The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1231: Iran, Israel, the US, and Purity Spiraling w/ Dexter White

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

104 MinutesPG-13Dexter White writes at and is co-owner of Gold, Goats, and Guns.Dexter joins Pete to talk about the recent attack on Iran by the American military. They also talk about purity spiraling and putting libertarianism behind. Gold, Goats and Guns BlogGold. Goats and Guns PatreonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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The Pekingona Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Dexter White's with me. How are you doing, Dexter? Hey, Pete. How's it going? Thanks for having me on.

Appreciate it. Yep. first time, please tell everybody a little bit about yourself what you're willing to share. Sure. I'm a co-conspirator with Tom Luongo and Goats and Guns. Pretty much the editor over there of our monthly newsletter. Tom and I've been doing that for about eight years now. You may know Tom from other things that he does out there on the internet. But that's pretty much my focus is there.

And I'm frequent podcast co-host over there as well. So that's my online kind of deal. So we got the, I guess this is as close to the three-day rule as we're going to get that you let something happen and then you wait three days. This is probably what we're at 48 hours, maybe a little less than 48 hours. Oh, did something happen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently, it's so funny because when something like that, this happens, you immediately, it's the biggest thing that's happened in, you know, the history of mankind. And then as you get the further away from it, you start to realize, well, you know,

there's a lot more to this. And there's a distinct possibility. It's absolutely a nothing Burger. And it could be like Syria, you know, circa April 2017, where you're bombing an empty air base, which upsets the people who want this to be the biggest thing ever. And if you say, well, you know, it's probably not. It's like, well, you're coping because it is. But I mean, we don't even know what I'm talking about yet. Obviously, I'm talking about, I think, did John Jones, John Jones retired from MMA. Yeah, we're talking about obviously the bombing of the Fordo and other nuclear complexes by the United States. But I think the key phrase there is, I don't know. And we don't know much. And yet we live in a media culture that demands an immediate opinion despite an absence of

facts. And I feel that the most notable thing that blew up this weekend was that model. Because a lot of people, you know, a lot of talking heads and reflexive commentators out there are, I mean, it feels like they push them to their breaking point, some of which because they had a totally unrealistic view of Trump in my view about him having like some sort of core principles. And I'm not saying, you know, he's unprincipled. I'm saying Trump doesn't operate as a person who gets up every day and says, how can I manifest my principles. If you think that's what Donald Trump does, you've misread the man. And, you know, I'm not. not saying that to be like judgmental or pejorative. I'm saying literally that's who this guy is.

We've known him for a long time as the guy on the apprentice. Like let that be your guide, you know. But so many people have, I think, tied up into the Trump and MAGA worldview of an unsustainable illusion that just got exploded. And now their brains are melting, you know, whether it's Candice Owens or Tucker Carlson or, you know, Dave Smith or whoever. I mean, they just, they can't deal with what they've, you know, this is a cognitive dissonance that's just too great for them. I'm not sure why that is, honestly, but. Is it not ideology? Is it not having an ideology? Yeah. A rigid, a rigid ideology. I mean, you know, you're, I think you're, you're, you're a Christian.

I'm a Christian. I'm a Catholic. I think you're Orthodox. We have an ideology. It's personal. But yeah, you know. I think in the case of sort of like, I think we have to separate this. Like there's a difference between like meocons and Bill Crystal and, you know, people who are reacting to something being done that they kind of like by someone they really don't like. And that I think I'd like to take later. But like the people in media who are struggling for an appropriate reaction, I don't. know I don't know that it's ideology driven. I think it's driven by the fact that the entirety of their media presence in terms of the careers they've taped out for themselves. Like Cassandra, or sorry, Candice Owens, you know, she was part of a bigger thing. And then I think, you know, it was pretty public, but parts of it aren't clear to anybody. But I'm pretty sure she had a blowup

with Ben Shapiro and seems like she got fired. Tucker definitely got fired. You know, these people have left institutions that were more or less, I mean, you could argue that both Fox and Shapiro's, you know, version of, you know, what they do over there is, are both kind of neocon-centered enterprises, right? Fox more than Shapiro's. But, you know, these are people who now Tucker and Candace have built their own thing and they're kind of stuck on their business plan. I don't think they can they can pivot quickly enough when when Trump just starts doing real stuff because they've they've sort of they've bet a lot on this kind of false archetype um i i you note that i don't i'm not willing to believe both of them are standing on their you know peace before all principles because

i just don't believe it maybe that's too mean of me but like i just don't think that it's I don't buy Tucker as a pacifist. Well, I think Tucker, I don't know whether he's playing pacifist or whether he's just playing non-interventionist. You know, some of us are, you know, have basically adopted the ideology, not the ideology, but the thought that, you know, you'll reward your friends and you punish your enemies. So, I think Tucker is, Tucker may try to be doing, may be doing his, what he thinks is best to try to prevent a friend, which I think he and Donald Trump are friends or at least, you know, good acquaintances, from doing something that, you know, will tarnish what he believes, you know, what Trump said his legacy is going to be no new wars, no new this. You know, and this isn't a war yet, but could it be? You know, I don't know. Sure.

Well, these kind of actions are certainly could be correlated with escalations that turn into things we called war, for sure. I mean, let's kind of, instead of going at this from like the analytical, analytical dissection route, like, let's just talk a little bit about the sort of the things we all kind of agree on and that some people are having. a really hard time parsing right now. I think we all agree that the Iraq war was a disaster. There happens to be a lot of reasons, and I'm talking about like obviously the second one, why, you know, what was done under Schwartz Kopp was different than what came later.

And there's a ton of detail, but in the end, we're all left with way too many American lives were lost for nothing. I think a lot of times there's conflation between the two times we went into Iraq. And I don't really think the conflation is justified for the first Gulf War, where we pretty much had an objective. We achieved it. We got out. And I would argue that we would have been much better taking Saddam out then, because weirdly, the Iranians wouldn't have become the oppositional force they became in the second incursion, because at the time, they were still really, really fresh in their minds like fighting the Iran-Iraq war. And I think we were like, hey, we're going to whack Saddam.

They'd be like, you know, we can deal with that. We can dig it. I think that would have been the Iranian response in, you know, 92 or whatever. But, you know, Saddam gave us, you know, a reason to do that. You know, he invaded Kuwait. Like, there were facts on the ground. So I think the libertarian and MAGA right infusion of libertarian anti-war. values you know it all comes from a place that is pretty decent which is that war and then what we

did in Afghanistan despite our righteous you know cause in my view like after 9-11 I think there was a righteous and moral just war reason going to Afghanistan and kill some folks we're the you know it's not nuance it's war they hit us we hit them um now it turned into something equally Pointless. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you.

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Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Farage. So opposing pointless wars is not something I disagree with, but I'm also not willing to turn it into a worldview that ignores the fact that there's no reason for the level of enrichment at all. And I'm not, I know a lot about nuclear issues and nuclear medicine and, like, I really understand these things. And I'm telling you, we're at a point where they might not have a warhead, but there's absolutely no reason for this level of enrichment, both to this purity and in this volume. It is not to give everyone in fucking Iran a renal scan. Okay. That's not what this is for. These centers were not for that. And I'm not willing to say, oh, well, because I have this principle, you know, no wars, that this, we should ignore.

you know what's literally a serious moment in history now that also you know there's a there's a further complication and that we didn't make this decision this decision was made for us by a third-party nation and if you believe that you know i happen to think there's probably a pretty decent argument to be made that this has been correlated i sorry has been co-werect coordinated for a long time between all the elements in Israel and the United States. And there's a Brookings book from 2019 lays us all out. Oh, there's no question. There's a longer idea of regime change in Iran that precedes even that.

I just mean post October 7th, I think Israel and the United States, even during the Biden administration, were were at least checking in enough to, I don't think there have been any surprises. That's the way I would put it, which is different than saying that we co-planned it, right? And again, I'm not some guy with a security clearance who's breaking it. I'm just some guy who reads stuff. You know, salt a taste. But that's my take on it. And the other thing I got kind of raked over the coals for in a recent Twitter space is a little that you were on in the beginning.

and I think you got knocked off too. Then I got knocked off and it's, you know, because Twitter space is great tech. But, you know, a lot of people just really couldn't handle the idea that, you know, just the take I had, that it was purely motivated by revenge by Israel. And I'm more or less okay with that. Like after October 7th, if I was Israel, I'm just going to kill all these people. We killed Hamas. We killed Hezbollah.

Now we're going to kill Iran. And I think that's like an ignored analysis. I mean, Halsey pushed back on that, and so did a lot of people online. But I still think it's pretty explanatory. Well, it can be two things, too. It could be three things. It could be that they've been planning to do this for a long time, and then they got their excuse. And they believed that because they were the victim once again, that the world would go along with whatever they do.

