The Tucker Carlson Show - Darryl Cooper Deep Dive: Zionism, Islam, Spain & Why the Iran War Is a Pivot Point in World History

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

The Great Replacement is no longer a theory, as what’s happening in Spain makes clear. Darryl Cooper on who’s behind the invasion and why. (00:00) How the Iran War Is Different (10:20) The Descent Into Primitive Tendencies Due to War (25:20) Trump, the Iranian Girls’ School Attack, and the Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza (1:20:49) How Propaganda Functions (1:29:46) The Loss of Identity in America Darryl Cooper is the creator of Martyr Made, America’s most popular long-form history podcast, and the co-host of Provoked, with Scott Horton. Paid partnerships with: Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/TUCKERVanMan: Use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order at http://vanman.shop/tucker American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Curativa Bay: Take your health back into your own hands. Get 15% off at https://CurativaBay.com/Tucker Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darrell, thank you for doing this. We must think of you every two weeks. We should call Gerald Cooper. But we try to keep it once a year because you live so far away, and I'm just grateful that you made this effort. And I just have to say, not simply because it vindicates me, but just because it's such an amazing and wonderful fact

that you actually are literally, measurably, America's most popular and important historian. That's just a fact. Which is incredible. It gives me hope because you do like five-hour podcasts on things that happened 100 years ago in granular detail and you know there are a million and a half people listening to that it's like this country is not lost so anyway thank you so much always a pleasure

we were uh speaking at breakfast about how the iran war started and you were putting it within the context of how western nations european nations fight wars historically and why this was different can you recap what you were just saying. Sure. I mean, I think that when you look back at the period of limited warfare in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, that was really one of the pinnacles of not just our civilization, but human civilization in general. You know, war is something that is sometimes necessary, sometimes interest conflict and you have to fight over it. But to be able to arrive at a place where you can treat your enemy with respect, even in defeat, is really an amazing accomplishment. And you start to see

the breakdown of that over the course of the 20th century, of course, the First World War. But even still, there was a sense of, you know, what's the saying that hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice, right? We still had to pretend. You know, we still had to come up with stories to tell ourselves so that we could go to sleep at night. We hadn't given up on those values completely. And what are the values? Fair play? Yes. The idea that even somebody who you have to put bullets downrange at is a human being and deserves to be treated as a creature of God. These are things that became very deeply embedded in our social consciousness and as individuals as well so that again even as uh as as those values started to fade in practice we still held on to them

in our hearts and i think a lot of people today or well i should say maybe a few years back just a few years ago if you talk to your average uh american soldier in iraq for example well is actually that's a perfect example if you look at iraq i i have a lot of anti-war libertarian type friends you know, and they're very strident in their views sometimes of American militarism. And I always tell them, like, look, when you compare, there were incidents in the Iraq war, no doubt about it, in the Afghanistan war where soldiers got out of hand. But when you compare their behavior, the level of discipline and honor that they displayed in those wars relative to any previous conflict in American history or world history probably, let alone in a really vicious.

insurgency like they were fighting. This was not a conventional war, but especially in Iraq, the enemy was vicious on a level that is, you know, hard for most people, I think, in our society to really even believe. And yet our guys continue to treat the people that they were, who were under occupation with dignity and respect by and large. And they really did have the idea that they were there to try to help these people and to free them from this, you know, again, whether we agree with that or not, they believe that. And if they hadn't believed that, they would not have been as willing to risk themselves and their friends the way that they did. I mean, we took a lot of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan because we refused to do certain things that we could have done

much easier. We could have done in ways that would have killed a lot more of their civilians, but preserved a few of our soldiers' lives. Yes. And we chose not to do that. And that, you know, It's unfortunate because over the course of the war on terror, and I think largely in more recent years, due to our just compulsive need in our political discourse, to find ways to rationalize everything that we see the state of Israel do, it's forced us to really compromise on a lot of those values because there's just, if you don't compromise on them,

then you have to condemn what's going on in Gaza, right? Exactly. And so we've lost a lot of that over the course of the last few decades. We've been poisoned and polluted by it. I had this dark thought. I think I mentioned this to our friend Scott Horton a while back, how, you know, back in 2004 when Abu Ghraib happened or when the photos came out. You know, again, I don't want to downplay. I was a very dark chapter, obviously.

But it wasn't Saddam Hussein power saws and, you know, scoffs. and, you know, screwdrivers in the eyeball kind of torture. It was sort of more of a, more of a psycho. Its severity was less than a lot of things that happened in the world. Yes. And yet people saw those photos and they were horrified by them. And they weren't just horrified by, look what we're doing to those people. They asked themselves, what are we doing to our own people here?

Like, what are we making our kids do in this place? What is happening here? And nowadays, I don't know if people would blink if they saw something like that. I mean, they do see something like that on a weekly basis come out of Gaza, often posted by, you know, Israeli soldiers themselves. And people have to find a way, it seems, they have to find a way to rationalize and justify that stuff. And so to do that, they've compromised their own most deeply held beliefs about what it means to be a civilized person. And so when we go into Iran, I'll never forget. when Donald Trump was entertaining the prime minister of Japan.

And he mentioned, you know, the secrecy and the sneak attack that we started the Iran war off with. And he kind of made that slight joke about you guys understand that. Sneak attacks, right? And I mean, for the president of the United States to compare the way we just correctly, in my view, compare the way we began this war to the day that shall live in infamy. And to think back, you know, to the, to the, to the, to Pearl Harbor. and how they felt about that at the time, how we still feel about it now. And then if you imagine that the attackers at Pearl Harbor had just happened to blow up a school full of little girls,

I mean, it would be on page one of every history book that talked about that incident to this day, right? Because it's something that offends our basic sense of decency and honor. You don't want to sneak attack in the middle of negotiations. That's just not the way European civilization has conditioned. itself to behave over the years. But we've compromised that stuff. In very recent years, I think, to the point where the cognitive dissidents became so great that we either had to change our ways or we had to just give up on certain values.

And I unfortunately think that, you know, we've, at least our political class has gone the wrong direction on that. You know, our guys out there, our soldiers and Marines, they're, you know, it's always tough for me because, like, I don't like a lot of the actions that they're forced to take overseas in service of things that I think are beneath them. And yet, I know from personal experience that the guys themselves, those are best people. And they're often criticized by people who are not fit to tie their bootlaces.

I agree. You know? And those guys, if you give them a good reason, they will go fight. They will risk their own life. unnecessarily to avoid the possibility of harming an enemy civilian. That's who these guys are. But when you remove that sense of honor, you know, that it's been on every recruiting ad and recruiting poster going back as far as you can imagine,

when you tell them that we're going to launch a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations on a much weaker country, we're going to threaten to end their civilization and destroy their civilian infrastructure over a war we started for reasons that nobody's really, bothered to even articulate to the American public, it becomes much more difficult to get those guys to do their job. And I think that within the service, these guys are still duty-bound enough that they will do whatever we ask them to do. But that's all the more reason not to abuse that trust. And we really have. We've just burned that credibility with our own people and I think with much of the rest of the world. You know, one thing that might make you feel a little better about your life is buying life insurance because life ends and

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they're pretty darn good. What does it do to us? Like, why would a civilization decide at its peak evolution, as you just said, the high point of its existence, that it was going to treat enemy combatants as human beings? Like, that is a kind of new innovation in world history, right? Is there any evidence that's ever happened before at any time ever? outside of European civilization, it would be really hard to, really hard to think of any examples. Because traditionally, when I'm at war with you, I get to torture you to death, enslave your children, rape your wife, burn your field, slay your livestock. Like, literally whatever, when I own you, you're not human. Right. And, you know, that's something that only emerges under conditions of, under conditions of strong organizations.

leadership, internal, internal discipline, and really just the organizational aspect of it, right? When you look at World War I, for example, absolutely savage war where we were spraying cans of raid at enemy lines just to choke people to death with gases, horrible, horrible, exterminationist war, but one that was almost entirely restricted to enemy soldiers. And when soldiers were taken captive, they were treated with dignity and respect. by all sides, by the way. And when you see in Eastern and Central Europe, immediately after the war, same people who just fought this relatively organized, relatively disciplined war from 1914 to 1918, when all the empires broke down and the states fell apart, an organization went away, you saw a descent into chaos and madness that's straight out of ancient. history books where, you know, wars became exterminationist to entire societies, where the goal was

to wipe people out and push them out. And these are the same people who were fighting the war and a relative discipline. We were celebrating Christmas across the trenches famously. Right. I mean, I was Western Front guys, but like on the Eastern, you know, because it was in the States, specifically, where everything fell apart, where the government, I mean, just, this is something that I've really been trying to convey in my World War II series right now, because It's, I think, very difficult for most Westerners to really picture the trauma that this would cause. I mean, when I was talking to my friend Jaco a while back, and he was describing how they'd be fighting in Ramadi. And it's just an insane gun battle, mortars going off, explosions, gunshots going everywhere.

And so they would kick down a door, take cover inside of a building. And it's somebody's house. And, like, there's the wife and the kids are hiding under the table. And, like, that's what's going on. you have this flash of like, oh, wow, this is happening outside somebody's front door, you know. And so back after the First World War, when the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, so basically everywhere from the Rhine to Vladivostok, the government just disappeared. All of them in the course of about 18 months or so, all the government's disappeared.

