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(upbeat music)
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- This is Undaunted Life, a Man's Podcast.
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
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Let's get into it.
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Hi guys, today we've got a special guest on the podcast.
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His name is Scott Horton.
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So he's the director of the Libertarian Institute
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and the editorial director of antiwar.com
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and the host of the Scott Horton show and antiwar radio.
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So he's also the author of a couple of books
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I wanted to mention that we talked about a lot in the show.
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And that's the 2021 book called Enough Already,
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Time to End the War on Terrorism
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and the 2017 book called Fools Airend,
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Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
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So I need to give a quick shout out
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to one of my teammates at the Ford tier
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in Edmond, Oklahoma, Robert Storksen.
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So he kind of turned me on to Scott Horton
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in some of his work,
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even though I had kind of heard of him a little bit before then,
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but it really kind of maybe in earnest
0:59
when I kind of get this guy on,
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kind of talk with him a little bit.
1:01
So again, if you just even look at the title
1:04
of this episode, you're gonna be like, wait, what?
1:05
So it's the antiwar Libertarian anarchist.
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Okay, so all of those titles, antiwar,
1:11
Libertarian and Anarchists are all things
1:13
that he would consider himself to be.
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But we do spend time in this podcast,
1:17
elucidating that out further
1:19
because you probably have a lot of conceptions,
1:21
possibly misconceptions about what each one
1:23
of those things would mean.
1:24
And so we do a little bit of definitional work
1:26
in this podcast.
1:27
And this podcast is gonna be a little bit different.
1:29
So I know for some of you guys out there,
1:30
I know I have a lot of conservatives in my audience,
1:31
a lot of people that are veterans
1:32
and different things like that.
1:33
I know to some of you,
1:35
you're gonna wonder why didn't I interrupt
1:37
in certain times?
1:38
Why didn't I ask him to fact check this?
1:41
Or why didn't I play devil's advocate here or there?
1:43
Guys, there wasn't really a whole lot of time for that.
1:46
I came into this interview today wanting to be
1:47
just highly curious about his position on different things
1:50
because as you go through his books,
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which the books will be there in the show notes
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so you can check them out for yourself,
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you're gonna have a lot of the same thoughts that I did.
1:57
And you're gonna wanna ask him those questions.
1:59
And guys, we didn't get to really most of my questions
2:02
that I wanted to talk about today,
2:03
but we still, I wanted him to have enough runway
2:06
to where he could describe his viewpoint
2:08
and kind of how his brain thinks through
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these different things.
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But we do talk about what is a libertarian?
2:14
How do they kind of align with that left right divide
2:16
or Republican conservative divide?
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We got into why he's anti-war,
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but also we get into Afghanistan
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'cause obviously he's written a lot and spoken a lot
2:24
about getting out of Afghanistan and then we did.
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What did he think about the withdrawal?
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If he could go all the way back 20 years before that
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to 9/11 and he were the supreme ruler,
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I asked him, what would you have done?
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Because this is a guy that doesn't think war
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is necessary in any way, shape, or form.
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So we got into a little bit of that.
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And then we looked at some quotes
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and we looked at some different citations
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and why one book has no citations
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and one has a whole bunch.
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But then at the end, I thought it was interesting
2:50
'cause I wanted to ask him 'cause I know when people
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read his work or listen to the things that he says,
2:54
some of them immediately come away with this pre-impression
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that this guy's just anti-America.
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He hates his country, he hates America.
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He doesn't trust anybody into those types of things.
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So I asked him about that directly
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and so we got to get his answer there at the end.
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So guys, I hope you enjoyed the interview.
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I had fun listening to him and kind of getting a sense
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of how everything connected for him.
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So I'm not gonna keep him from you any longer.
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So without further ado, let's get into it.
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- Scott Horton, welcome to
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Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
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- Thanks for having me.
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- Okay, I'm so excited to talk to you.
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And I told you that off air because you've got a lot
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of things that you've worked on
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that we haven't exactly talked about on the show before,
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even though we've been around for a really, really long time.
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But I guess we should start somewhat generically
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and let's talk about being a libertarian.
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And so you're the director of the Libertarian Institute.
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Now, I will say that probably a lot of people's understanding
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of the whole ideal of being a libertarian
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begins and ends with stuff that Ron Swanson said
3:45
on Parks and Rec, right?
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And so they don't exactly get--
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- That's not a bad start, you know.
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- It's really not a bad start and he's got a fantastic
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mustache, but I think that there are some people
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that might call themselves Libertarian
3:55
that don't really agree with a lot of the foundations
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of that viewpoint and all that.
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So let's just start there.
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What does it mean to be a Libertarian?
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- Well, Libertarianism itself is
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the unified field theory of Liberty, right?
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So it includes natural rights theory
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and Austrian school economics
4:12
and a lot of very critical revisionist history.
4:16
And we have our own kind of theory of class war,
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unlike the commies, we don't see it as rich versus poor.
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Libertarian see it as those who are productive
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versus those who live off of coercion.
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And so that could mean, you know,
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essentially anyone on the scale.
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Although obviously, it's, you know,
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the very richest people, not even the 1%,
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but the 1/10th, the 1% who, you know,
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control the vast majority of the biggest corporations
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and that kind of thing, own the most stock
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and in the biggest corporations.
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They're the ones who have the most influence
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over the state.
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And especially, I mean, look at America,
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anyone could tell you too,
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there's nothing special Libertarianism is just,
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we're the ones who notice all these things
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all going on at the same time
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and can explain why it's like that.
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But America is ruled by bankers,
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by the arms industry, by big agriculture,
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big pharmaceutical companies, right?
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When I was a kid, Ross Perot ran for a president
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and he said, "It's the American people versus the special interests."
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Well, what the hell does that mean?
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That means oil, do I leave out oil?
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I mean-- - Yeah, you left out of oil.
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- And banking and arms and medicine and agriculture, right?
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It means the biggest industries and manufacturing,
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which is, you know, the arms industry to a great degree.
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And then they capture the state
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and the regulatory state belongs to them.
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It's mostly there to protect them
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from competition in the free market.
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I think this is one of the great insights
5:49
of Libertarianism is essentially that Progressivism.
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Now, people, not all Libertarians
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will agree with this framing.
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However, it's very instructive, I think,
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and people, you really wanna read the best,
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read Murray Rothbard, "The Left and Right,
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Prospects for Liberty," from 1965,
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where he explains that essentially,
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Progressivism is a right-wing plot, and by right-wing, meaning,
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the very most powerful capitalists.
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So, if you go back in history, it's, you know,
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JP Morgan, in fact, where'd I learn this?
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I think this is from Anthony Sutton
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that in like 1889 or something like that,
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JP Morgan turned to Thomas W. Lamont, senior,
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on his board of directors and said, "Lamont,
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you're in charge of this whole left-wing thing."
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You know, and then that was it, right?
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So then what did Lamont do?
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Did he go and crush them all?
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No, he went and bought them off, right?
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That was what he did.
6:54
Was he bought off all the labor unions
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to prevent real communism?
6:58
Thank God, right?
6:59
We'd all started to death a long time ago,
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but was it that JP Morgan was Libertarian, you know,
7:07
ideological devotee of laissez-faire free market economics?
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No, of course not, right?
7:14
He was just trying to protect his own interests.
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And it turned out that short of Marxism,
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what the left wants is progressivism, right?
7:23
A regulated, a heavily regulated economy,
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a quasi-free market, a mixed economy,
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as they teach us in government school.
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Well, that's what JP Morgan wanted too, right?
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He didn't want free market competition
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with anyone new and upcoming.
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He wanted essentially a quasi-fascist system, right?
7:43
This mixed economy.
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And so just real quick.
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No, you're good.
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In, if you, there's, you know, some real irony here
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and it's a little confusing,
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but then there's enlightenment, right?
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So you look at Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat.
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Well, his Cheney was a guy named Edward Mandel House.
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Skateboarder from Austin, Texas
8:03
will recognize House Park as named after the guy.
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He wrote a book in 1910 called Philip Drew Administrator.
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And it was about, wouldn't it be great
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if America was a fascist dictatorship
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and I was the fascist dictator, right?
8:17
That's what it's all about, right?
8:18
It's a novel, a very poorly written novel,
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but it's essentially like one,
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it's the daydream of this guy,
8:23
but also he's really kind of setting the standard
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and he's laying down what is,
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what was meant to be perceived as the new consensus
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for the power elite and, you know,
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the Eastern establishment going forward,
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that this is what we believe now.
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We don't believe in the Constitution.
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We don't believe in a limited republic.
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We don't believe in free market capitalism.
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Everybody knows we need strong, wise men
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to control everything and make it all great.
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Now, the blueprint described in Philip Drew
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is exactly the regimentation of the economy
9:00
that was implemented during World War I,
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under Woodrow Wilson.
9:04
You will recognize the same economic program
9:07
loosely defined as the new deal, right?
9:12
The Democrats program for, you know, essentially,
9:17
and this started obviously starting with Wilson
9:20
and then especially with FDR,
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but you have central banking, progressive income taxation,
9:25
and you have essentially the growth
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of this massive fourth branch of government,
9:29
the regulatory state.
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And in Philip Drew, they go so far
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as to have a government bureaucrat
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on every board of directors
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of any important company in this kind of thing.
9:38
But, you know, later, see, you know, you might know
9:41
that in history, Mussolini, when he first came around,
9:46
was the toast of the town.
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It wasn't 'til later he got such a bad reputation
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for his war in Ethiopia in a line with Hitler
9:53
and all of these things, right?
9:54
So when he first kind of came out
9:56
and was regimenting the Italian state and economy,
10:00
Edward Mandelhaus complained
10:03
that I anticipated Mussolini by several years, right?
10:08
And he wanted the credit for really coining fascism.
10:12
And so then here's where I get you in your irony bone, right?
10:15
If the liberal Democrats have been fascists
10:19
for all this time, well, then what the hell
10:22
does that make the conservative Republicans?
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Who favor a powerful state
10:27
to favor the most powerful corporations
10:31
at the expense of the little guy all along?
10:33
In fact, you can look at left and right wing
10:35
and economic terms in America.
10:37
And I don't mean between communists and fascists,
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but I just mean between liberals and conservatives,
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basically, right, like lowercase S socialists
10:45
and lowercase C conservative,
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lowercase F fascists, basically, right?
10:53
They both want to rig the economy for supply
10:57
at the expense of the customer, right?
10:59
So the liberal side favoring progressivism
11:02
and labor unions and all of that,
11:04
they want to protect essentially the workers, right?
11:08
The suppliers, the labor that work at the corporations
11:12
that produce the things.
11:13
The conservatives want to rig the economy
11:16
to favor the business owners, the suppliers, right?
11:20
But in free market capitalism, as Lord of God Mises taught,
11:25
in the free market, the customer is king.
11:29
And it's the consumer who is, you know,
11:31
the driver of all business activity
11:34
as the owners of capital and the producers
11:37
and the managers are all racing to try to figure out
11:40
what we want and how to keep us happy.
11:43
But if they can use the political means of the state
11:46
to rig the economy to protect their favored interests,
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I left out the labor unions earlier,
11:51
I shouldn't have, they go in the pile too, right?
11:54
Then they can rig the economy at the expense of the customer.
11:58
Medicine is the perfect example of this, right?
12:00
Where we don't have a socialist healthcare system in America,
12:03
we have a fascist, a lowercase F fascist,
12:08
quasi free market, extremely regulated market,
12:12
including lots of socialism and welfare benefits
12:14
for the poor and all that, of course,
12:16
Medicare and Medicaid and all those kinds of things.
12:18
But at the top of the game, as you know,
12:20
as we've all lived through the last few years,
12:22
no question about it.
12:24
The pharmaceutical companies own the state,
12:27
they've captured the state that regulates them.
12:29
And so the libertarian insight is that,
12:34
and thus it will always be, right?
12:36
That's why you shouldn't let there be an FDA in the first place
12:40
because it's going to always be essentially captured
12:43
by the major corporations
12:45
and then the government will be used against the people.
12:48
They'll force us even to take their products.
12:51
You know, at the threat of being forced out of our jobs
12:54
or if they had their way,
12:56
they'd probably threaten us with arrest.
12:57
They thought they could get away with it
12:59
for refusing to take their vaccines and this kind of deal.
13:02
But certainly you see the way they rig prices,
13:05
the way they prevent competition in hospitals
13:08
and you know, all of the ways that they regulate,
13:13
you know, if you look at the stats of all the great drugs
13:17
that eventually were approved that were good drugs,
13:20
but that took years and years and years to be approved.
13:23
And the more you're like kind of an underground new company,
13:27
the harder it is to get approved when, you know,
13:30
because FDA favors Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson
13:33
and all the big firms that are already there, you know,
13:35
this kind of thing.
13:36
So now in other words, we're living in JP Morgan's world, right?
13:40
We're living in, and Phillip Drew,
13:43
I mean, a Colonel House was JP Morgan's man, right?
13:46
Like this is what they wanted.
13:47
It was this kind of regimen in economy.
13:50
And then they have their opposition, the progressives,
13:52
saying, no, no, we don't want that.
13:54
We want exactly more of the same, right?
13:57
And that's their only opposition.
13:59
Then come the libertarians and we say, no,
14:01
abolish the state as much as absolutely possible anyway
14:04
and let the free market sort it out.
14:06
And in the free market, the customer is king.
14:09
Rather than these corrupt interests.
14:11
- Right, so I appreciate you going into all that detail
14:14
before we move on, 'cause I definitely--
14:15
- What's a libertarian, right?
14:17
A libertarian, somebody agrees with me about everything,
14:18
[inaudible].
14:19
- See, that's what's funny about it,
14:20
but I will spend a little bit more on the libertarian stuff
14:23
and then I want to definitely dig into your books.
14:24
So the thing that's interesting is there was a quote
14:26
from the Libertarian Institute website that said,
14:28
"Whatever it is, we're against it."
14:29
And I laughed, I thought that was pretty funny
14:31
because that's kind of the perception.
14:33
So I guess what are some of the common
14:35
and biggest misperceptions of a libertarian?
