Dave Smith on how neocons wrecked the country

Here's the latest. I mean, it's a little weird for me, because you're a libertarian, and in fact, you could even wind up on a libertarian ticket at some point, if not this cycle. No, but I'm just saying it could happen, right? So you're literally a libertarian.

But for some reason, we have the same instincts on almost everything, I would say.

There are a lot of people in conservative media who I always have felt like I had a lot in common with, and now I don't, and it's not because I've gotten liberal, I've gotten way less liberal. I see them as way more liberal. So what happened to conservative media? Not all of them, I have a million friends in it, but a lot of the big names seem very liberal to me.

They're having cocktail parties with the Fed chairman, but you're a libertarian, you shouldn't be doing that.

They've been corrupted. And power is seductive. And I'm sure you know that from being in DC for so many years, that you... I'm not saying... You're kind of an anomaly.

Think about all the people in Washington, DC, and how much all of them wanted to suck up to power. Almost, right? Like, what? 90 something percent? At least.

That's why they're there. Right. And so it's a difficult thing to...

Everyone always said it was corrupt. It felt like a really nice place to me. I raised all my kids there. But when you realize how corrupt it is, I mean, it's horrifying.

The old, right, the Robert Taft, they were largely in opposition to the New Deal. They were fighting back against FDR's New Deal, were in opposition to that. And then you cut forward 20 years and it's FDR Democrats are the new Republicans, right? Ronald Reagan. It's like nobody would dare question the New Deal.

And then, of course, there was a movement pushing back against the Great Society. and now, of course, entitlements are like no one would ever dare question Medicare. Look, just recently, I saw Donald Trump, who's not a traditional conservative, but he did the most traditional conservative thing when he said, he said, when we get in there again, we are going to fix Obamacare. And I'm like, okay, all right. So that's where we're at now, right?

It's a no more repeal. You don't even hear Republicans talk about it anymore, right? So it's always like the next round of big government increases, the next round of centralized power in DC, they will put up a little fight, they will lose. They will then, a few years later, accept this as something that is consensus amongst all of us. But you see, we're against whatever.

the next thing is, you know, transing the kids, or, you know, student loan bailouts, we're against that now, you know, but they'll lose and then eventually accept that.

They kind of say the right thing, never really mean it, you know, and then ultimately acquiesce.

I noticed. Um, and as far as the, you know, the point about libertarians, there are kind of like, there are these moments, um, and I know you experienced this a lot when you, you were on your Fox show, there are these moments where there's like a storm, where there's something's like a white hot issue, you know? And it becomes very easy later, after that passes, to be on the right side of that. Like everyone's on the right side of Iraq. now, you know what I mean?

John McCain wrote in his memoir that Iraq was a mistake. So even John McCain could admit many years later. But the thing is that didn't, that doesn't really matter as much as if you were opposed to it when it was, because, like in 2002, if you were like, Hey, I don't, I don't think he has weapons of mass destruction. You were, everybody knew that, well, that just means you're a queer. basically, you know, and you hate your country and you're weak and you're, and so, you know, there's, there's little things, you know, the example I like to use a lot, cause I remember you broadcasting through this, so you'll remember it.

well, uh, but was when, um, when Donald Trump announced that he was going to pull out of Syria, and for like two weeks, it was like the Kurds. Remember, we're abandoning the Kurds, but our allies, the Kurds, like, by the way, if there's.

It's such a, it's such a consistent theme. Well, we're not laughing at the plight of the Kurds, we're laughing at the hypocrisy of the media. But for like two weeks, if anyone said they wanted to, you know, they supported Trump pulling out of Syria, it was like, you're a bad person. You hate the Kurds. By the way, has anyone checked in on the Kurds since then?

Has the media ever talked about them again? Like it? just, it was totally just used in that moment. And that's just a little example. Like, that's not the big one, but like.

Yeah. And you were like, Hey, this is a really like plausible theory of where, and in fact it, it seems to make a lot more sense, because already there was, it's not that we had like a conclusive case that you could take to court, but there were like big pieces of information that were really narrative, shattering. Well, and there were also, the bats weren't close enough to where the wet markets were.

You were, what, racist? Somehow, it's more racist to think that the Chinese had like a lab than to think they were like biting bat heads off or something.

We don't want to be ostracized. You don't want to be called these names. Some people just kind of have this personality trait, and this isn't like whether you're on the left or right, it's something that you have. It's something I have. It's something, uh, um, Alex Berenson has, he's kind of like, I don't care.

I'll say it right now when it's going to get me called all of these names.

And I went in about no exaggeration, 10 seconds from being placid and happy to being in agony and on fire. And I jumped in the lake, wrecked my cell phone. That is the experience of these hysterical moments where, all of a sudden, it's like being stung by a swarm. Everybody's against you. Everybody's saying exactly the same thing.

You go from like placid, happy, calm, clear thinking to totally unable to think clearly. And on all these issues, the day Navalny died in custody, Russian custody, it's like we decide, of course, Putin killed him or whatever. And to be able to see and think clearly in that moment, like that's the key right there, when you're getting swarmed. You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.

It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast.

Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running.

Tuckercarlson.

com slash podcast. You will not regret it.

Sure.

It's like, well, just tell me, how did you do on the last three storms? You know, like, like. were you, were you telling dopes to get the vaccine? Were you telling everyone to be socially distanced? or were you like on the right side of that?

Where were you on Ukraine? You know, were you saying that like, oh, you know, like they can win, or whatever the story is. You know what I mean? Like it's, and, and I do watch a lot of people who go like got everything consistently wrong. It's the same way as the neoconservatives, right?

Like, even if, I mean, I, I hate them so much. I, it's hard to speak about them like with any type of sense of fairness, but how do you, listen, let's just say you got six wars wrong and you were wrong about every single one. Like, let's just say, you were for the war in Iraq and then you were for, you know, regime change in Afghanistan against the Taliban who did not attack us. Um, and then you were for overthrowing Gaddafi, and then you were for overthrowing Assad, and then you were for backing the Saudi war in Yemen and like all these things. And it's just nothing but disaster.

