Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show
Speaker 1: for the first time. Long overdue. Darryl Cooper, how are
Speaker 1: you doing, Drell?
Speaker 2: Great man, It's great to be on here with you.
Speaker 2: Like I told you before the show, I'm a big fan,
Speaker 2: so yeah, a long time coming.
Speaker 1: Same here, same here. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2: So I'm pretty much a regular person. I grew up
Speaker 2: all over California, mostly in inner cities, from the Central
Speaker 2: Valley down to SoCal spent a little bit of time
Speaker 2: my high school and college years up in Montana, which
Speaker 2: was nice to get a different glimpse of that. I
Speaker 2: come from a family of veterans, and so I joined
Speaker 2: the Navy after I was done with college and did
Speaker 2: ten years doing Aaron ballistic missile work defense work, and
Speaker 2: then got out and worked as a DoD civilian for
Speaker 2: ten more years doing the same thing, basically Aaron ballistic
Speaker 2: missile defense engineering stuff. In the meantime, around twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: I started doing a podcast just sort of on a lark. Really,
Speaker 2: you know, I was a fan of Dan Carlin's hardcore
Speaker 2: history back then, and obviously he takes six or eight
Speaker 2: months between episodes, and I would always bitch about that
Speaker 2: and pretty much all I do. You know, I moved
Speaker 2: around a lot when I was a kid, and then
Speaker 2: in the Navy, I moved around a lot, and so
Speaker 2: my continuity was always books, and so ever since i've
Speaker 2: been a little kid, I just you know, I've had
Speaker 2: my nose in a book pretty much during all of
Speaker 2: my spare time every day. And you know, my girlfriend
Speaker 2: at the time and my friends were tired of hearing
Speaker 2: about the books that I recently read, and so they
Speaker 2: told me to go start a podcast, and so I did.
Speaker 2: I did that for a few years. You know, these
Speaker 2: are I do like long form five six seven hour
Speaker 2: long episodes, sometimes really deep dives on historical topics, and
Speaker 2: they're not for everybody, and I didn't really expect anybody
Speaker 2: to listen to it, but it's really kind of taken
Speaker 2: off and that's been really cool. And so last year,
Speaker 2: you know, I kind of was facing a point where,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm starting a family now, and I just
Speaker 2: had to realize that. You know, when I was at
Speaker 2: my DoD job, I was literally waking up two hours
Speaker 2: early before I had to get ready for work to
Speaker 2: read and write. I was reading and writing during my
Speaker 2: lunch hour. I was spending my evenings doing that just
Speaker 2: to get this podcast done. And that wasn't gonna fly
Speaker 2: anymore once, you know, I got a little screaming infant
Speaker 2: to deal with, plus work, and so I had to
Speaker 2: make a choice and decided to cut the strands of
Speaker 2: the safety net with a government job, and now I'm
Speaker 2: able to do the podcasting thing full time. I do
Speaker 2: a second podcast with my friend Jocko Willink, who's he's
Speaker 2: a retired nav CL commander. People may have heard of him.
Speaker 2: He's a he's an awesome dude. And we have one
Speaker 2: called The Unraveling as well. And so, yeah, that's that's
Speaker 2: what I'm doing. And what's the name of podcast, oh
Speaker 2: martyr made. Yeah, I'm terrible at advertising.
Speaker 1: Well, the thing I really enjoy is you'll talk about
Speaker 1: things like the Bolshevik Revolution, and you'll you'll talk about
Speaker 1: things that are historic, but also you're not scared to
Speaker 1: talk about things that people might, I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: good respectable people might roll their eyes at you know.
Speaker 1: So there was this there was this episode you did
Speaker 1: and it was about this vast conspiracy theory that you
Speaker 1: know has been put to bed and it was this
Speaker 1: thing called Pizzagate, and it was such a stupid conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory that like Ben Swan lost his job and had
Speaker 1: to go into hiding for a year after he reported
Speaker 1: on it on an Atlanta news station. I used to
Speaker 1: live in Atlanta, and uh, yeah, you know, and yeah,
Speaker 1: so why why did you look into this this silly
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory?
Speaker 2: So I was doing a short little series for my
Speaker 2: sub stack followers on Jeffrey Epstein and focusing on the
Speaker 2: you know, the what looked like connections to us and
Speaker 2: Israeli intelligence and kind of deep diving on that in
Speaker 2: a way that anybody, you know, I know, you've had
Speaker 2: Ryan on a few times and stuff. Anybody who's listening
Speaker 2: to him isn't going to get anything new out of
Speaker 2: the first episode and a half or so, probably.
Speaker 1: I mean, Ryan's basically done all the work for Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's done the work for all of us. And there's
Speaker 1: even somebody else out there who's like making a career
Speaker 1: off of Ryan's work and not really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's kind of unfortunate because you know, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: this is this is always tough for someone like me
Speaker 2: who has you know, sort of mainstream normy connections with
Speaker 2: people where you know, it's hard to just say that, like,
Speaker 2: you know, I got this from this source Ryan Dawson
Speaker 2: over here, X Y, and Z just me. Then it
Speaker 2: would just be kind of like whatever, I would eat that,
Speaker 2: no problem. I don't have an issue with it at all.
Speaker 2: But it affects other people that I work with and
Speaker 2: so forth, and so it becomes a little more difficult.
Speaker 2: And it's unfortunate because, like you said, he's done all
Speaker 2: the work, and it's really impossible to talk about the
Speaker 2: issue without ripping him off a little bit, just because
Speaker 2: he did all the work, Like that's who did it,
Speaker 2: you know, and so he was credit for sure.
Speaker 1: How was it making fun of you? I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: you knew who I was making fun of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, And you know, it's unfortunate.
Speaker 2: But uh, there's another example. You talk about Ben's Swan
Speaker 2: getting run off the rails. You know, he's another person,
Speaker 2: you know, got the full Alex Jones times ten treatment,
Speaker 2: you know, and he's not somebody you know, Ryan Dawson's
Speaker 2: not some dude who had millions and millions of people
Speaker 2: who were following him and they were like, we got
Speaker 2: to do something, but still they thought it was important
Speaker 2: enough to basically go as hard on him as they've
Speaker 2: gone on just about anybody, which is, you know, remarkable
Speaker 2: in itself.
Speaker 1: So you started looking into this Pizzagate thing, and you,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it just seems so silly, right of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the most ridiculous thing that you've ever heard about.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a satan an elite satanic pedophile ring
Speaker 2: being run out of the basement of a pizza shop
Speaker 2: in Washington, DC. It's the dumbest thing you've ever heard,
Speaker 2: for sure. And so I kind of approached the episode,
Speaker 2: you know, after doing the first one on Epstein and
Speaker 2: his intelligence connections, the second one where I step back
Speaker 2: and I just talked about several other cases over the
Speaker 2: last several decades where things like you know, the Finders Group,
Speaker 2: things like the Kincora Boys Home in Northern Ireland. There
Speaker 2: are a lot of instances where there seem to be,
Speaker 2: you know, instances of childhood sexual abuse, child sexual abuse
Speaker 2: where there are just fingerprints of intelligence agencies all around it.
Speaker 2: And obviously, when you're talking about intelligence agencies, it's like
Speaker 2: talking about the mafia. Everything's deniable, everything is circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 2: That's just the nature of the beast. But at a
Speaker 2: certain point you start to say, you know, if any
Speaker 2: one of these other cases is true, well then it's
Speaker 2: not unrealistic anymore, and it's more likely that the second
Speaker 2: one's going to be true, and it makes it more
Speaker 2: likely that the third and the rest of them could
Speaker 2: very well be true. Once you know that three or
Speaker 2: four of these things are true. You know that British
Speaker 2: intelligence was monitoring the Kincora Boys Home because they knew
Speaker 2: that there were a bunch of powerful people coming through
Speaker 2: there having sex with children they could later blackmail and control.
Speaker 2: Once you know that has happened, then it's not really
Speaker 2: you know, like I think when most people heard, you know,
Speaker 2: Ale's Acosta, Trump's labor secretary who was the prosecutor of
Speaker 2: Epstein back in his first case, say on the record,
Speaker 2: you know, to his interviewers when he was getting vetted
Speaker 2: for the labor secretary job, that he was told to
Speaker 2: back off Epstein because quote, he belonged to intelligence. Like
Speaker 2: in the world where I come from, and I'm not
Speaker 2: a journalist, maybe I should go to journalism school and
Speaker 2: they correct me on this, But I would think that
Speaker 2: there would be reporters camped out on his lawn and
Speaker 2: every time he poked his head out of his house,
Speaker 2: there'd be a microphone in his face saying, excuse me, sir,
Speaker 2: what did you mean when you said that Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 2: was connected to intelligence? Obviously that's not what's going on,
Speaker 2: And in fact, the complete opposite is what has been
Speaker 2: going on, where there's a very obvious effort, just a
Speaker 2: full spectrum effort to suppress the story, to keep questions,
Speaker 2: just very obvious questions from being asked. And so yeah,
Speaker 2: that was the second episode, and then in the third episode,
Speaker 2: I just wanted to kind of tie it all together.
Speaker 2: And I really wasn't sure when I started it. I
Speaker 2: didn't really plan on talking about Pizzagate exactly. But what
Speaker 2: I found was it's a good window into the into
Speaker 2: the culture in Washington, d C. And it's not just DC.
Speaker 2: It's the same in London. It's the same, and just
Speaker 2: a lot of elite circles, whether it's you know, business,
Speaker 2: you know, when you start picking through the Pizzagate conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory and think about how did this thing start, how
Speaker 2: did it get going? You know, I kind of remember,
Speaker 2: like back in the day as I was watching on
Speaker 2: the chans and read it and everything, watching this thing
Speaker 2: as it was unfolding there at the beginning, and you know,
Speaker 2: it starts out in twenty sixteen because John Podesta, Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton's campaign manager, gets his emails leaked and people are
Speaker 2: going through them and finding that, you know, normal stuff
Speaker 2: that the Clinton campaign rob Bernie Sanders and work with
Speaker 2: the DNC to like set that up, all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, and people are arguing over whether this was
Speaker 2: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump working together and so forth.
Speaker 2: But then some people came across some emails that really
Speaker 2: didn't seem to make any kind of sense if you
Speaker 2: just read them in a literal way, right, Like there
Speaker 2: were things like somebody writing John Podesta and saying like, hey,
Speaker 2: after the party from last week, we found a handkerchief
Speaker 2: with a map that looks pizza related, like do you
Speaker 2: want it back? And he says no or whatever. There's
Speaker 2: a bunch of little weird things like that that people
Speaker 2: are like, well, that doesn't even make any sense, Like
Speaker 2: why would there be a pizza related map on a
Speaker 2: handkerchief and why would it be important enough that he
Speaker 2: would want to like you know, return it to him whatever.
Speaker 2: And so they see that, and I believe this part.
Speaker 2: I wasn't around for somebody who's who was around for
Speaker 2: it told me that this was how the pizza thing
Speaker 2: got got started. Was it on the chans back in
Speaker 2: the day, like several years ago. I think people would
Speaker 2: come in and sometimes try to troll the board or
Speaker 2: get it in trouble by posting child porn or what
Speaker 2: looked like child porn, and so to not trip the filters,
Speaker 2: they would call it cheese pizza CP, and that that's
Speaker 2: where the pizza association came from. I'm not one hundred
Speaker 2: percent sure if that's true or not. That's what somebody
Speaker 2: who was there kind of told me. But the point
Speaker 2: is they read they started reading these strange emails as
Speaker 2: code where pizza is porn, cheese pizza's child porn, maps
Speaker 2: and handkerchiefs mean X, Y and Z having to do
Speaker 2: it this weird stuff. And then of course there's thousands
Speaker 2: and thousands of emails, and so if you do a
Speaker 2: search and you look for any time the word pizza
Speaker 2: shows up or map or handkerchief or whatever, it turns
Speaker 2: out that there's a bunch of emails in there that
Speaker 2: look pretty strange if you apply this cipher to it.
Speaker 2: And so that's how the whole thing kind of got started,
Speaker 2: when you know. So, yeah, that's how it got started.
Speaker 2: And I believe the next thing that happened, well, people
Speaker 2: started doing more research once they got on the trail
Speaker 2: of it. Somebody would bring up, for example, you know
Speaker 2: Andrew Breitbart's tweet from back and I want to say, like,
Speaker 2: what was it twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen or something
Speaker 2: than that.
Speaker 1: I think it was twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so all the way back in twenty eleven, and
Speaker 2: what does he say, how Prague guru John Podesta isn't
Speaker 2: a household name as a world class underage sex slave
Speaker 2: op cover upper defending unspeakable dregs escapes me. It's like, okay, look,
Speaker 2: Andrew Breitbart for sure is like a bomb thrower. You know,
Speaker 2: he's out there like starting fights or whatever. But he's
Speaker 2: also a wealthy businessman who's got to worry about things
Speaker 2: like libel and slander suits and so coming out and
Speaker 2: saying something like that is that's pretty serious. And he
Speaker 2: never backed down from it, and you know, it's almost
Speaker 2: as if he was like daring Podesta to take him
Speaker 2: into court and go do discovery or something. You know,
Speaker 2: some people found that because they're talking about John Podesta,
Speaker 2: these are his emails, and they go back years ago,
Speaker 2: go and find you know, Andrew Breitbart basically accusing him
Speaker 2: of running an underage sex slave operation. And then after
Speaker 2: Anthony Weiner got busted for texting sexting with an underage girl,
Speaker 2: Breitbart had been out there saying that this was going on,
Speaker 2: that there was a scandal out there for a long time,
Speaker 2: and he finally got vindicated, and he was on an
Speaker 2: episode of Red Eye. I think it was a great
Speaker 2: Gutfeld and they're talking about this and you know, he's
Speaker 2: obviously very excited, and Greg Guttfeld says something like, you know,
Speaker 2: he mentioned something about ping pong, and Andrew Breitbart interrupts him
Speaker 2: as he's like in the middle of a sentence, and
Speaker 2: he goes, huh, why would you switch the subject to
Speaker 2: the sport of ping pong? And the guy's like, Greg
Speaker 2: Gutfeld says, you know, you know how it is, and
Speaker 2: he's like, yeah, you're weird like that, like in a
Speaker 2: very kind of knowing tone of voice, very strange. Well,
Speaker 2: the next thing, people found in those emails was stuff
Speaker 2: about this place in DC, this pizza place. It is
Speaker 2: called comet Ping Pong Pizza. And people might remember that
Speaker 2: from the news because a dude with an AR fifteen
Speaker 2: showed up there to search the place for, you know,
Speaker 2: a sex dungeon in the basement. Comet Ping Pong Pizza.
Speaker 2: You know it was. I mean, it's something again, like
Speaker 2: the as you go through all of this stuff, it's
Speaker 2: all it all sounds so ridiculous, and maybe the whole
Speaker 2: thing is completely ridiculous, like the actual story once you
Speaker 2: tie it all together, but when you take all the
Speaker 2: little bits of it, you know, comet Ping Pong pizzas
Speaker 2: run by a guy named Jane's alaphontis. So yeah, and.
Speaker 1: Your tweet, your tweet this morning.
Speaker 2: Is that something else or what I mean, Like, I don't,
Speaker 2: I mean, Aliphantis is a Greek name. It's a common
Speaker 2: Greek name, so it's fine. But like the fact that
Speaker 2: Jean Leon fonts it's almost spelled the exact same way,
Speaker 2: and it means I like children or I love children.
Speaker 2: It's very strange. I don't even know if that's his
Speaker 2: real name. If it is, then it's just a huge coincidence.
Speaker 2: If it's not, then you know, throw them in jail.
Speaker 2: And so this guy's a pizza place owner in Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. Place called Comet Ping Pong Pizza and he
Speaker 2: is listed in GQ magazine as one of the fifty
Speaker 2: most powerful people in Washington, d C. Which is a
Speaker 2: little strange. He used to be the boyfriend of David Brock,
Speaker 2: the founder of Media Matters back in the day that
Speaker 2: was that was years ago. And so as there people
Speaker 2: start going through investigating this comic Ping Pong Pizza place.
Speaker 2: They thought it was weird that Breitbart had had that
Speaker 2: sort of weird exchange about Ping Pong, And they start
Speaker 2: investigating this place a little and they have musical acts
Speaker 2: that will come and perform. This is a place that
Speaker 2: is advertised for children, and so as a place for kids,
Speaker 2: bring your kids to this place. It's a fun place. Well,
Speaker 2: they have these acts, these musical acts that come through
Speaker 2: that are sort of like the best way I can
Speaker 2: describe it is that it's sort of a weird surrealist
Speaker 2: like David Lynch meets Pink Flamingos kind of aesthetic where
Speaker 2: it's sort of this trashy but like surrealistic creepy sort
Speaker 2: of vibe that you get they would. There's videos, music
Speaker 2: videos and promo videos that a couple of these bands
Speaker 2: have cut that we know we're playing there because they
Speaker 2: were on advertisements. And one of them is called, oh gosh,
Speaker 2: what is the one called? I know one of them
Speaker 2: is called sex Stains, and then there's another one called well,
Speaker 2: the lead singer is called Majestic Ape. I can't remember
Speaker 2: the name of the band off the top of me.
Speaker 2: It's been a while since I've really looked hard into
Speaker 2: this stuff, but you know, the one there's they're they're
Speaker 2: on stage joking about pedophilia. They're joking about pedophilia and
Speaker 2: their songs, and then this other band, sex Stains, that's
Speaker 2: performed there. They have a music video that you can
Speaker 2: go watch on YouTube, and it takes place this music video.
Speaker 2: Most of it in like a child's nursery basically, and
Speaker 2: there's big and large toys and blocks and various things around,
Speaker 2: and there's this very prominently featured throughout the video is
Speaker 2: this large block, multicolored block, and on one side of it,
Speaker 2: the side that's always facing the camera, is this symbol
Speaker 2: that looks basically like a triangular spiral like it's a
Speaker 2: spiral but in the shape of a triangle, right, And
Speaker 2: turns out that there is a released FBI document looks
Speaker 2: like it's maybe like a training document or something that
Speaker 2: got released that you can go find this on the
Speaker 2: internet as well. It says symbols and logos used by
Speaker 2: pedophiles to identify sexual preferences. And then it shows several examples,
Speaker 2: some of them drawn, some of them on coins or
Speaker 2: rings or amulets wear around your neck that are that
Speaker 2: exact symbol, that triangular spiral thing that apparently this is
Speaker 2: one of the ways that pedophiles expressed their proclivities to
Speaker 2: one another, like on the downlow, I suppose. And so
Speaker 2: at the end of that music video, the lead singer
Speaker 2: of the band is kind of she's got her hands
Speaker 2: out in like this weird position. I don't know what
Speaker 2: she's doing, almost some sort of like anyway she's she's
Speaker 2: reaching out directly toward this symbol. It's like the only
Speaker 2: thing really that's prominent in the thing in the foreground
Speaker 2: there is the lead singer and this big block with
Speaker 2: that symbol, and she's facing it and basically obviously her
Speaker 2: attention is on it and that's how the music video ends,
Speaker 2: after this thing has been prominently placed throughout the entire video,
Speaker 2: and so people think that's very strange. People think it's
Speaker 2: strange that two doors down from Comet Ping Pong Pizza
Speaker 2: was a place called besta Pizza and that the logo
Speaker 2: of that place was a pizza slice, which is in
Speaker 2: the form of a triangle that was done up like
Speaker 2: a spiral, just like that symbol, the exact same thing.
Speaker 2: They changed the logo a few weeks after all this
Speaker 2: stuff started popping up on the Internet and the place
Speaker 2: is closed now, I think, And so that was all
Speaker 2: very strange. The guy James alafontis the owner, you know.
Speaker 2: People found his Instagram page and the avatar that he
Speaker 2: used for his Instagram page was a statue of Antonis,
Speaker 2: who was the teenage boy lover of the emperor Roman
Speaker 2: Emperor Hadrian. On his Instagram page, there were a lot
Speaker 2: of pictures that in comments that if you just took
Speaker 2: him out of took him out of context or very strange.
Speaker 2: A child who's like taped to a table and jokes
Speaker 2: about things that could be interpreted that way. And so
Speaker 2: people think this is all very strange, especially when they're
Speaker 2: already listening to what Andrew Breitbart said, and there you know,
Speaker 2: they're already kind of three quarters of the way down
Speaker 2: the rabbit hole. Well, then somebody discovers an email that
Speaker 2: involves this. This it's an invitation from this performance artist
Speaker 2: called Marina Abramovic, and she has an event called Spirit Cooking.
Speaker 2: And everybody's probably heard of this, like at least in name,
Speaker 2: but for those who haven't, John and Tony Pizzet Podesta
Speaker 2: his brother were invited personally by Marina Abramovic to come
Speaker 2: to this Spirit Cooking event. And what it is is
Speaker 2: it's a dinner that takes place in a multi roomed
Speaker 2: art installation that is just it's I mean, if you
Speaker 2: were to tell somebody that this was some sort of
Speaker 2: a devil worship like ritual or something, I don't think
Speaker 2: they would change much about it. Like there's white walls,
Speaker 2: and the walls are covered with really cryptic, weird pre
Speaker 2: be messages about drinking fresh breast milk on earthquake nights,
Speaker 2: a lot of sort of art school like edge Lord bullshit,
Speaker 2: but it's written in pigs blood up on the walls.
Speaker 2: In one of the corners, there's an effigy of an
Speaker 2: infant with a bucket of pigs blood splashed all over it.
Speaker 2: There's little dolls that are, you know, positioned like they're copulating.
Speaker 2: And in the meal, the people who are there to
Speaker 2: participate in this thing, they drink things that are they're
Speaker 2: supposed to pretend or human blood or semen or breast milk.
Speaker 2: In another spirit cooking event that took place. You could
Speaker 2: find these pictures on the internet with like Lady Gaga
Speaker 2: and Gwen Stefani, a lot of other people like this.
Speaker 2: You know, they're there with like a naked body a person,
Speaker 2: a real person, lying in a tub of what's supposed
Speaker 2: to be blood, and they're pretending to be a corpse
Speaker 2: and people are eating off of them. A lot of
Speaker 2: just very weird, strange stuff, right, And so people we'll
Speaker 2: see and Abrama Vic herself, I mean, you can go
Speaker 2: find you know, her pictures on the internet, and she's
Speaker 2: got pictures of herself all in red holding up a
Speaker 2: bloody goat's head, another one with a snake around her
Speaker 2: head and neck and in her mouth. She was apparently
Speaker 2: friends with that Brazilian cult leader John of God, who
Speaker 2: is running a sex slave operation down there you can
Speaker 2: kind of forgive her for that. I guess Oprah and
Speaker 2: a million other people were apparently good buddies with that guy,
Speaker 2: so surprise, surprise. But you get to this and people,
Speaker 2: you know, I start asking questions, right, and so people
Speaker 2: start tying all this stuff together. They say, okay, there
Speaker 2: are you know, there's the code word emails that are
Speaker 2: telling us that there's something to do with pedophilia going.
Speaker 2: And then they take it out and they say, okay,
Speaker 2: now there's this pizza place involved, and this guy's connected
Speaker 2: to a bunch of other people, and so now it's
Speaker 2: this sort of sprawling pedophile ring. And then they discover
Speaker 2: the spirit cooking thing and they say, okay, this is
Speaker 2: actually a ritualistic, satanic elite pedophile ring. And that's kind
Speaker 2: of where you get to at this point. It got
Speaker 2: really fun when people started looking into John Podesta's brother,
Speaker 2: Tony Podesta. So Tony Podesta and John Podesta, you know,
Speaker 2: Podesta's both of these guys like they're those you know,
Speaker 2: there's like a whole class of these people who never
Speaker 2: run for office, they never run a government agency or
Speaker 2: anything like that, but they just always seem to be
Speaker 2: around somehow you know, they're always there whenever you like.
Speaker 1: Guys who owned pizza shops and get or like in
Speaker 1: the top.
Speaker 2: Fifty, right exactly. And so John Podesta was friends with
Speaker 2: Bill Clinton going back to the early seventies. They worked
Speaker 2: for the same senator together and he remained in that circle.
Speaker 2: And in nineteen eighty eight, he and his brother Tony,
Speaker 2: right as Bill Clinton is kind of deciding he's going
Speaker 2: to run for president, John and his brother Tony Podesta
Speaker 2: to start the Podesta Group, which, up until it closed
Speaker 2: a few years ago right after Hillary Clinton lost the presidency,
Speaker 2: was certainly one of maybe the most powerful Democrat side
Speaker 2: lobbying firm in Washington, very very connected because these are
Speaker 2: people who are connected to the Clinton kind of operation
Speaker 2: very very closely, and you know that's been running the
Speaker 2: show for a long time on the Democrat side. And
Speaker 2: so they started that up in nineteen eighty eight, and
Speaker 2: then John Podesta stepped away in nineteen ninety two to
Speaker 2: go work for Bill Clinton, and he worked for him
Speaker 2: throughout his presidency, eventually got to be his chief of staff.
Speaker 2: Gets done with the Clinton administration, and I think two
Speaker 2: thousand and three he started the Center for American progress.
Speaker 2: And then twenty sixteen he's running Hillary Clinton's campaign, so
Speaker 2: he's just very involved in that whole circle. And this
Speaker 2: whole time, his brother Tony now is running the lobbying
Speaker 2: group by himself because you know, I think you have
Speaker 2: to do it that way for conflicts of interest reasons.
Speaker 2: But they still work closely together obviously, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's a everybody kind of knows what's going on, right.
Speaker 2: And so it turns out that Tony Pedesta is a
Speaker 2: big art collector. And in twenty fourteen there was a
Speaker 2: profile of his house in a Washington society magazine called
Speaker 2: Washington Life, and they profile his house and some of
Speaker 2: his art. He's a well known art collector, I mean
Speaker 2: a very very big, like multimillion dollar, you know, pieces
Speaker 2: of art kind of thing, and they profile some of
Speaker 2: the stuff he's got in his house. The first thing
Speaker 2: that you notice is or that people noticed, was the
Speaker 2: giant statue. It's like a golden colored like bronze statue
Speaker 2: all shined up that is a human, a headless human,
Speaker 2: basically in a full backward arch. And it's called the
Speaker 2: Arch of Hysteria and it's by an artist called Louise
Speaker 2: Bourgeois and people. I don't know who found this. It
Speaker 2: wasn't me, but somebody pointed out that there is a
Speaker 2: picture that is a public of the aftermath of one
Speaker 2: of the serial killer in Cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer's Victims, and
Speaker 2: he took a picture of it because he would play
Speaker 2: with the corpses and do various things sometimes and take
Speaker 2: pictures of him where he had the corpse in pretty
Speaker 2: much the exact same position that this statue is depicting.
Speaker 2: And this statue she did this a year after all
Speaker 2: the Dahmer stuff became public. Now, Louis Bourgeois, apparently there
Speaker 2: are sketches in books going back a long time ago
Speaker 2: where she was drawing this thing, so like, that's probably
Speaker 2: not where the concept came from. But when people noticed that,
Speaker 2: obviously it continued to throw jet fuel on this fire. Well,
Speaker 2: then people started to look at some of the paintings
Speaker 2: he had on his walls, and these you can't really
Speaker 2: explain away like that, Oh I should mention, by the way,
Speaker 2: Louis Bourgeois, she's also got like there are sketches and
Speaker 2: drawings that have been made public that they show the
Speaker 2: two of them in particular where it's like a page
Speaker 2: or a canvas with a line drawn down the middle
Speaker 2: of it, and a little boy and a full grown
Speaker 2: man with father and son written beneath them, kind of
Speaker 2: holding on to the middle line like it's a pole
Speaker 2: or reaching out toward each other something, and they both
Speaker 2: have erections. And so that's a little strange, right, Not
Speaker 2: everybody draws stuff like that in their spare time. And
Speaker 2: so people started looking at the paintings on his walls,
Speaker 2: and these are pictures that are in the magazine profile, right,
Speaker 2: So these are things that he I mean, if I
Speaker 2: had an art collection with a bunch of pictures of
Speaker 2: what we're about to talk about, I would probably take
Speaker 2: those down before company came over. I would certainly take
Speaker 2: them down before the photographers showed up to profile my
Speaker 2: house in a society magazine. But apparently that's not something
Speaker 2: he felt was really necessary. And so there are a
Speaker 2: couple of paintings by this artist named Bill Yanna Jorjyevik
Speaker 2: or Djerjivic, I'm not sure she's Serbian artist. And the
Speaker 2: one you see in his living room, I'm looking at
Speaker 2: it right now. He's got, you know, a big white
Speaker 2: couch a nice you know rich man in DC's living room,
Speaker 2: and in the background there's this painting and you can
Speaker 2: make it out pretty clearly. And the full resolution version
Speaker 2: of this painting is available, you know online, you can
Speaker 2: just google it Billiyana Jerjievic. You'll find all this stuff.
Speaker 2: And it's a little girl with a sort of weird,
Speaker 2: deformed looking face and black sort of almost dead eyes,
Speaker 2: sitting on a stool with a short skirt up against
Speaker 2: like what looks like a tile bathroom wall or something
Speaker 2: like that. And that's one of them. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: it's a little creepy. It's creepy and weird and not
Speaker 2: something I would have on my wall, but okay, whatever. Well,
Speaker 2: then there's another picture of another room, kind of a
Speaker 2: sitting room with an orange couch and a yellow chair
Speaker 2: in a blue chair. And there are two more of
Speaker 2: this artist paintings from this same series. One of them
Speaker 2: is this huge painting. It's about maybe looks like it's
Speaker 2: about five or six feet tall by eight or ten
Speaker 2: feet why it dominates the room. And it's another one
Speaker 2: that you can find online. And what it depicts it's
Speaker 2: called synchronized swimming and it's got a bunch of young
Speaker 2: girls dressed in you know, different ways, laying in a
Speaker 2: circle on the bottom of a swimming of an empty
Speaker 2: swimming pool, and they've got that same sort of dead
Speaker 2: look in their eyes. They look like corpses, most of them.
Speaker 2: And that's the giant painting that he's got dominating this room,
Speaker 2: in this other walls, a bunch of young girls that
Speaker 2: look dead lying on the bottom of a swimming pool. Well,
Speaker 2: kitty corner to that is another one of these paintings.
Speaker 2: This one's about poster size, from the same series, and
Speaker 2: this one is unmistakably two young girls dead, lying dead
Speaker 2: in a pool or a pond, rather a pond or
Speaker 2: river or something like that, and they're laying on their backs,
Speaker 2: just looking up at the camera and their their their
Speaker 2: corpses like there's really no question about it. And so
Speaker 2: this same artist has done has done a bunch of
Speaker 2: others that weren't on Tony Pedesta's walls, and these pictures
Speaker 2: of this same series, a lot of them with the
Speaker 2: tile backgrounds. One of them, there's a little girl in
Speaker 2: a striped white and yellow shirt in her panties up
Speaker 2: against the wall and it's like picturing her from behind.
Speaker 2: There's another one with a little boy and just his
Speaker 2: underwear who's bound and tied up hanging against a tile wall.
Speaker 2: There's another one with a with a little girl who's
Speaker 2: lying dead in a pond. Another one with a girl
Speaker 2: with some sort of a deformed face holding a dead baby.
Speaker 2: And so this is uh, you know. The the artist
Speaker 2: Billiana Jerjovic, she's been interviewed before in a in an
Speaker 2: art magazine and she said herself that things that she
Speaker 2: had read about pedophilia or inspirations for this series of artwork.
Speaker 2: And so that's certainly the association that's being made here.
Speaker 2: And it's very obvious in a lot of these things
Speaker 2: that it's depicting abuse of children. That's really what the
Speaker 2: theme is of all of these. One of my buddies,
Speaker 2: after I put that podcast down, pointed out to me
Speaker 2: he's a guy who he worked in a slaughterhouse for many,
Speaker 2: many years, and I kind of looked at all the
Speaker 2: tile backgrounds on these things and figured there was like
Speaker 2: a shower kind of swimming pool type thing. He pointed
Speaker 2: out that that's how all slaughterhouses pretty much look on
Speaker 2: the inside, and he sent me a ton of pictures,
Speaker 2: and sure enough, it's just tiled walls, tiled everything. And
Speaker 2: then I realized that one of the other paintings that
Speaker 2: Djerdjievik has as part of this part of this series
Speaker 2: is three or four butchers wearing hoods over their head
Speaker 2: with the butcher's long gloves and like high boots and
Speaker 2: butcher's aprons, and they're all standing around in one of
Speaker 2: those tiled rooms. And so it seems like she probably
Speaker 2: made that connection too. And what we're looking at in
Speaker 2: some of these paintings is a bunch of kids in
Speaker 2: really you know again like creepy, abuse oriented pictures in
Speaker 2: slaughter in a slaughter hus And so it's seems like
Speaker 2: what we're probably looking at, maybe maybe not in People
Speaker 2: found an interview with Tony Podesta and he was being
Speaker 2: asked about some of his other favorite artists, and he
Speaker 2: listed a sculptor named Patricia Piccinini as one of his
Speaker 2: very favorite artists. And I don't know, it's like a
Speaker 2: sculpture like she does, you know, the plastic arts of
Speaker 2: one kind or another. Basically, she makes these statues that
Speaker 2: look like concept art for like a surrealist horror movie.
Speaker 2: Basically most of them are the vast majority of them
Speaker 2: involved children with monsters or demons of one kind or
Speaker 2: another leering at them over like leering over them as
Speaker 2: they sleep in their beds. There's one with this creepy
Speaker 2: monster with its long claws around standing on a bed
Speaker 2: with this what looks like maybe a four year old
Speaker 2: girl with its claws around her. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of there's a lot of imagery of like orifices that
Speaker 2: look like vaginas or anuses or mouths with things coming
Speaker 2: out of them and kids poking at them or playing
Speaker 2: with them. There's a weird one of a deformed child
Speaker 2: on top of like a horned goat. There's another one
Speaker 2: where there's this weird kind of pig monster with big
Speaker 2: pustules coming off of its back, with more monsters coming
Speaker 2: out of those, and it's behind this child, spooning him
Speaker 2: in bed, and so that's like, uh again, this is
Speaker 2: There's another one where there's a child trapped in a
Speaker 2: big spider's nest that with a bunch of eggs that
Speaker 2: are about to add So just creepy, weird stuff involving kids, right,
Speaker 2: And this is somebody that Tony Podesta listed is one
Speaker 2: of his very favorite, very favorite artists. Well, then in
Speaker 2: another interview he was asked the same question, and this
Speaker 2: is where you just start to wonder kind of what's
Speaker 2: going on. Here is another one of his favorite artists
Speaker 2: that he mentioned. And I'm sure he's got a lot
Speaker 2: of favorite artists, but when he was asked the question,
Speaker 2: these are the ones he thought of, and so that's
Speaker 2: probably relevant. Is this woman named Kim Noble, who's a
Speaker 2: British woman who spent most of her life in institutions
Speaker 2: like asylums. She's schizophrenic and has dissociative identity disorder, multiple
Speaker 2: personality disorder, and several of her multiple personalities are artists.
Speaker 2: And I'll put that in quotes because so Kim Noble
Speaker 2: was repeatedly, viciously, violently sexually abused for at least two
Speaker 2: years between the ages of one and three years old,
Speaker 2: and the damage that that did to her mind is
Speaker 2: again on display. She spent her entire life in institutions
Speaker 2: and the content of her paintings are not something that
Speaker 2: she's innocent of. This she should not be held accountable.
Speaker 2: This is a woman who's sick, obviously, but these drawings,
Speaker 2: these paintings that she does they're sort of scratched out
Speaker 2: stick figure kind of paintings, but it's everything's very clear
Speaker 2: in all of them exactly what's going on. It all
Speaker 2: depicts extreme violent sexual abuse of children by multiple adults.
Speaker 2: In many of these things, there's kids tied to chairs
Speaker 2: with adults with whips standing over them, while another child's
Speaker 2: on its knees covering its ears. There's another one with
Speaker 2: a little girl with adults surrounding her blindfolded, and it
Speaker 2: looks like her spirits kind of lifting up and leaving
Speaker 2: her body. There's another one with kids hanging and then
Speaker 2: standing in line in front of this adult who is
Speaker 2: sitting on a chair with a big smile on his
Speaker 2: face and he's got his hands down forcing the child
Speaker 2: to give him oral sex. You can look all these
Speaker 2: up on the internet. They're hard to look at, especially
Speaker 2: when you know the history where they're coming from. There's
Speaker 2: another one where, i mean, there's just a bunch of
Speaker 2: adults standing around a bed and there's a child laying
Speaker 2: on it and there's an adult crouched down on top
Speaker 2: of the child having sex with the child. There's ones
Speaker 2: where there's a bunch of adults standing around with children
Speaker 2: on their knees in front of them and they're urinating
Speaker 2: in the kid's mouths. This is one of the artists
Speaker 2: that Tony Podesta listed as one of his very favorite artists.
Speaker 2: And when you think about, Okay, all this is sick,
Speaker 2: but what we're really talking about here is a woman
Speaker 2: who had all of this stuff done to her for
Speaker 2: years when she was a small child, who's mind was
Speaker 2: shattered by that experience, and who now depicts this stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, just sort of again like she's not responsible
Speaker 2: for the content of these things. And the idea of
Speaker 2: some guy like Tony Podesta sitting around with a bunch
Speaker 2: of his you know, art friends over a thousand dollars
Speaker 2: bottle of wine looking at you know, oh, look at
Speaker 2: the use of color in this Kim Noble piece where
Speaker 2: the man is whipping and raping the child. It's just
Speaker 2: really sick. And it gets to the question that I
Speaker 2: that I this is the direction I took that third
Speaker 2: podcast is when you go through all this stuff and
Speaker 2: you lay it all out there, you can kind of
Speaker 2: understand why people had the response of what the hell
Speaker 2: is going on here? Whether or not you take that
Speaker 2: and tie it all together into there's this giant conspiracy
Speaker 2: involving a pizza place, and you know everything, everybody's connected
Speaker 2: and everybody's involved. You know, you don't have to do that.
Speaker 2: Like the thing, the direction I took the podcast, and
Speaker 2: the thing that just occupies my mind is well, you know,
Speaker 2: I think about, like one of the questions that is
Speaker 2: very strange to people like me, to people like you,
Speaker 2: to people out there listening, anybody out there listening, is
Speaker 2: how somebody like Jeffrey Epstein could have operated out in
Speaker 2: the open for as long as he did in these circles.