14:37
Because one thing for me kind of being outside
14:39
of the world of libertarianism is typically from my view,
14:42
when you're forced into the Republican Democrat binary,
14:46
it seems like libertarians tend to caucus
14:48
more with Republicans than they do with Democrat,
14:50
but I know there is a spectrum of libertarianism
14:53
that some go on to the left side of the spectrum
14:55
and some go on to the right side,
14:56
but just briefly give us an idea
14:58
of what some of the biggest misconceptions
15:00
are about libertarianism.
15:01
- Yeah, well, and libertarians come from the left
15:04
and from the right, and then they end up sometimes,
15:06
if they're from the left, they get further right wing,
15:08
or if they come from the right, they get further left wing,
15:10
or not, right, sometimes they stay more left leaning
15:13
or who knows, there's certainly a lot to it,
15:18
but I mean, the obvious misconceptions,
15:21
the most basic misconceptions are like,
15:23
"Oh, libertarians are Republicans who smoke pot,"
15:27
which, I mean, first of all, Republicans, again,
15:31
I mean, conservatives, not that I really explain this well,
15:34
but conservatives, as opponents of the left,
15:38
oftentimes are on the side of liberty,
15:40
but their own agenda is oftentimes very anti-liberty, right?
15:45
So we're not Republicans with an exception, right?
15:48
Essentially, we're the ones with the unified field theory
15:51
of liberty, and sometimes Republicans agree with us,
15:53
and sometimes Democrats agree with us,
15:55
but essentially, from the libertarian perspective,
15:58
this is the true ideology of America,
16:01
the Declaration of Independence,
16:02
this is what we're supposed to all believe in,
16:03
natural rights theory, and all the rest of this flows from that.
16:07
So in that sense, the conservatives and the liberals,
16:10
the progressives and the populists
16:13
and the right wingers and left wingers of all descriptions,
16:15
they're all deviationists from the true ideology of America,
16:19
which is individualism, private property rights,
16:22
free market capitalism, freedom, right?
16:25
The conservatives and the liberals are the ones
16:27
coming up all day with all the exceptions.
16:29
Freedom for this and this, but not for that, you know,
16:32
is their point of view all the time,
16:33
and we're the ones who are for freedom all the time.
16:35
In fact, that quote, so people don't get that wrong,
16:38
whatever it is, we're against it,
16:40
and that comes from Duck Soup, you know,
16:42
is a funny satire from the Marx Brothers before,
16:44
so it's not that we're just nihilists
16:46
and hate everything, it's the state that we hate,
16:50
because the state is the negation of liberty,
16:52
its very existence is based on aggression.
16:56
I guess it was Hans Hoppe who coined the phrase,
16:59
the expropriating property protector, right?
17:02
Like even your local sheriff's department
17:03
is essentially based on the communist theory
17:06
that from each according to his ability
17:08
to each according to his need will get security services
17:12
from their local sheriff's department, you know,
17:14
and you don't have a choice to opt out.
17:17
They're going to tax you, and in fact,
17:18
they're going to send the sheriff to march you out
17:21
of your own house and take your house from you
17:23
if it comes down to it with that kind of violent force, you know?
17:26
So we're certainly not that,
17:29
and then in the past, certainly you've heard,
17:31
especially from libertarian party types,
17:33
which those days are over,
17:36
but in the past, you had heard things like,
17:38
"Well, we're socially liberal, but fiscally conservative."
17:42
Meaning, well, we want, you know,
17:44
balanced budgets, but we're for gay marriage,
17:46
something like that, which again,
17:49
like both of those things are true,
17:50
but that's not because we're socially liberal
17:53
and fiscally conservative,
17:54
that's 'cause we're libertarians.
17:56
And those are two things where the right and the left
17:58
happen to agree with us on some of the time and have it right.
18:03
But again, you know, essentially,
18:06
libertarianism is its own ideology.
18:07
It's based on the first premise
18:09
that every individual human being is born free
18:13
and with their own natural rights and their own natural dignity,
18:15
and that of course includes the right to property,
18:19
whichever, you know, whatever property they justly acquire,
18:22
and that they have the right to defend themselves
18:25
and their property with violent force, right?
18:27
And then everything else flows from that, essentially,
18:31
if you especially read Ludwig Romises and Murray Rothbard
18:35
and the Austrian School Economist and that kind of thing,
18:39
they're, all their arguments essentially flow from,
18:41
as Mises put it, the central axiom that man acts
18:46
in at least what he believes to be his own self-interest.
18:51
And then that goes for government officials too.
18:53
Another major insight of libertarians
18:56
is what's called public choice theory,
18:59
which is essentially just expanding
19:02
individualist-type economic viewpoints to government action.
19:07
So why do we invade Libya?
19:11
Why do we have a war in Libya?
19:13
Well, on TV, they say it's 'cause something bad
19:16
is happening there and we have to go and help, right?
19:20
But in reality, what's really happening
19:22
is that Samantha Power and Susan Rice
19:26
and Hillary Clinton all want promotions.
19:30
And the British want revenge
19:32
as the Irish friend of mine was explaining to me earlier today
19:37
in the email, the British, and I totally missed this,
19:40
but it makes sense.
19:41
They'd been burned on some oil deals by Qaddafi,
19:44
but Qaddafi had provided major support to the IRA
19:47
in the 1980s, and this is why the British used
19:50
the bin Ladenites of the Libyan Islamic fighting group
19:53
to try to murder him in 1996 and again in 1999.
19:57
And then so America was essentially doing the Brits a favor.
20:01
They wanted to kill Qaddafi.
20:03
Now was their chance in 2011
20:06
to kind of hijack the Arab Spring and kill Qaddafi.
20:09
And then Samantha Power, she had run for,
20:12
pardon me, she had in 2008 when Obama was running for president,
20:16
she had sided with Obama over Hillary Clinton,
20:18
and in fact had called Hillary Clinton a monster.
20:21
And so once Obama got elected,
20:23
he made Hillary Clinton's secretary a state, oops.
20:26
So that meant Samantha Power got a kind of third rank job
20:30
on the National Security Council.
20:33
And as she was quoted by the great Michael Hastings
20:35
in Rolling Stone in the run up to the Libya war,
20:39
complaining that she had been relegated
20:43
to doing do-gooder, rinky dink stuff,
20:46
like helping protect Christians in Iraq.
20:49
And she wanted a raise and a promotion
20:52
and some attention from the president.
20:54
So when the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia and Egypt,
20:57
she figured out this was a way she could get a raise
20:59
and a promotion and some attention from the president.
21:02
And so they pretended that never even mind the threat
21:05
of bin Ladenite terrorism September 11th
21:08
or the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq or any of that,
21:11
we're taking the side of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Libya
21:14
because that's how to protect the civilians.
21:19
That's how for Samantha Power to get a raise and a promotion.
21:22
And which worked, right?
21:24
She got to be national security advisor
21:27
and Susan Rice moved up to ambassador to the United Nations.
21:31
Or was it the other way around?
21:32
Yeah, I forget.
21:34
But anyways, and Hillary Clinton was convinced
21:36
that she could run on this in 2016.
21:39
That unlike W. Bush who botched Iraq,
21:41
she would have smart power and the smart war
21:43
and the great success in Libya.
21:44
Now, of course, by 2016, she didn't run on that,
21:47
but that was why she got on board.
21:49
So, and this is very credibly reported
21:50
by at least two different sources.
21:52
I think three different people told the same story.
21:54
That in the actual White House,
21:56
you had the lady from the National Security Council,
22:00
the national security advisor,
22:02
and the secretary of state,
22:04
the three screeching valkyries of war,
22:07
these three women, power, rice, and Clinton.
22:10
And on the other side,
22:11
you had the secretary of defense, Robert Gates.
22:13
You had the national security advisor.
22:15
Well, see, Rice was a UN ambassador
22:17
because the national security advisor was Donalyn,
22:19
and his deputy was Rhodes,
22:22
and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' staff
22:25
at that time was Dempsey.
22:28
And who am I leaving out?
22:29
Anyway, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' staff,
22:33
secretary of defense,
22:34
and the national security advisor
22:35
and deputy national security advisor
22:37
all said, let's not do this.
22:39
But these three women for their own personal reasons
22:45
said we have to.
22:46
- And then Obama, and so then Obama did it essentially
22:49
as a favor to Hillary.
22:51
So in other words, this is the public choice theory, right?
22:53
Is that these people are all still just individuals.
22:57
And what some guy living in Ex-County
23:00
out in Nebraska somewhere might conceive of
23:03
as the national interest actually does not exist.
23:08
There's no such thing as that.
23:09
There's only the interests of the people in power
23:11
and doing what they're doing,
23:12
which might have a lot to do with explaining
23:14
our Ukraine policy right now,
23:16
which could get us all killed in a nuclear war.
23:20
But inside the bureaucracy,
23:22
everybody's gotta act off and everybody has to agree
23:25
and everybody has to be in the consensus
23:27
and it'd be absolutely sinful and verboten
23:31
for anyone to say that this just isn't right.
23:33
In fact, 20 years ago,
23:35
I mean, you're a bit younger than me.
23:38
I don't know how well you remember this.
23:39
But 20 years ago, they had the American people believing
23:43
that Iraq was gonna attack the United States of America,
23:48
that Iraq, which at that time consisted
23:50
of about four or five cities under Saddam Hussein's control.
23:54
As much of the north and the south had been broken away
23:57
and kept independent under American protection.
24:00
Iraq, whose army had been completely smashed
24:04
a dozen years before and had had no chance
24:07
to rebuild whatsoever.
24:08
That had no army, no navy, no air force
24:12
and no chemical weapons, no nuclear weapons program,
24:15
no more germs, any of that that Reagan
24:18
and George W. Bush's father had given him in the 1980s,
24:22
all of that was gone.
24:24
The thing was a 100% hoax.
24:28
And yet, it wasn't just that they lied us into war,
24:32
which they did, but it's that hundreds or thousands
24:36
or maybe tens of thousands of people
24:37
inside the government bought into the lies
24:40
and believed them themselves.
24:42
We know for a fact that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld
24:45
and Wolfowitz knew that they were lying,
24:47
but every so-called expert who went on TV
24:52
essentially was just citing them, right?
24:54
Was just citing the experts.
24:55
The experts say this is all true.
24:57
The cults of belief in the threat from Iraq,
25:02
which is just, I mean, it's again,
25:05
it's book of world records for stupidity,
25:07
of the most unrealistic.
25:10
It's like saying, I'm gonna come to your house
25:12
and hurt you somehow today
25:14
when I don't even know what city you live in, right?
25:16
I have no ability whatsoever to threaten you,
25:20
but you can just lie and pretend to be afraid.
25:23
I mean, that's the level of complete BS that it was.
25:27
But anyway, the point I'm really trying to get to
25:30
is the groupthink and the consensus
25:33
and the way that people can get, you know,
25:35
brought in to a cult of a lie like that
25:39
because they're just individuals
25:41
and they gotta do what's right for themselves.
25:44
You know, the CIA guys complained about this,
25:46
that, look, we're going to war.
25:49
So what are you gonna do?
25:50
You're gonna throw away your whole career
25:51
as a CIA analyst debunking the vice president's case for war
25:55
when they're shopping for a bill of goods.
25:58
Your job is to provide it.
25:59
You know, you're gonna throw your whole life away,
26:02
your whole career away, your mortgage
26:04
and your kid's private school and everything
26:06
'cause you're gonna tell the truth.
26:07
When you're not gonna stop the war anyway,
26:10
that was a great quote from The Washington Post.
26:12
It was Thomas Ricks from The Washington Post said,
26:15
essentially paraphrasing the point of view
26:17
of the editorial directors of The Washington Post.
26:21
Look, we're going to war anyway.
26:23
Why worry about all this contrary stuff?
26:25
- Yeah, I, well, no, you're making a great point there
26:29
about groupthink because whether you have a small business,
26:32
whether you work in a large corporation
26:34
at a university or something like that,
26:35
that is a pervasive thing that really goes against truth
26:39
in a lot of ways.
26:40
But a lot of things that you were saying there, Scott,
26:42
go into really the main reasons why I wanted to have you on.
26:44
And it's a couple of books that you wrote.
26:46
One's called Fools Arend.
26:47
This was released back in 2017, I believe,
26:50
time to end the war in Afghanistan.
26:51
And then when you released last year
26:52
before Afghanistan fell and that's enough already
26:55
time to end the war on terrorism.
26:56
And so I've heard you say this in other podcasts,
26:59
your anti-war.
27:00
And so I guess you can define a little bit more
27:02
of what you mean specifically by that
27:04
if it's not necessary.
27:05
And I don't know if you've ever said this
27:07
or maybe it's just been attributed to you,
27:08
but you're also an anarchist.
27:10
But the way that most people understand that word
27:12
is probably, or not at all,
27:14
how you would probably mean it and how it applies to this.
27:16
But one quick question, just like semantically
27:19
or I guess, you know, house cleaning on the book.
27:21
And then I want you to really get into the meat
27:23
of the points that you're trying to make.
27:24
So the biggest difference, obviously,
27:26
between Fools Arend and enough already,
27:28
is Fools Arend has like a Thomas soul level amount
27:31
of references and citations, but then enough already has none.
27:35
And so it's a history book that has so many truth claims.
27:38
And then you do theorize a little bit there
27:40
and it's really easy to see that.
27:42
But there are no citations.
27:43
And so if you're reading through,
27:45
it's almost impossible to really fact check
27:47
any of the stuff that you're saying,
27:48
because, you know, I'm a fairly forgiving guy.
27:50
And I'm like, oh yeah, that's probably true,
27:52
what he's saying, but it is a little bit hard to follow.
27:54
So give me the reasoning behind so many references
27:57
and one and the not and the other.
27:58
But then I don't want you to spend a whole lot of time
27:59
on that because I really want you to get into the meat
28:01
of your overall philosophy
28:03
as to why in general we should be anti-war.
28:06
- Yeah, okay, yeah.
28:06
So great stuff there.
28:07
So first of all, on the footnotes,
28:11
enough on Fools Arend is essentially chapter two
28:14
of Enough Already.
28:15
But what happened was it just grew completely out of control.
28:17
So I just went ahead and made it a book of its own.
