SCOTT HORTON : Russia retaliates Ukraine drone strikes w/ 11 Hour Barrage on Kyiv

Nuclear risk is back in the headlines, but the scariest part is how casually powerful people talk about “testing limits.” We sit down with Scott Horton to unpack why the Ukraine war keeps inching toward wider conflict, how drone strikes and long range weapons blur lines, and why the old mutually assured destruction mindset has been dangerously inverted. When deterrence becomes a dare instead of a warning, a single misread on a radar screen can matter more than anyone’s carefully written strategy.

Then we pivot to Iran and the Middle East, where talk of a pause, an MOU, or a reset collides with hard realities: geography, logistics, missile deterrence, and the lack of any clean path to a decisive US or Israeli victory. We walk through what “options” actually mean when invasion is implausible, escalation is catastrophic, and negotiations are politically messy. Along the way, we connect the dots to US grand strategy, military bases, energy security, and the true cost of chasing regional dominance for decades.

We also get into the domestic politics shaping what comes next, including the hawk versus restraint split inside the Republican coalition, the role of lobbying, and why the Gaza humanitarian disaster has shattered old information controls for many Americans. If you care about US foreign policy, NATO and Russia, the Iran conflict, Israel and Gaza, and the incentives that keep wars going, this is a sober and challenging listen. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with the biggest question you still have after listening.

Chapter Markers

• 0:00 Welcome And Scott Horton Intro
• 1:45Ukraine Provocations And Escalation
• 7:30 MAD Turned Into A License
• 12:50 Slow Russian Gains And Autopilot Risk
• 16:00 Odessa And Russia’s War Aims
• 24:10 Iran Pause And No Good Options
• 32:40 Bases, Oil, And Empire Costs
• 37:40 Rubio, Vance, And 2028 Fault Lines
• 44:00 Gaza Horror And Lobby Influence
• 51:20 Syria’s Jihadist Turn And Blowback
• 57:50 Courses, Books, And Closing

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey everybody, happy Thursday, July 2nd, Scott Horton is here.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna talk about how it looks like the Russians continue to be provoked.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Trump looks like he's doing his best to make everybody miss Obama.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess we got some more irony puns and maybe even some dad jokes coming up next.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Jim Web Podcast here on Thursday, July 2nd.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is almost 4th of July weekend.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sitting here with Scott Horton, the director of the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Director of Libertarian Institute.

[SPEAKER_00]: editorial directive and a word calm author of many awesome books including fools errand about i've get time to win the war in afghanistan's about afghanistan uh... enough already about g watt and provoked which is incredibly relevant and an awesome read to sky i could keep going but uh... if you want me to i can just want to welcome you to the show in a good way thanks very much happy to be here and happy and a penistate you oh thank you thank you

[SPEAKER_01]: The last second was the real vote on independence, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: They just adopted the declaration a couple of days later.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, uh, I call it, uh, hate week for Great Britain, um, just generally speaking here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, video's Albion.

[SPEAKER_00]: How you doing, man?

[SPEAKER_00]: Good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Been good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Appreciate you coming on here.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to jump right into it with Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you've written provoked about Ukraine about how we just kind of needled and poked the bear into doing something.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this story is falling a little bit to the back burner with the war on Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: But more recently, it looks like things are ticking up over there.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Russians are pretty upset with certain things.

[SPEAKER_00]: I would say a good example of this is Great Britain's, or which is a England's most recent provocation by bragging about how they're in co-production with missiles with Ukrainian state that are designed to hit Moscow.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that was even just a headline that was out there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So

[SPEAKER_00]: With that in mind, we have about 12 hours of a tax yesterday, most of which was focused on Kiev, but a lot of it was on the remaining logistical portions of the Donbass.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where do you think this all sits?

[SPEAKER_00]: Are they going to be successful in provoking Russia into doing something big enough to drag the West into open conflict?

[SPEAKER_01]: at G's.

[SPEAKER_01]: I hope not.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so far so good, but then that becomes part of the problem too.

[SPEAKER_01]: You hear this over and over where these cooks, I mean, Washington, DC in the foreign policy establishment.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is supposed to be self-explanatory, but see, make sure everybody's willing to say, Pager, these cooks will say that look, no, we're we're boiling the frog, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: We're turning up the heat and they keep not nukin us.

[SPEAKER_01]: So as long as they haven't nuked us, then I guess that means that we were wrong to hold back before, you know, before they said geez, no F-16s and we gave them F-16s still didn't nuk us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Said no Abrams tanks.

[SPEAKER_01]: We gave Abrams tanks.

[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't nuk us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Said no High Mars.

[SPEAKER_01]: We gave him high Mars.

[SPEAKER_01]: We gave him attack on us.

[SPEAKER_01]: They still didn't nuk us.

[SPEAKER_01]: We, the CIA helped develop this entire massive, supposed, domestic drone industry inside Ukraine that's been hitting targets even thousands of miles inside Russia.

[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever, they haven't nooks Kiev yet.

[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't nooks Brussels headquarters.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like what's the problem, man?

[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, this is something that does get nearly enough real consideration or discussion, I don't think at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm sure you may have noticed this, Jim, is

[SPEAKER_01]: Previously, the entire concept of mutually assured destruction, yes, man, that most especially we the USA cannot fight Russia, the Soviet Union, or now Russia, because they got too many H bombs, and we can nuke them, but they can nuke us back.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so as Reagan and Gorbachev agreed in writing,

[SPEAKER_01]: No one can win a nuclear war.

[SPEAKER_01]: Victory in a nuclear war isn't possible.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's why we see to end the Cold War and play down all this nuclear tension.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that concept has totally changed to essentially now we can do whatever we want.

[SPEAKER_01]: We can even fight a conventional war with Russia because what are they going to do?

[SPEAKER_01]: Nucous, we know that they can't because we got nukes too.

[SPEAKER_01]: So now instead of a reason to stay out, it's a license to be more belligerent because everybody knows that there's a limit on what they dare to do about it, but that's completely crazy.

[SPEAKER_01]: all the war games they and they've done these war games for decades about how this works.

[SPEAKER_01]: That in the military mind, if the last bottom wasn't big enough, use a bigger bomb, and it comes down to a major, you know, party conflict, and we have a bunch of military bases to make

[SPEAKER_01]: inert.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we nuke them.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what we do.

[SPEAKER_01]: We fight Russia.

[SPEAKER_01]: We nuke Russia before they can nuke us.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's how it goes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if a couple of guys set off a couple of bonds, say they nuke Ukraine and then we nuke Belarus.

[SPEAKER_01]: We lose all of our major cities by the end of the week, if not by the end of the day.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because the entire policy is use and we're losing in everybody's panics.

