Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #354 - China Vows To DESTROY US Troops In Taiwan, Take Island w/Posobiec & Forrest Cooper

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia jointly host digital editor of Recoil Magazine and former Army Ranger Forrest Cooper and journalist at Human Events and former Navy officer Jack Posobiec to examine China's troll-like response to a mis-stated number of American troops in Taiwan, a huge tech company that's just bought $50 million in gold as a hedge against a 'black swan event', how, exactly, Joe Biden failed in Afghanistan, and what could have been done to save it, how NYC has officially become worse than occupied territory, and Steven Colbert's hysterical tweet comparing Trump supporters to members of the Taliban. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In what China is describing as a security leak, accidentally put out on Twitter, Senator John Cornyn claimed the U.S. has 30,000 troops in Taiwan. That is, well, according to Newsweek and other fact checkers and probably most people, not true. The U.S. doesn't have 30,000 troops stationed in Taiwan. But certainly people in Chinese media and pro-Chinese Communist Party are acting like, oh, they've accidentally revealed that they've invaded Chinese space. Okay, well, this may have been Senator Cornyn slipping on a banana peel and accidentally starting World War III, because China says that would be a declaration of war.

They would invoke the Secession Act and immediately invade and destroy U.S. forces if they were in Taiwan. Yikes, man. At a time when there's chaos in Afghanistan and the U.S. is looking particularly weak, and then this happens, well, this happened probably because China's taking advantage of the fact that we look weak. They've also issued a statement through their state media that to Taiwan, when they invade to reunify with military force, the U.S. will not be there to protect them. So we're going to get into other stuff. We'll talk about Afghanistan. We'll talk about what's going on with this international conflict because we've got a couple of vets here who can help us get into it. But we also got news about New York. We got really interesting news that following these stories, Palantir announced that they're going to be investing

$50 million in gold in case of a potential black swan event. So when there's a company that does like data analysis and their name is effectively like a fantasy is based on a fantasy seeing stone. And then they're like, there's going to be a black swan event maybe. So we're buying a bunch of gold and our clients can now pay us in gold. I'm kind of like, what did they just see in their data? So I don't know. Maybe I want to buy some gold, but we'll get into all this stuff. We're hanging out with a couple of people.

We got Jack. So, but hey, hey, ladies and gentlemen, we just broke the news earlier tonight that Joe Biden is going to be heading back to Wilmington tomorrow. The FAA has confirmed this on their website. What I was being told was that he is not getting good sleep in the White House, doesn't like it there, prefers to sleep at home. Joe Biden, if you really want a good night's sleep. Oh, my gosh. Don't do it.

Give it to him, Jack. What you really need is to head over to MyPillow.com, utilize promo code POSO for up to 66% off, and Mr. President, you will get the best night's sleep in the whole wide world. But no, so that was something that I was actually told earlier today. I tweeted it out, and then the FAA put it up on their website that he isn't even putting in, on this week of all weeks, he's not putting in a full week of work,

that he is heading back to Wilmington, and he's going to be having a long weekend there yeah i mean trump had a lot of long weekends in mar-a-lago he called it the winter white house you know but uh i think now's not the time for a vacation i can put that you know for all the criticism we can make about past administrations let's just stick to it joe biden please work i guess i mean it's not i mean that's something a lot of people wanted to politicize it. But, you know, oh, what about golfing, et cetera, et cetera. But it's like you're the guy who's there now. That picture that came out, you know, of the situation.

It wasn't even the situation. It was Camp David, and he's just surrounded by nothing. Right? He's just sitting there in a room by himself. I don't exactly think that inspired confidence and i don't know if and people are questioning the the the the amount of chaos in the white house right now the the lines of communication by the way between the white house the pentagon the state department it's completely free yeah you had a source you were tweeting about this let's get into that we'll talk about it And I've actually saved some stuff for the show.

Oh, all right. Perfect. We got Forrest hanging out. Yeah, so I don't have, like, a MyPillow ad. Thank you. You can just do mine again. I can do yours again. Quick, get him in the pillow.

Don't hit me with it. So, no, my name is Forrest Cooper. I'm the digital newsroom editor for Recoil Magazine, and we are a firearms and firearms culture publication we also cover we've got off-grid concealment uh recoil and then we also have carnivore which is for high-end hunting and so i am i represent the digital side and something that you're going to find out about us is the broad majority of our editorial board we're all veterans so my military experience is third

ranger battalion i was a team leader there and so i i got to see afghanistan pretty close you were trying to teach some of these guys weren't you there were definitely well there's definitely times where any many different groups within the military had the opportunity to teach different levels of the afghan people and yes there were there was a time where i was actually trying to teach the Afghan, what we consider Afghan special forces. Yeah. So that was.

That'll be interesting to talk about. Rangers lead the way. Yeah. Thank you. And I am intimately familiar with the city of Kabul. Perfect. Right on, right on. We got Ian again.

It's interesting you phrased it. The time you spent there, you were trying to teach the people. Yeah. Measures of success. What was that like? Let's find out. Right. Yeah. We'll get into that in a bit. Trying to teach the people. Measures of success. Let's find out. We'll get into that in a bit. We got Lady of Present Buttons.

I am in the corner pushing buttons as always. I'm very excited about this because we got the expert on China. We got the expert on Afghanistan. We got the Navy and the Army representing. I'm stoked. It's going to be a great show. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget.

Go to TimCast.com. Become a member. We're going to have a members-only segment coming up. It usually goes live around 11 or so p.m. We record it after the show. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, go to TimCast.com, become a member. We're going to have a members-only segment coming up. Usually goes live around 11 or so p.m. We record it after the show. And when you're a member, you're supporting our fierce and independent journalism. We've got some research being done right now on the food shortages that are hitting. You may have seen my tweet about it. We'll talk about

it maybe later on in the show. But we're tracking this, trying to figure out where the holes are because there's, you know, Nando's in the UK, this restaurant shut down 50 locations due to the chicken shortage. This food shortage is serious. It's hitting across all sectors in the U.S. and the U.K. We'll get into that. Again, TimCast.com.

Don't forget to like this video. Subscribe to this channel. Share the show with your friends. Press that share button. Grab that URL. Do it for little Ian. Do it for me. Who sits here every day just wishing. And also smash the like button. I do it for you. Do do it who sits here every day just wishing and also

smash the like button i do it for you do it for me well let's talk about china all right we're gonna talk about china because i really want to talk about afghanistan but the big news is what the ripple of afghanistan means for the rest of us because of the failure in the withdrawal from afghanistan i mean it's absolute chaos they're trying to make it seem like it's it's good it's not good it's not good china is taking advantage to make it seem like it's it's good. It's not good. It's not good. China is taking advantage. And we have this article from the fake news Global Times. It's China's mouthpiece saying update.

Senator reveals 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in Taiwan Island equal to declaring war on China. If it's true, tweet deleted after wide controversy. So it seems that Senator John Cornyn just didn't know what he was talking about. The Taiwan number that there's 30,000 troops there. Apparently, it's an old number going back to the 70s or whatever. But China's not acting like it was just a dumb tweet from someone who wasn't paying attention. They're trying to make it seem like he revealed the information. Look at this. they say some others believe the news leaked by the u.s senator cannot be true because 30 000 is not some small amount the u.s army could hide and not being noticed on the island and the u.s has nothing to gain by stationing the u.s army in the island sacrificing its own interest to satisfy taiwan separatists also does not fit

with u.s foreign policy just like the u.S. did in Afghanistan. Talk about getting smacked around quite a bit by China right now. Ouch. Yeah, I mean, you don't usually see the CCP's and their mouthpieces being so publicly, I would just say, you know, trading barbs back and forth, especially in with, you know, kind of operating within the news cycle as we are right now. So this is definitely something new for the CCP. This is not something that you even four years ago, five years ago, you would see them doing only it's because now and I think with Xi Jinping and his new thrust for a more, a more aggressive China on the world stage, a more, you know, we're not going to be this.

We don't want to be viewed as a third world country anymore. So for years and years and years, we were told China is still developing. China is still, you know, we're bringing our people out of poverty. We need all these programs. But then if you just look, I believe yesterday, the Financial Times actually had the story up that BlackRock came out and said that they want to increase their investors' exposure to China. They want people tripling their investments in China.

That's BlackRock. And they said, they have sort of like an internal think tank there, they call it the BlackRock Investment Institute. And they said, we don't view China as a developing country anymore. They are a fully developed nation and we should treat them the same way as we treat everyone else. They are an engine that is growing. They are the future. That's essentially what BlackRock is saying, right? And now China, they are now using this opportunity as a way to shrug their shoulders off of sort of the, what, you know, what Tony Blinken or Joe Biden might call the international rules-based order. They're shrugging off the WTO, the UN, et cetera, everything else. And they're saying, we are not going to be pushed around by Blinken or Joe Biden might call the international rules-based order. They're shrugging off the WTO,

the UN, et cetera, everything else. And they're saying, we are not going to be pushed around by you anymore. We're going to push back. Think about how long it's been that China's been effectively just telling us to shove it, where they know that, man, no matter what the US says, it's always a finger wag. So they're dumping all this pollution. They're producing massive amounts of carbon while the rest of the world is like, hey, we're going to stop. Hey, we've got these protocols. We're all going to agree to. And China's like, no, no, thanks. Or they say they will. And then they start building more coal power plants. You've got really dumb leadership in the West where they're like, it's OK, guys. China said they're on board with our programs. And then China's laughing like, why would we ever actually do what we said and it's been happening for a really really long time that's a really good description

especially if you're going to go into afghanistan later but starting with china like as a country they take themselves seriously yeah there's another thing that china has that america doesn't have right now is that america is going through some sort of identity crisis where it can't figure out whether itself should exist anymore i mean the scary thing is that's true. Perfect way to put it. Yeah. Like it's the perfect way to put it. It's,

it's, it's going through internal mayhem. Why else wouldn't China move? If, if you're thinking about yourself as two players on a chessboard and you're watching your opponent run into dismay, if not aiding it somehow, or at least prodding it along,

I don't, I, you know, you could say that one way or another. I mean, you could ask the questions of questions of international influence and terrorism, and you could go all down those roads. But instead of just accusing China of participating in domestic terrorism,

within the world stage, they will make an agreement that they know they won't follow because they don't respect you as an interlocutor, right? Right. So what essentially you're talking about is this idea that, you know, I don't think China knows that it's not into their best interest to get into a shooting war with the U.S., right? A kinetic warfare is not something that would be really beneficial for either side. And so that what is the most effective, right, tool of their international foreign policy for their interests is what you

would call strategic neutralization, right? Get the U.S. so upset, so divided, so screaming at each other, so tied up in chasing its own tail in internal domestic tensions that we are unable to make a stand on the world stage. And we said that i came on here and said that for a year on this show and i've said it elsewhere and then you look at afghanistan see we're so busy and i mean it's almost a cliche right now but you've got general millie talking about white rage and we need to uh focus on critical race theory etc etc and then meanwhile it's like you can't even conduct a basic evacuation operation of your own or not even before that. I'm getting ahead of myself.

You can't even conduct a safe withdrawal of your own forces. Right. You didn't know that you were about to be attacked, which then set up. Right. This was supposed to be withdrawal. This wasn't supposed to be an evacuation operation. It's only we're only talking about evacuation because it was a failure. So for China, this is exactly what they want. Now they get to

backfill us in Afghanistan. Now they get to go after the rare earth minerals. Now they get to buy up all that stuff. Of course, they're making a deal with the Taliban. However, and this is my assessment, I've thrown it out there. I'll say it again tonight. But I think that you will see Taliban attacking China's one belt, one road infrastructure within or, you know, maybe not specifically Taliban, but other extremist elements over there within five years. That's just the history of the region. That's the history of the peoples of that region. You do not see occupying nations, occupying forces doing well in that part of the world. And there's a lot of history behind that. I have kind of a caveat. Unless China

does manifest the oppressor-oppressed narrative within the Afghan people and say I don't know about that. It's not hard. When we were on the ground, we experienced that with the locals. Oh, you're not the Americans. You're the oppressors. Oh, is that what they said?

Of course. It's already there. The language is already invested in the system Oh, is that what they said? was created by Mao. Maoist China was this idea of manifesting the political disdain of the people for their own government. Now you just use China doing that on the world stage, manifesting government countries or pseudo-countries against ambiguous ideas like the West, like rule of law, like America. I would not be surprised.

I think it buys them a couple of years. I think they can get a couple of years out of using that very narrative and as well going with the Taliban and saying, I don't think they've officially recognized the Taliban. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe anyone has officially recognized them yet. China has come the closest. But even then, I think it's something more,

they said, like we acknowledge the will of the Afghan people rather than we we recognize the Taliban's legitimate government. So I think it buys them a couple of years. Obviously, it's it's in their best interest, Taliban's interest to receive if they can get any kind of deals with China, if they can get banking, if they can get all this because, of course, you're seeing a lot of the international community trying to shut down any aspect of the Taliban getting into the finances of the government of Afghanistan, being able to use any of this stuff. And so for China, it creates this sort of wellspring for them of having that ability to not have to use

the international system because they can just go through China. So China's, as you say, they're trying to set themselves up as we are the benefactor to go against the big bad of the West. And I do think that'll buy them some time. But there's just 2000 years of history of Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires. Not to mention, if they're going to try and make it seem like, oh, the West is bad, they're the real enemies. They're also trying to make the world think that we've lost our power. Their attitude is the U.S. is fading.

