Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick: War Profiteering, Nuclear Tech, NATO v. Russia, & War With Iran About this episode America’s proxy war with Russia isn’t anything new. It’s been decades in the making. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick explain what nuclear war would actually look like.
(00:00) How Close Are We to Nuclear War?
(12:08) Why Don’t We Know All the Details of 9/11?
(29:27) The Nuclear War Chain Reaction
(38:23) Warcrimes in Serbia?
(49:00) Why Hollywood Exiled Oliver Stone
(51:11) Is There Hope for Hollywood?
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Transcript 17,135 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.
0:30 Tucker Carlson? Thank you both very much. Oliver, you first, how close do you think we are to nuclear war right now?
0:38 Speaker 02 That's why I came up here.
0:39 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
0:40 Speaker 02 Or down here.
0:40 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
0:41 Speaker 02 To tell you I'm scared. I'm really scared.
0:55 Tucker Carlson? Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers, here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode.
1:13 Speaker 02 I've been talking about it off and on since 2014, when the Ukraine thing happened.
1:18 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:18 Speaker 02 I was saying, this is frightfully like, there's a lot of elements of World War I. The alliances, the NATO alliance and
1:27 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:28 Speaker 02 The United States' involvement. And its hatred for Russia is astonishing to me, considering the recent history, the last 20, 20 years before that. There was no reason for us to pick on Russia and go back to this Cold War, Neo-Cold War that we have. That's what I don't understand, and I've been talking to Peter about it.
1:52 Speaker 02 It defies logic, because he says it's neocons in Washington that started that. And they never left, you know, they were always there. Przynski, from the Carter days. These are old arguments. I heard them with my father, who was a conservative, relatively conservative, in New York City back in 1950. That the Russians were going to invade us. This was very much the feeling, that McCarthy was saying, they're in the schools, they're in the churches, they're in the... But that's just, it was such paranoia. And I think you know that now. You grew up like conservative too.
2:29 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:30 Speaker 02 You know, when did you start to...
2:32 Tucker Carlson? Well, I am conservative on many things, but I see no reason to be at war with Russia. And I don't know why Russia would be an enemy. They're part of the West.
2:42 Speaker 02 It's shocking to me, because what Biden did, and I voted for him in 2018. He never talked about changing the Russia policy.
2:50 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:51 Speaker 02 He never did. And he never gave us any kind of knowledge, of education, about what he was thinking. But he seems to be an all-out cold warrior.
3:00 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
3:00 Speaker 02 Everything he's done has been to antagonize him. In fact, he called the president of Russia a thug and a murderer before he got elected. So he hasn't been very diplomatic.
3:13 Tucker Carlson? No, I would say not.
3:14 Speaker 02 About it.
3:15 Tucker Carlson? It must be strange for you to have grown up in the Democratic Party.
3:20 Speaker 02 Republican Party.
3:21 Tucker Carlson? Oh, right. But I mean, as an adult, to see the party that was the party of peace and reconciliation become the war party.
3:28 Speaker 02 Everything has turned around. Everything has turned around. With Peter, we were talking last night, and Peter is my co-author on Untold History of the United States. And we've been talking, he taught me a lot of this history, because he specializes in it for many years. But here we are with this situation where Democrats want war. They push war. They're pushing the strategy of weakening Russia.
3:52 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
3:53 Speaker 02 Which is a self-defeating suicidal strategy. What's the purpose of it? What did they do to us? What did they do? I don't understand.
4:03 Tucker Carlson? I don't know.
4:03 Speaker 02 What did they do to hurt us? And what has Ukraine to do with that distance for us to do this involvement with NATO? This NATO, also, for me, as a half-European, my mother is French, I spent time in Europe as a kid. What I've seen is a huge change in Europe. That's what's terrifying to me. Why? The people don't want war, but the EU, which is this political over- rider, seems to want war. And because the leadership in the EU is very elite, people who seem to come from the same school, factory or whatever they produced by, they seem to think the same way, that
4:46 Speaker 02 Russia is going to invade Europe again, that we're back to that World War II argument, which was nonsense in the first place. Yes. So here, Russia wants Ukraine and then they're going to go for Poland. That's what Kamala Harris said at one point. Yes. The stupidest statement I've ever heard, I think, from a political leader, just ignorant, no education, no history.
5:09 Tucker Carlson? What do you think accounts for, big picture, the hostility of NATO and Europe to Russia? What is that?
5:17 Speaker 02 It's got to be education, it's got to be propaganda, they believe these things. The woman who runs the EU, Ursula, she constantly says these things that are ignorant, ignorant of what's happened in the last 20, 30 years, ignorant of what happened in the 90s in Russia. She's just, they're not taking this into account. I talked to Macron at one point and he was a very reasonable man, I thought he was saying things like, "We need more nuclear energy in France." Right, great. And now he turns around and he's saying that Putin is, he's willing to send French troops into Ukraine. The British are the worst, Starmer, this prime minister, this new prime minister, Labour prime minister, you know who he is?
5:59 Speaker 02 He's quite, he said, yes, two days ago, he said, "We have to, we have to punish Putin to the maximum." Because he's relentless. That's what he said. We have to punish. So there's an aspect, a personal, a personal thing about Putin. Like Biden made it personal, saying he's a thug and a murderer. And Starmer saying he has to be punished. Putin has to be punished, not Russia. It's bizarre. We didn't talk like this back when we were mature, back in the 50s, 60s, when we talked about Russia as an enemy, because we thought it was adversarial.
6:36 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
6:37 Speaker 02 I disagree with that, but we thought so and we acted as such. But we didn't personally insult Khrushchev or Brezhnev.
6:44 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
6:45 Speaker 02 And here we are, insulting them constantly. So Biden, I think, is...
6:52 Speaker 02 Some people say Blinken has taken control of his mind. I don't know. But Anthony Blinken is trained in the Hillary Clinton diplomatic school. He was, for many years, he's been under her wing.
7:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
7:04 Speaker 02 So has, I gather, Jake Sullivan.
7:07 Tucker Carlson? Diplomatic is a little strong. By diplomacy, it's just, you know, regime change. Kill the leader you disagree with.
7:13 Speaker 03 Diplomacy is a dirty word now in the United States.
7:16 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:16 Tucker Carlson? So, Peter, I'm interested in your perspective. Like, why do you think the entire United States, from a position of greater weakness, has, with Europe, pivoted against Russia of all the potential enemies? Why Russia?
7:30 Speaker 03 What else is new?
7:31 Tucker Carlson? Right.
7:32 Speaker 03 We've been going after Russia since 1917. We got, we're mad at them. Well, in World War I, Lenin and Trotsky pulled Russia out of the alliance and had the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where they gave away a massive amount of Russia to Germany in order to get peace at that point. And what does the United States do with the Brits and the Japanese and others? We send troops into the Soviet Union in 1918. There were 15,000 American troops there. And Churchill wanted to overthrow the new Soviet government. He said we should strangle Bolshevism in the cradle.
8:15 Speaker 03 So this goes way back to then. We didn't even recognize the Soviet Union until Roosevelt was in power in 1933.
8:23 Speaker 03 So, and then during the war, they became our ally. Yes. And in fact, they were the ones who won the war in Europe. Correct. And I ask my students, who won the war in Europe? You know, people are believing that the Americans won the war in Europe. It's not true, it's not even close to the truth. We certainly contributed a lot during World War II. But the Soviets throughout most of World War II, the US and Britain were confronting ten German divisions between the two of us, while the Soviets were confronting more than 200 German divisions on their own. That's why, that's why everybody understood what Kennedy says in his great 1963 American University Commencement Address.
9:07 Speaker 03 What the Soviets suffered in World War II is the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago having been wiped out. You know, so you would think that we would be friendly with them afterwards. And Roosevelt had a vision for that. In fact, Roosevelt promised Stalin in May of 1942 that we would open up the second front before the end of 1942. He asked Stalin to send over Molotov and a trusted general for that meeting in the White House in 1942. And we made that promise. We don't open up the second front till June of 44. And by that point, we had lost all the diplomatic initiative. The Soviets were defeating Germany largely on their own
9:50 Speaker 03 with the support of US materiel. And so they were pushing back the Germans over Central Europe and Eastern Europe. And so the idea that Roosevelt gave away anything at Yalta that the Soviets didn't already have is nonsense. The Soviets had that area. And that's 44, 45. Then unfortunately Roosevelt died. And even more unfortunately, Truman became president instead of Henry Wallace, which is another story I hope we can get into, because Oliver and I do a lot about that in Untold History. And we argue that had Wallace become president on April 12, 45, 1945, instead of Truman... There would have not only been no atomic bombings in World War II,
10:35 Speaker 03 there would have likely been no Cold War. History could have been so, so different. But instead, we developed this enmity toward the Soviet Union. Instead of seeing that our allies, who suffered so greatly, as showing some largesse and generosity, we begin to vilify them after that. And the crackdown that happens in Eastern Europe doesn't happen immediately. That takes place over the next couple of years. It's a much gradual process. They allowed a good degree of democracy in most of Eastern Europe till really the Truman Doctrine, 1947, really. And then after that, then the Cold War is on. And but Kennedy was the one who saw it differently.
11:20 Speaker 03 And we can go into that, too. Anyway, I'll give you a lot of history very, very quickly.
11:24 Tucker Carlson? None of that is surprising, but none of it, I would say, accounts for the shift after the one that Oliver referred to, after 2014 at Maidan.
11:34 Speaker 03 But it actually starts earlier. Because we, when the Soviet Union collapsed, 1989, 1990, 1991, during that period, we had a chance to actually reach out in a more and more positive way. But it's in 1990 that Charles Krauthammer, the neocon theorist, says the Soviet Union has collapsed. Says this is America's unipolar moment. He says we're the only force in the world that can dictate world events. And he said, "The unipolar moment is likely to last 30 or 40 years." It was in 1992 that we come out with the Defense Planning Guidance,
12:17 Speaker 03 which is a much more elaborate plan of how we're going to dominate the world. And then, 1997, the Project for a New American Century takes shape, and that really fleshes it out much greater. And they say in that 2000 report that we're not going to be able to rebuild our defenses as quickly as we want unless we have a new Pearl Harbor. And they got that in 2001 with 9/11. And so then we invade Afghanistan, then Krauthammer revisits.
12:48 Tucker Carlson? Let me ask you a question. Do you think the people who said that we needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to rebuild...
12:56 Tucker Carlson? How do you think they felt about 9/11?
12:58 Speaker 03 I think they saw it as a tragedy and an opportunity. You know, I think they were...
13:04 Tucker Carlson? So you're not suggesting they knew about it?
13:06 Speaker 03 No, I'm not suggesting that, and Oliver and I...
13:08 Speaker 02 I think it's a mystery.
