Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the White's 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.
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, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, on the line, I've got Ken Silverstein.
He writes at WashingtonBabylon.com.
And he wrote The Secret World of Oil, which I have but have never read, but I should because what a great title for a book.
It sounds interesting.
And Private Warriors about all the American mercenaries and their industry.
And here he is writing at the New Republic of all places.
The title is Why a Coup is Unlikely in Venezuela.
Welcome back to the show, Ken.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I've got to say before we go any further, I am working on a book about Venezuela.
And if your listeners like what they hear, they should check out Washington Babylon, my website.
And we're raising money for a story about Marco Rubio, but that's actually going to be in the book.
A little part will be at our website.
And then Counterpunch, which I'm working in collaboration with, is raising money for the book itself.
So anyway, I just have to stress that because you know how hard it is to survive as a journalist these days if you do independent work.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
I'm all in favor of that, and I'm a big fan of your journalism, too.
I would not be surprised if you got a little bit of help from saying that on this show.
I hope so.
I hope so, too.
Thanks.
Yeah, man.
No problem.
Well, and you know what?
You just need to ring more out of these New Republic guys if you're going to be writing for them.
Why a Coup.
It's funny because they've been bad on every single war since World War I without any exceptions at all.
You're right, but however, there's a new editor-in-chief, Chris Lehman, who's a great journalist, a friend.
He just took over, and so the magazine is about to get a lot better.
So his purpose in life is not to sell empire to liberals.
Definitely not.
And he got the job as editor of the New Republic.
You don't say.
What an interesting curiosity.
Well, I think what happened was there were a few things.
The stars lined up.
Chris is a great guy.
He's a great editor.
And the New Republic was in a crisis because it was, how shall we say, largely, if not entirely, a piece of crap.
I wrote something for them a year or two ago, but it was a boring, bad magazine.
And somebody realized, gee, maybe we better do something different and bring in somebody smart and interesting who's going to bring in interesting writers.
And so they hired Chris.
So it's great news for everybody.
Cool.
Well, I'll keep my eyes a little bit wider open for things published there then.
I like this one.
I think you did a great job.
You went down to Venezuela and looked at things with your own eyeballs.
Is that right?
Yeah, and it's shocking what one discovers when you go to places that are extensively covered by the U.S. media.
I have to say, even I, having been a journalist for over 30 years and pretty damn cynical about the American press, was sort of shocked.
And it takes a lot to shock me by what I saw and how widely it converged with what's been reported.
To the extent that I said the media is either lying or stupid or blind.
It's beyond...
The only way to explain it is not, you know, well, it's lying.
I mean, there's just flat-out lying going on.
Now, why that would surprise me, don't ask.
But I'm not saying the situation down there is paradise.
But here's something you don't see a lot.
We hear about how the Venezuelan people are starving and nobody has anything to eat and the supermarkets are empty.
I mean, of course, nobody knows that there are U.S. sanctions that are punishing the population in a way that should bring international criminal charges against the Trump administration.
It's what they did to Iraq before overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
They starved the population, then they blamed the government, which, by the way, has a lot of problems, and I am not a fan of Maduro.
It's just that between him and the opposition, I'll take Maduro any day.
They starve the country, they starve the people, they blame the government, despite the fact that they're not letting any food in and are blocking the sale of oil and trying desperately to produce such a desperate situation.
And they've had some success in this, that the population finally says, enough is enough, we're tired.
The people there are exhausted.
It is a struggle.
And they're trying to prompt the military to overthrow the Maduro government.
They do this regularly when they want a government change.
This is the strategy.
It's what they did in Iraq.
Who knows what deals they cut.
I'm sure they went to some generals and intelligence officials and said, we'll give you a couple of million dollars in an offshore account in a home in Miami and just kill Maduro or overthrow him.
So, you know, hey, it's a smart strategy, right?
I mean, that's the way governments topple.
The problem the U.S. is having in Venezuela is, well, there are a few.
One is that despite the fact that the people are exhausted, they recognize that the opposition is total scum.
I'm not saying opposition supporters, because I understand why people are fed up.
Maduro is corrupt.
Let's not be stupid here.
