Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/25/22 Matt Taibbi on the Depravity of the Media and Liberal Interventionists

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

Scott interviews journalist Matt Taibbi about two articles he published at TK News. The first examines the role the New York Times plays in defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse in our country. Taibbi draws a comparison to the role of newspapers in the Soviet Union and points to multiple examples from the last few years of U.S. outlets doing the same thing. They then focus in on foreign policy, where they reflect on how the military and interventionists in both media and government went through a transformation after the Bush Presidency. By rebranding themselves as humanitarian interventionists and framing Obama as their leader, they were able to dismantle the antiwar left of the Bush years. Now we find ourselves in a moment where many on the right are taking a more anti-interventionist stance. Scott and Taibbi mull over whether this will, or can, change American foreign policy going forward.  Discussed on the show: “The New Kremlinology: Reading the New York Times” (TK News) Scott’s Debate with Cathy Young “Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.” (Bloomberg) “The Great American Military Rebrand” (TK News) The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama Bring Our Troops Home Defend the Guard Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: TK News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 dot for 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 matt taheby and he is of course a author of great many books insane clown president the great derangement I Can't Breathe The Killing on Bay Street about Eric Garner

Smells Like Dead Elephants Dispatches From a Rotting Empire I like the title anyway Gryftopia and Hate Ink Which is absolutely excellent I know you guys will like it And he writes at Substack We've got a couple of

TK News is what it's called there on Substack A couple of great articles Of interest today The Great American Military Rebrand And the New Kremlin Reading the New York Times. Welcome back to this show, Matt. How are you doing? Thanks for helping me, Scott. I really appreciate you taking time with us. And I really like your media criticism because I know you're the son of an NBC guy, right? Kind of born and bred in the major

media in a way. And you have such a great sort of perspective in your critique here. And and this is really fascinating article, the criminology one, about the New York Times. of just essentially, am I right? The theme is sort of the things that they reluctantly admit later are true that are so contrary to their narrative here. And it's just, what, 10 or 20 or 50 in a row? Yeah, I mean, I think the basic idea is that once upon a time, look, the times has always been really good at what it does, right? Like, you have to understand what the institution is for. It's huge.

It's got the best and the brightest people working there. When it wants to report the news, it does a really good job of it. But what's happened to the paper and I think a lot of the rest of the news landscape, especially in the Trump years, is that coverage has become increasingly politicized. And a lot of the, both journalists and editors, are making. calculations about what they do and do not want to report on based on what they think the political outcomes will be. So at the times, they are often not touching stories for years on end.

And then they'll suddenly come out with a feature, which performs the same function that I saw in the Soviet Union as a student and, you know, in the post-Soviet era a little bit, which is it's it's the official organ that tells you when you're allowed to talk about something, which in this case is Joe Biden's cognition and health problems. Right. And so this was an issue early on in the Democratic primaries where it was his opponents and major media people were pointing out that, boy, he's pretty far over the hill here. And then that became verboten until just now, huh? So what, two and a half years? Yeah, it's funny because I covered Biden's campaign, not a lot, a little bit.

I covered him more in 2008, but I did spend a little bit of time on the trail with him. I did a piece for Rolling Stone about it. Talk to some of the journalists. Everybody knew that this was an issue because if you had followed him in 2008, whatever you think of Joe Biden, he was pretty quick on the trail, I would say. He has some issues as a public speaker that are, I think, related both to his personality and to his history as a person who had a stutter. As everybody knows, he had a very serious one as a kid. But he was always in control, you know, I would say very lucid in his thinking and never kind of lost about where he was.

what he was talking about or what um you know geographically where the event was and he had pretty good pretty decent control of his emotions uh and that was not the case in 2020 everybody noticed it but almost nobody reported on it now and now suddenly we're reporting on it which is um a very curious phenomenon it makes you wonder why that would be yeah it's pretty obvious both things are obvious, right? For anyone who's paid attention to, you know, current events over the last 50 years or any time during the last 50 years, you're familiar with Joe Biden. He's one of the most famous men in D.C., not a president, but one of the most prominent senators all this time. Right? He started in the Senate. He went straight to the Senate back in elected in 72, took office

in 73, right? And so everybody knows Joe Biden. And anyone and everyone in their living room watching TV can tell the difference between how he used to be and now. He has more hair now and makes less sense. Yeah, it's absolutely true. That's a funny little subplot to the whole thing that nobody wants to talk about the hair plugs phenomenon. But yeah, absolutely. We all know he's a very familiar character to generations of Americans, right? Because remember, he was a big story in 1988, too.

Yeah. He was a big story during the Clarence Thomas hearings. So he's been front and center in American news media for 20 years ago. 30 years. Yeah, 20 years ago. In fact, this week or coming up maybe next week will be the 20 year anniversary of his bogus Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq War II and why we got to do it and why no dissenters are allowed to testify at all. my god if that was 20 years ago think about how long before that he was it was a big uh uh celebrity it's amazing right he's a he's a very everybody knows what he was like and the difference in 2020 was pronounced and you know you mentioned the stutter there and it's important as you mentioned in the article that this has been deployed as spin as sort of a shield that hey stop picking on Biden for his stutter you when that's not what we were talking about his stutter there was other

things that issue like him declaring war and then saying oh no i didn't really mean that though you know right and and this this this was as i mentioned in the piece this was a particular issue for me at rolling stone um because my my editor at the time um my online editor john hendrickson who is somebody who i really like and really respect um but he is also somebody who had a speech impediment and later wrote a piece for the Atlantic, essentially saying that we have to remember that Biden's problems are not due to cognition, but due to his speech impediment. And he and I went back and forth about this, and I kept trying to insist that, look, I've seen this politician before. This isn't a speech issue. And fully admitting and understanding to the

extent that I can, that the speech issue can complicate these other issues. But Joe Biden forgot what state he was in. And the most alarming thing, though, to me, was his inability to control himself in exchanges with people in crowds, which was a huge difference. He was always pretty charming, you know, going around the rope line in 2008. But, you know, I interviewed people he was poking and yelling at and challenging to push up contests and all this other crazy stuff. Like, he was off the chain in 2019, 2020. Yeah. And now, so talk a bit about, yeah, the stuff where he's like picking fights with people in the crowd and this guy thing.