[SPEAKER_01]: Once the nukes start going off, it's just the escalation ladder.

[SPEAKER_01]: People don't back down, they go up.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they've done these war games over and over again.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's virtually impossible to have a limited war with Russia.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Talk about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like they just have a license to get away with wars bloody murder because they have the nuclear shield the hide behind.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, that's something I just don't get.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's one of my favorite policies from the Cold War was mutually a shared destruction.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was just, you know, you have a agreed upon date time, like you stay in your sphere, we stay in ours.

[SPEAKER_00]: More or less, fight on the fringes is an exact, was exactly the, the calmest of Cold Wars as it were, but at least the people were maturing off to understand exactly what you're talking about, which is you start lobbing, nukes back and forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just, it's bad for everybody probably end civilization by the end of the week.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we start talking about the scenarios.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I brought this up.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think a couple of days ago on my show where good friend of mine was a, Tyler's a chief worn officer.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one of his last postings was to help develop war games, war plans, the next generation of how we were going to be doing stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And

[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't have to do with nukes what he was doing, but they ran scenarios where they dropped in, say the 101st Airborne Division into Ukraine, and this was probably 2017-2018, and they were annihilated within a couple of days.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, before they could even get a footprint, they were annihilated, so where does that lead you?

[SPEAKER_00]: Right?

[SPEAKER_00]: If your conventional forces go in, you can't hang on the battlefield, the next echelon up is exactly what you're talking about with these kukes in Washington, where they're going to start lobbing nukes back and forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: I really hope we avoid that to be honest.

[SPEAKER_01]: We are no Biden and I, I, uh...

[SPEAKER_01]: soon to be famously if they ever released the video lost to debate at Oxford University on this, where I said, come on guys they got nukes so you can't fight them so that's the end of that argument but they didn't like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: They scoffed at me.

[SPEAKER_01]: But what I wish I had said was Joe Biden was by far the most anti-Russia president we've had since the Cold War and really even

[SPEAKER_01]: He said, quote, we're not putting troops in Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_01]: That'd be World War III, forget it, forget it.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're not doing that.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's the difference between being in NATO and not being in NATO.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm here to tell you, I don't think that we're even going to go to Estonia, Russia invades Eastern Estonia.

[SPEAKER_01]: I hope that we don't.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing sacred about that stupid treaty, and I don't care who rules Narva.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not willing to trade Austin Texas for Narva Estonia.

[SPEAKER_01]: Are you kidding?

[SPEAKER_01]: And then when Russia gets Narva in the end anyway, or no one does, because we're all dead.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, forget NATO too.

[SPEAKER_01]: But when it comes to Ukraine, it's unthinkable that we'd fight there.

[SPEAKER_01]: And even Robert Cagan, which I'm sorry, but like, that's a real Trump card.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even if you think it's a logical fallacy, I don't care.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even Robert Cagan says,

[SPEAKER_01]: Who cares about Ukraine?

[SPEAKER_01]: No one in Washington ever thought it mattered who ruled the northern coast of the Black Sea throughout the entire five decades of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, but we're all upset about who rules Sevester Paul now.

[SPEAKER_01]: When it belonged to the Russian

[SPEAKER_01]: out from the Turks in 1783, the same year that Benjamin Franklin and John J went over there to negotiate the end of the American Revolutionary War.

[SPEAKER_01]: 1783.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, but we're supposed.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, no, but it has to belong to Kiev because for Secretary of the Communist Party and dictator of the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev decreed it so with the Holy Commie-Rit of dictatorship in 1953.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry if I'm not impressed at all by that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm even less impressed than Robert Cagan is Robert Cagan Who's wife Victoria Newlin's fault this all is?

[SPEAKER_01]: Even he says don't worry about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that should be good enough.

[SPEAKER_01]: But now as far as the war by the way currently because he did sort of ask this and your opening question

[SPEAKER_01]: Russia is winning slowly and they don't seem to be in a real hurry, both sides at least claim that they're fighting a war of attrition.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're just trying to grind up the other guys military until they lose and then they'll just force them out and do whatever they want.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, obviously, if you're on the other side of either of those sides, you're going to look at the other guy's side as that's a pure cop, obviously because you're losing, which is, you know, what both sides would say about each other, and then maybe some truth to that too, I mean, the Russians are in fact fighting to seize territory.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, obviously, you know, it's been their strategy to move very slowly, I think, to try to save lives, but I don't know how many lives are really saving.

[SPEAKER_01]: actually they just can't move much faster than they are.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it is, you know, in a sense, not perfectly, but sort of the unstoppable force versus immovable object type situation where the Russians, obviously they have the geographic access, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And there are much bigger country with a bigger population, a bigger industrial base.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so time is on their side in so many

[SPEAKER_01]: But the Ukrainians, they got home field advantage, and they got the West, and they got all of our tech, all of our money, and our satellites for helping kill people with, and that ain't nothing.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: So they, and now where the Russians, as it stands, we could have had this exact conversation one year ago or two years ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: As it stands,

[SPEAKER_01]: They are far removed from the territory that they've claimed, you know, they've claimed all of Luhansk and all of Don Yask, as well as Zeproja and Kersson.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they control all of Luhansk now, but they still have about 25 percent, 20 percent or so of Don Yask to go, and still I think about a quarter to a third of Zeproja and Kersson.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we're Kersson, one third of it is across the river.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: are from the, you know, completely controlling and standing on the territory that they claim to have officially annexed in their decrees and in their laws and everything else.

[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, the Ukrainians are still, they're losing, but they're losing slowly, and they're still standing on territory that they claim belongs to them, and they don't want to give up, and they're not about to turn around and walk away when they're not, you know,

[SPEAKER_01]: to move.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we see the lines moving, but very slowly.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I don't know, this could go on for a while.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the biggest dangers of escalation, or when people start coloring outside the lines, and you start having these massive waves of drone attacks inside Russia, and including, as was in the news, what I guess two weeks ago, where maybe three weeks ago, where their flying drones across the Baltic states to get access to Russia and the Baltic states apparently are in on that and allow on that.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's the kind of thing where politically

[SPEAKER_01]: spiral out of control, when they started the war, General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told Joe Biden, look, rule number two, I forgot what rule number one was, lose eventually, maybe, but rule number two was keep the war geographically contained inside Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they just threw that out a long time ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know what, man, all attention on the Middle East and everything like that, this thing is sort of on autopilot.

[SPEAKER_01]: Trump has less interest in it.

[SPEAKER_01]: He wanted to solve it, but he can't solve it.

[SPEAKER_01]: and I think that it is no less dangerous for the fact that we're ignoring it and the thing very well could spiral out of control.

