All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Okay guys, on the line, I've got Peter Van Buren again.
He wrote We Meant Well about Iraq War II, Ghosts of Tom Joad, and of course Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan, and he writes regularly at the American Conservative Magazine in his own blog, wementwell.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Always a pleasure to be with you, Scott.
Yeah, happy to have you here.
So Rushgate II at the American Conservative Magazine, Rushgate II, Return of the Low-Intelligence Zombies, and then there's a big picture of ugly American trader John Brennan, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, which they renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but he's still a trader.
And he says that Russia owns Donald Trump, President Trump, lock, stock, barrel.
The Mueller report said no, but I guess it's still true anyway, is that right?
You know, it's hard to keep up with these things, and I'm glad to provide something of a niche service here, kind of letting folks keep up with the latest thing about to destroy the republic.
But, oh my gosh, almost, gosh, a week ago, maybe 10 days, someone from the Czar of Election Securities Office, and it is a nice touch that we call them czars.
I like that too.
Briefed someone on the House Intelligence Committee, and supposedly in some format that briefing announced that not only were the Russians once again deeply interfering in the election, but that they were interfering on the side of Donald Trump to get him reelected.
Prior to that, though they leaked concurrently, the same czar, she actually is a woman, so it'd be a czarina.
Apparently briefed the Bernie Sanders campaign that the Russians were intervening in the primaries on Bernie's side, and both of these stories leaked nearly simultaneously.
The first one, the Russians love Trump story, went to the New York Times, and the Russians love Bernie story went to the Washington Post, and they came out on the same day, even though they were leaked by Adam Schiff separately.
The sum total, of course, is that we're getting the band back together.
2016, where the election was corrupted by the Russians, now it's corruptomania, because the Russians are not only going to get Donald Trump reelected, they're going to make sure that Bernie is his opponent, so that it's an even easier fight, I guess, or it could be that Putin wants to actually have Bernie run, because Bernie will beat Trump.
A lot of surveys say that, and Bernie, of course, is a lifetime communist, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and things like that.
I wonder if there's a pee tape from that time.
Does it matter that the Soviet communist regime disappeared 30 years ago?
I guess not, right?
No, no, no, no, because we just basically changed the name.
It's just like a company's rebrand.
They go from being Horton & Sons to Exco Austin, or something, and it's the same thing.
The bottom line is that the intelligence community, in this case, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sent up the bat signal to everyone that we're going to be talking about the Russians intervening, and they're intervening everywhere on both sides, all sides now, this time around, and you're left to sort that out.
Now, unfortunately, the whole thing was essentially debunked in real time.
Jake Tapper, who has got the words Deep State tattooed in 17 languages on his buttocks, actually was one of the first people to come out and say, I don't think this is true.
My sources indicate that the briefer did not actually say these things in those words.
The briefer said that the Russians are intervening, and they do like Trump, but they're not intervening to help Trump.
Then it came out that when pressed, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had no actual hard evidence to show the House Intelligence Committee, no signals, intercepts, no wiretaps, no computer bugs, no anything, nothing to actually demonstrate the Russians were involved, and so there were no details on this, or Bernie.
Essentially, the whole thing fell apart in real time.
It got another gasp when the mainstream media tried to twist the firing of the Director of National Intelligence to be related to all this, when in fact they were two separate events that occurred in different places in time.
The leaks were timed to after the firing so that the events that took place before the firing appeared to occur in real time with the firing, when in fact they occurred almost a month before the firing.
It's all a bunch of garbage, and it's gone.
It's just simply the bat signal saying, we're going to do this again in this election if you, the American people, are willing to bite one more time at this apple, and that's what John Brennan crawled out of his cellar to do this week, was to try to see if his scowling face could frighten enough people into believing a load of debunked crap one more time.
Which he did.
He went right on TV and said, oh my god, we know that this is all true.
And this is the thing that we should really focus on here in the very first part, is that when these stories came out in the New York Times and the Washington Post last week, TV went completely nuts.
As you say, for whatever reason, Tapper got this right.
But the rest of them, oh my god, see?
It's just like I told you.
Yep.
And it ignores, of course, the fact that we spent three years answering these questions using the full resources of the American government and American intelligence committee.
And the result was that the Russians bought some Facebook ads.
No one demonstrated in any way, A, a direct connection to the Russian government.
But even if we agree to disagree about that, no one ever showed any evidence other than the insistent belief that it must be true, that any of these ads played any role in the election itself, that they influenced a single vote.
Hey, and listen, you know what?
Never even mind the chip on your shoulder.
You just couldn't overstate that.
I mean, there's an article by Philip Bump in the Washington Post explaining how there is nothing to this story about the Facebook ads.
Nothing.
And if you bought it, you're wrong and maybe really dumb.
It's why my house is full of penal implants and baldness cures and why I have 27 mortgages on my house, because I actually believe every ad that comes across my Facebook feed.
Yeah, the baldness cures.
You need to cut me in on some of that.
Well, I've got lots of them because I purchased each one as it served up to me in the ads.
So you are going to be voting for Bernie then?
The Russians have passed you your marching orders, is that how it goes?
It's actually kind of interesting.
I don't know the answer to this.
See, we can blame Twitter.
See, Russia got you kicked off of Twitter so that you'd be on Facebook, so you'd be more susceptible to their Facebook ads.
It really all falls together, doesn't it?
It's very interesting.
I live in New York City and obviously all this stuff is geolocated and I am being intimidated with Bloomberg ads.