Every one of them. Okay. But then you're going to come out and confidently be like, and I'm for this next war, and let me tell you why you have to be too. And you don't have like enough, just like you don't feel humiliated enough that, like you, couldn't come out. Even if you were for this, you'd be like, man, I really think we should fight this war, but I can't come out and say we should fight this war because the last six times I said it, it was nothing but a disaster.

But the same people who were like, you see Tucker, when we overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will sweep the region. And you see, we're going to be greeted as liberators. We won't be fighting off a 20 year insurgency. You see, they'll greet us as liberators because they love us. And then democracy will sweep the region.

And then Iran will lose influence in the region. And then Hezbollah will start being nice to Israel and, like all these grand predictions and every last one of them, oh, it'll be paid for in oil. Do you remember all the things they used to say? I mean, it's, um, it's, you know, it's a cakewalk, it's a, it's a slam dunk that he has weapons of mass destruction. So every single one of these things you were wrong about, you get to now be the person advocating the next one.

No, I won't do it again. Right. Like that's a, that's an integral step, right? You have to go through that, or else you don't improve as a person, you become shittier as a person.

the major problem is that look like at least there are problems with free markets, and they're, it's made up of human beings. So there's always problems, but there's at least like a cleansing mechanism. There's like profit and loss. If you lose too much, you go out of business, in, in with the government, the, the worse you do, the more funding you get. But so this is the kids can't read.

We need a higher education.

That's right. Right. So he kicked out the old head. He brought in the new head. And you sort of wonder if you're a libertarian, it, you can't, you're not for the, you're not for government power, but you're also suspicious of oligarchs, right?

They've been talking about this forever. There's never been one time. And there's been several times in my life where the Republicans have controlled the Congress and the white house. Oh yes. Never once been a cut in spending.

Of course. Spending always goes up. There's been some cuts in top marginal tax rates, you know, not even drastic cuts, but yes, we'll have rich people pay less taxes. There's never a cut in spending, because that's a cut in the power of the federal government and they're not for that. And so if the guys who are funding that are also funding this libertarian Institute to write policy paper for recommendations that are never going to be implemented anyway, it's, it does raise some eyebrows.

I, I would say, like, look to, to the bigger question of, of, you know, libertarians in the site, like, like I've heard you say before, the, the us federal government is the biggest, most powerful government in the history of the world. by far. There's not a close second. It's a government that can snap its fingers and overthrow regimes anywhere in the world, and does it regularly. And so that is, look, as the country is kind of spinning out of control and everything has just gotten more and more corrupt.

That's directly related to the fact that DC has gotten more and more powerful. And this is to me, like I've, I've been saying this for a while. It's not my original thought. This is something Hans Hermann Hoppe said back in the nineties, where he, he basically said that libertarians need to learn a conservative lesson and conservatives need to learn a libertarian lesson. And what he meant by that was that libertarians basically need to learn that, okay, just because we might believe that the government ought to not bash someone over the head and lock them in a cage for doing something doesn't mean we have to celebrate it.

You don't have to celebrate degeneracy. You don't have to be on the side of that. In fact, a functioning society needs good family values, and that's just like a fact that that doesn't, we don't believe that should be enforced at the point of a gun, but we, that doesn't mean, like, you know, like, even if you think, say like, um, whatever you think prostitution should be legal, you could still have a feeling that it's horrible and represents a tragedy on all sides. And so that's like kind of the, the conservative lesson that libertarians need to learn. I think a lot of libertarians in the Ron Paul kind of school did learn that.

And the lesson that I would say that conservatives or, or Trumpy and populist types need to learn is that if Donald Trump's going to say, drain the swamp, it's like, okay, but what does that mean? Like what, what does that look like? How do you actually drain the swamp? And it's really actually very simple. It means cut government spending.

As long as Washington DC is the most powerful organization in the history of the world and they're spending over $6 trillion a year, that is by definition a swamp. That's why more millionaires live in the suburbs outside of Washington DC than anywhere else in the world. They don't make anything except weapons. You know what I mean? That are purchased by the government.

It's, I've never heard you talk about this before.

I agree.

It stifles free markets and we're against that. So the chamber of commerce and business round table were always sort of pushing back against the growth of government. Bill Clinton changed that and he changed that by declaring a ceasefire between the democratic party and the rich. And he did it during the tech boom. I'll never forget this.

Democrats were always saying, and I thought, you know, I didn't agree with them, but I sort of thought it was important for the purpose of balance to have this. They would say they were suspicious of people with too much money and there's too much power. Like, what about the value of labor? Right. Because the value of capital, the value of labor, they're kind of in conflict with one another and we're on the side of labor.

All of a sudden Bill Clinton's like, no, there's nothing wrong with being, you know, making a billion dollars at 32 for creating an app, you know, running web van or eat toys or pets.

com

com, it was just everything you could think of.

So once the government, you know, the people with the nuclear weapons and business, the people with the largest bank accounts, are aligned, that leaves everybody else like who's defending them.

Noblesse Oblige was a thing. And all of a sudden, in the nineties, you notice the richest people in America start dressing, you know, in like t-shirts and hoodies and like, what's the message of that? And the message of that is, we're just like you, which is another way of saying we have no obligation to anyone but ourselves, actually, we don't owe you anything. And it comes out of this mindset that they do have, and I know them, of course, well, so I know that they feel this way, that we're the richest, because we came up through this credentialing system that we claim as a meritocracy and we won. We won all the prizes because we're superior.

So, like, I've been relatively successful in my stupid little category. That's not all my doing. Like. show some, be magnanimous about it.

