many people like Kennan. I mean, many ambassadors and diplomats and generals and admirals and hardcore cold warriors. Even Paul Nitsa, who had been the hawk compared to Kennan, said we should not be doing this. You know, Bob McNamara and even Brent Skowcroft said we should not be doing this in the Clinton years. And opposition to it now seems like a wild idea, right? That people who actually oppose nasal expansion and saw the downsides of it are considered wackos, where all those people, all these these minds, great minds were opposed to it from the get-go.

Yeah, absolutely. Listen, can I keep you a few more minutes? I know we're at an hour here pretty much. I don't know what the schedule is like. Okay, so I want to talk about this Israel story that you have here. This is something that we've discussed on the show before. But really, the great segue is the thing that you already brought up about the change of the media. I mean, this really is exactly what Neil Postman was predicting in his book, Technopoli,

where the technology changes the way that we communicate. And the way that we think, as, you know, the George Carlin is, you know, on my shoulder is saying, you think in language. You think in, you know, the way that, you know, you got people now with, like, emojis and place of thoughts whenever they're, it happens. And so everything has changed now. And that has a lot to do with what's going on with the Twitter swarm and Israel. And I think it's the height of irony that this horrible Twitter swarm that was really created to defend the horrible Twitter swarm. horrible Russiagate narratives, and then horrible COVID narratives, and then horrible Ukraine narratives, is not really good on Israel Palestine. And, you know, I'm not sure whether it's really a

gift. It might end up backfiring on us somehow. But, you know, at least they got one right finally. But this all has to do with the form of social media and how it's changed the way everybody communicates with each other and you have all these great bullet points about how just everything about the way our culture you know the way the people in our society used to communicate with each other has changed yeah yeah um the media rather than having you know presenting stories in a in a contextual narrative in a long form from books to uh tv shows to even the nightly news has been transformed into packetized media. And I mean,

their original thinker on this is, of course, McLuhan. The technology that we use changes the way we think, and that changes the way we organize society. And that happened with reading. You know, when we had the printing press

and people started reading it changed. It actually had physical changes the way we think, certainly changed the way we process information. And then it was, It led to massive societal changes to, you know, governments based on a piece of paper, right, the Constitution, finance, contracts, academia, you're focusing on science and science and written product that was shared in that bureaucracy. bureaucracy it was all based on this so uh so we have this packetization of media and everything's broken down to single ideas tiny ideas lowest possible level and some of those ideas are emotional

some of our logical twists all presented in social networking and it creates this massive flow of packets too much for anyone to process you can't process everything that comes across So to cope, people start to do pattern matching. And pattern matching is, you know, is that you just let the flow wash over you and you just pick out the pieces, pick out the little bits of information, peccatize information that fits the patterns that you're curating, that you're, that are dear to you. The problem is at a societal level that ends up becoming those patterns have become

social organizations, kind of amorphous, open-source social organizations, I call them tribal network tribes, is that network tribes have formed around this pattern matching, this group pattern matching effort. So you have like an anti-racism tribe, and they focus on finding every little bit of news that comes across and fitting it into this anti-racism narrative that shows that everything is systemically racist and these, you know, these people are the enemy and these are the actions of behaviors of, of people who are a racist. These are the speech patterns and the language that would be used by a racist. Tribes are built for warfare. They're built on a negative narrative.

The standard tribal narrative is based on who we are and what we can do better together. The network tribes are based on what existential threat do we oppose. And that came to play with a bunch of these tribes came together to oppose Russia, oppose Putin in Ukraine, and it turned on Israel. And one of the participants, one of the tribes that participated in this, in a network tribes that participated in previous efforts, the anti-Semitism network focused on the

evil of anti-Semites was cast out. And in part, at least in terms of his defense of Israel. And Israel hit a lot of the buttons of these network tribes. One was anti-racism. We saw a racial component, a racism component in the way Israel treated Palestinians.