[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I think the most obvious example of what, you know, anyone ought to be able to think of this even in Washington, D.C., that you could have a paranoid Russian looking at an outdated radar scope that just shows a green blip.

[SPEAKER_01]: And because of the spirit of the times, he could read that as an incoming H bomb strike instead of assuming that, nah, that is probably not that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that has come up repeatedly, there are a couple of very famous cases in 1993, especially where the Norwegians launched a rocket and they told the Russians, we're launching a rocket, but the word didn't get passed through the chain of command.

[SPEAKER_01]: So they saw it on the radars and they thought, oh, no, we have an incoming ICBM and then when it broke apart in its stages, they thought, I don't know, we have three incoming ICBMs.

[SPEAKER_01]: And all that happened was a kernel, a look, maybe even a lieutenant kernel said, you know, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't see why Bill Clinton would nuke us in a surprise attack right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're getting along pretty well and like he's going to do it with three rockets from Norway.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think and so he didn't pat- he totally disobeyed orders and did not pass word up the chain of command and he later says name of Stanislaw Petrov.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, if he had passed word up the chain of command like he was supposed to, his bosses would have mashed that red button.

[SPEAKER_01]: They would have, and they would have freaked.

[SPEAKER_01]: They weren't half the man he was to sit there and say, you know what, I'm going to see here in wait and see if H bombs actually detonate over Moscow.

[SPEAKER_01]: But before I tell the bosses that I think there are H bombs coming in.

[SPEAKER_01]: even willing to wait and get new to make sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that's because it was the spirit at the time was that we're all trying to get along and Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltson are piling around and you know he's the new president and so there was so much reason to doubt that America would do such a thing in that time.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if that same guy or a lesser man saw that same blip on that same scope he might panic and he might pass word up to the up the chain of commands of people who are much

[SPEAKER_01]: And that could be it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a, I just scary thought.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's, thank God for a little bit of a reason, you know, just rationality back then.

[SPEAKER_00]: But to go back to something you mentioned earlier, it's kind of combines with the objectives on the Russian side, but also their way of war.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to say there's a direct tie-in between the way they fought war war two and what they're doing right now, but there definitely is like a,

[SPEAKER_00]: a Russian methodology about fighting wars that is vastly different than the way we do it in the West.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I've seen over the last couple years, they've incorporated some tactics that we use on the ground and it's not really worth it to get into it, but they've adapted, they've learned.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you look at the munitions expenditures that they are lobbying over to Ukrainian side, particularly artillery and now drones and the standoff munitions,

[SPEAKER_00]: It really looks to me like they're just trying to bleed out the Ukrainian military and smash them in place on a static front, excuse me, as an effort to eventually, you know, eventually break them down and push through without risking their guys.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that is kind of the way the Russians did it back in World War II, I mean, they took horrendous casualties, but any type of offensive they ever had was precipitated by,

[SPEAKER_00]: massive artillery strikes and specifically targeting the equipment of the vermarked in that conflict.

[SPEAKER_00]: But do you see that going on right now?

[SPEAKER_00]: And also, but more importantly, what do you think the overall objectives are?

[SPEAKER_00]: Do they want to seize the Black Sea back?

[SPEAKER_00]: Do they just want to take down the regime and Kiev, like in a kind of American-style regime-change operation?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like where do you think they're going long-term?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, they have officially annexed the four Eastern O blasts there, again, Le Hansk, Donetsk, Zeproja and Kerson.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, look at the map, and you can see why

[SPEAKER_01]: Assuming that they win all of that within whatever period of time, and then now they're on the other side of the river and control curse on, well, now it's just a hop skip and a Aussie there to Odessa, which is the crown jewel, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So massive port city, and if they take that, then not only do they get it, but they take it away from Ukraine, and really get to screw their enemies in Ukraine by taking away

[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, fighting an insurgency there is going to be a hell of a task because there's a massive tunnel network underneath the city and all kinds of things.

[SPEAKER_01]: If they're really willing to pay the cost, they could do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we're talking about years more war probably before it gets to that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because even if the army breaks and all flees west of the NEPA river, then that's still a half the size of Texas up a country to run an insurgency from.

[SPEAKER_01]: And looking at history, they got forests and swamps in the Carpathian Mountains and places from which to fight an insurgency in the west of the country, unlike in the east, where it's all step, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: But if the Russians can take Odessa, well, man, then you can see Transnistria from here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And for people not familiar, if you take a look at Ukraine's Western border with Moldova, there's a tiny little strip of land on the Moldova inside of the river, just the Nistur river.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's, and the strip of land is called Transnistria, or the Transdynistur.

[SPEAKER_01]: And...

[SPEAKER_01]: or trans-neaster, I guess the diesel is silent.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that little strip of land is controlled by Russia.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was a vacation territory for the Soviets, back during the battle days.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the Russians stayed, and Russian troops are there under an agreement with the EU, I think it is, and whatever, and with Moldova.

[SPEAKER_01]: But this is one of these frozen conflicts where what a weird place to have a tiny little strip of land that belongs to Russia, and it isn't even a military base or anything.

[SPEAKER_01]: but so it might make sense if and especially after all of this and certainly they talk like this in the Russian media, which I'm not a huge connoisseur of, but I have seen talk like this in the Russian media that boy, after the price we paid, we better get the entire Southern coast of Ukraine all the way to Transnistria.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or else it was all for nothing and this kind of thing and you know Odessa was really founded by Catherine the great right So this is all you know wrapped up in history people trying to take back their San Antonio that they used to rule and now It was taken away from them and that kind of thing so those things can be very important the way people can see them in history so But look I mean all that depends on how the war goes I mean I think

[SPEAKER_01]: If America would just play a little bit of hardball with Kiev, they would have to negotiate a piece right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we wouldn't have to force them to do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: We would just have to tell them we are cutting you off, because we're really worried about this thing spiraling out of control at this point, and we want to see an end to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you know what, even, I believe it's Andrew Blitzski, but some of the leaders, yes, I believe it was Blitzski himself and Dimitri Hirosh.

[SPEAKER_01]: Some of these other far-right leaders in Ukraine have said, you know, what's true, the Don Bass anyway?

[SPEAKER_01]: We hate them.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't want them to be part of our stupid country anyway.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like, well, good than let them go then, you know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: I guess they're prefer to just cleanse the area of Russians and keep it for themselves.

[SPEAKER_01]: But at times, they just said, you know what?

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a foreign country to us anyway.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's a whole problem.

[SPEAKER_01]: you might take note, but so let them go.