You know, like we're all in the same, I know one of my servants got COVID and couldn't come in today. So I only had a team of five, you know, and you're like, so in a sense you're like, while the message is, we're all in this together, and that kind of superficially sounds like a nice message, it's actually the worst message, a much better message would be to acknowledge that I'm not in this situation, that you're in at all, that for me it's actually fine to be locked out.

Right? Oh, I just drive like a shitty little Toyota. It's like, oh, actually, you're defrauding millions of people.

Like, you get to live in this insane mansion off what? Because you were president, and you get to cash in on that now?

You're not allowed to do that.

He didn't, he didn't just happen to, as a junior senator, get like a primetime speaking slot in 2004, where he gave that speech.

And I covered politics for a living. Right. And he gave the keynote at the end of that week. That was Sunday night. He spoke on Thursday.

And yeah, he was not a US senator. Right. That was the campaign. It was great. It was absolutely crazy.

And so does John McCain. The men and women who have fought for this country have been Republicans and Democrats and independents, but they fought together and died together, not defending a red America or a blue America, the United States of America. And then it's like, oh, I mean, he didn't really say anything there, but you know, the, but it was beautifully put.

I'm going to re-institute habeas corpus. We're going to end torture. We're going to, there were a lot of, he didn't do any of that. I mean, I guess he ended the war in Iraq eventually and then re-invaded the country because the ISIS fighters he was arming invaded the country. But then I think, essentially what happened, and it was around Obama's reelection campaign.

This is where things really went off the rails in this country, was that he got in there and continued and expanded all the worst of the Bush policies. Oh, of course. And so they almost had nothing to run on. And so they decided to pivot to a culture war instead. And this is, this was a decision, and again, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, but this decision was made from the top down.

That I think it was a response to Obama's failures. It was a response to these movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which were getting a little bit too close, a little bit too close to the target. And all this, I'm sure you've looked at this before, but where there's these nexus charts and you can chart out how many times all the woke terms are used, transgenderism, all that. And it's all right around 2012.. It's all of a sudden systemic racism goes from being mentioned this many times throughout history to shooting up the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And you can imagine, especially now, like having kids, at the time I didn't have kids and I was young, I was like, whatever, bad economy, that sucks. But you can appreciate now like, oh, what that would be like if you just lost 40% of your net worth and you got little kids, like how destabilizing that is. And Obama's solution to this, the Obama recovery, was, okay, it was record high government spending and record low interest rates. This was the solution, was. this is how we're going to save the economy, we're going to bring interest rates down to zero, and so we're going to bring government spending higher than it's ever been before at that time.

And so you can say on paper, there's a little bit of a recovery here, but what really happens in that environment? You know, it's like all the politically connected people in Washington DC, they make more money and the speculators have a field day because now everybody in Wall Street's making more money because you have to invest now, right, because you're losing money if you just save. And so this, ultimately, is what built, then they throw the culture war in there to, like you said, fight amongst yourselves, and the result of that was Donald Trump. The result of all of that was the condition for Trump.

And so there's a rush to assets, and now you can't buy a house, right?

Hey guys, Josh Hammer, here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the, this, the, that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day, right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes.

wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Of course. It's the price of borrowing money. And so, just like every other price, there's information given in these prices. So if, if steel becomes very, very cheap, that's gives information to a businessman that like, Hey, we're producing a lot of steel very easily now. If you wanted to do a project that requires a lot of steel, now's the time to do it, because we're producing steel now.

That works when you have real prices. because, oh, there's a big production of steel. So you can bet. But if, if the government just came in and said, you know, we have price controls and we insist that the price of steel is very, very cheap. What's going to happen is people are going to start building projects with steel and then realize we're out of steel pretty soon, because it wasn't a real signal.

Exactly.

You have to pay, I forgot what it was, but like you lose the, the tax shield. And it was like 18 grand. I had to pay, $18,000 a year for the privilege of not being in debt to a bank.

We would rather- Exactly. But, so here's the next level to that. This is all I think that you're missing in that, because I think you're completely right in your, like, your, your critique of that, but okay. So if we weren't, let's say, to fix that, that disparity, there's basically two ways we could do that. One would be to raise capital gains taxes up to 30%.

Okay. So the result of that would be that I guess we would disincentivize certain types of investment. Maybe the government, let's say it works out perfectly, and these, we, we are able, you know, like the, the people on wall street don't have an army of tax lawyers and accountants who can get them out of this stuff, as they always end up doing. So then DC gets more money. So then the corrupt, most powerful government in the world gets a little bit more money.

They will then leverage that to borrow three times as much and just-.

So that's all I'm saying. You're right about the discrepancy there and it's totally corrupt, but it's like, what, what's the solution to that?

I mean, they go back 20 years and ruin people. And this isn't just like, it's. like. people kind of have this idea that there's like economic issues over here and social issues over here as if they're different, but they're really not. I mean, you go back 20 years on somebody and say, you know, a guy who's making 30 grand a year and they go back, and maybe it's only just like, you know, a few thousand dollars a year that he owes, but they go back 20 years on you and you owe three grand a year.

And so now you owe $60,000.

. Oh yeah. With interest. You know what I mean? This is what leads to divorces.

Suicides. People putting pistols in their mouth. Yeah. You know, kids growing up without their dad around. I mean, it's like these things are interconnected, and you see that just over the last few years.

Um, with the price inflation, how bad it's been. I mean like this, this ruins people.

And so it's, you know, no matter who, you know, people, because we live in this weird like two party system and everybody becomes partisans, especially in an election year, and they're all just trying to kind of get their guy over and no one's really, you know, I mean, there are Trump supporters who like to talk about the inflation under Obama, but I don't really want to talk about it too much, because it all started with the money that was being printed in 2020.

. That's right. Donald Trump was championing the whole time, actually. And, and, and smearing Thomas Massey for, for daring to say, Hey, we should have a vote on this before we spend more money than we've ever spent when we're broker than we've ever been. And he's, and Trump, of course, bragging that it was the biggest bill, you know, cause it's so Trump, he goes, it's the biggest, he goes, a lot of other people had spending bills.