They saw anti-colonialist. They saw the colonial dynamic in place in Israel with Gaza, and then they saw the kind of anti-fascist you know, against the fact, what they saw is kind of the fascist dynamic, melchoristic, you know, genocide, that kind of stuff. And it was kind of like the trifecta. And these tribes just went nuts. And they took packetized media that, you know, initially it was kind of Israel and the pro-Israel network focused on managing the information flow coming out of the major media. And they've been pretty effective at that. And they thought they were involved.

to any kind of, you know, loss of narrative control. But what they didn't see is that the packetized media traveling over X and TikTok and Instagram and others would flow against it because they were using, you know, every single little video flowing out of Gaza, you know, turned into an empathy trigger, you know, little packet empathy triggers showing brutality. every story, every lie told on the podium at the State Department or the Defense Department, every spokesman that said something nefarious was all turned into a packet and put on TikTok. And, you know, frankly, most of that stuff was true. The spin was aggressive, though. And so all of those packets in total were 100. times what the pro-Israel packet level was and it all of them were fit into these kind of pattern

matching into these narratives like I mentioned earlier the anti-colonialist anti-racist anti-fascist narratives and it resulted in the growing opposition that we saw just recently in Colombia and other places and and the loss of support for Israel among most people in under 30. I mean, aggressively lost it. And that was, you know, at 2021, during an earlier Gaza engagement, I saw indications that Israel was vulnerable to a BLM-type movement. BLM was another example of a swarm of network tribes. Wait, remind us what was beyond?

Yeah, in 2021, there was a online reaction to Israel. brawls bobbing of of Gaza and I wrote a brief on it and it it wasn't enough to actually ignite it and then when this kicked off this this current conflict kicked off in October of last year it was apparent within a couple weeks the Israel didn't know the war it was really fighting they thought it was a war on the ground against Hamas or against guerrillas and that the real war that they were fighting was in the online space And if they understood that they were fighting a moral war in the online space that they would have acted differently.

I'm not sure about that. I mean, I don't know how concrete this doctrine is, but you do hear this a lot from especially Jewish critics of Israel in America who point out that, you know, the Israel, from time to time, at least, you'll hear the Lekudniks referring to the idea that they're better off with a world full of anti-Semites because then they get to say, in fact, remember a few years ago, there was a, I forget which anti-Jewish attack had had had. happened, and Netanyahu went to France and said, you're not French, you're Jews. You should come to Israel. And they were outraged. Like, what are you talking about? Their whole thing is how they're French, you know? And he's undermining that for his purposes, right? And so it makes sense for them to say, oh, yeah, that's right, Jews, you're not safe anywhere in the world. That's why you should all come here. And it makes sense for them to say to their own population. That's right. The whole world hates us. It's a worldful anti-Semites. And that's why you need us. Yeah, no, I think, I don't think they could have actually, even if they knew this was true, that, you know, that there was an online war, that they would have changed their orientation to the war. Fair enough. It's just too built into, you know, this need for revenge, you know, was just too powerful. And even now, you can see the polls are still, like, they haven't gone far enough. So, inside of Israel.

So it's like, no, they, you know, Hamas, if. to the extent that they could plan, could have planned a better trap for Israel, knowing their orientation, knowing their weaknesses. I called it the tactics and mistake is that you set a trap that the enemy can't help but

fall into. And that they can't extricate themselves either. I think you're also saying here that you don't even need a mastermind behind it, right? It's a decentralized secret plot. It's just right there in the open, right?

H. G. Wells' open conspiracy to get Israel to shoot itself in the foot. Right. They were facing existential crisis with the normalization of relations between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. If that had locked in, there was no way that they would ever be able to, you know, leave, leave Gaza or, you know, sustain themselves over the long term. their issues would be totally eclipsed and that this was a last-ditch effort and it worked I mean it was perfect I mean it could have fallen apart in any given moment if Israel had a plan to defend themselves or if Israel had acted better in terms of the defense it would never have been an attack of the level necessary to pull it off yeah no it it it worked and now there's a generational and global opposition to Israel.

And if it ends up resulting in the loss of U.S. support for Israel in the next 10 to 15 years, it's not going to be a debt benefit for Israel. I mean, you won't want to live there. I mean, I went to South Africa in the 80s, and I know that you don't want to live in a country that's under that kind of pressure. You can't fly anywhere. You can't visit anywhere. you can't you can't buy the things that you want to buy i mean everything is 10 times more expensive it's just miserable it's absolutely miserable um and they're a tiny country they just aren't

self-sufficient yeah i mean when uh i know it was a publicity stunt for biden and everything and whatever the intricate uh politics of it but that was what schumer said in his speech was it's going to be really bad for israel going forward if you're an international pariah state That's not a sustainable future. I mean, who's, I understand, it makes sense that Netanyahu is thinking about surviving the next six months, but what about the rest of you?

