Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
When I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing Peter Van Buren again.
He's a former State Department guy.
Wrote We Meant Well about his time during Iraq War II.
And his latest book is a novel, Hooper's War, about post-World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me in this day and age.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How you doing, man?
Absolutely watching my own head explode.
I like watching your head explode too on your Twitter feed there, man.
It's a lot of fun.
I actually had this vision.
They got you retweeting Prison Planet now.
You're losing your mind, dude.
Retweets are not endorsements.
I actually had this vision of some future simian archaeologists finding the pieces of my skull and then using our interview today to kind of track back and explain what happened and possibly from here trace back to the exact moment that the human civilization, at least the American Western version of it, collapsed completely.
So in a way, this is a public service that we're doing today.
That's right.
This whole thing, that's what it's about.
Nobody cares about what we're talking about now, hardly anyway.
This is for the future historians.
It's for the children of the future.
That's right.
Listen, so what happened to make you hate America and freedom so much?
I'm so disgusted by this article about how, you know, obviously you hate everything that is good, true, and beautiful.
Otherwise you would be on board the bandwagon for lynching Donald Trump over some stuff he didn't do.
Yeah, it's basically the hemorrhoids.
I just can't get past them.
And there's, you know, you look for an outlet and it turns out that the entire process that we're undergoing in the United States is so remarkably similar to what we did in the 1950s under what we call what's called the McCarthy era, that it scared me a little bit.
I don't like to use words like scared because that's what people on Twitter and the mainstream media do.
They want to keep us in a constant state of fear and apprehension.
So I use those words cautiously, but I do use them by choice.
The reason you study history at all is not so that you can claim whataboutism and end Twitter arguments.
It's because many times the things that we're going through today we've gone through at some point in the past and we can look back at how we handled it the last time around.
And in theory, make better decisions in the future.
It's why you don't get lost the second time you go to a new city.
And what we're doing, however, is we're not doing that.
If you rewind the tape back to the 1950s, there was a period of time that we call the McCarthy era, where essentially following World War II, when the Soviet Union was decimated, they lost 20 million people in the fight against real fascism, real Nazis.
Their economy was decimated.
They were clinging to third world status.
And the United States christened them a new global enemy that was on par with us, one to one.
We were going to slug this out, what became known as the Cold War.
Now, any rational thinker says, wait a minute, that can't make any sense.
The country is barely on life support at this point in time.
How can they possibly be our global equal?
Or in fact, should we actually be frightened that they're better than us?
They're going to overtake us in some way.
Well, the only answer that was contrived at the time was that it was traitors.
It was treason.
It was people inside the United States who had sold us out to the Russians.
There were bits and pieces of truth in there.
I mean, the same way that if you sprinkle some sand on the floor, you can say the floor is, quote, And a guy named Joseph McCarthy, a senator out of Wisconsin, came to embody what was essentially a movement in American society where you could destroy anyone simply by pointing a finger at them and saying, they're a communist.
They're in league with the Russians.
Evidence wasn't necessary because the American public was so desperate for proof of what happened.
This idea that the Soviets emerged from World War II are our global equal, that they were desperate for an answer and they were willing to accept one that made sense to them.
And working with the media of the day, Senator McCarthy and a lot of others, he was just kind of the figurehead of the whole thing, came to destroy large segments of the United States, particularly in the government.burst into the national scene, proclaiming that 205 members of the State Department were communists.
And he had a list of their names, which he wasn't going to reveal just yet.
You wait.
And he had no evidence whatsoever of any of this.
It went on to devolve out of McCarthy to local school boards who got rid of teachers they didn't like by calling them communists.
It went into Hollywood with the creation of blacklists that saw actors and directors and writers banned from creating things because they were, in fact, secret communists.
It made the career of Richard Nixon and helped him on his road to the presidency.
And we know how that worked out.
It helped Ronald Reagan move from being an actor to being a politician.
