Darryl Cooper Deep Dive: Zionism, Islam, Spain & Why the Iran War Is a Pivot Point in World History

The Great Replacement is no longer a theory, as what’s happening in Spain makes clear. Darryl Cooper on who’s behind the invasion and why. (00:00) How the Iran War Is Different (10:20) The Descent Into Primitive Tendencies Due to War (25:20) Trump, the Iranian Girls’ School Attack, and the Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza (1:20:49) How Propaganda Functions (1:29:46) The Loss of Identity in America Darryl Cooper is the creator of Martyr Made, America’s most popular long-form history podcast, and the co-host of Provoked, with Scott Horton. Paid partnerships with: Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/TUCKERVanMan: Use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order at http://vanman.shop/tucker American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Curativa Bay: Take your health back into your own hands. Get 15% off at https://CurativaBay.com/Tucker Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  Daryl, thank you for doing this. We must think of you every two weeks. We should call Darryl Cooper. So, but we try to keep it to once a year because you live so far away. And I'm just grateful you made this effort. And I just have to say, not because it, simply because it vindicates me, but just because it's such an amazing and wonderful fact that you actually are, literally, measurably, America's most popular and important historian. That's just a fact, which is incredible. And gives me hope because you do like five-hour podcasts on, you know, things that happened 100 years ago in granular detail. And, you know, there are a million and a half people listening to that. It's like, this country is not lost. So, anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  We were speaking at breakfast about how the Iran war started. And you were putting it within the context of how Western nations, European nations, fight wars historically and why this was different. Can you recap what you were just saying?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, I think that when you look back at the period of limited warfare in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, that was really one of the pinnacles of not just our civilization, but human civilization in general. You know, war is something that is sometimes necessary. Sometimes interests conflict and you have to fight over it. But to be able to arrive at a place where you can treat your enemy with respect, even in defeat, is really an amazing accomplishment. And you start to see the breakdown of that over the course of the 20th century, of course, the First World War. But even still, there was a sense of, you know, what's the, what's the saying?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  We still had to pretend. You know, we still had to come up with stories to tell ourselves so that we could go to sleep at night. We hadn't given up on those values completely.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And what are the values?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Fair play.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  The idea that even somebody who you have to put bullets downrange at is a human being and deserves to be treated as a creature of God. These are things that became very deeply embedded in our social consciousness and as individuals as well. So that, again, even as those values started to fade in practice, we still held on to them in our hearts. And I think a lot of people today, or well, I should say, maybe a few years back, just a few years ago, if you talk to your average American soldier in Iraq, for example, well, actually, that's a perfect example.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  If you look at Iraq, I have a lot of anti-war libertarian-type friends, you know, and they're very strident in their views sometimes of American militarism. And I always tell them, like, look, when you compare, there were incidents in the Iraq War, no doubt about it, in the Afghanistan War, where soldiers got out of hand. But when you compare their behavior, the level of discipline and honor that they displayed in those wars relative to any previous conflict in American history or world history, probably, let alone in a really vicious insurgency like they were fighting. This was not a conventional war. It was, especially in Iraq, the enemy was vicious

• 4:02Speaker 02

  on a level that is, you know, hard for most people, I think, in our society to really even believe. And yet, our guys continue to treat the people that they were, who were under occupation, with dignity and respect, by and large. And they really did have the idea that they were there to try to help these people and to free them from this, you know. Again, whether we agree with that or not, they believe that. And if they hadn't believed that, they would not have been as willing to risk themselves and their friends the way that they did. I mean, we took a lot of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan because we refused to do certain things that we could have done much easier. We could have done in ways that would have killed a lot more of their civilians, but preserved a few of our soldiers' lives.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  And we chose not to do that. And that, you know, it's unfortunate because over the course of the War on Terror, and I think largely in more recent years, due to our, just compulsive need in our political discourse, to find ways to rationalize everything that we see the State of Israel do, it's forced us to really compromise on a lot of those values. Because there's just, if you don't compromise on them, then you have to condemn what's going on in Gaza, right?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And so, we've lost a lot of that over the course of the last few decades.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  We've been poisoned and polluted by it.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  I had this dark thought. I think I mentioned this to our friend Scott Horton a while back, how, you know, back in 2004, when Abu Ghraib happened, or when the photos came out. You know, again, I don't want to downplay. It was a very dark chapter, obviously. But it wasn't Saddam Hussein, power saws, and, you know, screwdrivers in the eyeball kind of torture. It was sort of more of a, more of a psychol... Its severity was, was less than a lot of things that happened in the world.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  And yet, people saw those photos, and they were horrified by them. And they weren't just horrified by, look what we're doing to those people. They asked themselves, what are we doing to our own people here? Like, what are we making our kids do in this place? What is happening here? And nowadays, I don't know if people would blink if they saw something like that. I mean, they do see something like that on a weekly basis, come out of Gaza, often posted by, you know, Israeli soldiers themselves. And people have to find a way, it seems, they have to find a way to rationalize and justify that stuff. And so, to do that, they've compromised their own most deeply held beliefs about, about what it means to be a civilized person. And so, when we go into Iran,

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I'll never forget when Donald Trump was entertaining the Prime Minister of Japan. And he mentioned, you know, the secrecy and the sneak attack that we started the Iran War off with. And he kind of made that sly joke, but you guys understand that, sneak attacks, right? And, I mean, for the President of the United States to compare the way we just, correctly, in my view, compare the way we began this war to the day that shall live in infamy. And to think back, you know, to Pearl Harbor and how they felt about that at the time, how we still feel about it now. And then, if you imagine that the attackers at Pearl Harbor had just happened to blow up a school full of little girls, I mean, it would be on page one

• 7:31Speaker 02

  of every history book that talked about that incident to this day, right? Because it's something that offends our basic sense of decency and honor. You don't launch a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations. That's just not the way European civilization has conditioned itself to behave over the years. But we've compromised that stuff in very recent years, I think, to the point where the cognitive dissonance became so great that we either had to change our ways or we had to just give up on certain values. And I unfortunately think that, you know, we've, at least our political class has gone the wrong direction on that. You know, our guys out there, our soldiers and Marines,

• 8:14Speaker 02

  they're, it's always tough for me because like, I don't like a lot of the actions that they're forced to take overseas in service of things that I think are beneath them. And yet, I know from personal experience that the guys themselves, those are our best people. And they're often criticized by people who are not fit to tie their bootlaces.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  And, and those guys, if you give them a good reason, they will go fight. They will, they will risk their own life unnecessarily to avoid... The possibility of harming an enemy civilian. That's who these guys are. But when you remove that sense of honor, you know, that's been on every recruiting ad and recruiting poster going back as far as you can imagine. When you tell them that we're going to launch a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations on a much weaker country. We're going to threaten to end their civilization and destroy their civilian infrastructure over a war we started for reasons that nobody's really bothered to even articulate to the American public. It becomes much more difficult to get those guys to do their job.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  And I, and I, and I think that within the service, these guys are still duty bound enough that they will do whatever we ask them to do. But that's all the more reason not to abuse that trust. And we really have, we've just burned that credibility with our own people. And I think with much of the rest of the world.

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• 12:41Speaker 01

  Good. What does it do to us? Like, why would a civilization decide at its peak evolution, as you just said, the high point of its, of its existence, that it was going to treat enemy combatants as human beings? Like, that is a kind of new innovation in world history, right? Is there any evidence that's ever happened before at any time ever?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  You poof. Outside of European civilization, it would be really hard to, really hard to think of any examples.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Because traditionally, when I'm at war with you, I get to torture you to death, enslave your children, rape your wife, burn your fields, slay your livestock. Like, literally whatever, I own you, you're not human.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, that's something that only emerges under conditions of, under, under conditions of strong organization, leadership, internal, internal discipline, and really just the organizational aspect of it, right? When you look at World War One, for example, absolutely savage war. We were spraying cans of raid at enemy lines just to choke people to death with gases. Horrible, horrible exterminationist war. But one that was almost entirely restricted to enemy soldiers. And when soldiers were taken captive, they were treated with dignity and respect. By all sides, by the way.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  And when you see in Eastern and Central Europe, immediately after the war, same people who just fought this relatively organized, relatively disciplined war from 1914 to 1918, when all the empires broke down and the states fell apart and organization went away. You saw a descent into chaos and madness that's straight out of, you know, ancient history books, where, you know, wars became exterminationist to entire societies, where the goal was to wipe people out and push them out. And these are the same people who were fighting the war in a relatively.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Who were celebrating Christmas across the trenches famously.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, I was Western front guys, but like on the Eastern, you know, because it was in the States specifically, where everything fell apart, where the government, I mean, just, this is something that I've really been trying to convey in my World War Two series right now, because I think very difficult for most Westerners to really picture the, the trauma that this would cause. I mean, when I was talking to my friend Jaco a while back, and he was describing how they'd be fighting in Ramadi. And it's just an insane gun battle, mortars going off, explosions, gunshots going everywhere. And so they would kick down a door, take cover inside of a building. And it's somebody's house and like, there's the wife and the kids are hiding under the table. And like, that's what's going on. You have this flash of like, oh, wow.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  This is happening outside somebody's front door, you know? And so back after the First World War, when the German Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, so basically everywhere from the Rhine to Vladivostok, the government just disappeared. All of them in the, in the course of about 18 months or so, all the governments disappeared. There's no police to call. There's no government to expect to come in and enforce order of any kind. You really saw a complete descent into primitive sort of human tendencies as people started to really focus on their immediate survival as opposed to, you know, things that we would associate with civilization, meaning that, you know, the, the idea that you're living historically