Now, it may just be that he's just dumping ads everywhere all the time.
But it's actually, it's interesting, the most predominant political advertising that's coming across my Facebook is for Bloomberg.
And there's quite a bit on the local TV as well.
I think he's making a play for the delegates.
New York runs its Democratic primary late, but I think he's making a big play here.
But that's neither here nor there.
Has he influenced you very much with these ads?
Wait, do I have to read them?
Am I supposed to look at them?
No, you don't have to.
Oh, okay.
Well, then I'll say, no, not really.
See, I mean, that really is the thing, right, is people are going to decide about Mike Bloomberg based on a lot of things.
I guess, you know, $500 million worth of ads will move a margin a little bit.
You know what?
And depending on who you are, too.
I mean, part of Mike Bloomberg's problem, right, is that he's really ugly.
If he wasn't, you know, that money might really go a lot further.
But he's sort of a guy who couldn't possibly be president.
Yeah, I mean, maybe he could have thrown, you know, 200 bucks at Botox or something.
The important point here is that the deep state, if you will, is trying once again to play in the election.
And that is the most important takeaway.
It's not the question of whether they're good at it or effective or what have you.
Those are secondary questions.
I think in a country like ours, where we try to cosplay democracy, we have to be very concerned that the intelligence community is signaling they want to play again.
And given what we know and what we continue to learn about how it went last time, that should be scary.
Because the thing that kind of saved us last time from them determining who the president should be was their own clumsiness.
Their crazy TV movie stunts with minor Trump campaign people like Papandopoulos and Carter Page.
And the fact that when they decided to lie to the FISA court, they basically just put sticky notes over a footnote and photocopied the document to make the footnote go away.
You know, this wasn't particularly sophisticated stuff that they did.
And their clumsiness and their sort of blindness to the obvious made their work very ineffectual.
Plus, you know, whatever happened between Comey and Hillary and all that good stuff.
But the fact that they just weren't good at it should not be what we're pleased about.
The same thing this round.
This was obviously a very amateurish shot across the bow about the Russians being in the thing.
But again, as you pointed out, the ridiculous one voice that the media rose with to announce Putin's back and the way that the usual suspects popped up on TV like wet mushrooms, you know, working the talking points and all that.
The way that that whole thing just clicked into gear is what's of concern.
And if there are efforts that are going on that are more sophisticated, that we haven't sussed out yet, that's a worry.
And if the people who are doing this prove to be sentient and learn from mistakes as they go along, that's a bad thing.
That's a scary thing.
And of course, underestimating the stupidity of the American people is never a good move either.
The idea is they're back and they're playing in the election again.
And that alone is enough for concern.
And that's why I raised the Russiagate thing, even though it was a kind of a clumsy effort.
Yeah.
Well, I think you're right.
Yeah.
It's definitely not over yet.
It's going to stay like this from now on.
And you know, one of the things that's important about this is the briefing itself is just the excuse to leak it, right?
They brief Sanders, they brief Trump supposedly, and then they get to leak that, hey, we brief them about this.
And not only is it true, but they know it's true and all this kind of thing.
But that's just the setup, right?
Like these guys would be crazy to even take briefings from the FBI and counterintelligence division at this point anymore, because it's all just, oh, I get it.
You're J. Edgar Hoover here to set me up.
You know?
Well, that's what happens.
And you'll notice it in another way as well.
The idea is somebody has to throw the ball first.
And it can be a briefer like this that throws the ball first, so Adam Schiff can leak it to the New York Times, so the New York Times can splash it in front of all the secondary media and it goes off and spin like that.
But it works other ways too.
One of the most common methods we've seen is where one of the major newspapers keys up something, tees up something from a source, a source reports, and then they can just write anything they want.
A source reports Scott Horton has a reptilian tail.
Well, in this one, it was in the Washington Post, the Bernie one, it was people familiar with the matter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's it.
Sometimes they show a sense of humor by saying things, people familiar with the matter, people familiar with the president's thinking on the issue.
You know, who are, no one knows, doesn't matter.
It's just an excuse to get it there.
The other way that they like to do it is to put it out through a secondary media outlet, you know, like TMZ, and then the New York Times can pick it up.
In other words, if something stinks so bad that the Times passes on it, and I'm thinking back, for example, to the efforts to get the old Christopher Steele dossier out into the media.
The New York Times had it, Washington Post had it, and they knew it stunk, and there was no way they wanted to be tagged with being the source that first put that out there.
So they shopped it around until they found somebody at BuzzFeed who was willing to go first.
And that's another technique.
And once it's out there, well then, you know, sort of we're obligated to report on it.
You get these, used to get these back in the old days, like when they were going to out some celebrity, like when being gay was a bad thing.
And you know, the mainstream media would never want to be the first one to run the headline Liberace is gay.
So they let a tabloid run it, or a magazine, movie magazine run it, and then the New York Times could claim, well, we're not reporting this, we're reporting on the story about this.
And they'd have some ground cover there.
So there's a number of these techniques, but I think what you want to watch for is how quickly everyone picks up how similar the stories are, how the stories get more similar.
If you're interested in this, maybe as a media studies person, subscribe to a bunch of journalists on Twitter, or follow a bunch of journalists on Twitter.
And sometimes you can sort of see them almost working it out in real time.
One of them will say, they don't actually say they're working it out, but one of them will say, I think the talking point is obviously blah, blah, blah, and then someone else will come in and say, well, I'm not sure about that.