Speaker 2: I mean, you got to remember his private airplane was
Speaker 2: called the Lolita Express, and he didn't give it that
Speaker 2: name like other people gave it that name, you know,
Speaker 2: Lolita for everybody who hasn't read it. And I don't
Speaker 2: really recommend it, but this is what literary people consider
Speaker 2: high art. It's a nineteen fifty five novel based on
Speaker 2: an event that happened in nineteen forty eight where this man,
Speaker 2: this middle aged man, kidnapped this twelve year old girl,
Speaker 2: kept her for about two years on this cross country
Speaker 2: trip and just raped her all the time. And that's
Speaker 2: what this book is about, and it portrays it in
Speaker 2: a way that, like, you know, maybe they're in love.
Speaker 2: It's really it's really sick. I don't want the book.
Speaker 1: You know. What's interesting is the book did come out
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty five, but Nabokov, the author, some of
Speaker 1: his early writings are some of the books that the
Speaker 1: National Socialists burned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's not surprising. That's not surprising at all.
Speaker 2: You're not supposed to mention which books they were burning.
Speaker 2: Come on, yeah, you know better than that.
Speaker 1: I did a whole episode on that, and then I
Speaker 1: guess suspended from YouTube for questioning the the election results
Speaker 1: from two years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's so. You know, so again, coming back
Speaker 2: to that question, how is it that if people knew
Speaker 2: what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and they did. People
Speaker 2: knew exactly what he was up to. There's no question
Speaker 2: about that. I mean, people knew that he had been
Speaker 2: convicted for child prostitution, whatever that means. Back in the
Speaker 2: early two thousands or mid two thousands. Everybody knew that.
Speaker 2: Everybody who knew who Jeffrey Epstein was knew that. Put
Speaker 2: it that way. You know, they gave the other people
Speaker 2: nicknamed his airplane the Lolita Express. They knew what was
Speaker 2: going on on those airplanes, and so how is it
Speaker 2: possible that this guy could just operate like that, especially
Speaker 2: in a place like Washington, where you know, people are
Speaker 2: looking for anything they can find to smear somebody and
Speaker 2: destroy their career. If there's any little thing they can
Speaker 2: take out of context, they'll do it. But nobody seems
Speaker 2: to be interested in saying, hey, why does Tony Podesta
Speaker 2: have pictures of dead kids on his walls by artists
Speaker 2: who specialize in pedophile art. It just doesn't get mentioned.
Speaker 2: And in fact, he feels comfortable enough with all of
Speaker 2: that that he leaves it up when people come over
Speaker 2: for parties, He leaves it up when photographers show up
Speaker 2: from a magazine to profile his house, because this is
Speaker 2: normal in this place, Like this is what's normal. And
Speaker 2: so we ask, how is it that Jeffrey Epstein could
Speaker 2: operate out in the open. It's because we're thinking like
Speaker 2: normal people, you know, we're thinking that if I walk
Speaker 2: onto a dude's private plane and there are a half
Speaker 2: dozen teenage girls that are not related to him running
Speaker 2: around the plane, and he asked me if I want
Speaker 2: to get a massage from one of them, Like I'm
Speaker 2: certainly leaving the plane. The only question is whether I
Speaker 2: would get violent before I did that, And I think
Speaker 2: that's how most people would respond. And so they think,
Speaker 2: how is it that he could have operated out in
Speaker 2: the open like this, Well, if you just came from
Speaker 2: a party at Tony Podesta's house where he's showing off
Speaker 2: his Kim Noble drawings, and you know, after that, you
Speaker 2: went and had dinner at a Marina Brahmovic thing with
Speaker 2: pig's blood written all over the walls and everything like that,
Speaker 2: then you show up to Jeffrey Epstein's plane and it's
Speaker 2: not that weird, you know, it's pretty just par for
Speaker 2: the course basically among these degenerates. And so if these
Speaker 2: were people who you know, it was a guy who
Speaker 2: lived down the block, it was just somebody who, you know,
Speaker 2: he's into weird stuff. You know, some people like to
Speaker 2: listen to heavy metal music about the Devil too. Does
Speaker 2: that make him devil worshipers?
Speaker 1: Know?
Speaker 2: But if this was a guy down the block, first
Speaker 2: of all, I don't think anybody would let their kids
Speaker 2: hang out at that house, but maybe, you know, whatever,
Speaker 2: we interpret the First Amendment pretty broadly when it comes
Speaker 2: to filth in America. But and so whatever, maybe the
Speaker 2: cop shouldn't be sent to arrest him. Don't put me
Speaker 2: in charge if you don't want that to happen. But
Speaker 2: in the current setup, maybe that shouldn't be the case. Well,
Speaker 2: we're talking about people who are right at the center
Speaker 2: of the American power structure, and we are completely within
Speaker 2: our rights to demand to know. I mean, you would
Speaker 2: get kicked off of a local school board for having
Speaker 2: pictures of dead abused kids on your wall. And yet
Speaker 2: these people are at the center of the Washington power structure.
Speaker 2: And it's you know, so you ask yourself, like, what
Speaker 2: is it that's going on there that this stuff could
Speaker 2: be could be accepted the way it is. You remember
Speaker 2: what happened. I don't know all the details on this.
Speaker 2: I don't keep up with like just day to day
Speaker 2: politics that much, but I noticed that when that guy,
Speaker 2: Madison Cawthorn came out and said that he'd been offered
Speaker 2: to you know, since he became a congressman, people had
Speaker 2: come to him and invited him to orgies and you know,
Speaker 2: cocaine parties with orgies and everything. And man, they got
Speaker 2: rid of him quick inn They that took no time
Speaker 2: at all, they got rid of him.
Speaker 1: Well, let me let me bring this up. The former
Speaker 1: Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert went to jail
Speaker 1: for pedophilia. Yeah, and the Democrats don't bring that up
Speaker 1: every day?
Speaker 2: Isn't that weird? Yeah, like they still hammer the Republicans
Speaker 2: over Richard Nixon, but that yeah, that's fine.
Speaker 1: But you know, I said that to somebody on on
Speaker 1: Twitter who was like, you know, oh, Matt Gates and underage,
Speaker 1: you know, because you know, you're just playing they're playing
Speaker 1: left right politics. I'm like, do you find it weird
Speaker 1: that the former House speaker, when the Republican House speaker
Speaker 1: went to jail for pedophilia, and Democrats don't bring it up,
Speaker 1: and she will, And this person's like, well I bring
Speaker 1: it up. I'm like, how come your politicians, you like,
Speaker 1: don't mention it at every turn? Why isn't that a
Speaker 1: major talking point?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Why why don't the major you know, every time
Speaker 2: anybody posts anything about the Epstein story. You know, my
Speaker 2: podcast that I put out on that story. I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're like my top downloaded podcast,
Speaker 2: but they're definitely up there. Everything that that that gets
Speaker 2: put out, there goes viral. I mean, you have that uh,
Speaker 2: that leaked video from ABC News that James what's his
Speaker 2: name put out the the guy does like the hidden
Speaker 2: camera videos of all the James' James O'Keeffe. You had
Speaker 2: that video that he got a hold of and that
Speaker 2: thing went crazy viral. Everybody wanted to see it, Everybody
Speaker 2: wanted to hear it. And so you would think, you know,
Speaker 2: because they say that that the media is run by
Speaker 2: you know, the rule is like if it bleeds, it leads, right,
Speaker 2: So if it's just sensational and whatever gets eyeballs, and
Speaker 2: that's what they'll go after. If that were true, every
Speaker 2: single media organization would have an entire department devoted to
Speaker 2: Jeffrey Epstein because people all want to know about that,
Speaker 2: and they refuse to address it for probably the same
Speaker 2: reason that people just avoid and stay away from the
Speaker 2: Denny Hastard story. Denny Hasterrick, by the way, was at
Speaker 2: a a kid's summer camp with John Podesta back in
Speaker 2: sixty seven or sixty eight, I think it was in
Speaker 2: It was in Japan. It's kind of a weird thing.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know if that's a you know,
Speaker 2: we're bringing up but that is interesting and so yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean you you know, you start to ask what
Speaker 2: these people are, just just what it is they're doing
Speaker 2: when they're not on camera, and and who these people
Speaker 2: really are. And you know, there was a there was
Speaker 2: a a New York Times. Well a lot of people
Speaker 2: wrote about it, but there was this there was this
Speaker 2: French novelist back in maybe twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen
Speaker 2: named Gabriel matts Neff who you wrote novels that were
Speaker 2: about pedophilia. And they were not about like a cop
Speaker 2: who's chasing down a pedophile. They were, you know, a
Speaker 2: book written by a pedophile. It turns out based on
Speaker 2: his own experiences for other people who found that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff interesting, Well, Matt's Neff was not. He was
Speaker 2: a this is a this guy's a big deal. I mean,
Speaker 2: he had a he had a column in a major
Speaker 2: French newspaper or magazine. Rather, he was friends with, you know,
Speaker 2: Francois Holan, a lot of high up French people. Was
Speaker 2: a French high society, very very big guy over there.
Speaker 2: And finally he gets busted for being a pedophile. His
Speaker 2: entire life, you know, his first book that he ever
Speaker 2: wrote was called Under sixteen years Old and it was
Speaker 2: about pedophilia, right, So it was all out in the open,
Speaker 2: and everybody kind of knew about this. Well, finally they
Speaker 2: arrested him, and there was this New York Times article
Speaker 2: kind of about the whole situation, and it said something
Speaker 2: very very very interesting that I think maybe shot shines
Speaker 2: a fairmental light on a lot of this stuff. It
Speaker 2: said that, you know, in France there's always been this
Speaker 2: tension between its professed egalitarianism and the elitism of the
Speaker 2: people on top, and that the elites in France have
Speaker 2: for many years distinguished themselves from ordinary people through a
Speaker 2: different code of morality that was it was a status thing,
Speaker 2: that it was one of the ways that you know,
Speaker 2: that they mark themselves off, that they're above all of
Speaker 2: you know, a beyond good and evil, above all of
Speaker 2: all of those provincial kind of considerations. And I think
Speaker 2: that that probably shehins a lot of light on you know,
Speaker 2: why it is that could just think about it, like,
Speaker 2: how many of these people are there that how many
Speaker 2: people out there would think it's normal, would or would
Speaker 2: want a picture of a painting of dead kids lying
Speaker 2: on the bottom of a swimming pool, prominently featured, very
Speaker 2: expensive piece of art, like prominently featured in their living room.
Speaker 2: And the answer is very very few, right, it's it's
Speaker 2: And yet when you go to Washington, d C. When
Speaker 2: you go to a lot of these circles, there doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be a very few of these people. They
Speaker 2: seem to be very very They seemed to be all
Speaker 2: over the place.
Speaker 1: Think about Jimmy Seville in England. Everyone knew everybody. I
Speaker 1: think there's an interview of John Leiben in like nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven or he mentioned he says something, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's and it's like people knew that this was There.
Speaker 2: Was a there was a police officer, a British police officer,
Speaker 2: who talked about something that happened to him back in
Speaker 2: Jimmy Savill's heyday, where he came upon Jimmy Saville in
Speaker 2: a car with a fifteen year old girl and he
Speaker 2: just let it slide, He let it pass, and you know,
Speaker 2: the guy says, basically, it's like, look, I know this
Speaker 2: sounds absolutely horrible and this is not going to please
Speaker 2: anybody today, but this was normal back then, Like this
Speaker 2: was normal among like these type of people there was.
Speaker 2: It was another BBC presenter that wrote an article during
Speaker 2: the Me Too stuff where he said that you know,
Speaker 2: these days he he and a lot of people that
Speaker 2: he knows lose sleep at night and have nightmares that
Speaker 2: one day the cops are going to knock on their
Speaker 2: door for a lot of the things that they were
Speaker 2: up to back in the sixties and seventies that you know,
Speaker 2: especially that that period after the Cultural Revolution in the
Speaker 2: sixties and after the Hill, but before AIDS. You know,
Speaker 2: you hear about it, whether it's music bands, Hollywood, political circles, TV.
Speaker 2: These people were out of control in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: I mean it's you hear about bands like led Zepp
Speaker 2: and a lot of a lot of bands, a lot
Speaker 2: of Hollywood parties where it was just totally normal to
Speaker 2: have teenage girls and teenage boys running around. I mean
Speaker 2: it's even like, you know, even.
Speaker 1: Even Tyler, Stephen Tyler convinced some family, a couple to
Speaker 1: like take his what their thirteen fourteen year old daughter
Speaker 1: on tour with him and he ended up yeah, like
Speaker 1: and yeah. The police wrote the song have you ever
Speaker 1: Have you ever listened to the lyrics of don't don't
Speaker 1: stand so close to me.
Speaker 2: By the police. No, maybe I should.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, listen to that. I sang it to I
Speaker 1: sang it to someone once and I was and I
Speaker 1: was like, have you ever listened to these lyrics? And
Speaker 1: they're just like, I mean, sting mentions Nabokov in it.
Speaker 1: It's like.
Speaker 2: And so and so. You know, you're talking about a
Speaker 2: class of people for whom this kind of thing is
Speaker 2: considered normal, you know, normal enough that nobody, you know,
Speaker 2: nobody in Washington, d C. The most cutthroat city in
Speaker 2: the entire country, bothers to take a shot at Tony
Speaker 2: Podesto over having this stuff. It's just it's just totally normal.
Speaker 2: And then when you couple in the fact that you
Speaker 2: can't get the media to talk about any of I
Speaker 2: mean even just again the very obvious questions that really
Speaker 2: need to be answered. Why did Alex Acosta say, Jeffrey
Speaker 2: Epstein belong to intelligence? We just we by any standard
Speaker 2: of national security classification. I don't care what we Everybody
Speaker 2: wants and deserves an answer to that question. At least,
Speaker 2: you can't even get the question asked, and you know,
Speaker 2: it just, uh, it leaves room for you know, the
Speaker 2: kind of conspiracy theories that would lead to a guy
Speaker 2: grabbing a gun and going down to a pizza place
Speaker 2: and Washington, d C. Because when they're when when you
Speaker 2: see all of this stuff and you say, like, clearly
Speaker 2: there's something strange going on in all this like but
Speaker 2: and so you say, well, okay, I'll turn on the
Speaker 2: news and they'll tell me, like you know, they'll ask
Speaker 2: the questions about it. What I mean, you find that
Speaker 2: not only is that not happening, but anybody who mentions it,
Speaker 2: you know, it's died down a little bit now. But
Speaker 2: if you mention this stuff back, you know, when Ben
Speaker 2: Swann got kicked off, you would get kicked off of
Speaker 2: like all your platforms for bringing this stuff up, for
Speaker 2: asking obvious questions that any normal person would want answered
Speaker 2: of people who are at the center of the American
Speaker 2: power structure. And so you know that you're just you're
Speaker 2: begging for uh, you know, people to draw their own
Speaker 2: conclusions and take matters into their own hands. When that's
Speaker 2: the situation. I mean, these people, for a million different reasons,
Speaker 2: belong nowhere near power. But you know, I think this
Speaker 2: is one of the angles that you can really you
Speaker 2: can take this to anybody. You can take this to
Speaker 2: a Democrat mom, you know, a Democrat soccer mom, and
Speaker 2: show her a lot of this stuff and she will
Speaker 2: agree with you that these people belong nowhere near the
Speaker 2: decision making process on whether or not we should be
Speaker 2: doing sex change surgeries on children. You know, like, if
Speaker 2: you have pictures of dead, tied up, abused eight year
Speaker 2: olds on your wall, you shouldn't be helping make decisions
Speaker 2: as to whether eight year olds should be able to
Speaker 2: get gender reassignment surgeries. Most people could agree with that.
Speaker 1: Well, think about how obsessed with what these quote unquote
Speaker 1: elites are with Ukraine, And all you have to do
Speaker 1: is go searching back a few years and you'll find
Speaker 1: articles about how Ukraine is the actual not human trafficking
Speaker 1: like they talk about in this country. If someone becomes
Speaker 1: a prostituto, that's human trafficking. No, like literally Ukrainian girls
Speaker 1: going to Kiev, going to go into big cities and
Speaker 1: being kidnapped and taken to other countries to be sex slaves.
Speaker 1: Ukraine is like the center of that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: have one of my one of my Patroon supporters said,
Speaker 1: Ukraine it almost seems like it's West World for Western elites,
Speaker 1: you know, or why why do they want to spend
Speaker 1: so much time over there?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 2: You know, Well, that's what Russia was supposed to be too,
Speaker 2: and that's what it was in the nineties. You know, Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Ukraine is basically what Russia would have been if Putin
Speaker 2: had never come along and regulated the the the oligarchs
Speaker 2: and sent them packing to London, New York and Tel Aviv.
Speaker 2: You know, there's that famous story and right after Putin
Speaker 2: took power where he ordered a bunch of the most
Speaker 2: powerful oligarchs all out to this datcha and he sits
Speaker 2: him down at a table. There's guys with guns around
Speaker 2: and everything. He's got the full guy father likes set up,
Speaker 2: and he brings them all in, sits them around the table,
Speaker 2: and he just informs them, Look, you guys can stay billionaires,
Speaker 2: you can stay rich. Like I'm not going to interfere
Speaker 2: with that, but you guys are done having anything to
Speaker 2: do with the Russian state. The Russian state is back
Speaker 2: and it's going to be reasserting its prerogatives. Those of
Speaker 2: you who can get on board with that, great. If
Speaker 2: you can't, then you and I are going to have problems,
Speaker 2: and some of them could, you know, guys like Oleg Deripaska,
Speaker 2: a lot of the Russian ethnic Russian oligarchs, they were
Speaker 2: kind of on board with that because you know, they
Speaker 2: these were guys too. It's natural to have a certain
Speaker 2: amount of love for your country. They didn't like exactly
Speaker 2: what was going on, and so they were happy to
Speaker 2: get on board with that. You know, some of them
Speaker 2: fled to New York, London and Tel Aviv with hundreds
Speaker 2: of billions of dollars that they've since used buying off
Speaker 2: politicians and paying for media time and paying off think
Speaker 2: tanks to make sure that the Anglo sphere stays in
Speaker 2: a permanent gehat with Russia. And you know, they're very disappointed.
Speaker 2: They thought that they were going to be able to
Speaker 2: loot that whole country forever, and they were able to
Speaker 2: do it throughout the entire nineteen nineties and Putin you know,
Speaker 2: I mean people, you don't have to be a Putin
Speaker 2: lover or whatever. I mean. You know, whether or not
Speaker 2: I would want to live in a country that's governed
Speaker 2: the way Russia's governed is really beside the point, because
Speaker 2: I'm not coming from a country that was in the
Speaker 2: state Russia was in in the nineteen nineties. And you know,
Speaker 2: if you think that you're going to go from that
Speaker 2: to Bernie Sanders runs for office in Russia and then
Speaker 2: turns it into Vermont like from what it was in
Speaker 2: the nineties, that's just not how it works. And I mean,
Speaker 2: you had you had oligarchs that controlled major chunks of
Speaker 2: the country, including the natural resources, and it including the
Speaker 2: local governments that refused to send taxes to the central government,
Speaker 2: who had private military forces that were better equipped and
Speaker 2: better paid than the Russian army. And so you know,
Speaker 2: if you were to say, how is the Russian state
Speaker 2: ever going to recollect itself and just re establish itself
Speaker 2: as as a going concer, you said, well, there's going
Speaker 2: to be a massive civil war first of all, and
Speaker 2: then someone's going to come out on top of that.
Speaker 2: Didn't happen. And that's amazing that that did not happen,
Speaker 2: given where they were coming from. And you know, I
Speaker 2: don't think again, people can like or dislike Putin for
Speaker 2: a million different reasons, but there's very few people who
Speaker 2: could have pulled that off. And I think the Russians
Speaker 2: know that, and that's why he's so popular.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, well you don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm almost convincing if you say anything positive
Speaker 1: about Putin now you can get videos pulled.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think so too, And I think honestly, like
Speaker 2: I think it if this war really escalates, like if
Speaker 2: it does get to a point where you know, a
Speaker 2: tactical nuke is user, if it just if it continues
Speaker 2: to grow, if we get I think we'll be in
Speaker 2: full like Woodrow Wilson espionageack territory. And I'm very cognizant,
Speaker 2: cognizant of that whenever I criticize our policy on the war.
Speaker 2: But whatever, you know, I.
Speaker 1: Just I can't let's let's not discount the fact that
Speaker 1: if a new if a tactical nuke goes off in
Speaker 1: Ukraine somewhere that I mean, there's a country in the
Speaker 1: world that has nukes that but they don't have nukes.
Speaker 1: We're not allowed to talk about their nukes. And does
Speaker 1: anybody keeping counts of how many nukes they have? Very
Speaker 1: easy for one to just disappear, and you have a
Speaker 1: nice false flag that would you put the United States
Speaker 1: into a hot war with Russia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I was in I was at a
Speaker 2: conference a couple of weeks ago in Austin, and there
Speaker 2: were a whole bunch of different people. They are giving
Speaker 2: presentations and on panels. I was on a panel and
Speaker 2: one of the people who was there was Eric Prince.
Speaker 2: That's another thing I didn't mention is back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: Eric Prince gave an interview to Breitbart, I think it
Speaker 2: was a radio interview, and he said that he had
Speaker 2: sources at Won Police Plaza in New York, NYPD headquarters,
Speaker 2: high well placed sources. And I believe, I mean, he
Speaker 2: seems like the kind of guy who probably would have
Speaker 2: those sources who told him that they had gone through
Speaker 2: the fine tooth comb Anthony Wiener's laptop. And again, Anthony
Speaker 2: Wiener wasn't just a prominent congressman. He was married to
Speaker 2: Human Aberdeen, who was Hillary Clinton's good friend. I guess
Speaker 2: we'll just leave it at that. And if they had
Speaker 2: gone through this, this is Eric Prince. This is the
Speaker 2: guy who started Blackwater, a guy who was very very connected.
Speaker 2: I mean, his sister ended up being the education secretary
Speaker 2: for Trump. Right, very connected guy. And he goes on
Speaker 2: the radio and says that he's got high place sources
Speaker 2: at one police plaza. They told him they went through
Speaker 2: the Wiener laptop and they found chaos, They found evidence
Speaker 2: of child sexual abuse, money laundering, all of this stuff,
Speaker 2: and that they had sent it to the FBI. And
Speaker 2: when nothing happened that the NYPD was actually started threatening
Speaker 2: if you don't do something about this, then we're going
Speaker 2: to go public. But then that the Obama administration, the
Speaker 2: Department of Justice started threatening New York that we're going
Speaker 2: to prosecute a bunch of people over the Eric Garner
Speaker 2: case if you do that. And so they didn't. And
Speaker 2: so Eric Prince was giving a was giving a presentation
Speaker 2: or having a talk with a guy, and then there
Speaker 2: were questions and answers afterwards, and you know, I had
Speaker 2: to get in there. So I got up there. I
Speaker 2: was like, I've been waiting six years to get an
Speaker 2: answer to this question. I laid it out to him
Speaker 2: and I said, you know you said, and I quoted
Speaker 2: him exactly what he said. I was like, this is
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen. I know this a little off topic.
Speaker 2: I don't know about anybody else in here, but I
Speaker 2: for one would love and update on this. And he
Speaker 2: didn't disavowt any of it. He said, he's stayed by
Speaker 2: all of it. He said, it's he said it was true.
Speaker 2: And so then I asked him, I said, and this
Speaker 2: goes to what you were just talking about with Russia
Speaker 2: kind of is how I'm relating this is, I said, Okay,
Speaker 2: So you were just up here though, telling us how,
Speaker 2: you know, we need to stand with the people of Iran,
Speaker 2: we need to you know, back the people like the
Speaker 2: freedom fighters in Ukraine or whatever. It's like, you're just
Speaker 2: you're telling me in my answer here that a bunch
Speaker 2: of the most powerful people up in Washington are either
Speaker 2: complicit or actively participating in child sexual abuse and money
Speaker 2: laundering and all these things, and you want me to
Speaker 2: follow those people into a conflict with Russia or Iran
Speaker 2: or anything. Said, how do you square those two things?
Speaker 2: And he just he kind of just avoided the question,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean he seemed like actually kind of
Speaker 2: a pretty normal, like good head on his shoulders kind
Speaker 2: of guy, but a very boomer mentality in terms of
Speaker 2: like just can't get past you know. Like he told
Speaker 2: us a story like when he was seven years old,
Speaker 2: his family took him. They went to France on a
Speaker 2: vacation and they went to Normandy Beach, and he was
Speaker 2: already like so into World War two and everything that
Speaker 2: he was actually given his family it's seven years old,
Speaker 2: given them a tour of like Normandy Beach, right, So
Speaker 2: he's just one of those guys Team America kind of thing,
Speaker 2: and you understand it. But I think even I think
Speaker 2: people like him are even having a little bit of
Speaker 2: trouble with the cognitive dissonance there because I'm not following
Speaker 2: those people anywhere, I mean, putting all of this moral
Speaker 2: stuff aside. I mean, it just blows me away that
Speaker 2: people don't seem to remember that these the people who
Speaker 2: are who are managing this conflict with Russia are the
Speaker 2: same people who manage the Afghanistan withdrawal, like the exact
Speaker 2: same people, and everybody seems fine with that. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's really like it's late stage civilization like type of behavior.
Speaker 1: They spent five years calling everything fake news, yeah, and
Speaker 1: now when it comes to Ukraine and I think it's
Speaker 1: just one of those things. It's that Boomer truth regime
Speaker 1: bullshit of where well, if we respect the military and
Speaker 1: the people in the military, and the people in the military,
Speaker 1: they you know, they have our best interests at heart,
Speaker 1: will always respect. It's like the people in the Pentagon
Speaker 1: have your best interests or the people of the CIA
Speaker 1: have your the NFA, these people, you know, basically the
Speaker 1: deep state, you know, I mean these are still boomers
Speaker 1: who think that the deep state or Obama holdovers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So and then so yeah,
Speaker 1: you celebrate all these people finally realizing that the press,
Speaker 1: you know, isn't biased, it actually has an agenda and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden military something. I Mean, here's something
Speaker 1: that pisses me off the most is it's that it's
Speaker 1: the whole like Whig theory of history thing, how could
Speaker 1: another country being how could another country invade another country?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: It's like, this has been hacked, This is the default
Speaker 1: of humanity. This is if this isn't happening.
Speaker 2: That's if you just look at American history for the
Speaker 2: last twenty years. Like people will say that with a
Speaker 2: straight face. Obama was like being interviewed back in twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen after the crimea thing, and he just said with
Speaker 2: totally straight face that, like, you know, Russia and Vladimir
Speaker 2: Putin are just going to have to learn that, you know,
Speaker 2: civilized countries don't just go around invading other countries. It's
Speaker 2: like it's crazy, Like it really is. You think you're
Speaker 2: going insane listening to these people sometimes. I mean, you
Speaker 2: know that specifically, the way I asked Prince that question was,
Speaker 2: you know, because he had said a few things he
Speaker 2: seems like sort of maybe like an evangelical, like normy
Speaker 2: Protestant type, but I'm not sure, but that's what he
Speaker 2: kind of sounded like. You mentioned religion, Christianity a few
Speaker 2: times in his talk, and I asked him why we
Speaker 2: should follow the kind of people that he was describing
Speaker 2: in that Breitbart interview into a war against a country
Speaker 2: that is using government funds to build hundreds of Orthodox
Speaker 2: churches all over Russia? Like why should I want to
Speaker 2: go join these people to go fight them? And he
Speaker 2: didn't have a good answer for me. I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't think there is a good answer, you know, Like,
Speaker 2: and I will say this that it is there's been
Speaker 2: a lot of progress made, Like those boomers, a lot
Speaker 2: of them kind of fell in line as far as
Speaker 2: Russia and the Ukraine story and everything, but not quite
Speaker 2: It's a little less than have been say pre Trump.
Speaker 2: Thank God for Tucker Carlson. I mean, I can tell
Speaker 2: you Tucker Carlson is you know, he's a guy who,
Speaker 2: uh like I know him a little bit, and he's
Speaker 2: a guy who is very obviously like he's been just
Speaker 2: up here for so long that he's not quite normal,
Speaker 2: you know, like nobody could really be normal when you're
Speaker 2: that famous for that long. But I can tell you
Speaker 2: that his his politics are legit and his and his
Speaker 2: intentions are legit, like and thank God for him. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, the people at Fox News, and I've heard
Speaker 2: this from journalists who work with Fox News that the
Speaker 2: management at Fox News they hate Tucker's guts and they
Speaker 2: would get rid of him tomorrow if they could. And
Speaker 2: that to me just is that recommends him better than
Speaker 2: just about anything. So but if it wasn't for him,
Speaker 2: you know, if they had been able to get rid
Speaker 2: of him, and you just had Hannity and whoever they
Speaker 2: replaced him with, then you'd have Fox News and it
Speaker 2: would be just all pro Ukraine kill the Russians. And
Speaker 2: you know, so he provides that little wedge and you know,
Speaker 2: to the extent that I have any audience or influence
Speaker 2: at all, I just decided early on. I'm not going
Speaker 2: along with this. I just I don't care how big
Speaker 2: it gets or what goes on. You know, I wasn't
Speaker 2: going to ever get behind. I mean, you look at
Speaker 2: what happened in Syria. There's a lot of people I
Speaker 2: know that the Syrian War. Because again I came from
Speaker 2: a family of veterans. I served twenty years for the
Speaker 2: Department of Defense. It's in my nature to just be
Speaker 2: reflexively patriotic and reflexively nationalist and all that. And the
Speaker 2: Syrian War, I mean, we just have to be very
Speaker 2: direct about what happened there. I mean, we ginned up
Speaker 2: in international jihad to go destroy a country that all
Speaker 2: of the Christians and other you know, minorities in that
Speaker 2: country were hiding behind Asad's forces. He was the only
Speaker 2: thing protecting them. They were going to get completely wiped
Speaker 2: out by these animals that we sent in there. I mean,
Speaker 2: they did wipe out everybody they could get their hands
Speaker 2: on if they were on the outskirts of Damascus. When
Speaker 2: the Russians and the Iranians showed up, and the Russians
Speaker 2: showed up and stopped the genocide against Christians that we
Speaker 2: were perpetrating, and I know a lot of people that
Speaker 2: the Syrian War it really kind of like broke their faith,
Speaker 2: you know, it made it very hard to you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I just I will not support this jihad against Russia.
Speaker 2: I don't care what happens. If they want to, you know,
Speaker 2: throw me in jail, if things get bad enough, then
Speaker 2: they can do it. But I'm not cucking on that issue.
Speaker 2: I just refuse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it seems like they want to. I interviewed
Speaker 1: Ben Abelow who he just wrote a really short little
Speaker 1: book twenty thousand words on you know, how the West
Speaker 1: brought war to the Ukraine, and there are quotes in
Speaker 1: there from people in the State Department who are just like,
Speaker 1: we will fight and so the very last Ukrainian it's like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these people don't care about Ukrainians man, And you
Speaker 2: know what, the Ukrainian government doesn't care about Ukrainians. I mean,
Speaker 2: when you think about the fact, and this is kind
Speaker 2: of one of those areas that you talk about that's
Speaker 2: it's very hard to talk about without getting in trouble
Speaker 2: and without having a bunch of people just take the
Speaker 2: bits that you're giving them and then just running completely
Speaker 2: off the rails with them. But still like I One
Speaker 2: of the things I've been concerned about from the very
Speaker 2: beginning is that you know that that U Zelenski is
Speaker 2: a Jewish guy in Ukraine who just learned the Ukrainian
Speaker 2: language like seven years ago. His Defense Minister is Jewish,
Speaker 2: his Prime Minister is Jewish. His campaign was funded and
Speaker 2: run by a Jewish oligarchy. Whoor Kolamoyski. And uh you know,
Speaker 2: now I'm not I'm not like conspiracy theorizing here. What
Speaker 2: I'm what I'm worried about, and what I still worry
Speaker 2: about is like I don't like Ukraine is not a
Speaker 2: is not known as a traditionally like pro Jewish country,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously like they got a lot of these
Speaker 2: oun like neo Nazi militia types, the Asov guys, and
Speaker 2: always you think that this government under Zelenski, they don't
Speaker 2: care at all about throwing these neo Nazis into the
Speaker 2: fire forever, you know, I mean, I imagine I would
Speaker 2: imagine that probably growing up as a Jewish kid in
Speaker 2: Ukraine probably wasn't always easy for Zelenski. I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I'm sure there were times where that wasn't easy, and
Speaker 2: so I just I worry and wonder that. You know,
Speaker 2: they've got a guy in office over there who will
Speaker 2: just throw the Ukrainians into the fire until they're all
Speaker 2: gone because he just doesn't really care, you know, because
Speaker 2: these people have been hostile to him and hostile to
Speaker 2: his people. And I could be wrong about that. Maybe
Speaker 2: he's become a Ukrainian nationalist like all the Azov guys
Speaker 2: like over the years. But you know, it's it's something
Speaker 2: to be concerned about. I think, what do they call
Speaker 2: Ukraine the bread basket of Europe. Yeah, it's very rich land,
Speaker 2: a lot of resources, a lot more resources than a
Speaker 2: little stretch of land in the Middle East. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: would seem like there would be some some people might
Speaker 2: be interested in taking that land over, and you know,
Speaker 2: because it's a little more rich and probably a little
Speaker 2: more stable than you know where they are. All I know, yeah,
Speaker 2: all I All I know is that it would be
Speaker 2: it would be terrible for the world, and I think
Speaker 2: it would be terrible for America and Americans if if
Speaker 2: the regime gets its way in Ukraine. I think that
Speaker 2: that it would be a disaster for the world, actually,
Speaker 2: and I think that the best thing that could happen,
Speaker 2: including with like to America and two Americans. Is that
Speaker 2: the Russians get their way in Ukraine and that and
Speaker 2: that we have to take a step back from this
Speaker 2: global American empire. That uh, you know, we we we're
Speaker 2: I mean, if you look at places like Russia and
Speaker 2: Turkey and Israel, uh to a degree, and Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: to a degree, India, China. You know, basically these sort
Speaker 2: of civilization states, they all have an interest in a
Speaker 2: multipolar world order. We're we are the only ones that don't.
Speaker 2: And that and that goes for the Europeans as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, we see what's going on over there. The
Speaker 2: Europeans are the Europeans are done man like their their
Speaker 2: economy is I saw this thing the other day, point o, yeah,
Speaker 2: there you go. I mean, and it's ah and there
Speaker 2: were and yet they're doing it's a d I Y
Speaker 2: morgent Tho plan like getting them to do it to themselves.
Speaker 2: And you know, I mean that's I don't blame the
Speaker 2: European people for being that stupid, obviously, I think their
Speaker 2: leaders are compromised. NATO is not so much a military
Speaker 2: alliance as much as it's just the euphemism we give
Speaker 2: to the American domination of Europe. So yeah, it's I
Speaker 2: think that taking getting a bloody nose on this and
Speaker 2: getting pushed back and finding out that in fact, other
Speaker 2: major powers do have spheres of influence and you don't
Speaker 2: run the world, it would be the best thing it
Speaker 2: could happen to us and certainly to the rest of
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes getting punched in the mouth is very beneficial.
Speaker 1: I think that the world would be the United States
Speaker 1: would definitely be a much different place if a lot
Speaker 1: of the men who've become adults and who become adults
Speaker 1: age in the last twenty years have been punched in
Speaker 1: the mouth a bunch As a kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I had a cousin. I have a
Speaker 2: cousin who you know, he's always kind of a mama's boy,
Speaker 2: very soft, couldn't really and it translated over into just
Speaker 2: how he kind of lived his life. Couldn't really like
Speaker 2: get motivated to do anything. One day, He's like twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, twenty two, he was in a he was
Speaker 2: in a restaurant waiting in line with his girlfriend and
Speaker 2: there are these gang bangers there who like started making
Speaker 2: remarks to his girlfriend. He felt like he had to
Speaker 2: say something. They just kicked his ass and you know,
Speaker 2: really gave him a good, a pretty solid beating. These guys.
Speaker 2: It was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Speaker 2: I mean, he became a man that day. And then
Speaker 2: he just he went out and he you know, finished college.
Speaker 2: He's a teacher now, he's a very successful guy. And
Speaker 2: he really like matured about ten years in fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: during that beating. So yeah, definitely right about that.
Speaker 1: All right, Well let's get out of here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I rambled so much. I don't know if we
Speaker 2: want to cover up.
Speaker 1: I think we covered enough. Remind everybody where they can
Speaker 1: find your work.
Speaker 2: The podcast is called Martyr Made all one word Martyr
Speaker 2: as in a Lahu wak Bar made. My other podcast
Speaker 2: with Jocko's called Unraveling. You can find those both anywhere
Speaker 2: that you get podcasts or on the Martyr Made website.
Speaker 2: And then I got a substack Martermade dot substack dot com.
Speaker 2: And yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Daryl, thank you, and let's do this
Speaker 1: again soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anytime. Pete, thanks man, thank you.
Speaker 1: Take care. I want to welcome everyone back to the
Speaker 1: Pete Kenyona's show, returning to the show. I've been waiting
Speaker 1: for this, Darallel Cooper.
Speaker 2: They doing do good man, how are you. It's great
Speaker 2: to be back on.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you. Last time you were on, we
Speaker 1: did a We talked about the ridiculousness of Pizzagate and
Speaker 1: how that was just totally ridiculous. Yeah, totally ridiculous. Nothing
Speaker 1: there but this one. This one, this is a Was
Speaker 1: it five parts you've written?
Speaker 2: I think it was five or six? Yeah. I was
Speaker 2: supposed to be one, and then I decided it was
Speaker 2: going to be two, and then it turned it into
Speaker 2: five or six, which is what always happens with my projects.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and it was very simply titled. I remember
Speaker 1: getting the emails and said Jews and Blacks and I
Speaker 1: assume that's in America, because you know, that was my
Speaker 1: immediate assumption. And I started reading and I wanted to
Speaker 1: have you on so that you're doing this on your
Speaker 1: sub Sac and sub Sac is an unbelievable platform. They've
Speaker 1: been really good to me and good to a lot
Speaker 1: of people who believe in uh, you know, you should
Speaker 1: be able to say what you want and not have
Speaker 1: to suffer the consequences of the regime and their apparatus.