28:19
- Right.
28:21
- And then I picked the thing back up again
28:24
with Enough Already.
28:25
That's why the initial chapters of Jimmy Carter
28:28
through Bill Clinton are somewhat the same,
28:31
although there's more sections about Iran and so forth
28:35
in Enough Already.
28:36
But so what happened was everybody really liked Fools Arend.
28:42
But what I heard a lot from people was
28:45
that it was so difficult to read
28:47
because there's so many footnotes
28:49
and I like them right there at the bottom of the page.
28:52
I don't wanna have to go back for it.
28:52
- I thought it was great, super convenient, you know?
28:55
- Yeah, and there are like 1400 something citations
28:59
in Fools Arend.
29:00
So then on Enough Already,
29:03
I had a few different considerations
29:04
for not doing it that way.
29:06
The first was I was in a real hurry
29:09
and I was way behind and I'd done a huge fundraiser
29:14
to essentially, 'cause I published it
29:17
through my own little institute.
29:18
So that was my advance for writing the book
29:21
was this huge fundraiser I'd done
29:23
and it had been like a year and a half
29:24
and the damn thing wasn't ready yet.
29:26
And I felt like I couldn't do another fundraiser
29:27
for my institute until I coughed up the damn book
29:30
and the institute was just absolutely out of money.
29:32
So I was on a real deadline, I just had to get it out.
29:35
The other major deadline was Trump was leaving
29:38
and it was January 21 and here comes Biden
29:42
and even though it is this throwback in Biden,
29:44
essentially still it's the end of an era, right?
29:47
The first generation of the millennium is over.
29:50
W. Bush and Obama are ancient history now.
29:53
Trump's four years was sort of the capstone on that.
29:56
Now it's the 2020s as you can tell.
29:59
Nobody talks about radical Islam is coming to kill us anymore.
30:01
That whole narrative is over.
30:02
Now it's Russia, Russia, Russia, China, China and all of this.
30:06
And so I thought if I'm going to put out this book
30:11
about the terror wars, it really has to be now
30:14
and not six months into Biden's term
30:17
or nine months into Biden's term or whatever.
30:21
We just wouldn't, I wanted it to break up.
30:23
And then, but especially it was the fact
30:25
of what I really wanted to do was make it really accessible
30:29
to everybody and a friend of mine had said,
30:33
"You think Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly
30:35
"have a mess of footnotes in their books?"
30:38
The point is just get the damn thing out.
30:41
And then the way I write is,
30:42
I tell you where I found out all this stuff anyway,
30:45
pretty much or at least I write it in a way
30:47
where you ought to be able to verify.
30:49
Like I don't just say, some parts of the government
30:51
were telling Kuwait to tell Saddam Hussein
30:53
to go F himself.
30:54
While other parts of the government were telling him
30:56
to tell them, "Oh yeah, no, I tell you exactly who."
31:00
It was SENTCOM and the DIA who were warning this
31:04
and it was the CIA and the State Department
31:06
who were warning that and whatever.
31:07
And you can go find that if you Google hard.
31:10
You'll find it, if you can't find it just at Google.com,
31:13
go to Google.com/books and look there.
31:16
But essentially all this stuff is available.
31:18
And on the stuff that's the most controversial
31:22
kind of points that I think you would have every reason
31:25
to think that I must be BSing
31:26
'cause this can't possibly be right.
31:28
Then I'll have the block quote for you
31:30
and make it as, especially when we get to Syria,
31:35
Libya and Syria, but especially when we get to Syria.
31:39
At the beginning of the book, I explain Lookman.
31:43
Here's whatever five, 10 quotes
31:46
of some of the most powerful players
31:48
involved in this policy explaining
31:51
why they're backing Al-Qaeda against the Assad government.
31:56
The Assad government is run by the Alawites,
32:00
allied with the Shiites, allied with Iran.
32:03
And America, because of Israel, hates Iran
32:07
more than they hate Osama bin Laden's suicide bombers.
32:11
That's why, as I put it in there,
32:14
that's why the following impossible things
32:17
in this chapter are true.
32:19
Like if I just, if I left that out and just said,
32:22
"Oh, look, here's Obama back in a bunch of terrorists."
32:25
You would wonder what this can't be right.
32:28
Why would he do that?
32:29
It's not 'cause he's a secret Muslim from Kenya,
32:32
loyal to Osama bin Laden's goals, that's stupid.
32:36
So why is he doing it?
32:37
He's doing it 'cause he's loyal to Israel and Saudi Arabia,
32:40
just like George W. Bush before him, right?
32:43
Because just like with the medical industry,
32:45
our government has been captured by it's satellites,
32:49
by its client states around the world.
32:52
And the Saudi lobby and the Israel lobby
32:55
have a thousand times as much influence
32:57
over American foreign policy than the American people do.
33:00
There's no American people lobby on foreign policy
33:03
in Washington, DC.
33:04
It's all foreign states.
33:06
You know, the Atlantic Council that decides
33:07
if what you say on Facebook is true or not
33:10
is financed by the German government.
33:12
Well, what interest do they have
33:14
in keeping NATO in Europe?
33:17
And your dollars and your kin defending theirs for free, right?
33:22
The whole thing is a confidence game.
33:26
All of it is a racket.
33:27
Every bit of it is a racket.
33:28
So then, now, as far as anarchism,
33:32
let me just say real quick.
33:33
Yes, when you say anarchism people picture
33:36
arson fires at night and the Antifa communists
33:40
and whatever like that.
33:41
That's not what we're talking about.
33:42
What we're talking about is Rothbardian libertarianism.
33:44
It's essentially free market, property rights,
33:48
individualism, capitalism take into its ultimate conclusion
33:52
that the real problem is having a state at all.
33:56
The problem isn't the market and capitalism.
33:58
You have to have markets and capitalism.
34:00
You're gonna starve to death, okay?
34:02
If the salesman and the customer is the same guy,
34:07
then he doesn't know what the price should be.
34:08
If he doesn't know what the price should be,
34:10
then he doesn't know where the goods and services
34:12
need to be distributed.
34:14
And so then the people eat their children
34:16
'cause that's what happened in China, right?
34:17
Under mouth, that's what happens under communism.
34:20
You have to have prices, but then the problem is,
34:23
and the commies would be correct to point out.
34:25
The problem is the capitalists are corrupt.
34:28
The businessmen aren't devoted to libertarian ideology.
34:32
They're devoted to their own bottom line.
34:33
And if that means bribing a congressman
34:35
and getting a contract, then that's exactly what they'll do.
34:39
So the problem you could even say,
34:41
you know, a lot of times libertarians say
34:42
the problem ultimately at the end of the day,
34:44
it's all about the Federal Reserve.
34:45
And if it wasn't for the Federal Reserve,
34:47
well, the government wouldn't be able to do
34:48
all the horrible things that they do.
34:49
Well, that's true, but who created the Federal Reserve?
34:52
The Congress.
34:54
Maybe we just need to go ahead and get rid of the Congress.
34:57
You know, so for me, you know, as Rothbard puts it
35:00
in his essay, do you hate this state?
35:02
If there's a big red button and you could push it
35:05
and it would destroy the state right now, would you do it?
35:08
And then so for some libertarian's answers,
35:11
yeah, I don't know, maybe it would be worse.
35:14
For me, I say, let's go for it.
35:16
Let's try it out.
35:17
You know, their mythology is that we need them
35:19
because at the very least they're keeping someone worse
35:23
from replacing them.
35:24
But the way I look at it, they've been the greatest
35:27
purveyors of violence on the face of the earth
35:28
for the last, you know, three quarters of a century at least.
35:32
And so I'm no longer giving them that benefit of the doubt.
35:35
They're clearly the most violent destructive force
35:37
in our country, our own government is,
35:39
our supposed security force itself.
35:42
- Well, so you, obviously that tinges a lot
35:44
of your overall viewpoints in terms of having that ideology.
35:48
But let's specifically get into Afghanistan
35:50
because obviously you spent a lot of time talking
35:52
about and writing about, obviously, you know,
35:53
Fool's Airend was all about getting out of Afghanistan
35:56
and then a huge chunk of enough already
35:58
was talking about some of the same
36:00
and echoing those same sentiments.
36:01
And you did all of this, obviously,
36:03
before the U.S. withdrawal, you know, one year ago
36:05
this month, and so I guess just in general,
36:08
this is kind of a two-part question.
36:09
Gosh, I mean, we really should have planned
36:11
for more time today, just so we can really begin.
36:13
But what do you think about the withdrawal?
36:17
Because obviously we have the benefit of hindsight now.
36:19
So somebody could be very, very dishonorable
36:22
and disingenuous and take some quotes out of enough already
36:24
and be like, "So you, there's egg on your face."
36:26
But that's not really what I'm here to do.
36:28
- Yeah, I don't think so.
36:29
- I predict worst in there.
36:30
I never said everything's gonna be great when we leave.
36:32
- Right, right.
36:32
- I don't have to take back a single word
36:34
out of either of those books on Afghanistan.
36:36
- You said, I mean, literally I have a quote
36:38
right in front of me, things could get very ugly
36:40
in Afghanistan after the U.S. finally leaves,
36:42
whether sooner or later, so obviously it's in there.
36:45
So what is your overall viewpoint on the pull out
36:48
and kind of how we did it and the draw down
36:50
and kind of what it looks like now?
36:51
But also, going back to the very, very beginning,
36:54
so 9/11 happens, if you were the Supreme ruler
36:58
of the United States and you could have
37:00
and dictated all the terms of what would happen from there,
37:03
what would you have done?
37:04
- I know that's very, very unfair
37:05
because that's so, so much stuff, but you know,
37:07
you go for it.
37:08
- No, that's fine, no, that's fine.
37:09
So let's start, the first thing first here
37:11
is the withdrawal from Afghanistan, okay?
37:13
Here's a, you have to understand, okay?
37:15
And this is what they never explained in the book.
37:19
Essentially, the goal in that,
37:21
well, let's start with Iraq War II for a second,
37:23
real quick here, okay?
37:24
W Bush's war.
37:25
In W Bush's war, he won the war and then he lost, right?
37:29
He won the war because he was fighting
37:31
for the super majority Shiite Arab population in the country,
37:34
60%, also in alliance with the Kurds,
37:37
another 20% in the North,
37:39
against the minority 20% Sunni Arabs, okay?
37:43
Anyway, point being we're fighting for the super majority.
37:47
So yes, after we help them win their civil war,
37:50
they won it and it's not like it's a stable, you know,
37:54
government, it's the furthest thing from it,
37:56
but it is a super majority Shiite regime
37:58
that rules in Baghdad.
37:59
The same people who told W Bush,
38:01
thanks for winning the war for us.
38:03
Now get the hell out.
38:04
We don't need you anymore, beat it, right?
38:07
That makes sense, okay?
38:10
Now, America goes in Afghanistan,
38:13
we're fighting this parallel war at the same time,
38:15
but in Afghanistan, we're fighting for a coalition
38:18
of 20% minority groups against the 60%,
38:23
pardon me, against the 40% plurality, okay?
38:27
So you have the Hazaras, who are largely Shiites,
38:31
and then you have the Tajics and the Uzbeks,
38:33
these are ethnicities, okay?
38:35
They're at war against the 40% plurality,
38:38
they're not the majority, but they're the plurality,
38:41
twice the size of any one of these other ethnic groups,
38:44
the Pashtuns from the south and the east.
38:48
Now, unless America was willing to do like the Soviet Union did,
38:53
and just absolutely carpet bomb these people
38:55
off the base of the earth,
38:57
there's no way in the world they were ever going to defeat him.
39:00
It'd be like sending in a militia from,
39:03
or well, state guard forces from Michigan and Iowa
39:08
and Oklahoma to take out the people of Texas, right?
39:12
Like not just to get the government of Austin to surrender,
39:14
but to pacify the population too.
39:17
You're just not going to pacify the population of Texas,
39:21
you know what I mean?
39:22
In fact, when the Union defeated Texas,
39:23
the population was much, much smaller,
39:26
and the entire west of what we now call Texas
39:28
was all still Indian territory, right?
39:30
Like this is a entirely different game.
39:32
But imagine, especially in every mine American states,
39:35
but imagine like Mexico trying to invade and conquer,
39:39
not just down near Brownsville,
39:41
but where all the Anglos live in the major cities
39:44
all the way up to Dallas and Fort Worth and whatever.
39:46
They would have a serious insurgency on their hands.
39:49
It's really kind of the flip Vietnam upside down.
39:53
There, we're like pretending that we're protecting
39:56
the independence of the south from the north.
39:59
Well, here we're protecting the independence
40:01
of the north from the south.
40:02
But at the end of the day, it's still one country,
40:05
and these lines are just artificial.
40:07
And they had, you know, the men on their side,
40:11
they had time on their side.
40:12
So after 20 years of war, after all of Bush's escalations,
40:17
after all of NATO and after Barack Obama tripled the war,
40:23
they lost anyway.
40:24
And frankly, the Soviets carpet bombed the place
40:28
and killed something like a million Afghans
40:31
in half the time that America was there in 10 years.
40:34
And they lost too.
40:36
Carpet bombing the postunes off the face of the earth
40:39
didn't succeed in quelling the insurgency for them either.
40:42
It's just, you're talking about a land the size of Texas
40:45
that's completely landlocked away from the sea
40:49
and behind mountains.
40:51
And that's all bad lands, mountains like Colorado,
40:53
deserts like California, or like, you know,
40:56
out in far west Texas.
40:58
This is essentially an incredibly difficult land
41:03
and with a warrior culture, right?
41:05
That does not, you know, revere peaceful, holy men.
41:09
They revere warriors, you know, and always have.
41:14
They like to fight much like Americans do.
41:17
And so, you know, at the end of the day,
41:21
that's why I call it fool's errand.
41:22
It could not work.
41:23
In fact, that the title comes from an interview
41:26
that I did with a whistleblower named Daniel Davis.
41:29
He's the army lieutenant colonel,
41:32
decorated combat veteran of a rock war one
41:35
and a rock war two and Afghanistan.