You know? He's going to have an ICC warrant out for him, so no visits to Europe, no visits to a lot of countries around the world. Now he's going to be locked into this country except for the United States. Yeah. Now, I think it's funny, the irony,

I mean, it's the whole circumstance is dark and horrible, obviously, but the thing about, oh, you're a racist, you're an anti-Semite, It's kind of falling flat because, in this case, the protesters, they are sort of the wokenest, leftist types, and they've essentially already beat them to that narrative, that you guys are racist against the Palestinians. Right. And you're the ones who are the whiter, more right-wing nationalist faction crushing the indigenous, this and that. It's a purely leftist critique.

And then the Israelis come out and go, yeah, this is just, and they're really saying this. This is just like the rise of the Nazis in the 30s. Well, the Nazis weren't hippies. So that's stupid. It just sounds stupid to anyone listening to it. It doesn't make any sense. You're talking about white kids with dreadlocks. That's not Nazis.

They're Marxists or some shade of it, you know? Yeah, no, I mean, the pressure that they've applied is kind of zero tolerance for protests is actually back right on them. I mean, the early pictures of that, of that, that encampment in Columbia, it's like two dozen people. Yeah, talk about that. You have those pictures in your article here. Yeah, yeah. It's like they put pressure on the president of Columbia, and at the same time, they set up this encampment and two dozen people showed up. And they were sitting there doing nothing. You know, and if left down its own, it would have gone away by finals, maybe reoccurred. And then when people broke up for summer, it would have gone away completely. But the worry that they had lost control of the narrative, and they have, was so intense that they mobilized political, the pro-Israel faction mobilized political and military-like power to crack down it and put pressure on getting the police to remove them.

And that immediately blew up, immediately blew up. The protest grew, you know, a hundredfold, you know. It's like, and then there was professors, even if they disagreed with the premise of the protest, were out there protesting what they were doing to the students. And then it spread. It went campus to campus to campus. And all of this, you know, narrative that most people who are, you know, older, over 55 crowd, who represent seven-eighths of the nightly news, TV nightly news crowd.

You never saw that counter-narrative. I didn't see that anti-Israel narratives. You know, this was all a surprise, and it just blew up and it went everywhere. And, you know, all the efforts just then cracked down on it and, you know, increase the level of censorship is is not winning anyone over um granted they were able to force a bill through that would force tic-tok to divest but i think they're going to fight it all the way they end and there's millions of people dependent on it and that's electoral suicide for the democrats i don't know what they're thinking they you know what i adam townsen the other day said you know

the Democrats and must think that they are completely impervious to any kind of electoral defeat. That they are so sure that they are going to win that there's no way that they're acting like it. And that, you know, it doesn't really matter what all these people think we're going to win. And, you know, they're doing everything, you know, as if they didn't even have an election coming up. And I don't know. There is a lock on so many things right now that, you know, and there's going to be a lock as the fall heats up on social networking, too, like it was in the last election cycle, kind of filtering out anything that's, you know, anti-Biden or whatever. Long hot summer, man, it's coming. And that's the thing is there is the online swarm, but that online swarm, it operates by text message, too, not just by tweet, right?

So I don't know exactly who's running those networks, but remember that great article about how they really did kind of rig the election against Trump. And they talked about how they were able to turn on those leftist mobs and turn them off. And one great example of that was they ordered the leftists who you would think there's some, you know, you talked about the decentralized nature of it. On the other hand, they said don't show up on January 6th. Stay away. And they did. They all stayed away. And they were able to turn them on and turn them on.

off all summer long that that article for people looking it was in time or newsweek i think time had the whole thing about it there you know the one i'm talking about right yeah no i mean and i had people ask me i mean i watched all the videos in real time on on january six and people asking me should i go i go leave leave immediately this is right this is like a rickside fire stuff man you're gonna be you're gonna be targeted after this yeah this is a politic this is going to be politicized well you know by the way you know yesterday i think it was yesterday I get things mixed up a little bit, maybe day before yesterday. I'm sorry, I forget the name of it, but it's the official student organization of the Democratic National Committee voted to side with the Palestinians and against what Israel's doing.