[SPEAKER_01]: And for all the talk, recently, I'm sure you've seen all the hype in the news in the past couple of weeks about how all the tide is turning and Ukraine is ripping them down.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's an article in the telegraph about how Putin wants talks, crushing while he's down.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like what?

[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, they slowed the Russian advance in some places,

[SPEAKER_01]: who's not a liar or completely ignorant or live in a fantasy land thinks that Ukraine is actually going to turn their tide and force the Russians out.

[SPEAKER_01]: The questions, whether they can whether or not they can make it so costly for Russia to continue to advance, that they would just quit where they are now.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they're not giving Luhansk back.

[SPEAKER_01]: like what we talking about, crush, kick them while they're down.

[SPEAKER_01]: Please, you know, they're in Ukraine's living room right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's, they're not losing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Only question is like, how long will they make it to the back bathroom?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's, I mean, that's good way to put it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's uh,

[SPEAKER_00]: You brought up something there, where it's the inability for Washington to kind of, you know, snap our client states to heal and dictate how they operate their policy.

[SPEAKER_00]: When they're using all of our weaponry and our logistics and our imagery, and it's pretty similar to what's going on in the Middle East to be honest with Israel.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just straight up, where, and actually the way you brought that up makes me feel even more cynical about the way I already do about the conflict with Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you remember, you know, so you bring up how we can't bring the Ukrainians to heal, like how the heck are we going to do that with the Israelis.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ukrainians aren't nearly inside of our political process as Israelis are.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, you know, the dynamics are a bit different where if we leave Ukraine, we're leaving them high and dry.

[SPEAKER_01]: Obama went and said, hey, you and them go fuck.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, no, Obama, Joe Biden, they all look alike to me for giving me.

[SPEAKER_01]: You and him go fight and then so for us to turn our back on them now, which I'm in favor of, but still looks much worse than where it's the Israelis are clearly the aggressors in hell in Lebanon and in Iran.

[SPEAKER_01]: where they don't really have anything to lose, except their artificially bolstered position of dominance that we had handed them.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, should be much easier to say, oh yeah, no, actually you don't get to use our weapons to kill children anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to steal your neighbor's territory anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: These are all war crimes.

[SPEAKER_01]: This all in the Geneva Convention's written by the United States of America.

[SPEAKER_01]: You don't get to expand your borders.

[SPEAKER_01]: Go back home where you came from.

[SPEAKER_01]: And well, whatever, to Israel at least,

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, at fair point there, and it's, I was looking about in terms of historical arc of, you know, where we put our eggs in which basket, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: We've always had this, we've been, we've been the guarantee tour of Israel for God knows how long, and all of this stuff with Ukraine popped up really in the past 10, 15 years.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you can, you can draw a long, a arc back, but it hasn't been

[SPEAKER_00]: as paramount of an issue set, if you will, and you take all the, take the emotion and the influence out of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm not very bullish on either to be honest, but to kind of pivot over to Iran here for a second.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are a, you know, there's a lot of stuff bouncing around.

[SPEAKER_00]: We even had reports that, you know, and I find this somewhat comical that

[SPEAKER_00]: Trump was briefed on a full resumption of the conflict, and then you have JD Vance out there talking about how this is effectively an operational pause to reset oil around the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then he used the word stocks.

[SPEAKER_00]: I inferred that as magazine depth, just right out of gate.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think the likelihood of this MOU sticking is?

[SPEAKER_01]: And well, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: But on that, I sure hope that that's really not right that they are just faking it to rearm and all of that.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is signing this MOU and going forward with the talks that they have would be a hell of a long way to go on a simple rules, although that's what they did a year ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: The thing of it is, though, it's what good is rearming going to do them.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we already saw what happened was,

[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I have not read any very good reporting about this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm only inferring this, but it has to be the case, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: What other explanation is there that the beginning of April, the military told Trump, we don't want to do this anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: Call a ceasefire because they are overwhelming us with their missile and drone fire, and we can't repel it all.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we're losing all of our assets in the region here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so let's quit now while we're only this far behind.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was why Trump quit because he lost.

[SPEAKER_01]: He already lost the war after one month.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we already know, what are our options here?

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to send in the army, the entire army.

[SPEAKER_01]: You've been a conscript army to invade Persia, a land that size of Texas with two giant mountain ranges, and no real land route in there for anywhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and when the capital city is 15 million people, I looked it up the other day.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's 10 million officially in the city limits.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if you include the suburbs, it's 15 million people.

[SPEAKER_01]: You want to send your army to sack Mexico City?

[SPEAKER_01]: How do you think that's going to work?

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I mean, that's what we're talking about here.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, we're talking about a world war to level, um,

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, excursion, and try to actually sack and control and regime change, Persia.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then as we saw in all of our other wars, lose anyway.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so nobody's saying that or we could just drop H bombs on them, which I don't think Trump is even going to do on his very worst day as no call in the world to do that and Hell, his government might overthrow him if he ordered nuke strikes, you know, he's got no call, no cause whatsoever to do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if they would or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it really is as easy as snap in his fingers, but I don't think he's going to do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then so what is other choices?

[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have any other choices.

[SPEAKER_01]: Those were his choices.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Either you kill the Iatola and all your magic wishes that Benjamin Netanyahu promised you come true and the regime evaporates and you get what you want.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or you send in your land, army, or you nuke them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, you lose.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what choice do they have but to follow through on the MOU?

[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to think, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm an idiot.

[SPEAKER_01]: What do I know?

[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to think that if J.D.

[SPEAKER_01]: Vance is saying that, that he's just blowing smoke and acting tough, but like, and maybe that is Plan B.

[SPEAKER_01]: But like, you know what, while we're negotiating, at least we can replenish some of our munitions and get ready for another round if we need to,

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, show me even on paper how this is supposed to work, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: We already know it didn't work.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were, it was supposed to be that killing the Ayatola and killing whatever the top 50 guys would lead to beneficial results in the new government, the way kidnapping the president of Venezuela worked, that the vice president decided she would rather be compliant than dead and went along.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, but not just not happening here.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, obviously, the Israelis are a wild card in this, but again, this really military must be telling that Yahoo, everything, the same thing that the Pentagon has telling Trump, which is, we are to try it.

[SPEAKER_01]: What do you want us to do?

[SPEAKER_01]: Didn't work.

[SPEAKER_01]: So go back to war to what end.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't see it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the financial times had this whole thing about how they got 75% of their missile launchers and 70% of their missiles and how at least they claimed or

[SPEAKER_01]: I guess they seem to be reporting this, not just on the word, but like whatever indications that the Iranians didn't even use some major percentage of their missile launchers and locations because the original set were all still in play.