41:38
And his job in Afghanistan was, he was,
41:42
I'm sorry, I forgot the name
41:44
rough the top of my head, the official title,
41:46
but he's essentially the rapid supply officer.
41:48
So, there had been problems before right of men out
41:51
in the field and they can't get enough guns
41:53
and they can't get enough ammo
41:54
and they can't get enough helmets.
41:56
And so the army created this rapid response
41:58
rearmament team to be able to, you know,
42:01
do like a hot shot anywhere around the country
42:04
to bring men whatever ammo they needed,
42:06
whatever they said that they couldn't get, right?
42:08
So that was his job.
42:09
And so having that job meant he would travel
42:12
around the entire country.
42:14
And he would, you know, talk with army, talk with Marines.
42:16
He'd be in, you know, down in Helman province
42:19
in Pashtunistan.
42:20
He'd be way up north in Kunduz,
42:22
which there's also Pashtun's there,
42:24
but it's mostly Tajik and Uzbek up there
42:27
and in a place like that.
42:29
And so then he broke ranks in 2012.
42:32
And so David Petraeus is lying to the American people.
42:35
David Petraeus is saying that we won this war,
42:37
that we're winning this war,
42:38
that we're making progress,
42:39
that the Taliban is losing,
42:41
that as he put it, we're making progress,
42:44
but it's fragile and reversible.
42:46
And he broke ranks and he wrote an article
42:48
in the Air Force Journal saying that Petraeus is lying,
42:51
we are not making progress, we're losing the war.
42:54
The more we escalate, the more they escalate.
42:57
The more people we kill,
42:59
the more people we recruit into the enemy insurgency.
43:03
It's not working.
43:06
So then I interviewed Daniel Davis,
43:08
and this is probably 2012 or 13, you know,
43:10
just after the surge was finally, you know,
43:13
begun to draw down.
43:15
And I said, okay,
43:17
but what if instead of a completely ridiculous
43:20
and competent fraud like David Petraeus,
43:22
what if you had an actual competent general in there?
43:26
And what if instead of having 150,000 men, 140,
43:30
what if he had 250,000 men?
43:34
What about then?
43:34
Or would it still be a fool's errand?
43:39
And Daniel Davis, Lieutenant Colonel Davis,
43:41
said it would still be a fool's errand.
43:43
If you took the entire army active force of 500,000 men
43:47
and put them in there, it would still be a fool's errand.
43:50
And in fact, as I document in the book,
43:52
even according to the army specialist's own numbers,
43:55
that's what they would have to do.
43:57
They would have to occupy according their own theories.
44:00
They would have to put in 500,000 men
44:03
equivalent to the entire US Army's active force,
44:06
and they'd have to leave them there for 25 more years
44:10
to finally pacify these people, somehow modernize them,
44:15
integrate them into America's liberal rules-based
44:18
world order, a bunch of postune tribesmen,
44:22
which is of course a completely ridiculous hoax.
44:24
And if you'd given them,
44:25
you talked about the magic wish
44:27
in total warlord authority to decide,
44:30
if you'd given them 25 more years
44:32
and 500,000 more men,
44:34
they wouldn't be any closer to pacifying
44:37
the postune population of that country
44:39
at the end of all of that.
44:40
All they would have done was killed
44:42
another three quarters of a million people
44:44
or another half a million people,
44:46
three quarters of a million people,
44:48
and have still absolutely nothing to show for it anyway.
44:52
And here's the thing, now let's go back to September 11th,
44:56
because, and even still we're skipping ahead here,
44:59
but I'll take your question at face value for what it's worth.
45:02
- Sure. - What I would have done is,
45:03
I would have negotiated in good faith
45:05
with the Taliban for Al-Qaeda,
45:07
because as the American people did not understand at the time,
45:10
because government and TV lied to them,
45:13
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were entirely different
45:16
creatures and organizations.
45:17
Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban,
45:19
hated Osama bin Laden's guts.
45:22
And as even, you know, the most informed CIA people
45:27
like Milton Beardman, Milton Beardman,
45:30
who had run Operation Cyclone backing the Mujahideen
45:33
in the 1980s.
45:34
He told the Washington Post in September '01,
45:38
that look, we've been in active negotiations
45:40
with the Taliban over Al-Qaeda
45:42
since the Africa embassy bombings of 1998.
45:45
And we really threatened them after the coal bombing in 2000.
45:48
And they want rid of bin Laden.
45:50
They hate him.
45:51
When bin Laden was exiled from Sudan
45:53
and went there in 1996,
45:55
he was expected to be hosted by Rabani,
45:57
was just, it happened to be that the Northern Alliance
45:59
was losing, the Civil War, Rabani was killed.
46:02
And the Taliban took over the capital city.
46:06
So they essentially just were stuck with him.
46:09
He wasn't their invited guest and no blood brother.
46:12
They put all out all this nonsense
46:14
that he and Mullah Omar had married each other's daughters
46:17
and all this stuff.
46:17
That was a lie.
46:18
Mullah Omar hated bin Laden.
46:20
There's a great book called An Enemy We Created
46:23
by Kuhn and Lynn Shotan that says that,
46:26
well, and there's a hell of a lot more than that too.
46:29
But that book is great at describing
46:32
the absolute separation between these two groups.
46:35
And before September 11th,
46:39
and this is Bearden talking to the Washington Post,
46:42
the Taliban would say to the Americans,
46:44
"Hey, guess what?
46:46
Bin Laden is out in the countryside
46:48
falconing with his friends.
46:50
And elbow, elbow."
46:55
In other words, he's outside of our protection.
46:58
We told him to stay home,
46:59
but he's out in the countryside
47:01
where we can't keep him safe.
47:04
So, you know, if you guys were to say,
47:07
kill him dead, it wouldn't be our fault.
47:10
And then the Americans respond,
47:13
turn him over, towel head.
47:14
Yeah, but that's what they were just doing,
47:18
was turning him over.
47:20
And as Bearden put it,
47:21
again, the most qualified CIA man to comment
47:24
on the subject matter at that time.
47:26
As he put it, the Americans just wouldn't listen.
47:28
They just would not, he said,
47:30
"The Taliban are sending us signals.
47:32
We don't do signals."
47:33
Right, and so they, you know,
47:36
essentially did refuse to do what it took
47:38
to either negotiate his transfer or to kill him
47:41
before September 11th.
47:43
That Bill Clinton claimed to an Australian audience
47:46
that in order for him to have bombed Bin Laden
47:50
at his Tarnack farm on the outskirts of Kandahar City,
47:53
that he would have had to carpet bomb his words,
47:55
carpet bomb a little town called Kandahar.
48:00
Well, Kandahar is a city, it's a giant city,
48:03
not a small town.
48:04
And no, he would not have had to carpet bomb it.
48:08
One Iota.
48:09
All he had to do was carpet bomb one house.
48:13
That's not a carpet bomb.
48:14
You could do that with one bomb.
48:17
And it was on the outskirts of town.
48:20
And he actually made that claim on September the 10th,
48:22
2001, to a group of Australian businessmen.
48:25
That was his excuse for not killing Bin Laden
48:27
when he had the chance.
48:28
Was he claimed he would have had to wipe an entire city
48:30
off the face of the earth,
48:31
which is just completely a hoax.
48:33
And then after September 11th,
48:37
the Taliban wanted to turn him over.
48:40
And first they said, "Listen, we'll turn him over
48:43
"to any Muslim country if you give us not ironclad proof,
48:48
"but give us evidence of Al Qaeda's role
48:51
"in the September 11th attack."
48:52
Well, you and I both know they had evidence
48:54
of the Al Qaeda's role.
48:55
They knew Al Qaeda was going to attack us all summer long.
48:58
That's even the official story.
48:59
Was that certain cops and certain spies
49:02
were trying to do their job,
49:03
but they couldn't make the bureaucracy work tight enough
49:05
to actually prevent the attack in any way.
49:08
But there was no question whether Al Qaeda did it
49:10
or whether they could have connected Bin Laden
49:11
to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Ramsey Bin al-Shib
49:14
and all of these men who had done the attack.
49:16
It was all, you know, they all met at the Malaysia meeting
49:19
in 2000 where they planned the coal attack
49:21
and September 11th and all of that.
49:23
That was easy, Colin Powell went on
49:25
meet the press of the Secretary of State
49:26
and said, "We are going to give the Taliban a dossier
49:28
"full of evidence of Bin Laden's guilt."
49:30
And then they never did that.
49:32
And they said, "We'll turn him over
49:33
"to any Muslim country."
49:34
Well, that could have been Jordan or Egypt
49:37
or any sock puppet, you know, any friendly Muslim country
49:40
to the United States of America.
49:42
That would have, you know,
49:43
extradition to Egypt or to Jordan.
49:46
That would have meant the plain lands on the tarmac
49:48
while they sign a piece of paper
49:49
and then the plain takes off again.
49:51
Refules and takes right off again lands in Virginia
49:53
and then we have a trial, right?
49:54
You could have done that.
49:55
They could have done that and they didn't want to do that.
49:58
The Taliban then said, "Okay, fine.
49:59
"We'll give them over to any,"
50:01
pardon me, the second one was,
50:04
"We'll turn them over to the Pakistanis."
50:06
And the Pakistanis rejected that.
50:08
And I think that must have been
50:09
at America's insistence, although I don't know that.
50:12
But General Musharraf, this was his excuse.
50:14
Well, we can't promise that we can protect him.
50:17
We'll protect him nothing.
50:18
You're going to hand him right over to the Americans
50:20
immediately, anyway, what protect him, right?
50:24
I mean, that was obviously the game
50:25
was he was going to be extradited from wherever he went.
50:28
And then on October the 8th,
50:30
the day that Bush started bombing,
50:32
they said, "All right, all right, all right.
50:33
"We'll turn them over to any third country
50:36
"without seeing any evidence of his guilt."
50:39
I should have mentioned in the Pakistan example,
50:43
they still wanted some evidence.
50:44
By October 8th, they didn't even want evidence anymore
50:47
and they would have turned them over
50:48
even to Canada or Britain or France or whoever we said.
50:51
And Bush said, "Not good enough."
50:53
They wanted their war.
50:55
And as I demonstrate in the book,
50:56
and I got more than enough evidence for all of this,
50:59
in fact, I'll go ahead and tell you,
51:01
the primary source information here
51:03
is George W. Bush told his government
51:07
to take the National Security Council,
51:09
the classified National Security Council meeting minutes
51:12
and give them all to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.
51:17
The guy that was famously
51:19
did the Watergate scandal and all that.
51:21
And so the idea was, oh, we like Woodward, he's a good guy.
51:26
Well, I mean, I guess he's certainly loyal enough
51:29
to their agenda when it comes to that.
51:30
But in his book, Bush at War,
51:32
he has all the absolute direct quotes
51:34
straight from the transcriptionists,
51:37
straight from the horse's mouth.
51:39
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
51:42
all going on and on and on about attacking Iraq
51:46
and how we can't win the war in Afghanistan too early
51:49
or the American people will feel like the war is over.
51:52
And we need time to expand the war.
51:54
Rumsfeld said maybe we should start bombing Baghdad
51:57
right now just so the American people get the idea
52:00
that this war is going to take place over
52:02
a vast time, period of time, and a vast space.
52:07
And they went over and over and around and around about,
52:10
look, if we do kill Bin Laden, that's not victory.
52:15
And if we don't kill Bin Laden, that's not failure.
52:18
And we don't want the American people
52:20
to think that we've won the war on terrorism yet.
52:24
And we don't want them to get that false impression
52:26
because our agenda is we've got to move on to Baghdad.
52:28
- So is that why you think Torah Bohr happens?
52:31
- Yes, Connolly's a Rice and the CIA.
52:34
So Rice was the national security advisor.
52:36
She and the CIA were saying,
52:37
we should not be bombing the Taliban at all.
52:39
We should be bombing only al-Qaeda targets,
52:41
at least the best of our ability,
52:42
and we should be constantly signaling to the Taliban
52:45
that, look, man, we don't want to fight you.
52:47
We're just trying to kill these Arabs in your country, not you.
52:50
So stay the hell out of our way.
52:53
Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense,
52:55
and the neoconservatives and Bush agreed,
52:59
they overruled that and said, no,
53:01
if they're not just going to do whatever we say
53:03
on a moment's notice, then we're just going to bomb them all too.
53:06
And so that was contrary to the idea
53:08
that we wanted to separate them away.
53:10
No, we want to group them together.
53:12
And in fact, they decided they wanted to fight
53:15
the Taliban instead of al-Qaeda.
53:19
And now, so this gets us to Torah Bora,
53:21
but let me rewind just one moment here
53:24
to just after January 6th in Washington, D.C., okay, in 2021.
53:29
There's a CIA officer named Robert Grenier.
53:34
He wrote the book 88 Days to Kandahar.
53:36
He had been the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan
53:41
on September 11th or right after it.
53:44
So he was interviewed, and I talk about him in the book.
53:48
He was the guy who had arranged with the Pakistani Army
53:51
and Frontier Corps for deconfliction,
53:56
to prevent friendly fire on the assumption
53:58
that the American Delta Force was going to be chasing al-Qaeda
54:01
across the Pakistani border,
54:02
even though they were in refused permission to do so.
54:05
But that was his role in that, right?
54:06
He was right up in there.
54:08
So he does an interview with NPR News about January 6th,
54:13
and he's just making an analogy, okay?
54:16
He's not really talking about Afghanistan so much,
54:19
but he's making an analogy about the American populist right
54:23
and the January 6th right, okay?
54:26
So, but here's what he says.
54:28
He goes, after September 11th, we decided
54:32
we could go after al-Qaeda, and you know,
54:36
the guys who actually attacked us on September 11th,
54:39
but we decided instead that it was more important
54:43
to sort of focus on the overall milieu
54:47
of radical Islamism in which they were thriving,
54:50
meaning taking out the Taliban instead of taking out al-Qaeda.
54:56
And then his analogy was, so that's why we don't even
55:00
really wanna focus on persecuting the people involved
55:03
in the riot at the Capitol.
55:05
We wanna target essentially all American right-wingers
55:08
'cause they're the Taliban.
55:09
They're the milieu in which this, you know,
55:12
these certain individual actors who may or may not
55:15
have actually committed any crimes are thriving in.