The empire is collapsing. We're the big bad. We're next. So I don't know if they would want to convey that message simultaneously while they're trying to convince everyone the U.S. is failing. Robert Tabor, the classic war of the flea. I'm not an expert on his work alone, but the introductory paragraphs are, insurgency is prolonged political warfare, creating the spirit of revolution,

which runs on the idea that it could happen. Right? So Afghanistan, or China does not endorse the Taliban. They endorse the Afghan caliphate, which is the Chinese puppet that attaches themselves to movements like the Nation of Islam, then enters Western countries and uses that as a backdoor road into pushing more disdain for Western values. And then the real question, though, is what happens if, and they are talking about setting up an Islamic Republic,

or I believe the Islamic Emirate, I think, is the official name. It's like they're like Republic. No, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. So how do you have an Islamic Emirate? But when right across your border with China is what region of China? Xinjiang. Xinjiang, which is, I think, three times that one province, three times the size of Afghanistan. Nowhere near as populated as Afghanistan, but it's massively bigger than Afghanistan.

And you have one million Uyghur Muslims, also Sunni, by the way, who are kept in concentration camps by your same benefactor. Essentially, once you see these narrative conflicts, these contradictions, I think, are what will eventually cause problems in this relationship. Because China is going to say, well, we're here to help you. Okay, but what about our friends, our brothers that are within your land that you're oppressing so that you can build your pipelines across Pakistan? You know, I've heard some stories about what China is doing, and I kind of feel like the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan would not mind. So I don't know if you've heard these stories that when they harvest organs from the Uyghurs, they can then sell them to Arabic nations who need organ transplants that are halal.

I don't know if that's true, if you've heard anything like that. So essentially what I'm saying, though, is that you will still end up getting breakaway groups, right? You're still going to end up getting a group there. This is the nature of radical Islam is that you will have a group that says, how dare we be in bed with these guys? How dare we go along with this? They are atheists. They are communists. They are from the same stripe as the Soviet Union when they tried to impose communists on us.

Now you're trying to get in bed with the new communists who oppress our people, and that's where you're going to get this friction. Do you think with these threats coming from China, not only for the military force against Taiwan, but also to crush U.S. troops, assuming they're already there? I think we have like 20. There's like 20 military personnel who are in Taiwan for some training exercises. Do you think this leads to war? Look, I'm sort of like the proverbial, I don't think we're going to go to a shooting war with Taiwan anytime soon, over Taiwan anytime soon.

That being said, it's possible, right? I don't think it's in China's best interest. I don't think it's in china's best interest i don't think it's in our best interests again remember the plan right the we the axis of the elites between the ccp and the one percent in the west we want you to become the consumer nation they want the west to be the consumers of the world our inflated uh consumer values, our dollars. We want you to buy our TVs. We want you to buy our iPhones. Everything that's made in China, you are to consume that and be happy. Remember, right?

You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. Yeah, but that burst at some point. But it's still to your interest to continue it going for as long as possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then if we can condition down your, to your point, if we can condition down your national will, your national identity, if you don't feel as strongly as being able to stand up for your allies, then eventually you'll get to the point to say, well, why would we go to World War I or Taiwan, right? Who cares about this thing? And then so for China's perspective, again, it's similar to the Taliban in a sense. There's that phrase that's been going around this week, you know, you have the watches, but we have the time.

Right. So it was 100 years for Hong Kong and 1897 to 1997. Right. And that handover of Taiwan is seen, by the way, as the end of the British Empire. Many people see that as the end of the British Empire, as the symbolic act that, okay, we are no longer this international empire. What about Macau? That's Chinese? Yeah, I think Macau was 99, so that was Portugal, and that was about two years later. But Hong Kong, of course, was the big one, though. If you actually look at it in terms of

local revenue, I believe Macau is actually ahead. I know they're way above Las Vegas in terms of gambling revenue. That is the is actually ahead i know they're way above las vegas in terms of gambling revenue that is the gambling center of the world right now is macau really oh yeah oh yeah 100 and and so and you better believe that a lot of the companies from vegas are all still operating in macau which means they're all tied in with ccp as well and so you've got a situation where you know to the ccp's perspective, they want to assimilate Taiwan through osmosis. The strategy has been isolate, isolate them throughout the world, cut off their trade, cut off their finances, right? So if you land, I've been, you know, I've been in Taiwan,

I've been on both sides of the Taiwan Strait actually. And, you know, looked across, you can't see it, but you know. And so when you land in the Taipei airport, you know, usually when you land somewhere, there's you land somewhere, what's the first thing you see is advertisements. You see advertisements. It's usually banks or some kind of real estate or something like that. In the Taipei airport, there's none of that. There's just a couple pictures up of Taiwan from the local Ministry of Tourism, and that's it. So there aren't those huge international brands playing in Taiwan the way that you'd see everywhere else. And why is that?

That's because of economic isolationism. That's Beijing going around telling everybody, you don't do business with this island because we want their only economic, social, and cultural vector to be through us. And if you want access to our markets, if you want access to be able to sell, if you want all the deals that we can offer you, right, you have to cut off Taiwan. That is the price you have to pay. And that's why if you go back to the 1970s, that is why the US government recognized the government of Beijing for the first time for all those years throughout the Cold War, we didn't recognize them. And it was Carter who eventually switched that over, which then had the after effect of changing the seat at the United Nations, which was controlled by Taiwan, the Republic of China, which was and is the legitimate government of China prior to the CCP.

Then that seat at the UN Security Council went to Communist China. So what's a black swan event? Yeah, I'll jump into this one. The title of the black swan event is most often attributed to Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Now, he is a he's both an economist. He's been he's a professor. He's an author. He's kind of one of those autophages.

He's accomplished many things. But he wrote a book called The Black Swan. And the idea of a black swan event is something, it is a large event, a large catastrophic or a large event of very effective proportions, whatever, that either A, could not have been predicted, or B, if it would have been predicted, it wouldn't have happened and therefore would never have been noticed. And so when he opens up, I think it's when he opens up his book, The Black Swan, he's using the example of 9-11. So if a person had, if anybody in the airports had said,

it's strange that these people have these items, and just simply taken them, then there would have been no 9-11. Interesting. No one would have been better than I. And no one would have heard. They wouldn't have been promoted. They wouldn't have been made into generals or heroes. It was just like all of these little things had to happen in a row where it ended up in a catastrophe that no one predicted. It's a cascading failure.

Yeah. Right. I'm not going to use the word cascading failure yeah right i'm not gonna use the word cascading failure because i'm not going to be specific on that one but okay you might be correct in the sense of that one where well there's that story of um it's uh jose melendez paris was the was the one tsa agent um who had been i think it was um he's a puerto rican uh served in i think vietnam and he was the one who stopped um oh it's got muhammad al-qahtani who was you know supposedly the 20th hijacker um in from coming through in florida and because he

just and i always remember the story because it was like he just seemed he just says he seemed off to me right this guy got put in secondary screening and you know because he didn't he wasn't able to answer the questions when you come in you know hey where are you going how long you staying when you fly him back didn't have good answers the questions gets put into secondary screening and then jose melendez paris goes to see him and says look this this guy's got military training i can see he's got like a military bearing to him and you know like you kind of know if you've been in the military like hey this guy's got you know and something seems off his story seems off he doesn't have a return ticket. And then they pulled him aside and they said, hey, man, this guy's a Saudi. You got to be, you know, you got to be PC. You got to be careful.

And Melendez Perez says, I don't care. This guy, everything that I'm supposed to do says this guy shouldn't be allowed into the United States. So I'm going to send him home and he did send him home and he was supposed to be the muscle man for um for united 93 so that's why united 93 only had four hijackers as opposed to the others that had five and he was supposed to be one that was doing crowd control for the the um the passengers as the as the other guys flew and then what they what melendez perez didn't know was that waiting to pick up muhammad al-qahtani in the you know the parking lot of the airport in florida was muhammad atta who was the lead the lead hijacker you know because one guy just did what he was supposed to do just did his job so here's why i ask from the New York Post. Palantir buys $50 million worth of gold bars to counter Black Swan event. Oh, boy.

Yeah. So what does Palantir do? So Palantir is, I mean, they're like a database of databases, if that makes sense. Right. So they are a software which allows for database integration and, you know, think of, you know, and it, I know this from, you know, the Intel community using it and that's where I was able to get my fingers on, on the Palantir system, but you could, you really use it for any big, any large data set. I know this is starting, Wall Street's starting to use it more, pharmaceutical companies are starting to use it more, any of these massive data sets. And it's basically like, you know,

you think of any like online database where you're going through files and then things are linked to each other. Well, this is, it's multimedia and one thing can pop up to another. It's all tied together. You can do aggregation. I mean, they are what, you know,

and a Palantir, of course, is from Lord of the Rings and it's the Seer. It's kind of like Ian's, you've got a little, you know, that's Palantir, of course, is from Lord of the Rings, and it's the seer. It's kind of like Ian's. You've got a little, you know, that's Ian's Palantir right there, right? There it is. There it is. He literally has a crystal ball in front of him. It's a crystal ball, right?

The idea is like a crystal ball. It's Lord of the Rings FaceTime. Yeah. There you go. Right, right, right. It's what, who was it? Was it Mary or Pippin? They saw it, and they grabbed it in the movie.

It was Pippin. It was Pippin? Yep. So the Colorado-based company purchased $50.7 million worth of 100-ounce gold bars sometime in August. Palantir said in a short note buried in its 93-page second quarter earnings report last week. The company previously announced that it would accept Bitcoin as a form of payment, though it hasn't said that it's invested in any Bitcoin yet, unlike some other companies, including Elon Musk's electric car firm, Tesla.

What are they... Well, in Palantir, it's Peter Thiel. Oh, I know, I know, but I'm saying... I don't know if we said it. What's the Black Swan event that they're seeing? They have all this data. They're the seer stone, and they're like, we think we need $50 million in 100 ounce gold bars yeah i saw

a meme where they were what they say and they're not like the guys on tv saying you know buy gold william devane when when sauron is buying gold you have to wonder right what's going on what does sauron know yeah so i don't know what do you guys think is it uh it's economic they're they're hedging against economic inflation is that all you think that's like they're they know it's coming it's gonna dude one it's gonna be magnitude but that's not a black swan event one conversation combined 70 bucks that would be black one conversation sort of a meta conversation i've been having a few people you know offline um lately is if you just look like if you take the last five years worth of events and you kind of put them all together but you look at them from you know go through the mental exercise of going

20 years in the future and then looking back these last five years just the amount of upheaval and the quickness and speed with which events have transpired it sort of feels like the preface to something, right? It almost feels like you're reading, you know, okay, this is the backstory of how we, which led us up to the event. It kind of feels like you're on a roller coaster and the clinks are going slower and slower. Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.

Are you sitting in the front or in the back of the roller coaster? Always the front. I'm in the front, 100%. You've got to see. I want to know. I want to watch. It's a good view.

I'm not a big roller coaster person, though. It's kind of boring. Peter Thiel is heavily invested in Bitcoin marketplaces and stuff. So what is this? You're saying you think that it's going to be an economic shock to the system. There's going to be a magnitude of cost inflation, like times 10. That's what magnitudes are. We're already seeing it.

We're going to see things that cost $6 cost $60. It's going to be absolute madness. That would be insane. I don't know. Do you guys agree? Well, I mean, that makes sense as to why they were. Because, I mean, from what you're saying, that's why they're buying gold, right? Because, yes, there's a black swan event, but it'll be tied to economics.

And obviously, you would buy gold as a hedge against fiat. So the idea that – and that – now, it may also be, though, that they're not quite sold on crypto yet. And they're thinking that, look, you know, we kind of went through the pandemic. And, you know, there were times where crypto seemed like people were using it as a store of value. But other times where it seemed like it was crashing along with the stock market. Because there's a lot of speculation in crypto as well. And so, it's not an awkward crypto Twitter, by the way. You know, it's all the crypto bros out there. But I'm just talking about how it went last year.

And so, you've got to think that from Palantir's perspective, they want to go with the more traditional store of value that people have run to in a crisis, and that's gold. What would be a black swan event that would hit the economy in such a way that they would need $50 million of gold bars? They could print $120 trillion tomorrow. Right, right. But is that a black swan event? It would turn out, it would create a black swan event. Does that make sense? No, no.

You make a good point. Would the printing of $100 trillion be the cause of the black swan event, or would it be the event itself? Good call. Because was 9-11, was it the response to the buildings coming down that was the real black swan event, like the war? Or was it the actual building? How do you define? Was it the fact? Well, maybe I think that one would be, was the black swan event at the thing that contributed to what we call the black swan event of the war or was it the actual building how do you define was it the fact well maybe i think in that one would be was the black swan event at uh the thing that contributed to

what we call the black swan event of 9-11 was the towers coming down but the things that contributed to that are all of the subsequent or the all the preceding events that no one predicted no one thought anyone was going to hijack a personnel carrier well Well, actually. So maybe the formation of the Federal Reserve was the black swan event. I'm pretty sure they had done drills specifically mentioning this. It's been a long time since I've read a lot of the news.