[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't even need to break out the reinforcements and the Americans were bombing their hidden underground.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the Americas were bomb their position and then be shocked that their fire and missiles

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, because they just got a wheel of stuff to the back and then we'll let back out again, whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: They just can't do anything about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, that's the end of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Liz, you know, Jim, and they're always with this blowing smoke about, oh, yeah, but we sank their Navy in their air force.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, what do you tell me, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: You tell him you admit you didn't accomplish a damn thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you want to brag about that fine as a reason to stop fighting, then good.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'll pat you on the back.

[SPEAKER_01]: But let's be serious.

[SPEAKER_01]: Their entire military posture was centered around their missile deterrent.

[SPEAKER_01]: Their intermediate range missile deterrent.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it worked.

[SPEAKER_01]: Extremely effectively.

[SPEAKER_01]: And consider America already deterred.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what else to say, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, not much they're with you, man.

[SPEAKER_00]: And a couple of points about that is I don't even know how much we were able to touch the eastern part of Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like most of the strikes were staying off munitions in the western part.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some in Tehran, it's really hard to get accurate information about this.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, there's enough out there where you can see some of the attack vectors coming in.

[SPEAKER_00]: from the north over is really allied territory, if you will.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then just come out of the Middle East.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, you would think that the bulk of their equipment was in the west.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then you start talking about the capabilities that they have.

[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't scratch a surface on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're seeing FPV drones in Lebanon, which are obviously filtered in through the Iranians.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we didn't see one eye out of those or so it appears with our involvement.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they set the Iranians set right in the middle of the gap in our capabilities with the intermediate missile program.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't have any partners.

[SPEAKER_01]: They widen that gap by destroying all of our damn radars throughout the region.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and they, you know, I'm sure you've seen where they're calling the base at Bahrain is now the former headquarters of the fifth fleet.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not over, it's already a new world now.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's already in the corridor.

[SPEAKER_01]: Your doctor has been canceled.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's now called the Trump doctrine.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ironically enough, he's becoming to me, Carter, but on that same note, it had Larry Johnston here earlier this week, and he said something that was pretty illuminating to me, where you had all of these reports, I viewed them as just kind of hearsay, sensationalism on X, whatever you want to call it, that we were dumping upwards of 650,000 guys into the region to bring true conventional war

[SPEAKER_00]: to the Iranians, and it goes back to the counter to that goes back to exactly what you just talked about, which is there is no land route, our logistics hubs have all been smashed for the most part, and if they have smashed, they are thoroughly on the gun target line, so using places like Kuwait's not going to work.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what Larry said is that there is a source apparently that they're there to start a mass Exville of our troops from the region where they're going to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know But I thought that was really curious.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think there's a high probability of that or any probability at all?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I had no idea if that's really true.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, boy, they should I sure would be happy to see that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you saw the Wall Street Journal Was it the journal pretty sure as the journal was saying that yeah, they might move their bases to Israel

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, thank you, please, um, but look, this is the, the real point of, of the war that needs to be emphasized and reminder to me that

[SPEAKER_01]: The point is that, oh, yeah, the American Empire lost a massive strategic defeat here.

[SPEAKER_01]: American people won in that same way that I had told us it's doing us a favor kicking us out of the Middle East.

[SPEAKER_01]: What a weekcare who rules the Middle East.

[SPEAKER_01]: Been ladden himself said in 1997 to Abdel Barri at one of Al-Quds all R.A.B.

[SPEAKER_01]: newspaper in London.

[SPEAKER_01]: He goes, what am I going to do with the oil, drink it?

[SPEAKER_01]: is he was the real funny guy that Osama bin Laden anyway point being that yeah even if the worst head terrorist himself was in charge of the whole caliphate what's he going to do with the oil other than put it on the market only instead of that artificially low prices to subsidize our economy at their expense he would just charge the market right for the thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, there was a, I cite this in enough already.

[SPEAKER_01]: I forget the guy's name for gave me, but the guy calls himself an economic geographer or geographic economist from Princeton.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, we blew $10 trillion securing Middle Eastern oil between Jimmy Carter and W. Bush when we spent like a tenth of that on

[SPEAKER_01]: And that was only through, like, I'm sorry, I said, through W Bush by Shusset, through Clinton because that didn't even really count W Bush.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or maybe it did, maybe it was like half a W Bush.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that doesn't count the trillion spent.

[SPEAKER_01]: Since, you know, half a W Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and all the money spent on maintaining American dominance in the Gulf.

[SPEAKER_01]: Another 10 trillion since then, more or less.

[SPEAKER_01]: when we spent some tiny proportion of that on Middle Eastern oil.

[SPEAKER_01]: And why are we securing that oil at all as we've seen in the recent war?

[SPEAKER_01]: Who buys that oil?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Our friends, the South Koreans and the Japanese.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's why we need to control this.

[SPEAKER_01]: We can hold it over the heads of our allies.

[SPEAKER_01]: or it's for China.

[SPEAKER_01]: Our major economic competitor in the world is as far as I'll go, but so we're there to secure the oil for them.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the American taxpayers got to go to work for in the morning is to help the chai comms secure their access to oil and they don't have to provide for their own security on the high seas.

[SPEAKER_01]: We got to provide it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Makes no sense at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then what do we left with?

[SPEAKER_01]: pathetic, pitiful, disgusting, stinkin' no good, effin' is real.

[SPEAKER_01]: With their torture, prisons, and their, you know, their funnels they never hold for all the children that they kill.

[SPEAKER_01]: That do absolutely nothing for us, but no natural resources whatsoever, who, you know, the biggest thing that they trade with us is the secrets that they steal and sell to China, like how to build supersonic sea-skimming missiles for taking out our ships with.

[SPEAKER_01]: We get nothing out of our support for Israel except dead Americans and terrorists to tax in the corruption of our political process and every other thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the only reason we have to be there, it's the only other reason we have to be there.

[SPEAKER_01]: They start redrawing the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, between Jordan and Syria, whatever, who cares?

[SPEAKER_01]: Who cares?

[SPEAKER_01]: Americans don't care?

[UNKNOWN]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: and even then, barely.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's really all just because of Zionism.

[SPEAKER_01]: We can just completely abandon the doctrine of dominance in the Middle East and save trillions of dollars.

[SPEAKER_01]: And just not have an empire at all who needs an empire.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's a giant burden.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's a giant waste of money.

[SPEAKER_01]: We'd be much happier if we just had a humble, commercial little constitutional republic over here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, 100%.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I am more, if it's possibly more than 100%

[SPEAKER_00]: and it's it absolutely blows my mind that we keep doing this but let me let me snap you off a curve ball here real quick because there's a bit of Zionism I want to get into Zionistic influence if you will so there's a there was a report article I read via the Moon of Alabama but it was via the cradle talking about how there is some infighting in the White House between

[SPEAKER_00]: Rubio's cup ball, I think it's probably a good way to put it, and then JD Vance.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll preface this with, I don't particularly trust JD Vance.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like his instincts, but I also like Donald Trump's instincts on foreign policy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we see how that worked out.