Oh, I wanted to say real quick about that, just the spacing out. I space out. In fact, I joke sometimes I think I got what Biden's got because I forgot what we were talking about. What were we talking about again? And I know this is a somewhat self-inflicted wound here. But point is that that happens to everybody, and everybody knows when it's happening to Biden that, oh, he's spaced out. But it's just with him, it's virtually every sentence.

He can't help but space out all the time. He doesn't know where the hell he is. As you just said, you forget which state you're in. Yeah, that's going a little far. Yeah. And also, don't forget, politicians are, among other things, they're trained performers. Like, some of them are better than others. You know, and that's one of the things that campaign reporters are measuring.

Like, if you go out there and you watch Marco Rubio on the stump, whatever you think about Markerubio, he's good at this job, right? Like, he is a good political performer. Some of them aren't so good, right? Like, they, you know, they're not great speakers. They don't know how to emote. They don't know how to read a crowd. But all of them know how to recover, right? Because the job is about sitting on the razor's edge where, you know, you know, you know, you know,

your career can be over in a second if you say the wrong thing. So, you know, a politician who can't recall what state he or she is in or who says something totally inappropriate is, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat, they're going to be trained to find some kind of safe ground within seconds because that's how they operate. But this candidate was not able to do that. And that is significant. yeah for real and and like poking that guy in the chest and going i'm going to take your ar-14 away pal or whatever it was that he got wrong while he's fighting with that guy

yeah well there were a couple of uh people who got poked in the sternum i don't even remember how many i i interviewed i think two of them in iowa so there there were there were a bunch of those folks uh he he had a lot of confrontations with people that were like deeply on comfortable, including involving people who were very kindly disposed to him, like, who liked him. And these scenes turned wrong. So it was definitely an issue, but the reporters were all saying things like, well, we got to kind of soft pedal this because we don't want it to become ammunition for Trump, which I thought was crazy, you know, and but that was what people were doing.

Right. now then your article goes on here too speaking of the times belatedly admitting the obvious oh yeah by the way you know it's not settled on whether we should be transitioning little children to the other sex or yeah the war in Ukraine might not be going

as well as we sort of led you to believe or you know all these other things oh a hundred Biden's laptop wasn't really Russian disinformation and has all this incriminating stuff on it they do eventually admit it It's like the Georgia War of 2008. Remember that one, at the end of November 08. They go, oh, yeah, okay, Georgia started it.

Right, yeah, exactly. And, again, the Times here is fulfilling the exact same function that Pravda and Zvestia used to fulfill, right? So if you couldn't talk about certain things before 1957, when Khrushchev made his secret speech, after that, the newspapers told you that, that you could start to talk about certain excesses, right? That happened during the following years. And that was what those newspapers were for. They sucked at everything else. They were completely useless at reporting the news.

I remember when I first went to Russia, a friend of mine saying that the classic headline in a Soviet newspaper was air catastrophe, no victims. So you never got any real. real information from the newspapers, but what you did get was very, very good information about what you could and could not talk about. And I don't think that's very useful news, but that's what the Times has become good at. Yeah. Now, here was a fake story that they pushed was this proper not scam or anybody who added any perspective whatsoever to, you know, America, Russia relations or Russia Gate or any of that got smeared as propagandists. And I know that was the

host, but it's not like the Times debunked or anything. That's true, right. But I got breaking news for you here that there's a new Ukrainian government blacklist that includes Doug Bandow, Ray McGovern, Doug McGregor, Paul Pilar, Jeffrey Sacks, Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald, and John Mearsheimer. But you and I aren't on it, which leaves me jealous. And it's probably just a testament to your, you know, thorough explanation. of your nuanced positions, but they're just ignoring me, which makes me mad.

You'll get there. Yeah. So I guess that means there's a travel ban on all these people or the Ukrainian government's going to put sanctions on their bank accounts or something. Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, I think the really interesting thing is that this whole idea of we have to put a delay on any bad news that comes out of Ukraine. The Times is kind of belatedly reporting certain issues or saying not all the experts are convinced that, you know, this isn't going to turn into a quagmire for us politically or, yeah, I mean, in the first days of the war, and this has become the kind of the typical arc of an American news story, in the first.

blush of these gigantic sort of blowout stories where all the all the media corporate media organizations pile on the first wave was always total agreement and complete suppression of any you know dissenting points of view and then three four weeks later sometimes they'll allow you know kind of by the by a side door a discussion about the things that people were saying underground in the first brush of the coverage. It's just no way to cover things. Like, I think you got to allow people to talk about the negatives and to admit adverse facts. Like, with the Ukraine story, I just don't understand the utility and denying things about, say, the Azov Battalion. Like, where's that going to get you as a news organization to deny that it exists,

that it has far-right ties, that it's a neo-Nazi organization historically. Like, people know that, right? And it's going to come out eventually. So all it's going to do is damage your credibility. I just don't understand why they've gone down this path. Yeah, well, you've got to control the narrative, right? I mean, you in your article talk a lot about the censorship of people off of social media, including people who, you know, couldn't possibly be credibly accused of violating any terms of service,

other than it's just, you know, obviously, as old McLeod, what's his first name, Alan McLeod demonstrated recently over at Facebook and Twitter, it's all a bunch of FBI and CIA agents running the damn things now. And if they don't like your take on Ukraine, they might just some person you write off of the internet here, you know, as though you're whoever, someone's so racist that it's okay, I guess, right, is the old standard. I think that's what's so interesting about the, Ukraine story, as opposed to all the previous waves of censorship, which had much more, I mean,

I was against the censorship in any case, but they at least had some kind of argument for it in the past, right? So during the pandemic, you could argue, well, we don't want people to have access to health misinformation, which could cause them to hurt themselves, right? Or we're against hate speech or incitement to violence, right? There are all these justifications that at least have, you know, a patina of intellectual justification over them with the Ukraine story. When you're removing, you know, you're dinging people like Jackson Hinkle, you know, first of all, why bother, right?