I forgot the exact details, but it was. There's a generational time bomb. It is so extreme, so negative to Israel with younger, younger voters. Yeah. Well, you're looking at a six-year-old with their legs blown off. to death and you go, well, whoever did that is in the wrong? Yeah, no, these tribes, I mean, they've, they've locked in the narrative. And these kids, they grew up on this stuff.

This is, this is how they think. They think of pattern metrics. They're natural born, pattern. And this is a, this is a pattern that I don't think Israel is going to be able to shove off. Even if it puts pressure on the media companies, the social networking companies to kind of filter it out. Well, you know, a couple of months ago, I watched the PBS News out. and they just said, oh, man, October the 7th was really bad and did a 20-minute segment on that. It was like, you know, that was four months ago.

I don't know. That's what they're talking about instead of talking about Gaza. But I also have to admit that ever since Hillary Clinton started running for president, and again, in 2015, I turned the TV off. I just can't listen. And then ever since then, I haven't really turned it back on that much. And so I'm pretty ignorant of, yeah. Well, do you know, or is anybody even tweeting about, like,

Is there much change in the cable TV news coverage of this? Because I could have told you a few years ago that they never show a map of the occupied territories. They never explain that the Israelis are occupying the Palestinians. And the Palestinians are the beaten, imprisoned Indians on the reservation, getting bombed here kind of thing. But the power differential is so stark during this slaughter. I just wonder if that's really – I know that what's your name? Clarissa Ward from CNN has done. a couple of things that I've seen online,

but I just wonder if you know if the online swarm, I think you've made reference this, the online swarm really is upstream from TV and TV is forced to also adapt these same packets of information, as you call them. Or they lose all relevance. They have to adapt.

But are they? What? Are they now? On the sides. I mean, most of the editorial coverage, most of the coverage in the phrasing and the conjugation, they're using in the news is still pro-easer so

but there's on the edges they're letting the opposite view creep in yeah and um in fact when I was watching the layer news hour my telephone my phone in my hand my telephone my phone in my hand has dead kids on it

dead Palestinian kids and then I'm looking at TV and TV's like remember that one bad day months ago we're going to talk about that again today about how the Israelis are the victims in this thing and it's just couldn't be more stark the propaganda you know you should see the the pro-Israel stuff on TikTok it gets like 10 views they're 10 likes it's awful they can't even open up the comments oh that's interesting it's like it is it is really dire and um you know i know that on the youtube shorts you know those things we're like they get you it's a little uh dopamine addiction thing

you go from short little clip to short little clip on YouTube. I watch like one pro-Palestine thing, and they fed me 100 pro-Israel things after that, or they tried to, you know. Well, see, Google and Facebook are the opposite, but they're, you know, they're losing relevance. I mean, TikTok is the most used platform in the world. So it's like it is where anyone under 3035 gets almost, they use it as search.

They use it as everything. And, man, it is, it is packetized. media to an extreme. It's, it is really, you know, for the most part, I mean, it does screen out nudity and stuff like that. Um, but frankly, it's probably one of the freest networks out there. How dumb am I for writing a book right now, John? What? How stupid am I to write a book right now? Books are, books are, uh, cohesive ideas of size. You know, it's not going to go away. Books never, won't go away at all. Um, I mean, the new media stuff is there and it will become dominant,

but it won't completely erase all the stuff that came before it. We still have plays, and we still have movies that are kind of long narrative, structures, spoken word, visual. We have books. All that stuff still exist and people still make money from it. But the dominant media is the one that's going to, is reshaping our things. thinking and my worry ultimately is that we for whatever reason and a series of bad reasons that we let people who have the capability to do it let AI choose which packets of media and

topics and things that we get access to and that that kind of control that kind of control conversations at every level made easy by AI because AI is scalable to that kind of level. You can monitor and and manipulate conversations from billions of people simultaneously. Something you couldn't do in any

of the authoritarian regimes with buildings full of bureaucrats before that we're going to end up in what I call the long night is this that all thought is going to be narrowed down to this narrow orthodoxy of approved thought

and a sterile battle all innovation dies and it runs eventually runs a foul relatively quickly of human nature

and reality and that it causes a general collapse hold on just one sec we got to make some money here man starbucks support for Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign as almost disgusting as their coffee.