Speaker 1: But this is something that with my recent reading of
Speaker 1: race War in high school, which a lot of people
Speaker 1: wouldn't maybe they would see the black white conflict in it.
Speaker 1: But the fact that the New York City Teachers Union,
Speaker 1: the UFT at the time had sixty thousand members and
Speaker 1: forty thousand of them were Jewish. I look at that,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to also look at the historic relationship
Speaker 1: between the black and the jew in this country. And
Speaker 1: you just started writing about it. So I want to
Speaker 1: give you a chance to do an overview. So where
Speaker 1: do you want to start.
Speaker 2: You know, the reason I started writing that series is
Speaker 2: the Kanye stuff was in the news, and I knew
Speaker 2: a little bit about the history of Black Jewish relations
Speaker 2: in the twentieth century, and you know, I kind of
Speaker 2: realized that when the Kanye thing came out, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of happens every time, you know, when the Nick
Speaker 2: Cannon thing happened, or when jay Z got introlled. Each
Speaker 2: time this happens, people tend to just put it in
Speaker 2: a jar and you know, put it up by itself
Speaker 2: on display somewhere as like this ignorant rapper who made
Speaker 2: this ignorant remark you know, but when you look back
Speaker 2: at how often this has happened over the years, and
Speaker 2: how often it happens specifically with black celebrities and not
Speaker 2: white celebrities. You know, it took a bottle of Jim
Speaker 2: Beam and sleep deprivation for mel Gibson to go on
Speaker 2: his rant. You know, but that that you realize that
Speaker 2: there's a long history here and that this doesn't just
Speaker 2: come out of nowhere. It didn't erupt out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: and it's just, you know, these these ideas that Kanye
Speaker 2: is putting out about blacks being the real Hebrews, or
Speaker 2: you know, Jewish executives and business owners taking advantage of
Speaker 2: black labor or black customers, or you know, any of
Speaker 2: these things that he says. He's not going online and
Speaker 2: you know, to some hardcore right wing website reading these things.
Speaker 2: These are ideas that have been circulating in the black
Speaker 2: community for many decades, and you know, so I wanted
Speaker 2: to give people just a little history lesson on the
Speaker 2: background of what happened when when Kanye was having his
Speaker 2: self immolation on the steps of the A d L headquarters,
Speaker 2: But it ended up being like a much longer his
Speaker 2: history of black Jewish relations in the US, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of started back with the Great migration up through
Speaker 2: the teachers strike, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and
Speaker 2: then all the way on up through like the Crown
Speaker 2: Heights riot and you know, attempts by various people on
Speaker 2: both sides to kind of paper over their differences and
Speaker 2: smooth things over. And yeah, it was it was a
Speaker 2: lot of fun. I learned a lot actually when I
Speaker 2: was researching it.
Speaker 1: Well, the real migration from Europe of well, I mean,
Speaker 1: we know how Black scott here and then there'll be
Speaker 1: immigration later. But it seems like it started around eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty going into eighteen ninety. But there were a Jewish population,
Speaker 1: it seems like predominantly German, of German Jews at the time,
Speaker 1: and they had integrated into the into the population. I mean,
Speaker 1: some will argue not very well, but hey, you know
Speaker 1: pretty well though pretty well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the German Jews, like they were pretty assimilated
Speaker 2: in Germany, you know, and so when they came over here,
Speaker 2: they assimbly. They were pretty assimilated, right because they came
Speaker 2: over you know, there was a big German migration that came.
Speaker 2: It kind of gets forgotten because it happened at the
Speaker 2: same time as the huge migration of Irish in the
Speaker 2: mid nineteenth century. It was a pretty big German migration too,
Speaker 2: and some portion of those were Jews, and they you know,
Speaker 2: mostly lived up in the northern cities, and yeah, so
Speaker 2: they were there before.
Speaker 1: With the subsequent migration in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: it seems like the there was a worry with the
Speaker 1: group that was already here, that the assimilation here was
Speaker 1: not going to be as work as well as it
Speaker 1: did with them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean the you know German Jews and
Speaker 2: the ostudent in Poland and the Russian Empire, they there
Speaker 2: was a lot of animosity and mistrust there even back
Speaker 2: in Europe. You know, you read one of the early Zionists,
Speaker 2: like high In Wetzmen write about German Jews and he
Speaker 2: despises them because he thinks they look down on Polish Jews,
Speaker 2: and maybe they did to a certain extent. You know,
Speaker 2: they were German Jews were pretty well assimilated. They were
Speaker 2: very successful members of German society. You know. The Eastern
Speaker 2: Jews in the Russian Empire were they were less certainly
Speaker 2: less assimilated, but just sort of less less sort of
Speaker 2: integrated into the value system and the habits of like
Speaker 2: Enlightenment Europe by that point, right, And so there was that,
Speaker 2: But this is something that's actually happened. You know. You
Speaker 2: see the same thing when you look at the big
Speaker 2: Irish migration in the mid nineteenth century. There were Irish
Speaker 2: who were already here, who were well assimilated and who
Speaker 2: were because you know, the earliest Irish migrations into the
Speaker 2: United States were predominantly people with skill, are with a
Speaker 2: good trade or with wealth, and they were coming over
Speaker 2: and integrating pretty well. And then when you had the
Speaker 2: famine in in the mid nineteenth century, you started getting
Speaker 2: just flooded. Our cities got flooded with just I mean
Speaker 2: an unbelievable like a quarter of the entire population of
Speaker 2: Ireland moved to the United States in a short period
Speaker 2: of time. I mean, that's just unbelievable. But like you know,
Speaker 2: and they pretty much all settled in cities, at least
Speaker 2: at first, and you had the previous Irish residents of
Speaker 2: those cities who were seeing these mostly illiterate, poor rural
Speaker 2: Irish people who were coming over and they're thinking, oh
Speaker 2: my god, like these the Americans are going to hate
Speaker 2: Irish people now, and we're going to get sucked into that.
Speaker 2: And so they set up benevolent associations in settlement houses
Speaker 2: and various things to sort of try to integrate these
Speaker 2: people only did a pretty good job. And the same
Speaker 2: thing happened with German Jews when Eastern Jews started coming
Speaker 2: over in the eighteen eighty there was actually you know,
Speaker 2: if you wanted to participate, if you were a new
Speaker 2: Jewish immigrant, you wanted to participate or benefit from some
Speaker 2: of the like just community resources, community welfare resources, or
Speaker 2: anything that were provided by the Jewish community itself, you
Speaker 2: had to go through this process of you know, going
Speaker 2: into these settlement houses and sort of you had to
Speaker 2: make you had to learn English, you had you had
Speaker 2: to assimilate basically, and they made damn sure you did.
Speaker 2: And you know, you even saw the same thing when
Speaker 2: you get into the twentieth century with the great migration
Speaker 2: of blacks out of the South. You know, there there
Speaker 2: were black people who lived in the northern cities, very few,
Speaker 2: but they'd lived there for a long time. These are
Speaker 2: people who would live there since before the Civil War.
Speaker 2: And when they got up there and they started seeing
Speaker 2: their country cousins flooding into the cities. You know, they
Speaker 2: think this is this is bad news for us, and
Speaker 2: so you know, there was somewhat less of a of
Speaker 2: an attempt to help them integrate, which may have something
Speaker 2: to do with why you know, it didn't happen as well.
Speaker 1: Me knowing my history and especially my New York history,
Speaker 1: Harlem jazz clubs popping up. Now we're getting into the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, it seems like not only did a
Speaker 1: lot of Jews own the jazz clubs where are the
Speaker 1: blacks play? But a lot of the Jews were musicians,
Speaker 1: were a part of that scene. How do they get
Speaker 1: along at that time?
Speaker 2: Not bad? Not bad? Actually, you know. I mean there's
Speaker 2: always a difference in how different social classes relate to
Speaker 2: people who are different. Right, if you're in the upper
Speaker 2: upper class, you're not competing for your job with a
Speaker 2: new black migrant, for example, and so there's always a
Speaker 2: little bit more room for tolerance, like the higher you
Speaker 2: are up the social scale. But not bad, you know.
Speaker 2: In nineteen oh nine, I think is when the NAACP
Speaker 2: was formed, and Jewish money and Jewish like executive leadership
Speaker 2: in that organization was. It was critical to getting that
Speaker 2: organization going and remained critical to it like throughout most
Speaker 2: of its history. You know. It's it's interesting because you know,
Speaker 2: the Jews in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. You know,
Speaker 2: the way you have to kind of think of them before,
Speaker 2: like up to right around the well about the great
Speaker 2: migration of Jews over here in the eighteen eighties really
Speaker 2: is they were like a more advanced, more sophisticated Gypsy group. Basically,
Speaker 2: you know, they were people without a home country who
Speaker 2: lived everywhere, traveled around, and they engaged in trades that
Speaker 2: made them useful to their host populations. Right, So Gypsies
Speaker 2: are a little bit more primitive in that sense. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of art, music, dance, and fortune telling,
Speaker 2: you know, things like that, as well as criminal activity.
Speaker 2: But the Jews, you know, these were you know, they
Speaker 2: had the advantage of before this was common throughout Europe.
Speaker 2: Most Jews were literate because it was just part of
Speaker 2: their social tradition. And you know, if you were if
Speaker 2: you were literate in eighteen fifty, then you know there
Speaker 2: was going to be something for you to do. And
Speaker 2: but there were also a lot of Jewish entertainers, you know, singing, dancing,
Speaker 2: things that you know, were considered disreputable back in the day.
Speaker 2: Like back in the day, an actor was not something
Speaker 2: that anybody wanted to associate with. Like people might go
Speaker 2: to the shows and enjoy them, but they were considered
Speaker 2: it was considered a disreputable trade because they just you know,
Speaker 2: people didn't like them. And so Jews did a lot
Speaker 2: of that, and when they come over to the United States,
Speaker 2: they did a lot of that, a lot of Jewish comedians,
Speaker 2: Jewish musicians, et cetera. And they own ended up owning
Speaker 2: a lot of the jazz clubs. And yeah, they you know,
Speaker 2: as far as I know, I mean, race relations, you know,
Speaker 2: race relations in general in the North were not really
Speaker 2: bad before the Great Migration because there just weren't enough
Speaker 2: Black people to make anybody really feel threatened as far
Speaker 2: as their job or the changing of their neighborhood.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The first real anti black violence, like at a real
Speaker 2: scale that you get other than the Civil War riots,
Speaker 2: draft riots, comes after the First World War, when million
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know, it's probably about a million.
Speaker 2: Actually Black people had moved up into the cities, mostly
Speaker 2: in the in the East and Midwest, and you know,
Speaker 2: because men, white men were over in Europe in the
Speaker 2: trenches and they need they needed labor to fill up
Speaker 2: the industrial jobs. And so they start advertising down in
Speaker 2: the South. Companies are advertised down in the South to
Speaker 2: get black workers to come up and something that's kind
Speaker 2: of it's possible now, right because there's railroads that are
Speaker 2: available for mass use. And you know, so when when
Speaker 2: those workers, when when the white workers start getting back
Speaker 2: from Europe from the First World War, they find a
Speaker 2: lot of their jobs all taken up by these people,
Speaker 2: these black people who weren't here before. And you actually
Speaker 2: did see some some racial violence at that time. And
Speaker 2: so I think before the Great Migration, though it was
Speaker 2: not it was not so much of an issue sports.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was a time when Jews were the
Speaker 1: heavyweight champion of the world and boxing and they basically
Speaker 1: dominated basketball. So they still do.
Speaker 2: Look at the ownership.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it just switched a little bit. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: do you know about how that because from what I understand,
Speaker 1: it was another one of those things where Jewish community
Speaker 1: leaders were like, this is very disreputable. We really needs
Speaker 1: to concentrate on academics and basically they put in their
Speaker 1: neighborhood newspapers. We pushing people out and making other Jews
Speaker 1: feel like they shouldn't be doing this and they should
Speaker 1: be concentrating on other things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's that's definitely the case. And if you
Speaker 2: look at the NBA, you know that really is like
Speaker 2: the NBA and the recording industry you know too, which
Speaker 2: kind of come back to this topic between the relationship
Speaker 2: between Blacks and Jews, right, are two areas that Jews
Speaker 2: once dominated and then moved up to the ownership level
Speaker 2: on I think out of the thirty NBA teams, fourteen
Speaker 2: or fifteen of them have Jewish owners. And you know,
Speaker 2: they've had a Jewish League commissioner since I think eighty three,
Speaker 2: and David Stern was pretty much understood by everybody to
Speaker 2: be running the show as the as the second man
Speaker 2: for a decade before that. So you know, we're talking
Speaker 2: what is that fifty years that they've had a Jewish
Speaker 2: commissioner basically, And yeah, I mean and that creates resentment,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean it's something that you know, you
Speaker 2: see it in different ways, like in James Baldwin wrote
Speaker 2: this this kind of infamous article back in sixty three
Speaker 2: sixty four. I think sometimes in the sixties called negroes
Speaker 2: are anti Semitic because they're anti white. And you know,
Speaker 2: he starts it off with, I mean, this is not
Speaker 2: something you could get published today, even by a black author.
Speaker 2: You know, he says, when I was a boy growing
Speaker 2: up in Harlem, you know, the butcher was a Jew
Speaker 2: and we hated him. The landlord was a Jew, and
Speaker 2: we hated him because he wouldn't take care of our building,
Speaker 2: et cetera. You know, the our teachers were mostly Jews
Speaker 2: and we hated them because they talked down to us.
Speaker 2: And he kind of just goes on and on like this,
Speaker 2: and this is you know, I mean, it's pretty shocking
Speaker 2: to like modern readers to read it, right, just like that.
Speaker 2: You know, around the same time that that Norman pod
Speaker 2: hortz h article in the Commentary that I quote a lot,
Speaker 2: is really shocking to people today, you know, and I
Speaker 2: think we've probably really lost something, you know, by not
Speaker 2: allowing people to speak openly about these things. You know,
Speaker 2: when you read pod Hortz's article in Commentary, it's called
Speaker 2: it's called My Negro Problem in ours. It's a famous
Speaker 2: article that you know, one of the fathers of neo
Speaker 2: conservatism wrote and he talks about living in He grew
Speaker 2: up in Brownsville, actually so right there in Brooklyn and
Speaker 2: in a mixed neighborhood of primarily Jews, Italians and some blacks.
Speaker 2: And when he was a boy, it was still mostly
Speaker 2: Jews and Italians, but a growing black population. And he
Speaker 2: goes through with all these incidents when he was a
Speaker 2: kid of you know, once when he's a twelve year
Speaker 2: old boy gets attacked by a group and hitting the
Speaker 2: head with a baseball bat and just can consistently getting
Speaker 2: you know, mugged, extorted, threatened, intimidated, and beaten like a
Speaker 2: lot by these black kids. And he talks about how
Speaker 2: that experience growing up kind of shaped his shaped certain views,
Speaker 2: some of which he you know, justifies, others that he
Speaker 2: doesn't justify and that he's ashamed of. But he says
Speaker 2: that they're really there, you know, and those are you know,
Speaker 2: that's a that's a that's an important article, an important
Speaker 2: perspective to get. You know, you have a twelve year
Speaker 2: old boy who got beat over the head with a
Speaker 2: baseball bat. That's incredibly traumatic. It's incredibly traumatic for like
Speaker 2: for the parents, you know, for everybody involved to have
Speaker 2: something like that happen. I mean, I grew up in
Speaker 2: rough neighborhoods, in mostly black, black neighborhoods, and so I'm
Speaker 2: kind of used to this kind of thing. But I
Speaker 2: wonder sometimes how people who are who grew up in
Speaker 2: kind of middle class, stable circumstances when they read about
Speaker 2: a twelve year old boy getting attacked and beaten over
Speaker 2: the head with a baseball bat. It's pretty shock, you know,
Speaker 2: and and and it is shocking. It was. It was
Speaker 2: really traumatic. And the feelings that that that somebody like
Speaker 2: pot Horts has that are an outgrowth of these, you know,
Speaker 2: really difficult experiences. You know, they're important to talk about,
Speaker 2: but you can't talk about them anymore, and it's unfortunate.
Speaker 2: And just like in James Baldwin's case too, you know, Baldwin, Uh,
Speaker 2: you can call that article anti semitic. I don't really
Speaker 2: think it is, uh anymore than pot Hortz's article is
Speaker 2: anti black, but you can read it and say that
Speaker 2: this is you know, Baldwin's not somebody I have a
Speaker 2: lot of respect for as a writer or a thinker.
Speaker 2: I think he gets overplayed because of kind of who
Speaker 2: he was at a certain historical moment, but you know,
Speaker 2: he he the reality was growing up in his neighborhood,
Speaker 2: the butcher was a Jew. His teacher's word jews, his
Speaker 2: landlord's word jews, the pawnbroker's word used. And you're going
Speaker 2: to have a difficult relationship with those people when you
Speaker 2: have an outside community that owns everything, holds all the
Speaker 2: professional jobs, et cetera. Which makes sense because they've been
Speaker 2: here for a long time and so they've moved up
Speaker 2: the social ladder and you just got here. You know,
Speaker 2: your people just got here, and so it's natural that
Speaker 2: would be the case. But you know, at a time
Speaker 2: like the nineteen sixties, when identity was becoming so important
Speaker 2: and black militancy was on the rise, you know, the
Speaker 2: idea that kind of had held among liberals up until
Speaker 2: then that blacks would kind of travel the same path
Speaker 2: that previous immigrant groups had traveled, working their way up
Speaker 2: over the course of a few generations, you know, toward
Speaker 2: integration to the economy and everything. That that was not
Speaker 2: a proposal that was acceptable to black people anymore in
Speaker 2: the sixties, And you know, you can sympathize with that
Speaker 2: a bit right. They've been here for four hundred years,
Speaker 2: and you have second generation immigrants telling them to get
Speaker 2: in line and do what they parents did, and you
Speaker 2: can see why they would chafe against that. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, you know, that's the path, that is
Speaker 2: the path towards success and integration, and when it was abandoned,
Speaker 2: you know, we're still living with the consequences of that
Speaker 2: shift in identity and ideology among black people in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the intermediary, the merchant in the neighborhood that's not
Speaker 1: from there. It doesn't have to be the Jew. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many rap songs in the nineties were about the
Speaker 1: Korean grocer in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: There's and it's to society. You know, people watch it
Speaker 2: today and they're like, you know, what's going on? Or
Speaker 2: just people watch it today. I noticed and what they
Speaker 2: see is like there's a shop that happens to be
Speaker 2: run by this Korean couple and you know, the black
Speaker 2: kid shoots them. It's like, no, that was They're talking
Speaker 2: about something that was a prevailing theme in you know,
Speaker 2: like you said, rap songs, other black medium, this was
Speaker 2: something that was that everybody talked about in Black communities
Speaker 2: all the time is the Korean grocer, you know, So, yeah,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have to be at all. I mean, really
Speaker 2: like if you look at the La Riots, two thousand
Speaker 2: Korean businesses were burned down during the La Riots two thousand.
Speaker 2: When you look at like the Detroit riot in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven where they had to call in the eighty
Speaker 2: second Airborne in one hundred and first and I mean,
Speaker 2: it was all out war there were it was one
Speaker 2: of the nastiest riots in the country's history. There was
Speaker 2: something like four or five hundred buildings got burned down,
Speaker 2: two thousand Korean businesses got burned down. There were videos
Speaker 2: of groups of black rioters saying, you know, stay away
Speaker 2: from that block over there, that's all owned by our people.
Speaker 2: Let's go get those fucking Koreans. And so, I mean,
Speaker 2: that's a program by any definition of the word. And
Speaker 2: you know that happened in ninety two. In ninety one,
Speaker 2: you have the Crown Heights Riot where a bunch of
Speaker 2: dominantly like Jamaican and Kribbean Island are black residents of
Speaker 2: this neighborhood in Brooklyn, you know, went on what hesitates
Speaker 2: to call it a pugrom not a lot of damage
Speaker 2: was done and only one person was killed, but you
Speaker 2: did have like mobs of black people marching through the
Speaker 2: streets saying Hitler didn't finish the job and get the
Speaker 2: jew and stuff and so. And both of those were
Speaker 2: very much driven by the animosity that led to them
Speaker 2: was driven by similar circumstances. You know, it happened to
Speaker 2: be the Koreans in la who owned all the businesses
Speaker 2: in black communities in you know, in Brooklyn, it happened
Speaker 2: to be a lot of Jews, and you know it
Speaker 2: is it's a yeah, it's a problem, right because I mean,
Speaker 2: on one hand, if you look at the New York situation,
Speaker 2: it's a little different than the Koreans, because the Koreans
Speaker 2: moved into black neighborhoods and opened these businesses and took
Speaker 2: over kind of the commerce in those areas on the
Speaker 2: East coast. In the Midwest, the Catholic and Jewish Euroethnics
Speaker 2: that had previously lived in those places owned the real estate,
Speaker 2: owned the businesses. You know, they got driven out by
Speaker 2: the influx of black migrants from the South, and so
Speaker 2: they just owned what they had always owned, and they
Speaker 2: just continued to own it now that the population had changed,
Speaker 2: and you know, that's just something that you're you know,
Speaker 2: people can chant diversities our strength all they want, and
Speaker 2: maybe on some level and in certain ways it does
Speaker 2: strengthen us. But there are also extreme difficulties with managing
Speaker 2: a diverse society, you know, especially when when ethnicity or
Speaker 2: race corresponds with social class in an uncomfortable way. You know,
Speaker 2: it's very difficult to manage these things, especially in a
Speaker 2: democracy quote unquote, where there's just always going to be
Speaker 2: an incentive for or demagogues to rise up and say,
Speaker 2: the reason you're down here is because you know those
Speaker 2: people up there don't like you, and it's a very
Speaker 2: appealing message to people who are in rough circumstances. You know.
Speaker 2: I think if the I think if the Irish or
Speaker 2: the Jews when they first came and in the first
Speaker 2: generation or two, when they were down at the bottom
Speaker 2: of the social scale, if they had had, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of that same level of resentment for where they
Speaker 2: were starting out and everything that a lot of blacks
Speaker 2: kind of embraced in the twentieth century, they probably would
Speaker 2: have ended up in a similar bad situation. You know.
Speaker 2: But it was really the opposite. I mean they were.
Speaker 2: I mean, shoot, they we all know, like people change
Speaker 2: their names to make them more familiar to Americans. You
Speaker 2: hear about like ethnics in the Eastern cities, who you know,
Speaker 2: the parents are immigrants and they won't allow their children
Speaker 2: to speak the mother tongue at home. They're like, you
Speaker 2: speak English in this country, and you hear about that,
Speaker 2: or even even my family, like you know, on my
Speaker 2: father's side, my father's side came out to California as
Speaker 2: part of the Oki migration during the dust Bowl in
Speaker 2: the thirties. And you know that's something that is sort
Speaker 2: of romanticized for most people because of John Steinbeck and
Speaker 2: so forth. But this was, like, it was very, very similar.
Speaker 2: It was a smaller scale, but you know, you got
Speaker 2: these people who were like rowdy, hard drinking, fighting, rural
Speaker 2: Southerners who were used to being basically sharecroppers or just
Speaker 2: above sharecroppers, who are now moving over into California, and
Speaker 2: people did not like them. You know, they thought of
Speaker 2: them as vulgar, and the tent cities that sprang up
Speaker 2: to house them were you know, considered like just dens
Speaker 2: of vice and crime and just disorder. You know, there
Speaker 2: there was a famous incident where the LAPD actually took
Speaker 2: up positions on a freeway or a highway coming into
Speaker 2: I guess it wouldn't have been a freeway, but a
Speaker 2: road coming into Los Angeles County to prevent a caravan
Speaker 2: of OKI's from coming into La County because they didn't
Speaker 2: want them there. And so, you know, these are these
Speaker 2: are the kind of things that these are the kind
Speaker 2: of things that happened in a country like ours. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a reason that the Russians, for example, the Russian
Speaker 2: the Russian Empire. You know, people hear about how you know,
Speaker 2: Jews were restricted to the pale offf Settlement. They could
Speaker 2: only live in the palist Settlement, which is a huge,
Speaker 2: huge piece of territory. But you know, the Russians understood
Speaker 2: that they were running an empire. The fact that they
Speaker 2: had all these different people, by definition, you're kind of
Speaker 2: running an empire by that point. And so you know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't just the Jews who had to stay in
Speaker 2: the pale of settlement. The Tatars had to stay over there.
Speaker 2: Everybody had to stay because they knew that once they
Speaker 2: start all everybody just move around, you're going to get conflict,
Speaker 2: and they didn't want to deal They didn't want to
Speaker 2: have to deal with that, you know, And I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, after they started to loosen those rules actually
Speaker 2: in the late nineteen hundreds, he did start to get
Speaker 2: a late eighteen hundreds, he did start to get conflict.
Speaker 2: And that conflict was I had a lot to do
Speaker 2: with the Jews starting to move over to the United States.
Speaker 2: So you know, you read about like a lot of
Speaker 2: the pugroms that happened in the Russian Empire starting in
Speaker 2: the eighteen eighties, and you get the impression sometimes from
Speaker 2: reading them, unless you read like a deep history of it,
Speaker 2: that these are just like a bunch of Russians who
Speaker 2: hate Jews attacking the Jews, and when a lot of
Speaker 2: the times it was actually like you know, like you're
Speaker 2: in Odessa and it's the Greek community there that is
Speaker 2: in direct competition with the Jews who have now moved
Speaker 2: in there for all of these industries that they used
Speaker 2: to dominate, so that it's the source of the conflict,
Speaker 2: and they were the ones kind of leading a pogrom there.
Speaker 2: You see that a lot. You know, these are just
Speaker 2: the difficulties again of trying to manage a diverse society.
Speaker 2: And you know when you when you're way of trying
Speaker 2: to manage that is to just not let anybody talk
Speaker 2: about it, not let anybody voice their frustrations or their fears.
Speaker 2: You know, things build up under the surface until enough
Speaker 2: pressure builds up that they blow out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've talked about the the Odessa program and of
Speaker 1: nineteen oh five before, and how the United States government
Speaker 1: sanctioned Zar Nicholas over that. And you're like why, It's
Speaker 1: like who who in the government is telling who's manned
Speaker 1: into the government? Is like, we neeed to sanction this country,
Speaker 1: this little city because of this something that happened halfway
Speaker 1: around the world. But I wanted to go back to
Speaker 1: something that you had talked about. You had talked about
Speaker 1: how the NAACP was basically started by Jews, funded by Jews,
Speaker 1: and why.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a good question. It's an interesting one.
Speaker 2: I mean, on one level, you can understand why Jews
Speaker 2: were involved with the civil rights movement, sort of identified
Speaker 2: with the plight of black people in America before anybody else.
Speaker 2: A huge part of their of Jewish identity is tied up,
Speaker 2: excuse me, in their sense of being like history's victims.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a you know, before the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: that was their religious identity. You know, there were slaves
Speaker 2: in Egypt and then they kept getting exiled and chased around,
Speaker 2: and that really was like the basis of their group
Speaker 2: identity in a lot of ways. You get up to
Speaker 2: the twentieth century and I saw a it's like a
Speaker 2: pew or gallop pull that took place several years ago
Speaker 2: where they were asking Jews around the cunt what they
Speaker 2: thought the basis of like Jews, the primary basis of
Speaker 2: Jewish identity was it was like, you know, belief in
Speaker 2: the Torah, you know, affinity for the state of Israel,
Speaker 2: the Holocaust, remembering the Holocaust was like it got like
Speaker 2: seventy percent. And so you have like an identity that
Speaker 2: is that is very much based on a sense of victimhood.
Speaker 2: And you can understand why they would identify with another
Speaker 2: group of people who were you know, clearly second class
Speaker 2: citizens as they were you know in certain ways in
Speaker 2: the Russian Empire, although that gets overplayed in many many ways,
Speaker 2: but you can understand where that certain sympathy would come from.
Speaker 2: Part of it probably also has a lot to do
Speaker 2: with the fact that the Eastern Jews who were coming over,
Speaker 2: you know, they were coming at a time when when
Speaker 2: like revolutionary and socialist revolutionary politics had just consumed the
Speaker 2: Jewish community, especially the young people. You read about another
Speaker 2: there was a letter from that same Zionist leader, High Invitzman,
Speaker 2: who's writing to another Zionist leader about how he was
Speaker 2: over in Poland trying to get people to trying to
Speaker 2: find young Jews to convince him to be Zionists, why
Speaker 2: they need to come down to Palestine and so forth.
Speaker 2: He says, I can't find any. Says every stutle I
Speaker 2: go to, every village I go to, there's a bunch
Speaker 2: of kids, there's a bunch of old people. All the
Speaker 2: young people have left. They're all Communists now, or they're
Speaker 2: all you know, involved in some movement like this now.
Speaker 2: That's why, you know. In nineteen twenty five, Winston Churchill
Speaker 2: wrote that that article Communism versus Bolshevism versus Zionism, and
Speaker 2: it's pretty hilarious to read today.
Speaker 1: It reads like, well, especially when you know, especially when
Speaker 1: you know the history of World War two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, in Churchill specifically, right, but you know he
Speaker 2: you read it today and just with the level of
Speaker 2: knowledge most people have about these issues today reads like
Speaker 2: an insane John Birch conspiracy screed or something, but it's
Speaker 2: really not, you know. And he was presenting the question
Speaker 2: to English readers the way that Jews, like Zionist Jews,
Speaker 2: were presenting it to them to their own people, which
Speaker 2: is that everybody there was not a neutral Jew young
Speaker 2: a young person. As far as the young people went
Speaker 2: left in the Palist settlement, that's probably an exaggeration, but
Speaker 2: not much of one. They were all either going over
Speaker 2: into like communists and left wing politics, or they were
Speaker 2: becoming Zions And it really was like a battle for
Speaker 2: the Jewish soul in a way. And you know, uh,
Speaker 2: that sense of that sense of being history as victims,
Speaker 2: I think probably did have a lot to do with
Speaker 2: the sympathy that they that they had for blacks, but
Speaker 2: it also ended up becoming the source of a lot
Speaker 2: of you know, black animosity toward Jews, because the simple
Speaker 2: fact of the matter was that you know, for everything
Speaker 2: we hear today about university quotas and some social club
Speaker 2: that you know didn't allow Jewish members or something that
Speaker 2: Jews did find in the United States from the time
Speaker 2: they got here, you know, there were they certainly didn't
Speaker 2: face any any more obstacles to their integration and success
Speaker 2: than like the Irish or the Italians did, and they integrated.
Speaker 2: By the time you get up into the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: when the civil rights movement really gets going, you know,
Speaker 2: it could really grate on like a black activist to hear,
Speaker 2: you know, a Jewish student who had come down to
Speaker 2: Mississippi from the summer off from Columbia, you know, or
Speaker 2: Harvard coming down and being like, yeah, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: just like you, like I totally understand what you're going
Speaker 2: through because I'm Jewish and you know, so it eventually
Speaker 2: ended up leading to a lot of the problems, you know,
Speaker 2: that sense of like, you know, who are you kidding?
Speaker 2: Like that's that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: You had mentioned earlier the Great Migration. Can you say
Speaker 1: when that was? And the numbers and yeah, so.
Speaker 2: When the First World War broke out, you know, all
Speaker 2: those cities in the North that you think of today
Speaker 2: as being like centers of black life in America, you know, Baltimore, Philly,
Speaker 2: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Saint Louis, all of them. The
Speaker 2: black populations of those cities was typically between like one
Speaker 2: and at the highest like maybe five percent, very small populations.
Speaker 2: Ninety five percent of all the black people in the
Speaker 2: country still lived in the rural south. And the First
Speaker 2: World War comes along, and we send millions of men,
Speaker 2: white men over into the trenches in Europe and working
Speaker 2: administrative jobs for the military, and they have to leave
Speaker 2: their industrial jobs right at a time when the industrial
Speaker 2: base is expanding hugely because of the war. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, everybody hears about Rosie the Riveter during World
Speaker 2: War Two. You know, the women moving into the workforce,
Speaker 2: and that did happen to a degree, but the black
Speaker 2: population being brought up into the north to be integrated
Speaker 2: into the industrial workforce was really the primary way that
Speaker 2: they filled it. And so starting with the First World
Speaker 2: War in nineteen seventeen, you start getting a large migration.
Speaker 2: It kind of becomes a flood very quickly, because you know,
Speaker 2: one goes up there and he finds a job, and
Speaker 2: he sends for others, and you know, they write back
Speaker 2: about how great it is up there with no Jim
Speaker 2: Crow or whatever. Because things really hadn't started to deteriorate
Speaker 2: the way they would by the time you get to
Speaker 2: the fifties and sixties, and so it becomes a big flood.
Speaker 2: You know. You read like Isabella Patterson's book The Warmth
Speaker 2: of other Sons, which is about the Great Migration, and
Speaker 2: it you know, it portrayed. It's a totally very like
Speaker 2: Its angle is like this was the experience of these
Speaker 2: black families and stuff as they were making this trip
Speaker 2: and this transition, right, and so that's what it is,
Speaker 2: and you get you know, one of the things she
Speaker 2: talks about is how once this got going and started building,
Speaker 2: I mean, it was just a mad rush out of
Speaker 2: the South and you had big spikes during the First
Speaker 2: World War, continued you know, lowered a little bit, but
Speaker 2: continued until the Second World War, and then you know,
Speaker 2: I think we had something like sixteen or seventeen million
Speaker 2: men called up for the Second World War, serving in
Speaker 2: various capacities, and most of those were white men because
Speaker 2: the you know, the armed forces were still segregated, and
Speaker 2: so that created a huge hole. Part of it was
Speaker 2: filled by Rosie the Riveter. A much larger part of
Speaker 2: it was filled by a huge influx of black people
Speaker 2: coming from the South. I mean, you read about like,
Speaker 2: you know, like that neighborhood of Brownsville, where Podhort was
Speaker 2: from and where that teacher strike took place in. I
Speaker 2: won't get the year exactly right, but it's like nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty five. As late as nineteen fifty five, it's still
Speaker 2: like seventy percent Jewish and Italian. You get up to
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five or I think nineteen sixty seven, so
Speaker 2: like a decade later, it's ninety six percent black in
Speaker 2: Puerto Rican. I mean, you're talking about a massive influx,
Speaker 2: you know, eight hundred thousand people moving into New York
Speaker 2: over the course of like a decade and a half.
Speaker 2: Just huge, and it obviously overwhelmed the city's ability to
Speaker 2: absorb these people. You know, they didn't have places for
Speaker 2: them to live, they didn't have you know, enough school facilities,
Speaker 2: they didn't have the infrastructure to handle all this, you know,
Speaker 2: especially since these people were coming up like the Irish
Speaker 2: in the mid nineteenth century. You know, these are primarily
Speaker 2: like illiterate sharecroppers from the rural South, many of whom
Speaker 2: had never seen a big metropolis like New York City,
Speaker 2: you know, and let alone lived in one or participated in,
Speaker 2: you know, the complex credit economy that was developing in
Speaker 2: the cities or you know, being subject to sort of
Speaker 2: regimented industrial labor, you know, and they struggled, you know,
Speaker 2: just like the Irish struggled. And you know, by the
Speaker 2: time you get up to the to the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 2: as white flights like really taken hold the you know,
Speaker 2: you have these neighborhoods that are again like ninety ninety
Speaker 2: five percent black and a smattering of Puerto Ricans in them.
Speaker 2: And you know, all of the businesses, primarily all of
Speaker 2: the professional jobs like teachers and civil servants and various
Speaker 2: things that are still in those places. Most of the
Speaker 2: cops are still white. And you know, it's a if
Speaker 2: somebody were to ask me, like, could this have gone
Speaker 2: any differently? I don't know if it really could have
Speaker 2: gone any better than it did. I mean without without
Speaker 2: our political system just being completely different than it was.
Speaker 2: You know, if we had a political system that in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty one, you know, through a hood over Malcolm
Speaker 2: X's head and dump them off in the middle of
Speaker 2: the ocean, maybe you could deal with this a little
Speaker 2: bit differently. But in our society where it's sort of
Speaker 2: open two demagogues and people who were going to stir
Speaker 2: up anger for their own sort of for their own reasons.
Speaker 2: Very very difficult, I think too, you know, especially because
Speaker 2: like it was just it was inevitable that the black
Speaker 2: people who were coming up from the rural South, it
Speaker 2: was inevitable they were going to be at the bottom
Speaker 2: of the social scale. You know, they didn't have any
Speaker 2: skills that were applicable to city life. Most of them
Speaker 2: couldn't read, you know, taking taking discrimination like completely out
Speaker 2: of the picture. Like they were going to be at
Speaker 2: the bottom, just like the Irish were at the bottom
Speaker 2: when they came in the eighteen fifties. And you actually
Speaker 2: see like before you get up to the era that
Speaker 2: you know, the build up toward the sixties, it started
Speaker 2: in the fifties, but before you get to that air
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen that show Boardwalk Empire? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know that black white right, Yeah, So the
Speaker 2: way his wife behaves with her kids and stuff. You
Speaker 2: remember that that was That's a real thing.
Speaker 1: There was.
Speaker 2: There was that immigrant mentality of like we need to
Speaker 2: we need to assimilate into this society. We need to
Speaker 2: be more prim and proper and more orderly and everything
Speaker 2: than the whites. So that we can like assimilate into
Speaker 2: this society. But her husband, who's like kind of more
Speaker 2: more street, you know, uh, he goes along, he lets
Speaker 2: her kind of run the household. But every time something
Speaker 2: like this comes up, you know he did, he voices
Speaker 2: his displeasure. You know, he sees it as you know,
Speaker 2: selling out and bowing to the white man and everything.
Speaker 2: And it's like, you know, look, given the history of
Speaker 2: blacks in this country, like I understand where that mentality
Speaker 2: comes from. You know, like there's there's a certain level
Speaker 2: of like inevitable historical shame that comes with the fact,
Speaker 2: you know, the simple fact that you know, your your whole,
Speaker 2: your whole, all of your ancestors were slaves of the
Speaker 2: people who you now live around in whose society you're
Speaker 2: trying to integrate into, right, and so you can understand
Speaker 2: where that resentment comes from. But it's very it's very
Speaker 2: counterproductive and in his mentality when you get up into
Speaker 2: the fifties and sixties, you know, of resenting all that
Speaker 2: is selling out to the white man and everything became
Speaker 2: dominant by the time you get to the sixties, and
Speaker 2: so I mean you really start to see like you
Speaker 2: start to see, uh, just writings from very prominent like
Speaker 2: black intellectuals in the nineteen sixties. Who are you know
Speaker 2: they say this stuff today, But it all started in
Speaker 2: the sixties about how, you know, things like kids disruptive
Speaker 2: behavior in schools, like well, that's you're holding them to
Speaker 2: white standards or just all of these other different things.