13:10 Tucker Carlson? In what sense?
13:11 Speaker 02 I think it's a mystery. I don't think it's solved. Because all the events of 9/11 have not come out.
13:17 Tucker Carlson? No, they haven't. Why do you think that is?
13:19 Speaker 02 I would have to really study this, but it's just so many questions I have, so many... This is not the subject today, but it leads to this feeling that there's a cabal or something in Washington that has been there, kind of a strange, ghost-like cabal that goes back to the 60s with Kennedy's murder.
13:40 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
13:40 Speaker 02 That continues in some strange embodiment today. And I don't ask, it sounds like it, but it's a strange concept, but you have to think about it.
13:52 Tucker Carlson? Well, we can't assess it because the files are still classified, 23 years later.
13:55 Speaker 02 Everybody's talking about conspiracies now. I mean, a lot of the lunatics have come out of the asylum, no doubt.
14:02 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
14:02 Speaker 02 But there's a lot out there in the public that really should be examined and questioned and
14:06 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
14:07 Speaker 02 asked. And that's what the establishment's freaking out because we're overloading it. You know, it's running over the rapports now. They can't defend them anymore.
14:17 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
14:17 Speaker 02 I mean, there's...
14:18 Tucker Carlson? Well, you were once derided as a conspiracy.
14:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know, I know.
14:21 Tucker Carlson? I don't think so anymore.
14:23 Speaker 02 But I'm still alive.
14:24 Tucker Carlson? You've lived to see your own vindication.
14:27 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, in a sense. I mean, I'd love to see Kennedy understood better by the mass because, you know, you still hear this silly "Lee Harvey Oswald did it" stuff, you know, I mean, allegedly. They never said alleged, you know, alleged killer.
14:45 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
14:45 Speaker 02 They always say killer. But, you know, those are... I feel sorry that that happened, but that's a bigger story now. It's a bigger story because now it's the world is at stake. It's not the life of one man. He had a vision, as Peter said, of humanizing Russia, bringing them into the world community. That was defeated when he was killed. That was very badly defeated. Khrushchev fell shortly thereafter, the premiere of Russia. He fell too. Because he wasn't sufficiently strong with the United States, so...
15:16 Speaker 03 He gave in during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, his hawks wanted to get rid of him for being too weak. But, let me go back to what Oliver's saying. Because in October of 1962, right after the Missile Crisis, two weeks later, Khrushchev writes an incredible letter to Kennedy, in which he says, "From evils some good must come. Our people have both felt the burning flames of thermonuclear war. We have to use this now to eliminate every conflict between us that could lead to a new crisis." And Kennedy and Khrushchev, slowly on Kennedy's part, more rapidly on Khrushchev's, they began working together in 63. Norman Cousins was the intermediary.
16:01 Speaker 03 And he met with Khrushchev twice, and made it clear that the United States really did want to have a peaceful reconciliation. And had Kennedy lived, I mean, his AU commencement address that I mentioned is, I think, the most important presidential address of the 20th century.
16:19 Tucker Carlson? Can you flesh that out a little bit? His last big speech he gave before he was murdered?
16:22 Speaker 03 It was a great speech.
16:23 Tucker Carlson? What did he say?
16:24 Speaker 03 Well, and Norman Cousins came back from Russia and said, "Khrushchev needs some obvious signal that you're serious." And so, and Norman Cousins actually wrote the first draft. And then Kennedy took it. And, and they didn't let the CIA, the State Department, or the Pentagon even see it beforehand. Which is why Kennedy was able to, it was called the Strategy for Peace Speech. And what he says there, among other things, is that the relation between the US and Soviets is tragic. Why should we be enemies? Why should we see them as enemies? What Kennedy could do, and he doesn't have speech, is see the world through the eyes of America's adversaries.
17:08 Speaker 03 When was the last time we had a leader who could do that? I mean, Carter maybe for a minute, Obama maybe for a minute, but... But nobody else. So what Kennedy says is so relevant to today. He says to put a nuclear adversary in a position of either suffering a humiliating defeat or using nuclear weapons is either a colossal failure of statesmanship or a collective death wish for humanity, which is exactly what Biden is doing it.
17:41 Tucker Carlson? It's what we face right now.
17:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:43 Tucker Carlson? So how was that speech received?
17:45 Speaker 02 It wasn't as appreciated as it is now. It should be read.
17:48 Tucker Carlson? How was it received in Washington?
17:51 Speaker 02 Oh, I would think a lot of people didn't like it because they saw him as some kind of idealistic fruitcake.
17:58 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
17:59 Speaker 02 I really think so. Certainly, he'd fired Dulles and he'd followed the top people at the CIA, but I think there's a deeper. People in economic activity also were upset with him because there were changes in the economics of the plan. The Democrats were gearing up for the future. They were going to win the next election. That second term was very important. And they had a third term possibility with Robert Kennedy and a fourth term possibility with Teddy Kennedy. There was a possibility of another Roosevelt. That was what's terrifying to the Republicans, I think, certainly to my father. And I think that ties in. You asked earlier, why? You know, why? And I'm racking my brain, but I go back to my father, who was a stockbroker, a very
18:42 Speaker 02 good one, and he was intellectually wrote about it. To him, it goes back to World War I again, to this concept of they changed their system. They broke the rule, the international, the rules-based order was changed because now there's not only did they break the treaty, no secret treaties was one of the first things they did, and all these treaties from World War I came out. The secret treaties at France, England had signed before the war. So that was, you see, that came out and the German treaties came out. So that was, but it was economic in the sense that in the United States, we had a lot of strikes going on domestically. We'd had strikes going on since the 1870s.
19:26 Speaker 02 And there was a worldwide sentiment for revolution and the workers socialist movement infected France and infected England. I mean, it's well-known. And Germany was very much moving towards.
19:42 Speaker 02 A worker's revolution.
19:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:44 Speaker 02 So that was the most scary thing to Woodrow Wilson. It was the Russians are going to destabilize the whole world. And Churchill was right there and he wasn't a leader, but certainly the English felt the same way.
19:58 Speaker 02 They were the leaders of World War I, so they had a stake in getting rid of Russia. That's why the Starmer's recent comment the other day about punishing Putin to the maximum is very striking to me. The British have led the charge against Russia forever.
20:16 Speaker 03 And that gets back to 1990 NATO expansion. And then in 1997, Brzezinski lays it out in his book, The Grand Chessboard, which Fyth and Libby and Hadley were also writing about just at the same time. And what Brzezinski says in The Grand Chessboard is that if you can separate Ukraine from Russia, then Russia will never be a Eurasian superpower again. They had a strategy for doing exactly what they did for quite some time before that. This is not something that they just thought up in 2014.
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23:47 Tucker Carlson? Sue, Oliver, you know Putin as well as any American, or you've spent at least as much time with him as any living American. Characterize what he's like.
23:57 Speaker 03 If you would.
23:58 Speaker 02 I might just finish my point.
23:59 Speaker 03 Of course, yes.
24:00 Speaker 02 It's complicated. We're talking about why. I just feel the economics are crucial to understand in the sense that the fear of Russian revolution affecting American workers was gigantic. Workers started to emigrate to Russia in the 1920s to work there. Conditions were supposed to be better. We talk about it in the book. And America was moving away from the capitalist ideal that existed. I think that plays a huge role coming after World War II. Also, after World War I, of course, there's that. World War I leads to World War II in my mind, but let's jump to World War II. After World War II, they were terrified.
24:43 Speaker 02 The Republicans were terrified that the Depression would return. The Depression had been a horrible experience for many Americans. They were poor. They had nothing. They were terrified that it would come again. So the whole concept started up in the Congress of 45 with the Republicans winning. They had, they won a lot of seats, right?
25:04 Speaker 03 46, yeah.
25:05 Speaker 02 And they're talking about an economy, a war economy, all of a sudden, like keeping people in full employment. What are we going to do with all these men coming back?
25:14 Speaker 03 Yes.
25:15 Speaker 02 And the women have taken their jobs. We got to keep people working. So we're going to get into this military business. And that's what we did off and on. We did it through the era up to where Eisenhower says in 1960, you know, he's built the greatest nuclear force and army of all time. Because in 1960, we have how many warheads?
25:36 Speaker 03 We had 185 ICBMs and the Russians had four.
25:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I'm talking about in 1960 when Kennedy comes into office.
25:45 Speaker 03 Then we increase it by 1,000. And the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force wanted 10,000. Joint Chiefs wanted 3,000, I think it was. And McNamara said the lowest number we can get away with is 1,000. But from the Soviet perspective, they thought the United States was already ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 in every case. And now they see us adding a thousand more ICBMs. So the Kremlin interpreted it that the US was preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union, which is part of the reason why they put the missiles into Cuba to try to offset that, at least to some degree.
26:24 Speaker 03 But again, Kennedy got a briefing on July 20, 1961, about a secret advanced preemptive strike, nuclear strike to wipe out the Soviet Union.
26:37 Speaker 02 And China.
26:38 Speaker 03 And Kennedy walked out of that midway through the briefing, and he turned to Dean Raskin and said, "And we call ourselves the human race." Lemnitzer gave it, and one of the people there said, I think it was Roswell G. Patrick, says he gave it as if he was talking to kindergarteners, and Kennedy was so disgusted with it, and the thinking behind the idea that we were going to have a preemptive surprise nuclear strike unprovoked against the Soviet Union. But there are military people who were thinking that way, as there are today. I mean, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had an article on August 20. There were two interesting articles.
27:20 Speaker 03 Sanger had one in the New York Times that day, saying that the United States is preparing to fight a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea, and win that. And the same day, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists came out with an article saying that there are still planners in the Pentagon who believe that we can win a nuclear war and should plan for that.
27:44 Speaker 02 What would that mean to win a nuclear war?
27:46 Speaker 03 It's insanity. It doesn't mean anything.
27:48 Speaker 02 Well, that's why you should read. This book is very important, because there is-- This is Annie Jacobson's book. There's no partial-- Nuclear war. There's no partial victory in this book. It's impossible. Once it gets, it's a chain reaction, once this thing starts. There are so many different aspects to it. It's a bureaucracy beyond belief, the names, all the names of all the systems we have, protecting ourselves. One thing, it's clockwork. It's so rare if this, if it hang, we don't have a failsafe, is what I'm trying to say. We really don't.
28:20 Tucker Carlson? So what does it look like, once the chain reaction begins?
28:23 Speaker 02 Oh, she describes it beautifully, minute by minute. She talks about what's gonna happen to you, me, and forget about Los Angeles, forget about New York. Forget, they're gone.
28:35 Speaker 03 The Pentagon has been trying to war game, limited nuclear war for decades, and it never ends up, a limited nuclear war. I mean, at what point does it stop? It always keeps going till everything's gone.
28:48 Speaker 02 And then nuclear winter is something we discovered in what year?