Like, you know, why go after relatively people who are relatively on the fringes anyway? but they're doing that and the justification for it there there isn't one except that we think you're wrong about the war right which is which is just flat out censorship you know that's not a health issue that's not a hate speech issue that's not a that's not an incitement issue so they've they've steadily expanded the field of what what they can censor and that should be nerve-wracking for people yeah it is it's completely completely crazy. And it happens to, you see people all the time just disappeared.

You know, they make an example, as you wrote when it first happened. They made an example out of Alex Jones and Milo, Yanopoulos, and a couple of those people. And then they got away with it. And then it was on, right? Google deranking everybody. And, you know, Twitter and Facebook shadow banning people and outright banning people over just completely bogus and fresh. In fact, Kyle Anzalone, the news editor at the Libertarian Institute and opinion editor at anti-war.com, they just completely deleted his Facebook, no appeal and no strikes against him, no even claim that he did anything wrong, nothing official, just you violated our terms of service, you're gone.

Well, what was he doing? He's just posting anti-war.com articles about the war in Ukraine. That's all it is. Right, right, right, yeah, exactly. And they don't like what the message is there, right? so that's that's uh that's not a very that's not a very compelling reason to be censoring and you know um was there a time where that would have just absolutely been an outrage or just everybody thought it would and so they didn't try it and now they tried it and they're like oh

okay that's pretty easy i feel like it would have been an outrage as recent as recently as the bush years uh i remember i seem to remember i mean maybe i'm maybe i'm confused now i mean the last few years have been so weird. I don't even trust my own memories anymore, but I seem to remember the entire, like, left liberal world freaking out over the Dixie Chicks and things like that. So I would think overt censorship would have been a big deal once, but there's a couple of things that are going on that are really chilling. You just mentioned one that I think is, by the way, It's apropos to this whole New York Times issue because the whole idea of deranking people on Google, first of all, that's the biggest and most effective form of censorship there is on the web. If you're looking for a specific thing on Google, it's almost impossible to find it if they don't want you to find it.

Like, for instance, QAnon just started delivering messages again. Now, even if you just have morbid curiosity about it and you want to find it, good luck finding it. Now, like none of the organizations that reported on it linked to it. So it's somewhere buried down in Google's system. Now, how do we know about this? Well, one of the reasons we know about this is because the world's socialist website, of all people, did this study about traffic to various sites after Google changed, made a major change to its algorithm. And who else, but the New York Times, picked that story up about six months later, which was, I think, an inadvertent way of confirming the reality of it. And kind of let people know that, yeah, we're doing this.

You know, like Google is driving down certain sites and pushing up other sites. When I talk to Google, the example they gave me is that if you search for baseball, You might have gotten your local little league before, and now you're going to get MLB.com. So it's really a kind of size and influence-based form of censorship. But it's significant, you know, and most people don't know about it. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more.

That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit, I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War, nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.

But how do we get there? Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out in why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson. Available now. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman. Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Alison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses.

See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Well, now, and where you talk about the narrative building here, you quote Chomsky about, and I guess I've been quoting and paraphrasing him a little bit too here, about how they just built in. it's the unprovoked invasion unprovoked you have to say that's like white separatist randy weaver you have to say white separatist first you can't say widower randy weaver or anything like that you know um so here it's the unprovoked invasion and for only one obvious reason which is

that they provoked it and they're liars and so you have to say it that way and and then but they enforce that right and then so essentially um and i don't watch TV anymore. Ever since Hillary Clinton started running for president again, I just turned that damn thing off. I just can't. But I take it that on TV, nobody, like I guess I saw a little bit Amir Shimer on the news hour one time, but essentially the point of view that history did not begin on February the 22nd when it comes to Russia-Ukraine, you know, history here, is that's the rule of the day on every channel, right? Yeah, and again, this is straight. out of George Orwell in 1984, right?

It's the memory hole technique where suddenly we've decided that a discussion that was being had out in public and it is out there. If you know where to look, you can find it. And even the current head of the CIA was warning at one time that, you know, trying to expand NATO into Ukraine might provoke an armed response. Now, that's not, for anybody listening, that's not me saying I in any way endorse what Russia did. I'm just saying that there was a discussion between very prominent members of the American foreign policy establishment, including people like George Kennan, William Cohen, right, the former defense secretary,

all these people were saying essentially the same thing that Mearsheimer was saying, is, you know, if we try to go in there, Russia's going to take that as a provocation and they're not going to take it lying down. And that's going to lead to something that's going to be a big mess. Now, but you can't find that anymore. All you can really find is what you talked about, that capsule description, the unprovoked invasion, which I'm always highly suspicious of those like surgeon general type warnings that are mandatorily stuck into news cover. average, yeah. So that's another example of it. And it can still be an aggressive war and be provoked, too, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a question of degrees about how bad a provocation's got to be before you're really defending yourself. I mean, I think we can both agree

there's been low-level fighting, as they call it, in the Donbass since 2014. I mean, well, since 15. It was worse in 14. But whether that amounts to enough of a provocation to justify Russia coming over the border, that's entirely different question than whether that state of affairs existed and whether America would or would not negotiate over NATO involvement or missiles in Poland or whatever it is. You know what I mean? Or missiles in Ukraine or CIA advisors in Ukraine. I mean, And, you know, again, it's taboo to talk about this, but how would we feel if Russians suddenly parked in the Dominican Republic or Mexico or someplace like that? Like, you know, we wouldn't be happy about it.

We've been not happy about it in previous incarnations, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis and things like that. Now, is this as serious as that? I don't know. But it's a factor. Yeah, pretty close. And also, there's, look, I lived in Russia for a long time. The history of that region is extremely complicated.