Okay, just because the U.S. says he's corrupt doesn't mean that's all bullshit.
He is corrupt.
I am a huge fan of Hugo Chavez, his predecessor, who I had the privilege of meeting.
I am less a fan of Maduro.
Again, though, I want to emphasize, between Maduro corruption and the massive corruption, the criminal corruption, well, let's not say criminal because it's criminal on both sides.
But the corruption was worse under regimes previous to Chavez and the socialists who have ruled the country through democratic elections since 1999 when Chavez first won office.
You know, with his death, Maduro, the vice president, took over.
Anyway, the population knows that the opposition is scum.
They experienced, for hundreds of years, ruled by this white-skinned people over a mostly dark-skinned population.
The prior rulers and the people like Leopoldo Lopez and Guaido, this Trump's—I don't know what language I'm allowed to use in your program, so let's just call him Trump's trained puppy, you know, who the U.S. decided was president.
You know, just, well, we don't like Maduro, so we're just going to name our own president for Venezuela.
These people are scum.
They have no history of working for the Venezuelan people.
They're rich shitheads.
So, you know, I understand why people there are fed up and confused.
And, you know, not just confused.
Maduro is not an admirable leader.
I would prefer a younger socialist progressive to replace him.
That's what I want.
I want Maduro out at some point.
But the population has been put in a position where they're forced to choose between Maduro and scum of the earth.
You know, you read in the U.S. press.
I would urge your readers, anybody who doubts me, go to—just Google my name with my website, Washington Babylon, and Caracas Chronicles.
I wrote a bunch of stories, The New Republic, but also a few stories at Washington Babylon.
You know, I took pictures.
I went to the poor barrios, the poor neighborhoods.
I met people because that's what I do.
I don't sit around, you know, waiting for the president to talk to me, no matter who the president is, in what country, unless it's Hugo Chavez, who I did wait around for.
And I don't hang out in country clubs and in rich neighborhoods.
I spend my time in the barrio when I report from Latin America.
And poor people there are not starving.
I mean, look, I can only tell you what I saw in many barrios in Caracas.
I can't say what's happening outside of Caracas.
But the U.S. media portrayal of widespread starvation is bullshit.
I mean, I was in the barrios every month.
Poor Venezuelans, even lower middle class Venezuelans, because there is a strategy.
It's not just 99 percent poor and 1 percent scum rich.
I mean, there is a middle class and a lower middle class.
Even lower middle class people get a monthly food box.
You know, it's got rice and mayonnaise, which is popular, and corn flour to make arepas and various other items.
Every month, everybody gets it.
And I know that's true.
I mean, I saw it, but I also know many Venezuelans, and they have told me this about their own families.
They get a monthly box of food.
That's something poor people in this country, like, you know, poor people in Venezuela get treated with more dignity.
You can get on the metro, which is a pretty good metro system in Caracas, for like, okay, you know, when I say a dime or five cents, that still means something to poor Venezuelans.
But, like, I was in Puerto Rico earlier this year.
Public transportation is crap, and so you have to drive to your job, even if you're poor or, you know, spend hours on these minibuses.
But if you drive, you pay immense toll.
I'm writing about this soon, by the way, too, for another publication.
And I'd love to talk to you about that when that comes out in a few months.
But in Venezuela, the subways are packed, and it costs, I think it was the equivalent of a dime.
So for 20 cents, you can go to your job and get back home.
I'm not telling you that that's not an expense that's painful, but in most countries, in third world countries I've been to, in Latin American countries, there's no metro system.
You know, people get around with much greater difficulty, and they do not get a monthly box of food.
So all I can tell you is I went to Barrio's, I ate in people's homes.
I was fed in a woman's home.
I met her at a union meeting, and she said, hey, I want to show you around.
The meeting is a little slow, and I want you to see where I live.
So we walked for an hour through various poor neighborhoods until we got to her house.
She fed me a pile of – and this was food in her house.
This was not Potemkin Village stuff.
I mean, we never really talked about her views, other than I know she's a Chavista, pro Chavez.
I don't know what she thinks of Maduro, but I know she prefers the government to the opposition.
But she fed me pasta bolognese.
She fed me blood sausage, morcita.