There's no police to call. There's no government to expect to come in and enforce order of any kind. And you really saw a complete dissent into primitive sort of human tendencies as people started to really focus on their immediate survival as opposed to, you know, things that we would associate with civilization, meaning that, you know, the idea that you're living historically and are part of a chain of being that stretches out long before you were born and will continue long after you're dead. And there's certain things that you're expected to uphold as you steward, you know, through these 70 or 80 years of your existence, when it's your turn to steward your civilization, there's certain things that you're expected to uphold and make sure that the next generation inherits them just as you inherited them. When all that falls apart and your time horizon collapses to this afternoon because you're

looking at your kids and there's no food and they're hungry and their, you know, bellies are bulging in their cheeks are sunken in, there's not going to be anything on your mind, except for how do I feed my children? And when people, when people's horizon shrinks down to that level, become something very close to animals. And that's what you, that's what you saw happen immediately after the First World War and a lot of Eastern Central Europe. And so, this is something that, you know, from a basic level, you see, you know, you can think

of a lot of things like this where if you're the only person behaving this way, then it really makes no sense. And you're just going to end up nailed to a cross. Like, that's what's going to happen to you. But if everybody can come around and embrace these values and basically behave this way, then it's much, much better for everybody. And when you're able to achieve that, when you're able to get to a place where, because America had a reputation, it's not perfect, especially, you know, in what we used to call the third world. But, you know, had a reputation that we might get carried away,

you know, in a counterinsurgency, say. We may in a total war, like the Second World War, get, you know, drive ourselves to the point that we're firebombing cities. But there are still certain basic rules of fairness. Like you don't start a war of aggression with a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations, that people, would have said, yeah, but America wouldn't do that. Even our enemies would have said that. And when you

have achieved that, when you've gotten to a place where that really is true of your people, that's something that you really have to hold on to because the minute you let go of it, you let go of that bar, that ledge, you start falling down into that very dark place. And the way you understand yourself changes, which is, you know, I'm not saying it's the most important thing. How you treat other people is the most important thing. However, it's not unimportant how you see yourself. Like, I'm the sort of man who will do this, and the sort of man who will refuse to do that. And I think that's the idea from which self-respect and dignity grows, right? Right. And our civilization is, you know, emergent from our collective quality in that sense. You know, how how individuals see themselves,

you know, the sum of all those self-perceptions adds up to, you know, to a society and a civilization eventually in the direction that it's going to take. And when you stop seeing and treating people you're in conflict with as human beings and see them just purely as a material obstacle to whatever goal you've set for yourself, you know, you're handing the reins over to Satan at that point. I so strongly agree. The most distressing part of all of this, I had the same thoughts when this war started. It's hard to believe that. In fact, I couldn't believe we did that or when we double-tap the girls' school. Even now, it's hard to believe that could have been intentional. But the unwillingness of the Secretary of War, or the president to apologize for it,

you never apologize for it, you know, suggests that. And at first trying to deny that it was us. I mean, it's just, if I was the emperor of the United States, and I could, you'd have to be the emperor because if you're an election, official, our system just doesn't, it's not built to incentivize this kind of behavior. You could stay at war with Iran, fine, if there are reasons to be at war. I would offer restitution to the families of those girls. In the middle of the war, I would do it. And I think that that kind of thing goes a long way.

But what's so distressing is not just that, like, Trump did this. Well, obviously, Trump is totally degraded as a person that's widely known. But there was no kind of popular reaction against it. There were no protests. There was zero anti-war protests or zero anti-double-tapping girls' school protests. There were almost no commentary in the fact it was a Pearl Harbor that we committed. Yeah, I would think about, you know, I think about this a lot. One time when I was still with the DoD, I was out training a ship's crew on their, on their missile defense system and, or their air defense system.

This was maybe, it must have been 2019 or early 2020 just before COVID, because it was, everybody's talking about the election that was coming up. And I remember one of the kids on the ship was 17 years old. You know, his parents had to sign on the dotted line to let him get in at under 18 years old. And it hit me, this kid wasn't alive when 9-11 happened, which means for his entire life. And, I mean, the people who were going to go out in protest, these are 17, 25-year-olds traditionally, right? All of that entire generation, we've been doing this stuff since as long as they can remember. You know, Abu Ghraib, they probably, that was something they learned about in a history class because that was something that was, you know, they were three or four years old. And so we've been at war. And, you know, this is one of the real issues with prolonged, protracted war is the degradation of the spirit of the societies that are engaged in it. You know, if you look at any conflict that's been really long running, the Israelis and the Palestinians or the Israelis in the, you know, the surrounding region in general, the Balkan wars, for example, go to the Balkans.

today. You meet Serbs. My great grandmother was from Serbia. You go meet them. They're not, they're just Europeans. They're fine. It was not that long ago that they were fighting an absolutely savage war. I mean, at the bottom level of, you know, of human conflict. And you say, well, how is this even possible? It's like, well, because when you're engaged in a conflict for that long, you know, you're fighting a conflict, your parents were fighting and their parents might have fighting, the hatred that is necessary to keep a conflict like that going over time, it just, it comes to define who you are in important ways until you get out of that conflict cycle. And, you know, I think that is, comes back to what I said about Abu Ghraib a minute ago.

I just, you know, people would have protested if we had opened the Iraq War in 2003 by killing 150 little girls. People would have a problem with that. they wouldn't have overthrown the government. They wouldn't have necessarily forced them to stop the war, anything like. But people would have had a problem with it. And public officials would have felt the need to explain themselves. But when that's all you've known and anybody under really like 30 years old at this point,

this has been their entire lives, it's not as shocking. It's just how the world works as far as they know. Is that why Israel's been able to ethnically cleanse? the territories gaza most of all without anyone or a political class saying anything about it it's definitely one of the reasons and and it's why there's i think there's a there's a a tendency among really strong uh american zionist elements uh who you know that and by strong i mean the people who this is sort of their first and only issue or at least their bottom line there are many of those um there's been a push to sort of to sort of to sort of

of desensitize people to that kind of thing. And to place, here's a perfect example, when you were on, I believe it was your interview with Rogan, and you said the outrageous, just insane thing that maybe we shouldn't have nuked a couple cities full of civilians in Japan. And of all the things that you said in that interview, that was the thing that people were just so angry and so outraged by, right? Because the many of you start asking those kind of questions, that attitude carries over into the modern day. And you start judging decisions that we're making now, according to, you know, these very human standards. And, um, but absolute standards. Like it's always wrong to murder civilians, right, no matter who does it. And, you know, if,

if, because look, the, the bottom line is for all of the, uh, influence in power that the Zionist lobby has in the United States, if Americans saw what was going on with the Palestinians and did not approve it and demanded an end to it, they would have to stop. up. That's the bottom line. And so it's a strategic imperative for them, you know, for people like- To corrupt people so completely that they don't even care that they're paying for genocide. Yep. And- Just to rot the souls of the host nation so thoroughly that it's like, no, that's fine. It's a strategic imperative. Yeah, okay. Boy, what a cost to us. To them too. They might not know it, but to them too.

What do you mean? You know, the corruption, uh, is, It corrupts the heart of the corruptor, you know, just as much. So, you know, they suffer from it as well, even if they don't know it. I think that's, I try to keep that in mind. Well, you probably have heard about the Van Man company's amazing toothpaste. By the thousands, Americans are ditching traditional toothpaste in favor of Van Man. The switch is like pivoting your diet from candy packed with red dye number 40 to organic strawberries. It is always better to stick with real ingredients.

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One of them is a carcinogen. It's appeared in tons of body washes, but it's not in Van Man. make the switch visit van man.com slash tucker use the code tucker for 15% off your first order van man.com slash tucker code tucker 15% off no weird ingredients no exceptions great toothpaste awesome body wash so where does this war go i should just say for those who aren't familiar with your bio you spent 20 years working for the defense department 10 active 10 as a contractor i think this right working a lot of the time on missiles and missile defense. So I would say you're literally an expert on that subject. And our munition stock is like a big factor in how this goes going forward. So where does this war go do you think? You know, it's hard for it's hard for me to imagine. We were talking about this before and about how I'm always just hopelessly naive and optimistic when it comes to all these things. I was the guy of, you know, full admission before the Russian.

invasion of Ukraine who was being like, no, I don't think they'll do it. That would be crazy. That's I said that on TV, unfortunately. Same thing as we were building up all of our munitions for this attack on Iran. I was the one saying, it just doesn't make any sense, you know, just from a technical standpoint, from a logistical standpoint, this doesn't make any sense because we're not going to invade Iran. Iran knows we're not going to invade Iran. I'm doing it again, by the way, right there. But this was my thinking. And so there are like knowing those things there are just certain limitations to what we can do in a standoff war meaning a war where we're mostly launching munitions from outside of iran's borders

for fear of their own air defense network and flying our you know our own manned aircraft over them and and also you know our strategy has changed over the last you know over the course of the war on terror we have this very strong dependence on unmanned drones you know um the reapers now that the predators famously in the Iraq and Afghanistan war, where, you know, we've come to rely on them to a tremendous degree. But those things are not, those are not stealth platforms. You can't get real close with them. What you can do is launch long-range standoff weapons from far away. But there's only so much you can do with these things. People have this idea, I think. Like if a missile hits this building that we're in, that's going to be really bad news for us.

The people across the street, they'll probably be fine. This is not, you know, these things are not nuclear weapons like a tomahawk missile you remember back when uh in the first trump administration when he launched those tomahawks at that syrian airfield because they supposedly use chemical weapons yeah want something like that was a lie i think we know yeah yeah um you want something like 80 tomahawk missiles at this airfield and it was back up and running a week and a half later i mean these things are not massive payload because they got to fly 600 miles or something to get to the target right so a huge portion of it is just the rocket fuel to get it there and so the payloads are five 500 pounds, maybe, you know, a little more or less than that, which is, again, if you're in the building, that's bad news.

But you're not going to level a civilization as Donald Trump keeps threatening using standoff weapons like that. And so knowing that and having a rough idea, it's been a while since I've been in the game, but having a rough idea of what our stockpiles are, of what's involved with, you know, fighting a long-distance war like that where our bases that are in theater are under assault and mostly not usable. it makes the logistical element extremely difficult. I was describing to you how if you have a, say, a destroyer, which is our primary air and ballistic missile defense platform and also the platform from which we launch our Tomahawk missiles, and we have submarines as well, but mostly destroyers and cruisers and more destroyers than cruisers now.

You've got 128 missile cells. Some of those are going to be intermediate range, anti-aircraft, anti-cruise missile, SM2 type, missiles. Some of those are going to be tomahawks, and depending on what the mission is, will depend on the total loadout, but some of those are going to be tomahawks. Some of those are going to be vertically launched torpedoes. Some of those are going to be really short-range ESSMs. And when you get, and then some of them are going to be long-range ballistic missile defenses missiles, right? So let's say you've got 32 long-range anti-ballistic missile defense

missiles. When a missile's coming in, you don't fire one missile at it. You You fire two in each volley, and usually you're sending multiple volleys before the first volley even reaches its target because you want to be pretty sure. You don't want things are traveling so fast that, you know, you don't want to necessarily find out that you miss the first time and then have to make the decision to fire again. So multiple missiles each time. If you've got 32 missiles, you'll be lucky if really lucky. I mean, this is if everything goes absolutely perfectly, if you can shoot down eight incoming with that. Well, what happens then? You know, you don't have a supply ship that rolls up and gives you another magazine of missiles to pop in.