Speaker 2: It's like that is just an objectively like you're going
Speaker 2: down a very bad road, you know, and you're not
Speaker 2: going to make much progress with that kind of mentality.
Speaker 2: Even if it even if you can sympathize with or
Speaker 2: understand where it came from, it definitely derailed them. I mean,
Speaker 2: if you look at pretty much any statistic you want
Speaker 2: to look at for Black Americans from the Civil from
Speaker 2: the end of the Civil War up through about like
Speaker 2: the mid fifties to the early sixties, everything you want
Speaker 2: to look at, from wealth to just everything, it's up, up, up, up,
Speaker 2: up up up. And then you hit the sixties, when
Speaker 2: you get the Civil Rights Act, you get the Voting
Speaker 2: Rights Act, you get this sort of mass consciousness among
Speaker 2: white America that this is an issue that maybe needs
Speaker 2: to be addressed. And you know, so you would expect
Speaker 2: if it was going up before it would just skyrocket
Speaker 2: at this point. But you can look at those graphs
Speaker 2: and you start with the sixties and everything just collapses,
Speaker 2: and it's collapsed, you know really to the present day.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's you know, things like crime rates obviously
Speaker 2: have decreased since the nineteen nineties, but you know the
Speaker 2: proportion of who's committing the crimes really is not changed.
Speaker 2: And you know that's something that like we talk about
Speaker 2: white flight. You know, people just people today really don't
Speaker 2: have any they don't have like a real understanding of
Speaker 2: what it's like. I mean, you just have to imagine,
Speaker 2: like my wife's Armenian, right, and so over here in
Speaker 2: Glendale and Los Angeles, that's the Armenian neighbor There's buildings
Speaker 2: with Armenian writing all over them, and you know there's
Speaker 2: other people there, but that's there are more Armenians in
Speaker 2: Glendale than there are in any place in the world
Speaker 2: other than Yerevon. And you know the capital of Armenia,
Speaker 2: it's little Armena. It's what it is. And so you know,
Speaker 2: you just imagine a place like that or a China town.
Speaker 2: You know, something that over the course of ten years
Speaker 2: is ninety five percent plaque and all the crime is
Speaker 2: being committed by this new group of people. All of
Speaker 2: the disorder, you know, is being committed by these this
Speaker 2: new group of people, and you're gonna have real issues.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, and you know, people were people
Speaker 2: were afraid. I mean, you know, like it doesn't matter
Speaker 2: how how liberal you are, when your when your kid
Speaker 2: comes home with, you know, having taken a baseball bat
Speaker 2: to the head at school that day, you're going to
Speaker 2: start looking for you know, for rental or real estate
Speaker 2: ads in the suburbs, you know. And that's really what
Speaker 2: happened in the sixties. Well started in the fifties, but
Speaker 2: but was completed by the sixties.
Speaker 1: When you look at Brown Versus of Education nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: we know who wrote it. They have Jewish last names.
Speaker 1: They wanted to for whatever reason, not going to point
Speaker 1: any fingers and say anything, you know, say it was
Speaker 1: for nefarious reasons, but they wanted to integrate the schools.
Speaker 1: And almost immediately it became evident that that was a really,
Speaker 1: really bad idea. And I mean, how do we how
Speaker 1: do we talk about that? I mean I've been talking
Speaker 1: about it by reading a book that takes place in
Speaker 1: the late sixties, but starts in nineteen fifty eight talking
Speaker 1: about the formation of the New York City Teachers' Union
Speaker 1: the UFT, and what happened, I mean, what happened. It
Speaker 1: was sure there were crime rates that were out of control,
Speaker 1: but there was not this the military. It's the militancy
Speaker 1: that really really did this in And where did that
Speaker 1: militancy come from?
Speaker 2: Though, you know, I think part of it had to
Speaker 2: do with before the before the mid sixties. You know,
Speaker 2: the whole focus of the black rights movement in America
Speaker 2: was all on the South, and this was you know
Speaker 2: that that was a problem that you could look at,
Speaker 2: and it was a very concrete problem, right from the
Speaker 2: standpoint of like the people who were pushing integration, like
Speaker 2: it was a very concrete problem to fix. And the
Speaker 2: black people in the South, you know, they may have
Speaker 2: resented Jim Crow, they may have resented, you know, just
Speaker 2: the whole situation down there, but just over the years
Speaker 2: had kind of learned to live with it a little
Speaker 2: bit and learned, you know, like there was I was
Speaker 2: reading recently this story of this book about the Black
Speaker 2: Liberation Army, and in the early seventies they were running
Speaker 2: around killing cops and one of them, mentions that he's
Speaker 2: interviewing one of them, and he talks about how he
Speaker 2: would always drive whenever they were going somewhere because him,
Speaker 2: being from the South, had manners when it came to
Speaker 2: white people because he's yes, sir, no, sir, you know
Speaker 2: how to talk like that. Whereas his buddies who were
Speaker 2: in the car with them, who grew up in you know,
Speaker 2: the Bronx, they didn't have any of that. And you
Speaker 2: kind of get an this is something that like, I
Speaker 2: don't I don't think I've ever seen anybody else really
Speaker 2: point out, but I think it. I think it's definitely
Speaker 2: got a lot to do with it is you know,
Speaker 2: any group of immigrants, and I'm gonna call the blacks
Speaker 2: of the Great Migration immigrants just because I mean, shoot,
Speaker 2: when you're moving from Louisiana to Los Angeles or Oakland,
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a much larger migration than moving from
Speaker 2: you know, Greece to Italy or something, right in terms
Speaker 2: of and it's probably just as culturally shocking. And you know,
Speaker 2: the when when other immigrant groups would come in, Oh gosh,
Speaker 2: I lost my train of thought. Put that aside. I
Speaker 2: was gonna say that bail me out here. I'll think
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 1: Well, we were talking, we're talking about segregation, well we're
Speaker 1: talking about integration. Integrating the schools said it was easier
Speaker 1: on the side. Then you started talking about the about
Speaker 1: the book you were reading, and how.
Speaker 2: Right right, right, right right, So you know that he
Speaker 2: had those Southern manners. And I haven't seen anybody else
Speaker 2: really kind of put this out in a direct way,
Speaker 2: but I think people have probably thought about it at
Speaker 2: least is you know, any any immigrant group that comes
Speaker 2: into a place, usually you hear this all the time
Speaker 2: when people point out, like today they're talking about Latin
Speaker 2: American immigrants and they say, oh, they have a lower
Speaker 2: crime rate than, you know, than American citizens. And it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's true, but what about their kids, because that's a
Speaker 2: different situation. That is when you really start to see
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. And you really saw that with
Speaker 2: the you know, because immigrants, you come into a place
Speaker 2: and you're trying to get along. You know, you're trying
Speaker 2: to find your little place and keep your head down
Speaker 2: and you know, work and raise your family. Plus if
Speaker 2: you are an immigrant who's coming from a place, you know,
Speaker 2: as a refugee of some kind, you know, even an
Speaker 2: economic refugee or something. Whatever things are like in the
Speaker 2: new country is probably somewhat better than it was in
Speaker 2: the old country, So you don't you know, that's what
Speaker 2: you have to compare to. And so the black migrants
Speaker 2: who came up into the North and South from the South,
Speaker 2: you know, these are people who had lived their lives
Speaker 2: and their parents had lived their lives in the South
Speaker 2: where they understood that there were you know, the bad
Speaker 2: things happened if you pissed off the white people, and
Speaker 2: there was just a certain level of deference that they
Speaker 2: may have resented but had sort of learned to just
Speaker 2: it was just a part of the way they approached
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And their kids, you know, were the kids who grew
Speaker 2: up beating the shit out of Norman pod Hortz at school, right,
Speaker 2: and and they realized that, you know, they didn't have
Speaker 2: to be afraid of white people that you know, most
Speaker 2: of the time white people were afraid of them. You know,
Speaker 2: that's one of the dirty secrets kind of of like
Speaker 2: modern America, is that most white people are afraid of
Speaker 2: black people. Liberals, conservatives, they really are. You don't see
Speaker 2: it as much in the South, Southerners, it's not so true.
Speaker 2: But up in the up in the in the cities,
Speaker 2: your average white person is afraid of black people, and
Speaker 2: not just because they could call them, you know, a
Speaker 2: racist and get them in trouble or something. There's just
Speaker 2: a certain you know, there's a fear there that a
Speaker 2: lot of people have, you know, and I noticed it
Speaker 2: because I grew up around black people and so I
Speaker 2: have a comfort with them that is kind of bone deep.
Speaker 2: But you know that second generations started to come of
Speaker 2: age in the late fifties, early sixties, and so now
Speaker 2: you have these young adult black kids who never lived
Speaker 2: in the South, who grew up watching their parents kind
Speaker 2: of be deferential to the white people, and you know,
Speaker 2: didn't like seeing that. But now they're eighteen, nineteen, twenty
Speaker 2: years old, and they grew up you know, again in
Speaker 2: the mix mixed race schools with white kids who were
Speaker 2: afraid of getting beaten up by them, and they didn't
Speaker 2: have any of that fear, and so there was you know,
Speaker 2: you would never have seen a I want to say never,
Speaker 2: but like it would have been very rare for a
Speaker 2: first generation black migrant from the South to you know,
Speaker 2: to talk back to or let alone get violent with
Speaker 2: a police officer in the north, just like would be
Speaker 2: very rare because they understood, like you know, or they
Speaker 2: probably they assumed something. It probably wasn't so true that
Speaker 2: they would be real consequences for that, and you know,
Speaker 2: their kids just didn't think that way, and they were
Speaker 2: much more willing to uh to just yeah, get wild.
Speaker 2: I guess let's.
Speaker 1: Get into it. Let's get into the riots in the sixties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the first the first real race, right, I think, like,
Speaker 2: you know, at least at a real scale, was probably
Speaker 2: Harlem in nineteen sixty four, and it wasn't huge compared
Speaker 2: to what you'd see the next year in Watts or
Speaker 2: or the rest of the decade, but you know, that happened.
Speaker 2: You asked, like, where the militancy came from? This, you know,
Speaker 2: something I've been reading about lately, and it's hard to
Speaker 2: find really good stuff on it, but I have been
Speaker 2: finding a few things. There was certainly like an element
Speaker 2: in the rise in black militancy. How great of a
Speaker 2: factor it was, I'm still trying to hash out. But
Speaker 2: an element was definitely a communist subversion, you know, like
Speaker 2: the American Communist Party in that nineteen sixty four Harlem riot.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a there's a famous black activist who
Speaker 2: you know, he told a reporter or he was given
Speaker 2: a speech maybe in a reporter heard it that if
Speaker 2: he had one hundred dedicated black militants who were black guerrillas,
Speaker 2: who were ready to die for the cause, they could
Speaker 2: burn the whole city down. And like they were talking
Speaker 2: about that guy was one of the leaders of the
Speaker 2: New York branch of the Communist Party of America, right,
Speaker 2: And you see this a lot in a lot of
Speaker 2: these riots where the people who are primarily inciting them
Speaker 2: have not sort of indirect but direct affiliations with the CPUSA,
Speaker 2: And so that might be I have something to do
Speaker 2: with it as well when you get up to you know,
Speaker 2: a book by Rick Pearlstein Nixon Land, who you know,
Speaker 2: I don't agree with his politics or anything, but sometimes
Speaker 2: you still find good historical anecdotes. You know, he talks
Speaker 2: about how he talks about this period in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: sixty five when burned sixty five, when Lyndon Johnson had,
Speaker 2: you know, won the presidency easily and they're about to
Speaker 2: pass the Voting Rights Act, and there's this peer you
Speaker 2: read the rhetoric from Lyndon Johnson from you know, just senators,
Speaker 2: other you know, major leaders, and they're still talking like
Speaker 2: the future that's coming is this star trek Jetson's just utopia,
Speaker 2: you know, and they really still thought that up till
Speaker 2: like sixty five. And it's very interesting because you know,
Speaker 2: Lyndon Johnson gave like the most famous speech of his
Speaker 2: career on the eve of the passage of the Voting
Speaker 2: Rights Act and in sixty five, which was happening at
Speaker 2: the same time that the Selma marches were going on,
Speaker 2: and it's just a I mean, it's almost like a
Speaker 2: it's a sermon more than it is a speech, really,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, it really is just this soaring
Speaker 2: rhetoric and everything. And one week later, the Wats riot
Speaker 2: and Los Angeles broke out. And this was something that,
Speaker 2: like you know, the Harlem riot in sixty four didn't
Speaker 2: get a lot of national publicity. It was something that
Speaker 2: New Yorkers knew about, but most people outside of there didn't.
Speaker 2: The watch were right. It was so huge, and the
Speaker 2: aggression was so intense, and the level of devastation that
Speaker 2: people were seeing was so overwhelming. I mean, you had
Speaker 2: you know, because this was a uh, this was a
Speaker 2: televised riode. It was the first major televised ride in
Speaker 2: America you had, you know, So people were glued to
Speaker 2: their screens for four or five days watching live footage
Speaker 2: of you know, firefighters trying to put out fires and
Speaker 2: getting attacked by mobs, and the mobs dancing around the
Speaker 2: burning building, you know, and you know, or watching footage
Speaker 2: from a from a TV news helicopter that suddenly has
Speaker 2: to veer away because it's taking small arms fire from
Speaker 2: the ground, you know. And so people are watching this
Speaker 2: and they're like, you know, if you read like Christopher
Speaker 2: Colwell's book Age of Entitlement, for example, he really does
Speaker 2: a great job of showing how when Americans passed the
Speaker 2: Civil Rights Act, they looked at that almost is like
Speaker 2: a foreign policy issue. There was this very specific problem
Speaker 2: in the South where you know, the southern institutions, the
Speaker 2: governments and stuff down there were denying black people rights
Speaker 2: that the Supreme Court had said that they have, and
Speaker 2: you've got to give the federal government certain special emergency
Speaker 2: powers to deal with this crisis. Basically, right, That's how
Speaker 2: people saw it, and they didn't understand they were bringing in,
Speaker 2: you know, the way Caldwell puts it, is a rival constitution,
Speaker 2: you know, and just a whole new approach to politics
Speaker 2: in America. Really was was inaugurated with the passage of
Speaker 2: the Civil Rights Act, and you know, so that happened.
Speaker 2: You have, like, you know, the Civil Rights Act passes
Speaker 2: in sixty four. Again, most people outside the South see
Speaker 2: that as almost a foreign policy issue for those people
Speaker 2: over there. And then you have the Voting Rights Act,
Speaker 2: same thing, that's how people are seeing it. And then
Speaker 2: you have one week after the Voting Rights Act, you
Speaker 2: have the Watch Riots and it's nationally televised and are
Speaker 2: starting to realize that like, oh, this is actually, you know,
Speaker 2: this isn't just a Southern problem, This isn't everybody problem.
Speaker 2: And you know, the way the Wats riots were covered
Speaker 2: and the way they were sort of taken up by
Speaker 2: black militants at that point, and the fact that the
Speaker 2: older civil rights leaders, you know generation, the Martin Luther
Speaker 2: King generation, by the time you get up really after
Speaker 2: the passage of the Voting Rights Act, really was on
Speaker 2: the decline, you know, because what could be achieved in
Speaker 2: the South had been achieved by those two laws. You know,
Speaker 2: that was the thinking, and so they shifted their focus
Speaker 2: to the North, and it was just clear immediately that
Speaker 2: you know that these guys were not prepared for they
Speaker 2: didn't have any answers for the black people in the
Speaker 2: North because these weren't problems of like you can't vote,
Speaker 2: or you're not allowed to go in to that, to
Speaker 2: that establishment or something. I mean, these were much more
Speaker 2: complicated socio economic and social friction issues that a march
Speaker 2: was really not going to do a whole lot to fix.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So you see, like in nineteen sixty six when King
Speaker 2: goes up to Marquette Park in Chicago, they didn't achieve
Speaker 2: anything there. You know, the white people, or I think,
Speaker 2: as I understand it, the neighborhood he was trying to integrate.
Speaker 2: You know, people think of it as a white neighborhood today,
Speaker 2: and the white people came out and counter protested and everything,
Speaker 2: but that really it was actually a Lithuanian neighborhood. It
Speaker 2: was a Lithuanian Catholic parish neighborhood. And I think King
Speaker 2: probably didn't even understand that, I think, because in the
Speaker 2: South that's not how it was. You know, in the South,
Speaker 2: racial politics was the order of the day, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: because that's just how people thought based on you know,
Speaker 2: I mean the you know, because mainly because all of
Speaker 2: the Euroethnics that started to mass immigrate into the US
Speaker 2: in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they didn't move to
Speaker 2: the south. They moved to the northern cities. And so
Speaker 2: whereas you had ethnic politics in the north, you had
Speaker 2: racial politics in the south. And so when you know,
Speaker 2: King goes up to Chicago into this Lithuanian Catholic parish
Speaker 2: and he's trying to you know, integrate the neighborhood, you know,
Speaker 2: they they see this as an attack on them specifically,
Speaker 2: and and it you know, the really interesting thing is,
Speaker 2: I'm working on a piece about this right now, is
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways it really was, you know,
Speaker 2: the the wasp establishment in the country. You know, they
Speaker 2: really did see John Lindsay, the mayor of New York
Speaker 2: in sixty five, his first Welfare commissioner, guy named Morris,
Speaker 2: He actually uses the term battering ram. He says, We're
Speaker 2: you going to use the black migrants as a battering
Speaker 2: ram to break up these little ethnic enclaves that creates
Speaker 2: so much you know, political corruption. As they see it
Speaker 2: and all this stuff, and so they really they really
Speaker 2: did view it that way. And there's a lot there.
Speaker 2: I got a whole list of quotes and examples and
Speaker 2: stuff that I'm going to put out in this piece
Speaker 2: about how direct and aggressive like this was an attack
Speaker 2: on primarily Catholic but ended up in New York at
Speaker 2: least being Jewish communities as well. And you know, so
Speaker 2: what ended up happening eventually just partly because you know,
Speaker 2: the like we were talking about this before we got
Speaker 2: on the air, you go to a place like New York,
Speaker 2: which is so fascinating if you want to learn about
Speaker 2: the history of like American ethnic politics, right, it's you know,
Speaker 2: you had if you go back to the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: and you read the liberals in New York talking about
Speaker 2: what do we do about this huge influx of black migrants.
Speaker 2: You know, these people are struggling, there's all these things.
Speaker 2: How are we going to deal with this? And they
Speaker 2: were all very optimistic that, Okay, you had Jews, they
Speaker 2: had their neighborhoods and their interests and certain elements of
Speaker 2: you know, the social service jobs like the teachers for example,
Speaker 2: that were theirs. The Irish there got their neighbor hoods,
Speaker 2: and there's certain like parts of the government that everybody
Speaker 2: kind of understands the Irish or kind of you know,
Speaker 2: and they were the cops and the firefighters. The Italians
Speaker 2: got the construction contracts with the city, and they ran
Speaker 2: waste management, and that the Blacks would come in and
Speaker 2: kind of take their place as one of the ethnicities
Speaker 2: in New York City. And what happened was the influx
Speaker 2: was so big and ended up being so disruptive and
Speaker 2: so traumatic for all of the people who were affected
Speaker 2: by it that it really, you know, it like the
Speaker 2: Great Migration kind of really put an end to ethnic
Speaker 2: politics in America, which again was part of part of
Speaker 2: that was on purpose, like that's something that the WASP
Speaker 2: wanted to accomplish, you know, and it really did put
Speaker 2: an end to it. You don't really hear anything about,
Speaker 2: you know, there's little things here and there, with the
Speaker 2: exception of Jews actually because they you know, they're the
Speaker 2: one group that didn't when they moved out to the suburbs,
Speaker 2: didn't just become kind of white people, you know, Like
Speaker 2: there's Irish American now who are going to be celebrating
Speaker 2: drinking green beer this weekend. But you know, I mean
Speaker 2: it's not there, it's not the core of their identity.
Speaker 2: And in a way that being like a like a
Speaker 2: Jewish American is so important to their identity. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, it imported the sort of southern racial perspective
Speaker 2: into the northern cities where previously there had been like
Speaker 2: an ethnic perspective on how politics works. And you had
Speaker 2: all of these people who you know, lived in the
Speaker 2: neighborhoods where the black people were moving in. And you know,
Speaker 2: of course, you know, these are poor black people, and
Speaker 2: so they're moving into neighborhoods that they can afford to
Speaker 2: live in. And so those are typically the neighborhoods that
Speaker 2: immigrants of the previous generation, you know, lived in. A
Speaker 2: lot of them just buying their first house after their parents.
Speaker 2: You know, you're some Italian. Your father was an Italian immigrant,
Speaker 2: worked on the docs his whole life, you know, and
Speaker 2: now you, as his son, you work in like waste
Speaker 2: management this city. And you bought a house, you know,
Speaker 2: your fall you grew up in a tenement building with
Speaker 2: like all the other Italian immigrants. Now you bought your
Speaker 2: own house, and that's what your whole neighborhood is it's
Speaker 2: a bunch of your people, you know, Italian Catholics with
Speaker 2: an Italian Catholic church like in the center of the
Speaker 2: neighborhood that everybody goes to and it's a center of
Speaker 2: community life. And you know, all of this, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, you get this massive influx of
Speaker 2: people from the South who again are just very you know,
Speaker 2: their their habits were It's not just black people. Like again,
Speaker 2: you go back to the Okis, you know out in California,
Speaker 2: everybody saw them as disruptive and they they were. You
Speaker 2: had the big apple Achian migration up into some of
Speaker 2: the Midwestern cities like Detroit in the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 2: and it's the same thing. They were disruptive. You know,
Speaker 2: these are rural Southerners had more of like an honor culture,
Speaker 2: you know, so if you if they you know, you
Speaker 2: insult them, you're more likely to get punched in the
Speaker 2: face than reported to the principle. And the blacks were
Speaker 2: like that too, you know, they had that mentality, and
Speaker 2: then they had some racial resentment and animosity built on
Speaker 2: top of that. So you got all these people who
Speaker 2: lived in these neighborhoods who you know, they all scattered,
Speaker 2: they all moved out to the suburbs which were being
Speaker 2: thrown up after the war. And now you know, you
Speaker 2: don't live in a parish community you're in you're a
Speaker 2: second generation Italian and over here is like a wasp
Speaker 2: neighbor and over there is you know, just your whole
Speaker 2: neighborhood's mixed, and your kids go to a public school
Speaker 2: that's not primarily anything, and all of those people, the
Speaker 2: exception of Jews, you know, kind of stopped being Irish
Speaker 2: or Italian or anything like that and became white people.
Speaker 2: And you know, that's really kind of the shape that
Speaker 2: politics has kept ever since then, where you know, now
Speaker 2: there's more more more people other than blacks who are
Speaker 2: non white people in the country, whereas back then it
Speaker 2: was like pretty much ninety percent to ten percent of
Speaker 2: smattering of others. And so you have like the you know,
Speaker 2: the very phrase people of color. I mean, that's something
Speaker 2: that divides the world into two halves. You got white
Speaker 2: people and you got everybody else. And you know, again
Speaker 2: it's it's it's a really interesting thing to read about.
Speaker 2: How you know, the the we talk about like segregation
Speaker 2: in the northern cities, and we think, like of racial
Speaker 2: segregation in the northern cities, that this was like just
Speaker 2: this profound evil that had to be eradicated and changed.
Speaker 2: The people who lived in those cities. The way they
Speaker 2: sawt is, the city's always been segregated. You know, the
Speaker 2: Italians live over the air, the Irish live over the air,
Speaker 2: the Jews live over there in between, you know, there's
Speaker 2: mixed neighborhoods and so forth. But like that's how it
Speaker 2: has always worked. And you know, so they they just
Speaker 2: didn't under they didn't understand like why where this push
Speaker 2: was coming from, you know, to break up their neighborhoods
Speaker 2: like this, and uh yeah, I mean, and it's you know,
Speaker 2: the consequences of the Great Migration, the problems that resulted
Speaker 2: from it, you know, et cetera, like have pretty pretty
Speaker 2: much defined domestic politics in the US since the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century, so like since the First World War. I mean,
Speaker 2: just there's been other issues, obviously, but the overriding issue
Speaker 2: in the country domestically speaking, has been the racial question
Speaker 2: ever since then. And it's you know, and that's a
Speaker 2: result of like people, you know, people have this idea
Speaker 2: that because like you know, New York City or something
Speaker 2: was run by by white people that they just didn't
Speaker 2: care about the black people that were in those cities,
Speaker 2: and that's you know, why they didn't get social services
Speaker 2: or why their schools were bad or whatever. That is
Speaker 2: just not true at least in most of the big cities.
Speaker 2: I mean, when you look at the amount of attention
Speaker 2: and in local politics that was spent on how do
Speaker 2: we fix this, the amount of money that was spent,
Speaker 2: you could really get like the Great Society Programs in
Speaker 2: sixty five was really like an attempt. It was like
Speaker 2: it was almost a bailout of the cities by the
Speaker 2: federal government. They were like, we need to take some
Speaker 2: of the burden and cost that this is imposing on
Speaker 2: these cities up to the federal level, because you know,
Speaker 2: we're better equipped to handle it. And it's really been
Speaker 2: the case for you know, one hundred years, is this,
Speaker 2: you know, is what to do about it? How to
Speaker 2: fix it? And we've gone through different permutations, right where
Speaker 2: you go through the nineteen sixties and you know, we
Speaker 2: can maybe talk about this next but you know, by
Speaker 2: you get but by the time you get up to
Speaker 2: the late sixties, you have a split between the Jewish
Speaker 2: and Black activist communities.
Speaker 1: First, that's exactly where I wanted to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, So for several reasons, you know, partly
Speaker 2: because you know, there were real resentments that resulted from
Speaker 2: you know, you got to you just have to put
Speaker 2: yourself like you go to act like the Freedom Summer,
Speaker 2: and you read about you read the criticisms of some
Speaker 2: and like Stokely Carmichael, you have all these Jewish students
Speaker 2: who come down from the University of Wisconsin and you know,
Speaker 2: Harvard and Columbia and everything. Graduate students, you know, taking
Speaker 2: their summers off to go work in the Freedom Summer
Speaker 2: and they go down there and for every one of them,
Speaker 2: you know, there's thirty black activists who are down there
Speaker 2: in the South community members who were part of this
Speaker 2: part of this thing. And they come down a lot
Speaker 2: of these people, you know, they're illiterate or they're certainly
Speaker 2: not educated, you know at all. They don't have any
Speaker 2: experience running movements or organizations like these, you know, university
Speaker 2: activists do. And they would come in and you know,
Speaker 2: like Stokely Carmichael's the big one who he you know,
Speaker 2: he says these people are just pushy, they're condescending, they're
Speaker 2: coming in like trying to I mean, like the SNICK
Speaker 2: Student Non Violent Coordinating Committe, which is the biggest black
Speaker 2: youth movement in the country back then. You know, they
Speaker 2: when they were asking for white students to come down
Speaker 2: and participate, they he didn't want any more than one
Speaker 2: hundred to come down, and they screened the ones that
Speaker 2: came in for what SNICK called They didn't want anybody
Speaker 2: with a John Brown complex. You know, somebody who was
Speaker 2: coming in to save the Southern Negro They didn't want that.
Speaker 2: And you know, word kind of spread what was happening,
Speaker 2: and they got way more than one hundred people, and
Speaker 2: a lot of them had the John Brown complex, and
Speaker 2: that really did kind of happen. It created that resentment
Speaker 2: and as you start to get into the mid sixties, well,
Speaker 2: I think in sixty seven is when The Crisis of
Speaker 2: the Negro Intellectual was published. In that book, I mean,
Speaker 2: he gets pretty direct about how you know, he talks
Speaker 2: about how there's too much Jewish involvement in our movements
Speaker 2: and we're never going to get anywhere until black people
Speaker 2: run the black rights movements. And so there's that and
Speaker 2: then also in nineteen sixty seven, that's when the Sixth
Speaker 2: Day War happened and the global left kind of you know,
Speaker 2: on Moss turned on Israel, and you know, the by
Speaker 2: that point, the the sort of integrationist Martin Luther King
Speaker 2: angle on the black rights movement had really surrendered the
Speaker 2: field to the black power movement that very much identified
Speaker 2: with the Third World. You know, they the rhetoric back
Speaker 2: then was, you know, the French or attacking the Arabs
Speaker 2: in Algeria, were attacking the Vietnamese over in Vietnam, and
Speaker 2: you know right here in America, like we're part of
Speaker 2: all that. When they identified with the Vietnamese, the Algerians
Speaker 2: and so forth as part of the Third World, that
Speaker 2: they were this captive population in America, right And which
Speaker 2: was you know, which was not the approach of the
Speaker 2: of like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference guys. I mean,
Speaker 2: they were very American if they were anything, you know,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's again, it's another thing that's understandable.
Speaker 2: You go, you know, if you're if you were a
Speaker 2: black person in America from the end of the Civil
Speaker 2: War on up until you know, around the fifties or sixties,
Speaker 2: in the twentieth century. You know, your history is not
Speaker 2: really something to write home about. You know, it's something
Speaker 2: that you've been subjugated, You've been second class citizens, You've
Speaker 2: been discriminated against. And you know, now even where you're
Speaker 2: not discriminated against, you're the poorest people in the city.
Speaker 2: And like it's just and so when and then even
Speaker 2: back before slavery, like nobody had ever even heard of
Speaker 2: like an independent black African country. You know, they've been
Speaker 2: colonized for hundreds and hundreds of years, right, and so
Speaker 2: when you started to get these post colonial nationalist movements
Speaker 2: in Africa, you know, uh, leaders like Patrice Lamumba, you know,
Speaker 2: all these were they were idolized in the black community,
Speaker 2: especially in Harlem. And you can understand why. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's like it's you know, you see it today when
Speaker 2: the Black Panther movie comes out, right, that will kind
Speaker 2: of stuff and people laugh at it. I'm laughing a
Speaker 2: little bit now, but I sympathize with it. You know,
Speaker 2: these are a people who you know, Tyrone Jackson is
Speaker 2: not an African name. You know, Tyrone is a county
Speaker 2: in Ireland, Jackson, you know, and so these people lost everything,
Speaker 2: they lost their identity, they lost their religion, they lost
Speaker 2: you know, everything that kind of tied them together, and
Speaker 2: so they're trying to put something back together. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think you see this white people a lot these days,
Speaker 2: because white people have been so deracinated and lost their
Speaker 2: own any sense of their own history or heritage that
Speaker 2: you see people going. I mean, you know, whether it's
Speaker 2: a neo pagan movement or just there, there's a million
Speaker 2: different varieties, and I sympathize with all of them, including
Speaker 2: you know, Wakanda forever, because people need an identity, you know.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so you know, when anyway I was talking
Speaker 2: about Israel Six Day War happens, the global left turns
Speaker 2: on Israel and they start to be viewed as you know,
Speaker 2: not this ragtag state, like refugee state, you know, of
Speaker 2: these people who've been persecuted and carved out a homeland
Speaker 2: for themselves. The global left really started to look at
Speaker 2: them as you know, the front line of white imperialism
Speaker 2: in the colored countries in the global South. And you know,
Speaker 2: by that point again, you know, the third world is
Speaker 2: kind of black militant view of things had really taken
Speaker 2: over in America, and so they went along with that,
Speaker 2: you know, and they absorbed that anti Zionism and that
Speaker 2: really was like the big break because back then, even
Speaker 2: like liberal Jews like today you have, you know now
Speaker 2: that Lekud has been in power for basically forty years straight.
Speaker 2: You know, liberal Jews in America are kind of, at
Speaker 2: least when they're not in a moment of crisis, are
Speaker 2: kind of like touch and go about their relationship with Israel, right,
Speaker 2: But back then that wasn't the case. You know, other
Speaker 2: than some extreme far left Jews like the ones who
Speaker 2: you know made up the Weatherman Crew and everything, which
Speaker 2: were very small in number, all Jews in America were
Speaker 2: affectionate toward toward Israel, and you know, for obvious reasons.
Speaker 2: And so when black people started turning very you know,
Speaker 2: very violently against Israel, that was a huge break. And
Speaker 2: that happened, you know, in sixty seven. That's when SNICK
Speaker 2: expelled all of its white members. And at that point
Speaker 2: those white members were still seventy or eighty percent Jews,
Speaker 2: and they were really expelling their Jewish members, and you know,
Speaker 2: there was actually like at the SNICK conference in sixty seven,
Speaker 2: there was some of the Panthers who were there insisted
Speaker 2: on a vote that the organization take, you know, a
Speaker 2: negative position towards Zionism and Israel. And of course the
Speaker 2: white students protested and stuff, and they expelled them, they
Speaker 2: just kicked them out, and so that starts to happen.
Speaker 2: And I tend to think that, and I may be
Speaker 2: over I may be kind of imposing my own view
Speaker 2: on this. But you know, by the time you get
Speaker 2: you get up to sixty eight and Nixon is elected,
Speaker 2: and you know, he turns this again, and this question
Speaker 2: that really has been the dominant domestic question of the
Speaker 2: last hundred years in America, the racial question. He I said,
Speaker 2: we go through permutations and like variations of how it works.
Speaker 2: We had been in like a period of like how
Speaker 2: do we solve this in a way that brings these
Speaker 2: people into the fold and helps solve all these problems.
Speaker 2: Nixon came in and by that point people were so
Speaker 2: fed up with the riots, with the crime, with you know,
Speaker 2: just everything that it for From that period like on,
Speaker 2: like Nixon approached it as this is primarily a law
Speaker 2: enforcement problem. This isn't a problem for social workers, this
Speaker 2: isn't a problem for you know, psychology. This is this
Speaker 2: is a law enforcement problem, and that's what we're going
Speaker 2: to focus on. So all the Great Society stuff, everything
Speaker 2: that all went away. The cities, of course, had become
Speaker 2: dependent on that federal money from the Great Society by
Speaker 2: that point, and all the cities just you know, they
Speaker 2: were already in bad shape. But you know, you get
Speaker 2: up to the late sixties and they just absolutely fall apart,
Speaker 2: and you see this steady rise in crime through the seventies,
Speaker 2: eighties and up into the early nineties that I think,
Speaker 2: you know, people today, like younger people today, like I
Speaker 2: lived in South LA in nineteen ninety two. I wasn't
Speaker 2: in a riot zone or anything, but I was close enough,
Speaker 2: and I went to school with kids who were. And
Speaker 2: you know, people don't realize that. For example, like the
Speaker 2: in the three years before the La riots, three years
Speaker 2: there were over sixty five hundred drive by shootings in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles County. They didn't all result in deaths or anything,
Speaker 2: but that's like five a day, okay. And when you
Speaker 2: think about the fact that like ninety percent of LA
Speaker 2: had zero drive by shootings, you know, these are all
Speaker 2: taking place in a very tightly concentrated area that is
Speaker 2: as dangerous as you know, the worst part of El
Speaker 2: Salvador before you know, the current president took over, I guess,
Speaker 2: and so you know, people were looking at that and
Speaker 2: they just sort of, you know, the white people who
Speaker 2: had moved out to the suburbs to get away from
Speaker 2: all this, you know, they just didn't want to hear
Speaker 2: about it. They just were like, keep it over there,
Speaker 2: I don't care, and unless it starts to spill out,
Speaker 2: like just have the police deal with it. And it
Speaker 2: gets to the point where again you get up to
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety one, nineteen eighty nine, ninety ninety one, and
Speaker 2: then culminating with the La riots, you know, you have
Speaker 2: like I think New York City today, or I'll use
Speaker 2: Los Angeles because I know that one. Los Angeles had
Speaker 2: like three hundred and fifty murders last year. It had
Speaker 2: like eighteen hundred murders in nineteen ninety one. I mean,
Speaker 2: insane levels of crime and like and it was you know,
Speaker 2: if you look at like the crime statistics, I know
Speaker 2: people always talk about that. You know, you can look
Speaker 2: at it and say, well, yeah, like it's only half
Speaker 2: I mean, it's certainly disproportionate to the population. Like the
Speaker 2: number of murders committed by blacks. Half is a lot
Speaker 2: when you're only fourteen percent of the population or whatever
Speaker 2: it is. But you know, it's it's a very different
Speaker 2: problem than the other half, which are like white or
Speaker 2: Latino murders or something, because you know, like the white
Speaker 2: murders in the country. It's like, all right, this guy
Speaker 2: over in Great Falls, Montana found out his wife was
Speaker 2: cheating on him with this guy and he killed him.
Speaker 2: And then over here in like, you know, northern California,
Speaker 2: there was this white guy who got into a fight
Speaker 2: at a bar and killed the guy.
Speaker 1: Whatever.