And over the course of a dozen tweets, something will evolve, and don't be surprised when that's what you see in print the next day.
It's not a good system.
It's a system that is designed to not inform, but to manipulate.
Yep.
Well, and we got to get back to this, too.
I mean, just speaking for myself, I know of no indication that the Russians ever did anything or had any intention to intervene in America, in our election process in any way at all, from 2015, 16 through right now.
The whole thing is a bunch of crap, right?
Yes, I agree.
What am I missing?
You're not missing anything.
It's like the Iran nuclear program.
Not only is there no evidence, there is no indication that they are militarizing this program.
You guys are just lying.
Same thing here.
See, the thing that's interesting, and the kind of proof of it, if you will, is a couple fold.
One is how the main theme of what the Russians are doing is shifting, and again, it's shifting in real time.
The last Democratic debate seemed like where they were trying it out, and that is after the confusion that was caused by claiming that the Russians were intervening for Trump and Bernie Sanders, and nobody could actually figure out what that meant, after that, the shift on the stage was visible, was the Russians actually simply want to create chaos.
So discord.
Those type of words.
If you go and do a little Googling for the word chaos in Russians, you'll see all sorts of articles that use those terms, and this is where it shifted, because you can't prove chaos.
Eventually, some Americans, not many, but a few will say things like what you've done, which is, so where is the evidence that Russia has done anything, and where is the evidence that if someone with a Russian surname bought a Facebook ad, that that ad actually had any actual influence on voters?
It changed any votes.
And that gets sticky, because the answer is they don't have any of that, and the same time around now with, well, can you prove that they're intervening for Bernie?
Well, no.
So if the goal of Russia is this ambiguous concept of chaos and sowing discord, no proof possible.
It becomes so- Well, and it's non-falsifiable, too, right?
Like, hey, look at all the chaos.
And in fact, they deliberately, back, there are all these accusations against Trump.
We focus on all the lies about Carter Page and Michael Cohen going to Prague and all this kind of thing.
But what about the million little drips and leaks about, you know, it was the Russians that made the black people upset about what had happened to Mike Brown.
They were perfectly happy in their position before the Russians came and told them that black lives matter and that they ought to be sick and tired of the cops murdering them all the time.
And on and on.
There's, you know, 20 of them, 50 of them.
Whatever the dissension is, whatever you're upset about, it's because the Russians told you to be.
Otherwise, you'd be just fine.
Yep.
And this concept of sowing chaos and discord is somehow a national state goal of Russia and has some point and purpose to it.
And just kind of, you know, take our word for all this.
It becomes vaguer and vaguer.
And you're left with this sense that you're angry about things or upset about things.
But it gets harder to sort of pinpoint precisely what you're upset about.
I know we may talk about the coronavirus here in a little bit.
But I mean, the main meme that's being pushed through the media right now is Trump has failed to prepare us.
And nobody really kind of gets to the next steps in too many details about which failures specifically are we talking about?
What wasn't done that should have been done?
You know, it kind of tails off very quickly there.
But left with this odd sense of everything's wrong and things are a problem and I'm upset about stuff.
And yeah, I mean, it's the Russians for sure.
I know that.
But the vaguer it gets, and I think that's one of the lessons that was learned by the deep state in 2016, is they thought by being specific.
Here's a dossier.
Here's a pee tape.
Here's Carter Page saying these things on this date.
They thought by being specific, they were going to be convincing to the American public.
But in fact, they put facts out there that people could look into, that they could investigate and they could come to a conclusion about that was, for example, Michael Cohen never met the Russians in Prague.
That simply did not happen.
And once that happens, your facts get disproved and you don't build credibility.
You lose credibility.
So the vaguer the accusations are, the vaguer the evidence is, the harder it is to disprove and you fall back on these kind of appeals to experts.
In other words, well, if our intelligence services say it's true, who are we to say that isn't correct?
Well, especially on the very bottom line here about who liberated or stole, depending on your point of view, those DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.
And this is something that I'm sure you're familiar with Eric Wemple at the Washington Post.
He's kind of their ombudsman media watchdog type guy.
And he spent all January belatedly doing a comeuppance about all those who had been the worst on Russiagate.
Hey, CNN, you kept claiming this, but where's the beef now?
And Rachel Maddow this and the Washington Post, in fact, that he wrote some pretty good stuff.
And I wrote a thing to him saying, you know, I'd really like you to get to the bottom of how it is that supposedly the government is so sure that this hack was done by the Russians in the first place.
Because I mentioned that Philip Bump article.
There's this article by Philip Bump where he completely destroys the Facebook ads narrative.
Just totally nukes it.
But then at the end it says, but that doesn't really matter because, of course, as everybody knows, the real meat here is that the Russians hacked the DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.
And everybody knows that because the CIA assures us that they believe it.
What?
And that's how the article ends.
And I say, hey, look, after all we've been through, the doubters are the conspiracy theorists and the conspiracy theorists are still supposed to just be taken at face value here.
Why don't you show me that the Russians hacked that goddamn server?
And then so he actually said, you know what, I really want to look into that more and whatever.
I don't know if he'll be able to follow up.
And you can't nail it down.
So who knows if he'll be able to really write a story about it.
But that's really important that even to this day, any story that you read that refers to Russian intervention, if they even bother to get into the details at all and talk about that hack, they will simply remind you that we know this is true because the government says so.
And that's it.
They have demonstrated this to exactly no one.
As Matt Taibbi was making fun of this, I quit Twitter, but I still troll Matt Taibbi's and Aaron Maté's page sometimes.