28:52 Speaker 03 Sagan came up with that idea in the early 80s.
28:56 Speaker 02 Early 80s.
28:57 Speaker 03 If anything, and then he got attacked by the Wall Street Journal and others, for bad science, which is bullshit. And, but, the latest scientific findings are that Sagan and company actually downplayed the effects of nuclear winter.
29:12 Tucker Carlson? So what is nuclear winter?
29:13 Speaker 03 Nuclear winter, for example now, the latest studies show that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan,
29:21 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
29:22 Speaker 03 In which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons would be used, would push 5 million tons of smoke, soot, and debris into the atmosphere. It would encircle the stratosphere within two weeks, block the sun's rays from getting to the earth, temperatures would plummet to freezing on the earth, much of the agriculture would be destroyed, and a limited nuclear war of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons could kill up to 2 billion people. 2 billion. If there was a, we don't have 100, we've got 12,000. And they're not Hiroshima-sized, many of them are 7 to 70 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. And so, if there was a large-scale use, it would...
30:07 Speaker 03 The cities would would burn and would send up so much soot that would block the sun's rays for years. And we might not survive as a species. The likelihood is that all large life forms would probably die off. Some people might be able to get under the ground. Uh, you know, we'd have a mine shaft.
30:26 Speaker 02 That was the idea in failsafe. Kubrick didn't know anything about nuclear winter when he was he did the movie. But he had the underground system being described by the Dr. Strangelove, remember?
30:38 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:38 Speaker 02 By the way, you should I had I did a clip. I showed Strangelove to Putin. Dr. Uh, Dr. Strange, I showed it to. I wanted him to sit through that climax to.
30:47 Speaker 03 Had he seen it before?
30:48 Speaker 02 He's no, he never heard of it, I don't think. And he sat through it with me and it's on film. His reaction is. Yes, this is very realistic.
30:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:58 Speaker 02 It could happen, but now our weapons are even much bigger, much bigger.
31:03 Speaker 03 Much worse, yeah.
31:04 Speaker 02 But he was, he said, yeah, this is real.
31:05 Speaker 03 Although back in the sixties, we're actually building bigger nuclear weapons than we are today. It's the Russians tested their 50 million megaton weapon, the Tsar bomber. And it could have been 100 megatons if they'd wanted to.
31:20 Tucker Carlson? Underground?
31:22 Speaker 03 I'm not sure if it was an underground test.
31:24 Tucker Carlson? So what do you think Putin's view of nuclear war?
31:26 Speaker 02 Oh, I he he knows he's a very realistic man. This is serious when he he talk, he doesn't, he doesn't bullshit. He talks very straightforwardly and I think that's we don't understand that. Our language is a little more rhetorical than his.
31:41 Speaker 03 Yes.
31:42 Speaker 02 He's he's pretty consistent. He said this is a red line in Ukraine and he always has stayed has maintained that and he went to war for it.
31:50 Tucker Carlson? The red line being NATO up against his.
31:52 Speaker 02 The Russian minority in in Ukraine. They moved into Donbass. Donbass and Lugansk were the issues at that time. Now.
32:03 Speaker 02 That was what was at stake.
32:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
32:05 Speaker 02 They promised, the Ukrainians promised to, Minsk won and Nizh two. They promised to respect the autonomy of those people. They never did. They started killing them. And there was terrorism being... Ukraine changed in 14, after Maidan. It became truly a dangerous country because they had a lot of zealots in the government. They weren't Nazis, but they were a lot of people like that who were working with the Ukrainians and terrifying the Russians.
32:40 Speaker 02 I don't know, you saw my movie, "Ukraine in Winter"? It's about that Maidan and how these people got into power. That was a violation of the neutrality of Ukraine, which had existed since the end of the Cold War. It's a sad story because we wanted it. It was our entree. Obama said, "We want neutrality, we want this and that, we want to have a good relationship." And meanwhile, he betrayed it. He betrayed it with a... Maidan broke into violence, I don't know if you know all the details.
33:15 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
33:16 Speaker 02 There was a lot of killing of the protesters. And the evidence is really pointing heavily to the neo-fascists there who came in and shot these people from these rooftops that were controlled by the Ukrainian side. It's a very sad story.
33:35 Speaker 03 Turgut, let me take it back just a little bit.
33:37 Speaker 02 Of course.
33:38 Speaker 03 Because in 2008, that's when the United States called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO.
33:46 Speaker 02 Right.
33:46 Speaker 03 And that was clearly crossing Russia's red line. In fact, our then-US ambassador to Russia was William Burns, now the head of the CIA. Burns writes a secret memo back to the White House titled "Niet means niet." "Don't cross Russia's red lines about Ukraine in NATO." And that's where things begin to change. Putin was furious. He actually came, went to the NATO meeting and was, had been reaching out to the US since 9/11. I mean, he was the first foreign leader to actually contact the White House and to offer assistance. And he did help us in Afghanistan originally. And then what did we do in 2002?
34:31 Speaker 03 We abandoned the ABM treaty. He was, that was a horrible blow to them. Then we invade Iraq, which they were totally opposed to. And so then the relations began to deteriorate. But I was saying before about Krauthammer. In 2002, he revisits his idea of the unipolar moment. Says, "I was wrong in 1990. It's not the unipolar moment. It's the unipolar era. And the US is going to dominate the world for the foreseeable future. Could be 100 years, not 30 or 40 years." And that's when they all, the neocons started coming out of the frame. They started appearing everywhere and saying the importance of American empire.
35:14 Speaker 03 That we're going to, we're going to change the chessboard. When Wesley Clark went to the Pentagon, they told them we had plans to have regime change in seven different countries.
35:25 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:26 Speaker 03 And what was on that list? Iraq, Iran, Syria.
35:31 Speaker 02 Libya, Syria.
35:32 Speaker 03 Libya, yeah. I mean, you go through.
35:33 Speaker 02 Iran, yeah.
35:34 Speaker 03 And so that was the game plan. What's happening now in Syria was part of a game plan.
35:39 Speaker 02 And Iran was the last, it was the big prize. The biggest prize of all was Iran.
35:42 Speaker 03 Crucial there. Sudan, Somalia. They had a lot of different countries we were going to overturn. And they had this vision that we could do it. On January 5th, 2003, the New York Times Sunday Magazine section, big headline, "American Empire, Get Used To It." I mean, they weren't even hiding it. They were proud about it at that point, until things started to go haywire in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then finally.
36:11 Speaker 02 And Libya.
36:12 Speaker 03 Libya was a little later.
36:13 Speaker 02 And also includes Serbia, go back to 99.
36:16 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, the Russians were furious about what happened in Serbia.
36:19 Tucker Carlson? Can I ask, not to digress, but what was the point of the intervention in Serbia? The post Yugoslav interventions?
36:27 Speaker 02 We announced it as we were catching the butchers, the people who were dictators in Serbia.
36:35 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
36:36 Speaker 02 And that was our excuse. But essentially, it was a much more. Important destabilization of, we bombed a city in Europe.
36:47 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
36:48 Speaker 02 Belgrade for 99 days. I mean, think about it. We came into the war, it called it, it's a complicated war, there were two peace treaties. Don't have time here to go into it. But essentially, we wanted to Balkanize Yugoslavia, which we did.
37:03 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
37:03 Speaker 02 The same way we're gonna Balkanize Syria now.
37:06 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
37:06 Speaker 02 This is American policy, you divide, conquer, divide, conquer. Balkanize it. Cut it up into, Kosovo was a violation at the deepest level of everything we're talking about. We talk about the rules-based order.
37:18 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
37:18 Speaker 02 They had a referendum that was a little bit shady. And we said, "They're free, you know, they're no longer a part of Serbia." Kosovo was a gangster state, what became, it's a whole, I was there, I don't know, I can't tell you. It's grim, what happened to them.
37:39 Tucker Carlson? What's interesting though is as that was happening and NATO was bombing and Wes Clark was becoming famous and all that. I don't think I heard a single debate in the United States over why we're doing this.
37:50 Speaker 02 Did we?
37:50 Speaker 03 Not much, no. But in Russia, you would have heard very, very different. Something like 96% of the Russians thought that what was going on there was a war crime.
38:00 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
38:00 Speaker 03 And the Russians were a totally opposite view. And the US was establishing the rules-based international order, which meant instead of going through the United Nations, which they couldn't have gotten it through, they did it on their own.
38:12 Tucker Carlson? Militarily.
38:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
38:14 Speaker 02 And don't forget in Iraq, when we went in there, Germany, France, and Russia did not join, they did not agree with that. Schroder and
38:21 Speaker 03 Old Europe.
38:22 Speaker 02 Iraq. It's important because what's happened now is the opposite. France and Germany are all for
38:28 Tucker Carlson? And the UK, leading the charge.
38:29 Speaker 02 So, there's been a change in values, and you say, "Where?" I don't know why. But I think there's some kind of NATO is not the one, but it's sort of an elitism that has come into being with in Europe, an elitism of the leaders coming from a university where they're trained to be leaders. But they all think alike, that's what surprises me. I don't frankly Farage, whatever he says, he's different, at least he says something is different. Le Pen says something different. So that's why these people are appealing to people because they're saying there has to be some peace. This is madness.
39:06 Tucker Carlson? And it's why they're the most attacked.
39:08 Speaker 02 That's part of it too, the media is in on it and they're very, very critical of people who differ. In this country, you've noticed the censorship has gotten far, you suffered from it.
39:20 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, well certainly.
39:20 Speaker 02 I suffered from it. I mean, it's, you're insulated because you're epic tenure, but...
39:27 Tucker Carlson? How many Oscars have you won?
39:29 Speaker 02 I won three.
39:31 Tucker Carlson? You've won three Oscars.
39:31 Speaker 02 That was a long time ago.
39:32 Tucker Carlson? Right.
39:34 Speaker 02 No, but essentially I got cut off because I did, the Putin interviews didn't help me in Hollywood.
39:39 Tucker Carlson? But you'd been cut off before then, I think, hadn't you?
39:41 Speaker 02 No, my ability to make films was choked a little, you know, there is, after 2000, things changed in the United States because we became the victim. We were suddenly the patriotism of the soldiers. We started Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down. All the films were a different mentality than what I was presenting, which was a reality, I thought, to the American public, that this military has to be... Why are we doing these military expeditions overseas? This is like in Vietnam, this is what was my main point, I kept going at it and going at it.
40:24 Speaker 02 And I guess all of a sudden it became okay. But the people never voted. There was no candidate, there was no election that said, "I'm against any empire. I want to bring it back," like back in William Jennings Bryan's back in 1898. "I don't want empire." We never got the choice. We swallowed it.