Speaker 2: This distributed thing whereas you know, and it can't be
Speaker 2: addressed or solved with the same tools that you need
Speaker 2: when you have this very tight concentration of just total chaos,
Speaker 2: which is what the black neighborhoods had become by the
Speaker 2: early nineties, and you get to like, you know, ninety two,
Speaker 2: like the La riots really were like a kind of
Speaker 2: a last straw kind of moment where people had just
Speaker 2: had enough. And then when you get up to the
Speaker 2: second kind of last straw following right on that, on
Speaker 2: the heels of that was I think people don't today
Speaker 2: don't recognize how important this was that, you know, the
Speaker 2: whole country's attention was glued to the oj Simpson trial
Speaker 2: while that was going on. Everybody was watching that. And
Speaker 2: when it became this situation where you had this guy
Speaker 2: who obviously killed these people, who gets off because you know,
Speaker 2: one of the investigators may have made a comment or
Speaker 2: something at some point in the past unrelated to him
Speaker 2: when that happened. And then after the trial when he
Speaker 2: gets acquitted and you have the news cameras out in
Speaker 2: front of the courthouse and you have just crowds of
Speaker 2: black people out there cheering, we won, We won. I
Speaker 2: really think that was like a major breaking point where
Speaker 2: people were like, you know what, we're We're not dealing
Speaker 2: with this anymore. And you saw a huge turn, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think if you go back to like
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five, there was something like four hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand people incarcerated in the United States, and it's
Speaker 2: like two million now. And when you count like the
Speaker 2: people who were on probation, in parole and in some
Speaker 2: level of the criminal justice system, I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a uh. I mean, crime has gone down for
Speaker 2: a reason, and it's gone down because we you know,
Speaker 2: and this might be an ugly thing to say, but
Speaker 2: I mean it went down because we you know, put
Speaker 2: a good percentage of the worst people in the black
Speaker 2: underclass in prison or in some level of the criminal
Speaker 2: justice system. I mean, that's what happened. And it's unfortunate,
Speaker 2: I guess, because there's a lot of downstream effects that
Speaker 2: you know, that that causes that are not good. But
Speaker 2: you know, this was a response to a crisis. You know, again,
Speaker 2: you had five drive by shootings a day in la
Speaker 2: over the three years before the ninety two riots, and
Speaker 2: it kind of stayed that way, like all the way
Speaker 2: up until I guess, like Trayvon, you know, or maybe Ferguson,
Speaker 2: when everything started to change again and you start to
Speaker 2: get this nineteen sixties kind of version of how these
Speaker 2: things are approached. And you know, I hope that we
Speaker 2: don't have to go through the same process they went
Speaker 2: through in the sixties, which is that everything just falls
Speaker 2: apart for twenty or twenty five years and gets worse
Speaker 2: and worse, and the city has become unlivable until finally, people,
Speaker 2: you know, decide to throw out John Lindsay and replace
Speaker 2: him with Ed Koch or Juliani or something. But you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be it's gonna be interesting to see how
Speaker 2: that does develop.
Speaker 1: Actually, well, I think yeah, the one thing I'm very
Speaker 1: interested in seeing going forward is just how Black and Jewish,
Speaker 1: how they relate to one another. Still. I mean green Blat,
Speaker 1: Jonathan green Blatt, the president of the ADEL. I don't
Speaker 1: say this because I don't like I say this because
Speaker 1: it's just obvious. He's not the smartest person who ever
Speaker 1: has headed the ADL. His tweets are just insane. I mean,
Speaker 1: the guy is he's pandering to the black community. I've
Speaker 1: seen many many we're in this together, we're in the
Speaker 1: same boat. And then you just see one comment after another.
Speaker 1: Who owned those boats? Talking about the slave ships? Who
Speaker 1: owned those boats? Who owned those boats? Why were the
Speaker 1: slave markets closed on Saturday? And it's like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: if a billionaire black man is asking questions, and then
Speaker 1: you have Dave Chappelle go on you know, Saturday Alive
Speaker 1: and say there's two words you can't say together, the well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's gonna it's interesting. It's because if those
Speaker 1: two groups start going to war with one another again,
Speaker 1: and of course this is only on social media now,
Speaker 1: which is probably a good thing because it's not in
Speaker 1: the streets yet, but it's the future is very is
Speaker 1: going to be very interesting when it comes to those
Speaker 1: two groups.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because because one of those is going to say
Speaker 2: that back sorry, in the sixties of one of the
Speaker 2: things I was just going to say, and I'll be
Speaker 2: quick with this one, is that I suspect that the
Speaker 2: loss of Jewish support for the black movement around sixty
Speaker 2: seven sixty eight is like that was a critical part
Speaker 2: of their political support that they really needed to keep
Speaker 2: like a Nixon from going ham on them and stuff.
Speaker 2: And so that's one of the things that I could
Speaker 2: see happening. If there is like a big break, then
Speaker 2: we could maybe go back, you know, in a direction
Speaker 2: of addressing this as a law enforcement problem and kind
Speaker 2: of like more of a nineteen nineties version of addressing
Speaker 2: black crime in the cities and stuff, because they you know,
Speaker 2: the pretty much unanimous support of politically active Jews for
Speaker 2: the black cause. I mean, it's I think that's a
Speaker 2: critical element of the support they need to keep the
Speaker 2: rest of the society from you know, fixing the problem
Speaker 2: in a very different way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, correct, And if they lose that support now, and
Speaker 1: you know, with it seems wherever any major institution, you
Speaker 1: look at, any major industry, there are Jews at the
Speaker 1: top of it. That money. If that money and that
Speaker 1: support stops going into the Black community, then we are well,
Speaker 1: I guess said. The only word I can use is interesting,
Speaker 1: because it's very hard at this point to try to
Speaker 1: figure out exactly how that would play out, considering so
Speaker 1: much of our lives are and so much debate is
Speaker 1: online now instead of at city hall, on the steps
Speaker 1: of city hall, or in the streets in a march.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, yeah, you know, I guess The last thing
Speaker 2: I'll say is I think that, like, you know, black
Speaker 2: people in America right now are really kind of on
Speaker 2: the edge of a precipice. I think in a way
Speaker 2: that they haven't been you know, really ever, just because
Speaker 2: you know, the changing demographics of this country, you know,
Speaker 2: due to immigration. I mean, there's a lot of people
Speaker 2: and pretty soon enough, probably a majority of people in
Speaker 2: this country, certainly a majority of people in the cities
Speaker 2: who don't care about slavery, they don't care about Jim Crow,
Speaker 2: they don't identify any of that with themselves. You see
Speaker 2: it in Los Angeles specifically, where you know, you have
Speaker 2: black what used to be black neighborhoods, like back in
Speaker 2: the early nineties, Compton and stuff, those are all Latino
Speaker 2: neighborhoods now. And that transition was not a peaceful one.
Speaker 2: The Latino gangs drove those people out. They firebombed apartment buildings,
Speaker 2: they were just random murders of black people trying to
Speaker 2: drive them out. And you know, the black gangs and
Speaker 2: the black community in general doesn't have the numbers or
Speaker 2: the organization that the Latinos do, and so they got
Speaker 2: you know, when all of the Latino on black violence
Speaker 2: started to subside around like the early to mid two thousands,
Speaker 2: people looked at that as like they celebrated as a victory,
Speaker 2: but it was really just because that job of cleansing
Speaker 2: had been accomplished by that point, you know, and so
Speaker 2: it died down. There's you know, you have situations where
Speaker 2: these things would be going on and Latino local politicians
Speaker 2: in LA would be providing cover for these Latino gangs
Speaker 2: that were driving these people out. They were you know,
Speaker 2: there was a situation in LA where there was this hospital.
Speaker 2: Actually it's a reverse situation of like the thing that
Speaker 2: you know, people were complaining about in the sixties Black
Speaker 2: people were coplaying about in the sixties, which is, you
Speaker 2: had a neighborhood that used to be black. There was
Speaker 2: a hospital there, and most of the employees there were
Speaker 2: black because they were from the community. Over a pretty
Speaker 2: short period of time, that neighborhood became predominantly Latino. Still
Speaker 2: a bunch of black people working at the at the hospital,
Speaker 2: and the Latinos there. The Latino community successfully used affirmative
Speaker 2: action laws to say there shouldn't there, there needs to be
Speaker 2: more Latinos here, and so they used it to drive
Speaker 2: black people out of these good jobs. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, for all the problems that you know, black
Speaker 2: people have had to face over the over the over
Speaker 2: the years in America, when you got up to the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, for all the trouble and all the problems,
Speaker 2: you know, white America as a whole, you know, had
Speaker 2: kind of come around to the idea that like, Okay,
Speaker 2: there needs to be some kind of a resolution of this,
Speaker 2: Like you know, these people have been enslaved, they have
Speaker 2: been second class citizens, and you know, we got to
Speaker 2: do something here, Like something needs to be done and
Speaker 2: people like really were ready for that conversation in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties in the America that's coming. You know that
Speaker 2: are nobody is going to care about that. Nobody will
Speaker 2: care they can you know, talk about historical oppression or
Speaker 2: whatever it is. And you know, I think maybe actually,
Speaker 2: like the uh, maybe the tipping point, like something you
Speaker 2: can probably look for is when you start to see
Speaker 2: a lot of Jews really start to take the side
Speaker 2: of Latinos when they come into conflict with Blacks, because
Speaker 2: that's sort of like sticking your finger in the wind
Speaker 2: and seeing which way it's blowing, you know, And so
Speaker 2: you know, I feel bad for you know, I feel
Speaker 2: bad for black people in this country right now in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways because you know, I look at
Speaker 2: something like Wakanda Forever or Black Lives Matter, and it's
Speaker 2: so ridiculous in so many ways. But these people are
Speaker 2: in like a pretty desperate situation and their future does
Speaker 2: not look good, and you know, I look at those things,
Speaker 2: it's like almost last gasps of a of an attempt
Speaker 2: at creating some kind of a coherent identity and you
Speaker 2: know a certain amount of political cohesion that'll help them
Speaker 2: kind of withstand and you know, just help them survive
Speaker 2: in a country that is going to be completely defined
Speaker 2: by ethnic politics again, you know, where people who are
Speaker 2: unrelated to any of our history of race relations in
Speaker 2: this country are really running the show. And it's not
Speaker 2: going to be you know, it's not gonna be very good.
Speaker 2: I mean, talk about the Great Migration. Over the last
Speaker 2: fifteen twenty years or so, there's been a reverse Great migration.
Speaker 2: You know, the Blacks are getting driven out of the
Speaker 2: cities because of rising real estate prices and everything, and
Speaker 2: they're moving back to the South, and in some ways,
Speaker 2: I mean that's kind of a you know, it's kind
Speaker 2: of a tragic thing, right. You have like that uh,
Speaker 2: what's that Midnight Train to Georgia? You know that old
Speaker 2: song and it's about like this black dude who went
Speaker 2: out to I think Los Angeles, Hollywood or something and
Speaker 2: just couldn't really make it and so he ended up
Speaker 2: going back to Georgia, taking the midnight train back to Georgia.
Speaker 2: And it's like kind of a sad song. And uh,
Speaker 2: that's happening like on mass now, you know. And so yeah,
Speaker 2: it'll be very interesting, it'll be very interesting to see
Speaker 2: how it develops. But I'm not optimistic.
Speaker 1: Plug anything you want.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't have anything you come. I mean I
Speaker 2: have a podcast Martyr Maide focuses primarily on like like
Speaker 2: broader his historical topics, and then uh, I've got a
Speaker 2: substack martyrmade dot substack dot com where I talk about
Speaker 2: things that are you know, more current usually So yeah, sorry,
Speaker 2: I don't like self promotion. I'm not good at it.
Speaker 1: I need to get better at it. I've been doing
Speaker 1: this long enough that you think I would be a
Speaker 1: lot better at it. But Darryl, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks man.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pequnana Show.
Speaker 1: I'm here with Darryl Cooper once again. How are you doing,
Speaker 1: Daryl good Man. It's always good to be here with you.
Speaker 1: Thanks well, thank you for joining me today. This is
Speaker 1: a week where an announcement came down that for those
Speaker 1: of us who actually know who runs foreign policy and
Speaker 1: who influences foreign policy, it was a huge announcement that
Speaker 1: Victoria Nolan was stepping down as I think was she undersecretary?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, people like her, you know, their titles come
Speaker 2: and go, but she's sort of one of those undead
Speaker 2: creatures in Washington that no matter who's the Republican Democrat,
Speaker 2: Dick Cheney, you know, Joe Biden, doesn't matter her like,
Speaker 2: she kind of always hangs around and they maintain that
Speaker 2: consistency of policy over the course of you know, many
Speaker 2: administrations that has not ended well. And you know, hopefully
Speaker 2: the fact that she's stepping down, I mean, she's going
Speaker 2: to land on her feet. Don't worry about that. I'm
Speaker 2: sure she'll have a nice gig at Harvard or something soon.
Speaker 2: But it may signal that the policy that she's headed
Speaker 2: up in Eastern Europe since you know, she was hired
Speaker 2: to her current position in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, when
Speaker 2: might Dan happened, that maybe we're deciding that we've got
Speaker 2: to accept defeat on that front and move on. So
Speaker 2: hopefully that's the case.
Speaker 1: When you see someone like her step down, someone who's
Speaker 1: such a permanent fixture in what you would call the
Speaker 1: administrative state, really what's your reaction.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there's a lot of sort of musical
Speaker 2: chairs going on with the like this, and so you
Speaker 2: have to look at who she's replaced by, and you know,
Speaker 2: the guy that they brought in I don't know a
Speaker 2: whole lot about him except that he used to work
Speaker 2: for Strobe Talbot, and you know, Strobe Talbot was one
Speaker 2: of Clinton's main Russia guys back in the nineties. And he,
Speaker 2: you know, he's not a he's not an idiologue like
Speaker 2: someone like like Victoria Newland in her set is like
Speaker 2: with regard to Russia. He's more pragmatic. He was always
Speaker 2: somebody though who ah. You know, when he he may
Speaker 2: have thought something was a bad idea or he was
Speaker 2: pushing for something he thought was a good idea. But
Speaker 2: when Clinton told him, no, you're going to go do
Speaker 2: this and endorse it fully and push it on everybody else,
Speaker 2: he would follow orders and go do it. So you know,
Speaker 2: he he uh all all things told, I'd rather have
Speaker 2: a pragnant, pragmatist like that in there than somebody like Newland.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's hard to read these things because again,
Speaker 2: like you know, new Ones not leaving the foreign policy scene.
Speaker 2: She's gonna go get hooked up at Brookings or CSIS
Speaker 2: and you know, teach classes at Georgetown about how we
Speaker 2: ought to conduct their foreign policy. So you know, it's
Speaker 2: not some giant victory. But as far as the immediate
Speaker 2: policy with regard to Russian and Ukraine. It hopefully signals,
Speaker 2: you know, an improvement in that area.
Speaker 1: When you look at all of this. I was listening
Speaker 1: to Scott Rider the other day, was saying he believes
Speaker 1: that as many as four hundred thousand Ukrainian men could
Speaker 1: be dead, and what they're judging that bias. They're looking
Speaker 1: at obituaries. They're kunt of obituaries for the last two
Speaker 1: years that have appeared. He says, another one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: could be missing. Do those numbers seem in the ballpark
Speaker 1: of what you've been looking at?
Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously it's hard to say, but you know, when
Speaker 2: I look at you, I think these numbers came from
Speaker 2: Ukraine or if not Ukraine, US officials, but one of
Speaker 2: the two that the average age of a Ukrainian infantryman
Speaker 2: on the field right now is forty three years old.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, that's like Germans in February of
Speaker 2: nineteen forty five numbers. You know, because you know, again
Speaker 2: it doesn't mean that everybody on the battlefield is forty three.
Speaker 2: Some of them are twenty five, But they got fifty
Speaker 2: five and sixty year old guys out there.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: And if you're scrape in the bottom of the barrel
Speaker 2: like that, then you know a country of pre war
Speaker 2: was it thirty five forty million people or something, and
Speaker 2: you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like that, then
Speaker 2: you're hurting for manpower, no question about it. And you'd
Speaker 2: have to kill a whole hell of a lot of
Speaker 2: Ukrainian men to get them to that point. So you know,
Speaker 2: whether it's four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand, or
Speaker 2: it's a lot, it's a hell of a lot.
Speaker 1: Go back to Maidan and what is your take on it?
Speaker 1: What's your take on why? Why a coup took place?
Speaker 1: Why the yep, everybody wants to talk about the house.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants to talk about snipers here there. I've read,
Speaker 1: I've read it all. To me, it's always the why.
Speaker 1: So why you know?
Speaker 2: I uh? I read this anecdote from the former ci
Speaker 2: director and Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who you know, obviously
Speaker 2: is a swamp creature, but uh, relative to his colleagues,
Speaker 2: you know, is more sensible, I think than most of
Speaker 2: the people who've been in those positions for quite a while.
Speaker 2: And he was asked about our difference in approach toward
Speaker 2: Russia and the Soviet Union versus our approach to China
Speaker 2: over over the years, and this was, you know, a
Speaker 2: little this was a handful of years ago before a
Speaker 2: lot of people have started to talk about, you know,
Speaker 2: our need to start focusing on China more. But you know,
Speaker 2: he said it was very interesting because you go back
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine and you have these two communist powers
Speaker 2: and one of them agrees to let their empire go voluntarily,
Speaker 2: agrees to have a bloodless democratic revolution, essentially agrees to
Speaker 2: end the Cold War without a fight. The other side
Speaker 2: had Tianum and Square, and you know, I know there's
Speaker 2: sort of some revisionism going on about that, and I
Speaker 2: haven't really sort of through any of that yet, but
Speaker 2: there's something going on in nineteen eighty nine in China
Speaker 2: that was, you know, trying to put pressure on that regime,
Speaker 2: and they squashed it. And from that point on, you know,
Speaker 2: we've pretty much been treating China like a good buddy
Speaker 2: and somebody we can trust and work with and so forth,
Speaker 2: and we've been just like rabid dogs when it comes
Speaker 2: to Russia, at least after they stopped taking orders from US,
Speaker 2: in the nineteen nineties, and so Gates was asked about this.
Speaker 2: He says, you know, it is interesting, he said, if
Speaker 2: you go back to like World War Two, this is
Speaker 2: hard for us to even really imagine in these days
Speaker 2: because we're just we've grown up in the Empire. You know,
Speaker 2: when the OSS was stood up, when America came into
Speaker 2: the war, like, we had no presence overseas, we had
Speaker 2: no intelligence presence overseas, we had nothing, to the point
Speaker 2: where Dulles was actually bringing in recent immigrants from like
Speaker 2: Holland and stuff to ask them to draw diagrams of
Speaker 2: like where the port is and stuff. That's where our
Speaker 2: you know, our foreign intelligence presence was at the time.
Speaker 2: And so you know, you start out like that, we
Speaker 2: have to stand up a Soviet Union desk at this
Speaker 2: new intelligence agency, or you know, we have to beef
Speaker 2: up the Soviet desk at the State Department. We have
Speaker 2: to build out these institutions now to deal with these
Speaker 2: these things that are emerging. And he said, when we
Speaker 2: started doing that with China, the people that we hired
Speaker 2: to fill all the seats at the China desk, whether
Speaker 2: it's State Department or DD or the intelligence agencies mostly
Speaker 2: like overwhelmingly they were the children of missionaries who had
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time in China, and they liked China.
Speaker 2: They like Chinese people, they like Chinese culture, and they
Speaker 2: sort of saw their role as you know, facilitating peaceful
Speaker 2: mediation between their country and this country that they had
Speaker 2: a lot of respect for with regard to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: When we started doing that, and even before that, when
Speaker 2: we had like, you know, our diplomatic corps in the
Speaker 2: Russian Empire before the Soviets, small as it was, wasn't
Speaker 2: you know, ah, we filled that up almost entirely with
Speaker 2: non Russian refugees who had come over who did not
Speaker 2: like Russians, they did not like you know, and they
Speaker 2: saw their role as helping the United States, United States
Speaker 2: fight this beast, or using the United States to fight
Speaker 2: this beast, and that you know, Gates said that when
Speaker 2: you start, you know, bureaucracies have a lot of sort of, uh,
Speaker 2: just inertia behind them, and so when you start out
Speaker 2: with a certain attitude, a certain approach, it stays that
Speaker 2: way for you know, unless you have some sort of
Speaker 2: conscious cleanup of it. It's going to stay that way
Speaker 2: because everybody there's like it. You hire somebody new, they
Speaker 2: get integrated into that culture, the old people retire, you
Speaker 2: bring in new people, and it just maintains that culture
Speaker 2: and that approach. And you know, I think that that's
Speaker 2: something we've really seen pick up, you know, in spades
Speaker 2: since the Soviet Union fell, or really since like I
Speaker 2: guess the eighties is when we started taking in like
Speaker 2: a lot of refugees, and then in the nineties, like
Speaker 2: a whole lot where you know, if you and not
Speaker 2: only refugees, just foreign nationals and you know, recent immigrants
Speaker 2: and stuff. If you look back at the nineteen nineties
Speaker 2: for example, like whether you're talking about Madeline Albright, whether
Speaker 2: you're talking about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in
Speaker 2: the in the mid nineties under Clinton, General Salakashvili, just
Speaker 2: across the board, you see the same thing you saw
Speaker 2: during the first Trump impeachment hearing it's just one emigrat
Speaker 2: after another from Eastern Europe or from from that region
Speaker 2: going up, and you're like, you know, you kind of
Speaker 2: realize that these people are they're bringing their priors with
Speaker 2: them when they come to the United States and join
Speaker 2: up for that, and you know, you can understand what look.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you need somebody to work intelligence or
Speaker 2: or in your diplomatic corps for uh, you know, Nigeria,
Speaker 2: the child of a Nigerian immigrant is probably a good
Speaker 2: candidate to do that. You know, they understand the culture
Speaker 2: and can bring that to it. But there's down there's
Speaker 2: downsides to it, you know, especially when the other side
Speaker 2: really comes with a chip on its shoulder.
Speaker 1: I guess listening to what you just said, I get
Speaker 1: some people could say, well, because they chose people who
Speaker 1: were more sympathetic to China, maybe that's why we have
Speaker 1: so many China problems now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean for sure, although I would say our
Speaker 2: China problems really didn't start until you know, the late
Speaker 2: nineties or so. I mean when we when we decided
Speaker 2: to let them into the WTO and just kind of
Speaker 2: through that open you know, before that. And this really
Speaker 2: goes to like US hoeign policy as a whole. You know,
Speaker 2: if you go back to even the even the eighties,
Speaker 2: I'll say, up through the eighties even you know, you
Speaker 2: still had this sort of this sort of old school
Speaker 2: wasp attitude, post warlike kind of wasp attitude where you know,
Speaker 2: you had guys like James Baker. You had these people
Speaker 2: who had enough heft in gravitas, not just in Washington,
Speaker 2: but just sort of in general that they could control
Speaker 2: the fanatics and hold them back a little bit and
Speaker 2: overrule them a bit. You know, you get up into
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: and you know, a lot of those people really started
Speaker 2: to fade away, to the point where you get up
Speaker 2: to the Bush administration and like, you know, our foreign
Speaker 2: policy is just totally hijacked by a bunch of second
Speaker 2: and third generation neo cons that somebody like George Kennon
Speaker 2: never would have even allowed into his office, you know,
Speaker 2: and so that that sort of consistent hand on the
Speaker 2: steering wheel leadership at the very, very very top level
Speaker 2: has sort of evaporated. You know, it really doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: There is like a there's a ruling class, but it's
Speaker 2: sort of amorphous, and people come and go, and you
Speaker 2: can come in and be cast out. And it's not
Speaker 2: this you know, it's not the Sons of Cincinnatis anymore,
Speaker 2: you know, the children of the American Revolution or something.
Speaker 2: And so you know, there's nobody who has like a
Speaker 2: real sense of proprietorship over the country and feels like,
Speaker 2: you know, by thinking about the long term future of
Speaker 2: the country, they're looking after the long term future of
Speaker 2: their own grandkids and great grandkids in a very real sense,
Speaker 2: because this is their legacy that they're going to inherit,
Speaker 2: you know. Now, it's there's nobody like that for the
Speaker 2: most part, and so it's just a big free for all,
Speaker 2: you know, And it's whichever interest group is the best
Speaker 2: organized and the best funded and the most ruthless and
Speaker 2: just the best at getting their way through all the
Speaker 2: various you know, levers that we provide for that they
Speaker 2: tend to get their way, you know. And it's not
Speaker 2: a conspiracy necessarily. It's not something that you know, there's
Speaker 2: a there's this sort of you know, deep seated sort
Speaker 2: of conspiracy against Russia that keeps US in this belligerent
Speaker 2: attitude toward them. That I mean, it's that when I
Speaker 2: say there's not some conspiracy, I mean it's not something
Speaker 2: that like pervades the whole government. It's not like the
Speaker 2: regime is like this. It's that the people who feel
Speaker 2: that way, they know how to work the system. They're
Speaker 2: extremely well organized, they're extremely well funded, you know, especially
Speaker 2: since Putin throughout all the billionaires I mean or a
Speaker 2: lot those oligarchs, those guys have been spending their money
Speaker 2: in London and New York to get you know, NATO
Speaker 2: and our countries to remain belligerent toward Potin ever since
Speaker 2: they got run out of town. So you know, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of money behind it, a lot of organization.
Speaker 2: And then you have on top of that sort of
Speaker 2: the long term institutional approach that you know, I just
Speaker 2: that Gates described so.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what part of them being the manager being
Speaker 1: under a managerial regime does, right. You you can have
Speaker 1: these little special interest groups, unelected special interest groups, you know,
Speaker 1: people who they can be fired, but if they do
Speaker 1: their job well, they can be there for for a
Speaker 1: very very long time. Even after the administrations come and go,
Speaker 1: they stay around. And you can have these where it's
Speaker 1: not really a conspiracy. All it is is there is
Speaker 1: one group inside the government that's like, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: what we want to do. We have the power to
Speaker 1: do it, so let's trade. Let's work with this NGO whomever,
Speaker 1: and let's you know, institute a coup and put our
Speaker 1: guy into place. And you can have you know, you
Speaker 1: can have audio on YouTube with the proof where you
Speaker 1: know they're like, oh what what, what was it?
Speaker 2: You EU?
Speaker 1: Going to say? Well, fuck the EU. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's what we get, right when we have a managerial regime.
Speaker 1: We can have two or three people who decide, let's
Speaker 1: funment a war on the other side of the planet,
Speaker 1: and there you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know, I think maybe in one of
Speaker 2: your one of your conversations with with Thomas something he said,
Speaker 2: he said that the American government is a machine that
Speaker 2: has been built, was built to fight the Cold War, right,
Speaker 2: And you know, and I would I would say the
Speaker 2: Cold War in World War two, because if you go
Speaker 2: back to like December sixth, nineteen forty one and look
Speaker 2: at the size and the funk of the federal government,
Speaker 2: it was ninety nine percent of what we have now,
Speaker 2: Like it was one percent of what we have now.
Speaker 2: And so it grew up in that environment and the
Speaker 2: environment of total war and global conflict with the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: and you know, that's just not something you can necessarily
Speaker 2: shut off. You know, I'm doing a series on my
Speaker 2: substack right now about the history of like slavery, going
Speaker 2: back a long ways and taking it up to the
Speaker 2: lead up to the American Civil War, and I was
Speaker 2: talking about the Spanish and the Portuguese and how you know,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna when you want to talk about the
Speaker 2: approach they took when they when they came over into
Speaker 2: the New World, or any of the other places that
Speaker 2: they ended up. You know, these people had been in
Speaker 2: war for hundreds and hundreds of years. For six hundred years,
Speaker 2: they had been at continual war against the Moors, pushing
Speaker 2: them out of Iberia, and so it was built into
Speaker 2: their culture. It was built into the very way that
Speaker 2: like the incentives that led to certain people being promoted
Speaker 2: and receiving sort of you know, and you can't just
Speaker 2: turn something like that off. And so we have a
Speaker 2: we have a government that's built to fight a war
Speaker 2: like that, and you know, it's it's I mean, look,
Speaker 2: Samuel Huntington did not have to be a genius to
Speaker 2: know that after the Soviet Union fell, we were going
Speaker 2: to go look for another enemy, and it was probably
Speaker 2: going to be Islam, you know, he called that one.
Speaker 2: Islam proved to be sort of an unworthy adversary in
Speaker 2: a certain at least for our purposes. And so we
Speaker 2: you know, we sort of moved back to trust the
Speaker 2: old Russia.
Speaker 1: It really seems like that that Russia can be made
Speaker 1: into the enemy at any given time. It because when
Speaker 1: you when you had a standoff for so long, even
Speaker 1: before that under the Cizar there were issues. You can
Speaker 1: go to the Civil War and the argument could be
Speaker 1: made that the North wouldn't have one without Russia. There's
Speaker 1: it seems like Russia is definitely a whipping boy someone,
Speaker 1: especially a country that's so resource rich that you're if
Speaker 1: you're in a perpetual war state, they're an easy enemy.
Speaker 1: They're not they're slav they're not most A lot of
Speaker 1: people say they're not like us, they're not like Westerners,
Speaker 1: and yeah, there is all there are all of these
Speaker 1: riches there, and yeah, it just it seems like it's
Speaker 1: the perfect the perfect country to pick on, especially when
Speaker 1: you're when you've done so much to basically defeat and
Speaker 1: demoralize the countries that surround it that you can insinuate
Speaker 1: yourselves into those countries and basically surround them much like
Speaker 1: they did what they're in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know you talk about the money that's there.
Speaker 2: I think that really gets kind of at the at
Speaker 2: the deepest part of it, let's say, the most proximate
Speaker 2: cause of why we've taken the approach we have since
Speaker 2: Putin came to power. You know, if you if you
Speaker 2: look at you know, after the collapse of the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union in ninety one, most people out there probably know
Speaker 2: things were not good in the former Soviet world, especially
Speaker 2: in Russia. You know, and you just put that in
Speaker 2: some kind of context. I mean, you know, in twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one, with COVID, with record numbers of people
Speaker 2: in America committing suicide, record numbers of people dying from
Speaker 2: death to despair, alcohol and drugs and things like that,
Speaker 2: the life expectancy in America dropped. It dropped by about
Speaker 2: six months or something, six to eight months, I think.
Speaker 2: And that's a big deal. That's a very traumatic thing
Speaker 2: to happen. You look at all the death that you
Speaker 2: know that's happening. You know, record numbers of suicides and
Speaker 2: death to despair is no joke. People feel that, and
Speaker 2: it affects the culture in a very deep way. The
Speaker 2: life expectancy in Russia, you know, from nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 2: when the Berlin Wall came down to nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 2: just six years, dropped about a decade, a little over
Speaker 2: a decade, actually, you know, And when you look at
Speaker 2: the distribution of who was affected, it wasn't that you know,
Speaker 2: a lot more babies were dying at birth. It wasn't
Speaker 2: that a lot of women were dying that women life expectancy.
Speaker 2: Female life expectancy was not affected all that much. And
Speaker 2: the people who were already like fifty or sixty years old,
Speaker 2: like theirs, wasn't affected too much. It was pretty much
Speaker 2: all just hyper concentrated in that group of men, like
Speaker 2: you know, fifteen to forty years old, and they weren't
Speaker 2: dying of you know, because of an increase of cancer rates,
Speaker 2: like the life expectancy dropped ten years because of malnutrition, alcoholism,
Speaker 2: drug addiction, and violence. And so when you think about again,
Speaker 2: like what I just said about COVID and the deaths
Speaker 2: of despair over here, which are all at records, for
Speaker 2: it to drop six eight months, for it to drop
Speaker 2: a decade, I mean, you need you know, it was
Speaker 2: a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare for these people.
Speaker 2: You know, you when you you know, there's a there's
Speaker 2: an element to it. It's sort of like Germany after
Speaker 2: the First World War. You know, people, even people who
Speaker 2: are sort of pro Russia and you know, against the
Speaker 2: US approach there, they don't necessarily like this analogy because
Speaker 2: you know, the end result is that they end up
Speaker 2: where the Germans are ending up. But I think it's
Speaker 2: a solid analogy in a lot of ways. You know,
Speaker 2: if you think about how, you know, the Germans fight
Speaker 2: this long, hard war, and people can, you know, historians
Speaker 2: can debate how the whole thing ended and whether they
Speaker 2: were stabbed in the back or lied to whatever. But
Speaker 2: the fact is, like they certainly felt that way, and
Speaker 2: they weren't just being bitchy about it, Like they really
Speaker 2: felt that way, like, and they had good reason. Even
Speaker 2: if you don't agree, you have to like listen to
Speaker 2: their reasoning and admit it's consistent right that they felt
Speaker 2: that they had agreed to lay down their arms. Churchill
Speaker 2: kept the British Navy cutting off their food. You know,
Speaker 2: tons of Germans were starving to death, and then they
Speaker 2: were basically forced knife at their throat to sign just
Speaker 2: an unbelievably punitive treaty. And so you know, you have
Speaker 2: the hyperinflation in twenty three and you go into the twenties,
Speaker 2: and you know, you have to try to put yourself
Speaker 2: in like the in this place where you're observing this
Speaker 2: happened to your own society and how it would radicalize
Speaker 2: and affect you right where. You know, the middle class
Speaker 2: due to the inflation just got completely and totally wiped out.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, people out there on who listened
Speaker 2: to your show know what hyperinflation is, and they know
Speaker 2: that the middle classes are the ones who get annihilated
Speaker 2: by that. You know, the poor they have nothing and
Speaker 2: there in debt, and their debts are worthless now, so
Speaker 2: in a way they're better off. The rich people have
Speaker 2: international connections, connections to you know, international currencies, they own
Speaker 2: hard assets and other things, and they sort of ride
Speaker 2: the inflation wave up to a degree. But the middle class,
Speaker 2: who has their money in annuities and savings, you know,
Speaker 2: when all of a sudden you've got to go to
Speaker 2: the store to buy a loaf of bread with a
Speaker 2: wheelbarrow full of cash, those people just lost everything like immediately.
Speaker 2: And you literally had like respectable middle class German women
Speaker 2: who were having to resort to turning their homes into
Speaker 2: brothels because they just had no other way to feed
Speaker 2: their children or feed themselves, and this was epidemic across
Speaker 2: the country, you know, and you have to again think about, like,
Speaker 2: how if that were going on, especially if you felt
Speaker 2: like the reason you're in this position is because you
Speaker 2: were tricked and misled and the you could have kept
Speaker 2: fighting if you knew they were going to do this,
Speaker 2: and you would have, but that they lied to you,
Speaker 2: you know, it would be extremely radicalizing. And so you know,
Speaker 2: if you if you want to follow that an analogy further,
Speaker 2: I mean, shoot, after the First World War, we sheared off,
Speaker 2: you know what, fifteen percent or whatever it is of
Speaker 2: the German population. And from the moment, you know, from
Speaker 2: from the moment that happened, the new German government, even
Speaker 2: the Weimar government, was expressing a lot of concern about
Speaker 2: the fate of those people. Because you know, you have
Speaker 2: a country like Poland that hasn't been a country for
Speaker 2: a long time, and now it's a country, and so
Speaker 2: you're going to have this upsurge of nationalist feeling and
Speaker 2: you know, and all this kind of thing, and that's fine,
Speaker 2: that's totally natural, but you know, how are they going
Speaker 2: to look at the German minority over in the West
Speaker 2: and it wasn't necessarily good. Same with Czechoslovakia and other places.
Speaker 2: And so eventually, like the Germans got to the point
Speaker 2: of like we got to we got to get these
Speaker 2: people back. And I mean that's exactly what happened with Russia.
Speaker 2: You know, even Boris Yeltsen, our total you know, just
Speaker 2: puppet throughout the nineties, Like even the very very early
Speaker 2: nighties when we were trying to negotiate the withdrawal of
Speaker 2: Russian forces from Estonia and Latvia things like that. You know,
Speaker 2: even Yeltsen, who again we controlled like a like a marionette,
Speaker 2: was resistant. He was like, we got to wait until
Speaker 2: I can verify that the Russian people who live over there,
Speaker 2: who woke up one day and now they're foreigners in
Speaker 2: minorities in a foreign country. I got to make sure
Speaker 2: that they're okay and that they're going to be treated okay.
Speaker 2: And from the beginning, I mean there were signs of trouble,
Speaker 2: you know, and in almost all of these countries, you know,
Speaker 2: in Estonia, for example, they started passing citizenship laws that
Speaker 2: made it very very difficult for like native Russian speakers
Speaker 2: and ethnic Russians to get citizenship, and I think to
Speaker 2: this day there's a large percent the Russian population still
Speaker 2: can't vote or anything like that. You can say that's like,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of sort of a that's maybe a
Speaker 2: bit of a minor inconvenience. But when you look at
Speaker 2: what's happening in Ukraine and what's been going on since
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen into a certain degree since two thousand and four,
Speaker 2: you know, you can see why Yelsen would have been
Speaker 2: concerned and putin finally, now that Russia's back on its
Speaker 2: feet and able to actually do something, has has done
Speaker 2: something because they never stopped considering those Russians their responsibility
Speaker 2: and their people, you know, and rather than rather than
Speaker 2: respect that and understand how you know, a country might
Speaker 2: feel about that, we've sort of used those people as
Speaker 2: foils to to you know, drive up the intensity of
Speaker 2: nationalist feelings in the post Soviet countries and to direct
Speaker 2: them against Russia, you know. And you read about this
Speaker 2: in like in two thousand and four during the Orange Revolution,
Speaker 2: which obviously we had a hand in as well. Before that,
Speaker 2: you go back even two thousand and three and you
Speaker 2: look at Poles in even western Ukraine, you look at
Speaker 2: Poles about how people feel about Russia and Russians, and
Speaker 2: it's fine, it's you know, a large majorities totally approve there.
Speaker 2: Everything good. Two thousand and four comes along and you're
Speaker 2: gonna have a revolution like that, you got to have
Speaker 2: some energy to drive it. And where's that going to
Speaker 2: come from? And you start to see all of these
Speaker 2: NGO funded and led media outlets that popped up and
Speaker 2: everything else start putting out a lot of propaganda demonizing
Speaker 2: the Russian people, calling them the problem in Ukraine and
Speaker 2: they're the reason we're having these issues and so forth,
Speaker 2: and that really started to pick up. And you know,
Speaker 2: now twenty twenty four years later, you know the kids
Speaker 2: who were who were in elementary school when that started happening,
Speaker 2: that change in attitude and approach started happening. You know,
Speaker 2: they're the guys who joined as of battalion later on.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's it's it's you know, it's not good.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know. And the thing is, actually, you can
Speaker 2: go ahead and redirect this because I'll keep.
Speaker 1: Going, Okay, well, let's go back to the nineties. Then,
Speaker 1: to me, everything I've read about what was happening there,
Speaker 1: it was basically a looting operation Okay, so now this
Speaker 1: empire falls essentially no one's in charge except the oligarchs,
Speaker 1: and they're just looting. And to the point, I know,
Speaker 1: I was reading about ninety four and ninety five, people
Speaker 1: are buying stuff with coupons. Their money isn't even in existence,
Speaker 1: and basically all of the wealth is being than out
Speaker 1: of the country. That's what you understand, right.
Speaker 2: One hundred Yeah, and that was happening in Ukraine as well,
Speaker 2: by the way, And the difference between the two countries is,
Speaker 2: you know, Russia got its putin and Ukraine never got
Speaker 2: its putin, and so those oligarchs still run the country.