It's bizarre. You have to remember that Ukraine was essentially given its independence sort of on a lot. Well, it was turned into an independent republic kind of on a lark by a Ukrainian-born general secretary of the Soviet Union. So that was a historical quirk to begin with. The natural dividing lines of the country are far different from what they look like on the map. You know, the Crimea historically was like a Russian resort area, you know, back in the days of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the idea of calling that part of Ukraine would have been really strange to some people. But, look, leaving all that aside, the salient point is that you just can't. talk about this stuff. You just can't say it's complicated. And that is not good for news,

I don't think. Yeah. Well, and I'm sorry to bring this up because I happen to be a participant in it, but I went up against Kathy Young, who writes for Bill Crystal and has a reputation as being a stalwart advocate of the interventionist take on this. And I completely destroyed her in a debate the same way I did her boss, Bill Crystal, on other questions. I don't know if I don't I think we talked about Russia, me and Bill. But anyway, so when it comes down to it, there's the reason for your censorship right there overall is because their case can't withstand scrutiny, as we're talking about. They have to pretend that there's no prehistory here. But if anybody knows the prehistory, they know that it's full of these warnings, more than a generation in a row of American, very legitimate so-called wise men warning that this could happen.

Well, what are you going to do? Discredit every last one of them? It makes no sense, you know? You can't. So you just have to ignore it. Yeah. And the interventionist takeover and dismissal of, you know, what we used to call like the real politic or containment concept, which was, you know, standard policy as recently as Barack Obama in 2014, remember his, you know, him basically declining to do anything about the Crimean occupation. Because he just told the Atlantic magazine flat out, like, that area of the world is always going to matter more to Russia than us.

And so it's just not worth it for us to go in there. Now, I would have gone further than that and said the whole issue of which part of the world that belongs to Russia and belongs to Ukraine and which populations are where and whether they have. have the right to self-determination, whether the plebiscites in those areas were legitimate or not. You know, I think you have to get into all of that, but you can't, you know. And so the point of view that they want to make the prevailing point of view is this Bill crystal, messianic, democracy promotion idea, which is, you know, really, it's the neoconservative project, you know, with regime change in race. Russia at the end of the idea. I mean, I don't know how crazy you have to be to think that

that's a realistic idea, but I think these people really do think that it's a realistic idea. Yeah. Well, and sometimes they say that, right? At least off the top of my head, I know there was that Nile Ferguson article in Bloomberg where he said, you know, unnamed sources told me they want to see Russia weakened so badly to the point that the regime collapses. That's what they're going for here. And Blinken and Austin both have. have come right up to the edge of that, but both saying that the purpose of our involvement in the war is to weaken Russia. And bleed, bleed Putin. That's another phrase that I've seen. Yeah, there you go. So, and just think, I know you're an expert on this, of the American absolute moral panic freakout over the absolute hoax that the Democrats and the FBI and the CIA put over on the American people that the Russians had intervened and overthrown Hillary Clinton and installed Donald Trump in power.

Right. And again, that was another one of those mandatory Surgeon General warning moments, right? Remember where every newspaper had to include the phrase Russia's interference activities in every coverage of every Trump-Russia story that had to be in there somewhere? Absolutely. You know, I think that's where a lot of this goes back to. It's this idea that Vladimir Putin isn't just, an autocratic leader of a state that we've had difficult relations with dating back, especially to the late 90s. But he's part of this burgeoning access of autocracy that not only includes him and people like Victor Orban, but also the quote unquote populist movements in Western countries like Le Pen in France and Trump in America. And so it's this kind of, you know,

Bush-style unified field theory of the evil killers all around us. Like, this is crazy. I mean, this is a, this is a, you know, a kind of one-size-fits-all theory of everything, version of doing foreign policy that I think even somebody like Henry Kissinger would have considered crazy,

But they want to make it the norm. Well, in fact, now it's fashionable, I guess, to attack Kissinger, because this is the one time he's preaching caution. And they're saying, oh, yeah, did I ever tell you about that time he killed all those leotions? Yeah, we already knew about that. You know, here he is finally being good on something and they are ready to throw him overboard. Right, because now containment is a bad policy. Right. No, like when Henry Kissinger before was saying, well, we have to commit troops to make sure that communism doesn't spread in South Vietnam, which was a lie, like really what the United States was doing was occupying South Vietnam to prevent, you know, an internal political dispute, not an invasion really from the north, but whatever.

That doesn't matter. Once upon a time, Kissinger was the person who was advocating for the use of force primarily to restrain the expansion of communism. Now, what this new crystal-type thinker is saying is that's not good enough. We have to go out and actively stamp out autocracy everywhere and spread democracy everywhere, which when you think about it, It's kind of like a world domination plan, which goes leagues beyond even what Kissinger was for. Yeah. And, of course, they're the world's greatest hypocrites. I mean, we're 20 years into this century, and we're seven, eight wars deep already, the United States of America.

And our president just got back from laying the groundwork or further groundwork that his predecessor started on creating a new Middle Eastern NATO, you know, with those democracies. Israel and Kuwait and Jordan and Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain and his Oman going to be included? These people, Egypt. Yeah, no, it's us and our democratic allies against the forces of darkness, Matt. Get on board for this thing, pal. Yeah, I thought it was great when he talked about how he was going to be the first president to go into a region where into the Middle East where there were no American wars. going on. I'm like, I guess he's, he's forgetting a few countries, but, you know, that gets us back to the original topic of Biden not really being on top of things very, very much.

But yeah, this whole episode has been really strange. I mean, does raise the question. I'm sorry, does the President of the United States not know that we have troops in Iraq and Syria and at war actively, you know, on missions, regularly in Somalia still supporting Djibouti, Niger, like Yeah, did he forget? Or does he really not know?

I mean, those are two kind of different things. Maybe nobody told him. Maybe it's been years since anybody told me had a war in Somalia. He has no idea. Yeah. And he supposedly ordered troops back in there when Trump ordered them out to Djibouti.