40:45 Speaker 03 Let me give a different timeline on Oliver's history that I see. I mean, Oliver was walking on water in Hollywood with Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July. And then he made JFK. And then everything changed. And they started attacking JFK seven, eight months before the film was produced. Based on a stolen first draft of the script. At the New York Times, Los Angeles Times.
41:16 Speaker 02 Washington Post, all that.
41:18 Speaker 03 They were all going after him. And a conspiracy theorist and, you know, and it's a very controversial movie, which takes a lot of risks. And Oliver admitted at the time, he didn't have all the answers, but he wanted to get the questions out there and make people think about some of these issues. But at that point, he went from being Hollywood's golden boy to being the conspiracy monger.
41:40 Tucker Carlson? I remember it very well. And the late night comics, who are always tools of the existing order, jumped in. But why do you think that film and that topic, I mean?
41:51 Speaker 03 Because Americans had already disagreed with the Warren Commission. And even before Oliver's movie came out, the overwhelming majority of Americans thought, didn't think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. They didn't from the very beginning find that credible at all. In fact, four of the seven members of the Warren Commission didn't think that or thought that there was likely a second gun.
42:13 Speaker 02 Nor Robert Kennedy, nor Lyndon Johnson.
42:16 Speaker 03 Connally.
42:17 Speaker 02 Jackie Kennedy, so many people.
42:20 Tucker Carlson? Hal Boggs.
42:21 Speaker 02 Fidel Castro, Charles de Gaulle, various British leaders, Harold Macmillan.
42:28 Tucker Carlson? Did you ever talk to Castro? You knew Castro?
42:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, sure.
42:30 Tucker Carlson? What did he say about it?
42:31 Speaker 02 Oh, it's, uh, he was so sad because he really was like Kennedy and he was hoping for a deal. They were in backdoor negotiations. Kennedy understood the Cuban Revolution and he said eloquent about it. He understood why the people were... Cuba had been the most corrupt island in the American Empire in the Caribbean. Since the Platamen in 2001, 1901.
42:55 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
42:55 Speaker 02 But a lot of this is economic. Let's not lose sight of that. You see, what they got after World War II was an economic empire, which is, it was working. People were investing in the war economy and they were prosperous.
43:07 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
43:08 Speaker 02 But you saw the budgets grew and grew and grew. Here we are now with a trillion-dollar defense budget, right? Which is insane because we have how many bases abroad? 800 bases? That was never the intention of Eisenhower or any of those people. To have, to control the world, to dominate every place in the world. And this is Asia and Europe.
43:28 Tucker Carlson? But Ken...
43:29 Speaker 02 And South America. This is a gigantic empire. Do you realize how busy they are every day trying to run this thing? Everything is coming... Personally, I believe there's an invasion coming up. It's either gonna be Iran or, I hope not. Israel is a proxy army for us. Certainly Trump supports them, you know that. Trump supports, Trump is very zealous about Israel. Scary. But also don't overlook Venezuela, which is still one of the richest countries in the world with all its oil. Some people believe that is an easy, easy target for Trump to knock off. I pray not because it's gonna be a battle. But this doesn't end, is what I'm saying. They plot every day.
44:14 Speaker 02 They, there's, imagine the world map. You got the China, the China challenge, right? Sending ships constantly...
44:23 Speaker 02 Stating our supremacy right in the seas, freedom of the seas.
44:27 Speaker 03 Navigation.
44:30 Speaker 02 And China, it's crazy. I mean, I understand economically, take it on, be competitive with China, fine. But we can be economically friendly. In other words, we can be competitors. I don't see why we can't be in business together, as with Russia. Russia was a capitalist country. It's no longer a communist country.
44:52 Speaker 03 Yes.
44:52 Speaker 02 So as much as we hate communism, it doesn't make sense to antagonize Russia. They can be our partners in climate change in so many ways. Their nuclear energy industry is one of the best in the world, as is China. They can teach us. We can build SMRs in quantity if we wanted to. We can really solve climate change. We don't have to sit here victims of it. But this is all, this is Kennedy thinking. This is what we need. We need leadership. We need a de Gaulle, somebody who has a vision of the world.
45:27 Speaker 02 Trump, to some degree, has a vision.
45:29 Speaker 03 Oliver's stressing the economic roots of all this.
45:31 Speaker 02 I do.
45:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, I wanted to go back because in 1948, George Kennan lays it out in a secret memo. George Kennan, who was the architect of the Cold War, writes a memo and says, "We have 6.3% of the world's population, yet we control 50% of the world's wealth." He said, "The challenge before us today is to maintain this position of disparity. And we're not going to do it with idealistic slogans. We're going to do it with pure power concepts." He later regretted that. He later regretted the Mr. X article. And he becomes really very, very worried about the threat of nuclear war in his later life, and he lived to over 100 years old. But, you know.
46:17 Speaker 02 In 97, he condemned Clinton's move.
46:19 Speaker 03 He condemned the NATO expansion, for sure.
46:21 Speaker 02 In 99, Clinton expanded NATO.
46:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:24 Speaker 02 And Kennan was horrified, horrified.
46:29 Tucker Carlson? So we were at a meeting here at TCN the other day, and I looked around the room and every other person had a kind of ruddy vitality, sort of pink cheeks, alertness, bright eyes, full mental acuity and a cheerfulness you could almost smell.
46:47 Tucker Carlson? And I asked, why does everyone look so good? And part of the answer, of course, is they like what we do for a living. It's really interesting. We think it's important. But another reason everyone looks so good is because they'd all had a great night's sleep. I'm not making this up. Almost everybody here uses a new sleep technology from a company called Eight Sleep. They sent it to us and everyone here loves it. It's called the Pod. It's a high-tech mattress cover effectively that you add to your existing bed. You don't need a new bed or anything like that. You just throw this over what you have. What it does is adjusts the temperature of your bed, warmer or cooler, depending on what you want.
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49:16 Speaker 05 Bonjour, compadre. It's the
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49:59 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, but you're arguing that it's more than just economics that are driving.
50:03 Speaker 03 Economics, geopolitics, it's
50:06 Tucker Carlson? Economics.
50:06 Speaker 03 Military ideological domination. I don't think it's an either or. Some people make that mistake and say it's this or it's that. I mean, there are a lot of different people involved in planning this and they're motivated by different things.
50:18 Speaker 02 No, I say that was the original reason we were antagonistic to Russia.
50:22 Speaker 03 Yes.
50:23 Speaker 02 It wasn't military. It was economic because we had strikes in this country and we were trying to control labor and the large corporations were in a deadly struggle with labor. And up until the end of World War II, Taft Hartley, that was a big issue. There were so many strikes during the war. People don't even take that into account. There were, there was a huge strikes in Detroit, cars, steel. And after the war, it was continuing and until Taft Hartley came along, which allowed them to close down any strike that was dangerous to the national security, I think.
51:01 Speaker 03 But in the 30s, that's what motivated Roosevelt's turn to the left.
51:05 Speaker 02 So the Cold War comes out of economics, too. It's very much so.
51:09 Speaker 03 The labor movement was huge in the United States in the 30s. The formation of the CIO, the organizing of steel, auto. I mean, all of the big industries were organizing. And who were the leaders of the organizing? The communists. You know, there was a reason why they had to shut down the Communist Party during the quote-unquote McCarthy period. And McCarthy's a latecomer to McCarthyism. But it starts in 47. And Truman, according to Clark Clifford, his main domestic policy adviser, Truman said, Truman knew that this was baloney, all this stuff about communist infiltration. But the Republicans started to attack in 1946. The chair of the Republican Party in 46
51:51 Speaker 03 says, "It's a choice between republicanism and communism." And so we're beginning this anti-communist hysteria very, very early after the war. And then Truman takes the bait and has the loyalty hearings, which leads gradually into McCarthyism. So first in 47, first they say that the real threat is the atomic scientists. But they quickly decide that the one they're going to investigate first is Hollywood. Right? So then they have the Hollywood Ten and then all those other hearings that were taking place because they were very concerned even then about people who might influence American thinking. And Hollywood was a hotbed of leftists.
52:34 Tucker Carlson? Kind of an irony, though, that Oliver Stone, after winning three Oscars, would be excommunicated from Hollywood by the same people for thought crimes.
52:43 Speaker 02 I didn't get excommunicated yet.
52:47 Tucker Carlson? That you would be even vigorously criticized is a little strange.
52:52 Speaker 02 No, it's very hard for me. I mean, a military-type theme, these kind of things I'm talking about with you. I couldn't do this as a movie now. I could do the Putin interviews because that was a documentary.
53:02 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
53:02 Speaker 02 And I could do nuclear energy because I cared about that. That was a documentary, pro-nuclear energy. So I'm interested in ideas, but in terms of drama, I have to curb it. I can't go to where my imagination wants to go.
53:19 Tucker Carlson? Why?
53:21 Speaker 02 What do they say to you? They never tell you the truth. They tell you too controversial, too political, too this, too that. You know, I don't think I've lost my touch, but I have to live with it. It's okay. I live with it. I'm writing a book, another book. I wrote a book, a memoir, a first part of my life. I'm gonna write another one from 40 on, the age of 40, to wherever I am now.
53:45 Tucker Carlson? So, are there any filmmakers left in Hollywood who can take on the biggest questions, like the power of the intelligence?
53:54 Speaker 02 That's the thing. They don't take on the... Oppenheimer is an interesting movie. I liked it as a movie. I loved it. There are some flaws in it, you know. The big flaw being that Truman is honestly pictured knocking Oppenheimer. Remember that? There's a great scene in the movie. But what's ignored in the film is, for example, General Groves... Leslie Groves is one of the most anti-communist generals we ever had. A total Cold Warrior from beginning to end. He said, quote, the quotes in the book, "From the beginning, the Manhattan Project was created to destroy, to address the Russian Empire." You know the line?
54:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, of course.
54:35 Speaker 02 "Nothing more. It was not about Japan. It was about Russia."
54:38 Speaker 03 He says, "From two weeks after the time I was appointed to head the Manhattan Project, I had treated it as if the Soviets were the enemy, and that the project was directed in that way."
54:50 Tucker Carlson? And so the bombing of Japan was really aimed as a message to the Soviets?
54:54 Speaker 02 Well, yeah. The Russians were in the war at that time. We knew that Japan was finished, but we had to keep going in those crucial few days to establish the weapon. And Leslie Groves, I mean, Matt Damon played him, a very good performance, but I don't know.
55:11 Speaker 03 That's not Leslie Groves.
55:14 Speaker 02 It's not Leslie Groves.
55:15 Speaker 03 That's the most warm and fuzzy Leslie Groves you're ever gonna see.
55:19 Speaker 02 And it doesn't go into the issue of whether, why we... Oppenheimer, I don't know. I'm sure Oppenheimer got an inkling of it later, no? At the time?
55:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, but he said that when he testified. He said, "We didn't know beans about the military situation. We didn't know that Japan could have been made to surrender without using the bomb." You know, so Oppenheimer later effectively apologized for supporting the use of the bomb.
55:43 Speaker 02 And then he got into trouble. That's when he really, he was in trouble. Then he opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb. Once you cross the Rubicon, you have to cross.
55:53 Tucker Carlson? So, speaking of, you're crossing the Rubicon, yes, I have crossed it. But when you came back from interviewing Putin for your documentary, it was released, what was the reaction like in L.A.?
56:04 Speaker 02 People, they don't talk to me publicly, they, it's always behind closed doors, right?
56:11 Tucker Carlson? Did you hesitate before doing it?
56:12 Speaker 02 Not really, because it was fascinating, new material my producer set up. No, I was doing Snowden in 2013, which was a very brave movie, because we're dealing with a man who was exiled, who I thought was a hero and was treated
56:26 Tucker Carlson? I agree.
56:27 Speaker 02 as if he was a traitor. So I wanted to make that movie. In making that movie, I had to go to Moscow to finish it, and I met Putin there, and we talked about Snowden first, because that was where we met. And what he said about Snowden, as he says in the movie, is, it's very true. He didn't like what Snowden did.
56:45 Tucker Carlson? No.
56:46 Speaker 02 But, and he would have punished him the same, probably the same way, but he understood the mechanics of it. Meanwhile, we got to know each other, and my producer said, "Let's do an interview with him, because he's a crucial figure right now." Yeah, we didn't know what was coming, you know, we didn't know about the coup at that point. So we set up these interviews, and we were talking. The coup had just happened at that point, so he was upset. And I, as an American, didn't really know the situation, so I was treating it like, you know, Ukraine, okay, it's, what's the big deal? I mean, it's another one of the countries like
57:31 Tucker Carlson? Sure.
57:32 Speaker 02 like Georgia, I thought.
57:33 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, it's still Warsaw Pact country.
57:35 Speaker 02 Like Romania. And he looked at me, "No, it's not a big deal for us, Mr. Stone." And he explained in the movie what, I think he says that on tape. And he, I understand Ukraine better and better, but at first I didn't, I talked to Ukrainians.
57:53 Speaker 02 It's, uh, it was evident, I mean, it was coming. This, this thing is very dangerous. It was, it was a firecracker from 2014 on, because it was a violation of, at the heart of the Soviet empire, of the Russian empire. That underbelly is where the invasions happened.
58:11 Tucker Carlson? So it seems like we're relying now on Putin's restraint.
58:16 Speaker 02 It's not just him, it's Russia. If he goes, if he's out, and if Biden gets his wish, and all these nutcases want to remove him, take him out, fine, kill him, but he's not going to solve it. Russia is Russia. It's going to stay loyal to what it believes in. There is a, what, they don't have a democratic vote, but they have a consensus. If Putin was not doing what the public, the people wanted, he'd be out. That's the way it works. It takes maybe a couple of years more, what, but it doesn't, that's the way Russia works. They, if the czar didn't work out, they get rid of him, you know, and they shot him too. Remember, that's one of the reasons the Japanese were terrified of the Russians and why they
58:57 Speaker 02 surrendered, because they didn't want the Russians to invade the homeland. That was a big fear. But, no, the Russian people are very strong, but they, they're passive. So they, they talk in certain ways. You know, we believe the Moscow crowd, but the Moscow crowd doesn't talk for Russia. It's, it's a bigger consensus.
59:17 Speaker 03 But you're making an important point, though, that we are in many ways dependent on Putin's restraint at this point.
59:24 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
59:25 Speaker 03 Because we, in today, he just made a statement that the US keeps crossing all of Russia's red lines. And if they keep doing this, this is going to explode. I mean, Biden, for a long time, refused to give permission to Ukraine to use the attack and missiles. And he said that it would be too provocative and could possibly lead to a much broader war between the United States and Russia. And he refused to do it. But that he did with every other weapon system, he finally caved in. And so Ukraine has struck Russia several times now with these attack M missiles inside of Russia, the long-range army missiles. And then you got the British Stormtrooper, Storm Shadow missiles.
1:00:09 Speaker 03 You got the French missiles, the scout missiles. The German ones haven't been used yet. And in response to that, Russia lowered, changed its nuclear doctrine. And said that, they lowered it and said that if Russia is attacked by a country with the support of a nuclear power, then they're going to consider that an attack by both countries, meaning the United States and Ukraine. And both countries become legitimate targets for all of Russia's weapons, meaning nuclear weapons. And so far, then how did Russia respond? With the Irashnik missile, this brand-new hypersonic medium-range missile.
1:00:51 Speaker 03 And they, it was devastating because it goes at 10 times the speed of sound. And it's a hypersonic missile, and they can't be shot down. And they used it once so far. But they have some warnings that they could take out Kiev, or at least the leadership there. They could hit the bases in Poland, wherever they want.
1:01:12 Tucker Carlson? So just for some context, what is the difference between the bomb, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and the current nuclear arsenal? Like, how much more advanced are nuclear weapons now?
1:01:27 Speaker 03 They are so much more advanced. In fact, Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his speech in Prague
1:01:35 Tucker Carlson? For existing, yeah.
1:01:36 Speaker 03 in 2009, calling for nuclear abolition.
1:01:40 Speaker 03 He's the one who put into process the policy of modernizing America's nuclear arsenal. It was a trade-off with the Senator Kyle from Arizona in order to get them to support the New START treaty. And so what does modernizing the delivery systems and the weapons mean? Making them more efficient and more lethal. And then Trump doubled down on that in his nuclear posture review in 2018. And so Obama said, "We're going to spend a trillion dollars over 30 years to modernize." Now it's closer to 2 trillion, and we're doing it. But not only is the United States modernizing, all nine nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals.
1:02:22 Speaker 03 And for the first time, you know, at the peak of the Cold War, 1986, we had about 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world. We got it down to now 12,000. But for the first time, we're increasing the arsenals. You know, we've been trying to get rid of these hellish weapons since they were first started. And initially, even Eisenhower supported giving them to the UN and letting the UN destroy them. And Eisenhower also was the only president who's openly critical of the US dropping the atomic bombs in 1945. You know, and he criticized it at the top. What did he say? What he said, he said, "When Stimson briefed him at Potsdam
1:03:07 Speaker 03 that the United States was about to use the atomic bomb, Eisenhower wrote on a couple of occasions, "I got more and more depressed just listening to him, but I didn't volunteer anything because my war in Europe was over. Then he asked me what I thought, and I told him I was against it for two reasons. Number one, the Japanese were already defeated and trying to surrender, and we didn't need to use it. And number two, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." The US had eight five-star admirals and generals in 1945. Seven of the eight are officially on the record saying the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both. And the other, the eighth was Marshall, who said that the Soviet invasion...
1:03:49 Speaker 03 invasion alone would likely leverage the Japanese into surrender by itself. So they all knew that the atomic bombs were necessary. Truman knew it as well as anybody. When he went to have lunch with Stalin at Potsdam on July 17th, he goes back and writes in his journal, said Russia Stalin will be in the Jap war by August 15th. Finny Japs when that occurs. He writes home to his wife Bess the next day, say the Russians are coming in, we'll end the war a year sooner now. Think of all the kids who won't be killed. He knew it. He refers to the intercepted telegram on July 18th as the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace. They knew that the Japanese were defeated.
1:04:33 Speaker 02 If there had been an invasion, what was the estimate of casualties, the original one from Marshall?
1:04:37 Speaker 03 Well, the original one, they were talking only like 20,000. And then the highest one for the original Linoleum exhibit that we could find was 46,000 Americans would be lost. But in his memoir, Truman says, I was told by Marshall that we could lose a half million American boys in an invasion. It's a myth. And that's but that's just what kids are taught in schools.
1:04:56 Speaker 02 And then Bush brought it up to.
1:04:58 Speaker 03 H W Bush said millions, we could lose millions. A tough calculating decision by Truman.
1:05:03 Speaker 02 These presidents.
1:05:04 Tucker Carlson? Right, the retroactive justification. So do you think that, you know, you said the world's nuclear arsenal has dramatically declined?
1:05:13 Speaker 03 But it's going to be increasing now.
1:05:15 Tucker Carlson? But do you think in that decline is, of course, at the end of the Soviet empire and anyone? Do you think that all of those warheads were accounted for? We certain that they were destroyed?
1:05:26 Speaker 03 I don't have any evidence that they weren't.
1:05:28 Tucker Carlson? Okay.
1:05:29 Speaker 03 So, but I mean, I've heard speculation about that.
1:05:34 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:05:34 Speaker 03 But I don't know that there are any out there.
1:05:36 Speaker 04 Breaking news, Trump intends to nominate Cash Patel to serve as the FBI director.
1:05:41 Speaker 06 The level of corruption in Washington DC was not wholly new to me, but I also didn't expect it at that level.
1:05:49 Speaker 00 Is it your expectation, though, that Cash Patel will pursue investigations against your political enemies? If they were crooked, if they did something wrong?
1:05:57 Speaker 06 They have broken the law. Comey, the former deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, literally hijacked the system of justice. And at the time, of course, we didn't know this, but he was running Russia Gate. They went after me, you know. They went after me, and I did nothing wrong.
1:06:12 Tucker Carlson? Here's the thing that I think people need to understand. The information operation is not Mockingbird. It's everybody.
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1:06:58 Speaker 05 Priceline Negotiator. It's me, the Priceline Negotiator. We don't need the jingle twice. What about a third time? Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars. Seems like you decided. Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app. Time to read the timeline. Fine, no one deals more deals than Priceline. Please stop. Priceline. Touche. Priceline. Priceline.
1:07:42 Tucker Carlson? How much do you think Putin worries about nuclear war?
1:07:46 Speaker 02 A lot. I can't tell you. I mean, he's a cool customer, as you know. He's seen a lot. He's been there for 23 years. I mean, he knows every world leader. He's seen six American presidents come and go. I would say he qualifies as a statesman and a wise man.
1:08:03 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:08:04 Speaker 02 And we don't pay any attention to him. We should. We should respect him. He has the experience. He understands the American system, how it sends new leaders in and they change the policies all the time. So he, but he thinks there is a deep state. And that deep state-
1:08:21 Tucker Carlson? In the United States.
1:08:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. And that, and that's what he has to deal with. And that deep state is very dangerous because, and when we started our conversations over three years, it was our partners, the Americans, and I got irritated. I said, "Why you keep saying our partners, the Americans, they don't express these sentiments at all towards you. You're considered a murderer by Mr. Biden, and they think you kill people, you know, that you're some kind of character out of a James Bond spy movie. They keep talking about KGB, ignoring the fact that George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush was the head of the CIA."