Speaker 2: You know, they were running it when the war started,
Speaker 2: they were running it when might on happen. They're still
Speaker 2: running it now, although a lot of them, you know,
Speaker 2: the bulk of their wealth and assets were tied up
Speaker 2: in the industrial East that is now controlled by Russia.
Speaker 2: So you know, that's probably one of the reasons they're
Speaker 2: continuing to feed their young men into the wood chipper,
Speaker 2: even past the point where it makes much sense to
Speaker 2: any outsiders. But yeah, absolutely, and I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: you can kind of see how see it working when
Speaker 2: in this there's another here's Another parallel the Germany in
Speaker 2: the twenties is you know, people who were in Russia
Speaker 2: in Ukraine who had access to you know, like you
Speaker 2: if you had access to a foreign financial institution that
Speaker 2: was willing to back you, I mean, you know, you
Speaker 2: could buy up the whole country. It literally got to
Speaker 2: that point where, you know, seven oligarchs in the mid
Speaker 2: nineties seven just there were a bunch of them, but
Speaker 2: seven oligarchs owned fifty eight percent of the entire Russian economy,
Speaker 2: which is an insane number, you know, and Ukraine, you know,
Speaker 2: very similar and in both of those countries, you know,
Speaker 2: we don't have to go too far down this road,
Speaker 2: but you know, in both of those countries, the vast
Speaker 2: majority of the of the big oligarchs were all Russian
Speaker 2: and Ukrainian Jews, right, which these are people who had
Speaker 2: cousins and relatives in other countries and they were able
Speaker 2: to sort of draw on those resources at a time
Speaker 2: when there was a kind of free for all within
Speaker 2: the country itself. And you know, when you have a
Speaker 2: situation again where you go back to Germany where the middles,
Speaker 2: respectable middle class women are having to you know, sell
Speaker 2: their bodies to put food on their table, and people
Speaker 2: with foreign connections and foreigners themselves are not just getting rich,
Speaker 2: but I mean becoming just fabulously insanely wealthy bye by
Speaker 2: looting your economy. That starts to draw up a certain
Speaker 2: amount of resentment. You know. It's it's very fortunate in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways that you know, you haven't seen
Speaker 2: so much of that in Russia and Ukraine, specifically with
Speaker 2: regard to the Jews, because you know, it's something that
Speaker 2: you could have seen happening. You know, like in Russia,
Speaker 2: you know, those seven oligarchs who won fifty eight percent
Speaker 2: of the entire economy, six of them were Jewish. And
Speaker 2: when Putin came along and sat the oligarchs down and
Speaker 2: told them that you know, look, you guys are going
Speaker 2: to stay billionaires. You're going to keep your businesses, you're
Speaker 2: going to do all these things, but you're not part
Speaker 2: of politics anymore. Like that's not yourusinessman, and that's it. Uh.
Speaker 2: And if you are okay with that, then we're friends
Speaker 2: and you're rich. If you're not okay with that, then
Speaker 2: you're gonna have a problem with me. And the ones
Speaker 2: who fled the country to New York. In London, in
Speaker 2: Tel Aviv were primarily those non Russian oligarchs, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's a it's it kind of goes to you think
Speaker 2: about somebody like Bill Browder. You know, there's a guy
Speaker 2: who was working with Sergei Magnitsky, the biggest to want
Speaker 2: to talk about, like the biggest scam. Just it's mind blowing,
Speaker 2: like how well this operation is worked because that guy,
Speaker 2: that guy was a straight up criminal stealing from the
Speaker 2: Russian government and Sergai Magnitsky was his accountant who was
Speaker 2: helping him do that. I don't you know, the conditions
Speaker 2: in Russian prisons are probably bad, and you know it's
Speaker 2: not good that Magnitsky goes in there and ends up
Speaker 2: dying of you know, sort of you say negligence, but
Speaker 2: you know, who am I to talk when you look
Speaker 2: at the condition of our prisons and you know the
Speaker 2: conditions we throw people into. So but the point is,
Speaker 2: like you know that Browder was one of these guys.
Speaker 2: You know, people descended on that country like vultures, and
Speaker 2: they went and they found local agents that they could
Speaker 2: work with, people who were happy to exploit everyone around
Speaker 2: them and do this, and you know, whoever they could
Speaker 2: find was the most unscrupulous, you know, people around. It
Speaker 2: was the most ruthless people around. You know, there's people
Speaker 2: like these oligarch guys like Kotarkovsky, who you know is
Speaker 2: held up as sort of some type of a human
Speaker 2: rights icon, a dissident. That guy is a gangster who
Speaker 2: if he had you know, lived the life he led
Speaker 2: in the nineties in Texas instead of Russia, they'd have
Speaker 2: put him in the gas chamber, you know, he would
Speaker 2: he would have gotten the death penalty for that. And
Speaker 2: you know, but it was a great gravy train. I mean,
Speaker 2: you have like a giant, giant country with resources galore,
Speaker 2: and every big financial institution across the West is just
Speaker 2: making huge amounts of money, you know, pulling that wealth
Speaker 2: out of the country. And in one country, you know,
Speaker 2: a guy stepped in who put a stop to that.
Speaker 2: Ukraine is what Russia would have looked like if Putin
Speaker 2: never came along and the entire place was still I mean,
Speaker 2: you look at like the people who were appointed as
Speaker 2: governors of the different provinces in Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution.
Speaker 2: There was a whole bunch of the oligarchs, you know,
Speaker 2: often in control of the zones where a lot of
Speaker 2: their particular industries were, you know, the rest were like
Speaker 2: US State Department assets like Sakishvili and stuff. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Putin cut the gravy train off
Speaker 2: and that was his great sin, and we've not forgiven
Speaker 2: him for it. And you know, I think we had
Speaker 2: this pipe dream, people like Victorian Newland had this pipe
Speaker 2: dream that maybe we could we could we could open
Speaker 2: them back up and maybe bring them back down a
Speaker 2: notch or two so that we could we could get
Speaker 2: the gravy train flowing again. Uh. But you know, it's
Speaker 2: a very like like the people in Russia. They remember
Speaker 2: what the nineties were like. They remember what it was like,
Speaker 2: and their parents at least remember what it was like.
Speaker 2: And they know that whether they there's you know, whether
Speaker 2: they agree with the Ukraine War, whether they like Putin
Speaker 2: or anything like that, what they know is ever since
Speaker 2: Putin came along, the way things were in the nineties,
Speaker 2: it's not like that anymore, you know, And they can
Speaker 2: live normal lives in their country, and you know, those
Speaker 2: people are going to stick by their leader when that's
Speaker 2: the case, you know, because they know the downside. And uh,
Speaker 2: you know, especially as time has gone on, and our
Speaker 2: belligerence toward them and really are I mean our hatred
Speaker 2: towards them, you know, And like we see things over
Speaker 2: here that sort of go in and out of the news,
Speaker 2: like when you know, some Russian tennis stars getting banned
Speaker 2: from tennis tournaments and you know, Dostevsky's getting pulled from
Speaker 2: the curriculum of some Harvard class or something like. We
Speaker 2: see that and it's like, oh, it's so stupid and whatever.
Speaker 2: That stuff is plastered on the six o'clock news in
Speaker 2: Russia and everybody sees it and they think this is crazy.
Speaker 2: These people are crazy, like they really hate us and
Speaker 2: seek our destruction. And you know, and again I think
Speaker 2: that most Americans don't naturally feel that way. But the
Speaker 2: people the group who do feel that way, you know,
Speaker 2: they're very well organized, very well funded, and they know
Speaker 2: what they're doing.
Speaker 1: So it's a safe to say that those people who
Speaker 1: the gravy Train stopped, that putin put a stop to
Speaker 1: the gravy train in the nineties were probably behind everything
Speaker 1: that was happening in twenty thirteen, in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: You know, they supported it, you know, financially, they backed
Speaker 2: the think tanks that employ the people like Victoria Newland
Speaker 2: when they are out of government, and they exert a
Speaker 2: lot of influence in that sense, Like I don't think
Speaker 2: that they're you know that that that you know, Roman
Speaker 2: Abramovich is meeting with the president or the Prime Minister
Speaker 2: of England and sort of giving him marching orders or
Speaker 2: anything like that, but they exert the influence that they have.
Speaker 2: And given the fact that the US and NATO sort
Speaker 2: of foreign policy approach or Eastern Europe Russia approach, it's
Speaker 2: kind of already geared in that direction. Like really, they're
Speaker 2: just giving it sort of an extra push. You know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't need much more of a push, and but
Speaker 2: it's definitely a part of it. I mean, you're talking
Speaker 2: about hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars
Speaker 2: they got pulled out of that country. They got pulled
Speaker 2: out of Russia. I mean, we hear about the big
Speaker 2: ones like Abramovic who left the country with forty billion
Speaker 2: dollars or whatever, but they were hundreds of these people ultimately,
Speaker 2: and you know, and that's not counting like the money
Speaker 2: that got siphoned out to Western financial institutions as all
Speaker 2: this was going on. So, I mean, you're talking about
Speaker 2: a massive chunk of the Russian economy that was just
Speaker 2: straight up looted. And you know, that's a it's a
Speaker 2: hard thing to give up, you know. And when you
Speaker 2: have a lot of in when when you're on that
Speaker 2: gravy train and you've got a lot of influence with
Speaker 2: the United States government, you're gonna try to pull that
Speaker 2: lever to get it to act on your behalf. You know,
Speaker 2: It's always been that way.
Speaker 1: So the narrative when the Russia, when Russian invaded Ukraine,
Speaker 1: was one of the narratives was that in the Donbas
Speaker 1: region ethnic Russians had been slaughtered since twenty fourteen. Here
Speaker 1: numbers anywhere from twelve thousands to thirty two thousand. Is
Speaker 1: what do you know about that? I mean, how is
Speaker 1: it happening? Were they bombing them? Were what was going on?
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of artillery, mortars, things like that, primarily
Speaker 2: as far as I know, aircraft weren't weren't primarily doing it,
Speaker 2: but but yeah, I mean they were just sort of
Speaker 2: indiscriminately targeting civilian areas and laughing about it. You know,
Speaker 2: you had Poroshenko, who you know, gave that speech, and
Speaker 2: he was bragging about how Russian children are going to
Speaker 2: be hiding in basements or down Bass children are going
Speaker 2: to be hiding in basements, you know, to avoid our
Speaker 2: artillery while our kids are going to eat breakfast and
Speaker 2: go to school. And it's just you know that we
Speaker 2: have a word for that. When you know Arabs do
Speaker 2: it or something, it's called terrorism. And you know, if
Speaker 2: you look at the immediate aftermath of the Maidan coup,
Speaker 2: there was essentially a nationwide pugrom against Russians, you know,
Speaker 2: against Russian speakers and by you know, again a lot
Speaker 2: of the you know, I've actually read like some of
Speaker 2: the memoirs of these hardcore as of types. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a few of them in English, and you kind
Speaker 2: of feel for these guys in a way when you
Speaker 2: read them, even if you think that you know, it's
Speaker 2: sad that they're you know, puppets of a regime that
Speaker 2: really does not care about them or their country at all,
Speaker 2: and that they're you know, they're they're they're ignorant or
Speaker 2: whatever for allowing themselves to be used that way. But
Speaker 2: these are you know, these are hardcore like right wing
Speaker 2: patriots in their country and in the context of their lives.
Speaker 2: This is the way that it makes sense for them,
Speaker 2: you know. And so when when you know twenty fourteen happened,
Speaker 2: I mean you you know the famous ones, you know,
Speaker 2: with a few dozen people getting burned alive in the
Speaker 2: trade building uh in Odessa. But that was something that
Speaker 2: was happening all over the place, people getting kidnapped because
Speaker 2: they were ethnic Russians who were considered, you know, politically
Speaker 2: unreliable in this new regime. And you're talking about hundreds
Speaker 2: or thousand of people getting kidnapped and abused and tortured
Speaker 2: and killed. And again we sort of, you know, we
Speaker 2: sort of look at that. If it gets mentioned at
Speaker 2: all over here, it sort of gets mentioned as like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: there was a violent there was a revolution, and revolutions
Speaker 2: are crazy and bad things happened, and you know in
Speaker 2: any revolution, and that's true enough. But you know, this
Speaker 2: is if if you look at that from the Russian perspective,
Speaker 2: you know, from the perspective I was talking about earlier wherever,
Speaker 2: since the early nineties, somebody like Yeltsin was expressing concern
Speaker 2: over the fate of ethnic Russians in these countries, whether
Speaker 2: the nationalist fervor was going to get out of control
Speaker 2: and make their lives too hard, and just continually expressing
Speaker 2: concern about that over the years, and then watching that happen,
Speaker 2: watching all of those kidnappings and murders happen, watching down
Speaker 2: Bass neighborhoods get get you know, bombarded by our artillery.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be very provocative, you know, and especially when
Speaker 2: you have larger geopolitical reasons to want to draw a
Speaker 2: line in the sand, you know, which which obviously was
Speaker 2: you know, was probably like the stuff I just talked
Speaker 2: about the ethnic Russians. I mean that probably gave the uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the sort of emotional impulse and the it
Speaker 2: sort of drives the enthusiasm for the war effort and
Speaker 2: the cohesion in Russia maybe to a large degree. But
Speaker 2: I mean, make no mistake, They're in this war because
Speaker 2: they felt, from a geopolitical standpoint like they had no choice,
Speaker 2: and you know, and I think we knew that, and
Speaker 2: I think we put them in that position on purpose.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 2: You know, I do think that that probably we thought
Speaker 2: that they would continue to back down forever because we're
Speaker 2: America and they won't. Dare we overestimated our own capability
Speaker 2: to cripple them and underestimated their capability to sustain a war.
Speaker 2: But we knew we were putting him in that position.
Speaker 2: You know, the current CIA director was the ambassador to
Speaker 2: Russia back in two thousand and eight, and in January
Speaker 2: of two thousand and eight he wrote this, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of famous now memo back to Condoleeza Rice, who
Speaker 2: was Secretary of State at the time, called neet means
Speaker 2: net and in it he, I mean, it's so it's uncanny,
Speaker 2: like how specific he is about the whole thing. He says, Look,
Speaker 2: I'm over here talking not just forget putin, I'm talking
Speaker 2: to everybody in the upper echelons of Russian power, military people, civilians.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. They are unanimous that. You know, they
Speaker 2: put up with NATO expansion in the Baltics and these
Speaker 2: other places, you know, because they had no choice because
Speaker 2: they couldn't do anything about it. But that expanding NATO
Speaker 2: into Ukraine and expanding it into Georgia are absolute red
Speaker 2: lines that they just they simply cannot tolerate and they
Speaker 2: will be forced to act. And then he said specifically,
Speaker 2: he said they're concerned in Ukraine, is that if like
Speaker 2: like our movement to try to to try to push
Speaker 2: that idea and try to get them in there would
Speaker 2: lead to tension between the Russian ethnic Russians in the
Speaker 2: east and the Ukrainians in the west who you know,
Speaker 2: as that debate over whether they should join NATO or
Speaker 2: could they join NATO and everything heat it up, that
Speaker 2: it would lead to conflict between those two peoples and
Speaker 2: possibly even civil war and that and this is remarkable,
Speaker 2: he said, and that Russia would have to decide whether
Speaker 2: or not to intervene, which is a decision they do
Speaker 2: not want to have to face. And I mean, so
Speaker 2: the State departments kind of lesa. Rice gets that memo
Speaker 2: from her ambassador to Russia, and three months later, in
Speaker 2: March of that same year, just three months later, at
Speaker 2: the NATO summit, we come out and say, yeah, Ukraine
Speaker 2: and Georgia are going to join NATO. And so you know,
Speaker 2: it didn't take long obviously before the president in Georgia
Speaker 2: saka's Vili, because we had the short Georgia War over there.
Speaker 2: You know, sakes Vili is a guy who you know,
Speaker 2: he's educated in the United States. Literally like was over
Speaker 2: like as part of a State Department program you know,
Speaker 2: and he's he's a Georgian. But for some reason after
Speaker 2: the Midon coup, he got put in charge of the
Speaker 2: Odessa Oblast in Ukraine as the governor there. For nobody
Speaker 2: can really explain why, but everything everybody knows why. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, Georgia had a problem when it came to
Speaker 2: joining NATO, which is, you can't join NATO if you
Speaker 2: have an ongoing territorial dispute, because it essentially would immediately
Speaker 2: require NATO to get involved with that territorial disview. So
Speaker 2: you have to clear that up first. And he had
Speaker 2: that problem up in Ostya and the northern region of
Speaker 2: his country that had been sort of in an uneasy
Speaker 2: but steady peace since the early nineties where they sort
Speaker 2: of governed themselves with some autonomy and there were peacekeepers
Speaker 2: in there and stuff, and it was fun. You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't resolved, but it was fine, and he needed
Speaker 2: to clear that up, and so he moved to clear
Speaker 2: it up. And so the Russians moved in and kicked
Speaker 2: their ass and pushed them back. And you know, you
Speaker 2: had John McCain like telling us like he was literally
Speaker 2: John McCain was calling for us to to bomb the
Speaker 2: tunnels that the Russians were driving their tanks and their
Speaker 2: armored vehicles through, and like just attack the Russians directly,
Speaker 2: Just madman for for what, you know, to bring Georgia
Speaker 2: into Ukraine something that doesn't improve or rather to bring
Speaker 2: Georgia into NATO, something that doesn't improve NATO's fighting ability,
Speaker 2: its ability to extend nothing like that. Like all Georgia
Speaker 2: would be to NATO is an out of the way
Speaker 2: new obligation that really didn't provide any kind of countervailing
Speaker 2: benefits to NATO itself. And you know, it kind of
Speaker 2: shows what the purpose of a lot of this NATO
Speaker 2: expansion is. And you know, if Georgia, like Georgia is
Speaker 2: not anywhere near the North Atlantic. You know, I asked
Speaker 2: a question when I was I was talking to a
Speaker 2: Lavian guy I know who's very very anti Russian, pro Ukrainian,
Speaker 2: and he denied that you know this, the NATO expansion
Speaker 2: was sort of targeting Russia, that it was directed at Russia,
Speaker 2: something that I think is sort of self evidently silly.
Speaker 2: But I said, why don't why aren't we trying to
Speaker 2: bring uh Brazil into NATO. Brazil's at least on the Atlantic,
Speaker 2: you know, but we're trying to bring Georgia INTONATO. Why
Speaker 2: is that, like, why is it only countries that are
Speaker 2: pushing in and surrounding this one country? And I think
Speaker 2: the you know, the answer is pretty obvious. And you know,
Speaker 2: a certain point, you know, a leader of a country
Speaker 2: has to has to you know, you come to a
Speaker 2: Meersheimer talks about this right where you can you know,
Speaker 2: you can believe like Vladimir Putin can believe that the
Speaker 2: United States and NATO don't want to attack Russia, that
Speaker 2: they can expand into Ukraine and Georgia and everywhere else.
Speaker 2: And that does not mean and probably and almost certainly
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that one day they're going to wake up
Speaker 2: and it's going to be June nineteen forty one again
Speaker 2: in American tanks are just Russian Like, he doesn't think
Speaker 2: that's going to happen, but he's responsible for national security
Speaker 2: in Russia. And so unless he can say for sure
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen, you know, you have to
Speaker 2: take steps to protect yourself. And we just haven't respected
Speaker 2: that at all. You know, we've treated Russia like like
Speaker 2: al Qaeda or something ever since you know, the mid
Speaker 2: two thousands, as if none of their concerns nothing, they
Speaker 2: say nothing, they worry, none of those have any legitimacy,
Speaker 2: Like we're not concerned with what isis' you know, grievances are,
Speaker 2: what their security concerns are. Just kill them that right,
Speaker 2: And we treated Russia that way like just they have
Speaker 2: no legitimate interests or concerns whatsoever. And look, if you
Speaker 2: treat a country that's been around for a thousand years
Speaker 2: and has, you know, a strong sort of cultural base
Speaker 2: to build a sense of strong nationalism out of, if
Speaker 2: it comes down to it, eventually they're gonna buck. And
Speaker 2: you know, Russia bucked and and again hopefully with the
Speaker 2: with the resignation of Victoria Newland, we maybe coming to
Speaker 2: the end of at least this current cycle of that.
Speaker 1: Obama sent Ukraine money, Trump sent money and guns. Why
Speaker 1: why do you think Putin waited so long?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, look, part of it is that Putin,
Speaker 2: I think it's clear that he genuinely wanted to find
Speaker 2: a peaceful resolution of this. You know, the Russians were
Speaker 2: coming to the table to negotiate the Minsk agreements in
Speaker 2: good faith. You know, let's work something out where like
Speaker 2: look at the beginning of the war. The Russian military
Speaker 2: did move in like for a while in twenty fourteen fifteen,
Speaker 2: and they routed the disorganized Ukrainian forces at the time,
Speaker 2: and they could have pushed them back, but they didn't,
Speaker 2: you know, they stopped their progress and then they went
Speaker 2: back to Russia, you know, other than some special forces
Speaker 2: little green men or whatever. And when you know, they
Speaker 2: annexed Crimea, and the leaders in the separatist area of
Speaker 2: don Bass, they said, well, do us like we do
Speaker 2: us next, you know, we want to be annexed to Russia.
Speaker 2: And Putin said, no, you know, we did it with
Speaker 2: Crimea because like that's just so strategically critical for us
Speaker 2: that you know, we can't risk losing our navy base
Speaker 2: and so forth. But no, he told them, no, you
Speaker 2: literally had okay, like and this was what's really crazy.
Speaker 2: It's a great documentary that PBS series Frontline put out
Speaker 2: back in twenty fourteen. I think it's called Yeah, I
Speaker 2: can't remember, but it's like a thirty five to forty
Speaker 2: minute documentary about what's going on in what was going
Speaker 2: on in Ukraine at the time, and it's remarkably balanced.
Speaker 2: You would never see anything like this on like American media,
Speaker 2: mainstream media today, it's quite balanced. And they there's a
Speaker 2: scene where the reporter is in Kharkiv and you know
Speaker 2: there's like an old woman and a crowd of people,
Speaker 2: but like an old woman specifically who's on her knees
Speaker 2: and she's crying and saying Putin, please save us, Please
Speaker 2: save us from you know, from the fascists. They hate us,
Speaker 2: they're going to kill us, Please save us. And so
Speaker 2: those people asked Putin to annex them and protect them,
Speaker 2: and he said no because he thought like that was
Speaker 2: a bridge too far. And you know, with the state
Speaker 2: that the Ukrainian military was in at that point, he
Speaker 2: easily could have done it. There's nothing Ukraine. There were
Speaker 2: a bunch of militias, you know basically at that point.
Speaker 2: You know, they're totally disorganized. We hadn't trained them, we
Speaker 2: hadn't armed him, anything like that. And he said no.
Speaker 2: And so he spends years, you know, participating in these
Speaker 2: in these min's negotiations, which would have kept the don
Speaker 2: Bassist part of Ukraine, but you know, had a sort
Speaker 2: of semi autonomous governance system that would allow them to
Speaker 2: kind of do their own thing within the context of
Speaker 2: Ukrainian government to make sure that those people were protected
Speaker 2: from you know, a Ukrainian government that was was like
Speaker 2: literally their parliament was full of people who had just
Speaker 2: led pogroms against Russians, like all across the country. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, I think he just genuinely wanted to find
Speaker 2: a peaceful solution to the whole thing, maybe partly because
Speaker 2: you know, I think Putin and you saw this a
Speaker 2: little bit in that Tucker interview, I think he's probably
Speaker 2: he seems like he's at the point now where he's
Speaker 2: done with the United States, like there's nothing we can
Speaker 2: say that he can trust, there's no deal we can
Speaker 2: make that he would consider reliable anymore. But I think
Speaker 2: long term, he does still care about his relations with
Speaker 2: Europe and he's looking forward to a possible future where
Speaker 2: you know, Europe is something more than just an American
Speaker 2: base and he can start to repair those relations at least.
Speaker 2: And so maybe he pursued the Minsk Ac courts because
Speaker 2: of that. But then you know, you go through all
Speaker 2: that trouble, all that trouble, and then you know, you
Speaker 2: see the German Chancellor as a French official, like people
Speaker 2: coming out and saying that was all that was all
Speaker 2: BS like, we didn't the whole Minsk thing was just
Speaker 2: to drag things out and to make sure Russia didn't
Speaker 2: move in and take over, to give us time to
Speaker 2: build up the Ukrainian forces and get them armed and trained.
Speaker 2: And could you imagine hearing that like as a Russian official,
Speaker 2: I mean mean, yeah, it's uh, because I can, and
Speaker 2: it would it would pretty much permanently break you know,
Speaker 2: my ability to take any any negotiation with these people
Speaker 2: seriously again. And so you know, I think when he invaded,
Speaker 2: it's when it became clear to him that the peaceful
Speaker 2: solutions that that he had been pursuing up to that
Speaker 2: point were just not going to happen. You know, if
Speaker 2: you look at the week or two right before, right
Speaker 2: before the invasion, from day to day to day, if
Speaker 2: you look at it, you know, there's a there's a
Speaker 2: UN organization over there that was monitoring the ceasefire. Right
Speaker 2: they had a ceasefire where you know, you could use
Speaker 2: small arms and stuff, and so the Ukrainians could do
Speaker 2: counter terrorism stuff with like small arms, tactics and stuff,
Speaker 2: but you couldn't use a whole range of heavy weapons, artillery,
Speaker 2: and mortars and all these other things, and there were violets,
Speaker 2: you know, one way and violations the other way occasionally,
Speaker 2: like as like the Minska agreements were being negotiated and
Speaker 2: so forth. And then in a couple of weeks just
Speaker 2: prior to the invasion, you know, it goes from like
Speaker 2: and they're all on one side, they're all coming from
Speaker 2: the Ukrainian side, firing toward the Donbass. It goes from
Speaker 2: like thirty violations, eighty violations, the next day, three hundred violations,
Speaker 2: a thousand violations. I mean, they're just ramping this up.
Speaker 2: And then Russia invades, and you know, the sort of
Speaker 2: defenders of US policy over there will try to convince
Speaker 2: me that that had nothing to do with Russia invading,
Speaker 2: but you know, to me, like the default position should
Speaker 2: be to assume that it did, and that you know, that,
Speaker 2: along with a lot of other things, just led up
Speaker 2: to a point where Russia realized that if we wait
Speaker 2: another year, then they don't have to bring Ukraine into NATO.
Speaker 2: They're making it a NATO country right now, right before
Speaker 2: our eyes. They're not calling it that, they're not moving
Speaker 2: forty thousand US troops in there yet or anything but
Speaker 2: you know, they're in every other way imaginable. They're essentially
Speaker 2: turning this into what it would be if it was
Speaker 2: a NATO country, and they're going to get to a
Speaker 2: certain point where we're not going to be able to
Speaker 2: do anything about it, you know, because if it gets
Speaker 2: to to a certain point and they continue to think
Speaker 2: that we're just not going to act, and then, you know,
Speaker 2: in a very short period of time, you know, an
Speaker 2: executive order comes down and thirty thousand American troops are
Speaker 2: landed in Ukraine and take up residence in a base
Speaker 2: that we're calling permanent. Now Russia has to face the
Speaker 2: decision of whether to invade and attack American troops. Like
Speaker 2: that's a whole different ballgame, and I think he just
Speaker 2: decided that we can't wait any longer. We just can't,
Speaker 2: you know. And also actually around the same time, like
Speaker 2: a little bit beforehand, is when you had that attempted
Speaker 2: color revolution in Belarus, and that may have had something
Speaker 2: to do with like him just you know, deciding like
Speaker 2: these the Americans are never going to stop, Like these
Speaker 2: people are just absolutely relentless, and at a certain point,
Speaker 2: you just you know, there's even if you think you're
Speaker 2: gonna get your ass kicked. Sometimes you have no choice
Speaker 2: but to plant your feet and punch the bully in
Speaker 2: the mouth.
Speaker 1: Oh, they're not getting their ass kicked. They're you know, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the I know that putin immediately after the invasion started
Speaker 1: asking for you know, hey, let's talk about this, let's
Speaker 1: let's find a piece, and it's just going on and on.
Speaker 1: And I think what we found out, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you can correct me if you think I'm
Speaker 1: wrong on this is that, well, at least against the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian military, the Russian military is pretty form Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I would even add to that a bit by
Speaker 2: you know, I think a lot of people in the
Speaker 2: West have this, have this idea of like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: it's the Ukrainians, you know, it's just the Ukrainians. This
Speaker 2: is a this is an army. Now, I mean, they're
Speaker 2: they're again scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.
Speaker 2: But you know, in the in the meat of this war,
Speaker 2: this was an army that was trained and equipped up
Speaker 2: to NATO standards. And I would say, you know, look,
Speaker 2: I think your average Ukrainian male, you know, who joins
Speaker 2: the military voluntarily, that he is not a hell of
Speaker 2: a lot tougher than like your average guy in France
Speaker 2: or Germany or America for that matter. You're damn right.
Speaker 2: Ideas like those guys are no joke. These guys are
Speaker 2: are motivated, they're serious, they're well trained, they're well equipped,
Speaker 2: and other than honestly, like other than the US and
Speaker 2: maybe Turkey and Poland you go back to like just
Speaker 2: before the war started in twenty twenty two, and Ukrainian
Speaker 2: military probably would have kicked the hell out of any
Speaker 2: NATO country one on one, you know, in a straight
Speaker 2: up fight. I mean, this is a formidable force. And
Speaker 2: you know, people talk about the difference in population, which
Speaker 2: obviously is coming into play at this point. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, you know, Russia doesn't look at Ukraine
Speaker 2: and say, oh, this is such a tiny country that
Speaker 2: Ukraine's got about the same ratio of population to Russia
Speaker 2: now that Germany did in nineteen forty one to the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union. I mean, and they know how much damage
Speaker 2: you know, a small country can do they if they
Speaker 2: bust loose and break out, and so you know Ukraine
Speaker 2: is I mean, they showed it. Look, you take nothing
Speaker 2: away from the actual guys on the ground who were fighting.
Speaker 2: They showed their willingness for a long time. And it
Speaker 2: looks like the edges are starting to fray now. But
Speaker 2: these guys showed their willingness to die in place, you know,
Speaker 2: to hold their ground and fight to the last man,
Speaker 2: very often not surrender when it was obvious that there
Speaker 2: was nowhere to go and that the fight was over.
Speaker 2: And you know, these guys are very motivated game fighters
Speaker 2: who who gave the look I mean Putin did not.
Speaker 2: People look at like the initial invasion when Putin supposedly
Speaker 2: thought he was going to conquer all of Ukraine and
Speaker 2: take Kiev and all that kind of stuff, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's so silly, like when you look at the amount
Speaker 2: of troops and specifically like which troops, A lot of
Speaker 2: a lot of Wagner troops and stuff who were brought in.
Speaker 2: You know, it was the whole country coming in on
Speaker 2: five different axes. Was barely enough troops to throw at
Speaker 2: one of Ukraine's secondary cities. I mean, if you're really
Speaker 2: going to take it like you know, it was clear
Speaker 2: from the beginning that that was not what they were
Speaker 2: trying to do. I think that they probably severely miscalculated
Speaker 2: and thought that is one. As we show that we're serious,
Speaker 2: than the ukrainians'll panic can come to the table and
Speaker 2: then they'll sign a real deal and we can you know,
Speaker 2: get this done. And so you see it, and like
Speaker 2: the in the tactics they employed with you know, you
Speaker 2: have columns of armor just rolling down country roads with
Speaker 2: no infantry support, no nothing, and they end up getting shredded.
Speaker 2: And it's because I don't, you know, they weren't they
Speaker 2: weren't expecting a fight. They weren't expecting the kind of
Speaker 2: resistance that they got, so they didn't go in prepared
Speaker 2: for it. But then even for months after that, you know,
Speaker 2: for months and months after that, it was very apparent.
Speaker 2: I think that Putin like he didn't want to admit
Speaker 2: that this was even a war. You know, they call
Speaker 2: it a special military operation for a long time, and
Speaker 2: it took them a long time to mobilize. And uh,
Speaker 2: you know, even to this day, Uh, you know, Putin's
Speaker 2: rockets could have flattened Kiev a long time ago. You know,
Speaker 2: at the beginning of the Iraq War, both the Iraq wars,
Speaker 2: the first thing we did, we knocked out their entire
Speaker 2: communications grid, destroyed all their power all their clean water,
Speaker 2: they're all their infrastructure. We just wiped it out like
Speaker 2: the first night, you know, in Iraq. Putin didn't do
Speaker 2: any of that. For like a year, he wasn't doing
Speaker 2: any of that, and uh, you know, and he still
Speaker 2: is not attacking Kiev when he could be. He could
Speaker 2: be doing that and he's not. And I think, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, he he for up until the mobilization, which
Speaker 2: I think was probably driven by internal pressure from people
Speaker 2: to his right in the Russian establishment. Uh you know
Speaker 2: that that he was still trying to find some way
Speaker 2: to get this done with minimal damage to both sides,
Speaker 2: you know, and then he finally just had to admit, Okay, no,
Speaker 2: this is a war, and I can't sign a deal
Speaker 2: with the Americans or with NATO nothing that they say
Speaker 2: is reliable. I just have to, you know, fight this
Speaker 2: thing to the to the end until this country is
Speaker 2: no longer a threat to me and and not an
Speaker 2: asset to NATO. And you know, at this point, like
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't know, you know, it's very unfortunate
Speaker 2: for the Ukrainians themselves, right, because you go back you
Speaker 2: mentioned that Zelenski and Putin were negotiating at the like
Speaker 2: in the opening months of the war, uh and that
Speaker 2: they had a verbal agreement, like a tentative verbal agreement
Speaker 2: that was gonna it was gonna bring it to a halt,
Speaker 2: and that Boris Johnson flew over there, it's all infamous
Speaker 2: now and told them, you know, oh no you're not.
Speaker 2: And you think about that. I mean, it's really that's
Speaker 2: really evil. I mean, this is because this is a
Speaker 2: country that you know, Ukraine, like we had the power
Speaker 2: to tell them, like, you end this war and we're
Speaker 2: just gonna leave you hanging, and you can you know,
Speaker 2: you're you're blown up cities and you know, you're destroyed
Speaker 2: economy and all that. You guys can just have fun
Speaker 2: with that because we're not helping even though you got
Speaker 2: into this whole thing largely because of you know, policies
Speaker 2: we were using you as a proxy for we could
Speaker 2: just abandon them and really put the hurt on them.
Speaker 2: We essentially blackmailed them into continuing to throw their young
Speaker 2: men into this, into this meek grinder, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's really awful. But yeah, I think that at this point, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: you know, the Russians probably feel like they have to
Speaker 2: fight this thing to the end, which is not what
Speaker 2: Putin wanted to do. I think that's clear. And I'm
Speaker 2: not like, look man like. Putin is not like some
Speaker 2: fuzzy friendly fella, you know. I mean, he's a he's
Speaker 2: a hardcore, ruthless dude, and nobody but a hardcore ruthless
Speaker 2: dude was going to pull Russia out of the condition
Speaker 2: it was in in the nineties, when you know, the
Speaker 2: government is controlled by the guys who own the entire economy,
Speaker 2: They control regions of the country with their own private armies.
Speaker 2: And he managed to you know, re establish the prerogative
Speaker 2: of the Russian state and put that society back together
Speaker 2: and clip the wings of all those oligarchs without a
Speaker 2: civil war. I mean, it's amazing, It really is amazing
Speaker 2: that that happened. And you know, some guy who was
Speaker 2: you know, Bernie Sanders was not going to be able
Speaker 2: to do something like that. He's a he's a hard
Speaker 2: man who came up in a very very hard time
Speaker 2: and so but you know, yeah, I think that, But yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that's where we're at. I think that Russia
Speaker 2: is finally kind of you know, reached a point of
Speaker 2: exasperation where it's affected you know, over the long term,
Speaker 2: I think that they have accepted that, you know, we're
Speaker 2: never really going to fully accept them and we're never
Speaker 2: going to let them in. And so that's why you know,
Speaker 2: they've solidified their relationships with China and Iran and India.
Speaker 2: You know, India didn't abandon Russia and a lot, you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of the countries around the world. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's what you want to talk about, like the failures
Speaker 2: of the New end policy. I mean, the Russian military
Speaker 2: is way stronger now than it was beforehand. The Russian
Speaker 2: military has a ton of experience fighting NATO tactics and
Speaker 2: NATO weapons systems that it didn't have before. It's Russia
Speaker 2: has had a long and brutal war to advance their
Speaker 2: understanding of drone tactics on the battlefield. You know, probably
Speaker 2: a decade or two worth of like military advancement in
Speaker 2: that space has probably been compressed into like two years.
Speaker 2: And you know, they've had to learn a lot of
Speaker 2: that the hard way, but they've learned it now. And
Speaker 2: if you look at the United States, like what we
Speaker 2: gained from this, you know what, like you know, our
Speaker 2: other rivals around the world. You know, China Indian just
Speaker 2: not not rivals, but the other powers around the world
Speaker 2: have seen that there are limits to what we can
Speaker 2: actually do, which you know, maybe they believe that before,
Speaker 2: but they weren't sure. You know, they saw Iraq or
Speaker 2: or Libya or something and they say, okay, they you know,
Speaker 2: Americans weren't able to achieve their goal or whatever, but
Speaker 2: they can sure as hell cause a hell of a
Speaker 2: lot of problems, you know, for us that we don't want.
Speaker 2: But they see that there's limitations to that is to
Speaker 2: you know, what we can actually do. A lot of
Speaker 2: countries that were you know that we're friendly with and
Speaker 2: we're still friendly with, you know, India, Brazil, uh, Mexico,
Speaker 2: a lot of these countries. We told them, you know,
Speaker 2: you have to, uh we we need you to be
Speaker 2: with us on this. Cut Russia off, you know, uh
Speaker 2: follow these sanctions. And most of those countries said no,
Speaker 2: and you know, outside of outside of NATO said no.
Speaker 2: And there were no consequences for that, you know, we
Speaker 2: we weren't able to impose any consequences on them. And
Speaker 2: the fact that you know, the these financial institutions that
Speaker 2: the United States has really used as as instruments of
Speaker 2: global control for you know, since in the post war period,
Speaker 2: like the like the IMF and all all these others,
Speaker 2: the Swift system and so forth. You know, these are
Speaker 2: things that before countries had to worry like what actually
Speaker 2: will happen if they cut us off the swift system?