55:19
And so, but there he was just admitting outright that,
55:22
and in fact, go back and check his language in the interview.
55:25
You'll see it said NPR News, and he even says,
55:27
you know, I'm sorry, I forget the exact quotes,
55:29
but you know, he talks about primary
55:32
versus secondary targets and this kind of thing,
55:34
and he makes it clear that the decision was,
55:36
we don't really want to focus on al-Qaeda and the guilty.
55:41
And as Bush said, only six months after the war,
55:44
and I block quote the entire statement in both books
55:47
'cause I don't want anyone to think I'm leaving out
55:49
any of the context whatsoever, in March of '02,
55:52
the beginning of March of '02, one half a year
55:56
after the September 11th attacks, reporter lady asked Bush,
56:01
how come all you ever do was talk about Saddam Hussein,
56:03
you don't ever talk about Osama bin Laden anymore.
56:06
What about him?
56:07
And Bush says, hey, and this is in the National Security
56:11
Council notes too, he uses words very close this.
56:15
As long as bin Laden is on the run, that's good enough for me.
56:18
Right, he says, I truly am not that concerned about him.
56:23
I was concerned back when he was a parasite
56:26
and had control over the Taliban government
56:29
and all these things, that now that we've overthrown
56:31
the Taliban and essentially chased bin Laden away somewhere,
56:35
that's fine, that's good.
56:37
And she's saying, but geez, I mean,
56:40
is that right?
56:41
And then he gets on madder.
56:42
See, you just don't understand, lady,
56:44
the broad scope of the war on terror.
56:46
And he's just not smart enough to be subtle enough
56:49
to do this right.
56:50
So all that he can essentially do is blurt out.
56:53
I am bait and switching your [inaudible], stupid lady.
56:58
Get on board with the program.
57:00
We have to leave bin Laden out there.
57:02
So you and your mom are still afraid
57:04
that Saddam Hussein is gonna what?
57:09
Sail his navy over here?
57:11
No, he's gonna give chemical weapons
57:14
to Osama bin Laden, who's still out there somewhere.
57:18
And that's how we're going to go to Iraq.
57:21
It was just as blatant as could be.
57:23
And everybody can just go read it themselves
57:25
over and over again.
57:27
And so now to specify Tora Bora, it's in both books.
57:30
In fact, I'm more and better sources even
57:33
in enough already about how the CIA and Delta Force,
57:37
that's the top tier special operations forces at Tora Bora,
57:41
they weren't even allowed to go to bin Laden's hideout,
57:44
where everybody knew it was this hideout.
57:46
The lions den at Tora Bora,
57:48
he'd been interviewed by CNN and ABC News
57:50
and the independent there before.
57:52
Everybody knew where it was.
57:53
They weren't even allowed to go there
57:54
until the very, very end of November,
57:57
like the last three or four days of November.
57:59
And then they spent two weeks and change,
58:02
essentially begging for reinforcements.
58:08
At the time, the green berets were screwing around
58:11
way up in Missouri, Sharif, fighting the Taliban,
58:14
no al-Qaeda to be seen anywhere.
58:16
The Rangers had, they were like 20,000 Rangers
58:19
or something like that.
58:20
We're holding down the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.
58:23
Oh, and we got to get back to the withdrawal.
58:25
Don't let me forget, we got to get back to the withdrawal
58:27
from Afghanistan at the end here, I skipped that,
58:28
I'm sorry about that.
58:29
- Yeah, you're good.
58:30
- And they had more Rangers, I forget, green berets.
58:35
The 75th Rangers were down in Kandahar
58:38
and there were some al-Qaeda guys there
58:40
that they were chasing.
58:41
- Delta, Delta Force was in there as well.
58:43
- Yeah, no, so Delta Force, oh, down in Kandahar?
58:47
- So, Tora Bora, that's one more, yes.
58:50
Delta's in command there.
58:51
And they're backed up by the CIA paramilitaries
58:54
of the Special Activities Division, right?
58:56
And then, but so, way up in Missouri, Sharif,
58:59
you got green berets at the Kandahar,
59:02
pardon me, at the Bagram Air Base
59:04
and the Kandahar Air Base, you have army Rangers
59:06
and General Mattis, later a famously Donald Trump
59:09
Secretary of Defense, had 4,000 March in Marines,
59:12
also in Kandahar.
59:13
- More than that, I'm more than gonna take care.
59:16
- That's right, so Delta and CIA are begging
59:19
for reinforcements, begging and begging and begging
59:21
and in their words.
59:22
And you can read this in Gary Burntson's book,
59:25
Jawbreaker, he's the CIA guy.
59:28
And the other book is called "Kill Bin Laden"
59:31
and it's by Dalton Fury, which is the pseudonym
59:36
for Thomas Greer, who is the Lieutenant Colonel
59:39
in charge of the Delta Force on the ground there.
59:42
And they both just say over and over again
59:44
how frustrated they were that they could not get
59:46
ground troops to help them seal the border.
59:49
And then, you know, I give actually undo credit
59:52
in both books to Bush and I say,
59:54
well, you know, they did call in a lot of air power
59:56
and I do have to admit that they could have bombed
59:58
and killed Bin Laden that way.
1:00:00
But then I only learned this a year ago.
1:00:03
In task and purpose, they had an interview
1:00:06
with the Air Force controller who was embedded
1:00:09
with the Delta Force, a special operations Air Force guy,
1:00:14
embedded with the Delta Force.
1:00:15
And it's the one guy responsible for all air traffic
1:00:18
control and airstrikes at Torbora during that time.
1:00:21
And in fact, he says there had been a friendly fire incident
1:00:24
elsewhere in the country.
1:00:25
So all air strikes were called off, except at Torbora.
1:00:29
So he had full access to every single American
1:00:33
and British plane in Afghanistan at that time
1:00:36
at the beginning of December, 2001.
1:00:38
And he is the one guy is in charge of all air traffic
1:00:41
control and air strikes.
1:00:43
And he's running it all day and night.
1:00:46
And then he says, yeah, and then they call me out of there
1:00:48
on December the 8th, huh?
1:00:52
December the 8th.
1:00:54
But Bin Laden didn't get away until December the 17th.
1:01:00
And I guess I had just never realized
1:01:02
or asked the question before how long the air strikes went on
1:01:04
before they stopped them, which is sort of assumed.
1:01:07
It went on all along.
1:01:09
So they had called off the air strikes on December the 8th.
1:01:13
And then for another week and a half,
1:01:16
the guys were sitting there gnashing their teeth
1:01:18
because they are being made to rely on local Afghan militiamen.
1:01:23
And any progress that they make in the daytime,
1:01:28
the militia guys go home at night.
1:01:30
And the Delta Force guys aren't willing to hold
1:01:32
the positions themselves and risk their lives for the thing
1:01:35
or they're forbidden from doing so either way.
1:01:39
And then eventually they all escape on December the 17th.
1:01:41
And then the Delta Force is forbidden from following him.
1:01:44
And Dalton Fury writes all about this.
1:01:46
He did an interview.
1:01:46
Anybody can watch his interview in 60 minutes.
1:01:48
He's sitting there in all full makeup and a fake beard
1:01:51
and a hat and sunglasses, whatever.
1:01:53
Anybody can watch it on YouTube.
1:01:54
It's Scott Pelley interviewing him.
1:01:55
And they have a whole diorama built of torabor
1:01:58
of all the mountains and whatever.
1:01:59
And here's the Pakistani border.
1:02:00
And what we wanted to do was seal the border
1:02:02
so they couldn't get away.
1:02:03
But they wouldn't let us seal the border.
1:02:04
So then what we wanted to do was we wanted to take helicopters
1:02:07
and mine.
1:02:07
There was only three valleys of possible skate routes
1:02:10
out of there.
1:02:11
And so we wanted to mine all those valleys.
1:02:13
Nope, they're forbidden from doing so.
1:02:14
Oh, what we wanted to do then we wanted to take Chinook
1:02:17
helicopters, we're talking about our army's top tier
1:02:19
special operations forces.
1:02:21
We're going to take our helicopters, our Chinooks,
1:02:23
go over the mountains and then come and meet Bin Laden coming
1:02:26
from the east and head him off at the pass.
1:02:29
For Bin, decline, denied.
1:02:32
And now for the rest of your whole life you've heard this.
1:02:34
Everyone listening to this show has heard this.
1:02:36
A million times over.
1:02:38
Well, but then Bin Laden and his men
1:02:41
slipped across the border into Pakistan.
1:02:46
And then your brain is just supposed to turn off
1:02:49
when you hear the magic word slipped.
1:02:51
And you're not supposed to ask.
1:02:53
Well, why can't the Delta Force walk after them, huh?
1:02:59
Because of the the magical semi permeable membrane
1:03:04
that separates the wilderness of Nangahar province
1:03:07
from whatever the hell you call that part of Pakistan.
1:03:11
There's no reason in the world that Delta and their special
1:03:15
activities division guys couldn't just walk right after them
1:03:18
other than they were forbidden by their commander in chief,
1:03:21
George W. Bush.
1:03:23
They were allowed to escape.
1:03:26
Just like in Star Wars, they let us go.
1:03:29
It's the only explanation for the ease of our escape.
1:03:33
It's exactly right, it's treason.
1:03:35
And the reason why is because they wanted to lie
1:03:38
to your mom and dad, that they and you were in danger still.
1:03:45
Saddam might give weapons to Osama, who somehow he's
1:03:50
in exile in No Man's Land as far as you could ever
1:03:52
get from anywhere without being on the way back again.
1:03:56
But anyway, he's going to reach out and touch you again.
1:03:58
And as George W. Bush said, absolutely shamelessly,
1:04:01
over and over and over again 20 years ago.
1:04:04
Just imagine September 11th again, only this time
1:04:10
bin Laden's terrorists armed with Saddam Hussein's weapons
1:04:14
of mass destruction.
1:04:16
Things like that over and over and over again.
1:04:19
And of course, Dick Cheney and the neocons
1:04:22
lied over and over that Iraq had met
1:04:26
with Muhammad Atah, the lead hijacker,
1:04:29
and had given him a flask of anthrax.
1:04:31
He won't be surprised to find out it was the Israelis who
1:04:33
made up that lie and put it in the German newspaper
1:04:37
to visit or was it billed claiming.
1:04:41
Oh, yeah, when Saddam Hussein's man
1:04:44
met with the lead hijacker, which never happened,
1:04:46
yeah, we happened to also be there, too.
1:04:48
And we just happened to witness the Iraqi, what,
1:04:53
deputy foreign minister, hand the lead hijacker,
1:04:56
a flask full of anthrax.
1:04:58
Yeah, you buying that?
1:05:01
So that was the whole thing.
1:05:03
And this is why I will give some credit to the 9/11 truthers.
1:05:06
I don't think that they're right that America, or even
1:05:11
the Israelis or Saudis did the attack.
1:05:14
But they might as well have.
1:05:17
They exploited it with enough cynicism and dishonesty,
1:05:21
the grief and the fear of the American people
1:05:24
after that attack that they might as well have done it.
1:05:27
It would have been, at that point,
1:05:29
it would have been just one half of a hair or more of a sin
1:05:33
for them to have actually done that damn to attack themselves
1:05:37
compared to, I mean, one, their criminal negligence
1:05:40
in, I mean, this lowercase A, allowing it to happen
1:05:44
on their watch.
1:05:45
But two, the way they then turn right around,
1:05:48
let the chief perpetrator escape,
1:05:51
and then try to exploit the American people's fears
1:05:53
that can have their bonus wars.
1:05:55
I mean, it's treason.
1:05:57
It really was, you know, calling off the effort,
1:06:01
refusing to negotiate, and then refusing
1:06:04
to allow the reinforcements and calling off the effort
1:06:06
against bin Laden was literally like the Uvaldi cops
1:06:10
holding the parents back, right?
1:06:12
It's literally an active measure on behalf of the enemy.
1:06:17
- Well, Scott, I appreciate you getting into that detail,
1:06:20
and I know we're a little bit pastime,
1:06:21
but you did want to get into the withdrawal.
1:06:23
- Yeah, so let me talk about that.
1:06:24
So what I meant to say about the whole thing about,
1:06:27
you know, fighting for a coalition of minorities
1:06:31
against the plurality was about how,
1:06:34
and I talked about Daniel Davis,
1:06:35
how he said, you know, we could never win the war.
1:06:38
Well, so Trump knew this, and he wanted to get out
1:06:40
as soon as he came into power.
1:06:42
In fact, there was just a new story about this the other day.
1:06:45
Oh, man, I need to collect these footnotes better.
1:06:47
You might have seen this, it was just the other day.
1:06:50
Who published it?
1:06:52
Oh, it was Millie's book.
1:06:54
Millie just published a book.
1:06:56
The chairman's. - Oh, yeah.
1:06:57
- He's not quite out yet, right?
1:06:59
- Oh, okay, yeah. - But they were just doing leaks.
1:07:00
- Yeah, so they're, yeah, yeah, they have excerpts, right.
1:07:02
So he's talking about how Trump wanted
1:07:05
to get out of Afghanistan and Korea,
1:07:07
and how they just overruled them, and just said no.
1:07:09
And this is also in Woodward's,
1:07:11
I believe Woodward's second book on Trump.
1:07:13
The first one is fear, the second one is rage.
1:07:16
I believe it's in rage, where Mattis bracks to him,
1:07:21
or Tillerson does, one or the other.
1:07:23
He was the secretary of state that, yeah, Trump,
1:07:25
in March of 2017, you know, in other words,
1:07:29
you know, four, six weeks after taking power.
1:07:33
Trump ordered America, ordered a full withdrawal
1:07:36
from Afghanistan and South Korea.
1:07:39
And Mattis and Tillerson turned to each other
1:07:42
and just said, we're not doing that.
1:07:44
And they agreed that they would just be insubordinate
1:07:46
and they would refuse to carry out his orders, and they did.
1:07:48
But of course, he is such a damn flake
1:07:50
that he didn't pick up the story the next day
1:07:52
and the next day and the next day and the next day,
1:07:54
and say, either do what I say, or I'll put you in jail.