1:08:58 Speaker 03 But everybody I know in Russia, everybody I talked to there, says they wanted, they wish we could have friendlier relations-
1:09:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:09:07 Speaker 03 -between the United States and Russia. They all feel that way. You know who fears nuclear weapons, nuclear bombs? Trump. Trump said recently, already says, "We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden. A global conflict between nuclear armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history." That's what Donald Trump said recently. You know, so he thinks that giving the Ukrainians permission to use the attack Ms. the way we are is crazy.
1:09:41 Tucker Carlson? I haven't heard an American president say anything like that since Kennedy. Sir, so you said, you're talking about Russia, you said it is a Christian culture. What does that mean?
1:09:48 Speaker 02 They're, they're a strong Christian culture, very much this concept of a, of, they don't, interesting thing, they go to church, they don't sit at all during the service. They stand the whole time. It's, that's serious too.
1:10:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:10:05 Speaker 02 If you remember going to Sunday School.
1:10:06 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:10:07 Speaker 02 We're more Protestant, we're, we don't, we're divided culture, and there are so many sects. There's the Jewish sect, there's Arabs, there's this, and then we're all into different things, you know? Some people are atheists, some people are, don't know, agnostics, this, that. They feel, the Russians feel, that we have lost touch with Christianity and that we're moving towards a more of a satanic culture. And I can understand why, because we have embraced the bomb. We've embraced regime change, corruption in all these countries. We believe in the dollar, controlling the world. They don't see hope in our way of life.
1:10:50 Speaker 02 They see people who are exhausting themselves competitively and dropping dead. You know, as Means told you in your interview.
1:10:59 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:11:00 Speaker 02 We spend more on health than anybody and we die sooner. Our expectation, life expectancy is very low. And our quality of life is not up to the other countries, you know. Europe is better. So there is a lot of big question about America. We say we're, you know, we see ourselves as a great country. And I think in many ways we are, and I'd like to see it. But I think our greatness is tied to some humility and the sense of what we were fighting for. Abraham Lincoln, in holding the country together, made some of the greatest speeches and a purpose of life. But he was a very strong Christian, remember that.
1:11:36 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:11:36 Speaker 02 Very strong sense of God and that, you know, the grapes of wrath are marching on.
1:11:44 Tucker Carlson? So you think that Russia sees this as a conflict between a Christian culture and a secular culture? How is being a secular?
1:11:52 Speaker 02 I think some people do, yeah. Putin goes to church, but he doesn't sell, he's not an evangelist or anything like that.
1:12:02 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:12:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. No, it's interesting, but you're asked, they fundamentally have to be respected. People who really study Russian culture love it. I saw Americans over there, they love it. They read the literature, they understand the culture, they speak Russian.
1:12:22 Speaker 02 You have a Russian background, you told me your story.
1:12:25 Speaker 03 Well, I've got a lot of friends who are Russian historians and Russian experts. And my friends in Russia, when we talk about religion, they say after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everybody got baptized, but nobody actually goes to church. So, I mean, they're religious in a different sense, and it's part of their national identity and heritage, but I'm not sure that they're believers in that way. And as you were saying, unlike the United States, where we've got Catholics and all kinds of Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Hindus. I mean, they've got much more of an identity that revolves around their religious heritage.
1:13:03 Speaker 02 The whole concept of what Rome, I mean, Rome moved east. The new Rome. And that they were the inheritors of our empire. And that's where they fought the Turks and all that.
1:13:15 Speaker 03 Yes, all these conflicts.
1:13:17 Speaker 02 But it's interesting what's going on with Ukraine, because they changed the rules in the church. They formed a new church, they're no longer Orthodox Russian.
1:13:26 Speaker 03 Yes, well, they don't have religious freedom there.
1:13:30 Speaker 02 And they're accusing the Russians of distorting their religion.
1:13:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:13:34 Speaker 02 But this is very strange. So Ukraine is also, this is, it's a religious battle too. They changed everything Russian. Do you know that Zelensky didn't even speak Ukrainian? He learned it quickly.
1:13:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:13:50 Speaker 02 In his, yeah. So they really banned the language, they really went against Russia. They tried to root it out, they hated Russia, some people hated Russians, and they turned it into a campaign, like Hitler, a Hitler campaign of genocide.
1:14:06 Speaker 03 Against Russia.
1:14:07 Speaker 02 Against Russia, yeah. That war in Donbass started in 2014, 15.
1:14:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:14:13 Speaker 02 And maybe 16, but it got worse and worse. And it was in 22, when the thing blew up. They were on the verge of invading Donbass. They had 100,000 troops on the border. The Ukrainian troops, well-trained by the Americans, with all our work there, our CIA, our advisors. We had really trained that Ukrainian army. That was a deliberate, deliberate manipulation. We did not abide by the treaty. The treaty was intended for peace, make an interim peace. But as Merkel said, the Ukrainians sought as a way to use the time to build up their army.
1:14:55 Speaker 03 Hollande also said that.
1:14:56 Speaker 02 To reconquer Donbass, that's what they wanted to do. And they would have killed a lot more people.
1:15:02 Tucker Carlson? What, how do you suppose the incoming Trump administration can fix this?
1:15:08 Speaker 02 Well, he announces everything so that Biden is just counter moving him on every regard. It's very dangerous. You can't say what you're gonna do in a new administration, especially this one, right? It's, what do you do? I mean, how do you? I don't know.
1:15:25 Speaker 03 But this administration, much like the Biden administration, we were talking about Biden earlier, and Oliver was talking, surprised by how hawkish Biden is. Biden's always been a cold warrior and very much of a hawk. And he came to office with 18 top advisers from the Center for New American Security. Now, these are the people like Sullivan, who are the China hawks. Many of them were the people behind the Asia pivot under Hillary Clinton and Obama. But Ukraine got in the way, because there was China who they wanted to go after.
1:16:05 Speaker 03 But you, and even Rand has proposed something about, or a report saying, titled "Avoiding a Long War in Ukraine," because they wanted to get after China. Now, the Trump people are also much more hawkish toward China and Iran than they are toward Ukraine. So I think that.
1:16:26 Speaker 02 Economically.
1:16:27 Speaker 03 My fear is that they'll successfully end Ukraine and then turn their fire elsewhere. Except that Trump did invite Xi Jinping to come to the inaugural inauguration. And I think it is showing some signs of moderating.
1:16:42 Speaker 02 It's economic with Trump, that's what I think.
1:16:44 Speaker 03 Well, and transactional.
1:16:47 Speaker 03 So it's possible we're not gonna go that way.
1:16:49 Speaker 02 That's the only hope we have, to make a deal.
1:16:51 Speaker 03 Right. How make a deal with Iran?
1:16:54 Tucker Carlson? What would that look like?
1:16:56 Speaker 02 We're gonna have to inherit Ukraine, we're just gonna have to pay it, keep paying and paying it. We gotta keep it up, and somehow he'll make some kind of phony state, you know, like, create like a Laos or Vietnam, yeah, kinda a half-state and
1:17:13 Speaker 03 Well, twenty percent.
1:17:14 Speaker 02 Keep it alive, spend a lot of taxpayer money and
1:17:19 Speaker 02 it's a front.
1:17:21 Speaker 03 A front for what?
1:17:22 Speaker 02 For NATO in a way, but, you know, they won't, they, they, Ukraine has to stay NATO-free, it does, and so does Georgia, otherwise it's gonna be, the Russians won't accept that.
1:17:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:17:35 Speaker 02 We have, they have to understand, why is NATO even alive? I mean, it was a defensive alliance, I don't understand, we formed NATO because the Russians were gonna invade Europe, is that correct?
1:17:46 Speaker 03 Nineteen forty-nine.
1:17:47 Speaker 02 Basically, yeah, they never invaded Europe, they never could, they never had the intention to, and Mr., as I said to you earlier, Kamala Harris said something so stupid, like, the moment they win in Ukraine, they're gonna march into Poland, it's nuts.
1:18:02 Speaker 03 That's what that, the whole foreign policy establishment is saying that, and I agree with Oliver, it's nuts.
1:18:07 Tucker Carlson? Do they believe it, do you think?
1:18:08 Speaker 03 They can't even defeat Ukraine, they wanna take on NATO? I mean, this makes no logical sense at all. And for Putin, Ukraine has a special meaning and special history for Russia.
1:18:19 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:18:20 Speaker 03 You know, and it doesn't want Poland or Romania, or, I mean, this doesn't make any sense.
1:18:25 Speaker 02 He's not at all that way, he didn't do anything like that, he was in office for twenty-three years. What did he do? Very little, in terms of expansion, it was just, just their borders, their security, that's what it's about, their security. Let me thrive, let me build up my country economically, let me do this, and that's what he did with Russia. Russia did very well, up until the war.
1:18:49 Speaker 03 This idea that he wants to recreate the Soviet Empire, he said, anyone who doesn't miss the Soviet Union has no Anyone who wants to recreate it has no brain.
1:19:00 Speaker 02 It's a good line.
1:19:02 Speaker 03 But, you know, but they are hurting their own economy again by this massive expansion of arms production. That's what brought them down in the eighties, really. They're spending 25 to 40% of their budget on arms. And now they're doing that again. So even though in the long and short run, they're thriving economically, unlike Europe, in the long run, it's going to hurt them. So it's very much in their interest to end this war. It's in everybody's interest. If you're pro-Ukrainian, what is the point of it? For example, after the attack Ms. were given permission, everybody gave permission. I was watching CNN and they had Bolton and they had Stavridis and Clark.
1:19:45 Speaker 03 And they all said, too little, too late, giving, using the attack Ms. That it's great that we're doing it, but it's too little, too late. What these people are saying is they're willing to risk nuclear war over something that they know is not going to make any difference for the Ukrainians anyway. Ukraine is losing. That's the reality. They can't keep up with Russia. They're outmanned, they're outgunned, they're outstrategized at this point.
1:20:12 Tucker Carlson? In the settlement, do you think it's as simple as telling the Russians, no NATO? That'll end it?
1:20:19 Speaker 03 No. Putin wants a little bit more than that right now.
1:20:23 Speaker 02 Oh, he wants to keep what he earned.
1:20:25 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:20:26 Speaker 03 He's going to keep, he's got four provinces that they said are incorporated into Russia. So Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya. And he's going to want at least as much of them as his army controls. He's going to want more, but their bargaining position might be, they might give up the parts that they don't control and for no arms, no foreign arms and soldiers in Ukraine, no NATO in Ukraine, and a lasting peace. I don't think they want it. The West says, oh, it's going to be temporary and then they're going to just start it up again when they're ready. This has been a terrible war for Russia as well as for Ukraine.