Yeah, it's impossible to know what's going on. I'd be fascinated to hear what the discussions are in the White House about how much the president really needs to know about his own administration, but I would assume that he's got an inner circle that is representing Biden's interest. It would be kind of a shock to me if they weren't at least looped into most things, but who knows? The fact that he's being dumped on so vociferously in the press right now is a pretty major indication that the Democratic

party has made a decision about him. Yeah. Well, I just think it's hilarious. I have to say, you can comment on this if you want, but I got to throw us in here. I think it's so funny that they're talking about maybe bringing Hillary back, talking about Gavin Newsom, talking about anyone in the world, but they're sitting vice president. The first female vice president, United States of America, first woman of color to be in that level of a high, and nobody's even pretending to entertain the possibility of running her in Biden's place. They're already looking for. a white guy from California if they can.

The guy who presided over hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the state while he was in charge of it. But anyway, still better than her, they figure, apparently. Well, that I mean, I'm going to guess that some of that is because they've run

the numbers. I covered Kamel a little bit in 2019. If you remember, there were two different ways. of media pressure trying to make the argument for her as the frontrunner, and in both of those instances, she went backwards in the polls when that happens, which is an indication that as the public is more exposed to a politician, they register a greater dislike.

She's just a bad candidate. Like, I don't know what to think of her as a politician, because I didn't, you know, I never spent a lot of time looking at her record as, you know, the California, California Attorney General, but, um, but, you know, as a candidate, she was, she was incredibly maladroit on the, on the stump. She, she just, she has this inability to connect with people, which is, like, fatal to a presidential candidate. Yeah. I'm amazed that she was the saving grace for Biden. I know Biden is old and crotchy, but don't worry. He's going to have Kamala Harris with him. And that was, and, and, she was the best one that they could do out of the litter that they were picking from at

the time, which is another. But also, but don't forget, Biden lost ground relatively with black voters in that election. So some of the logic they clearly had in mind with nominating Kamala was clearly faulty because But the major thing that put him over the edge was that they had this massive gain with white and especially male voters vis-a-vis 2006. In other words, Biden did six points better with that group than Hillary did. But he did worse with everybody else, including black voters, including female voters. So, you know, who knows? Yeah.

All right. Now, can I keep you another minute and ask you about this great American military rebrand here? because this is a lot of fun, sort of. It's a horror show. But, you know, I did an interview the other day. The guy interviewed me. And he said, hi, I'm only in my early 20s. And so I was just wondering, you know, I read your Afghan book.

So can you explain Afghanistan since, like, 79 for me, please? Because me and my people, we don't know nothing about it. So even though remember a minute ago, we were both kind of shocked that it was 20 years ago, that they were lying us into war with Iraq, that that's how long it's been. That means there's people who don't really remember that era at all. who are grown adults now, listening to this. And so here your story is about how liberals love war now, but you start out about how they used to didn't,

and really kind of the remnants of the anti-war spirit left over from Vietnam that had been reinvigorated a little bit with the Rock War I, really came back with a Rock War II for a minute there, especially before it. But then with the Cindy Sheehan movement and all of that stuff, and hey, if you want to righteously oppose George W. Bush, I got some policies for you to focus on, you know, but then this story is, you start with that, but then you talk about how those days are over.

But can you start a little bit with the Bush years and all the, you talk about the Cunningham scandal and all that here? Yeah, so part of this is my perspective. During that entire period of the Iraq War and the Bush presidency, I had to cover a lot of this stuff. from the anti-war marches. I mean, I was part of the historically enormous marches in February of 2003, I guess it was, right, against the war. I covered those. Then a little bit later, the earmark scandal, which was significantly about members of Congress doing dirty deals on behalf of defense contractors.

I spent a lot of time on that story, so I remember the outrage about that. And I think the takeaway is that the quote-unquote liberal left at the time. Remember, I was writing for Rolling Stone, so this was a almost pure blue audience. They were incredibly fixated on the issue of the war on terror. on military corruption, on the rising military budget, on Guantanamo Bay, on torture, on rendition. If you remember in pop culture, there were all these movies about the excesses of the war on terror.

Remember, rendition was a movie? Well, just even on the Rolling Stone, I mean, they're publishing Bob Dreyfus and James Bamford, and just, oh, I'm sorry, I had three more on the tip of my tongue a second ago, but I got what Biden's got. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, yeah, you're exactly right. like the bush was like the archetypal uh war mongering republican villain at the time and we all thought he was crazy because he was the the arguments that he was making michael hastings i meant to say oh right yeah michael hastings yeah the late the late dear departed michael hastings um yeah

all that stuff was incredibly resonant at one point with this audience and then in a really in a heartbeat Obama gets elected and there are cuts to the defense budget in 2011, and right away, there begins this rebrand of the whole military project. And one of the people I interviewed is this think tanker named Christopher Mott, who talks about it starting with the Coney 2012 campaign. Most people don't know that the United States began secretly sending. troops to Central Africa or building up troops at that time to fight the, I forget what it was, the Lord's Revolution, the Lord's something army, I forget what it was called, Lord's Resistance Army.

But then, you know, we had a series of interventions that were more and more framed as humanitarian interventions that were designed to prevent social justice outrages. So in Libya, when we went into Libya, if you remember, like, the big story that was animating the left was that Gaddafi was handing out Viagra to his troops so that they could commit mass rapes. That story turned out to be not so true. But then we had the responsibility to protect doctrine, which was the U.N.'s. Basically, its new idea about how to use force, the use of force was indicated in order to prevent mass atrocity events, you know, whether it's ethnic cleansing or, you know, anything like that. So you have to use multilateral force to go in to prevent that, to prevent genocide, whatever. And so they essentially took the Bushian project of let's use military force to rid the world of evil, right, which was his way of phrasing it.