Speaker 2: Like that could be armageddon, Like that could be all.
Speaker 2: But now everybody's seen it that actually, you know, you
Speaker 2: can get by. You can get by just fine, and
Speaker 2: you know, we're in a much weaker position now. We
Speaker 2: Europe is in a much weaker position. Although you know,
Speaker 2: I've heard people hypothesize that maybe that was, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of part of the goal of this whole thing
Speaker 2: was to you know, was to make sure that you know,
Speaker 2: Europe didn't I mean, if you go like everybody knows
Speaker 2: that Russia asked Yeltsin and Putin one time, asked about
Speaker 2: Russia joining NATO because that was one of their solutions.
Speaker 2: They were like, in fact, Yeltsin said, look, why don't
Speaker 2: we This is when we were talking about the first
Speaker 2: tranch of expansion in the mid nineties, and he was like,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, why don't we join NATO first?
Speaker 2: And then we'll bring in all the countries between US,
Speaker 2: and we won't have anything to worry about because we're
Speaker 2: part of the program. And of course we said no,
Speaker 2: you know, we were. That was never on the table
Speaker 2: because ah, you know, NATO is it's just the dealing.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's the you know, it's it's the instrument
Speaker 2: of American control over Europe. That's what it is. We're
Speaker 2: not going to you know, share the share the room
Speaker 2: with another large power that we can't control and has
Speaker 2: ideas of their own. But then also it was you know,
Speaker 2: if Russia's our friend, then Europe might start looking around
Speaker 2: and say, well, wait, okay, what do we need you know,
Speaker 2: an American military base in Germany for If Russia is
Speaker 2: our friend, what do we need to continue to like
Speaker 2: take dictations from Washington, d C. On our foreign policy?
Speaker 2: If the only country that's even feasibly a threat to
Speaker 2: US is now not just not a threat, but an
Speaker 2: ally and you know, so uh, it's uh, it's dark
Speaker 2: and crazy to think that you know that that that
Speaker 2: planners might have been thinking that way. But at the
Speaker 2: same time, it would be in keeping with you know
Speaker 2: a lot of their behavior where you use controlled chaos,
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of times, chaos is the goal.
Speaker 2: You know, if you look at like this is something
Speaker 2: Putin talks about all the time, and most Americans are
Speaker 2: just like, huh, what's he talking about? But uh after
Speaker 2: during as well, but uh then even after the second
Speaker 2: War with Chechnya it was over, we were over there
Speaker 2: like funding training you know, these jihadists who were there.
Speaker 2: This is after the war's over, Like they're not gonna
Speaker 2: retake you know, Gros near anything like that's all over.
Speaker 2: But what we wanted was just to keep enough chaos
Speaker 2: going in that region so that you know, a pipeline
Speaker 2: couldn't get built down to the Black Sea that Russia
Speaker 2: was trying to do for years, and a lot of
Speaker 2: these other things you couldn't develop, you know, the region
Speaker 2: strategically because there's just too much chaos popping off. And
Speaker 2: then by the way, and I and I uh, you
Speaker 2: know some of this is public knowledge, but you know,
Speaker 2: I have like confirmation from a marine who was a
Speaker 2: part of the training operation working out at Istanbul when
Speaker 2: Marsak was was training these jihadis and arming them. One
Speaker 2: of them, one of our main guys was there were
Speaker 2: four main warlords that we were like really working with
Speaker 2: on their own militias, and one of them his group,
Speaker 2: you know, and as far as I know, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: we were not working directly with them anymore at this point,
Speaker 2: but it was his group that went and did the
Speaker 2: Beslan school attack in Russia. And so I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: you just again you have to try to put yourself
Speaker 2: in the in the position of the Russians and you
Speaker 2: see something like that, you know, and think of how
Speaker 2: we would respond to it. And you know, I think
Speaker 2: about like you know, you've heard like Dan Crenshaw, Lindsey Graham.
Speaker 2: You guys just total maniacs. You know, they go on Twitter,
Speaker 2: they go in public. Dan Crenshaw actually said this is
Speaker 2: almost word for word. I think he said, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't understand why people have a problem with what
Speaker 2: we're doing over in Ukraine. A bunch of Russians are
Speaker 2: dying and it's not costing us anything but money. Like
Speaker 2: that's literally what he said. And so imagine like we're
Speaker 2: in Iraq and the Russians are just training, arming and
Speaker 2: not even on the sly They're just like basically leading
Speaker 2: the insurgency against US, and Russian politicians are out there
Speaker 2: in public saying, oh, yeah, we don't. Our only goal
Speaker 2: is to kill Americans, Like we just want to see
Speaker 2: more dead Americans. Like other than that, like if that happens,
Speaker 2: we're you know, we're happy. Dead Americans is cool in
Speaker 2: our book. That's enough for us. You think these people
Speaker 2: are fucking maniacs, you know, And and I think that's
Speaker 2: where the Russians are with us at that at this point.
Speaker 2: And it's unfortunate because you know, I love Russia. I
Speaker 2: mean I you know, I started reading Russian literature when
Speaker 2: I was a teenager, and you know, I've always loved it.
Speaker 2: I love the culture, and I find it to be
Speaker 2: a real tragedy that that our relationship to that country
Speaker 2: has been dragged down by a few, you know, really
Speaker 2: malicious interested parties.
Speaker 1: Well, let's finish on that. I mentioned before we started
Speaker 1: recording that we talked about managery early interested parties that
Speaker 1: they can get they can they can start wars, they
Speaker 1: can foament wars, they can fund wars that that even
Speaker 1: Americans don't have to fight in. And Colonel McGregor, Douglas
Speaker 1: McGregor has been running around basically saying that he believes
Speaker 1: that there's an the people who are doing this in
Speaker 1: the United States government are doing it out of an
Speaker 1: ethnic and ethnic vendetta. Basically that Victoria Nowlan her husband
Speaker 1: Robert Kagan Kagan is Russian for kne that it's a
Speaker 1: Jewish animosity for the pale of settlement, stettles, the pogroms.
Speaker 1: How do you answer? What do you think of McGregor
Speaker 1: saying that, what's your opinion?
Speaker 2: I think that there's there's definitely something to it, But
Speaker 2: it's not just the Jews, you know, like you you
Speaker 2: listen to the polls, like I think the polls, they're
Speaker 2: like if we go to nuclear war, we go to
Speaker 2: nuclear war. Like as long as Moscow gets flat and
Speaker 2: as part of that deal, I'm cool for like the
Speaker 2: just absolute manium.
Speaker 1: And mind you and mind you, there are four thousand
Speaker 1: Jews in Poland. Yeah, look I looked that up recently
Speaker 1: when that whole when that one Polish politician extinguished a minora,
Speaker 1: I look to see what the Jewish population of Poland was,
Speaker 1: and it's like four thousand right now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, and I mean look like there's this,
Speaker 2: there's this, there's this good joke. See if I can
Speaker 2: get it right, where this this Polish peasant is out
Speaker 2: in his field and he finds a magic lamp, the
Speaker 2: Genie lamp, and so he gives it a rub. He's
Speaker 2: gonna have his wishes. The genie pops out and says,
Speaker 2: you get three wishes. What's your first wish? And he says,
Speaker 2: I want China to invade Poland. He says, huh do
Speaker 2: you want to repeat that? And he tells him. He's
Speaker 2: like whatever, it was fine, and so you know, a
Speaker 2: few hours later, or however long later, see smoke on
Speaker 2: the horizon and tanks start rolling in and the air
Speaker 2: force rolls in. The Chinese military comes in, just flattens Poland,
Speaker 2: just wipes out the guy's village, everywhere else destroyed. And
Speaker 2: then they go home and he says, all right, so
Speaker 2: I want my second wish, and he's like, what do
Speaker 2: you want this time? You want me to rebuild the country.
Speaker 2: What is it you want? He said, I want China
Speaker 2: to invade Poland again, and he's like okay, And so
Speaker 2: the whole who same thing happens again, and third wish
Speaker 2: he wants China to invade Poland again, and so it
Speaker 2: happens again. He says, I got to ask you, like,
Speaker 2: why is it that you want. Don't you love your
Speaker 2: country like or do you really hate your country? Why
Speaker 2: do you want want China to come destroy it?
Speaker 1: Said?
Speaker 2: Are you kidding? I love my country. I love Poland
Speaker 2: more than anything. But to come to Poland three times,
Speaker 2: China's got to go through Russia six times. And you know,
Speaker 2: on one level, like I think that, And you know,
Speaker 2: I've got friends in the Baltics especially, but in Poland
Speaker 2: as well, and they would all fight me on this,
Speaker 2: but I think there's a certain level, a certain a
Speaker 2: certain way in which you know, those countries were part
Speaker 2: of the Soviet Union, some more willingly than others. You know,
Speaker 2: Poland honestly is one of the one of the ones
Speaker 2: that was part of the Soviet Union much more unwillingly.
Speaker 2: But you know, the Soviet Union was a was a
Speaker 2: multi f multinational project, especially early on before Stalin kind
Speaker 2: of reconverted it into a sort of a Russian empire.
Speaker 2: But you know, this is a multi ethnic, multinational project
Speaker 2: that had participation, you know, from strong communist parties like
Speaker 2: across Eastern Europe who were who were doing this. You know,
Speaker 2: it was not it was not a bunch of Russians
Speaker 2: who were going into you know, country A and you know,
Speaker 2: attacking the ethnic people over here. It was their own
Speaker 2: communist parties who were leading those efforts, you know, and
Speaker 2: taking leadership from Moscow obviously, and so this went on
Speaker 2: for a long time, and I think like, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: there's some there's something of once the Soviet Union fell,
Speaker 2: and these countries are sort of reckoning with their own past,
Speaker 2: their own the fact that you know, you're a country
Speaker 2: that that was part of the Soviet Union. Now you're not,
Speaker 2: but you're still living in the you know, next door
Speaker 2: to a guy who was part of the Secret Police.
Speaker 2: You're living next door to a you know, a communis
Speaker 2: apparatchic over here is something and you have to figure
Speaker 2: out how are we gonna knit this society back together?
Speaker 2: Like how are we gonna And I think one of
Speaker 2: the ways that they've done it is they just think, now,
Speaker 2: like the Soviet Union was Russia, Russia is the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: US we're pure victims of Russian imperialism and that was
Speaker 2: our role in the Soviet Union, just as victims, and
Speaker 2: so even our people who are a part of that
Speaker 2: or whatever, like you know, we really had no choice,
Speaker 2: and we can all kind of come together, and so
Speaker 2: I think it's been like a mechanism for pulling, you know,
Speaker 2: those societies back together in a cohesive way. I don't
Speaker 2: want to say it's the beginning and end of it,
Speaker 2: but I think there's something to that.
Speaker 1: Cool. It's all everybody where they can find your work.
Speaker 2: So I've got a podcast where I do long form
Speaker 2: history stuff. It's called Martyr Made, and you can find
Speaker 2: that on iTunes or Spotify or whatever. I've got another
Speaker 2: podcast with my buddy Jocko Willink called The Unraveling where
Speaker 2: we talk about sort of more recent history and contemp
Speaker 2: prairiy events. And then I've got a substack Martyrmade dot
Speaker 2: substack dot com where I kind of go into a
Speaker 2: lot of these things even more in depth.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to all of them. I do.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Daryl, Thanks brother. Always a good time.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone to Part one, the official
Speaker 1: Part one, first part of my reading of Kudeta and
Speaker 1: I have a special guest here, Daryl Cooper, Hey doing.
Speaker 2: Daryrol doing great man. It's always good to be on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so tell me. I asked John when I
Speaker 1: had him on before, when did when did kuditab come
Speaker 1: on to your radar.
Speaker 2: I think I read this book maybe, gosh, it must
Speaker 2: have been must have been fifteen years ago now, yeah,
Speaker 2: around two thousand and nine, twenty ten, and I was
Speaker 2: reading a lot of that kind of stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: I was reading a lot of Peter Dale Scott and
Speaker 2: you know, reading a lot about just like the Banana War,
Speaker 2: just all the twentieth century kind of kind of Cold
Speaker 2: war stuff. And I read through it back then. But
Speaker 2: I'll tell you it's one of those books that I
Speaker 2: think the last fifteen years that have passed since that
Speaker 2: time have really given the book a new flavor in
Speaker 2: a way, because you know, I read it back then
Speaker 2: and I enjoyed it. I've been rereading it because we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about it, and I've been getting a
Speaker 2: lot more out of it. There's a lot more to
Speaker 2: draw on, for sure, So I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 1: Cool. So what we're going to do is the preface
Speaker 1: to the first edition is one page. I'll read it
Speaker 1: and then skip to the first chapter. If there's anything
Speaker 1: you want to comment in on a comment on here
Speaker 1: on the preface, just let me know. Right, let's go.
Speaker 1: This is a handbook. It is therefore not concerned with
Speaker 1: the theoretical analysis of the coupdhata, but rather with the
Speaker 1: formulation of the techniques which can be employed to seize
Speaker 1: power with in a state. It can be compared to
Speaker 1: a cookery book in the sense that it aims at
Speaker 1: enabling any lay person, equipped with enthusiasm and the right ingredients,
Speaker 1: to carry out his own coup. Only a knowledge of
Speaker 1: the rules is required. Two words of caution. In the
Speaker 1: first place, in order to carry out a successful coup,
Speaker 1: certain preconditions must be present, just as in cooking Bullyabase,
Speaker 1: one needs to needs the right source of fish to
Speaker 1: start with. Second, readers should be aware that the penalty
Speaker 1: of failure is far greater than having to eat out
Speaker 1: of a tin. The rewards, too, are greater. It may
Speaker 1: be objected that should such a handbook be inadequate or misleading,
Speaker 1: the readers will be subject to great dangers, while if
Speaker 1: it is an efficient guide to the problems, it may
Speaker 1: lead to upheoples and disturbances. My defense is that coups
Speaker 1: are already common, and if as a result of this
Speaker 1: book a number of people learn how to carry them out,
Speaker 1: this is merely a step towards the democratization of the coup,
Speaker 1: the fact that all persons of liberal sentiments should applaud. Finally,
Speaker 1: it should be noted that the techniques here discussed are
Speaker 1: politically neutral and concerned only with the objective of seizing
Speaker 1: control of the state, and not at all with subsequent policies.
Speaker 1: When jump into chapter one, let's do it all right?
Speaker 1: Chapter one? What is a coupd'tas? I shall got a
Speaker 1: couple quotes here. I shall be sorry to commence the
Speaker 1: era of peace by a coup de ETAs such as
Speaker 1: that I had in contemplation, Duke of Wellington, eighteen eleven.
Speaker 1: No other way of salvation remained except for the army's intervention.
Speaker 1: Constantine Collius, April twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, Athens, all right.
Speaker 1: Starting with the text. Though the term coupdata has been
Speaker 1: used for more than three centuries, the feasibility of the
Speaker 1: coup derives from a comparatively recent development, the rise of
Speaker 1: the modern state, with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces.
Speaker 1: The power of the modern state largely depends on this
Speaker 1: permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records and officials,
Speaker 1: can follow intimately and if it so desires, control the
Speaker 1: activities of lesser organizations and individuals. Totalitarian states merely use
Speaker 1: more fully the detailed and comprehensive information available to most states. However,
Speaker 1: democratic the instrument is largely the same, though it is
Speaker 1: used differently. Right off the bat, when you start reading this,
Speaker 1: it really seems like he's describing the managerial state, right,
Speaker 1: what has existed since let's call it the late twenties
Speaker 1: to early thirties.
Speaker 2: You're muted, Yeah, I forgot about that. There's like a
Speaker 2: Babarian aspect to it too, right, Like Max Weber describes
Speaker 2: three forms of like organizational or political authority. You got
Speaker 2: like the charismatic or the traditional or the legal rational,
Speaker 2: and that's what he's talking about here. And you know,
Speaker 2: for Lootwalk, the coup is really only possible with the
Speaker 2: legal rational when you get that distinction between the political
Speaker 2: authority and the state machinery where there's sort of two
Speaker 2: distinct things and you can swap people out at the
Speaker 2: top and they are conferred genuine power from their position,
Speaker 2: you know, in a traditional authority structure, which is just
Speaker 2: basically like a patronage system. Everything from you know, say
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia today to feudal systems in the past, you know,
Speaker 2: these things were built on organic relationships, like that's what
Speaker 2: the system of power represented was the totality of these
Speaker 2: organic relationships. And a coup. You can't really pull off
Speaker 2: a coup unless you're maybe you know, a brother taking
Speaker 2: out the you know, the crown prints and taking his
Speaker 2: place or something like that. But that's about it. And
Speaker 2: same with charismatic authority, where leader, you know, leadership sort
Speaker 2: of coalesces around the person of a single charismatic individual.
Speaker 2: A lot of times you don't have much of an
Speaker 2: organization to go with that. The organization is, you know,
Speaker 2: the gathering of people around the man, and it's very
Speaker 2: hard to pull off a coup in that environment. Once
Speaker 2: the legal rational system gets in place, though, and especially
Speaker 2: once it gains a sort of autonomy and self awareness,
Speaker 2: you know, of itself as a class and as a
Speaker 2: as a as a as a function, it starts to
Speaker 2: learn how to defend itself and it'll start to, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, fend off challenges from charismatic leaders or traditionalist
Speaker 2: you know, patronage type type networks, and you know, and
Speaker 2: it's only that type that, yeah, that that you can
Speaker 2: run a coup against.
Speaker 1: Ye right onward The growth of modern state bureaucracies has
Speaker 1: two implications that are crucial for the feasibility of the coup.
Speaker 1: The emergence of clear distinctions between the permanent machinery of
Speaker 1: state and the political leadership, and the fact that state
Speaker 1: bureaucracies have structured hierarchies with definite chains of command. The
Speaker 1: distinction between the bureaucrat is an employee of the state
Speaker 1: and as a personal servant of the ruler is a
Speaker 1: new one, and both the British and the American systems
Speaker 1: so show residual features of the earlier structure. The importance
Speaker 1: of this development lies in the fact that if the
Speaker 1: bureaucrats are linked to the leadership an a legal seizure
Speaker 1: of power must take the form of a palace revolution,
Speaker 1: which essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler.
Speaker 1: That ruler may be forced to accept new policies or
Speaker 1: new advisors, or may be killed or held captive. But
Speaker 1: whatever happens, the palace revolution can only be conducted from
Speaker 1: the inside and by insiders. An insider might be be
Speaker 1: the commander of the palace guard, as in ancient Rome
Speaker 1: or the Ethiopia of the nineteen sixties, and if the
Speaker 1: dynastics system is preserved, the aim is to replace the
Speaker 1: unwanted ruler with a more malleable descendant. The coup is
Speaker 1: a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from
Speaker 1: the outside and operates in the area outside the government
Speaker 1: but within the state, the area formed by the permanent
Speaker 1: professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The
Speaker 1: aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state
Speaker 1: from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done
Speaker 1: if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties.
Speaker 1: I don't know that people saw, like when you read
Speaker 1: that last paragraph, how clearly you can see what he
Speaker 1: talks about with The aim is to detach to permanent employees,
Speaker 1: which would we would call the deep state now, from
Speaker 1: the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done. I
Speaker 1: don't know that when he wrote this, it was even sure.
Speaker 1: Burnham had written the manager or Revolution thirty years thirty
Speaker 1: three years earlier, or thirty years earlier, But I don't
Speaker 1: know that that was as widely understood as it is now.
Speaker 1: The fact that we're basically run by managerialism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's interesting given that the people who kind
Speaker 2: of put over that revolution, were quite explicit about their
Speaker 2: goal in doing that, in detaching political authority and government machinery. Right,
Speaker 2: if you go back to like the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: most American cities, local and even state governments, which the
Speaker 2: federal government was much smaller and weaker back then, so
Speaker 2: that meant most of government in America, you know, it
Speaker 2: was run by ethnic patronage networks that sort of emerged
Speaker 2: more or less organically as a way of organizing people
Speaker 2: for political activity. And the Progressive movement was a very explicit,
Speaker 2: you know, the Good Government Movement, very explicit sort of
Speaker 2: attack on those patronage networks. And you know, you can
Speaker 2: take that all the way up to like like Colonel
Speaker 2: House's book, or all the way eventually in the apotheosis
Speaker 2: obviously in the New Deal Revolution when that all really
Speaker 2: came together, and they're quite explicit about it. But for
Speaker 2: some reason, Yeah, it's something that's that's been lost a
Speaker 2: bit today. You know, when you when we were kids,
Speaker 2: we watched Schoolhouse Rock. They had that little commercial, you know,
Speaker 2: where there's like the piece of paper and he's like, hey, folks,
Speaker 2: I'm a bill and here's how I get passed. There's
Speaker 2: three branches of government and so forth, and like you know,
Speaker 2: and this is how your government works, and that you know,
Speaker 2: that's that's not how the government works at all, right,
Speaker 2: I mean the government ninety nine percent of the government
Speaker 2: and certainly all of the functional parts of the government,
Speaker 2: the ones that actually take action. It's this unelected bureaucracy
Speaker 2: that that that's purpose is to be completely detached from
Speaker 2: political authority, which is to say, you know, quote, you know,
Speaker 2: in an ideal world, or if our system worked the
Speaker 2: way it was supposed to, which is to say that
Speaker 2: it's detached from accountability from from the you know, the population.
Speaker 1: All right onward. In the last dynasty of Imperial China,
Speaker 1: as in present day African states, it was primarily an
Speaker 1: ethnic bond that secured the loyalty of the state apparatus.
Speaker 1: The Manchu dynasty was careful to follow native Chinese customs,
Speaker 1: and it employed Han Chinese in the civil service at
Speaker 1: all levels, but the crucial posts in the high magistracy, magistracy,
Speaker 1: and the army were filled by the descendants of the
Speaker 1: Jurchens who had entered China with their chiefs the founders
Speaker 1: of the dynasty. Similarly, after and rulers typically appoint members
Speaker 1: of their own tribe to the key posts in the
Speaker 1: armed forces, police and security services. When a party machine
Speaker 1: controls civil service appointments, either as part of a more
Speaker 1: general totalitarian control or because of a very long period
Speaker 1: in office, as in postwar Italy till the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: political associates are appointed to the senior levels of the bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: partly in order to protect the regime and partly to
Speaker 1: ensure the sympathetic execution of policies. In the communist countries
Speaker 1: of yesteryear, all senior jobs were of course held by
Speaker 1: party appoatrics. Saudi Arabia provides an instance of traditional bonds.
Speaker 1: In this case, the lack of modern know how on
Speaker 1: the part of the traditional tribal affiliates of the royal
Speaker 1: house has meant that what could not be done individually
Speaker 1: has been done organizationally. The modern army, manned by some
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand unreliable city dwellers, is outnumbered by one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five thousand or so enrolled in the
Speaker 1: White Army of the Bedouin, or at least nominally be
Speaker 1: followers of the Saudis officially known as the Haras al
Speaker 1: Watshani Guard of the Homeland or National Guard, the so
Speaker 1: called the White Army. It includes a tribal militia of
Speaker 1: some twenty five thousand official official officially designated the Iman
Speaker 1: Imam Muhammad bin Saud Mechanized Brigade based in the capital
Speaker 1: of Riad and plainly ment as an anti coup force.
Speaker 1: Have you been to Saudi?
Speaker 2: I have been to Riyad once and other than that,
Speaker 2: I got stuck on a tarmac and a helicopter in
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty degree heat for about eight hours
Speaker 2: one time.
Speaker 1: I keep going. Such ethnic or traditional bonds between the
Speaker 1: political leadership and the heads of the bureaucracy and the
Speaker 1: armed forces are not typical of the modern state, while
Speaker 1: looser or ethnic affiliations will tend to embrace groups large
Speaker 1: enough to be successfully infiltrated by the planners of the
Speaker 1: coup as a direct consequence of its sheer size. In
Speaker 1: order to achieve even a minimum of efficiency, the state
Speaker 1: bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear cut areas
Speaker 1: of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department,
Speaker 1: there must be an accepted chain of command and standard
Speaker 1: procedures have to be followed. Thus, a given piece of
Speaker 1: information or a given order is followed up in a
Speaker 1: stereotyped manner, and if the order comes from the appropriate
Speaker 1: source at the appropriate level, it is carried out. In
Speaker 1: the more critical parts of the state apparatus, the armed forces,
Speaker 1: the police, and the security services, all these characteristics are
Speaker 1: intensified with an even greater degree of discipline and rigidity.
Speaker 1: The apparatus of this state is, therefore, to some extent,
Speaker 1: a machine that will normally behave in a fairly predictable
Speaker 1: and automatic miss manner. What happens if it stops operating
Speaker 1: in a predictable and automatic manner?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think what Luboks saying here is that,
Speaker 2: you know, he's pointing out that I think he's probably
Speaker 2: setting up to defend his thesis that you can actually speak,
Speaker 2: for lack of a better word, like scientifically about these processes.
Speaker 2: You know that this is something that that that these
Speaker 2: are systems that have certain rules and laws and guidelines
Speaker 2: that they run by, and so you can actually speak
Speaker 2: about them in general terms. But what happens if they
Speaker 2: start if they stop reacting in a predictable manner? I mean,
Speaker 2: at that point you're very very very close to the edge.
Speaker 2: You know, the whole uh, the whole purpose of that.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think about the base level of
Speaker 2: all government, right, and maybe this has something to do
Speaker 2: with Weber's traditional you know, patrimony based system of authority,
Speaker 2: but at the bottom of it is whoever can provide
Speaker 2: physical security and whoever can distribute resources that people need
Speaker 2: to live or secure and distribute those resources, then that's
Speaker 2: gonna that's the government in time. Like it might not
Speaker 2: be today, but eventually, if the government that you think
Speaker 2: you have can't do those things, then that's not gonna
Speaker 2: be the government for long. You know. You see this
Speaker 2: with like terrorist organ I mean we had to come
Speaker 2: to terms with this, Like in Iraq for example, right
Speaker 2: when we went into Iraq, people really did go in
Speaker 2: with all of these for all the cynicism of the
Speaker 2: neo cons and everything, like these people when they you know,
Speaker 2: they really had sort of pioped themselves into believing that
Speaker 2: the people of the world are just Americans in embryo.
Speaker 2: And as soon as they're given the opportunity we get
Speaker 2: rid of at Am Hussein or whoever, then they're gonna
Speaker 2: throw roses at our feet and be happy to become
Speaker 2: because they were thinking of you know, Poland in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine, you know, Czechoslovakia in nineteen eighty nine, like
Speaker 2: just take that boot off their neck, and they want
Speaker 2: to wear blue jeans and basically be Americans, like if
Speaker 2: they're given the opportunity, And they really did sigh off
Speaker 2: themselves into believing that to a degree. But then once
Speaker 2: we got in there, we had to deal with the
Speaker 2: reality which the terrorist organization, the insurgents understood much better
Speaker 2: than we did it first, which was, you know, they
Speaker 2: knew that if they could prove that the Americans could
Speaker 2: not protect you, could not provide physical security, and that
Speaker 2: the Americans weren't able to ensure that you and your
Speaker 2: family could eat or have water or then we weren't
Speaker 2: going to be governing that country for very long, you know.
Speaker 2: And the people who are capable of turning those things,
Speaker 2: the violence spigot or the resource pigot on and off,
Speaker 2: if the insurgents, through violence could make that be them,
Speaker 2: then they would, you know, replace us. And they understood
Speaker 2: that we had to kind of we had to kind
Speaker 2: of adapt to that, and we got to the point
Speaker 2: once you got up to like six o seven, where
Speaker 2: we did kind of just accept that, you know, Betraeus
Speaker 2: went out with like hundreds of millions of dollars and
Speaker 2: just started paying off tribal cheeks. Not so much so that,
Speaker 2: you know, it wasn't so that they could go stuff
Speaker 2: it in their Swiss bank account and flee the country
Speaker 2: if things go bad later on. It was so that
Speaker 2: we were conferring upon them the legitimacy they needed as
Speaker 2: distributors of resources. You know, they could actually give their
Speaker 2: people things that they needed, while we provided physical security
Speaker 2: to actually get them on our side. You know. It's
Speaker 2: that's that's like really the fundamental kind of base level
Speaker 2: of all of all government and so at that. I mean,
Speaker 2: in that sense, if it started starts acting unpredictably at
Speaker 2: that point, then you're already in a period of you know,
Speaker 2: of severe breakdown.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember a couple of years ago, my friend
Speaker 1: Rachel and I were discussing, texting back and forth asking about, well,
Speaker 1: if everything collapsed, who's in charge? And she said, well,
Speaker 1: obviously whoever can feed whoever can feed you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I mean that's you know, I think if
Speaker 2: you go back even to the just the origins of
Speaker 2: human government, you know, once you get past the sort
Speaker 2: of band level of organization, you know, where the guy
Speaker 2: in charge is your grandfather or whatever. You see this,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's built into our myths. You see it
Speaker 2: in history where you know, where we have access to
Speaker 2: it is that the basic form of government is a
Speaker 2: warrior and his friends. You know, if you're a farmer
Speaker 2: and you're out here and you have a bunch of
Speaker 2: lions terrorizing your livestock, and you know, threatening your children
Speaker 2: when they go outside, and it's a pack of lions,
Speaker 2: and you're a farmer, you know, in the days before firearms,
Speaker 2: you know, that's a real problem for you. In fact,
Speaker 2: that's like a that's a that's a life or death
Speaker 2: problem for you, not just whether or not you get
Speaker 2: killed by a lion, but whether you can actually do
Speaker 2: the things you need to do to eat. So a
Speaker 2: guy shows up on a horse with six of his
Speaker 2: friends and says, where are the lions there? That way?
Speaker 2: And he goes and kills those lions. That dude's in charge.
Speaker 2: And you're fine with that, you know, And that's a
Speaker 2: legitimate basis of human government in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: All right, A coup operates by taking advantage of this
Speaker 1: machine like behavior both during and after the takeover. During
Speaker 1: the coup, because it uses parts of the state apparatus
Speaker 1: to seize the controlling levers, over the rest and afterward,
Speaker 1: because the value of the levers depends on the degree
Speaker 1: to which the state really functions as a machine. We
Speaker 1: will see that some states are so well organized that
Speaker 1: the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion according to
Speaker 1: a given conception of what is proper and what is
Speaker 1: not in the orders that it executes. This is the
Speaker 1: case in the most advanced countries, and in such circumstances
Speaker 1: a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a
Speaker 1: few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus
Speaker 1: is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership
Speaker 1: to allow room for a coup, as as is still
Speaker 1: the case perhaps in the ex British protectorates of Southern Africa, Botswana,
Speaker 1: Lesotho and Swaziland. Fortunately, most states are between those two extremes,
Speaker 1: with bureaucratic machines both large and unsophisticated, and thus highly
Speaker 1: vulnerable to those who can identify and seize the right levers.
Speaker 1: One of the most striking developments of the twentieth century
Speaker 1: was the great decline in general political stability. Since the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, governments have been overthrown at an increasing pace.
Speaker 1: In the nineteenth century, the French experienced two revolutions and
Speaker 1: two regimes collapsed. Following the military defeat in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: the change of regime that brought Charles de gaul to
Speaker 1: enduring power was a blend of those elements. People every
Speaker 1: whe have followed the French example, and the lifespan of
Speaker 1: regimes has tended to decrease while the life span of
Speaker 1: their subjects has increased. This contrast sharply with the relative
Speaker 1: attachments to the system of constitutional monarchy displayed in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. When Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians secured their freedom
Speaker 1: from the Turkish colonial system, they immediately went over to
Speaker 1: Germany in order to shop around for a suitable royal family. Crowns,
Speaker 1: flags and decorations were designed and purchased from reputable English suppliers.
Speaker 1: Royal palaces were built, and where possible, hunting lodges, royal
Speaker 1: mistresses and a local aristocracy were provided as fringe benefits.
Speaker 1: Twentieth century peoples have on the other hand, showed a
Speaker 1: marked lack of interest in monarchies in their paraphernalia when
Speaker 1: the British kindly provided them with a proper royal family.
Speaker 1: Unhappy Iraqis made numerous efforts to dispense with it before
Speaker 1: finally succeeding by mass in nineteen fifty eight. Military and
Speaker 1: other right wing forces have meanwhile tried to keep up
Speaker 1: with violent mass movements, using their own illegal methods to
Speaker 1: seize power and overthrow regimes. Why did the regimes of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century prove to be so fragile? It is,
Speaker 1: after all, paradoxical that this fragility increased while the established
Speaker 1: procedures for securing changes in government were becoming more flexible.
Speaker 1: The political scientists will reply that although the procedures became
Speaker 1: more flexible, the pressures for change were also becoming stronger,
Speaker 1: and the increase in flexibility did not keep up with
Speaker 1: the increased social and economic stresses. Violent metho you want
Speaker 1: to say.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I actually wanted to go back a little
Speaker 2: bit too. I was thinking about when he was talking
Speaker 2: about you know that you have to kind of have
Speaker 2: this Goldilock's bureaucracy, right, this goldilocks state where it is
Speaker 2: developed enough that it's worth taking the reins of you know,
Speaker 2: if you that if you get the control of it,
Speaker 2: then you actually have power that you know, it's developed
Speaker 2: enough for that, but that it's not so mature that
Speaker 2: it can exercise self will you know, if it doesn't
Speaker 2: like who the leader is or what the leader wants
Speaker 2: to do. And you know, there's a there's a sense
Speaker 2: in which if you think of like the National Socialist
Speaker 2: Revolution in Germany, you know, obviously that wasn't a coup
Speaker 2: or kup atah or anything, but it really was like
Speaker 2: a I mean, it was a revolution and the system
Speaker 2: of government there for sure that if you were to
Speaker 2: go back, you know before that, well it was something
Speaker 2: that like it like not understanding this. The this part,
Speaker 2: I think kind of led to it was part of
Speaker 2: what led to the conflict that eventually emerged between the
Speaker 2: regime and the sort of the old school hardcore revolutionaries
Speaker 2: of like the Essay for example, right, because once Hitler
Speaker 2: got into power, he had to he had to deal
Speaker 2: with the fact that this machinery existed that he was
Speaker 2: now at the controls of that he had to compromise
Speaker 2: with on someone you know, because it was developed enough
Speaker 2: to resist anything he wanted to do if he couldn't
Speaker 2: co opt it like that, and he had to make
Speaker 2: certain compromises to accommodate it. And you know, the ernst
Speaker 2: Rome's of the world and stuff. These were hardcore, like
Speaker 2: street revolutionaries, and they didn't like that. And you see
Speaker 2: that in a lot of these revolutions, and it's why,
Speaker 2: you know, in revolutions all over the world throughout the
Speaker 2: twentieth century, the first thing that happens is the revolutionary
Speaker 2: seized control of the government. And the second thing that
Speaker 2: happens is most of the revolutionaries get killed off by
Speaker 2: the boss. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you study you know, if you study
Speaker 1: the rise of then socialists and they're taking power, it's
Speaker 1: pretty clear why Thomas went over that. We did a
Speaker 1: whole episode on that, and he just liked that. I
Speaker 1: from a real politic standpoint, it's like, yeah, these are
Speaker 1: the guys who brought you here. But I mean, some
Speaker 1: of these guys just they weren't going to be along
Speaker 1: for the ride and they were not going to let
Speaker 1: go on their own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a this is a total off topic
Speaker 2: digression real quick, but I'm just going to throw it
Speaker 2: out there in case you have anybody who wants to
Speaker 2: pick this one up, Like if I was if I
Speaker 2: had any talent as a fiction writer, like as a novelist,
Speaker 2: you know, the book I would write. I would love
Speaker 2: to read a book that is about It's a biography
Speaker 2: or a mini biography of the period of Hitler's life
Speaker 2: from the rise to power, like through the twenties, you know,
Speaker 2: from the Puts and on its way up, all the
Speaker 2: way up and ends in nineteen thirty four when he
Speaker 2: had to kill Rome and a of these essay guys,
Speaker 2: and just the inner turmoil that he had to have
Speaker 2: gone through, you know, having to having to take out, uh,
Speaker 2: so many of the people who had you know, been
Speaker 2: who had ridden with him up to that point and
Speaker 2: been through everything with him, and coming to the conclusion
Speaker 2: and having to carry out uh something that you know
Speaker 2: that was necessary but but maybe very distasteful to him.
Speaker 2: I think I would. I think that would be a
Speaker 2: great story.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think most people, uh most people hear that
Speaker 1: story just think he was an absolute mad man and
Speaker 1: done taken a consideration, you know, what he thought, what
Speaker 1: he believed was coming, and what needed and you know
Speaker 1: what the what the fight was actually going to be,
Speaker 1: and well, yeah, well let's go, let's go on. We
Speaker 1: we get detorted on that one for a while, all right.
Speaker 1: Violent methods are generally used when legal methods of securing
Speaker 1: a governmental change are useless because they are either too rigid,
Speaker 1: as in the case of ruling monarchies where the ruler
Speaker 1: actually controls policy formation, or not rigid enough. It was
Speaker 1: once remarked, for example, that the throne of Russia was,
Speaker 1: until the seventeenth century neither hereditary nor elective, but occupative occupative.
Speaker 1: The long series of abdications forced by the Great Boyar
Speaker 1: landlords and the Streltsi the Kremlin Palace guards had weakened
Speaker 1: the hereditary principle so that whoever took the throne became czar.
Speaker 1: Precedents by birth counted for little. Some contemporary republics have
Speaker 1: ended up in this position, which comes about when a
Speaker 1: long series of illegal seizures of power leads to a
Speaker 1: decay of the legal and political structures needed to produce
Speaker 1: new governments. Thus Syria went through more than a dozen
Speaker 1: coups before the Assad family dynasty was established by Hafez
Speaker 1: A la Sad's nineteen seventy coup, and the provisions for
Speaker 1: all open general elections written in the Harani Constitution could
Speaker 1: no longer be applied because the necessary supervisory machinery decayed
Speaker 1: and disappeared. Assuming, however, that there is an established procedure
Speaker 1: for changing the leadership, that all other methods must fall
Speaker 1: within some category of illegality. What we call them depends
Speaker 1: on what side we are on, but skipping some of
Speaker 1: the details, we use one of the following terms. All right,
Speaker 1: so a bunch of lists of terms here, though with
Speaker 1: brief explanations. Revolution.