[SPEAKER_00]: But apparently there's a bit of a split according to this report where Rubio is insulating himself to kind of harbor the traditional lobby for a 2028 run, Lindsey Graham's in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're obviously taking a more hawkish stance on Israel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have JD Vans kind of pushed out in the corner.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he is allegedly, you know, the guy who's trying to push some realism in some restraint into this whole equation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even if he's out there talking about reset and full-on war.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where do you think this goes in 2028?

[SPEAKER_00]: I have my thoughts, but I want to get your thoughts on it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well,

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Ruby, I might as well be just be tying a rope around his own neck.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's a damned fool.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, yeah, now's the time for the resurgence of the George W. Bush wing of the Republican Party.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, after their gigantic success in their Iran war that they launched, they wasn't a world.

[SPEAKER_01]: This guy's one of these that take his crack pipe away.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I know they always said that he was a cocaine, like powder, cocaine, dealer, not a crack dealer,

[SPEAKER_01]: that stuff up.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's got guys at CIA that can do that form.

[SPEAKER_01]: And look, I don't trust JD Vance either, but I do basically believe what you said that, you know, in the face of that, that's true that he's less worse than Rubio.

[SPEAKER_01]: And clearly, he was chosen for a reason to lead the negotiations here with Iran rather than

[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, he's clearly the least worse of the two.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think to me, there's all this hype about Rubio, and I guess whatever he shows up in the polls, but when it comes down to the campaign season, the guy just has no charisma, dude.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he's just too stupid.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you remember the thing in 2016 where he got into the argument with Chris Christie at the debate?

[SPEAKER_01]: And he got stuck on like this man, Churian candidate hypnosis thing where he kept saying, listen,

[SPEAKER_01]: make no mistake.

[SPEAKER_01]: Barack Obama is doing this to our country on purpose, because he's the terrorist thing or whatever it was.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then he said that over and over and over.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Chris Christie's like, dude, why do you keep saying that thing about Obama?

[SPEAKER_01]: And then Marco Rubio looks right at him and goes, make no mistake.

[SPEAKER_01]: Barack Obama's doing this on purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Chris Christie's like, about to pull his hair out.

[SPEAKER_01]: What's wrong with you, dude?

[SPEAKER_01]: Are you okay?

[SPEAKER_01]: You have a stroke right now?

[SPEAKER_01]: like they trained you to say this one thing, and now you can't say any other things.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just Nick, make no mistake.

[SPEAKER_01]: Barack Obama's doing this on purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like the guy's just got a hole in his head, dude.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, like whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: I, great amount of curve.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like I can read books and stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't know that he probably does, but he can read articles and things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I, he's,

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think Rubio's just got nothing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And trying to put together a Kabbal of pro-war Republicans with Lindsey Graham and all that, that's just the kiss of death for them.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like Hillary Clinton.

[SPEAKER_01]: She lost to Obama in the primaries in a way because she was a hawk and he wasn't supposedly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then he makes her secretary state, and the first thing she does is demand that he escalate the war in Afghanistan and then the second thing she does is demand that he launch an aggressive war against Libya.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because she wants to run on it in 2016.

[SPEAKER_01]: Wars are great.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you know who really loves wars, Republican swing voters.

[SPEAKER_01]: So she did the same thing Kamala Harris did.

[SPEAKER_01]: She went and campaigned with Robert Cagan.

[SPEAKER_01]: See, I'm a blood soaked warhawk too.

[SPEAKER_01]: So all you good like conservative swing voter types ought to, you know, cross the line and vote Democrat this time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, guess what?

[SPEAKER_01]: All the liberals stayed home, all the progressives and leftists all stayed home and she lost.

[SPEAKER_01]: right uh... she was running on a no-fly zone of her city to protect al-Qaeda from Russia and she lost so broke Donald Trump won promising peace it was just he'd lied but he won promising not to do this they think they get a run rubio is the great champion of the war in Iran oh well that's a world so if i was jadey vans i would say

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, dude.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just stay in your corner.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let them treat you as an outsider as much as you can.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, what can they do with all JD?

[SPEAKER_01]: He's vice president.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's sort of kind of independently elected on that ticket.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so he's just they have to put up with him.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a good narrative, dude.

[SPEAKER_01]: You should just let them continue to push that and and run with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, cool man, I appreciate that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think there's a I think's a big misnomer about the middle of the road voter, the swing voter, particularly conservative ones.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's uh, doesn't data analysis on this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're the people who got Obama elected, they're the people who got Trump elected this first time.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're actually the same people who probably got Biden elected in 2020.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the key issue for them is always war and because it's if you start breaking down the demographics on these folks, they come from larger from the Rust Belt and it's there's a whole bunch of counties that are called high casualty counties which are right in the Rust Belt.

[SPEAKER_00]: It runs up the Mississippi up into Michigan, Northern Ohio all through there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And their kids are the ones who paid disproportionately during the G-Wat, and I think these folks not the not the voters, but you know your George Bush wing or the party got kind of high on their own supply when he got reelected in 08, not because they liked the war, but because they were looking for more of a steward for the future of their kids, if you will, and it blew up in their face, punned very much intended, and then it's promised on the

[SPEAKER_00]: in the intro.

[SPEAKER_00]: We got one pun in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: But since then, they've gone the opposite direction every single time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I only hope that they show up again this next election cycle and pick the person who's going to be an anti-war, but be more pressing is on the opposite end of all this Israel stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just because it's gotten way fricking out of hand, but the silver line

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's true, and I think, you know, part of the politics of pushing through the MOU is that the Americans and the Israelis, I'm sure they had to agree to this on the phone in the background.

[SPEAKER_01]: I assume that they had a phone call where they said, okay, you say bad stuff about us and we'll say bad stuff about you because we got to get through this, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So Netanyahu and his cabinet denounce it and whatever, but then JD Vance got to say some pretty strikingly anti-Israel things, Trump even chimed in on his behalf and said some pretty strikingly anti-Israel things.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, should be quoteable for the rest of us later, too, but that also set the precedent that, you know, as he said in his interview with, I'm sorry, was it a drayer at the New York Times where he says, listen, if everything is anti-Semitism, then nothing is anti-Semitism, which is a really great way of just completely disarming that libel.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and like, yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like if somebody does something bad to a Jewish person because they're Jewish, that's anti-Semitism, not anybody ever criticizes anyone who's Jewish for anything that they may or may not do, even if they're safe, for example, the sovereign of a nation's state ordering his military into battle against children and stuff like that, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so, um,

[SPEAKER_01]: coming from the vice president's office.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, it ain't the Cheney years, man.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's a little something different.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and so, and yes, the, you know, in a rock or two, that was no less the Israel lobby that did that to us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Same for Obama's dirty war for Al Qaeda in ISIS in Syria.

