Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/11/24 Laurie Calhoun on Anthony Blinken and All the Terrible People Running American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Scott is joined by Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Laurie Calhoun to talk about Anthony Blinken. Using the recent transfer of F-16s to Ukraine as a jumping-off point, the two discuss Blinken’s terrible tenure as Secretary of State and reflect on the lunacy of the officials in charge of American foreign policy. Discussed on the show: “Parody of a Statesman: Antony Blinken, Secretary of War” (Libertarian Institute) Cheney in 1994 on Iraq “New Information Shows CIA Contractors Colluded with the Biden Campaign to Discredit Hunter Biden Laptop Story” (House Intelligence Committee) Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow at the Libertarian Institute and the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line, We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique. 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 Scott Horton.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. I heard you guys on the line. I got Lori Calhoun. Where in the world is Lori Calhoun? That's the game we play over at the Institute where she's senior fellow

and where she wrote this great book questioning the COVID company line which is actually a compilation of her great essays that she wrote for the institute in real time during all that craziness critical thinking in hysterical times and what she does is she travels the whole world pretty sure she's been to every country britain has ever invaded and where are you now lori hi welcome the show hello scott thank you i am now in al aureen el grande in the very south part of spain close to malaga cool so you're swimming in the mediterranean then

No, but I do have a pool, so I'm okay. Cool. All right. Too many tourists out here, and I don't want to, like, brave the beaches at this point, so. Fair enough. Well, I'm glad you're having a great time, and it's great to talk to you again. It's been way too long. Yes.

Let me mention to the people that you are one of the great reasons that they should donate to the Institute. It's our summertime fundraising time right now, and basically, everybody's donations go straight to payroll and you know for articles you know for our writers and our regular fellows and staff and uh for a book production we do a bit of book production around the institute as well but um you really get a lot of bang for your book if you donate to the institute and you get the likes of the great lorry calhoun and all of her brilliant writings there uh as one of your great paybacks and plus we got all different kickbacks and uh donations and free gifts of your choice that we would like to give you as a token of our appreciation for your

support of the Institute. And especially you millionaires out there, you should just give us hundreds of thousands of dollars. That would be great. And then I can just pay all of my guys and everybody can keep doing great work and then I can stop bothering everybody and it'll be wonderful. So just go to libertarian institute.org slash donate and see what you can We appreciate the very smallest ones as well, whatever you can do to support. And you know the great staff that we have and all the great podcasts and writing and everything that we're doing at the Institute there. So I ain't too proud to beg because it's just to pay all these great people to keep putting out all the great output that they're doing. So there you go.

Yeah, and this includes this, which is a great article about how much you don't like. like secretaries of state, especially this one. And I also don't like him. And I also think that like he's probably mostly the president when people say who's in charge, certainly on foreign policy stuff. I mean, this is Biden's right-hand trusted guy for 40 years or something, right? They're real podness. So now he's not in the White House, though. Sullivan is. So you've got to assume, you know, I don't know. Anyway, so we got two major catastrophes. And of course, there's, you know, China, Bruin, but we have major catastrophes in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East as well on Blinken's watch. And I guess he thinks that they're both a measure of his valor and

greatness. Is that about right? I'm not sure what he thinks, to be honest. I just know how he conducts himself is more as a salesman for war than as a diplomat. I just have seen no efforts on his part on either the Ukrainian front or the Israel front to resolve these horrible conflicts in which many thousands of people are dying and suffering. And, you know, instead he goes to the NATO summit the last couple days and announces that F-16s are being shipped to Ukraine and they'll be flying over the country soon. So I consider him to be a pseudo-diplomat, I suppose you could say. You know, the title of my essay is Parody of a statesman, Anthony Blinken, Secretary of War, because he's not a Secretary of State.

He does nearly no diplomacy as far as I can tell. Yeah. So, and that really is an important point, because you could just chalk him up to a failure. Jeez, what a failed diplomat. But, no, this is all on purpose. And he's not shy about it either, right? No, he's not shy about it. And he's constantly bragging about how great.

things were going in both of these conflicts. And I point out that he, in a way, is following the example of many of the previous secretaries of state who were equally warmongers. And they also did more to promote war than to prevent it. And then often vaunted their so-called diplomatic skills when, in fact, what they were doing was promoting wars. I like the way you compare Zelensky to Juan Guaido here. You know, this is... Oh, that's right. Well, it struck me.