Don't you just hate them? You, me, and a lot of other people, too. It's time to boycott and divest from those genocidal blood-drinking traders at Starbucks, but you're still going to need your caffeine in the morning. Well, you guys are going to love Moondos coffee. It's so good, and the price is right.

Check out a massive variety of awesome tasting coffees at Moondosartisancoffee.com. You'll be glad you did. That's Moondosartisancoffee.com. Hey, guys. 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 Scotthorton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Well, you know, I mentioned Neil Postman earlier, who wrote that book, Technopoli, back in the 90s. And his complaint about all this AI and not even AI, but just computer stuff. And I think he does talk about the future of AI, you know, somehow in there. But basically, it's the diffusion of responsibility away from individual people. So you would always have some dingbat making the wrong call and censoring the wrong channel.

Oh, we can't have this pro-Hitler stuff. but then with the you're going to have some idiot censor a professor who has some examination of Hitler on there because they're too stupid to understand what they're looking at but at least they're a person and they can be corrected and fix something if there's a mistake there but the AI is at least as stupid and probably more stupid and so you know um i don't know if you're one tom anglehart from tom dispatch dot com he's a progressive type and he ran a thing that was critical of i'm pretty sure it was like some january sixth stuff donald trump trying to stay in office kind of thing that they were being critical of and then they got in all this trouble and got on i forgot which black list or whatever for that and it was probably because the computer says that you're a bad guy now if you're pro this guy who's the major presume major party candidate for president that makes you an enemy of the state and we get to censor you

off the internet based on total misunderstanding of a paragraph in an article, you know? Yeah, no, it's those training, the biases that are trained into these these AIs creates contextual errors that are impossible to dig, you know, find

tests for and then, and figure out where they're at. You mean, you see it creeping into even like something as mundane as HR, right? In hiring, you let these systems decide, you know, which resumes make it through and they filter out all the rest. I mean, you talk to anyone who's like actually got a job and they said through the back channel of talking to people and getting hired and you go to the HR and they go, wow, you can't find

more people like you. And they go, you filtered me out at the first pass. You never let me through and they go, what? Well, they didn't know. They outsource their screening process to these systems that are, have, they operate in ways they don't have any clue is that why they do what they do. And, you know, we're going to do that on a mass scale. And that's scary. It's a, you know what I mean, there's intentional biases and there's unintentional ones that are being built in that they're going to cause all sorts of problems. You know what? I think more than before, and I've been at this a very long time. But I daydream all the time about the Joe Biden never lived act that just undoes all this stuff.

No more Patriot Act, no more censorship, no more war, no more NATO expansion, undo the empire, return to some kind of normalcy, abandon the empire to save the USA kind of a thing, some sort of rollback. But then there's no one, there's no kind of consensus among, say, for example, the network swarm. That that's what we need is the, you know, Ron Paul's Freedom Restoration Act and the undoing of the, the worst of the government's abuses here. We're talking about what you're really saying, John, is you're describing the ultimate American totalitarian dystopia where the central government, through its proxies, prevents us from talking to each other, doing anything about their abuses of power ever again. oh yeah no if if you don't think that the government in the west western governments are capable of doing the most heinous things and you haven't been paying attention last year or two or three or four i mean i i thought it was you know western governments were incapable of participating in something that could be construed as genocide right i thought it was impossible and then and trying to you know then explain it away or cover it up and i'm thinking wait a second if they could do that there they can do it anywhere i mean they can explain it with the right context they could say you know this internal population's a danger we've got to take them out you know we got to you know and it

could be extreme and it could be explained away and that people would attack and troll and and and diminish any argument against it or the or the bill yesterday on censorship i mean it was so flagrantly anti first amendment is it should have been obvious and you know when i started opposing it yesterday saying this is just you know when when um i feel unsafe becomes a reason to or justification for extreme censorship then you know that's an abuse of power that's like authoritarian and awful and that fortunately you know almost everybody i i like and and respect his minds all jumped on um and said the same thing so i was like okay i thought i thought i was hanging out there but i'm not but yeah no the government will do things and we saw it in covid and we saw it in

