12/13/16 – Alex Sobel on his political comedy show “Hypocrite Twins” – The Scott Horton Show

by | Dec 13, 2016 | Interviews

Political humorist Alex Sobel discusses his show “Hypocrite Twins” that pokes fun at the typical Democrat-Republican talking points on issues of the day; and why so-called “fake news” sites don’t come close to the MSM’s proficiency in spreading misinformation and creating ignorant viewers.

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Alright, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
Alright, introducing Alex Sobel.
Oh, am I saying it right, Sobel?
Yeah.
Alright, good.
From the hypocrite twins, it's you and your twin brother, huh?
Is that it?
Yeah, I mean, basically the concept was originally that I wear red and blue shirts and I debate myself on all the issues, but the idea kind of has been morphing a little bit.
It was originally I set it up to just have a pro and con, and now it's kind of morphed into having them unite against corruption, which, as it turns out, is pretty much most things that the government is doing overseas.
Oh, that's interesting.
Alright, so hang on a sec.
We'll get to all the morphing in a minute because I noticed that, too.
So, yeah, first of all, hypocritetwins.com, that's the website, and then it's a YouTube channel as well.
And, yeah, like you say, it's red shirt and blue shirt arguing about the ones I saw too on Syria, but you have climate change, you have the Central Bank, the Saudis, the Iran deal.
I'm going to have to watch the Iran deal one.
Immigration.
You've been doing this for how long?
About a year.
About a year, okay.
So, yeah, I'd never heard of this before, but this is a pretty cool thing, man.
I wouldn't mind if you put them on my blog, judging by the Syria ones, anyway, if you wanted to blog and post them at the Libertarian Institute, man, I'd run them there.
Alright, sweet.
That'd be cool.
So, yeah, tell us about how you came up with this.
First of all, you're already a comedian before you're a political guy?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
I've been doing stand-up in New York City for a couple years, and I always felt like people, it's not that they disagreed with me, they just had no idea what a Central Bank is or what we're doing in Syria, you know, just really no idea what's going on, not that they disagree with me per se.
So, my mentality was, alright, well, if I just can actually get people to even understand the basics, basic level comprehension, we'd be a lot better off.
So that was kind of my motivation to start doing The Hypocrite Twins.
But then as I started doing it, you know, I have to assign what the different characters are going to say, and as I'm going through it, I'm like, you know, the vast majority of the stuff that I want to talk about, like Syria or the Central Bank, neither side is really in favor of what the CIA is doing or having interest rates at zero.
So it kind of became into this, like, let's unite against corruption.
It's almost like you need four characters.
You need a Republican and a Democrat official, and then you need a Republican and a Democrat voter.
Because the way you portray the Republican and the Democrat voter is like, well, gee, that doesn't sound right to me, which is how an average American actually would think.
But that's not how a partisan would think, because how the partisan would think is, no, because my team's better, so that's why it's all your fault.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, right now we kind of have a backwards world where the liberals are pro-war.
I mean, this is crazy.
I started The Hypocrite Twins a year ago, and no one was disputing any word I was saying about the liberal being, you know, bleeding heart in favor of ending wars.
But now with Hillary and the Russia thing, it's a totally backwards-ass world, man.
Hey, so tell me about the success that you've had with these.
I see some of them have some pretty good numbers.
It seems like these would be pretty viral-type videos to go around on Facebook and that kind of thing, too.
Yeah, I mean, I've definitely been reaching out more.
I've gotten a bunch of channels recently to post my stuff, like the Caspian Report, and I got Black Pigeon Speaks to post my stuff.
So I've been getting some traction recently, and it's going well.
I also do a lot of the social media stuff, the Twitter, Snapchat.
I've managed to get a couple thousand people on Snapchat, and a lot of them are, you know, under the age of 20, so they really have a very limited political knowledge.
And, you know, I don't know if you've ever used Snapchat.
You only get 10 seconds.
But you can have a bunch of 10-second ones in a row.
And so, yeah, it's trying to get millennials and people into getting interested in the subject, the basics, you know, what is the central bank, why are we arming Al-Qaeda, you know, the basics.
Right.
And, you know, I want to tell you, too, that I think you do a real good job on the production and everything.
I mean, you told me, you know, in the email, yeah, I am a comedian and whatever, but I still thought, well, wait, it's definitely not brothers, right?