Mine's the biggest spending bill, you know, and like, look, I'm not trying to, you know, there are, Trump is like the most entertaining, uh, character and he's hated by all of the right people and a lot of his instincts are correct. And he was also framed for treason by his own intelligence agencies. And so there's a lot of, of Donald Trump that I can sympathize with and relate to his supporters. But the truth is that it was such a disaster. to lock down the economy and to say, we're just going to print our way out of this was such a disaster.

I agree. And he totally got rolled by all the people around him and just did not have the wisdom or the courage to stand up to them. And he kept Fauci on that task force through all of 2020.. I mean, he just kept so many people who hated his guts around him. Um, and it's really, it was a tragedy.

Um, and he's got some talent, and I don't think he's evil or anything, but there's something really damaged. And I always felt that he was put in there, um, he wouldn't be the first VP to be in this position, but he was put in there by permanent DC to keep an eye on Trump. Yeah. Obviously. Yeah.

Like, uh, basically there was like, you know, as you know, cause you covered it, there was what was called the Ron Paul revolution. And that's what I was. I was one of the young people in that Ron Paul revolution. that totally changed, you know, the way I look at the world, and I became obsessed with all of this stuff. And so there were a bunch of us, and a lot of us had hoped that, um, Rand Paul was kind of gonna carry the mantle and continue this, this Ron Paul energy.

And now I'm not saying anything against Rand Paul. I think he's one of the best Senator, probably the best Senator. He was great during COVID and grilling Fauci and all that stuff. But for whatever reason, there's, there's several, it didn't work out that way. And Donald Trump came in and stole the Republican party and stole, I mean, he won it, but anyway, so when that happened, um, there were a lot of us who were like kind of disappointed about Rand Paul.

And then the, we had Ron Paul running in the Republican party, but then a lot of us started looking to the Libertarian party like, oh, they were the third party candidate and they ran Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. We were very disappointed with that campaign, particularly with Bill Weld, who's just horrible.

Yeah. It was horrible. So, basically, then there was this group called the Mises Caucus, uh, that I joined. I was led by this guy named Michael Heiss and Angela McCardle, who ultimately is, she's currently the chair of the party. And we basically went and took over the whole party.

We, in the name of Ron Paulians, like, if there's going to be a Libertarian party, it's going to be represented by Libertarians. And so anyway, cutting to, so, once that happened, it was kind of my group who took over and they, they wanted me to run for, for president on the Libertarian ticket, and I was considering it for a while. Ultimately, it just wasn't the right time for me. I got two little kids. I got a lot going on in my career.

It's like, it just wasn't the right time for me. But so now to what you said, Angela McCardle pulled this off to her great credit that she's got Donald Trump coming and speaking at the Libertarian National Convention. It looks like RFK Junior is also coming.

Um, but anyway, I mean, RFK just challenged Donald Trump to debate him there, which I don't think is going to happen, but would be very interesting if it did happen. And so it is. at, at least to me, it kind of represents the Libertarian party. who is this third party trying to engage in relevance of, of some sort and trying to at least look, obviously we're not in a position, we're not going to win the White House or even win any Senate seats or anything like that. But I do think the Libertarian party could effectively be used to put pressure, particularly on the Republicans, to be better and to not run like awful neocons and run better candidates.

Um, I certainly prefer the kind of America first strain of Republicans to the neoconservative strain. And I think right now there is, well, I mean, there's kind of been a civil war in the right half of America since Donald Trump came onto the scene, but I don't even know if you'd call it a civil war because Donald Trump just won so dominantly. You know, it's not like the Republicans were split between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump or something like, no, like it was 95 to 5%, but particularly, and I know you've talked about this a lot since the, the war in Israel, or I should say the war in Gaza, or I don't even know if I should say the war, the, the attack of Gaza, whatever you call it. I don't know if you can call it a war when one side doesn't have a military, but whatever you call that, um, since that you've seen this kind of divide grow, uh, where I think largely, neoconservatism had been rejected by the, by the voters, Republican voters. But when Israel came up, it's a little bit different.

I don't know exactly.

Like I, if there's one thing I wanted to help do is get rid of that worldview, but it seems stronger than ever.

There's not one thing Putin's ever said that you could point to. In fact, when you interviewed him, he explicitly said, if Poland attacks us, that's the only scenario I could see us going to war.

He wants more land? I don't think he wants more land.

And even the head of NATO himself, Strossenberg, whatever, said that. Vladimir Putin said that if you just signed a deal, put it in writing, that Ukraine won't join NATO, I won't invade. And NATO refused. And so he invaded.

Like, would you go, it was so unprovoked.

And so, yeah, no, it was a series of provocations, very unnecessary ones. And not just like, not just ones that, like libertarian doves like me or something like that, were against, but what George Kennan, the cold warrior, the founder of the containment strategy. What he said, which is a great piece with him and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, and I think it was in 1999.. And he laid it out right there, when we first started the first round of NATO expansion. And he said, the people advocating this expansion are going to keep advocating it until there's a Russian response.

And then, when there's that response, they'll say, see, this is why we were right to expand NATO. But that's all wrong.

And I think my, like that was the big scandal about Ukrainegate, right? Was that Donald Trump kind of did this, kind of like a very Trumpian, kind of gray area thing where he's like, I'd really like you to investigate the Bidens. Maybe you don't get these weapons if you don't investigate the Bidens. Now, you, the reason why that was so ridiculous, to impeach him over, was because it was totally legitimate to want to investigate what the Bidens were doing in there, but it was very corrupt involvement in Ukraine. But, that being said, what no one ever talked about in the story was that Trump caved.

Of course. Didn't get the Biden investigation and gave them the weapons. And like that, never, that was the other reason why the impeachment was so ridiculous, because there's no quid pro quo when you don't get anything for anything. You know what I mean? You could argue it was an attempted quid pro quo.