• 16:22Speaker 02

  and are, are part of a, a chain of being that stretches out long before you were born and will continue long after you're dead. And there's certain, there's certain things that you're expected to uphold as you steward, you know, through these 70 or 80 years of your existence. When it's your turn to steward your civilization, there's certain things that you're expected to uphold and make sure that the next generation inherits them just as you inherited them. When all that falls apart and your time horizon collapses to this afternoon, because you're looking at your kids and there's no food and they're hungry and they're, you know, bellies are bulging and their cheeks are sunken in. There's not going to be anything on your mind, except for how do I feed my children?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  And when people, when, when, when people's horizon shrinks down to that level, becomes something very close to animals. And that's what you, that's what you saw happen immediately after the First World War and a lot of Eastern and Central Europe. And so this is something that, you know, from, from a basic level, you see, you know, you can think of a lot of things like this where if you're the only person behaving this way, then it really makes no sense. And you're just going to end up nailed to a cross. Like, that's what's going to happen to you. But if everybody can come around and embrace these values and basically behave this way, then it's much, much better for everybody.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  And when you're able to achieve that, when you're able to get to a place where, because America had a reputation, it's not perfect, especially, you know, in, you know, what we used to call the third world, but, you know, had a reputation that we might get carried away, you know, in a, in a counter insurgency, say, we may in a total war, like the Second World War, get, you know, drive ourselves to the point that we're firebombing cities. But there are still certain basic rules of fairness. Like you don't start a war of aggression with a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations that people would have said, yeah, but America wouldn't do that. Even our enemies would have said that.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  And when you have achieved that, when you've gotten to a place where that really is true of your people, that's something that you really have to hold on to because the minute you let go of it, you let go of that bar, that ledge, you start falling down into that very dark place.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  And the way you understand yourself changes. Which is, you know, I'm not saying it's the most important thing, how you treat other people is the most important thing. However, it's not unimportant how you see yourself. Like, I'm the sort of man who will do this, I'm the sort of man who will refuse to do that. And I think that's that's the idea from which self-respect and dignity grows, right?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Right, and our civilization is, you know, emergent from our collective quality in that sense. You know, how, how individuals see themselves, you know, the sum of all those self-perceptions adds up to, um, you know, to, to a society and a civilization eventually, and the direction that it's going to take. And when you, when you stop, when you stop seeing and treating people you're in conflict with as human beings, and see them just purely as a material obstacle to whatever, whatever goal you've set for yourself, um, you know, you're, you're handing the reins over to Satan at that point.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I so strongly agree. The most distressing part of all of this, I had the same thoughts when this war started. It's hard to believe that, in fact, I couldn't believe we did that. Or when we double-tapped the girls' school, even now, it's hard to believe that could have been intentional. But the unwillingness of the Secretary of War, uh, or the President to apologize for it, have never apologized for it, um, uh, you know, suggests that-

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And at first trying to deny that it was us. I mean, it's just, like, if I was the Emperor of the United States and I could, yeah, you'd have to be the Emperor, because if you're an elected official, our system just doesn't, it's not, it's not built to incentivize this kind of behavior. Um, you could stay at war with Iran, fine, if there are reasons to be at war. I would offer restitution to the families of those girls. In the middle of the war, I would do it. And I think that, that kind of thing goes a long way.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  But what's so distressing is not just that, like, Trump did this, well, obviously, Trump is totally degraded as a person, that's widely known. But there was no kind of popular reaction against it. There were no protests, there were zero anti-war protests, or zero anti-double-tapping-girl-school protests. There were almost no commentary in the fact it was, it was Pearl Harbor that we committed.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, think about, you know, I think about this a lot. One time when I was still with the DOD, I was out, uh, training a ship's crew on their, on their missile defense, uh, system, and, or their air defense system. This was maybe, it must have been 2019 or early 2020, just before COVID, because it was, everybody's talking about the election that was coming up. And I remember, uh, one of the kids on the ship was 17 years old, you know, his parents had to sign on the dotted line to let him get in at under 18 years old. And it hit me, this kid wasn't alive when 9/11 happened, which means for his entire life, and I mean, the people who were going to go out and protest, these

• 21:45Speaker 02

  are 17, 25-year-olds, traditionally, right? All of that entire generation, we've been doing this stuff since as long as they can remember. You know, Abu Ghraib, they probably, it was, that was something they learned about in a history class, because that was something that was, you know, they were three or four years old. And so, we've been at war, and you know, this is one of the, one of the real issues with prolonged, protracted war is the degradation of the spirit of the societies that are engaged in it. You know, if you look at any conflict that's been really long-running, the Israelis and the Palestinians, or the Israelis in the, you know, the surrounding region in general, uh, the Balkan wars, for example. Go to the Balkans today, you meet Serbs, my great-grandmother was from Serbia, you go

• 22:26Speaker 02

  meet them, they're not, they're just Europeans, they're fine. It was not that long ago that they were fighting an absolutely savage war, I mean, at the bottom level of, uh, you know, of human conflict. And you say, well, how is this even possible? It's like, well, because when you're engaged in a conflict for that long, you know, you're fighting a conflict your parents were fighting, and their parents might have been fighting, um, that, the hatred that is necessary to keep a conflict like that going over time, it just, it comes to define who you are in important ways, until you get out of that conflict cycle. And I, you know, I, I think that is, comes back to what I said about Abu Ghraib a minute ago.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  I just, you know, people would have protested if we had opened the Iraq War in 2003 by killing 150 little girls. People would have had a problem with that. They wouldn't have overthrown the government, they wouldn't have necessarily, you know, forced them to stop the war, anything like, but people would have had a problem with it. And people, public officials would have felt the need to explain themselves. But when that's all you've known, uh, and, you know, anybody under, really like 30 years old at this point, this has been their entire lives, um, it's not as shocking. It's just how the world works as far as they-

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Is that why Israel's been able to ethnically cleanse the territories, Gaza, most of all, without anyone or a political class saying anything about it?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  It's definitely one of the reasons. And, and, you know, it's why there's, I think there's a, uh, there's a, a tendency among really strong, uh, American Zionist elements, uh, who, you know, and by strong, I mean, the people who this is sort of their first and only issue, or at least their bottom line.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  There are many of those.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Um, there's been a push to sort of, to sort of desensitize people to that kind of thing. And to place, uh, here's a perfect example. When you were on, uh, I believe it was your interview with Rogan, and you said the outrageous, just insane thing that maybe we shouldn't have nuked a couple cities full of civilians in Japan. And of all the things that you said in that interview, that was the thing that people were just so angry and so outraged by, right? Because the minute you start asking those kind of questions, that attitude carries over into the modern day, and you start judging decisions that we're making now according to, you know, these very human standards. And, um-

• 24:54Speaker 01

  But absolute standards. Like, it's always wrong to murder civilians, no matter who does it.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  And, you know, if, if, because, look, the, the bottom line is, for all of the uh, influence and power that the Zionist lobby has in the United States, if Americans saw what was going on with the Palestinians and did not approve it, demand an end to it, they would have to stop. That's the bottom line. And so, it's a strategic imperative for them, you know, for people like-

• 25:24Speaker 01

  To corrupt people so completely-

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  That they don't even care that they're paying for genocide.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yep, and-

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Just to rot the souls of the host nation so thoroughly that it's like, no, that's fine.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It's a strategic imperative.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. Boy, what a cost to us.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  To them too. They might not know it, but to them too.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, the corruption, uh, it, it corrupts the heart of the, of the corrupter, you know, just as much. So, you know, they suffer from it as well, even if they don't know it.

• 25:55Speaker 01

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• 27:01Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Wash. So, where does this war go? I, I should just say, for those who aren't familiar with your bio, you spent 20 years working for the Defense Department, 10 active, 10 as a contractor, I think, that's right? Working a lot of the time on missiles and missile defense. So, would say you're literally an expert on that subject. And our munitions stock is like a big factor in how this goes going forward. So where does this war go, do you think?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's hard for, it's hard for me to imagine, we were talking about this beforehand, about how I'm always just hopelessly naive and optimistic when it comes to all these things. I was the guy of, you know, full admission before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, who was being like, no, I don't think they'll do it. That would be crazy.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  That's I said that on TV, unfortunately.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Same thing is we were building up all of our munitions for this attack on Iran. I was the one saying, it just doesn't make any sense, you know, just from a, from, from a technical standpoint, from a logistical standpoint, this doesn't make any sense because we're not going to invade Iran. Iran knows we're not going to invade Iran. I'm doing it again, by the way, but this was my, this was my thinking. And so there are like, knowing those things, there are just certain limitations to what we can do in a standoff war, meaning a war where we're mostly launching munitions from outside of Iran's borders for fear of their own air defense network and flying our, you know, our own manned aircraft over

• 28:59Speaker 02

  them. And, and also, you know, our strategy has changed over the last, you know, over the course of the war on terror, where we have this very strong dependence on unmanned drones, you know, the reapers now, the predators famously in the Iraq and Afghanistan war, where, you know, we've come to rely on them to a tremendous degree. But those things are not, those are not stealth platforms. You can't get real close with them. What you can do is launch long range standoff weapons from far away. But there's only so much you can do with these things. People have this idea, I think, like if a missile hits this building that we're in, that's going to be really bad news for us. The people across the street, they'll probably be fine. This is not, you know, these things are not nuclear

• 29:42Speaker 02

  weapons, like a tomahawk missile. You remember back when in the first Trump administration, when he launched those tomahawks at that Syrian airfield because they supposedly use chemical weapons?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Want something like

• 29:52Speaker 01

  That was a lie, I think we know.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He wants something like 80 tomahawk missiles at this airfield and it was back up and running a week and a half later. I mean, these things are not massive payload because they got to fly 600 miles or something to get to the target, right? So a huge portion of it is just the rocket fuel to get it there. And so the payloads are 500 pounds, maybe, you know, a little more or less than that, which is again, if you're in the building, that's bad news, but you're not going to level a civilization as Donald Trump keeps threatening using standoff weapons like that. And so knowing that and having a rough idea, it's been a while since I've been in the game, but having a rough idea of what our stockpiles are, of what's involved with, you know, fighting a long

• 30:35Speaker 02

  distance war like that, where our bases that are in theater are under assault and mostly not usable. It makes the logistical element extremely difficult. I was describing to you how if you have a, say a destroyer, which is our primary air and ballistic missile defense platform, and also the platform from which we launch our tomahawk missiles, you know, and we have submarines as well, but, but mostly destroyers and cruisers and more destroyers and cruisers now. Maybe, you know, you've got 128 missile cells. Some of those are going to be intermediate range anti aircraft, anti cruise missile, SM2 type missiles. Some of those are going to be tomahawks and depending on what the mission is will depend on the total loadout, but some of those are going to be tomahawks. Some of those are going

• 31:19Speaker 02

  to be vertically launched torpedoes. Some of those are going to be really short range ESSMs. And when you get, and then some of them are going to be long range ballistic missile defenses, missiles, right? So let's say you've got 32 long range anti ballistic missile defense missiles. When a missile's coming in, you don't fire one missile at it. You fire two in each volley and usually you're sending multiple volleys before the first volley even reaches its target because you want to be pretty sure. You don't want, things are traveling so fast that, you know, you don't want to necessarily find out that you missed the first time and then have to make the decision to fire again. So multiple missiles each time. If you've got 32 missiles, you'll be lucky if, really lucky. I mean,

• 32:01Speaker 02

  this is if everything goes absolutely perfectly. If you can shoot down eight incoming with that. Well, what happens then? You know, you don't have a supply ship that rolls up and gives you another magazine of missiles to pop in. You got to go back to one of the very few bases around the world where we've got large stockpiles of those missiles and the facilities on base to reload them. And it's hard hats and cranes and it takes multiple days just to do that, let alone the

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Just to reload?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Just to reload. And that's not counting the time it takes to transit, going, you know, all the way to Diego Garcia and back. And