It's just the one guy.
Because there are times where there's both of you in one frame and whatever, and I admit that you, not that you fool me, because I guess I already knew better to be fooled, but you had me question it, like, wait, are these guys brothers or what?
So that means you're doing your job well, I think.
Yeah, yeah, when people ask me, I always say, oh, yeah, both sides are controlled by the same person, just like the real world, you know.
Yeah, there you go.
There's no difference.
That's cool, man.
Yeah, I mean, like I was saying, it's just a totally backwards world with this Hillary thing.
I can't even make sense of it.
Because one thing that stood out to me is Paul Krugman, he tweeted that now that Trump won, it's a banana republic, that America is a banana republic.
But meanwhile, the word banana republic comes from the CIA in South America.
Our actions of creating these totally backwards places with dictators that we put in, and Hillary supported a coup in Honduras.
So here it is, he said, oh, now America is a banana republic, but he's endorsing the creator of banana republics.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is crazy.
Yeah, oh, the CIA's candidate lost?
Well, that's terrible.
Yeah.
The CIA has killed so many people.
I mean, you would probably have a better number than me, but I read it's somewhere in between 11 million and 20 million.
Oh, I mean, who knows?
Yeah, and depending on how you count it, if you include all the famines and, you know.
Yeah, so I mean, let's say, you know, 15 million or so.
So the thing you always hear the neocons say is they always go, oh, well, we have to intervene because such and such person could become the next Hitler.
But Hitler only killed 11 million people.
So really, Hitler should have said, hey, we got to stop the next CIA.
You know, stop the Americans.
And the truth is they had less time to kill as many people as they did, though.
But, yeah.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
I think it's good that you're doing this with comedy because it's hard for people to admit that, wait a minute, I'm from here, so what you're saying can't be right, you know.
But then if you make it true enough, but with, you know, the spoonful of sugar, I guess, as they would say about Bill Hicks, right, make them laugh a little bit and then it doesn't hurt as bad to understand the new thing that you're making them learn, you know.
Yeah, I mean, people are becoming pretty divided with this fake news thing because they're trying to basically squash the alternative media, you know.
Actually, one idea I had was to purposely try and get on the fake news list to get some publicity, you know.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
So people would be like, man, I don't even know this guy.
Hippogriff Twins is fake news.
Yeah, that's good.
You know, yeah, Antiwar.com was on the list, but I wasn't.
My own site wasn't, so.
But I'll take it.
I'm the opinion editor there, so that's kind of.
Look at me, everybody.
I'm blacklisted.
Yeah, I mean, they're basically they're trying to get people to not look at the WikiLeaks stuff.
And that's the way they're going about it.
And if you think about it, it's pretty wild because Arab Spring was started by WikiLeaks.
So that means that the people that are starving in war zones are better at reading and deciphering the WikiLeaks than we are living in affluence to reading how they are fake news.
Well, and that's the whole thing about it, right?
Like, you're really getting to the core of it.
If you're spending your day on Facebook trying to understand what's going on, you're really mostly exposed to mainstream news sources.
And that's the fake news that's really getting you more than the parody stories about the Pope endorses Trump or whatever that anybody ought to be able to see right through.
It's all these things about Assad kills his own innocent civilians only for sport all day long for no reason that anyone else has ever discerned or been able to articulate.
And so now back to why we got to help save those people some more.
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous.
We're saying we need to overthrow a serious dictator because he tortures his own people.
Meanwhile, we're torturing people in Guantanamo Bay.
I mean, Assad should just waterboard the rebels.
It wouldn't be torture.
He could just go, hey, Bush taught me this.
Yeah, exactly.
Let him go.
Yeah, I actually follow Mara Rahr on Twitter, who I understand why he's pro-regime change.
Bush had Assad torture this poor, innocent guy who was mistaken identity.
He wasn't even the guy they were trying to torture.
So he's like the one pro-Syria regime change activist I respect basically on Twitter that like, well, after what George Bush put him through, kind of got to respect that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I really I don't even understand why we have a Guantanamo Bay.
Like, if you can't keep the people in America because you're breaking so many things in the Constitution, you shouldn't be doing it.
I mean, it's as simple as that.
That was why they put it there.
They weren't even shy about it.
They're like, well, we got to have a place where the law can't reach them.
I know communist Cuba.
What is the background on that?
How did they?