And she fed me meat chopped – it was tripe, which is not my favorite, but it wasn't bad, and it was with a pile of rice.
I could barely walk when I left her house, and I bought us a few beers.
She and a friend of hers who had dinner with us.
And that's just – I haven't seen that reported anywhere else in the U.S. media.
And that's why if you go to Caracas Chronicles, you'll see that I took pictures in the homes of poor people in the barrios, and took pictures of the food, because I knew people would say that's not true.
And I'd say, really?
Look at the pictures.
If it's not true, then what?
Did I fake these pictures?
Did I make this up?
I was going to say – let me jump in here for a second, Ken.
Before my audience just decides that you're Walter Durante here, I want to point out – well, speaking of Russia.
I read a report by a Russian journalist there.
It was really a funny piece.
It was at the Saker's blog, and it was about how a cop – the title of it was about how the cop robbed him for his cell phone, or something like that.
But he said he'd gone all over the place, and he'd gone to the government grocery store where the shelves were stocked.
But he said, you know, then again, the government can do that at a loss and whatever, but how's the rest of the economy operating?
And he went and found the regular grocery stores – not government-owned, but the privately-owned grocery stores – and said that all of their shelves were full of stock, too.
Everything that you need.
He said that all the rumors about everybody going hungry were wrong, just as you're saying.
Essentially, as he put it, there's no state of emergency on the ground there in Caracas at all.
There are protests on one side of town, and there are protests on the other side of town.
But there's no revolution afoot.
There's no fall of King Louis in the air or any of these kind of things going on.
But I do want to ask you, though, about prices, about hyperinflation, not all of which is because of America's economic war.
But because of the expansion of the monetary base, and also all the people voting with their feet.
Apparently – I don't know who claims what and where these numbers come from – but they say that millions of Venezuelans have fled and just are economic refugees in other Latin American countries and in the United States now.
Well, there's absolutely some truth to that.
In fact, I'll tell you, the guy that owns the house I'm renting, he's a Venezuelan who fled just because he couldn't take care of his family, because the economy was just garbage.
He had to leave.
Let me tell you something, Scott.
I lived in Miami for a year and a half, because I was – and this is, like, I'm joking and not joking – an economic refugee.
I couldn't get a job in journalism.
I got a job in Miami, so I moved there for a year and a half.
And I point this out, because I'm a mess.
And yeah, I speak very good Spanish, so I can report from Venezuela and not be led around, which I never was.
I was always on my own.
In fact, I got into arguments with government people who did not like what I wrote, because I did point out that Maduro is corrupt and authoritarian, and he is far from perfect, and he's not my pick for leader of Venezuela.
But, I mean, I met – there are a ton of – I mean, I can believe the numbers are really high.
What they don't mention is that there are refugees from Colombia and other Latin American countries.
Venezuela accepted a ton of Colombians for a long time.
I mean, but people have voted with their feet, I would say partly because of U.S. strangulation.
This is not just dating back for months.
This is since Chavez took power in 1999.
It's just escalated now to a point where criminal charges should be brought against Trump, Rubio, John Bolton, and Elliott Abrams for starving the people.
I mean, that's got to be illegal under international law.
But we're talking about going back to 1999, not to 2019, January 2019.
But there's criticism there.
Well, let me stop you there just to reiterate, too, because you're kind of going off, but I want to make sure that people kind of take this point on its own terms and as important as it is.
Sanctions is such a soft sort of a euphemism for a blockade, whether a literal one, a real economic embargo, where the purpose of it, the declared purpose of it, is to put pressure on the regime, meaning make the civilian population miserable.
Be hungrier, sicker, die younger in order to pressure the government or to pressure them into pressuring their government into doing what America wants or ceasing to exist and allowing itself to be replaced by one that the American government would prefer.
We call that democracy, but it doesn't look like that to them.
And we see them do this over and over again in Iraq, in Cuba, and we're doing it right now in Yemen, only with airstrikes and a full naval blockade to go along with it.
It doesn't ever work.
It sure makes people miserable and sick and die young, but it never does achieve the regime change.
No, well, it does.
It typically does not.
And that's why you have to be careful, or I should say I would be careful.