You know, the essay begins with my memory of Blinken parading his children on Halloween in costumes dressed as the son was Zelensky and the daughter was dressed as the Ukrainian flag. And they were, the children were soliciting candy from Joe Biden in the White House, I suppose it was. and I just I just thought wow this is just theater he's doing theater here this has nothing to do with diplomacy and then as the Israel conflict became more and more prominent and people were focusing primarily on that Zelensky was getting worried that he was going to be forgotten about and so started increasing his media spots and asking for money begging for money asking if you can't give us money can you loan us money, you know, getting more and more desperate. So at that time, I actually thought he was going to disappear. I really thought that it was just going to fade away. People were just going to sort of forget about it. And I guess I was overly optimistic that someone maybe had a bit of realism and recognized that a conflict between a nuclear and a non-nuclear

power has to be resolved by negotiation if it's not going to end in a nuclear war with the entire world. But unfortunately, I was wrong. And so he managed to, to get more money out of the United States government and also out of NATO and also out of the European Union since then. And now he's, you know, he's in some F-16s. Yep. They keep escalating it. It's funny you go back and look at the Washington Post at the start of the war and the actual supposed secretary of defense. Oh, no, I'm sorry.

It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff. Millie had said that, you know, on Millie's rules of the Ukraine war. Number two was keep the thing geographically contained inside Ukraine. Don't let them spread the war to Russia, which seems like a funny thing, like to tell your friend to not fight on the other side of the line when they're the one being invaded. But when we are so involved in the thing, then they got to accept those rules. Only here we are a couple years later, and actually those rules are canceled. You could go ahead and hit inside Ukraine if you want. And here are F-16s, which literally, and technically, as Lavrov said, are a nuclear weapons threat.

They're made to deliver nuclear bombs of 16s. It's very frightening. Yeah, I don't know what these people are thinking. It's incomprehensible to me how these people are running this government. I really don't understand. I mean, I guess we know with Biden there's really nothing going on. I don't know who is actually running the Biden administration, but these people appear to be a bunch of neocons, and they somehow think they can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing,

pushing the boundaries, expanding NATO, and nothing's ever going to happen. They will never reap consequences for people in the United States, I guess, as they're thinking. But what's more troubling to me is that Europe, the Europeans, have not pushed back more on this. I mean, they're right there. They're in Europe with, you know, next door to Ukraine. So I have no idea why they would take these chances of having this spread into World War III. Yeah, I mean, well, on the European thing, I don't know, but for the

Americans, you know, always, I don't like these answers because it's not a good enough answer, right? Like the fear of being called weak on communism or terrorism or something. Like, that's one thing. But here, like, especially with Biden himself, and this certainly would seem to be the case with Blinking is you have a real self-righteousness here which like for Biden you know he always was like that but he used to be intelligent enough to like sometimes second guess himself or think deeply about some issues or something but he's just been reduced to such a shout of himself that all he has left is shouting they're like Putin is coming to Poland next and ah you know and and so in that sense as as he put it in the state of the union, he's FDR, and Putin is Hitler, you know, and by FDR,

he means the greatest American president ever, the founder of the American Empire, who, who beat Hitler. And so you're asking him to, like, back down from that responsibility? Never, right? And so, in that frame of mind, where it's always 1939, then, you know, it's a trap thinking that way. And, you know, I guess Blinken is just as self-righteous as Biden. He certainly seems to be. I think that there are many layers of self-delusion, though, involved. I mean, when you look at someone like Anthony Blinken, who has gained, earned a lot of money through West Exac and also Pine Island, and these are firms that are directly working with defense companies.

And so they've earned a lot of money through their associations with these companies. because they call themselves consultants instead of lobbyists, and so they get away with it. And so this has happened with a bunch of other people. Jen Saki, the former press secretary to Biden is another one, who went immediately from her position with the government to a position at West's exec. And the thing is, these people don't actually have any competence in business

or in engineering or in weaponry, and yet they get these positions. And so the only thing they can be offering is, access, which is what West exec calls it itself. They say they have unprecedented access, you know, to, basically, they set these people up as I believe as kind of matchmakers between companies and government officials so that these companies can sell their wares abroad and also to the U.S. government itself. And they, the middle, these middlemen, people like Lincoln and also Lloyd Austin and

Jen Tsaki and all the others, Michelle Fouinwa, all the ones who work for these companies, they enrich themselves by doing this. And so I feel like there's got to be a lot of self-deception where they tell themselves that they're doing the right thing, like they're actually more moral people, and just sort of coincidentally, they're becoming rich in the process. Wait, how do you say it always called her Michelle Flournoy?

Well, her name is French. So Michel Flournoy is what it would be, but she's American, so she probably calls herself Michelle Flournoy. You know, I call her... I never heard her name pronounced, actually. The lady that sold the escalation of the Afghan war and then oversaw its failure as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy. And also, as you say, fortune, sit or honor.