Well, yeah.
I mean, well, because so they they stole the base back 100 years ago, 120 years ago, almost now, and they never did give it up after the revolution.
They just kept it.
And they had a lease to pay $100 a year, I think it was, for the base that they had arranged, something like that.
Maybe it was to adjust with inflation.
I forget.
But anyway, Castro quit cashing the checks.
Once Castro took power, he refused to cash the checks or accept the legitimacy of the base there.
But he obviously couldn't do anything about it.
So they just kept it.
So then when Bush and John, you and David Addington and the torture regime came in, they said, well, so where are we going to keep these people where we can have Adam and do what we want with them?
But they won't have access to the courts.
How about Guantanamo?
It's just 90 miles away.
So it's, you know, our our our officials can get there and back easily, basically.
And yet the court won't be able to touch it.
Now, of course, the court ended up disagreeing with that and saying, just like the rest of the empire, they can do whatever they want.
And they can rule about a Guantanamo base if they want for the good in that case.
But yeah, I mean, that was the theory.
I mean, they weren't even shy about it back in 2002.
They were like, yeah, that's why we're doing this.
Yeah, we're wasting this beautiful, sunny paradise on a prison.
It's so crazy to me.
Well, that's what they keep saying, too.
Oh, boo hoo, they're being tortured.
They're laying in the sun.
It's great.
Everybody loves it down there.
They got his tan.
Wait, that's a burn mark.
We're torturing him.
No, Charlie Dan.
They brought Charlie Daniels down there to give a tour and say, yeah, no, these guys are eating lemon chicken and they're happy.
Of course, they're happy.
It's a perfectly nice prison, just like any other prison.
It's the epitome of fake news.
Oh, and by the way, was this T-minus 40 days or what, 38 days or something until Obama's gone and Guantanamo's still there?
Yeah.
When he supposedly ordered the thing closed on his first day in office?
I know.
And he's still in Iraq, too.
So, you know, I mean, as I tweeted, I'm surprised Obama only has two kids considering he has such trouble pulling out.
All right, cool, man.
Well, hey, I'm not good enough at playing this straight man to your Johnny Carson here to set you up for all these jokes.
But you got some good ones.
I'm just like, yeah, let's talk about that kid that they starved some more.
Well, actually, I wanted to ask you because, you know, you have all this knowledge and sometimes I wonder.
Basically, I was wondering who – the deep state, who's pulling the strings here?
Like I made a list of five things that all obviously are pro-war.
So you got big oil, the defense contractors, and obviously there's some that like Halliburton that are both.
The Federal Reserve bankers, Israel and some type of rogue CIA thing as being the five forces that are influencing the deep state.
But the thing is those five on the list, some of these contradict each other.
Like, for example, if you're going to have sanctions, obviously oil company wouldn't want that because they would want to do stuff in the place.
While it's a place like Israel would be – want to have sanctions.
Or you could say the Fed and oil, they work together to want to conquer some land.
But they have different goals in that big oil would want some inflation, want those high oil prices.
While it's the Fed wants to conquer the land to keep oil down and sell it in dollars so the dollar's strong.
So they have opposite goals in some ways.
So the question is when they do have different goals, who wins?
Who has the final say on the deep state?
I mean I don't know if we can answer this right now.
I don't think there is a final say.
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And when I was a kid I thought, well, I guess it's the patriarchs of skull and bones or the final committee with the final veto power on whether or not to do something.
But, yeah, that model didn't really hold up too well with the weather.
And, yeah, no, I mean I think that's, you described it pretty well.
You left out the generals and the admirals and they count for a hell of a lot.
But, you know, I mean I think really that they're in first place.
Their first on the list is the Pentagon itself and then the CIA with them.
And then, yeah, absolutely Israeli interests and just, you know, the entire NATO bureaucracy and all of that as well.
And then, of course, yeah, the Israel lobby.
I would – it seems to me like oil has less to do – the oil companies have less to do with mongering war as they do with, you know, I guess trying to, you know, in the case of Iraq War II which is sort of the benchmark.
You know, they wanted a coup basically.
They wanted a compliant Hussein.
That was the James Baker plan.
The neocon plan was let's smash it up against the wall and see what happens and all of that.
And then, you know, James Baker came in and tried to create a national oil company to rule the place.
But then really like his guys – he's the lawyer for Exxon, right, Baker Bots.