And we know how that worked out.
And it helped a guy named Roy Cohen, who was one of the most vicious people ever to emerge in the U.S. political scene, to go on and help a number of politicians, including he worked for a while for Donald Trump when Donald Trump was in real estate.
So the outcome of all of this, this creation of an era of fear and paranoia where accusations alone were evidence of treason, has come back.
All right.
Well, so sticking with the past for a second here.
First of all, the Soviet Union, as you say, they'd lost 20-something million people in World War II and they were decimated.
And yet they did have spies in the United States like the Rosenbergs and others who gave them nuclear weapons blueprints that they used to make their atom bomb before the end of the 40s.
Right.
It was 49.
They tested their first nuke.
And they had Alger Hiss and others who were at the very highest levels of the State Department in the FDR and Truman governments.
And so I wonder, you know, as far as that goes, what difference did that make?
Alger Hiss and those.
And it was later proven in the Venona documents that he was guilty as hell.
Well, sure.
I mean, there's espionage going on all over the place.
And you're right.
In 1949, the Soviets had one atomic bomb that if they could find one truck that worked, they could drive someplace and detonate.
The idea of saying that there were no spies during the McCarthy era is factually incorrect.
Given the retrospective history, which is kind of the whole point of it, you can go back and look and see that the reaction to a handful of grains of sand on the floor was far, far worse than the problem of those grains of sand.
Sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, but that's kind of a separate question.
But I mean, well, it's but it's part of what we're talking about here.
You might say that the Rosenbergs were heroes, right, that if they hadn't given the the blueprints for Manhattan Project type information to the Russians, that America would have launched a war against the Soviet Union.
And their possession of atomic weapons is what kept the peace throughout the Cold War.
There's a lot of fun.
What ifs?
You can also say that if the Rosenbergs didn't do it, then three years later, the Russians would have would have come on to it.
The actual way of making an atomic bomb was not particularly secret then or now.
It's really a matter of harnessing the technology at a level of skill and on a scale that enables you to actually produce the thing.
I mean, any college physics student can outline for you the information that the Rosenbergs died giving the Soviet Union.
I don't want to get too far off the trail because what we're talking about.
Well, I mean, but that's the whole thing is, yeah, it's not off the trail, though.
I mean, I'm talking about the kernel of truth, right?
The few grains of sand.
Stay on because I don't want it.
I don't want people to think that what you're saying is there was no problem.
It's just what we're talking about is, you know, the further reaction from that.
The reason why is because people were willing to believe that there were communists, you know, for example, anywhere in Texas.
Right.
Like you could find some communists in Brooklyn.
Right.
But the idea that they somehow were going to take over the United States, the 48 states or whatever it was then, that they were going to be able to consolidate power over any institution in this country, even the State Department, was completely ridiculous.
A lot of the movies and TV shows from that era and after that era capture this sense of paranoia exquisitely.
The Manchurian Candidate is a great example.
The movie Fail Safe.
Any of the great Twilight Zone episodes.
The monsters are due on Maple Street.
Any of the Twilight Zones that involve neighbors not letting other neighbors join them in their in their underground bunkers and things.
There's an enormous amount of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The original one is a great movie.
And any of these capture very effectively through art the sense of paranoia that dominated American society and allowed bad actors like Joseph McCarthy to take advantage of this fear to destroy their political opponents simply by pointing a finger and saying he's in league with the Russians.
I don't have any evidence that I'm ready to show you now.
Please wait.
But you know it's true.
You believe it's true.
And if you go back and I do want to jump forward in time to 2018 and look at the articles that are written, quote, proving Trump is a traitor and proving Trump is treasonous.
You see the word believe appearing many, many times.
And it appears not only because there is no hard evidence that he's been he's been presented as that he's a traitor, that he's committed treason, that he received favors knowingly from the Russians and is returning those favors, all those definitions.
It's also because what we're experiencing now is very similar to the 50s, where emotion is being allowed to step over reason as the controlling factor.