Yes, exactly. So they just happened upon these incredible treasure troves of money just by doing the right thing is what they must be thinking because they're able to sleep at night, apparently. So that's the only way to understand it. I think, you know, someone like Lloyd Austin, you know, it's probably not cool. coincidental that Lloyd Austin thinks that war is how you should resolve conflict because he's you know been in the military for his whole career until he you know left and then he got involved in private industry and enriched himself and so you know you ask him what to do he's going to consult and he's going to obviously you know try to sell as many weapons as possible which

explains why he was on the board of Raytheon among others and so it's a little bit frightening because what we have is there's no division anymore between the military, military industry and the supposedly civilian government. So there's all this overlap and, you know, they call it the revolving door, but it's much more extensive than I had known before. I mean, I always knew that it happened with the military guys. And the whole idea, of course, has always been, well, they're the only ones who understand these weapons. But then you take someone like, Anthony Blinken, right? What does he know about weapons?

He's a lawyer by training or someone like Jem Saki, who probably has a degree in communications or something. These people obviously know they've never been in the military, so they know nothing about the military. So the only thing they can be peddling is access, which they've managed to do legally, and Congress has allowed them to do it, I suppose, because so many people in Congress do the very same thing. Yeah.

It's the American way. There's no shame attached to it whatsoever. is just exactly within the rules of the game. It's fine. Everybody knows and they don't even know it's wrong. When I say they're all like self-deluded, I like I watched Biden's speech on NATO. I mean,

there's just no recognition of the negatives that NATO has foisted on the world. For example, the destruction of Libya. No mention of that whatsoever. You're right. Everyone sort of stuck in this like 1940s thing, we save the world from the Nazis. And then everything else is,

you just don't talk about it, I guess. you know it's funny in the new york times um at the start of the of the ukraine war brett stevens wrote a thing in the new york times where he's like listen forget about iraq forget about vietnam forget about slavery okay just focus on Washington crossing the delaware and defeating the nazis and what the liberation of paris and i can't remember And he's like, so just forget about all that other stuff and just focus on these other things. We're like, the greatest American military victories. That's the only American history relevant here. Now is our chance basically to redeem.

This is what Obama's guy, Rode said, David Rowe was like, this is how we redeem ourselves from the war on terrorism. We felt real bad about how bad all of that went. So we've been now as a chance to kind of start over. and believe in ourselves again by sending a bunch of weapons to Ukraine for risking World War III and getting tens of thousands of innocent people, well, at least fighters killed, thousands of innocent people killed. And at the same time, supporting a country which, you know, postpone the elections and has martial law and conscription. So all these young men are trying to escape from Ukraine because

they don't want to fight in this, in this, you know, hopeless war, meat grinder war. And so this is supposedly all for democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy. I mean, it's a farce even to pretend that it has to do with democracy. But they keep doing it. And when you, if you listen to Biden, what he said at NATO, you know, he just talked about how basically NATO is the greatest, you know, military force in history, blah, blah, blah, and how it has saved us from all these things.

But no, actually, it hasn't saved us from anything. So it's all like this big fiction. And the idea is you're supposed to keep the alliance growing and growing, I guess, until it engulfs the entire globe like an amoeba. But in fact, all of this is just a pretext for increasing military spending. So all the members of NATO are being constantly goaded to spend 2% of their GDP on military, even though we just got through the war on terror, which was a complete catastrophe and served no purposes. for which, you know, was claimed to be intended. It didn't promote democracy. It didn't save anyone, actually killed a whole bunch of people

and terrorized many, many more. But that's just, you know, Biden instead pretends that when, after he even mentioned 911, when the terrorist attacks of 911 happened, all of member states of NATO rushed to the aid of the United States. Yeah, well, they actually mischaracterized what had happened. It was a crime. And they addressed it as though it were an invasion by a military state.

And then, you know, the war and terror ensued. What they should have done, of course, was to pursue the perpetrators as the criminal suspects that they were. Instead, they killed thousands and thousands of people who had nothing to do with it. Yeah. And it's amazing, especially in hindsight, just the level of advantage that they always take in these things, you know. And I think it's really hard to gauge, though, isn't it, Lori?

about just how much of the financial tail wagging the dog thing is going on here. Because there's so much ideology of American Empire and there's geopolitical interests and there are, you know, office politics and public choice theory and all these things. But then also, boys, there are a huge Pentagon budget, as Winslow Wheeler showed recently. If you really add it all up, not just the strict Pentagon budget, But the rest of it, too, that it's $1.7 trillion a year, as William S. Lynn had said in the past, the biggest honeypot in the history of the world. There's just nothing like it.

And so at some point, at least I guess in some cases. Everything on top of that is just added on top as like, that's like extra. Okay, so all this, I think it was, it's $200 billion by now we've given to Ukraine. I mean, this money is supposedly incidental. Meanwhile, the debt clock is ticking away. I mean, the country is going to implode at some point. Right. In fact, that's my next guest.

It's Mike Swanson, my old buddy from Wall Street Window, and he sent out a thing recently. There's this book about financial collapse, and he says, like, 133% of your debt to GDP ratio. That's the ceiling. And we're headed that way right now. Start buying things with your cash, because your cash is going to be worthless as they try to inflate away the debt when it all comes crashing down.