I still believe the coup is not going to succeed, but there's one wildcard factor.
I mean, Marco Rubio is a lunatic.
He's also totally corrupt, which is going to be in the book that I want to again mention I'm writing, and if any of your listeners want to contribute, they can go to Counterpunch and check out the book.
This weekend they'll be advertising, showing how to donate to it or to my site, washingtonbabylon.com.
We have a Patreon to fund this.
But Rubio is off his rocker.
Bolton and Elliott Abrams are off their rockers.
And Donald Trump, I actually don't think Trump is stupid, and I think it's a mistake to write him off as stupid.
He is reckless and dangerous, but he's not dumb.
I think he's the best hope, actually, because he's a businessman, and he understands that this might not work out well for business.
And also my understanding is that even oil companies are split.
My understanding is that ExxonMobil is way more in the Trump overthrow camp, and Chevron is way smarter and are very dubious.
Now, I can't state that for certain, but that is what I've heard from very good sources, multiple sources.
And so the influence of their bondholders, Venezuelan bonds, hedge funds who have a stake here.
I mean, what I'm trying to get at is you can't say there's not going to be a coup, but I would say there's not going to be a change of regime without direct U.S. military involvement, like what happened in Iraq, because the sanctions aren't going to work.
And the bribing military officers to do what they want is not going to work.
The military, it's been under a socialist government since 1999, and there's a small clique of officers, not necessarily good, some of them are decent, some of them I find very troubling, but who are very, you know, well, A, they're loyal to the revolution, and B, they have a lot to lose, because some of them may be corrupt, too.
And it's a very tightly knit group around Maduro, who really is sort of a puppet for other people.
So that's not going to work.
The only thing that will work, I think, is the U.S. invasion.
I mean, shit, they just shut down the electric grid.
If the government had no support, they just put out the electric grid.
I mean, that was sabotage.
Rubio even stupidly said it was sabotage, and then it was like, oh, no, because it was obvious who would have done it.
He said, no, it wasn't.
It was just incompetence on the part of the government.
Well, you know, Greg Palast said it was because of the sanctions.
They need replacement parts, maintenance parts from Siemens in Germany, and the sanctions preclude that.
And so just like Iranian planes falling out of the sky, it's the sanctions and the blockade that, in effect, might as well be the CIA putting a shape charge at the bottom of some tower, right?
Yeah, well, that's actually true.
But I think there was beyond that.
I think there was sabotage.
And I do think from what I've heard from people in Venezuela, even government supporters, that once again, the world is not black and white.
There was some incompetence on the part of the government in getting things going.
It wasn't just missing parts from Siemens, which I haven't heard about.
But from what I've heard, it was not just missing parts.
It was sabotage.
There may have been amplified by the missing parts, but the government failed to respond in a timely and efficient manner as it often does.
Again, I must emphasize, I don't like the government, but I don't want to see it overthrown.
I would like a more progressive socialist to replace Maduro at some point down the road.
But I'm not an apologist for the government, but my God, the opposition, they are the worst.
I mean, we've seen this play out in other countries.
I mean, Gaddafi in Libya was not a nice guy.
I mean, you know, his son, you know, his family was pretty brutal.
Saddam was not a nice guy.
You know, Bashar Assad is not a nice guy.
But I think if they overthrow Assad or Maduro, you're going to have worse, way worse than what you had before.
Maduro is in a different category.
Those other countries are Middle Eastern, and that's a different world.
I mean, they're tribal societies.
Let me ask you this, though.
I mean, it doesn't seem like, and I don't want to make excuses for Trump here at all, but I just thought this anyway before he started making excuses in the Washington Post about it, that Bolton told him this was going to be easy.
As soon as this guy declares himself president, the government and the military are going to switch over to him because everybody hates Maduro.
But that just wasn't true, or it wasn't true enough, and certainly not with him having the blessing of the Yankee imperialist empire from the North at the time that he declared himself president in January.
It didn't work.
We already had that trombone.
They tried the stun at the border with the truck on fire and all that.
That didn't work.
They got Richard Branson, of all people, in on that one.
And then they failed again two weeks ago.
He announced himself president again and asked the military to rally around him, and all of that fell flat.