You know what I mean? But he never got anything. But he sent the weapons in. And I do think part of this, and this was the really effective, the way that the intelligence agencies really won was that, because a lot of people would look at it like, okay, so the Russiagate was an attempted deep state coup. And essentially it was, I mean, Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 Minutes that they debated at the Justice Department invoking the 25th Amendment, and then they ultimately settled on a special prosecutor.

You know what I mean? They were trying to overthrow the guy. But so on the surface you could say, oh, it failed. It failed. But in another sense, Donald Trump explicitly ran in 2016 on detente with Russia.

Let's work with Russia. Let's work together to kill the terrorists. We all don't like terrorists. Who cares about overthrowing Assad? That's not in our national interest.

Who cares? So? let's be friends with Russia. Let's get along with them. And then, when you're being called a Russian spy every day on the news, and then when he went to Helsinki and said, you know, I believe Putin, you know, I don't think he interfered in the 2016 elections.

By the way, there's still never been a shred of evidence presented that he did. They've got like one company that they claim had Russian IP addresses, because no one can fake an IP address. You know, it's like the most ridiculous claim. who was once at a party with Putin or something like that. They've nothing.

And so Trump just said, yeah, I agree with him. And they were like, so you don't trust your intelligence? You know, everyone was freaking out so much that it got to a point where he couldn't have made a deal with Russia. Because if he had, that would have just been proof, right? Like, imagine, in that environment, when Trump-Russia collusion was being said all day long, if Donald Trump had made some deal with Russia, it would have been like, see, proof.

He's a Russian puppet. And so Donald Trump, I think, went out of his way to prove what a Russian puppet he wasn't. It was like, here's how much. I'm not a Russian puppet. I'll send weapons into Ukraine.

We're losing that war. So Ukraine's not going to win, that I can... I don't see how Ukraine... Right, it's impossible.

So what happens when that becomes really obvious, that all we've achieved is destroyed this country and killed a million of its young men, and like, how does the State Department and the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute and Joe Scarborough and the whole sort of blob, like, how do they respond to that?

. Look, I mean, I think, basically, it's over. And I don't think anyone even... I mean, this latest round of funding is just, it's an election year, and Biden's trying to kick the can to not let this fall right now. You know what I mean?

Be totally obvious.

Of course, it'll all be completely ridiculous. Regardless, we could have avoided this war by just saying we're not gonna admit Ukraine into NATO and putting that in writing. We could have avoided this war. This is not according to me, according to the head of NATO, we could have avoided this war by doing that. And whatever the number is, and who knows, you never know in the fog of war.

I mean, it's not until they really test the excess mortality rate that you know, but it's clearly in hundreds of thousands. They've got 50-year-olds fighting for them at this point. So that tells you something.

And so, yeah, it's a total disaster. The, like, incredibly dark irony of it is that all the people, like, cheering on Ukraine have just... As John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that's what we did. You're cheering them on, but you're leaving them to their demise. And it didn't need to happen.

It's terrible. And I'm not absolving Putin of responsibility. He was certainly put, backed into a corner, but there had to be another answer other than.

we use tactical nukes against Russia, for example.

It's not.

. I'm just saying, however you feel about it, it's not actually vital to U.S. survival, whether Russia controls Ukraine or not. That's absurd. But Vladimir Putin really believed it was a must-win.

And that actually is a much more reasonable case. That you can't lose a war on your border. That's a proxy war. You know, even in the Cold War, we never had... You know, we fought in Vietnam, but that's not on Russia's border.

You know what I mean? Like, this is a whole different game. And so, to me, the real fear from the very beginning was not that Vladimir Putin might win. The real fear was that, well, what if the West wins? Like?

what if Vladimir Putin is humiliated right on his border and feels that his death is imminent? Because that's the time when nukes might fly. I absolutely agree. And so, in that sense, you know, it's quite possibly the better outcome. I mean, no, nuclear war is always the better outcome.

I do think.

. And I gotta say, I think you're a huge part of this. I think that if you look at, like, say, 2002, when the war drums were beating for Iraq, there was just nothing like what we have today. I mean, like, the biggest shows in cable news, they were all for it. They were all...

I was for it. Yes.

. I immediately apologized, I would say, in my defense.

. What about? the trip made you change your mind?

And I mean, I was hosting a chat show, a debate show, Crossfire. And actually, it's a true story. I was at lunch with my father, I had lunch with my dad every week at the same table in this place, in this men's club in Washington, and we were sitting at the table, I'll never forget this, in the fall of 2003.. And he goes, when are you going to Iraq? And I was like, I don't know.

I don't think.

. I mean, I don't plan to go to Iraq. I've got a daily show I have to host. He goes, oh, so, you're a journalist, and there's a war, but you're not going to cover the war? And I was like, no, I've got, you know, like four kids and a daily job.

He's like, oh, so, but you just kind of sit this one out. And he like, shamed me into it. It's a true story. He was like, so unimpressed that I wasn't going to see it. And I was like, okay, you're right.

I should go. So I went, I took leave of my show and went for a couple of weeks with some friends who were contractors, defense contractors, all military guys, a buddy of mine called Kelly McCann and a bunch of Bill Frost, all these really impressive contractors. And we went to Iraq. And the first, well, the first thing that happens, we get to Kuwait, we're going to fly in and the insurgency shot down a DHL plane coming into Bayop, or, you know, the Baghdad airport. And so we couldn't fly in.

I was like, so we've occupied the country now. I went in December, early December. So that was, I don't know, nine months. And we had at least unequivocal victory over Saddam, right? He was hiding.

In fact, he was captured in Tikrit the day I got there. So we had just won and we can't control the airport. So then we, we drive in from Kuwait immediately got, like, it was, out of control. People were shooting. It was, it was chaos.

It was full chaos. And then we stayed outside the green zone for, um, in this, just this house that they had rented. And one night I'm sitting on the roof on a sat phone, trying to talk to my wife back in Washington, taking our dog to the vet. And someone starts shooting at me. And then all these people start shooting at our house.