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Can you, for those who don't have a map handy, is Diego Garcia right around the corner?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  No, it's way out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. You know, it takes, depending on, you know, the platform or the ship that's, that's going out to it, take you close to a week to get out there.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  One way.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  One way. Yeah. And so, and then a couple of days to reload as well. And so, you know, you, you, one of our ships is out there, maybe it, maybe it gets shots off at eight missiles and then it's got to take two and a half weeks to go reload its missiles and come back. It's just something was not sustainable. And it's one of the reasons that I just thought this is, this is crazy. I don't think they're going to do this because it just makes no sense. And as we saw, it made even less sense than I thought because one of the things that, you know, those of us who are on the technical side of missile defense understood for a long time, that the general public and honestly, a lot of government and even military officials, I think, like high level military officials, didn't understand because

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I think that the, you know, whereas the, you know, certain aspects of the data might have gotten to them, the narrative that got to them was very often rose colored, you know, in terms of what the, what our actual capabilities were. And, you know, look, if we want to do a missile defense test, a ballistic missile defense test, we will wait until all of the conditions environmentally are perfect. We will do it at a specific time where they'll say countdown, 10, nine, eight, you know, so you know exactly when they're launching, exactly where they're launching from, exactly where that missile is headed and we place our assets, our radar and our missile launchers in specifically the place that will give them the absolute best view and best chance of engaging that target.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  What, this is during a test?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  This is during like a test, right? Because we're trying to baseline the system. We want our data to be something that we know under absolutely controlled conditions or to the extent that we can make them that way, what our data is going to read. And then we can judge deviations from there. And there, we'll often, you know, we'll usually hit the thing, but not always. Still, still tough. It's hard to do. Ballistic missiles are very difficult. And this is something, by the way, that, you know, even through government shutdowns and everything like that, it was basically SOCOM and ballistic missile defense had, we just had unlimited money. We were the two, we never shut down. We never had any of our budgets looked at, anything like that. We were very, because we placed a very high priority on it. And so from a technical standpoint, we knew it was very difficult

• 35:02Speaker 02

  to shoot down a ballistic missile. And about a week or so into the war with Iran, I'm watching all these videos, just crazy, like the footage we get out of these wars now. And you'll see a ballistic missile coming in and you'll see a volley of two, volley of four, or two volleys of two, go up and engage the missile. Very often the missile would land and blow up somewhere where it was headed. But then after about two weeks, about 10 days, two weeks, and then from there on, I started seeing all these videos of a ballistic missile coming in and it was just, we would flood the sky with interceptors, eight, 10 interceptors for every incoming. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, well, first, this kind of makes more sense. Like at first I was knowing the effectiveness

• 35:46Speaker 02

  of ballistic missile defense systems and we have the best in the world, by the way, but it's just a technically difficult thing to achieve. Knowing the limitations of it, I was surprised at first that I was seeing volleys of two and four going up. Once they started to get up to volleys of eight, 10, 12 missiles per, I said, well, this makes more sense. And they would come out and say, you know, we're having a success rate of 97%. We're shooting down 97% of incoming. It's like, well, yeah, but you're shooting 10 interceptors at every one of them. And so, you know, you're, you're, you're shooting it down, but at what cost? And, and when that started to happen, then I realized that this thing is way more irrational than I even thought at the beginning. And there's no way that this can be a protracted war because we just, we just don't have that

• 36:31Speaker 02

  many. And we don't have a defense industrial base that allows us to sort of ramp that up real quick. You know, this is something, these, these systems nowadays are so proprietary and so specialized in high tech. You know, you can't, it's not like World War II where you can tell General Motors and Ford to start making tank parts.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  This is something that even if you had the budget put aside, even if you had all of the resources you needed to build five more factories, we don't have the personnel to man those factories. We would have to get people that we have now to train up entirely, an entirely new workforce to build these things. Just something that would take years under the best of circumstances. And so, I mean, honestly, I was surprised that it lasted as long as it did, especially since I know from people that I, that I speak to on a regular, big, good friends of mine who work in the Pentagon, that at the highest levels on the uniform military side, at least, they were perfectly aware of the problems that

• 37:32Speaker 02

  even from the earliest days, that we were going to have issues with ammunition stockpiles. We were going to have issues defending all of the things that we had committed ourselves to defending. And you saw very quickly that we essentially abandoned a lot of places that probably, you know, a lot, a lot of Arab countries who have spent a lot of money, a lot of credibility with their own people, a lot of, you know, they've spent a lot. Building up their relationship with the United States for this eventuality. And they found out what that was worth very quickly when we started moving a lot of our resources over to honestly, much less strategically critical areas of defense around Israel.

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• 39:23Speaker 02

  And so, I mean, the whole thing has been, you know, it's been a disaster, not just for our relationships in the region. It's, it's been a disaster just in a much broader strategic sense because, you know, if you go, you look at Afghanistan, you look at Iraq, people say we lost those wars and granted, we've, you know, what we found out in those wars was not that the US military is incapable of achieving military objectives. We found out it's not the best tool to fight a counter, an embedded counterinsurgency.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Fine. But I promise you that the Russians, the Chinese, all of our potential adversaries out there, potential peers, they still looked at the United States and they were like, yeah, but I don't know, in a real war, like, we just don't know what they can do. Now, everybody knows. Everybody knows the sheen is off. They know what our, not just our political limitations are, but what our technical and actual capabilities are. And that's going to reverberate as countries start to, start to adapt their own geostrategic posture to what they now see are, are genuine limitations.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  How long can this go on?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I mean, it kind of depends, right? Like, the, um, there seems to have been a shift recently where Iran realized, this is how it looks just for me as an observer, that Iran kind of realized that they were getting played a little bit by allowing things to die down and tit for tat while we kind of catch our breath and let oil prices go back down and let bond yields fall a bit and then we start again and they launch some in return. But then when we stop, they stop, kind of letting us set the pace and set the terms. It was, I had to laugh. I mean, it's obviously, none of this is funny, but a week or so ago, when Iran launched

• 41:22Speaker 02

  those missiles at Jordan and they were like, it was a sneak attack, this dastardly sneak attack. I'm like, is there a ceasefire that I'm not aware of right now? We're in a war. And so it seems like they've adjusted a little bit to not letting us set the terms and set the pace to the extent that we had been before. And so if we had been allowed to just continue to do that, a tit for tat on our own terms at our own pace, I mean, we could probably, we could probably, from, from a pure military standpoint, not talking about global oil reserves and stuff, we probably could have continued it for quite some time. If the Iranians, as it seems now, are wise to that, and they say, no, you're not going to get a break and rebuild your interceptor stockpile while you do it, you're going to

• 42:07Speaker 02

  continue to spend those things and then, then, I mean, things are going to come to a head very quickly, you know? And I say that with trepidation because it's so, you know, our, our system, unfortunately, like the bravest thing that Donald Trump could do is to admit this was a mistake, pay some restitution to those girls' families and get out of there, stop doing it. This thing was, uh, that would be an incredibly brave thing to do. It would honestly like go a long way to making up for a lot of the things that he's done that I, that I don't like. It would, I would be, I would be amazed by it.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  But our political system is just not structured in a way that that's really even a possibility. And so if we are backed into a corner where we're running out of stockpiles and the Iranians are aware of that and they're not going to take their foot off the gas pedal because they're afraid that if they do, you know, that we're never going to stop, that we have to be forced to stop, that we could, you know, take this to places that, that I think even most hawks who are in favor of the war would probably be uncomfortable with.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  It's obvious to, it has been obvious to me since day one that this was moving toward a nuclear exchange. I just thought that from the very beginning.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  The really dark part about that, though, is it's not an exchange.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. Sorry, that's just a phrase.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but that's how dark is that even?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. We're assuming that there would be no response. I mean, there are a lot of other players in this.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Beyond just Iran. There are a lot of countries with nuclear weapons, including Pakistan, and you know, there's a lot could happen. But the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in 80 years, like, I thought that immediately. Do you think that's a possibility?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Man. Um, well, I'll say it's certainly a possibility for the Israelis.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  That's what I'm talking.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, it's really hard for me to imagine the American government doing it, but again, I'm, I'm always caught off guard by everything, no matter how many times I've been beaten over the head with a lesson. So, um, it really depends. I put, I put it this way. I think if the Israelis thought they could get away with it, if they thought that they could handle the geopolitical fallout, they would have already done it a long time ago.

• 44:29Speaker 01

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• 46:09Speaker 02

  But I, I just think of the consequences of losing this. So for the United States, it means obviously the end of our empire and, I mean, all kinds of consequences that are hard to foresee, but it's a huge deal. It's like the end of the post-war era. And then we have to deal with whatever comes next, a world run by China. Okay. So that seems like it's going to.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Or, I mean, the lesson of this might be that nobody's going to run.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly right. And the eastern part of the world.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Run by China, which seems natural to me anyway. But, um, because they've got a bigger economy than we do. So like, why wouldn't they control the South China Sea? I don't really understand why we're fighting what's inevitable. And if we didn't want that, then probably should have done something to prevent China from becoming a bigger economy, right? But anyway.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  The consequences are big for the United States, but for Israel, what are the consequences of losing this? I'm just trying to be empathetic.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  The consequences of losing this for Israel, and this is, you know, this is a reason that a lot of the hawks over there sound as crazy as they often do these days. I mean, it could be, could be the thing that sets the ball rolling toward the conclusion of that whole project.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Well, exactly.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  You know, Israel has survived for certainly since 1967, at least on this aura of military invincibility. And there are a lot of people over in Israel, even now, I mean, Israel has trouble holding on to it, even before all this started up. Israel has trouble holding on to its people. You've been to Israel.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  We love going to the old city and things like that, but you go around and, you know, it's, there are nice parts of it for sure. I like going to the Bahai Gardens and, you know, and Haifa and, but in general.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  The only nice part of Haifa is the part that was there before 1948.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sorry. And so, you know, it's, it's much nicer in, you know, Paris or London or New York or something, put it that way.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Well, or Dubai, Riyadh, or Abu Dhabi.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Right. And so, you know, there's a lot of people, I think, who, this was a big concern of the Israeli leadership after the 2006 Hezbollah war, which they also lost. It was not necessarily that our enemies are going to see this and this is going to, you know, lead them to become more belligerent toward us. It was that if our people don't believe that we are completely invincible over here, it gets, that, that, that job that their cousin has from in Manhattan starts to look a lot more tempting and people start to leave. And then you start to get this self-reinforcing cycle, right? Where it's the people who aren't quite comfortable with, with, with, say, the Likud government,

• 48:52Speaker 02

  the people who think that maybe Israel is going a little bit too far in Gaza, few as they may be left over there these days, but the people who we would consider somewhat moderate, people who aren't prepared to die in their apartment, you know, from an Iranian missile because Netanyahu decided to start a war, those are the people who are going to leave, which means that the people who are left behind are going to be more and more concentrated crazy.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  And, and more hardline.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  And non-productive, who don't work and don't serve in the military.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  And the people who do make aliyah and, and travel there, you know, this, I mean, you see this, I guess, in like, it's kind of similar to, you talk to a lot of like Orthodox and Catholic converts, and they're all just Deus vault, you know, just holy war, kind of just, you know, really like thinking in these big, grand historical, like cosmic terms, whereas you talk to somebody who grew up as an Orthodox or Catholic and they're thinking about the relationship with Jesus Christ and like, you know, that kind of thing.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  And you get this sort of thing, like you go out into the West Bank and a lot of these settlements and it's a bunch of guys from Brooklyn and they're crazier than the craziest Israelis.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Oh, by far.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  And it's like, of course they are. They moved from America to go out to live in this hostile territory. It's like naturally that's who you're going to get. And, and, you know, as the society becomes a more and more concentrated version of that, then the stakes really do get raised, you know? What happens when you remove the last people who were against the first use of nuclear weapons from Israel? Cause they go live in New York or London. I mean, then you start to get, you know, a real problem. I mean, you see this with like, so shocking for Americans over here, there's so much of what goes on over there that I think for Americans and Europeans, it's so far outside of our understanding of how human beings behave with, toward each other, that people just, they don't, just don't believe it.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  They assume it must be exaggerated or propaganda, but I mean, just.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  They're not really raping people with dogs in their prisons, right?