1:07:58
Mr. you know, especially to his military men,
1:08:00
to his generals, he certainly could have fired
1:08:02
all of his, the civilians obstructing him.
1:08:06
But then once they got rid of Bannon,
1:08:08
Bannon was the only one who agreed with Trump
1:08:10
about wanting to get out of Afghanistan.
1:08:12
So once they got rid of Bannon, by August of 2021,
1:08:17
they took him out to Camp David,
1:08:18
and you can see pictures of this.
1:08:20
It's Trump in like 25 generals, admirals, and CIA spies.
1:08:25
And then he announced that yet we're escalating,
1:08:27
we're sending 21,000 more troops,
1:08:29
and we're gonna massively escalate the air war, and he did.
1:08:32
He killed hundreds of thousands of people,
1:08:33
it's got barely any coverage,
1:08:35
but he escalated a massive air war
1:08:37
during his four years in power.
1:08:39
However, he also negotiated and is unbelievable.
1:08:44
I still am not 100% sure how this happened.
1:08:49
But Trump went to Zalme Khalilzad,
1:08:51
who's an extremely influential neo-conservative,
1:08:54
dating back to, you know,
1:08:55
studied with under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago
1:08:59
in the late '60s and was friends with Paul Wolfowitz
1:09:01
and Richard Pearl and all of those guys.
1:09:03
I cite him over and over and over again in the book,
1:09:08
advising the very worst policies from 1979
1:09:11
all the way through today.
1:09:12
But there, somehow Trump got this guy
1:09:15
to sign in blood or something, his oath,
1:09:18
that he was gonna make a deal with the Taliban
1:09:20
and he was gonna really make a deal with the Taliban.
1:09:23
He was gonna not screw Trump over,
1:09:25
he really was going to seek this goal out and finish it.
1:09:28
And he did, he signed, and step one was excluding
1:09:32
the government in Kabul from the negotiations.
1:09:35
And step two was recognizing
1:09:36
that Taliban have already won this war.
1:09:38
The war's already over.
1:09:40
It is the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
1:09:42
The only thing remaining is for the Americans
1:09:44
to get out of the way of final victory, but that's it.
1:09:47
And so they said, "Listen, our only conditions for leaving
1:09:52
"are that you maintain the ceasefire between now
1:09:55
"and when we're all the way out
1:09:57
"and that you promise not to host
1:10:00
"Al-Qaeda or other foreign-oriented terrorists
1:10:03
"inside your country to attack outside your country
1:10:06
"after we leave."
1:10:07
And that was it, which is, you know, unenforceable anyway.
1:10:11
Scout's honor, promise not to bring Al-Qaeda back
1:10:14
and we're cool.
1:10:15
And so that they signed that deal.
1:10:17
Now, there was no other deal that the Taliban would sign.
1:10:20
You have to understand, they had won the war.
1:10:23
They weren't gonna sign a deal that said anything less
1:10:25
than we're getting the hell out of their way.
1:10:28
They weren't going to make a deal.
1:10:29
And look, all through Bush and Obama, they said,
1:10:32
"Yeah, we'll make a deal with the Taliban
1:10:33
"as long as the Kabul government can be included.
1:10:36
"Back to public choice theory, right?"
1:10:42
The individuals running, or even the state itself,
1:10:46
the government in Kabul, the puppet government in Kabul,
1:10:50
they had no incentive to negotiate with the Taliban.
1:10:53
They had area incentive to keep the war with the Taliban
1:10:55
going so that the Americans would stay and prop them up.
1:11:00
They make peace with the Taliban, then we can leave.
1:11:03
They would prefer that we stay.
1:11:05
So for Bush and Obama to insist that they get
1:11:08
to participate in the negotiations means the negotiations
1:11:12
will never go anywhere, right?
1:11:14
And so that was Trump and Khalilzad's great invention
1:11:19
was they said, "Screw the government in Kabul,
1:11:20
"we don't care, we're negotiating this exit anyway."
1:11:23
And then I don't know what in the world kind of promises
1:11:27
they made to each other.
1:11:28
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that scene
1:11:31
where Trump somehow got Zalmay Khalilzad
1:11:34
to make this promise and mean it.
1:11:36
That he was going to sign this deal and get us the hell
1:11:39
out of there, that he wasn't gonna represent
1:11:41
any other institutional interest in America
1:11:44
other than the president of the United States
1:11:45
who has given him this job.
1:11:47
Just still a miracle to me.
1:11:48
I still, I mean, if I have to explain this
1:11:50
'cause they wanted to get part of the establishment,
1:11:53
wanted to get out of there so they could focus
1:11:54
on pivoting to China instead, that kind of thing.
1:11:57
And many of them did write like that at the time.
1:11:59
And they did know that if they were going to,
1:12:04
and they were so dishonest,
1:12:05
I mean, you can see David Petraeus arguing
1:12:07
about this in the media this week.
1:12:10
And a year ago, all these hawks were so dishonestly saying,
1:12:14
"Well, all we have to do is stay.
1:12:15
"All we have to do is tell the Taliban,
1:12:16
"no, we don't wanna leave, we wanna stay,
1:12:18
"and then we'll just stay."
1:12:19
Well, but that just wasn't true.
1:12:20
We had had to cease fire with them
1:12:22
for 18 months already more.
1:12:24
If we had said stay, we're gonna stay and the deal is off,
1:12:28
they would have gone right back to war against us.
1:12:30
And then they would have still been very much
1:12:33
in control of more than half of the country
1:12:35
and they would have very much threatened
1:12:37
the American regime in Condous, the Missouri Sharif,
1:12:40
and even in Kabul, even with our troops there.
1:12:43
And if they were fully at war back against the Americans,
1:12:46
or the Americans wanted to somehow fully roll Taliban power
1:12:50
back to their home bases in Nangahar
1:12:53
and Kandahar and Hellman Province and that kind of thing,
1:12:57
they would have had to send another 100,000 men.
1:13:00
They would have had to redo Obama's surge again.
1:13:02
They'd lost the war.
1:13:04
I think that must have been,
1:13:05
it can have been a promise to Trump.
1:13:07
That must have been what it was with Khalilzah.
1:13:09
Maybe he was the one reading the riot act of Trump
1:13:11
and just explaining nothing other than a massive
1:13:15
renewed effort there is going to turn this tide.
1:13:19
So now we get to Joe Biden.
1:13:22
Trump gets himself unelected and he did.
1:13:25
Doug McGregor did try to have him order all troops
1:13:28
out of Afghanistan in December of 2020.
1:13:32
Before it's too late,
1:13:33
before the Democrats get in here and ruin it,
1:13:35
you gotta get him out now.
1:13:37
And he did order, he wrote up an order
1:13:39
and gave an order to get all of our troops
1:13:41
out of Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia.
1:13:44
And then his secretary of defense was like,
1:13:47
no, we're not doing this.
1:13:49
And he was like, oh, okay.
1:13:50
And back down again and withdrew the order.
1:13:52
So then he changed the order
1:13:53
to we're leaving 2,500 troops in Afghanistan,
1:13:55
2,500 troops in Iraq and whatever the number was in.
1:13:59
Oh, and we're pulling the troops out of Somalia,
1:14:01
just to Djibouti where they can still attack Somalia
1:14:03
from Djibouti.
1:14:04
So yeah, great.
1:14:05
Then Biden comes in and Biden doesn't want to leave
1:14:10
on Trump's timeline because then it's Trump's withdrawal.
1:14:14
And if it looks good,
1:14:15
then Trump gets the credit for it.
1:14:17
Biden wants it to be his withdrawal.
1:14:20
But this is a huge mistake because the withdrawal date
1:14:24
in the agreement was, pardon me,
1:14:27
May the 1st of 2021.
1:14:31
Well, that's essentially the first day of duck season
1:14:35
over there, man, right?
1:14:36
Like the first day of hunting season.
1:14:38
So when Biden said, no, we're going to leave
1:14:41
in the middle of September instead,
1:14:44
he was delaying America's timeline
1:14:46
for getting out of the country.
1:14:48
But he was not delaying the Taliban's timeline
1:14:50
for taking the [inaudible] over, right?
1:14:53
So now, so that was his first huge mistake.
1:14:58
He should have just said, a deal's a deal.
1:15:01
Trump signed it.
1:15:02
I might've liked to delay it a little, but I can't.
1:15:04
And so we're just going to go and get out by May 1st.
1:15:07
And he would have had to, you know,
1:15:09
kick some ass inside the Pentagon
1:15:11
and around the bureaucracy and insist,
1:15:13
but he could have done that.
1:15:14
Once he failed to do that,
1:15:17
now he had a huge problem
1:15:19
because you see the army, as we saw,
1:15:24
the army of the puppet government we created in Kabul
1:15:28
and the civilian puppet government
1:15:30
that we create in Kabul itself
1:15:31
could not stand without American support at all.
1:15:36
So the two big humiliations of the withdrawal,
1:15:39
we're not that we lost the war.
1:15:40
We lost the war under Barack Obama 10 years ago.
1:15:43
The humiliations were that the Afghan army
1:15:49
turned over about or, you know, had no choice,
1:15:52
but to turn over billions, three or four billion dollars
1:15:56
worth of military equipment to the Taliban.
1:15:59
So a huge humiliation, like when ISIS took over all the bases
1:16:02
in Western Iraq, now they got American howitzers
1:16:04
and Humvees and all the rest, right?
1:16:06
That's embarrassing.
1:16:07
Then also, the Afghan government just completely fell
1:16:13
and ceased to exist while the Americans were still there
1:16:16
and they ended up having to rely on the Taliban
1:16:17
to provide security while they're on their way
1:16:20
out at the airport.
1:16:22
And why are they leaving from the airport?
1:16:24
'Cause they turned over the Bagram air base
1:16:26
to the Afghan army, which again, could not exist
1:16:30
without their support.
1:16:31
So the Afghan army had turned right around
1:16:33
and handed the whole air base over to the Taliban.
1:16:36
Now you have the Americans trying to get out
1:16:38
at this airport that has one measly airstrip
1:16:41
and, you know, are in all this trouble
1:16:43
and they're asking the Taliban to provide them security.
1:16:46
The Taliban just walked right into the capital city.
1:16:48
They didn't invade it.
1:16:50
They didn't use armored vehicles.
1:16:52
They just walked right in and they're sandals, you know?
1:16:55
So, but here's the thing.
1:16:57
The only way to have avoided that,
1:17:00
whether they left on the deadline or after it,
1:17:03
would have been for Biden to tell the American people
1:17:05
straight up.
1:17:06
Listen, the government that Me and Barack Obama built,
1:17:10
the army that Me and Barack Obama built,
1:17:12
it's a joke, man.
1:17:13
It's a Potemkin village.
1:17:15
It'll never last.
1:17:16
And so as we withdraw, I hope you understand
1:17:19
we have no choice but to completely stab the Afghan army
1:17:23
in the back and destroy all the weapons
1:17:25
that we'd left for them, right?
1:17:27
For him to do that would have been absolute suicide
1:17:29
and all the Republican hawks would have said
1:17:31
that the Afghan government would have been fine.
1:17:33
Donald Trump left it in great shape,
1:17:36
but you undermined it by destroying all their weapons, right?
1:17:39
So politically speaking, that was, you know,
1:17:42
almost impossible for him to do.
1:17:44
And then same thing with the government in Kabul.
1:17:46
Look, this thing is a joke.
1:17:49
We gotta get all our civilians out of here now
1:17:52
before it's a giant fall-as-side-gone type crisis.
1:17:55
Because the fact of the matter is sorry to say,
1:17:57
this puppet government always was essentially
1:18:01
a government created for a foreign purpose.
1:18:03
It is not a legitimate Afghan government.
1:18:06
It does not have popular sovereignty.
1:18:08
It will not stand after we leave,
1:18:11
and so we gotta get out now.
1:18:12
Both of those things would have been absolute
1:18:15
political humiliations.
1:18:17
So the White House calculated that they'll send Biden out there
1:18:20
and say it's okay for us to leave,
1:18:23
not because we lost the war and what the hell are you gonna do?
1:18:26
No, it's okay for us to leave 'cause we won the war.
1:18:29
That's right, we did a great job
1:18:31
and we built a 300,000-man army
1:18:33
that'll have no problem standing up
1:18:35
and protecting Afghanistan after we leave.
1:18:37
So that's why it's okay to leave, right?
1:18:40
And then that became the ultimate humiliation
1:18:42
that's the whole thing disintegrated on his way out.
1:18:44
So in other words,
1:18:46
the only way to win the game is not to play
1:18:50
and the only way to back out and lose
1:18:54
and save any face whatsoever is to tell the truth.
1:18:58
And they couldn't do that.
1:19:01
They couldn't say we did this all for 20 years.
1:19:04
It made no sense.
1:19:06
We're cutting off all support for the Afghan army
1:19:09
and the Afghan state and we know for a fact
1:19:13
that they are both going to cease to exist
1:19:15
the day after tomorrow.
1:19:16
So we're gonna go ahead and destroy all the weapons.
1:19:18
We've left them and we're gonna say sorry
1:19:20
and then that's all.
1:19:22
And politically that was impossible.
1:19:23
So then what do they do?
1:19:25
They got the bloodiest black eye in the world,
1:19:27
leaving with literal panicking Afghans,
1:19:32
clinging to the landing gear and falling to their deaths,
1:19:35
which was totally unnecessary, by the way, right?
1:19:37
I mean, after that happened,
1:19:38
planes were still taking off from Kabul airport
1:19:41
for three weeks after that or whatever.
1:19:43
Those people had not been so panicked
1:19:44
and waited their turn.
1:19:45
They might've got out of there.
1:19:46
But anyway, it's an absolute catastrophe to see on TV.
1:19:51
And then of course a suicide bomber killed,
1:19:53
I believe it was 11 Marines and two others, 13 told.
1:19:58
I believe it was 11 Marines and these are young kids too,
1:20:00
like four or five of them born after September 11.
1:20:03
'Cause they're only deployment there.
1:20:04
They deployed there only to help in the evacuation
1:20:07
and then leave and got blown to bits out there.