Unfortunately, instead of, you know, blaming it on Iran and saying, well, Iran's the one. who is financing Hamas and directing Hamas. Let's quickly take Hamas out, flood the tunnels with concrete, do whatever you need to do, go in there, boom, boom, boom. They decided to basically turn a section of the world unlivable. It just happened to be next door to them, which seems insane to normal people. And then, you know, they wait, you know, two years, almost, you know, almost two years. And they're like, okay, yeah, a year and a half.

And they're like, okay, now let's go take care of the people who were destroying all of this while basically every nation in the world except for like five thinks they're absolute monsters. What's your take on last year's missile exchange that was predicated by the Israelis hitting the building next to the embassy, right, in Syria or in Lebanon? Was it in Lebanon? I think it was Lebanon. Yeah. So I guess it was arguable, but this is one of those nuances where I'm not, it's like they hit the embassy. Maybe they hit the building next to the embassy. But that is what provoked the missile exchange between around and Israel last year, where I think they both tested and theatrically so tested each other's, you know, stuff. What is your take on how much of that might have been kind of coordinated and like, because that part, that whole thing to me still, I'm not sure what I believe. happened there. I'm just curious what you think. Okay, so I mean, I think of so I think of the reaction to the Soleimani assassination. They launched miss Iran launches missiles at a U.S. base and Trump comes right out and says they had to save face. In many ways, what I see now that, you know, you're

past the fog and the anger of why the hell are you doing this? Why are we involved in this? Why do we, why do we care about this, you know, this aircraft carrier in the Middle East that, you know, hates us and it's just basically parasitic towards us. This looks like the same kind of thing. You know, I'm listening to different people who were talking about how these sites had already been hit numerous times. They would have had chance to move everything. Any kind of research they had, they could have moved it elsewhere, that we basically did the same thing. We went in there, Iran probably knew that there were people in the Iranian government who knew this was going to happen. And then they bombed a couple things.

And they said, yay, victory, just like Syria, 2017. I mean, I can understand that perspective. The one thing I will say, I don't believe, is there's no moving 4,000 centrifuges in like three days. That didn't, that just not a thing. And I think it's notable that Iran did not, before the strikes on Saturday night specifically, did not, anywhere that I saw say, oh, well, we've already moved everything out. Because if you were trying to protect your facility, but you had already taken the steps to protect your facility, you might leak that, you know, to confound your enemy because Ford has a pretty decent chunk of change, man. That's a

nice facility. And if you had moved it out, I think the move is you literally video it, Or you invite an inspection and say, look, it's empty. Screw you. We beat you. It's somewhere else. Just to taunt because when they came out after the strike, like, oh, we already moved all the uranium. I was like, eh, did you? It just seemed like a big cope to me.

You know, it's, there's 4,000 centrifuges at Fordow. And I think they're still there. Whether they're damaged or not is that's a damage. That's something I don't know. Right. Right. Well, you also have to take it. We fucked up the door at least. Yeah. Well, you also have to take into consideration like Dr. Ted Postal, who has been doing videos and writing research papers on these bombs, who, you know, clearly went out on shows talking about how these bombs aren't going to do a thing. So, I mean, they can do some damage. They can do some surface damage. But they already, Iran already has access to the, the, the place.

and how to structure and how to build so that you can actually even deflect the force of bombs like this. So even if they didn't move 4,000 centrifuges, I mean, there's no, from what I understand, I can't remember who said it, might have been Ritter talking about how there's eight entrances in Fordow. And like maybe we got two of them, maybe we got three of them, but did we get all of them, were there entrances we don't know about? You know, it just seems like, like it was like this is just theater. It's Trump again, dropping bombs and not a lot, you know, obviously some damage is going to be done.

There'll probably be some loss of life somewhat. But it just seems like that whole thing again of mission, you know, not mission accomplished, but hey, you know, we, this is the greatest action we've ever done, the greatest thing ever done by the, yeah, it's just. He's only capable of talking how he talks, as we know. Yeah, and he's talking about it. Like, he talks about it like some of the greatest, you know, military triumphs in the history of the United States and of America.

And it's, there's no evidence, you know, I mean, I've already heard from somebody that I know who knows people on the inside. And they're saying they're detecting any kind of signature for radiation at all. and or seeing anything. So who the, I mean. Right. There's a lot of, there's a lot of scenarios, though, where that wouldn't necessarily be notable

because the non-enriched, there's got to be a lot of yellow cake in storage there to feed the react, to feed the centrifuges. And that kind of signature is not going to, that shit you can't, I mean, this is very deep.

if it had collapsed a tunnel, these are all very heavy, non-gasified. Well, we introduced a lot of heat, so it would gasify the uranium hexafluoride, which is what the feedstock is for the centrifuge. But if it didn't find a way out, it didn't find a way out. I don't think the absence of aerial radiation detection, because there are no fission products, right? It's just you hit a storage place that contains pretty much only uranium. So if you didn't perfectly gasify it and liberate it, I can see why it wouldn't get out.

A lot of these sniffers are trying to find other elements. They're definitely trying to find, like our sniffers are optimized to detecting subterranean tests where weird isotopes get out and there are characteristic isotopes of a fission reaction and like, oh, we found some xenon 133, like we're in concentrations. it shouldn't have been like that's what those sniffers are for but an explosive attack again i i agree with you that trump is always going to be superlative in his speech and i don't know that the the destruction to the level he describes though is is required for the mission to be a success uh there's a lot of things going on here so ready for huge savings will mark your calendars from

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Savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump, Ireland. gift vouchers, Trump on Dunbiog Kosh Farage. I want to actually, weirdly, for me, I sent this thing to Tom the other day for, and I think

it was what he vamped on his morning report, I guess, yesterday. But it's Scott Ritter. And Scott Ritter said, and it's someone I never quote for a lot of reasons, not a fan. But he said, this is why I said repeatedly that Iran was making a huge mistake posturing as a nuclear threshold state. There's a lot in that state. And I think posturing as a nuclear threshold state, one of the things when they were trying to drive that wedge between Tulsi Gabbard and Trump, people did not read the text. The text was very clear. There's a big difference between enriched uranium at nuclear weapons grade and a warhead or a weapon, right? You can have three-day breakout to

weapons-grade uranium and you will not have cast that into two hemispheres and made it it with a trigger in a sub-assembly that fits in one of your missiles, right? That's a lot of work that hasn't happened. But there is no reason for enrichment. So you have to ask yourself, do we really have to wait until they do the trigger work and they've done the trigger work. They're not using, that's what the heavy water was reactor was for. There's deuterium-tridium use of as trigger materials in a fission only bomb. Most of the time when people hear heavy water, they think that's fusion. It can be used for fusion, but it can also more importantly be used for the creation of durable neutron sources for triggering a fission bomb. They were caught with too

much deuterium like 10 years ago. So the idea that they've figured out how to make a trigger is not crazy. So do we really have to wait till they cast the warheads before we act? Or do we just say, look, you guys have 60 percent tons of yellow cake and enough weight to spin 60 into 90 in three days. We're just going to act. I think that's a legitimate thing that everybody's ignoring. They're acting like there was some disparity between saying, oh, well, there's no evidence they had a warhead. It's like, dude, there's no other reason for this. And now let's talk about this from the lens of Ritter's comment. If they're willing to do all of this just to quote appear like a breakout state in order to drive negotiations,

first of all, that's a really dumb bluff. Ritter's right there. But the better question is who the fuck told them to do that? Because I just, I feel like it begs the invitation that there's another party like advising them. Because it's a really odd decision. And, you know, there's also a much more pragmatic and simple Occam's razor type conclusion is they were making a bomb. And I don't like our foreign policy being guided by others. And I don't have to like it in order to recognize that, you know, sometimes there's a time for action that isn't perfect.

And I feel that so many people right now can't separate their distrust of Israel from an honest. analysis of this scenario like they won't they cannot in any way except there might have been an actual ticking bomb so to speak and i agree we've been lied to before but one thing i'll say about the the second iraq war is they knew they were lying right there was no question about why they were lying um so it's not like anybody got duped and um that doesn't necessarily make it preclude that they're just lying again, but I think people need to get over this idea that there's some sort of confusion where the Israelis are tricking us with lies. I'm like, I don't think that's in the game. Well, there was a question you asked earlier that said,

you know, why would they be enriching uranium this much? You know, why would they be going weapons grade? Well, I mean, this may seem simplistic. and I may seem like a moron, but, you know, if I was in Iran and I was in charge, I wouldn't want to be bayoneted in the street and sodomized to death. Right, right. You know, and it really seems that whenever there is a threat against them, and it seems like if you want them to enrich uranium, accused them of enriching uranium. I mean, I don't know what your opinion is of the JCPOA, but it seemed like the JCPOA actually kept them in line some sorts.