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Right. And, and having, you know, high cabinet ministers celebrating it and defending the rapists, you know? I mean, Ben Gavir, essentially the equivalent to Marco Rubio in our system, he's, he's the leader of the Jewish power party and he cites, over the years, and he's defended this position many times, that one of his heroes, Baruch Goldstein, the mass shooter who killed dozens of innocent Arabs back in the early 90s. And so it'd literally be as if the Secretary of State was the leader of the white power party and had repeatedly said that Dylann Roof was one of his heroes. And people are fine with that. And when you get to a place where your society is perfectly fine with something like that,

• 51:37Speaker 02

  you know, you have to, you have to imagine sort of the, the consequences that spill out in other areas, maybe beneath the surface that you're not seeing, you know?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Like they blow up the Temple Mount and then launch a nuke against Iran. But I guess the reason I've always thought it was a possibility is because Israel can't lose, as you just said, like a, they've spent so many years hyping the threat against them falsely, telling stories to themselves and the rest of the world about how, you know, they're just one moment away from being eliminated. It's always been fake, but now it feels like it's getting closer to true.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And not militarily wiped out necessarily and driven out of there, but I think it's something that could collapse under its own weight. You know, if you were to go back to the earliest days of Zionism and tell most of the people who were embracing the ideology back then, that you're going to get your state, but here's what it's going to require and here's what it's going to transform you into, it would have lost a ton of support. I mean, it took, it took a long time and, and a lot of, a lot of effort to even get much of the Jewish community around the world to, to support Zionism in the first place. I mean, it was primarily just an Eastern European movement, the German Jews, the French Jews, most British and American Jews. It took all the way up until the 1930s before they started to come around to it at all.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  If you, you know, if you would have gone back then and told them that this is what it's going to entail, this is what it's going to take from you, a lot of people wouldn't have supported it to begin with. And so when you have this edifice that is built on some, on the, on the kind of brutality and requires really the, not just the hard things to be done in war, but really to keep it going over time, requires the population to take on a persistent mentality of paranoia and hostility, the way we've seen taken root over there. Something like that becomes, you know, it goes back to what you were saying about the effect that it has even on the corrupter. I mean, it, it, that becomes oppressive on people and it becomes something that people

• 53:43Speaker 02

  are not as interested in defending.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  But it turns them into monsters. I mean, the more you think you're hated, the more you hate other people.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. It always happens that way. I think.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  But for all of us.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  George Kennan, when talking about the Soviet Union, he said something like, I won't be as eloquent as he was, but it's the, the privilege of every paranoid man to eventually prove himself correct.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  And it's because when you believe everybody's out to get you, you interact with everybody as if they're out to get you, and then eventually they get tired of it and they're out to get you. That happens with every cult, every, honestly, every like nascent nationalist movement. We saw this after the first world war, to go back to that, you saw a lot of these emergent countries, the Polish, for example, the Czechs, you see it with the Ukrainians now, especially since 2004. When you have this newly birthed sense of nationalism, you're, you feel like you're under threat. You know, you were just under an empire for centuries. You might be under an empire again, if you're not ready for that threat. And there's this real, real sense of, of paranoia and hostility toward outsiders that

• 54:50Speaker 02

  kind of holds the national community together. And most of those other countries stabilized to a point that, that, you know, it didn't become, it wasn't necessary any longer and the kids were raised differently. But in Israel, they've been in a state of conflict for their entire existence so that it's really just, it's, it's become the identity of the state, you know? And unfortunately, this is one of the saddest things about the whole project. And there were, there were a lot of prominent religious Jews back in the early days of Zionism who feared exactly this, that Zionism was just going to swallow Judaism whole. And it really has done that. And what that means in practice is that for so many Jews, not just in Israel, but in

• 55:32Speaker 02

  the diaspora, the definition, oh, here's a perfect example of it, actually. There was a Gallup poll or a Pew poll a few years back, where they polled American Jews and asked them, what is the most important aspect of Jewish identity? And it was, you know, belief in the Torah, affinity for the state of Israel, various values, moral values and things. Far and away, the number one answer, like 70% was remembering the Holocaust, which is another way of saying, you know, when you, when you, when you consider like the Jewish understanding of the Holocaust, it's not the way the Armenians understand the Armenian genocide, where this is something that the Ottoman Empire, the Turks did to us. This is the culmination of what mankind has been doing to us for thousands of years,

• 56:17Speaker 02

  since, you know, the Pharaoh and all the way on up through, and then it culminated in this thing. So when you say remembering the Holocaust, what it really means is remembering what they have done to us. And when that become, when, when 70 something percent of, you know, your entire population are answering that as the primary, the, the, the primary fact that, that, that is constitutive of their identity, there are going to be consequences to that and how that identity develops and how you relate to the rest of the world. And, and, you know, it's something.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  How do you feel about people who hate and persecute you?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I know how I'm supposed to feel and how I do feel.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  But how do human beings?

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Right. No, Christianity offers us a way out of this, which is a true blessing, but, but human instinct, all human, not just Jews or Israelis, or Ottoman Turks, or Armenians, like everybody feels, I think, instinctively, if someone hates me and threatens me, I hate them back. I want to hurt them.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Hatred and anger, they make you-

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I want to shoot the home invader.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  They make you strong when you feel weak. They make you feel brave when you feel vulnerable. You know, they're useful emotions, but when they become, again, constitutive of your identity and the basic building block of your relationship with other peoples, then you, things become sort of self-reinforcing, you know, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy over time. And when you have, like, look, I mean, when you look at what happened to the Jews in World War II, it's easy to understand why there's a lot of collective trauma that has been, that has been passed down. And you wouldn't expect people to be just over it, right? Just because a couple of generations-

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  But that also doesn't mean that it's, it's healthy for them or anybody else. You know, you can say, like, they say you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. And it's like, well, the thing is, like, no, you still can be pathologically paranoid, even if they are out, even if there is something worth fearing out there. Being pathologically paranoid is still bad for you. Still has really negative effects on yourself and your relationship to the rest of the world. I was talking to, um, what was I, a common friend, I won't say, I won't say who, but a common friend, and we were, he's Jewish, and, but, but not Zionist and not religiously Jewish. We grew up Jewish, and he mentioned that when he was a kid,

• 58:46Speaker 02

  there was a period of time where he was afraid to take showers. He wouldn't take showers because his parents had drilled into him the story of the showers at Auschwitz and stuff. There was an interview a few years back with Winona Ryder, when she made the TV series of that Philip Roth book, Plot Against America, or Plot Against the United States, where she said that when she was a little girl, she's a privileged American actress, you know, that when she was a little girl, there was a period of years where she wouldn't sleep in her bedroom. She would sleep with the lights on in the hallway, right outside her parents' door, because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that one day, her neighbors, the parents of her friends,

• 59:31Speaker 02

  were going to break down their door and drag their family off to be murdered. This is a little girl, and, you know, I remember, actually, when I was at your show in Fort Worth, you were with Roseanne Barr, and I remember she told you a story about how she was a little girl, and her parents sat her down and were having her watch all this footage of people being bulldozed into pits and, you know, all of these emaciated naked people, you know, being liberated from the, all these horrible things. It's just a little tiny girl. She said it gave her, like, weird twitches and nightmares for years and years afterwards. And it's like, I get it on one level, right?

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get it too.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Like, those parents, all they think they're doing is preparing their kids to live in a, in a, in a dangerous world. But when you look at it from the outside, you realize, like, that's a form of pretty extreme child abuse.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  They're also teaching their kids to hate. Because if I, I'll just speak for myself, if I felt that, and by the way, and I agree with you, I get why trauma persists through generations. I do. Sorry to sound like a liberal. I really do understand that. And I think it's real, and I think the trauma is real. Like, awful things were done to the Jews in Europe, there's no doubt. But if somebody told me that my neighbors could rise up at any minute and kill me, I would hate my neighbors. I would hate any nation where that was true. Why wouldn't I?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  I mean, really, the only answer to why wouldn't I is Christianity.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Why, right, right.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  So, but yeah, when that starts to happen, again, like, it, it affects the way that you interact with the people outside your in-group. And you see this, again, on small scales, you see it with individuals, individual people. The person at work who thinks everybody at the office is out to get them. Eventually, nobody at the office likes that person, and they kind of are out to get them because that's how they interact with, with everybody. And so, that's always a danger. It's something that I found very strongly when I was researching different cults for my Jonestown series that I did. You know, that's a, almost a universal feature.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Is everybody, everybody hates us, everybody wants us destroyed because we have this special truth, or whatever the cults thing is.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Jon's told his people that.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  They, they all tell their people that, you know? And it's because the people are being held together by something that is really inorganic. And for that to persist over time, you know, you, like, you can, you can, you can organize a group according to two principles, right? One is that there's something inside the group, inside the people, that pulls them together, or they can be packed in from the outside because external forces are preventing you from, you know, from, from escaping. It's one of the reasons that you see, for example, so many cults, organized crime elements as well. One of the first things that they'll do as part of initiation is get you to do something that you can't take back.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Because now it's a lot harder for you to make your way back into mainstream society with the expectation that you're going to be forgiven for that, right? And from an internal standpoint, it lets you know that I can probably trust the person next to me because we're both similarly guilty, you know, that kind of thing. So it does lead to in-group cohesion. But it leads to an in-group cohesion that makes conflict with external elements basically inevitable.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  So is the world getting more stable or less stable? That's a rhetorical question. We're not in charge of the world, unfortunately, but you are in charge of, in fact, responsible for your own family and your savings. So the dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power since 2020. That's crazy. The dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power in six years. You know what hasn't? Gold. Gold has been a trusted store of value for thousands of years, and that's one reason you should think about gold right now. It's about 25% below its high from earlier this year, which is amazing. Some of the world's biggest financial institutions are making the move because gold, relative to its power and endurance as a medium of exchange,

