SCOTT HORTON | Being An Anti-War Libertarian Anarchist (Ep. 350)

0:00 (upbeat music)

0:02 - This is Undaunted Life, a Man's Podcast.

0:21 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.

0:23 Let's get into it.

0:23 Hi guys, today we've got a special guest on the podcast.

0:25 His name is Scott Horton.

0:27 So he's the director of the Libertarian Institute

0:29 and the editorial director of antiwar.com

0:32 and the host of the Scott Horton show and antiwar radio.

0:35 So he's also the author of a couple of books

0:37 I wanted to mention that we talked about a lot in the show.

0:39 And that's the 2021 book called Enough Already,

0:42 Time to End the War on Terrorism

0:44 and the 2017 book called Fools Airend,

0:46 Time to End the War in Afghanistan.

0:48 So I need to give a quick shout out

0:49 to one of my teammates at the Ford tier

0:50 in Edmond, Oklahoma, Robert Storksen.

0:52 So he kind of turned me on to Scott Horton

0:54 in some of his work,

0:54 even though I had kind of heard of him a little bit before then,

0:57 but it really kind of maybe in earnest

0:59 when I kind of get this guy on,

1:00 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.

1:08 Okay, so all of those titles, antiwar,

1:11 Libertarian and Anarchists are all things

1:13 that he would consider himself to be.

1:15 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,

1:52 which the books will be there in the show notes

1:53 so you can check them out for yourself,

1:55 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

2:10 these different things.

2:11 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?

2:19 We got into why he's anti-war,

2:21 but also we get into Afghanistan

2:22 'cause obviously he's written a lot and spoken a lot

2:24 about getting out of Afghanistan and then we did.

2:27 What did he think about the withdrawal?

2:29 If he could go all the way back 20 years before that

2:31 to 9/11 and he were the supreme ruler,

2:33 I asked him, what would you have done?

2:35 Because this is a guy that doesn't think war

2:37 is necessary in any way, shape, or form.

2:38 So we got into a little bit of that.

2:41 And then we looked at some quotes

2:43 and we looked at some different citations

2:45 and why one book has no citations

2:47 and one has a whole bunch.

2:48 But then at the end, I thought it was interesting

2:50 'cause I wanted to ask him 'cause I know when people

2:52 read his work or listen to the things that he says,

2:54 some of them immediately come away with this pre-impression

2:56 that this guy's just anti-America.

2:57 He hates his country, he hates America.

2:59 He doesn't trust anybody into those types of things.

3:00 So I asked him about that directly

3:02 and so we got to get his answer there at the end.

3:04 So guys, I hope you enjoyed the interview.

3:06 I had fun listening to him and kind of getting a sense

3:09 of how everything connected for him.

3:10 So I'm not gonna keep him from you any longer.

3:12 So without further ado, let's get into it.

3:14 - Scott Horton, welcome to

3:16 Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.

3:18 - Thanks for having me.

3:20 - Okay, I'm so excited to talk to you.

3:21 And I told you that off air because you've got a lot

3:23 of things that you've worked on

3:24 that we haven't exactly talked about on the show before,

3:27 even though we've been around for a really, really long time.

3:29 But I guess we should start somewhat generically

3:32 and let's talk about being a libertarian.

3:33 And so you're the director of the Libertarian Institute.

3:36 Now, I will say that probably a lot of people's understanding

3:39 of the whole ideal of being a libertarian

3:43 begins and ends with stuff that Ron Swanson said

3:45 on Parks and Rec, right?

3:46 And so they don't exactly get--

3:48 - That's not a bad start, you know.

3:49 - It's really not a bad start and he's got a fantastic

3:51 mustache, but I think that there are some people

3:53 that might call themselves Libertarian

3:55 that don't really agree with a lot of the foundations

3:57 of that viewpoint and all that.

3:59 So let's just start there.

4:00 What does it mean to be a Libertarian?

4:03 - Well, Libertarianism itself is

4:05 the unified field theory of Liberty, right?

4:07 So it includes natural rights theory

4:10 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,

4:19 unlike the commies, we don't see it as rich versus poor.

4:22 Libertarian see it as those who are productive

4:25 versus those who live off of coercion.

4:28 And so that could mean, you know,

4:30 essentially anyone on the scale.

4:33 Although obviously, it's, you know,

4:36 the very richest people, not even the 1%,

4:38 but the 1/10th, the 1% who, you know,

4:43 control the vast majority of the biggest corporations

4:46 and that kind of thing, own the most stock

4:48 and in the biggest corporations.

4:50 They're the ones who have the most influence

4:53 over the state.