It's really remarkable that they continue to do this. I mean, we know we have this overwhelming debt and the interest on the debt is, you know, astronomical by now. And yet they keep doing it. It just every time they get together, Congress sends another $50 billion to Ukraine and they just ignore everything domestically because you can't afford any of that. You can only afford to send money to Ukraine or to Israel. So it's, you know, we really have devolved into a military state. There's really, there's no other way to describe what the United States has become. And you see this on every level, the people in the state department, the people in the military,

the people in the network news. So Jen Saki went from, you know, being in the government to doing consulting with West Deck and now, sorry, West Dix, and now she has a television program on MSNBC. And so basically all of the versions of the story. that people are getting come from these people, you know? So, so this is why you still see people in the population who will support these initiatives and wave their Ukrainian flags because that's the only version of the story they ever see. Yep. Yeah, exactly right. And it's funny again how like people don't even use the phrase conflict of interest anymore. No, I know. Of course,

Jen Saki has a TV show and works with this military industrial complex consult. firm and came straight from the west wing of the White House. I think we have Dick Cheney to thank for making all of this palatable and making people believe that there's like nothing wrong with that because he did it. He just was completely straight-faced through the whole thing, acting like, oh, yeah, you know, of course, I'm doing the right thing. You know, I'm doing the moral thing. You know, I'm defending the country by privatizing all these aspects of the military and, in fact,

becoming extraordinarily rich in the process. So I think he made it, he made the world safe for war entrepreneurialism. He's probably the foremost war entrepreneur on the planet, I would say. Yeah, seriously. Well, and I make the case enough already that he really owed the boys at Halliburton and Kellogg-Bride Root big time because he had been a really lousy CEO when he was in charge. the whole point of hiring the former defense secretary was this guy's going to hook us up with some welfare payments from the treasury here and he never really made good on that and not to any great degree he didn't have that much influence in the clinton years right and then he and his cfo whose name i forget who he trusted to do the work of course being lazy and not taking responsibility himself uh let his buddy vet this company and they decided to buy dresser industries just we

weeks before all of the libel verdicts started coming in in the civil lawsuits that they were facing over asbestos cancer claims. And it was literally billions of dollars in these claims that they were paying, not just hundreds of millions, but literally billions. And Dick Cheney bought the company weeks before those suits started coming in. And so he just, oh man, he was in so much trouble. And I don't have anecdotes. I need some. But he must have been in so much trouble with those guys. And so then you could see why he's like, oh, you want me to pick your vice president, huh, Jr?

All right. I pick me. We're going to war. I owe these guys bad, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say what all the motivations could be in the mind of someone like that. It's very hard to imagine what it would be like to be digging. Cheney but there he is so out there having done so much bad for the you know for the world and for humanity and yet there he is yep I mean he's on video from 1994 everyone should look this up

maybe Connor be so kind to put it in the show notes just searching YouTube Cheney C-SPAN Iraq 1994 and he's explaining why they didn't go all the way to Baghdad and it's all really good reasons why like especially well see iran would like to control the south and east of the country yeah they might and anyway and how how he talks about how bad it would be to fight an insurgency trying to hunt down saddam hussein as he went into hiding and to build a new government there and all of this stuff um yeah well that was right wasn't it it certainly was so he he certainly made the case like it really was his own opinion not just defending Bush's policy. But I think he even agreed with Baker and Skowcroft at the time that this is what

we should stop here, Mr. President, which is what they did. So anyway, for him to go back on that, he had some reason. And it wasn't just because Wolfowitz said so or something like that. You know what I mean? Cheney's his own guy. Right. Right. The neocons had their reasons. Yeah, they have their reasons. But I do think that, you know, it's become more and more frequent for people in the government to be offered these lucrative positions. You take someone like Nikki Haley, you know, what in the world did she know about anything? And she ended up being on the board of Boeing and becoming rich as a result of that. And then, you know, tried to be the strongest contender against Trump. She failed. And now she seems to be sort of hoping he'll

select her as vice president. But I don't think he'll do that because it would open him up to assassination so that she could be president that neocons could take over the world so i don't think he would do that anyway we'll see i don't know man he's clever lots of times but also not lots of times but yeah but i do think he has i think he has a good instinct for self-preservation so you can whatever i agree he's certainly not the best on anything right but i do think he's good at that and And so he even, actually, he made a comment recently about how Biden had made a good choice by taking Kamala Harris as his vice president because she's so incompetent that no one would push him out because they would know that they would get her as the president instead.

So the fact that he made that comment suggests that he does think along those lines, you know, like, how am I going to prevent myself from, you know, being taken out or whatever? So, I mean, who knows? But we shall see. I guess he'll announce it pretty soon. Yeah. Well, and also he's just hilarious, right? In the middle of the debate where they're just going back and forth and then he just stops.