And really, the only time they ramp stuff up is when people cancel the JCPOA or people talk about regime change in Iran. And, I mean, I don't particularly like the Mullahs. I wish I didn't know Iran existed. There's no reason I should know Israel or Iran. existed. I'm an American. There's no reason these things should be, they should be places where I'm like, like, exotic places where I'd be like, oh, maybe I'd like to travel there one day and see what that, what that culture is all about. Persia seems to be like an ancient culture. But no, no, that's, that's not it. Maybe that's as simple as that. Maybe it's as simple as I don't want to be

bayoneted in the ass in the street until I die by people that, you know, I've, been, you know, maybe I haven't been the best leader, but I haven't been, you know, I haven't been the worst leader. The problem with, I mean, I think there's a lot of good reasoning there as far as we're trying to guess the motivations for actions that we have an incomplete sense of. I agree that Israel is willing to fabricate things in order to advance the agenda they want. which the agenda they want in the Middle East is that no one can challenge them, I think is a fair way to say it. Some of this is neurotic projection and some of it is based in pretty smart reality. Like, it's both in my view.

And I don't know. I think there's been a lot of times both before and after the JCPOA that Iran could have avoided. I mean, here's the question. like what was the motivation for Iran both pre and post JCPOA to put as many missiles into Syria, into Lebanon, you know, it's not like their hands are clean. If their hands were clean, I think your argument would be pretty much impossible to argue. I don't think anyone has clean hands. I don't right. I'm talking about the moving of ass for what purpose is the moving of this level of missiles into, you know, whether,

whether has bow turned out to not be very effective. They were definitely armed. And there comes a point where you have to think back to the revolution when the first thing Iran did was move into that neck of the woods. They created things that didn't exist before, like Hezbollah. And they came after, you know, they stepped into the middle of a civil war in Lebanon that they helped create. They, you know, definitely murdered 241 American Marines. They murdered thousands of US servicemen in Iraq with force penetrators. So, you know, there comes a point where you got to just say, look, I agree everybody's hands are dirty, but then the near term, I think, matters more for what just happened

than, then the whole, you know, we don't have to give the Turks Vienna back, you know. There comes a point where everybody's just like, look, everyone keeps making choices. And they made choices very recently to do things that led to where we are. are. I do, I am confused honestly about how much of the JCPOA, I believe, given who was involved in it and who got it signed. And when the, there was a date when the IEA, excuse me, came back with a level enrichment test that was very discordant. And I think the JCPOA was still in force. And everyone was like, oh, no, no, no, that's a, no, no, no, no, it was a mistake. It wasn't really that hot and i i feel like the iran was just not you know they had they had places that the jcpoa

didn't apply to um so i i'm not sure i believe they were they were spun down so to speak well i mean i guess what i'm not getting is is the fact that you're questioning iran's motives for doing certain things as if every motive they're doing is evil but evil to who evil to whom Is it, I mean, what, Israel? Well, I'll put it this way. I mean, I literally, the only reason I don't want to see Israel blown off the map, like the only reason I don't want to see Israel removed from existence is because then those people have to go somewhere and they're probably going to come here. Well, I think that avoiding nuclear war is probably a global good for all reasons because. Well, there's only one country we've mentioned that didn't sign a nonproliferation treaty.

Well, what I was going to do anything. What I was just going to. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro.

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Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. And now this is over the same to the hamsterer. It's leargoal to the Gwaffe and not art greeing in Aundun and leant of Gaela to give a time of a day. In Ergaret,

we're talking too tawwain in one of the funerner. I think of them, one of them to do do you know on a hundred lecturers on as good people

tariff in tithe to a cooctue a couple full of the eargrey Ponguey say actually is that

there's one part of the Ritter comment that and I don't know if you've listened to Tom over the last you know a couple days but Tom's kind of staking out some territory that I'm not sure I agree with

but it was kind of on that that space as the other night but but um the question is to what end like so let's talk there's there's certain things i'm not it's not questionable whether iran's uranium enrichment was for any purpose other than weapons that that's what it was for so then the question becomes is is somebody tell them hey if you enrich up to this point where you have breakout and it's undeniable then we're going to use that to force israel like then we're going to let you know we're going to work a deal where you give up yours and Israel gives up theirs. That's a pipe dream in my view, but I'm not saying somebody

didn't tell Iran that. Because other than that, if Iran wasn't on the midst of creating 10 nuclear warheads, let's go all the way to warheads. Let's assume they figured out the trigger and the miniaturization problem is not very intense. The trigger problem is pretty intense. That's a lot of work but Iran has a lot of talent. So the idea that when they moved all the stuff out of Iraq, A-R-A-K facility, and they had a research reactor there or whatever, or is it, I think Natanz was the one on the coast, which one is on the coast? But it doesn't matter. I think we should assume they probably have a workable trigger solution. If they were just going to one day say, hey, we have, we have nukes, we really have them,

and we're going to do an underground test, boom, now we did it, now let's not fuck around and let's all talk. Okay, but I don't see the, I as an American do not view that as incredibly destabilizing. I don't see that as a threat only to Israel. I see that as a major problem, given Iran's history with us, that we would want to act independently to stop. I really do. Now, you might not. You might think it's like Pakistan or North Korea.

I think Iran's a little bit in a different category because not only have they been willing to engage us with proxies, they've done it as it's pretty much the entirety of the ideology of their state. I also, yeah, I mean, that's my tape again. Yeah, but I'm also one of those people who is like, sure, if I think that a country is a threat, I don't care if I like them or not, you know, we should take care of them. You know, we should engage them. I have a problem doing that with a government that I don't trust that is owned by interests that I don't believe align with mine. but let's say, you know, my friends were running the government.

I would have no problem if I thought Iran was a threat. But I also think that I also have to consider the history of why, you know, people are like, oh, you know, the whole meme of, well, what are the country chance death to America? And I'm like, I've had dogs that like barked at me for 15 years and never bit me. You know, and then, you know, and that's, I know that's. quaint on my part. But also it's like, okay, why? Why would they scream that? Is it because we wear blue jeans? Or do we over, or do these people have a long, do these people live historically and think, oh, in 1953, you know, the CIA overthrew our duly elected leader? Oh, and even

before that, they came and stole our minds and gave them to the Roy, and gave a, yeah, but, but. The third generation of Pallavi's inserted by the West is what the current plan is. So yes. I mean, and what I mean by that is you understand that like the grandfather, the father, and the son are all the Shah Pahlavi, right? 1920, 1955 and potentially 2025. And that's what the alternate to the Mollas are. Now, move it up the geostrategia ladder a bit.

And, you know, don't forget before, why did Iran have F-14s? Why, they were the only country that had cutting edge. Those were our best fighters in the 70s. And Israelis were passing weapons to Iran is in the 1980s, probably into the 1990. Correct. There was a big part of where Iran-Contra happened was through, you know, at the time Israel was much more concerned about Saddam than Iran. And so was Iran.

Don't forget. This is the thing people always leave out of that analysis, is that Iran was scared shitless of Saddam, which was not without merit. And I'm not saying it's all strange bedfellows stuff, but, you know, loyalties change for sure. And concerns. And I also will say that. that mission that people are saying was all just a stunt as if we called Iran and said,

hey, we're going to blow up these empty buildings. I think it was a little, it was more of a display of, I mean, that wasn't a six-plane mission, right? They said 125 planes were involved. So what that really means is there were probably 10 F-22s and like another 12 F-35s in tow plowing the road. because B-2s aren't very fast, and all of the planes, the F-35, the F-22, and the B-2 all have the ability to avoid, you know, they have similar stealth capabilities, but the B-2 has no speed. So we definitely put a fighter escort in there. We pulled off that combined arms operation with B-2s allegedly flying out of the U.S.,

but we had more B-2s in Diego Garcia, and then we also had decoy B-2s in the air, flying in America. So there was a lot of shit going on for misdirection purposes. And I assume the F-22s took off from Saudi because they had been there. And then F-35s are kind of everywhere. We just have a lot of those in the region. So this is also a display of, again, I'm coming down on the side that the Iranians did not know what was happening. You're free to disagree. But I think that this is a demonstration to Russia and China of certain capabilities that, you know, the S-400 and all its alleged superpowers can't stop. And ultimately, an Iran being neutralized, short or long term, brought into the Western sphere of influence is a mega move in doing the only thing the United States needs to be doing right now, and that's checking China's rise. If we can control the energy supplies to China and honestly also to India by by bringing Iran under our direct control

That's a huge strategic win and and ultimately maybe driving more of this decision-making than anything else This may be Israel wants X and blah blah blah but America really wants Z and we're doing it for another reason because you know if you were wanting to this also very provocative to putin but at the same time maybe trump has offered him something because putin's pretty nervous about china you know china's his ally blah blah blah blah but on the long timeline he's he's not happy about it and i'm not saying russia's coming back to to the west i don't see that happening given the reality and given the the fact that Trump has no successor that I can see that has a great chance of winning. We got a lot of work to do on Vance before you convince me he can win an election.