I just mean to say that it was a failure on the part of the government. It's kind of like when... I mean, certainly hijackings had taken place. But it's when Biden says, we plan for every contingency. We know they didn't. like when I mean, certainly hijackings had taken place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's when Biden says we plan for every contingency. We know they didn't know you did. Right. And when they said like, oh, I think it was like, I don't know, was it Condoleezza Rice at the time?

Like who could have predicted they would do this? It's like the U.S. did. Look, not specifically, but they knew that planes could be used as weapons. Look at this last weekend in Afghanistan. That was a black swan event because we're like, OK, well, we I i mean anybody who's been there knows has some expectation that as the as america recedes somebody's going to fill that void and if it's not the afghan military the afghan government at the time it's going to be somebody else and who's that going to be it's obviously going to be the taliban we just did not expect it the black swan event was that they precipitated on across the country so quickly.

And so that's kind of the multiple layers of failures of the relationships with the local people, not on the individual level, but on the state level. And how do we how do we do? Are we looking at this social investment in the country and taking it seriously? No. So I read a bit about Afghanistan and what I can't remember. I don't know who wrote this. They said that the U.S. pulled air support. And as soon as that happened, that's the centerpiece of American military strategy. So they give the Afghan security forces these air capabilities.

But then Biden's like, we're pulling support and we're out. Well, there was actually an interesting and it kind of ties into what you're saying, there was an interesting angle to that because it was something along the lines of, and I don't want to get this wrong, but the idea was that we were maintaining the Afghan Air Force and they didn't have the capacity to, there I am using buzzwords, capacity, the capacity to maintain their own Air Force. so when we pulled our contractors and essentially our mechanics for their air force rather than having you know it's like lead you know it's like you teach a man to fish right you know um that the minute we pulled

those mechanics out they didn't have an air force anymore is that because in the 20 year training that we were training militant training militants but not engineers? Well, we were training the – I mean, I won't put words in your mouth, but we were training armed forces. It wasn't mechanics, though? I was not – I was in Ranger Battalion. I was not in charge of understanding the relationship. Why didn't you train them better, Forrest? Come on, man.

Because they never taught me how to – Please, please. It's very clear that everything we've seen is Forrest? Come on, man. Because they never taught me how to play. Please, please. It's very clear that everything we've seen is Forrest's fault. It's obviously all of his fault. Biden is not Trump, not Bush. You have discovered what the Department of State thinks. Yes, exactly. It's not our policies.

It's the guy on the ground. His sideburns are too long. Here's my question. Here's my question. His gas mask cannot be properly long. Here's my question. His gas mask cannot be properly fitted. Here's my question to you, Forrest. Could we have withdrawn in such a way that Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban in three days? Yeah, absolutely.

And that problem would have started maybe ten years ago. Because we didn't plan for – when did we start planning to pull out of afghanistan legitimately like how long was it just an eventually thing we'll do it right well we're gonna leave we have to leave we have to figure out the terms on which we're gonna leave maybe us we we who are seen as the powers that be the generals are like well we wouldn't we are only going to willing to pull out when it pull out when it looks good for my political career. Yeah. You think that's not a thing?

Like, absolutely. Of course. No, no, no. Well, that's what – you saw that thing from Matt Zeller where he was on MSNBC and he said that he told them over and over again, plan for this, but they were more concerned about looking bad than actually solving – planning for the problem. And now they look bad because of it. Plus you've got guys who – and I'm sure you know this dynamic well it's hey we can't pull out now i got a deployment coming up i just finished my training we're all ready to go we're about to do this you know i'm about to make rank so this is the last time this is my my chance to be in the seat in the hot seat on deployment

i'm not gonna skip my deployment i'm going no yeah no one wants to be a tabbed ranger who went overseas who never got to go overseas never never and has to go home and visit his family and run I'm not going to skip my deployment. I'm going. No one wants to be a tabbed ranger who went overseas, who never got to go overseas. Never, never. And has to go home and visit his family and run into his uncle who's annoying as possible, who was in the National Guard and he's got three deployments under his belt.

Exactly. No, that's 100% true. But it's that mentality that drives a lot of this decision-making too. I think it has influence on it. I wouldn't consider it a root cause. I think it's a symptom, not a cause. But very simply, Joe Biden could have done this right. Easily, yeah.

What would he have done different? Your opinion, anyway, Forrest. I'm going to build a foundation for this one first. This is going to be about a three-minute piece. Let's do it. But it's going to require layers. So if one first. This is going to be about a three-minute kind of piece. Let's do it. But it's going to require layers. So if you're looking at the situation in Afghanistan, you're looking at multiple layers of problems, multiple layers of failures.

One of them being, this is going to piss off a lot of people, but generally speaking, Afghanistan is a failed state. So it's not a unified people. It doesn't have a unified government. It's constantly in a state of upheaval. So if you're going to look at countries like China, America, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico even, Afghanistan culturally does not have the unity that even America has in our own fractured nonsense. So for them as a culture, some of it is still very much so i'm i'm really

only loyal to my tribe which makes sense but they don't have the they don't have the kind of trickling up effect of at least some sense of loyalty or some sense of unified cultural identity there are a lot of spurious connections between them but there's not a single unified cultural identity in there some of this is because of things that we just don't understand in the west and some of them are things that are a little bit more nuanced than just tribalism but there are issues within the afghan culture that which he saw because we spent 20 years and a lot well we spent all this time and money building an american or an afghan military and as soon as they saw the taliban coming they're like ah you know

here's the guns we're good they gave up the weapons so that's the first layer the second layer is that so much of the american military's leadership was more concerned about the opinions of people that don't even like them or are actively working against them they're so worried about american news agencies writing hit pieces on them because then their political career is done. Because once you get past a certain level in the American military on the officer scale, you become an inherently political position. And so the American body politic – I mean, at this point, you get that first – I mean, you become an officer, you're a politician. Exactly.

Well, I don't even know what the lieutenant looks like anymore, but I would expect some. Because if you're going to put that much investment into it, you're half to being, at least hoping to look far enough in, that you're going to go on for a colonel and move your way up there. And then the third part that comes into this one is the American cultural issue of we didn't

as a culture come to terms with what we were trying to accomplish there, nor did we as a culture believe to terms with what we were trying to accomplish there nor did we as a culture believe in our own values enough to try to transpose them into this country if we think certain things are good like we're not even like representative government as a value we did not pass that on to the afghan people or they did not root it in they did not take root of that so we were talking about afghanistan is a multi-layered problem, you're dealing with bureaucrats making rules of engagement for the people who are on the ground. In the words of a good friend of mine, you have people who are

non-threats. And what I mean by non-threat is they have no strategic value. If an if if you if the if the an opposing force were to encounter them they wouldn't even take them seriously right so this person is so disconnected from the american military the concept of war but somehow they're being allowed to make rules of engagement for navy seals army rangers delta force guys where now you've got the guys who signed the paper chose to do it and don't get me wrong, those people are responsible too because they listened to bad leadership if they did, when they did, if they did. And it's not just a blanket statement, well, the leadership is bad, because you're your own person. American rugged individualism begins at the person, and the American military gave that up as the American culture has been giving that up. So layer one, Afghanistan was never going to become a glorious utopia.

Layer two, the more concerned about what my American constituents are going to say. And then layer three is on a cultural level. We gave up the fact that I as an individual, it's my responsibility. If I'm the one carrying the firearm, I am the one who's responsible for it. And it's not that the people on the ground gave that up. It's that their political leadership took that from them. Going back to Nicholas Nassim Taleb, if you want to read three books of his, Black Swan, Anti-Fragile, Skin in the Game. Skin in the Game means if I'm the guy on the ground, I know that I can make decisions

because I know that if I'm looking at a combatant or non-combatant, I can make that decision. If my leadership does not believe that I can make that decision but instead puts rules of engagement, which I don't even get to engage that part of my mind, then they have failed. The apparatus that is the American concept of war failed in Afghanistan, which is no surprise why China would be willing to push it. So suddenly an E4 tip of the spear, you're thinking, oh, well, I'm the bottom of this echelon.

I have this whole hierarchy above me. Keep giving me the rules of order to making these strategic decisions, giving me commander's intent. But instead, because you're the one who's there and then you've got someone on the other side that's taking your picture or that's portraying your actions or misportraying your actions. You are now the face of U.S. government policy. You're the face of the, you know, or in their terms, the way they would like to portray it, of course, as the evil Western occupying empire that is crushing their land for 20 years. And let's face it, if you were, you know, if you were someone in Afghanistan who's 18 years old right now, right, you don't know what 9-11 was. That's like something you read about, you know, or maybe you saw a video of, but you just know that you've been living in a country your entire life as you've been growing up and seeing foreign soldiers walking around,

occupying your country, telling your government what to do. And then you've got some people saying, oh, just go along with them, even though they don't speak your language, they don't have your values, they don't share your religion, they don't share your culture. And then you've got another group that says, no, follow us. Let's get rid of them. Let's talk about the rules of engagement, though. Let's talk. Have you guys, I'm assuming you probably have, experienced things where it's like it makes no sense? Absolutely.

Absolutely. So, yeah, elaborate. Forrest Cooper, team leader 2013, was explained that I have to tell the people that I'm in charge of. I'm a team leader. I'm in charge of guys. I have to explain to them that in the event there's a man standing in his doorway with a belt-fed machine gun shooting at your people, we are not allowed to return fire with effective weaponry because there's the possibility that somebody might be standing behind him in his house. What?

A belt-fed machine gun in his door. Yep. And so the appropriate response at that time was to pull back to a safe situation where you can contain it without receiving effective fire. Okay. Now we're using military jargon. Well, you can contain the situation without receiving effective fire, which is anywhere between 50 yards and 300 yards or whatever. And then wait for him to stop shooting. That's amazing. How? Well, I mean, they run out

eventually. Yeah. Theoretically. Okay, so let's make another very important distinction. When your job is you are in a special operations unit and you're tasked with performing things like a night raid where you go, we're going to go after perfect most famous night raid ever, going after Osama bin Laden. Right?

So if they had told the guys going after Osama bin Laden that you're not allowed to shoot unless you're being shot at. Okay. Think about that dynamic really quickly. Yeah. Okay, think about that dynamic really quickly. You're being employed by the American military to go after a specific target, but you're supposed to also act like you're a beat cop in Chicago, and you're not allowed to actually engage with the targets that you know are armed and preparing to fight against you until you have some sort of checkmark from somebody else who has no skin in the game

that confirms that you have received effective fire from somebody this is really interesting we were looking at this graph the other day that lydia had pulled up showing the different jobs by political affiliation and it's like you know army ranger probably tends to be more conservative and then bureaucrat who sets policy for armies army ranger probably tends to be more liberal or something that effect you're going to get people who don't do the job telling you how to do the job they commanded you to as a tactic a battle tactic is way for the enemy to stop fighting that was a great tactic it was also our strategy it wasn't it wasn't a tactic it was enforced by law if i broke that because i was like oh well you

know what i'm a designated marksman i know that I can make this shot at this yardage, and I know that I'm not being shot at right now. I am fully trained and confident in that ability, have the equipment and the situation that presents it. If I even completed that, then I would go home from the mission and have to face lawyer at well not lawyer but i have to face an entire effectively court appearance overseas by americans basically trying to figure out whether or not they can throw me in is this like does this happen where someone will by the way you've got you've probably got three or four activist jags looking to make rank that look at you and say aha we've got a situation where somebody broke the rules they're not looking at what your mission was or what your objective was or what the context of that particular objective was.

They're looking at how can I make rank as a JAG, that's a military lawyer, by going after somebody, prosecuting them, and winning. Precisely. So you could save three people's lives and then they would persecute. Does that happen? That's completely irrelevant.

You didn't save their lives. You just failed to accidentally hurt them. Right. Like, if there was going to be a firefight, and the guy with the machine gun was going to mow down three of your guys, and then they were going to mow him down, but you prevented that by sniping the guy. How did you know he was going to attack your people?

Yeah, right. There's no way to know. He's opening fire with a machine gun. How do we know that he's trying to hurt someone? Or what if he's got a machine gun, and he's, like, literally feeding the what if he's got a machine gun and he's like literally feeding the belt in it while staring at you frantically?