As we all should.
As we all should.
And he's saying, oh, yeah, no, it was the hack was signed Iron Felix, which is just like the FBI hacking into Vladimir Putin's party computer and signing it J. Edgar Hoover.
Yeah, sure.
I bet that's exactly how it happened then, huh?
Give me a break.
And yet this this is what makes keeping current with the news, you know, a full time job, because you have to constantly keep asking yourself, well, where does that information come from?
How?
How?
If we don't know how they do know it, how would they know that if they have no physical access to the server to look for malicious code or malicious hardware, how would they know the Russians were the ones there?
Well, the only the next thing would be that they have some comprehensive logs of traffic back and forth that they've been able to sort through the maze of DNS jumps that any intelligence service or even a decent hacker would would use, you know, and that would be a paper trail, And there's and there's, in fact, strong indications that that is not the case because of the reality winner document shows that the NSA was essentially going along with the FBI and the CIA said we only give it medium confidence when they're the ones who should be able to know for a fact by rewinding the Internet and looking at where those packets went and whose DNS, whatever.
Like you just said, if anybody knows it's them and they only gave it a yellow light, not a green.
And that's important because you have to understand how different organizations acquire information.
The CIA, for all the stuff you see in movies, their thing is human sources, people telling their secrets to us, whereas the NSA is all about technology.
And if the NSA who would you go to, you go to the question of, well, how do we know the Russians did it?
Well, we're looking at a paper trail, we're looking for a paper trail, electronic trail, if you will.
Well, who does electronic trails?
That's not the CIA.
The CIA is over there dangling prostitutes in front of Russian agents.
No, that's the NSA.
They're the ones who do electronic trails and they are not saying they think this is what happened.
So that kind of is a clue is who would have that information?
Which part of the government would be responsible for that specific information and what do they have to say about that?
I'm well aware the CIA has technical people as well, but it's nothing compared to what the NSA does.
And if the CIA had technical, had an e-trail, they would probably wave their NSA guys friends over at lunch and show it to them to bring them from medium confidence to high confidence.
That's how that's worked.
Those confidence levels are not done like the Academy Award voting in secret.
They're discussed and negotiated and each side tries to persuade the other side.
You know, it can't be medium confidence.
Look what we've got.
Things like that.
So who has the information?
What information realistically would be necessary to know that?
You have to start asking all these questions.
And in the case of this, the Russian thing, we don't really have squat.
Everything flows from that piece of data, right, that the Russians did this.
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You know what, so I guess as long as we're both just being as politically incorrect we can be on this issue, wouldn't it be heroic for Vladimir Putin to leak those DNC emails?
Isn't that a liberation?
And didn't every single American have a right to read every dot and cross in that entire thing?
And the Podesta campaign stuff too.
And he says she's supposed to be a public servant?
This stuff gets all kind of garbled up because if someone, well, someone had a couple years ago had some scrappets of Donald Trump's old taxes, which they immediately gave illegally to the New York Times.
And it became, you know, they became another patriot of the resistance.
Who gives what, when, to whom is what separates the patriotic whistleblower from the traitor.
You know, these terms are all extremely flexible.
You only have to look at the life case of Julian Assange, who went, it flowed through the media from patriot to traitor over the course of two administrations based on what information he was putting out that embarrassed which president.
Yeah.
Same guy.
Same thing.
Yeah.
I mean, here's, here's my example, though, is in 2014, of course, as everyone knows, America did coup d'etat in Kiev, Ukraine, used, you know, essentially Nazi militias to do a street putsch and overthrow the elected government there.
And one of the reasons that we saw that coming, which we had seen that coming really since November, but 2013.
But one of the reasons we really knew was because quite apparently, I don't think anyone ever contradicted this.
There's every reason to think this.
And as far as I know, no reason to think otherwise.
The Russians intercepted and posted on YouTube audio of Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, which you helped me clarify is essentially the ambassador to the EU, on the phone with the ambassador to Ukraine plotting the coup.
And they leaked it online.
And I don't see the sin in that whatsoever.
That's good journalism.
And whatever Russian spies intercepted that call and posted Robert Kagan's wife plotting that coup.
I don't know if they're a hero.
I certainly don't have a problem with that.
I don't know why the DNC leak is any different.
Russia, if you're listening, there are still 30,000 missing emails that Hillary Clinton claimed were all just private.
She says, oh, well, that's me emailing back and forth with my husband, Bill, about I'm going to be late coming home from yoga practice.
That's funny, because here's Bill twice on the record saying he's only emailed twice in his life on somebody else's account.
Yeah.
These are interesting questions.
I have a parallel question, of course, which is the what how many years that Hillary Clinton was using an unsecured email server from foreign locations, including trips to Russia and China.
Of course, all of that stuff was intercepted.
It had to be.
I mean, you could intercept it.
I mean, you could have intercepted it with with a bunch of spare parts from the old radio shack.
I mean, it wasn't something that needed to be worked.
It was flowing through the air.
And so, of course, the Chinese and the Russians were aware at a very early point that she was doing this unsecured server thing.
So they have all those emails, and they've never really done anything publicly about that.
They've obviously benefited greatly from the intelligence and what they learned there.
The conduit is obviously shut down.
There's nothing to preserve.
They've cleaned up anything they wanted to clean up.
So I'm just curious why they didn't bother to do kind of do something with it.
I'm not sure exactly what, you know, the guess my guess would be the way these things work is.