But now we want to use it to promote democracy and to prevent human rights outrages and social justice outrages. And it was very compelling, I think, for left liberal audiences for some reason that. I never really understood because, I mean, I remember in those years covering Terror Tuesdays with Obama using drones and having the weekly meetings to decide who to assassinate. Like, this seems to me like an almost exact continuation of the Bush war on terror stuff and nobody seemed interested in anymore. Yeah, it's just partisanship makes people crazy. And it inspires faith where it, you know, is not warranted at all. And I remember, you know, for example, the first interview I had with Juan Cole,

who had been, he had actually been a hawk on Iraq, but then quickly became a critic about how the war was being carried out conveniently and was really smart and was really right about a lot of what was going on in Iraq War II. But when it came to Libya in 2011, he's like, oh, yeah, got to stop Gaddafi, of course, let's do it. And I go, yeah, but this is the same military that just did The other thing that we just finished talking about, this whole, you can't just act like this is going to be a snap of a fingers.

This is going to be war, you know, explosions and people dying and unforeseen consequences, maybe a nation building mission. We're going to have to build up a new military to try to rule Libya now, which thankfully they didn't go that route, but they still got a catastrophe out of the thing. But I just couldn't even believe that to him. It was like, yes, of course. And he's not just some fool consuming this media, right? He's an expert. But to him, it was like, well, Bush is gone. Cheney's gone.

So all is forgiven, blank slate. The military can now be the object of, you know, to achieve all of our desires here, there, and wherever. Yeah, exactly. And as you mentioned, the thing with Libya, that was amazing, is they didn't even bother to try to do the nation-building project. They just let the whole thing turn into a hellhole. and basically a rudderless, borderless, sectarian nightmare. In other words, they just went straight to the last chapter of the Iraq debacle, skipping the delusional part in the middle, right? But that was okay with them, right?

And now we're in this place. I was really struck a couple of weeks ago when the New York Times ran this piece about opposing Putin, and there was a passage in there about how his vision was to replace the bad West, which is like opposing him, with a good West, which would include a raft of nationally oriented leaders like Orban and Hungary, Le Pen in France, and even Trump in the United States. It's the axis of evil idea. It's the same exact idea that we all laughed at 20 years ago, and now all of a sudden it makes sense. It's just mind-boggling to me that this stuff goes down with people. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company.

Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic habanero, honey habanero, pineapple, habanero, Pabloano Halapeno, and the blood orange ghost. They're all so good, I swear. And for a limited time, Tennessee hot sauce company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the Sun thermonuclear hot sauce. It's full of Carolina Reapers, Scorpion Peppers, Dr. Pepper, hydrogen isotopes, and all kinds of things that'll burn your tongue clean off. Seriously, it's really good. Get yourself a hot sauce subscription. Spend $40 or more and use promo code Scott to get a free bottle of hotter than the sun hot sauce.

That's TNHotsauceco.com Hey y'all got to check out these awesome busts of our hero, the great Ron Paul. They're made by the renowned sculptor Rick Casale, the 13 inches tall hand-painted bronze resin based on Casale's brilliant original. You may have seen mine in the background on my bookshelf in some recent interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casale.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean.

Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks And this show will get a little kickback too That's Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul Cassali is C-A-S-A-L-I Rick Casali dot com slash Ron Paul And there's free shipping too Well you know what's funny about that too is Fukuyama himself in the end of history

He said that yeah you know markets and democracy But still ethnic nationalism is very powerful And if we don't do this liberal world order thing just so carefully, it might not last because people are going to react. And then what they do? They blew up everything. Started a bunch of wars, told a million lies, blew up the economy over and over again. I mean, some liberal world order. I wonder why the Chinese aren't embracing the American way right now, Matt. Well, yeah, and the inability to recognize that one thing affects the other, you know, going on on the campaign trail with Donald Trump and seeing that there

were all these vets in the crowd from the Middle Eastern wars. And Trump saw it too and he started saying things about NATO, you know, that it was obsolete, that they owed us money, that maybe we wouldn't fulfill our obligations if they, if the Baltics got invaded. Like these, these were like cheer lines all of a sudden. And why do you think? think that is, right? Like, this was just treated as pure and adulterated evil in the press, but the reality is, like, you're not going to get that reaction if you don't have a whole bunch of really pissed off people who are coming back from the Middle East and not happy with why they were there or what the result of that was. And to just not recognize that,

it's just so strange. Yeah. And here from a regular person's point of view, the advent of the post-terror war, not that it's all the way over yet, American right, and their change, especially because of Ron Paul and then Donald Trump and to this kind of America first, we're tired of this intervention kind of attitude. Immediately, they're all smeared as isolationists. Right. Even though these liberals are no good in a fight, how many of them have ever been over there and back, you know? And here you got G.I. Joe talking about, I don't think the next generation of guys should have to go through what I just went through for nothing the way I did. And then their smear is, oh, yeah, you're the kinds of people who allowed Hitler to take over the world,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, slogans. Right, yeah, it's unbelievable because, I mean, not that long ago in 2002 and 2003, it was almost mandatory in left liberal circles to say things like the United States has no national interest. invading Iraq and taking over the country. And of course, they were exactly right in that, right? I mean, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. The whole cover story never made any sense because if there's one kind of person that groups like Al-Qaeda hated more than they hated the United States, it was these, you know, quote-unquote, you know, non-sectarian,

atheistic leaders like Saddam Hussein. Like they thought of those people as worse than us. And the idea that those two groups would be in cahoots together was nuts. But it was nobody blinked to eye at arguing that we had no interest in going in there. And now all of a sudden when you have people arguing that about other places, they're traitors and they're the people who would have let Hitler go into the Sudeten land. And so, yeah, it's crazy. And meanwhile, just think about it, nobody attacks Mexico or Brazil or the Central African Republic. Well, I don't know about their record, but I don't know, whoever.