So that's already over, and I just got to say, going from my gut, that it doesn't seem like the next plan is to send Jay Salk to murder him or to invade with the Marines.
You're right, that's what it would take, but Trump doesn't want to do that, does he?
He's not going to do that.
Look, I don't think so.
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah, sure, it was a cakewalk overthrowing Saddam, and then things went to shit from there.
But I think you're right.
There's no question these morons and criminals, Bolton, Abrams, and Rubio, told him this is going to be a piece of cake.
This regime is going to topple.
It's going to go down like dominoes.
It's going to be a cakewalk.
And Trump, what I can't figure out, because Trump is not stupid.
That's the thing that people have to be careful of.
I don't like the guy.
I didn't vote for him.
I didn't vote at all, because participating in that shitshow election was just too degrading for me.
I mean, there's a limit to my masochism, so I just spat it out.
But he's not stupid.
What I can't quite figure out is how he's allowing – how did the neocons infiltrate his administration, not only in Venezuela?
I mean, it's a problem across the board.
You've got clowns – Rubio is too stupid to read off a teleprompter.
I mean, Bolton and Abrams should be rotting in prison cells.
I mean, we are talking about the three stooges here.
So how did these guys – how did the neocons – I mean, we do know everybody hates to use the term deep state.
You can call it whatever you want, but there is a foreign policy elite, a group of mandarins, that are very, very, very hard to dislodge.
And neocons are very, very powerful.
It's not unilateral.
I mean, there are opposing forces.
You know, it really is interesting in this case, isn't it, how – and this is a pretty small sort of slice of that foreign policy blob that really is about this.
It has so much to do with making sure to win Florida next time and these kind of politics.
This isn't the argument of the Council on Foreign Relations journal and foreignpolicy.com and all of the more centrist think tanks.
However, as soon as Donald Trump and John Bolton and Elliott Abrams and Marco Rubio announce that this is what they're doing, the entire American media establishment, the entire center rallies around it.
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting presented in their study, zero percent of major American media figures, including the editorial page of every single newspaper in this country and all of the cable television talk show hosts and stars, etc., were opposed to this.
In fact, the one exception they left out was Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Unbelievable.
No, it's astonishing, and it's sad and depressing, and it makes me – you know, I increasingly – I've toyed with getting out of journalism many, many times.
Unfortunately, it's the only thing I know how to do.
However, I have to supplement my income in various ways because journalism pays shit and because – I've worked at places like the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Harper's Magazine.
I mean, the LA Times, I guess, would be the most surprising.
I had a really cool editor who said, you know, you're a great investigator.
She put me on the National Investigative Unit, and then I quit over in a dispute four years later after having gone through multiple problems there.
I quit in a dispute about the way they edited a story of mine on the Middle East where they wouldn't allow me to say that Israel had stolen Palestinian land, which is just a fact, but that couldn't be printed in the LA Times.
In any case, it's a very sad state of affairs, but what you're pointing to is the way that – there's that saying, our divisions end at the water's edge.
So Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, it's wag the dog, and frequently it succeeds.
There are a lot of stupid people in this country.
I hate to say it.
There are a lot of smart people, and I'm actually optimistic in some ways, not about journalism.
Journalism is dead.
I mean, I'm still doing it because I'm stupid, but I'm optimistic about our future, which is really rare for me.
But I think people are getting smarter and smarter.
The wag the dog stuff doesn't work as effectively as it used to.
And other than the media, which is privileged, wealthy, elitist, Ivy League schools, upper-class schools for the most part, I mean, when you get to the top of journalism, you're looking at country club lifestyle.
I mean, these clueless boobs don't even recognize – they either are too stupid or corrupt to recognize what's going on right in front of their faces, which is that for most people in this country, they are hurting.
I mean, this country is – you drive – look, I live in a nice neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
It's a middle-class neighborhood.
It is not an upper-middle-class neighborhood.
It is – I love it.
I love being here because it's African-American, it's Caribbean, it's Ethiopian, and so I don't have to deal with official asshole Washington, D.C.
I barely interact with it.
I mean, I don't need to.
I've been here a long time.
I'm thinking of leaving the country, frankly.
I have for a long time.