And so when you're talking about emotion, you're talking about believing things, not having things proven to you, not evaluating facts objectively and coming to a conclusion.
But starting with a sense that something must be true and then searching for evidence to hold up that belief.
It's not that different from what some people do with their religion, where they ignore evidence of some things and seize upon evidence of other things when they find something that's inexplicable.
A child who couldn't walk suddenly is able to step out of his wheelchair.
The answer must be proof of their belief.
And that's what we're finding with Trump.
I like the way you say here that, you know, for so many people, and especially in that all important Washington, New York corridor there, that every poll that they read said she'd win.
Every article that they read said it, too, as did every person that they knew.
And I think this is a fun quote from someone saying, how could Nixon have possibly won?
Everyone I know voted for Humphrey.
But of course, yeah, it's a pretty big country out there.
Everybody in Tehran voted for Rouhani.
But everyone out in the countryside voted for Ahmadinejad, dude.
That's the way it happens sometimes.
The thing that's going on is that we are ignoring the fact that there are multiple threads to the so-called Russian story, and we're allowing bad people to tangle them up for us.
So one thread is, did the Russians, whether that's individuals or governments or corporations, try to play some role?
And I'm being vague in these terms because I want everyone to agree with me that the answer might be yes.
And, OK, that's fine.
That's one thread.
Second thread is, did any of that matter to the election?
Well, we're not even opening that box.
No one wants to even talk about whether whatever we think happened actually affected the election.
That's off the table for discussion.
The third thread is getting combined with those first two.
And the third thread is Trump had to know about it.
He had to be involved in it.
He was directly connected with it.
The word collusion is kind of sums that all up.
And what's happening is kind of scattered evidence of the first idea that there was some Russian entity involved has been tied to the conclusion that, therefore, Trump must be colluding on this, which then connects to the fourth independent thread.
Which is the Russians hold blackmail material.
Or if I want to sound like I work for MSNBC, I can say Kompromat, the Russian word, which now Rachel Maddow says more often than she says, I need more AA batteries.
And the thing is, they come pretty fast here, Scott.
So try to keep up with me.
I'm with you, man.
Those goosebumps will go down over over time.
Don't worry.
So the idea here is that these four independent threads are being twined together by the media, by politicians, and everything then proves that they're true.
So Trump gives a wishy washy statement on Russia somewhere along the line.
And that's obviously proof that he's been compromised, because otherwise he would give a more red blooded statement.
And you can see where it goes from there.
And this is exactly what McCarthy did is he picked up grains of truth and use them to as evidence of a greater truth that wasn't there.
He used the fact that people wanted to believe the Russians were going to take over the United States, that we use that belief against people to help them avoid reason and focus on emotion.
Once you get a population into that state, you can manipulate them in pretty much any way that you want to.
And this is where the word scary and the word fear comes back to me, because as I see an American population increasingly pushed into that state of jitteriness, the Russians are under every bed, including in the White House.
I know that they can be easily manipulated.
And it worries me who will emerge a little more clever than than than people like Rachel Maddow, who's just basically interested in making money for herself.
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Well, this is where I differ from you.
I'm not worried about it.
I mean, Americans will believe anything as long as it's not true.
And so I'm not exactly sure how this is that much different.
I mean, I guess usually it's the Iranians are making nukes.
The Iraqis are making nukes, whatever, some external enemy.
That's bad enough.
We've seen millions of people get killed there.
And I see your point that it's supposedly this internal threat.
But then also the target is the president himself that nearly half the voters voted for in the election.
And so and it's not the left, it's the right.
And so and they won't give in to anything.
They can't be pushed around on this.
They're not turning on him.
And so at the end of the day, when the Mueller investigation comes to nothing, what are they going to have left?
The whole thing is going to just the same thing.
What happened to McCarthy?
Right.
The whole thing.
Finally, he resigned in shame and went and drank himself to death.