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  is pretty cheap right now. Central banks are reducing their reliance on treasuries and increasing their holdings of, yes, gold. They're not alone. Individual investors are doing the same. Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund and a friend of ours, recommends holding up to 15% of your portfolio in gold. We've long believed in gold. We've been vindicated. We started Battalion Metals to give Americans an honest, fair-priced way to buy metals, gold and silver, because a lot of these companies are scams. Ours is not. You know, we have, like, three points over spot, and we'll ship it to your house. BattalionMetals.com/Tucker is the place to go to learn more about buying metals,

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  gold and silver, precious metals, IRAs, secure storage, all of it. BattalionMetals.com/Tucker. All of which leads to what's happening in Spain. So Spain just had part of a longstanding, like, the biggest wave of a longstanding invasion of, like, 50,000 people over the course of just hours from Morocco. And this, in the days following, it became really clear that this was not organic at all, that the Israeli government and the US government, well, obviously, knew this was happening, and basically was, both governments were using mass migration

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  as a weapon against a government that they don't like for various reasons, mostly because it's anti-Israel. And people are shocked to discover this. Were you shocked to discover that?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Um, again, kinda. I shouldn't, I shouldn't be at this point, but yeah, kinda. I still am always shocked. I guess it's a good thing. I always look at it as a good thing. The fact that I'm still capable of being shocked.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  It's just the, exactly the opposite of what we've been told. We've been, it's a pretty clear story that they've been telling, propagandists in this country have been telling for the last, I don't know, 10 years at least, really since 9/11, that we have to support Israel because they are the bulwark against, the, the defense against what we just saw happen in Spain. Like, we're going to get overtaken by the Muslims unless we support Israel. And here you have Israel supporting an invasion of a Western European country by Muslims, which I think has been, you know, sort of ongoing for generations now. Like, they've been doing this for a long time. But most Americans kind of think we're on the same side, like, neither,

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  we don't want to be invaded by the Muslims, and the Europeans don't, and the Israelis are our ally in that, but they're not.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the, one of the worst aspects of, I mean, look, uh-

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Christian civilization and Islamic civilization are different things with their own geographic spheres and are, you know, it's definitely a situation, I think, where, you know, what do they say, "Strong fences make for good neighbors" kind of thing, right? We should have our own spheres and I think it would be deleterious for, you know, any European Christian country to acquire a Muslim population past a certain threshold where it becomes a culturally separate, you know, thing. That's, that's something that's not necessarily specific to Christianity and Islam is just two different groups. And so

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  I'm not in favor of that kind of stuff. And I do see the problems with the migrations. But one of the saddest things and most, and grossest things that it really has come out of just the last couple of years of the recent things going on since, really since Gaza. I mean, it's, when you look back on it, it's been going back, it's gone back further than that, but it's really intensified where as Israel has lost support, they have really, really, you know, they've almost, they've lessened the propaganda that comes from the direction of sort of justifying and explaining and building up support for what they're doing and directed it instead toward just building up more and more hatred of Muslims and Islam in general. I mean, you see this from people like Laura Loomer

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  and other types who their whole thing is just, "We need to get Christians to hate Muslims." Because if they do that, then their enemies are our enemies and we don't have to think past that. And that's very unfortunate.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never thought I would be the defender of Muslims. It never occurred to me, since I'm not a Muslim and I'm not going to become a Muslim. But it's been so gross and obvious and anti-human that like, at some point, you have to be like, "I don't know."

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  When it comes back to, you know, the universal values you were talking about. I mean, there are certain things that apply no matter who is standing across from you.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  And if you believe that, then, I mean, a lot of this comes down to just personal experience too. I mean, I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I've known a lot of the Muslim community down in like the South LA, Orange County area. And after a while, like, you know, once the mystification, you know, the fog sort of starts to part, you realize, yeah, there, there are differences for sure, cultural differences and things, but they're just people. And I think most Americans have very little, if any, experience with-

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  I feel that way about Jews or Baha'is or any, I don't know that hate all Muslims. I don't know why that's better than hate all Jews. I just don't, it's the same to me.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah, of course, it is the same. I mean, obviously, it is the same. So it's really hard for, I mean, when you think about Christianity, like the hardest, the hardest command in Christianity, well, the hardest command in any world religion that's ever been made is "love your enemy." And so to be able to recognize that somebody is your enemy, that their interests are fundamentally contradictory to yours, and that you have to be prepared to defend your interests, but not allow that to escalate to hatred for this creature of God that's across from you. I mean, that's something that, again, is built very deeply into our hearts. Even people who consider themselves atheists, I

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  think, to a degree, very often still have that built into them. But it's a mistake to think that, you know, to extrapolate that and think that everybody in the world, certainly throughout history, but even today, sees these things that way, because they don't. And, yeah, again, I think it's, I think it's-

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  But that is Western civilization, isn't it?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it defines it, absolutely.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  And that's not just some random line in the New Testament. That's a repeated command from Jesus, repeated. It goes on about it. And if you only love those who love you, how are you different from the pagans? That's easy.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we have no excuse, you know, for, you know, particular, we can't use particular circumstances as an excuse when he gave us the example and prayed for, you know, the people who were in the process of crucifying him. And so we have no excuse, you know, to allow that to build up in our hearts and we have to fight it. And very often, I mean, that is, it becomes one of the, you know, like, you can, you can survive a war physically, you can even win a war, and still have it do so much spiritual damage to you over time that the victory is hollow.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  I'm from a country that did that, so I'm aware. You end the war by nuking a population and then you never apologize for it and pretend it was the right thing when it's prima facie repulsive. And look what happens to your society when you do that.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's, I think that, you know, the, the post-World War II sort of post-Nuremberg society that we live in is very much a, I mean, if you, if you, if you look at the effects of our policies and, and the cultural tendencies that have been imposed, you know, it was much easier, obviously, throughout most of the 20th century to impose cultural norms from above because mass media was still, in general, trusted by most people and it was controlled by very few interests. And so we were all sort of shit, excuse me, we were all sort of sharing the same couple of dreams, you know, and

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  participating in the same couple of imaginaries. And the general thrust of that, and this comes back to what's going on in Spain and Europe in general and in the United States, is that for a people to live historically, meaning to feel themselves as part of a chain of being that stretches back before they were born and will go on after they live, that that is actually something that is very dangerous and that is something to be broken down and destroyed. I'm writing a foreword for a book, you know, this is, I always tell people that you got to read, you got to read everything. You got to read stuff even by people who, you know, all your friends or maybe even you think of as, you know, on

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  the extreme side. I'm, I'm writing the foreword for a book on the Nuremberg system right now by an author, Thomas Sear. And it's, you know, he's a, he rocks his leather jacket with iron cross, you know, patches on it, walking around the streets of Chicago, right? So like, most people would think, "Wow, that's an, that's an extreme dude." And he kind of is in certain ways. But he's, he's a dude who wakes up with a book in his face, goes to sleep with a book in his face, and reads the entire time in between. He's a good writer and a good researcher and just a very smart guy. He's worth reading. He's one of those guys who would not have been available to any of us to read until very recently. You know, it's one good thing that the internet has done, it's broken apart that-

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  When you say the Nuremberg system, what does that mean?

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  It means, well, there's a lot of elements to it, having to do with geopolitics and warfare. But from the standpoint that we're talking about right now, you know, it's this idea that for people to live historically, in the sense that I just described it, is something that is dangerous and to be targeted and broken down. And you saw this really on domestic, social levels. I mean, you see, I mean, it's not as if that left-wing government in Spain is not part of the problem, you know-

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  They're definitely part of it.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  Clearly are. But here in the United States, you know, you saw the effects of it over the course of the second half of the 20th century where, you know, you had our cities back in the day that were sort of these organic communities with separate neighborhoods divided by ethnicity and religion that were not in conflict with one another. They had arrived at compromises over the years and ran their cities in an organic way. And people were part of, you know, they were plugged into communities that watched them be born and that would watch them die and that their kids would grow up in and know that their kids were going to grow up in. And they sensed themselves as these people. You know, they understood themselves as part of this living community that was going to continue on afterwards. So it was important for them to make sure that the things they

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  inherited were given to the people that, that came along after their period of stewardship. And in, over the course of the second half of the 20th century, I mean, it was official US government policy essentially to use mass migration generally of African-Americans from the South as bludgeon weapons to go in and break these communities up and drive these people out to the suburbs, drive them out to other areas where, you know, that old parish church that used to be all, you know, Italian Catholics, you go drive through there now in Newark and it's maybe some old grandmas who are still there, but everybody else lives 45 minutes away now, so nobody goes there anymore. And all of those communities

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  were broken up by force very often and through violence indirectly, on purpose. And it was because they were looked at as something that was potentially, you know, that, that when people are living in a way where they sense themselves as part of a larger project, the idea after World War II was that that can and in fact will almost inevitably get out of hand. And out of, out of-

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, get out of hand in what way?

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  Well, the way that the Germans got out of hand. I mean, that's, you know, the idea that they start taking themselves too seriously and thinking of their historical mission too seriously, and they start to act on it in the world in a way that is dangerous to other, to others. That was, that was the idea, right? And of course, the only, there's only one group, at least in the Western world, that we decided that that doesn't apply to, and it's because they were the ones who were the victims of the Germans. So the Israelis, the Jewish people in general, very much live historically and their right to do that and ability to do that is, you know, it, you could say it's the-

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  The central and primary, certainly foreign policy, but even with a lot of domestic policies, mission of the US government and the sort of Western European NATO system in general, it's a central focus of that, which is very strange when you think about it. Until you realize that we're, we're living in the aftermath of Nuremberg, we're living in the aftermath of the Second World War, and we're probably coming up to the end of that cycle right now. I think that we're, you know, we're reaching the point where everybody who was around back then is gone. People who remember it directly and who have the real enthusiasm for it that was born out of direct experience is probably fading away.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  That seems to be the historical cycle. Every 80 to 100 years, you know, things blow up again and the crisis and trauma of that explosion sort of shapes the four generations that are alive during that period. You know, you were either a young man who had to deal with it, you were a kid who watched your father deal with it, you were an old man who, you know, and so as people go through the rest of their lives and they mature into the, into other stages of life, they carry that with them and it really shapes who people are for 80 to 100 years or so. And the Second World War, at least the myth of the Second World War, and by myth, I don't mean, you know, that it's a lie, that's something that didn't

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  happen, but you know, something that has taken shape in the, in the cultural consciousness in a, in a, in a way that, that, that explains to people why things are the way they are, why power arrangements that exist now are, are necessary, why all of it-

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  And legitimate.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  And legitimate, right. It underlies the legitimacy, exactly. And, you know, I think I said this on the episode that we had that got us in so much trouble, but-

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  You said nothing wrong or controversial. It's, I've never, in 35 years of interviewing people, I've never had an interview so mischaracterized with that level of hysteria. It was like crazy. I would tell everyone who barked at me like, actually, Darryl Cooper's a very moderate kind of liberal minded man who's like, means malice toward no one, wouldn't hurt anyone ever. Like, what are you even talking about? That was crazy.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was an interesting experience for sure. I've seen it happen to other people, but when it happens to you, it's, it's-

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  But I've never seen it happen on the basis of less.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and with such a level-

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  You didn't say anything.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  With such a level of ferocity too, it was crazy.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Well, it just tells you a hurt dog barks, like, the lies that have attached like barnacles to the World War II story define our lives and do lend legitimacy to projects that are inherently illegitimate and anti-human and harmful. The post-war system is a disaster. I don't know if it's a worse disaster than the war itself, but it's certainly a disaster to completely destroyed Western civilization. I don't know if it's fixable. And so I guess if you're one of the rare beneficiaries of that monstrous system, you know, you've got a lot at stake.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, you know, the World War II narrative is, is one that, oh, just look at the, look at the response that we had in that episode to something that I said that I thought was fairly anodyne. I could have put it in less punitive terms, I guess, with a nod to all of my English friends out there, but, but the content of what we were talking about was not anything particularly extreme that you can't find in, in AJP Taylor or Pat Buchanan or something like that. But when you have a, a topic, a historical topic that the slightest deviation can provoke that kind of a response, that sends a message

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  out to everybody of how they have to handle this topic. You know, this is set about with taboos and, you know, forbidden areas that you're not supposed to-

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  You don't have to live like a slave anymore?