You've got to go back to one of the very few bases around the world where we've got large stockpiles of those missiles and the facilities on base to reload them. And it's hard hats and cranes and it takes multiple days just to do that, let alone the time. Just to reload? Just a couple of days? And that's not counting the time it takes to transit going, you know, all the way to Diego Garcia and back. And can you, for those who don't have a map handy, is Diego Garcia right around the corner? No, it's way out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. You know, it takes, depending on, you know, the platform or the ship that's going out to it,

take you close to a week to get out there. One way. One way. Yeah. And so, and then a couple days to reload as well. And so, you know, one of our ships is out there. Maybe it, maybe it gets shots off at eight missiles. And then it's got to take two and a half.

half weeks to go reload its missiles and come back. It's just something that was not sustainable. And it's one of the reasons that I just thought, this is crazy. I don't think they're going to do this because it just makes no sense. And as we saw, it made even less sense than I thought. Because one of the things that, you know, those of us who were on the technical side of missile defense understood for a long time that the general public and honestly a lot of government and even military officials, I think, like high-level military officials, didn't understand. Because I think that the You know, whereas the, you know, certain aspects of the data might have gotten to them, the narrative that got to them was very often rose-colored, you know, in terms of what our actual capabilities were. And, you know, look, if we want to do a missile defense test, a ballistic missile defense test, we will wait until all of the conditions environmentally or perfect.

We will do it at a specific time where they'll say, countdown, 10, 9, 8, you know, so you know exactly when they're, you know exactly when they're, they're launching, exactly where they're launching from, exactly where that missile is headed, and we place our assets, our radar and our missile launchers in specifically the place that will give them the absolute best view and best chance of engaging that target. This is during a test? This is during like a test, right? Because we're trying to baseline the system. We want our data to be something that we know under absolutely controlled conditions or

to the extent that we can make them that way, what our data is going to read. And then we can judge deviations from there. And there, we'll often, you know, we'll usually hit the thing, but not always. It's still tough. It's hard to do. You know, ballistic missiles are very difficult. And this is something, by the way, that, you know, even through government shutdowns and everything like that, it was basically so calm and ballistic missile defense, we just had unlimited money. We were the two, we never shut down. We never had any of our budgets looked at anything like that. You were very, because we placed a very high priority on it. And so from a technical standpoint, we knew it was very difficult. to shoot down a ballistic missile. And about a week or so into the war with Iran, I'm watching all these videos, just crazy, like the footage we get out of these wars now. And you'll see a ballistic missile coming in, and you'll see a volley of two, volley of four, or two volleys of two, go up and engage the missile. Very often the missile would land and blow up somewhere where it was headed. But then after about two weeks, about 10 days, two weeks, and then from there on, I started

seeing all these videos of a ballistic missile coming in and it was just we would flood the sky with interceptors eight 10 interceptors for every incoming and as soon as i saw that i was like well first this kind of makes more sense like at first i was knowing the effectiveness of ballistic missile defense systems and we have the best in the world by the way but um it's just a technically difficult thing to achieve knowing the limitations of it um i was surprised at first that i was seeing volleys of two and four going up. Once they started to get up to volleys of eight, 10, 12 missiles per, I said, well, this makes more sense. And they would come out and say, you know, we're having a success rate of 97 percent. We're shooting down 97 percent of

incoming. It's like, well, yeah, but you're shooting 10 interceptors at every one of them. And so, you know, you're shooting it down, but at what cost? And when that started to happen, then I realized that this thing is way more irrational than I even thought at the beginning. And there's no way that this can be a protracted war because we just we just don't have that many. And we don't have a defense industrial base that allows us to sort of ramp that up real quick. You know, this is something these systems nowadays are so proprietary and so specialized in high tech. You know, you can't, it's not like World War II where you can tell General Motors in Ford to start making tank parts. This is something that even if you had the budget put aside, even if you had all of the resources you needed to build.

five more factories, we don't have the personnel to man those factories. We would have to get people that we have now to train up an entirely new workforce to build these things. It's just something that would take years under the best of circumstances. And so, I mean, honestly, I was surprised that it lasted as long as it did, especially since I know from people that I speak to on a regular big, good friends of mine who work in the Pentagon, that at the highest levels on the the uniform military side, at least, they were perfectly aware of the problems that even from the earliest days that we were going to have issues with ammunition stockpiles, we were going to have issues defending all of the things that we had committed ourselves to defending. And you saw

very quickly that we essentially abandoned a lot of places that probably, you know, a lot of Arab countries who have spent a lot of money, a lot of credibility with their own people, a lot of, you They've spent a lot building up their relationship with the United States for this eventuality. And they found out what that was worth very quickly when we started moving a lot of our resources over to, honestly, much less strategically critical areas of defense around Israel. Homeownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value. Right now, though, too many homeowners are stuck. swiping credit cards to cover groceries, there's basically a survival tax of 20% interest or more.

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Americanfinancing.net slash Tucker. And so, I mean, the whole thing has been, you know, it's been a disaster not just for our relationships in the region. It's been a disaster just in a much broader strategic sense because, you know, if you go, you look at Afghanistan, you look at Iraq. People say we lost those wars. And granted, we've, you know, what we found out in those wars was not that the U.S. military is incapable of achieving military objectives, we found out it's not the best tool

to fight a counterinsurgency. Yes. Fine. But I promise you that the Russians, the Chinese, all of our potential adversaries out there are potential peers, they still looked at the United States and they were like, yeah, but I don't know. In a real war, like, we just don't know what they can do. Now everybody knows.

Everybody knows the sheen is off. they know what our not just our political limitations are but what our technical and actual capabilities are and that's going to reverberate as countries start to adapt their own geostrategic posture to what they now see are our genuine limitations how long can this go on i mean it kind of depends right like the um there seems to have been a shift recently where Iran realized, it's how it looks just for me as an observer, that Iran kind of realized that they were getting played a little bit by allowing things to die down in a tit for tat while we kind of catch our breath and let oil prices go back down and let bond yields fall a bit. And then we start again and they launch some in return. But then when we stop, they stop, kind of letting us set the pace and set the terms. It was, I had to laugh. I mean, it's obviously none of this is funny. But, a week or so ago when Iran launched those missiles at Jordan, and they were like, it was a sneak attack, this dastardly sneak attack. I'm like, is there a ceasefire that I'm not aware of right now? We're in a war. And so it seems like they've adjusted a little bit to not letting us set the terms and set the pace to the extent that we had been before.

And so if we had been allowed to just continue to do that, a tit for tat on our own terms at our own pace, I mean, we could probably, we could probably, from a pure military standpoint, not talking about global oil reserves and stuff, we probably could have continued it for quite some time. If the Iranians, as it seems now, are wise to that. And they say, no, you're not going to get a break and rebuild your intercept or stockpile while you do it. You're going to continue to spend those things. then, I mean, things are going to come to a head very quickly. And I say that with trepidation because it's so, you know, our system, unfortunately. Like the bravest thing that Donald Trump could do is to admit this was a mistake, pay some restitution to those girls' families, and get out of there, stop doing it. This thing was, that would be an incredible. incredibly brave thing to do. It would honestly, like, go a long way to making up for a lot of the things that he's done that I, that I don't like. I would be, I would be amazed by it. But our political system is just not structured in a way that that's really even a possibility. And so

if we are backed into a corner where we're running out of stockpiles and the Iranians are aware of that, and they're not going to take their foot off the gas pedal because they're afraid that if they do, you know, that we're never going to stop, that we have to be forced to stop, that we could, you know, take this to places that, that I think even most hawks who are in favor of the war would probably be uncomfortable with. It's obvious to, it has been obvious to me since day one that this was moving toward a nuclear exchange. I just thought that from the very beginning.

The really dark part about that, though, is it's not an exchange. Well, exactly. Sorry, that's just a phrase. Yeah, yeah, but that's how dark is that? Well, I don't know. We're assuming that there would be no response. I mean, there are a lot of other players in this. Right. Beyond just Iran, there are a lot of countries with nuclear weapons, including Pakistan. And, you know, there's a lot could happen. But the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in 80 years, like I thought that immediately. Do you think that's a possibility?

Man. Well, I'll say it's certainly a possibility for the Israelis. That's what I'm talking. Yeah, it's really hard for me to imagine the American government doing it. But again, I'm always caught off guard by everything, no matter how many times I've been beaten over the head with a lesson. So it really depends. I put it this way. I think if the Israelis thought they could get away with it,

if they thought that they could handle the geopolitical fallout, they would have already done it a long time ago. Oh, of course. Well, they've threatened it many times. You know, if the last couple of years have taught us anything and said the people in charge of public health, public health don't actually care about public health. Apparently they want you dependent, waiting around for the next mandate or their next set of rules.

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So for the United States, it means obviously the end of our empire and, I mean, all kinds of consequences that are hard to foresee. But it's a huge deal. It's like the end of the post-war era. And then we have to deal with whatever comes next, a world run by China. Okay. So that seems like it's going to. Or, I mean, the lesson of this might be that nobody's.

going to run the world. Well, that's exactly right. And the eastern part of the world went by China, which seems natural to me anyway. But because they've got a bigger economy than we do. So, like, why wouldn't they control the South China Sea? I don't really understand why we're fighting what's inevitable. And if we didn't want that, then probably should have done something to prevent China from becoming a bigger economy, right? But anyway, the consequences are big for the United States. But for Israel, what are the consequences of losing this? I'm just, trying to be empathetic. The consequences of losing this for Israel, and this is, you know, this is a reason that a lot of the hawks over there sound as crazy as they often do these days.

I mean, it could be, could be the thing that sets the ball rolling toward the conclusion of that whole project. Well, exactly. You know, Israel has survived for, certainly since 1967, at least on this aura of military invincibility. And there are a lot of people over in Israel. And even now, I mean, Israel has trouble holding onto it, even before all this started up, Israel has trouble holding on to its people. You've been to Israel.

We love going to the old city and things like that. But you go around and, you know, there are nice parts of it for sure. I like going to the Bahaie gardens and, you know, in Haifa. But in general. The only nice part of Haifa is the part that was there before 19, In 48, sorry. And so, you know, it's much nicer in, you know, Paris or London or New York or something, put it that way. Or Dubai, or Abu-Dhabi.