Nobody attacks, you know, pango pango for being isolationist and not taking on the burdens of world order. Nobody ever explains why it has to be us. And there's also this completely baked in fallacy that she says, American power recedes, either Russia or China or both together are going to take over the world and replace us as the world's dominant, hegemonic power type thing, when that's not really what's at issue at all? What's at issue is now a multipolar world instead of a unipolar world. Nobody thinks the capital of the planet's moving to Beijing, just that, hey, they have more

wealth and power than they used to. And so they're going to have to be treated in that context instead of the previous context where they didn't. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea that we have to maintain this military and political hegemony worldwide, first of all, that train has left the station already. But second of all, you know, it's just not realistic.

And it's also, there's a big question as to whether the public, that's what they want. I mean, if you go back even all the way to the Clinton years, there was a debate over whether we should take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union by reinvesting in the United States, the so-called peace dividend, or should we, you know, should we continue to be this global power that has its fingers and everything? And, you know, obviously we know who won that fight. But I don't think it's a set. settled issue. I don't think it's, it's been proven that that was, that we made the right decision by, you know, by going that way. So, yeah.

The furthest thing from it, if from sitting in the chair, I'm sitting in here, man, I don't know. I can't think of how they could have blown it worse than what they've done. Well, no, that's not true. But still, it's been really bad. It still is. I'd like to hear about, you know, the psychologizing of the American Empire here reminds me of Garrett Garrett where in an empire foreign policy

just dominates everything where what's the problem with the cowardice of the cops in Yuvaldi it's that the Ayatollah might think that we're getting weak

and take advantage of us or something like that, huh? Oh, I know. I know. I know. Yeah. You saw news stories like that like Uvaldi isn't just a domestic problem. Like, we have to, we have to send some kind of signal to Putin or, yeah, or the bomb grenada, dude, that'll show them.

Yeah, like, who thinks like that? I mean, are these people able to drive cars? Like, I just, I'm continually amazed at the level of delusion and just weirdness in the thinking of, you know, the foreign policy establishment and the press. very strange well i mean they're reacting against the crisis of confidence that they feel it themselves that geez our state really sucks at doing its most basic function being our security force they do nothing but pick fights and even when some sicko is masquering babies they stand around with their hands in their pockets kidding me what are they good for at all and then but then that does raise the question if you are a foreign interventionist

that oh no all our foreign adversaries will also be having that same kind of not so much crisis from their point of view but that loss of confidence in american power and that loss of fear in the threat you know um they can't help it because that's they feel the same way as all of us that why do we even tolerate these people taking our money and acting in our name when this is how they act yeah and this was the art the big argument that people like tom freeman made in the early bush years that, you know, we have to show some other countries that not only are we powerful, but we're a little bit nuts, too. Like, we're not, we're willing to go in and get our hands dirty and, and make you remember

how nasty we can really be, right? And that was part of the underlying logic of the Iraq war is like, we have to, we have to kick a little ass to, you know, to put the fear of God into some other countries. And of course, that's exactly the opposite of that happened in Iraq. You know, Iraq revealed us to be militarily, not weak, certainly, but run by people who were not terribly bright, you know. The idea that we would go into Iraq, that Americans could go into a country that has, you know, natural Shia and Sunni divisions and put that all together while being commanded by a president who didn't even know about the different sects within Islam, you know, we all see how it turned out. It turned into like the biggest mess in modern geopolitical history. that makes us look not just weak but you know totally incompetent and stupid and I think it emboldens other

countries right and they've shown no inclination to recognize the damage that that's done yeah and by the way and not just to the to the military but to the to the news media also right I think that was a major, major consequence of the Iraq war is the loss of belief in the ability of the news media to report things accurately and to face up to their mistakes. And look, there's always been kind of marginal beliefs too, but it seems like they seem to really be growing in the sense where people don't know where the propaganda begins and ends. Does it include the weather cycle or is it just the global warming? hoax? Or is it, you know what I mean? Is it the same people who said that we had to do Iraq and that it was great the whole time and we can't leave now because we're about to win and it's even getting better? Are the same people who say that the earth is round, you know, I don't know,

or that nuclear weapons exist. This is one that people have been tweeting at me recently, that everybody knows that nuclear weapons are a hoax. It's just to, you know, get you on to fossil fuels and afraid of nuclear power. All these, all these explosions. that you've seen footage of or faked, they think. And it's just, I mean, you can blame them, but you also kind of can't blame them because they're lied to about everything all the time and not everybody's good at figuring out

where the line is, you know? Right, and even, I could forgive even very smart people for not knowing what's what, right? Like, you think about what happened in 2003 and beyond, you know, one incident sticks out for me, which is the one where Dick Cheney, went on meet the press and said uh you know the new york times just reported that there was a connection between i i forget what what the i think it was the mohammed ada in prague thing um

and the you know what he was he was doing basically was he was using the time because they had given that story to the times uh so then he then he goes on tv and cites the times now the the issue with that is that why is the New York Times not coming out the day after and saying, yeah, actually, we got that story from the same people, right? And so I think what people saw is that these news organizations, not only are they often taken in and easily fooled, but that they're kind of in on it, too, right? And that's like a kind of a, that messes with your mind as a media consumer and even as somebody who works in the business like it makes you not know what to think about anything yeah now overall obviously my major interest is in you know anti-imperialism and anti-war

sentiment in the country here and it's so important i mean this is on the top of my mind all the time about the degree to which the right and the left and to which degrees on the right and the left people are anti-war and to what effect and that kind of thing and so i kind of look at it like well, we did have the Powell Doctrine or Weinberger Doctrine was you need the American people united behind any war if you're going to start a war, you know, and then the W. Bush doctrine was, well, we'll just settle for the right. And there were the Republicans after all. And then, you know, the problem has been, you know, under, you know, it's true that Trump was a Republican in there for four years. And that did kind of mix things up a little bit. But he wasn't really the dominant force in the society like Bush was at the time. You know what I mean? the whole media and even government establishment were against him the whole time all along. So it was still like the liberal project. It was the FBI and the CIA who were saving us from him, even though he was the democratically elected one, not them, and that kind of thing. But so you do kind of have, as you're talking about this neutering of the left on their opposition to war.