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's dangerous, I guess.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Right. And so, but when that happens, you're naturally, I mean, this is gonna, it's naturally going to be a topic that is just incredibly fertile because you have something that is relatively recent history that we have a ton of documentation on, that most people still know very little about what actually happened. And what they do know, a lot of it is not true, or it's, or it's, you know, true in a way that doesn't necessarily prove the point that they've been taught to think that it proves, you know? And so,

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  it's, I mean, I figure we probably used to have, you know, we, we probably used to have similar myths around the American Revolution and things like that, but as our demographics changed over time, nobody really cares if you slander George Washington.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  No one ever went to jail for having different views on the American Revolution, okay? Just to be clear.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Indeed. And so, you know, to me, look, every society, we need our myths.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Right? But those myths, you have to, it comes back to what purpose they're serving. And there was a period of time throughout the 20th century that maybe you could have said the World War II myth. Look, there, there's something to the idea that really over the course of a single generation, we had this moral revolution that made it so that, you know, virtually everywhere, I mean, you go down to Birmingham, Alabama in 2026 and you drop an N-bomb in a 7-Eleven and it's gonna be a bunch of white people in there are gonna look at you like, are you crazy? We don't say that anymore. Like, what are you talking about? And so that's a moral revolution that in part grew out of the Second

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  World War and the, the myth of the Second World War and what it was about that you would look at and say, you know, it was a positive development. It softened the way people look at out-groups and things. Great. But what is that myth? What purposes does it serve now?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Well, and what's the fruit of it? So, Selma, Alabama is much worse than it was in 1965. Like, for the people who, for the black people who live there, Britain is much worse than it was in 1945. So is the United States. So if the system produces human misery and death, failure to thrive, debt, then like, it's not legitimate. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, I'm all about politeness in the face of myths. Like, I, I'm not running around attacking-

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Which is why I do feel, like, I-

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Anybody else's religion.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  When I made those comments about Churchill on that one, as anodynes, I think they were afterwards, I was like, I did wish I hadn't put it that way.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  I get it.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Because there are people out there that, you know what I mean? I wouldn't, I don't necessarily love FDR, Abraham Lincoln, but-

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  FDR actually deserved a lot more criticism.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  But I don't, but I don't want to hear, you know, some Frenchman talking smack about him. So I get that.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  I get it. No, but the point is, like, you go along with certain things, maybe it's not fully true or it's mischaracterized or whatever, but like, it's working, it, it inspires empathy between people and we get along better and like, I don't think you should call the fat girl fat, actually. I think you should refrain from saying obvious things in the service of human understanding. Like, I'm not for using the N-word, actually. Just, I'm just not. I never have. I'm never going to. Like, I get all that. But if obeying the lie, pretending to agree with the lie gets you modern Britain, or modern Germany, or modern America for that matter, like, why are we going along with this? This is

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  all, like, this is what you get when you go along with a lie. Misery. So no. Is that-

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think one of the, one of the things that happened is that it, it happened so rapidly, really over the course of a single generation-

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Since the 1960s, that-

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  By the time anybody even realized what was going on, they found themselves in circumstances

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  that the measures, the severity of the measures that would be necessary to correct the error are so great that they violate all of these, all of these landmines that have been planted in our heads since earliest education, you know, of, again, to go back to what purpose is the myth serving? If you want to do something about the fact that your people, and I'll, and I'll speak about like European countries, because we have a little bit different situation here in America, but you know, if you go to Ireland or some place like that, that these are real people. This is a people who have existed for thousands of years as a, as a bloodline, as a nation, and they're about to lose their homeland permanently, that

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  if you oppose that and want to take measures to correct it, well, you're a Nazi, you're Adolf Hitler. And that's the myth, that, that's the purpose that that myth serves now, along with, of course, like legitimizing the American Zionist empire around the, around the world, things like that. There's geostrategic and other, other purposes it serves, but on individual psychological level and as far as our own domestic policy and societies, it's so powerful- That it has convinced people to do what by any measure is really the craziest thing that any people can do, which is to give up its homeland forever without a fight.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  And to allow their daughters to be raped. So like the lie that European peoples and Americans believe is that all this is about love and tolerance, but your daughter's getting raped. That's not love. That's the ultimate act of violence. And yet that's, that's the result of it.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Literally the result.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Sure. And you, and again, to go back to the internal migrations in the 20th century, after the Second World War, like in the United States, in the way that the internal migrations were used to break up these traditional Catholic parish communities and city after city after city around the country and done so. I mean, we know this from, from documentation, you know, that, uh, that these, this was something that they knew what they were doing. They knew they were breaking up these communities that they saw as pools of like insularity, these black boxes that the system itself couldn't really see into and didn't exactly know what was going on.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  So Robert Moses wasn't just a highway designer? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  No, no. But this was a, but this was a national push. I mean, this didn't just happen in New York City, you know, it happened everywhere. And, um, and when you realize when you, that when you, when you start to see that, and then you start to see what's going on in Europe and now in the United States as well, and you recognize that these are weapons that are being wielded against us. They're not something that, um, it's not happenstance. It's not something that's being done, um, because, you know, um,

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  The labor markets demand it.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  The labor markets demand it.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  That's my favorite. It's the market.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or because we've just sort of, um, you know, there were, there were certain Cold War strategic imperatives that, uh, led to the, to the promulgation of certain propaganda that maybe made some sense at the time, that it just outlived its usefulness and is sort of going along on its own, uh, on its own power at this point, that this is, this is a weapon that's being used against these countries on purpose. Um, because I mean, you know, there's a, there's a great little book by a French author, uh, Jacques Ellul. He was, wrote a bunch of great books, but he wrote one on propaganda and how it functions. And he has this great section in

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  there on how, um, it seems like at first blush, that a mass society and individualism are somehow like, you know, that's oil and water, that those are two completely different things, when in fact they're the same thing. Because when you break up, say, those parish communities and you drive everybody out to the suburbs, everybody's living within their own fence line now. They're not living in a community. They're living in their own fence line. They maybe don't even know their neighbors' names. You have all of these people who are completely isolated and easily homogenized over time. And, um, you know, they lose their distinctiveness and become, and melt into a part

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  of a, a mass that you can now propagandize on a mass level in, in a way that, you know, you think about it like, uh, if you lived in a, in a parish community back in the 1920s in the United States, you lived in an Irish parish community in New York City, and the government was, uh, or, or the culture, whatever outside force it is, is trying to propagandize you in a given way, that your grandfather and your priest and the elders in your community that everybody respects are all telling you is not true. You're not going to believe that. And you also just really have no need for whatever ideology it is that's being pushed on you because you have your community

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  here. That's your ideology, you know? And, um, when you break all these people up, I mean, every, every, every intelligence agency going back to the Korean War has known that if you want to brainwash people, the first thing you have to do is isolate them.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  And so when everybody's isolated, and yet you can propagandize all of them at the same time, and their little isolation, it becomes very easy to, and in the 20th century, when the media channels were as controlled as they were, I mean, it was incredibly powerful. And, you know, I, the, the, one of the great hopes that I think, even though it was originally a military technology and everything, is I don't think that they planned for the internet. And the reason I think that is because

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Even though they created it.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Even though they created it. Um, and the reason I think that though, is because when you look back at so many, at JFK, at all of these different things that happened in the pre-internet era, a lot of times, like you probably had this experience yourself, you look back on this and you're like, this can't be true because they would have covered this up, right? It's like, no, they didn't even bother. Because they had control of the three channels and the newspapers and just didn't have to worry about it. I just don't think they planned for the internet. And so that's why there's a huge, a huge scramble to try to clamp it down and consolidate and get control of it, because it is a leak in their system.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  So that's, but balkanizing your society and then atomizing it is the key to homogenizing it. I think that's such a smart insight. And that's one of the reasons so much energy has gone into feminism, because, you know, the marriage is kind of the ultimate stronghold of, that's the ultimate community. It's the basis of all communities.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  Well, and family also is the basis of any, any, uh, community that is living historically in the sense that I meant.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Have you ever met a happily married woman, happily married woman who's for mass migration into the United States?

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that, uh,

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Who's for any of that program?

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I mean, look, you'll find, you'll find people who are not particularly political, and so they pair it whatever they think the, but in terms of people who have given it any thought, no, definitely not. Because, you know, they're, and, you know, it's actually really funny, because, um, I really think that one of the reasons that this, this, you know, if you look over the decades, right? In the 1950s, it would have been impossible to predict the 1960s. 1960s probably would not have predicted the 1970s. Things, things go in cycles, you know, there's a sine wave of sort of cultural movement that exists. Um, but this one has really just gone in one direction for quite some time now. And I think part of the reason for that is that millennials took until their mid 30s, late 30s to start having kids. And so people didn't become

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  mothers, they didn't become fathers for a much longer stretch of time. And so that, that group of people had a much, those ideas had much more runway, you know, before people got into that period where they start to rethink things like that. Cause I've seen this with, um, a lot of my friends, people who, people who I hadn't seen, I had this experience really powerfully recently, good friends, but, um, I just hadn't seen them and hadn't really kept in touch all that much for 10 years or so. These were the two least political people you could possibly imagine. I mean, the idea that they would even have an opinion on any political issue would have just been, it just didn't fit at all. And when we met them again, not because I brought it up, they couldn't go five minutes without just all this stuff about their kids' schools and the stuff

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  they're teaching, but it changes your mentality, right? And so

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Even just the act of getting married, I have seen this up close a number of times, you know, a young unmarried woman living in a city has a certain set of politics. That woman gets married to a man she loves and respects, boy, those attitudes change like in about 10 minutes. It's crazy how fast that works.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when you have people who are isolated and whose, uh, whose time horizon has shrunk down to, you know, their next fix of whatever it is that the culture's managed to addict them to Netflix or weed or whatever.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Gambling, Benz of the Azapines.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  Right. Um, when you do that, I mean, you can do anything you want with that population. Because this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Why did nobody protest when we blew up a school? Because at this point, who's we? Like, that's really what's been lost is a sense of being a part of a we at all, is something that has really been broken down, disintegrated. And so that allows the people who are at the levers of power to get away with almost anything, because nobody really identified, like, nobody actually thinks about, it sounds like a, almost like a, you know, these days, it sounds like a 1950s kind of, you know, slogan or something maybe made sense in Beaver Cleaverville, when they say, not in my name, you know, that the government is doing these things in my name.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  I feel that way so strongly.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  But people so much these days really don't, you know? And what that means is that the people who do have control of the levers of power can do pretty much whatever they want without worrying about backlash, because nobody really identifies with it unless it harms them in some way.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  I feel so personally affronted by it. You bomb a girl's school and then you don't apologize? I feel like smacking him in the face. Who do you think you are?