He goes, you're the worst president ever. That thing that happened was the worst thing that ever happened. I can't hell. I just laugh my ass off at Trump. The highlight was the golf debate when they were debating their golfing abilities. That was by far the high comic relief point of the debate. It was great. I've seen your swing.

You can't hit a ball of 50. feet. And Biden's like, I'll, I'll challenge you to a match, but can you carry your own bag? I mean, it was fabulous. It was like really high comedy. Well, low comedy. But anyway, it was like slapstick, really. And then at the end of the little exchange, Trump goes, let's not act like children. That's so funny, dude. 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. Thomas done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high school, 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. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time?

Coffee. It helps keep me from falling asleep. And it tastes really good because I get it from Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondoseartisan Coffee.com. Moondos is kind of the anti-starbucks, in that their coffee tastes real good. They have lots of great choices, representing all kinds of regions, blends, and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait, also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to Moondoseartisancoffee.com slash Horton.

Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash Horton. Anyway, so I don't know if you watched the George Stephanopoulos interview where Biden was trying to prove that he actually is not as in coherency within the debate. I was just watching where he called in morning Joe this morning and he called in on a landline, obviously, because they don't want to show him that he has a bunch of cue cards in front of him with things to say. Oh, okay. So he sounds terrible. He's on a landline. And he's just going off.

Like, not one of those cue cards in front of him said, be cool. he would have read that out loud if it did yeah right it would have been like next card be cool yeah exactly stop for a second and let joe talk you know like you'd have read that out loud so instead he's just going off about you can't stop me you know it's just it's really becoming sad actually the pylon i mean this is a different topic but um it's related because i think Anthony Blinken has been doing a lot of the work behind the scenes, you know, propping up Biden, making him look at as believable as possible. I mean, making the case that he has been the president for these years, you know, when it's becoming more and more obvious that he hasn't been.

It's almost like a, it's like an object proof of the existence of the deep state, you know, that debate. You look at Biden and you're like, actually, he hasn't done anything for the last three years. Look at this. I wonder how often they meet. I mean, you know, I know Blinken has worked for him for a long time. I mean, they're buds. You know, he really trusts him and stuff like that. So, or if he doesn't trust him, I don't know who he trusts. But, yeah, I think he was actually the national security advisor to the vice president.

So under Obama, when Biden was the vice president. Yeah, I think in the first term. I think they do have a long relationship. Yeah. Yeah, I think in the first term. And then in the second term, it was Sullivan replaced him because Sullivan had been Clinton's guy. Okay.

Uh. But anyway, he has been around, he has been in the State Department, quote-unquote State Department, you know, really wearing the mask of a State Department employee, even though he just promotes war since 2009, so. Uh-huh. Yeah. And he had been Biden's aide in the Senate, too, right? He had been his right-hand man before that. Oh, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't know about that. Yeah, I only knew about his federal post. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So then they go way back. Okay, so, yeah.

Oh, and of course, we can't like to mention that he picked up the phone and called Mike Morrell and led to the composition of the 51 intelligence experts' opinion that the Hunter Biden laptop was probably Russian disinformation or it had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. So Blinken did that. And I think he was probably rewarded with this appointment as Secretary of State for having done that, for having just keeping, you know, having kept Americans in this anti-Russia configuration where everyone is very, very wary and even paranoid of Russia after all the Russia get years. I mean, people just will never shake that, I think. And that has helped enormously in Boeing support for the continuation, the prolongation of the war in Ukraine when it should have been resolved by diplomatic means years ago yeah you know I'm

just it's on the tip of my tongue I can't quite place it but I know that there's more to that story about blinking in the laptop and something that he had done for hunter but it's escaping me right now I know it's in the book somewhere oh okay I got what Biden's senior's got here yeah he was like a at that point he was a Biden campaign advisor and they wanted to just come up with some talking points to finish the effect right before the election of the appearance of this laptop. And so that was like his job was to sort of get the media to downplay the whole thing. And, you know, this is how he did it. He got people not only former intelligence experts, but also people who were at that time contracted by the CIA. And so, you know, the, actually

the it's called the document is called new information shows CIA contractors colluded with the Biden campaign to discredit Hunter Biden laptop story and this comes from the House Permanent Select Committee

on Intelligence. It just came out late June, June 25th. So there's a whole report on the CIA subcommittee's investigation of what happened and some of the people who signed a letter were in fact on active contract with the CIA. So this raises all these questions about, you know, the CIA is not

supposed to be doing domestic stuff. Of course, we know they do. But anyway, we'll be investigated further, I believe. Yeah. Well, I just found that section in my book and I don't have anything extra on Blinken's motive there other than wanting to help Biden win. But that he was the one, according to Morel, that phone call, quote, triggered and quote, his move to go ahead and round up all the experts to lie. Pretty remarkable. And then when they were approached later, when it emerged that, in fact, when the FBI itself admitted that the laptop was genuine and it was not planted and the documents