um you know recently restarting the cold war never thought that it would restart the cold war from nothing and that yeah no it's whatever your whatever your limitations of what you think the western governments are capable of in this post-coil war era in the 21st century there aren't any limits and extreme actions will be justified and they may attack groups that you're a part of so and make you the target and um the only thing we could use do to protect ourselves against that stuff uh especially as as power becomes more and more centralized um through autonomous weapons and the like i haven't touched on that but i mean what israel showed and with the with the drone attacks and targeting systems is that you can automate mass death

yeah yeah that's the thing about terminator you're saying no it it's just done yeah yeah Yeah, you don't, automated system. Yeah, you don't need the AI to go rogue. You just need the military to have control of it and use it to kill people all the time. That's exactly what they would do with it anyway, you know? No, it's the people who control the AIs and control the autonomous weapons and do it at scale. And they come up with this wacky justification for doing. And any group in the West is a potential target if they run a foul of, of, of, of,

the establishment and or whatever swarm that that that uh how much of an advantage do we still have though in just their absolute incompetence right because ultimately we are talking about Brazil not 1984 where they're just you know well just just incompetence yeah well a lot of it a lot of the incompetence shows that you know it's kind of the holliness right and how could we miss the ineffectiveness of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan such that when we tried to withdraw it turned into an evacuation where U.S. troops and civilians were surrounded at Kabul airport and within mortar range and we could have been decimated, held hostage. People are, you know, hanging on to the gear of plants. How could we miss that? I mean, so completely miss it. It's just

incompetence. Yeah, sure. And incompetent. is combined with malice and wacky ideas is a pretty volatile in a networked age is a pretty volatile thing yeah what was the pride too i mean donald trump had a deal with the taliban you got zalmea kalilzat to cut the deal which i would have thought he would have just sabotaged it and kick the football further down the field you know but no he they had a deal and biden put it off for four months. But the Taliban didn't put off their timetable. So we should have already been gone before they walked in to Kabul. But it was just his pride that he didn't want to do what Donald Trump said. He wanted it to be his withdrawal instead. Yeah, no, I was, I testified in front

of the Armed Services Committee back in 2009, said, you know, they asked me about Afghanistan, I said, let's get out. Let's create an excuse right now and get out. This is a no win. We could have saved a trillion and a half dollars if they followed at least that. my advice. And McGregor had tried to get him to withdraw in the summer and then again in the winter of 2020. And in fact, he did issue an order to get out of Afghanistan in December 2020. And then they, again, just like in Syria and whatever, they rolled him and he rescinded it. But that's what he should have done, was gotten out of there when it was still cold outside and before fighting season had begun again. Oh yeah. No. And then they say U.S. trips are

risk if we withdraw and then they lobby this get involved and it goes away or they just they ignore it and they sandbag them and say we're doing as fast as we can but we can't move that quickly and be safe right and then they cause this catastrophe and 13 Marines mostly get killed and yeah the 100 and something what we saw with trump though was interesting is that presidents don't have any power anymore. Somebody's mentioned that there were factotems for the establishment, right? So it's like they are, they can't order anything done that hasn't already been approved by the establishment.

And the establishment determines what gets done and what doesn't get done, what the limits are. And if the president doesn't have any power, where are we at in terms of being a democracy? Yeah. I mean, we saw this with the encroachment in the Senate back a few years ago, some of these real tell-tale signs, like when John Brennan was spying on Diane Feinstein's staff and even trying to get them prosecuted for receiving a leaked true history of the torture program. Like, who the hell is this guy think he is? And I ain't no Feinstein fan, but that doesn't matter. The point is she was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. His only, you know, he had a duty to her.