They ended up cutting a separate deal with the Kurds because, you know, the Shiites that we fought for, they're closer to Iran and didn't want to deal with the Americans.
Down near Basra, I think that oil is mostly being developed by other foreign companies.
But the Kurdish oil is – you know, so in other words, they're kind of like playing catch up with the policy rather than in the driver's seat as maybe they would have been in Palestine.
So even with the Halliburton-Dick Cheney thing?
Well, Halliburton – you know, OK, so here's my theory about Halliburton.
I mean this is too oversimplified obviously but more or less the reason he got the job was because he was a politician, not because he was a businessman, right?
I mean he had some experience in oil work in Wyoming and whatever.
But they hired him because he was the former secretary of defense.
And then what he did was he ran the company into the ground.
He made a bunch of real bad decisions including buying a company about two weeks before they were found liable for a zillion dollars worth of asbestos claims and all this.
So he had to make it up to them basically by putting them on the army dole.
And so Halliburton themselves, they're an oil services company.
They're not really an oil company.
They build pipelines.
They do construction.
They do hardware.
And Cheney really turned them into a company for building bases.
So I think the primary, even in Cheney's mind with the Energy Task Force and all of that and their concentration on Iraqi oil supplies, it was still about, you know, I mean maybe this sounds naive to say it but I don't know, I think it's more about the strategy of the empire being able to control that oil rather than profits for Exxon and all of that.
In fact, Greg Palast's whole thing was that they wanted to redline that oil and keep it all off the market to keep prices artificially high as long as they could.
So I think it was more about the Pentagon and basically trying to corner the market on oil worldwide so that in the event of a war with China we can turn off their supply.
Well, if you make that argument then wouldn't you say then that the bankers, the Federal Reserve is in the driver's seat of that decision?
If they're not trying to sell the oil, they're just trying to control it and have it in dollars.
Well, I mean the Federal Reserve is one apparatus of the state.
You mean the Open Market Committee or you mean Goldman and Chase Manhattan or JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup?
So from WikiLeaks we have an email from the CEO of Citigroup, Joe Obama.
Isn't that something?
Yeah, that totally blew me away.
I think that was the number, to me that's the number one.
Wait, I shouldn't have interrupted you.
Finish your sentence.
Tell the people what the memo said.
All right.
Basically this was sent from the CEO of Citigroup to Podesta, which is Obama's campaign manager.
This is right as he's about to come into office.
So he's not in office yet.
And this email gives a full list of exactly who he's supposed to put in every defense position and every economic.
His whole cabinet is planned out by Citigroup.
Including, I want you to keep Robert Gates at defense.
Yeah.
So now some of the things he gave like two or three choices.
Right.
So, I mean, I guess they would go like, oh, well, that's how many people you get to vote from.
Right.
We gave him three choices.
You only vote from two.
Yeah.
So that's a step up.
But it really makes you think, you know, why are the bankers picking defense positions?
So they have a say in it.
And if you think about it, what does all these banks want?
What do all financial firms want?
More stimulus.
Immediately all their bonds go up in value.
All their stocks go up in value.
All their real estate goes up in value.
Stimulus equals immediate profit.
How do you get the government to stimulate?
They need to be in debt.
How do you put them in debt?
War.
Well, so tell me what you think about Donald Trump nominating the baker Gates and Rice recommended CEO of Exxon to be the secretary of state.
And but what do you think about the reaction?
Because it seems like all of Washington, D.C., you know, if it's Lockheed versus Exxon, it seems like D.C. is on Lockheed's side.
And they're talking about this guy like he's absolutely unqualified just because he's had deals with Putin in the past.
And he's the CEO of Exxon.
And they're like, who is this scumbag?
I mean, do you think that he would want to not have war?
I think that Trump I mean, honestly, I hate to give Trump any or any politician any credit for anything.
It goes against Horton's law, which is they're going to break any good promise and keep all the bad ones.
But with Trump, I think he really means to make peace with Russia.
He's talked like that for 30 years or something.
And right in the middle of everybody accusing him of treason, he's like, screw you.
I'm going to appoint the one candidate for secretary of state that I've interviewed who actually wants to get along with Russia and is has a proven track record of knowing how to.
And getting this done.
And here's even footage of him shaking hands and not just symbolically.
Here's footage of him sealing tens of billion dollar deal, tens of billions of dollars worth of, you know, kind of however you say that.