The thing about to finish off McCarthy proper.
Basically, two things happened with McCarthy.
One is he attacked the army and claimed there were communists there.
And he was too stupid to realize that you don't attack the military in America.
Those are sacred things.
You can say anything you want about politicians, but you can't diss the troops.
So he made that mistake.
And others are smarter.
The other is that there were a handful of journalists led by a guy named Edward R. Murrow who stood up to McCarthy, who called bullshit, who called him out.
And we don't have any journalists like that anymore.
And if one were to emerge, he or she would be marginalized so quickly in the modern environment that they'd never get two breaths out onto the airwaves.
I guess I go back to something.
And I was the worst McCarthy we got.
I mean, already nobody takes her seriously except the people who take her seriously.
No matter how I is benign in the sense that she only is interested in making money for herself.
And right now, the rubes want to see chickens beheaded.
And so she's going to be had.
But I mean, her side of the argument, they don't have a real good demagogic leader like McCarthy to follow.
No, not yet.
Yeah.
But I remember something John Kiriakou told me.
And I know your listeners are very familiar with with whistleblower John Kiriakou, the guy from the CIA, the only person in the CIA to admit torture, at least the first.
And he told me something about his plan to survive prison.
And he said, you know, one of the things that the CIA taught him was that smart people know how to take advantage of divisive.
They know how to take advantage of chaos.
They don't see those as dangerous situations for themselves.
They see those as opportunities where they can step in and say, I'm the one who's going to solve this problem.
I'm the one who's going to stand between the flailing left and the flailing right and restore order or restore civility or restore what have you.
That's where a demagogue may see advantage.
It's not going to be Rachel Maddow, like I said.
And I don't know.
I can't put it.
I don't see anybody out there right now who seems to have the smarts to see this.
There's no Democrat in America with enough charisma.
I don't even think to challenge Trump in the next election.
I mean, who's going to take up this cudgel?
You know, Elizabeth Warren or Charles Schumer or something?
Yeah, no.
Nancy Pelosi?
No, I will now predict absent some kind of unpredictable global scale event.
I can't see Trump losing in 2020.
So I'm with you on that.
I mean, you're certainly right, though, about the the level of, you know, nonsense in the and I see the way, you know, on your Twitter recently attacking you as being unpatriotic for refusing to believe in that kind of thing.
But but who are they really persuading against you?
Who's not already picked their side, I guess?
Right.
We didn't go that far.
And there were some good reasons why it didn't happen.
What I'm saying is that we are in that McCarthy-like situation now and as such are seeing a why in the road ahead of us where a smart demagogue has the possibility to take advantage of our divisiveness as one could have done in the 50s and didn't.
And I'm calling that out.
I'm saying the why in the road is front in front of us.
We may have to make a decision to turn one way or the other.
And I'm putting that yellow sticky note in the book saying that's where we are right now.
I'm to go further than that is interesting.
What ifs?
And it's fun for these conversations.
Yeah, you're saying that, but you're just a Russian bot.
Well, you know, I wish I could find some way to profit off that.
Maddow has found her niche.
Chris Matthews, all these other people have found their niche.
I'd like to find a way that I could write a, you know, long form article in The New Yorker.
And those kind of things are those kind of articles will pay six figures, you know, that I could write a long form article basically just repeating over and over again.
Trump is a traitor because I know it to be so.
And, you know, he went to Russia once.
And, you know, that someone he knew knew someone who went to Russia once and things like that.
You know, the New York City real estate market, I live in New York, has been flooded with foreign money for decades, including Russian money.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a lot of people who needed to get money out of Russia.
And one way to do that then, as it is now, is to buy up real estate.
Real estate is a great investment, kids.
And the city flooded with Russian money.
The CNN Center building, by the way, the one that CNN has its headquarters in New York, was financed entirely by Russian money.
