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