Right. And so, you know, there's a lot of people, I think, who this was a big concern of the Israeli leadership after the 2006 Hezboa War, which they also lost. It was not necessarily that our enemies are going to see this and this is going to, you know, lead them to become more. belligerent toward us, it was that if our people don't believe that we are completely invincible over here, that that job that their cousin has from in Manhattan starts to look a lot more tempting and people start to leave. And then you start to get this self-reinforcing cycle, right, where it's the people who aren't quite comfortable with, say, the Lekud government, the people who think that maybe Israel is going a little bit too far in Gaza, few as they may be,

left over there these days. But the people who we would consider somewhat moderate, people who aren't prepared to die in their apartment from an Iranian missile because Netanyahu decided to start a war, those are the people who are going to leave, which means that the people who are left behind are going to be more and more concentrated crazy. That's right. And more hard line. And nonproductive who don't work and don't serve in the military. And the people who do make Alia and travel there. You know, it's just, I mean, you see this, I guess, in like, it's kind of similar to, um, you talk to a lot of, like, Orthodox and Catholic converts. And they're all just deus vault, you know, just holy war kind of just, you know, really like thinking in these big grand historical, like cosmic terms. Or as you talk to somebody who grew up as an Orthodox or Catholic and they're thinking about the relationship with Jesus Christ and like, you know, that kind of thing. And you get this sort of thing like, you go out into the West Bank and a lot of these settlements. and it's a bunch of guys from Brooklyn, and they're crazier than the craziest Israelis.

Oh, by far. And it's like, of course they are. They moved from America to go out to live in this hostile territory. It's like, naturally, that's who you're going to get. And, you know, as the society becomes a more and more concentrated version of that, then the stakes really do get raised. You know, what happens when you remove the last people who were against the first use of nuclear weapons from Israel because they go live in new.

York or London. I mean, then you start to get, you know, a real problem. I mean, you see this with like, so shocking for Americans over there. There's so much of what goes on over there that I think for Americans and Europeans, it's so far outside of our understanding of how human beings behave toward each other that people just, they just don't believe it. They assume it must be exaggerated or propaganda, but I mean, just... They're not really raping people with dogs in their prisons, right? Right. And having, you know, high... cabinet minister is celebrating it and defending the rapists, you know? I mean, Ben Gavir, essentially the equivalent to Marco Rubio in our system, he's the leader of the Jewish power

party, and he cites over the years, and he's defended this position many times, that one of his heroes, Baruch Goldstein, the mass shooter who killed dozens of innocent Arabs back in the early 90s. And so it would literally be as if the Secretary of State was a leader of the white power party and had repeatedly said that Dylan Roof was one of his heroes. And people are fine with that. And when you get to a place where your society is perfectly fine with something like that, you know, you have to imagine sort of the consequences that spill out in other areas maybe beneath the surface that you're not seeing, you know. Like they blow up the Temple Mount and then launch a nuke against Iran. But I guess the reason I've always thought it was a possibility

is because Israel can't lose, as you just said, like they've spent so many years hyping the threat against them falsely, telling stories to themselves and the rest of the world about how, you know, they're just one moment away from being eliminated. It's always been fake. But now it feels like it's getting closer to true. Yeah, and not militarily wiped out necessarily and driven out of there, but I think it's something that could collapse under its own weight. You know, if you were to go back, to the earliest days of Zionism and tell most of the people who were embracing the ideology back then that you're going to get your state, but here's what it's going to require, and here's what it's going to transform you into. It would have lost a ton of support. I mean, it took a long time and

a lot of effort to even get much of the Jewish community around the world to support Zionism in the first place. I mean, it was primarily just an Eastern European movement, the German Jews, the French Jews, most British and American Jews, it took all the way up until the 1930s before they started to come around to it at all. If you would have gone back then and told them that this is what it's going to entail, this is what it's going to take from you,

a lot of people wouldn't have supported it to begin with. And so when you have this edifice that is built on the kind of brutality and requires really the, not just the hard things to be done in war, but really to keep it going over time, requires the population to take on a persistent mentality of paranoia and hostility the way we've seen taken root over there. Something like that becomes, you know, it goes back to what you were

saying about the effect that it has even on the corruptor. I mean, it, it, that becomes oppressive on people. And it becomes something that people are not as interested in defending. But it turns them into monsters. I mean, the more you think you're hated, the more you hate other people. Right. Yeah. It always happens that way. I think George Kennan, when talking about the Soviet Union, he said something like, I won't be as eloquent as he was, but it's the privilege of every paranoid man to eventually prove himself correct.

And it's because when you believe everybody's out to get you, you interact with everybody as if they're out to get you. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're out to get you. That happens with every cult, honestly, every, like, nascent national, movement. We saw this after the First World War, to go back to that, you saw a lot of these emergent countries, the Polish, for example, the Czechs, you see it with the Ukrainians now, especially since 2004. When you have this newly birth sense of nationalism, you feel like you're under threat. You know, you were just under an empire for centuries. You might be under an empire again, if you're not ready for that threat. And there's this real, real sense of paranoia and

hostility toward outsiders that kind of holds the national community together. And most of those other countries stabilized to a point that, that, you know, it didn't become, it wasn't necessary any longer and the kids were raised differently. But in Israel, they've been in a state of conflict for their entire existence so that it's really just, it's become the identity of the state. You know, and unfortunately, this is one of the saddest things about the whole project. And there were, there were a lot of prominent religious Jews back in the early days of Zionism who feared exactly this, that Zionism was just going to swallow Judaism whole. And it really has done that. And what that means in practice is that for so many Jews, not just in Israel, but in the diaspora,

the definition, oh, here's a perfect example of it, actually. There was a Gallup poll or a pew pole a few years back where they polled American Jews and asked them, what is the most important aspect of Jewish identity. And it was, you know, belief in the Torah, affinity for the state of Israel, various moral values and things. Far and away, the number one answer, like 70% was remembering the Holocaust, which is another way of saying, you know, when you, when you consider like the Jewish understanding of the Holocaust, it's not the way the Armenians understand the Armenian genocide, where this is something that the Ottoman Empire, the Turks did to us. This is the culmination of what mankind has been doing to us for thousands of years since, you know, the pharaoh and all the

way on up through, and then it culminated in this thing. So when you say remembering the Holocaust, what it really means is remembering what they have done to us. And when that become, when 70-something percent of, you know, your entire population are answering that as the primary, the primary fact that is constitutive of their identity, there are going to be consequences to that. And how that identity develops and how you relate to the rest of the world. And, you know, it's something... How do you feel about people who hate and persecute you? Well, I mean, I know how I'm supposed to feel and how I do feel. But how to human beings... Right. Right. No, Christianity offers us a way out of this, which is a true blessing, but human instinct, all human, not just Jews or Israelis or Ottoman Turks or Armenians.

Like, everybody feels, I think, instinctively, if someone hates... me and threatens me, I hate them back. I want to hurt them. Hatred and anger, they make you shoot the home invader. They make you strong when you feel weak. They make you feel brave when you vulnerable. You know, they're useful emotions. But when they become, again, constitutive of your identity and the basic building block of your relationship with other peoples, then you, things become sort of self-reinforcing, you know, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy over time. And when you have, like, look, I mean, when you look at what happened to the Jews in World War II, it's easy to understand why there's a lot of collective trauma that has been, that has been passed down. And you wouldn't expect people to be just over it, right, just because a couple generations.

I agree with that. But that also doesn't mean that it's healthy for them or anybody else. You know, you can say, like, they say you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. And it's like, well, the thing is, like, no, you still can be pathologically paranoid, even if they are out. Even if there is something worth fearing out there, being pathologically paranoid is still bad for you. Still has really negative effects on yourself and your relationship to the rest of the world. I was talking to a common friend, whereas I won't say, I won't say who, but a common friend.

And we were, he's Jewish and, but not Zionist and not religious. religiously Jewish. He grew up Jewish. And he mentioned that when he was a kid, there was a period of time where he was afraid to take showers. He wouldn't take showers because his parents had drilled into him the story of the showers and Auschwitz and stuff. There was an interview a few years back with Winona Ryder when she made a TV series of that Philip Roth book, Plot Against America, Plot Against United States, where she said that when she was a little girl, is a privileged American actress, you know, that when she was a little girl, there was a period of years where she wouldn't sleep in her bedroom. She would sleep with the lights on in the hallway right outside her parents' door because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that one day her neighbors, the parents of her friends, were going to break down their door and drag their family off to be murdered. This is a little girl. And, you know, I remember actually when I was at your show in Fort Worth, you were with Roseanne Barr. And I remember she told you a story about how she was a little girl. And her parents sat her down and were having her watch,

all this footage of people being bulldozed into pits and all of these emaciated naked people, you know, being liberated from the camera, all these horrible things. It's just a little tiny girl. She said it gave her like weird twitches and nightmares for years and years afterwards. And it's like, I get it on one level.

Yeah, I get it too. Like those parents, all they think they're doing is preparing their kids to live in a, in a dangerous world. But when you look at it from the outside, you realize, like, that's a form of pretty extreme child abuse. They're also teaching their kids to hate. Because if I, I'll just speak for myself. If I felt that, by the way, and I agree with you, I get why trauma persists through generations.

I do. I'm sorry to sound like a liberal. I really do understand that. And I think it's real. And I think the trauma is real. Like, awful things were done to the Jews in Europe. There's no doubt. but if somebody told me that my neighbors could rise up at any minute and kill me, I would hate my neighbors.

I would hate any nation where that was true. Why wouldn't I? I mean, really the only answer to why wouldn't I is Christianity. Right, right. So, but yeah, when that starts to happen, again, like it affects the way that you interact with the people outside your in group. And you see this again on small scales. You see it with individuals, individual people. The person at work who thinks everybody at the office is out to get them.

Eventually nobody at the office likes that person and they kind of are out to get them because that's how they interact with everybody. And so that's always a danger. It's something that I found very strongly when I was researching different cults for my Jonestown series that I did. You know, that's almost a universal feature. Amazing. Is everybody, everybody hates us. Everybody wants us destroyed because we have this special truth or whatever the cults thing is. James told his people that.

They all tell their people that, you know. And it's because the people are being held together by something that is really inorganic. And for that to persist over time, you know, you can organize a group according to two principles, right? One is that there's something inside the group, inside the people that pulls them together, or they can be packed in from the outside because external forces are preventing you from escaping. It's one of the reasons that you see, for example, so many cults, organized crime elements as well,

one of the first things that they'll do as part of initiation is get you to do something that you can't take back. Yeah. Because now it's a lot harder for you to make your way back into mainstream society with the expectation that you're going to be forgiven for that, right? And from an internal standpoint, it lets you know that I can probably trust the person next to me because we're both similarly guilty, you know, that kind of thing.