on it were, in fact, authentic, that, you know, I think it was New York Post, maybe some other newspapers, reached out to all the 51 intelligence experts, you know, asking them, were they going to retract their statement and most of them just said no comment no comment no comment or based on what I knew at the time I stand by my comment I stand by what I said you know so but most of them just refuse even to acknowledge that they were wrong on that right hey all I had to do was page down a little bit more and I found the second part of that it was later revealed that antony blinkin had his own personal reason to see the laptop suppressed he knew it contained evidence that he had lied to Congress about his knowledge of Hunter Biden's role on the board

of Burisma and its hiring of the Washington, D.C. lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies. So it later was proven that he knew about it and that he had lied to Congress and told them that he didn't. Okay, there we go. Okay, that's a much stronger reason, isn't it? Well, I mean, I think, you know, he had multiple reasons, but that personal reason is even stronger. Oh, wow, interesting.

Yeah, one thing great about having this early onset. 100% pot-induced dementia is that I learn new things reading my own book all the time. I'm like, oh, this is really fascinating stuff. Well, when it's so densely documented, you can't possibly remember all this, you know, tiny little grains. You know, you have a very granular coverage of all these things. Most people have a kind of summary statement and you really dive into the detail. Well, I knew it was something. I knew that he had two reasons.

And I just, but I didn't remember what the second one was. So that was what it was. There was proof in the laptop that he had lied to Congress about what he knew about Burisma, hiring Hunter and Hunter influencing Burisma to hire Blue Star Strategies. Oh, that I did not know. Thank you. Okay. Interesting.

Yes, everybody add that to the anecdotes in your head that you know about things. It's very important. So anyway. So he's even worse. I thought. Okay, thank you. That's right. It's always worse. I mean, it's a kind of overdetermined at this point. Like, I just think he's so bad on so many levels.

And so he's got to be incredibly self-deluded because, you know, he does these things. Like, I talk about his little performance in a basement bar in Kiev where he played the guitar. He played Neil Young's ballad for freedom. I think it's freedom in the, no, rocking in the

free world or something like that. And this isn't a bar in Kiev. You know, the country is at war. And this is, you know, simultaneous with all these young people being hunted down by the conscription police to go, not even just young people, men from the ages of 18 to 60, being hunted down for failure to present themselves and go fight in the meat grinder war. So, you know. And this is, that song is sarcastic. It's just like, well, well, born in the USA is not sarcastic, but it's, you know, got a deeper meaning if you like actually listen to the,

the lyrics between the chorus. You know what I mean? It's about a brother coming home from Vietnam and the economy sucks and the world sucks and nobody cares and it sucks. And this one was, you know, about he's mocking H.W. Bush and his Iraq War I and his thousand points of light

and all of this stuff. And he's going, oh yeah, keep on rocking in the free world. Meanwhile, they're dropping bombs on people and exploding them to death. And, of course, bringing on the next. next era of war. Isn't it so clueless that he didn't even know that? Yeah.

It's really, I mean, isn't that the, like he must have, yeah, he's doing karaoke or whatever, right? Like, isn't he reading the lyrics that, like, you know, Antonin Blinken's War is bullshit. He's right there in the song. I mean, maybe it's perfectly fitting because his whole thing is just, you know, theatrical performances and whatever's going to fool boy Pelooy. He obviously thinks that people are really stupid and they believe all this nonsense that he's constantly telling them.

He's always putting up these memes, not him, but whoever runs his Twitter account, these memes about freedom and how great Ukraine is. He's always, like, floating the Ukraine flag. And, you know, he's just as bad on Israel and Gaza, really, to be honest. Hey, why don't you talk about that for a while here? Go ahead. Okay. Well, you know, just the fact that he'll give these what appear to be heartfelt performances

talking about the humanity of the Palestinians. And then, you know, he pivots. And he's like, yeah, we're sending a whole bunch of more weapons. and missiles to Israel so they can defend themselves. Well, I mean, how does killing thousands of children defend anyone, really? And yet he somehow manages to compartmentalize all this in his mind as though he's helping both the Israelis and the residents of Gaza. They have little aid packages going out now and then so that once they reduce a neighborhood

to rubble, you know, they maybe hand out a little bit of food and water to the survivors. You know, it's awful. He's such a hypocrite on that. And they won't really make any efforts to get Beebe to stop. You know, they just won't. They've kind of just allowed him. They act like it was 9-1-1 only in Israel, so 10-7-23. So they act like basically anything goes.

He can do whatever he wants to defend his country, when in fact he's not defending his country. He's actually destroying his country because he's making it so it will never be safe for anyone again. I mean, because every time you kill these children, you're just producing more potential radical jihadists. Got that right. Yep.