But that's a big part of this puzzle, I think, is, you know, it's not just about Israel's interests. Israel's interests are very kind of one-dimensional and first layer. They can't handle people in their neighborhood who they don't can't dominate. That's a personality disorder and it's a national policy manifestation of that personality disorder. But I think the U.S. is thinking about a bigger board. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

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It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.i. forward slash under-insurance, brought to you by Insurance Ireland. Well, that I agree with. I do think some of this has to do with China, not all of it, like some people who don't want to talk about it. Israel or put any blame on Israel. Oh, this is all about China and the Belt and the road and whatever.

But I'm just not even Belt and Road, just just just energy. I mean, so much of China's energy comes from not just Iran, but listen, the straight of Hormuz is going to be closed for like an hour and then Iran will have a Navy. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about on a much like more medium to long timeline. If we control Iran, not even all the way, but enough that we put in some government that wants to have talks with everybody, we're going to start offering them stuff to slow down. If all we did was slow down the shipment of energy to China by 30% because we drop so much money on them.

Because don't forget, every country we take over is another place we can store dollars. and we can rain dollars on, which, you know, helps control global inflation and, you know, keep dollar flows, you know, it's all about that at some level. And maybe not as the prime reason, but also the side benefit of any time another domino topples. It's like, oh, yet another cubbyhole for dollars. And if we do that, you know, China, China has a really hard time sourcing enough energy to continue what they need. need to do, whether it's, I mean, because don't forget, there's whole things they don't make. You know, it was very interesting when the whole rare earth versus, not ethylene, but there's a precursor

for most plastics. It's, uh, that only the U.S. makes. And, and so we, we both blinked, but it was interesting. China would have been more affected because one of the reasons Trump is selling off all the Western BLM lands is there's a whole bunch of rare earths out there. and we're going to be rare earth independent by the time Trump leaves office. Well, I mean, I don't, I'm not for that. If you want, if they want that, they can do a government project. I don't want that in private hands. I'm way past the libertarian, way past the libertarian, privatize everything when.

Right, right. I'm just saying, listen, it's a stretch goal. It's a negotiation trick. I think what they're going to do is they're going to say they're going to do all that, and then they're going to walk it back. But meanwhile, whole swaths of BLM not National Park. Most BLM land is crap and it's poorly managed and it isn't some nature paradise. And I think, you know, it's all just typical flood the zone shit where they'll, they get what they want by, you know,

Trump read one book his entire life. He got it at the Chester Karras negotiating seminar, and he learned the concept of the Zopa. And Trump's whole shtick in everything he's ever done, whether it's real estate development or reality TV, is just define an absolutely unreasonable Zopa, zone of potential agreement. He does that by throwing his first spear, his first price point, into a land of total madness. And the person on the other side of the table is like, he just told us he wants to. wants a million dollars for this can of Coke? Like, is he insane? And meanwhile, you know, he just looks at him. And that's how he does every negotiation. He doesn't start a negotiation with an irrational

zone. He defines an irrational, literally lunatic zone to destabilize the people who are negotiating with him and try to provoke what's called the midpoint fallacy, which is where people negotiate poorly when they succumb to the idea of a midpoint being valid. So if we offer a negotiation starting at 100 units and you counter with 20, there's this natural, you know, vacillation towards 60 is the midpoint, right? And so you think 60 seems like a fair deal. We can spend three weeks arguing about bullshit and then eventually you're like, I offer you 60 and you take it. But, you know, the reasonable value is 30. You were right, putting it at 20. But when I put it at 100, it fucked up all your calculations. That's Trump in everything. If you want to understand this guy and all the crazy

shitty shit he does, it's literally just that. It's just negotiating seminars that were big in the 70s in New York City that were in every Sky magazine when you flew on an airplane. I think that's a good, I had already mentioned the lands and it's like, I'm, you know, I don't want to sound like a libertarian because, yeah, I think both of us were libertarians at one point. I try to think back to why I was one and I'm I really I struggle with it. It's like what it's almost like what the hell were you thinking. This isn't existing in reality. You're you're always you're always like a backbiter. You're always screaming from the stands and going, you know, saying neither side is neither side knows how to play the game. Only I know how to play the game, but

you get out on the ice and you just, you know, you fall flat on your face. So, I mean, you know, not a hard segue, but, you know, why do you? You ask a question. One, one, a question that you can answer for yourself. You know, what point in your life was that when that appealed to you? But I think the other thing is just the honest thing about libertarianism is that it confuses a lot of people by by criticizing things that are that deserve to be criticized like canesianism or shitty foreign policy or whatever and then it lies and says well the only valid criticism of canesianism is libertarianism and people who don't know anything who've never studied history or read a book you know might think that's true they might think oh yes the entire world is canesian uh all these

it's it's all a giant canesian conspiracy and the only opposition of that are these great people over here, you know. So is Austrian economics libertarian or do people in America who were libertarians decide that this one of many anti-Recardo, anti-Marx, anti-Kinz, anti-Kinsey and later perspectives on economics is clearly libertarian? Would you think Hayek would have been a libertarian had the LP been in existence? I don't. Not even. close. And the other thing in my view is that what what the LP and the movement that led to it in the United States is just so obviously a post-Trottsky neutralization program. I think these are the Trotskyites. You know, the neocons went after the Republican Party and then some of them went on a

special mission to waste the time and the talent of a whole generation of young men, and it was mostly young men. And I think libertarianism in the U.S. was always meant to just be a place to absorb and distract and trap in amber all like the best minds of each generation by confounding them with bullshit. And, you know, people do not like it when I say this, but this is my honest take. I was attracted to it in college. I went to some libertarian meetings, and then I decided I would prefer to drink beer and meet girls because when you go to a libertarian meeting in college, you get a pretty quick knowledge of like, oh, there's a personality type here. And that personality type is looking for a way to be empowered because it lacks any personal power. And I think if

you're ever at a point in your life where you're just, you know, it's just a cult. It's just the same as any cult. It feeds on a sense of rootlessness and directionlessness. And it then gives a ridiculous pretend philosophy. The thing that made me not a libertarian was just growing up, but the thing that made me an anti-libertarian or a post-libertarian, meaning someone who's willing to attack the essence of libertarianism as harmful is just, I went down the rabbit hole, I read their canon, I looked at, I put it this way, I had arguments with enough libertarians who unlike Tom Luongo have not read their books.

Tom's, you know, the fact that Tom still is mostly a libertarian after reading their stuff and being treated by them the way he's been treated is just a miracle or a testament to being, you know, obstinate. But most libertarians have not read their own supposed canon. And when you argue with them, they're always like, well, you have to read this book. I'm like, do I really have to read some 400-page book? You couldn't possibly summarize what it is you believe and put it in a, fucking argument, you can't do that? What kind of acolyte of anything can't at least argue the

fucking premises? But libertarian after libertarian is always like, well, you haven't read Rothbard. And my answer to you is none of you fucking people have read Rothbard. None of you know what any of it means because it's all just negation. It's all like, I'm perfect. I'm in the I don't kick puppies club. Wow. What a great club that is. You know? Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community.

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And then here you are. You don't. You're so cool. And that's like, that's the level of like personal fulfillment these people want. And their intellectual weakness is the same thing. Because they're always, they always like tell you, oh, well, I beat you in the argument. I'm like, we didn't have an argument. you don't have any premises.

Oh, I debated you. You didn't debate me. You read a fucking Wikipedia article. Like, it's like, do you really think you're arguing? And it all comes down to the fact they don't, they don't know what praxis is in Marxism, and they don't know what praxeology is in Austrianism, right? They just, they just don't. And I'm not saying none of them do.

I'm sure the bow tie wearers in Auburn, Alabama do. But give me a break. Like, these people are useless. They've never accomplished anything in American politics. You know, maybe they bought some buildings in Alabama, but whatever. Congrats. Well, I think the thing that really started to turn me off to it was, well, there's a couple things. One, it turns out not all of them, but a shit ton of them are atheists who are looking for a moralistic framework.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And somehow it's private property and the non-aggression principle is their framework. Also, it always seems like anything that they push that they can say, oh, look, we were the first people to champion gay marriage or legalized drug use. And it's like, okay, how does that work that? How, how, what is Colorado like now? Who wants to go to Denver? Who wants to spend any time in Denver? Who, you know, who, who wants to, who wants to argue that the United States has become a really moral place?