Speaker 2: Oh sorry, I was just going to jump in real
Speaker 2: quick and say, like, you know, there's a look the
Speaker 2: obvious geopolitical reason that the post colonial states in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century were the places where, you know, coups happened
Speaker 2: more than any their places. One part of its geopolitical
Speaker 2: and it's obvious, right that was the those are the
Speaker 2: places that were up for grabs in the Cold War, right,
Speaker 2: and so they had both sides sort of vuying for them,
Speaker 2: but also from like a lootwalk perspective, you know, it's
Speaker 2: interesting because they those those were the countries that kind
Speaker 2: of fit the model that he's talking about here the
Speaker 2: best in the sense that you had these say in Africa,
Speaker 2: you had these countries that really were only countries because
Speaker 2: the French and the British drew some lines on a map.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That's why it's a country that has a state machinery
Speaker 2: that is somewhat well developed because it was either left
Speaker 2: in place or put in place as the colonizers were leaving.
Speaker 2: And so there's this machinery that can kind of run
Speaker 2: the country, kind can kind of defend itself against interlopers
Speaker 2: and so forth. It exists and whoever controls it, you know,
Speaker 2: is sort of in charge. But there's no you know,
Speaker 2: the population itself is just broken up into tribes. They
Speaker 2: don't identify with each other. There's no nation underlying this thing.
Speaker 2: In other words, the power of structure doesn't actually represent
Speaker 2: any organic power. It's just this thing that's there that's
Speaker 2: sort of that that's sort of imposed on people. It's
Speaker 2: not it's not representative of anything that really like on
Speaker 2: the ground. Right, Like if you look at Afghanistan, for example,
Speaker 2: you know, there are people who are we going to
Speaker 2: call them geniuses or anything. There's people with basic common
Speaker 2: sense who back in two thousand and one we're saying,
Speaker 2: this is a this is just never going to work
Speaker 2: in the long term for the very simple reason that
Speaker 2: the Northern Alliance, all these people that like, we're going
Speaker 2: over there and wanting to ally with that, these people,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a big coalition of all the different
Speaker 2: minority groups in Afghanistan, and you want to bring this
Speaker 2: coalition together. They have nothing in common. They really don't have,
Speaker 2: you know, any anything that they share other than their
Speaker 2: opposition to the postune majority. And so it's going to
Speaker 2: make them completely dependent on the United States occupation forces.
Speaker 2: And once that occupation forces leave, whether it's now, whether
Speaker 2: it's in a hundred years, those people are are going
Speaker 2: to scatter to the winds because the real power, the
Speaker 2: organic power in this country is the postune majority that
Speaker 2: is organized under the Taliban, and you know, and that's
Speaker 2: real power, whether or not, whether or not they are
Speaker 2: represented in the government or not. Usually, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: reality wins out. And so you have a lot of
Speaker 2: these African countries and other post colonial countries that had
Speaker 2: that state machinery with nothing underneath it. And even a
Speaker 2: place like Liberia. Liberia is actually a great example because
Speaker 2: it was never a colony. You know, it was like
Speaker 2: you had essentially like Monrovia was like a city state
Speaker 2: where you know, a bunch of former American slaves had
Speaker 2: gone to had gone to live. And they never really
Speaker 2: even left Monrovia or the immediate environs of Monrovia much.
Speaker 2: They didn't go out to the hinterlands, you know, or anything.
Speaker 2: But then once the Wrench in the British really started
Speaker 2: to get on their colonization spree in Africa, we started
Speaker 2: putting pressure on the Americo Liberians in Monrovio. We're like,
Speaker 2: you need to become a country. You can't just be
Speaker 2: a city state. We need you to form the country
Speaker 2: of Liberia, and we're going to define its borders so
Speaker 2: that we can say to the French and British, like,
Speaker 2: you can't come in here, you have to stay out
Speaker 2: of this area. And so they did, and they went
Speaker 2: and they created a quote unquote country of Liberia with
Speaker 2: a government of Liberia, you know, and they created a
Speaker 2: sort of national quote unquote police force that went out
Speaker 2: and found which tribal authorities and chiefs could be co opted,
Speaker 2: getting rid of the ones that couldn't, and then reinforcing
Speaker 2: the co opted ones authority with the national you know,
Speaker 2: security forces. But it was it was always just very
Speaker 2: very very inorganic, you know, it never had any purchase
Speaker 2: like on the ground. In most of the country. It
Speaker 2: was something that they existed on paper to a large degree.
Speaker 2: And you saw in the twentieth century that you know,
Speaker 2: with the slightest push, a place like that comes apart.
Speaker 1: All right. First one, revolution the action is conducted initially
Speaker 1: at any rate, by uncoordinated popular masses, and it aims
Speaker 1: at changing the social and political structures, as well as
Speaker 1: the personalities and the leadership. The term revolution has gained
Speaker 1: a certain popularity and many coups are graced with it
Speaker 1: because of the implication that it was the people rather
Speaker 1: than a few plotters who did the whole thing. Thus,
Speaker 1: the obscure aims abd Abd al Karim Kassim had in
Speaker 1: mind when he overthrew the Iraqi regime of King Faisal
Speaker 1: the Second and Prime Minister nourri said are locally known
Speaker 1: as the Sacred Principles of the July fourteenth Revolution. Next
Speaker 1: one is civil war. Civil war is outright warfare between
Speaker 1: elements of the armed forces and or the population at large.
Speaker 1: The term is perpetually unfashionable. Whenever there is a civil war,
Speaker 1: all sides typically deny its existence, variously passing it off
Speaker 1: as an international war, such as the war between the
Speaker 1: states of the Confederacy, or more often as a foreign aggression.
Speaker 1: Though in Franco's Spain, the civil war of nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six to nineteen thirty nine was always la Cruzada the
Speaker 1: Crusade siamiento. This is an essentially Spanish and South American
Speaker 1: version of the military coup de'ta, but many recent African
Speaker 1: coups have also taken this particular form. In its original
Speaker 1: nineteenth century Spanish version, it was a highly ritualized process.
Speaker 1: First came the trabajos, literally the works, in which the
Speaker 1: opinions of army officers were sounded. The next step was
Speaker 1: the compromisos, in which commitments were made and rewards promised.
Speaker 1: Then came the call for action, and finally the appeal
Speaker 1: to the troops to follow their officers in rebellion against
Speaker 1: the government. The pronunciamanto was often a liberal rather than
Speaker 1: a reactionary phenomenon, and the theoretical purpose of the takeover
Speaker 1: was to ascertain the national will. A typical liberal concept. Later,
Speaker 1: as the army became increasingly right wing while Spanish governments
Speaker 1: became less so, the theory shifted from the neoliberal national
Speaker 1: will to the neo conservative real will theory. The latter
Speaker 1: postulates that the prospulates the existence of a national essence,
Speaker 1: a sort of permanent spiritual structure which the wishes of
Speaker 1: the majority may not always express. The army was entrusted
Speaker 1: with the interpretation and preservation of this essential s Spain,
Speaker 1: and the obligation to protect it against the government and,
Speaker 1: if need be, against the people. Siamiento was organized and
Speaker 1: led by a particular army leader, but it was carried
Speaker 1: out in the name of the entire officer corps. Unlike
Speaker 1: the pusch, which is carried out by a faction within
Speaker 1: the army, or the coup, which can also be executed
Speaker 1: by civilians using some army units, the pronounciamiento leads to
Speaker 1: a takeover by the army as a whole. Many African
Speaker 1: takeovers in which the army had participated as a whole
Speaker 1: were therefore very similar to the classic pronouncmento what do you?
Speaker 1: How do you? This was written before before Chile nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three would how would that be How would that
Speaker 1: even fit into that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it would fit into what he's saying,
Speaker 2: you know, in the sense of representing at least the
Speaker 2: majority of the armed forces.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's Another interesting example is like when CECI in Egypt
Speaker 2: throughout the Muslim Brotherhood, and you know, you saw in
Speaker 2: that situation. I mean, in a way you could say
Speaker 2: that wasn't it wasn't quite a coup in the sense
Speaker 2: that what was really happening was the real power in
Speaker 2: the in the country was revealing itself. You know that
Speaker 2: the that the deep state there was always in charge
Speaker 2: election or no election, and it was it was making
Speaker 2: that clear. But still like that's how it played out.
Speaker 2: But when that happened, you know, sure Mubarak was in
Speaker 2: jail and everything, but if you looked at it, I mean,
Speaker 2: every time CEC was on stage, like he was on
Speaker 2: camera somewhere, it's just nothing but four stars flanking him
Speaker 2: on either side. And if you look at something like
Speaker 2: the twenty was it fifteen or sixteen attempt against ern
Speaker 2: and I remember when they first went on the people
Speaker 2: who were pushing the putch or coup, whatever you want
Speaker 2: to call I guess this would be a putch in
Speaker 2: Lutwalk's terms. And I remember watching it and seeing like
Speaker 2: I think there was like a two star on stage talking,
Speaker 2: but then there was like a couple of colonels and
Speaker 2: then there was like a captain on stage. I'm like,
Speaker 2: if you got a captain on stage for your coup,
Speaker 2: like it's over. This is not gonna work. There's just
Speaker 2: no he should be like getting coffee for somebody, for
Speaker 2: all the four stars that are or else. This is
Speaker 2: not gonna work. And sure enough it didn't work.
Speaker 1: All right, Let's move on to the puch. Essentially a
Speaker 1: wartime or immediately postwar phenomenon, a pusch is attempted by
Speaker 1: a formal body within the armed forces under its appointment,
Speaker 1: under its appointed leadership. Excuse me. The corny Love putsch
Speaker 1: is a clear example. Lavera Korni Love, a general in
Speaker 1: charge of an army group in northern Russia, attempted to
Speaker 1: seize the then Petrograd Petersburg in order to establish a
Speaker 1: fighting regime that would prosecute the war. Had he succeeded,
Speaker 1: the city would perhaps have borne his name instead of Lenin,
Speaker 1: as it did until nineteen ninety one liberation. A state
Speaker 1: may be said by supporters of the change to be
Speaker 1: liberated when its government is overthrown by foreign military or
Speaker 1: diplomatic intervention. A classic case of this was the installation
Speaker 1: of the communist leadership in Romania in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: The USSR forced to then King Michael to accept a
Speaker 1: new cabinet by threatening direct military force by the Soviet Army.
Speaker 1: You ever read what Evela had to say about the
Speaker 1: Iron Guard.
Speaker 2: No, I've read a lot of Evela, but I can't
Speaker 2: remember anything about that.
Speaker 1: It's like a ten page article. And he said that
Speaker 1: if anybody was going to defeat Bolshevism in your it
Speaker 1: would have been it would have been the Romanian Iron Guard.
Speaker 1: It would have been Clergiano and the Romanian Iron Guard,
Speaker 1: he said, just because not only a nationalistic feeling, but
Speaker 1: also the Orthodox, the Orthodox feeling, and then just a
Speaker 1: they had recognized the influence of certain groups in Bolshevism
Speaker 1: very early on, and we're and we're writing about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe that's why, you know, the Legionnaires probably
Speaker 2: got it worse than just about every other anti communist
Speaker 2: group in Europe, you know, in Poteste prison, in some
Speaker 2: of the other places.
Speaker 1: Man, all right, let me keep doing. I don't want
Speaker 1: to talk about that. That makes it, that makes me ill,
Speaker 1: war of national liberation, insurgency, et cetera. In this form
Speaker 1: of internal conflict, the aim of the initiating party is
Speaker 1: not to seize power within the state, but rather to
Speaker 1: set up a rival state structure. This can be politically,
Speaker 1: ethnically or religiously based, as with the Taliban, whose aim
Speaker 1: is in Afghanistan wholly converted to their own Deobandi or
Speaker 1: Wahabi Islam, which contrives to be both the official state
Speaker 1: religion of Saudi Arabia and a rigorously fanatical ideology that
Speaker 1: denies any legitimacy whatsoever. It's any other form of Islam,
Speaker 1: let alone non Muslim faiths. As for secessionist insurgencies, they
Speaker 1: are necessarily ethnically based, though ethnicity can be all in
Speaker 1: the mind, as with the Eritreans and Ethiopians, as with
Speaker 1: the Kurds of Iraq as well as Iran and Turkey,
Speaker 1: the Somalis of Kenya and Ethiopia, the current people in
Speaker 1: Burma and formerly the Nagas of India. All Right, the
Speaker 1: definition of the coudetat drink real quick. A kudata involves
Speaker 1: some elements of all these different methods by which power
Speaker 1: can be seized, but unlike most of them, the coup
Speaker 1: is not assisted by the intervention of the masses or
Speaker 1: by any large scale form of combat by military forces.
Speaker 1: The assistance of these forms of direct force would no
Speaker 1: doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would
Speaker 1: be unrealistic to think that they would be available to
Speaker 1: the organizers of a coup. Because we will not be
Speaker 1: in charge of the armed forces. We cannot hope to
Speaker 1: start planning of a coup with sizable military units already
Speaker 1: under our control, nor will the pre coup government usually
Speaker 1: allow us to carry out the propaganda and organization necessary
Speaker 1: to make effective use of the broad masses of the people.
Speaker 1: A second distinguishing feature of a coup is that it
Speaker 1: does not imply any particular political orientation. Revolutions are usually leftists,
Speaker 1: while the which and the pronunciamiento are usually initiated by
Speaker 1: right wing forces. A coup, however, is politically neutral, and
Speaker 1: there is no presumption that any particular policies will be
Speaker 1: followed after the seizure of power. It is true that
Speaker 1: many coups have been of a decidedly right wing character,
Speaker 1: but there is nothing inevitable about that. If a coup
Speaker 1: does not make use of the masses or of warfare,
Speaker 1: what instrument of power will enable it to seize control
Speaker 1: of the state. The short answer is that power will
Speaker 1: come from the state itself. The long answer makes up
Speaker 1: the bulk of this book. The following is our formal
Speaker 1: and functional definition of a coup. A coup consists of
Speaker 1: the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the
Speaker 1: state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government
Speaker 1: from its control of the remainder. And there is footnotes
Speaker 1: for chapter one, start chapter two and cefr we get.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Whenever you need to break off, just let me know
Speaker 1: Chapter two, when is a kudeta possible? Quoting the Bolsheviks
Speaker 1: have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets.
Speaker 1: They must take power immediately victory is assured, and there
Speaker 1: are nine chances out of ten that it will be bloodless.
Speaker 1: To wait is a crime against the revolution. That's Vladimir
Speaker 1: ilitch Ilyanov lenin October nineteen seventeen. The process of decolonization
Speaker 1: that started soon after the end of the Second World
Speaker 1: War first doubled and then more than triple the number
Speaker 1: of independent states, so that the opportunities open to us
Speaker 1: have expanded in a most gratifying manner. We have to recognize, however,
Speaker 1: that not all states make good targets for our attentions.
Speaker 1: There is nothing to prevent us from carrying out a
Speaker 1: kup and say the United Kingdom, but we would probably
Speaker 1: be unable to stay in power for more than a
Speaker 1: short time. The public and the bureaucracy have a basic
Speaker 1: understanding of the nature and legal basis of the government,
Speaker 1: and they would react in order to restore a legitimate leadership.
Speaker 1: This reaction renders any initial success of the coup meaningless,
Speaker 1: and it would arise even though the pre coup government
Speaker 1: may have been unpopular and the new faces may be attractive.
Speaker 1: The reaction would arise from the fact that a significant
Speaker 1: part of the population takes an active interest in political
Speaker 1: life and regularly participates in it. This implies a recognition
Speaker 1: that the power of the government derives from its legitimate origin,
Speaker 1: and even those who have no reason to support the
Speaker 1: old Guard have many good reasons to support the principle
Speaker 1: of legitimacy. I guess that's really important when you have
Speaker 1: so many people, a good percentage of your population who's
Speaker 1: actually employed by the governm or living off of its teeth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. And I think you see exactly what
Speaker 2: he's talking about in how the way a lot of
Speaker 2: conservatives in the United States today, you know, they can
Speaker 2: be blocked up for fifteen years for trespassing in the capital,
Speaker 2: they can be spied on for their political activity, whatever,
Speaker 2: all of these things, and they still will fall back
Speaker 2: on a constitution, you know. And it's because they do.
Speaker 2: And that's look, that's a that's a noble impulse, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's a sense that they have that
Speaker 2: you know, we have this this bolwark that if we
Speaker 2: give up and we give that up, then there's going
Speaker 2: to be real chaos on the other side of it.
Speaker 2: And so we have to suffer what we must in
Speaker 2: order to sustain it. But but that's that you know,
Speaker 2: principle of legitimacy that people hold on to long after
Speaker 2: it really has any any reality to it.
Speaker 1: We are all familiar with the periodic surveys which show
Speaker 1: that say twenty percent of the sample failed to correctly
Speaker 1: name the prime minister. And we know that a large
Speaker 1: part of the population has only the vagus contact with politics. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: in most developed countries, those who do take an active
Speaker 1: interest in politics form in absolute terms a very large group.
Speaker 1: Controversial policy decisions stimulate and bring to the surface this participation.
Speaker 1: Pressure groups are formed, letters are sent to the press
Speaker 1: and the politician, and the press and the politicians. Petitions
Speaker 1: and demonstrations are organized, and this adds up to a
Speaker 1: continuing dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. I automatically
Speaker 1: think of Uncle ted over socialization when I read those
Speaker 1: two paragraphs right there. This dialogue does not depend necessarily
Speaker 1: on the existence of a formally democratic political system. Even
Speaker 1: in one party states where power is in the hands
Speaker 1: of a few self appointed leaders I muted, But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: active dialogue can take place. The higher organizations of the
Speaker 1: party can discuss party decisions, and in time of relative relaxation,
Speaker 1: the discussions extend to the larger numbers in the lower
Speaker 1: echelons and to publications reflecting different currents. Though only within
Speaker 1: the wider framework of the accepted ideology and the broad
Speaker 1: policy decisions of the leadership. The value of the dialogue
Speaker 1: from that takes place in non democratic states. Let me
Speaker 1: repeat that again. The value of the dialogue that takes
Speaker 1: place in non democratic states varies greatly. In the former Yugoslavia,
Speaker 1: for example, the Communist Party contrived. Okay, so I'm assuming
Speaker 1: this is these are updates that he wrote in the
Speaker 1: He wrote in the new edition. I think what is it?
Speaker 1: The twenty sixteen edition?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so, twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the
Speaker 1: Communist Party contrived to remain in control for decades while
Speaker 1: nevertheless functioning to an increasing extent as a semi open
Speaker 1: form for increasingly free, increasingly wide ranging debates on major
Speaker 1: political issues that press, though unable to assert truly independent opinions,
Speaker 1: at least echoed those debates. In the process, while there
Speaker 1: was still no democracy, the population evolved from subjection to participation,
Speaker 1: learning to scrutinize and question orders instead of simply obeying them,
Speaker 1: so that they were increasingly likely to resist a coup.
Speaker 1: In the Arab world, by contrast, the nominal ruling parties
Speaker 1: that function from the nineteen sixties, the Arab Socialist Union
Speaker 1: of Egypt and the Bath Party of Syria and Iraq
Speaker 1: very soon degenerated into mere rubber stamps for the ruling
Speaker 1: dictators Damal Gamal abdel Nasser, Havez al Asad and Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 1: As time went on, their pretended deference to parties councils dissolved,
Speaker 1: but all along they made every significant decision by themselves,
Speaker 1: while the parties could only cheer them on. When the
Speaker 1: question came up of whether Egypt's ASU dominated National Assembly
Speaker 1: would accept now sirs withdrawal of his resignation following the
Speaker 1: June nineteen sixty seven debacle known as the Sixth Day War,
Speaker 1: an observer pointed out that the Assembly will jolly do
Speaker 1: what it is told. You want comment on that at all?
Speaker 2: I think it's safe to say that that was an
Speaker 2: English observer.
Speaker 1: With the Yugoslav Communist Party, the ASU and the Rolling
Speaker 1: Bath Party now but a memory. The very greatest of
Speaker 1: questions across the entire horizon of global politics is, of course,
Speaker 1: the future of the Jianguo.
Speaker 2: The Communist Party of China can help.
Speaker 1: The Communist Party of China until the twoth twelve appointment
Speaker 1: of Jijing Peng as Party General Secretary, President of the
Speaker 1: People's Republic, President of the People's Republic of China and
Speaker 1: the chairman of the Central Military Commission, significantly the most
Speaker 1: powerful of all three. The party's future seemed quite predictable.
Speaker 1: It was becoming a holding company for all the public
Speaker 1: wealth and much of the private wealth of China, whereby
Speaker 1: officials continued to receive their modest salaries, they did not
Speaker 1: exceed R and B eleven three hundred and eighty five
Speaker 1: or basically eighteen hundred and fifty four dollars US dollars
Speaker 1: per month in twenty fifteen, even in the very highest rank. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the party officials collected large amounts of bribes, ensuring a
Speaker 1: degree of affluence even at the village level, rising to
Speaker 1: sometimes very great wealth at the top. As a faithful
Speaker 1: fan of Beijing's top discos, I grew accustomed to seeing
Speaker 1: the young sons of party officials driving up in their
Speaker 1: Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Little aside by Ludwak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of those young sons of party officials
Speaker 2: who were driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis are the people we
Speaker 2: call political prisoners in China. Right now that g had
Speaker 2: locked up for corruption. So you know that previous part
Speaker 2: you read too, It's like, you know, it's an interesting
Speaker 2: point because you know it kind of it speaks to
Speaker 2: the fact, like we have this bias over here in
Speaker 2: most of the West, I mean definitely in America that
Speaker 2: representative government, you know, the people being gaining having representation
Speaker 2: is synonymous with democracy. And I think that, you know,
Speaker 2: if you really think about it for more than two seconds,
Speaker 2: you know, we can see that there are functional democratic
Speaker 2: systems like ours, like so many in Europe that don't
Speaker 2: represent their people at all, that everybody's very unsatisfied with,
Speaker 2: and that go their own way. But that even in
Speaker 2: one party states or dictatorial states, that there are other
Speaker 2: means of allowing people the dialogue with the government and
Speaker 2: express their needs and their interests. There are other ways
Speaker 2: to do it other than you know, mass democracy. And
Speaker 2: I think you know, there have been plenty of examples
Speaker 2: of governments throughout the twentieth century. Usually you know, they
Speaker 2: didn't they didn't last too long, partly because we placed
Speaker 2: him in the crosshairs for one reason or another. Who
Speaker 2: managed to represent their people and involve them in the
Speaker 2: participation of their own governments without having everybody go to
Speaker 2: the polls every two or four years.
Speaker 1: All right, moving on, We're going to finish up this
Speaker 1: section before he breaks off into before he breaks off
Speaker 1: starts breaking off down like he did in the last
Speaker 1: section where he's doing revolution and he was doing and
Speaker 1: we'll just finish this and I'll let you go, right.
Speaker 1: But the continued transformation of the Communist Party of China
Speaker 1: into a mega corporation man by the ambitious duly rewarded
Speaker 1: with increasingly overt payoffs was interrupted by the decision of
Speaker 1: Jijingping's high party colleagues to elevate him to a seat
Speaker 1: of unprecedented power. They did so, most likely because they
Speaker 1: feared that the party's further degeneration into an open, corrupt
Speaker 1: enterprise would lead to an outright collapse. The problem with
Speaker 1: bribes is that their distribution is very uneven, generating corrosive
Speaker 1: resentments and embarrassing leaks. As a result, Jijingping is left
Speaker 1: with the pretty problem of finding a substitute for both
Speaker 1: a putrefying ideology and the lost and sensive of corruption,
Speaker 1: with only Han nationalism ready at hand. Still, for the
Speaker 1: time being, the Communist Party persists, as does subjection rather
Speaker 1: than citizenship.
Speaker 2: I think that's pretty insightful. I think.
Speaker 1: I think that's a pretty clear description of what's happening
Speaker 1: right yeah. The running dialogue between rulers and the rule
Speaker 1: that precludes any coup can only exist if there is
Speaker 1: large enough section of society that is sufficiently literate, well fed,
Speaker 1: and secure enough to talk back. Even then, certain conditions
Speaker 1: can lead to the deterioration of the relationship, and this
Speaker 1: sometimes generates sufficient apathy or outright distrust of the regime
Speaker 1: to make a coup possible. The events of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: eight in France were marked by a formal adherence to
Speaker 1: the then constitutional rules, but were nevertheless analogous to a coup.
Speaker 1: Twenty years of warfare, which had included the ignanimous defeat
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty, the German occupation, the installation of the
Speaker 1: authoritarian Vishi regime, and from nineteen forty six, long and
Speaker 1: losing continual wars in Indo, China and Algeria, had thoroughly
Speaker 1: undermined the country's democratic consensus. The continual changes of government
Speaker 1: had dissipated the interest and respect of most, and left
Speaker 1: the bureaucracy leaderless. Because the complex business of the ministries
Speaker 1: could not be mastered by ministers who were only in
Speaker 1: power for months or weeks. The French army was left
Speaker 1: to fight the bitter Algerian War with little guidance from
Speaker 1: Paris authorities, because more often than not, the ministries were
Speaker 1: too busy fighting for their survival in the Assembly to
Speaker 1: worry about the other, bloodier war. The cost of the
Speaker 1: Algerian War, in both money and lives antagonized a general
Speaker 1: public from both the army and the government, and many
Speaker 1: of the French felt a growing fear and distrust of
Speaker 1: the army's leadership, whose national sentiments and martial ideology seemed
Speaker 1: alien to many of them and against the spirit of
Speaker 1: the times. While the structures of political life under the
Speaker 1: Fourth Republic were falling apart, Charles de gaul the grand
Speaker 1: heroic figure long and simulated retirement, gradually emerged as the
Speaker 1: only alternative to the chaos that threat. When the army
Speaker 1: in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly
Speaker 1: drastic action and yet another government was on the verge
Speaker 1: of collapse, de Gaull was recalled. He was able to
Speaker 1: impose his own terms on May twenty ninth, nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: when Rene Coti, the last President of the Fourth Republic,
Speaker 1: called on him to form a government which was invested
Speaker 1: on June first, to Gaul was given extraordinary powers to
Speaker 1: role by decree for six months and to write a
Speaker 1: new constitution. Under the terms of this constitution, presented for
Speaker 1: consultation in mid August and approved by referendum in September,
Speaker 1: elections were held in which de Gaul's newly formed Union
Speaker 1: for the New Republic UNR party won a majority. On
Speaker 1: December twenty first, De Gaull became the first president of
Speaker 1: the Fifth Republic. He was an American style president with
Speaker 1: wide executive powers, but without an American style congress to
Speaker 1: restrain them. Nineteen fifty eight, France had become politically inert
Speaker 1: and therefore ripe for a coup. The circumstances were unique,
Speaker 1: of course, But while the political structures of all highly
Speaker 1: developed countries may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets,
Speaker 1: if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally.
Speaker 1: Of those temporary factors, the most common r A severe
Speaker 1: and prolonged economic crisis with large scale unemployment and runaway inflation.
Speaker 1: B A long and unsuccessful war, or a major defeat,
Speaker 1: whether a military or diplomatic c Chronic instability under a
Speaker 1: multi party system. Italy is an interesting example of an
Speaker 1: economically developed, socially dynamic, but politically fragile country. Between nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight and circa nineteen ninety end of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: the persistence of a large communist party that opposed Italy's
Speaker 1: alignment with the West, if less vehemently after this Soviet
Speaker 1: invasion of Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight, forced the moderate
Speaker 1: majority to keep voting for the increasingly corrupt Democrazia Christiana DC,
Speaker 1: which itself ruled with the smaller but even more corrupt
Speaker 1: Socialist Party. Its leader, Mattino Krazzi, would die a fugitive
Speaker 1: outlaw in Tunisia. Because even the two parties did not
Speaker 1: attain a parliamentary majority, every government required a broader coalition,
Speaker 1: whose formation amounted to an intricate puzzle. The DC was
Speaker 1: the largest party, but with only thirty percent of the votes,
Speaker 1: it could not rule alone. Even with the Socialists, it
Speaker 1: only reached a forty percent mark if it brought in
Speaker 1: the two small left of center parties, the social Democrats
Speaker 1: and the Republicans. The right of center parties, including the
Speaker 1: MSI neo fascists, would not join in, but if the
Speaker 1: latter were invited to join the coalition, the left would
Speaker 1: break away and no government could be formed. In the end,
Speaker 1: of course, were procured one way or another, mostly by
Speaker 1: handing over control of parts of the vast array of
Speaker 1: state owned businesses, everything from oil and gas to ice cream,
Speaker 1: in exchange for parliamentary support. The votes, however, did not
Speaker 1: stay bought for long and coalitions had short lives. Between
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five and nineteen ninety four, there were thirty
Speaker 1: three governments until the nineteen ninety four election victory of
Speaker 1: the television and advertising tycoon Silvio Burlasconi, whose brand new
Speaker 1: party Forts Italia was originally formed by its own employees
Speaker 1: and the Milans football team fan club. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I remember, yeah, Italian politics. You know, my
Speaker 2: buddy Danielle Blilli, he doesn't fall I mean, he's been
Speaker 2: in America for a long time, but he still can
Speaker 2: talk about it, and he knows the twentieth century pretty well.
Speaker 2: And he starts describing telling me stories just you know,
Speaker 2: different eras in the twentieth century, and I just get
Speaker 2: lost immediately because it's just like you said, it's like
Speaker 2: a new government every two years, different players, it's very
Speaker 2: hard to follow.
Speaker 1: And I did two hours on the years of lead
Speaker 1: and it was I mean, you're you're jumping from governments
Speaker 1: to government while you're while you're explaining exactly what they
Speaker 1: were doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And all of these countries in Italy is
Speaker 2: obviously such a perfect example of this. You know, they're
Speaker 2: they're countries that are are battlegrounds in the Cold War,
Speaker 2: and so they're facing like forces of destabilization from the
Speaker 2: outside that are kind of amorphous and hard to identify,
Speaker 2: but often you know, very very powerful with you want
Speaker 2: to talk about you know, Gladio and the and the
Speaker 2: and the Soviet control of the Communist Party there. You know,
Speaker 2: that's what you've seen in a lot of these countries
Speaker 2: is that a lot of the chaos and instability is
Speaker 2: caused because because they're being vibe.
Speaker 1: For while the DC was unable to modernize Italy's increasingly
Speaker 1: outdated state institutions, it nevertheless presided over decades of economic growth.
Speaker 1: The combination of communists and Catholic anti capitalism made it
Speaker 1: impossible to introduce either American style higher and fire labor
Speaker 1: flexibility or German style economic discipline enforced by sophisticated trade unionists,
Speaker 1: but the DC had its own remedy. Every time wage
Speaker 1: rates were pushed too high, it devalued the Lira to
Speaker 1: restore the competitiveness of Italian exports. Equally, the inability to
Speaker 1: make the state efficient was offset by the lax enforcement
Speaker 1: of tax collection. Thus Italian entrepreneurs, ill served by an
Speaker 1: inefficient state, only had to pretend that they were paying
Speaker 1: tax paying their saxes first one and then the other.
Speaker 1: Of these practices came to an end once Italy adopted
Speaker 1: the common European currency, the Euro, in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: prohibiting competitive devaluations, and since then its economy has stagnated,
Speaker 1: with little or no growth and chronically high unemployment. Politically,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, Berlusconi's combination of a economic power
Speaker 1: his enterprises could offer very many jobs, consultancies and contracts,
Speaker 1: b media influence through the control of publishing houses, newspapers,
Speaker 1: magazines and three television channels, and c of course, electoral
Speaker 1: power through the votes he won by vigorous and well
Speaker 1: organized campaigning ensured his political preponderance from nineteen ninety four
Speaker 1: until twenty eleven, even went out of office as of
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, the government of Matteo Renzi is sustained by
Speaker 1: a parliamentary majority that still requires Berlusconi's votes.
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting that it looks like you're about
Speaker 2: to at the end of a section.
Speaker 1: I'll let you get there, yeah, yeah, and then we'll
Speaker 1: be done. We'll you can close this out. Berlusconi's leading
Speaker 1: role in Italy's public life over more than twenty years,
Speaker 1: hiss co existed with the most blatant conflicts of interest.
Speaker 1: He was operating state regulated businesses, a long series of
Speaker 1: trials for tax evasion and vote buying, and numerous personal
Speaker 1: scandals arising from his delight and cavorting with young and
Speaker 1: very young or very young prostitutes. Hence, his prominence in
Speaker 1: Italian politics is quite enough to describe the country's political
Speaker 1: order as fragile. He could not have survived in a
Speaker 1: fully functioning democracy that requires of its leader some semblance
Speaker 1: of discretion in their personal conduct and the careful concealment
Speaker 1: of significant conflicts of interest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say, in the case of
Speaker 2: de gaul and even Berlusconi, I think you can speak
Speaker 2: of in the same way you have two You had
Speaker 2: two countries where to go back to Max Weber's terms,
Speaker 2: where that legal rational authority system is breaking down or
Speaker 2: becoming decrepit and having to turn back to a charismatic
Speaker 2: leader who can come in and actually be the organizing
Speaker 2: principle for the state because you know, the machinery itself
Speaker 2: is too gummed up. And I think both of those,
Speaker 2: I mean, especially de gaul, you know, where they were
Speaker 2: very aware of the fact that they were they were
Speaker 2: reaching this this point of crisis in the in the government,
Speaker 2: and they they turned to him almost in a you know,
Speaker 2: periclean sort of Cincinnatus type type of way, to be
Speaker 2: the guy who has the weight, who can come in
Speaker 2: and and be that guy. And Berlisconi wasn't quite that direct,
Speaker 2: but you know, just the fact that he stayed in
Speaker 2: power as long as he did in a system that
Speaker 2: had previously been so unstable and just changing out all
Speaker 2: the time, it kind of shows you that he played
Speaker 2: that role as well. You know, you see that very
Speaker 2: often where I mean you see that in a person
Speaker 2: like Putin right for example. You know, people in the
Speaker 2: United States who watch regime media, you know, often have
Speaker 2: this idea of Putin and all dictators really and even
Speaker 2: like historical monarchs or whatever. But they have this idea
Speaker 2: that you know, these are like god emperors who can
Speaker 2: just you know, order the general top generals of the
Speaker 2: army to be tortured and executed with their families and
Speaker 2: nothing will happen because they're in charge. And obviously that's
Speaker 2: that's never been reality. It's not reality. You look at
Speaker 2: somebody like Putin. Why is Putin there? Putin is there
Speaker 2: because he's the only person in Russia who all the
Speaker 2: different power centers, all the different interest groups that have
Speaker 2: and can wield organize power. He's the only person that
Speaker 2: they actually trust to mediate and arbitrate their you know,
Speaker 2: their conflicts of interests and their disputes, and they know
Speaker 2: that if they get rid of that guy, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe I want to take his place. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: from this interest group or that power center, and I
Speaker 2: want to be Putin. I want to take his place.
Speaker 2: But I know that if I get up there, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to have the buy in of all of
Speaker 2: these people, and my power is not going to last.
Speaker 2: And so you know, that's that's the source of like
Speaker 2: real sustainable power in a person like that, doesn't you know,
Speaker 2: you can you can extra size, all the force you want,
Speaker 2: but unless you're well, I wouldn't even say in less
Speaker 2: because I was going to cite Stalin, but that's not
Speaker 2: even really true, Like you can exercise all the force
Speaker 2: you want if you're not if you're not able to
Speaker 2: occupy that central position as the one that's recognized as
Speaker 2: like if we get rid of that person, then we're
Speaker 2: all going to fall into chaos. Then you're not going
Speaker 2: to sustain your power.
Speaker 1: Well, let me conclude by asking you a question. So,
Speaker 1: say there is this we're looking at an election this year,
Speaker 1: and one side has this plan, let's call it Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, and anyone who someone may have looked
Speaker 1: at it and been like, huh, this looks like it
Speaker 1: wants to dismantle the administrative state with dismantling the administrative
Speaker 1: state in the United States and giving power back to
Speaker 1: the three branches of government and basically like return even
Speaker 1: returning the power of the presidency to FDR levels. Would
Speaker 1: that be considered a coup?
Speaker 2: I think Luke Walcke would say no, But the uh,
Speaker 2: sort of the level of almost extraord the level of
Speaker 2: extraordinary action that would really be necessary to carry that out,
Speaker 2: would would meet the threshold, you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 2: it's something that would face so much resistance that you
Speaker 2: would have to be willing to override you know, technical
Speaker 2: rules in legal boundaries in order to carry it out.
Speaker 2: And so in that sense, you know, I suppose you
Speaker 2: could call it a coup. You know, it's an illegal
Speaker 2: seizure of power, illegal exercise of power for the purpose
Speaker 2: of transferring the center of gravity and the government from
Speaker 2: from one place to another. So I guess you could
Speaker 2: maybe say that cool, and by saying that, I'm totally
Speaker 2: okay with it and they should do it, by the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm one hundred percent. I mean, of course, you
Speaker 1: can be so black pilled to the point where it's
Speaker 1: just like, just get some of it done, please. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll be happy with some of it. But you know, really,
Speaker 1: I think, as Jarvin has said over and over again,
Speaker 1: if you're going to cross the rubicon, you can't wait
Speaker 1: on the other side, and you can't you can't you
Speaker 1: can't wait in the water on the other side. And
Speaker 1: if you do climb on to the shore, you can't
Speaker 1: set up camp there. You have to keep going. And
Speaker 1: the only way you're going to dismantle. The administrative statu
Speaker 1: is to keep going, so.
Speaker 2: Never take the black pill. Despair is a sin.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man, So everybody where they can find your work.
Speaker 2: I have a podcast, the Martin Made Podcast if you
Speaker 2: if you like really long form, deep dive historical podcast,
Speaker 2: then that's the one for you. I do another one
Speaker 2: with my friend Jocko Willink called The Unraveling where we
Speaker 2: talk more about contemporary and it's sort of more recent
Speaker 2: historical stuff, twentieth century things and stuff like that. And
Speaker 2: I've got a substack. If you really really like those things,
Speaker 2: you can come support me at Martyrmade at substack dot com.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Always good Pete.
Speaker 1: Keep pushing boundaries.
Speaker 2: Later, brother,