And we're talking about that earlier where that's the official warnings coming in as well that, you know, groups are being radicalized right now. by this just as you would expect them to that's right when you see your brother or your father or your daughter you know mutilated by these missiles what reaction are you going to have it's a human reaction of of righteous anger when these entirely innocent people are destroyed um and so uh unfortunately they end up being molded in the image of of the criminals is what happens yeah so they take up they take up arms. And then that serves as the pretext for even more oppression. And it's just this vicious cycle. The old violence breeds violence. We've seen it over and over again.

I mean, you know, you wrote the book on the War on Terror. There's a reason why it's spread all over the Middle East. Yeah. And, you know, it's just like, I guess I do say this in the books, too. Sorry for being so redundant. But just like people from Hawaii or Arizona went and signed up for the army on the Marine Corps to go and fight because D.C. and New York had been attacked and Pennsylvania had been attacked. Well, that's the same thing as Egyptians following a Saudis call to avenge Lebanese and Palestinians, you know, even though they live under, you know, separate dictatorships of various kinds and what have you. It's still, you know. And in Iraq, in Iraq, when they said, you know, we have to go, we have to go defend our Muslim

brothers because a Muslim country is under attack by a non-Muslim country. I mean, that's why you had all these people flowing into Iraq to take up arms against the invaders. So it's exactly the same logic. And you had, look, it's the same reason that American Muslims join the army to go and fight them, right? It's just a matter of solidarity. Who do you identify with? And so obviously religion can be a strongly unifying factor with people, especially when they're under attack. Yeah, for sure. I will say that one consequence of what's going on in Israel right now in Gaza is that we've seen a reawakening of the anti-war left in the United States. I mean, I thought they were gone forever because they were completely asleep throughout the Obama years. But they're, you know, doing protests on campuses or trying to do protests on campuses. And so that that was good to see, that has been good to see, unfortunately, you know, for a bad reason that these horrible things are taking place. But, but, but. there is some anti-war sentiment on the left. I really was marveling when the whole Ukraine conflict began and everyone had their Ukrainian flags, you know, waving in their yard and everything.

And I just found it kind of shocking that all of the Democrats were voting for every single provision of money, provision of arms and money to Ukraine, when in fact they supposedly care about all these domestic issues, which are just being ignored. You know, so the high priority now is just anything that involves producing, selling, and shipping weapons. And the Democrats are all in. So we really have, I mean, people have been saying it's the war party doophily for quite some time. But you've seen it in a stark way this past couple of years. Yeah.

Well, when it comes to the Borg group thinking of liberals these days on all of these issues, it's really just something to the whole. I don't know of anything that compares to it. Well, I don't know. Republicans in the Bush years were really the same kind of idiots. There's a little bit different dynamic in the Trump years because you have the whole government against the president. So even though he's the president, he's still kind of the outsider. And then you have the liberal siding with the government against the elected leader of it and all that kind of weirdness.

But, you know, I don't know. It's really wild, actually. Yeah. And, you know, look, I mean, not to insults anybody, you know, obviously there's so many great journalists. journalists and so many great anti-war left-wing people and have been this whole time. When people say the anti-war leftists disappeared, they really mean the liberal posers. And I guess the leftists also do have a lot of different damn priorities. But at the same time, like, who's been really good anti-war people all along other than libertarians?

Leftists. I mean, that's who we run at anti-war.com. That's who writes all these great articles and does all this great journalism, people who are to the left of the Democrats. So they're not beholden to the Democratic Party and they're willing to tell the truth about it. typically they're not necessarily always to the left of the democrats but usually that's the distinction you know so you know god love them and everything like that that's fine but at the same time i kind of you know when it comes to like you know riding kids blocking highways and whatever i think all that is just counterproductive and does more harm than good i i kind of still regret

to this day like how many right wingers were pro war just because they hated hippie so much back then. You know what I mean? And like, even Matt Welch at Reason Magazine, he like never really support, you can't really catch him supporting the war in Iraq, but he specialized in character assassinations against all anti-war leftists who were trying to stop the war in Iraq just because he was so annoyed by leftists. And you kind of can't blame him. You know what I mean? I don't know. So that's all I'm saying. That like they, in a way, if, you know, we want be an anti-war to be patriotic. But if the whole thing is, We just hate everything about the American system, also including the wars.

And I really don't have – there's nothing to work with there. You know what I mean? That's right. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, I was really talking more about the anti-war sentiment in the people who now would describe as liberals, but they're Democrats. I'm talking about Democrats, really. So I'm not talking about intellectuals like Chomsky, for example.