Well, you know, the Americans said, well, if you do that, we're going to do this and we've got these documents or we've got, you know, then everybody just agreed, hey, better keep it.
You know, we got nothing really to gain from exposing it.
So, yeah, we'll just do this one.
The normal spy.
It's funny the projection.
Right.
I mean, for all their claims about Putin blackmailing Trump, if she had been elected and it was understood that the Russians have your 30,000 missing emails, which, of course, all are all about payoffs to the Clinton Foundation and that kind of massive blackmail material, of course.
Maybe they think she's still got a shot, which, by the way, I would be for I mean, I don't care.
I mean, what's he going to do?
Force her to abolish NATO or something?
Good.
Yeah.
I don't care.
Whatever they say is in Russia's interest means in the American people's interest, because it means not picking a fight with Russia unnecessarily.
Good.
Maybe she maybe they're holding them, you know, figuring she's still got a shot at this, you know, at the brokered convention.
God, if only that were true.
The undead Hillary will rise from the crowd and elevate over the stage, you know, and the Russians are sitting on all these emails figuring, hey, they're still worth something.
Well, yeah, when Chelsea runs, we'll have when Senator Chelsea Clinton is making her presidential run in a few years, she's she's keeping active.
CNN just featured her opining about the shortcomings of Trump's response to the coronavirus thing.
Well, let's let's jump into that in just one second.
But one more thing here about this whole Russiagate, too, is that.
As Matt Taibbi pointed out in his piece at Rolling Stone, when they came out with this what last Thursday against Trump, I think it was that Thursday night, Trump's numbers went up on Friday and Saturday.
Nobody cares.
And then they came out with this against Bernie on Friday.
And the next day, he cleaned everybody's clock in Nevada.
And there was no indication whatsoever that the story had depressed his numbers at all.
And, you know, if anything, maybe it probably motivated people to vote for him.
Because did you see that clip of the lady she's being interviewed by MSNBC?
And she said, well, I really like all of them, which I'm just facepalm.
She says, I really like all of them.
But I voted for Bernie because you guys at MSNBC said I can't.
You told me I have to hate him and I'm not allowed to support him.
Well, screw you.
You know, so I think there's probably we're already at that stage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tell me again about the Kremlin sowing discord.
I mean, you'd have to be completely brain dead.
You'd have to be afraid of Corona beer, which apparently people are to fall for that.
Well, that's that's the bottom line here is is if people just simply stop believing this, then you disarm them.
You take it all away.
If you stop believing that the Russians want to do this, are doing it, are capable of doing it, blah, blah, blah.
If you just say, no, I just don't buy it anymore, then they got nothing on you.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So tell me what you think about, well, not just the virus, but the politics of the virus here breaking out.
Oh, well, I mean, I don't know what's going on in Austin, but I mean, I'm looking out the window right now.
There's buildings on fire, cars overturned.
It appears that humans are mutating in front of me.
Black people with guns.
Oh, no.
Black people with guns call the government.
Humans are mutating in front of me.
Dogs have been in New York here, have become partially sentient and are now occupying territory.
It's a crazy thing.
And this is all the Republicans fault.
Is that it?
We've run out of cheeseburgers.
I mean, it's just the situation is just about reaching apocalyptic state.
I have personally retrofitted my Honda Fit with jet turbo engines and a flamethrower so that I can wreak havoc across the wastelands.
Good luck out there, buddy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, don't worry.
But we'll finish the interview.
I'm on a higher floor.
The fires haven't reached this yet.
The thing about the coronavirus is that we've once again made it so we cannot talk intelligently about a subject that we probably should talk a lot intelligently about.
Basically, you know, in mid-January, the Chinese made public that they had this thing, this new virus, and it appeared to be something of great concern.
And nobody paid any attention to it here in the United States until literally two days ago, three days ago at the Democratic debate.
It was mentioned once by Bloomberg, basically mumbled something about, I saved America from 9-11 and I'll save it from the virus.
And that was it.
Nobody picked up on it.
None of the other candidates even mentioned it.
But today, which we're doing this interview about three days after that, you know, we're at the edge again.
It's apocalypse now time.
And it's all Donald Trump's fault.
And all these folks have come up with all these reasons to explain why a global virus is A, going to destroy America, B, take down Donald Trump at the same time, and C, could have been stopped if Trump had done, well, something, but we're not quite sure exactly what that was.
The whole thing has been grotesquely politicized almost overnight.
Now the reality is, is that this is something to be concerned about.
And it's something that with some relative, I'm not a doctor, but the doctors are very clear that some relatively simple things about washing your hands and considering some forms of social isolation are going to make a big difference.
Every virus follows a bell curve and we are at the beginning of that bell curve.
And so it's going to appear to get worse and then it'll get better.
But we're going to now overreact to this in every possible way.
And we're going to politicize every single step, gesture and things.
I mean, for example, it appears that some bonehead at Health and Human Services didn't distribute enough masks and a few people whose job it was to hand out hotel room keys to American evacuees coming back from Japan didn't wear masks.
Now the evacuees they were working with had not shown symptoms or tested positive.
They still haven't.
The people themselves don't have any symptoms of it.
It was a brief encounter.
They were handing out hotel keys.
They weren't like licking up blood spills off the floor.
But that's now become a whistleblower story in The Washington Post, which is treating it as an example of the wait for it chaos that is characterizing the Trump administration.
Are you saying that Vladimir Putin is behind this?
No, not yet.