There's a gun battle at the house. I'm like, what? Do you have a gun when you're over there? Oh, absolutely. I almost got fired for it.

Actually, amazingly, um, you were, you were told to carry a gun. It was so out of control when I was there that journalists and NGO workers, or I don't know why it was certainly me. You had to go get a certification from the state. Do I still have my badge? It's hanging in my office right there.

that, um, you qualified with this. It was an AK 47.. I actually had an AK 47 already, not fully automatic, but just because of my range. I knew how to operate it, but yeah, you're required to carry it. That's how out of control it was.

And then a buddy of mine got killed there. A journalist was killed there. A guy called Mike Kelly was a really great guy. And the bottom line was, we're not good at colonialism because we don't have the self-confidence. We're not sort of bringing Christianity and civilization.

There's no like clearly defined goal for this. And we're bad at it. And the armed forces is not designed to do that. And the effect was super obvious. It was chaos.

And the one thing I cannot deal with and I hate, and I think all people hate instinctively is chaos. People can handle repression. They live under repressive regimes, you know, all through history they have, they can't handle chaos. And we brought chaos to Iraq. And I just thought this is the opposite of what a great power should be doing.

This is disgusting. And I saw really, really clearly that it would never get better. And I'll just add one more thing to this, which I've never forgotten. We went into the green zone one night and had dinner with some generals. I did.

And this, and I'd always sort of liked that my dad was the military, I'd sort of respected the military. I didn't realize how corrupt and disgusting and feminized the officer class was and politicized. Just repulsive people, actually at the flag officer level. So we're sitting at dinner and this general is telling me about, oh, I saw something really touching today. I saw, we had this female officer and she was killed.

Her legs were blown off by an IED and her husband was there. And he, you know, they've got three kids back in Virginia, but he held her hand as she died of this ultimate sacrifice for America. And I was like, what? You're like celebrating this? A girl got killed?

A mother? I thought we fought wars to protect mothers and children. First of all, if you're sending girls to fight your wars, you're disgusting because you're violating the most basic agreement there is, which is the man protects. And in exchange for that, the willingness to sacrifice his life, he gets to be revered as a man. It's at the head of the table and all the benefits of being a man, and there are many, but if you're sending-.

They're above that. We should be defending our women.

And the PIO, the fairly well-known sort of spokesman for the provisional authority, Dan Seenor, was sitting at the table. He was very offended by my behavior, but I was outraged. And that rage has sort of never, it's just exploded on you, sorry, but it's never left me.

Whatever. I don't want to talk about myself, continue to talk about myself, but yeah. You asked and then-.

right now. We've got a blank check from the American people, which they did, that you tell us, you say the word terrorist in point and we will support you bombing the crap out of them.

It's like, he's dumb. So he didn't know, but I just felt, I was like, this whole thing was like so nuts. So I never thought we were going to invade Iraq. I never thought that. And I show up and I'm whatever, like having a cigarette on the lawn outside where all the sticks are, all the standup guys, the TV cameras are.

And I run into Mike Allen, an old friend of mine from Washington Post reporter, now runs Axios and really nice person, and has this like clarity of vision that I don't have, because he doesn't cut in the weeds on shit. And I said, we're not really going to invade Iraq. He goes, of course we are. And I said, how do you know that? He goes, well, because it's all the machinery's moving in that direction.

Like if it's going to happen. I was like, that can't really happen. He goes, oh no, that's going to happen. He wasn't endorsing it. He could just see that if everyone starts talking about something, they will convince themselves that it's true and it will happen.

We should remember that. Don't overthink things. If something really obvious is happening, it's happening.

You'd find it's called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm. It was a letter written by Richard Perle and David Wormser and a few other neo-conservatives.

And so, basically, the idea was like, well, look, forget all of this, like this peace process where you focus on land exchanges and whose land belongs to who. that's all kind of lame. And so what really you should do is reach out to the broader Arab world, kind of make arrangements with them so you don't have to go through this, this peace process. And that starts with overthrowing Saddam Hussein. And like, that's our first step here.

And then there's several other steps, but it's outlined why we want Saddam Hussein overthrown. And so then this was for Israel's interests. We wanted this, this war in 1996.. Now, by the way, there's other things I'm not like saying, like Israel is 100% pulling the strings of the American government. I think a big part of the reason why the war ended up happening was also because George W.

Bush had a personal beef against Saddam Hussein and tried to have his father killed. But these neoconservatives then, who get into, as soon as 9-11 and in the project for a new American century, when they talked about how they wanted to fight wars on multiple fronts, they explicitly said they probably wouldn't be able to do that unless there was like a new, another Pearl Harbor type event where there'd be enough popular support too. Now, the 9-11 truthers, the Alex Jones guys, for a while, they would hang on that as evidence that, you know, whatever, Cheney did 9-11 or something like that, or something elements within our government. I think they're overplaying their hand there. I don't actually think that, but it certainly is evidence that they recognize what it was once it happened.

So we can only speculate to some extent, but like what, should we be suspicious of the official explanation for 9-11?

and in real time I was again against lockdowns from the very beginning. and I was again, and it's all because I just, I operate from a worldview of recognizing the government as essentially a criminal gang. Yes. They're basically the mafia who won and now they just rule. You know what I mean?

And like, so.

I try to just go off what I know. So we don't know exactly what happened on nine 11.. We do know at this point that there was pretty high level Saudi involvement and that the Saudis have that. the government knew that and had no interest in punishing those people. And in fact, still wanted to continue doing business with them.

We do know that we were comfortable enough fighting on the same side as Al Qaeda in Libya, in Syria and in Yemen. So it didn't seem like Al Qaeda. fighting Al Qaeda wasn't really the motivating force. And, like I said, we, we know that these, this group of neocons who hijacked the federal government, wanted these wars. And after nine 11, used that opportunity to get them to use that opportunity.