1:21:11 Speaker 03 And if you're sympathetic to Ukraine, the last thing you want is going to see this continue because they're only losing more, they're only in a weaker position, and their young men are getting, not so young men are getting killed at incredible numbers. So if we stop it a year from now, what's going to be different? Russia is going to have more of Ukraine, there'll be more Ukrainians dead, more economy destroyed on both sides, more Russians dead. This is a horrible war for everybody.
1:21:41 Speaker 02 America was fine with that. That's what they said, weaken Russia, weaken Russia.
1:21:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, weaken Russia.
1:21:47 Tucker Carlson? And build up our armaments industry.
1:21:49 Speaker 03 Yes. The big five, the military contractors are doing great.
1:21:54 Tucker Carlson? So there was a point in American history when the Congress considered banning war profiteering.
1:22:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:22:02 Tucker Carlson? When did that happen?
1:22:03 Speaker 03 1934.
1:22:04 Tucker Carlson? 1934.
1:22:05 Speaker 03 Gerald Nye.
1:22:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was a great time.
1:22:07 Speaker 03 The Nye Committee hearings in the Senate were an extraordinary moment, and it was a reaction to World War I. Because while the, you know, what Wilson said, we want a million volunteers. Well, they got 73,000 because Americans had been watching the World War I in Europe go on for three years. They saw the trench warfare, they saw the poison gas. It was a horrible war, and so very few Americans wanted to volunteer. So we had a draft instead. But afterwards, in the 1920s, going back to Hollywood, they had a lot of fabulous movies about World War I that were passionately anti-war. Movies like The Big Parade, Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front.
1:22:51 Speaker 03 And the novels, almost all the Americans writers were opposed to the war. And so the American attitude was very negative about World War I. So in 1934, Gerald Nye proposes these hearings and a new legislation to eliminate all profit from war. Now these bastards are making enormous amounts of profit.
1:23:16 Tucker Carlson? So that's such an obvious idea that your, that your national industry shouldn't get rich from war.
1:23:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:23:23 Tucker Carlson? Because it sets up an incentive for those same industries to lobby for war.
1:23:25 Speaker 03 Which they do.
1:23:26 Tucker Carlson? Which is what we do now. It's a self-evidently good idea, it seems to me. What happened to it?
1:23:33 Speaker 03 Well, then they started to go after Wilson because it was a bipartisan effort on the committee. It had front page headlines.
1:23:40 Tucker Carlson? Who was Gerald Nye?
1:23:41 Speaker 03 Gerald Nye was a senator from...
1:23:44 Tucker Carlson? Midwest.
1:23:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, Midwest, Midwest Republican.
1:23:47 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:23:48 Speaker 03 Progressive, or a lot of progressive anti-war Republicans.
1:23:51 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:23:51 Speaker 03 During World War I and then afterwards, in the 20s and 30s.
1:23:55 Tucker Carlson? They've been libeled ever since.
1:23:57 Speaker 03 Robert LaFollette is one of the greats, but there were a lot of them then. And they were in strictly isolation. William Bora was one of the leaders from Idaho.
1:24:06 Tucker Carlson? Henry Wallace was from Iowa.
1:24:08 Speaker 03 Right, Henry Wallace was from Iowa. And so, but when they started to go after Truman, the Democrats got very defend... And after Wilson, the Democrats got very defensive. And they blew up the hearings. Even Roosevelt was supportive of what they were calling for in 1934.
1:24:25 Tucker Carlson? So what were they calling for?
1:24:27 Speaker 03 Well, there were various variants on this. One was to either tax everything above $10,000. Once war began, anything that people earned over $10,000 would be taxed at either 98% or 100%. Because the DuPonts and the Morgans, Melons, made huge profits out of World War I. Astronomical profits. And, you know, part of the reason why we got involved in the war at all, even though the American people did not want to, was because we had lent, Morgan Banks had lent $2.5 billion to the Allies and $100 million to the other side.
1:25:10 Speaker 03 And so it was clear which side we were going to get involved in. What Wilson said when he was criticized, because he ran in 1916 as a peace candidate, the slogan was "We kept America out of the war." And then in 1917, they changed the slogan to "It's the war to end all wars," or "The war to make the world safe for democracy." But Wilson entered it in large part because he knew that if we didn't, then the US would have no hand in the post-war settlement. And he said, "We have to be in it so that we can shape the post-war world." And he came up with the League of Nations, which could have been a good idea under certain circumstances.
1:25:48 Speaker 03 But his fourteen points were very progressive, but the British and French colonialists were not going to accept it. And as Oliver said before, when the Soviet Revolution occurred, one of the first thing they did is they broke in and found all the diplomatic papers which showed the secret treaties between Russia, France, and Britain to divide up the Middle East. You know, the problems we're talking about now trace back to then, to the colonialists who controlled the Middle East. And but this was going on all over the world. They had this plan. The Germans wanted to get involved in the war in part because they were latecomers to the empire in Africa. They felt they'd been frozen out of the empires
1:26:31 Speaker 03 that the British and French and Dutch and Portuguese all were controlling.
1:26:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, Wilson wouldn't meet with Ho Chi Minh from Vietnam.
1:26:38 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:26:39 Speaker 02 Famous story, yeah.
1:26:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:26:41 Speaker 02 There's an interesting play by Arthur Miller, his first play, All My Sons. You ever see it?
1:26:46 Speaker 03 No.
1:26:46 Speaker 02 Oh, they made it very, it was a big hit before Salesman. And it was made into a movie, but it's about war profiteering. The father, there are two sons and the the older son goes against the father when he finds out that the father has been making defective parts. And his brother is killed in the, in one of the planes that crashes because they're defective, which happens a lot more now than ever because we have such a corrupt system. They have crashes of this new F-35.
1:27:19 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:27:20 Speaker 02 It's the biggest boondoggle of all time. So it seems like this, and that play had a huge impact. It was Broadway, nineteen forty-five, six. You know, that was, that's part of the reality of war is that people make money with it. And that people knew that then at that level. And it goes on and on.
1:27:40 Tucker Carlson? But they weren't able-
1:27:40 Speaker 02 It's gotten worse. The profiteering. Gerald Nye should come out of the fucking woodwork now and investigate-
1:27:46 Speaker 03 Another play that Oliver knows that also is critical of war profiteering was Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets. You know, it's also got various episodes about condemning the war profiteering.
1:28:01 Tucker Carlson? But they failed to get control of the system in 1934 and no one's tried since.
1:28:04 Speaker 03 They came close and it was overwhelmingly popular at the time. And then the Democrats reacted to these allegations against Wilson getting us into the war.
1:28:15 Tucker Carlson? What's interesting, though, is that history now regards anybody who had second thoughts about the First World War and anyone who didn't want to get into another war in Europe in the 30s as pro-Nazi. That is how they're isolationist, they're pro-Hitler. Do you think that's a fair characterization?
1:28:35 Speaker 03 You know, the kids don't even know about World War I.
1:28:38 Tucker Carlson? Right.
1:28:38 Speaker 03 That's really ancient history. They hardly know about World War- hardly know about Vietnam.
1:28:42 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:28:43 Speaker 03 You know, Oliver fought in Vietnam. Oliver volunteered for combat in Vietnam. Probably the only person to drop out of Yale and volunteer for combat in Vietnam in history.
1:28:52 Speaker 02 No, no.
1:28:53 Speaker 03 No?
1:28:54 Speaker 02 I think there are others.
1:28:55 Speaker 03 Oh, maybe. I doubt it. But, you know, and I was an anti-war activist during that period. You know, but you- I was in Hanoi in January. And it's interesting to me because I had Robert McNamara come into my class some years ago. And McNamara said to my students that he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. And I've always used that figure because it's mind-boggling. But when I was in Hanoi, the Vietnamese leaders told me that now the figure that they use is 5 million Vietnamese. So, one of the one place that all my students have been is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, which you've been there.
1:29:37 Speaker 03 And it's got two walls with 492 feet long with the names of 58,280 Americans who died.
1:29:47 Speaker 03 And the message is, the tragedy of Vietnam is that 58,280 Americans died, which is part of it. But if you included the 5 million Vietnamese, the million Cambodians and Laotians, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, the Thais, everybody who died, that wall would be more than 10 miles long. And that would be a fitting tribute to the Vietnam. But it was sent a whole different message. Oliver and I are invited to Okinawa in February by the prefectural government to support the anti-base movement in Okinawa. Another story we could get into. But the Okinawa War Memorial has the names of all the Okinawans,
1:30:30 Speaker 03 the Japanese, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, everybody who died there. And that would be an anti-war memorial. But what the Vietnam Memorial sadly, as powerful as it is, is giving the wrong message. And America is always giving the wrong message when it comes to war.
1:30:49 Tucker Carlson? So is it strange for you, we touched at the outset at, and as Oliver put it, the complete inversion of American politics. But you were, you said an anti-war protester during Vietnam, then you watched the party you voted for become the war party. Like what, what happened? What caused that inversion?
1:31:07 Speaker 03 Well, the United States, foreign policy has been bipartisan.
1:31:13 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:31:14 Speaker 03 Throughout the Cold War, really. And so both parties have been war parties.
1:31:20 Tucker Carlson? Correct.
1:31:20 Speaker 03 But there was a strong element within the Democratic Party, progressive Democrats, who were much more anti-war, anti-defense spending, and wanted to use that money instead for healthcare and education and infrastructure and the things that people needed, actually helped people's lives. But it's become this group think now. And even progressive Democrats, who are my friends, sound so hawkish these days that I don't recognize them. And the odd thing, so we had this reversal. Trump ran as the anti-war candidate.
1:31:54 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:31:55 Speaker 03 Trump ran as the pro-labor candidate. You know, it, it, it makes no sense to those of us who grew up. I was never a Democrat, but I usually voted for the Democrats because they were more progressive than the Republicans. But at this point, you've got two war parties. Although there's a stronger faction in the Republican Party at this moment, who are at least making sense about the nuclear threat and about Ukraine.
1:32:22 Tucker Carlson? But what, I mean, what caused that? How did Liz Cheney wind up campaigning with Kamala Harris?
1:32:27 Speaker 03 And it backfired, and it was stupid. And you know, what really hurt Kamala with the young people was the unquestioning support for Israel. I saw with my students. They despised the Democrats. Gaza is the big issue for this generation. And they see it every day, or they were seeing it at least for a while on television. And the stories, you know, every day they were digging out babies from under the rubble. It was horrible to watch. And it was worse, if you traveled to other parts of the world, they were even more graphic and explicit than they were in the United States.
1:33:03 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:33:04 Speaker 03 This was my kids were watching, my students were watching. And they were so disgusted with the Democrats for keep on feeding this Israeli war. I mean, I would say that most of my students were pretty horrified by the October 7th attack that Hamas made. And I know I felt very strongly too.
1:33:23 Tucker Carlson? Me too.
1:33:24 Speaker 03 I mean, you know, I know that they've been badly treated for a long time, the Palestinians. But what happened on October 7th is unacceptable, unforgivable.