I think we're blaming Chinese bio-warfare laboratories, but we'll get around to the Russians.
So Trump appoints, as every president does, his vice president to be in charge of the Blue Ribbon Committee who oversees this.
This is what vice presidents do.
They get appointed titular heads of things so they can look grim on TV and make statements so they can amass some B-roll for their own presidential ambitions.
This is what vice presidents do.
Vice President Biden does nothing but talk about these little ceremonial roles he did when he was with Obama.
That's his whole shtick at this point.
And we go from Pence being given this essentially ceremonial post to Mike Pence doesn't believe in science, so therefore the coronavirus response will be inefficient, world will end, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And a lot of it, for example, focuses on him not believing in science and creating the AIDS epidemic in Indiana.
I mean, this is what the headlines literally are saying.
And when you go back and read the articles from 2015 when this actually happened, before he was Satan, when he was just another dumb Midwestern governor, the reality has very little to do with any of this.
Basically, and it's worth talking about because it's being used in the media as an example, and it's an example of how the media is inducing panic based on misinformation.
You know, when Pence was governor, like in a lot of states, he had an opioid epidemic, and people were trying to press him to set up needle exchange programs because the people who were using needles were passing them around, and the needles were conveying all sorts of nasty stuff, including HIV.
And Pence, like every other Republican and certainly a lot of other governors, including Democrats, said, you know, needle exchanges just encourage drug use.
I don't support that.
And somebody brought up to him, this would have been in January of 2015, somebody brought up to him that in rural Scott County, Indiana, over the course of two months, 71 people got AIDS infection.
They appear to be intravenous illegal drug users.
Now, 71 is not a happy thing.
Nobody wants to see 71 people get HIV, but it's 71.
It's not 200 million.
And these are folks who are intravenous drug users.
Their lifespans were arguably already encumbered here.
Anyway, they pointed out to Mike Pence that this number was bigger than it should have been.
And if they had a needle exchange in Scott County, they would bring this number down.
And Pence said, I think, you know, you're right.
He changed his policy and allowed the needle exchange there and in four other counties.
Now, you could argue the takeaway here is a guy who started out with an ideological slash political position, changed it when confronted with science and information.
And he changed it in a way that appears to have bettered the lives of people.
That seems to be the way the story went.
You could also play it as this is a relatively small thing that happened that didn't really have much effect on life in general.
Or you could do what the mass media is doing, which is claiming Mike Pence doesn't believe in science.
He started an HIV epidemic and he's the wrong guy to run the corona response.
Or you could run the story of Mike Pence and any other vice president is in a ceremonial position.
And in fact, why don't why doesn't everyone know the name of Debra Briggs?
You know, Debra?
No.
Tell me she's the head of the CDC or.
No.
So so Debra Briggs is the person who's really in charge of the United States government's response to the corona virus problem.
She is the person that Pence chose to basically do the real work while he looks good on TV.
Dr. Briggs has been a doctor for over 40 years.
She did her main work as an immunologist for the U.S. military.
She worked at Walter Reed Hospital and she was appointed by Barack Obama to oversee U.S. global AIDS HIV efforts, which is the job she was doing until yesterday.
Which, by the way, let me go back.
I'm sorry, let me interrupt you and just go back to the needle exchange thing there.
I really didn't think that was where you were going with that story.
And I've always despised, you know, moralizing right wing Christians taking positions like that when, you know, I know a guy in high school, my science teacher was very much involved in what I think was an illegal kind of black market needle exchange because it was forbidden here for the same reason.
And people like him were going around passing out needles to drug addicts anyway.
And back then, AIDS will really kill you.
Not like now where they can keep you alive a lot longer anyway.
And so but yeah.
And then the thing was, is I was waiting for the part like, where's this story going where all these people die and then now you're playing down the number and then what's Pence reaction?
And then you say, yes.
So then Pence said, you guys are right.
And then legalized it and said that he'd been wrong and did the right thing after that.
You know what?
That's a pretty good end to that story.
You know, especially as you said, where there's still, you know, governors and legislatures in states all over this union that would forbid such a thing when it's purely a public health thing.
No one ever started becoming a drug addict because they had a free, clean needle.
That wasn't it.
You know, what am I going to do with this?
I've had to fill it up with drugs.
Exactly.
See, I can't smoke weed out of it.
I know.
I'll just shoot up.
That's the thing in a media environment or in a political environment where we actually do have some concern for the country.
The story is that Pence changed his policy based on new information that he put ideology aside to do the right thing.
That's the story.
And yet that gets buried in all this.
And, you know, what's cool about that, too, is we could build on that, right?
Maybe we could say to him, you know, because attitude follows behavior.
Yeah, there you go.
Remember that time that you recognized that addicts are real human beings and not bad people who are committing sins and deserve whatever they get, but are just patients with addiction and or HIV or Hep C type problems?
Well, let's build on that.
You're right about how human and innocent they all are.
It's that I didn't fly to Indiana and meet a source, you know, in a darkened parking garage to get that information.
All I had to do was put in a date range on my search through the New York Times archives, and I read those stories.
This is the thing.
This is not accidental.
This is not, well, the media is sloppy or, gosh, in the in the rush to get stories out, we sometimes make mistakes.
This is obviously part of a process of manipulation.
And the media is working in a coordinated fashion to convince us to be panicked and afraid.
It reminds me very much of the post 9-11 days when that seemed to be the only point of reading the news was to add another layer of fear and panic to things.