[SPEAKER_01]: That was the Israel lobby that did that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But this time around, just everybody knows, nothing can be hidden anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: The old Twitter censorship regime is dead, and they do.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of censorship on behalf of Zionism, but it just ain't enough to overcome, especially after the absolute unforgivable sense that they've committed over the last few years in the Gaza Strip, and still ongoing in Lebanon and the West Bank and the West Bank and the West

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes, the decimation in Gaza has just left even little old housewives, just, you know, breathless to look at it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just the most sickening thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, and it's, and you can't take it back.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's no way to tell people, you know, that no, you need to accept this has barra our over your own lion eyes, not after all this.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, I saw this actually right before we came on the air today, had a program on what mentioned on the air, which channel I was watching, but they are very much involved in Gaza, and it's in the life expectancy there is now 40 years old, and living conditions have been set back 77 years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a headline on anti-word.com today that says, um,

[SPEAKER_00]: uh... israeli strike in northern gaza kills three palestinians and it's including a one-year-old on my lord i mean it's it's uh... it's unconscionable you know and it's uh... i just i i can't i can't even articulate

[SPEAKER_00]: well-formed thoughts, you know, as a parent, like thinking about the number of kids that have been killed over there, and just, for no reason, and then you combine that with, like, I'll combine it with my experience in the Marine Corps, where civilians were always caught in the middle, and it was the most horrible thing to watch, and it just, it, it, it,

[SPEAKER_00]: it blows my mind and then it sends me quite frankly into a rage when I start here in these guys particularly Netanyahu who say they have the most moral army on earth and because it's absolutely not the frickin truth whatsoever.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean they're deliberately killing civilians especially children like you can watch the videos where they shoot them and it's uh

[SPEAKER_01]: It's unreal, and the testimonies from the doctors who treat volumes of children, who, you know, as the one doctor explained on the Tucker Carlson show, and there are others, this is well documented from multiple sources before this interview ever happened, but the doctor on the Carlson show back just a couple of weeks ago was explained that they'll have signature wounds where

[SPEAKER_01]: One day, they're all shot in the stomach.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then the next day, it's the elbow.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then the next day, it's the genitals.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking children, you know, young boys.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and then in the head, in the neck, in the head.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can see that the sniper, like it goes around, we're having a contest.

[SPEAKER_01]: Who you can shoot and how precise your shots are, whether you can place one right in the 10 year olds throat or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's completely sick.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, people go, oh, why are you singling out Israel?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's the most degenerate criminal regime on the face of the earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: They made their chycombs look like heroes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Are you kidding me?

[SPEAKER_01]: And people come back with, oh, yeah?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what about the genocide in the Xinjiang province?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good question.

[SPEAKER_01]: What about it?

[SPEAKER_01]: Does anyone in the world think that China has brought to the Xinjiang province, the destruction that we've seen in the Gaza Strip?

[SPEAKER_01]: No, you're just an idiot who believes lies.

[SPEAKER_01]: If they killed three million people in East Turkestan, there would have been total chaos.

[SPEAKER_01]: There would have been millions of refugees and there would have been pictures of Xinjiang that looked like Gaza.

[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, what do they do?

[SPEAKER_01]: They go, I can't believe you deny the genocide and then they'll show you the same thing over and over again, a picture of a bunch of guys in prison.

[SPEAKER_01]: like a bunch, meaning like a couple of hundred.

[SPEAKER_01]: Look, here's a couple of hundred guys in prison.

[SPEAKER_01]: How dare you deny the Xinjiang genocide?

[SPEAKER_01]: Eh, okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: If Xinjiang is a genocide, then Gaza is 15 Holocausts.

[SPEAKER_01]: Give me a break.

[SPEAKER_01]: What a bunch of crap.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so meanwhile, now, who do you have to compare the Israeli regime too?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wait.

[SPEAKER_01]: Who in the world?

[SPEAKER_01]: Not the Russians.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the Russians tell the civilians get the hell out of the way and then bomb their cities.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I got one one thing you just remind me about you mentioned the Chinese and us this is just kind of a non-secretor point here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but us protecting their oil form if you will go and back and forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it should not fall into the dustbin of history that we ran security for them.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Chinese and Afghanistan.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I've got friends who sat outside a Chinese mining camp, Green Braise, who sat outside and provided security so that they could do their thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, which

[SPEAKER_00]: At some point, I would love to find a way to wrap my brain around so many odds and ends from that conflict.

[SPEAKER_00]: They just didn't make sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's just one of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know they think about it all the time, but one more one more data point here on Syria, head choppers, and one of my fellow alumni is from Al-Nbar University who is now running a country.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is quite possibly the most successful amongst us because he's a president of a country and JD Vance is just vice president, so maybe one day JD will catch up.

[SPEAKER_01]: your peer abumaham at aljalani, huh?

[SPEAKER_00]: That might peer, let's slow.

[SPEAKER_00]: Don't decide off too many red flags here.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've got a bunch up in the air.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I have no association with him.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not associated.

[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, for the record, everyone.

[SPEAKER_01]: These two were in the same battles, but on the opposite sides in those battles, they're in the animal.

[SPEAKER_00]: Kisses, and his new sensors take note.

[SPEAKER_00]: But so there was like one of, I mean, Trump's full of all kinds of random crap, just wow comments, but he made one earlier this week or late last week about how he thought that the Syrians would do a better job fighting Hezbollah?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, really not great.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's somewhat majestic, but I don't know what they're to take it seriously or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they don't have a force capable of doing any such thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just kind of wishful think and it's funny because that was the that was the same quote where he says cheesy just because one guy goes inside you don't have to blow up a whole apartment complex right Israel's just they've been there too long and I hate the way they're fighting this on that's a great quote.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: The United States said that it's wrong to bomb an apartment complex just because you say that one supposed illegal enemy combat and ran inside

[SPEAKER_01]: And then look, what is Trump really know about Jolani in them?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I get someone must have told them that yeah, these guys were insurgents in Iraq or two, but we like them now in Syria and at least the Israelis like them because they hate the Shiites.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've been trying to explain this this whole time for, you know, 15 years now since Obama started the dirty war in Syria then and really ever since the redirection came out, Seymour Hershey's article in his great series of articles really from the year 2007 in the New Yorker, all about how, well, we decided we like how Kate again because we're mad at ourselves that we thought that they sent you Jim and your buddies to go and fight for the Shiites to put them in power and Baghdad, don't

[SPEAKER_01]: And so now what we're going to do is we're going to tilt back toward the bin Ladenites and that's been the deal.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was Fatal Islam in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, then got much worse later.