I couldn't live within 1,000 miles of Washington, D.C.
I don't know how you do it.
I do it because – I've got a piece up in Washington, D.C., and it's posting at 2 o'clock about recently traveling to Ethiopia.
I travel a lot, and when I'm in my neighborhood, I hang out with – I don't hang out with the asshole D.C.
I spend a lot of time at a great Ethiopian shisha bar.
I hang out with people I like.
I'm like three miles – I'm in D.C., but I'm not in official D.C., and I don't interact with official D.C., even though there are – of course, I have friends in that world and sources in that world and people who I respect and admire, but for the most part, I don't really interact with it.
That's how I survive here.
Well, and the point is, too – the more important point, I think, Ken, is that people like them don't interact with people like you or your neighbors or any of the rest of us, either.
Man, all these CNN ladies telling each other how smart they are all day, they don't know nothing at all.
Well, you've nailed it, and that's where I was heading, but frankly, as you can tell, I get excited and distracted and lose my train of thought.
That's all right, man.
Believe me, I do it every day.
What I was trying to say is just that if you drive 30 minutes – I mean, if you drive 10 minutes from my house – I mean, if you drive five minutes, if you walk five minutes, you see a lot of abandoned houses.
I mean, it's a nice middle-class neighborhood for the most part, but if you drive 20 minutes, you see real poverty.
If you drive 40 minutes out into Maryland or parts of Virginia, I mean, you see – it's all over there, but these assholes sit around on their expense account at downtown Washington, D.C., expensive restaurants and tell each other how great they are.
They don't have a clue what's going on in the country.
They're idiots or corrupt.
I mean, I don't know, Scott.
It's one of the great mysteries.
Noam Chomsky posed the question many years ago when writing so many great things, Manufacturing Consent, with Ed Herman.
I think he wrote that one with Herman.
Yeah, yeah.
But in any case, I mean, it's a lifelong mystery.
Are these people stupid or are they corrupt?
I mean, it's – Definitely both.
Yeah, definitely both.
And this is one of the things that is kind of fascinating to me.
I think I figured out, it must have been 2008 or something, I started – and I don't want to pick a fight with everybody, really, but I do think that essentially everybody is a truther.
That everybody argues inductively about everything.
Everybody believes whatever the hell they want, and everybody hates whoever they feel like, and they don't have to change their mind ever.
And people live in a complete other world.
I mean, the world where Donald Trump is a secret Russian spy is the same world where Barack Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim, and the same world where what we're going to do is we're going to send the Marine Corps to Fallujah to make these people free, or whatever it is.
All day long, I'll tell you one, where – and I don't have a dog in this fight, and I'm not fighting about it, but the point is about – the meta point about the fight is every day in media are doctors and more elite media people just savaging people who don't believe in vaccines.
But they never ask the question of, why don't you trust me, man?
I'm a scientist.
I'm telling you.
But people go, uh-uh, and they don't trust it.
Why not?
It's because they know that everything is corrupt.
They know that everybody's incentive is not what it's supposed to be, and that if you would make money selling me a vaccine full of poison, you would.
And if the same people who told me that the moon orbits the earth are the same people who told me we had to go save the world from Saddam Hussein, then why should I believe anything that they say at all?
And that's where people are now.
They're lost in the dark, but why?
Because all their elitist leaders who are in charge of everything are so corrupt and so dishonest that nobody knows anything to believe in anymore.
So then any jackass with conviction, whether John Bolton or some kook in the media or whoever it is, who says this is the way it is, people glom right onto it.
Rachel Maddow is a great example.
Matt Taibbi's new book has Matt Allen Hannity as one of the same people running this charade on everyone else.
Right.
I totally agree with you.
And it makes it very hard to assess any information because there is so much.
I hate to use the term because it's a Trump term.
There's so much fake news, but there is fake news.
And that's why Trump gets trashed with that, because people don't trust the media.
But that, and I have to bring this to a close.
I think I've probably gone on too long, but I got to run.
I hate to do this to you.
And we're way off Venezuela, but I'm having fun talking with you.
I do just want to say I am optimistic because people are fed up, because people no longer believe the lies.
Donald Trump is not the cause of the problems facing this country.