And it's so much, so much more peaceful and so much more, you know, cohesive because of gay marriage. Because, I mean, basically any, anything, any win that. they want to they want to point out is something that you could look to and go what what is that how has that helped the populace how's that it's an artificial version of i mean this is exactly like what the left hard left has done with the civil rights act right it it's the creation of a fake tyranny and saying oh look we freed the people from the tyranny let my people go right and then the next thing and the next thing but none of these are actually maligned groups who have suffered injustice. All they are is more pillars of consistency and stability in society.

And this is where the Trotsky trick really is revealed, because they're just another lane, another channel in the Marxist destruction of the non-Marxist West. It's not about left versus right. It's about destroying family. It's about destroying the concept of nation. And it's about deracinating all the members of said nation so that they have no local connections because that's when you know when when some asshole moves into your town suddenly gets on the city commission and like brings in developers from another state and you're like wait i've lived here with 25 years that's the that's the rub man that's how they're ruining this country and the libertarians are just pawns in this whole shit show and the other thing is i think it's worth noting i don't know how

how much I want to dive into it. But one of the main things that drove me out of libertarianism very early was when I perceived that left libertarianism and right libertarianism were both in this bucket together. And somehow these morons couldn't look at each other and be like, yeah, we're not like each other. Oh, but we all have the same brand name. And I was like, what is wrong with you? Like, I think there's probably a minority, but a decent minority of libertarians who are not atheist. And I don't think politics needs to have a religious underpinning, just as an aside,

but inside libertarianism, the conflict between the conclusions drawn by mostly left libertarian atheists and what the rest of the party who, you know, and there was all this LP Civil War shit, which I don't care about. But there's a very dramatic problem when a bunch of people who are just like, we're libertarians, can't look at what they're talking about and say, dude, we have have an intractable division here. This isn't a party. This isn't even a group of people who are the same type of people. And that to me just more and more made me think this is just a cult and a scam. And it's meant to waste everybody's time because it's really there just serving another tranche of the destroy, you know, America destroy the West. And I just say it, destroy the non-Marxist West.

Plenty of the West is on their team. But, but that's the way I look. at everything they do. And that includes the absence of achievement. You know, you can, you can accomplish a lot by accomplishing nothing because you just brought everyone who could have accomplished something else down with you. Well, yeah, that's, that's another thing that libertarianism seems to be. It seems to be a sponge for high IQ, for high IQ young men, to pull them away from anything that would have anything to do with Realpolitik or to, or, you know, especially at the local level. Yeah, and I think that the thing that got me out was in 2021,

probably like August or September, there was this, they were looking to pass this thing. There were companies, there are private companies, quote unquote private companies in Florida. like supermarkets that were like, okay, you're not going to be able to come in here and shop unless you have a vaccine passport. And I remember DeSantis going, yeah, that's not going to happen. You're not going to, I'm going to step in. And libertarians were defending this.

They were defending like the corporations, the supermarkets. You know, one of the funniest things you'll see over the last, like over the last five years is a lot of libertarians have gotten a, from defending corporations. I mean, there are still some, I mean, complete lunatic retard, Spurgy, autist who want to talk about argumentation ethics and things that don't exist that will still defend corporations and whatever they want to do because it's a private company, bro, and they can do whatever they want.

But, I mean, that was like my final straw was, I'm watching these people defend these companies. It would be like, no, you can't buy food. They're like, no, no, it's up to a company, whether a human being can buy food. Oh, and that politician, that politician has no, should have no say in this. Right. And the libertarian will always tell you, well, I already won that argument when I said NAP five times. It's like, well, yeah, but you didn't. They believe that by reciting magic words that they've won an argument. And they don't believe in public policy. They don't believe that

there's a complexity. One, when you don't believe in the state a priori, and then you believe in corporate power a priori. And then you say, oh, well, nobody can argue that the state can control corporations from violating public policy because I said NAP. That's not debate. That is not a syllogism. Like, that's just recursion of we're right because we're right, which is actually what's at the core of the libertarian, you know, ethos. They don't, you know, this is this is the problem with this whole men act praxeology thing that they've that I would argue that you know this is more of right libertarianism um they've they've brought this into their worldview where they just don't understand that you can't base the rightness of your worldview on the declaration that you're correct

you have to prove it and they just have this rigidity and and you know I think it's important just psychologically to talk about the spurgy, autistic, certain types that are drawn to this. I think half the people who come into libertarianism do not have a personality disorder or some sort of other psychic issues. But once you get into this group, you start deferring to people who do. And to me, libertarianism is in many ways, you know, impossible to describe without an analysis of personality disorders. because it's primarily male.

There's a lot of, you know, not necessarily diagnosed Asperger's, but very Asperger's adjacent levels of rigidity within the community who calls themselves libertarians. And this is one of the reasons why that group of people acting together cannot get out of their own way because they spend all their time just debating minutia. And don't think that that's an impossible aggregation of individuals. to think about bringing together for that purpose and bring as many people towards that core as possible. That's what a good Trotskyite designer would do.

I mean, people underestimate how much deviousness there is in this world. And it's hard enough to debate in groups. It's hard enough to, you know, mass communication is a difficult task just because of the nature of communication between individuals versus what, it is in a crowd. And all of these cults, you know, the Antifa, all these things are managed by people who aren't declaring their management. So. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes

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brought to you by Insurance Ireland. Well, you know, and over a lot of the people that I, the people that I started reading after I left libertarianism, like James Burnham, Carl Schmidt, people who are more, Oh, believe me, there is a whole group of people who are just like that over on this side. But guess what? They all share the same personality type as the Spurgy Libertarian.

They just trade, and a lot of them are former libertarians. And all they did was trade one subject to Spurge out over another. And, you know, it's like, and then what's funny is when they get over here, that's when you see. guess what they do? They purity spiral. Right. And it's like, okay, well, what about, you know, like realpolitik and, you know, maybe, maybe get a couple of our friends elected on a lower level. No, no, no, no.

We have to take over the national government. If we don't take over the national government, they're just going to waco us. You know, you hear this. And, but the thing to come back to libertarianism is one thing that I've noticed, though, is that a lot of the people that I'm still friends with who call themselves libertarians over the past few years, you know, five or six years ago, 10 years ago, they may have been talking about like the ins and outs of this and that and every little, you know, every dorky book that Walter Block wrote or, you know, Rothbard wrote and everything.

And I think a lot of them have just gotten to the point where it's, oh, this is about private property. and because that's where it's like, okay, we can't deal with, we want to leave the left libertarians behind because they're nuts and they're the ones talking about what we used to talk about and going crazy with it. There's a bunch of Spurgs on the right libertarian side. So we're just going to talk about private property to which I ask, okay, prove to me, prove to me private property is the right way. Prove to me that, like, you, what is your whole basis for private property? Where is this coming from? Is it coming from nature? Is it coming from God?

Who's this coming from? Because if you're not willing to have the debate of it, you know, if you're not willing to have, like, to let metaphysics come into this and talk about, okay, you say private property is all that matters, that if we had private property, we'd have a more orderly world. Okay, prove that. to me. Right. They've also never come up with like, and I know they've, it's been addressed by the more serious, one, I've, I've said a lot of things about libertarianism that is highly pejorative. I recognize that. And it's, I'm not saying I don't believe what I said, but at the same time, I do recognize

there have been people who are intellectually honest trying to solve these problems. I don't think they've been influential. And again, nobody reads the canon, so what does it matter? But the, the real is like the tragedy of the comments they've never really addressed it in a way that is arguable i've never heard a libertarian address you know a eminent domain with anything other than like just a shit fit i don't like eminent domain but at the same time i recognize that railroads work better when straight and so do roads and so does water piping and so do a lot of things where the idea that one day everyone will just negotiate that because it's the best idea. It's like, no, you're always going to have one asshole who's trying to like extract a confiscatory amount of value because he owns

the piece in the middle. And just being able to give him market rate before he started changing his price. No, no. These lots are worth 300,000. You have two of them. You get 600 grand from the government. And we're taking it. And we're putting transmission lines over so everyone can have electricity. Sorry. You know, libertarians, well, that just can't happen. Because I'm the violence the NAP and I'm like okay and yet walk outside your fucking house dude tell me about do you own that that 10 feet in the back where the where the power poles are oh you don't interesting that's how good your arguments are no one cares well what they're going to do is they're going to write a book about how you can well if somebody doesn't want the road on their property they'll

build a tunnel under their property yeah instead of just instead of just going hey buddy fuck you We're going to take it from you because you're a dick. Right. Right. And I'm sorry. There are people in this. I asked about private property earlier. I like private property.