[SPEAKER_01]: And John Dala in Iran as well as P. Jack, the Kurdish Communists.

[SPEAKER_01]: And

[SPEAKER_01]: and the whole point was just to try to weaken the Shiites.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as they say in the article, it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter that solid-feast throwing bombs, it just matters who they're throwing them at.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so now,

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's basically been the policy.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's why Obama backed Al Qaeda in Syria.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's why Obama backed Al Qaeda in Yemen as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: That was as much as Rayleigh behest, as much as Saudi and UAE, but still they were mad that sheites the Houthis friends of the Iranians had taken power.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so launched that war and which absolutely was

[SPEAKER_01]: on behalf of a QAP, okay, in the Arabian Peninsula on the ground.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, for all those years, I would say in interviews, because I know it sounds crazy.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want people thinking I'm a crank, because I'm not.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I would say, like, look, man, you're sitting here saying, yeah, but Scott Horton, why would Obama back outkater in Syria?

[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't make sense, man.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, in the Reagan years, yeah, sure, but after September 11, after a rock war two,

[SPEAKER_01]: How can we back Al Qaeda again, and the answer is simply, because they hate his bola.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what Israel wants.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it is.

[SPEAKER_01]: America's regional rivals, most of because of Israeli influence, our regional rivals are the Shiites.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even though the bin Ladenites are all the most extremist radical edge of the Sunis who had attacked us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, but our government doesn't care about that.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care about the 3000.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care about their own damn Pentagon.

[SPEAKER_01]: There won't, well, actually, that's not true.

[SPEAKER_01]: The CIA doesn't care.

[SPEAKER_01]: The military was kind of pissed off back then, if you remember, but they kind of went along with it because they had you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Army Rangers, three Army Rangers, really green berets, were stabbed in the back, were shot in the back and killed by an ISIS guy, training terrorists in Jordan.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Grace.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jack Murphy, not the cook with the weird beard, but the former Special Forces veteran turn journalist had a great story about that in software at back years ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: But anyways, point is, yeah, it should sound crazy to people.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want Trump to say he wants that OK to government of Syria to invade Lebanon to attack his balla.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, he did say that.

[SPEAKER_01]: The same guy that...

[SPEAKER_01]: who admitted to PBS front line that is government television, that he fought Americans and presumably killed some fighting in Mosul and Ramani in Iraq or two, where he was part of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, later the Islamic State of Iraq under Abu Musaub al-Sarqawi, and later under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and then when ISIS split from Al-Nusra in 2013, I'm

[SPEAKER_01]: Aljalani, that is Alshara, the guy, the president of Syria right now was Zawanhries, designated guy 13 years ago, got the big stamp of approval from the butcher in New York City.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's the guy that Trump sprays him with perfume in the White House and says, he's strong, he's so strong and has such a strong past.

[SPEAKER_01]: When a strong guy was such a strong pass, as he flirts with him and sprays perfume on him and takes credit, I am the one who installed him in power, when no it was Joe Biden who installed him in power at the end of 2024, and Netanyahu and Recip Erdogan of Turkey both also took credit, just like Joe Biden all three of them took credit for installing an al-Qaeda regime in Damascus.

[SPEAKER_01]: All the Islamic state, we hate them when they rule Mosul.

[SPEAKER_01]: because we're just mad at them that they didn't go west and sack the mascuses.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, because that's what Israel wants.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, and I mean, I would love to keep going.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to put a pin in it, but um, a couple quick things.

[SPEAKER_00]: I hope that this is just like, thank you so much for saying that, Scott, and I hope we continue to talk about all this and the awakening here domestically continues that we can

[SPEAKER_00]: decouple from these guys, decoupling pointed at China.

[SPEAKER_00]: I remember when that was in Vogue, it'd be nice to have a decoupling movement with the Israelis because it's way more detrimental to all facets of American life going back decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, I got a point out that for some reason, my wife gave us a super chat.

[SPEAKER_00]: She's sitting over there somewhere, paid $5 to say hello.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome you back.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's always great to have you, man.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, thank you, man.

[SPEAKER_00]: Appreciate it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure, she'll say thank you a little bit.

[SPEAKER_00]: But here's your website.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anything you want to pump on the way out of the door here?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, man, that's the deep dive on all of this stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's Scott Horton slowed down so you can catch up.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to know all I know about the Middle East and about the Cold War with Russia and the War in Ukraine, it's Scott Horton Academy.com and we are just posting today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, I finished the edits of the second half of my Cold War course.

[SPEAKER_01]: So my two courses are walking you through my books and stuff already and provoked.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then I also have a Palestinian Ramsey Paroud.

[SPEAKER_01]: I got the Great Libertarian Journalist Jim Bovard.

[SPEAKER_01]: I got William Bupert, the former Army Ranger, and historian on how we lost every war since World War II.

[SPEAKER_01]: I got Adam Francisco.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can see right there, did a whole thing on the history of...

[SPEAKER_01]: Christian Zionism and then as I say my Cold War course is now finally complete and next week we'll be adding Grant F. Smith and his course on the history of the founding of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and you are not going to want to miss that.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's all at Scott Horton Academy.com.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, man, appreciate it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, give a shout out for your podcast, provoked with Taylor Cooper, that is now on Thursday nights, in case anybody was looking for it and didn't get the memo.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the Scott Horton Show, my interview show, which comes out, you know, I do a few interviews a week and also check out all my great books for Vogue.

[SPEAKER_00]: Fulls Aaron and enough already for sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll make sure we get links to all that, put in the episode comments.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what to call it episode wind up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Roundup wherever you go if you click on YouTube, you'll see it it'll all be there Hit them more button the more button that's right for more Scott, but it's a R. I meant hey As always great talking to you man.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for coming on Thank you, you've done for me and also You come on.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's fantastic We will be back tomorrow with a greatest hits episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: I am going to take the day off and allow that our producers here to take They off to but you're not going to miss that and we will be back Monday live July 6

[SPEAKER_00]: same bad time, same bad channel.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for all your support.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're thirsty, get yourself some killer instant coffee at killer instant coffee.com It is the official coffee of this podcast and it keeps me going because I don't get to sleep anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways Thanks for coming.

[SPEAKER_00]: Appreciate your support and have a good one