Of course, the intellectuals have a lot. always been there, a very small pocket of determined writers and activists, you know, someone like Medea Benjamin or David Swanson, these people are left, they're on the left, but they're professional, I don't even, I don't, let's just say they're devoted anti-war people. That's who they are, you know, I'm talking more about all the people who, here's an example, once, after Trump was elected and there was that pink pussy hat protest, all the people who got together for that people who are never politically active at all but then they got somehow wheeled into participating in that protest and they were probably never politically active

again but they think of themselves as Democrats more than we now call them liberals and they're definitely not leftist right most of them yeah they're Bill Maher people that's who they are you know they're like way better than the left on some things and way worse than them on others you know Anthony Gregory, you say the best thing about the liberals is that they're not leftists. And the best thing about the leftists is that they're not liberals because they each side of them have their charms, but they also are so bad on so many things. And then the worst thing about Trump, well, I don't know if he said this is the worst thing about Trump. One of the bad things about Trump was that he made them put aside their differences and both get worse and abandon the things that they were good on, like the leftists being good on war and being anti-national security. state and then the left and then the liberals abandoning free speech and this kind of thing

all so that they could work together against Trump and so they adopt their yeah TDS is real I mean it was like a bizarre phenomenon I mean it's still active now coming again soon too just wait until the second term you know yeah it's it's going to be wild how these next 100 and how many days 115 days play out I mean I have no idea what's going on with this pile on against Biden. I mean, it really seems like it's not organic that it's some sort of orchestrated thing. Oh, it totally is. Which makes me suspect still what I've been predicting for two years, which is that Hillary is going to be the candidate. So people have been laughing at me when I've told them this. But it just looks more and more like it because like watch CNN now,

Clinton News Network. They're working overtime just completely just to demolish Biden. I mean, it's actually gotten to the point where I don't like Biden, but actually I'm starting to feel sorry for him because they're so cruel at this point. I mean, they're just, they're taken out, they took off the gloves and now they're taken out the knives. I mean, it's really bad. So, um, you know, calling for him. I mean, it's just, it's embarrassing. And it's embarrassing because he is a super senior, you know, you know, you can hate him for his policies, this, that, whatever. But he's an elderly, man who should be in retirement right now. And I, I don't like watching this play out. Oh, I do. I think it's hilarious. I hate him. Oh, you do. Okay. I absolutely. I absolutely love.

I love his disgrace, and I love seeing everybody turn on him, and I love how they have no alternative to him at all. And now they just paint themselves into this corner with their lies, you know? But I think that he is diminished, and as a result, I think of this onslaught or pile on as similar to kicking a dog. You know, you don't, like, you don't beat up. You don't beat up on dogs and children and, like, dementia victims is the way I look at it. But yeah, no, but I'm more interested in the part about how contrived it is, how like even in the middle of the debate, when all the initial articles that came out against him, they all started the same way. I'm getting a bunch of text messages from Democratic Party insiders telling me, this is it, we're throwing him overboard. And it has been on full court presence then clearly organized by some secret email list that we're not on, that they are.

You know, no question about it. I think it's the Clinton cartel. I mean, obviously Obama is in on that. this whole George Clooney thing coming out. And after he did this big fundraiser for Biden three weeks ago, then he comes out with his long editorial saying that Biden can't be the nominee. I mean, it's unbelievable. Clooney did not do that unprovoked. I mean, to use your word, you know, he was asked to do that by some little. If Hillary runs, I'm going to die laughing.

I think she will. I think she will because she's so delusional. She actually thinks that she can win. And then she has the power, you know, to control all these media. She has always had the Clinton News Network, you know, for many years now. Watching her lose to him twice. MSNBC, yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think that's what's going to happen.

We'll see. If she, if she's the nominee, there's like no chance I'm going to live to see Christmas. Like, I am just going to hyperventilate and fall down dead laughing watching her lose twice to Trump. It is going to be the funniest damn thing. Everyone tune in for the live stream. that night. And see Scott Horton just laugh himself all the

way out of oxygen to death, dude. Like, what happened? Hillary lost. The dude started laughing and never came back. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, I'm just saying it's good. They're pushing so hard now and they're not letting up. So it's obviously not going to be Biden. And I don't see, you know, she can just waltz in and in her view save the day for the Democratic Party.

So we'll see whether I'm right about. You know, I've been, I've been noticing. this for the last couple of years. Every time some big thing happens on the world scene, she crawls out of the woodwork to make some sort of quasi-presidential statement. And I'd like, she's running. She's running. So we'll see. Anyway. She certainly wants it. All right, hey, listen, I better let you go. Because there's so much more that I want to ask you, but I'm out of time. I got to edit this show and send it off to the people. Great talking to Scott. Always great talking to you too. I hope you'll

write another book for us to publish soon. I will. I will. Okay. Thank you. And let's talk more often. All right. Everybody, that is Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow, the great Lori Calhoun, author of a whole bunch of great books that I didn't get to publish, including We Kill Because We Can and War and Delusion.

But her latest is called questioning the COVID company line, Critical Thinking, and hysterical times. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM, in LA. APSradio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.