He's a symptom.
People were desperate.
Bernie was blocked and Trump became the only option to the old order, the corrupt old order of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
So that's, I think, why Trump got elected.
Absolutely.
I mean, in fact, look, you couldn't have written it as a TV show script any other way.
We were told years in advance that our choice was going to be either Bill Clinton's wife or George Bush's brother.
And that was going to be it.
We already knew it.
It was preordained.
And the fact that Trump saw the hole in the market there, that he could probably maybe beat them both if the both was what he was running against, that was smart.
It only took Roger Stone to figure it out, you know?
Nobody too bright.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so, but people are fed up.
And I think our leaders are in for a very, very rude shock.
I don't know how it's going to play out, but the political system is rigged to the point that it's virtually impossible to do anything.
I mean, except you do end up with people like AOC, who I still have some issues with.
But I mean, let's face it, her or Joe Crowley, I'll take AOC.
I really admire Omar, Representative Omar.
There are people getting in who are better.
I think it's going to end up with a lot of bricks being thrown through store windows.
I mean, I think we're in such a state.
I'm not urging that, although I would say that if it comes to that, I will be throwing bricks.
Well, one more thing I want to throw in here, because this keeps coming up, and so many of my friends and interviewees are leftists, but you know, I'm a libertarian, and I think it's really important for people, from my point of view, to listen closely to what is going on around here, where people are moving so much further to the left and further to the right, because the centrist neoliberals have absolutely failed.
But for us libertarians, this ought to be our place in the market, to say, no, freedom is what we all have in common, and freedom, if limiting power and enhancing individual liberty for everyone is our political ideal, then that should be the real moderate center that we can all support, rather than kind of neoliberalism, which is really sort of third-way fascism, right?
It's just democratic fascism, in a sense, this corrupt empire we have now.
So, no wonder everyone hates it.
But it's a real crisis of which way we're going to go now.
And you say you like AOC.
Just as much as you like her, there's a lot of people reacting so harshly the opposite direction, where it's almost the symptom of the same thing, where everybody needs to stop reacting and start thinking and compromising about some of this stuff.
Not in a John McCain, Hillary Clinton way, but in more of a Ron Paul way.
Like, hey, I'll stop doing this if you'll stop doing that.
If I can say, in more of a Ken Silverstein, Scott Horton way, because you and I don't agree on everything, but we recognize that the country is in a crisis.
We want a better country.
We're not empowered to do much, because voices pissing in the wind sometimes is what it feels like.
But I do feel like we have a bigger audience, people like you and I. And you and I aren't going to agree on everything, but we respect each other's opinions, and we're willing to engage and to talk and to have an intelligent conversation, and not to scream and shout like those idiots Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity.
And there's so many good right-wingers, too.
I mean, if you read Daniel Larrison and all the guys over at the American Conservative Magazine.
I read lots of conservatives.
I'm on the left, but hey, it's like they say about – I always used to hear when I was a kid some of my best friends are Jews.
That's what Jew haters would always say.
Hey, some of my best friends are conservatives, and that's the truth.
I mean, I find it – I don't want to be in a bubble, whether it's a Hannity bubble or a Wolf Blitzer bubble or a Rachel Maddow bubble.
I like my ideas to be challenged.
It's like playing tennis, Scott.
If you play with people inferior to you or people who play at your level, you get worse or you just stay the same.
I want to get smarter.
I want to hear opposing points of view.
It's what makes life interesting.
One more thing on sports there, too, is if you've ever played any sport, then you know of people of all different descriptions from you who are better than you, and so you have to respect that.
Simple as that.
There's every kind of human in the world.
You can find at least many of them who are better than me at skateboarding, and that is the real measure of a man, is it not?
Once you realize that, people who are better people than you disagree with you, then that's a new beginning of wisdom, too.
You're right.
Hey, love talking to you.
Thanks, Ken.
Hey, thank you so much.
All right, guys, check out Ken Silverstein.
He's at Washington Babylon.
Like he said, he's got a new book project.
You can read about that at Counterpunch also.
And check out this great article at the New Republic.
Why a coup is unlikely in Venezuela.
It's from back on March 5th, 2019.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