And the idea would be that you can then start to extrapolate off that and say, well, therefore, CNN must be in, you know, Putin's cockholster or something like that.
And that's what I worry about is that the dumbness of the American people has no bottom.
And right now, we're lucky that the pseudo demagogues who have emerged, and I'll include Donald Trump in that group, why not, aren't clever enough.
We breed dumb people, which means we breed dumb demagogues.
And that kind of saved our ass a couple of times in history.
But it's not really the strategy you want to bank on.
And so I'm marking a date in history and hoping that at some point in the future, everyone will be able to show me how wrong I was.
And I'll be very glad to be wrong.
I hope someday the Mueller investigation concludes in some kind of conclusive form.
My guess is it will not conclude anytime soon, because the value of it is to keep it going, to keep the balls in the air until something else happens.
But one thing that's certainly true is, you know, I think regardless of the Mueller investigation, if as far as he ever gets is prosecuting Manafort for trying to persuade Yanukovych to do what America wanted him to do in Ukraine and this kind of crap, that still the level of belief, the depth of belief on the part of the partisan Democrats here is so bad.
They're never coming back from this.
I mean, it's it really is crazy.
And I, you know, and although I like to point out here that the leftists often, at least, you know, the writers, they see right through this stuff, you know, and they all hate Trump for wide and varied reasons, and many of them good reasons.
But this whole Russia thing doesn't impress them.
And I'm sure you saw where some leftist Antifa type Facebook pages got cancelled in the name of the latest, you know, Facebook scare there.
And the leftists are really pissed off about this.
You know, Adam Johnson over at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is going, oh, yeah, who could have predicted that from now on all left wing politics are Russian plot.
In fact, it was the other Scott Horton who wrote this thing from Harper's Magazine, wrote this thing on Facebook saying, I'm hearing from European intelligence officials that there's a Russian plot to support leftists in the midterms to undermine the centrist establishment.
And I think, you know, a lot of people go, oh, no, but a lot of people go, man, screw you.
How dare you?
You know, and they push back against that.
So that's one thing I like about, you know, the real leftists is they're not partisan Democrats, and therefore they're just not falling for this stuff.
I hope so.
I hope there's truth in that.
I'm… And we go back to the idea of demagogues taking advantage.
And it's something that I'm writing about, working on right now is this, these calls from the left for corporate censorship.
And you've just pointed out one.
Facebook is in the process of purging so-called Russian influence, you know, mind control Facebook pages.
And they, quote, accidentally, unquote, also deleted some legitimate pages that were, that were arguing for dissent.
And everybody got all upset about how could this possibly happen without, of course, understanding that once you open the door to censorship, once you say we're going to eliminate anything that has to do with hate speech, something as amorphous as what is hate speech, you're never going to stop that.
And basically what you're seeing is people take, some people taking and trying to take advantage of the Russia paranoia to demand corporate censorship, and essentially do an end run around the First Amendment, because the First Amendment, as we all know famously, only covers the government, not private businesses.
And essentially turn the, make the First Amendment irrelevant because the government won't matter in terms of censorship because Facebook and Twitter and the newspapers and the media will be doing it for us.
We already know that the mainstream media censors, they are very selective in what they write, how they write, that they're already lost to us.
But we're talking about platforms here, Facebook, Twitter, whatever emerges alongside of them, that supposedly we're going, the internet itself, for example, that we're supposedly going to open up the media and allow micro publishers and everyone to get their thoughts out there.
Well, if those platforms are allowed to control things, then we don't need the First Amendment anymore.
It's going to be as archaic as the Third Amendment, right?
You can't quarter soldiers in the time of war in your homes.
Google has just announced that they are creating and ready to roll out a new version of their search engines, China specific, that will not produce search results for websites that the Chinese government doesn't want to see in the search results.
They are going to do the censoring for China.
And something like that is very much in our future.
Once upon a time, I have to dig it out, it was back for Fire Dog Lake.
I don't know if anybody remembers that website.