4:54 And especially, I mean, look at America,

4:56 anyone could tell you too,

4:57 there's nothing special Libertarianism is just,

4:59 we're the ones who notice all these things

5:01 all going on at the same time

5:02 and can explain why it's like that.

5:05 But America is ruled by bankers,

5:08 by the arms industry, by big agriculture,

5:13 big pharmaceutical companies, right?

5:16 When I was a kid, Ross Perot ran for a president

5:18 and he said, "It's the American people versus the special interests."

5:22 Well, what the hell does that mean?

5:24 That means oil, do I leave out oil?

5:27 I mean-- - Yeah, you left out of oil.

5:28 - And banking and arms and medicine and agriculture, right?

5:33 It means the biggest industries and manufacturing,

5:36 which is, you know, the arms industry to a great degree.

5:39 And then they capture the state

5:41 and the regulatory state belongs to them.

5:43 It's mostly there to protect them

5:45 from competition in the free market.

5:47 I think this is one of the great insights

5:49 of Libertarianism is essentially that Progressivism.

5:53 Now, people, not all Libertarians

5:56 will agree with this framing.

5:58 However, it's very instructive, I think,

6:01 and people, you really wanna read the best,

6:03 read Murray Rothbard, "The Left and Right,

6:07 Prospects for Liberty," from 1965,

6:10 where he explains that essentially,

6:12 Progressivism is a right-wing plot, and by right-wing, meaning,

6:17 the very most powerful capitalists.

6:20 So, if you go back in history, it's, you know,

6:24 JP Morgan, in fact, where'd I learn this?

6:27 I think this is from Anthony Sutton

6:29 that in like 1889 or something like that,

6:35 JP Morgan turned to Thomas W. Lamont, senior,

6:39 on his board of directors and said, "Lamont,

6:42 you're in charge of this whole left-wing thing."

6:46 You know, and then that was it, right?

6:47 So then what did Lamont do?

6:48 Did he go and crush them all?

6:50 No, he went and bought them off, right?

6:53 That was what he did.

6:54 Was he bought off all the labor unions

6:56 to prevent real communism?

6:58 Thank God, right?

6:59 We'd all started to death a long time ago,

7:01 but was it that JP Morgan was Libertarian, you know,

7:07 ideological devotee of laissez-faire free market economics?

7:12 No, of course not, right?

7:14 He was just trying to protect his own interests.

7:16 And it turned out that short of Marxism,

7:19 what the left wants is progressivism, right?

7:23 A regulated, a heavily regulated economy,

7:26 a quasi-free market, a mixed economy,

7:30 as they teach us in government school.

7:32 Well, that's what JP Morgan wanted too, right?

7:35 He didn't want free market competition

7:38 with anyone new and upcoming.

7:40 He wanted essentially a quasi-fascist system, right?

7:43 This mixed economy.

7:44 And so just real quick.

7:46 No, you're good.

7:47 In, if you, there's, you know, some real irony here

7:51 and it's a little confusing,

7:52 but then there's enlightenment, right?

7:54 So you look at Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat.

7:57 Well, his Cheney was a guy named Edward Mandel House.

8:01 Skateboarder from Austin, Texas

8:03 will recognize House Park as named after the guy.

8:06 He wrote a book in 1910 called Philip Drew Administrator.

8:10 And it was about, wouldn't it be great

8:13 if America was a fascist dictatorship

8:15 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,

8:20 but it's essentially like one,

8:22 it's the daydream of this guy,

8:23 but also he's really kind of setting the standard

8:26 and he's laying down what is,

8:29 what was meant to be perceived as the new consensus

8:33 for the power elite and, you know,

8:34 the Eastern establishment going forward,

8:37 that this is what we believe now.

8:39 We don't believe in the Constitution.

8:41 We don't believe in a limited republic.

8:43 We don't believe in free market capitalism.

8:45 Everybody knows we need strong, wise men

8:48 to control everything and make it all great.

8:51 Now, the blueprint described in Philip Drew

8:56 is exactly the regimentation of the economy

9:00 that was implemented during World War I,

9:03 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,

9:22 but you have central banking, progressive income taxation,

9:25 and you have essentially the growth

9:27 of this massive fourth branch of government,

9:29 the regulatory state.

9:31 And in Philip Drew, they go so far

9:32 as to have a government bureaucrat

9:34 on every board of directors

9:36 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.

9:47 It wasn't 'til later he got such a bad reputation

9:50 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?

10:24 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,

10:38 but I just mean between liberals and conservatives,

10:40 basically, right, like lowercase S socialists

10:45 and lowercase C conservative,

10:49 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,

11:49 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 ♪