1:33:34 Tucker Carlson? Fair.
1:33:34 Speaker 03 And I can understand why there was a strong reaction. But the Israeli response, we're talking like, you know, for 9/11, people being ready to do something. They had already been brutalizing the people in the West Bank. Gaza had been an open-air prison for years already. And so the Israeli response is so disproportionate, it's so horrific. For those of us who have different history and experience with Israel to see what Israel has turned into now, without any, almost no protest against this brutalization of an entire people, whether you consider it genocide or just a slaughter, it sickens one. And that's what I found my students.
1:34:19 Speaker 03 And the young people did not vote. I mean, for the first time, Trump got a majority of young voters. And it wasn't just young men, young women also.
1:34:28 Tucker Carlson? Well, people like me followed Robert Kennedy too.
1:34:32 Speaker 02 I followed Robert to Trump's camp.
1:34:35 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:34:36 Speaker 02 Not that I was... Robert was... I was the medium.
1:34:39 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:34:39 Speaker 02 He's... I like what he's saying, and I hope he does it. I hope he achieves it. Whether Trump keeps his word with him, we'll see. I think he will.
1:34:49 Tucker Carlson? Do you know others in Hollywood who did the same?
1:34:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who went with Kennedy. I think a lot.
1:34:55 Tucker Carlson? To Trump?
1:34:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:34:57 Tucker Carlson? Amazing. Did they talk about it?
1:34:59 Speaker 02 They voted for Kennedy, so their vote canceled out.
1:35:01 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. But they were not gonna...
1:35:04 Speaker 02 In California, Kennedy was on the ballot. But he asked all his people to vote in swing states for Trump. Anyway, I like people who are shaking up the system, who are asking questions. And the media is very, very hard on these people, very hard.
1:35:26 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:35:27 Speaker 02 It's like dissent is not allowed anymore. This is not the American way.
1:35:33 Tucker Carlson? Do you think he'll be able to do it? Trump will be able to bring reform?
1:35:37 Speaker 02 Why not? If he's willing to break with some of the pharma companies and some of the... And that's gonna be hard because of money. But who knows how it works. Trump's a... He's an idiosyncratic candidate.
1:35:50 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:35:51 Speaker 02 He knows that he is. He's a... I don't think he's a one-shot. I think there's... There'll be... I think Vance will inherit, and people like that. They will inherit that.
1:36:03 Tucker Carlson? What do you think of Vance?
1:36:04 Speaker 02 Well, I think he'll do what Trump wants. Yeah, I think that's important. There's gotta be some change. If there's no change in this world, we're... America cannot continue on this course. It cannot. And it knows it. It knows it in its gut. You know it.
1:36:22 Tucker Carlson? I do know it. Yeah.
1:36:24 Speaker 02 And you're worried. But change is good. Change is good.
1:36:28 Speaker 03 And, you know, I see with my students, you know what they lack now? They're very critical. They're very smart and analytical. There's no utopianism. So many of the young people think that the world that they've inherited is what... Is all there is gonna be. And they don't have any... The 60s generation, Oliver and I were part of the 60s generation. When you were too young, but not even born, but you know, the 60s generation had a vision of making a better world.
1:36:59 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:36:59 Speaker 03 And that informed everything we did. And we would jokingly refer to what we're going to do after the revolution. You know, but we did have a utopian vision for how human beings could live differently. Young people now are even much more ready to critique the system at its roots than we were back then. We were just learning about what it meant to critique the system. But we had a hope and a belief that the future could be that much better. And I don't, you know, I think kids now see it, maybe it could be different, but they don't have a, this kind of burning vision that we can make a better world.
1:37:38 Tucker Carlson? So, last question that you both, I think, can answer in an informed way. I'll start with you, Peter. History and its uses. It does seem like we're in a moment where people are at least open to reassessing their interpretations of what happened, particularly in the last 100 years, the 20th century. Do you think that 50 years from now, our grandkids will be reading a different version of history?
1:38:07 Speaker 03 50 years from now? Well, I should start with Oliver, my book. This is the earlier edition, The Untold History of the United States. You know, this one, the 2012 edition had, it was about 750 pages. We put out an updated edition in 2019, and now it's over 900 pages. People really should read it and watch it because it's got so much history that people don't know. I was talking about the ignorance about World War II. Well, I did an anonymous survey with college students, all of whom were A students in high school, and I asked them, how many Americans died in World War II? And the median answer I got was 90,000.
1:38:49 Tucker Carlson? Many thousand?
1:38:50 Speaker 03 So they were only off by 300,000, so they were in the ballpark. I asked them how many Soviets died in World War II. The median answer I got was 100,000, so they were only 20... Twenty seven million off, right? These are smart kids and they know nothing. They couldn't understand World War II. They couldn't understand the Cold War. They couldn't understand what's going on in Ukraine unless they know the history. And this is why Oliver and I did the Untold History of the United States, to begin filling in those blanks. Tulsi Gabbard was interviewed by The New York Times in 2019. And they asked her, what, the big article, what podcasts do you watch? She says, I don't want to talk about podcasts, but I just finished watching The Untold History of the United States.
1:39:33 Speaker 03 And everybody should watch it because it fills in those blanks in the history that nobody knows, that we never learn about in this country. You know, and so 50 years from now, it depends really. Because it's going on in Japan. Oliver and I wrote an article after one of our trips in Japan called Partners in Historical Falsification: The United States and Japan. You know, it's going on Russia, it's going, I mean, everywhere. People try to sanitize, whitewash their history on the assumption that if people know true history, then they're going to rebel and want something different and something better. Because if anything, history teaches you that what is this now is not what has to exist or what should exist,
1:40:18 Speaker 03 that human beings can create a much different world. And that's the lesson of it. So it's not just to learn the past for the sake of the past. It's to learn the past so you can shape a better future.
1:40:28 Tucker Carlson? Of course, it's.
1:40:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's what Oliver and I.
1:40:30 Tucker Carlson? Most reliable guidepost to the future. So, I mean, do you think, we were talking about JFK. And when it came out 30 years ago, you were roundly mocked. You were no longer mocked. People see it as likely, at the very least.
1:40:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think so.
1:40:45 Tucker Carlson? It seems that way.
1:40:46 Speaker 03 They much more accept it, yeah.
1:40:48 Tucker Carlson? So do you.
1:40:49 Speaker 03 That was the critics. The public loved that movie.
1:40:51 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I know.
1:40:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, it did well. Did very well.
1:40:54 Tucker Carlson? I remember.
1:40:55 Speaker 03 And it led to the Assassination Records Review Board. A three hour, six minute movie. It led to the Assassination Records Review Board. Yes. Which is why so many documents have been released. Which is why I did this documentary that I want you to see.
1:41:08 Speaker 02 Revisited. This is about the Assassination Records Review Board. They did good work. They didn't do everything, but they did some very good work and brought out new facts that we, that are in this.
1:41:21 Tucker Carlson? So why aren't, why are the intelligences still holding on?
1:41:26 Speaker 02 Trump had a shot in 2016, and he blew it. He got pressure.
1:41:31 Tucker Carlson? From Pompeo?
1:41:32 Speaker 02 From Pompeo and those guys. And then Biden killed it. And Biden, he knew what he was doing. This is a very bad action he did. He's undercutting Congress, but they've been doing that for years anyway.
1:41:45 Tucker Carlson? So why? Why are they so intent on keeping them?
1:41:49 Speaker 02 Well, there's obviously some bullshit in there. Yeah, obviously. I mean, I'm not saying that those are the who killed them names, but we should know more about those CIA guys. There's files on them.
1:42:01 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:42:01 Speaker 02 What was, what was Angleton up to? That's a big deal. James Angleton, the counterterrorism chief. What was Phillips, Dave Phillips, David Phillips up to? He was a very important factor in the Latin American operation from Guatemala on. He was the handler for Oswald and Clay Shaw's in there. There's a bunch of people that are, oh, the fellow for Giannidis, the Morley's chasing, George Giannidis. He's, he's, he's dirty all the way. He was in from the beginning and they covered it up at the time. They brought him back as a witness
1:42:37 Speaker 02 for the HSCA. Anyway, oh, and Harvey, Bill Harvey, I think he needs to be checked out.
1:42:47 Tucker Carlson? If you had to guess as to why they're holding these documents 60 odd years later, what would it be?
1:42:56 Speaker 02 I, you know, they, they, they, they declare everything a secret, everything practically. It's just, it's, it's standard now.
1:43:06 Speaker 03 Massive classification. We need more transparency.
1:43:10 Speaker 02 It's a habit, it's like a dog peeing on a hydrant. You know, it just goes on and on and on. I don't understand. If there's names and stuff, they redact it. They redact it. So, I'm not looking to government, but I am looking to honesty. That's what I'm looking for. And these bureaucrats in the government, how do they feel? What do they feel about their lives? Are they working for us, or are they working for secrecy? The people have not been dealt with honestly. And we know that. I think Americans know that. I think Americans are very cynical about the government.
1:43:52 Speaker 03 Which is part of the reason why we're hoping that Trump will pardon Ed Snowden and Julian Assange.
1:44:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, good point.
1:44:01 Speaker 03 Oliver made a great movie about Snowden. You've met with Snowden. Yes. You know, and what he did was a great service to America. He exposed the mass surveillance that was going on of all of us. It was a wake-up call. Yes. He should be lionized. Dan Ellsberg was one of my closest friends, and Oliver knows Dan also. And, you know, and Dan was facing 115 years in prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers. But he said it was worth doing it, even though he thought there was only a little chance it could end the war, affect the end of the war. He wanted to get out this history. And for that, he was vilified and gone after by Nixon.
1:44:43 Speaker 03 I mean, that was really the best thing they had on Nixon was the break into Dan's psychiatrist's office and the plans to try to, you know, effectively kill him, compromise him. You know, but Dan ended up, by the end of his life, and what he spent most of his life warning about was the nuclear threat. You know, and the end of his life, he was getting, even the New York Times and everybody else, was treating him much like what he deserved to be treated, like, was a hero. And I'm hoping that Trump will understand that and pardon Ed Snowden as quickly as possible.
1:45:19 Speaker 02 And Julian Assange.
1:45:20 Speaker 03 And Julian Assange, yeah.
1:45:21 Speaker 02 Well, he has been.
1:45:22 Speaker 03 Assange has at least, you know, got some measure of freedom at this point, but...
1:45:27 Speaker 02 He was commuted.
1:45:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:45:28 Speaker 02 He pleaded on one charge?
1:45:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:45:32 Tucker Carlson? But he can't come here. Gentlemen, thank you both very much.
1:45:36 Speaker 03 Thank you.
1:45:39 Tucker Carlson? Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library. TuckerCarlson.com.
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