1:20:10
And then in a perfectly fitting punctuation point
1:20:17
on the whole thing, the military launched a drone strike
1:20:23
and killed an entirely innocent family
1:20:25
as their last major act there and just, you know.
1:20:29
- As about the Biden administration was trying to prove
1:20:31
they're over the horizon capabilities
1:20:34
and then to do something like that.
1:20:36
- Yeah, and it, you know, it was a stupid mistake.
1:20:39
Essentially, they were following a corolla around
1:20:41
that they thought was the ISIS guy
1:20:42
and then somehow they started following the wrong corolla.
1:20:46
Somebody went on a lunch break, came back or whatever,
1:20:49
went and had a smoke and came back
1:20:50
and started following the wrong car around.
1:20:52
- It was an entire, I think it was seven children.
1:20:53
It was an entire family and they owned the worker.
1:20:56
- Yeah, the guy that they killed spent his entire life
1:20:59
was driving around Kabul delivering drinking water
1:21:02
and soybeans to desperately poor people
1:21:05
and was trying to get into the United States
1:21:07
and become an American, was trying to, you know, flee
1:21:09
and all that and he was working for an American NGO,
1:21:12
literally given water and soybeans to people
1:21:14
who otherwise would be dead without his water and soybeans.
1:21:17
That's the guy that killed the salt of the earth.
1:21:20
And the whole war is like that, by the way.
1:21:22
There's nothing but a [inaudible] catastrophe
1:21:24
the whole time, thousands of people killed,
1:21:26
hundreds of thousands of innocent people,
1:21:29
blown to bits and their lives destroyed
1:21:31
just for absolutely nothing.
1:21:33
And we shouldn't forget it and we shouldn't forgive
1:21:35
so-called quote unquote ourselves for it either.
1:21:38
Like this was all some, you know, misunderstanding
1:21:43
or said of bad choices made in good faith
1:21:46
or something like that.
1:21:48
I mean, at the very least,
1:21:49
and I'm not one for collective punishment, you know,
1:21:51
like anybody deserves anything that happened
1:21:53
to them over this or anything like that.
1:21:56
But I do believe that it is the responsibility
1:21:59
of the American people to at least be honest with themselves
1:22:02
to try to seek out the truth
1:22:03
and to try to form a consensus about whether we want to,
1:22:07
you know, be doing these things.
1:22:09
It's not like just arguing over, you know, pothole repair
1:22:13
or arguing over, you know, the rate of increase
1:22:16
of social security checks or something like that.
1:22:19
We're talking about destroying people,
1:22:21
blowing them to little bitty pieces with high explosives.
1:22:24
You better be sure you have a good reason
1:22:27
to do that to somebody if you're gonna do that to somebody.
1:22:31
And, you know, the Afghan war is just a virtually
1:22:34
endless series of atrocities.
1:22:36
You know, just for one example, in 2008,
1:22:39
I think it was an Apache helicopter blew away
1:22:41
a group of young boys out gathering firewood.
1:22:44
It was eight boys and the ninth one survived
1:22:46
because part of a tree fell on top of them.
1:22:48
So the helicopter couldn't see him and finished the job.
1:22:51
And he came back and he told this story.
1:22:53
And these were all young kids.
1:22:54
They're like nine, 10, 13 years old right around there.
1:22:58
And, you know, I don't know about you exactly,
1:23:00
but in my life, you know, where I grew up
1:23:02
in my neighborhood, eight of us, that was about right.
1:23:05
That would have been all the boys from the neighborhood, right?
1:23:07
Me and all of my friends for three or four blocks
1:23:10
in any direction, that was us.
1:23:12
We, when we might very well have been out there,
1:23:15
you know, playing guns in the woods,
1:23:19
something like that running around.
1:23:21
And just to matter, eight doesn't sound like that big
1:23:24
of a number, but eight would be a huge number
1:23:27
if somebody with a hell-fire missile
1:23:30
or with a helicopter firing machine guns
1:23:34
have blown away me and my seven closest friends
1:23:38
when we were kids.
1:23:39
What, imagine for just one moment
1:23:41
what that would have done in your neighborhood.
1:23:43
You and eight kids, you and seven kids,
1:23:45
you went to kindergarten and first grade with,
1:23:48
all blown the kingdom come by a foreign military
1:23:52
occupying force flying an Apache gunship
1:23:56
against little children out getting firewood, right?
1:23:59
It would have been the end of your mom,
1:24:03
your friends, moms, their families, their everything,
1:24:07
their worlds.
1:24:09
That's just another day of the Afghan war.
1:24:12
And blown to bits by the way,
1:24:14
we're talking about blown apart, you know,
1:24:16
you've all day style with these high caliber bullets
1:24:20
for nothing at all in the name of helping these people, right?
1:24:23
Not in the name of punishing them for September 11th,
1:24:26
everyone agrees they didn't do it.
1:24:28
The Taliban didn't do it,
1:24:29
the Afghan people sure as hell didn't do it.
1:24:32
So we're only killing them because we love them so much
1:24:34
'cause we're trying to build them a school
1:24:35
and turn their wilderness into a Westphalian nation state.
1:24:40
And then we act like, oh well, whatever.
1:24:43
You know what, let's just move on to the next one.
1:24:45
We don't even have to think about this stuff,
1:24:47
know about it, think about it, much less feel guilty about it,
1:24:50
much less try to make a change
1:24:51
in the way that our government runs.
1:24:53
And you could read in the New York Times
1:24:55
where they say, look, honestly, man,
1:24:57
what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is really bad, right?
1:25:00
Never mind Libya and Syria and Yemen.
1:25:01
Who even cares about that?
1:25:03
But yeah, what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan,
1:25:05
it is really bad.
1:25:06
But that's why it's so important
1:25:08
that we pour all these arms into Ukraine now.
1:25:10
This is our absolution for all of our sins
1:25:14
that we committed in the Middle East over the last 20 years.
1:25:17
Like getting the people of Ukraine into the same mess.
1:25:21
Get it?
1:25:22
And Scott, it plays into a lot of the narrative games
1:25:24
and perhaps next year we can have you back on.
1:25:26
'Cause I do want to talk about Ukraine, Russia and China,
1:25:28
but unfortunately we are at a time.
1:25:30
But I do have one last question
1:25:31
because I can almost hear my audience
1:25:34
and I can almost hear myself as I was reading through the book.
1:25:36
And I know you've been asked this before.
1:25:38
So as you read through some of these things
1:25:40
and as you read the tone and tenor of the book
1:25:43
and if you were to perceive the tone and tenor of you
1:25:46
in this interview, some people might draw the conclusion
1:25:49
that, wow, this guy just hates America.
1:25:51
This guy just hates his country
1:25:53
and they could easily dismiss you that way
1:25:56
or they could easily hate you
1:25:57
or make you their enemy or something like that.
1:26:00
Now, that's not exactly my read of it,
1:26:02
but obviously there's a big difference
1:26:04
between hating something and distrusting it
1:26:07
or hating something and wanting it to be
1:26:09
the better version of its purported self
1:26:11
or something like that, that hopefully that makes sense.
1:26:13
But when you get that pushback,
1:26:15
'cause I know you've gotten it before
1:26:16
that, oh, well, Scott just hates America,
1:26:18
how do you respond to that?
1:26:19
What would be your direct response to that question?
1:26:22
- Well, I mean, my immediate response is grow up, right?
1:26:27
Like, what is this?
1:26:28
We're all little children.
1:26:29
I remember thinking about this on September the 12th, right?
1:26:33
That like, okay, we've all had like a good 16 hours,
1:26:38
20 hours to be very upset and emotional.
1:26:43
Now, can we be grownups?
1:26:45
Now, can we be adults and think about this?
1:26:49
Instead of being, just completely crybaby,
1:26:52
emotional knee jerk reaction,
1:26:54
and then the answer was no, we can't, you know?
1:26:57
And look, I mean, I don't know.
1:27:02
In a way, like, if people are really that binary
1:27:07
and childish and simplistic and they're thinking,
1:27:10
I almost don't know what to do for you.
1:27:12
Are you Jimmy Carter?
1:27:14
If Jimmy Carter runs a red light and, you know,
1:27:19
hits some old lady and breaks her elbow,
1:27:22
are you responsible for that?
1:27:24
'Cause you're an American.
1:27:25
How come you hate America, dude?
1:27:27
Why would you criticize Jimmy Carter
1:27:29
for running a red light and breaking some lady's elbow?
1:27:32
That doesn't follow at all.
1:27:35
That's stupid.
1:27:36
Well, guess what?
1:27:39
You're not Bill Clinton either,
1:27:41
and you're not Barack Obama either.
1:27:44
And frankly, if you believed in George W. Bush,
1:27:47
you were really damned dumb to do so, and you know it too.
1:27:52
So, what do you want me to say?
1:27:56
There's 350 million people live on
1:27:59
however many billion square acres in the land
1:28:02
between Canada and Mexico.
1:28:04
A certain percentage of you are dumb enough
1:28:07
to cheer for this stuff.
1:28:09
You are responsible for that.
1:28:12
I'm not, okay?
1:28:15
All the people, the millions of people
1:28:17
who protested in the streets
1:28:20
and said this is an aggressive war,
1:28:22
and that the guy with the beard
1:28:23
and the guy with the mustache are different dudes, dude.
1:28:27
Those people aren't responsible.
1:28:29
The people who are responsible
1:28:32
are the ones who are responsible.
1:28:33
The liars and those who willfully believed in them.
1:28:38
And if that's you, well good.
1:28:40
I'm glad you're a little bit of feelings are hurt, cry baby.
1:28:43
But meanwhile, America, our nation is worse off because of you.
1:28:49
You helped them.
1:28:54
You abetted the blowing of 10 trillion dollars
1:28:59
and two million lives.
1:29:01
So, yeah, I won't call it hate.
1:29:05
How about, yeah, contempt that I have for the people
1:29:09
who willfully went along with this?
1:29:11
And yes, and the polls all prove this.
1:29:15
The more you went to Protestant church and Catholic church,
1:29:20
the more you spent time in Sunday school,
1:29:23
the more you supported torture and war
1:29:27
during George W. Bush.
1:29:29
That's the truth.
1:29:32
They showed it over and over and over again.
1:29:34
Who supports torture in America?
1:29:37
Evangelical Christians.
1:29:40
Why?
1:29:41
Because of their slavish devotion
1:29:43
to that golden idol, the presidency.
1:29:47
When every single one of them must have known that,
1:29:51
geez, I'm taking a risk that Jesus is gonna send me
1:29:54
to be tortured by Satan forever and ever and ever
1:29:58
and ever for being an avowed torture supporter.
1:30:02
Now, well, little cognitive dissonance, don't worry about it.
1:30:09
And they supported torture.
1:30:10
And yeah, they tortured 113 people to death
1:30:13
that we can prove, the military and the CIA.
1:30:16
And the people who supposedly support
1:30:20
George Washington's constitution,
1:30:22
did they rally around the 8th Amendment and prosecutions
1:30:26
for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
1:30:29
and Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet
1:30:31
for torturing people to death?
1:30:33
No, they rallied around the torturers.
1:30:35
Why?
1:30:36
Because they were afraid.
1:30:38
Afraid of what?
1:30:40
Radical Islam.
1:30:42
The boogeyman that they don't even try to scare you
1:30:44
with anymore, which just goes to prove that they knew
1:30:47
that they were lying to you all along.
1:30:49
They were just jerking your chain.
1:30:51
Radical Islam, bin Ladenite, Wahhabis, suicide bombers,
1:30:55
solifus, suicide bombers, they work for us, dude.
1:30:58
Since 1979, until 2001.
1:31:04
And then again, starting in 2006 through 2022.
1:31:09
The war against the bin Ladenites
1:31:11
was this tiny little aberration.
1:31:13
They're the loyal servants of the American Empire.
1:31:17
And they're, well, somewhat loyal servants
1:31:20
of the American Empire and their Saudi satellite state.
1:31:23
But meanwhile, both of my books are endorsed
1:31:27
by Colonel Douglas McGregor, who you know
1:31:29
as the hero of the Great Tank Battle of Iraq War I
1:31:33
and the regular on the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News,
1:31:36
endorsed by Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis
1:31:38
and Matthew Ho and Danny Sherson.
1:31:41
And, you know, go look at the comments on amazon.com.
1:31:45
Go look at audible.com and at fool's errand and enough already
1:31:49
and go see how many soldiers say.
1:31:51
I was there, this book is correct.
1:31:53
That's what they all say.
1:31:54
And everywhere I go, I give speeches to libertarians
1:31:57
and others, and everywhere I go, people come up to me
1:32:00
and go, I was a ranger, I was there.
1:32:02
And then the next words out of their mouth are thank you
1:32:05
for telling the truth about what happened.
1:32:07
And no one has ever said to me, F.U. Horton,
1:32:10
you don't know what you're talking about.
1:32:11
'Cause I do, and they know that I do.
1:32:14
- Well, Scott, I-- - Simple as that.
1:32:16
So look, and honestly, like the book is written in a way
1:32:19
where I'm not pandering to soldiers whatsoever,
1:32:23
but I'm also not insulting them either.
1:32:24
I mean, the book is about the guys who run the think tanks,
1:32:28
the guys who make the policy,
1:32:29
the guys who represent the foreign interests involved
1:32:33
and the army officers involved, some of them.
1:32:37
But the book is not about why you're a bad person
1:32:40
for joining the army when you were 17
1:32:42
and your dad encouraged you to or whatever kind of thing.
1:32:45
That's not what it's about.
1:32:46
And everywhere I go, I get nothing but gratitude
1:32:49
from soldiers for telling them the truth
1:32:51
'cause they spent their whole lifetime
1:32:53
being ingesting a giant pile of crap and they know it.
1:32:58
And look, I think about, man,
1:33:00
there've been three million Americans, something like that,
1:33:02
have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan and back.
1:33:04
And every single one of them knows that it was for nothing.
1:33:09
Every single one of them knows that
1:33:10
if they did anything redeeming over there,
1:33:12
it was protecting their buddy.
1:33:14
It was saving somebody's life in a very narrow circumstance.
1:33:18
Right?