So to me, that's a big screw you guys.
I got elected president.
You didn't and I want to do this and I'm right and you're wrong.
And I'm even hiring the guy from Exxon to help me do it is on the surface, at least.
That's sure what it looks like.
Now, you know, again, the guy was recommended by Baker and Gates and everything.
He is the CEO of Exxon.
It's not like he's some kook from some university somewhere.
He is a very, you know, influential and powerful person.
But I guess he just hadn't been a player in this part of the game.
The reaction against him to me is really telling.
I think that, you know, like socially, what's Gates going to do, like not be his friend anymore or something?
Somebody this powerful.
But on Russia policy, boy, I think these gentlemen have a disagreement.
You know, I sure hope they do.
You know, maybe I'm being naive.
I'm not I'm not one to be naive, but sometimes I want to be for just a minute, you know.
But look, he told Petraeus, no.
And he told all these other guys, no.
Thank God he told Mitt Romney.
Forget it, man.
Romney's horrible on Russia, horrible on Iran.
So whoever this guy, you know, from Exxon is, at least he ain't from he's not a governor.
He's not a senator.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, what I read from some of the liberal media is that he would try and do land grabs.
And I don't know how true that is.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't.
Well, I don't know if that's really his job.
But, yeah, I would expect Keystone and this, that and the other every every kind of pipeline to go through, no matter what Indian tribe is in the way or whatever under these Republicans.
No doubt about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's there's definitely, you know.
But I mean, yeah, it gets us back to that that thing.
So let's say there's there's six six things on the list.
You know, how does it reconcile between that deep state divide?
Well, it's a fight.
You know, it's a constant fight.
Everybody send their lobbyists with a bag full of cocaine and some hookers and see what you can get them congressmen to go along with, you know.
I don't know.
I like the idea that, you know, there are agencies of the government that really don't even have names that, you know, where the paycheck comes, you know, by way of one agency or another.
But just, you know, people with a more or less a government license to run things.
I mean, like who's in charge of the operation where the CIA and other federal intelligence type agencies control the state legislatures of the 50 states?
Because, you know, there's a program like that.
I don't know if they have a name for it or who's in charge of it, if they run it out of Langley or if they run it out of the military or what.
But, you know, my default would be to presume that every state Senate in this country has at least one former CIA officer in a very powerful position in it.
You know, and that or current one, because they're not going to let, you know, federalism get out of hand or anything like that.
You know what I mean?
They got that locked down.
But I don't know who runs it and I don't know if the thing that runs it has a name at all, you know, but it must exist.
Do you think the CIA killed Kennedy?
I'm not sure.
Probably.
That's my assumption.
But I'll tell you, basically, Kennedy, when I was a kid, that helped get me interested in conspiracy type stuff.
When I saw JFK when I was like 14 or whatever and that kind of thing.
Well, I already was like that anyway, but I decided then that I'm not going to read 15,000 pages about this in order to decide.
So I'm just going to go ahead and figure that.
Look, if Alan Dulles was on the commission, then Alan Dulles must have been the trigger man.
Because what am I?
He was so insane that he's on the commission.
Yeah, they put him on the commission, you know.
So, yeah, whether it was the army or whether it was the CIA, you know, we're exactly who I don't think it was about the Federal Reserve.
In fact, it's G. Edward Griffin from the creature from Jekyll Island who debunks the Kennedy myth that those silver certificates were any challenge to the Federal Reserve's power whatsoever.
It wasn't about that.
It was about Vietnam and about the power of the military to push the president around.
You know, it's going to be really interesting to see, man.
I got to say that, you know, I said for years and years it's going to be Jeb.
It's going to be Jeb because anybody can be Hillary and nobody can be Jeb.
But then Donald Trump was the only one in this country who could do it, who is not a governor, not a senator, not a vice president.
But is rich enough and famous enough and narcissistic enough and willing to just, you know, accuse Jeb of having E.D. or whatever it took to win the election.
Just to bulldoze the hell out of everybody to do it.
And yet nobody really knows what he's going to do.
You know what I mean?
It's not like he was Ron Paul and got this done.
He's Donald Trump.
So it's like it really is.
It goes to show the structure of the American constitutional system.
None of the none of the restrictions still apply, but just the structure of you have to have a vote every four years.
And this kind of thing is still in place.