So it does lead to in-group cohesion, but it leads to an in-group cohesion that makes conflict with external elements basically inevitable. So is the world getting more stable or less stable? That's a rhetorical question. We're not in charge of the world, unfortunately, but you are in charge of, in fact, responsible for your own. family and your savings. So the dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power since 2020. That's crazy. The dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power in six years. You know what hasn't? Gold has been a trusted store of value for thousands of years, and that's one reason you should think about gold right now. It's about 25% below its high

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All of which leads to what's happening in Spain. So Spain just had part of a long-stander like the biggest wave of a long-standing invasion of like 50,000 people over the course of just hours from Morocco. And this, in the days following, it became really clear that this was not organic at all, that the Israeli government and the U.S. government, well, obviously knew this was happening. And basically both governments were using mass migration as a weapon against a government

that they don't like for various reasons, mostly because it's anti-Israel. And people are shocked to discover this. Were you shocked to discover that? Again, kind of. I shouldn't be at this point, but yeah, kind of. I still am always shocked. I guess it's a good thing.

I always look at it as a good thing, the fact that I'm still capable of being shocked. It's just exactly the opposite of what we've been told. It's a pretty clear story that they've been telling propagandists in this country have been telling for the last, I don't know, 10 years at least, really since 9-11, that we have to support Israel because they are the bulwark against, the defense against what we just saw happen in Spain. Like, we're going to get overtaken by the Muslims unless we support Israel. And here you have Israel supporting an invasion of a Western European country by

Muslims, which I think has been, you know, sort of ongoing for generations now. Like, they've been doing this for a long time. But most Americans kind of think we're on the same side. Like, now they're, we don't want to be invaded by the Muslims. And the Europeans don't. And the Israelis are our ally in that, but they're not. Yeah. One of the, one of the worst aspects of, I mean, look, Christian civilization and Islamic civilization are different things with their own geographic spheres. And, you know, it's definitely a situation, I think, where, you know, what do they say, strong fences make for good neighbors kind of thing, right?

We should have our own spheres. And I think it would be deleterious for, you know, any European Christian country to acquire a Muslim population past a certain threshold where it becomes a culturally set. separate, you know, thing. That's, that's something that's not necessarily specific to Christianity. And Islam is just two different groups. And so I'm not in favor of that kind of stuff. And I do see the problems with the migrations. But one of the saddest things in most, and grossest things that really has come out of just the last couple of years of the recent things going on since, really since, since Gaza. I mean, it's, when you look back on it, it's been going back, it's gone back further

than that, but it's really intensified where as Israel is lost support, they have really, really, you know, they've almost, they've lessened the propaganda that comes from the direction of sort of justifying and explaining and building up support for what they're doing and directed it instead toward just building up more and more hatred of Muslims and Islam in general. I mean, you see this from people like Laura Luma and other types of their whole thing is just, we need to get Christians to hate Muslims because if they do that, then their enemies are our enemies and we don't have to think past that. And that's very unfortunate.

Yeah, I never thought I would be the defender of Muslims. It never occurred to me since I'm not a Muslim and I'm not going to become a Muslim. Yeah. But it's been so gross and obvious and anti-human that, like, at some point you have to be like, I don't know. When it comes back to, you know, the universal values you were talking about, I mean, there are certain things that apply no matter who is standing across from you. Exactly. And if you believe that, then, I mean, a lot of this comes down to just personal experience, too.

I mean, I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I've known a lot of the Muslim community down in, like, the South L.A., Orange County area. And after a while, like, you know, once the mystification, you know, the fog sort of starts to part, you realize, yeah, there are differences, for sure, cultural differences and things, but they're just people. And I think most Americans have very little, if any, experience with Muslims. Jews or Baha'is or I don't know that hate all Muslims. I don't know why that's better than hate all Jews. I just don't, it's the same to me.

Of course, yeah, of course it is the same. I mean, obviously it is the same. So it's really hard for, I mean, when you think about Christianity, like the hardest, the hardest command in Christianity, well, the hardest command in any world religion that's ever been made is love your enemy. And so to be able to recognize that somebody is,

your enemy, that their interests are fundamentally contradictory to yours and that you have to be prepared to defend your interests, but not allow that to escalate to hatred for this creature of God that's across from you. I mean, that's something that, again, is built very deeply into our hearts, even people who consider themselves atheists, I think, to a degree very often still have that built into them. But it's a mistake to think that, you know, to extrapolate that and think that everybody in the world, certainly throughout history, but even today, um, sees,

sees things that way, because they don't. And, um, yeah, again, I think it's, I think it's,

but that is Western civilization, isn't it? Yeah, it defines it, absolutely. And that's not just some random line in the New Testament. That's a repeated command from Jesus. Repeated.

It goes on about it. And if you only love those who love you, how are you different from the pagans? That's easy. Yeah, and we have no excuse, you know, for, you know, particularly, like we can't use particular circumstances as an excuse when he gave us

the example and prayed for, you know, the people who were in the process of crucifying him. And so we have no excuse, you know, to allow that to build up in our hearts and we have to fight it. And very often, I mean, that is, it becomes one of the, you know, like you can, you can survive a war physically. You can even win a war and still have it do something. so much spiritual damage to you over time that the victory is hollow. I'm from a country that did that, so I'm aware. You end the war by nuking a population, and then you never apologize for it and pretend it was the right thing

when it's prima facie repulsive. And look what happens to your society when you do that. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's, I think that, you know, the post-World War II sort of post-neuron, We're in is very much a, I mean, if you look at the effects of our policies and the cultural tendencies that have been imposed, you know, it was much easier, obviously, throughout most of the 20th century to impose cultural norms from above because mass media was still, in general, trusted by most people, and it was controlled by very few interests. And so we were all sort of share, excuse me, we were all sort of sharing the same couple of dreams. you know, I'm participating in the same couple of imaginaries. And the general thrust of that, and this comes back to what's going on in Spain,

in Europe and general and in the United States, is that for a people to live historically, meaning to feel themselves as part of a chain of being that stretches back before they were born and will go on after they live, that that is actually something that is very dangerous. and that is something to be broken down and destroyed. I'm writing a forward for a book. You know, this is, I always tell people that you got to read, you got to read everything. You got to read stuff even by people who, you know, all your friends or maybe even you think of as, you know, on the extreme side. I'm writing the forward for a book on the Nuremberg system right now by an author Thomas Sear.

And it's, you know, he's a, he rocks his leather jacket with Iron Cross. you know, patches on it walking around the streets of Chicago, right? So like most people would think, wow, that's an extreme dude. And he kind of is in certain ways. But he's a dude who wakes up with a book in his face, goes to sleep with a book in his face, and reads the entire time in between. He's a good writer and a good researcher and just a very smart guy. He's worth reading. He's one of those guys who would not have been available to any of us to read until very recently. You know, that's one good thing that the internet is done. It's broken apart that means.

When you say the Nuremberg system, what does that mean? It means, well, there's a lot of elements to it having to do with geopolitics and warfare. But from the standpoint that we're talking about right now, you know, it's this idea that for people to live historically in the sense that I just described it is something that is dangerous and to be targeted and broken down. And you saw this really on domestic social level. I mean, you see it, I mean, it's not as if that left-wing government in Spain is not part of the problem. You know, they're definitely part of the problem. But here in the United States, you know, you saw the effects of it over the course of the second half of the 20th century where, you know, you had our cities back in the day that were sort of these organic communities with separate neighborhoods divided by ethnicity and religion that were not in conflict with one another. They had arrived at compromises over the years and ran their cities in an organic world.

way and people were part of, you know, they were plugged into communities that watched them be born and that would watch them die and that their kids would grow up in and know that their kids were going to grow up in and they sensed themselves as these people. You know, they understood themselves as part of this living community that was going to continue on afterwards. So it was important for them to make sure that the things they inherited were given to the people that, that came along after their period of stewardship. And in, over the course of the second half of the 20th century, I mean, it was official U.S. government policy, essentially, to use mass migration generally of African Americans from the South as bludgeon weapons to go in and break these communities up and drive these people out to the suburbs, drive them out to other areas where, you know, that old parish church that used to be all, you know, Italian Catholics, you go drive through there now in Newark, and it's maybe some old grandmas who are still there, else lives 45 minutes away now, so nobody goes there anymore. And all of those communities were broken up by force very often and through violence indirectly on purpose. And it was because they were looked at as something that was potentially, you know, that when people are living in a way

where they sense themselves as part of a larger project, the idea after World War II was that that can and in fact will almost inevitably get out of hand. And out of, out of, out of, get out of hand in what way? Well, the way that the Germans got out of hand. I mean, that's, you know, the idea that they start taking themselves too seriously and thinking of their historical mission too seriously, and they start to act on it in the world in a way that is dangerous to others.

That was, that was the idea, right? And of course, there's only one group, at least in the Western world, that we decided that doesn't apply to. and it's because they were the ones who were the victims of the Germans. So the Israelis, the Jewish people in general, very much live historically. And their right to do that and ability to do that is, you know, you could say it's the central and primary, certainly foreign policy, but even with a lot of domestic policies, mission of the U.S. government and the sort of Western European NATO system in general. It's a central focus of that, which is very strange when you think about it.

until you realize that we're living in the aftermath of Nuremberg. We're living in the aftermath the Second World War. And we're probably coming up to the end of that cycle right now. I think that we're reaching the point where everybody who was around back then is gone. People who remember it directly and who have the real enthusiasm for it that was born out of direct experience is probably fading away. That seems to be the historical cycle every 80 to 100 years. you know, things blow up again, and the crisis and trauma of that explosion sort of shapes the four generations that are alive during that period, you know. You were either a young man who had to

deal with it, you were a kid who watched your father deal with it, you were an old man who, you know, and so as people go through the rest of their lives and they mature into the, into other stages of life, they carry that with them. And it really shapes who people are for 80 to 100 years or so. And the Second World War, at least the myth of the Second World War, and by myth, I don't mean, you know, that it's a lie. It's something that didn't happen, but, you know, something that has taken shape in the cultural consciousness, in a, in a way that, that, that explains to people why things are the way they are, why power arrangements that exist now are, are necessary, all of the- And legitimate.