It lets me know and my neighbor know what we need to take care of and what, you know, I believe it brings some sense of order. But it doesn't always. They don't own the concept of private property. This is the key thing. It's like libertarians will take something that people agree with. Or even partially, like some people have thought about Keynesianism and said, oh, I don't like the implications of this money printing. It bothers me.

And then libertarians would be like, see, you're a libertarian. And you're like, but there's other people who don't like it who weirdly aren't libertarian. So it's almost like anyone can dislike a thing for their own reasons. And they don't have to join your club. And they get very weird when you point this out to them. So it's, you know, this is the problem. with people who are the the rigidity is a real issue you know they they have a hard time with plurality and a hard time with with multiple you know explanations for for a phenomenon and um they're

very single single cause thinkers you know yeah or god forbid one of your solutions crosses over with theirs you know i'm very into local politics and i'm very into um you know that people who who know each other and our neighbors would be better to, you know, form some sort of local government over each other and exclude other people from serving and whatever. You can share tools without being a Marxist. I can lend my neighbor my rake without, like, singing the Internationale. Right. But, you know, as soon as you say that, it's like, oh, well, no, that's just libertarian.

It's like libertarians didn't invent the concept of localism you started. scumbag? Yeah. It's like that is how this, that was, that is how monocultures naturally occur. Naturally, I mean, if you look at like the founding of this, well, not even the founding. I'm talking about 100 years before this country, before a government was, a national government was instituted or there was a constitution or a declaration of independence. You didn't even need local police because if, if a horse went missing, you're going to put

together a posse of people to find out who stole the horse because then your horse could be going missing next. That's what we're talking about here. Libertarians didn't create that. Get over your fucking selves. Have you ever been to Spain? No, and I'm fucking going, man. There's like no one who talks about the Spanish Civil War as much as I do. I'm not going to, I'm going to totally different tack. So the Sagrada Familia is a church in Bartholona by. designed by Gaudi. And it is, if no structure on earth is a better reputation of libertarianism, I don't know what it is. Maybe the pyramids. But when you look at this thing, which is still not

complete, right, they've been working on this for 100 years. No, cathedrals always took hundreds of years, by the way. You know, another thing the West has forgotten. But, you know, describe to me how something like the Sagrada Familia would exist in a world run by libertarians. It literally, never would. It's and yet here it is. And I say that because so so much of what's missing from libertarianism is an honest to God aspirational future. I think yes, they take possession of a lot of critiques of things that are bad like you just pointed out. But they never really paint anything but a future where, you know, they have all the bullets and then society collapses and then you have to go beg them for for something. Like that's the libertarian view of

of paradise, also known as the apocalypse to everyone else, right? Libertarians always have a fantasy about being the like apex prepper. That's their view of the future. That's their aspirational future. It's not, you know, it's not anything else. It's not like, oh, we're going to build this great society that intercan. No, no, because they can't do that. They never can.

Well, it's not profitable. It won't be profitable, too. You know, it's like who's going to build, when your whole, I've had people say, all we need to do is fix the whole dollar system. If we didn't have fractional reserve banking, there wouldn't be as much degeneracy in the world. There wouldn't be as much brutalism in the world. I'm like, yeah, because like the richest people on the planet, they have no problems with degeneracy. Yeah. What the fuck are you talking about?

So I have a question. Are we all off base on, so when I criticize purity spiraling, I do it a lot. I have a whole habit of doing it. I hear you criticizing it. I know lots of people criticize it, but are we missing a major thing to explore in that the nature of purity spiraling itself is in many ways anti-aspirational? Meaning it's just policing. It's like a very like, like shitty kindergarten teacher way of thinking.

Like, if you're in your chair, or maybe second grade teacher, more than the point. I always talk about purity spiraling, and I'm just kind of criticizing myself, and I'm literally curious what you think about this. I always kind of use it as a way to just say, oh, well, these people aren't, you know, they just haven't thought this through,

and they're just willing to, it's a perfect be the enemy of the good kind of thing. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Like, get something done for God's sake. And purity spiraling is a way that, you know, people who are just too fussy, possibly too spurgy, but also possibly malign actors, mind you, all possible. These can all be true together. Versus, you know, we don't talk about it enough for what it is, which is the absence of anything

that we honestly want to work towards. Like purity spiraling more than anything else. And it is in no way a criticism reserved for libertarians. It is probably the most, whatever that act is, and I'm saying kind of like the phrase we use might be too reductionist. But that act is our media. That act is our two political parties, for God's sakes. They're just paying reference, you know, paying lip service rather to, you know,

some so-called principle that's not deeply held. And like, have we missed something here? just by calling it that, because I feel like it really is at the core of this problem. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person.

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Visit optionscar.orgie today. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee. A visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with breathtaking views

of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness, it's Christmas. at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. Well, I guess from my experience and only in my experience, the purity spiraling that I've seen and experienced is by people who have not achieved or have not even set out a path or have any power whatsoever. And basically, what purity spiraling, I think, allows you to do is it allows you to feel like you're having

some kind of wins, like you're accomplishing something when you really haven't accomplished anything. You know, purity spiraling is basically what you're looking to do is you're looking to get, say you're looking to get rid of bad actors or you're trying to hone something. Well, you can end up doing that for the rest of your life. instead of just achieving what you need to achieve and then looking around and saying, okay, we need to get, we need to get rid of this. We need to get rid of that. Including the sloppy middle state of like the thing that is an ideal that is necessary

to build the next not ideal thing that moves the whole enterprise forward. And that's the thing is if you never start, you never start. But to me, like the purity spiraling thing, it goes back to the puppy kicking. Like I feel like it's just like pointing to the T-shirt, be like, I'm in the I Don't Kick Puppies Club. It's like, great. You know. Well, it's, and I think you said it and you may not have realized you were saying it,

but it's also the assumption that you're ever going to get anything 100% pure. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. You're going to be dealing with, you know, politics is, I forget who said that politics is perpetual. You are always playing politics. There is never going to, you're never going to get to a point. where you're not going to have to police, you're not going to have to, you know, govern in some way. It's a process, not a project. Yeah, yeah.

And the only thing you can hope for is that you can hope that you can hope that you're doing it within a system where what you're doing is you're policing instead of trying to build. That's what the progressives do. That's what liberalism is. is building is selling and building, selling a vision and building towards a vision that can never be achieved. So you're constantly having to, you know, well, I just, we got to kill the Kolox because we're not going to get, you know, we got to get rid of instead of being like, well, maybe we're not, maybe what we're trying to do can't scale. Maybe a government, maybe governing 350 million people is beyond scale. And,

it's a lot easier if you have 10,000 or you have 20,000 or even 100,000. Maybe there can be a confederation of states of 100,000 people that can come together and, you know, oh, you mean like we tried and they gave up on very quickly, you know, in the founding of this country. And I don't know if you want to argue over that. But the basically. No, there wouldn't be. I wouldn't argue. There's no argument.

The only defect I see in the original, you know, U.S. Constitution, not the articles, and it was not foreseen because it wasn't foreseen. But like, I think California, you know, even Florida, like these states are too big. And after we screwed up the whole role of the Senate, not just by electing them, you don't have to ruin the role of the Senate by popular election, but it comes a long way. Ideally, the senators would know and the U.S. Senate would know that they represent the interests of the state they come from. And I think states should be approximately, you know, give or take, geographically, reasonably the same size and population-wise reasonably the same size, because that would have preserved a very mechanical kind of senator count

that was tied to land, which was tied to people who, you know, it's much more of that yeoman farmer kind of origin story that America really has. But when you have a state like California, who has an excessive amount of representatives. No, granted, thankfully, they only have two senators, but it screws the system up even more. We screwed it up, obviously, by allowing senators to be elected, and we created this distortion. It's like, oh, it's just some more people that represent me.

That's not what senators are supposed to do. And we don't even write laws, and, you know, you look at what's happening with the big, beautiful bill bullshit. You know, they're not sitting there trying to rectify state's interests with the interests of the people's house. That's not what they do. They just do, oh, we have a different set of, you know, we have a different electoral count here.