But anyway, so the point I was making about not being an expert, but being able to shatter.

It's kind of, listen, these are people who are, and, and I think this is one of the things that people have been waking up to a lot more recently. And this has led to some wild conspiracies, some of which are not true, some of which might be true. Um, but people have been waking up more and more to recognizing, like, who are these people? You know what I mean? Like these people who have, like, real power in our government, like who are these people?

I mean, you know, you take someone like Hillary Clinton, um, so it's like, okay, so your husband.

is a rapist. I mean, he's been accused of rape by multiple women, clearly a sexual predator. You know what I mean? A man who, even just the stuff we know confirmed, this was a man who, at, when he was a married president, was like fucking a 20 year old intern in the White House, like a sexual predator. You know what I mean?

Um, and okay, your best friend, her husband, also is a sexual predator who's sending naked pictures to underage girls. Like, hey, that's weird.

They're doing really weird stuff there. that Jeffrey Epstein was real. There was a like pedophile ring that a lot of the most powerful people were connected to, at least knew about and didn't feel like blowing the whistle on it. Um, these are people who are comfortable making decisions where babies will die, you know, like mass slaughter will happen and they can sleep at night. And like, I'm not saying like a situation where either our babies are going to die or their babies are going to die.

And there's a horrible decision that I have to make this, a decision where, like, no, we're choosing this to happen and they're kind of okay with that. And you kind of wake up to like, so, when you say like, is it possible that they'd kill Americans or be complicit in that? Like, yeah, of course. Of course, that's possible. I don't have enough evidence to like prove that that's the case, but I can prove that they wanted these wars.

And then, when the opportunity to get them came, they lied through their fucking teeth in order to sell the wars. Look, General Wesley Clark, he said, as I'm sure you, you've seen as a democracy now interview, where he said that he saw the plans in late 2001,, that it wasn't just that we were going into Iraq, but that we were also going to have regime change in Syria and several other countries. But then, when they go to start the regime change in Syria, 2013 or whatever, where they start in 2012,, but then they go, oh, we have to overthrow Assad because, you know, he's killing all of his own people. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You wanted to overthrow Assad over a decade ago.

Don't give me this bullshit that this is some new plan now. So I do know that they will lie through their teeth to the American people. Like this, I know for certain that they will lie through their teeth to the American people to get enough public support for mass slaughter campaigns because they want those campaigns for completely different reasons. And again, like I said before, this isn't speculation. They wrote this in their own words.

One of the reasons they wanted to remake the Middle East in this way is because they thought it was in Israel's interest. And that to me is like just totally unacceptable as an American. That you're first of all, you're lying to the people of this country and you're doing something with a foreign country's interest in mind. That's just like so appalling that I think people should be like publicly hung for it. After a trial.

After a fair trial.

What's interesting is that so many people who talk about America first or whatever, they're fully on board with this. They attack anyone who's not. I had a thoroughly bizarre experience the other day, and maybe you can shed light of what it means, because I don't fully understand it, but I was doing Rogan's podcast at your urging. So thank you for that. I had a great time.

And at one point I just blurted out for like 15 seconds something I've thought about recently, which is the use of the nuclear bombs, which they have been used, in August of 1945 against Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Complex topic. A lot of it's not publicly well-known, okay? But just the bottom line fact that we dropped, particularly the bomb on Nagasaki, which was the Christian capital of Japan, by the way. That bomb was dropped on a church and killed three quarters of the Christians in the city, which bothers me as a Christian.

But leaving even that aside, it killed civilians. It wasn't dropped on a military base. It was killed civilians. And I get why people did it, or maybe I don't get it, but I think 80 years later we can say it's not something to brag about incinerating civilians. I don't care what the context is.

That's evil. That's all, basically all I said. Holy shit, did I get attacked from the right? And I thought, and I don't even follow the attacks on me ever, but I kept getting texts from people, I can't believe you said that, or people are mad at you for saying that. And I thought of all the dumb, cruel, untrue things I have said over 30 years of just talking in public, a lot of which I regret, and I hope I've apologized for every bad thing I've said, but I've said a lot of.

really, things are impossible to defend. That's what they attack me on? Yeah. What is that?

We didn't need to do this. But also there's just-.

And this, you know what I mean?

That wouldn't, like, you wouldn't be mad about that. You'd be like, I don't think you really know, because you're not hiding anything.

It did happen. Well, yeah.

We'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for the American military. So how dare you question the next thing? That's why Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Milosevic was Hitler. Putin's Hitler.

Gaddafi's Hitler. Putin's Hitler. They're all Hitler. I can't tell you how many people I've heard, and I've debated some of these people, defending Israel's attack on Gaza. by going, well, we killed a lot of civilians in World War II.

So just like that. As if Hamas or the Nazis is anything comparable. But the thing is that, so when you talk about World War II, you're only allowed to have the official narrative on it. And here it is. We all know what it is, right?

Who are you? Neville Chamberlain? You mean you don't want to go to war? You want to appease? That's the only lesson of history that you're allowed to learn, is that appeasement doesn't work.

Presumably we should have started the war earlier, I guess, is the story. But by the way, you can never learn the lesson of history that sometimes preemptive wars don't work. Sometimes ruthless power doesn't work. Maybe sometimes appeasement would be better than that. It's like, there's only one.

And so that's the lesson. By the way, it's the same thing with Putin. Everybody who, if you didn't support the war, I know you got called this, I watched you get called this, you were never Chamberlain for not wanting to back Ukraine immediately in the war, right? It's the only lesson in history. Now you can't look at World War II and say, hey, maybe Danzig was the lesson.

Maybe war guarantees were the lesson. I'm not even saying they aren't, maybe not. But objectively speaking, if we want to be honest about World War II, World War II is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.

And they really were. Now, it's a little more complicated than that, because Stalin's army wasn't like high-fiving everybody on the way in to Germany.