And legitimate, right. It underlies the legitimacy, exactly. And, you know, I think I said this on the episode that we had that got us in so much trouble. But you said nothing wrong. I know. I feel. It's I've never, in 35 years of interviewing people, I've never had an interview so mischaracterized with that level of hysteria. It was like crazy. I would tell everyone who barked at me, like, actually, Daryl Cooper is a very moderate kind of liberal-minded man who's like, means malice toward no one, wouldn't hurt anyone ever. Like, what are you even talking about? That was crazy. Yeah, it was an interesting experience, for sure. I've seen it happen to other people, but when it happens to you, it's, it's, it's, but I've never seen it happen on the basis of less. Yeah, and with such a level of, with such a level of ferocity, too, it was crazy. Well, it just tells you a hurt dog barks, like the lies that have attached like barnacles

to the World War II story define our lives and do, lend legitimacy to projects that are inherently illegitimate and anti-human and harmful. The post-war system is a disaster. I don't know if it's a worse disaster than the war itself, but it's certainly a disaster. Completely destroyed Western civilization. I don't know if it's fixable. And so I guess if you're one of the rare beneficiaries of that monstrous system, you know, you've got a lot at stake. Absolutely. And, you know, the World War II narrative is one that oh, just look at the, look at the response that we had in that episode to something that I said that I thought was fairly anodyne. I could have put it in less punitive terms, I guess, with a nod to

all of my English friends out there. But the content of what we were talking about was not anything particularly extreme that you can't find in AJP. Taylor or Pat Buchanan or something like that. But when you have a topic, a historical topic, that the slightest deviation can provoke that kind of a response, that sends a message out to everybody of how they have to handle this topic. You know, there's set about with taboos and, you know, forbidden areas that you're not supposed to work. But you don't have to live like a slave anymore? Yeah, that's dangerous. Right. Right.

And so, but when that happens, you're naturally, I mean, this is going to, it's naturally going to, it's naturally going to. to be a topic that is just incredibly fertile because you have something that is relatively recent history that we have a ton of documentation on that most people still know very little about what actually happened. And what they do know, a lot of it is not true. Or it's, or it's, you know, true in a way that doesn't necessarily prove the point that they've been taught to think that it proves, you know? And so it's, I mean, I figure we probably used to have, you know, we probably used to have similar myths around the American Revolution and things like that, but as our demography's changed over time, nobody really cares if you slander George Washington.

No one ever went to jail for having different views on the American Revolution, okay, just to be clear. Indeed. And so, you know, to me, look, every society we need our myths. I agree. Right? But those myths, it comes back to what purpose they're serving. And there was a period of time throughout, 20th century that maybe you could have said the World War II myth. Look, there's something to the idea that really over the course of a single generation, we had this moral revolution that made it so that, you know, virtually everywhere. I mean, you go down to Birmingham, Alabama in 2026, and you drop an N-bomb in a 7-Eleven, and it's going to be a bunch of white people in there are going to look at you, like,

are you crazy? We don't say that anymore. Like, what are you talking about? And so that's a moral revolution that, um, in part grew out of the Second World War and the, the myth of the Second World War and what it was about, um, that you would look at and say, um, you know, it was a positive development. It's often the way people look at outgroups and things. Great. But what is that myth? What purposes does it serve now? Well, and what's the fruit of it? So Selma, Alabama is much worse than it was in 1965. Like for the people who, for the black people who live there, Britain is much worse than it was in 1945. So is the United States. So if the system produces human misery and death, failure to thrive, debt, then, like, it's not legitimate. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, I'm all about

politeness in the face of myths. Like, I'm not running around attacking. Which is why I do feel, Like I felt anybody else's religion. When I made those comments about Churchill on that one as Anodyne as I think they were afterwards, I was like I did wish I hadn't put it that way. I get it. I get it. There are people out there that, you know what I mean? I wouldn't, I don't necessarily love FDR, Abraham Lincoln.

FDR actually deserved a lot. But I don't, but I don't want to hear, you know, some Frenchman talking smack about them. So I get that. I get it. No, but the point is like you go along with certain things that maybe it's not fully true or it's mischaracterized or whatever. but like it's working. It inspires empathy between people and we get along better. And like, I don't think you should call the fat girl fat actually.

I think you should refrain from saying obvious things in the service of human understanding. Like, I'm not for using the N word actually. Just I'm just not. I never have. I'm never going to. Like, I get all that. But if obeying the lie, pretending to agree with the lie gets you. modern Britain or modern Germany or modern America for that matter.

Like, why are we going along with this? This is all, like, this is what you get when you go along with the lie. Misery. So no. Is that, you see what I mean? I think one of the things that happened is that it, it happened so rapidly, really over the course of a single generation. Yes.

It's the 1960s that by the time anybody even realized what was going on, they found themselves in circumstances. that the measures, the severity of the measures that would be necessary to correct the error are so great that they violate all of these landmines that have been planted in our heads since earliest education, you know, of, again, to go back to what purpose is the myth serving, if you want to do something about the fact that your people, and I'll speak about like European countries, because we have a little bit different situation. here in America, but, you know, if you go to Ireland or someplace like that, that these are real people. This is a people who have existed for thousands of years as a bloodline, as a nation, and they're about to lose their homeland permanently, that if you oppose that and want to take measures to correct it, well, you're a Nazi, you're Adolf Hitler. And that's the myth that, that's the purpose that that myth serves now, along with, of course, like, legitimizing American,

empire around the world, things like that. There's geostrategic and other purposes it serves, but an individual psychological level, and as far as our own domestic policy and societies, it's so powerful that it has convinced people to do what, by any measure, is really the craziest thing that any people can do, which is to give up its homeland forever without a fight. And to allow their daughters to be raped. So like the lie that European peoples and Americans believe is that all of this is about love and tolerance, but your daughter's getting raped. That's not love.

That's the ultimate act of violence. And yet that's the result of it. Yeah. Literally the result of it. Sure. And again, to go back to the internal migrations in the 20th century after the Second World War, like in the United States,

in the way that the internal migrations were used to break up these traditional Catholic parish communities in city after city after city, city around the country and done so i mean we know this from from documentation you know that uh that this was something that they knew what they were doing they knew they were breaking up these communities that they saw as pools of like insularity these black boxes that the system itself couldn't really see into and didn't exactly know it was so robert moses wasn't just a highway designer is that what you're saying no no but this was a but this was a national push i mean this didn't just happen

in New York City, you know, it happened everywhere. And when you realize that when you start to see that, and then you start to see what's going on in Europe and now in United States as well, and you recognize that these are weapons that are being wielded against us. They're not something that it's not happenstance. It's not something that's being done because, you know, the labor markets demand it. The labor markets demand it. That's my favorite. It's just the market. Yeah, or because we've just sort of, you know, there were certain Cold War

strategic imperatives that led to the promulgation of certain propaganda that maybe made some sense at the time that it just outlived its usefulness and is sort of going along on its own power at this point, that this is a weapon that's being used against these countries on purpose. Because, I mean, you know, there's a great little book by a French author Jacques O'Lule, he wrote a bunch of great books, but he wrote one on propaganda and how it functions. And he has this great section in there on how it seems like at first blush that a mass society and individualism are somehow like, you know, that's oil and water, that those

are two completely different things, when in fact they're the same thing. Because when you break up, say, those parish communities, you drive everybody out to the suburbs, everybody, living within their own fence line now. They're not living in a community. They're living in their own fence line. They maybe don't even know their neighbor's names. You have all of these people who are completely isolated and easily homogenized over time.

And, you know, they lose their distinctiveness and melt into a part of a mass that you can now propagandize on a mass level in a way that, you think about it, like if you lived in a, in a, parish community back in the 1920s in the United States. We lived in an Irish parish parish community in New York City and the government was, or the culture, whatever outside force it is, is trying to propagandize you in a given way that your grandfather and your priest and the elders

in your community that everybody respects are all telling you is not true. You're not going to believe that. And you also just really have no need for whatever ideology it is that's being pushed on you because you have your community here. That's your ideology, you know? And when you break all these people up, I mean, every intelligence agency going back to the Korean War is known that if you want to brainwash people, the first thing you have to do is isolate them. Of course.

And so when everybody's isolated, and yet you can propagandize all of them at the same time in their little isolation, it becomes very easy to. And in the 20th century, when the media channels were as controlled as they were, I mean, it was incredibly powerful. and, you know, one of the great hopes that I think, even though it was originally a military technology and everything, is I don't think that they planned for the Internet. And the reason I think that is because...

Even though they created it. Even though they created it. And the reason I think that, though, is because when you look back at so many, at JFK, at all of these different things that happened in the pre-internet era, a lot of times, like, you probably had this experience yourself. You look back on this and you're like, this can't be true because they would have covered this up, right?

It's like, no, they didn't even buy it. bother. No. Because they had control of the three channels and the newspapers and just didn't have to worry about it. I just don't think they plan for the internet. And so that's why there's a huge, a huge scramble to try to clamp it down and consolidate and get control of it because it is a leak in their system.

So that's, but balkanizing your society and then atomizing it is the key to homogenizing it. I think that's such a smart insight. And that's one of the reasons so much energy has gone into feminism. because, you know, the marriage is kind of the ultimate stronghold of that's the ultimate community. It's the basis of all communities. Well, and family also is the basis of any community that is living historically in the sense that I meant. Exactly. Have you ever met a happily married woman, happily married woman who's for mass migration into the United States?

I mean, I think that... Who's for any of that program? I mean, yeah, look, you'll find people. who are not particularly political, and so they pair it whatever they think the, but in terms of people who have given it any thought, no, definitely not. Because, you know, there, and, you know, it's actually really funny because, um, I really think that one of the reasons that this, this, if you look over the decades, right, in the 1950s, it would have been impossible to predict the 1960s. In 1960s, probably would not have predicted the 1970s. Things go in cycles, you know,

there's a sign wave of sort of cultural movement that exists. Um, but this, one has really just gone in one direction for quite some time now. And I think part of the reason for that is that millennials took until their mid-30s, late 30s, started having kids. And so people didn't become mothers. They didn't become fathers for a much longer stretch of time. And so that group of people had those ideas had much more runway, you know, before people got into that period where they start to rethink things like that. Because I've seen this with a lot of my friends, people who, people who I hadn't seen, I had this experience really powerfully recently, good friends but I just hadn't seen them and hadn't really kept in touch all that much for 10 years or so.

These were the two least political people you could possibly imagine. I mean, the idea that they would even have an opinion on any political issue would have just been, it just didn't fit at all. And when we met them again, not because I brought it up or anything, they couldn't go five minutes without just all this stuff about their kids' schools and the stuff they're teaching, but it changes your mentality, right? And so... Even just the act of getting married, I have seen the up close a number of times. You know, a young unmarried woman living in a city

has a certain set of politics. That woman gets married to a man she loves and respects. Boy, those attitudes change like in about 10 minutes. It's crazy how fast that works. Yeah, and when you have people who are isolated and whose time horizon has shrunk down to, you know, their next fix of whatever it is that the cultures managed to addict them to,

Netflix or weed or whatever. Gambling, benzodiazepines. When you do that, I mean, you can do anything you want with that population. Because this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Why did nobody protest when we blew up a school? Because at this point, who's we? Like, that's really what's been lost is a sense of being a part of a we at all. It's something that has really been broken down and disintegrated.