Shadowproof now.
Shadowproof now.
I wrote an article called Disappearing Edward Snowden.
And this was written before we were quite as aware of the connections between the NSA and Google and all these people.
And the idea that I posited was in the near future, instead of trying to discredit Edward Snowden or other whistleblowers, to simply make them disappear.
To work with Google, for example, so that the search results for Edward Snowden simply produce what the government wants you to see.
They simply don't show you results from websites that are wrong as far as the government is concerned.
You take that to the next step where various other platforms join in.
And basically, for most of the world, you wall off Edward Snowden.
You disappear him.
He disappears from the internet.
Yeah, if you want to type in a 300-letter URL into the dark web and find somebody's blog, you can probably do that.
But you're irrelevant at that point.
I'm no computer genius, but it seems to me like the open market worldwide is screaming for an open source application to replace Twitter and Facebook and, for that matter, Google.
Where you have the program on your computer.
They can all be networked together, whatever, whatever.
And there is no Zuckerberg.
There is no one to say that this or that is canceled or we're changing this or that algorithm.
It's just like having your own email receiver program or something.
There's nothing they can do.
Who's going to make money off that?
And that's the idea.
All these things cost money to create, to program, to maintain.
Google and Facebook and these guys are businesses.
They exist at the end of the day to make money.
And they are going to do what they need to do to make money.
We, as people, have amorphized them.
We have decided Google is good.
Starbucks is good.
Uber is bad.
We give these companies these personalities.
Oh, it's called honesty.
They donate 10 percent of their profits to God.
I don't know what happens to the money, but they say they do.
So I'm going to buy that.
We give these companies personalities, but that's just silliness.
We're forgetting that at the end of the day they exist simply to extract money from us.
And so some kind of people search engine or what have you is going to run right into the problem of who pays for it.
How does it get done?
You can look at what's happened to the open source software movement, and you can see that it hits certain limits, and that's where it just kind of stops.
Because you can't make money off it, and people need money to eat, and they need money.
They need the possibility of money to invest.
And so when Twitter goes away, there will be another platform or another one after that.
And you have to understand that the majority of people want it simple and easy.
I mean, we're going to geek out a little bit here, but look at things like Linux and Ubuntu, the free open source software.
I run Linux on my home computers.
But it's not as easy to use as other stuff sometimes.
You can't go to this.
My mom can't figure it out.
You can't go to the store, and you don't go to the store.
You can't go online and download something and click OK, and it works in every case.
And that's the problem.
Google is too easy.
It's too pervasive.
It's too good.
Twitter will be replaced, the same as MySpace disappeared and whatever.
But the idea that these are corporations and are controlled by corporations whose only motive is profit will not change.
And fascism, the true definition of fascism, children, is not whatever Trump is doing.
It is the collective running of the country by government, military, and corporations working together.
And don't forget that corporation leg of the tripod.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, I'm just ashamed that you would attack America this way, just like Russia attacked us by leaking these very true e-mails that revealed what a wonderful person and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was.
I'll tell you when I become unpatriotic, Scott.
Not Russia, because the weather sucks.
The day the day that Bermuda or the Bahamas or St. Lucia, you know, tries to recruit me to destroy America.
That's the day I'm going over to the other side.
Some play when the first tropical spies that try to put the hit on me are going to win.
All right, y'all get out there.
That's Peter Van Buren.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine with a history lesson for you here about Joseph McCarthy.
For you young and especially go and check this out, man.
You might not have learned in your government school about Joe McCarthy and and just how much that era has to do with, you know, the lessons that that era has for what we're going through right now.
Thank you, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, Peter Van Buren.
The books are We Meant Well and Hooper's War, a novel of post World War Two Japan.
Again, this article attack is called Donald Trump is not the Manchurian candidate.
But the establishment blob is looking a lot like the new McCarthyism.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at Libertarian Institute dot org.
Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com.
Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book.
Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