The idea that every story that Pence is incompetent isn't followed by, but holy crap, look at the woman that he's got doing the real legwork here.
No one in the world could be more qualified.
And Obama picked her.
Right.
That somehow, again, again, I didn't have to meet a source in a dark alley.
This is just in her bio on the State Department website.
Well, it's just like the BS what you mentioned a minute ago about how when the director of national intelligence was forced out, how they tried to make it look and they really pushed that he was forced out for telling the truth about Russian intervention right now when that's just not true.
They just they have their narrative.
They're determined to make you see it their way.
And what's at the end, the point is to not worry too much about facts and not basically to just keep you in a state of fear and panic that makes you manipulable.
Last time we had this national PTSD state after 9-11, we gleefully signed off on multiple wars and we applauded the president, George W.
Bush, taking away as many of our civil rights as he could get.
We held up Dick Cheney as the anti-hero we needed in our tough times.
And that's what fear does to you.
You've got boneheads down the street from me selling off their life savings because they're not sure why.
I mean, do they think all life on Earth is ending and the stocks are going to be, you know, worthless paper by next week?
I mean, do they really believe the zombie apocalypse is coming?
I mean, why are they?
Well, they believe everybody else believes it.
That's the thing, right?
I mean, that's what fear does.
That's what panic does.
Yeah.
I mean, speak it for myself.
I'm not really afraid of getting this virus, but I am concerned that the economy of Austin is going to shut down for a few weeks and that I better make sure I have enough toilet paper to get me through, you know?
Get some toilet paper.
That's perfectly OK.
You can never have too much.
But the idea that panic and fear are, I hate to say, weaponized, because everything is weaponized.
I hate to say it, but I mean, that that's what the takeaway from the coronavirus is.
It's not, hey, Americans, we're going to have to be slightly inconvenienced for a while and you may not be able to buy as much hand sanitizer at the store as you want and yadda yadda.
You know, no, none of that is the story.
The story is panic, fear.
It's all fallen apart.
This is every prepper's wet dream.
It's now time to go into the basement and start eating canned food for the next 25 years.
And, you know, we may get our hair must up a little bit, but as long as we bring attractive biological specimens into the mines with us for breeding purposes, we'll be OK.
The idea here is that that's what the story is.
Trump is incompetent.
We're all going to freaking die.
This is the same story.
It's the same story we've been hearing for three years.
Paul Krugman predicted global depression the day after Trump got elected.
All right, well, now, but here's where the rubber meets the road.
And speaking of your latest article here about the Democrats is I think that there's a real chance that there's going to be a crash here because there is a massive bubble.
And, you know, it's not like slow and steady and genuine growth, which, you know, as you say, that's not going away.
Even if the economy grinds to nearly a screeching halt for a month or two, we're not still not going to all drop dead and everything will be all right again after that, except that it's a big fake bubble again, just like in 2008, just like in the year 2000.
And so this virus is obviously bringing with it extreme deflationary pressures that could be enough to pop that bubble.
And I can see already I saw where in Japan and South Korea, they're printing money like mad trying to make up the gap by, you know, buying debt with new money.
I mean, this could be that's the kind of thing that could get us into a lot of trouble.
And that's what Trump is so mad about is he's afraid that the economy is going to crash before the election.
It's going to crash sooner or later, whether it's 2007 or 2008.
Right now, I'll leave to the listener.
But that seems to be the real problem that everybody's worried about.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, I noticed, too, they're like, oh, we're in correction territory now, guys.
Yeah, no, no, there's all sorts of wordplay that's important here, because when you're talking about stuff that was grossly overpriced, correcting its price and finding a new normal, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And that just depends on how artificially high those prices are when the correction comes.
Sure.
But the idea would be that.
Well, first of all, we need to remember that during the worst of the 2008, we looked at about a 30 percent average reduction in value on across Wall Street, and it took less than three years to gain most of that back.
So there's a lot of perspective that's necessary here.
Now, I understand people suffered and died and lived in their.
I mean, I know this.
I know the whole story, but I'm making it back was a bunch of phony money that they printed out and nothing to do it, too.
So and that option remains one that it exists.
Right.
The thing that is going on here is reacting to something that hasn't happened and may not happen.
And that's what's also very important here.
When you're looking at real crashes there at the end of it all, there has to be something that causes that crash to happen.
There has to be a real thing somewhere in all that.
And in this case, the virus situation is mathematically certain to work itself out in the form of a bell, a bell graph.
Right now, we are just climbing the left side of the bell.
China is probably I was looking at some statistics today, probably near the top of the bell and going to slide back, start sliding back down in terms of new cases.
So that is a mathematical certainty because that's how viruses work.
It can even be can be speeded up by by science, discovering new things.
Even the weather can have a big effect.
I know everybody lost their lunch over Trump saying, you know, in the spring, this is all going to go away.
What he was talking about, though he's not articulate enough to explain it, of course, is that viruses have to live within a host.
Right.
They don't live forever out on the shelf.
And so when you cough and spit up the virus onto onto the shelf, how long it lives and how live lively it is depend on the weather.
You know, the basically cool and dry lets viruses live longer than other conditions.
This is why you don't get AIDS from the toilet seat, because the AIDS virus has a lifespan on the toilet seat of of seconds.
But if you remember back when when we were just learning about AIDS, we were all panicked about getting it from toilet seats.
So the idea is, is that on day zero, you know nothing about the virus and you have no reported cases or deaths on day one.
You know nothing about the virus.
You know nothing about the virus until you know something about the virus.