1:33:19
But fighting to free the people of Ramadi,
1:33:23
get the hell out of here.
1:33:25
- Well, Scott, I can certainly cosign
1:33:27
the tone and tenor of these books for any of you guys
1:33:29
that are listening to this at our veterans
1:33:31
that I would cosign that,
1:33:32
that you don't really get after the veterans in any way.
1:33:34
And man, there's so much more left that we could discuss,
1:33:37
but as for now, that is all for me.
1:33:39
Is there anything else you wanna get off your chest?
1:33:41
- Yeah, well, I guess I'm a little sorry about that last rant.
1:33:44
I mean, I guess I don't feel like disclaiming to anyone
1:33:49
or pandering to anyone.
1:33:53
You know what?
1:33:54
It's the truth and you're not supposed to like it.
1:33:57
Right, you're supposed to appreciate it for being true.
1:34:00
No matter how tough it is.
1:34:04
So, you know, again, the book is not written
1:34:06
to be an insult against the vets.
1:34:08
It's not written to be an insult against the Americans
1:34:11
who supported the wars.
1:34:13
It's supposed to be enough to clue you in
1:34:15
and it was really written again to the question
1:34:17
about the lack of footnotes there.
1:34:19
I wrote the book not just for, you know,
1:34:21
enough already we're talking about.
1:34:23
Not just for my people to read, you know,
1:34:25
people who were fans of my show and antiwar.com
1:34:27
and that kind of thing, but I wanted it,
1:34:29
I wanted for people to give it to their people, right?
1:34:31
I want you to read it and then give it
1:34:32
to your right-wing uncle and go,
1:34:34
"Hey, Mr. Support of the War of the Last 20 Years.
1:34:36
"I wanna see what you have to say after you read this."
1:34:39
And that's the purpose of the book
1:34:41
is to change people's mind, to win people over.
1:34:44
And, you know, in a way, I guess you could argue
1:34:46
it's written in sort of a patriotic
1:34:48
and a conservative sort of a tone.
1:34:50
It is, you know, it is an I am a patriot
1:34:53
and it is written with the I toward, you know,
1:34:56
what I want, what I think is best for this country,
1:34:59
which is to end all this militarism
1:35:02
and renounce the foreign empire.
1:35:03
So worst thing about our society.
1:35:06
So, you know, if I sound a little defensive
1:35:09
about, oh, anti-American or whatever,
1:35:11
I would just, you know, I apologize for that,
1:35:13
but I guess the point of it is that,
1:35:16
I mean, people should just ask them,
1:35:17
so if you wanna be honest and not a crybaby about it,
1:35:20
ask yourself, why would I bother writing this book?
1:35:22
Because I hate America and I'm trying to talk bad about it.
1:35:28
I could just go on RT News every day and do that
1:35:31
if I just wanted to, you know, bad mouth,
1:35:35
the land of my birth, the place where I live to this day.
1:35:39
You know, that's obviously not the point.
1:35:41
The point is I'm trying to be free.
1:35:43
And I wanna live in a free society
1:35:45
where the rest of my fellow countrymen also can be free.
1:35:49
But as every ban of Star Wars
1:35:52
and everyone who can see out their eyeballs
1:35:54
or even if they're blind, listen with their ears
1:35:57
in this society for the last 20, 30 years,
1:36:01
the empire is destroying America.
1:36:04
It's the worst thing about our society
1:36:07
is the violence that we spread to the world,
1:36:09
all of the lies and hypocrisy that are all, you know,
1:36:13
manufactured in order to, you know, sustain it all.
1:36:16
The money blown, the resentment created.
1:36:20
I mean, we started that one question
1:36:22
with what would you do if you were in charge
1:36:24
after September 11th?
1:36:25
Well, what would I do if I was in charge
1:36:28
when Saddam Hussein asked for American support
1:36:31
to invade Iran?
1:36:32
What would I do in the CIA?
1:36:34
Said we wanna back the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
1:36:37
What would I do with Saddam Hussein
1:36:39
was asking me for a green light to invade Kuwait
1:36:42
or Saudi Arabia was asking me to occupy their country
1:36:45
in order to bomb Iraq to force them back out again.
1:36:48
The answer is I would have said no, no, no, no, no,
1:36:51
the whole time and then September 11th
1:36:53
would have never happened.
1:36:55
September 11th happened because Jimmy Carter
1:36:58
and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
1:37:00
and Bill Clinton's mercenaries turned against us
1:37:03
because H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton
1:37:05
kept our forces in Saudi Arabia after Iraq War I.
1:37:09
This is, you know, the great Ron Paul Giuliani moment
1:37:12
in 2007, he said, get the hell out of here, Giuliani.
1:37:17
They don't hate us 'cause we're free.
1:37:19
They hate us 'cause we've been bombing for 10 years
1:37:21
before September 11th ever happened.
1:37:23
And Giuliani said, I don't know what you're talking about.
1:37:25
I've heard a lot of absurd explanations for September 11th
1:37:29
but I've never heard something so absurd
1:37:31
as they were angry that we were bombing Iraq
1:37:33
from bases in Saudi Arabia.
1:37:35
I demand you take that back.
1:37:37
And Ron Paul goes, no, I won't take it back.
1:37:39
The CIA coined the phrase blowback.
1:37:42
It means consequences of CIA policies,
1:37:46
of American foreign policies.
1:37:48
And if you think we just go around bombing the world
1:37:50
and without creating violent reaction
1:37:54
against the American people,
1:37:55
then you do that at our own peril.
1:37:57
And that's how you got us into this mess in the first place.
1:37:59
And Ron Paul, there he was in 2007,
1:38:03
feeding the American people the most bitter pill,
1:38:06
beating down America's mayor, the most wonderful American
1:38:11
to ever exist other than George W. Bush,
1:38:15
who somehow was a hero even though 9/11 happened
1:38:17
on his watch and he'd only been in power
1:38:19
for eight months preceding it.
1:38:22
But beating down America's mayor,
1:38:25
Ron Paul who no one ever heard of before,
1:38:27
feeding the American people the most bitter pill
1:38:29
in the world which was not that America deserved it
1:38:31
but that our government had provoked it.
1:38:35
And that woke up 25 million people
1:38:38
became Ron Paul revolutionaries overnight.
1:38:40
That created the Ron Paul revolution
1:38:42
'cause Ron Paul was willing to tell the truth
1:38:44
to the American people.
1:38:45
And then who supported Ron Paul?
1:38:47
Well, he got more donations and support
1:38:49
and presumably votes from active duty
1:38:51
and retired military than all the other candidates combined.
1:38:56
And that's including John McCain,
1:38:57
the supposed war hero who was never won.
1:39:00
And that includes in 2012 when Barack Obama
1:39:04
was the sitting commander in chief
1:39:05
and was running for re-election.
1:39:07
Ron raised more money than all the other Republicans
1:39:11
and Obama too combined.
1:39:14
And that was 'cause he supported peace
1:39:16
and non-interventionism in the name
1:39:18
of the United States Constitution
1:39:21
and the American national interest.
1:39:23
And he gave right wingers a permission slip.
1:39:25
And you don't have to believe in this stuff anymore.
1:39:27
This is a bunch of crap and you know it.
1:39:29
And they said, really?
1:39:30
Oh, okay, great, right?
1:39:32
Same thing happened with Donald Trump.
1:39:33
Donald Trump said, and because he's Donald Trump,
1:39:36
he said it like this.
1:39:37
Going to the Middle East was the worst thing
1:39:40
anyone ever did.
1:39:41
It was the dumbest decision anyone ever made.
1:39:45
And he said it like that
1:39:46
'cause he was trying to hang it as a millstone
1:39:48
around the neck of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton
1:39:50
who supported it all.
1:39:51
And whose brother and best friend
1:39:54
had got us into it all and husband too.
1:39:56
And so he told the American people,
1:39:59
"F these wars, we should have nothing to do
1:40:02
with war in the Middle East at all."
1:40:04
And what he essentially was doing was
1:40:05
he was telling right wingers,
1:40:06
"It's okay for you to agree with that."
1:40:08
This is not Michael Moore,
1:40:10
the big fat communist gluttonous millionaire hypocrite.
1:40:15
This is Donald freaking Trump.
1:40:18
And he's telling you,
1:40:19
you could be tough and you could be macho
1:40:21
and you can drink hard liquor.
1:40:22
Oh, he doesn't drink.
1:40:23
But you could be a tough guy with a pickup truck
1:40:26
and you could still think that this war is stupid.
1:40:29
That spending 10 trillion dollars and killing 2 million people
1:40:32
has gotten us absolutely nothing.
1:40:34
There'd be a damn fool to still believe in it.
1:40:36
And what's the point of clinging to foolish beliefs?
1:40:40
You don't have to admit that you were a fool before,
1:40:42
but you're continuing to be a fool now.
1:40:45
So just snap out of it and grow up and admit it.
1:40:49
Some of us knew better all along.
1:40:51
Some of us it took 21 years.
1:40:53
Welcome to the club, man.
1:40:54
It should have never been this way at all.
1:40:57
Bill Clinton should have got us out of Saudi Arabia
1:41:01
the moment he took office in 1993 and he didn't.
1:41:05
And in fact, what happened?
1:41:06
One month and one week later,
1:41:08
Egyptian Islamic Jihad,
1:41:11
which later merged with the Islam group
1:41:13
and became Al-Qaeda, blew up the World Trade Center.
1:41:16
They were trying to knock one tower over into the other.
1:41:19
And the guy who cooked the bomb, Ramsey bin al-Shib,
1:41:22
I mean, no, no, no, pardon me.
1:41:24
Ramsey Youssef wrote letters to all the New York newspapers
1:41:27
saying, why is he doing this?
1:41:29
He's doing this because of American support for Israel
1:41:31
and their violence against the Palestinians and Lebanese
1:41:34
and because of American bases in Saudi Arabia
1:41:37
being used to bomb and blockade the people of Iraq
1:41:40
even after we already won the war
1:41:42
against them more than a year before.
1:41:45
That was when Bill Clinton had been in power
1:41:47
for a month and a week.
1:41:48
And what did he do?
1:41:49
He kept the bases in Saudi.
1:41:51
He kept bombing Iraq and blockading Iraq
1:41:53
from them for eight years straight,
1:41:55
even while he was backing the terrorists
1:41:57
in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya.
1:42:00
And then we're supposed to be surprised
1:42:02
that this blows back to Biden.
1:42:04
We're supposed to believe that history began
1:42:07
on September 11th, that you don't have to know anything
1:42:09
about what Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush,
1:42:12
or Bill Clinton did to get us into this mess.
1:42:14
You just need to let George Bush's son solve it.
1:42:18
And as we talked about, George Bush
1:42:20
who then used the chemical weapons that no longer existed,
1:42:23
that his own father had sold Saddam Hussein
1:42:26
as the pretext to launch an entire separate aggressive war.
1:42:30
Those are the facts.
1:42:33
You want to spin for that?
1:42:35
Anybody want to come and lay down and go,
1:42:37
"No, it's radical Islam."
1:42:39
When all we're talking about is the CIA's pet mercenaries
1:42:43
sometimes going a little bit off the reservation.
1:42:46
But look, America is supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria right now.
1:42:52
The entire Idlib province is under the control
1:42:54
of Jabbat al-Nusrah and Haras al-Din and ISIS
1:42:58
under the protection of the USA and our allies, the Turks.
1:43:02
We're supporting Al-Qaeda in their war
1:43:05
against the Shiites in Yemen right now.
1:43:08
There's your war on terrorism.
1:43:12
But I'm anti-American for no one better than that.
1:43:17
What the hell out of here?
1:43:18
All it is is I'm right and the people
1:43:20
who don't agree are still wrong, that's all.
1:43:23
And if grown men, especially a bunch of tough guy war veterans
1:43:27
and right wingers who spend five days a week at the gym,
1:43:32
making their muscles big, can't handle the truth,
1:43:35
I guess I feel sorry for them.
1:43:38
- Well, Scott, I appreciate all the time you've given us today.
1:43:42
I certainly appreciate your passion on the subject
1:43:44
and the myriad of subjects.
1:43:45
Thank you so much for coming on
1:43:46
on "Daunted Life of Man's Podcast."
1:43:48
- Oh yeah, thanks for having me.
1:43:50
There you go, guys.
1:43:51
I hope you enjoyed my time with Scott Horton.
1:43:53
But before we let you go,
1:43:53
we are gonna do a quick resilience boost.
1:43:55
Add on "Daunted Life,"
1:43:56
our mission is equipping men to push back darkness
1:43:58
with content that forge a spiritual,
1:43:59
mental and physical resilience.
1:44:01
So here are the links I've got for you today.
1:44:02
I've got a link to Scott's website.
1:44:04
I've got a link to the Libertarian Institute,
1:44:05
which we talked about there at the top of the podcast.
1:44:07
And then both books that we spend a lot of time
1:44:09
speaking about at least the content they're in.
1:44:11
And that's enough already and full air.
1:44:13
And you can check both of those out.
1:44:14
All right guys, thanks so much for listening to this show.
1:44:16
We do appreciate it.
1:44:17
Wherever you're listening to this,
1:44:18
please subscribe, rate, leave us a positive five-star review.
1:44:21
If you wanna come speak live at your event
1:44:22
or on your podcast,
1:44:23
just shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life.
1:44:26
That's INFO@undaunted.life.
1:44:28
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
1:44:30
and check out our website for everything else,
1:44:31
including how to donate to keep more content
1:44:33
like this coming your way.
1:44:34
Just go to www.undaunted.life.
1:44:36
And as always,
1:44:37
we wanna thank the band August Burns Red
1:44:39
for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:44:41
The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Ties,"
1:44:43
which is off their 10th anniversary
1:44:45
re-recording of their album "Leveler."
1:44:47
The links are in the description.
1:44:48
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:44:50
Remember, keep pushing back darkness,
1:44:53
keep foraging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:44:57
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:44:59
♪ I know I live, there's a heart in life ♪
1:45:06
♪ I know what you want ♪
1:45:08
♪ It's a side of patience ♪
1:45:11
♪ It's a virtue ♪
1:45:14
♪ You're being revived ♪