Do people go through this court process knowing that they save people's lives by disobeying an order and they're like, you know what, I did the right thing and then they get their careers

trashed and they're thrown in prison? Yes. They do not care. They do not care. Remember, there was even, I mean, it goes even further than this

with, I don't know how much we can talk about the, I don't even know how to say it. But basically, there was a situation where there would be underage boys on and around U.S. military bases. And I'm trying to be very YouTube friendly with this. And there are specific terms for that. I have no idea whether youtube has an issue with the afghani terms for that yeah probably but just not gonna say it is a horrifying um but there

would be times where i'm sure you know these stories as well where u.s soldiers would say i can't take this anymore i can't live with myself and they would step up and try to stop it times where it was happening where young boys are being abused are being abused yes uh boys are being abused but it was known about they were told to shut up about it i mean the new york times has covered this extensively um this was being done by afghan military officers police officers and even times where people lose their careers get prosecuted for getting involved with this and trying to stop it right so you're trying to stop them so not not even talking about rules of engagement which which is obviously a completely separate thing this is just you know right and wrong right kind of stuff and they said well

oh that's just a cultural difference you you just you know you have to let them is that what we're trying to prop up you're you're a company commander you're in charge of 130 guys plus a couple of more, and then your company is attached to an Afghan company, and you're supposed to be working with each other. Well, they're attached to you. Fine. And because you understand that you need to integrate your forces so that they can work well together, otherwise it's just going to be two completely useless bodies. Well, one's going to be very useful and one's going to be very lost.

You can figure that out for yourself um uh land nav is not an officer especially uh so but you can take this issue and you're working with some of us can recompense this in 1970 oh so uh back to the joke um uh you know i went to ranger school i know how that works uh but so in that one you have and you're working with you're working with a you have a host nation cohort and you know they're participating in not just casual corruption like issues where it's not just money being exchanged but many many worse things and instead of being able to say this is not the what we're going to represent to our, we're not going to this because they're we're gonna put a stop to this in this connected force and you get sidelined because it wasn't politically operative or optimal that's what

you're dealing with right yep man virtue be damned war is messed up and so you talk about the ptsd ramifications of that you talk the 22 veteran suicides a day that obviously this is something that's driving, you know, and you're right, by the way, that's that is the different cultural values. It is a very Western cultural value that if you see something like see something, say something, how many times do we say that? Right. But that's not the same in all cultures, right? And other cultures, they'll say, well, I don't know that person, and I'm not involved in that, so why should I get involved? We would encounter villages, towns, and areas where a person would be targeted because he was 100% confirmed being a bomb manufacturer intended to do harm on whoever, right? And they have their little compound with their walls, and in that compound they're building explosives

for the purpose of maiming and killing American soldiers and Afghan citizens. Their neighbor will know about it and say, it's not on my property, so I don't care. Correct. I do not care that my neighbor, oh, yeah, yeah, my neighbor, well, that's one dynamic, right? They'll be like, neighbor oh yeah yeah my neighbor and well that's one dynamic right they'll be like oh yeah my neighbor works for the taliban he builds bombs and you're like thanks but then you then you also have to deal with the secondary layer of you and i are neighbors you're the american government and you and i are in a feud and i'll be like you know i

want some of his land but I won't tell you that. I'll be like, yeah, he builds bombs. That's like the Soviet Union. My friends who are from there have said similar stories where I was hanging out in an apartment, and my friend told me that she's like, hey, you know the apartment next to this one? Back during the Soviet Union, there were two neighbors, and they were feuding with each other, so the person who lived here just called the Communist Party and said they were badmouthing the party. And a day later, their apartment was empty.

Yep. It's a nightmarish way to live, man. We're screwed up. Because you're talking about values. You're talking about an American value, at least a Western value, is this idea that we know our neighbors and we at least hold them to a certain level of accountability. To some extent. At least to some – i mean that might yeah like if you're in the u.s right and i see my next door neighbor like like beating their dog or something or their kid or whatever it is like you're gonna call the cops most likely yeah you

are going i mean nine times out of ten someone in the u.s is gonna say all right i'm gonna pick up the phone and do something about that because that's wrong right i see that's wrong other parts of the world it's hey that's their that's their dog. That's their kid. Maybe they did something wrong. Yeah, and there's a left and right limit to that for sure. Sure. Because then you run into the Minneapolis problem of, well, they didn't have a Black Lives Matter flag outside their house, so let's burn it down next time. Well, you've seen the riots in Hamburg during, I think it was the G20 or whatever.

All the windows are smashed out except for one. There's a photo. All the windows smashed out except for one, and it's got the communist fist in the window that's the one that gets that it gets it gets left alone but i i i've been studying a lot of like war history and a lot of times it's like you know the the army goes into the city they they kill most of the male fighters and then they rape the women and pillage and burn the city this doesn't always happen but it was pretty pretty frequent like normal the commander be like okay he lets his troops pillage because burn the city. This doesn't always happen, but it was pretty frequent, like normal. The commander would be like, okay, he lets his troops pillage because if he doesn't, they're going to mutiny and kill him.

So he lets his troops. But we've gone the opposite direction with the Geneva Convention and the American military permanent proper, like making sure you don't upset your foes before you kill them. And I wonder if we've gone too far. Like war, the one that tries to fight with honor is the one that loses. I mean, we learned that in the Revolutionary War. You see that in World War I. I wouldn't be so cynical as not willing to fight with honor.

I think that's a bit of a hyper-simplification. Okay, you definitely are. So an example of what your metaphor, your example does come out is, so you go into an Afghan town, you kick down a door, and you find the character that you're looking for. Now you have to pay the family, the American equivalent of the fanciest door, to the family because you kicked down the door. Because could you have done it without kicking down the door? Like, dude, he's a terrorist. Why do I have to pay the family for the door? Well, because you did damage to the property like we were going after him because he was facilitating insert one of these issues he was doing one of these things

like we didn't just go after him willy-nilly because his name is whatever it's you know you go after a guy he's he's building bombs he's facilitating fighters he's in he's he's he's he's uh recruiting recruiting he's whatever i mean you could figure out any of the answer. So you go into the village. You have your target structure. You hit the building. And then afterwards, you're like, well, now we have to pay the family for the door. American police, if they kick a door down, they don't pay for the door of American citizens. Would you look at that?

American police and military differences. There's a lot of big ethical and moral questions that arise from what's going on in Afghanistan. And the first is, you know, you mentioned the horrible things that they do. They have this really disgusting practice that we can't really talk about on YouTube, but it's child abuse. And actually, that's one of the things, just to get into the more complexity of it, that's one of the things that the Taliban was against. And so one of the ways that they originally, and Mullah Omar and Kandahar were rising to power was because they were, essentially they would find out about stuff like that going on

and then execute people in the streets. And so people would say they were so sick of it, they'd say, okay, well, let's go for this extreme reaction. Let's join in with these guys because at least they'll do something about it. So I think about the US being in this foreign land where a bunch of people don't like them as you pointed out they don't speak the language don't even look like you they're a bunch of imperial powerful troopers who come in and tell you how to live and what you have to do

and there were people who were there who were like no way they were going to resist by any means necessary the problem i see is i don't think we should have been there if we wanted to go after al-qaeda that i understand sticking around for nation building and occupying this country results in people resisting you and for all of the really horrifying things i would personally wish they were not doing i don't know if that is justification for the u.s being the world police for every single issue like that because if we were going to go into every country where they had a problem like that we'd be occupying the you know uh north africa for for everything that's happening like with the slave trade now i could i could sit here for hours and tell you about you know country after country

that's that's conducting we can't do it moral atrocity and there's always going to be a rwanda out there if we're going to go after somebody though we better go after them that's the issue that i have this is what this is where i come from the on the ground guy right exactly so it's like again if you've trained guys you spend millions of dollars to train dudes to be really good at what they're doing where the american when this was the initial the the initial operations in afghanistan october 2011 was just that look at those kind of things right like look at the the abilities of the of the american warfighter uh jawbreaker right i don't remember because if it was if we're talking about like 2001 it's like jawbreaker anaconda like some of those really early and i was really young of course of course um and and i will not

pretend to be the most astute historian in american military history um because is especially when you look at the global war in terror it it gets bigger the more you look into it. Oh, yeah. But a very simple answer is you let the people who you've trained to do the job do the job. You don't put artificial barriers for them. So when we're talking about Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Delta Force, Special Forces guys, it's like, okay, what's the mission? Dismantle theiban's network in this

area okay go do that and go do that to the best of your ability and just keep doing that until you've accomplished the the dissolution of the taliban network no we don't really want to go after the taliban network anymore now we want to engage in nation building because it looks better for our constituents i got a question about afghan When the U.S. went in, did they set up a bunch of checkpoints requiring identification from the citizenry? Eventually. Eventually. Yeah, they had to. I mean, a checkpoint is also a method of area denial.

It's not as simple as saying, well, we're here for papers, please. It's a way to... A checkpoint is an uncomfortable way of saying it's going to get people's attention and so we can observe people. It's a third order move. It's a third order move, right? So if I put a checkpoint out here, I can also watch how people

move around that checkpoint. Or maybe if that checkpoint is so that they can't come into the embassy, that's pretty straightforward straight but i'm going for a segue here so did you ever force people if they want was there ever a policy where it was like people could not freely use services anywhere during this these operations unless they had id to prove who they were or what you know what they were doing i think i see where this is going oh you see where this is going i'm making a point about a military occupation versus what we're seeing in our country right now yeah that was too special checkpoints you were what i said i was too special for checkpoints it's a big general knowledge

no it's that segue that's an inflated ego conversation i think i think what we could say though is that there was a lot certainly a lot of vetting that went on for people that were in these uh these joint units people who are allowed to join the ana uh also people who served as contractors um of host nation uh nationals that were serving on bases there's a ton of vetting that went into this there were biometrics that were were conducted and that even with all of this vetting that was done, you still had a massive amount of what were called green on blue attacks. And you cannot talk about resettling Afghanistan refugees in quote unquote refugees in the United States without confronting that very real fact that even the people who were vetted in many times. This is what we're talking about.

Stream vetting. Right. Yeah. We're still these green and blue attacks yeah what's a green on blue so green on blue attack means so blue forces is like me and my allies that's my buddies red forces that's the bad guy

that's that's that's the enemy right but green is the sort of you know you're a host nation national your host country national or you know you're so you're someone who's working for us in a in a contractor capacity you're a host country national, or you're someone who's working for us in a contractor capacity, you're in a civilian capacity, but you're not one of our

allies in uniform, right? I knew a guy who got the defect. He got shot in the cafeteria as he was waiting in line to get chow one day by someone who was working there. Just got shot in the stomach. Wow, just waiting in line. For the knuckle draggers out there like me in that sense, well, by someone who was working there. Just got shot in the stomach. Wow. Just waiting in line.

For the knuckle draggers out there like me in that sense, well, okay. So for that sense, green on blue, green is Afghan. In this scenario, green was the Afghan military, and then blue was American. Right. Sometimes it was accidental. Sometimes it was not accidental. Man. So.

Well, so the point I was trying to get to was I was trying to be rather disparaging of New York, considering we were talking about war and all that, and hearing about just the things that you were able to and not able to do. And then I think about what's happening in our own country, and it kind of feels like it's beyond occupation, right? So my question was general, not that you ever operated a checkpoint or – There were checkpoints. Right, right, right. operated a checkpoint or there were checkpoints right and by the time i was i was more involved by the time i spent more time in kabul most of those checkpoints within the city were run by afghan nationals which there was there there was easily examples of layers of corruption there bribes beyond reason i mean it doesn't matter but there were checkpoints within major cities and there were also checkpoints um between certain political standpoints actually my

my one jsoc buddy always has this great line about that it's it's quick i know you want to segue but you got to hear this one so it because it talks about the moral differences right so he would say in the united states we consider it corrupt if you are a government official and you give jobs to your family in afghanistan you are considered corrupt if you're a government official and you give jobs to your family. In Afghanistan, you are considered corrupt if you're a government official and you don't give jobs to your family. So now what we have here in the U.S., in New York, is substantially worse than any kind of checkpoint or, you know, I guess general search in a designated area. We have, you can't enter buildings without an ID.

So I actually, I don't know if you guys saw, I was on Fox News earlier. And for those watching the clip, they'll probably put a clip up of it. Because I did, as I've been mentioning for the past couple of days, I did a bunch of phone calls. I called the city. And what's happening in New York is substantially worse than a military occupation. You have to fire your employees if they have a disability, barring them from vaccination. You want to enter any building, you got to have an ID. A company must terminate their employees.

And so I'm thinking about this stuff. I'm like, how did we get to the point where New York has basically violated civil rights law across the board from the federal government? And how does this happen? How does it happen that in our own cities, you know, you can't even, you can't even shoot at a guy if he's got a machine gun pointed at you. But in New York, they can straight up say the ADA is in the toilet. We can do whatever we want. It's a million times. Well, there's a lot, there's a lot worse with actual military conflict, but I tell you, man, the Nazis, they went after the disabled first. And now we're at the point where we're watching this in four cities.

You've got L.A., S.F., New Orleans, and New York under these lockdowns. You are getting to a situation in the United States where it's really amazing. And you could get into the moral and ideological implications of why this is. But it is medical apartheid you are having people that are being told because of their personal decisions or their personal medical history that they are no longer allowed to participate in society and those same people are also if you watch certain other media, a lot of mainstream media now, they are being demonized.

They are being otherized. They are being labeled. And they are being more and more, and when I say demonized, I really mean that. Because the President of the United States just gave a speech today. Joe Biden gave a speech today talking about how it's the unvaccinated's fault that all this is going on. It is your fault. You are the ones that, you are the reason that this pandemic is still going on.