She was supposed to be ma'am to him. Who the hell does he think he is? Right. And, you know, Senator Rockefeller, too, had said, someone had cornered him in the hallway and said, why don't you get to the bottom of this, whatever, the spying or the torture? And he goes, what do you think that we can ask these intelligence agencies

to do things and that they're responsible to us? It's not how it works. You know, they just don't. They're, we can't touch them from here. Yeah. And then you hear Tucker talking to this, you know, about this the other day. And he goes, everybody on the hill is,

absolutely mortified, scared of the intelligence agencies. By the way, I might emphasize that's John D. Rockefeller the fourth, by the way. Jay Rockefeller, that, you would think he's one of the most powerful guys. You know, he was the son of

Winthrop or whatever. You know, one of those. Yeah, it's funny. It's like we've institutionalized Hoover. Right. You know, kind of a everyone talks about Hoover and having you know, his blackmailing and his manipulation. of the political system, but we've institutionalized it.

We've decentralized it. It's everywhere. Yeah. And it's become a kind of an anonymous beast of sorts. You know, the system just opposes change and does not, does not want to get out of Cold War mode. Yeah. Well, so we have the-old mode is money, it's life, it's expertise, it's who they are. So what about the opportunity in this, John?

I mean, can we get the, we got the Twitter swarm. The network swarm is more or less on the right page. I know that there are problems with leftists and things, but they're more less doing the right thing on Israel now. So can we? It has open source dynamics. So you're always going to get wackos. Right.

The same thing on every, you know, every kind of network movement and organization. It's made up for people who have different motivations for joining. And a lot of more wackos. So you've interview them individually that you're going to find it makes for great little snippets, but packetized media, right? Yeah. If you interview them, they say something stupid. But, yeah, it doesn't really change.

It doesn't shift the ball at all. Is there any opportunity? I don't know. You know, I like a lot of the stuff that's gone on on the outside. I mean, I see a lot of stagnation, say, in defense, right? like producing the wrong thing overly expensive not working that if the u.s does get in trouble that it won't be able to actually respond effectively and then i see people coming in from the outside kind of like john boyd's mafia that is meant to you know redid or rethought you know how

we build aircraft and came out with the f-16 years ago kind of outsiders but with insight And you get, like, Musk coming in with SpaceX and taking on a broken, bureaucratic, expensive, un-innovative space industry and completely putting it out of business. And by reinventing it and then becoming, turning the U.S. into a kind of the dominant space launch nation. It's like it's not even close. And then you Andrew coming in and winning the autonomous aircraft stuff coming out of

none of the traditional kind of defense contractors even approaching what they did and they're going to reinvent that space and there's ways of doing it I was trained working recently trying to do the same thing as shipbuilding we lost all the shipbuilding

as everywhere else in the world except for the United States now largely because of our laws and the way we structure things and moving towards kind of autonomous modular system that doesn't go through big ports and can go to almost every small port and works off containers and these are smaller modular ships that are electric swap in and out batteries on using containers could put us by reinventing the industry

be turn us into the shipbuilding capital of the world i mean overnight by reinventing it and also provide us, you know, extra capacity if it comes to terms of a defense. So coming in from the outside, it's possible to reinvent things. And haven't seen it yet truly in the political space, lots of people trying to do that, like, Pelagian stuff, picking up in this kind of network state idea. You know, I played with it in 2010, and I just never, never figure out a way to actually make it kick. but it's possible that we can create on the outside things that we'll compete with the things that we're currently dealing with and put them out of business, replace them.

Yeah. So that's hope for the future, but it's always a long shot. We'll see. You're right. Yeah. We're stuck with a hell of a national security state with a money printing machine. And a lot of rifle power, you know, ultimately, they're not going to just give it up without a fight. But it's, it is, it's interesting, as you say, like this, the contradiction between in the country, people are less and less loyal to even the idea of the USA in an old fashion sense.

You know what I mean? It's like, it's like radio used to be the thing, but now it's not. That's kind of happened with this whole thing. at the same time that our government insists on maintaining this world empire when if you really wanted to save the first you'd give up the second there you know oh yeah i don't i don't think anyone truly appreciates the loss of loyalty that happened um with people under 30 when they saw the u.s um supporting israel on this i mean it it was wow i mean So extensive and so extreme that they hear the U.S. is complicit in this thing that they thought was impossible and that that loss of loyalty. You can just feel it just these kids will never serve in the military or do anything. It's like this is like never see the U.S. as a as a good place. It's their Waco.