. But any sane person, if you look back at World War II and you recognize the worst thing that ever happened, you would try to say, how could we have avoided this? Exactly. What could we have done to not make this happen? The lesson should be like, oh my God, we imposed Versailles on the Germans and insisted on humiliating them internationally, and look at the backlash of this.

And then, you know, whatever, there's all this. A lot of it comes down to entering World War I, and World War II was really an extension of that. That's right. But it's like. the only lesson you're allowed to take away is this.

But, you know, I really liked the way you put it on Rogan, and it was just kind of a quick aside. But look, it's just so evil on its face that I know human beings are amazing at doing mental gymnastics to justify anything. I've been doing a lot of debates on the topic of Israel, and I've been watching this firsthand. It's like you could watch videos every day on Twitter of babies, you know, like suffocating to death under rubble, and like someone will justify that. Someone will say, well, actually, we need to do this because, whatever, all of Hamas must be destroyed.

Why exactly? Like, why is it absolutely necessary? You're telling me. Israel, the fortress of the world, can't just not drop the ball again? You know what I mean?

Like. there's not some other answer other than this, and of course, America must fund it for reasons. But it's like, no, actually, that is just evil. And the onus is on you to exhaust every single other option before doing that.

And the other question I have, and maybe you've got insight into this, I don't know that much. I've read a lot about World War II, I'm not an expert. But like this, worship of Churchill, I think, is very odd. There's a lot about Churchill. I think that was impressive, erudite guy, fluid writer, had a kind of style that I like, used tobacco, which I love.

I mean, there's a lot about Churchill, right?

Poland. Okay. Maybe that's a reason.

Then, four years later, he hands Poland to the Soviets.

Exactly. I don't know. I guess you could say if Hitler had won the war, could he have then killed more people than Stalin? I guess we'll never know. But yeah, still up there.

Okay. So that's a huge problem. We're talking Jordan and Kobe. Exactly. You could debate.

And that country is a depressing husk right now. I go there a lot. Unfortunately, I don't want to go there. It's the most depressing place I can imagine. It's totally defeated in some deep spiritual sense.

And it's embarrassing to go there. So you destroy your country on behalf of Poland, and then you hand it to Stalin. Those are the bottom line facts about Churchill. There are a lot of other things to say about him, but those are the salient points. How could anybody think that's good?

He took Britain from being the most powerful nation in the world to being totally defeated. They lost that war as much as anybody else did. But look at it now. Yeah. It's disgusting.

By the way, there's so many ripple effects of this too, because the whole situation with Israel-Palestine, this is also a result of the British Empire being defeated and being driven out. So there's so much to this.

I'm just saying, 80 years later, when we can see clearly the aftermath, how could you possibly defend that? Right. And why would you want to?

Yes. And there was something really profound that they saw there. And this idea, and this is a real problem with like, it's like, why would we even want Ukraine and NATO? Why do we want to make war guarantees for countries that we have neither the resources nor the political will to actually defend in the case of a war? Nicely put.

Like, you know, look, I mean, like, first off, we're broke, we're $34 trillion in debt. We can't afford, we can't afford our own wars, let alone everybody else's. We're literally, it's so cartoonish, we're borrowing money to the, you know, it's like if you were like, if I was given my sister money and my cousin's money and all of them, but I'm putting it on a credit card, you know what I mean? Like. I'm just, I don't have the money, but I'm, I'm such a great guy, I'm helping my whole family.

It's like, no, you're not in a position to do this.

There's always some type of conflict going on in the world and it's awful. But like, the question is like, would you be willing or would you be willing to send your kids to go fight and die over between, you know, to determine whether, you know, the Donbass region is ruled by Kiev or Moscow? Like, is that important enough to you? Because to me, it's a very easy answer, which is no, I would not be.

They're all just like gardening with each other and stuff, you know?

It's awful. And so he decided to take it down to Austin, where they had kind of like opened up and it was flourishing. And Austin is, it's like, it's one of the last, like great liberal cities in this country, you know? Which is, and, and like, I know a lot of people on the right who kind of have this attitude of like, well, screw them. They voted in these policies and all that.

But I just think that is wrong. That is the wrong attitude to have. You need liberal cities and for, to have a healthy country, you kind of need that dynamic as much as you need beautiful country. You know what I mean?

Rogan happened to kind of like come up as this internet world was exploding and he's just such an interesting guy, such a genuine guy, that his podcast just took off. And he became kind of like in this situation where he, anybody who kind of comes on, or if you come on and you do well, you know, it's just like the biggest opportunity. And he's such a genuinely like, generous person that I think he loves that. I think that's his favorite thing of all of it. Out of owning the comedy club, the podcast, like everything he does, I see it in him, what he really loves, what really makes him happy, is that he gets to kind of bring all of his guys with him.

And you know, I, I know a lot of friends who, Joe, has changed their lives. You know, like he's been, it's the Johnny Carson thing. It's, I remember Jerry Seinfeld hearing him, I don't know him, but hearing him describe doing Carson. Oh yeah. And he said it was a, he said it was an experience like having kids, where you go in one person and come out another person.

You know what I mean? Which is really is the experience of having kids, particularly that first kid. Because you literally like, it's like you and your wife go to a hospital as a couple and then you leave that hospital as like we're mommy and daddy now, and it's a really weird feeling. Like it's amazing.

But anyway, he said Carson was like that. Like you go into nobody and then you come out and you're a somebody. And it's kind of like that with Rogan. Like it's just, and, and it's, there's all these similar dynamics. Like he'll kind of go, you know, like he'll go like two hours and 15 minutes with some people and then he'll go like three and a half hours sometimes if he really likes the conversation.

And you never know, as you know, when you're in there, you have no idea how long you actually went for or whatever. But it's, um, and that, like my experience with him, was he heard me on, uh, a mutual friend of ours, Ari Shaffir's podcast, who I love, also hilarious.

So he's like, Oh, I want to make this guy like successful. It's just like amazing.