You need to do this. We need to push this in those governors that are standing in the way of masks. They're standing in the way of mandates. They need to stop and they need to get with the program. You know, you know, word I like that everyone seems to be using now. Anathematize. What's that mean? It's like a condemnation from the cathedral, That's a good word. Like an official curse or condemnation from the authority.

So that's what we're seeing. I guess what would the word be? The anathematization of groups of people, be it because they have personal medical issues that aren't necessarily disabilities, but they have to make hard choices or because they have just personal choice. And by all means, I'm sure that people can, you want to make an argument and say, well, your personal choice is bad for us. I don't choose to drive drunk. I'm like, okay, that's not the same argument, but I'll tell you this. What about somebody who goes to the doctor and the doctor says no. And now when you go to these restaurants, what happens? They say, I'm sorry, you're fired because of your disability. But it's not it's not I don't want to make it seem like nobody's fighting back because we do have an article from over at Timcast dot com.

Restaurants sue Mayor Bill de Blasio over vaccine passport mandate. A group of restaurants and businesses in New York City have filed a lawsuit against Mayor Bill de Blasio over the vaccine passport. And this is interesting. They mentioned there is no there's no medical exemptions there's there's exemptions for celebrities performers yeah that's right if you book a show you don't got to be a celebrity book a show you're good don't worry about it we don't we don't we don't we don't need that from you the new york post reports and the lawsuit filed on tuesday in staten island supreme court the businesses argued the mandate violates their constitutional rights and unfairly targets certain establishments because churches,

grocery stores, schools, offices, and medical facilities do not have the same strict requirement. Additionally, the mandate does not make any allowances for people who cannot get the vaccine or already have antibodies from having the virus. It makes no exception for people allergic to the ingredients in the vaccines, have religious beliefs against them, or have pre-existing conditions. So one of our friends made a phone call and asked a restaurant if they would bar someone with a disability from coming in. As you guys know, I talked about how I made this phone call. And they said, I'm sorry, regardless, if you don't have the vaccine, you can't come in. And he said, what about a Jewish person?

Would you let them in? And they said, what do you mean? Like, mean like if they were instructed you know because of their religious beliefs they couldn't and they're like oh absolutely not there wouldn't be a lot in the establishment their religious beliefs do not give you any kind of exemption from from this well and by the way you know as um you know as the uh the category token catholic on the on the podcast and since no sh Shimcast tonight unfortunately but and really just for Christians as well though

that so in the Catholic faith and in the Christian faith abortion is obviously something that's completely against our religion it is throughout the Bible etc etc not to get into all that but it is 100% against.

A lot of the vaccines used aborted fetuses in their development. And so a lot of people have looked at that in good faith and say, look, this is just against my religious beliefs to use something that benefited and was created through abortion. That this is something that is completely against our religious beliefs. It's something that we believe in our core and it's something that we completely reject. And it goes deeper, too, because you're using the term anathema. And that term has a long history. I mean, being Catholic, I would figure the history of the term anathema, I am being able to whether it was. And so I'm not Catholic. I'm reformed. But I'm in that sense. We may have different beliefs, but the concept remains the same. It is as if somebody were to say you are no longer or you are not saved. We are cut off from the grace of Christ. So that's a heavy thing to say. And your parallel to it, though, is very important here because you're also now dealing in major cultural differences that we're starting to see

on the metaphysics level. We believe in a difference between positive and negative rights. So a negative right is such that I cannot impose on something to you. I cannot. It is befouling your rights. It is... I have a great way to explain positive and negative rights. A negative right to life means I can't kill someone. A positive right to life means I'm obligated to try and save you if I see you dying.

Yes, and we don't believe in the same positive rights. As in, I don't have to go out of my way to prevent you from something. But what you're seeing, especially in this example, is that people are viewing the conscious decision not to get the vaccine as a violation of somebody else's negative rights.

You're seeing this in the light, but this is nothing new. This is nothing new. We've been seeing it on the colleges for years. You know, silence is violence. It's all the same thing. You know, people were saying for the longest time, once these college kids get out of school

and see the real world, and I said it how many times? I probably said it 500 times over the past couple of years. Yeah, once these kids get into the real world, however, I want to be fair to myself and say I still have always said, but maybe what happens is they graduate college and get jobs here and the companies just do what they want, I guess. Yeah, they do.

They get jobs in HR and then they control your company and then they tell you who that you can and cannot hire based on race and gender and because – or whatever Ibram X. Kendi says today well i wasn't i wasn't actually going to go into this but you just gave us a good way to put in it put it out that when you said it is your connection from the source of grace right that is anathema well that is what they see themselves as doing right right so these government leaders political leaders establishment leaders they view the power of government and good society as being on the side of grace as but that's why the term the cathedral is used so often right it's because we are on the side of the angels this our progressive world sphere and our control over this part of society is grace and there is nothing higher right because they're materialistic even so this is it even if you have broken one of our social commandments, then we must cut you off. But it's materialism as well.

It's straight up. It's not even the metaphysical. It's not even the grace. It's literally like the you want to use our banks. It's all materialism. It's a religion of the materialistic. Here's another way of dividing that question. Are you saying that the issue with their belief system is that they

believe it or is it the belief system itself they view this is again i'm going to actually tie this into a similarity between something like uh russian communism the government is god the government is holy they got everything the government says it's like a great example would be the first episode of that hbo miniseries on chernobyl well the government just said it couldn't happen, so it's not happening. They believe themselves as the author and dictator of reality. That's how so convoluted they got. Now you're looking at early stage issues with that, where are you saying that the problem that you have with their belief system

is that they believe it so wholly? They believe in the holiness of the state so well? Or is it the fact that they believe it itself, or believe in the holiness of the state so well or is it is it the fact that they believe it itself or is it the belief is it what they believe or that they believe it because i would say something like i believe that i insert some easy one i believe that murder is wrong okay so and i believe that with absolute conviction that for me to just go murder out of greed or whatever is wrong. Okay, so I believe that with absolute conviction. Am I wrong because I believe it or is my belief wrong? the new inquisition, non-Catholic church, but the new inquisition of the state

as being holy, I think that's where it's wrong, that they view themselves wrong. Well, no, it's not both wrong because I can't fault them for believing something, but I can say that their belief is wrong. Yeah, they believe that the government is telling them the truth. They believe

in the power of the state. What they believe is kind of all changes by the day, depending on what the CDC comes out with. The state is bigger than the truth. They believe in the power of the state. What they believe is kind of all changes by the day depending on what the CDC comes out with. The state is bigger than the government. The CCP believes in their accomplishments. They believe in their... They believe it was given to them by heaven. Or whatever.

Do they, though? Do they really? I don't know. I mean, maybe, maybe not, but they believe it, and so we can't fault people for believing things alone. Let's put it this way. It's not just the belief.'s the enforcement that's the issue right the issue is the enforcement

of the belief if there is somebody out there that you know praises the national register and you see these people who actually have little like shrines to dr fauci in their homes while they call trump supporters a cult um and they're singing you know, Broadway musicals that they've changed the words out and put in with Dr. Fauci that they are quite literally, they are quite literally making him as an avatar of government and idol, right? They are idolizing government. And so they are making government in this case, the state and writ large, the overstate, if you combine academia and some elements of the corporate sphere in this, that they are then enforcing that through what you just said in New York. They're cultural institutions.

Now the cultural institutions are enforcing that belief on everybody. And that's the issue. I have this tweet from political Math on Twitter, Polymath. It's a clip from Stephen Colbert's show where he likens Trump voters to the Taliban. Oh, yeah, totally. And Polymath says there are two options. This is a rhetorical game,

and people like Colbert are so frightened by reality that they retreat to this harmless rhetorical marshmallow happy land where nothing means anything. Or two, they're serious, and they think we should kill trump supporters that's that's a horrifying prospect i think it's somewhere in between um i think it's also the idea that with what we're saying right now right they have this belief system they have this belief system in the power of this not just the power of the state, but the grace of the state, the grace of the overstate. And so the Taliban refuses to believe in the grace of the state.

Trump supporters refuse to believe in the grace of the state. But it's you know, it's like one of those logic equations where that that doesn't mean that they believe the same things as the Taliban equivalency. It's a false equivalency. You know, I have a I have a Twitter thread I'd like to pull up and show y'all guys something. Whenever there is an apocalyptic news cycle, I always start the tweet with, I don't want to set the world on fire. I just want to start a flame in your heart, which of course is a Fallout

reference for those that are fans. And it's just the imagery of that song playing, for those that are familiar with Fallout 3, is that you see DC in a wasteland. It's a nuclear wasteland and it's playing this old song from, I think, the 50s or something like that. And that's why I write it.

And I've pulled up, let's see, we got here. We got four, we got eight, we got 16. I literally have the entire playlist right here. There you go. I've got 16 articles I pulled up about supply chain collapse. And the reason I pulled this up is because there's a big story about Nando's food,

Nando's shortage. 50 restaurants were shut down in the UK because of a chicken shortage. So I've been tracking the food shortage story for some time and also the food inflation story. And the one thing I've said over and over again is that for some reason, the mainstream news cycle is not talking about the food shortage, of which there is one. And maybe for the most part you don't notice because a shortage of food in certain areas just means you eat something else because we still have a lot of food. Or also it could just mean you're paying more and slowly starting to notice. Maybe you see Joe Biden increase food benefits because prices are going up. That also happens. And the reason I bring this up is after I showed the 16 articles

saying things like Nando's closes 45 restaurants, Rogue Valley restaurants facing food shortage, Burger King, Popeye say labor shortage and food shortages are causing prices to increase, understaffed Colorado restaurants. It's not just food, it's also labor. I then show this. The one thing you know I love to cite,

particularly over the past week, how would you rate the condition of the national economy right now? Democratic voters say 57% fairly good. I did a Google search for food shortage and it's page after page after page, all in the last week of all these localities saying we have shortages of this, that or otherwise. Chinese food restaurants across the country have been reporting it in various jurisdictions. But because CNN doesn't say it, it must not exist. And that is the cathedral, the religion these people follow. How in how could anyone who watches the news, legitimate news with a critical mind, believe

the economy is going well? We had four million resignations in April. They're calling it the great resignation. They say more are coming. They say, oh, but look, we added 950,000 or so jobs this past month, but we also have 10 million, a record job openings because people are quitting. More people are quitting. We may be adding jobs. People are quitting. You've got a food shortage. You've got Nando's shutting down. And yet you still have people. Look at this. Here's the best part. During Donald Trump, I think it's fair to say the Democrats believed the economy was pretty good during Donald Trump, even though they didn't

like the guy. I can respect that. They believe that it was fairly good, not very good. But then something happened. The coronavirus stock market crash and there was an inversion all of a sudden now the democrats felt everything was bad and do you know what date it was january 20th that that started to flip what a great january january 20th good guess the moment joe was joe biden gets elected it was a little dip after Election Day. But after Joe Biden is inaugurated, the Democrats who felt the economy was very bad plummeted. And the Democrats who felt the economy was good skyrocketed simply by virtue of having a different president. All of a sudden, the economy was good. I got to say, I don't think any of those numbers have any value.

It sounds like they're just voting whether or not they like the president. Exactly. But think about what that means. When you look at independent voters and Republican voters, they track more with the truth. But this also goes back to what we were just saying. When you view your theological belief as through the lens of the state, so you believe in the grace of the state. I want to tease this out a little bit more then the leader of the state right is now also the leader of your religion and he preaches to you so he preaches to you right so if you're if you're you know pope all of a

sudden becomes donald trump and you're an avowed liberal Democrat, right? This kind of explains some of the reaction that you got to that, right? This where it was a visceral, emotional experience that they had when he was elected versus a lot of people who looked at it and said, oh, you know, I didn't vote that way. I guess we'll have somebody else in the office for a term. I have to imagine it must be like being Catholic and seeing the devil literally rise from the ground. You'd be freaking out. Yes. Yeah, well, the conservatives view a separation of church and state as in I recognize that I have my religion and then I have – well, maybe not all.

This is a gross exaggeration. But the idea of the separation of church and state can collapse in two different directions. You can either have the church become the state and eat the state, where you saw a lot of the conflicts in the medieval ages as they're prescribed by non-literate historians. And then you have the communist example where they dissolve the church and take on its authorities. What is the difference between the church and the state? The state is the sword, the church is the pulpit. So the church tells you what is right, but does not have the ability to enforce it with the sword. The state has the sword, but does not have the ability to dictate to you what is right. Because the state, the sword is only there to honor contracts and protect rights, not dictate morality. So if I go to a pastor and a pastor says, tithe, or don't cheat on your wife, or some sort of positive thing, like, you know what, if you need,

if you want to do some good, here's a, here's some charity you can participate in. That's different than the state coming to you and saying, we're, you're going to do what we tell you is good, or we'll use the sword against you. And then, you're talking about this this pope nature yeah these people don't believe that the economy is bad because their savior is in our is is there like it's it's because joe biden's but but even even when trump was president before covid there was still it was over 60 percent in uh oh i'm sorry that was obama when when yeah no no hold on hold on i'm looking at one part sorry it's from from i guess i'm confused all the time from 60 percent down to 40 before covid so it was between 40 and 60 percent of democrats felt the economy was fairly good under donald trump only 40 is still pretty high

right right that's why i don't want to make it seem like right you know under obama it was like 65 thought the economy was very good. Donald Trump got elected. There was a little drop-off, which is kind of hilarious, but only a little one. And it stayed around 60% for a little bit. And then went down to 50% about, you know, a year later. And then down to 40%. And then COVID happened.