And then you do have, you know, these kind of provocations like these myths of Viagra in Libya and the, auto genocide in Syria and the different narratives that they push, the history-less, unprovoked invasion in Ukraine that you can get people excited about on Twitter and whatever. But it seems to me, I think, more or less, kind of, and I hope I'm not just stretching here, that the remnants of that anti-Vietnam War II sentiment there on the left, and after all, we are talking about, liberals don't join the army by large, right? Like, they don't, they're not the ones with the upper body strength who do the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting battles. And so, you know, it's kind of, you know, they're, it's OCS, but, I'm sorry?

If they join, they're going to OCS, you know what I mean? They're not, they're not in, they're not enlisted. Oh, yeah. I don't know what OCS is, sorry. Oh, officer training, sorry. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, in other words, you know, they're in a kind of hollow place to really be much a hawks.

And I think their heart really isn't in it, right? Like, don't you insult their Obama, and, you know, they'll try to look away when it's Biden. But I think they're really, and frankly, like, almost all, almost all of our best anti-war journalists are leftists and progressives and liberals. There's no question about that. It's just true. And there are a lot of great paleo-cons and populist right-wingers and libertarians as well. But, you know, look at the roster of the people I've been interviewing over the last 20 years. And it's almost all leftists who are the ones who really do the war.

work on this stuff and that goes for the anti-war groups to almost all our left-wing groups who act even when they're small they're the ones who are still out there and still doing the work too so yeah but they shouldn't be so short but i'm sorry go ahead but look at what happened to them like yeah they do it's true but i guess what i'm i'm trying to build to the point though that like left-wing hawks aren't very convincing and that when you have the right wing getting better and better all the time. Obviously, Republican Party leadership is horrible still, but the American rank and file right are getting better and better on this, certainly on the Middle East. I know they can be whipped up about China, and we're working on that too, but it just seems like if you

don't have the American right to support your war, and yeah, you can send some drone robots or something maybe, but under, you know, what's left of the Weinberger Powell Doctrine here, somebody who's like believable in the society has to be willing to sign up for this thing. In fact, that's one of my interviews later today is a guy who's just got out of the army, who's addressing why people are not joining the army now, why numbers are so low, is because there's just no reason for people to believe in it anymore, and you can't psych them out into believing in it after all of this. So I guess I'm a little bit hopeful just on the overall trend, not that people are like hardcore opposed to the wars, But there's just no spirit behind them at all, really, I don't think, outside of D.C. and the Atlantic and whatever, you know.

Yeah, I mean, the only people who are gung-ho expansionists are the people who are never going to go and whose kids are never going to go. So that's, I think that's a long term. That's a big problem for the American kind of expansionist project is if the right is becoming isolationist, then at, As you point out, it's not, you know, sort of woke liberals who are going to go join the army, right? Like, you know, in big numbers anyway. I mean, there's probably a few. But, yeah, if that fighting force is not going to be credibly led by somebody who has the attention of the people who are actually, you know, in the services, then, yeah, I don't see where this is going. Yeah. Well, I'm very proud of the fact that I just know that there are scores and scores, hundreds, probably maybe many more than that, of anti-war veterans who listen to this show and who, you know, I meet them all the time when I go around. And none of them ever say to me, you don't know what you're talking about, dude. They all say, man, hell yeah, and thanks, because, yeah, we all feel like we've been betrayed by all these lies that you highlight there.

That's great. You know, that's how they feel about it. And the only point is we've got to really highlight, by the way, Mr. Journalist, man, have you ever heard of this really important phenomenon called the Defend the Guard legislation that's being pushed through the states? So there's a guy named Pat McGeehan who's in the State House, I believe it is, in West Virginia. And he's the one who invented this. And what it is is it's a law that says that the Feds cannot have the National Guard troops unless they have an official for overseas country. combat unless they have an official declaration of war from the congress in other words never

because they'll never take responsibility of the congress right so but now this is a whole phenomenon and there's this great group called bring the troop bring our troops home dot us led by this guy dan mcnight and and a bunch of great guys and they're all combat veterans of this century's terror wars and they also have defend the guard dot us so that's bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us. And they have got this introduced in 30 state houses so far. And PBS NewsHour did a big special about it. And they send a two-star general around to try to testify to the state legislatures. Why, you better not do this. We might take your money away and this kind of thing. And they're all essentially, you know, technically on the right.

They're libertarians and kind of Ron Paul Republicans and, you know, anti-war, right-leaning guys. and they're working from the bottom up, nullification and interposition and getting the states to stand in the way of the feds abusing the National Guard. And, of course, I know you know the history of just, you know, in our recent past here, where the National Guard in Louisiana was nowhere to be found during Katrina because they were over there patrolling and getting blown up playing the IED lottery in Iraq for no reason. And the same thing when there's wildfires in Oregon, the guys are in Afghanistan or wherever it was. I mean, I was embedded with the National Guard group from Oklahoma.

So, yeah, I mean, I know all about that. There you know. They're certainly not happy about it. Absolutely. So look, this is a whole huge phenomenon, and it's, you know, it's a statement more than actually signed legislation yet. But, you know, it seems to really be gaining steam. And it's a huge kind of symbol of the new sentiment on the right here that, you know,

Think about even going back to 08, when Bush was still in the chair, Ron Paul got more donations and support from the military than all the other candidates combined. Right. Well, what does that tell you? Right. I mean, and I think some of that bled over into Trump in 2016. And, you know, the fact that politicians aren't paying attention to that is pretty damning. Yeah. Well, they need to start and it's up to the anti-war movement to let them know that this. is what we care about the most. So if you want to survive, you're going to have to get good on it. That's all the lever we have, mostly, but... Absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, listen, you're such a great writer.

I read everything. You send me in my email box here. It's Matt Taiibi at substack.com, TK News. And check out all his great books, too, including the latest is hate ink. Thanks, Matt. Thanks so much, Scott. Take care. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-PFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.