Yeah, but on a mass scale, we're talking like 60%, 70% of the population. Yeah. Maybe because it's Waco every day for seven months in a row, no wonder. Yeah, no, but yeah, just casting the U.S., and it's, that pattern once it's fixed in their heads is not going to go away. You know, it just doesn't disappear. It's how they process information from here on out. And no amount of, like, alternative messaging is going to displace it.

they're just going to read it in that way that the pattern dictates and yeah that's that good for the in terms of trying to resurrect the concept of the united states um going forward well that's a depressing note huh yeah well you know i'm really a moderate for an anarcho-capitalist and i'm be willing to settle for completely abolishing the empire and saving the old constitution if we could have anything like it but you know problem is once the last of that old law is gone then we're just at the mercy of this craziness and you could see how yeah it it you know if you were thinking in terms of networks and how do you create cohesion at a national level using network thinking is that you find ways to make it participatory in the sense that if the u.s.

and sees this GDP increase, you get wealthier at the rate of increasing that GDP. And you know, that you're participating in the upside. And how to do that is, there's lots of ways to do that, but you should have like good kind of equity, not equity like parity of outcomes or, you know, we're talking equity in terms of ownership equity in the success of the systems and the network. that you're participating in. And that's something that we haven't done. You know, you see the GDP going up massively

over the last 20 years and seeing incomes just stagnate and seeing cost rise, eating up any kind of income increase that we see. Well, speaking of opportunities, I mean, this is an opportunity for real free market economist to explain the argument for hard money. And because I saw a poll that said that even above immigration, inflation is the number one issue this year. And Austrian school economists, we need to be exploiting the hell out of that and explaining to people that, no, you're right. But let us elaborate about how this system is rigged against regular people, you know? Yeah.

But trying to update it to a network level. Right. And network cohesion is that participation, that equity, kind of ownership has to be made more explicit. It's got to be a moral outrage against those devils at the Federal Reserve. Right? No, yeah, you won't see it. But it is kind of funny, though. Behind these kind of network tribes, there is like a core moral basis, you know, that there's probably good that would propagate everywhere.

But it's taken to extreme levels, which makes it negative. And, you know, what do you do in a world that global and global information flows and global population flows and everything else where religions in decline in the West? And there's so many different religions and so many different ways of looking at the world that how do you develop a common moral standard? and that is there some kind of minimal moral standard that we can build together that they could provide some kind of structure to how we interrelate with each other that's beyond states and these networks are kind of trying to aim for that trying to achieve that but they they do it

in such an aggressive overly complicated maximalist way that you know rather than focusing on just like a minimalist approach, which is ultimately what they should be aiming for, what we should be getting out of these organizational forms. It's like after the printing press hit, you know, in Europe, all these different organizations, all types came about, and they went through a kind of a evolutionary process that made them at the end of the day effective, as we learned to kind of, dampen them, you know, cut off the bad parts and keep the good parts and prove it and systematize it, is that we found ways to turn, you know, bureaucracies into something that are

positive. And even joint stock corporations, like the earliest ones of it that was the East India company and turned out to be, you know, a monster. It's like you got to figure out ways to actually make these things work correctly. And this is what I think we can do with these networks, but setting a basic moral standards minimal moral standards but uh maybe maybe i'm wrong on it but i think it will evolve yeah no i mean bottom line we like to think that the arc of the universe bends toward a reasonable argument you know that right if we're free to hash this out that's what thomas jefferson said that like go ahead and everybody argue and then whoever wins is the one who's right is best we can do you know right you're gonna do uh so but yeah

That's why the censorship regime has got to be the worst thing. And it's, there's something where, you know, the network swarm has got to internalize how important it is that they have the right to be one at all. That that could be taken away from them. They need to be the pro- First Amendment network swarm, that anybody who's a threat to the First Amendment, we swarm on their ass. This is our highest value. You get to choose which church you go to and you get to. to say whatever you want. It's the First Amendment.

They want to align everything with their viewpoint, with their pattern. They want to enforce, push their pattern onto everyone and everyone, every organization. Every network has to align with them. And that's how they wage warfare.

That's how they think. And, no, it's a, it's not nuanced. It has to be. to find a way to actually accomplish that, to minimize the demands and maximize the nuance. Thank you for your time. It's been great.

I hope everyone will go check out global guerrillas. All right. Thanks, Scott. How are going? The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.