It hits the bottom. And then Biden gets elected and it goes right back up. So if we're using this as a measure of statistics, it's a set of facts, not evaluations. How would we evaluate the decisions of the people who – what are we trying to evaluate here? Are we trying to evaluate the opinion – the validity of the opinions of the people who changed their opinion on the economy based on whoever was in power? Let me put it this way. If I said to an independent or a Republican, do you think it is going to rain? They would look up at the sky and say, you know, that does look like a storm cloud. I think it might rain.

I would give it a 30% chance. So you get 100 independents and 100 Republicans and you ask them. And they all give you relatively similar answers. The independents lean more towards – more optimistic. It's probably going to be a little sunny. It'll clear up. But they all look and then you get about 40.

I think actually the plurality of negative is like 68 to 70% of independents and Republicans believe the economy is bad. So they're all looking up and they're going, that's a storm cloud. It's probably going to rain and some are like,

I don't know, I think it'll clear. And then you ask Democrats and instead of looking up at the sky, they look down at their phones. And then they scroll through Twitter and they say, no rain. Better check CNN. Nope, CNN says it's not going to rain. CNN says it's not raining, so it's not raining. And you're like,

but there's a cloud in the sky. So the governor of Minnesota is Governor Walz, also colloquially known as Lord Walz declares. Yeah, it's great. Lord Walz declares that today no one shall be doing indoor dining. That's what de Blasio's doing.

Although Wilhelm is demanding your papers. Wilhelm. Kaiser Wilhelm. Kaiser Wilhelm. That's his name. Was his name Warren Wilhelm? His original name, yeah. What would Kaiser mean?

Like a title? It's like Caesar. Oh okay oh right of course caesar would it would it would it sound too cool to call de blasio kaiser wilhelm no we should definitely do that a hundred percent kaiser yes kaiser we will uh absolutely show our papers you know the thing about new york is that you need your id to get in let alone the vaccine passport no id sorry so that's what that's like 70 of the black community in new york can't go inside buildings anymore but you know what you know what you know what honestly though i'm willing to bet up in like the bronx and harlem they're not checking what are they going to do they don't have the means to do it like what i mean by that like if i'm going into a like a corner store like a bodega or something are they really going to sit there and be like –

I don't think you need it for that. Not for that, but like a sit-down restaurant. But that could be Taco Bell. What about a stand? What about like a food truck? You're allowed to walk into a restaurant for takeout. So takeout is fine. Right, right.

So what I mean by the means is that these restaurants have to hire someone to sit at the door and do vaccine checks now. Like when you're carding someone at a bar. Yeah, and so most of the places that have the ability to do this are in Manhattan. They're not in Central Brooklyn or South Brooklyn. It's not Flatbush Avenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, probably in the hipster areas. Do you want to go into business with me?

I want to start a business where we just vaccine check and we only take bribes. Yes, this sounds lucrative. Actually, you know. Afghanistan, it'll be called. You are vaccinated. You might want to regret that because I'm willing to bet a company will pop up in New York right now that says we do vaccine checks and they contract to all the businesses. And then they could easily have 30,000 employees in a week. I'm looking forward to the black market that's going to rise up, like the prohibition market,

like we saw with alcohol, the speakeasies. Restaurants and basements. All the groups, organizations of speakeasies that are going to now. It's going to be a genre. It's going to be an industry. You're right. Yeah. Dude, it did so much damage to the American people and the economy and everything trying

to prohibit alcohol. Like, haven't we learned our lesson? We see what prohibiting weed has done to society we want to talk about group psychosis you remove the weed and make people feel bad for it so you want you want to here's the silver lining to that so today is the 18th of august 2021 today's the last day for comment on the atf's attempt to redefine what a receiver is for a firearm they're trying to go after 80 lowers and blah today's the last day to comment on it, so if you haven't, please do. And you can find more of that on recoilweb.com if you have to.

Shameless plug. But here's the silver lining. We just watched the American government, so great and powerful that it be, accidentally lose a bunch of belt-fed machine guns, night vision equipment, silencers, suppressors, rifles. Black Hawk helicopters. Black Hawk helicopters. Did the Taliban have to pay a Class 3 tax on any NFA regulated? We've been going after them for decades.

So here's the part of that solution in the silver lining is stop taking the clowns seriously. Right? So when David Chipman, they're trying to appoint David Chipman as the head of the ATF. He's that mass child murderer, isn't he? He was a participant in Waco. So, yes. And children were murdered at Waco. Yep.

Yep, there you go. Yes, I also don't want him to show up at my house tomorrow. Oh, okay. By the way, there you go. Yes, I also don't want him to show up at my house tomorrow. Oh, okay. By the way, not only unrepentant, he's a celebratory participant in Waco. Oh, yeah, he went on Reddit and lied about it.

He's gone on Reddit and defended it to the hilt, to the hilt about Waco. Not even a question of, you know, oh my gosh, I wish it hadn't gone that way, but, you know,

we had our crazy situation. He lied. He straight up lied about the people. Actually, you know, oh my gosh, I wish it hadn't gone that way, but we had our crazy situation. Just straight up lied about the people. Actually, you were telling us a good story before we went on. It's not exactly a story, but it's a really spurious connection of events. Well, it's what he did. It's what he said. Yeah, right? We shot a firearm. The first

time I came out here, we shot one of your firearms. It was a Beretta M82. Barrett. Barrett, I'm sorry. Barrett M82. 50 caliber. Semi-automatic. I know. I'm we shot one of your firearms. It was a Beretta M82. Barrett. Barrett. I'm sorry. Yeah. Barrett M82. 50 caliber. Yep. Semi-automatic. I know. I'm supposed to get my numbers right.

Or the name right. Those are words. So we shot a Barrett M82. And a friend of mine who was a gunsmith this week informed me on the origins of the barrett m82 so back in the days when the mujahideen were fighting against the russians the americans created the barrett m82 to use a common anti-vehicular round that was they'd been around for a while which was the 50 caliber round and they put it into a sniper rifle that was semi-automatic so you have to pull the trigger and then pull the trigger again so it's no fully automatic every you have to pull the trigger to shoot you around um and the advantage of that firearm was that it

could be used to take out certain russian helicopters that were plaguing afghanistan so that kind of gets ingrained in the cultural history of the firearm. And then a couple of years later, a decade and a year later, there's Waco. And what happens at Waco? Supposedly, according to David Chipman, somebody shot down a helicopter with a plane, with a sniper rifle, which would have been a Barrett. And all he's got to say is they had a Barrett so they shot down a helicopter and he can go in front of the American people digitally and in voice outright lie to them that

people at Waco shot down a plane with a Barrett.50 caliber. This is what he just had on Reddit. He went on Reddit and was making this argument. Yeah, it's not true. Completely not true. Did a helicopter get shot down? There was a helicopter that crashed if I'm not Yeah, it's not even... Completely not true. Did a helicopter get shot down? There was a helicopter that crashed, if I'm not mistaken, but it was not related to it.

Yeah, my understanding is it didn't happen. Yeah. No, it completely didn't happen. But what your point is, though, is that he was using this sort of cultural history of the weapons platform in order to basically, you know, not even deduce, but just sort of like connect, manipulate the narrative so that people would think that this helicopter had been shot down by them simply because they had a certain weapons platform. Or he could even say, well, they must have wanted to shoot down helicopters

because what else would you use a Barrett for? Was it confirmed that they had a Barrett? I wouldn't even be able to tell you. So if he were to come here to the cast castle and find out that Mr. Timothy Poole owns a Barrett, then he would say, oh, well, you must be shooting at helicopters, aren't you? That's the only thing you can do with them, right? That's the only thing you use it for. Well, shall we go to Super Chats, my friends?

If you haven't already, please smash that like button. Subscribe to this channel. Share the show with your friends. And go to TimCast.com. Become a member because we're going to have the members-only segment coming up around 11 or so p.m. But let's read. Weefie117 says, what's China? You mean East Taiwan?

No, we mean West Taiwan. West Taiwan. Yeah, yeah. All right. George Georgio. Oh, George Georg georgio sorry there you go tim with the fall of afghanistan the chinese communist party would make their move on taiwan after the 2022 beijing winter olympics do you guys agree no you don't think so no i don't think so no for reasons i outlined earlier i actually bet somebody a thousand dollars this week

that china will not invade tai Taiwan in the next 90 days. I'm going to get that $1,000. All right. Shock Trooper 333 says, hey, Tim, missed you yesterday. It was busy. I was deployed to Bagram Airfield for the end of the EVAC OFS, Operation Freedom's Sentinel. Trump's EVAC plan in Bagram was simple. All contractors were airlifted out months before we did.

So this, by the way, this, and so I want people to know this. Shout out to my friend Rahim Kassam, who had a huge scoop today, National Pulse, that back in June, the State Department actually canceled Trump's evac plan for Afghanistan that they had put in place. This was something that they had done prior to obviously the election. He had all the documents on this free beacon came out and said they eventually were able to confirm the whole thing, too. So massive, massive story.

Huge scandal, by the way, because then you've got, you know, Austin and Millie Millie, who, by the way, is considering, you know, possibly putting in for retirement after, you know, with maybe like, say, a month post-evac once this is all cleaned up. They just realized that you saw that press conference today. They looked like a deer in the headlights of realizing that. So you've been checkmated by the Taliban, right? Basically, it's like you're playing chess and you just like play to lose. And then the kid on the other side says, OK, well, I'll just do this, do this this and this and boom there you go now what now what move are you in and no consequences

none not whatsoever it doesn't matter you're the guy you're you're the guy on the ground you have all the consequences it's your fault yeah the guy in the chair the guy getting shot at yeah yeah that has to make split decisions like and and and and has to deal with you know you you go into a building under night vision and you're suddenly faced with a crying child and a woman, but you know there's a guy that just ran into that room with a gun, and you're the one making the decision. So what was it? In the long, long before time, when there was a problem in the village,

they would take a goat and put it on the field and then say the goat did it? Is that what it was? Escape goat. Is that where it comes from? Yeah, so you're the guy. Hey, don't look at me. I just told you what to do and how to to do it and that guy signed the paper is you're the one who did it so right all right we got an important one here robert pointer says hey tim james lindsey just put on an article where he discusses the tim pool gap put this to bed which is the chicken and which is the egg of wokeness culture or academia um

it's hard to understand what you mean by culture or academia. I will say academia is not the progenitor of wokeness, in my opinion. I do believe it is a contributing factor, but let me explain. Critical race theory has been around for a long time. Critical race theory ideas have been around for a long time. And there's a reason that I, on this show, draw a distinction between critical race theory and wokeness, because wokeness encompasses a whole bunch of other things, notably that

Democrats think the economy is good. There is this weird cult. Now, critical race theory became a component. Critical race applied principles became a component because certain people who followed these things saw what they could exploit and latch onto. So I'll put it this way. Wokeness is the giant beast flying around. It's the dragon.

And academia and these academics are basically small little parasites that jumped on its back and are now slowly crawling to its brain to try and control the beast

and guide it in a certain direction. So the argument was because I was talking with James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. They were the people

who pulled off the Sokol Squared hoax where they hoaxed these academic journals. I love that. That's so funny. Peter Boghossian was adamant it started in academia. Yes. I was adamant that it started because of algorithms. And before Facebook and these woke blogs and rage bait and before the social media manipulation, these ideas existed but were not prominent in the mainstream. It was only after algorithms started to perform before articles that mixed different

injustices together started to perform well that critical race theory, intersectionality, and these ideas started to become prominent, not because academia created them, but because social media manipulation allowed for them to latch on and rise to the top. But wokeness incorporates more than just those ideas. Look at the non-binary stuff, the envy stuff you see on Tumblr. That is not born from academia. It's born from 12-year-olds who are fed garbage in an algorithm. Look at the videos of the Finger Family Hitler videos where Hitler's doing Tai Chi with a female body, I female body, with the Incredible Hulk. That is not born out of academia. It's born out of algorithms fed to children. Children get these insane ideas from academia, but from a whole bunch

of other places. So to put it mildly, I think academia played a very outsized role, probably the largest role in the development of a lot of wokeness. But wokeness itself, I believe, is a product of algorithms telling you, if you want clicks, combine as many rage bait words as possible. Like Vice's article where they said trans women of color being attacked, you know, being subjects of police brutality, it's inseparable for the cause of Black Lives Matter. You put all those things in one link and then Google shows it to you if you search for each and any one of those words, which means if you have a community that cares about police, a community that cares about Black Lives Matter, a community that cares about trans issues, they will all search for one word and get a different word, but get the same article. So all of these companies

were incentivized to jam all of these words, creating a prominent critical race theory and intersectionality of which many academics now found themselves reaping the rewards of. But critical race theory has been around for decades and it wasn't prominent in the mainstream until algorithms and social media made it possible. And then people like Jack Dorsey hooked his mouth up to the toilet sewer line and started guzzling down his own refuse from his platform. And he went from the guy who said free speech wing of the free speech party. I don't think it was him who said, free speech wing of the free speech party. I don't think it was him.