So we're going to pull our bullshit in all, same bullshit, just different ways. The whole process is just corrupted. Now, my solution for that is, why don't we just go back to the way it was or, you know, re-institute. And I am not claiming I have a way of doing this because obviously if you cut California,

New York, Florida, and Texas, into smaller pieces, we just get some gerrymandering fight where the left will steal it all, and then we're going to be living in a country with no rights. I get that. But speaking idealistically, I think the greatest system is the one we have, honestly. The world's tried a lot of other things, and I think we need to kind of balance some states' rights back into the whole system and maybe make the states more similarly sized. That would be a big, to me. But it's a better solution than revolution. It's a better solution than letting California withdraw and take the land and give it to China. If California wants to secede, I say, okay, great,

we'll just, you know, you can, you can leave, but the land's still ours. So you always want to flood Canada. That's fine with, fine with me. But you're not, you're not taking the land with you. So no, yeah, I've, I used to be one of those people when I was a libertarian. Oh, let California succeed. It's like, no. No, you're not doing that. We're we're we'll let you go. We'll let the people go. Well, it's one of these things that sounds like a principled statement, but it's in concert with foreign malign actors, right? So if you haven't noticed this pattern yet, like, okay. But, but that's reality. That's the, reality of of the Democratic Party being highly corrupted by Chinese communist influence.

The Republican Party is highly corrupted by global corporatist influence, which includes parts of China that are probably not in great communion with Beijing in CCP terms, but they're they're not the enemies of Beijing either. So you know, we get a lot of crossover and what the corruption ultimately means, but both parties are certainly not serving the interests of the people. I do distrust the Democrats more, but that could just be a bias or that could just be the reality, is that it's more dangerous when a party is corrupted in a unitary fashion to a single foreign malign actor because that they can then coordinate for real damage. Whereas if the Republicans are just taking envelopes from everybody, then it's less risky. Doesn't make it less corrupt.

Yeah, yeah, I've said that really the only good thing about this, this administration is the fact that there are different elite factions vying for power. Right. So at least you, at least there's a chance that a, you know, the non-AAC wing will, will win one. I don't know if I've seen that yet. But the, you know, I don't know how much crossover there is with these. with these factions. I mean, I'm pretty much at the point now where it's like,

state-level politics and local politics have to basically have to make a comeback. And that's really the only way you're going to deal with this, trying to change the machine, the managerial system that Washington, D.C. has become,

you know, people talk about the, oh, the strong centralized government. I'm like, kind of. but also it's like what's the head of the snake? Yeah. Like who like like if you if you wanted to destroy D.C., what head of the snake do you chop off? And you know, and some of the people who listen to this

will be like, well, you just, you get rid of all Israeli. Well, no, we're still under the system. The system still runs the same way. Now you're just going to have another interest group that's going to be able to run the manager run those managerial levers. Right. So I'm looking at your background.

I'm a fan of certain Vexillology. Is that flag something, is that the, I don't think you're a Neo Byzantine in your choice of yellow and red. But is that sort of, like, are you kind of at this ANCAP meets the state moment? Like what is your background image? What's the takeaway from that? All right. us the Alabama flag with the Spanish colors.

Interesting. Yeah. I just basically came to the conclusion a couple years ago that there is really the only flag that possibly represents me in this country is a flag you're not allowed to fly anymore. So I decided to make my own. Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a self-foucher or a Spend Anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds.

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Get the facts, be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. Got it. And it does kind of, it does resemble the, that flag you're not allowed to fly anymore. Yeah. But, yeah, I don't know. You should get out more. I mean, you live in Alabama. Then you should certainly see that flag on a regular basis.

Oh, actually, you will see that flag more in Oregon. Then you will see it in Alabama. Because in because so many people down here have bought into the, the whole. Yeah, we don't want to offend people. Wow. Even though I live in the middle, I mean, I live in the middle of fucking nowhere. I can see one drive, you know, I've seen maybe one or two in my town, possibly. What about the high concept stars and bars flyers as opposed to the battle flag flyers?

The high, what do you talk about the? Some people fly the stars and bars, which is the state flag of the Confederacy, which is not the cross. I never, I never see that one. i.e. the old Georgia flag. That was the whole thing is the Georgia flag they or excuse me the the replace. So the Georgia flag used to have the battle flag in it which pissed everybody off just like the Mississippi flag. But then Georgia's flag that they fly now is essentially really similar, even more similar to the stars and bars, which was the official state flag of the Confederacy than the previous one was. And that's the one everyone picked in their fits of uneducated moral

preening. So, um, I never really even, never even thought about that and I lived in, I lived in Georgia forever. The interplay, I think, of all these things, it's, it's, you know, there comes a point where it really is about individuals versus the state. And I think, you know, we could do a whole other podcast on the implications of atheism versus faith in that fight. Um, there's people who will not submit to any authority. And I think that's a type of individualism that doesn't appeal to me. But there's also states that won't submit to any authority people, either below or above. That doesn't appeal to me either. And, you know, I think this moment of where we are in the, I'd say since 2012, 2012, 2013, at some point, like, as blogs yielded to

podcasts, yielded to whatever, like, we have a very strong amount of some other form of, you know, of media. Like we're at this transition point between the old mass communication era era like like and I mean gerbils, bernays, soap operas, like whatever you want to call it and there's all different ways we could parse it. But the top down propaganda era has yielded unfortunately to the multipolar propaganda mixed with good content era. And there's right now literally, after this bombing of Fordo, I'm watching the decompensation of all these little fiefdoms of, you know, Tucker, Candice, blah, blah, blah. I really think we're at a weird moment right now. It could be one of the biggest, most important moments in independent media history is that

this could just be where it all, it feels like an event horizon has been crossed where all these little, and it may, again, come back to purity spiraling, like each one of these little zones. where you can't you think you're a rebel but you can't say X you can't say why I feel like the whole thing is just it's too brittle and Trump taking the action he took you know we don't know why but we know that I will tell you I do not predict that that MAGA as a movement just broke I think a lot of OG MAGA Twitter a lot of it was bots man like a lot of these people think they're more important than they are. And I think Trump has a real connection with a lot of users. And I think something's about to happen in the media space. You know, AI is a major unknown in all of this,

right? Because there's things AI can, especially at moments if we cross some sort of event horizon, it's AI presents a huge danger to all of us. But I feel like something, something just happened. And I I don't know that we can talk about it today, but in a couple of months, I think we're going to look back. You know, it's going to be interesting to see how, you know, Dave Smith or Tucker or some of these people who have laid out these incredible anti-Trump positions, we'll see how that ages. Because I think some of it's going to, you know, like you said before, there's another alternative than this turning into World War III. and people pounding, you know, their Applebox about it being World War III and there being no other possibility this sort of reductionist thinking. I mean, we all hope they're wrong because no one wants World War III, right? You know, I hope that's true.

But I think a lot of a lot of this apoplexy, you know, is going to have a cost to a lot of people. and I'm just really interested to see what happens. I don't, I'm not making a particular prediction. I'm just saying that we just pass through something. And I'm not expecting us to look back and not remember it. Well, I don't know. People have, people do have really good memories because, obviously, because I said Trump was preferable to Kamala.

That means that I endorse everything that's happening now. I don't know that he ever took money from Merriam Adelson. And, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I don't, according to some people, I was just being, I was being duped. And anyone I told to that Trump was preferable to Kamala, I was duping them. And I'm, I'm the enemy. Yeah, I've heard this from the spurgy scumbags. You don't have to listen to those people because those people believe in a world of single causes. Like, they're just solving a level on their video game.

Like, there's only one demon. You saw, you stab them in the left side. you move on to the next level. It's just not a good metaphor for life or understanding the world you live in. And they talk a lot, you know, like come to our Slack server. I can introduce you a few just like that. Well, I'll put it this way. I'm not a, my personality is not conducive to 100,000 downloads an episode.

I'm okay with that. If I put it this way with a lot of the stuff I talk about, if I was at 100,000 downloads an episode, the world would probably be looking very different right now. But I understand that I just don't. See, the thing is, is that I think that a lot of these people who have these big, gigantic audiences are not going to suffer at all

because it's a cult of person. personality. People like them. People like, you know, people like Tucker, people like Dave Smith, people like Candace Owens. And whatever mistakes they're making now, whatever hyperbole, they're unleashing now, even if it turns out to be, even if it turns out that, you know, they're completely wrong. And, you know, this, hey, this just was, you know, like the bombing, like, the bombing of the air base in Iraq after the Soleimani when it ran bombed and basically Trump said, I knew it was going to happen. It was them saving face. It's fine. If that's what this was, then they'll just be like, well, you know, they'll find something else that their audience

that is expecting everything to go wrong. That is just waiting for is buying the message that nothing can go right. And I don't know that Tucker sells that message as much, but, you know, he definitely has been lately. I don't, I think that people just keep still, we'll keep listening to them because that's the message that they want to hear. I've noticed that, I've noticed that on all sides of the political spectrum is people latch on to somebody because the message is something, the message is coming out, even if it turns out

that it was crying wolf, well, that's perfectly fine because I like this person. Well, the most, I think the most recurrent problem that Tom and I have had in sort of the evolution of gold goats and guns has been, you know, we've stuck to a very simple framework, which is, you know, we examine things over and over again, and we examine our premises. and there's always these kind of periodic shakeouts of people. They think it's about, frankly, about some current event and our perspective on that current event. But I notice over and over that it's the same personality types that get shook out. And we have a very strong community because the people who remain are actually interested in analysis, not conclusions.