And once you know something, you start to panic less.
And I think Wall Street is is going to get to that stage a lot quicker than the bell curve is going to start to bring the virus back down, because the knowledge will grow quickly and the people who are selling based on fear will have that fear largely ameliorated.
But it's going to get worse first, definitely.
Yeah, but it will get better.
And mathematically, the virus will will do what viruses have mathematically done since And your point earlier in our conversation about you said something about when back when people used to die of AIDS.
And that's a, you know, a very important point.
We when the AIDS virus kind of first became commonly known, there was massive panic based on lack of information.
You could catch it from toilet seats.
You could catch it from giving someone a kissy kiss, cheek kiss.
Giving someone a kissy kiss, cheek kiss, you know, there were all these these ideas going around and people went crazy and humanity was going to be wiped out by this virus and yada yada.
Now, it's taken a while and a lot of suffering in the interim.
But now we have exhaustive protocols for how to handle one of my daughters is studying to be a nurse and learning how to deal with HIV positive patients is just integrated into all their their training.
And more importantly, there are met drugs and things available that that can grant eight people decades of remission stuff you never would have imagined existed when when the AIDS virus was first surfaced.
And so this is a process that we're in.
We're treating it.
I mean, I hear CNN say, if these numbers continue one more time, my brain will just explode.
It's a bell curve.
The numbers will not continue.
They're actually going to get worse for a little while and then they're going to get better.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
The fact that as far as I know, I guess I haven't been reading the South China Morning Post enough where I've been trying to keep an eye on the Wall Street Journal, but there haven't been any kind of outbreak in Beijing or Shanghai, right?
No.
So, I mean, just that right there goes to show, you know, well, I don't know what it goes to show, but it's a positive answer anyway.
It is.
And you also want to the other thing that I think investors will start to catch on to is the idea that people are not dying in great numbers.
You've got the mortality rates are kicked around as numbers, but in fact, when if you just want to take one number, you're not getting the story.
Yeah, it definitely varies country to country and from time to time, too.
But also, it seems that the people who are dying from it are elderly or in poor health and young people, especially children, seem to not get it very much.
Healthy people seem to survive it.
And that's a big deal, because if you're not getting killed by it, then it's going to get better.
It's a problem.
It's again, it's a bell curve.
On the way up the bell curve, the weak folks, the old folks, they're going to unfortunately get killed off.
But by the time the virus climbs that that curve, it's going to run out of easy victims.
And these processes will take place.
They're they're mathematical.
And the idea would be investors hopefully will catch on to them faster than the biology will unfold and stop doing dumb things like deciding that Microsoft is worth 10 percent less today than it was two days ago.
Yeah, well, so I guess one of the things that's more worrying about this one is that, you know, like SARS, I just I didn't start paying attention.
I didn't start paying attention to SARS till it was already over and never did really.
And and they always have some panic.
And of course, TV always plays up whatever it is, you know, you know, 100 times.
And I already know that going in.
But this is the one that seems to check off the more boxes in terms of dangerous pandemic and especially the one about people being contagious for a few days, two or three days before they even come down with a fever and their first symptoms.
And that seems like the thing where just you got essentially sleepers all over the place who have no idea they're sick, going around and accidentally getting other people sick.
And the funny thing is that for all the people that are screaming about Trump's inaction, if Trump were to do the things that China has done, they would be, you know, screaming that he's an authoritarian dictator.
You know, imagine this.
You want you want to stop the spread of a virus.
Well, you stop people from coming in contact with one another.
Right.
So how about this?
Let's say that Trump.
Stops all air traffic in America for the next two weeks.
Grounds every plane, just like after 9-11.
You know, that would have a very positive effect on spreading, stopping the virus from spreading, but people would lose their minds.
You know, what if what if we shut down the subway system here in New York City?
What if we closed all the schools and Disneyland?
You know, these would have very positive effects on on social contact and the virus spreading.
But again, I don't know that people would begin to tolerate that type of thing, and especially under the current administration, where they've lost their minds over far less dramatic gestures.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, when that becomes necessary, people are just going to stop going to giant gatherings and getting in aluminum tubes with each other in the first place.
So maybe, maybe New York subway still running at, you know, regular capacity right now.
Oh, yeah.
But that's what I'm saying.
To and from Wall Street.
Once people start getting the coronavirus on the New York subway, that's going to change real quick.
They won't have to be told, you know.
Yeah, maybe.
But I mean, that the idea would be that if you really wanted to do something about it, then you do you do that now, and we would lose our minds and we wouldn't accept it.
So, of course, that's why every government employee right now is licking their chops and doing the excellent thing like Mr. Burns with their fingers, because now is their chance to take more liberty, seize more power, point more guns, take more money.
I'm offended by Mr. Burns as an older Caucasian person with aspirations of wealth.
I feel that he his character unfairly portrays my community.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
If you cry loud enough and make a documentary about it, they will change the entire character for you.
I found out.
OK, good, good.
Let me give me something to do.
I didn't really have any plans today.
There you go, folks.
The evil Peter Van Buren.
Thank you very much, sir, for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, Peter Van Buren.
He's at We Meant Well.
Ghosts of Tom.
Oh, no, that's the website.
The books are We Meant Well.
Ghosts of Tom Joad and Hooper's War.
And he writes constantly over at TAC.
And you can read the Democrats' narrative of Gloom Won't Fly in 2020.
I don't know.
And Rushgate 2, Return of the Low Intelligence Zombies.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