And it's enough that at least once in a blue moon, somebody who's not a chosen, you know, city group senator can end up in the position.
So, you know, what's he going to do with it?
So far, he's appointing only generals and powerful bankers and I don't even know, industrialists, financial capitalists.
So, you know, what he's really going to do with it?
You know, I doubt it's going to be good, but it may be different.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, well, I was joking with people that I would vote for the rapper 50 Cent.
So this way, if he wanted to pull out of the wars when the CIA tried to kill him like Kennedy, they go off.
We shot him nine times and he's fine.
And what is this?
But I have no idea how deep Trump is in the deep state.
You know, I don't know who if he has puppet strings or maybe he's right now getting debriefed on who actually killed Kennedy, you know?
Yeah.
Well, that was the Bill Hicks thing, right?
They pull you in the back room and they show you the footage from an angle you've never seen before.
Oh, any questions?
First, we bomb Iraq.
Okay.
That joke is still fresh.
It's from 1993 or something.
Yeah.
Yep.
So, yeah, man.
Well, look, I like this project that you're doing.
I haven't had the time, but I want to go through and see.
You got Iran's revolution on here.
You have melting ice caps.
I definitely want to watch all about the melting ice caps and the secret Saudi deal and all this.
This looks like a lot of great stuff you got here, man.
Yeah.
I could probably use you sending me some articles or something on the nuclear grade stuff for Iran.
That was definitely one of the things that was lacking from the liberals' arguments was like – and maybe you could even explain briefly to your viewers now as to why it's impossible for them to have – make what the neocons are saying that they could have made out of this – it's like a different percent plutonium or something.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's kind of a mess.
But, yeah, the bottom line is they never had weapons grade anything, plutonium or uranium.
And right now they have so little stock of uranium that it wouldn't even be enough for a bomb if they did enrich it to a higher grade.
And so that's one thing.
And then the other thing is that the inspections regime has been expanded beyond any historical precedent to double extra guarantee that there's no way around that they could use the nuclear program that they have and convert it into a bomb program.
But they lacked it before the deal was struck?
Before the deal was struck, they had enough low enriched uranium that if they enriched it to weapons grade, it would have been enough for one bomb.
But that doesn't mean it would have been a bomb.
It just would have been enough for a bomb.
But that's what they call the breakout capability.
So they've gone from a latent deterrent to a barely latent deterrent.
A much more latent deterrent, I guess, is the better way to put it.
Gotcha.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely one of the issues where when people don't know anything about it, it's easy to scare them.
Yep, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing is you just say nuclear a bunch of times.
If you've ever had a job where you drive for a living and you listen to radio and the top of the hour radio news, it's always something about Iran.
Always ABC radio news, top of the hour.
You know, the chimes come in and then an Iran scare story.
And probably six times out of ten, at least, it's got nuclear in it.
And I mean, people got to be wondering, how come they haven't nuked us yet?
Then, you know, how come they still don't have any nukes if they've been making nukes for 30 years?
What the hell kind of Manhattan Project is that?
You can't make a single atom bomb in 30 years.
Either that or somebody is lying to me.
You know, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the majority of my adult life, I've always seen an Iran scare story.
And it's never materialized.
Just North Korea is in the same boat.
Well, no, they got a mess of nukes now.
But of course, it's all George Bush's fault.
Bill Clinton had a deal with the North Koreans to basically bribe them to stay in the nonproliferation treaty.
And he never paid them.
He never gave them the fuel oil.
Maybe he gave them a little bit of fuel oil.
Never did build them the light water reactor that he promised to do.
Never even lived up to their side of the deal.
But then when Bush came in, he outright broke it on a lie, on a false accusation that the North Koreans had admitted that they had a secret uranium enrichment bomb program.
And so the Americans broke the deal.
This is all buried under the fact of the march to the Iraq War in late 2002 and early 2003.
This was going on right in that same time frame.
They broke the deal and announced new sanctions and all this stuff.
And only then did the North Koreans quit the nonproliferation treaty and kick the inspectors out of the country and turn their nuclear reactor back on and start harvesting the plutonium out of it to make bombs.
This is all George Bush and John Bolton's fault.
I see.
Wow.
You know what you do?
This would be a good one, man.
You could do this.
Just search how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes.
And that's the great Gordon Prather.