Because you live in a world where if you want the same analysis from two different spigots, You can get all you need and you still don't feel informed. So really having sort of an exegetical, analytical approach to each one of these things, it guarantees you'll piss people off repeatedly. And, you know, like currently Tom is down a rabbit hole on whether Iran is working with Davos that I think a lot of people thinks he's nuts. I don't even know how far down the development cycle I am to even comment on it because I don't see that way either, but people understand that what Tom does over and over is, is, you know, dismiss

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you can't, uh, undo and just and not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so posting, right, which is kind of the opposite of purity spiraling in a weird way, but it's repeatedly doing that and iterating on that to the point where we, we, we also criticize the, the dumb conclusions. we make and and what's left is something people want to you know at least witness and i take as much pride in people telling us you know dude i literally do the opposite of what you say but you're so different that you're the reason i trade the way i trade because i don't follow your and not that we get financial advice but um you know a lot of people understand that we're just honestly

analyzing what we analyze and that that product is consistent you know and sometimes we deliver tomorrow's zeitgeist today when we hit it out of the park and and it's those moments which are the reason we do it and sometimes we get shit wrong you know fine but the world where everybody is in a personality cult where that in that relationship is a much different type of relationship um you i think anyone who is has hitched their ride to Trump and then who reverses on Trump is going to lose most of their audience. But I think you're right that like Tucker, certainly Dave Smith's audience, you know, isn't there because Dave was recently nice about Trump in the last three months. So I think he's

probably pretty safe there. And I'm not sure I can make a generalization about Candice Owen's audience at all. It's like I'm not sure who her audience is. But I think, Tucker is probably on the most risky ground for what I've mentioned before. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity

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Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. Yeah. I think the mistake that I made is, and I know that Tom has people in the background who tell them stuff. You know, like insiders. And it's gotten to the point where I have insiders who feed me information all the time too. But I've gotten to the point now where I wait for like two or three people to tell me something so that if I repeated and say, well, this might be in play, this might be in play, this might be in play. There are competing things, you know, I think where I've gotten in trouble in the past is one person will tell me something and I'll be like, well, this could be in play. And when I say could, no one hears could. They hear this is in play and this is what's going to happen.

And this is where you need to bet all, you know, this is where and it's not like I'm telling people to invest money. people have this idea and I've experienced this over the past couple days that if they are following somebody who's made predictions that are right on like Iran's going to be bombed. Trump's going to Trump's not going to be the peace president. He will do some bombing or Trump's going to do this. Trump's going to do that. If they follow somebody who's right about that, somehow that's enriching to them.

Like they know something because they listen to this person who basically says, you know, they'll listen to people who will just say nothing is ever going to change. Everything's just going to get worse and worse. And that's a great bet. Yeah. Because 80% of the time, you're going to be right. And the other 20% you can just, you can deflect and you can make it mean something else. Well, you know, this is actually what's happening.

And, you know, this can't be proven, but this can definitely be proven. So it's just basically people are people want like it's why conspiracy theories are so popular. People want to feel like they know what's going to happen or what's happening because it makes them feel special because other people don't. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the settled audience that around, you know, like what you're describing is somebody's gotten some stuff right and these people by vicarious, you know, participation feel that it makes them, you know, be part of the.

the right team. I think though as you grow, you get this opposite weird effect, which is, and I think you mentioned that this has happened to you a lot in the last, you know, let's say week, when you predict something and it comes true, and it's not necessarily a positive event, there's a whole weird type of listener, follower, who then blames you for endorsing the course of action, which you merely predicted. And it's like, dude, I didn't, I don't think this is good. I think this is bad, but I looked at the fucking game board and I told you this was going to happen. And then I have to get flak about you telling me, oh, I can't believe you wanted this. It's like, I didn't want this.

I just told you it was coming, you fucking moron. Well, I'm actually in the opposite direction because I'm more apt to say, I don't think this is going to happen. No, no, I'm speaking generally. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah. But then when it does happen, well, then I would. is leading people astray. And it's like,

either way, they're both describing like participatory conspiracy, right? Like you were running, in that sense, you're running malops and like, like I'm running disinfo. You know, it's like,

okay. But the point is, is there's a type of person who can't distinguish between a prediction and an endorsement. And those are some of the, some of them are very intelligent on one vector, but they're very hard to deal with on others.

And I think that, you know, what you're saying about audiences, too, is like as you're growing, that other version where people are sort of vicariously, you know, living out their, their worldview through you, that's like, that's always on, you know, you get more and more of those people as you go. And that's honestly, you know, until it feeds your ego to the point where you collapse, that that's, you know, kind of the point, right? like you want people to at least agree with you most of the time but the danger comes where they don't disagree with you ever um thankfully i'm not there yet you get plenty of disagreement so yeah oh no and i get disagreement too and that's fine i have people tell me all the time i listen to you because i think you're honest but you're you know sometimes you're just honestly wrong well yeah i mean that's what's going to happen the other thing is when you get big enough there are people trying to to lie to you because they think you might not catch it and you'll magnify the point of

view like there came a point where I don't know like Tom and I've done this for a while and he went down some rabbit hole with like Italy and blah blah blah and I was like where are you getting this information you know and I kind of was like I need you to get this from more than one person because there comes a point when something's obtuse to your personal lived experience you get down to like what they call like you know the imprinting factor. It's like, you know, the baby giraffe who thought the Jeep was her mother. The first thing you hear has excess validity, right? It's, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a word in psychology for this anchoring bias. And so when people, when you're,

when you're popular up to a certain level and then someone's like, hey, have you heard about what's happening in Bhutan? And you're like, I don't know anything about Bhutan. And they're like, let me tell you. Now all of a sudden, you have a big risk of being just played by one very small fashion in Bhutan to like, you know, take a side in something you have no fucking idea about. And so, you know, that's a whole other risk factor is as you grow, you have to just keep applying the same heuristics to like bullshit or not, you know, because there's someone out there who's like, oh, this guy doesn't know shit about this and maybe I can sleep, sneak this in. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I don't like to, I try not to talk about

think like I know Tom likes to talk about London, likes to talk about Davos, like to talk about, it's like, I mean, I know about those things, but really honestly, I look at the United States and I see enough, you know, the founders talked about the enemy foreign and domestic. I'm a little more concerned about the enemy domestic. I mean, whoever may be pulling their strings, okay, that's, fine. But if I, you know, if you can point out that their strings are being pulled, you know, I mean, Ted Cruz last week probably, I mean, I know a lot of people who would have been Ted Cruz forever who have contacted me and said, oh yeah, it's just right in my eyes.

Because of the, because of the Tucker interview? Yeah. I mean, he basically said, I really just don't you know i i went into the senate for one reason and it wasn't to protect american interests right and then he went and then what's weird is is kept going he probably what's what the the thing that makes it even worse is he probably said that on the fly like he's such a oily lizard that like he probably made that up on the fly because he's just that like those are his political instincts he's so bad at certain things. And I, like, I'm not sure I believe that he entered politics to serve Israel's interests, but I know that he didn't enter them to serve Americas.

And that's all that really matters. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you get caught. People can get caught out there. And they're like, oh, I feel like this group that gives me millions of dollars is being attacked.

I need to defend them. And I'm going to go over the top in defending them. Yeah. And then he just went full. He went full Mediterranean and, you know, high time preference and just started losing his mind. Sorry. That's just the way it looked at me. Hey, what are you talking about?

Hey, I know what I'm talking about here. Exactly. But, all right, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Let's get out of here. Promote gold goats and guns and we'll end this. Yeah, yeah. No, thanks for having me on.

I really appreciate it. It's fun having chats about stuff like this. And like I said, we'll revisit some of these assumptions. If you want to find my work, my name is Dexter White. I write for Gold Goats and Guns. We have a monthly newsletter, me and Tom Wongo. You can go to goldgoats and guns.com, but chances are, you're just going to go to Tomwongo.m.m.e.

Because it's easier to spell. And one just forwards to the other anyway. So if you're interested, podcasts, newsletter, et cetera, is all available there. And again, Pete, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Appreciate it, Dr. Thank you. Cheers.

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