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a history nerd, so.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  This is your country? I don't think it is. You just like rolled in here and like took control and then you get to do stuff in my, in the country my ancestors built? Like, no?

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Don't you feel that?

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  Of course. You know, I'm a history guy and nerd. And so, you know, I think about, and maybe this is something that only a nerd would do, but, you know, I think about, every time I read a history book about ancient Rome or the British Empire, or just anything like that, I think about, wow, 500 years from now, people are going to be reading about America. And what are they going to read? We put the first man on the moon, you know, uh, well, now, like, we're, we're shaping it so that they're going to read a lot of, like, they're, they're corrupting the way that my country, my people are going to be remembered by future generations. And that offends me. It really does bother me. And, you know, I think a lot of people would find that sentiment, I know you don't, but a lot of people today would find that sentiment sort of, uh,

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  antiquated and, uh, just kind of silly. And that's unfortunate, because what that means is that you have a people who is no longer living historically. You have a people who are no longer, they don't have the mentality that certain things for centuries, my ancestors shepherded so that they could hand them down to me, and it is my job to steward those things, to make sure that the next generation can carry it on.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Turning the family home into an Airbnb. It's degradation. You know, random strangers are like wrecking your house that your ancestors built. That's how I feel.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  That's what's happening.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  And the people renting, and it's, it's so much like the Bolshevik revolution. It's like, none of the people leading the revolution are with power, like, have any connection to the country at all.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, isn't that something that uh really I I often think about how I think Nelson Rockefeller died in seventy eight, seventy nine, something like that.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Seventy five, I think.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Seventy five.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  With Meghan Marchak.

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  The only Rockefeller that I know about after that was the one who got eaten by cannibals in the Indian Ocean, right? And I I always look at that as sort of a

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  South Pacific.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  South Pacific, yeah.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  He got eaten before.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. Oh, did he really?

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. But well, that kind of goes to my point, right? Is like, I I kind of look at that almost as emblematic of the disintegration of the old WASP power structure that

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  You can tell I keep track of this subject.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That like, look, over the years, made its mistakes, had its faults, all these kind of things, but had a proprietary sense of this is our country. This was my father's country and it's going to be my son's country.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't have another passport.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Right. And they have their, they had their hands on the steering wheel, even as we had a, an open system that was self governed to, you know, a large degree. There were, there, there was a ruling class that ruled with a very light hand for the most part, that had their hand on the steering wheel. And when that last generation, after the Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, sort of made it so that those people's own children, they just didn't want to do it anymore. They just, they lost legitimacy in their own eyes, their own college professors told them they had no right to to rule. They took their hands off the steering wheel. And that ever since then, the American system has really been under the control of whatever organized, highly organized, well-funded minority group can manage to get its hands on the controls.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  And it's one of the reasons, by the way, that, you know, it's, it's really, I mean, if you go from nineteen forty eight, when the state of Israel was founded, up until the late sixties, early seventies, you know, people have this idea that America has always had this tremendous Zionist influence. And it's, it's been there at certain elite levels and stuff, but it was never this overwhelming force that we started to see in the last several decades. And it was because you had guys like George Kennan, these old WASP guys who were gonna, who, who, who saw the big picture and were still living historically, who were like, if these neocons would have rolled into their administration and started barking orders at them, they would have told them to get lost. But now that just doesn't exist anymore. Everybody's time horizon is their own lifetime at most.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Most people aren't even thinking that far ahead. And um, their sense of continuity is completely cut off from the past and future. And so people who are still connected to that sense of continuity, who are well organized and thinking in longer terms like that, who have been able to get their hands on, on, you know, the, the helm of, of the state, they're really just able to make it do whatever they want, even though um, they may not be, you know, what we found is that you don't have to be this overwhelming dominant force that controls everything. You can get what you want done as long as you're organized and focused. And, you know, we've really just kind of seen that. It's why the American government, ever since, really like the nineteen eighties at least,

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  but certainly um, since the nineteen nineties, has just been sort of this, this tool in the hands of whatever organized minority is controlling it at the time, or at least controlling certain aspects of it. You saw this, for example, after the fall of the Soviet Union during the Clinton administration, you know, back in the, I think it was ninety, the ninety four election, ninety four, ninety six, whenever uh, you know, we were pushing really hard for an organization called the Partnership for Peace, which was, you know, supposed to be like a non-militarized NATO that was going to include Russia and kind of be a, an institutional platform for European

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  societies to mediate disputes and just get, learn to get along with each other and learn to live with each other again, and communicate on, on diplomatic levels, all those kind of things. Um, and it was the big push and you had a lot of officials in the Clinton administration who were very much in favor of that, but you had another contingent in the Clinton administration that was just, just irrationally hostile to Russia. And when you look at who a lot of those people were, these are a lot of recent emigres or children of emigres from Eastern and Central Europe who just hate Russians, you know, and um,

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  We think they have a right to own Russia, control Russia.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Or own, own and control it, right. And um, in the ninety six or ninety four election, one of the two, I can't remember which, um, the Partnership for Peace basically just fell apart that year because Clinton was worried about the Polish, he got convinced, I don't know if this actually would have been a thing, but got convinced that the Polish vote in Chicago and this Eastern, the Lithuanian vote over here was going to be critical to this swing state. So he said, well, we have to completely change our entire approach and foreign policy with regard to the former Soviet Union because this tiny, well organized political minority uh, is, I mean, obviously Cuba is probably the best example of this over a long period of time. But um, you know, that's, that's unfortunate. That's not the way that

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Well, we wound up in a war with Russia as a result.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  So can I just ask you about, about Spain? So the internet is aflame with the realization that the President Sanchez, that runs Spain is, you know, obviously aligned with this replacement project and is a source of a lot of Spain's problems, in my opinion. However, this specific example of invasion was really the result of larger forces acting on Spain, including the US and especially Israel and Israeli figures, including the Prime Minister and his son are basically saying, this is what you get. We're going to punish you with Muslims because you aren't, you don't approve of the Gaza genocide.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  So people are just like, what in the world is going on? This is like dawning on people who didn't know this was happening and has been for a long time. But Spain itself, it was, I was thinking this this morning, has been this kind of battleground for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. It's considered a sort of irrelevant place now, good ham, that's it, decent soccer, but like Spain, who cares about Spain? But a lot of people do care about Spain and have for a long time, hundreds and hundreds of years, Spain has been a place where larger battles are fought. Have you noticed this?

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I would say that even as the Spanish Empire declined over the years and it became something of a backwater, as the rest of Europe developed industrially, uh, the Spanish were one of the people, and to this day remain, um, there's, there's several peoples down along on the northern side of the Mediterranean, actually, who are still this way, who are living historically, in the sense that we were talking about earlier, where they still know themselves as Spaniards. And they still have, even if they're atheists and they don't like the Catholic Church or something like that, they still have a sense of continuity with their history that uh, you know, that, that, that, that people who have had conflicts with, other people who

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  are living historically, who have had conflicts with them over the years, they remember that and they know that, that, that the other side remembers it too. And so uh, it has been a battleground because there's no reason, once a people stops living that way, and it just becomes a, you know, a kind of a atomized Blade Runner society or something, there's no reason to fight with those people anymore. Who are you fighting with? You know, you might have to put down a, a rebellion of some kind, people will just, you know, get really antsy or upset, but you don't have to actually have conflicts with those people, because what people are you really even talking about? And Spain is, you know, uh, has not lost that to, to a great degree.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  And um, if you think about it, I mean, all of the countries that, European countries uh, that, that are still insisting on holding on to that sense of who they are, whether it's Spain, whether it's Russia, whether it's Hungary, these are all the targets of the Western system. I mean, of, of the sort of American-led, you know, whatever you want to call it, the global American empire, some, those are the targets.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but why is that?

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Because there's a rational explanation which you offered before, which is the lesson of the Second World War was when European peoples have a sense of themselves, they're a threat to others. Okay, so you have to break that down. You can't have, you can't have Europeans with self-respect because they're a threat. Okay, you know. But there's also, it feels like there's a deeper thing going on, like there's a spiritual factor here that maybe?

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's hard to get around that, it's hard to get around that feeling, right? When you look at the history and you see the Spanish Civil War, for example.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Yes. What was that?

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  It's one of those, I mean, I'm going to have an entire episode on it.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  When I, as part of this World War Two series, even though, you know, it only lightly involves the future Axis powers who, you know, they were involved with the conflict, but that's not really what it's about. The, the episode is really going to be about trying to help people understand how absolutely shocking what was happening over there was to um,

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Can you just give us a quick, without taking an hour, but like, what's your summary of it? For people who aren't, the Spanish Civil War, so it's thirty five to thirty nine, something like that?

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Thirty's, yeah, yeah. And um, you know, there was a very, very, very, the thing that it is sort of most notorious for um, is the anti-Christian, uh, just absolute zealotry of the Republican and later Communist side that came into it. And it's something that, you know, when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, one of the, first thing they did, this is nineteen twenty, I think, so very, very early on, they built a statue to Judas Iscariot in Moscow.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is at the same time they're burning down churches, massacring priests.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  They built a statue to Judas?

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was surprised, I actually only learned that like relatively recently.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  How did I not know that?

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, well, indeed.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  And it's the same reason probably that uh, people don't know about it, a lot of what happened in Spain in the nineteen thirties. I mean, you're talking about, you know, something that can only, it had the character of what you normally see in history from, from slave revolts, like in Haiti, for example, where there is just um, you know, a conflict driven by abject resentment and hatred for, for, for the, for the people so that you're, they were not just raping nuns, they were not just massacring priests, they were not just using churches as latrines and pornography theaters, all of those things were happening. They were digging up the graves of people who had died years before, centuries before,

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  uh, and desecrating their corpses. You know, these are the kinds of things that were happening. When you see something like that,

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  You know, look, Israelis don't like Palestinians. They're doing a lot of really bad things down there. They're not doing that. It's not quite to that.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Right. No, that's fair.