I think it was one of the other Twitter guys. But you get the point. The company said, free speech wing of the free speech party. And then they plugged the sewer line into their own mouths, gargled down the garbage produced by their trash network. And now they all believe insane things. But to Jack Dorsey's credit, he tweeted out Rothbard's anatomy of the state to the shock of many libertarians.

Let's read more Superchats. I would disagree a little bit because I would move the chains back just a little bit further. And I would say wokeness is a natural extension and a natural outgrowth of materialism. And materialism arose because of the attacks on traditional morality in the West. That once you remove that, and you only make the material world the only thing that matters, that all of these things then arise. It's the cult of materialism. To be fair, we could continue to reduce everything down to that. Not that I disagree with anything that you said tactically. We could reduce it further and say, how did materialism come to overtake the United States?

A loss of faith in television. Modern manifestations. Right. So I'm just saying that you can look at the LexisNexis data before Facebook and the rage bait blogs, instances of the words like, you know, critical theory. But why don't we reject it? Why don't we reject it out of hand? This is where you get to the point. This is my saying.

If you had a traditional moral base in this country or in the West or a classic moral base, you would reject that stuff out of hand and it would remain relegated to those spheres or people would look at it and say, oh, that's silly. And if the academies believed in what they claimed to believe, they would have been a bastion against wokeness. Instead, they became an incubator for it. Correct. Ten years ago, this stuff was laughed off. And when the culture war started ramping up, I believe the Gamergate may have been the first major instance of the culture war, many people said, oh, you're online too much. This is meaningless.

What they didn't understand is that children were put in a rage bait incubator where they got either the anti-SJW side or they got the SJW side. Those kids who are 10 years old in 2011 are now 20 in 2021, and they're voting. And their whole world was shaped by wokeness on an ever-growing platform. 100%. The only thing they'd ever see on these platforms

was the rage bait garbage, and now they're getting jobs in media, and the ones who are a little bit older are getting jobs at the New York Times, and now we are seeing all the pronouns in the emails. You have to put the pronouns in your email block now. And now companies are mandating it, not because these kids went to college. A lot of

people go to college and complain about this stuff, but kids who grew up on Tumblr are, you know are otherkin. They believe they're actually mystical dragons trapped in the body of an owl that was transported to a human body in an altered dimension. Oh, maybe they are, Tim. Maybe they are. Maybe. To some of them, not all of them.

But to put it simply, I think critical race theory was always there. Derrick Bell has been saying these things for a long time. He gave a speech in 2004 talking about how he was defending— It was the 90s. I think it was his first book. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. He was defending Plessy v. Ferguson and other ridiculous ideas. Right. And nobody cared. It wasn't mainstream. It wasn't on TV. It wasn't until social media startups, blog startups got venture funding. And it's very, very simple. At the dawn of social media, when articles started getting posted on Facebook, two companies would emerge. Legitimate News, Huffington Post.

And they both start writing articles. And legitimate news articles don't get shared that much. But Huffington Post, oh boy, you betcha. So Venture Capital steps in and says, why would I invest in them? Nobody reads it. Now they're getting the money. And what were they doing? Many of these blogs were, they realized they could do police brutality.

They could do racial justice. Exactly. And then the 10-year-old kid who gets on Facebook spends their entire existence only being slammed by all of that content. And then the virtue signaling starts. And now all of their friends are saying, I believe these things too, don't you? And now they're indoctrinated in a cult. Reality Winner is always one of my favorite examples of this. Someone who joins the NSA becomes of issues Air Force. And then but if you went on her Facebook, which nobody talks about, is she was deeply involved in two things.

One was yoga and the other one was Russiagate. Just everything to do with Russiagate, everything to do with this. And then she finds something at the NSA that, you know, kind of, sort of, it talks about Russia and Trump loosely. And it's like an assessment. It's not even real intel. But she says, well, I've got to leak this because this proves everything that I've read on Facebook. Right. So now I can be this great hero and this heroic person.

And then all of a sudden she learns about, like, the Department of Justice. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And she learned about progressive journalists at the Intercept. Yep. What did they do? They published the unredacted. There was.

I'd have to go back and look at it. But there was something that they published had enough of identifying information. From the printer, I think. It was from the printer. And they were able to. She's like. They looked up who logged in and used it. They had it in their nylons or something.

They were able to find. Yeah, they were able to find it was her. Identify her. Alright, let's read some more. We got Fubidu. He says, who cares what Afghanistan does with China or anyone else? The Taliban is the government now. They have every right to run the country as they see fit. It's not our problem unless we want more warmongering. I mean, yeah.

I don't believe America should be the world police. I don't want my tax dollars going to someone being like, ooh, that country is doing things I don't like. We have so many rare earth minerals right under American soil. I know next week we're probably going to come on and talk about that a little bit more. But I just got back from Alaska and I got to tell you guys, if you're worried about rare earth minerals, let me tell you a little story about a country called the United States of America and the amount of trillions and trillions of dollars that we have literally under our feet, or not even under our feet,

in the vast wastelands of the northern tier of our country that no one is using. That there is no... It's literally a waste... I could show you a picture, you would think it was Afghanistan. Wow. If I showed you this picture,

but it's parts of Alaska, parts of Montana, et cetera, Canada as well, by the way, that no one is using, that wildlife doesn't care about, that we are not allowed to touch. Yeah. And so the reason that it matters is because we're beholden to so much of this international and the international economy because of our stupid policies here at home. If we weren't tied into the international oil market, why should we care what OPEC talks about? Because we could have energy independence, but we don't, because we reduced our domestic capacity, our domestic supply, and so now we have to go begging to OPEC to please, please, the oil prices are going too high.

Could you just have a little bit more? And OPEC tells Biden to shove off. I saw we just established nuclear fusion ignition in a lab. I said that to you last night. They actually didn't do the fusion. When you say we, you don't mean like you and the guys. Me and Tim didn't do it last night, but I arrived before you. Oh, I missed it.

Oh, man. I think it was JPL, Lawrence National Livermore National Laboratory. And they established the temperatures needed to produce ignition. Right on. So we're right there. All right. Black Czar says, something that is given has little value. People prize and take care of what they feel they've earned.

This applies to everyone and everything, even to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the presidency. I see what you're saying there. Interesting, yeah. Morgan H. says, Not sure if that's the look Forrest is going for, but he reminds me of Sergeant Oddball from Kelly's Heroes. Haven't seen it, so I don't know. What is it?

Someone else superchatted something similar, too. Yeah, I haven't seen it, so I don't know. He has like a shrine to it at home. I mean, it's a Gypsy Walter shirt. Alright. Kev says, third time's the charm. Third time asking, perhaps I will rephrase the question. Tim, ask Forrest about the H&K MP7,

how it pertains to the history of Requil Magazine, and what they had to do to overcome the cancel culture. So that's a long time before me. But early on in the history of the magazine there's sort of a there's a line that you're not supposed to cross in the firearms culture is you're not supposed to tell people they can't have something so there's right it's a pretty

standard thing now um this is one of those things where i actually get to claim both diplomatic immunity and i wasn't there and i kind of don't know about it because it was like the magazine that came out right before I discovered it. But as far as I understand, some people were frustrated that somebody said the MP7 is for the military, not for you. Now that can be interpreted something like that. I'd need to read the article again and go back. It was like an opinion piece? Someone was doing a review of the H&K MP7.

And H&K, Heckler & Koch, if you're familiar with the company, is notorious for making one thing for the government and something else for the people. Right. Like their entire business model is like, hey, we made it for the Navy SEALs. We'll sell you a non-Navy SEAL version for like seven grand. I'm being facetious. They make really good quality stuff. But that's what people like to rag on them for that one. So a very early edition of Recoil had a review of the MP7.

And as far as I understand, somewhere in that somebody claimed something that it was, well, it's only for the military, not for civilian population. Now, one, I cannot verify it because I don't have it in front of me, but it's a conversation I can have with the other editors. Two, that's not the position of the company. So I don't know what happened, and this is a long time before me, but you're like, if you're familiar with any controversy that's happened about Recoil magazine, that was 10, maybe 15 years ago with a lot of differences. That was before Ian came on Ian Harrison's the lead editor. And that,

that guy is somebody where you follow into battle. Like he's a good guy to work under, but even more importantly, recalls, not unfamiliar with controversy this year alone. We put Maj Toure on the cover of our magazine in january then we put chris cheng on the cover of our magazine and maj toure is in charge of the organization black lives are black guns matter very big difference black guns matter right

dealing with inner city situations now there's this sort of left-wing narrative that the gun world and gun culture is all a bunch of old white men like first of all you're so wrong i can't help you i just quite frankly can't help you like and also if that's your opinion of american gun culture you're not a valuable participant in the conversation because yes you know how much what percentage of the american population is white and male how many people own fine you can go on to something and we're not talking about equity second part we put chris chang on the cover he's um chris chang represents the lgbtq community and he's both chinese and uh he's got both chinese and japanese heritage and so ch Chris Chang is, again, a really good representative,

especially towards different communities within the United States. In this upcoming edition of Recoil magazine, which the pre-orders just ended, but if you subscribe, you can get it, Bonnie Rotten is going to be on the cover. And I didn't know who she was because I'm an innocent boy from Minnesota. Oh, boy. I know, right? So Bonnie Rotten is an adult actress who has changed her opinion over the last couple of years

from being pro-gun control to being pro-Second Amendment rights. And even in that, and if you want to call yourself, you're going to be in 58. So you're going to be not 58. So you're going to be not in the current magazine that's coming out for recalls, got Bonnie Rotten on the front, and then the one after that, or yeah, in 58, which is the magazine, you're going

to be interviewed in that. Can we put Tim on the cover with a throne, like the Game of Thrones throne, but made out of guns? If we can make a throne out of guns. Oh, let's do it. Oh, hey, I confirm. You do look like Oddball.

It's Donald Sutherland. Yeah, I look like that, too. Yeah, looks just like him. He's wearing a flight cap, which looks like a backwards hat. All right. He looks great. I look like Oddball. I mean, young.

Hey, you know, I could have thought of worse things to be called. Sutherland's the man. Hey. All right. Mike G says, Black Swan event equals the massive market correction confirmed by JP Morgan that is coming aka to the mother of all shorts that we apes have been

talking about for months. Stone Krampus says the Black Swan event will be the mother of all shorts from GameStop short selling. Super Stonk has the receipts and a DD. I actually can throw out that. I agree with that, actually. That makes sense.

That could be it. The White House official that sends me stuff from time to time was actually watching the show earlier. And they texted during this and said the Black Swan event is the Biden administration. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. They also wanted me to say that going, the Pentagon right now, the Joint Chiefs, is basically like the intro of Benny Hill, if you just play that over and over.

Yeah, that song, yeah. It's pretty much what's going on in the government. Wacky sax or whatever. Alright. Zimemaru Forrest, I was thinking about guns as an investment. Is that a good idea? If so, what type of guns are the best investment?

Good question. If you are purchasing firearms for the first time, start with making sure you have at least a handgun and a carbine that are finished, which is a joke because you're never done building your first gun. But I do not think it is wise to go out and just say, I'm going to buy 30 of the cheapest insert gun now and then use that in the future to sell it. Because, first of all, you're dealing with legal issues

because the idea of purchasing firearms to sell them, there is some legality to that, and it's muddy, and I'm not going to say it's an easy explanation. You could be purchasing a firearm every month for 30 years and then in 30 years you intend to put it all together into an estate and sell it as a group fine there's a legality to that so our guns as an individual item and investment yes and no and it's not a financial decision that i would have authority over however if, if I had bought 100,000 rounds in 2015, I would have made a

lot of money in 2020. Or, depending on what the market is looking at right now, there are times where you can buy a firearm in 2019 and sell it in 2021 for a profit. Are guns themselves a good investment?

On the first question, yes, for the sake of your investing into yourself. You're figuring out what it takes to become lethal, knowing that you have rights and responsibilities. It builds character. It builds self-responsibility or self-sustenance, for lack of better words. It builds autonomy. And those are things worth investing in. So now that I'm your life coach, go buy guns, do the right thing, participate in culture, and then if you want to buy a collection, yeah, you can figure out ways to make money, but it's not as easy as it sounds. There's a great meme I saw.

I can't remember who posted it, so they're going to get mad at me, but it was a Facebook post where they said, look, the debate is over. Go out and get it already. It keeps you safe. It keeps us all safe. It keeps us all safe. Everybody knows that communities that have gone out and gotten this are safer.

They're better protected. And it's the right thing to do. There's no negative effects. Accidental effects are extremely rare. Just shut up already. Stop debating and go buy a gun. Yep. Yep.

That was my boy BrickSuit. It got me. I was reading it and I was like, oh, geez, one of these again. And then it ends like, go buy a firearm. I was like, oh. So expectations subverted. All right. Let's see.