He is a retired nuclear physicist who used to write a whole mess of articles in the Bush years, mostly about Iran but also about North Korea.
And he's a serious nuclear weapons physicist.
I mean, he made nuclear weapons.
A real expert.
And he told this story very well.
So this would be a great one for the hypocrite twins, I think, man.
Because like you're saying, you're trying to make this introductory.
What's the deal with North Korea anyway?
You know what I mean?
You could do that.
And what's the deal with their nuclear program anyway?
Because it is a concern, you know?
I don't know if they could really deliver a nuke.
They might have to deliver it on the back of a truck.
But they could still kill a hell of a lot of people with one.
So if you were designing a hypocrite twins episode, what would the liberals say?
The liberals would say, Bill Clinton had a perfectly good deal.
I mean, you know, no, we shouldn't really pay North Korea money to not be evil.
But it was just a little bit of money, and in the scheme of things, who cares, right?
We're not talking about libertarian paradise here.
We're talking about we had a perfectly good deal.
We weren't even living up to our side, and they were still within their side.
They weren't making nukes until Bush ruined everything.
And then your question is whether you want Red Shirt to be a neocon or whether you want him to be like a red-stater guy.
Because, you know, if he's a tea party guy, he might say, that's right, the Bushes suck.
But, yeah, I don't know.
I'll leave your art to you, man.
I'll just tell you what happened there.
Gotcha.
Well, I mean, right now the situation is, what, just try and not step on any toes to spark something?
Yeah, I mean, Obama's basically done nothing except leave it status quo and do nothing.
Which is, you know, really unfortunate.
And who knows what Trump's going to do.
I mean, he said, well, he's going to lean on China and make China lean on North Korea.
Well, okay, but what?
Does he think nobody ever tried that?
And the Chinese have their own reasons for keeping North Korea independent from the South and independent from the Americans, right?
So, you know.
What's going on with the Taiwan thing?
Is that just totally...
It's the art of the deal.
...so Fox opera?
Yeah, well, it's the art of the deal.
I mean, right now we have a situation where Taiwan is independent and everybody knows it, but we don't call it that.
And we pretend that it's one country and we'll someday, again, all of it, Taiwan will be ruled by Beijing.
But someday it'll never come.
And in the meantime, we're going to keep selling weapons to Taiwan to make sure someday it never comes.
And that's the status quo since Nixon.
So Trump has come in and...
...he tweets and it's like, oh my God.
Yeah, well, he took a phone call from the president.
The bombs were selling that.
But so this is the art of the deal, right?
Is you bring up old stuff and, you know, just to disrupt everything and then get what you want.
So, you know, at the end of the day, the strategy there probably won't change.
It was probably not meant to.
It might end up leading to a serious reaction.
So you think Trump purposely was trying to show that we have something over China?
Yeah.
Because the liberal media is making it out to be like, oh, what a buffoon.
You know, I think there was a pretty credible piece in the post that were his people, I think, pretty credibly explained that they did it deliberately.
They've been planning it for a long time.
And that, in fact, Bob Dole, the former senator and former presidential candidate, was the lobbyist who helped arrange it.
So it wasn't just a one-off thing.
It was a planned deal.
Oh, I see.
You're going to have a lot of material to work with in your little comedy show here, buddy.
I'll tell you what.
It's going to be interesting times, as they say.
Yeah, it's sometimes almost, I feel like the kid in the store that only has a little bit of money, but every toy looks so good.
Right now I'm doing one on the IMF.
Oh, cool.
And I want to do the World Bank, but there's so much stuff.
It's so corrupt.
I always tell this to people, that it's pro-con, but they unite on the corruption.
But even if I just do the corruption, I'll never run out of stuff to talk about.
It's just so amazing.
Living in the heart of the empire, man.
Yeah.
You're not going to run out of material.
Not in the next few years, anyway, that's for sure.
Well, listen, I got to go, man, because I got to go.
But this has been great, and I hope everybody will look at your stuff.
Again, everybody, it's Alec Sobel, hypocrittwins.com, and find him on YouTube.
There's a bunch of great ones.
If you want, man, I'll give you the keys to the blog, and you can start posting these on the Libertarian Institute website as well, if you want.
Nice, thank you so much, man.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Hope to see you again soon.
Thank you for doing it, appreciate it.
Bye.
Again, that is Alec Sobel, hypocrittwins.com.
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