And so that allows the people who are at the levers of power to get away with almost anything. because nobody really identified. Like, nobody actually thinks about it. It sounds like a, almost like a, you know, these days, it sounds like a 1950s kind of, you know, slogan or something maybe made sense in Beaver-Cleaverville when they say, not in my name, you know, that the government is doing these things in my name.

I feel that way so strongly. But people so much these days really don't, you know. And what that means is that the people who do have control of the levers of power can do pretty much whatever they want without worrying about backlash, because nobody really identifies with it, unless it harms them in some way. I feel so personally affronted by it.

You bomb a girl school and then you don't apologize? I feel like smacking him in the face. Who do you think you are? Yeah, I'm a history nerd. This is your country? I don't think it is. You just like rolled in here and like took control and then you get to do stuff in my country my ancestors built.

Like no? Yeah. Yeah. Don't you feel that? Of course. You know, I'm a history guy and nerd. And so, you know, I think about, and maybe this is something that only a nerd would do,

But, you know, I think about every time I read a history book about ancient Rome or the British Empire, just anything like that, I think about, wow, 500 years from now, people are going to be reading about America. And what are they going to read? We put the first man on the moon, you know, well, now, like, we're shaping it so that they're going to read a lot of, like, they're corrupting the way that my country, my people are going to be remembered by future generations. And that offends me. It really does bother me. And, you know, I think a lot of of people would find that sentiment. I know you don't, but a lot of people today would find that sentiment sort of antiquated and just kind of silly. And that's unfortunate because what that means is that you have a people who is no longer living historically. You have a people who are no longer, they don't have the mentality that certain things for centuries, my ancestors shepherded so that they could hand them down to me. And it is my job to steward those things to make sure that the next generation can carry it on. It's turning the family home into an Airbnb. be. It's degradation. You know, random strangers are like wrecking your house that your ancestors

built. That's how I feel. That's what's happening. And the people renting it. And it's, it's so much like the bullshit revolution. It's like none of the people leading the revolution or with power, like have any connection to the country at all. Yeah. Isn't that something that really, I often think about how I think Nelson Rockefeller died in 78, 79, something like that. 75, I think. 75. And the- Megan Marshack.

The only Rockefeller that I know about after that was the one who got eaten by cannibals in the Indian Ocean, right? And I always look at that as sort of a South Pacific. South Pacific. He got eaten before. Okay. Yeah. Oh, did he really?

Yeah, he did. Oh, okay. But, well, that kind of goes to my point, right? Is, like, I kind of look at that almost as emblematic of the disintegration of the old wasp power structure that, you know, you know, You can tell I keep track of this subject. Yeah, yeah. That like, look, over the years, made its mistakes, had its faults, all these kind of things,

but had a proprietary sense of this is our country. This was my father's country and it's going to be my son's country. Yeah, don't have another passport. Right. And they have their, they had their hands on the steering wheel. Even as we had an open system that was self-governed to, you know, a large degree, there was a ruling class that ruled with a very light hand for the most part that had their hand on the steering wheel. And when that last generation, after the cultural revolution in the Vietnam War, sort of made it so that those people's own children, they just didn't want to do it anymore.

They just, they lost legitimacy in their own eyes, their own college professors told them they had no right to rule. They took their hands off the steering wheel. And that ever since then, the American system has really been under the control of whatever highly organized, well-funded minority group can manage to get its hands on the controls. And it's one of the reasons, by the way, that, you know, it's really, I mean, if you go from 1948 when the state of Israel was founded up until the late 60s, early 70s, you know, people have this idea that America has always had this tremendous Zionist influence. And it's, it's been there at certain elite levels and stuff, but it was never this overwhelming force that we started to see in the last several decades. And it was because you had guys like George

Kenan, these old wasp guys who were going to, who saw the big picture and were still living historically, who were like, if these neocons would have rolled into their administration and start barking orders at them, they would have told them to get lost. But now that just doesn't exist anymore. Everybody's time horizon is their own lifetime at most. Most people aren't even thinking that far ahead. And their sense of continuity is completely cut off from the past and future. And so people who are still connected to that sense of continuity, who are well organized in thinking in longer terms like that, who have been able to get their hands on the helm of the state,

they're really just able to make it do whatever they want, even though they may not be, you know, what we found is that you don't have to be this overwhelming dominant force that controls everything. You can get what you want done as long as you're organized and focused. And, you know, we've really just kind of seen that. That's why the American government ever since really like the 1980s at least, but certainly since the 1990s, has just been sort of this tool in the hands of whatever organized minority is controlling it at the time or at least controlling certain aspects of it. You saw this, for example, after the fall of the Soviet Union during the Clinton administration.

You know, back in the, I think it was the 94 election, 94-96, whenever, you know, we were pushing really hard for an organization called the Partnership for Peace, which was, you know, supposed to be like a non-militarized NATO that was going to include Russia and kind of be an institutional platform for European societies to mediate disputes and just learn to get, get along with each other and learn to live with each other again and communicate on on diplomatic levels, all those kind of things. It was the big push and you had a lot of officials in the Clinton administration who were very much in favor of that, but you had another contingent in the Clinton administration that was just just irrationally hostile to Russia. And when you look at who a lot of those people were, these are a lot of recent emigres or children of emigres from eastern and central Europe who just hate Russians, you know, and...

I think they have a right to own Russia or control Russia. Or own and control it, right. And in the 96 or 94 election, one of the two, I can't remember which, the partnership for peace basically just fell apart that year because Clinton was worried about the Polish. You got convinced, I don't know if this actually would have been a thing, but got convinced that the Polish vote in Chicago and this Eastern year, the Lithuanian vote over here was going to be critical to this swing state. So he said, well, we have to completely.

change our entire approach and foreign policy with regard to the former Soviet Union because this tiny, well-organized political minority is, I mean, obviously Cuba is probably the best example of this over a long period of time. But, you know, that's unfortunate. That's not the way that... Well, we wound up in a war with Russia as a result. Yeah. So can I just ask you about Spain? So the Internet is aflame with the realization that the President Sanchez who runs Spain is, you know, obviously aligned with this replacement project and is a source of a lot of Spain's problems, in my opinion. However, this specific example of invasion was really the result of larger forces acting on Spain, including the U.S., and especially Israel and Israeli figures. including the prime minister and his son are basically saying this is what you get we're going to punish you with Muslims because you aren't you don't approve of the Gaza genocide so people are just

like what in the world is going on this is like dawning on people who didn't know this was happening and has been for a long time but Spain itself it was I was thinking this this morning has been this kind of battleground for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years it's considered a sort of irrelevant place now, good ham, that's it, decent soccer, but like Spain, who cares about Spain? But a lot of people do care about Spain and have for a long time, hundreds and hundreds a year, Spain has been a place where larger battles are fought. Have you noticed this? Absolutely. And I would say that even as the Spanish Empire declined over the years and it became something of a backwater as the rest of Europe developed industrially, the Spanish were one of the people.

and to this day remain, there's several people down along on the northern side of the Mediterranean actually who are still this way, who are living historically in the sense that we were talking about earlier, where they still know themselves as Spaniards. And they still have,

even if they're atheists and they don't like the Catholic Church or something like that, they still have a sense of continuity with their history that, you know, that people who have had conflicts with other people who are living

historically who have had conflicts with them over the years, they remember that and they know that the other side remembers it too. And so it has been a battleground because there's no reason once a people stops living that way and it just becomes a, you know, a kind of a atomized blade runner society or something. There's no reason to fight with those people anymore. Who are you fighting with? You know, you might have to put down a rebellion of some kind of people just, you know, get really antsy or upset, but you don't have to actually have conflicts with those people because what people are you really even talking about and spain is you know uh has not lost that to to a great degree and um if you think about it i mean all of the countries that european countries uh that

that are still insisting on to that sense of who they are whether it's spain whether it's russia whether it's hungary these are all the targets of the western system i mean i mean i've of the sort of American-led, you know, whatever you want to call it, the global American empire system. Those are the targets. Yeah, but why is that? I mean. Because there's a rational explanation which you offered before, which is the lesson of the Second World War was when European peoples have a sense of themselves, they're a threat to others. Okay, so you have to break that down.

You can't have Europeans with self-respect because they're a threat. Okay. You know. But there's also, it feels like there's a deeper thing going. on like there's a spiritual factor here that maybe i mean it's it's hard to get around that it's hard to get around that feeling right when you look at the history and you see the spanish civil war for example yes what was that it's one of those i mean i'm going to have an entire episode on it thank you when i as part of this world war two series even though you know it's it only lightly

involves the future axis powers who you know they were involved with the conflict but that's not really what it's about. The episode is really going to be about trying to help people understand how absolutely shocking what was happening over there was to... Can you just give us a quick... Without taking an hour? But like, what's your summary of it? For people who aren't the Spanish Civil War, so it's 35 to 39, something like that? In the 30s, yeah, yeah. And, you know, there was a very, very, very, the thing that is sort of most notorious for is the anti-Christian, just absolute zealotry of the Republican and later communists side that came into it. And it's something that, you know, when the Bolsheviks took over

in Russia, one of the first things is, this is 1920, I think, so very, very early on, they built a statue to Judas Ascariot in Moscow. What? Yeah. And this is at the same time they're burning down churches, massacring priests. They built a statue? to Judas? Yeah, I was surprised. I actually only learned that, like, relatively recently. How did I not know that? Yeah, it is, well, indeed.

Okay. And it's the same reason, probably, that people don't know about it. A lot of what happened in Spain in the 1930s. I mean, you're talking about, you know, something that can only, it had the character of what you normally see in history from slave revolts, like in Haiti, for example, where there is just, you know, a conflict driven by, abject resentment and hatred for the for the people so that you're they were not just raping nuns they were not just masquering priests they were not just using churches as latrines and pornography

theaters all of those things were happening they were digging up the graves of people who had died years before centuries before and desecrating their corpses you know these are the kinds of things were happening when you see something like that You know, look, Israelis don't like Palestinians. They're doing a lot of really bad things down there. They're not doing that. It's not quite to that level. No, that's fair.