Fight On 777 says, love you guys. Can you shout at my recently started nonprofit, Troops With Paws? We provide service dogs to disabled veterans through dog rescues and educate kids about the importance of military working dogs. Thanks, Poso and Forrest, for your service. Thank you. Very cool. Very cool, yeah.

Troops With Paws. Sounds cool. Reach out to, if you're still listening, reach out to info at recoilweb.com, and we'll get connected, and perhaps we can see what you're doing. That'd be cool. Cameron says, Please discuss the mandatory vaccine counseling already happening in our military i know firsthand from my spouse he's asked why he won't weekly is that something's happening they're doing counseling or something no they're kicking you out of the military i mean you're or

you're being faced with the choice basically yeah you get this is that a medical discharge or is it dishonorable or what it'll probably be a medical discharge it'll probably be a medical discharge or is it dishonorable or what? It'll probably be a medical discharge. It'll probably be medical. It'll probably be either medical or administrative. Or ADSEP, yeah. Or maybe even something as simple as early retirement. I mean, depending where you are in your career. Yeah. Think about the kind of people who will be in the military who are just like, sure, fine, whatever, I don't care. And don't ask the questions.

I mean, and again, like I just said before, I talk about this every day with people in the community. I'm a real good friend of JSOC. You know, people are saying like, hey, I wanted to serve for another 10 years, another 15 years. I've got 10 years behind me or however much experience behind me, but I don't want to do this. And so you're going to lose all of that human capital because of this look at it in comparison to also what a lot of veterans are feeling with afghanistan right now i invested i myself invested deployments into afghanistan yeah when we saw pictures and videos of the embassy like i knew that area and the government the government that employed people like us to go out there, you're –

I mean, my inbox right now of people who either situations like that or even worse talking about my – someone – the one I got today was their – I think it was their – I don't want to get it wrong, but it was their daughter-in-law's brother had been killed there when he had a five-month-old kid at home. Yeah. I mean, it's... And those stories. Eleven years and ten days ago, I had a team leader and a friend get killed. Yeah. Now, this is not for me to carry on them as if it adds on to mine.

Because one of them I got along with and one of them I didn't. And it's not like it was whatever. But what I'm saying there is, yeah, there's the tragedy of their, well, what about their sacrifice? We're still starting to get back into that muddy of, it's kind of an emotional argument. Because some of us went to war to go see what it was like and see for ourselves firsthand instead of being told by a news apparatus. But the other part about it is, yeah, some of us know interpreters that their family, their lives are in jeopardy right now, that we worked with them for years, and we don't know where they're going.

And this is something that I want to, you know. Well, I don't want to, I mean, I think you're okay to say that, though. It is emotional. That's what we mean. It's very – and we're a country of people. And this is the last part about it. I'll kind of go into this if I can is to you who are veterans out there who reached out to your friends or to you who are not veterans and reached out to the people you know who spent time in Afghanistan, like collectively thank you because this weekend was hard for a lot of people absolutely because i met i had i got phone calls from the wives of friends who are hardened veterans who have spent

15 years in harsh combat saying i don't know how to talk to him right now because he doesn't know how to talk about it right now because we all went through this emotional weekend we're still going to go through it because we don't have suddenly we don't have the tools where we can do anything about it. Right? I can't get on a helicopter and be like, I can't just say one more deployment. We'll go help those guys out. Even though that may be misguided, whatever. Well, that's what they're doing, right?

Sort of. I mean, we'll see. Right. And that's where I would personally come down on, by the way, any administration that had conducted this in such a way that was number one. Obviously, it's chaotic and ridiculous in what they're doing. But also, number two, when Biden comes out and says, oh, well, there wasn't any other choice. There wasn't any other way to do this. It's just have a little bit of an outlet for the people that did serve and give them something to show that you understand what they're going through and so that they feel that

they have a space where they can come into and have these discussions, something they can fall back on and say, we served for this purpose. This is why we did this. This is why we put in those deployments, put in that time away from family, away from however many life events that we had to skip over, the sacrifices that were made both in time and blood and treasure, that it was all for what?

And Joe Biden says, well, there wasn't anything else we could do. Yeah, part of the hardest thing for me is that I don't get to go back. As far as I know, there's not really any clean avenue. If I were in a situation where I decided't get to go back. As far as I know, there's not really any clean avenue. If I were in a situation where I decided I wanted to go back to Afghanistan, I can't. I mean, we don't know what the future holds, but most likely not.

C. Hennessey says, We need a progressive tax system for corporations based on manufacturing in the U.S. with a backstop that 5% of deduction can't be deducted unless they are 100% in the states. 100% for it. Yeah, the states. 100% for it. Yeah, interesting idea. 100% for it. Productionism, baby. All day long.

Libertarian shuck. I love it when they just jump on me like that. All right, let's see. It's the super jump. All right, let's see. Okay. Oh, okay. Scott Anderson says,

Parts for two 50 BMGs were found in the wreckage, referring to Waco. Both were in a disassembled state, lacking enough parts to build a fully functional rifle. They had barrels, but lacked almost everything else. Interesting. They were still used to shoot down a helicopter. I mean, I believe. He said so.

The head of the ATF said so. I mean, Biden, the trustworthy guy, you know, who lives by the creed of critical race theory, which is definitely a truth-finding system. Biden, whose son certainly follows all gun laws to the letter. Absolutely. These people aren't hypocrites. They just don't like you.

All right. Let's see. Rob Ingram says, Where's Jack Murphy been? No Luke, we puke. No Ian, we pee, and no Jack, we yak. Wait, wait, wait. Ian's right here. What are you talking about?

Yeah, Ian's chilling. Yeah, he's chilling, yeah. Where's Jack Murphy? That big muscle-bound hunk. I don't know. I think he's just not here. Was he adding a third color to his beard? He's grooming his beard.

Yeah, yeah, he's grooming his beard. It's true. Luke is doing, like, survival classes. He's growing a full rainbow with his beard. And I keep, like, we have all these opportunities for true. Luke is doing like survival classes. He's doing full rainbow with his beard. And I keep like, we have all these opportunities for Luke. I'm like, Luke, hey, we're going to have this person. We're going to have that person. You got to come.

You'll be great. And he's like, oh, I can't. I can't. I can't. He's busy. He's got the free state stuff. They're all sleeping. They're all sleeping on their palatious MyPillows having used promo code POSO.

Where do I get one of those? No, no. Well, if you go to MyPillow.com and use promo code POSO. P-O- one of those? No, no. Well, if you go to MyPillow.com and you use promo code POSO, P-O-S-O, you can get your very own MyPillow. This is a king size MyPillow. They do have smaller ones,

but there are different levels of firmness. I do like that about them. I don't actually know which firmness this one is. Oh, this is a medium. This is a medium firmness. He brought a MyPillow to the is. Oh, this is a medium. This is a medium firmness. He brought up my pillow to the studio. Again, yes. Once again.

They're good pillows. We'll talk about that pillow afterwards because the pillow that I'm currently using was stolen from Iraq in 2009. Wow. Interesting. That's an old pillow. I can get you a better pillow. All right. Let's see.

Summer Arbogast says, listen to you every morning on Spotify. Thank you for letting me know I'm not alone in this you got it Gina Carano tweeted you are not alone but I tell you this man with what's going on in New York the Nazis went for the disabled first the Nazis claimed that Jewish people

had typhus and that's why they needed to be separated and marked and so whenever I bring these things up first people will be like, oh, Godwin's Law. I don't care. I'll violate Godwin's Law, which, of course, for those unfamiliar,

is that all Internet arguments eventually devolve to the point where someone accuses the other person of being a Nazi. And I tell them, do you think that when the Nazis rose to power, they immediately just snapped their fingers and said, here are the trains, everyone hop aboard, or do you think it was,

oh, we have to do this because, you know, for this reason, and there's there's disease we have to oh i'm sorry and then they were just escalating and ramping up the rhetoric and the other and so anathematization this is the point i was making earlier this week when arnold schwarzenegger was doing whatever podcast he was on and he said screw your freedoms right screw your freedoms and i made the point of saying that, oh, did you, you know, I like to do like historical context for people that Arnold Schwarzenegger's father, right? Not someone who's like, you know, barely distantly associated with him.

His father was a member of the Brownshirts, a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party of Austria, and then eventually served in the Wehrmacht and was actually wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad. So he was a decorated member of the Nazis, right? And I posted that up. My post was banned from Instagram for saying that because it said that I was posting about extremist organizations, even though I was simply making a point about Arnold Schwarzenegger and his father. Yes, yes.

Newsweek comes out, fact checks the whole thing, and said, to be clear, Arnold Schwarzenegger's father was definitely a Nazi. Now, to be fair, to be fair, I will not condemn someone for the sins of the father. Nor will I. I'll condemn them for their own sins of saying, screw your freedom. Right, exactly. But the point I was making was it's like, you know, the apple in the tree kind of situation. Right, right, right. To add some utility to Godwin's Law is if you are dealing with the situation where it is the Nazis, ask yourself, was it wrong because the Nazis did it or were the Nazis wrong because they did it?

Great question. I like that. Because the Nazi, it was the segregation of people that was part of making the Nazis wrong. Right. So it doesn't matter who does it. It's wrong what they did. Yes. My friends, smash that like button.

Subscribe to this channel. Share the show. Go to TimCast.com. Be a member. We're going to have a bonus members-only segment up by about 11 p.m. You can follow the show at TimCastIRL. You can follow me personally at TimCast. Do you guys want to shout anything out?

Humanevents.com. Go to Humanevents for all your breaking news, especially on what's going on on the shade war between Joe Biden and the vice president waiting in the wings. And for something a little bit closer to home, Recoil Web for your firearms, Off-grid web for anything survival-based. And then if you want to subscribe to any of our magazines, you can do that from those.

And then, finally, if you want to follow me personally, my Instagram is at foxrow underscore official. And then we have Recoil and both Recoil and Off-Grid have their own Instagram pages as well. Very cool. I want to point out these amazing rocks that Tim procured.

That's not a rock. This is rose quartz. Crystal. It's crystal. This is crystal. I don't know if that's technically a rock or not. This is a bad promotion so far. What is this?

Pyrite? Yep. This is fool's gold. This is better. It's like polished insert. Tim took a big crew and went to a rock shop, a local rock emporium. Oh, no. It's more magical than that. We went to the mall for no reason, and in the dark back corners,

we discovered a rock store where they had fossils and giant quartz spheres. They have something called TV stone. It's where they believe that fiber optics were invented. It's a rock with a bunch of fibers. Horizontal fibers. Yeah, when you take it, it's thick, and you put it as a lens, it looks like a TV screen. It pulls the image to the front. So when you're holding it and you put your finger on the back, you can see the fingertip as if it's several inches in front of you.

And so that's the concept for fiber optics. Right, right. It's amazing. And they also had optical citrine, I believe it is, or sunstone, that when you put it over, when you look through it, everything doubles and you can spin it and the image moves. This store was fantastic. Well, it's all captured on video. Cast Castle, the YouTube channel, it's in the Today's Vlog. So check it out.

It was incredibly entertaining. We're going to start doing vlog. We're ramping up to the point where we're doing vlogs every single day. So we've added a whole bunch of people. And it is not a personal vlog, as some people have tried to argue because i'm not going to be at all that often though i'm in it a lot now it's basically just the house and everybody and you know i'm available probably only a few minutes every day to pop in when i do so we'll see one of the things we're planning right now is we're going to make we're going to

take fungus bread with a mushroom with fungus-based cheese to make a fungus sandwich, and they have fungus-based ice cream. So we're going to do a whole mushroom thing. All right. All right, yeah. Let me make sure we are doing that so I can just not be around. Oh, no, it's going to be awesome. It's going to be so good. Portobello burger is so good.

All right, Portobello. Follow me at Ian Crosland on the internet, and I'd love to see you. I think we just discovered what the Black Swan event's going to be. Mushroom food. Mushroom gate. You guys may follow me at Sour Patch Lids. Don't follow Sour Patch Kids. I'm trying to beat them in followers.

I'm really sad that I missed out on this rock shop. I freaking love going to rock shows. My favorite rocks are Labradorite, Tanzanite, and Savarite, which you guys should look up if you have any. I think we have Labradorite. We do. I almost brought it up. It's gorgeous. One of my favorites. You weren't with us, were you? No. No, somebody was like, Labradorite.

We saw the rock shop and Andreas was like, Moldavite! And they were like, we have Moldavite. It's a meteorite. I hear good things. They have a bunch of meteorite and I asked the guy how much meteorite would I need to craft a sword? And it looked like I smacked him. He was like, oh, you'd have to destroy

so much meteorite to do that. And I was like, okay, okay, I won't buy tens of thousands of meteorite to craft a sword. So before I go, I know we're trying to wrap up here, but my favorite author actually was knighted by the queen, and he made his sword out of a meteorite so that she can knight him. It's very cool.

Crazy. All right, everybody, smash that like button. Don't forget to go to TimCast.com because we will see you all in the members-only segment coming up at about 11 or so p.m. So thanks for hanging out. Bye, guys.