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  And so when you do see something like that happening, I mean, I think it's very hard, especially for people of our persuasion, not to see a spiritual element in there.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Well, what's the, I mean, first of all, anyone who's ever dug a hole in the ground knows it's difficult work. So to dig up a grave by hand is not something that you do because you're bored. You do because you're driven by some overwhelming, impelling force, right?

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  You're doing things that humans are, when you see things that humans can never justify according to their own personal or collective interests, but can only be justified by some, by some larger ideological or spiritual imperative, then you have to believe them when that's happening. And

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Well put, nicely put.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's definitely true. In Spain, you know, for all of their, like, I would put it this way, like, I think there's a lot of people out there who see those comments from Israeli government officials and from Netanyahu's son and so forth, and think that their problem is with the Spanish government, because the Spanish government has a problem with what's going on in Gaza. I don't think that's really what it is. I think that the problem is with Spain and with the Spanish people themselves, because they're seen as sort of a, you know, look, as long as there's one, one group of people left who are still living historically, there's hope for the rest of us. And Spain is one of those bastions. It's one of those places. And I mean, just recent, just, I think in the last couple of

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  years, they just completed that cathedral in Barcelona, the Sangre Familia. I bought my sister, they came out with a Lego set of that. It's 12,000 pieces. I bought it for my Catholic sister, so she has to do it with her kids. But I mean, the fact that that thing took 120 years or something to build, and they just finished it. And at no point, you know, over the last 120 years, with everything that's happened, all the social changes, the civil war, the world wars, everything that's happened, that project was never abandoned. They finished it. That's a people who's living historically. You know, those are people who, the people who started that, the people who worked on it 50 years after they started it, they did not see it completed. They never attended a service in there. That's what

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  living historically means. You know, planting trees under whose shade you'll never sit, right?

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  And so that's a people who's still doing that, at least in remnant. And as long as that's there, it's going to be targeted. And

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  But how interesting, targeted not just by, you know, political factions within Spain that don't like it, though that's happening, but by the world. So the Spanish Civil War breaks out, the rape nuns, murder priests, dig up the bodies of long dead Christians and desecrate them, and the entire intelligentsia in the West joins them. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade forms, it's like all guys from Brooklyn. What? What is that?

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  It's a really deep subject. I mean, because you're talking about the same class of people who are all, you know, very pro Stalin, very pro Trotsky and Bolshevik Revolution as that was going on. And I think that just like with, with a lot of issues, there were different people with different motivations, but the ones who are the, the, the engine of the whole thing, the motive power behind it, you know, they have a very, very deep belief that's driving them. And, and I think that when

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  And what's that belief?

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think it comes back to, I mean, look, these are, there are people in the world from whom Spain is an ancient enemy. It's not something that has anything to do with fallangism and Franco. It doesn't have anything to do with whatever the political order of the day is. It's something that has, same with Russia. You know, there are people in the world, peoples in the world, who just have a deep and abiding intergenerational hatred of Russia. And they see their conflict in broad historical terms. It's not with Putin, it's not with this or that leader, it's with this people over a long period of time. And part of it's because those people, you know, like, when you get to a place where

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  nobody else in the world is living historically, when the entire world is just a mishmash of atomized people, and you have a couple groups that are still living intergenerationally like that, those groups are going to rule the world. It's going to be their world. They're going to be living among a bunch of human beasts. And I mean that almost literally in the sense that their time, when your time horizon has shrunk down to your next meal, or even the end of your own lifetime, you're living like an animal lives, you're not living like a human being. And so you're going to be living in a sea of human beasts as real people still living historically, and you'll rule the world. And as long as, and when

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  there are other peoples out there who are also living that way, you're not going to be able to fool them into thinking that that's not what you're trying to do. They're going to recognize other people who are living historically, and they're going to recognize you as, it doesn't even have to be as allies or enemies, but just as people who are doing that. And then once that happens, it becomes, you know, much more difficult to pull the wool over their eyes. And so the Spanish are a people who still have a remnant to their population and something deeply embedded in their culture that allows them to see things that we here in America, for example, where almost nobody is living historically, in the sense that we've been talking about, is even really, we just don't have the conceptual

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  horizon that encompasses, you know, enough to allow us to recognize that in other people. Probably, you know, if you were to take, maybe the Tucker Carlson audience is obviously an exception, but if you were to just take a lot of this conversation and show it to a lot of, just a random cross section of people, they would think, they wouldn't understand half of what I was saying. What do you mean, living historically? What do you mean, intergenerationally? I care what happens to my kids? Or, but this idea of being part of a great chain of being, that there's an organic, living community of which you are a part, that goes through history as, as, as, as a cohesive unit, even as the individuals that comprise it pass

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  in and out of the world. You know, this is something that used to be taken for granted by all humans, everywhere in the world, at least once we proceeded out of paganism. And that's what's been lost. And the people who are still out there, living that way, at least in remnant, have a different relationship to each other than they have to the rest of the world that's no longer living that way, if that makes sense.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Not only does it make sense, it's one of the most profound things I've heard in a long time. I assume you said this before, what kind of reaction do you get from that?

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that the, my audience is fairly curated, partly thanks to you. So they're used to, you know, they're used to hearing me talk like that. So the reaction is usually fine, but I have had the experience from time to time where you speak out of class on these issues, and usually it's not even hostility you run into. A lot of times it's just people are befuddled. They don't exactly even know what I'm, what I'm getting at, which is unfortunate, because again, this is something that was taken for granted by

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  And then taken from people without even their knowledge. And it's one of the essential things to, and George W. Bush, who didn't put many things well, put it this well, and he said, everybody wants to believe they're living for something bigger than themselves. And I, and, you know, the missions that have taken the place of living historically, of being attached to this larger whole, are so small. You know, liberating Ukraine, okay. You know, or whatever, whatever that, you know, war on poverty, war on cancer, you know, these are, I mean, I'm against invasions, I'm against war, I'm against poverty, I mean, you know, I get it. But fundamentally, they're offering up a vision that is so, just like silly and

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  It's one of the reasons I feel so terrible for the, for the people in Ukraine. You know, your average nationalist in Ukraine who thinks that this is what he's doing.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  But he's serving the forces that are actually attacking it. And it's just very sad.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Well, and of course, the, you know, the very first thing the Zelensky government did was ban the largest Christian denomination and put priests in jail. So it's impossible not to see the Zelensky project, which is not Ukrainian in any sense.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  I think he only learned the Ukrainian language something like eight or nine years ago.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole thing's absurd. But he's the Trotsky of Ukraine. Okay, fine. But it's the same as the French Revolution and the Spanish of war and, and the Bolshevik Revolution. It's exactly the same program. It's the anti-Jesus program. And like, it always winds up in the same place, which was in total destruction and misery. And the Ukrainians are an unusually great people, I think, just based on knowing a lot of them, like great people, excellent people, great culture, just good-hearted, decent Christian people. And the fact that they're being subjected to this is really sad.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  It is. Yeah, it is. The, it's, it's, it's a, going to go down as a mark of great shame on our country that we had anything to do with that whole situation. I mean, that's a, that's an understatement of our involvement, obviously, but it's a terrible shame. And, you know, I, I guess I'm really grateful that Dostoevsky's been my favorite author since I was in high school, because it made it so that, you know, when I started getting bombarded on all sides with anti-Russian propaganda, it was just, I had an immune system built up to it, because I already love these people, you know?

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Anyone who wrote The Brothers Karamazov cannot, you know, that's not a shallow culture. You can say whatever you want about Russia.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  And it's not my enemy. I don't care.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  I, you know, so strongly agree. Last question, as the United States, for many reasons, including its own sins, gets pulled into all of this, what's happening in Europe is happening here, maybe even more aggressively, we just don't know that, but it is, how, how do individuals respond to that?

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  This is, this is usually not a popular answer. But I think that, I'm not saying, don't go vote in the next presidential election or anything like that, but I think that the idea of imposing a solution politically from the highest levels is probably, I think that's probably a lost game. I think we have to start to, we have to start to look very close to us and build out from there. You need to focus on your family, you need to know who your neighbors are, you need to, I mean, because think about like, a society works best, or works at all, when each of the concentric circles of concern, you know, your family, your community,

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  somewhere out here is your country, maybe further out is your civilization, that each one of those concentrics that are further out have legitimacy because they nourish the ones that are closer in, and that it's those that protect and nourish, you know, the ones that are closer. And so, your community matters because that's the world in which your family is able to thrive together, you know, your larger political community matters because it allows your community, you know, and so, like, that's, that's how a society maintains legitimacy over time and becomes something that people are willing to march off by the millions to defend, if that's what it comes down to.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  And I think that that unfortunately, again, over an incredibly short period of time, has, I mean, you think about how crazy this is, like, we went from all of human history, and I'm not talking about back to the Sumerians, I'm talking about back to, you know, homoerectus, basically. People lived in a cohesive, coherent community among people who knew them and who they knew, who, some of them watched them be born, they would watch those people die, I mean, they, they lived within a community that they were, that they were absolutely plugged into as a, as a significant part of, people lived all of human history that way, up until

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  like, the 1950s or 60s, and then we just, in a generation that has completely evaporated, so that people literally don't know the name of their neighbor that they lived next to for years, and they have no, I mean, even worse than that, I mean, their kids leave for college, and for the rest of your life, you see them once every two years on Christmas because, you know, one year they come see you, and next year they have to go see the in-laws, and that's it, and maybe you hear from them on the phone once or twice a year. That is something that, you took something that was absolutely so fundamental to being human, the social environment that we literally evolved to be adapted to, and you stripped that away from people and threw them out on their own resources, and they're expected

• 2:00:30Speaker 02

  to go out there now and find meaning for their lives and orient themselves in the world without recourse to a broader community or even a family. And that's what needs to be rebuilt, and you're not going to rebuild that from the Oval Office or from the halls of Congress, it's gotta be something that starts, you know, it's very seductive, people on the right like to make fun of people on the left or criticize people on the left for being so, so, so concerned and having so much love and concern for people who are far, far away from them, but the people who are, you know, right here, close to them, they really don't like those people that much, and that is a thing, for sure, but we do that on, on the right as well, where you have a lot of people who, interpersonally, don't really feel a need to love their neighbor, treat their neighbors themselves, but

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  Or even their own children. Who are so concerned about whether, you know, the, the federal government is being used to impose some moral law that they, you know, that, that, that is important, but that, you know, the far more important thing is, are the things that are within reach. Start there and build out, and, once you start to do that, here's the magical thing about it, is once you start to do it, you won't even have to explain it to yourself, it'll be so obvious that this is, that this is the proper way to do it, because what you're doing is you're, you're building something that you will know in the deepest core of your being is worth defending, and, once you've done that, you know, then you've

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  got solid ground to stand on, to move out from there and hopefully fix the bigger picture. Terrell Cooper. Every time I see you, it's, it's really a soul bath, so thank you very much. Anytime.