And so when you do see something like that happening, I mean, I think it's very hard, especially for people of our persuasion, not to see a spiritual element in there. Well, what's it? I mean, first of all, anyone who's ever dug a hole in the ground knows it's difficult work. So to dig up a grave by hand is not something that you do, you're bored you do because you're driven by some overwhelming impelling force right you're doing things that humans are when you see things that humans um you can never justify according to

their own personal or collective interests but can only be justified by some by some larger ideological or spiritual imperative then you have to believe them when that's happening and well put nicely put and So that's definitely true. In Spain, you know, for all of their, like, I would put it this way. Like, I think there's a lot of people out there who see those comments from Israeli government officials and from Netanyahu's son and so forth and think that their problem is with the Spanish government because the Spanish government has a problem with what's going on in Gaza. I don't think that's really what it is. I think that the problem is with Spain and with the Spanish people themselves because they're seen as sort of a, you know, look, As long as there's one group of people left who are still living historically, there's hope for the rest of us.

And Spain is one of those bastions. It's one of those places. And, I mean, just, I think in the last couple of years, they just completed that cathedral in Barcelona, the Sangra Familia. I bought my sister. They came out with a Lego set of that. It's 12,000 pieces. I bought it for my Catholic sister, so she has to do it with her kids. But, I mean, the fact that that thing took 120 years or something to build.

And they just finished it. And at no point, you know, over the last 120 years, with everything that's happened, all the social changes, the civil war, the world wars, everything that's happened, that project was never abandoned. They finished it. That's the people who's living historically. You know, those are people who, the people who started that, the people who worked on it 50 years after they started it, they did not see it completed. They never attended a service in there. That's what living historically means. you know, planting trees under whose shade you'll never sit, right?

Exactly. And so that's a people who's still doing that, at least in Remnant. And as long as that's there, it's going to be targeted. And how interesting, targeted not just by, you know, political factions within Spain that don't like it, though that's happening, but by the world. So the Spanish Civil War breaks out, they rape nuns, murder priests, dig up the bodies of long dead Christians and desecrate them. and the entire intelligentsia in the West joins them. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade forms, it's like all guys from Brooklyn.

What? What is that? It's a really deep subject. I mean, because you're talking about the same class of people who were all, you know, very pro-Stalin, very pro-Trottsky and Bolshevik revolution as that was going on.

And I think that just like with a lot of issues, there were different people with different motivations, but the ones who are the engine of the whole thing, the motive power behind it, you know, they have a very, very deep belief that's driving them. And I think that when...

And what's that belief? Well, I think it comes back to, I mean, look, these are, there are people in the world from whom Spain is an ancient enemy. It's not something that has anything to do with phalanjism and Frank, It doesn't have anything to do with whatever the political order of the day is.

It's the same with Russia. You know, there are people in the world, peoples in the world who just have a deep and abiding intergenerational hatred of Russia. And they see their conflict in broad historical terms. It's not with Putin. It's not with this or that leader. It's with this people over a long period of time. And part of it's because those people, you know, like when you get to a place, where nobody else in the world is living historically,

when the entire world is just a mishmash of atomized people, and you have a couple groups that are still living intergenerationally like that, those groups are going to rule the world. It's going to be their world. They're going to be living among a bunch of human beasts. And I mean that almost literally in the sense that when your time horizon has shrunk down to your next meal or even, the end of your own lifetime, you're living like an animal lives. You're not living like a human

being. And so you're going to be living in a sea of human beasts as real people still living historically and you'll rule the world. And as long as, and when there are other people out there who are also living that way, you're not going to be able to fool them into thinking that that's not what you're trying to do. They're going to recognize other people who are living historically. And they're going to recognize you as it doesn't even have to be, as allies or enemies, but just as people who are doing that. And then once that happens, it becomes much more difficult to pull the wool over their eyes. And so the Spanish are a people who still have a remnant to their population and something

deeply embedded in their culture that allows them to see things that we here in America, for example, where almost nobody is living historically in the sense that we've been talking about, is even really, we just don't have the conceptual horizon that encompasses, you know, enough to allow us to recognize that in other people. Probably, you know, if you were to take, maybe the Tucker Carlson audience is obviously an exception, but if you were to just take a lot of this conversation and show it to a lot of just a random cross-section of people,

they would think they wouldn't understand half of what I was saying. What do you mean living historically? What do you mean intergenerationalally? I care what happens to my kids. But this idea of being part of a great chain of being, that there's an organic living community of which you were a part that goes through history as a cohesive unit, even as the individuals that comprise it pass in and out of the world,

you know, this is something that used to be taken for granted by all humans, everywhere in the world, at least once we proceeded out of paganism. And that's what's been lost. And the people who are still out there living that way, at least in Remnant, have a different relationship to each other than they have to the rest of the world that's no longer living that way, if that makes sense. Not only does it make sense, it's one of the most profound things I've heard in a long time. I assume you said this before, what kind of reaction do you get from that? Well, I would say that my audience is fairly curated, partly thanks to you.

They're used to hearing me talk like that. So the reaction is usually fine, but I have had the experience from time to time where you speak out of class on these issues. And usually it's not even hostility you run into. A lot of times it's just people are befuddled. They don't exactly even know what I'm getting at, which is unfortunate because again, this is something that it was taken for granted by. And then taken from people without even their knowledge. And it's one of the essential things. And George W. Bush, you didn't put many things well, put it this well. And he said, everybody wants to believe they're living for something bigger than themselves. And I, and, you know, the missions that have taken the place of living historically, of being attached to this larger hole, are so small. You know, liberating Ukraine, okay.

You know, or whatever, whatever that, you know, war on poverty, war on cancer, you know, these are, I mean, I'm against invasions, I'm against war, I'm against poverty. I mean, you know, I get it. But fundamentally, they're offering up a vision that is so just like silly. It's one of the reasons I feel so terrible for the people in Ukraine. You know, your average nationalist in Ukraine who thinks that this is what he's doing. I know. But he's serving the forces that are actually attacking it.

And it's just very sad. Well, and of course, you know, the very first thing the Zelensky government did was ban the largest Christian denomination and put priests in jail. So it's impossible not to see the Zelensky project, which is not your, Ukrainian in any sense. I think he only learned the Ukrainian language, something like eight or nine years ago. Yeah, the whole thing's absurd. Yeah. But he's the Trotsky of Ukraine.

Okay, fine. But it's the same as the French Revolution and the Spanish of war and the Bolshev revolution. It's exactly the same program. It's the anti-Jesus program. And like it always winds up in the same place, which is in total destruction and misery. And the Ukrainians are an unusually great people, I think, just based on knowing a lot. of them like great people excellent people great culture just good-hearted decent christian people and the fact that they're being subjected to this is really sad it is yeah it is the uh it's it's a it's a

going to go down as a mark of great shame on our country that we had anything to do with that old situation i mean that's a that's an understatement of our involvement obviously but it's a terrible shame and you know i i guess i'm i'm really grateful that Kostoevsky's been my favorite author since I was in high school because it made it so that, you know, when I started getting bombarded on all sides with anti-Russian propaganda, it was just I had an immune system built up to it because I already love these people, you know. Anyone who wrote the brothers Karamazov cannot, you know, that's not a shallow culture. You can say whatever you want about Russia. And it's not my enemy. I don't care. I just so strongly agree. Last question, as the United States, for many reasons, including its own sin. gets pulled into all of this. What's happening in Europe is happening here, maybe even more aggressively.

We just don't know that, but it is. How do individuals respond to that? This is usually not a popular answer, but I think that, I'm not saying, don't go vote in the next presidential election or anything like that, but I think that the idea of imposing a solution, politically from the highest levels is probably,

I think that's probably a lost game. I think we have to start to, we have to start to look very close to us and build out from there. You need to focus on your family, you need to know who your neighbors are, you need to, I mean, because think about it, like a society works best or works at all,

when each of the concentric circles of concern, you know, your family, your community, somewhere out here is your country, maybe further out as your civilization, that each one of those concentrics that are further out have legitimacy because they nourish the ones that are closer in. And it's those that protect and nourish, you know, the ones that are closer. And so your community matters because that's the world in which your family is able to thrive together. You know, your larger political community matters because it allows your community. You know, and so, like, that's how a society maintains legitimacy over time and becomes something that people are willing to march off by the millions to defend if that's what it comes down to.

And I think that that, unfortunately, again, over an incredibly short period of time, has, I mean, think about how crazy this is. Like, we went from all of human history, and I'm not talking about back to the Sumerians. I'm talking about back to, you know, homo erectism. basically. People lived in a cohesive, coherent community among people who knew them and who they knew, who some of them watched them be born. They would watch those people die. I mean, they lived within a community that they were absolutely plugged into as a significant

part of. People live all of human history that way up until like the 1950s or 60s. And then we just, in a generation that is. completely evaporated so that people literally don't know the name of their neighbor that they live next to for years. And they have no, I mean, even worse than that. I mean, their kids leave for college and for the rest of your life. You see them once every two years on Christmas because, you know, one year they come see you and next year they have to go see the in-laws and that's it. And maybe you hear from on the phone once or twice a year. That is something that you took something that was

absolutely so fundamental to being human, the social environment that we literally evolved to be adapted to. And you stripped that away from people and threw them out on their own resources. And they're expected to go out there now and find meaning for their lives and orient themselves in the world without recourse to a broader community or even a family. And that's what needs to be rebuilt. And you're not going to rebuild that from the Oval Office or from the halls of Congress. It's got to be something that starts some, you know, it's very seduct. People on the right like to make fun of people on the left or criticize people on the left for being so, so, so concerned and having so much love and concern for people who are far, far away from them. But the people who are, you know, right here close to them, they really don't like those people that much. And that is a thing for sure. But we do that on the right as well, where you have a lot of people who interpersonally don't really feel a need to love their neighbor, treat their neighbors themselves.

But even their own children. who are so concerned about whether, you know, the federal government is being used to impose some moral law that they, you know, that they, that that is important. But that, you know, the far more important thing is, are the things that are within reach. Start there and build out. And once you start to do that, here's the magical thing about it is once you start to do it, you won't even have to explain it to yourself. It'll be so obvious that this is, that this is, um, the proper way to do it because what you're doing is you're building something that you will know in the deepest core of your being is worth defending and um once you've done that you know then you've got solid ground to stand on to move out from there and hopefully fix the bigger picture to go to cooper just every time i see you it's it's really a soul bath so thank you very much anytime